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Artist Trust announced six finalists for the Arts Innovator Award for Washington State artists, funded by the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Foundation. Two of the six will each receive $25,000. Good work panelists! I’d pick Leo Saul Berk and Akio Takamori but can’t say any of these would be a mistake in the top spot.

The six are:

Leo Saul Berk (His website here, my most recent review here)

Detail from Spider Hole, 2009

Margie Livingston (Her website here, my latest review here)

Lead Pencil Studio (Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo) (Their website, Jen Graves’ review)

Maggie Orth Barcode Man, 2009
Hugo Solis, Metaphors for Dead Pianos (video image/sound on the link)

Akio Takamori (more, and my latest review here)

Winners announced Oct. 7.

No matter how grounded any particular piece of art may be in the authenticating experience of any one viewer, art is, in the end, a leap of faith. While I was not willing to take it for Ben Waterman when he graduated in 2009 from the University of Washington with an MFA in clay (Elizabeth Bryant called his work at the time, sympathetically, half-baked), a year later, it looms large, and the leap is effortless.

He makes mud shine. Despite the title of his installation at 4Culture Gallery, The Grand Rooms, those looking for finish won’t find it. If he’d called it, Laboratory in a Corridor, we’d have truth in advertising, but he isn’t interested in advertising, truthful or otherwise. 4Culture Gallery is a long corridor that hooks left and continues. And Waterman’s material experiments contain in their shoddy manifestations a suggestion of grandeur around the corner of his next effort. (We can’t go on. We’ll go on.)

He fails. Attempts to graph the vigor of wild plum with the sweetness of the domesticated do not hold. His thumbprints on bits of unfired clay do not add up to a bloom. The joints of his efforts swell and leak. His plans collapse under the weight of their execution.

Nevertheless, he sets the table…

…and sets the floor on fire with his desire.

The Northwest has a robust tradition of handyman poetics, from Buster Simpson to Elias Hansen. Waterman stakes his handyman poetics after the fall, with no possibly of making it work. And yet he goes on, shouldering the weight of never-say-die America. While in search of a true thing within the bare, ruined choirs of bombastical idealism, he leaves behind him a rare and vulnerable beauty.

Through Sept. 30.

Big score for Seattle’s Fantagraphics: Next summer it will publish Ah Pook Is Here, a graphic novel from the 1970s by Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill. Begun as a comic strip titled The Unspeakable Mr. Hartt in the London magazine Cyclops, Burroughs and MacNeil extended it into a novel of 120 pages that folds out into a single scroll painting with text inserted.

No takers from the publishing world. (In the 1970s, the term “graphic novel” was not yet in use to signify a word/image combo, and the project was considered uncommercially weird.) After seven years of effort, Burroughs and McNeill gave up on it.

Burroughs was 56 when they met, McNeill 23.

McNeill:

In the first meeting he’d introduced me to the Reactive Mind, Reichs’
Orgone theories, Randolph Hearst, “Nigger Killing” sheriffs, Mugwumps,
the CIA, the Algebra of Need and a whole lot of other stuff I knew next
to nothing about. I knew right away I was in at the deep-end, but of
what, I had no idea. In time I realized I’d even got that wrong. ‘Deep’
in conventional space/time orientation implies that there’s some kind of
bottom. (more)

Below, from Ah Pook, a “tornado of vigilantes sweeps up from the bible belt.”

Jan Hermann on the influence of The Unspeakable Mr. Hartt here.

From her artist statement: 

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into
the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive
surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously
scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and
lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that
little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your
candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an
exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle
is the egoism of any person now absent.

George Elliott, Middlemarch

Tippit, Lazy Susan, 2010

At Peregrine through Sept. 30.

When Hans Hofmann asked Jackson Pollock why he did not work more from nature, Pollock is said to have replied, “I am nature.”
Who doesn’t feel the same?
It’s why we aspire to push up daisies or be scattered on the water as ashy food for fish.

Heidi Anderson, Grey Face
Watercolor on paper
9″ x 15″ 2007

Eric Yahnker, Bummed Bouquet, Graphite on paper, 52.5″ x 65″ 2009 (From Playboys and Killjoys at Ambach & Rice)

Barbara Noah, Earth As Bowling Ball II, Oil on photo emulsion on linen, 72″ x 72″
From Happy Hour installation

Like parade floats, mass murderers loom large but lack physical weight. Because their deeds remove them from the stream of daily life, they become unimaginable as flesh and blood. Eric Yahnker pops that bubble. His popping tools are found objects, real books whose titles were probably intended as jaunty but land with a thud in the bizarre. What’s shocking is the reminder that the ghouls in the titles sat down for breakfast, lunch and dinner, making witty repartee.

Yahnker A Full Plate, 2010. Found Books & Shelf

Yahnker is one of five artists in Playboys & Killjoys at Ambach & Rice. Its title derives from Harry Levin‘s idea that comedians can be divided into those categories. Playboys we laugh with, killjoys we laugh at.

I’m not sure either applies. Art rarely provides hilarity. The jokes it features are more of a nudge, a  knock or a confoundment. They revel in displacement, undermine the expected and charm us with deliberately false cheer. It’s possible to appreciate them without cracking a smile, let alone laughing.

William Sloane Coffin once observed that the Bible is like a mirror. “If an ass peers in, we can’t expect a prophet to peer back at him.” Yahnker whited-out everything in his Bible but letters that sequentially spell out “Beegees.” It’s the first time I looked in a Bible and thought of Saturday Night Fever.

Jokes repeated lose their humor. The crack and curdle, become red in the face, fall flat, get no respect. Depending on the teller, however, the stale can rise again, acquiring a faint patina of horror.

Sara Greenberger Raffery Rodney, 2009 C-print.

Remember those boys in seventh grade who inked battles in their notebooks? One of them grew up to be Raymond Pettibon. The arrested development of his content glows inside the fluid grace of his delivery.

Air guitar, kitchen version: Greenberger Rafferty, Testing 1-V, 2009 (Microphone stand and baster, whisk, slotted spoon and ice-cream scoop.) Detail

Pickles are never the star. (Erwin Wurm, Untitled (pickle) 2009 Cast and hand painted acrylic resin & pedestal)

If Markus Vater is not working at The New Yorker, I can’t imagine why.

Through Sept. 19.

Where did Howard House artists go, after the gallery’s demise? A few of the best have joined a few others who are nearly always unaffiliated to form a temporary online fire sale, the BBQ Biennial. Instead of $5,000 or $10,000, how about $150? How about $5? It’s a joke about art and money, with real art as its sobering punchline. Those offering their life’s work for a song are Debra Baxter, Gretchen Bennett, Jason Hirata, Jenny Heishman, Joey Veltkamp, Matthew Offenbacher, Nicholas Nyland, Sol Hashemi, Ian Toms and Wynne Greenwood.

Bennett: a mosquito, my libido, hello Pen on cardboard. 20 x 3 x .25 in.  $50
.
Baxter: Glass, sand, sterling silver, African wonder stone. 14 x 13 x 10 in.  $475

Nyland: Ceramic. 2.5 x 5 x 7 in.  $25

Veltkamp: Plaster Bunny Plaster and tint. 10 x 8 x 6 in $25 (Also available in chocolate.)

Nicola Vruwink opens a solo show at L.A.’s D.E.N. Sept. 15.

You have to be on her email list to get it. If ever a woman could benefit from Flickr or facebook, it’s she. 

Burns, Dahlias

In response to this post, Steal (download free) This Book, Marulis wrote:

Forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, but I always thought that Abbie Hoffman was a phony, an unethical exploiter, and a plagiarist. Try reading Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan for an eye-opener about Hoffman and Leary and the rest of those professional media manipulators.

Sure, I was only a street kid with barely a ninth grade education but even I could see beyond their phony brand of fluff.
There is no nostalgia in my mind for those guys, just memories of the damages their selfish hi-jinks caused They were preeminent A-Holes of the very first order.

Unlike, say, the blissful reaction to Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, those praising the student activists from late 1960s meet stiff resistance. Even the activists from the mid-1960s disapproved of those who came later. Mario Savio was serious in the face of serious issues. Frolic disgusted him.

Hoffman was anti-war with bells on. Confronted by a bad war and everything The Greatest Generation chose to ignore (racism, sexism and homophobia), he danced at his revolution like a class clown with a microphone. What the Wife of Bath claimed for herself he could claim, that he had the world in his time.

But Lord Jesus! When I do remember me

Upon my youth and on my jollity

It tickles me about my heart’s deep root.

To this day does my heart sing in salute

That I have had my world as in my time.

In defense of Hoffman, I won’t say he was right about everything although I think he was. I’ll say he was young.

Andrew Marvell:

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may…

He sported and he stood up. Was he phony? Only in the eyes of those seeking consistency. An unethical exploiter? Hell no. A plagiarist? Note the title of his book. He was a property-is-theft kind of guy. It isn’t good for anyone’s character to be so right as a teenager. Of course it went to his head. Obnoxious and charming at the same time, he never lost faith that America could one day live up to its own ideals. His mistake was that he wanted that happy time to be his time and was crushed by the country’s wide, long swing to the right.

Where did he get his faith in justice? From the Civil Rights Movement, and from reading Allen Ginsberg.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

You made me want to be a saint….Any Catholic could have told him, saints tend to come to bad ends, and their grace co-opted to serve a corrupt institution.  Because Hoffman could not be remade in the image of the state, he has been rejected, even by those who should know better.