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Zack Bent‘s family is his instrument, and his activities with them an arena in which he acts. Unlike others who have made their families their muse, Bent proceeds as if he’s walking a grid to collect trace evidence.

The process is the product: both forlorn and fugitive, like shoveled smoke.

At Vermillion through Sept. 4.

Claire Johnson recently wondered aloud:  “What’s the deal with all of the fake lesbians in erotic art?” Except in the Bible Belt and Afghanistan, gay has a cache no longer available to the straight, not that it’s easy to tell the two apart. Those addicted to visual cues are frequently wrong.

Molly Norris, Self-Portrait, 1982

A character in Sarah Schulman’s 1988 mystery novel, After Delores, felt confident she had cracked the code.

Where are we going?
Charlotte’s place. I have the key.
How did you know it was okay to come out to me so quickly? I asked.
Easy. Charlotte taught me the trick. She says that if you’re talking to a woman and she looks you in the eye and really sees you and listens to what you have to say, then you know she’s gay.

As a straight woman, I hope it isn’t true, but I fear it’s a more reliable guide than slicked-back short hair and a man’s shirt.

Because memories are fragile and easily distorted, Lynne Yamamoto casts hers as solids, in marble, slip ceramic and thick black thread. She grew up in Hawaii with no artists in her family save for a grandfather, who wouldn’t have called himself one. In his shed in his spare time, he carved dolls that carried his understanding of his cultural heritage.

What Do-Ho Suh floats, Yamamoto makes as heavy as a tomb.

Currently at Greg Kucera: GRANDFATHER’S SHED, 2008-10
Lāna’i City, Island of Lāna’i
Digitally carved and hand finished marble

Hawaii is a symbol of an easy life, with fish crowding the seas and fruits ripe for the plucking, and yet, following World War II, canned goods became a staple, particularly (and inexplicably) Spam. Yamamoto’s rendering in vitreous china gives the cans the purity of Communion wafers.

PROVISIONS, POST-WAR, Pacific Asia and U.S. (Sardine), 2007-10
Vitreous china

PROVISIONS, POST-WAR, Pacific Asia and U.S. (Spam), 2007-10
Vitreous china

Just as human immigrants came to the island in waves, displacing the first peoples, insects immigrated with them, pushing the original occupants out of their niches. Yamamoto’s work is so beautifully crafted and physically recessive, it hides as much as it reveals. The exception is her embroidery on found doilies, which she displays from the back side, with black knots providing the relish of a coarse vitality: Dollies undone.

INSECT IMMIGRANTS, AFTER ZIMMERMAN (1948), 2009-10
Embroidery on found doilies

Camamponotus maculates (carpenter ant)

Through Oct. 2.

Tim Bavington can see the strip from his studio, which is part of what he likes about Las Vegas. Aside from the cheap space, cheap shrimp cocktails and free parking, he likes the neon at dusk. Dusk is the magic hour, when the signs smeared against the sky fight the dark.

The first time he saw Vegas he was 14, visiting his father after the divorce, leaving the airport in a Cadillac. From a bleak London neighborhood, Bavington rode into the culture of flash American Etch-A-Sketch.

He’d grown up drawing. Drawing is as natural to him as brushing his teeth or turning on the telly. By the time he met Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Bavington was making good money working on The Simpsons, drawing everything but the animations. (Pick up a Simpsons’ calendar or comic book from the ’90s, chances are pretty good you’re looking at his work.)

Abstraction intrigued him. He followed Dave Hickey‘s advice and enrolled in graduate school in Las Vegas, where Hickey was on the faculty. Hickey isn’t for everybody, but for Bavington, he was key to a wider world.

As a painter, he especially admires abstraction from the ’60s, first, Bridget Riley, but also Gene Davis and Kenneth Noland. They were all improvisers from the jazz tradition, but Bavington is not only a planner, he’s rock ‘n’ roll to his boots. When he gets to jazz, it’s through rock, as in, John Coltrane from Jimi Hendrix.

Admiration of elders is a necessary first step, locating an artist in a particular territory, but as Lester Young told the teenage drummer Max Roach, “You can’t join the throng till you write your own song.”

Currently at Greg Kucera, a survey of Bavington’s terrain: echoes of Ed Ruscha, but in color, not language.

IT’S GOOD (TO BE FREE), 2008 Synthetic polymer on canvas 54 x 72 inches

Using synthetic paints, his colors have a digital glow. Their edges are vague, as if their focus
needs adjusting. In their shimmer is a kinder, gentler version of his ’60s forerunners. Some of his stripes are based on
commercial bar codes writ large and radiant. Others relate to music. But
instead of the metaphoric music/art tradition of early 20th-century
modernists such as Kandinsky, Bavington’s in sync with a wised-up
literalism.
He matches the 12 tones of a musical scale with 12 tones from the color
wheel, assigning each note a particular color,  the bandwidth of
each stripe determined by the length of each note with a musical
sequence.

OUT OF TIME, OUT OF TUNE (FRETBOARD), 2010
Synthetic polymer on canvas
12 x 112.5 inches

Much has been made of Bavington’s methods – the match between color and sound a deadpan echo of Kandinsky’s early 20th Century efforts to paint music. His success is not in his self-assigned marching orders, however, but in the march itself. His colors are candy, but they have the toughness of black and white.

Lester Young also warned Max Roach about being a “repeater pencil.” Bavington, like Roach way before him, is in no danger of that. His strategies are elastic, with his latest work resembling some sort of merger between Gene Davis and Uta Barth, veering back to Rothko.

JUMP ON IT, 2010
Synthetic polymer on canvas
24 x 24 inches

Through Oct. 2.

Like the unnamed narrator of his first novel, Life With A Star, the Jewish writer Jiri Weil had a chance to escape from Prague just before the German invasion in 1939, but he couldn’t bear to leave.

Life With A Star:

I was born here, I knew almost every street, I had my own cafe, my movie house, my newsstand and tobacco shop.

Weil faked a suicide so his name would be struck from the Nazis’ list; he survived the war in hiding. His characters didn’t fare as well.

At one time we all dreamed of miracles and now we didn’t like it when they occurred. We would have preferred to live calmly and simply, instead of on the edge of our seats….

Digging our graves, we counted every minute separating us from death. As long as we held the handles of our shovels, as long as our fingers held a handle, as long as our fingers were freezing and the skin on our hands was raw, we were alive…

We would never have admitted that our lives were worthless, because they were our lives, our unique and unrepeatable lives.

I thought of these sentences looking at Jesse Edwards‘ photos of bleak marginalia. Our unique and unrepeatable lives….

And I thought of the video tribute to The Hooters, below. We are still living in the hangover of those European murders, but as Weil who witnessed them was able to report, the important thing to the victims was not their deaths but their lives.

First a story from 2006:

Three ace P-I business reporters, Todd Bishop, John Cook and Dan Richman, were strolling past the Olympic Sculpture Park, which will open Jan. 20 on the Seattle waterfront. Richman asked his friends what they thought of the eraser. What eraser, asked Cook. Bishop looked around and nodded. Yeah, what eraser?

(Photo via)

Cook and Bishop are too young to have used or even seen a typewriter eraser. By the time they were old enough to correct a text, they let their pudgy fingers do the walking and press delete…To somebody who has never seen the original model, Claes Oldenburg’s eraser looks like an odd abstraction, maybe an orange wheel attached to a beat-up broom. (more)

Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala

Dalton Ghetti

Robert Lazzarini

Tim Roda

Zack Bent

Mira Morse

Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer A Nail

Grant Barnhart

Original post. Suggestions from readers below. Thank you all.

From MWnyc, at the Metropolitan Opera House

From Gala, Appendix Project Space: Tabor Robak

From Emily Pothast, Adam Ekberg‘s Disco Ball on the Mountain, 2005, via Platform Gallery

From EllenL, Todd Simeone’s Record Cover in a Flash (Air Supply), 2006
Ultrachrome Inkjet print
28″ x 28″
Ed. 1 of 3, via James Harris Gallery

From Jill, Dave Muller’s
Centers & Radii b/w
Celebrity Top Tens, via Anthony Meier Fine Arts
From Netherzone, John Armleder, (first image via)

Laura Castellanos, from Laura Castellanos

My original post concentrated on the romantic use of sepia and related tones. Part two is its opposite – anti-romance sepia, following James Joyce, that the past is a nightmare from which he is unable to awake.

Jason Mitchell, Portrait of Scott D. Wilson

Marsha Burns, from Portraits of Auschwitz and Buchenwald

Christopher Knight’s disdain for Jerry Saltz has a religious quality. (What is truth; said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.)

Knight:

Never pass judgment on the merits of art you haven’t actually seen. I would no more review art from reproductions on a museum’s website or in a magazine than I would from seeing it on a TV show. Be there or be square.

My surprise in finding myself stating what I’ve always thought obvious comes from reading an item posted Wednesday on New York magazine’s website. New York’s Vulture blog (Editor’s note: i.e., Saltz), opines that “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist” created a new way to practice art criticism. In online forums and the comment sections of blogs and across Facebook pages, “people who would otherwise have no access to art-world opinion, criticism or power were given voice.”

Really? Art criticism is about having “access” to establishment art-world power?
…

Needless to say, virtually all the “Work of Art” Twitter feeds and
comment threads on all the blogs were written by people who — like me
— have not seen Abdi Farah’s paintings, sculptures and drawings, except
as mediated through a camera.

Art criticism tends to be pretty low-grade without real access to the art.

In
fact, for criticism that’s the only access that really matters. The art
is where the authentic power does or does not lie. Viewers of Bravo’s
TV show haven’t had that chance, although those who do go to the
Brooklyn Museum to see Farah’s work can then expound. (more)

Get thee behind me, Satan, all ye who confuse replicas with the real. Knight argues for an absolute division between real and fake (virtue and vice). I doubt there’s an art critic alive who doesn’t, on an emotional level, agree with him, especially about painting, even realizing, as John Russell put it, a painting is a “vegetable construct that changes in time.”

A direct encounter is the key that slides into the lock and turns the tumblers, but before getting to the nature of that encounter, let me pause to say that critics who rear up to declaim this first principle as if were a rock solid have begun to sound like Bible thumpers.

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me… (more, always more)

To brush up on the complexities of the encounter between viewer and the viewed, I suggest Knight click over to John Perreault’s blog and read his entry, Fakes: Have Replicas Replaced the Real? The answer for me is no, as it is for Saltz, for Perreault, for Knight and for all those hundreds of thousands of people who pour every year into art museums instead of being content to click through images on their laptops. But it is a no inside a muddle instead of a clarity. We can’t go on, we go on.

Perreault:

At a 2007 conservation workshop at London’s Tate, there were “collective
gasps” when an original Pevsner, now looking like a “plate of Doritos,”
was shown next to an image of a recently constructed replica of what it
had looked like in its glory day.

Nobody settles for replicas; we all settle for replicas. Why is it that when the homicidally-repressive governments in Russian and China cracked open enough to let art in and out, the West found artists who’d evolved their work from premises of Duchamp, Beuys and Warhol, with whom they’d never had a direct encounter? Credit goes to reproductions in illegally obtained art magazines, passed hand to hand.

We can’t go on, we go on. No need to be so desperately rude about it. As Carolina Miranda so aptly wrote of Knight, meow!