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David Hammons made sculptures from elephant dung in 1978.

Chris Ofili followed in 1996, getting all the ink.

For sheer invention, David Hammons is the equal of Bruce Nauman, although Nauman is the bigger name. Why? I don’t think it’s racism alone, although racism can’t be counted out. Nauman will talk to people. He’s willing to participate in the gallery and museum system. Hammons is not.

Hammons:

THE ART AUDIENCE IS THE WORST AUDIENCE IN THE WORLD. IT’S OVERLY EDUCATED, IT’S CONSERVATIVE, IT’S OUT TO CRITICIZE NOT TO UNDERSTAND, AND IT NEVER HAS ANY FUN. WHY SHOULD I SPEND MY TIME PLAYING TO THAT AUDIENCE? (more)

Like a corset leaving little room for breathing, tight budgets curtail curatorial choices. The Henry Art Gallery is dipping into its collections for answers, which in Henry’s case is overdue. Aside from photography and contemporary art from Bill and Ruth True, what the Henry owns tends to be unexplored.

Part of the reason is unwieldy diversity. Only in the 1980s, under director Richard Andrews, did the Henry clarify its identity as a contemporary art venue, leaving the bulk of its collections with no reason to surface.

Besides contemporary art, these holdings range from historic photography, Horace C. Henry’s 19th-century landscapes; 19th-century prints, Japanese folk pottery, prints and ceramics as well as textiles, clothing and costumes from the U.S., Japan, Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

Under director Sylvia Wolf, the necessity of budget cuts fused with a genuine interest in making what’s best in the back bins accessible to the public. Costumes and textiles are available in depth online, with other collections to follow.

In its galleries, the Henry is making a virtue of its disconnects. The unfailingly deft associate curator Sara
Krajewski opened the year-long Vortexhibition Polyphonica with a fluid presentation of  nearly 100 objects that make sense in their own company, despite disparities of time, media and place. In 2010, senior curator Elizabeth Brown will reshuffle the object deck.

Krajewski offers not just a noir Nan Goldin woman, but a corset her more modest mother might have worn in the 1950s.

Nan Goldin, Joey with her heart shaped breasts, NYC. 1999
Silver dye bleach (Cibachrome) print
25 9/16 x 38 1/8 in. (64.9 x 96.8 cm)

The exhibition’s title is a hat tip to E.V. Day‘s Cherry Bomb Vortex from 2002. (Red sequin dress with monofilament, turnbuckles, and stainless steel base
115 x 102 x 102 in.)

The dress is exploding, but the hat needs work. Rhythm, ladies and gentlemen, rhythm. Were the title Vortex Polyphonica  instead of Vortexhibition Polyphonica, the point would have been clear and pronounceable, stylish even. As it is, it’s tone deaf and, with the suppression of the ex in exhibition, too cute.

Better a bad title than a bad show. This one is a pleasure. The associations between objects are sometimes obvious but frequently subtle and intuitive. It asks viewers to create their own or simply enjoy shopping amid its multiplicity.

Morris Graves would have been pleased by the company he’s keeping, a Buddhist devotional hanging from the 17th or 18th century in silk damask and satin weave with embroidery.

Graves,
Sublime Buddha Gestures [study drawing]. 1935
Ink drawing and tempera on Japanese rice paper
17 7/8 x 13 7/16 in.

California funk is well represented along with Northwest fellow travelers, such as Clair Colquitt. The penis in the center is a replicia of his own. Turned on, it whirls like a drill.

Table Top Air Purifier, 1975
Hand built and slab built earthenware with low fire underglazes, clear glaze and luster
20 7/8 x 19 7/8 x 17 3/8 in
The spineless confront the rigid: Robert Longo’s color print Triptych: Men in the Cities from 1981 is pretty funny in the company of Axel Lieber
I Beam (Ich Strahl) from 2004.

Shoes for bound feet keep company with stilettos from contemporary high fashion.(If you think they have nothing in common, take a look at the bunions on the feet of models.) Nineteenth-century silk brocades mix and match with Pop art dresses from the 1960s. Arnulf Raine and Lucas Samaras make fiend faces beside Cindy Sherman’s high gothic.   

I love Helmi Dagmar Juvonen‘s drawing, We Are the Seeds of Our Ancestors from 1955. Juvonen was the only woman in the Northwest School. She was hauled away into a mental for having too many cats and being in love with stalking Mark Tobey.The artists in her circle tended to take themselves and their spiritual
aspirations seriously. She was at hand to smack some
sense into them, rolling their fine ideas in her heavy, tender paws.

A pair of Gilles Barbier’s panoramic landscape photographs feature himself as a footnote of a footnote within their terrains. He had an exhibit at the Henry in 1999. I looked up my review and found it unrelentingly wrong. If I could walk back into the PI files and erase it, I’d be tempted. 

Paint makes the world go round.

Jeffrey Simmons, Pontian,1997
Oil and alkyd on canvas
26 x 24 3/8 x 1 1/4 inches

So does Howard Kottler. Just in time for same-sex marriage, his Look-Alike Plates from 1972. More images here. He’s a buried treasure.

Mainstream journalists do not break up their lines to weep, laugh or jeer. Even when the question is ridiculous, they’re devoted to their version of a call-and-response pattern.

Exhibit A: (It’s in the PI)

Question:

 What is the significance of the pedestrian crossing sign with the circle?

Answer:

Eric Widstrand, city traffic engineer for the Seattle Department of
Transportation, says the hula hoop is a sticker (which is graffiti)
that has been applied to the sign to make it look like the pedestrian
is hula-hooping. “There is no significance to the hula-hoop sticker
from a traffic operations point-of-view. Signs with graffiti can be
reported by calling (206) 684-7587,” Widstrand says. (If you Google
“hula hoop pedestrian signs,” you”ll see the stickers are associated
with a band called the “The String Cheese Incident.”

Relatively well known on the East Coast in her youth, Yvonne Twining Humber moved to the Northwest with her husband in the 1940s and promptly fell off the art map.
Yet she kept on.

In 2001, she set up the award that bears her name (administered by Artist Trust) as a shout out to other women who find life getting in the way of art. It was her way of saying, “You’re not alone; keep working.” To win, artists have to be female, 60 years old or older, have worked as an artist for at least 25 years and live in Washington State.

Humber puts me in mind of Tillie Olsen, whose stories of women buried alive under homemaking reflected her own life and meager art output.
Somehow, the award has never gone to anybody like that, and this year is no exception.

Congratulations to Anne Hirondelle, who receives $10,000. More about Hirondelle here. Her gallery here.

Sol LeWitt:

He is the tide on which all these boats rise.

 Barry McGee:

Michael Knutson:

Jim Lambie

Mark Grotjahn

Emily Pothast

Julia Haack:
Tim Bavington:

Susan Dory:

Starting in January, Chiyo Ishikawa, the Seattle Art Museum‘s Deputy Director for Art & Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture, is one of 12 curators selected to participate in the 2010 fellowship program at the Center for Curatorial Leadership at Columbia University.

From press release:

Christophe Cherix, Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs
El Museo del Barrio, New York
• Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge, Department of Photographs
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Kristina van Dyke, Associate Curator for Collections and Research
The Menil Collection, Houston
• Kathleen Forde, Curator of Time-Based Visual Arts
Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, New York
• Alison de Lima Greene, Curator, Contemporary Art & Special Projects
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
• Frederick Ilchman, Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Chiyo Ishikawa, 
Seattle Art Museum
• Alisa LaGamma, Curator, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Lisa E. Rotondo-McCord, Assistant Director for Art & Curator of Asian Art
New Orleans Museum of Art
• Trevor Schoonmaker, Curator of Contemporary Art
Nasher Museum at Duke University
• Stephan Wolohojian, Landon and Lavinia Clay Curator and Department Head, Department of
Paintings, Sculpure and Decorative Arts
Harvard Art Museum/Fogg.

Even though it’s a good group, they lucky to have her. What I think of her here.

The Seattle Art Museum‘s blog, SOAP, is off to a promising start with three entries by new director Derrick Cartright. After receiving a certain amount of (gentle) ridicule for its (what the?) name, (here and here), Cartright countered with a description of the process of choosing it and a few image associations, chief among them:

Considering the alternatives, floating is a good thing.

When Michael Knutson was 19 and doing summer farm work, a grain thresher grabbed his left
hand and chewed.
If he hadn’t been wearing a sweat shirt, he would have bled
out. The shirt twisted in the machinery to form a tourniquet just under
his shoulder, leaving him dangling.

Help arrived 20 minutes later. He
did not lose consciousness.
The accident helped him focus, he said. “I was vague about what I
wanted to do. After that, I knew I wanted to paint.”

In his early 30s, Robert Hardgrave was making a slim living as an illustrator when his kidneys failed. After the transplant, he was diagnosed with lymphoma. In the interval between health and disease, he became a terrific painter. He still does commercial work, but not for clients who want him to illustrate their ideas. They come to him, they get him.

Although tainted by association with fetishistic fundamentalists, the concept of born-again applies.

Friday night, 5-9 p.m., Hardgrave hosts what he calls Drum of the Draw at Halogen Gallery, 2316 Second Avenue.

Hardgrave:

It’s an invitational drawing event that brings artists and their creative process to the public for one night each month. The artists create original drawings while the public is invited to enjoy refreshments, observe the artists at work and purchase art as it is completed. None of the work is over $200.00. Participating artists are:
Daniel Mitchell,
Karin Yamagiwa,
Ninjagrl, Robert Hardgrave, Soopajdelux,
Suzanne Kaufman and
Todd Lown.

Nancy Spero, 1926-2009. Holland Cotter obit here.

    The Bite – Olga Broumas

What I wear in the morning pleases

me:     green shirt, skirt of wine.         
I am wrapped

in myself as the smell of night

wraps round my sleep when I sleep

outside.          By the
time

I get to the corner

bar, corner store, corner construction

site, I become divine.         
I turn

men into swine. Leave

them behind me whistling, grunting, wild.

Faris McReynolds

Aaron Morse