tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77375651287857964112024-03-05T10:26:46.159-08:00GO SEE ARTa blog about artStephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-8947277110674804672013-03-08T17:10:00.001-08:002013-03-08T18:15:34.395-08:00Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
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<a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/goseeart/8539948363/in/photostream/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 15px;"><img alt="Michael Heizer, 2012, Levitated Mass" border="0" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8375/8539948363_78453e67a5.jpg" width="310" height="" /></a></div>
<p>It seemed the great majority of opinions formed around <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Heizer">Michael Heizer</a>'s instantly famous sculpture, installed last year at the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.lacma.org/">Los Angeles County Museum of Art</a>, had been decided well in advance of it's actual creation. In the extreme cases, it was either <a target="_blank" href="http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/riverside/levitating-the-archaic-mind-with-michael-heizers-levitated-mass-at-los-angeles-county-museum-of-art.html">the greatest thing to happen in four thousand years</a>, or <a target="_blank" href="http://www.kcet.org/news/the_back_forty/commentary/golden-green/rock-of-ages-michael-heizers-levitated-mass-isnt-uplifting.html">the worst possible thing anyone could ever do with a boulder</a>. Mostly though it was just a novelty of engineering, of the effort involved in moving an object so heavy through a cityscape so sprawling — and how expensive that was. Christopher Knight, writing for the LA Times, produced <a target="_blank" href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/03/michael-heizers-rock-levitating-the-masses.html">an interesting analysis of the phenomenon</a>, and was, as far as I have found, the only person to note in print that all of the judgements, whatever else they were, were coming in a little bit prematurely. "I can't tell you how many people have asked whether I like a sculpture that doesn't yet exist," he wrote last March, three months before the piece was finally unveiled.</p>
<p>For those who did reserve their judgements for a finished product, the reaction was middling. Many, as is usual, preferred to make no judgement, and again report on the process of bringing the piece to fruition, or the ceremony of the opening, but for those who chose to write about the earthwork itself, <a target="_blank" href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/22/entertainment/la-et-knight-heizer-rock-20120623">Knight once again</a> provides an appropriately representative sample: "Huge advance publicity set up a love-it-or-hate-it anticipation for either a masterpiece or a fiasco. But this work is neither." Having now seen the work myself, I am inclined to agree, but the question then is why.</p>
<p>First it should be reiterated that the boulder itself is not the artwork. In other words, don't just go glance at the rock and proclaim dissatisfaction — or, for that matter, <i>not</i> go and still proclaim dissatisfaction. Rather, this piece seems to be about the experience of approaching and walking under the boulder through the concrete trench — just about being everywhere called a "slot" — that forms the lower portion of this large earthwork sculpture, along with the hardware holding the rock in place, namely a pair of heavy steel shelves bolted to the trench walls and the boulder. The surrounding field of decomposed granite serves mostly as a framing device, directing the focus to what is inside the trench, not out.</p>
<p>Much criticism has sprung from the title of the piece, <cite>Levitated Mass</cite>, which, if for some reason you're inclined to take the title of an artwork literally, promises that the famously massive boulder will float in midair, or at least present the illusion of floating. And then there was LACMA Director Michael Govan promising repeatedly ahead of time that the title was indeed to be taken literally. "The piece is actually called Levitated Mass, because, as you walk down the ramp, it will appear that the rock is levitating," he states in <a target="_blank" href="http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=PLMZUpUBrOM&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DPLMZUpUBrOM">a YouTube video released by the museum</a> before the rock moved from its quarry. Govan has not been one to hold back, either in his advance proclamations or <a target="_blank" href="http://www.dailynews.com/ci_20930898/lacma-art-is-eye-boulder">subsequent praise</a> for the piece, so it may not be surprising that it doesn't quite live up to his promises. My favorite analysis on this point comes from <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitated_Mass">a deadpan Wikipedia contributor</a>, taking a little bit more liberty than Wikipedians are generally afforded, writing, "Initial plans for the work described the boulder as being affixed to the trench walls themselves, giving the boulder the appearance of 'floating' when viewed from within the trench via optical illusion, hence the work's title. With the addition of the support shelves, this illusion does not occur." Another way of looking at it could be that the boulder does not appear to levitate any more than the ceiling in your home does when you walk down the stairs, but the writer is on to something in citing the shelves.</p>
<p>Ignoring the the title of <cite>Levitated Mass</cite>, we should evaluate the piece, as we would any other, based upon the reality it proposes. And what seems to be proposed, standing under the two story boulder, is that a feeling of uneasiness should set in. No, we shouldn't suspend our disbelief to think the rock is levitating, but its purchase should feel uncertain, sort of the way <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Serra">Richard Serra</a>'s best sculptures bend the space around themselves, disorienting viewers and seeming on the point of toppling. As it stands now, Wikipedia is on the mark. The great steel brackets lend too much stability, relegating the megalith oddly to the status of a giant knick knack, placed carefully on the mantle.</p>
<p>Curiously, only architectural publications have seen fit to delve into the compromises made in constructing this piece. <a target="_blank" href="http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2012/06/120625-A-Rock-Star-Takes-the-Stage-in-LA.asp">Architectural Record notes,</a> "The design and engineering team had to balance Heizer’s vision with the safety of the public," and goes on to describe some of the earthquake safety measures implemented in the construction. And in <a target="_blank" href="http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=6137">The Architect's Newspaper, a more exhaustive list:</a>
<blockquote>Many of the design details of Levitated Mass prioritized technical requirements above aesthetics. The cement trench rises above the decomposed granite of the surrounding grounds to waist height—otherwise the building code would have required a glass railing. ADA-mandated handrails make an unavoidable contribution to the interior of the trench. And two of the concrete trench’s more noticeable characteristics have more to do with nuisance abatement than artistic panache: the skimcoat cover on the concrete will make graffiti easy to wash away and recoat, and triangle notches on both ends of the trench are meant to keep skateboarders off the concrete.</blockquote></p>
<p>All of these elements have an effect on the experience of the piece, and one wonders if these compromises could have been mitigated? Why, for example, didn't the ADA mandated handrails simply continue to the top of the trench? They would then have appeared more as a conscious design element than regulatory accommodation. And indeed, why aren't the trench walls closer together so as to support the boulder directly? One imagines that the bolts holding the rock in place could have been disguised somehow.</p>
<p>As with any artwork, such speculation is just a critical exercise, since the piece is already made and not going anywhere — this one more than most. I wouldn't go quite so far as Christopher Knight in calling this piece "good". The word that comes to my mind instead is 'fine'. It's just a shame that in a piece designed to dominate a landscape for hundreds, or, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-lacma-rock-sculptor-20120525,0,2543276.story">it's been suggested, thousands of years,</a> the compromise stands out just a little bit more than the vision.</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-28125367995499454962012-12-29T16:02:00.001-08:002013-01-03T16:53:15.778-08:00Art 2012: Ocean Park at OCMA<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
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<a target="_blank" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mat-gleason/the-litmus-of-richard-diebenkorn_b_1305398.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 15px;"><img alt="Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, photo from The Huffington Post" border="0" src="http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2012-02-27-estengerOP96.JPG" width="300" height="280" /></a></div>
<p>It's rare to come across an Ocean Park painting in the gardens of galleries dotting our country's coasts and interiors. Rarer still is it to find more than one in a single outing. Isolated, these paintings are novelties, wanderers from that great body of work by the great <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Diebenkorn">Richard Diebenkorn</a>, his crowning achievement, his masterpiece(s).</p>
<p>We know because we've seen them in books, salivating and wondering if we'd ever have the opportunity to see them in person. Those stragglers we find now and again are confirmations of Ocean Park's existence, but alone they only intensify the curiosity. On the page the paintings are bright, their colors played up against the intense white, and their sizes obliterated, reduced to measurements of too many inches. With only the occasional representative, the question inevitably persists: what must the others be like?</p>
<p>This year, for anyone with the means in <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ocma.net/index.html?page=past&show=exhibit&e_id=3471">Southern California</a>, <a target="_blank" href="http://themodern.org/exhibition/past/richard-diebenkorn-the-ocean-park-series/5">Eastern Texas</a>, or within a reasonable radius of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.corcoran.org/exhibitions/past/diebenkorn">Washington, D.C.</a>, that curiosity was finally satisfied with <cite>Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series</cite>, "the first major museum exhibition to explore the artist’s most celebrated series", as the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ocma.net/">Orange County Museum of Art</a> put it.</p>
<p>The colors of the catalogues did not accompany these paintings into real life. Diebenkorn's reality is much more subdued and contemplative. The paintings, as we know, fill walls, but less well known is that many fill mere inches. With rooms and rooms of Ocean Park, each piece was no longer a memento, but a full fledged force to behold — or by which to be held, turned, pushed. There is no monolithic Ocean Park, not in size or palette or medium. With uncommon authority, each canvass — or collage, or etching, or cigar box lid — directs you in its own way and offers its own unique rewards.</p>
<p>One long held measure of a painting's effectiveness has been its ability to function both up close and at a distance. The painting, it is said, should excite the eye no matter what the proximity. Surprisingly however, many of these works do no such thing, and interestingly manage to in no way fall short. While most paintings that draw you in and prove wanting only disappoint, Diebenkorn's seem simply to say to you, 'No no, go stand over there,' as though there is an optimal viewing range for every piece, and each will let you know in turn what that position is.</p>
<p>In this way the paintings upend the common notion of "push and pull" which generally refers to the illusion of space within a painting. At the Orange County Museum, the push and pull was <i>of</i> the visitor, paintings tugging you in from other rooms, pressing you into oblique viewing angles, pulling you right up to the layered surfaces, and pushing you back when you got too close.</p>
<p>What's more, for all the buzz around their landscape inspiration — some have mentioned overhead views of farmland in addition the Ocean Park neighborhood itself — there isn't much space in these paintings. Diebenkorn seems to keep colors flat precisely to prevent them from competing for depth. Thus, a mark that's technically <i>over</i> can be <i>through</i>, as in <cite>Ocean Park #54</cite>, in which an opaque blue line pushes its way through a same blue scumbling. The interplay here is between millimeters, not miles, for as with much of the artist's work, what each piece reveals more than anything else is the process of its own making.</p>
<p>The what of that process was of course Diebenkorn's constant revision. A layer of yellow over red, washes of pink and blue and green resolving finally to a beige rose, lines that intersect and intertwine and flow from here to there all to tie that end of the surface to this one. Diebenkorn could let flecks of paint fly as well as <a target="_blank" href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/cy-twombly-idiosyncratic-painter-dies-at-83/">Cy Twombly</a> and may have given more attention to edges than <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian">Piet Mondrian</a>. Asked once whether he had ever let a particular group of paintings out of his studio, the artist replied, "These? No, no, they're not done. Or, they're sort of cooking." For Diebenkorn there was no recipe to follow; he just had to keep tasting to see if he'd gotten the balance of flavors right.</p>
<p>There has been no shortage of praise for this traveling one man show. The widely known but little conglomerated series stands as a capstone to what was already an impressive artistic career. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/columnists/scott-cantrell/20111017-art-review-diebenkorns-california-sublime-at-fort-worth-modern.ece">The Dallas Morning News</a> referred in its review to Diebenkorn's "Southern California sublime"; <a target="_blank" href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/02/art-review-richard-diebenkorn-the-ocean-park-series-at-ocma.html">The LA Times</a> called the show one "you might have wanted to see but that you didn't know you really <i>had to</i> see -- until you [saw] it," (italics added); and <a target="_blank" href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-06-28/entertainment/35460407_1_ocean-park-series-sarah-bancroft-richard-diebenkorn">The Washington Post</a> billed the exhibition as "a large, dense, rewarding show devoted to one of this country’s finest abstract painters." The greatest praise may have come from critic <a target="_blank" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mat-gleason/the-litmus-of-richard-diebenkorn_b_1305398.html">Mat Gleason, writing for The Huffington Post</a>, who declared, "If you miss this one, you are just not into art." Gleason's elaboration on this statement highlights the semi-elitist assholeishness of much of the art world, but the fact remains, the exhibition was really quite good.</p>
<p>So while it may not be particularly impressive to top the list of someone whose obligations over the past months prevented much in the way of far reaching art viewing, I've little doubt this series would have been the jewel in the crown of any good year.</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-44058535317502210312012-08-10T00:42:00.000-07:002012-09-12T00:31:50.321-07:00Esther Traugot<div class="author">by Stephen Cummings</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6TynnCV_fodmBmuYp7y6_56vrKQzquSWFaT0uadrKeJqKbfs8Ph6WljhHSkyjijCx9ICscuXx1ubFCxqg4bEpHiqGykUPM2m2QVHyQgFKJO86_ajZfttSKEwBnBBPcFHOL9w4qVmf6A/s1600/traugot-2011-egg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 15px;"><img alt="Esther Traugot, 2011, Egg" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6TynnCV_fodmBmuYp7y6_56vrKQzquSWFaT0uadrKeJqKbfs8Ph6WljhHSkyjijCx9ICscuXx1ubFCxqg4bEpHiqGykUPM2m2QVHyQgFKJO86_ajZfttSKEwBnBBPcFHOL9w4qVmf6A/s320/traugot-2011-egg.png" width="269" height="180" /></a></div>
<p>Jasper Johns showed us decades ago that a cast of a <a href="http://www.shafe.co.uk/art/Jasper_Johns-_Light_Bulb_I_and_II_%281958%29-.asp" target="_blank">light bulb</a> is something quite different from the bulb itself. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, likewise, found that wrapping objects, buildings, landscapes could transform them dramatically; the historical seat of German government repurposed into <a href="http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2002/christo/74fs.htm" target="_blank">their monumental sculpture</a>, if only for the time it was enveloped. More recently, knitters have entered the fold, Olek, probably most famously, covering the <cite><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/fashion/creating-graffiti-with-yarn.html" target="_blank">Charging Bull</a></cite> in New York's financial district.</p>
<p>The impulses are different, but the results are interestingly similar. Johns, in his usual way, chose something ubiquitous and made it into high art, a not unprecedented, but still somewhat absurd gesture. Christo and Jeanne-Claude elevated an already elevated construction, making profound again a selection from the once most highly regarded art form. And Olek turned the banker's ego pink.</p>
<p>Each of these artists transformed the somethings they worked with into very similar, but undeniably different somethings else, and it is as a part of this tradition that <a href="http://esthertraugot.com/" target="_blank">Esther Traugot</a> has positioned herself. Crocheting sheaths of golden fiber, the artist encases fragments from the natural world, simplifying them into irregular pieces of sculpture. The smoothing out is common to each of the artists mentioned, making the objects on display more digestible by their presentation, and by being simpler, somehow more worthwhile. Such is the case with Traugot's <cite>Rootsy</cite>, part of her <cite>Outside In</cite> show recently on display at <a href="http://chandracerritocontemporary.com/" target="_blank">Chandra Cerrito Contemporary</a> in Oakland. The wrapped object is both adorned and erased by its casing; writhing bits of tree mounted for consideration, swallowed by the pollen-yellow, interlocking threads.</p>
<p>Thus, by loop upon meticulous fiber loop, does this artist "gild" her subjects, making precious the insistently banal. In contrast to Olek's blunt emasculation, Traugot raises her subjects' profiles by the tediousness of her action. At once cradled and adorned, these objects are treated with reverence, whether attention is drawn to the surface or its shape. Yarn blankets the inside of <cite>Home Again 2</cite>, standing in for the creature that once inhabited this shell, protruding like an odd, careful growth. In <cite>Egg</cite> an exterior portion of the object is ornately framed by its intricate cover, as though inviting us to take a look at the lovely texture.</p>
<p>But then again, it's an egg in a sweater.</p>
<p>Whatever the profundity of Traugot's sculptures, they're also weird. The tediousness of the adornment is in a way as banal as the objects themselves. When a piece of a twig or shell protrudes from its wrapper it's unclear what the difference is. The parts behind the yellow screen are notionally preserved, but as fragile as ever. Why take so much care with this part and not that? The answer may be that no part is more important than another. In the past, Traugot's cast-off bits of wrapped up nature have been installation, artifact, and plays on the tradition of landscape in art, but in all cases the pattern of yellow curls invites a look at each object that would not otherwise have happened. Traugot, like her predecessors, forces a look at things we've all seen a thousand times, only to have us see something else.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/goseeart/sets/72157631517609643/with/7978915777/" target="_blank">See more work by Esther Traugot on the GO SEE ART Flickr page.</a></p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-6121656942199707592012-03-02T01:58:00.012-08:002012-03-02T23:18:25.323-08:00Jenny Saville Now<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2bLOouBrOsMBAAvlgAtxcFlhkSiN0bULHKV6QcGVBOz_hO2rVbj742EkpyUxSQfMWEK50kfRUBKfk-qORbX2UNWSRkHIEcgSMNmAxb3Qar743VFMcysHKgiDWfxza_9kMmAbSKyLjzw/s1600/Saville-2011-Isis.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 239px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2bLOouBrOsMBAAvlgAtxcFlhkSiN0bULHKV6QcGVBOz_hO2rVbj742EkpyUxSQfMWEK50kfRUBKfk-qORbX2UNWSRkHIEcgSMNmAxb3Qar743VFMcysHKgiDWfxza_9kMmAbSKyLjzw/s320/Saville-2011-Isis.jpg" border="0" alt="Jenny Saville, Isis, 2011" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715374769614908242" /></a>
<p>What do you say about <a target="_blank" href="http://www.gagosian.com/artists/jenny-saville/">Jenny Saville</a>? One of the <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_British_Artists">Young British Artists</a> who found fame in the early nineties, Saville remains perhaps best known for that first <a target="_blank" href="http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/aipe/jenny_saville.htm">body of work</a> she produced to fill London's <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saatchi_Gallery">Saatchi Gallery</a> in 1994. Those paintings were brazen at the time, large and naked and very much anti-ideal. Saville confronted her audience without being combative. Her feminism proffered vulnerability. Arranging the naked form became her routine, and the nakedness, along with the British connection, led maybe inevitably to comparisons with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=lucian+freud&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvnso&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=8aVQT9a6B-nPiAKx0fi0Bg&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CCIQ_AUoAQ&biw=1279&bih=680">Lucian Freud</a>, a painter whose surfaces are as unpolished as his subjects, and comparison to whom is not a small compliment.</p>
<p>But that was 1994.</p>
<p>Two decades since those earliest works were snatched up, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.norton.org/Exhibitions/Current/JennySaville/tabid/495/Default.aspx"><cite>Jenny Saville</cite></a> at Florida's <a target="_blank" href="http://www.norton.org/">Norton Museum of Art</a> puts old and new side by side, demonstrating both stark change and general continuity in the artist's work. The shock of the monumental, unlovely nude has certainly dulled with the passage of time, as has Saville's flirtation with bloody things. Women have remained her focus, though not so much the <span style="font-style: italic;">image</span> of women. But without the confrontation of Saville's early subjects, what we're left with are just these paintings and drawings. And emphasis, unfortunately, must be placed on <span style="font-style: italic;">just</span>.</p>
<p>Absent a powerful political message, Jenny Saville must be considered as a painter. That the artist is skilled there can still be no doubt. Her series <a target="_blank" href="http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/april-15-2010--jenny-saville/exhibition-images"><cite>Reproduction drawings</cite></a>, for example, demonstrates highly competent draftsmanship; strong linear development, replete with varied weights and cross-contours and utmost confidence — all the things we try to teach students in drawing class. Her paint application is equally facile, but how many <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mica.edu/Browse_Art/Painting_Student_Artwork.html">MICA</a> graduates paint just as well?</p>
<p>Comparisons to Freud are all well and good when we're considering the strange baseness of pale, human flesh, but what more does Saville have in common with the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jul/21/lucian-freud-died-aged-88">recently departed</a> master? Looming large and bursting at the canvasses' edges, her figures are much too grandiose to share his concerns. And while Saville moved on to splashier, more demonstrative paint application, Freud's was a long obsession with coarse, awkward plainness. To her credit, Saville herself draws a contrast: "Freud's women are dead bodies; they lie there," she says. "I don't make those images." And as the Norton points out, "Critic Charles Darwent wrote about [Saville's <cite>Fulcrum</cite>] '[...] The echo is less of Freud than of <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon_%28artist%29">Francis Bacon</a>, humanity on the butcher's block.'" But is comparison to Bacon fair? Here again is the British connection, but the pain of a Bacon painting is abject. Even his paint is tortured, barely holding on. Saville's, by contrast, is smooth and easy. She likes that way paint flows.</p>
<p>More descriptive in the early years, the brushstrokes in much of this exhibition document <a target="_blank" href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/02/05/v-gallery_detail_list/2623344/shock-and-awe-two-south-florida.html">Saville's tendency</a> toward broader, more blatant mark-making. "I have moved away from the anatomy of the body to the anatomy of paint," she said. With a statement like that you might expect to see a painter like <a target="_blank" href="http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=3213">Willem de Kooning</a>, whose figures were almost obliterated by "the anatomy of paint". But Saville's paint, rather than redefining her figures, remians wholly beholden to description. However free her brushstrokes almost are, they still subordinate themselves to her very reserved mosaic — and not a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.artnet.com/galleries/artwork_detail.asp?G=&gid=423991058&which=&aid=4171&wid=426011596&source=inventory&collectionid=62418&rta=http://www.artnet.com">Chuck Close</a>-like mosaic either. Heads so large as Saville's compare naturally to Close, but are not nearly straightforward enough to be so powerfully honest. Their roving gestures come across as forced, if not as forced as the containment of would-be wild brushstrokes within unsurprising portraits.</p>
<p>The most recent piece in <cite>Jenny Saville</cite> is <a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2bLOouBrOsMBAAvlgAtxcFlhkSiN0bULHKV6QcGVBOz_hO2rVbj742EkpyUxSQfMWEK50kfRUBKfk-qORbX2UNWSRkHIEcgSMNmAxb3Qar743VFMcysHKgiDWfxza_9kMmAbSKyLjzw/s1600/Saville-2011-Isis.jpg"><cite>Isis</cite> (2011)</a>, an over life-size portrait of a pregnant mother, and an exemplar of the artist's progress from her initial pluck into stardom. Gone is any hint of confrontation in this subject. The woman is placid, content, and, frankly, attractive. She is a contemporary embodiment of the <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis">Ancient Egyptian goddess of motherhood</a> — or so it is indicated. Saville's description is lovely, but the content, including "ancient texts" projected across this woman's body, is entirely tacked on. Those splashy, overemphasized strokes of color have fortunately gone away, reverting to the simpler, softer approach. What we're looking at in the end is a portrait, plain and simple, forced lighting situation or no. There is not a hint of Freud, nor Bacon. Instead, the artist Jenny Saville resembles most closely with this canvas, more than any other I can think of, is <a target="_blank" href="http://arthistory.about.com/od/from_exhibitions/ig/America---Painting-History/aphnw_13.htm">John Singer Sargent</a>, whom de Kooning called "a good, bad painter".</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-11249313486025996122011-12-31T08:46:00.000-08:002012-01-02T08:33:25.075-08:00Art 2011: The Best of Further Wanderings<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1149">MoMA’s first ever retrospective of Willem de Kooning</a>. 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.</p>
<h4>A Small Self-Portrait</h4>
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<p>The year got off to a strong start with three exceptional pieces on display simultaneously at UCLA’s <a target="_blank" href="http://hammer.ucla.edu/">Armand Hammer Museum</a>. <a href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2011/02/go-see-this-drawing.html">Roberto Cuoghi's untitled self-portrait</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/195">this body of work</a>, Cuoghi certainly doesn't subscribe to the school of though that prizes it above all else.</p>
<h4>The Cutters</h4>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0UThltmJwwVNnCjZl1Zj9FOsXX1HA0nicVARBpgQVbTUlVTGET8d4XassToF_N77k7nv4hbkTx0LcQ1rbLKfkDptS8dwhjrTyjf88FKJnB29zdhA6i6SDKgH7ySb8myoFPKEM9MAoxg/s1600/sibony-2011-the_cutters.JPG"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 228px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0UThltmJwwVNnCjZl1Zj9FOsXX1HA0nicVARBpgQVbTUlVTGET8d4XassToF_N77k7nv4hbkTx0LcQ1rbLKfkDptS8dwhjrTyjf88FKJnB29zdhA6i6SDKgH7ySb8myoFPKEM9MAoxg/s320/sibony-2011-the_cutters.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692547288412895010" border="0" /></a>
<p>In adjacent galleries could be found the Hammer's <a target="_blank" href="http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/197"><cite>All Of This And Nothing</cite></a>, featuring, among other works, Gedi Sibony’s <cite>The Cutters</cite>. 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. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.wmagazine.com/artdesign/2008/11/gedi_sibony">As reported in <cite>W magazine</cite></a> 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 <cite>The Cutters</cite> was, <a href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2011/02/amidst-all-of-this-nothing.html">as mentioned</a>, a quiet and powerful thing to behold.</p>
<h4>Anticultural Positions</h4>
<p><a href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2011/02/amidst-all-of-this-nothing.html">Also part of <cite>All Of This And Nothing</cite></a> was Paul Sietsema’s <cite>Anticultural Positions</cite>, a thirty-minute, looped film featuring black and white stills of the artist’s working surfaces interspersed with text from a lecture <a target="_blank" href="http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/paul-sietsema/">he reportedly presented in 2008</a>. 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, <cite>Anticultural Positions</cite> nevertheless created an atmosphere to be savored.</p>
<h4>The End</h4>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://web.cmoa.org/?page_id=1259">In Pittsburgh</a>, another video piece proved even more enthralling. <a href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2011/08/end.html">Ragnar Kjartansson’s <cite>The End</cite></a>, 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.</p>
<h4>Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris</h4>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge-wmK9z9lsfkUcqmL99XXOlmYd52PPb8JuFIsRM0d8dt6ELeE0d06-U9XoRNv-cDzawKtx9bZvYiQVr186WcofrRYMXuYguoc17Wz9q3gR_yljWSq6I8Xd6tpFS0U6g6fAkKnuP_lVw/s1600/picasso-1939-head_of_a_woman.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 140px; height: 165px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge-wmK9z9lsfkUcqmL99XXOlmYd52PPb8JuFIsRM0d8dt6ELeE0d06-U9XoRNv-cDzawKtx9bZvYiQVr186WcofrRYMXuYguoc17Wz9q3gR_yljWSq6I8Xd6tpFS0U6g6fAkKnuP_lVw/s320/picasso-1939-head_of_a_woman.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692547139478550098" border="0" /></a>
<p>Another collection of greatly varied styles came from an in-depth look at a single artist in the <a target="_blank" href="http://deyoung.famsf.org/deyoung/exhibitions/picasso-masterpieces-mus-e-national-picasso-paris">de Young Museum’s <cite>Picasso</cite></a>. 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/410">snagged by the Steins, interestingly</a> — 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 <cite>Picasso</cite> an unforgettable look at the master.</p>
<h4>B. Wurtz: Works, 1970 - 2011</h4>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSIa91DlMR_PDFtKCDLLI-_636O7o2HrtDyUZ58L6gReoIwYPnN2Tqnl_q0iD0DoQdDPVQxurrw2qq51M2VEPdho00zB18TUUD6oqsJ44JYbU91fIkg3yaTFv0cphs_RdQ3yf0gLlpUQ/s1600/wurtz-1997-untitled.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 126px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSIa91DlMR_PDFtKCDLLI-_636O7o2HrtDyUZ58L6gReoIwYPnN2Tqnl_q0iD0DoQdDPVQxurrw2qq51M2VEPdho00zB18TUUD6oqsJ44JYbU91fIkg3yaTFv0cphs_RdQ3yf0gLlpUQ/s320/wurtz-1997-untitled.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692547445872934882" border="0" /></a>
<p>And maybe equally unforgettable was <a target="_blank" href="http://www.metropicturesgallery.com/exhibitions/2011-06-22-b-wurtz/">Metro Pictures Gallery’s retrospective</a> of <a target="_blank" href="http://bwurtz.com/">B. Wurtz</a>. 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/camerablaylock/sets/72157626702759257/">Richard Tuttle’s work</a>, concurrent at the nearby Pace Gallery, feel leaden. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/arts/design/b-wurtz-works-1970-2011-at-metro-pictures-gallery-review.html">Reviewing the show in June</a>, 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.”</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-54090230068560158362011-12-25T12:16:00.000-08:002011-12-25T21:38:35.887-08:00Bryson Gill: Plaisir l'Oeil<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGNryIQncpi-3VL3p75Y-Msk7ovqoo9YAMYrkjpatF2BUTeWNI0qaOWFOQEsR8N3anEfzfXwVSMT9V4A2A3euBanTYNWUbAe5cIZBxV9l2RDg_KHtU8mhBitfYfjm0xvFXHhZ4LZrVeg/s1600/2011-gill-AAAA_%2528Consecutive_Utterance_2%2529.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 258px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGNryIQncpi-3VL3p75Y-Msk7ovqoo9YAMYrkjpatF2BUTeWNI0qaOWFOQEsR8N3anEfzfXwVSMT9V4A2A3euBanTYNWUbAe5cIZBxV9l2RDg_KHtU8mhBitfYfjm0xvFXHhZ4LZrVeg/s320/2011-gill-AAAA_%2528Consecutive_Utterance_2%2529.jpg" border="0" alt="Bryson Gill, 2011, AAAA (Consecutive Utterance 2)"id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5690166843103477090" /></a>
<p>The trompe l’oeil tradition goes back a long way in the history of painting; a Baroque term, so <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe-l%27%C5%93il">Wikipedia reminds me</a>, 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. (<a target="_blank" href="http://baroque_ceiling.udu.cas.cz/imagines_photogallery/0002_clamgallas_carlone.html">Ceilings opening onto the heavens</a> were popular.) Artists working on architecture today are similarly deceptive — <a target="_blank" href="http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/images/maidinlondon.jpg">Banksy, perhaps most comically</a> — 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, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:phi,0978,001:35:36">as Pliny tells us</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Haberle">provincial</a> <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Michael_Harnett_After_the_Hunt_1883.jpg">Americans</a> 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.</p>
<p>So imagine my delight upon entering San Francisco’s <a target="_blank" href="http://basebasebase.com/">Triple Base Gallery</a> to find the paintings of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.brysongill.com/">Bryson Gill</a> in his new exhibition, <a target="_blank" href="http://basebasebase.com/index.php/bryson-gill-solo-show"><span style="font-style:italic;">The Optimist Gene</span></a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Through January 1st.</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-9091965968740510062011-10-01T21:02:00.000-07:002011-11-26T01:51:56.289-08:00Bryan Christiansen's Nature Preserve<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" target="_blank" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiedl7uzMwTHsVyvfV9bIF3i8fL0Y0aCo70ZjTZKqNejwV-Vh5qsKO2VehtpyOnDBOQc8fUzZ9ByFNxJ9v9gHu8SqTvq97gqqzkSAQ63ch9mwtQR8dnoMc_V78yq1erEUV8HxkGotsoAA/s1600/christiansen-2011-doe_%2528floral_sofa%2529.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 300px; cursor: pointer; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiedl7uzMwTHsVyvfV9bIF3i8fL0Y0aCo70ZjTZKqNejwV-Vh5qsKO2VehtpyOnDBOQc8fUzZ9ByFNxJ9v9gHu8SqTvq97gqqzkSAQ63ch9mwtQR8dnoMc_V78yq1erEUV8HxkGotsoAA/s320/christiansen-2011-doe_%2528floral_sofa%2529.jpg" alt="Bryan Christiansen, 2011, Doe (Floral Sofa)" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5658747191794184978" border="0" /></a>
<p>If Bryan Christiansen's exhibition at <a target="_blank" href="http://stremmelgallery.com/">Stremmel Gallery</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://stremmelgallery.com/artists/john-randall-nelson/">John Randall Nelson</a>.) 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nevadaart.org/exhibitions/detail?eid=153">the recognition Nevada Museum of Art offered in 2010</a>.</p>
<p>NMA has compared Christiansen's sculptures to <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ocma.net/index.html?page=highlights&piece=7">Bruce Conner</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/38753128@N03/5349833792/#/photos/38753128@N03/5349833792/lightbox/">Ed Kienholz</a>, 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://calvert.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Butterfield-Horses-NMA-for-VIA-113007/G0000dYNpjZjdou8/I0000ja1MedEJXm4">Deborah Butterfield</a> 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?)</p>
<p>What the museum did get right in describing these works is the phrase "exquisitely crafted". Christiansen's frozen menagerie is like something <a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/manitobamuseum/2847566660/">Richard Jackson</a> 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.</p>
<p>Ok, so there's <span style="font-style: italic;">some</span> irony. What <a target="_blank" href="http://www.newsreview.com/reno/hunting-party/content?oid=3703509">Brad Bynum described</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://whitney.org/Collection/ClaesOldenburg/2002255as">Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures</a>, 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.</p>
<p>Piecing together living forms from scrap is <a target="_blank" href="http://stremmelgallery.com/wp-content/gallery/artists/web_stremmel-1.jpg">hardly unique</a> 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.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/goseeart/sets/72157628156901985/" target="_blank">See more work from Bryan Christiansen on the GO SEE ART Flickr page.</a></p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-21073793399055636452011-08-09T17:12:00.000-07:002011-08-10T08:12:47.428-07:00The Beautiful, Bizarre End<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" target="_blank" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw9Xumkfs12QliUZB3K7DdQ8k0mNWAtRdZ2aq2U4TmwTUoNN4BKojmH9YNds4A0V88kG-LJykvh6Ci0aTAniGNIZIsmV7mfphyphenhyphenF3C5PDxp9FeK_b9SNnObUB70t2hrM27SxLWCSq5lxw/s1600/kjartansson-2008-the_end.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 15px; cursor: pointer; width: 284px; height: 201px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw9Xumkfs12QliUZB3K7DdQ8k0mNWAtRdZ2aq2U4TmwTUoNN4BKojmH9YNds4A0V88kG-LJykvh6Ci0aTAniGNIZIsmV7mfphyphenhyphenF3C5PDxp9FeK_b9SNnObUB70t2hrM27SxLWCSq5lxw/s320/kjartansson-2008-the_end.jpg" alt="Ragnar Kjartansson, The End, 2008" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5639078362771903234" border="0" /></a>
<p>No praise for the <a target="_blank" href="http://web.cmoa.org/">Carnegie Museum</a>’s summer programming would be complete without mentioning <a target="_blank" href="http://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/ragnar-kjartansson">Ragnar Kjartansson</a>. Having <a target="_blank" href="http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/6844">gotten</a> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.whitewallmag.com/2009/06/23/the-icelandic-pavilion/">some</a> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/ragnar-kjartansson/">attention</a> representing <a target="_blank" href="http://www.icelandicartcenter.is/Projects/Viewprojects/venicebiennale2009">Iceland in the 2009 Venice Bienniale</a>, Kjartansson was brought to Pittsburgh this year for his first U.S. solo museum exhibition. <a target="_blank" href="http://web.cmoa.org/?page_id=1259"><cite>Song</cite></a> 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.</p>
<p>The videos variously display a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/ragnar-kjartansson#/images/19/">half-buried, unclothed guitarist</a> (Kjartansson), a triptych of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/ragnar-kjartansson#/images/34/">one expectorating mother</a> (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 <a target="_blank" href="http://vimeo.com/12922707"><cite>The Man</cite></a> 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.</p>
<p>Whatever the case, the prize of the show is <cite>The End</cite>, which featured at that little biennial mentioned above, and is here unencumbered by any <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/arts/design/04icel.html">painting performance</a>. 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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-82241865640518771742011-07-29T06:27:00.000-07:002011-08-03T12:05:26.257-07:00Zak Prekop Makes Good Paintings<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" target="_blank" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAOaEmu5E_ADUwH99YPsPVEhaEMXaHPe6bKNwRheBrSZ7SFzTZKboaT0SA6x74yT2dmcKww9RjyN4w1cgoS2zmRaaxMm1MmkC_uTPpT1LQnWUmVAPmnWDbprjdrdpzLNno-S7_SX7nlg/s1600/Prekop-2011-untitled_02.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 15px; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 301px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAOaEmu5E_ADUwH99YPsPVEhaEMXaHPe6bKNwRheBrSZ7SFzTZKboaT0SA6x74yT2dmcKww9RjyN4w1cgoS2zmRaaxMm1MmkC_uTPpT1LQnWUmVAPmnWDbprjdrdpzLNno-S7_SX7nlg/s320/Prekop-2011-untitled_02.jpg" alt="Zak Prekop, 2011, Untitled" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5636025212832630162" border="0" /></a>
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<p><a target="_blank" href="http://rhmfoundation.org/collect/index.php/selection/web-nominee/64-zakprekop/">Zak Prekop</a> makes good paintings — at least as far as I can tell, given the selection currently on view at the <a target="_blank" href="http://web.cmoa.org/?page_id=2659">Carnegie Museum</a>. As part of <a target="_blank" href="http://biennial.pittsburgharts.org/?p=113">Pittsburgh's 2011 Biennial</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://hirshhorn.si.edu/visit/collection_object.asp?key=32&subkey=8746">Ellsworth Kelly</a>, as well as the great collages of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.picassomio.com/gallery/markowicz-fine-art/henri-matisse-artwork-87385.html">Henri Matisse</a>, which he called "drawing with scissors." Two pieces in fact are <a target="_blank" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzVsqixVQbafBTsTXzT2_NG4lFdXW23kGbU-TheDiOIDkhltvt-eUU2DaAWwBPeiIZqElVxbImEgFBxIstXF_096c-kqKgVkNUGrjvXNTSB1NeBKUhrssRCst-UXdeOP2QKJkUYcZ-BA/s1600/Prekop-2011-untitled.jpg">straight collage</a> 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.</p>
<p>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, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.yveskleinarchives.org/works/works1_us.html">Yves Klein</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=3787">Agnes Martin</a>'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.</p>
<p>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.</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-43904505512451462892011-07-07T10:40:00.000-07:002011-07-07T19:05:53.962-07:00Another On Kawara<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_pOwHPb_pZ0PRvGxDkJBBBIUBo-2RTmmb4nAP1MaKB5-hVdVT2R93HfmMCFfDZOdzcJb4bf68EEfGSZSy_Kk7bjba3mujb8ln8X_lHjv74DYVcGISQPxAySjO0rtpE9AU5NTDIm7XNQ/s1600/kawara-1978-apr_27_1978.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 260px; height: 199px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_pOwHPb_pZ0PRvGxDkJBBBIUBo-2RTmmb4nAP1MaKB5-hVdVT2R93HfmMCFfDZOdzcJb4bf68EEfGSZSy_Kk7bjba3mujb8ln8X_lHjv74DYVcGISQPxAySjO0rtpE9AU5NTDIm7XNQ/s320/kawara-1978-apr_27_1978.jpg" alt="On Kawara, 1978, Apr. 27, 1978" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5626670066733329794" border="0" /></a>
<p>My compliments to the <a target="_blank" href="http://web.cmoa.org/">Carnegie Museum of Art</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Kawara">On Kawara</a>'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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.diacenter.org/exhibitions/introduction/86"><cite>Today Series</cite></a>, 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.</p>
<p>At the Carnegie Museum my experience was different. Perusing the Scaife Galleries from present to past I first came upon Kawara's <cite>Feb. 29, 1988</cite>, a small, grey to black object in the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A3030&page_number=4&template_id=1&sort_order=1">classic Kawara style</a>. 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 <cite>Apr. 27, 1978</cite>. 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, <span style="font-style:italic;">red</span> painting. Now I could compare them in my mind; I had forgotten some of these <cite>Today</cite> paintings came in color. The pleasure began to set in. Around another wall, <cite>19 Jul. 68</cite>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Delaware-Crossing/0A33A8FD0CE4C2E9">Frank Stella</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sharkycharming/284707498/in/photostream">Paul Feeley</a> were doing when Kawara painted <cite>19 Jul. 68</cite>, and what <a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIsMdSO_qx4">Bruce Nauman</a> was doing when <cite>Feb. 29, 1988</cite> was made. The <cite>Today Series</cite> is remarkably consistent in the presence of such changing approaches, and all the more remarkable for having remained so over so many decades.</p>
<p>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, <cite>19 Jul. 68</cite>, 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.</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-54024389590353873592011-06-28T20:35:00.000-07:002011-08-02T21:00:02.864-07:00If you don't have anything interesting to say . . .<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" target="_blank" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6J_bBw86XpnohOKxJ32vurkwaGp9QIn_N8DB9bBZWF6WgMhDXbtoLR12VYJeH9DL8W8mGZRr_psNKdshzYrx1dg6SaONgftJlwoYcsCSadvQcdPeZSbESLE-WdQU4YxFKosO5bvmpjA/s1600/Nyland-2011-Flemish_Lines.JPG"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 15px; cursor: pointer; width: 206px; height: 275px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6J_bBw86XpnohOKxJ32vurkwaGp9QIn_N8DB9bBZWF6WgMhDXbtoLR12VYJeH9DL8W8mGZRr_psNKdshzYrx1dg6SaONgftJlwoYcsCSadvQcdPeZSbESLE-WdQU4YxFKosO5bvmpjA/s320/Nyland-2011-Flemish_Lines.JPG" alt="Nicholas Nyland, Flemish Lines, 2011" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5623485124181073586" border="0" /></a>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/">Seattle Art Museum</a>: If you don't have anything interesting to say, please, don't say anything at all.</p>
<p>Case in point: a trio of sculptures by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nicholasnyland.net/">Nicholas Nyland</a>, loafing away the summer at SAM's <a target="_blank" href="http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/visit/osp/">Olympic Sculpture Park</a>.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/320/gallery/">Antoni Gaudi</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://dcl.umn.edu/search/search_results?search_string=%20Spatialist&per_page=60">Lucio Fontana</a>, what Jen Graves called "<a target="_blank" href="http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/in-art-news/Content?oid=1206031&show=comments">sweet messes</a>", 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> 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.</p>
<p>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 <cite>Embroidered Path</cite>, a piece made of bricks splotched with color, laid into the floor of the park's meadow.</p>
<blockquote>Using bricks he painted with vibrant glazes and then fired, Nicholas Nyland created <cite>Embroidered Path</cite>, 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 <cite>Embroidered Path</cite> through the Meadow.</blockquote>
<p>There are several problems in this short description, which we'll consider in turn:
</p><ol>
<li>Do we really need a physical description of the piece directly in front of us? It's right there.</li>
<li>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?</li>
<li>"[T]his modest work recalls decorative walkways [...]." No shit.</li>
<li>"[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?</li>
</ol>
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.
<p>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. <span style="font-style: italic;">Obviously</span> 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?</p>
<p>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.</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-14036137205369374002011-05-07T09:16:00.000-07:002011-12-28T10:10:50.267-08:00Digging Paint<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<!--<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqYfs1F9DLDcFSqvtMU1azbXZZU7B1P-4OTNQ81JyeSzT3xo7pgaXTBdcj_uI592nhDwo5Wh35gq7ANaX2Yfp_CEc7SmSus_4aU7JxRam9gDHwUzsQ4ikapwWAtjg4_-v_LALd9vJyLw/s1600/miller-2010-Stegosaurus.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 226px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqYfs1F9DLDcFSqvtMU1azbXZZU7B1P-4OTNQ81JyeSzT3xo7pgaXTBdcj_uI592nhDwo5Wh35gq7ANaX2Yfp_CEc7SmSus_4aU7JxRam9gDHwUzsQ4ikapwWAtjg4_-v_LALd9vJyLw/s320/miller-2010-Stegosaurus.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5604012006213329714" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirTmPwbQL36Qm-0y64u3yIPIXZixJpYZ8WaYhLRoD9wxOPEf935LG8bNPYFr9krCZZribDuM6wM3-M6r_Dwl_8liR7YHH2VaDRv66nokm9tZUQHPEHeArkwkhh6vVbDCzs52W6TqpyCA/s1600/miller-2010-Stegosaurus.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirTmPwbQL36Qm-0y64u3yIPIXZixJpYZ8WaYhLRoD9wxOPEf935LG8bNPYFr9krCZZribDuM6wM3-M6r_Dwl_8liR7YHH2VaDRv66nokm9tZUQHPEHeArkwkhh6vVbDCzs52W6TqpyCA/s320/miller-2010-Stegosaurus.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5604011842133987442" border="0" /></a>-->
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqYfs1F9DLDcFSqvtMU1azbXZZU7B1P-4OTNQ81JyeSzT3xo7pgaXTBdcj_uI592nhDwo5Wh35gq7ANaX2Yfp_CEc7SmSus_4aU7JxRam9gDHwUzsQ4ikapwWAtjg4_-v_LALd9vJyLw/s1600/miller-2010-Stegosaurus.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 15px; cursor: pointer; width: 275px; height: 183px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirTmPwbQL36Qm-0y64u3yIPIXZixJpYZ8WaYhLRoD9wxOPEf935LG8bNPYFr9krCZZribDuM6wM3-M6r_Dwl_8liR7YHH2VaDRv66nokm9tZUQHPEHeArkwkhh6vVbDCzs52W6TqpyCA/s320/miller-2010-Stegosaurus.jpg" alt="Ryan Peter Miller, 2010, Stegosaurus" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5604011842133987442" border="0" /></a>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.ryanpetermiller.com/">Ryan Miller</a>'s a smart ass. (That's Ryan <span style="font-style: italic;">Peter</span> 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 target="_blank" href="http://www.ryanpetermiller.com/Portfolio/Pages/Ainting.html#25">a Warholian sort of memento mori</a> that turned childish things oddly serious in its poking fun at encaustic paint, and an aggressively blunt poke at — well, if not <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ryanpetermiller.com/Portfolio/Pages/Ainting.html#32"><span style="font-style: italic;">everything</span></a>, 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ryanpetermiller.com/Portfolio/Pages/Ainting.html">Ain'ting</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://margie.net/portfolio-2008-2009.html">those Margie Livingston started playing around with</a> — 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, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ryanpetermiller.com/Portfolio/Pages/Excavation.html">dinosaurs</a>. <a href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2011/05/digging-paint.html#footnotes" class="note">[1]</a></p>
<p>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">digging</span> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<a name="footnotes"></a>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li>I'm nerd enough that I feel obliged to point out that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ryanpetermiller.com/Portfolio/Pages/Excavation_files/Media/Pteradon/Pteradon.jpg?disposition=download">Pteranodons</a> are not dinosaurs, strictly speaking, but <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaurs">pterosaurs</a>. Please forgive me the use of the catch all.</li>
</ol>
</div>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-51948282813979471842011-04-30T20:20:00.000-07:002011-05-02T18:42:54.286-07:00Fundamental Truths<div class="author">by Sean Flannigan</div>
<a href="http://kathrynsbooknook.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/under-the-banner-of-heaven.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-right: 1em;"><img src="http://kathrynsbooknook.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/under-the-banner-of-heaven.jpg" alt="Jon Krakauer, 2003, Under The Banner of Heaven" border="0" height="200" width="128" /></a>
<p>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 <cite>Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith</cite>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It is that beginning, the creation of <cite>The Book of Mormon</cite>, 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.</p>
<p>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, <cite>Under the Banner of Heaven</cite> 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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>Love it or hate it, <cite>Under the Banner of Heaven</cite> is an undeniably interesting read and you will know more for having read it. So, go read it.</p>Sean Flanniganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08496564936028783309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-54944369173496374752011-03-27T09:45:00.000-07:002011-03-28T18:35:12.645-07:00Recently Read<div class="author">by Sean Flannigan</div>
<h4>The People of Paper (McSweeney's Books, 2005)</h4>
<p>A friend lent me this book by Salvador Plascencia, thought I'd like it, as he returned to me my copy of Kundera's <cite>Unbearable Lightness of Being</cite>. 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.</p>
<a target="_blank" href="http://images.indiebound.com/117/032/9780156032117.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 15px;"><img style="width: 215px; height: 307px;" src="http://images.indiebound.com/117/032/9780156032117.jpg" border="0" /></a>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Overall, I would recommend picking it up and giving it a try. It is something different, a little fantastical and very smart.</p>
<p>I will conclude with a small passage from the beginning that I just turned to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Saturn</span></p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>Sean Flanniganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08496564936028783309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-76367801757887088252011-02-28T02:05:00.000-08:002011-03-01T00:33:52.383-08:00This Unassuming Drawing<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdxSXxMBF4GIYKTMhKD1Zt6o-4lvUWkRWnU_KJciktGWoOgcFifTSAlXOgBWf9G21-uXspxlsSa0MrC7D5KUkjAp5dREBoOabXVWS0yLF3gBRspT-F1fZxUnd8xZmcUDlSlFZq7lr1Rw/s1600/hammer-2011-roberto_cuoghi-installation-go_see_it.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 15px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 250px; height: 165px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdxSXxMBF4GIYKTMhKD1Zt6o-4lvUWkRWnU_KJciktGWoOgcFifTSAlXOgBWf9G21-uXspxlsSa0MrC7D5KUkjAp5dREBoOabXVWS0yLF3gBRspT-F1fZxUnd8xZmcUDlSlFZq7lr1Rw/s320/hammer-2011-roberto_cuoghi-installation-go_see_it.png" border="0" alt="Go see this drawing by Roberto Cuoghi."id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5578706857043439698" /></a>
<!--<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGv1LSn0I94NukfUhjwL7bRcuMpAYHGwQ5ZWPiCDQMMcDxBx3zmRdnVupaV-yhhfOKjnPG48ke-lIxDVqKWLT9Lcek4xP54X2R2bzANP4YUDoHCm6vrug3ecjBNu2b04pDP20vFjMJg/s1600/hammer-2011-roberto_cuoghi-installation.png"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 250px; height: 165px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGv1LSn0I94NukfUhjwL7bRcuMpAYHGwQ5ZWPiCDQMMcDxBx3zmRdnVupaV-yhhfOKjnPG48ke-lIxDVqKWLT9Lcek4xP54X2R2bzANP4YUDoHCm6vrug3ecjBNu2b04pDP20vFjMJg/s320/hammer-2011-roberto_cuoghi-installation.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5578688794197686610" border="0" /></a>-->
<p>How often do you come across a really good drawing? I mean a <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/leonardo-da-vinci-the-leonardo-cartoon">The Virgin and Saint Anne</a>, or <a target="_blank" href="http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=200262">Seurat's portrait of his mother</a>. Maybe some of those spare, celebrated arrangements by <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egon_Schiele">Schiele</a>? 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/195">the Hammer</a> to have a look at one small piece by Italian artist <a target="_blank" href="http://www.massimodecarlo.it/Dynamic/Artists,intLangID,2,intCategoryID,2,intItemID,79.html">Roberto Cuoghi</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">drawing</span> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-42584732842986714362011-02-06T22:56:00.000-08:002011-03-01T00:39:59.781-08:00Amidst All This Nothing<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVONEunmXV3F37qjxvAqAchPumBU28FeU5PepHYrnlUZ05QB_xUne8Ds36mVqRUJBUMBsRJl1o57mrHlrEKQQLNDvXmtzAxsfL8bwpaJQzyHBwpipH97Rucx49HxC39kOPtRv69Nh0oA/s1600/sietsema-2009-anticultural_positions.JPG"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 15px; cursor: pointer; width: 235px; height: 175px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVONEunmXV3F37qjxvAqAchPumBU28FeU5PepHYrnlUZ05QB_xUne8Ds36mVqRUJBUMBsRJl1o57mrHlrEKQQLNDvXmtzAxsfL8bwpaJQzyHBwpipH97Rucx49HxC39kOPtRv69Nh0oA/s1600/sietsema-2009-anticultural_positions.JPG" alt="Paul Sietsema, 2009, Anticultural Positions" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571221055863915282" border="0" /></a>
<p>So word is that the staff at the <a target="_blank" href="http://hammer.ucla.edu/">Armand Hammer Museum</a> 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.</p>
<p>It's pretty magical.</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/197"><cite>All Of This And Nothing</cite></a>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">are</span> amazing.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.marcfoxx.com/artist/view/1424">Evan Holloway</a> took some real bad photos, but there they are on prominent display. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.matthewmarks.com/artists/paul-sietsema/">Paul Sietsema</a>'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. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.crggallery.com/artists/frances-stark/">Frances Stark</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.vielmetter.com/artists/Charles_Gaines/selected_works.html">Charles Gaines</a>' <cite>Manifestos</cite>, 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://hammer.ucla.edu/watchlisten/watchlisten/show_id/502553">admits</a>, "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 <span style="font-style: italic;">four</span> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.alisonjacquesgallery.com/artists/25/overview/">Ian Kiaer</a> 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."</p>
<p>That said though, this show is very worth seeing. Gaines' piece is worth <span style="font-style:italic;">hearing</span>, Sietsema's drawings are <span style="font-style: italic;">kind of</span> interesting, and Ortega has a kinetic sculpture/installation on the ground level that makes you go, <span style="font-style: italic;">Huh</span>. 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.</p>
<!--<p>Early on, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.jorgemacchi.com/eng/obras_1.htm">Jorge Macchi</a> presents some things that are self-consciously investigative: a broken pane of glass with a reproduction of that broken pane of glass, a matchstick video clock, wallpaper that plunges into the corner. <a href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2011/02/amidst-all-of-this-nothing.html#footnotes" class="note">[1]</a> But oddly captivating is a piece called <cite>Five Note</cite> that runs overhead. The simple arrangement consists of five wires passing through a blank sheet of music and anchored into the walls at opposite ends of the gallery. It's so minimal it might even be too simple, but something about those 'notes' passing through the page makes you want to watch as though something else could possibly happen, even knowing full well that nothing will.</p>-->
<p>In the third gallery sits the show's most commanding piece, a high, broad section of wall and doorway from the studio of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.greenenaftaligallery.com/artist/Gedi-Sibony">Gedi Sibony</a>. <cite>The Cutters</cite> exists in that tradition of assemblage begun by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=Robert+Rauschenberg&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=kOxQTfb7OI_EsAP559iaBw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CD0QsAQwAA&biw=1280&bih=680">Robert Rauschenberg</a>, but is a much more minimal, quiet, solitary thing, something akin to <a target="_blank" href="http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=agnes+martin&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=H-1QTbNajeSxA5vJyPwG&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CDcQsAQwAA&biw=1280&bih=680">Agnes Martin</a> or the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=georges+seurat+drawings&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=ru1QTbfOA4uCsQPtpKG_Bg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CDQQsAQwAA&biw=1280&bih=680">drawings of Georges Seurat</a>. Revealing little more than drywall, metal framing, primer, and some hanging canvas, the economy of language in this piece is striking. <a href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2011/02/amidst-all-of-this-nothing.html#footnotes" class="note">[1]</a> 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.</p>
<p>Midway through the exhibition, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.antonkerngallery.com/artist.php?aid=14">Sergej Jensen</a> 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.</p>
<p>Toward the end of the show you will find <a target="_blank" href="http://www.regenprojects.com/artists/paul-sietsema/">Paul Sietsema</a>'s <cite>Anticultural Positions</cite>, 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_5.2/dubuffet.htm">1951 lecture</a> of the same title by <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dubuffet">Jean Dubuffet</a>. The pairing has the sort of arbitrariness that went into collaborations between <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage">John Cage</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.merce.org/about/index.php">Merce Cunningham</a>, 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ubu.com/film/close_bob.html">Chuck Close</a> 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.</p>
<p>And before you escape the circuit of galleries you will encounter at last the great white expanse of Karla Black's <cite>Once Cut</cite>, 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.</p>
<a name="footnotes"></a>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<!--<li>It has to be said that this wallpaper piece, called <cite>Vanishing Point</cite>, is lazy in the way its pattern just stops diminishing in size for no apparent reason right at the point when it should really take off into vanishing.</li>-->
<li>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.</li>
<li>The original version of this post featured a paragraph about the work of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.jorgemacchi.com/eng/obras_1.htm">Jorge Macchi</a>. It has been removed after further viewing caused me to rethink such high praise.</li>
</ol>
</div>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-31799047831119252010-12-30T12:20:00.000-08:002011-02-19T12:59:14.877-08:00Art 2010: A Wandering Best Of<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h4>A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter</h4>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsOaBimwcNCDwYIDs4vU_ZEdCjsOctZ7WsQxL430ZECz1Y9h9l2IVMAAySdDbtkA_qj_ut67a3zPHR3UCqge46n3nTiv3HjNE5nlUpjCUhcIDsvcPh3_zCKLw67P4Smh6_5JRbQrxfdA/s1600/larsen-2010-a_tool_to_deceive_and_slaughter.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 15px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 108px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsOaBimwcNCDwYIDs4vU_ZEdCjsOctZ7WsQxL430ZECz1Y9h9l2IVMAAySdDbtkA_qj_ut67a3zPHR3UCqge46n3nTiv3HjNE5nlUpjCUhcIDsvcPh3_zCKLw67P4Smh6_5JRbQrxfdA/s200/larsen-2010-a_tool_to_deceive_and_slaughter.jpg" alt="Caleb Larsen, 2010, A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556591141020457762" border="0" /></a>
<p>Early in the year I walked past a well-made black box in Seattle's <a target="_blank" href="http://www.lawrimoreproject.com/">Lawrimore Project</a> and couldn't be bothered to examine it more closely. It was clearly related to <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_%28artist%29">Robert Morris</a>'s <a target="_blank" href="http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/emuseum/code/emuseum.asp?style=browse&currentrecord=1&page=search&profile=objects&searchdesc=robert%20morris&quicksearch=robert%20morris&newvalues=1&newstyle=single&newcurrentrecord=1"><cite>Box with the Sound of its Own Making</cite></a>, 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09FOB-Consumed-t.html">in <cite>The New York Times Magazine</cite></a> that this piece by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.caleblarsen.com/">Caleb Larsen</a> actually tries to sell itself <a target="_blank" href="http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290515893819">on eBay</a> . . . all the time. All the time? Yes. Once someone buys it, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.atooltodeceiveandslaughter.com/"><cite>A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter</cite></a> 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 <cite>Tool</cite> Godspeed in repeatedly raising its own price into perpetuity — <a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/01/19/the-uncollectable-artwork/">or not</a> — and pointing out one of the absurdities that has been made of art in our time.</p>
<h4>Untitled (Shit Happens)</h4>
<p>Another irreverent favorite, found in Indonesia, was Malaysian artist <a target="_blank" href="http://ahmadfuadosman.com/">Ahmad Fuad Osman</a>'s presumably operational blender serving as home to a fish and a water plant. I hate to heap praise on an art star, but <cite>Untitled (Shit Happens)</cite> was so blunt, so cocky, so absurd, and so unsettling, I can't help but mention it <a target="_blank" href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2010/11/kitsch-reigns-in-yogyakarta.html">again</a>. 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.</p>
<h4>Love Fear Lust Pleasure Pain Glamour Death</h4>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMWOj5vweetN1zNxFQC7DBlcmtrXZxIbLtlVHTkaAmtUkR2buVYu3uHkez9eUUvMaGbQhzj4GKH-MwrbzSltYwISg4nRzwMW5k9I6uNm_GIhcMKljPQvw8492icAuABJ6RslR1xS1uxg/s1600/Warhol-1965-Screen_Test-dennis_hopper.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 5px 15px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 184px; height: 140px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMWOj5vweetN1zNxFQC7DBlcmtrXZxIbLtlVHTkaAmtUkR2buVYu3uHkez9eUUvMaGbQhzj4GKH-MwrbzSltYwISg4nRzwMW5k9I6uNm_GIhcMKljPQvw8492icAuABJ6RslR1xS1uxg/s200/Warhol-1965-Screen_Test-dennis_hopper.jpg" alt="Andy Warhol, 1965, Screen Test, Dennis Hopper" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556605393396516946" border="0" /></a>
<p>Also <a target="_blank" href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2010/08/love-fear-lust-pleasure-pain-glamour.html">previously mentioned</a> was <a target="_blank" href="http://seattleartmuseum.org/">Seattle Art Museum</a>'s staging of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/interactives/andy/default.asp"><cite>Love Fear Lust Pleasure Pain Glamour Death</cite></a>, a selection of photographs and short films by American master <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol">Andy Warhol</a>. 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, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/movies/30hopper.html">Dennis Hopper</a>'s <cite>Screen Test</cite> was made more poignant with the coincidence of his death.</p>
<h4>Chuck Close Prints</h4>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip73o2-MXCBCGxX-pVNT_6JMeeCPI8mnCZXw2SvGl3dCW5cG6xPJsuj4xVck-pSd6yLYWR0d9bldSSw0Pe38dtRNaz4gx2zH5EpY85UeB15MRrcQK_UULaCxaqLkFc92xw3DxerGvikA/s1600/close-2010-roy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10pt 5px 0px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 164px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip73o2-MXCBCGxX-pVNT_6JMeeCPI8mnCZXw2SvGl3dCW5cG6xPJsuj4xVck-pSd6yLYWR0d9bldSSw0Pe38dtRNaz4gx2zH5EpY85UeB15MRrcQK_UULaCxaqLkFc92xw3DxerGvikA/s200/close-2010-roy.jpg" alt="Chuck Close, 2010, Roy" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556625096849867506" border="0" /></a>
<p>In the other Washington, another American master. There's nothing surprising about a collection of <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close">Chuck Close</a>'s work coming off as impressive, large as it tends to be, but what was most impressive about <a target="_blank" href="http://www.corcoran.org/close/index.php"><cite>Chuck Close Prints</cite></a> at the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.corcoran.org/index.php">Corcoran Gallery</a> was its deep insight into the art and process of printmaking. I worried at first that it would be instructive like that time <a target="_blank" href="http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/02/25/us/politics/1194838132435/jindal-delivers-republican-response.html">Bobby Jindal talked to us all on national television</a>, 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.</p>
<h4>Wall</h4>
<p>A very different deconstruction of process could be seen in March at Seattle's <a target="_blank" href="http://www.westernbridge.org/">Western Bridge</a>. In a three-day performance, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.vcu.edu/arts/sculpture/dept/portfolios/gallery.html?album=98">Corin Hewitt</a> 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.</p>
<h4>A Dirt Crown Worth Its Weight</h4>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSaVDRVN1coaDzT7Q96SFtIYuwKlSQ17LMdyrpqk7xAbTDBhqJfQjtNJUPWSEkNEZgAUr56yie2ATspUGoUfla0_lWFoya95YIi2F_JIg_odzj0l8H2ehu7TVFUn2uZeEm_m3CPi7cXw/s1600/schoneman-2010-the_dust_settles.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0px 5px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSaVDRVN1coaDzT7Q96SFtIYuwKlSQ17LMdyrpqk7xAbTDBhqJfQjtNJUPWSEkNEZgAUr56yie2ATspUGoUfla0_lWFoya95YIi2F_JIg_odzj0l8H2ehu7TVFUn2uZeEm_m3CPi7cXw/s200/schoneman-2010-the_dust_settles.jpg" alt="Bryan Schoneman, 2010, The Dust Settles: A Dirt Crown Worth Its Weight" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556651624287099842" border="0" /></a>
<p>Continuing a tradition of good work, <a target="_blank" href="http://bryanschoneman.com/">Bryan Schoneman</a> staged a thesis performance in the <a target="_blank" href="http://art.washington.edu/39_3D4M">University of Washington's 3D4M</a> 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, <a target="_blank" href="http://bryanschoneman.com/artwork/1394786_Dirt_Dumper.html"><cite>The Dust Settles</cite></a> seemed to be about the slow, eerily peaceful atmosphere arising from the artist's bizarre, trivial exertion. In either case, <a target="_blank" href="http://depts.washington.edu/soanews/online/2010/09/07/alumni-news-bryan-schoneman/">it later won an award</a>. (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.</p>
<h4>Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass)</h4>
<p>The other highlight of the MFA season was <a target="_blank" href="http://www.kingducksamuel.com/">Samuel Payne</a>'s installation and/or assemblage at the Henry Art Gallery's <a target="_blank" href="http://www.henryart.org/exhibitions/upcoming/1121">UW MFA Thesis Exhibition</a>. (Full, if cryptic, disclosure: I was personally involved with this show.) <cite>Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass)</cite> has been <a target="_blank" href="http://www.artsjournal.com/anotherbb/2010/06/what-if-flash-gordon-went.html">called overkill</a>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span> 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.</p>
<h4>Beat Memories</h4>
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<p>Speaking of memories, <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg">Allen Ginsberg</a> took some photographs, and the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nga.gov/">National Gallery</a> mounted <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/ginsberg/">an exhibition</a>. If I am to mention a photography show, it would certainly be appropriate to include <a target="_blank" href="http://www.moma.org/">MoMA</a>'s first ever <a href="http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/968">retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson</a>, 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.</p>
<blockquote>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</blockquote>
<blockquote style="text-align: right;">Allen Ginsberg</blockquote>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-47067386167960985912010-11-03T07:59:00.000-07:002010-11-28T02:09:40.936-08:00Kitsch Reigns in Yogyakarta (But There is Hope)<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0zFZPvfmHc87hiwXWYBbei2ap1TvDmP1wwo_8xF_hPw4hvXQvH1i8tC0rjLaI99CN-krGEV0qvnEEMUST-ibWIqZIRdonH00ZjTS1xv249AI-JR_fjbZFGDP3Sqs6-UI1Cv9-VOThRw/s1600/osman-2007-recollections_of_long_lost_memories.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 237px; height: 155px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0zFZPvfmHc87hiwXWYBbei2ap1TvDmP1wwo_8xF_hPw4hvXQvH1i8tC0rjLaI99CN-krGEV0qvnEEMUST-ibWIqZIRdonH00ZjTS1xv249AI-JR_fjbZFGDP3Sqs6-UI1Cv9-VOThRw/s200/osman-2007-recollections_of_long_lost_memories.jpg" alt="Ahmad Fuad Osman, 2007, Recollections of Long Lost Memories" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5536387863444859410" border="0" /></a>
<p>Visit <a target="_blank" href="http://maps.google.com/maps?rlz=1C1_____enID375ID404&q=yogyakarta&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Yogyakarta&gl=id&ei=VIDRTL6dO43CvQPX8pnbDA&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CBwQ8gEwAA">Djogjakarta</a> — spelling is flexible — and you <span style="font-style: italic;">will</span> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_Batik_Yogyakarta">Museum Batik</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bentarabudaya.com/agenda.php?lg=in&t=Bentara%20Budaya%20Yogyakarta">Bentara Budaya Yogyakarta</a>, the opening of a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bentarabudaya.com/agenda.php?id=631">new show</a> had vague hints of interest, but really was just flat. At <a target="_blank" href="http://tujuhbintang.com/">Tujuh Bintang Art Space</a>: a host of painters eager to proclaim their own relevance with references ranging from <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo">Frida Kahlo</a> to <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Johns">Jasper Johns</a> to <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_L%C3%B3pez_Garc%C3%ADa">Antonio López García</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Rosenquist">James Rosenquist</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso">Picasso</a> 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.</p>
<p>At <a target="_blank" href="http://www.sangkringartspace.net/">Sangkring Art Space</a> heroicism was the order of the day. Marvel At My Ambitious Achievement. A lot of hot air. Here though, our first exception: <a target="_blank" href="http://ahmadfuadosman.com/">Ahmad Fuad Osman</a> blows just as much smoke as the rest; he just does it better — sometimes. His irreverent sense of humor is evident in <a target="_blank" href="http://www.thenutgraph.com/recollections-of-long-lost-memories/"><cite>Recollections of Long Lost Memories</cite></a> (2007), in which he's placed himself (in this version) into thirty-six historical photographs hung in a grid, as well as in <cite>Untitled (Shit Happens)</cite> (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.)</p>
<p>At <a target="_blank" href="http://www.jogja-gallery.com/">Jogja Gallery</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bellagio.com/amenities/richard-macdonald.aspx">cirque gallery</a> at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bellagio.com/">Bellagio</a> Las Vegas. But the gallery did well with its choice for the show's banner: <a target="_blank" href="http://bungajeruk.net/main.htm">Bunga Jeruk</a>'s <cite>Boy With No Name</cite> (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 <cite>You Can Take This Season #3</cite> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-46432401598340799932010-10-28T15:14:00.000-07:002011-04-12T15:47:05.059-07:00Opera at the Movies: Better Than the Real Thing?<p class="author">by Forrest Jones</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" target="_blank" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi51BFqxuxN1N99BfOTnBZEkDMzN7gUz7QA9Ro_0ngHNHEW_MI_8zRd7xxncWsf45rdmwu1Q2vv4-33WwDURE2Ne0ekKR-FEgoGTB-kLyHlqBxggwI9vWWunki9HOHpdO4AmwN_R3o1Of0/s1600/225x333-Das-Rheingold.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 15px 5px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 354px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi51BFqxuxN1N99BfOTnBZEkDMzN7gUz7QA9Ro_0ngHNHEW_MI_8zRd7xxncWsf45rdmwu1Q2vv4-33WwDURE2Ne0ekKR-FEgoGTB-kLyHlqBxggwI9vWWunki9HOHpdO4AmwN_R3o1Of0/s320/225x333-Das-Rheingold.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533227211639333650" border="0" /></a>
<p>I just saw the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/">New York Metropolitan Opera’s</a> production of Wagner’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Das Rheingold.</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Met: Live in HD</span> at my local movie theater.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p><p>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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryn_Terfel">Bryn Terfel</a> as the Norse god Wotan made the story much more compelling, and being able to see beads of sweat rolling down <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Owens_%28bass-baritone%29">Eric Owens’</a> face (excellently portraying Alberich) makes you really appreciate how hard these singers are working up there.</p><p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>Forrest Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00212628797804025549noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-13526717615148567892010-09-26T12:56:00.000-07:002010-09-29T13:47:31.796-07:00Read Banned Books!<div class="author">by Sean Flannigan</div>
<a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources/free_downloads/ALA_BBW_Poster_2010.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 20px;" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources/free_downloads/ALA_BBW_Poster_2010.jpg" border="0" height="320" width="239" /></a>
<p>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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution" target="_blank">first amendment</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ala.org%2Fala%2Fissuesadvocacy%2Fbanned%2Fbannedbooksweek%2Fideasandresources%2Ffree_downloads%2F2010banned.pdf&rct=j&q=%22books%20challenged%20or%20banned%20in%202009-2010%22&ei=gpGfTLq8H4ygsQOghvXVAQ&usg=AFQjCNG4VriBThYvS4F7o6huAZ1ZwM3ViA&sig2=94MxdDX4KXFZR-0LRo2lyQ&cad=rja" target="_blank">here</a>. 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 <a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedbydecade/2000_2009/index.cfm" target="_blank">here</a> (2000-2009) and <a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedbydecade/1990_1999/index.cfm" target="_blank">here</a> (1990-1999).</p>
<p>Books, in case it's unclear, must be <a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/challengeslibrarymaterials/index.cfm" target="_blank">challenged</a> before they are banned. Here are some visual aids concerning our recent past, provided by the ALA (click to enlarge):</p>
<div style="text-align: center; margin-bottom: 2em;">
<h5>Challenges by Year</h5>
<a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengesbytype/Year.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengesbytype/Year.png" border="0" height="268" width="400" /></a>
<h5>Challenges by Institution</h5>
<a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengesbytype/Institution.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengesbytype/Institution.png" border="0" height="271" width="400" /></a>
</div>
<p>More information about challenges and bans in history can be found <a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/aboutbannedbooks/index.cfm" target="_blank">here</a>, plus further <a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/index.cfm" target="_blank">statistics</a>. Partial lists of banned books can be found <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedclassics/index.cfm" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
<a href="http://collegemoneymakingideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Where-Can-I-Read-To-Kill-a-Mockingbird-For-Free.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img src="http://collegemoneymakingideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Where-Can-I-Read-To-Kill-a-Mockingbird-For-Free.jpg" style="height: 193px; width: 120px;" border="0" /></a>
<p>A popular and popularly banned book, <cite>To Kill a Mockingbird</cite>, is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary and has, as recently as November 2009 (aforementioned <a target="_blank" href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ala.org%2Fala%2Fissuesadvocacy%2Fbanned%2Fbannedbooksweek%2Fideasandresources%2Ffree_downloads%2F2010banned.pdf&rct=j&q=%22books%20challenged%20or%20banned%20in%202009-2010%22&ei=gpGfTLq8H4ygsQOghvXVAQ&usg=AFQjCNG4VriBThYvS4F7o6huAZ1ZwM3ViA&sig2=94MxdDX4KXFZR-0LRo2lyQ&cad=rja">PDF</a>, 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.</p>
<p>Here are some further resources and opinions:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://philipkent.blogspot.com/2010/09/celebrate-banned-books-week.html" target="_blank">Celebrate Banned Books Week</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.suite101.com/content/how-to-fight-literary-censorship-a66631" target="_blank">How To Fight Literary Censorship</a></li>
<li><a href="http://bannedbooksweek.org/index.html" target="_blank">Banned Books Week Dot Org</a></li>
</ul>Sean Flanniganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08496564936028783309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-35851698910842990842010-08-23T21:43:00.000-07:002011-04-12T15:39:52.192-07:00Pixar's Day & Night<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" target="_blank" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmvvs2d-DikEGl6TC-9jjAvqD4v4mBUXv-CZLuYc4OgATdb30q38QsXKte2X_r8l_H6GY8APZySamZ-iIdGNqsLVX1-q6iLk94bZm-r6bUU8_w76e-1sS9k8f_RCfNkp_D5TUbHOM5Ww/s1600/newton-2010-day_and_night.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmvvs2d-DikEGl6TC-9jjAvqD4v4mBUXv-CZLuYc4OgATdb30q38QsXKte2X_r8l_H6GY8APZySamZ-iIdGNqsLVX1-q6iLk94bZm-r6bUU8_w76e-1sS9k8f_RCfNkp_D5TUbHOM5Ww/s320/newton-2010-day_and_night.jpg" alt="Teddy Newton, Day & Night, 2010" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5508846365213580898" border="0" /></a>
<p>For the past few years, I've had a growing complaint about <a target="_blank" href="http://www.pixar.com/">Pixar</a>: 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.laika.com/entertainment/">lesser known studios</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Hertzfeldt">filmmakers</a>, and/or <a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkiPrd-iH6Y">from overseas</a>. But what of the studio with the expressed goal of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzbKgujZF7c&feature=player_embedded#%21">"making the greatest animated films ever"</a>? Pixar's sole venture into unconventional form came with <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E"><cite>WALL-E</cite></a>, wherein live action humans were used to represent the past — their future counterparts, though, still of the ubiquitous, smooth, cute variety. (<cite>WALL-E</cite> 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.</p>
<p>Enter <a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0628599/">Teddy Newton</a>'s <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_%26_Night_%282010_film%29"><cite>Day & Night</cite></a>. 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435761/"><cite>Toy Story 3</cite></a>, manages to do so three-fold.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000318/">Tim Burton</a>'s giant in <cite><a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319061/">Big Fish</a></cite>.) <a class="note" href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2010/08/day-night.html#footnotes">[1]</a> In animation, the modernist dilemma was examined in films like <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ubu.com/film/richter.html">Hans Richter</a>'s <cite><a target="_blank" href="http://www.ubu.com/film/richter_rhythm_1923.html">Rhythm 23</a></cite>, and had an influence on popular practitioners like <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Jones">Chuck Jones</a> who took animation on a new, flatter course, <a class="note" href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2010/08/day-night.html#footnotes">[2]</a> but Disney's hold on the medium maintained a certain amount of focus on something <a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw">"more realistic [...] giving us a real feeling of three dimensions."</a> 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.</p>
<p><cite>Day & Night</cite> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Framed_Roger_Rabbit"><cite>Who Framed Roger Rabbit</cite></a>, the makers of <cite>Day & Night</cite> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diegesis#Diegesis_in_film">diegetic</a>, 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?)</p>
<p>Equally delightful — and fascinating — is <cite>Day & Night</cite>'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 <cite>Day & Night</cite> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_Hear_This_%28film%29"><cite>Now Hear This</cite></a>, this auditory disconnect illuminates the fact of <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_artist">Foley</a> 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?</p>
<p>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 <cite>Day & Night</cite>'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 <cite>Day & Night</cite> as to which reality is the predominant one is undercut by the fact that neither is in fact a reality at all.</p>
<p>In short, this is hardly conventional filmmaking. Given the trajectories of the big American animation houses, <cite>Day & Night</cite> 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.</p>
<p>Now if we could only get them to make something without a happy ending . . . .</p>
<a name="footnotes"></a>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li>"Director Tim Burton Commentary" on <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Big-Fish-Ewan-McGregor/dp/B0001GOH6Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1282628732&sr=1-1"><cite>Big Fish</cite></a>, Dir. Tim Burton, 2003, DVD, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2004.</li>
<li>"Drawn for Glory: Animation's Triumph at the Oscars" on <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Entertainment-Academy-Animation-Collection/dp/B000ZOXDKA"><cite>Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Academy Awards Animation Collection: 15 Winners - 26 Nominees</cite></a>, DVD, Warner Home Video, 2008.</li>
</ol>
</div>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-81496907881389248972010-08-07T08:56:00.000-07:002010-09-04T10:21:42.188-07:00One More Month of Warhol<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJbv5tLngI6C-8Dn8eIMk_MvP-ABQgWeMPT2USg3CKHTh26OnFbFmznylj4g4JkLVjwNSnvQJSMgnBNeYbdKCyV6FHP3xpPNHRU5yvo14dqsdeSAVw4ovnBuCKMak1iT8ZIHfQIvMq5g/s1600/Warhol-1966-edie_sedgwick_screen_test.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJbv5tLngI6C-8Dn8eIMk_MvP-ABQgWeMPT2USg3CKHTh26OnFbFmznylj4g4JkLVjwNSnvQJSMgnBNeYbdKCyV6FHP3xpPNHRU5yvo14dqsdeSAVw4ovnBuCKMak1iT8ZIHfQIvMq5g/s320/Warhol-1966-edie_sedgwick_screen_test.jpg" border="0" alt="Andy Warhol, 1966, Screen Test, Edie Sedgwick, ©2008 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5502812884493380770" /></a>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol">Andy Warhol</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://seattleartmuseum.org/">Seattle Art Museum</a> may be in order. (But there's only a month left.)</p>
<p>On view through September 6th, <cite><a target="_blank" href="http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/interactives/andy/default.asp">Love Fear Lust Pleasure Pain Glamour Death</a></cite> 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.</p>
<p>The heart of this show features about two dozen of Warhol's <cite>Screen Tests</cite> — 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. <span style="font-weight:bold;">It is very important to watch the full four and a half minutes.</span> 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 <span style="font-style:italic;">have</span> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Carter Ratcliff, of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/">Art in America</a>, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.allworth.com/category_s/147.htm">among other things</a>, 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." <a href="http://goseeart.blogspot.com/2010/08/love-fear-lust-pleasure-pain-glamour.html#footnotes" class="note">[1]</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edie_Sedgwick">Edie Sedgwick</a>, and see if you agree.</p>
<a name="footnotes"></a>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li>Carter Ratcliff, "Looking Good: Andy Warhol's Utopian Portraiture", in <cite><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Andy-Warhol-Portraits-Tony-Shafrazi/dp/0714849669/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281196630&sr=8-1">Andy Warhol Portraits</a></cite>, ed. Tony Shafrazi, (New York: Phaidon Press Inc., 2007), 21.</li>
</ol>
</div>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-89201802976406516942010-08-04T11:05:00.000-07:002010-08-05T11:50:43.299-07:00Buzz Lightyear al Rescate!<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings</p>
<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE9s7gcvY_cE96tSl709W89wUDkrXDC0fuuv09WfbR9WwQq-PcFGJMewrjrWn41WdHnx_JFugcXWVEoK_lmy68KGiisBH-IaTn60KOOAAW4UycnN3tgcIoJsHVzyO8EFsl7FoBggTKQA/s1600/unkrich-2010-toy_story_3.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE9s7gcvY_cE96tSl709W89wUDkrXDC0fuuv09WfbR9WwQq-PcFGJMewrjrWn41WdHnx_JFugcXWVEoK_lmy68KGiisBH-IaTn60KOOAAW4UycnN3tgcIoJsHVzyO8EFsl7FoBggTKQA/s320/unkrich-2010-toy_story_3.png" border="0" alt="Lee Unkrich, 2010, Toy Story 3, Buzz Lightyear"id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5501662096298890962" /></a>
<p><cite><a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114709/">Toy Story</a></cite> has always been about our past's collision with the future: <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriff_Woody">Woody</a> — the Old West — forced to reconcile with <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Lightyear">Buzz Lightyear</a> — our technological triumph. It's Classic meets Cool, Silicon Valley versus Death Valley, LPs recorded onto iPods — or at that time, what? <a target="_blank" href="http://www.pocketcalculatorshow.com/walkman/sony/">Walkmans</a>? — even <a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/user/disneyanimation?blend=4&ob=4#p/u/53/BBgghnQF6E4">Steamboat Willie</a> whistling along with <a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uC1x7_Ni6k&feature=channel">WALL-E</a>. <cite>Toy Story</cite> is the story of America. Drawing from the past, we look to the future. The theme runs through <cite><a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435761/">Toy Story 3</a></cite> 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?</p>
<p>In its broadest strokes, <cite>Toy Story 3</cite> pits optimism against cynicism. It is the toys' belief that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0002487/">Andy</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters#Lots-O.27-Huggin.27_Bear">Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear</a>'s philosophy: no owners means no heartbreak. <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_%28Toy_Story%29">Jessie</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters#Ken">Ken</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters#Big_Baby">Big Baby</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters#Chuckles_the_Clown">Chuckles</a> can't help but crack a smile.)</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters#Chatter_Telephone">Chatter Telephone</a>'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.</p>
<p>Buzz Lightyear's transformation, mid-way through the film, into a suave, Spanish dancer is the moment that brings <cite>Toy Story 3</cite> into that uniquely American space that has been the series' strength. Dancing the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/user/disneypixar?blend=7&ob=4#p/u/1/LwON8qNTfyQ">Pasodoble</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorro">Zorro</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bowie">Jim Bowie</a> 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.</p>
<p>Further details include <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters#Mr._Potato_Head">Mr. Potato Head</a>'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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters#Bonnie_Anderson">Bonnie</a>, 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ilike.com/artist/Randy+Newman/track/You%27ve+Got+A+Friend+In+Me">Oscar-winning theme</a> which was introduced in Andy's room, rounds out the trilogy with a recording by the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ilike.com/artist/Gipsy+Kings?src=onebox">Gipsy Kings</a>, this time with the words, "<a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu8GQQctTi4">Hay un amigo en mi</a>."</p>
<p>As the furor over U.S. immigration policy continues with <a target="_blank" href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/29/nation/la-na-arizona-immigration-20100729-12">court orders</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66U0HJ20100731?type=domesticNews">appeals</a> and even <a target="_blank" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/01/ftn/main6733905.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentAux">calls for reexamination of the 14th Amendment</a>, it's hard not to catch the resonance of this final <cite>Toy Story</cite> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_the_Explorer">Dora the Explorer</a>, baseball's biggest stars have names like <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Pujols">Pujols</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Rodriguez">Rodriguez</a>, and <a target="_blank" href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/06/soccer/soccer-text">the world's game</a> continues to creep into the national consciousness. These are the cues that will shape the future, not <a target="_blank" href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/30/jan-brewer/arizona-gov-brewer-says-majority-illegals-are-drug/">Jan Brewer</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/jd-hayworth-arizona-immigration-anger">J.D. Hayworth</a>. And now, even one of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.pixar.com/">Pixar</a>'s most beloved characters is bilingual. So, thank you, to <a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0881279/">Lee Unkrich</a> 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."</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-38160941624198614622010-07-19T16:00:00.000-07:002010-07-23T14:12:22.839-07:00Kurt - They'll miss you when you're gone.<p class="author">by Stephen Cummings with Christina Mesiti</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNez2FfCmeetrDrS-eqdpYjDgXAJ9E0ZNQGn7w7Djtsh6jbeIo7bk1R7Z7WcB3QdAvX_AC_q9pw4ssFb1P5r-3DFR1kuYDS8nBbBe112hXn2Igts4xIqfEeruRciQ5_vepbGuxiDKNzQ/s1600/SAM-2010-Kurt.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 5px 15px; cursor: pointer; width: 250px; height: 250px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNez2FfCmeetrDrS-eqdpYjDgXAJ9E0ZNQGn7w7Djtsh6jbeIo7bk1R7Z7WcB3QdAvX_AC_q9pw4ssFb1P5r-3DFR1kuYDS8nBbBe112hXn2Igts4xIqfEeruRciQ5_vepbGuxiDKNzQ/s320/SAM-2010-Kurt.jpg" alt="Kurt at Seattle Art Museum" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5495906403196074770" border="0" /></a>
<!--<a target="_blank" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGTOwuywwpiLs5-fpMEC-cfDUqMv4R-AFq63ppZKB9-wvSL2ct45irGDBiswFga_hwrepFxjg3xK_wWtQysJ33wTnEUxxGN-8LalwFeR3h-QTj_KHiCFjw5tdA_FAzI6t3ldEPU7HfBg/s1600/SAM-2010-Kurt.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 5px 15px; cursor: pointer; width: 250px; height: 250px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGTOwuywwpiLs5-fpMEC-cfDUqMv4R-AFq63ppZKB9-wvSL2ct45irGDBiswFga_hwrepFxjg3xK_wWtQysJ33wTnEUxxGN-8LalwFeR3h-QTj_KHiCFjw5tdA_FAzI6t3ldEPU7HfBg/s320/SAM-2010-Kurt.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5495897381723298466" border="0" /></a>-->
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/04/29/modern-and-contemporary-curator-leaving-sam">Michael Darling</a>'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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/interactives/andy/default.asp">Warhol show</a>. Whereas <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/info/andy-warhol/">Andy</a>'s portraits seem to lay bare the depths of his subjects, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/">Seattle Art Museum</a>'s <a target="_blank" href="http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/interactives/kurt/default.asp"><cite>Kurt</cite></a> dances around its title character without really going anywhere.</p>
<p>Whether through big photographs, crude graphite, or loud noises, <cite>Kurt</cite>'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,” <a target="_blank" href="http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/exhibitDetail.asp?eventID=16652">as Darling says</a>, 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. <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge">Grunge music</a> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Cobain">Nirvana's lead singer</a> rejecting the visual as unrelated to . . . the visual?</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.charlespeterson.net/">Charles Peterson</a>, and a sort of stage set / recording studio installation by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.jessicabradleyartprojects.com/artists/Hadley_Maxwell/show">Maxwell + Hadley</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Peyton">Elizabeth Peyton</a>. What <a target="_blank" href="http://www.artsjournal.com/anotherbb/2010/05/kurt-cobain-is-his-admirers.html">Regina Hackett</a> calls "lovely as a wilting wildflower," I call piddling and naive. Later on, <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banks_Violette">Banks Violette</a> reproduces photographs in graphite, to which I say, Why not just photographs? <a target="_blank" href="http://www.moma.org/">MoMA</a> 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.</p>
<p>I could go on with more non-aesthetic paintings, and heavy-handed graphite, and bland photography, and <a target="_blank" href="http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/05/20/the-burial-ground-that-is-kurt-at-sam-part-5">a thing that gets in your way while it plays lots of music</a>, but you get the idea. There are highlights: <a target="_blank" href="http://www.platformgallery.com/artist_pages/Fife/Fife_main.html">Scott Fife</a>'s big ol' head is sort of interesting, though it's exactly the same as his <a target="_blank" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4PbE-4Bj00zLXNLzO2XzhSLu8BnSMFQrOUFJD2D-lMnbMML5KpoNxioBfmscFiXe9_2HmYNT3LsKFL8prJb4IGfxdMiUuOzD8D3mNSDFnbgU27Q0sBHXL7pqPV3824voGL3z6deZVZw/s1600/fife-2009-elvis_large.jpg">Elvis</a>, and lacks the power of his <a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/8277723@N06/4602771100/sizes/l/">T-Rex</a>; and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/jeffry-mitchell/Content?oid=2708929">Jeffry Mitchell</a>'s <cite>Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain in the Style of Jay Steensma</cite> stands out as something worth seeing, but I have to agree with <a target="_blank" href="http://calitreview.com/9311">the assessment</a> 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.</p>
<p>Remember though, this is grunge. The visual aesthetic is supposed to say "I don't care." (Not the nihilistic, revolutionary uncaring of <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada">Dada</a>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">may</span> 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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/125945">Dan Flavin</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.albersfoundation.org/Albers.php?inc=Galleries&i=J_1">Josef Albers</a>?</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.jamesdean.com/">James Dean</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>Stephen Cummingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12421390535739926325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737565128785796411.post-91444145253693526692010-07-08T18:06:00.000-07:002010-07-20T11:04:51.210-07:00Reading The New Yorker on the West Coast<p class="author">by Sean Flannigan</p>
<p>Full of abstract comics, very specific advertisements aimed much to the East of me, and current-event-minded articles by big name intellectuals, <cite>The New Yorker</cite> 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 <cite>New Yorker</cite> font characters. Near one of my favorite seats in the house sits a pile of them, <cite>The New Yorkers</cite>. 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 <cite>New Yorker</cite> sundae (or pie?).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h4>"In The South" by Salman Rushdie (May 18, 2009 issue)</h4>
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2009/05/18/p233/090518_r18482_p233.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="float: left; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 15px;"><img src="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2009/05/18/p233/090518_r18482_p233.jpg" border="0" height="200" width="143" /></a>
<p>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 <cite>Midnight's Children</cite> and <cite>Satanic Verses</cite>. I have read only <cite>Satanic Verses</cite>, the book for which he had a fatwa placed upon his head, and I loved it. <cite>Midnight's Children</cite> is supposedly even better. I can't wait. I suggest him highly. Here are some lines and phrases:</p>
<blockquote>"...after a lifetime of priding themselves on the quality of their teeth, they had both surrendered to the humiliating inevitability of dentures..."</blockquote>
<blockquote>"His days emptied out into tedious inaction."</blockquote>
<blockquote>"The great events of eight decades had managed to occur without any effort on his part to help them along."</blockquote>
<blockquote>"'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."</blockquote>
<h4>"Here We Aren't, So Quickly" by Jonathan Safran Foer (June 14 & 21, 2010 issue)</h4>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIvcjavXFd3ZUrmj9gz-MPxfr9Og-o2XuAjXIrCHbgtAiqettg3KqzkgGqv8NF4B4sPrrvtxfakdgUnQHEY3K8wZQnwPMyNmzdHqve-m_CIvYAXEyIy1DkaL-vTIHHEuaCI1OvPodmDNFa/s1600/herwearen't.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="float: left; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 15px;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIvcjavXFd3ZUrmj9gz-MPxfr9Og-o2XuAjXIrCHbgtAiqettg3KqzkgGqv8NF4B4sPrrvtxfakdgUnQHEY3K8wZQnwPMyNmzdHqve-m_CIvYAXEyIy1DkaL-vTIHHEuaCI1OvPodmDNFa/s200/herwearen't.jpeg" border="0" height="132" width="200" /></a>
<p>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 <cite>20 Under 40</cite> issue of <cite>The New Yorker</cite>. 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, <cite>Everything is Illuminated</cite>, 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, <cite>Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close</cite>, was itself another wonderful piece of literature. Now, snippets:</p>
<blockquote>"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."</blockquote>
<blockquote>"They encouraged us to buy insurance. We had sex to have orgasms. You loved reupholstering."</blockquote>
<blockquote>"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."</blockquote>
<h4>"The TV" by Ben Loory (April 12, 2010 issue)</h4>
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2010/04/12/p233/100412_r19509_p233.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="float: left; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 15px;"><img style="width: 90px; height: 137px;" src="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2010/04/12/p233/100412_r19509_p233.jpg" border="0" /></a>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>"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."</blockquote>
<h4>"Extreme Solitude" by Jeffrey Eugenides (June 7, 2010 issue)</h4>
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2010/06/07/p233/100607_r19683_p233.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="float: left; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 15px;"><img src="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2010/06/07/p233/100607_r19683_p233.jpg" border="0" height="200" width="169" /></a>
<p>I read this in parts on my toilet. If you haven't read <cite>Middlesex</cite> 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:</p>
<blockquote>"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."</blockquote>
<h4>"Free Fruit For Young Widows" by Nathan Englander (May 17, 2010 issue)</h4>
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2010/05/17/p233/100517_r19627_p233.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="float: left; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 15px;"><img src="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2010/05/17/p233/100517_r19627_p233.jpg" border="0" height="200" width="179" /></a>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote>"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."</blockquote>
<blockquote>"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."</blockquote>
<p>These are some of the stories I gleaned from the pages of <cite>The New Yorker</cite> like precious gems. Many more await. You can find and read most of these stories and more at <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fiction">http://www.newyorker.com/fiction</a>. Enjoy!</p>Sean Flanniganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08496564936028783309noreply@blogger.com1