GO SEE ART

Art 2011: The Best of Further Wanderings

2011-12-31T08:46:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

In a year that felt abundant with looks back at great artists my biggest regret in terms of seeing art is not having made it to New York for MoMA’s first ever retrospective of Willem de Kooning. Of course no one can be everywhere, and while I was fortunate enough to be in a lot of places this year, the trouble with being all over is that you’re bound to miss a lot from any one place in particular. So again I offer a selection of the best new works and exhibitions I managed to see over the past year. My route was at times directed by art, and at others by the whims of my life, but having bounced up and down both coasts and through several cities in between, I hope the list presented here can provide some kind of useful sample of the best the country had to offer in 2011.

A Small Self-Portrait

The year got off to a strong start with three exceptional pieces on display simultaneously at UCLA’s Armand Hammer Museum. Roberto Cuoghi's untitled self-portrait is a rare achievement in the practice of drawing. Far from feeling academic, this small piece is a staggering turn of realism with a figure as viscerally present as any painted by Manet or even Rembrandt. Coughi's portrait is unpretentious and uncanny, and reinforces realism's place in contemporary discourse — though given the rest of the portraits in this body of work, Cuoghi certainly doesn't subscribe to the school of though that prizes it above all else.

The Cutters

In adjacent galleries could be found the Hammer's All Of This And Nothing, featuring, among other works, Gedi Sibony’s The Cutters. The language of this piece was so concise, and its feeling of completion so thorough, it was clear from the beginning this would likely be one of the best things I’d see. Sibony is truly one to traffic in arrangements. As reported in W magazine a few years back, “He avoids altering his finds from their original state [...]. Before an opening he’ll spend days arranging his works so that the light will energize them, creating rich ‘situations’ for viewers.” The richness of The Cutters was, as mentioned, a quiet and powerful thing to behold.

Anticultural Positions

Also part of All Of This And Nothing was Paul Sietsema’s Anticultural Positions, a thirty-minute, looped film featuring black and white stills of the artist’s working surfaces interspersed with text from a lecture he reportedly presented in 2008. The effect was disjointed and abstract, a gorgeous visual experience complimented by the mesmerizing rattle of the projector. Literally readable in parts, but overall quite bewildering, Anticultural Positions nevertheless created an atmosphere to be savored.

The End

In Pittsburgh, another video piece proved even more enthralling. Ragnar Kjartansson’s The End, on view at the Carnegie Museum, enveloped its audience in a visual and and auditory landscape like nothing I’ve ever encountered. The weird, warped music and vast, white wilderness combined to create an environment both serene and exhilarating, and Kjartansson’s odd mix of exuberance and flippancy make him a joy to watch.

Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris

Another collection of greatly varied styles came from an in-depth look at a single artist in the de Young Museum’s Picasso. It was the same traveling show that left Seattle earlier in the year, drawn from the currently renovating Musée National Picasso in Paris. Now, I’ve visited that museum, but something about the way this show was laid out made the work absolutely thrilling. While it felt a little thin in the early years — a number of Picasso’s best early works having been snagged by the Steins, interestingly — man, did Picasso take off as he got older. Still lifes, portraits, busts, bathers, and even some lesser known landscapes from the artist’s early days to his last made Picasso an unforgettable look at the master.

B. Wurtz: Works, 1970 - 2011

And maybe equally unforgettable was Metro Pictures Gallery’s retrospective of B. Wurtz. Little known outside the confines of artistic circles, Wurtz has been steadily producing smart, playful sculptures since the 1970s. Some of these are freestanding, some hang on the wall, but all incorporate surprisingly common objects to produce compositions of uncommon originality and wit. So light are Wurtz’s creations that they made even Richard Tuttle’s work, concurrent at the nearby Pace Gallery, feel leaden. Reviewing the show in June, Roberta Smith was quite right in her sentiment that, “Mr. Wurtz’s show may be, in its own quiet and eccentric way, one of the high points of the summer, if not the entire year.”

Bryson Gill: Plaisir l'Oeil

2011-12-25T12:16:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

The trompe l’oeil tradition goes back a long way in the history of painting; a Baroque term, so Wikipedia reminds me, used to describe the devices of perspectival painting intended to ‘deceive the eye’ into perceiving great depth where, on a flat surface, obviously none could exist. (Ceilings opening onto the heavens were popular.) Artists working on architecture today are similarly deceptive — Banksy, perhaps most comically — but trompe l’oeil painting refers most often to that class of still life works whose represented objects are depicted in a relatively shallow space, one so carefully rendered as to fool the viewer into believing he sees not a representation, but the objects themselves. The most apt illustration of this tradition dates back to ancient Greece, where, as Pliny tells us, the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius struck a bet to see whose painting could most closely mimic the real world. Zeuxis’s grapes were real enough to entice birds to swoop down at the supposed fruit, but when he asked Parrhasius to pull aside the cloth covering his painting, the painter realized he had been beaten, for the ‘cloth’ was the painting itself, and while Zeuxis had fooled the birds, Parrhasius had fooled Zeuxis.

Following the Renaissance, trompe l’oeil still life painting proceeded with variable popularity from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth, but the practice was largely eclipsed by the rise of Modernism, sputtering out with provincial Americans producing staid collections of playing cards and other clutter depicted against wooden backdrops. Given the accelerating pace of the twentieth century, it’s no wonder a tradition predicated on artists’ mastery of illusion was shunted aside when our collective focus shifted to ideas, and materials, and a general questioning of tradition itself — not to mention painting’s shift, from illusion to literal flatness.

So imagine my delight upon entering San Francisco’s Triple Base Gallery to find the paintings of Bryson Gill in his new exhibition, The Optimist Gene. Having determined to see the show from a look at the gallery website, I had already been fooled, asking a friend to come along to see “Oh, some paper collages, I don’t know.” As it turned out, what appeared to be folded paper scraps were strokes and daubs of paint, presented in thoroughly convincing trompe l’oeil.

Far from being old-fashioned, Gill’s approach is fresh and exciting. He's embraced the painted focus of Modernism, allowing his ‘paper’ forming strokes to rise from the linen surface of each painting in unabashed impasto. These marks are as much paint as they are mimics of paper texture, abjuring the smoothness of traditional trompe l’oeil in favor of something not nearly so fussy, yet even more convincing. Meanwhile, the paintings’ ‘cast shadows’ are soft as can be, so thin as to appear stained into the fabric, and masterfully carrying off the illusion of depth. In this way, the artist has achieved the Postmodern joke of literal/representational simultaneity. It’s a trompe l’oeil — but! no, it’s just paint strokes.

Filling out these canvases are playfully stained and patterned backgrounds, further emphasizing the flatness of each affair, and in one piece making up the entire composition. A few of the works offer a Picasso-like still life sensibility in which the simplest shapes become suddenly complex elements of one of painting’s classic subjects, but still maintain the light-heartedness of present day. Even a stick-figure is not outside the purview of this artist, whose humble paintings are as pleasurable as they are deceptively simple, and become all the more exciting the longer they manage to linger in your mind.

Through January 1st.

Bryan Christiansen's Nature Preserve

2011-10-01T21:02:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

If Bryan Christiansen's exhibition at Stremmel Gallery in Reno challenges anything, I suppose it's Stremmel's status as a purveyor of hotel wall decorations priced for the wealthy, art-inexperienced. (Unfortunately, he's paired with John Randall Nelson.) That's a little simplistic, but it's fair to say that Stremmel is at least not on the cutting edge — such as it is. With pretty pictures, and pleasant sculptures, this isn't a place to go to see what's going on; it's a place to go to pick up something Westerny, or something with nice colors; it's a place you've seen before if you've wandered on vacation through some vaguely artsy quarter in a tourist district. Happily, Christiansen's work bucks the trend of the expected. It's nice, yes, even pretty, but there's less pretension here. Add to that a little lighthearted self-awareness, and this artist is well deserving of the recognition Nevada Museum of Art offered in 2010.

NMA has compared Christiansen's sculptures to Bruce Conner and Ed Kienholz, although with some serious caveats that rightly show the artists to be pretty much wholly dissimilar. These creatures are much too sweet to draw parallels to such brutal assemblages as theirs. (Was a comparison to Deborah Butterfield too obvious?) There also, judging from the current work, seems to be little basis for the notion that these pieces "represent Christiansen's own triumph of the present over the past and his strength to confront some of life's most challenging contradictions." (Seriously, what does "[his] own triumph of the present over the past" even mean?)

What the museum did get right in describing these works is the phrase "exquisitely crafted". Christiansen's frozen menagerie is like something Richard Jackson might make if he could ever let go of his grumpiness. The forms are, again, sweet, and cleanly put together, but absent is the heaping bowlful of irony. A couch is a deer and that's all there is to it.

Ok, so there's some irony. What Brad Bynum described as "a neat inversion of hunting" yields beasts resurrected from discarded human detritus, Christiansen stalking the streets and alleyways to find it. The hunted has become . . . well, the hunted. Timorous, elegant creatures have become stilted, ornamental furniture, and furniture here is taxidermy. It's a little like Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures, being both representation and stubbornly not. Then there's also the "hide" of an armchair, splayed out as if a trophy rug, and a trio of framed "hide" pieces, prodding the nature of stretched artist supports. These are whimsical things; puns in physical form.

Piecing together living forms from scrap is hardly unique in the artsy crafty West, but Christiansen's work hints at an awareness of his surroundings. His exploration is one of made and found and what's made and what's found and what's to be made of what's found. It's an exploration that raises the bar for Stremmel, and is a welcome development in Reno. Bryan Christiansen may be making pretty animals, but he would appear to be more than just a craftsman.

See more work from Bryan Christiansen on the GO SEE ART Flickr page.

The Beautiful, Bizarre End

2011-08-09T17:12:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

No praise for the Carnegie Museum’s summer programming would be complete without mentioning Ragnar Kjartansson. Having gotten some attention representing Iceland in the 2009 Venice Bienniale, Kjartansson was brought to Pittsburgh this year for his first U.S. solo museum exhibition. Song collects four of the artist’s video works (as well as one limited run performance which I unfortunately didn’t catch) and sprinkles them throughout the museum to offer their often comedic and occasionally moving experiences.

The videos variously display a half-buried, unclothed guitarist (Kjartansson), a triptych of one expectorating mother (Kjartansson’s), and the captivating nonagenarian pianist Pinetop Perkins (now deceased), whose performance deserves mention for its unadorned directness if nothing else. Perkins is mesmerizing in this piece. Sitting at his piano working his way unhurriedly through a well-worn repertoire, the man may as well be tickling a dusty old stand-up in some bygone saloon or speakeasy. He’s a hold-out from an era that’s slipped away, a time capsule in himself. Kjartansson’s The Man is as much a document of Perkins as it is a piece in its own right, highlighting the tension in mechanical reproduction between what is made and what is observed.

Whatever the case, the prize of the show is The End, which featured at that little biennial mentioned above, and is here unencumbered by any painting performance. With four guitars, two amps, a bass, one drum set, one baby grand, two bottles of bourbon, and ten furry, skin caps, this performance is assembled in the only way it could be: on video, in five projections. Kjartansson and his collaborator and fellow musician Davíð Þór Jónsson play every part in the thirty minute concoction, the only members of an eight piece ensemble uncollected in a snowy Canadian wilderness and filling the gallery’s four walls. It’s brilliant. The song, a patient, folksy kind of thing, ambles along as it pleases until those points where it builds into a great cacophony, piano or drums taking control, before settling back into its regular, leisurely warp. The mood is easy, but affecting, and the odd collection of instruments makes for a wriggling, intriguing texture, here bluegrass, there classical — now an electric guitar squawk?

Kjartansson seems to thrive on upending expectations. The setting in this piece would appear to indicate a reverence for sublime nature, but then there’s all that recording equipment, as though this great outside were actually just some inside somewhere. And of course there are the performers themselves, clearly committed when it’s their time to play, but when it’s not, hey, it’s cold outside. They warm their hands, they look around. Sometimes they take whiskey breaks. On separate walls, both of the nonperforming bystanders just walk away. There is no decorum in this group, a nonchalance which bends the enthralling audible and visual components toward something equally laugh inducing.

If you haven’t seen this piece, it’s well worth the visit. And hey, it’s in the lobby, so you didn’t hear it from me, but just wander in. I guarantee Kjartansson wouldn’t mind. And if you’ve ever wondered why art should be taken so seriously, go see for yourself that it’s not always supposed to be.

Zak Prekop Makes Good Paintings

2011-07-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

Zak Prekop makes good paintings — at least as far as I can tell, given the selection currently on view at the Carnegie Museum. As part of Pittsburgh's 2011 Biennial, the museum has assembled a group of works ranging from generously sized found objects to stacks of a newsprint comic book to sculpture that urges the use of 3D glasses. The sampling makes Prekop's flat canvases appear downright traditional, even as they thwart expectations. While much else in the show seems to be clambering (yes, clambering) for attention — albeit with a fairly uniform detachment — Prekop's works stand out from the others not because they stretch farther, but rather because they hang back, waiting for you to take notice. Do.

In total there are seven paintings, roughly human in size. I say 'paintings', though all but one of these pieces include collaged paper. They represent a breed of abstraction somewhat reminiscent of the irregular, amorphous color forms of Ellsworth Kelly, as well as the great collages of Henri Matisse, which he called "drawing with scissors." Two pieces in fact are straight collage in the Matisse tradition, but with their cut paper shapes adhered to the backs of their stretched, bare canvases — and minus the color. Much as these predecessors, Prekop is drawing with the edges of his shapes. This as opposed to forming the edges of those shapes through his drawing, just one of the apparent contradictions that makes the work so engaging.

If there is any expression in these forms at all, perhaps it is to be found in the edges, but taken with the work's other elements, a cool remove is constantly established. Where there is color, it tends to be muted. Where there is pattern, it is interrupted. Where texture is evident, it is ever used to emphasize these paintings' stubborn flatness. Even when offering up a deep, Yves Klein blue, or running blue and red racing stripes across a canvas, Prekop deliberately interrupts his compositions, substituting reticence for would-be boldness. Fields of paint are broken up to make their holds on the canvases merely tentative. Much of what is presented seems as though it has already been peeled away. There is nothing of Agnes Martin's search for the sublime in the patterning here. Something so grand is necessarily undermined. We're not allowed to grab hold of anything in considering this work, as though we're repeatedly being told No, it can't be.

This is precisely these paintings' allure. Because nothing is asserted without due contradiction, a skepticism is instilled that is either melancholy or refreshing, or probably both. Without being allowed to fall wholly into any one illusion, we must enter each deliberately, aware of the impossibility of the journey, but willing to indulge nonetheless, just for the moment. What Zak Prekop has offered is a space stripped of presumption, where everything must be taken as false before anything can be accepted as true. The result is a group of works that do not ask you to come in, but, once you have, are reluctant to let you out.

Another On Kawara

2011-07-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

My compliments to the Carnegie Museum of Art for hanging their collection chronologically. The practice is in no way unusual of course, but in this particular configuration it allowed me to experience an old artist in a new and supremely satisfying way. I've seen On Kawara's paintings before, those brazenly direct canvases putting forward nothing but a date. Oct.31,1978. Apr.24,1990. If you don't know about the Today Series, it might make you go, Huh, someone painted a date. If you do know, it sort of makes you go, Huh, he really does paint the dates. The experience definitely has a slant of novelty, but the paintings are more than that. There's a Minimal appeal to the work; clean, white letters on flat, dark grounds; and there's something vaguely profound about the act of constructing the date and offering it up for consideration, as though the day itself were being made, or would not have otherwise been. Most often you'll see these canvases alone, single examples amid the throb of post-modern (are we calling it that?) exuberance, or reticence, or reductive, deconstructive explication. At other times you might find two or three together, a little huddling group looking skeptically at the other artists' paintings. Why so showy, Ellsworth Kelly? Then there are those retrospectives, which I have not seen myself, but that pictures indicate are filled with nothing but date paintings, great, stark gatherings of day upon day, powerful in their uniformity.

At the Carnegie Museum my experience was different. Perusing the Scaife Galleries from present to past I first came upon Kawara's Feb. 29, 1988, a small, grey to black object in the classic Kawara style. My reaction was typical, something along the lines of, Ah, On Kawara. Little more thought was given. I've seen these, after all; my visit was not interrupted. Farther on however, in another gallery, I found myself considering Apr. 27, 1978. Wait, hadn't I just seen On Kawara? Confused, I backtracked to find the first painting. Indeed I had. So little notice had I given the first time that I still was unsure whether my mind was playing tricks on me when confronted with the second, red painting. Now I could compare them in my mind; I had forgotten some of these Today paintings came in color. The pleasure began to set in. Around another wall, 19 Jul. 68. This one was again grey-black (more grey and less black?), but with rounded lettering, more like the free-loving ‘60s. I laughed out loud.

Needless to say, I enjoyed the surprise. Setting aside the novelty, however, there is much to recommend this way of presenting and considering Kawara's work. It's tempting to group the Today paintings because their forms are so similar. Presenting them far apart from one another must be a far more conscious decision than with the work of someone like Philip Guston, for example, whose paintings underwent massive transformations during his career. By seeing them apart, we are reminded that each painting is in fact unique, something that's easy to forget when they are presented serially. We may also be reminded of their similarities though. It helps to see Kawara's paintings grouped with other paintings of the same period, to be reminded what Frank Stella and Paul Feeley were doing when Kawara painted 19 Jul. 68, and what Bruce Nauman was doing when Feb. 29, 1988 was made. The Today Series is remarkably consistent in the presence of such changing approaches, and all the more remarkable for having remained so over so many decades.

The greatest pleasure for me was to be reminded of the passage of time, to remember that each of these dates is distinct, and represents a real time in the past. Kawara's paintings — whether you see the accompanying newspaper-lined boxes or not — are like time capsules sent out into the world to remind us of our own existence. One day in 1968, On Kawara actually made the day, a day different from all the other days, distinct from the day before and the one after. And here it is for us too see in 2011, 19 Jul. 68, just as it was then, made by a man alive on that day, considered by you and me on this day. Without the progression, from one day in 1968 to another, separate and distinct, in 1978, to yet another, equally unique, just as far removed, in 1988, it’s too easy to see each painting as just another day, one in an endless series of sameness. Fortunately, at the Carnegie, these paintings are much more.

If you don't have anything interesting to say . . .

2011-06-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

I get it. Art has diverged fairly radically over the past century and a half from what the general mass of humanity expects or recognizes or accepts or wants art to be. Obviously. It is thus no wonder museums feel the need to provide some kind of written context for much of the work they display. English, after all, is generally intelligible — certainly more broadly intelligible than art — in English speaking countries. (One exception unfortunately: artist statements.) So, in addition to titles, dates, media, title cards are also adorned with little blurbs of information, presumably to illuminate things about works of art that we might not otherwise have noticed. Sometimes it's helpful, but I would like to offer some unsolicited advice to the Seattle Art Museum: If you don't have anything interesting to say, please, don't say anything at all.

Case in point: a trio of sculptures by Nicholas Nyland, loafing away the summer at SAM's Olympic Sculpture Park.

From what I can tell (and I can't say for certain because I haven't seen the other work in person) Nyland's sculptures tend to be a bit more interesting than those in the park right now. The wacky playfulness that brought forth odd, colorful piles recalling Antoni Gaudi and Lucio Fontana, what Jen Graves called "sweet messes", seems to have given way to bland geometry. Bland because these geometric forms that demand to be considered in themselves have been mussed by hollow, arbitrary colors, as though the geometry were not enough. Bland because the haphazard geometry of the two brick pieces is not enough. And bland because what should have been three sculptures made of rope, are for some reason to be considered as one, as though each unit were not enough in itself. To consider them together removes the simple power of any one.

So Nyland didn't quite hit it this time. It happens. But! here's the Seattle Art Museum to save the day! Just a little context will make your whole viewing experience worthwhile — unless it turns out the museum basically tells you nothing. As an example, let's examine the label for Nyland's Embroidered Path, a piece made of bricks splotched with color, laid into the floor of the park's meadow.

Using bricks he painted with vibrant glazes and then fired, Nicholas Nyland created Embroidered Path, a sculpture masquerading as a garden path. Placed directly into the soil so that each brick is seamlessly integrated into the Meadow, this modest work recalls decorative walkways used in formal and backyard gardens, further revealing our attempts to shape nature. Visitors are encouraged to walk on Nyland’s Embroidered Path through the Meadow.

There are several problems in this short description, which we'll consider in turn:

Do we really need a physical description of the piece directly in front of us? It's right there.
The description is inaccurate. Each brick is not "seamlessly integrated into the Meadow". Some are clumsily tilted out of the ground, and I'm going to go ahead and say that even if they weren't, the meeting of brick and earth with plants growing out of it necessarily includes a "seam". What is the point of calling it seamless?
"[T]his modest work recalls decorative walkways [...]." No shit.
"[F]urther revealing our attempts to shape nature"? Where does this come from? Was there something else that partially revealed our attempts to shape nature?

The only thing really to be gained from the museum's helpful little tidbit is that visitors are encouraged to walk on the piece. The rest is fluff, trying to make the work bigger than it is, and making it kind of sad by being so feeble. The other labels are not much better, mentioning the nautical context of proximity to Puget Sound, but failing completely to suggest or consider what that might mean.

So what's the museum's alternative? Pointing out something about the work that isn't blatantly obvious is a good start. It might also be good to say things that don't seem to come out of nowhere. What artistic traditions does this work draw upon? (Besides the fact that it's a path. Obviously it's a path.) Is the location actually important, or are you just saying it's important? Are these site-specific works, destroyed upon removal? Alternatively, perhaps some of the artist's biographical information could be included. Who is he? Where did he come from? Is all his work like this?

The answers to these questions are not to be found at the Olympic Sculpture Park this summer. Maybe next year. Or, and I know this is crazy, the museum could say nothing, and the work could be left alone, forced to speak for itself.

Digging Paint

2011-05-07T09:16:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

Ryan Miller's a smart ass. (That's Ryan Peter Miller, sorry. Probably a union thing.) When I first saw his work in 2007 I called him Mr. Contemporary Art — whatever that can mean. There was an attitude in the work that set him apart from his then MFA colleagues. On the walls of his open studio hung small panels that took shots at artists and movements and even painting media with the brand of ironic iconoclasm that's proven important over the past few decades. Most prominent in my memory are a Warholian sort of memento mori that turned childish things oddly serious in its poking fun at encaustic paint, and an aggressively blunt poke at — well, if not everything, at least a lot of things. It was funny, and snarky, and maybe a bit much at times, but it stayed with you. All this work was organized into a pair of Ain'ting shows in that and the following year, so you'll probably remember it if you happened to be in Phoenix/Tempe at the time, lookin' at art.

I paid a fresh visit to Miller's studio recently and was happy to see he's still dripping, molding, pushing paint together in ways related to but quite distinct from those Margie Livingston started playing around with — and getting praise for — a couple of years after. These aren't just pretty pictures — well, objects; Miller has more of an agenda, more of an awareness, and more of a sense of humor. One work in progress is half paint half mustard; another casts acrylic as paper. The attitude is out in front in works like these, but the pieces that really caught my eye were slightly more lighthearted: a series of, of all things, dinosaurs. [1]

In this group of panels, Miller is creating images — as opposed to objects with an emphasis on their own objecthood — but he's hardly painting a picture in the traditional sense. Each panel consists of layers and layers and layers of thinly applied acrylic, strata that have been carved into to reveal the visages of these prehistoric behemoths. He's digging for dinosaurs; it's funny. The quality of these super simplified pictures reminds me of postage stamps for some reason — three foot width notwithstanding — but they're maybe more reminiscent of the old game graphics that appeared as primitive lines of color on our early '90s TV screens. That, and the fact that we're looking at dinosaurs, a childhood favorite, takes us back, as the paint takes us literally back into the painting surface, into its own history. Things start to get tangled up quickly in these, maybe part of their appeal, but equally important is that the panels are just gorgeous. The surfaces glisten, milky and tactile, and there's something mysterious and stimulating about those hollowed-out troughs of color, reminiscent in their flickering juxtapositions of the divisionism of Georges Seurat or Chuck Close, an unexpected treat. The paintings were displayed in Chandler last year, so maybe you saw them then, but if you didn't (as I didn't) they're well worth seeking out.

So keep an eye out for Miller; his is a an active mind with a sharp wit. And if he's occasionally heavy-handed in his protests, at least he has the chops to make the experience one to indulge in.

I'm nerd enough that I feel obliged to point out that Pteranodons are not dinosaurs, strictly speaking, but pterosaurs. Please forgive me the use of the catch all.

Fundamental Truths

2011-04-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

by Sean Flannigan

Continuing on the thread of books I've recently read, I will present a book wholly different than my last, and in the realm of nonfiction. This time I read Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. The book's central focus is on the horrific murder of Brenda Lafferty and her infant child Erica. They were killed by Dan and Ron Lafferty, Brenda's brother-in-laws, who were commanded personally to do so by God, or their God at least, the one that speaks into their brains. The Lafferty brothers are Mormons, but that is too simple. They are fundamentalist Mormons, part of one of the ubiquitous sects of the dry West, dividing like cells, spawned by multitudes of differing revelations. From this one detestable act, described throughout the book from all available sources including the brothers themselves, Krakauer shines a light on the violent past and present of this relatively new pariah of a religion.

I say pariah, but in more recent years it has gained a great deal of traction. We've even had, and will have, a possible presidential contender who is of the faith. Mormonism is growing exponentially, much thanks owing to their responsibility to mimic the reproduction of rabbits. More children, more workers, more believers. They send missionaries out across the nation, and further into all the nooks and crannies of the world, suited-up in black and white and kindly asking for everyone's hand in theological union. This, though, wasn't the case at Mormonism's conception, inside an old hat with the face of Joseph Smith, who spoke with confidence of the existence of buried golden plates left by an angel called Moroni. The wild revelations of Joseph Smith needed time to lay down roots in the minds of the people.

It is that beginning, the creation of The Book of Mormon, and the ensuing struggle for legitimacy that Krakauer explores in an effort to explain the phenomenon of Mormonism's fundamentalist progeny. It seemed to me a very level analysis and history of a very guarded and temperamental faith, both the main Latter-Day Saints church and their unintentional polygamist offspring. Krakauer did a great deal of research in order to confidently write about an ever-present but not widely understood religion, using the Mormons' own well-recorded histories and religious texts as well as highly regarded books and personal interviews. The picture that emerges, from Joseph Smith's small band of followers to the more recent polygamist sects, is that of a extremely well-run and tremendously paranoid cult whose power structure at times resembles that of the mafia.

Personally, I couldn't put the book down. It was engrossing, suspenseful and disturbing; a story so strange it had to be real. Like all great sociological or anthropological studies, Under the Banner of Heaven illustrates the malleability of human consciousness under the sway of an ideological construct. A convincing origin story, or at least one which stirs the audience's heart, can evolve (or mutate) into something grander (or more monstrous), given the right circumstances. This is the case with Mormonism, born on the back of a crooked con artist (historically verified) and sold with the gusto of the best Evangelical pastor.

And this is not to single out this one particular religion. The most populous religions, the ones which rule the world's theological pie-charts, all have histories of great crookedness and horrid violence. None should be off the hook. The only difference is those who own much of the pie are the ones whose histories are just large enough to build a religion yet too sparse and ancient to build a case against. The truth is that no-one can scientifically say that any virgin births occurred, ever, or that the supposed product of said unverified event was reborn three days after he died in the company of criminals. The story put forth by Joseph Smith was crazy because it was crazy, but also because it was unfamiliar. Who is to say what is familiar isn't also improbable and crazy as well?

Love it or hate it, Under the Banner of Heaven is an undeniably interesting read and you will know more for having read it. So, go read it.

Recently Read

2011-03-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

by Sean Flannigan

The People of Paper (McSweeney's Books, 2005)

A friend lent me this book by Salvador Plascencia, thought I'd like it, as he returned to me my copy of Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. The book was overlarge where width and height were concerned, but a cursory glance through the relatively thin volume showed its post-modern flare, with ever-changing blocks of formatting, black shapes covering up some or all of certain narratives and small illustrations breaking up (and supposedly holding up) the story. These things excited me and I began reading it the next day.

The book centers around Federico de la Fe, father and husband, who must change the straw in their mattress each Tuesday by the river for all the uncontrolled piss he makes at night. His wife, Merced (who loves limes), chooses not to be pissed on anymore and leaves them both. The story springs from this sad point, the narrator changing with each column of text, from Little Merced (the daughter) to Rita Hayworth to Baby Nostradamus and more. Federico tempers his sadness by burning himself, which he hides from Little Merced (who also loves limes). This works for him and he always wears long sleeves. The main narrator is Saturn, that third-person omniscient whom Federico blames for everything, and whom Federico wages a war against with the carnation-chewing gang of the town of El Monte in Southern California. Saturn sees everything, hears everything, is making a history of their lives with his voyeurism.

Oh, yes, there are also the people of paper. A highly skilled origami artist began by reanimating his dead cat with paper organs and paper arteries before working his way up to human organs, and finally whole people of paper (whose fellators develop paper cuts on their tongues or wake up with soggy newspaper skin stuck to them overnight).

Needless to say, there are a great deal of creative elements at work in this book, so much so that to be brief about it is to sound a little ridiculous. His language is something like I have never read, totally casual yet thick with imagination, self-aware but not grievously meta. He brings the reader into a world occupied by obvious creation, occupied by the writer himself. It is a book mired in the sadness of loss and the futility of displaced anger. The characters and their struggles are tied to all who involve themselves in the story and illustrate how personal the act of writing fiction is.

Overall, I would recommend picking it up and giving it a try. It is something different, a little fantastical and very smart.

I will conclude with a small passage from the beginning that I just turned to:

Saturn

Saturn was aligned directly over Federico de la Fe, following him wherever he went, budging a half a space centimeter for every five hundred land miles de la Fe and Little Merced traveled. But once Federico de la Fe retreated into the lead shell, safely hiding from view and refusing to reemerge until the weight from the air was lifted, Saturn withdrew into his orbit and faded into the blur of the chalky galaxy.

This Unassuming Drawing

2011-02-28T02:05:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

How often do you come across a really good drawing? I mean a really good drawing. Something that grabs hold of you and won't let go. For me it's not that often. I think of Leonardo's portrait of The Virgin and Saint Anne, or Seurat's portrait of his mother. Maybe some of those spare, celebrated arrangements by Schiele? Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great drawings out there, but some take it to another level. Fortunately you can see what I'm talking about, provided you get yourself over to the Hammer to have a look at one small piece by Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi.

It's a self portrait, like every piece in this particular body of work (unless that Pazuzu sculpture can be said to be included), and untitled like the rest of them as well. What makes it stand out is its solidity, its straightforwardness, and the absolutely exquisite handling of the materials.

Looking out from the page is the head of a heavyset man, with no pretense to anything else. And I should go further and say, a drawing of the head of a heavyset man, with no pretense to anything else. Lines unravel toward the edges of this paper like those of the old masters. This thing does not seek to be a window onto a world; it's a drawing. Marks bold and delicate make up the concentrated but serene figure. It's a confident draftsman who can allow the tiniest lower eyelashes to coexist on the page with a flattened haze of hair and fat lines around a fat neck. Moving across the face a near sculptural right eye composed of clear, concise marks gives way to the soft, sfumato whisper of the left side of the head, a rich, receding space cut out by the bold, dark lines that define the form's left edge. Because the crudeness of these lines brings us firmly to the surface of the paper, it's as if the face is sunk into the space beyond. Elsewhere can be found a stubble made not of stippled pigment, but of depressions poked into the page, possibly with the staples mentioned in the list of media. These same holes form pores in other areas, and in still others mere stippled value. In an otherwise graphite palette, the ear and cheek on the right side betray subtle hints of color, and the whole fleshy guise sits atop a collar pushed forward by its whiteness, whiteness achieved with help of that white-out tape you can find at office suppliers as well as some coarse scraping away of the paper. This drawing, in short, is a tour de force.

There are artists who take great pains to insist that virtuosic draftsmanship is superior to other forms of art. Their work is boastful and self-conscious and stale. And Cuoghi, with this matter-of-fact, fat beauty, displays a level of virtuosity that they can only dream of.

Amidst All This Nothing

2011-02-06T22:56:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

So word is that the staff at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is all aflutter because a hummingbird built its nest in their courtyard. And while that in itself might have elicited a certain amount of excitement on any normal day, this little construction project happened to coincide with the installation of the Hammer's latest show, and in that show there is a piece which, in a one hour video, on a little Toshiba flat-screen, features — are you ready? — a hummingbird, asleep on a twig.

It's pretty magical.

All Of This And Nothing, which opened last week and runs through April 24th, features works by fourteen contemporary artists from LA and without. According to the museum, "these artists conceptually and emotionally invest simple [...] materials with a newfound poetic meaning while offering a thoughtful meditation on the fragility of our lives and the objects that make up the world around us." It's kind of a nebulous notion that, thought about from different angles, could describe a huge swath of the artwork from now or the past. But the show hangs together pretty well, though it does rely heavily on the assumption that certain things just are amazing.

For example, do you think it would be amazing to watch a hummingbird sleep? Well then you probably are going to find Fernando Ortega's video to be pretty amazing. (Though now of course you can watch in real life just outside the galleries. Undercut?) What about the idea of a spider weaving a web in place of a harp's strings? Then get ready for three dull photographs of just that, none more interesting than the next, and possibly less interesting as a series. With curatorial complicity, Ortega is absolutely the worst offender in this, staking his work almost entirely on our wholesale acceptance of his profundity. But it's not just him; from room to room too much is being made of things all over the place.

Evan Holloway took some real bad photos, but there they are on prominent display. Paul Sietsema's drawings are not bad by any objective test, but being told about the "obsessive" process of their making does not catapult these papers into the hyperbolic realm the curators see them occupying. Frances Stark makes good work, but the collages in this show are rather clunky. Yet it seems we are asked to regard them more highly simply because they depict the artist at work in her studio. And then there's Charles Gaines' Manifestos, in which he used historical texts as the basis for musical compositions through an arbitrarily applied system of assigning notes to letters. As Gaines himself admits, "I could do any text in the world [...] apply it to the system, and it would sound the same." So why this grand treatment? Is it necessary that these huge drawings of the specific texts and corresponding scores accompany the music? And four thirty-some inch flat screens perched oddly on hardboard podiums? Really? And why hardboard? I guess the artists is at fault here too though, having made those silly drawings in the first place. It's all just so . . . overblown. Perhaps one of the docents put it best when she said of the Ian Kiaer installation that opens the show, "You're supposed to kind of go back to when you were five in this room. I don't know why, but."

That said though, this show is very worth seeing. Gaines' piece is worth hearing, Sietsema's drawings are kind of interesting, and Ortega has a kinetic sculpture/installation on the ground level that makes you go, Huh. But more than that, amongst the smattering of glorified whatnot, a handful of pieces stand out as whole, and not overdone, and you are encouraged not to miss them.

In the third gallery sits the show's most commanding piece, a high, broad section of wall and doorway from the studio of Gedi Sibony. The Cutters exists in that tradition of assemblage begun by Robert Rauschenberg, but is a much more minimal, quiet, solitary thing, something akin to Agnes Martin or the drawings of Georges Seurat. Revealing little more than drywall, metal framing, primer, and some hanging canvas, the economy of language in this piece is striking. [1] Passing around and through it gives such a clear sense of its completeness that it's no wonder Sibony felt the need to physically cut it out of his work space. However he managed that, it was worth it; with a couple of other pieces offering an even greater economy of materials and arrangement, Sibony's presence in the museum has a singular authority.

Midway through the exhibition, Sergej Jensen offers up one of those minimal compositions that strikes an iconic position in your mind almost before you've become aware of it. One of his three contributions to the show, this particular untitled arrangement of various sewn fabrics reposes in a muted palette of grays. It's a constructed fitting together of rectangles that you almost feel like you've seen before. But this familiarity, while it may allow you to pass by without too much consideration at first, keeps the piece with you, and you may find a nagging urge to keep returning to it, if for nothing else than to figure out what you must have missed.

Toward the end of the show you will find Paul Sietsema's Anticultural Positions, a gorgeous black and white film featuring close-up stills of the surfaces of the artist's work tables intercut with text modified from a 1951 lecture of the same title by Jean Dubuffet. The pairing has the sort of arbitrariness that went into collaborations between John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and it has that sort of success too. These two inputs compliment one another. An exceedingly close examination that can be likened in some ways to Chuck Close is kept from being tedious by the addition of Dubuffet's words, and those words in turn seem to make an effort relate to the changing images that precede and follow. Despite the separation of half a century, these two languages hold together quite well.

And before you escape the circuit of galleries you will encounter at last the great white expanse of Karla Black's Once Cut, a broad field of plaster powder sprinkled evenly across the gallery floor and interrupted by the addition of a few colorful bath soaps and liquids. It's a thing that makes you stop and wonder about it, whether you're new to art and questioning whether any of this is art at all, or if you're more experienced and trying to decide whether this composition and its materials hold together the way you expect. In either case, one thing is sure, you won't be able to see it at all if you don't make it out to this show.

The museum gets a little carried away again, stating, "Sibony conjures the magical from the mundane." But hasn't that been the nature of art since, you know, forever? Paint being essentially mud and all that. Silly museum.
The original version of this post featured a paragraph about the work of Jorge Macchi. It has been removed after further viewing caused me to rethink such high praise.

Art 2010: A Wandering Best Of

2010-12-30T12:20:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

I didn't spend enough time in any one place this year to claim to present a synopsis of a region's best, but I did, in my wanderings, see a good deal of good art. (Mostly I was in Seattle.) Some have been praised already, both on this blog and off, and some I would be remiss if I let the year pass without giving them mention. So before the date turns, here are the best new things I came across in 2010, in no particular order.

A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter

Early in the year I walked past a well-made black box in Seattle's Lawrimore Project and couldn't be bothered to examine it more closely. It was clearly related to Robert Morris's Box with the Sound of its Own Making, a fixture in Seattle Art Museum's Minimalism gallery, but the night was wearing on and I was eager to make my way home. Mistake. Only later did I learn in The New York Times Magazine that this piece by Caleb Larsen actually tries to sell itself on eBay . . . all the time. All the time? Yes. Once someone buys it, A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter sets up a new auction with a newly revised opening bid, and the owner is required to send the piece along once sale is made. A hilarious take on the consumerism that is the art market, I bid Larsen's Tool Godspeed in repeatedly raising its own price into perpetuity — or not — and pointing out one of the absurdities that has been made of art in our time.

Untitled (Shit Happens)

Another irreverent favorite, found in Indonesia, was Malaysian artist Ahmad Fuad Osman's presumably operational blender serving as home to a fish and a water plant. I hate to heap praise on an art star, but Untitled (Shit Happens) was so blunt, so cocky, so absurd, and so unsettling, I can't help but mention it again. The very real possibility of so easily snuffing out an unsuspecting, if inconsequential, little fish — and the neon letters seemingly taunting you to do so — is a surprisingly disturbing prospect. It's the kind of thing that makes people object. 'This isn't art!' (Notice it's not about the fish.) But it knows, and it loves it, and it is.

Love Fear Lust Pleasure Pain Glamour Death

Also previously mentioned was Seattle Art Museum's staging of Love Fear Lust Pleasure Pain Glamour Death, a selection of photographs and short films by American master Andy Warhol. What was refreshing about this show was how much the museum stood back, and allowed the work to just be on display. Then of course, the work was powerful and enthralling all on its own. And in what ended up the humblest of curtain calls, Dennis Hopper's Screen Test was made more poignant with the coincidence of his death.

Chuck Close Prints

In the other Washington, another American master. There's nothing surprising about a collection of Chuck Close's work coming off as impressive, large as it tends to be, but what was most impressive about Chuck Close Prints at the Corcoran Gallery was its deep insight into the art and process of printmaking. I worried at first that it would be instructive like that time Bobby Jindal talked to us all on national television, but the museum assumed no stupidity in its audience, and managed to present printmaking from its fundamentals to a number of elaborate and unconventional processes in a way that was both interesting and understandable — and not patronizing. The lens of Chuck Close's oeuvre offered an ideal and commanding structure for this heavy undertaking.

Wall

A very different deconstruction of process could be seen in March at Seattle's Western Bridge. In a three-day performance, Corin Hewitt cut, removed, reinforced, rearranged, and otherwise fiddled with the inner and outer portions of gallery walls where he could be observed both directly within the gallery and by closed circuit video from the outside. I preferred the video, in which objects became suddenly not themselves when they were revealed to be photographic reproductions, or stacks of the like, and photographs became objects as the mind lost track in the jumble. Unsurprisingly, it's not really about the wall.

A Dirt Crown Worth Its Weight

Continuing a tradition of good work, Bryan Schoneman staged a thesis performance in the University of Washington's 3D4M Gallery in which he operated an oversized machine built solely for the purpose of pouring dirt onto his head. Schoneman may contradict me on this, but I'm convinced it's not really about the dirt. Instead, The Dust Settles seemed to be about the slow, eerily peaceful atmosphere arising from the artist's bizarre, trivial exertion. In either case, it later won an award. (Congratulations.) With any luck, galleries will learn to accommodate the mess so more of us can see Schoneman perform in the future. And if they don't, they'll miss out, because I'm sure he'll manage to find other venues.

Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass)

The other highlight of the MFA season was Samuel Payne's installation and/or assemblage at the Henry Art Gallery's UW MFA Thesis Exhibition. (Full, if cryptic, disclosure: I was personally involved with this show.) Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass) has been called overkill, but such is the specificity of Payne's language that this piece was anything but. Surely it was difficult to decipher, but Payne's work needs to be understood in the context of its past incarnations, and this piece built upon a personal iconography developed by the artist over the course of years. There were the paper covering that began on his studio wall, the shoes oriented maybe in cardinal directions to allude to his travels, the music stand from a number of previous pieces, the sound of chopping wood from — from who knows where. It's hard to be specific about this piece without being really specific, which is why I hope to write more about it in the future, if I can muster it. In the meantime, just envision a complicated conglomeration of recycled forms and works and memories.

Beat Memories

Speaking of memories, Allen Ginsberg took some photographs, and the National Gallery mounted an exhibition. If I am to mention a photography show, it would certainly be appropriate to include MoMA's first ever retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but we already knew he was a great photographer. Allen Ginsberg, the poet, was the more surprising. Plus, in addition to some darn good photography, each print included a hand-written caption of sorts, a little prose poem inseparable from the image, which added that much more richness to the experience. I'll let Ginsberg close us out, with the caption that stayed with me all the rest of the year.

I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window, one day recognized my own world the familiar background, a giant wet brick-walled undersea Atlantis garden, waving ailanthus ("stinkweed") "Trees of Heaven," with chimney pots along Avenue A topped by Stuyvesant Town apartments' upper floors two blocks distant on 14th Street, I focus'd on the raindrops along the clothesline. "Things are symbols of themselves," said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. New York City August 18, 1984

Allen Ginsberg

Kitsch Reigns in Yogyakarta (But There is Hope)

2010-11-03T07:59:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

Visit Djogjakarta — spelling is flexible — and you will be asked to visit a batik shop. Please, do not buy. You will be much better off if you make your way first to the Museum Batik so you can get a feel for what really is good before rushing into any purchasing decisions. As with any art, there is a lot more bad than not, and outside this small museum, batik is Yogyakarta's most abundant form of kitsch. It's made to appeal not to satisfy, like so much vacuous American cuisine. (Incidentally, there are some really big KFCs here.) Foreign visitors have obviously driven this colorful binge, and I suspect the same is true for Yogya's contemporary art market.

Like their batik counterparts, the works here cry out for attention. Generally large, and generally painting, all are working hard to be impressive to the international buyer. There seems to be almost no Asian influence in terms of style, these artists having bought fully into the plunge we've all taken from the European Renaissance. (Many are, however, happy to point to their own Asian-ness; a way to give specificity to the current in which they operate perhaps, and/or to appeal to Asian and Western buyers seeking representation from the East.) At Bentara Budaya Yogyakarta, the opening of a new show had vague hints of interest, but really was just flat. At Tujuh Bintang Art Space: a host of painters eager to proclaim their own relevance with references ranging from Frida Kahlo to Jasper Johns to Antonio López García and James Rosenquist and Picasso all at once. One artist even fancied himself Picasso's heir, maybe the greatest absurdity of my entire visit. (A note to those: painting a picture of an artist does not demonstrate an understanding of and/or influence by his or her work.) Others seemed to think large representations of attractive women would carry the day. One painted dinosaurs.

At Sangkring Art Space heroicism was the order of the day. Marvel At My Ambitious Achievement. A lot of hot air. Here though, our first exception: Ahmad Fuad Osman blows just as much smoke as the rest; he just does it better — sometimes. His irreverent sense of humor is evident in Recollections of Long Lost Memories (2007), in which he's placed himself (in this version) into thirty-six historical photographs hung in a grid, as well as in Untitled (Shit Happens) (2010), wherein a blender is plugged into the wall, and has a fish living inside. He's an asshole, but you have to respect the wit. He did however also make some of those huge, full-of-himself, bad paintings I was complaining about, so where do I go with that? (I could not bring myself to kill the fish.)

At Jogja Gallery the 4th Anniversary show, which closed Sunday, was likewise clogged with that brand of contemporary painting loathe to relinquish any of the hard-won draftsmanship acquired in art school, and trying desperately to synthesize something new from our accumulated cultural detritus, but ending up just so much more of the same. Britney Spears and graphic novels featured. One sculptor seemed to make work expressly for that terrible cirque gallery at Bellagio Las Vegas. But the gallery did well with its choice for the show's banner: Bunga Jeruk's Boy With No Name (2009) is kitsch with a sense of humor. An absurd, resigned, cartoon of a boy carrying over his head an equally shiny though passably realistic canvas sack, this painted resin sculpture might be a heavy handed comment on child labor if handled any differently. As it is, the message comes across — or is that the message? — but with a smirk. On a nearby wall Dedy Sufriadi's You Can Take This Season #3 stood out from the rest with a rigor and urgency akin to the Abstract Expressionists, with layer after layer of paint, and spray painted and markered scrawl interwoven with a minimal arrangement of blue rectangle on light background. It's classic-ish, made now with the nod to graffiti, without being overdone.

All of this work risks falling off into effete, but for the moment these four at least stay with you, exuding that certain amount of authority that's lacking in things like . . . bad batik. I hope these artists will continue to not do what their peers are doing (and in Osman's case, I guess, stop doing part of what he's doing). This is work I can get behind. The rest, is cheap.

Opera at the Movies: Better Than the Real Thing?

2010-10-28T15:14:00.000-07:00

by Forrest Jones

I just saw the New York Metropolitan Opera’s production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. The singing was beautiful, the special effects were impressive, and set design was innovative. It was all of the things that we have come to expect from the richest opera company in the U.S., but there were a few things that you may not expect. First, it was only $22, and I only had to drive five minutes from my house in Reno, Nevada to see it. It was The Met: Live in HD at my local movie theater.

Opera companies are struggling to stay open and put on shows, and I am glad to see this move to reach out to new audiences. In an age of instant gratification and limitless entertainment opportunities, very few people are going to shell out $100 or more to watch a three or four hour opera. Not to mention the fact that you won’t see an opera of this quality unless you are in New York, San Francisco, or a handful of other major cities. Unlike the European state operas, American companies receive very little help from government funding. They are very heavily reliant on donations from individuals and foundations. They needed to make a move to change this downward trend and bring in some new revenue.

Here it is: live operas broadcast all over the country in movie theaters, accessible to both wealthy city dwellers and regular, rural Americans like me. Some may ask, “Is it really the same as going to see the real thing?” No, it isn’t the same, but neither is the price. 22 bucks seems like a lot for a trip to the movie theater, but a live opera would be at least three times as much for the cheap seats, and about 15 times as much if you want a view like the one you get on the movie screen.

And when I say it isn’t the same, I don’t mean it’s worse. In fact, there were some things that I enjoyed more than a live show. For one, the camera work is excellent. Using high-definition cameras, this production gets you closer to the singers than you could ever be in the audience of the actual auditorium. Watching the excellent acting of Bryn Terfel as the Norse god Wotan made the story much more compelling, and being able to see beads of sweat rolling down Eric Owens’ face (excellently portraying Alberich) makes you really appreciate how hard these singers are working up there.

Normally, the costumes and props are fuzzy because they are so distant, but tonight I could easily see the rippling muscles of the two giants and the fiery fingers of Loge, the God of Flame. The makeup and hair styles are also more easily appreciated. I was particularly impressed with the dreadlocks of Alberich that lit up whenever he cast a spell. These are all things I might have missed sitting in the back of the balcony of a live performance.

Another aspect of the filmed production that nobody in a live audience normally sees was the behind the scenes features before the performance. I enjoyed watching the three Rhinemaidens trying to learn to float across the stage on harnesses at an early rehearsal (“I’m F-ing Scared!” one of them said on her first try), and the pre-concert interview with Bryn Terfel, in costume and about to perform, was insightful and gave a personal touch to the show.

My final verdict on this experience? I thought it was incredible. There may be a little more excitement and electric energy in the actual Metropolitan Opera House, but you can’t see as well and you don’t get the behind-the-scenes look that you do in the movie theater. Most importantly, we have to look at the huge pocketbook advantage. If I went to the live performance, I would have had to spend $1,500-$2,000, including a plane to New York, a hotel, meals, cab to the show, and the show ticket itself. Not to mention missing work for a day or two. Instead, I had about 90% of the experience for 1% the cost. Sounds like a good deal to me. I recommend seeing the next one in a theater near you, and if enough people jump on this bandwagon (orchestra wagon?), maybe opera in America can make a comeback.

Read Banned Books!

2010-09-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

by Sean Flannigan

This week, starting yesterday actually, is Banned Books Week, an annual educational affair sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA). It is a week of celebration for the intellectual freedom of thought, of being exposed to new ideas or being the one exposing. The right to information through free speech, as outlined in the first amendment, has had a difficult slog through the stubbornness of human ignorance and religious fundamentalism, and has only been protected by the tireless advocates of those freedoms, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ALA.

Throughout history, American and otherwise, books have been dashed from the shelves with gleeful fervor by the iron-fisted arbiters of our various republics and democracies. Anything deemed offensive, heretical, subversive or overly critical, among other things, by any ruling government or religious majority has been challenged and banned with great speed. Beyond these supposed threats to incumbent ruling classes and ideologies, there are also the books which are banned in order to shield the eyes of the innocent from anything untoward or obscene, as decided by the seemingly frightened and hyperbolic. This sort of backwards "burn the witch" mentality, one would assume, should be a thing of the past, something we have worked through and gotten over, like a bad flu or adolescence, but it is still alive and well today at a school or library near you. Many books have been challenged and banned in the U.S. and Canada in just the past year. You can find the PDF here. One from this list I would like to point out is the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which was pulled from the Menifee, California Union School District because a parent complained when their child came across the term "oral sex" whilst perusing the "O" section. The district is forming a committee to consider a permanent ban. Maybe this parent should scan the dictionary for any other entries they find unnecessary, in order that we could appropriately abridge that book of words. The past two decades have been rife with these sorts of challenges and bans, the most popular of which you can find listed here (2000-2009) and here (1990-1999).

Books, in case it's unclear, must be challenged before they are banned. Here are some visual aids concerning our recent past, provided by the ALA (click to enlarge):

Challenges by Year

Challenges by Institution

More information about challenges and bans in history can be found here, plus further statistics. Partial lists of banned books can be found here and here.

A popular and popularly banned book, To Kill a Mockingbird, is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary and has, as recently as November 2009 (aforementioned PDF, page 6), been banned in certain schools and libraries the country over. This gives proof that great ideas can withstand the tyranny of ignorance over time, even despite lingering righteous outrage. So, wish it a happy fiftieth and read it if you haven't. Libraries all over the U.S. are participating in Banned Books Week, which they call "Think for Yourself and Let Others Do the Same." Check out your local library for Banned Books Week events and displays. Go read some banned books. Think for yourself. Let others do the same.

Here are some further resources and opinions:

Pixar's Day & Night

2010-08-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

For the past few years, I've had a growing complaint about Pixar: their films are too conventional. The studio may have pioneered the technology that forever changed the animation industry, but as they continued to improve upon its texturing and simulation abilities, everyone else caught up. Movie houses are now saturated with that sleek 3D world which has become so pervasive and homogenous as to be the antithesis of innovation. There have been examples of relief, fortunately, coming mostly from lesser known studios and filmmakers, and/or from overseas. But what of the studio with the expressed goal of "making the greatest animated films ever"? Pixar's sole venture into unconventional form came with WALL-E, wherein live action humans were used to represent the past — their future counterparts, though, still of the ubiquitous, smooth, cute variety. (WALL-E is more profound than I'm giving it credit, but we won't go into it here.) So as critical praise continued to be lavished upon the Emeryville team, I grew weary.

Enter Teddy Newton's Day & Night. Only rarely does one see a film which calls attention to the nature of its medium, but this six-minute short, which runs ahead of Toy Story 3, manages to do so three-fold.

In film, as in painting, there is a tension between flatness and depth. Is the rectangle a window, through which to view an entire, other world? Or is it a surface, upon which media is applied? — or projected, in film's case. The greater part of modernist painting, of course, was devoted to this question, but film has been much less aggressive in its approach. More often than examining the tension, filmmakers have exploited it for the purpose of visual effects, making objects appear larger or smaller in relation to other characters, for example. (See Tim Burton's giant in Big Fish.) [1] In animation, the modernist dilemma was examined in films like Hans Richter's Rhythm 23, and had an influence on popular practitioners like Chuck Jones who took animation on a new, flatter course, [2] but Disney's hold on the medium maintained a certain amount of focus on something "more realistic [...] giving us a real feeling of three dimensions." With the advent of digital animation, the dream of a completely three dimensional world was achieved. Or was it? A film, remember, is still contained in a rectangle, still a projection on a flat surface.

Day & Night addresses this problem directly by combining 3D digital animation, with traditional, two-dimensional hand-drawing in a way that's never been done. Rather than inserting two-dimensional characters into three-dimensional spaces à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the makers of Day & Night have defined its two protagonists only by the flat black surrounding them (along with the whites of their eyes), while their bodies serve as windows onto a world of depth. In this pairing, the dominant reality seems to be the flattened foreground. But while the two characters draw attention to the factual flatness of the medium, apparently driving the action of both the flattened and deep spaces, they are at times subject to the topographies and actions of the world inside (or outside?). For the protagonists, every moving part is diegetic, while for the world beyond, those two characters are as an audience, disconnected. It is a delightful and fascinating treatment that poses the problem of what propels this film: its reality or its fantasy? (And which is which?)

Equally delightful — and fascinating — is Day & Night's use of sound. The two main characters may drive the physical action in this film — sort of — moving about freely, and seemingly independent of the background, but they are incapable of uttering sounds of their own making. All diegetic sound in Day & Night is a result of activity in the background, even as it corresponds to foreground actions. This begs the question of whether the foreground characters truly can move about freely, or whether they are beholden to the three-dimensional reality in order to express themselves. Are they really dominating this scene, or does it in fact drive them? Plus, the disconnect between the diegetic sound of the background, and the action of the foreground — that is, its being closely related to, but not precisely the sound you might expect for a given foreground action — calls attention to the tricky relationship between sound and film in general. In something akin to Chuck Jones's Now Hear This, this auditory disconnect illuminates the fact of Foley in the making not just of animated films, but in live-action as well. Sound, apart from voices, is rarely recorded along with action, instead added later by a team of artists. This being the case, what business do audiences have expecting sounds and actions to align?

All of these contradictions and competing realities speak to the nature of cinematic experience. Of course viewers do come to watch a flat surface, but in doing so we allow ourselves to be temporarily transported into an alternate space. While watching, we embrace this outside reality as our own, just as Day & Night's two characters when they discover the worlds inside each other. But unlike the continuous, and, for them, factual space those characters find, the one we embrace is limited, and constructed, one not captured, but created. This is especially true for animation. The question in Day & Night as to which reality is the predominant one is undercut by the fact that neither is in fact a reality at all.

In short, this is hardly conventional filmmaking. Given the trajectories of the big American animation houses, Day & Night is the kind of thing you might expect to come out of France or Japan. With all the mess of questions posed and assumptions challenged by this latest short film, Pixar has firmly reasserted itself as a leader of animation innovation.

Now if we could only get them to make something without a happy ending . . . .

"Director Tim Burton Commentary" on Big Fish, Dir. Tim Burton, 2003, DVD, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2004.
"Drawn for Glory: Animation's Triumph at the Oscars" on Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Academy Awards Animation Collection: 15 Winners - 26 Nominees, DVD, Warner Home Video, 2008.

One More Month of Warhol

2010-08-07T08:56:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

Andy Warhol is known for his detachment. He had a penchant for flippancy that pervaded both his art and his persona. Celebrities, products, processes; all became serialized in Warhol's work. Nothing is sacred. Everything is glamour. This unconcern has caused the artist to be written off in circles both public and artistic, even as he is celebrated in alternate sects of the same. Such hostility is understandable, but ill placed, for it is precisely in Warhol's detachment that his profundity lies. If there is any doubt, a visit to Seattle Art Museum may be in order. (But there's only a month left.)

On view through September 6th, Love Fear Lust Pleasure Pain Glamour Death is a collection of photographs and films by the man who embodied both Pop Art and avant garde cinema during the 20th century. No, you won't find any of Warhol's famous silk-screens here, but the selection on view is well more than satisfying, making for a commendable exhibition that combines those two most essential — and simple — elements: great work, and the space to see them.

The heart of this show features about two dozen of Warhol's Screen Tests — short films of roughly four and half minutes which feature a single actor (or singer, or model, or regular Joe, etc.) full frame from about the neck up. It is very important to watch the full four and a half minutes. These films are Warhol's passivity at perhaps its most striking. The camera never moves. The lighting never changes. The background is nondescript. With so much inaction, we are confronted with the bare reality of another human being. They stare back at us (typically). They stare back at you. You begin to notice small details: tendencies, ticks, discomfort. The shape of a shadow, the mouth, the strain of sitting. Sometimes an unnerving cool. Looking at this person, studying this person, you begin to feel as if you know this person — as if you have known this person. Occasionally it seems as if this person knows you. These films, static and removed, uncut, not physically present but captured from their original prints and digitally projected, remain formidably intimate. Displayed side by side and opposite one another in two galleries, these slow, silent films infuse the space with a glowing intensity.

On either side of the central galleries can be found some of Warhol's immobile photographs, often straightforward as their filmic counterparts, if not quite so staggering. In one room: photo booth portraits, in another: internal dye diffusion transfer prints — which is to say, Polaroids — and in another: sewn gelatin silver prints (that go a little too far in asserting their made quality, and assuming their own importance). Finally, the museum offers visitors an interactive portion: a photo booth, which, in uncharacteristic fashion for art museum interactivity, manages to be rather interesting. Probably it's because people like to look at people, but whatever the case, having your photo taken and adding it to the wall of faces adjacent is a surprisingly engaging activity (as well as a brilliant money-making venture for SAM). Not only do you get to examine the visages of your fellow museum goers, you also have the opportunity to compare your own work to Andy's — which should make it clear that he is the master.

Carter Ratcliff, of Art in America, among other things, has written of Warhol, "His portraits lead us to the edge of sheer impossibility and beyond. No one, not even Debbie Harry, can be as glamorous as Andy's Debbie Harry. Realizing this, we step over the edge, back into the real world." [1] It would be a fitting conclusion, if Ratcliff weren't writing about the paintings. But I can't help but feel this quote lay its touch upon the photographic work as well. If you haven't already, go see Edie Sedgwick, and see if you agree.

Carter Ratcliff, "Looking Good: Andy Warhol's Utopian Portraiture", in Andy Warhol Portraits, ed. Tony Shafrazi, (New York: Phaidon Press Inc., 2007), 21.

Buzz Lightyear al Rescate!

2010-08-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

Toy Story has always been about our past's collision with the future: Woody — the Old West — forced to reconcile with Buzz Lightyear — our technological triumph. It's Classic meets Cool, Silicon Valley versus Death Valley, LPs recorded onto iPods — or at that time, what? Walkmans? — even Steamboat Willie whistling along with WALL-E. Toy Story is the story of America. Drawing from the past, we look to the future. The theme runs through Toy Story 3 with a note of regret at what's being left behind. While the only loss in the original was Buzz Lightyear's delusion of grandeur (a healthy trade for Woody's newfound acceptance of the unknown), there is a clear sense through most of this third installment that things will not be the same. But is it really so bad in the end?

In its broadest strokes, Toy Story 3 pits optimism against cynicism. It is the toys' belief that Andy no longer wants them that leads the group away from him in the first place, despite Woody's appeals to the contrary. Once at Sunnyside Daycare, there is the seduction of Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear's philosophy: no owners means no heartbreak. Jessie and the gang are sold, until Sunnyside turns out not to be all that was promised, and Lotso's unsavory side comes to light. Naturally, it is Woody's loyalty, and his companions' unity that saves them from the draconian grip of Sunnyside (not to mention the love welling up in Ken and Big Baby that saves Sunnyside from Lotso). In this ideal world, Woody and friends are able to take the higher road — near calamity notwithstanding — letting go their anger at Lotso while the audience is assured of the strawberry scented bear's comeuppance. Though purity of heart is not without its dangers, the lesson to be learned is clear. (In the end, even Chuckles can't help but crack a smile.)

It's a fairly standard Hollywood theme that includes a current of cooperation trumping exclusion. Sunnyside's dark side is a product of Lotso's separation of new arrivals from old hands, a system abandoned in his absence in favor of a shared effort with benefits for everyone. And while the original cast do well in their escape attempt, it is the Chatter Telephone's decision to fend for himself that jeopardizes the whole operation. Again, a fairly standard treatment, and a good lesson for the kids, but there are a few details that make this particular tale one worth remembering.

Buzz Lightyear's transformation, mid-way through the film, into a suave, Spanish dancer is the moment that brings Toy Story 3 into that uniquely American space that has been the series' strength. Dancing the Pasodoble with cowgirl Jessie, Buzz becomes suddenly both past and present. He reminds us of our mythic, Western roots, when cowboys roamed between Spanish missions and trade flowed freely across the Rio Grande, and between Alta and Baja California — the time of Zorro and Jim Bowie reified in a space ranger. While taking us back, Buzz remains firmly in the present, still a favorite, plastic toy — and symbol of Disney merchandising — with a Spanish/English owners manual to boot. Jessie, the all American girl, of course finds the new Buzz all the more enchanting, and in a sign of the times, needs only offer a slight musical nudge to set Buzz's alter ego bubbling up irresistibly from below the surface.

Further details include Mr. Potato Head's use of a tortilla in the escape operation (innocuous, perhaps, but a clear sign that our national identity has already shifted — back to its roots?) and Andy's decision to leave his toys to a girl called Bonnie, the embodiment of the next generation, who is herself possibly Latina. It is a touching conclusion, and reassuring in that this little girl of ambiguous lineage is so plainly the best possible heir to the characters we've come to love over the past 15 years. The future, it turns out, will not be so different. Finally, the Oscar-winning theme which was introduced in Andy's room, rounds out the trilogy with a recording by the Gipsy Kings, this time with the words, "Hay un amigo en mi."

As the furor over U.S. immigration policy continues with court orders and appeals and even calls for reexamination of the 14th Amendment, it's hard not to catch the resonance of this final Toy Story chapter. Much as some may fight to keep our southern neighbors on the opposite side of the border, the fact of the matter is that the battle is already won. Kids today are growing up on Dora the Explorer, baseball's biggest stars have names like Pujols and Rodriguez, and the world's game continues to creep into the national consciousness. These are the cues that will shape the future, not Jan Brewer and J.D. Hayworth. And now, even one of Pixar's most beloved characters is bilingual. So, thank you, to Lee Unkrich and his team. It's a comfort, when things have gotten terribly overheated, to have a reminder that everything will be ok. To quote Woody: "We're all in this together."

Kurt - They'll miss you when you're gone.

2010-07-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings with Christina Mesiti

Michael Darling's parting gift to Seattle may appeal to the city's grunge nostalgia, but if you want to see a worthwhile look at some pop culture icons, I suggest edging next door to the Warhol show. Whereas Andy's portraits seem to lay bare the depths of his subjects, Seattle Art Museum's Kurt dances around its title character without really going anywhere.

Whether through big photographs, crude graphite, or loud noises, Kurt's efforts at introspection fail to do much more than point to an icon. (Look! he existed!) I mean, I guess the work does "cause viewers to question why and how Kurt’s visage and his gestures came to mean so much to a generation,” as Darling says, but that's largely because the visual ineptitude causes us to ask ourselves why we should be looking at this stuff in the first place. Grunge music may have rejected the flashy visual effects of 80's glam rock as unrelated to the music, but is this amalgam of half-baked drawings, half-realized installations, and juvenile tributes to Nirvana's lead singer rejecting the visual as unrelated to . . . the visual?

Art is more than that, of course, and much of the work in these galleries is clearly aimed at more than one of our senses, but be it auditory, visual, or the institutional arrangement itself, this show, more often than not, is limp. Upon entry, two of our first encounters are a series of photographs by Charles Peterson, and a sort of stage set / recording studio installation by Maxwell + Hadley. The photographs: better suited for a VH1 documentary than an art museum. The frozen frames of Kurt Cobain's drum-set jump, seen all together, slow everything to a plodding monotony where the end is known and the middle isn't very interesting. I suppose the large format printing was intended to make this work bold, but the slow, awkwardness of it all makes what must have been at least a mildly violent action seem strange and kind of pathetic. As for the Maxwell + Hadley installation, here I suppose the cacophonous crowd noise in that little space was meant to be overwhelming and off-putting — and it was. But the stilted arrangement of objects and lazy separation from the rest of the gallery ensured immersion was a non-occurrence, making a weird, loud, obtrusion nothing more than weird, loud, and obtrusive.

It goes on like this. In the next room, a blaring silver wall cries out, 'Look! Icon!', only to direct us to a sad little painting by Elizabeth Peyton. What Regina Hackett calls "lovely as a wilting wildflower," I call piddling and naive. Later on, Banks Violette reproduces photographs in graphite, to which I say, Why not just photographs? MoMA or not, this was an assignment I had in high school, and no more interesting, even with a gallery full of bad-ass wall decal blackness.

I could go on with more non-aesthetic paintings, and heavy-handed graphite, and bland photography, and a thing that gets in your way while it plays lots of music, but you get the idea. There are highlights: Scott Fife's big ol' head is sort of interesting, though it's exactly the same as his Elvis, and lacks the power of his T-Rex; and Jeffry Mitchell's Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain in the Style of Jay Steensma stands out as something worth seeing, but I have to agree with the assessment that it's a "hidden gem". Unassuming, this small painting doesn't scream for attention, so you'll have to look for it in what is otherwise a collection of mediocrity.

Remember though, this is grunge. The visual aesthetic is supposed to say "I don't care." (Not the nihilistic, revolutionary uncaring of Dada, mind you, but an angsty, teenagery uncaring that's trying really hard to show us just how much it doesn't care.) But isn't grunge dirty? Isn't it at least unkempt? Isn't it haphazard, or slightly dangerous, or something? I ask this only to say that all the the things I've complained about may have been effective if the setting wasn't the inescapable white cube. (May have.) For all the daring of putting on a show around such an odd subject, no innovation was employed in presentation. It's the same, antiseptic neutrality as always. Could it be that this work needs to function in a space that's different from that of Dan Flavin and Josef Albers?

With work deliberately unresolved, and often at odds with its surroundings, the viewer looks to the institution for explanations. It creates a perfect opportunity for the museum to explain to us why we should care, flexing its analytical muscle to prove the relevance of the whole endeavor. But the result is overly earnest wall text taking itself very seriously in a show ostensibly serious about being apathetic. Sort of. This could just be a serious attachment to grunge. The Kurt Cobain hero worship is way over the top, curators, artists, and many viewers complicit. It seems that the only reason to care about much of this is an abject embrace of all things Cobain. Why is that ok? A comparable James Dean show would never fly. Way too kitschy. The stuff of tents at arts and crafts fairs. But because grunge brings that edge of anti-aesthetic, this show is called important.

So the curators fail the museum visitor first by selecting work we shouldn't care about, and then by trying to make us care about it. Kurt is seriously flawed in its execution. But it seems to be a success — of sorts. Reviewers and visitors alike are enthusiastic, many — too many — professing a love for the whole half-heartedly grungy affair. I attribute this difference of opinion to an overdeveloped local pride. But the fact that there are fish in the waters around town doesn't make sculptures of schooling salmon any good. Oh well.

At any rate, if I had known my ball point pen drawings from ninth grade would be museum quality work in ten years, I would have saved my trapper keepers.

Reading The New Yorker on the West Coast

2010-07-08T18:06:00.000-07:00

by Sean Flannigan

Full of abstract comics, very specific advertisements aimed much to the East of me, and current-event-minded articles by big name intellectuals, The New Yorker arrives each week in my mailbox, with cover art to puzzle over while standing in my apartment building's foyer, scratching my head. A small joy explodes inside me. I look immediately inside the cover at the line-up. The first name I attempt to recognize is near the bottom, beside the word "FICTION" in those beautiful and regal New Yorker font characters. Near one of my favorite seats in the house sits a pile of them, The New Yorkers. I read through articles about new cancer drugs (Malcolm Gladwell, May 17, 2010), Balkan jewel thieves (David Samuels, April 12, 2010), the future of the electric car (Tad Friend, August 24, 2009) and the simple and paranoid genius of WikiLeaks (Raffi Khatchadourian, June 7, 2010), among other things. And, while these articles are extremely interesting and mind-expanding, the fiction is a true treat, the proverbial cherry atop the New Yorker sundae (or pie?).

As of late, I decided to look through my stack to personally appraise the stories I have enjoyed in the last few months. There are many. I narrowed and distilled my selection and will forthwith appraise and advertise them publicly, for possible enjoyment by others, by you. How about five? In no particular order, the following are stories I have liked and things I would like to say about them.

"In The South" by Salman Rushdie (May 18, 2009 issue)

I read this story July 3rd actually, out in the sun, while drinking a beer and listening to the groans of thousands of zombies (the Zombie Walk in Seattle's Fremont district, the purpose of which was to break the record for most zombies walking, I suppose). It, the story not the Zombie Walk, takes place in the South of India and concerns two old and crabby men, called Junior and Senior. They aren't related but one is seventeen days older than the other and they both share the same name, an unmentioned nomination which begins with the letter "V." The story begins, "The day that Junior fell down began like any other day..." followed by a poetic list of decorated descriptions which encapsulate the spirit of them and their region, including, "the traffic's tidal surges, ... a child's cry, a mother's rebuke, ... scarlet expectorations, ... the smell of strong sweet coffee..." Already a story of some variable impending doom. These old men live next to each other and speak nearly as one. They love each other in an unspoken way, with their spoken language being one of mutual dislike. Rushdie's prose, as always, is wonderfully poetic. I enjoyed the story itself but had more fun with the underlining of great sentences and phrases. I will list a few following this conclusion. Rushdie has written many great and lauded novels, two of the most notable being Midnight's Children and Satanic Verses. I have read only Satanic Verses, the book for which he had a fatwa placed upon his head, and I loved it. Midnight's Children is supposedly even better. I can't wait. I suggest him highly. Here are some lines and phrases:

"...after a lifetime of priding themselves on the quality of their teeth, they had both surrendered to the humiliating inevitability of dentures..."

"His days emptied out into tedious inaction."

"The great events of eight decades had managed to occur without any effort on his part to help them along."

"'We knew, let me say this, who we were. And now I am a shadow without a shadow to shadow. He who knew me knows nothing now, and therefore I am not known. What else, woman, is death?' 'The day you stop talking' she replied."

"Here We Aren't, So Quickly" by Jonathan Safran Foer (June 14 & 21, 2010 issue)

This I read on the couch. It was quickly read, not even two full pages. But good. Foer is a man of incredible prosaic fortitude. Vegetarian also. I like. This story is one of many stories in the 20 Under 40 issue of The New Yorker. It is about a relationship. You did this, I liked that. And on and on like that throughout. Through this simple literary mechanism he is able to weave a sweetly melancholic story of two people, a certain sad nostalgia. He folds the pronouns "I," "you," "we," they" and "he" back and forth over each other in a way that explains the lives of these people in so little space, sort of the main theme of poetic prose. Snippets will follow. Jonathan Safran Foer is most well-known from his book, Everything is Illuminated, and this is merely because it was optioned for a movie and it hit the big screen. Said movie was, as are nearly every book-to-screen adaptations, not as good as the book. The book was beautiful. His other book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was itself another wonderful piece of literature. Now, snippets:

"I was always never complaining, because confrontation was death to me, and because everything was pretty much always pretty much O.K. with me. You were not able to approach the ocean at night."

"They encouraged us to buy insurance. We had sex to have orgasms. You loved reupholstering."

"I was always watching movie trailers on my computer. You were always wiping surfaces. I was always hearing my father's laugh and never remembering his face. You broke everyone's heart until you suddenly couldn't. He suddenly drew, suddenly spoke, suddenly wrote, suddenly reasoned. One night I couldn't help him with his math. He got married."

"The TV" by Ben Loory (April 12, 2010 issue)

This I read while in the bath. Though it wouldn't top my list if it were ordered by how much I loved it, I still enjoyed it. "The TV" is a story about addiction, sort of. It is a story about observation v. action. Maybe. About laziness? Yes. It is essentially about a man who decides to call in sick and ends up watching his life being lived for him on the television. I don't want to give it away since it is a story of discovery, you and the man discovering what he is going to do next, both from the safety of your respective homes, you and the character. It was engrossing and I had to read it all in one sitting, or laying rather. Watch for this writer in the future, I say. Here is one segment for you:

"The man stays home from work again the next day, claiming to have the flu. The show is on again—his show. Yep, there he is, arriving at work. He is wearing the suit he bought last week at Macy’s. There he is, waving at the security guard he always waves at in the morning. Now he’s walking down the hallway toward his office, now he’s moving inside—there’s his desk, his chair, his in-box and his out-box, his stapler and his letter opener. It’s amazing; the man can hardly believe it. Onscreen, he sits down at his desk, looks at the clock, and begins to work."

"Extreme Solitude" by Jeffrey Eugenides (June 7, 2010 issue)

I read this in parts on my toilet. If you haven't read Middlesex yet, then go find a copy and read it soon. It is one of my favorite books. This story isn't that good by any means, but I enjoyed it. It stuck in my head a little and I love how he isn't afraid to venture casually into the world of sex. Centrally it concerns a girl, Madeleine, who finds herself falling for this mentholated-chew-spitting biology-philosophy double major named Leonard. They meet in Semiotics 211. Roland Barthes' "A Lover's Discourse" is the philosophical bible of love for this Madeleine. In the class she drudges through stacks of books of nearly incomprehensible theory — Derrida, Eco, Balzac, Handke, Van Vechten — before coming upon this Barthes, whose writing was finally beautiful and understandable. The two characters, Madeleine and Leonard, come from two entirely different backgrounds, rich and poor respectively, and it shows in their living situations, Madeleine with her weekly laundry day and Leonard with his empty and dirty apartment adorned with various milk crates for furniture. Their relationship consists mostly of talking, listening, eating and sex. She obsesses about love and he is much more philosophical and loose about such ideas. The story ends with what I see as an unresolved and confusing feeling. Lover's quarrel or the de facto end? The following is an extremely long sentence which should give a sense of the piece:

"But ever since the night they went back to Leonard’s place after watching “Amarcord” and started fooling around, when Madeleine found that instead of being turned off by physical stuff, as she often was with boys, instead of putting up with that or trying to overlook it, she’d spent the entire night worrying that she was turning Leonard off, worrying that her body wasn’t good enough, or that her breath was bad from the Caesar salad she’d unwisely ordered at dinner; worrying, too, about having suggested they order Martinis because of the way Leonard had sarcastically said, “Sure. Martinis. Let’s pretend we’re Salinger characters”; after having had, as a consequence of all this anxiety, pretty much no sexual pleasure, despite the perfectly respectable session they’d put together, and after Leonard (like every guy) had immediately fallen asleep, leaving her to lie awake stroking his head and vaguely hoping that she wouldn’t get a yeast infection, Madeleine asked herself if the fact that she’d just spent the whole night worrying wasn’t, in fact, a surefire sign that she was falling in love."

"Free Fruit For Young Widows" by Nathan Englander (May 17, 2010 issue)

I really loved this story and wasn't expecting that I would. I know nothing about this writer but if this story indicates his whole portfolio, he is good. It begins with an historical flashback, in the Sinai Desert around 1956. The French had previously been aligned with Egypt until it switched agitated with the Egyptian President's decision to take control of the Suez Canal, a major route for the West. This matters only because Israeli and Egyptian forces were adorned with the same French supplied outfits, and so couldn't tell who was who in the conflict. In the present of this story, a father is explaining to his son (both Israeli) why Professor Tendler doesn't have to pay for his fruit and vegetables from their stand. Tendler and the father (Shimmy Gezer) were in the military together during this 1956 happening wherein Tendler shoots and kills all of the soldiers sitting around Gezer at the outdoor mess, all of whom happened to be Egyptian. He saved his life. But he was a murderer. All the widows of slain soldiers also get free fruit, which the son could understand. Murder was different. He could have taken them prisoner. The father tries to explain the gray areas, context, and the son tries to understand yet thinks black and white, no context to draw from. Tendler survived the camps, hid in piles of dead bodies, scraped along as a ghost to survive to find a real life. How can one find morality in the face of such atrocity? I won't tell the whole story. It is very much worth reading.

"Etgar’s father explained the hazy morality of combat, the split-second decisions, the assessment of threat and response, the nature of percentages and absolutes. Shimmy did his best to make clear to his son that Israelis—in their nation of unfinished borders and unwritten constitution—were trapped in a gray space that was called real life."

"And from this pile of broken bodies that had been—prior to the American invasion—set to be burned, a rickety skeletal Tendler stared back. Professor Tendler stared and studied, and when he was sure that those soldiers were not Nazi soldiers he crawled out from his hiding place among the corpses, pushing and shoving those balsa-wood arms and legs aside."

These are some of the stories I gleaned from the pages of The New Yorker like precious gems. Many more await. You can find and read most of these stories and more at http://www.newyorker.com/fiction. Enjoy!

Walking and Talking and Going to a Reading About Walking and Talking

2010-04-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

by Sean Flannigan

Flâneur, something Baudelaire defined loosely as a "gentleman stroller of city streets," or more directly and gender non-specifically, "a person who walks the city in order to experience it," is a term derived obviously from the French, those lackadaisical and aimless walkers. It is a term I had not had the pleasure of knowing until just days ago when I saw it on the "internet." It is a term that explains me in ways English simply doesn't provide for satisfactorily. Also, it bears a comfortable resemblance to my last name. This aforementioned "internet" also informed me of a reading that was going to take place at the newly located, local and independent bookstore, Elliott Bay Book Company, Saturday night at 7 pm.

Now, to divert attention from this reading for one moment, I will talk about the bookstore. This wonderful independent bookstore once lived in Pioneer Square, a little historic district in the south of downtown Seattle, in an old building with old wood floors and old wooden bookcases and old stairs made of wood. It was a comfortable place and the floor creaked a bit when you walked across it. I liked it and would often find myself there after a bout of flâneurism, sometimes buying something from the bargain section, sometimes not. Then it decided to close. It moved to the illustriously hip and gay and bar-ridden Capitol Hill, a flâneur's dream come true. To celebrate the arrival of Elliott Bay Books, Capitol Hill threw a party with a beer garden, food (from Via Tribunali pizza, Elliott Bay Cafe, and Oddfellows) and bands, all out in the closed off street in front. It was a beautiful sunny Seattle Summer-ish day and there were a lot of beautiful people strolling and eating and drinking, in celebration of books! I bought three books that day (Everyman and Exit Ghost by Philip Roth and Oracle Night by Paul Auster, both authors which you should read). The new location is better, I think, and still appropriately woody and old-seeming.

The reading took place below the bookstore in a musty basement with old books lined up along the wall behind the stage for effect. Although there were lights hanging everywhere about the old basement, it still seemed dark. Wooden chairs with blue cushions were set up in uncommitted rows and were sparsely occupied by people in groups of two or three, one chair in between like the unused urinal between men in public restrooms.

The book, Ten Walks/Two Talks, was written by two men named Andy Fitch and Jon Cotner. It was published by Ugly Duckling Presse, an independent writer-and-artist run press out of New York City. Beforehand, I overheard Jon Cotner talking to the girl who would be introducing them and telling her that she need not say that Andy is not here, stuck in Wyoming in the snow, and that rather they would "maintain the illusion" that the man accompanying Jon to the stage was Andy. The two men, after a few minutes, were introduced and came up to stand behind the dais, at which time it was explained that the man beside him was, in fact, not Andy who was stuck in snow in Wyoming, but would be reading his parts nonetheless. I do not recall this man's name. The idea of the book was born from two projects, the first being Andy's alone, in which he walked in New York, aimlessly as it were, for sixty minutes on sixty consecutive days and would subsequently write sixty lines about each. The second project was the both of theirs and it involved the recording of forty-five minute talks in stationary places about New York, of which two were chosen and distilled for this book.

The reading included a segment of a walk, then some of talk one, then another segment of another walk, then some of talk two. They traded off line for line on the walks and each had a voice in the dialogue. Throughout the reading of the first walk, I assumed that they took these walks together and each wrote thirty lines. This I found not to be true. I wished that only one person read the lines of the walk, so that I could be sure if it were the content that I thought didn't flow or if it were just the back and forth dual nature of the reading. Either way, it didn't seem like it flowed poetically or in action. I like the images (there was one in which a woman got out of a car and clenched her butt muscles). It seemed like it could be successfully transmitted if singular in voice. As for the talks, I liked one but not the other. One occurred in Central Park and one in a natural foods market they call simply WF. The Central Park conversation seemed clipped and staged, very unlike real conversation, as if they were too aware of themselves and said pseudo-philosophical things in place of the normal fart jokes of lady ogling. They talked aesthetically about their surroundings and I couldn't seem to get interested in it. The second talk was better and much more like a regular dialogue, as they talked in the table-and-chairs area of their New York WF. It seemed, though, that these talks were nothing incredibly special besides the fact that they were recorded and published in an edited form. Couldn't many of us do the same thing?

All in all, I liked it and didn't. I liked the concept very much and wished that I, myself, had come up with and executed it. Walking and talking are such intertwined activities and both can be beneficially aimless. To see this in written form may change my mind, but I feel like it was like weak tea when you really want to taste it. Like weak and slightly pretentious tea. Nonetheless, check it out. I could be wrong.

False Identity

2010-04-20T00:28:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

The most interesting show I've seen in a Seattle gallery in a while is at Howard House through the end of the month (plus one). You are encouraged to go see it. And don't be fooled by the gallery's unintentionally diminishing press release, or Seattle Weekly's glowing, inane review, or even the artist's not-so-interesting comments about his own inspirations; this show actually is worth seeing.

I repeat, unintentionally diminishing. The trouble with everything I've been reading about Sean M. Johnson's This Growing Up Stuff ... is that it all focuses narrowly on the what of Johnson's objects, or worse, the why behind his making them. False Identity 1 and 2, for example, may indeed have been created in order to point to the artist's racial background, but these tilted chair halves feel more like two takes on the same subject à la Robert Indiana than they do Michael Jackson. And don't even get me started on I Was Nine. Every positive sentiment I have about this show should be understood to apply to every piece except that one.

Johnson's work is bigger than the personal narratives that serve to drive his process. It's aggressive and uncomfortable, even as it occasionally manages to be delicate. That desk attached to the wall with nothing but push pins and rubber bands is rather a prickly thing, transforming the otherwise cheerful office supplies into forcefully embedded anchors, and encouraging a cautious approach considering the obvious strain on each diminutive rubber strip. In the front gallery, the threatening confrontation of Cautionary Tale comes not from its shattered porcelain inhabiting our space, but from the lashing down that arrests the motion of the cabinet. Every element strains against its suspended state. There's something of a Rachel Whiteread "familiar made strange" [1] in these objects, and even more of Richard Serra's disorienting uneasiness. Referring to Serra's work, architect Peter Eisenman's words could just as easily be applied to Johnson: "Whether or not the pieces actually fall down, they create the anxiety of the maker and the viewer being not in control." [2] At least Johnson's in good company.

For all there is to experience in the gallery, it is quite possible to miss these effects by simply noting the factual arrangements of the objects, and being amused by the novelty. Better to look more closely. If you do, you might notice just how precariously each False Identity is perched, or catch BFFs visually teetering as it sits physically perfectly still. As Nancy Stoaks, who works in the gallery, put it, this work "resonates" beyond the literal. If you take the time to take it in, it should become apparent that in this show, the artist's grasp seems to exceed his reach.

Helen Molesworth, Part Object Part Sculpture, (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 211.
Richard Serra/Peter Eisenman, "Interview with Peter Eisenman," (1983), in Jon Wood, David Hulks, and Alex Potts, Modern Sculpture Reader, (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007), 347.

If You're Going to Make an Animated Movie . . .

2010-04-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Cummings

Let's get this out of the way up front: the latest version of Alice in Wonderland is not worth seeing. I mean, maybe if you have kids under the age of ten and you want them giggling for an hour and a half over some fantastical creatures galumphing [1] about you could see it, but unfortunately for you and the rest of us, the fantastical creatures don't do anything particularly interesting.

Nor do they look particularly good doing it.

In 1993 — that's 17 years ago, twenty-somethings — Industrial Light & Magic set a new standard for the integration of live-action and digitally generated content with Steven Spielberg's instant classic Jurassic Park. It was incredible. The way those dinosaurs looked like they really were right there with the actors! And about to eat them! And while things have advanced since then, Jurassic Park holds up surprisingly well. Go back and look at it. You can distinguish animated from animatronic because the digital creatures move more naturally, but there are exceedingly few places where you might notice a problem with the lighting or texture (in other words, the thing looking like it's part of its environment). And in fact, the use of both digital and physical versions of the beasts helps to enhance their believability. It's a lesson today's filmmakers should take to heart. While some recent pictures, like Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, do combine animation with good-old-fashioned props and suits to stunning effect, too many are relying too heavily on digital imagery, and failing to meet the responsibilities that entails. Remember when Tim Burton used to build sets?

I'm exaggerating, of course, but Burton's latest picture has a serious issue. With so much of every shot being either created or modified digitally, the concern is not so much how to incorporate an animated element into live-action film, as it is how to squeeze Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, and Anne Hathaway into a total unreality. Burton, like so many others, does not meet the seventeen-year-old standard of Jurassic Park, though a more fair comparison might place it with The Phantom Menace, in which it's been noted that 95% of the filmic landscape was created digitally. [2] A still unmet standard, still over a decade old. Clearly, too little effort has been made to bring the animated elements off as "real" — whatever that begins to mean in a film like this — but there are some awkward choices as well. With a head the size of the Queen's, some digital manipulation is obviously necessary, but what about her companion, the Knave? Sure he's a little taller than normal, but Burton's giant in Big Fish was made to look giant without having a fully digital body. And if you're going to animate something as simple as that, why aren't Depp and Hathaway animated too? It has to be admitted that the two look out of place, no matter how made-up they are. And why saddle yourself with the burden of trying to create a photo-real Wasikowska for all those times when Alice does something impossible? When you fail — and Burton did — all you get is a semblance of Alice standing in for the real one. Furthermore, animating the figure provides greater opportunities for stretching and distorting it, but none of the new Alice's transformations are nearly as interesting as those from Disney's 1951 hand-drawn version. If you're not going to take advantage of the freedom offered by animation, why animate? And if you must animate — for . . . budgetary reasons? — why not take advantage? And if you're going to animate just about everything anyway, why not just animate everything? Why not make an animated film?

Like its title character, this film suffers from a confusion over what it wants to be. And it's not just the animation issue. For instance, you might think that with a foundation built of Lewis Carroll's famously bizarre Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, with direction by none other than the man who brought us Edward Scissorhands — you might think there must be something a little off about this newest, wonderful Wonderland, something askance, uncomfortable, or disturbed. Yes! the Queen's head is much too large. And Johnny Depp's eyeballs are opaque! Surely there must be something disquieting driving this uneasy place! But there isn't. The Queen's bad, so's the Knave, everyone else is trapped, Alice please save us you're the chosen one, end of story, yawn. If you want complexity, you'll have to look elsewhere.

But that's not to say there isn't a subtext. There's confusion there too. Alice spends her time in this film learning to accept her place in the preordained structure of Underland (as it's been rechristened for 2010). She must fulfill the prophecy and slay the Jabberwock, however much she swears she won't, and in the end she does. Taking this lesson with her to the surface — that is, back out of the rabbit hole — Alice has no choice but to . . . reject her place in the social hierarchy and follow her own path. Wait. What? (Maybe it's about the difference between real responsibility in the imaginary world, and imagined responsibility in the real world?)

Disneyfication these days is worse than it used to be. The most Tim Burtony thing about this film — aside from the obligatory pairing of Depp with Helena Bonham Carter — is Danny Elfman's score, which provides a promisingly eerie introduction to a film that thereafter shies away from true oddness in favor of the non-controversial. And, as the credits begin to roll, whatever mood Elfman had managed to hold on to is totally shattered by Avril Lavigne.

Damn, Alice is empowered now.

So, fate or self-determination? Tim Burton or the Walt Disney Corporation? Make up your mind. And I maintain, if you're going to make an animated movie, do it.

'Galumphing', by the way, is one delightful word from Jabberwocky which, unless I'm mistaken, did not find its way into the film.
David Norman Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), 106.

Go See A Play

2010-03-23T17:46:00.000-07:00

by Nathan Wonder

Go see a play.

I recommend seeing a good play. This can be difficult.

If you are in New York, I recommend you see Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane.

"The play is incredibly funny and it’s really dark and it turns in unexpected ways all the time. I think it’s the most surprising comedy I’ve ever read." Zoe Kazan

McDonagh's new dark comedy runs 90 minutes with no intermission, and the play’s comedic and macabre energies, filled with foul language, racism, and violence, propel the audience into a world only he can create.

“It’s not a world I’m completely familiar with and I get a kick out of it.” Edie Falco

McDonagh has had four of his plays nominated for Tony Awards in the Best Play category, notably The Pillowman and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. He is also the writer and director of the film In Bruges which was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Original Screenplay category.

“Any time Martin has a play on in New York it is an event.” Zoe Kazan

The play had a lot of buzz because of the star-driven cast and the pedigree of the playwright. Christopher Walken, who plays Carmichael, is an American acting legend still at the top of his game. Mervyn is played by Sam Rockwell, whose film credits include Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Frost/Nixon, The Green Mile, and many more while his theatrical credits are even more impressive. Zoe Kazan plays Marilyn. The granddaughter of Elia Kazan, she has made an impressive career for herself both on the big screen in It’s Complicated and as a stage actress and playwright. As Toby, this is Anthony Mackie’s fourth time on Broadway, and his film credits include The Hurt Locker, 8 Mile, and Freedomland.

”From my standpoint it’s about a guy who had his hand chopped off by some villains when he was a teenager and he’s spent the rest of his life looking for his hand.” Chrisopher Walken

The four character play stars Walken as a one-handed man. He encounters a pair of naive con artists who try to sell him what they claim is his hand. Rockwell plays Mervyn, the caretaker of the hotel.

“I’ve never been in a play that got this kind of reaction: the roaring laughter of the crowd and the ovations, it’s just intense to be up there. It’s great I mean we are putting out a lot of energy and we are getting it all back.” Zoe Kazan

The play is thoroughly entertaining with many moments that cause the audience to both laugh and shriek at the same time. It is a tightly-woven story that keeps the audience on edge, always wondering what could possibly happen next.

The play is not without its faults, though. There are a few lines that seem to be written purely for their surface joke value, as noted in the New York Times review by Ben Brantley: “Poor Mr. Mackie is required to describe the hotel room as ‘Hand Central Station.’” Brantley also feels the two con artists are written poorly, as though they are characters from a “Hollywood caper comedy about dopey, foul-mouthed crooks who keep tripping over themselves.” I never felt any of the characters became that broad, but the actors did seem to get lost in the wake of Walken’s “fabled eccentricity” as Brantley puts it.

“[With] Christopher Walken every day is new, every day is fresh. He’s truly a gem of the acting community.” Anthony Mackie

This is some of Christopher Walken’s finest work. Simultaneously familiar and revelatory, his charismatic creepiness is perfect for the role, which feels as though it was written specifically for Walken’s idiosyncratic line readings (surprisingly, he was actually the last actor cast). From the opening moment with Carmichael sitting alone on the dingy hotel bed staring into space all the way to the final curtain, whenever he is on stage he is a commanding presence. He plays the character with incredible ease and complexity; nothing Carmichael does is either expected or unbelievable. Perhaps the Times reviewer puts it best with: “[Mr. Walken’s] use of his signature arsenal of stylistic oddities has seldom been more enthralling.”

The rest of the cast, playing around Walken’s eeriness, serve primarily as foils. Carmichael wants desperately to find his missing hand while Mervyn has no idea what he wants. Carmichael’s energy is a black hole, while the con artists are abuzz with youthful vigor.

“This play is a true broadway experience. It’s a true theatre experience.” Anthony Mackie

Read This Book

2010-03-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

by Sean Flannigan

Recently, I went to an event at the Sunset Tavern in which an author I hadn't yet read talked to The Stranger's Paul Constant about his work, his likes and the comic he was writing, about an obscure rarely seen superhero called Omega The Unknown from the mid-seventies. This author's name was Jonathan Lethem, one of a trove of talented New York writers such as two other Jonathans, Safran Foer and Ames, as well as Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Norman Mailer. I enjoyed the talk quite a lot and proceeded afterwards to gather up his books into my collection, my ever burgeoning collection.

Lethem is one of a number a great new writers who are making it OK to give a nod at comics or genre without referring to them as one's "guilty pleasures." These guilty-pleasure-people are insecure about their image and have not given credit where it was due for too many years. Lethem recently completed a ten-issue series of the comic Omega The Unknown, published in 2006, after being offered the chance to write any comic he wanted. Apparently this very obscure superhero made an impact on him as a young man. Omega is an alien prototypical creation with superhuman strength, some psychokinetic powers and a psychic rapport with other organic Protar beings (the race from the planet Protaris in the Regreb System in the Milky Way Galaxy). Pretty cool.

In the realm of full-length genuine literature, he lays claim to many published works, most notably Fortress of Solitude (heavy reference to Superman), Chronic City (most recently) and Motherless Brooklyn (the book I implore you to read).

I would implore you to read Motherless Brooklyn. It is good. The main character/narrator, Lionel Essrog, is a Tourettic New Yorker in the employ of a seedy small-time gangster named Frank Minna at a quote unquote detective agency. Lionel Essrog, whose name itself is a Tourettic linguistic feast, details his past with his fellow Minna Men from their beginnings at home for orphans to the point of Frank Minna's death, from which unfolds a detective story of a wholly different kind. The story at times references Philip Marlowe, the private detective at the center of Raymond Chandler's crime novel The Big Sleep, a highly praised novel which Time thought to put in their 100 Best Novels published after 1923. Lethem obviously recognizes his influences.

This book had me reading it at any two minutes I had available. Lethem's ability to create a world of language around this character for which language is the ultimate compulsion was astounding. This book and this author have joined the ranks of my highest shelf (which is where I keep the books I love the most, and where it will shoulder Milan Kundera, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon and Philip K. Dick). I suggest this book highly and I will be reading further Lethem books myself.

Hey MCA, Why so serious?

2010-02-21T01:37:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

Currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago is a show called The Artist's Studio (or something like that). It's a collection of, um, contemporary work that deals with — surprise! — artists' studios. So, points for straightforwardness. A decently interesting sampling, the media ranges from painting to a galleryfull of laser-etched glass. Also prominent are a performance (now the remnants of a performance) by Indian artist Nikhil Chopra, and a room of videos by William Kentridge. It's definitely the best work I've seen by Kentridge; a little lighter, not quite so Oh, this is so profound. Not quite. That self conscious gravity is by no means absent. Chopra's performance, likewise, while potentially funny, was pretty heavy, and created a rather imposing space. And given the way he talks about the work, I doubt if he means to wink in our direction.

Actually the whole show is pretty serious. But unnecessarily. The driving force behind the insistently sober intellectualizing of every element seems to be more the museum than the work on display. To illustrate this point, I'll take as examples the two artists who bookend the exhibition.

At one end — the end end — there plays a video piece by Justin Cooper. It's not the only work in the room, nor the biggest, but its ferocity ensures that it is absolutely the focal point, overpowering the artist's large-scale drawings. Produced at Skowhegan, Cooper's video begins outdoors, a hand-held shot that soon moves into the studio where what can most closely be described as a tantrum ensues. The camera, or the cameraman, perhaps the viewer, proceeds, after examining and struggling with the place a bit, to tear apart the space with all the savagery of a Scottish terrier, furiously flailing about the room in an effort to displace the contents of seemingly every surface, small-animal grunts and snorts included. The point comes across pretty quickly, and it's silly. (Yep, sometimes people come into your studio, and yep, sometimes they rip you a new one.) This kind of poor-me artwork is the height of self absorption. Nobody cares. It's possible this piece is meant to be ironic, but the heavy-handedness of the snarling destruction produces a bizarre earnestness. And the museum presents it straight-faced, as if this is a profound statement about studio experience, as opposed to simplistic whining. A similar video might feature a group of painters talking about how they can't keep the pigments off their clothes. Nauseating.

Better work is to be found at the entrance to the show. There, a couple of photographs by Canadian artist Rodney Graham strike an undeniably humorous note — a note the museum utterly fails to acknowledge. Let's first consider Artist's Model Posing for "The Old Bugler, Among The Fallen, Battle of Beaune-la-Roland, 1870" in the Studio of An Unknown Military Painter, Paris 1885. Now one might suppose that with a title like that the jig would be pretty much up. But loathe to admit the absurdity of such a thing, MCA's analysis has Graham "propos[ing] the artist's studio as a site where history is perpetually restaged and reconsidered." Then there's Artist in His Studio (which appears above in the context of book cover). Says MCA: "Artist in His Studio alludes to Graham's other role as a musician, with a subtly offensive hand gesture perhaps betraying a conflicted sense of the kind of studio artist he would prefer to be."

Or it's a joke. "Subtly offensive hand gesture"? Where I'm from we call it the finger. Graham's work — as well as that of some others in the show — is funny, and for MCA to just ignore that fact, seems to me to be missing out on a large part of what's there. Plus, it perpetuates the problem of alienating a lay audience by insisting that there's something they're not seeing. Sometimes work is just funny. Why don't we embrace it already?

A New Face in Los Angeles

2010-02-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

by Forrest Jones

Classical music is a tough sell these days. To meet someone who regularly buys and listens to classical music is a rare event, and it is even stranger if that person is under 50. In today’s world of instant information and entertainment on demand, people just don’t have the patience to sit and listen to a beautiful 45-minute piece of music. If we all just set aside a few hours to really listen to some classical music, it might bring a little peace and focus into our overloaded, fast-paced lives.

Right now, classical music needs someone to bring the younger generation back, and that person could be the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. Dudamel is a young (29 years old), energetic, charismatic conductor from Venezuela. In his concerts conducting the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in his home country, he has led the orchestra in exciting performances of varied literature, from Mozart to Mahler to West Side Story. Any good orchestra can play music well, but he knows how to make an orchestra sound exciting and fresh. Hopefully, this new sense of creativity and energy will lure in some new fans who didn’t consider classical music before.

Dudamel is a product of the excellent music education system that is in place in Venezuela, which provides music classes to poor children throughout the country. This system has been so effective, that Dudamel might merely be the first spark in an explosion of Venezuelan talent that could potentially land on the international classical music scene.

Since a conductor is also an ambassador to the public, this background could play an important role in his philosophy. As a music educator myself, I hope that Dudamel spreads a renewed sense of the importance of music in public schools. The popularity of standardized testing combined with the budget problems of many school districts has led to reductions and elimination of music programs, and the hardest hit places are the low socio-economic areas. With his experience in the Venezuelan system, hopefully he can be a catalyst for a renaissance in music education.

Of course, he also has to be a good conductor. If he can’t lead a major orchestra, then it doesn’t matter what he says. To find out, I listened to his recording of Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony with the L.A. Phil (Deutsche Grammaphon). The first great thing about this recording is that it is taken from several live concerts spliced together. It is edited, for sure, but it is still a more accurate representation of an orchestra’s prowess than a studio session, in my opinion. In listening to this recording, you get a sense of this live feeling with applause at the end and coughing in between movements. It adds to the feeling a little bit, and reminds you that this is a living, breathing orchestra that you are listening to.

As for the music, the orchestra not only plays beautifully, but with some style. Some sections are a little slower than I expected, but I really like the casual pace. It allows you to soak in the melodies a little more, and I found myself listening to them more closely than before because you really can hear every note.

This symphony is so dense and thick, that it is difficult for orchestras to play with great balance. Under Dudamel’s leadership, however, every background detail is very clear without overpowering the melody. It isn’t just a muddy wall of sound, like many recordings before this one. This means that I have heard things in this work that I never really noticed before, and I am quite familiar with the First Symphony.

What really stands out to me, though, is how the conductor does a wonderful job of portraying the elements of Mahler’s young, somewhat sarcastic personality in this work. For example, the second movement almost sounds like an 1890s dance party, and as a result, Dudamel has some fun with it. It starts with a simple but heavy bass line, moving at an absurdly slow tempo. When the rest of the “band” comes in, they try to get things back up to speed, but the basses, of course, slow it back down every chance they get. The horns, then, want to take it ever faster, so the entire movement seems like a battle between sections. At one point, the movement seemingly ends with a big bang, but the horns start to play again, as if to say “We aren’t done yet!” You can almost imagine a drunk and incompetent chamber orchestra playing for a crowded tavern, in which they can barely keep the music going. It is a fun movement.

The third movement, though, is a strange play on the song “Frere Jacques”. The melody is familiar, but it is actually in a minor key, and quite slow. The first instrument playing the tune is a rare solo string bass. This gives it the feeling of a funeral march, but why such a familiar tune? It is weird, but still intriguing.

The finale is a bombastic one with lots of fast notes in the violins and flutes, and brass and percussion playing loudly. It is exciting music, and the orchestra doesn’t disappoint. The beauty, drama, and humor of Gustav Mahler’s work is outstanding, and Gustavo Dudamel really takes advantage of it. This is a very good beginning for this young conductor. Remember the name and keep an eye out for him. Hopefully he can put classical music back on the map.

Michelangelo Comes Down at SAM

2010-01-29T23:46:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

Before it closes, I feel it incumbent to shore up my earlier poke at what Regina Hackett has called Seattle Art Museum's "Michelangelo debacle". To be concise, this show sucked. Why, is a longer tale.

Let's start at the beginning (of the gallery, that is; the ad campaign is another matter). Walking in, past the sculpture that opens the obviously more important, though curiously less advertised exhibition on the left, one is greeted at what would be the logical beginning of the show, if it had been laid out by a reasonable person, with a sign that reads "EXIT ONLY", and points visitors toward the entrance at the opposite end of a corridor lined with Calder. Presumably this was a conscious effort to funnel people into the Alexander Calder exhibition next door, but it makes for an awkward filtering. If we're honest with ourselves, it must be admitted that a good number of the people who are likely to visit a Michelangelo show will have absolutely no interest in modern, kinetic sculpture, so really this is just putting them out. Plus, if the exit and entrance had been reversed, people would have had to filter through Calder afterward anyway. So why the forced collision? The other result of this odd choice of layout is that when people do find themselves at the entrance to the galleries, they are met with signs of equal weight sporting the headings "MICHELANGELO WEDNESDAYS", "Emergency Exit Only", and "FIRE DEPT. VALVE". . . . Unfortunately it sets the right tone.

What follows inside the galleries is not so much an exhibition of Michelangelo drawings as it is an exercise in how to simultaneously over- and under-do a thing. Yes, there are drawings by Michelangelo on display. Eleven by my count — one of which is a grocery list — though the museum claims twelve. (Are they counting the letter to his nephew?) Also on display, however, is a lot of mediocre work by artists contemporary with, or merely looking back at Michelangelo. I am nonplussed. And then there are those awful things which the museum seems to be calling 'photomurals'. Photomurals? What they are are huge, gaudy pieces of vinyl stuck on the walls and used to distract from the exhibition's lack of content. Are we supposed to feel privileged to be looking at under-life-size reproductions of famous work shinily giving a hint of the wall texture to which they cling? Each drawing is also presented with a miniature photomural next to its wall label, showing where in the larger work this particular study fits. In other words, everything in this show is presented as important only insofar as it relates to something else which is important and not present. There are a few nice drawings on display — the best of which is the Study for Adam reproduced on the catalog cover — which could have and should have stood on their own, but when a My Favorite Things tour of a Renaissance exhibition by a PhD art history student includes a couple of giant stickers, one wonders if there isn't just a little bit of fluff.

Not to be left out, the writing is also crap. Did you know Michelangelo was "multi-talented"? Perhaps the most informative example is also the most absurd, and I'll share it with you in full. It's from the label of a little model by a "19th-century artisan", and reads like a children's book:

This model, showing how Michelangelo's David was transported to the Academia in the nineteenth century, prompts questions about Michelangelo's own use of technology: How did he move the original from his workshop near the cathedral to the front of the Palazzo Vecchio? (On a special sled placed over rolling logs.) How did he bring heavy marble out of the quarries? (By tying long ropes around the blocks and sliding them slowly down the mountain.) Did the ropes ever break? (Yes, killing and maiming workers.) How did he get the material up the Arno River from Pisa? (In barges loaded using wooden cranes.) How did the material finally arrive in Florence? (On ox carts.)

Never mind that no marble by Michelangelo is actually on display here, nor even a study for a sculpture. Can't you just see the Way Things Work illustration?

Michelangelo was a great draftsman, and Seattle Art Museum promoted this show like they would showcase it, like it would be a revelation. "Michelangelo burned most of his drawings. See twelve that survived the fire." Unfortunately, flame retardance seems to have had little to do with quality in this case. And the rarity created by such a practice means it's hard for a museum like SAM to get its hands on the best work. Thomas Hoving, in 1993, declared the blockbuster show dead, saying it had simply become too expensive to gather up the kind of great work in quantities that made such events possible. The only way around this, I guess, would be to have a show so good that it would earn enough money to pay for those costs. That'd be excellent. Get people in the museum; get them telling their friends how great it is; get them looking at other artists; raise interest in art in general. But SAM didn't do that. Maybe the blockbuster is dead, and they know it. And until we know it, it seems a museum like SAM will be perfectly willing to lie to us to get us through the door.

Art and Lit in the Bronx

2010-01-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

by Sean Flannigan

I have the distinguished honor of needling in on the "Fine Art" portion of this blog this time. The other day I went to the Frye Art Museum, located in the flamboyant and hipster-laden Capitol Hill portion of Seattle. This museum is always great, and always free. Upon entering, you encounter a movie playing before you can even hope to see any art. This was planned. I had the distinct urge to move on. That urge was stupid and I accomplished a very parental chastisement of this urge later on in the day. I watched the whole thing. It was longish and I was standing the entire time, but it was good. I nearly cried on two occasions, but as I looked around at some of the art people, they seemed stoic and rigid and their faces didn't even attempt at tears, so I sucked it into a ball in my stomach to wait patiently for my inevitable nervous breakdown years from now.

The show was called "Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: A History." Tim Rollins started what he called the "Art and Knowledge Workshop" in South Bronx, a place known for its poverty and violence, for at-risk kids who called themselves "Kids of Survival" or K.O.S. The idea was to read important literature (see where I come in here) and make art from its seeded themes. The film concerned a specific group of these at-risk kids, who would cycle through as they moved on to (hopefully) bigger and better things. With each book, they would take every page and paste them in order on the canvas. That was almost always the foundation. Tim was rough with the kids in a way that worked. He held them responsible for their own education, an education the he helped them achieve. I won't give away what happens or why I could have cried. If you can, go see it yourself (as this blog demands).

So, swallowing the intensity of the movie and shaking my legs out, I finally entered the art portion of the museum. This is where I realized how important it was that I saw that film. All these pieces which were given such thick histories involving the kids and their struggles were on display. Seeing all of it firsthand was amazing. Considering everything — the education, the synthesis between art and literature, the buoyancy it gave to their futures — I was moved. These pieces had a wonderful fourth dimension, meaning they weren't merely stretchers, canvas, print and paint, but also carried the weight of emotion and history, moved across time. These kids are now adults with something to show for their struggle.

Their pieces are part of many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Tate Gallery in London amongst others. They have also had many exhibitions all over the world and now including the Frye in Seattle. See it. It is worth it.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream XVII (after William Shakespeare), 2001
watercolor, fruit juice, aquaba paper, collage, mustard seed, xerography, rag paper on canvas
106.7 x 122 cm

The Scarlet Letter – The Prison Door (after Nathaniel Hawthorne), 1992-93
Acrylic and book pages on linen
54 1/8 x 77 3/16 x 1 3/4 "

Invisible Man (after Ralph Ellison), 2008
Matte acrylic and book pages on canvas
72 x 72 inches

The book, published by MIT Press

Oh, Avatar

2010-01-16T15:10:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

All right I saw it. The movie everyone's talking about, it's a wonder, gonna revolutionize the industry, yadda yadda yadda. Ok, so I saw it. And? I have to admit it wasn't so bad. You can't beat the action: giant, flying creatures meet giant, flying machines is not a recipe for dullness. Nor is slender, blue-skinned "alien" based on incredibly gorgeous actress a burden to the eyes. And the animation's pretty decent; at certain points even uncannily naturalistic. (Absolutely not always, but at certain points.) Only sometimes is the often cheesy dialogue way oversold. ("The legendary floating mountains of Pandora. Heard of them?") There's even a super-sized version of the Krupp Earth Mover. Sure the message is simplistic — ignorant, hard-hearted, capitalist, militarists = Bad; harmonious, nature-worshiping, noble savages = Good — but the spectacle, the adventure, the 3D! all come together to make it well worth the extra 25% ticket price, right?

The short answer is No. And let's ignore the fact that the 3D makes the picture unsure as to whether it's a window onto a world, or a mold through which the on-screen (in-screen?) elements should be extruded into the viewing space. We'll also let go the unabashed self-aggrandizement of the whole thing. (Even the score at the trailing end of the credits — when the disclaimers come up — crescendos to strains of I am an important movie.) No, the real trouble with Avatar is that I've seen this movie before.

Let's face it, it's been done. And done, and done, and done. This movie is Pocahotas. It's Dances with Wolves. It's The Last Samurai (really a lot). It's School of Rock; it's A Bug's Life; apparently it's Dune. Hell, it's even Galaxy Quest. I have seen this movie so many times, and while there's nothing inherently wrong with a cookie-cutter plot — the preceding films have all made this one work — James Cameron at no point gives any indication that this story will so much as prod the mold in any way. And it doesn't.

Avatar is so packed with clichés it's hard to keep them straight. Gruff marine commander, greedy corporate big-shot, hired-gun doesn't-know-what-he's-getting-himself-into newcomer, wide-eyed science geek, exasperated yet good-hearted researcher, slightly oblivious and xenophobic chieftain, much more understanding wife of said chieftain, beautiful warrior-daughter of chieftain, jealous would-be husband of beautiful warrior-daughter. Need I go on? In fact, there is very little in this film that hasn't been seen. The landscape, the sets, the fauna: not notably dissimilar from any old piece of sci-fi/fantasy illustration. (Roger Dean is getting a lot of attention online, but I'm thinking of everything from Halo to Magic: The Gathering to The Dragonriders of Pern.) Those dual-rotor helicopters: brief appearances in The Incredibles. The machine-man walking suit things: Aliens and The Matrix (the third one). Even the visual passage from human to avatar consciousness: straight out of Sliders. And and! — and I was warned about this beforehand — the subtitles: Papyrus. Papyrus?! The typeface notable for it's constant appearance on bad travel posters and holistic healing products?! As a designer friend noted: guess there wasn't money in that 500 million dollar budget for, you know, a font.

But maybe there's something to be said for bringing all this stuff together and putting it on the big screen for everyone to marvel and applaud. Especially since it comes to us in . . . Expensive 3D!. And hey, James Horner even gets on board, reprising his music from The Wrath of Khan. So, you know, maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.

Rembrandt in Reno

2010-01-11T23:59:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

Hey Renoites. If you have any free time during the next six days, do yourself a favor and use it to go see Rembrandt.

Too often when a small museum boasts a big name, it's little more than a ploy to get people through the door. You might glimpse a meager few works by the artist you came to see, and be stuck with a glut of additional hangers on, or else the examples on display may be just . . . less than noteworthy. Not so with this show. As you may or may not know, Rembrandt van Rijn is widely considered to be one of the greatest printmakers of all time, and since November, the Nevada Museum of Art has featured a very healthy collection of etchings, drypoints, and engravings by the Dutch master, drawn from the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (I didn't count myself, but they say there are 130!)

In other words, this is good stuff, and I'm convinced there's something in this show for everyone. (The only failing really is that "loosely" recreated studio setup — what the hell? — fortunately you can just ignore it.) Obviously, if you are at all interested in printmaking, you can't miss such a feast, and even if you have no particular interest in the medium, a simple respect for art will ensure your appreciation. For Renaissance type tastes there are portraits and tableaux to spare, including a great many Biblical scenes to sate the devout. If your inclinations are more formal, you might find interest in the landscapes, where, freed from the demands of an established narrative, the artist was able to more fully investigate abstract arrangements. (Although he wasn't exactly shy about moving things around in the other work.) And if you don't get art at all, this could be a fine introduction. Many prints are shown in two or more states, so it's possible to see how the process moved, how decisions were made to alter psychology, or narrative, or composition. The work ranges in complexity from loose and gestural to ornately composed, and in imagery from beggars to windmills to barely intelligible darkness. Whatever your visual proclivities, I should hope you'll find something gratifying in this show.

As is usual, there's nothing like seeing this work in person. I'm sitting here right now with four catalogs of Rembrandt's etchings laid out in front of me, and none of them hold a candle to what I was looking at a couple of weeks ago. What you have down there is a treat, so take advantage before it's too late.

Three Literary Standouts of this Last and Dreary Decade

2010-01-06T19:31:00.000-08:00

by Sean Flannigan

I have no "Top Ten" for this decade, or for that matter, any decade. I usually take little note of when something was written, for the most part. New writers are easier to place in a time-line, though. It's happening now. You can't miss it. I can't say what is best of this decade because I haven't read all the books of this decade, or even just the notable ones. There are a lot. But, I have read some and a few were really amazing. So, of the books of this decade that I have read, I think that three really stand out.

In no particular order:

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

This beautifully and intricately written novel blew me away. There are few books, beyond even the last ten years, that operate on so many levels as this one. The character, being what Wikipedia tells me is called "intersexed", is already a strange and mysterious persona, the idea alone holding for the great majority of humanity a perspective none could entirely fathom. But, its masterfully woven threads of his/her embattled and sometimes incestuous Greek ancestry and his/her sexually-identified and narratorly present, and his description of the 5-alpha-reductase deficiency that Calliope suffers from, captures the reader fully and makes them feel if not always good at least a little weird, sad and obsessed (especially if that reader is me). It was also the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. This is a novel of much heft, emotionally and physically. It is a great achievement and thus has made its mark within my three notables of this last decade.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Despite what many may assume, you do not have to be into comics to be into this book. It involves all of those many segments of human emotion, from the entirely squishy to the absolutely jagged. Sometimes I get pissed. On occasion I will cry. That sort of stuff. Plus the in between. This novel was also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, in 2001. As with most Chabon novels, the story centers around a very Jewish protagonist, or rather two. Cousins, Kavalier (a recent refugee of Prague) and Klayman (as he is named before he renames himself something decidedly more catchy) come together in New York City. They find they both enjoy drawing and both adore that famous Jewish escapist, Harry Houdini. What follows is success and disappointment, pain and joy, confusion and clarity (and probably many other opposing themes). What stuck out, what really glued me to this book, was the characters. They were strongly developed, lived next to my bedside, in my wandering work-time thoughts, and past the point of reading them. I didn't want this book to end and I felt that those characters would survive beyond the last dot delivered by Mr. Chabon. I think that they have.

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

This was my latest read. Although it didn't win the Pulitzer prize, it did feature a Jewish protagonist. It also garnered much praise from many major publications and even some very well-known authors (Updike and Rushdie, to name two). The strands of this story are each as strong as the other. In one, the Ukrainian translator, Alex, relates his story of adventure in helping a Jewish-American traveler, who he refers to as the "hero," find and assemble pieces of his family's past, which he plans to write a novel about. Another strand is the novel-in-progress of this "hero" (whose name happens to be the same as the author's) in which he details this past, going back to his great-great-great-great-great grandmother, glamorized in many shades of the most beautiful magical realism. The third narrative is the letters from Alex to Jonathan, post-adventure, where he shares his critiques of Jonathan's novel-in-progress and the events going on in his own life, back in Ukraine. Having such varied perspectives, this novel shines with a nearly unrivaled imagination. It was as intriguing and funny as it was melancholy and sentimental. This author has a strength of prose and breadth of emotion that isn't found readily and should be, when found, held close and never let go. Everyone should read this.

So, there you are. These are the good books that I have liked this last and dreary decade. The best thing to do when a tyrant rules your country for most of a decade: read good books. And on a side note, these covers were the particular covers of the versions that I read. They hold a certain nostalgic significance. I can almost feel their weight and smell their pages. It feels good. Kindle will never take over. Nothing can beat having a physical book in your hand, and the wear that they endure is proof of their significance. OK, enjoy.

Seattle Art 2009: Last Year's Best

2010-01-02T17:04:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

Trying to find good art tends to mean wading through at a lot of crap. Ok ok, maybe 'crap' is too harsh. (But not always.) Let's go with Dan Britton's phrase: "a veritable sea of mediocrity." Fortunately though, there are those rare gifts that bubble to the top and make all the year's searching worthwhile. Here's what stands out from Seattle's exhibition scene in 2009, a smattering of artists, shows, and individual works, in no particular order.

Eric Elliott

His show at James Harris may have gotten Art in America's attention, but I prefer the work from the Tacoma Biennial. There was something slightly awkward about those little paintings that seemed to have tempered in the more recent show. No matter though. Elliott's paintings manage to be alluring even at the times they fall a little short. (How does he do that?) Each is a fascinating play of surface, image, and atmosphere, built with obsessive consideration. These are paintings that'll make you want to paint, and glaring examples of why you can't just look at art in books.

Gala Bent

She was also in that biennial. And flew solo at 4Culture. And was in that thing at SAM Gallery. Basically, Gala Bent kept popping up everywhere. And those weird whimsical watercolors do grab your attention. I don't know what world these images come from, but improbable arrays of hair and geometric conglomerations featuring odd creatures in bright yet modest colors prove there's something to be said for the fantastic — and the naked pencil line.

Oh, and she had a Stranger cover too.

Tim Roda: Recent Photographs

Speaking of crazy fantastic. (That's 'fantastic' in the imaginationland sense, not the woo-hoo! sense, by the way.) This series of photographs at Greg Kucera Gallery recalls those crazy orientalist paintings by the likes of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Jean-Léon Gérôme, except these are a lot more crazy (and not so haughty-imperialist naive). My only complaint about the show was the unnecessarily craggily cropped prints. It's as though Roda didn't trust the work to be unruly enough on its own, so he decided to make it literally rough around the edges. Lame. That aside though, the tension of quasi-disturbing meets playful innocence is really something to see. And that he can achieve the same effect through both elaborate costuming and design, and pure value composition, is all the more impressive.

Partly How Things Grow Cold

I hesitate to come right out and say it, but this was maybe the best. Ben Waterman's installation in the University of Washington CMA Gallery was a baffling arrangement of constructed platforms, video, and dirt. So baffling, in fact, that it was difficult to tell where the work began and where it ended. Could it be the recorded event, the installation, the gallery talk were all one and the same piece? Waterman, I think, likes to blur those lines. Or maybe he just finds the distinctions irrelevant. One thing is clear though: anyone who heard Ben Waterman speak that night, was in the presence of something exceptional.

Bob Yeaw: BFA Exhibition

In the same gallery, a few months later, Bob Yeaw invited guests to have a drink. Described as a connoisseur, Yeaw clearly takes pleasure in the things he does, in this case, using his exhibition of gorgeous ceramic vessels as an opportunity to provide hospitality — in the form of fine barbecue and scotch — to everyone in attendance. A not uncongested affair, it still managed to remain intimate. Blame the rigorous attention to detail for making it possible.

Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act

Excruciatingly dull title notwithstanding, this had to be the best museum show of the year. I've already written fairly effusively on the subject, so I won't say much, but it was refreshing to see something this substantial at SAM.

Nocturne

This bronze by Mark Calderon stared at me from a pedestal in Kucera for months. It set the bar too high serving as bait for Calderon's solo show in late summer, but the disappointment at its counterparts doesn't diminish the power of this sly, ominous phantasm.

A Little Painting with No Official Title

Anne Petty has glimmers of excellence. If you saw her work at the Henry in May, forget about it. She's at her best on a small scale, where she can't overwork or overthink. (It's why her watercolors turn out so well.) I was lucky enough last year to acquire this particular painting, and it may just be the new favorite in my collection.

A Note About 'Art'

2010-01-01T02:40:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Cummings

'Art' as it is used in the title of this blog should be understood broadly, referring to all those practices which are commonly known collectively as 'the arts'. Painting, sculpture, dance, music, literature, theatre, etc. Go see a play. 'See', then, should be recognized as a stand-in for any number of verbs which might suit a particular medium, and may reasonably be generalized as 'experience'. Go hear a symphony. And 'go', it turns out, may be sometimes excluded altogether, depending on the art form in question. Read a book, for example. A more apt title for the blog might thus be something along the lines of, 'Make an effort to experience art of some kind.' But that wouldn't be very catchy. So, Go see art.

In the body of this blog, on the other hand, 'art' will tend to possess its more narrow definition, denoting those media which are so often generalized as 'visual art'. 'Visual', of course, doesn't begin to cover the myriad iterations which have come to be over the past century, which is why we'll be sticking with the unqualified 'art'. It is somewhat irksome, however, that a term so small should lead to such potential perplexity. If only there were some context upon which we could couch our confusions. Sigh.