We caught up with him at an absurdly late hour after his talk (11 pm PS, 2 am his time), but he was as eloquent as ever. The fact is, Anderson is one of the smartest and most up-to-date museum directors in the business, and in this podcast, he describes many of the philosophies that make him so good.
Just listen.
And check out the best museum web site in the country at the museum where he’s director in Indianapolis. Next year, the IMA will open its 100-acre art and nature park, which sounds something like what the Olympic Sculpture Park could have been but isn’t. Anderson says it won’t be about “trophy hunting and monument building.”
Oh, and here he is doing one of his regular YouTube videos about the art at the museum. (Yes. Imagine a director making time to do that.)
An installation view of Dario Robleto’s An Instinct Toward Life, in his show Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others at the Frye. (Photos by Adam L. Weintraub)
2008 is not even half over, and I’m putting money on Dario Robleto’s new exhibition at the Frye Art Museum as the Seattle exhibition of the year. Basically, Robleto, a San Antonio-based artist, went in search of a dead Seattle woman, Emma Frye (co-founder of the museum), and this show is the story of his dark travels.
A closer view of An Instinct Toward Life, with two madonna-and-child paintings from the permanent collection.
Not much is known about Emma, except that she was married to Charles, had a miscarriage, and never after had children. Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others is an imagined walk through her life led by a call-and-response of 19th-century paintings from the Frye’s permanent collection and 21st-century “sampled” sculptures made by Robleto using such materials as melted-down audiotape of the longest-married couple talking about their marriage, melted lead excavated from various wars, and fulgurites, or glass made from lightning striking the desert. The show is also a story about the making of an art collection, about war and love, and about loss and the remix—but this is enough to start with.
A detail from Robleto’s sculpture Time Measures Nothing But This Love.
This month at James Harris Gallery is Margot Quan Knight’s coming-out party in Seattle.
She is, basically, a disillusioned photographer. A wonderfully disillusioned photographer. She’s become disillusioned from her fantasy (our collective fantasy?) that photographs describe, if not reality, then still a version of truth. Until recently, she made composed images of unreal events that revealed themselves to be fictions indicative of real sensations and experiences, often ones that defy time, like this one (that’s her):
Drop, 2006
But then she was hit by a car. And she started graduate school (MFA at Bard; she finishes this summer). And the result of those things intersecting with Berenice Abbott (and other readings in photographic history), a strobe-light dance she saw at Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the thought of her mother getting older resulted in a break—out of which came an entirely different body of work, all based on reflective surfaces.
Artists at the beginning of their careers—and sometimes, artists at any stage—may be doing great things, but they don’t always really know what they’re doing. That can be perfectly fine, or a disaster. In Quan Knight’s case, her eloquence is not necessary to understand her work, but it’s a very nice surprise. Listening to her will be well worth your time.
And because these works are all reflective, I’m posting a video (by Quan Knight) that depicts the works the way you would experience them, rather than the blank, more formal stills on the gallery’s web site.
Because I’m a semiotics nerd, one of my favorite pieces by LA-based artist Geoff McFetridge is a drawing of concentric rectangles with the slogan, “Support Responsible Abstraction.” When you think about it, there is a lot of irresponsible abstraction going around—you know, the kind determined to mystify some original meaning or impulse that A) may or may not really even be known to the artist, and B) may or may not be worth memorializing in paint anyway. Either way, it pushes the viewer away. What would responsible abstraction look like? McFetridge says it’s not the kind that broadcasts that it’s hoarding a secret. It gives instead of takes.
McFetridge’s background is graphic design. He studied it straight-up as an undergrad in Alberta, Canada, and then moved on to “conceptual graphics” (graphics that are well-considered but often look like crap) as a grad student at CalArts. Now, he has his own studio in Southern California, where he works both as a fine artist, making public murals, gallery pieces, and artist books, and as a commercial designer for various companies (especially skateboard and snowboard), and movies and TV (he did the titles for “The Virgin Suicides” and “Freaks and Geeks”).
His new installation in Seattle will be up at the Olympic Sculpture Pavilion for a whole year. It’s about where graphics and sculpture meet—about the imaginative transition from two dimensions to three, from flat to real, from general and iconic to specific and personal.
He hung sheets of thin plywood that he bent to look like posters with the ends curled up. They’re nailed to the wall, but swaths of blue tape and giant sculptures of tacks pretend to hold them up. One of the giant tacks has the round head of a pin, but casts the painted shadow of a mighty pushpin. It has bigger ideas for itself.
Don’t take my word for any of this; listen to the artist talk. I caught up with him while he was working at the pavilion, and we talked about responsible abstraction, pre-op transgeometrism (not a fancy word, but a condition we invented), and why he wouldn’t mind designing a cigarette commercial in Japan.
Listen as Margaret Laird, University of Washington Assistant Professor of Ancient Art & Archeology, takes Jen Graves on a tour of the Seattle Art Museum’s Roman Art from the Louvre exhibit (through May 11).
In the story “Gray Area” in this week’s paper, Jen Graves takes a look at accusations that two prominent Seattle artists—Lead Pencil Studio, winners of a Stranger Genius Award—are copycats.
“Which is worse,” she writes, “theft or ignorance?”
On this podcast is everything that didn’t make it into the story: more opinions from curators and the artists, what Graves thinks of the whole thing, and how it crossed her desk in the first place.
Eric Eley struggles with illusion. He doesn’t like it. He’s a facts man, and the depth in his resin drawings is literal depth, with pigment embedded in layers of resin.
Plane Drift, resin and dry pigment, 2007
“I’m showing you what I want to show you,” he says of his outer-spacey geometric abstractions, which share affinities with Julie Mehretu’s works. “This isn’t a piece of a larger world.”
He used to be certain about that. But now, his lines, points, and planes are beginning to lead off the edges of his drawings and to fade away into deep space—and he’s trying to figure out why, and whether he likes it, and where he wants it to go.
This is an artist who started by making teapots and became a professional seamstress (seamster?) before he studied in the MFA ceramics program at UW.
His newest works are at Platform Gallery in Pioneer Square through February 9, including this drawing, titled In Place of Three (2008)—the dry pigment is applied with makeup applicators—
and the installation/spatial drawing Prospect Fields, which fills the gallery.
This is Ellen Forney doing Kelly O. Meaning, Forney’s the artist and Kelly’s the subject. Then again, who knows what else happened in that modeling session?
LUST is a collection of Forney’s Lustlab cartoons, which appear every week on her blog, in addition to on the Stranger’s site. Here’s the latest, a tribute to a woman who likes Odd Nerdrum, Zdzislaw Beksinski, and Joel-Peter Witkin:
The man with his back to us in the photograph above is Seattle artist John Grade. Mounted on him is his sculpture Collector: two horn shapes made of interlocking wood parts, first displayed at Davidson Contemporary Gallery last year. Back then, the piece hung on the white wall—in a refined state. That was before Grade took it hiking.
Now, the piece has acquired a mane of seaweed: It lies among the oysters—watched over by some oystermen—in Willapa Bay. Here are views of it there.
Later this year, Grade will take it out of the water, remove the oysters that have grown on it, and eat them in a formal feast on the site. After that, the horns will be mounted onto the front of Grade’s red pickup truck, where they’ll acquire a layer of bug guts as he drives them down to a slot canyon in Utah.
This particular canyon was the driving force behind the shape of the horns in the first place—that and an experience Grade had with hostile Ugandans during a trip a few years ago. (For the full story on that, you have to listen to the podcast.) The horns were shaped to fit snugly into the canyon, and in the spring, the rushing water that goes through the canyon will either scrub the horns bone-clean, or destroy them. Grade will wait to see.
Until recently, Grade was known mostly for his small, intensely controlled charcoal and graphite drawings, like this one, Bog (2005).
His other familiar work was finely wrought, faux-weathered sculptures. The new work comes out of both these traditions. It’s formally tight, at least to start. It’s not faux-weathered, it actually weathers. It changes with its site, like the process work of Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, and according to the lapsing of time, like (Turner Prize nominee) Darren Almond’s videos. (Grade admires both British artists.)
Bog is a drawing that refers directly to an installation Grade unveiled last week: a giant, sagging false ceiling dotted with craters, made of paper pulp and hanging in Suyama Space in Belltown. That’s where I met him to talk for this podcast.
Seeps of Winter is the new installation’s title. Grade first got the idea for it during a residency near a bog in Mayo County, Ireland. Running by, Grade couldn’t help thinking about the human beings frozen under the thick surfaces of bogs for thousands of years—the ones who surface occasionally, staring upward. In Suyama Space, the false ceiling acts as the bog surface; you can lie on the floor to look through at the natural light above.
Like Collector, Seeps of Winter has an adventurous life ahead of it.
When Martha Rosler made her photographic series of Skid Row in the 1970s, she left out the people and instead added words referring to drunkenness, calling the whole thing “The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems.” This was her demonstration of what she called “the indignity of speaking for others,” in implicit protest of the sort of sympathetic documentary photography made by early 20th-century snappers like Jacob Riis.
Zoe Strauss would side not with Rosler, but with Riis. She backs up her perspective by showing her images not only in galleries and museums—and currently at Open Satellite in Bellevue—but also in an annual exhibition she organizes under a freeway bridge in the tough neighborhood where she shoots the photographs, not far from the South Philadelphia neighborhood where she grew up and still lives.
Hear her talk about her Philadelphia street practice, about her time harassing the Factoria Mall Santa, about what gets on her last gay nerve, and about her mixed feelings on Diane Arbus in this installment of In/Visible.
Seattle-based sculptor Dan Webb’s problem is that he can make anything with his hands. He could build a perfect monument, but he doesn’t believe in perfect monuments. So he builds things that warp and disintegrate, that survive with compromises.
Twice he’s been on the Stranger Genius Award shortlist (2003 and 2007) and his new installation Little Cuts immediately became a part of the regional canon when it was first shown last December. It’s up now—just until December 21—at Western Bridge, in a terrific group show with work by Martin Creed, Jordan Wolfson, Anthony McCall, Jeppe Hein, Rachel Harrison, Alex Schweder, Neil Goldberg, Julia Schmidt, and Roger Hiorns. (Northwest readers: Miss it at risk of serious regret.)
Little Cuts (pictured above, at right) is the process of Webb carving a man’s head out of a block of wood. In a series of 40 photographs, the man’s face emerges from the wood and then grows old; his flesh decomposes leaving only his skull, and then even his bones wither to dust. The dust—all the sawdust from the carving—is encased in a Plexiglas box, set on a pedestal in the center of the room, with the 40 photographs hung on the walls around it.
Next month, Webb has a solo show at Acuna Hansen Gallery in LA. I caught up with Webb in his unheated studio for a peek at the work that will be in that show.
The show is titled Dandelion, in a play on the artist’s name (though the down-to-earth sculptor is neither really dandy nor lion), and on his most common theme through the years, survival in sculpture. At left is his floor installation, Dandelion in America. In it, a weed made from the pages of old issues of art magazines like Art in America sprouts up from a pile of the magazines, as if in homage to all the now-forgotten names inside the periodicals.
At right, Rubber Dandelion is a cast-rubber dandelion held up by a bronze wire armature. It will be set on the floor on a platform with springs. Whenever anyone walks near it, the rubber will wobble, invoking the tough malleability of weeds but also, thanks to the wire maze, the appearance of limbs gone slack and on life support.
Listen to the artist talk about these and other dandelions, made of bronze, paper, and Sculpy—and about the chopped-off finger of Galileo, on this week’s In/Visible.
Alison Knowles, performing tonight (December 5 at 7:30 pm at Good Sheperd Chapel in Wallingford—thanks to the inspired programming of Steve Peters’ series Nonsequitur and Robert Mittenthal’s Subtext Reading Series), is a pioneering sound/visual/performance artist. She made prints with Marcel Duchamp. She was pivotal in early Fluxus. She turns making a salad into a work of art.
And this is the first time she has ever performed in Seattle. Do not miss it. But if you do, at least you can hear her talk, and hear her playing some of her “instruments” from the performance, on In/Visible.
When Beth Sellars notices that an artist she’s invited to Suyama Space is making something that doesn’t really work in the gallery, what does she do?
How involved should a curator be in the formation of new works?
Is it possible to compare the work that curators do with the work that artists do?
Four curators tackle these and other questions in a roundtable on this week’s In/Visible: two independent (Suzanne Beal and Jim O’Donnell), and two attached (Sellars at Suyama Space and Jess Van Nostrand at Cornish College of the Arts).
In the last year, Seattle Art Museum has gotten attention for new architecture, big-name sculpture, and a giant donation of art from various donors to celebrate its new facilities.
But Asian art has always been a specialty of SAM. The place was founded by an Asian art collector—and even now it’s run by a scholar of Chinese art who happens to be more famous as Bill Gates’s stepmother, Mimi Gardner Gates.
Gardner Gates is not a particularly contemporary soul, or tech-savvy; before we turned on the recorder for this podcast, I introduced her to the concept of Wikipedia, and showed her her own page, which includes a reference to her old friendship with Teresa Heinz Kerry. Of the page, she would like to correct the date of her arrival in Seattle—it was 1994, not 1995—and she would like to know why Bruce Hornsby “lent her special thanks in the liner notes on his 1993 album Harbor Lights.” (She did not know he had done that, and she does not know him.)
But here is a rare example of Gates talking about the art she loves, and explaining why. A few times she even seems to break out of official museum-director mode.
Three pieces she geeks out on in particular:
14th-century Chinese porcelain painted in underglaze cobalt blue
Chinese vase from early 1700s, porcelain with copper red glaze
14th century ink on paper Flowering Plum branch, by the “amateur” artist Yang Hui
Brad Biancardi is a formidable painter. He makes strange, wildly colorful images that look like reflected and refracted blueprints, and often, they are based on the real architecture of a room or a building.
He’s also the kind of guy who says he doesn’t understand color. That one of his paintings at Crawl Space only counts for a half-painting, because it’s bad, but that he put it up to demonstrate what he was going through in his studio at the time. No wonder he was a finalist for this year’s Betty Bowen Award.
In other words, he’s devoted, curious, generous, and talented—and, sadly, moving to Chicago in November. (He’s got family back there.)
Listen to what he’s struggled with in the studio since last spring. You can see the results at Crawl Space Gallery, where he has a solo show (of 4 1/2 paintings) through Nov. 11, and Platform Gallery, where he’s part of a group exhibition called A Spectral Glimpse through Dec. 1.
Here are a couple of teasers:
The Millennium Falcon (doubling, unintentionally, as a Marsden Hartley soldier painting):
1983 Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue “Made in
America” (his first car):
A painting unusual for him in that it incorporates collage (that bird is made of cutouts of eyes), which he calls Enchanted Elevator Shaft or Hawkeye:
Dawn Cerny is the most anarchic of the emerging talents of Seattle. Her work cannibalizes history and spits it out on cheap paper.
In a solo show at Gallery 4Culture in May 2006, wild dogs painted directly on the wall terrorized each other, but they didn’t affect the delicate, framed paintings of noblemen on which they were superimposed. The two realms rebuffed each other like opposing magnets.
At Catherine Person Gallery in March, Cerny installed a large grid of dozens of scraps of drawings and paintings on the wall in the form of questions and answers, based on the Victorian magazine Notes and Queries.
Now, she has an eccentric, multimedia double marriage portrait of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln up at Kirkland Arts Center, as part of Suzanne Beal’s excellent Help Me I’m Hurt show.
What is this woman up to? Time to find out. Here are two older works:
A Walking Sculpture That Will Talk to You, Maybe Lie to You
Around 1974, Kim Jones, a former painter and sometime sculptor, became a sculpture himself. He called it “Mudman,” and it meant him wearing a latticework of sticks on his back, and covering his body in mud and his head in pantyhose—but interacting with people more or less normally, which often, well, freaked them out.
As Mudman, Jones walked the streets of Los Angeles and, later, New York. He gave performances that included smearing himself in his own shit while hacking at beer cans with a machete he got during his tour in Vietnam, and burning live rats to death, repeating something he and his fellow Marines had done during the war. (The rat act got him sent to court and put on partial probation.)
In his retrospective opening Friday night at the Henry Art Gallery, documents from those performances join sculpture, installation, ever-evolving war drawings, and a timeline of his life that includes snapshots from his time in Vietnam and begins with a newspaper photograph of him when he was crippled from a polio-like disease as a child.
At Friday’s opening, Jones will perform Mudman for the first time in a while. Before you meet him there, listen to him talk.
Drew Daly’s latest sculptures are all made from the same single object: an IKEA chair, “an object that has absolutely no shock value,” an object “without content.”
It isn’t the object that Daly hones in on, it’s what’s happening to it. For these are objects that have been subjected, at least optically, to a series of actions. They’ve been compressed or expanded, cropped, merged, doubled, and quadrupled. They’ve been handled like photographs in Photoshop, taken to be as malleable as information.
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini’s first American survey is in Seattle, at the Frye Art Museum, organized by Robin Held. It is aptly titled Hug, in an intimation of the warmth that emanates from her otherwise discomfiting work.
There are videos, photographs, and sculptures, all proposing new forms of life—baby motorcycles that will grow up to be regular-sized bikes, faceless furry blobs wiggling around on a living-room floor, toothsome creatures designed by Piccinini as bodyguards for endangered species, a patch of bubbling, hairy, transforming skin. Her creations are wild, slightly beyond control or understanding. So are we, she suggests.
Schematic drawing for Anthony McCall’s Doubling Back, an installation in which two digitally animated sine waves are projected onto a wall in a dark room as they slowly wrap around one another. Shaped by a haze machine, the light that is projected creates forms in the room that move through a half-hour sequence of two 15-minute segments played forward and backward. In this drawing, the strip at the top refers to the first 15 minutes, and the strip at the bottom is the reverse motion, played out in second 15 minutes.
When the prestigious jokesters behind the Wrong Gallery were asked to select artists (typically hot, young artists) for the latest edition of the Cream series of art books, one of their choices was Anthony McCall—a guy who broke onto the scene 34 years ago.
Similarly, ARTnews magazine this summer dubbed McCall one of 25 worldwide “trendsetters.” Well, yes, he is a great rediscovery, having been absent from the art world from 1980 to 2000. Then again, he started the trend in 1973—of cinematic sculpture.
McCall’s 2003 “solid light” installation Doubling Back is at Western Bridge this fall, and I’ve written about it here. For the opening, McCall was in Seattle, and he was gracious enough to sit down with me for a conversation upstairs at the gallery.
L.A. artist Olga Koumoundouros arrived in Bellevue three weeks ago to begin her residency at Open Satellite, a brave new exhibition space that invites artists from out of town to create work here.
In a phone interview before she arrived, she told the story of wandering around Bellevue in search of a coffee and not being able to find one because the urban core is so segregated—residential versus commercial. What she found instead were two crumbling shacks right up next to a brand new high-rise.
What kind of life is dying in Bellevue, and what kind of life is sprouting up in its place? How is the new architecture designed to deliver luxury, and how well does it serve basic needs?
Koumoundouros’s installation at Open Satellite, up Aug. 29-Oct. 13 and curated by Lead Pencil Studio, explores just these questions. In this conversation recorded last week, she talks about the process of making it, and about why inviting an artist whose work is socially critical was a difficult but smart way to begin Open Satellite.
Ken Allan arrived in Seattle a year ago from L.A. He’s assistant professor of art history at Seattle University, and he specializes in postwar L.A.—essentially, in the construction of Los Angeles as an art center.
I first came to know him through an essay he wrote looking back at the late Walter Hopps.
He’s at work on a book about “artistic practice, spectatorship, and social space in 1960s Los Angeles,” and he sat down at his office to talk about the birth of L.A., the way emerging scenes (like Seattle’s) perform themselves, the role of a place in shaping art and vice versa, and why there’s so much damn L.A. in Seattle lately.
Ceci n’est pas une swingset (This Is Not a Swingset) by PDL. (Photograph by Felipe Luis Naranjo)
Jason Puccinelli, Jed Dunkerley, and Greg Lundgren are PDL—a group of artists that originally began as an homage/parody of another collaborative trio in Seattle, SuttonBeresCuller. (The guys are all friends.)
So what have they done since they announced their intention to work together for one year starting March 1, 2007? Actually, a lot, all under the radar. They dumped money in public squares in Coin Drops, entertained riders in their cars in Theater Hitchhiking, and interrogated Seattle Art Museum’s “don’t-touch” campaign at the Olympic Sculpture Park with Ceci n’est pas une swingset. Now, they’re about to roll about Portable Confessional Units at Bumbershoot.
They may have started out as fake artists, but at times they’ve made it hard to tell the difference. That’s probably just as they like it. Listen in.
Here’s what I wrote about Patterson Sims in a Stranger Suggests last week:
Before even-keeled Michael Darling, before take-charge Lisa Corrin, before academic Trevor Fairbrother, there was Patterson Sims, the notoriously charming Seattle Art Museum curator who could always get a collector on the phone and an artwork in the museum’s vault. Now he’s directing the Montclair Museum of Art in New Jersey, where he put together Anxious Objects: Willie Cole’s Favorite Brands.
In this podcast, Sims talks about Cole (Anxious Objects is now at the Frye), his days at SAM, Seattle art now, and whether he’s inclined to try to make a move back to Seattle (hint: yes).
(And for more on Cole, the New Jersey artist who has a fascinating fixation on the steam iron, do not miss SAM African curator Pam McClusky’s talk with him Friday, August 10, at 7 pm at the Frye Art Museum.)
Marisa Sanchez started in April as assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at Seattle Art Museum—just before the crush of the opening, so her arrival got kind of buried. No more.
Before this, she worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; got her master’s degree in art history, theory, and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and originally, she’s a Jersey girl.
So what’s she like? Listen in as she details her journey from this
Van Gogh’s Room at Arles by van Gogh (1889)
to this
Oval Billiard Table (1996) by Gabriel Orozco
to this
Untitled (Barragan House, 10) (2005) by Luisa Lambri
Bill and Ruth True are the leading collectors of contemporary art in Seattle. They buy a lot of art and they really do live with it—there are stories of videos playing above the table in their dining room or over a set of stairs. They even accidentally scared one of their children with something they installed in her room when she was young.
But they can’t put it all up at home. In 2004, they opened Western Bridge, a contemporary art center that this summer looks empty but is actually full of a new sound installation by Bill Fontana. (The Trues commissioned him to make the work.) They’ve also given and loaned regularly to museums—The Henry Art Gallery currently has an exhibition up, Mouth Open, Teeth Showing, of several works owned by the Trues, including Doug Aitken’s i am in you, having its U.S. premiere.
On a sunny day recently, the Trues sat down outside the St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle University and talked about their history, their hopes, and the way they feel about having exposed themselves publicly at Western Bridge.
Cris Bruch has been one of those artists who’s famous mostly among artists. No longer.
Lawrimore Project has organized a terrific 20-year survey of his work, which manages to cross minimalism, feminism, and 1980s Pioneer Square. It’s up through August 4, and ranges from early sculptures that carry overt social commentary to the complexly built abstractions he makes now.
What are these objects, why does he make them, and how did he get from there
The first time Richard Andrews saw art, it was because a friend of his urged him to get in a car that was rushing toward the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “You have to see it before the bastards take it down!” she told him. He was a teenager. The exhibition was the censored Ed Kienholz show of sculptures including Backseat Dodge.
Andrews became an artist, but eventually he stopped making his own work—and as if to make that completely worth it, pursued supporting the work of other artists with a vengeance.
After 20 years of working with contemporary artists on commissions, installations, and touring exhibitions as director of the Henry Art Gallery, Andrews is about to step down.
But he remembers it all, and he has words of advice (though he’d never call them that) for whoever it is that takes over Seattle’s contemporary art museum.
(And as a bonus, he talks about his current work with the Skystone Foundation, which is supporting the creation of James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona, seen below in two interior views and from above, in a lithograph—listen to the podcast to understand what you’re seeing.)
Charlie Krafft is the guy who makes the porcelain guns. And plates and vases out of human cremains (“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Delft”).
He’s the one whose contribution to last year’s Bumbershoot show, Softly Threatening, was a layered wedding cake decorated in Nazi symbols. (The bakery that did it pleaded anonymity. At the show, a guy spit on it and ran.)
Has it gotten harder over the years to piss people off? Hell yes, Krafft says. So he has to work harder. His latest reward for his efforts is the $15,000 Neddy Fellowship in ceramics (Whiting Tennis won for painting).
No interview with Krafft could possibly be dull. He recounts his days negotiating with Slovenian arms dealers, talks about the state of the Mystic Sons of Morris Graves (a Northwest art “brotherhood” that once held a legendary Chihuly-smashing and that’s still gathering members—check out who the newest and most famous are on this podcast), and describes what happens when he breaks into a shack on the side of the road in Skagit Valley. Krafft also explains why he’s a “bad” gallery artist.
Do listen.
Charlie Krafft’s Sal Mineo Bunny, on display with several of Krafft’s other works at the Tacoma Art Museum.
This episode is one of the best artist interviews this podcast has seen—from the slightly heartbreaking story of the sterilization of an animalistic sculpture to a blow-by-blow account of Whiting Tennis trying to figure out how to make his newest work, Blue Tarp, a giant collage painting mounted on canvas that looks like a blue tarp.
Blue Tarp is on display at Tacoma Art Museum, where last Saturday night, Whiting Tennis walked away with the $15,000 Neddy Fellowship for painting. (Charlie Krafft won for ceramics, and we’re hoping he’ll be on In/Visible next week.)
It has been a banner year for Tennis. In October, he had a well-loved show at Greg Kucera Gallery, from which Seattle Art Museum bought for its permanent collection a massive sculpture called Bovine: The Oregon Trail Reversed.
Two years ago, Tennis moved back to Seattle (his hometown) from New York, where he’d spent more than a decade. He bought a house, after a lifetime of being a hobo, and fell in love with the handmade objects the elderly couple that had formerly lived there left behind.
Meanwhile, over the past five years, he’s begun making not just paintings, drawings, and low-reliefs, but standalone architectural figures. His work is stronger than ever, as if at 47 years old he’s hit some kind of stride, and you can hear it in the easy way he talks.
Bill Fontana was a pioneer of sound art in the 1970s, and since then he has made installations all around the world, using objects as resonators and moving immobile landmarks around by transferring their sounds (“taking” Big Ben into a London gallery, for instance).
Seattle collectors William and Ruth True commissioned a full-scale installation from Fontana for this summer, and the piece occupies the entire building of Western Bridge, their private gallery space. In town for the installation recently, the San Francisco-based artist took a few minutes to talk about what he was doing:
A still from Marie Jager’s 12-minute 2006 collage film The Purple Cloud.
Coinciding with the first week of the Seattle International Film Festival is a visit from contemporary film artist Marie Jager, who talks to The Stranger’s Jen Graves about impoverished mediums, fondling camera parts, and the 1901 Victorian science-fiction novel The Purple Cloud, by M.P Shiel. Jager’s 2006 collage film based on the novel and named after it, which made its debut at the California Biennial last fall, and Machines Also Die, her film starring the shiny pieces of the Cameflex Éclair that Jean-Luc Godard used to shoot Breathless in 1960, are on display at the Henry Art Gallery through June 21.
At 8:00 p.m. tonight, Wednesday, May 23, as part of the Henry’s “Artist’s Cinema” series at Northwest Film Forum, the L.A. artist offers a glimpse of her influences by choosing historic films and contemporary works for a two-hour program of short films that share “a profound wonder of both nature and absurd fictional premises” (the roster includes Dudley Murphy’s The Soul of the Cypress [1920], Jean Painleve’s The Love Life of the Octopus [1965], Jack Goldstein’s 46-second film Butterflies [1975], Dr. Jean Comandon’s The Movement of Plants [1927], At the Winter Sea Ice Camp [part of the National Film Board of Canada’s Netsilik Eskimo series], and Jean Rouch’s Mad Masters from 1956).
This also is your chance to see Jager’s Purple Cloud on a big screen in a dark room (the little screen at the entryway to the Henry is slightly window-addled). It’s a three-part work presenting fragments of the book’s narrative, moving from gemstones in deserts to tomb boats at sea to a city of doomed survivors who’ve only escaped the stalking of the toxic purple cloud temporarily.
Another still from The Purple Cloud. A still from Marie Jager’s 3-minute 2001 film Machines Also Die.
In it are the tiny uniforms of nurses and queens, each with her own battlefield specialty: loss of limbs, K.I.A., last rites. They’re adorably small but surprisingly dignified, made from the aged, dirty, world-weary skin of a used fur coat.
And there are only nurses here, not doctors. It is past the point of doctors. A child nurse after the infanta in Velazquez’s Las Meninas wears a gas mask, embodying help, terror, and vulnerability all.
A larger-than-life-sized queen in a gas mask stands in a forest of layer cakes in a reprise of Jameson’s sculpture for Bumbershoot last year, Keeping Up Appearances. It is covered in 300 pounds of white fondant icing.
Jameson talks to Jen Graves on In/Visible about watching her late father dress for military life, about whether she’s more afraid than she used to be, about the mysterious new costumes she’s making for her band the Buttersprites, and about trailing 40 feet of sleeves behind her on the streets of Vienna. Will she do an art performance in Seattle?
For almost a year and a half, Seattle has been seriously starved for pre-20th-century art. When the newly expanded Seattle Art Museum opens, you might be surprised at how refreshing it is to see centuries-old European paintings, Islamic and Egyptian artifacts, and ancient Asian masterpieces.
SAM curator Chiyo Ishikawa leads a tour connecting five paintings across time and across Europe—paintings by a Renaissance Florentine; a 16th-century Flemish mannerist; Lucas Cranach the Elder; and two 17th-century Spaniards, one being Bartolomé Estebán Murillo.
Most of these have never been seen before publicly in Seattle. They’re new acquisitions, or loans, or part of that sad species often trapped in too-small buildings like the former SAM—the gems that almost never come out of storage.
In addition to Ishikawa’s podcast tour, here’s a slide show of the five works she selected to feature. You’ll see them in person when the museum opens May 5.
Paul Rucker has spent the last four months in a dark room at McLeod Residence. Showing in January was his installation called Eleven Conversations, in which a video of him performing a musical number on the cello was manipulatable by visitors who could control the sound—and, it appeared, his movements on the video—by waving hands over a glowing orange sensor in the middle of the room.
Now comes Happy Ending Machine, a sweet-hearted, playful, interactive piece that drew a huge crowd at the opening. People still call ahead when they’re coming to the gallery to make sure it’s on when they get there (it is). It pairs footage borrowed from a Louisiana butterfly enthusiast with a clear Plexiglas console that Rucker built.
Four red lasers shoot out from inside the console. Each one corresponds to an instrument, or a group of instruments, and the four tracks are synced up in a single recording by Rucker and a saxophonist. Running a hand across one of the lasers turns the track on; running a hand the other direction turns the track off.
Smoke pumped into the machine has the same effect. It blocks the laser, which plays a track continuously. In fact, during this podcast, the saxophone, under the influence of excess smoke and a laser weakened with time, absolutely will not quit. Then the drums refuse to stop. The machine takes over. (The laser has since been fixed.)
Rucker, a self-taught musician and a trained composer, talks about his early days in Seattle almost a decade ago, when he stopped playing music for a while and worked as a janitor at the Seattle Art Museum. That’s where he first got interested in combining music and visual art. In the last three years, he’s shown at Consolidated Works and the McLeod Residence, and he’s building a piece for a show next month at Jack Straw, in addition to working as a professional composer, in the multimedia department at SAM, and keeping up with his solo writing and performing career.
Sure he’s busy, but what will this room at McLeod Residence do without him?
Five Capital Executions in China: Drawing and Quartering, 2007.
Five Capital Executions in China: Flaying, 1993.
Five Capital Executions in China: Starvation, 1999.
Looking at Zhi Lin’s cycle of brutal, vivid death-penalty paintings, you might not expect the calm-voiced professor who appears on this podcast. Lin left his native China for art school in London in 1987. He continued school at the University of Delaware and got a job teaching in John Ashcroft’s hometown in Missouri before coming to the University of Washington in 2001. For 14 years, Lin has quietly and tirelessly devoted himself to painting five giant scenes of violence. At Howard House this month, they have their first completed exhibition.
Each 12-by-7-foot canvas—surrounded by black fabric and topped with a ribbon, like a ceremonial object—depicts one of five executions: death by starvation, firing squad, decapitation, flaying, and drawing and quartering.
The scenes are packed with onlookers who seem to move the fatal action forward by pressing in, mob-style, on it-—or onlookers who go about their lives, eating or biking in tacit agreement with the killing. Lin cites W. H. Auden’s poem “Musee des Beaux Arts”:
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters;
how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
In each painting, the long vertical scene spills downward on the canvas, the violent action laid virtually at the feet of the viewer. Though Lin’s inspiration to turn from abstraction to social realism was the quashing of the 1989 Chinese student uprisings, it is important to him that these scenes are not specific to any one country. They’re about all government killings.
Lin’s next project is a series of paintings—horizontal this time, so that he doesn’t have to live on ladders any longer—depicting the Chinese workers who built the railroad from Sacramento to Promontory, Utah, from 1866 to 1869. On display in the front room at Howard House are poignant Chinese ink studies for this series of paintings, titled Unwelcomed: Invisible People, sketched from historical photographs and from Lin’s own travels “following the footsteps” of the workers, including going to the annual Golden Spike reenactments in Utah, where he’s one of very few Chinese attendees.
The ink studies on paper are bereft of the workers themselves; the Chinese, unlike the Irish workers, were systematically left out of the railroad festivities that occasioned the photographs, and their presence was documented almost not at all. Lin plans to bring them back, on canvas.
Sometime around 1757, the renowned fresco painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo took to a ceiling in the Palazzo Porto in Vicenza to create The Triumph of Valor Over Time—the scene pictured above, which now is being feverishly restored in the conservation studio at Seattle Art Museum.
When SAM acquired the roughly 17-by-10-foot Tiepolo from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1961, the museum had to knock down walls to get it inside at the Volunteer Park location (now the Seattle Asian Art Museum). But once there, it “sort of became part of the furniture,” said SAM conservator Nicholas Dorman. “People tended to walk past it.”
Now that the museum will be reopening in an expanded facility on May 5, the Tiepolo is being thoroughly restored and rehung on a higher ceiling in a brighter room, one lined with sparkling cases of hundreds of pieces of porcelain.
Dorman recently took time out from restoring the painting—something he’s doing with three other full-time conservators—to tell its story.
Originally made in fresco, The Triumph was removed around 1900 by a technique called strappo, which entails pasting a gauzelike material to the wall, waiting for it to dry, and then ripping the painting off the wall before reattaching it to canvas. (Funny thing is, when that’s done, scant marks and indentations remain on the wall and the piece can be rebuilt. This is what happened with the Tiepolo at the palazzo, where another, similar but largely overpainted Triumph of Valor Over Time hangs—Dorman and SAM curator Chiyo Ishikawa saw it when they visited Vicenza last year.)
After leaving the palazzo and before arriving at SAM, the Tiepolo changed hands a few times, once ending up as the centerpiece in the living room of a German collector who tore a hole and thrust a chandelier through its center. (The marks from the tear remain.)
At SAM, it was handled delicately but began naturally to sag over time in its oddly shaped wooden stretcher. In preparation for SAM’s new building, the museum contracted with an Italian framer who made a new, superior aluminum stretcher. The conservators transferred the painting, cleaned it with swabs and distilled water, and now they are in-painting where the color has flaked away, or where previous in-painting by other restorers has discolored.
This is the crowning project in the studio’s job before the reopening in May, but there are other works under examination, too, including a painting by Uccello and a sculpture by Donald Judd. Dorman gives a tour of all the art currently being prepared for its turn in the limelight.
Margie Livingston brings craggy branches into her studio, hangs them from the ceiling, and traps them by building grids of soft string and wood around them. Then, she paints. The results look like quiet, almost sedate geometric abstractions, but are also impressionistic representations of her grid-and-branch sculptures interacting with whatever light hits them and the air in and around them.
Last year, Livingston won Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award; her work will be on display at the new SAM when it opens in May. This month, she has an exhibition of large, medium, and small paintings at Greg Kucera Gallery. And late last year, she displayed one of her studio sculptures at SOIL, which got me interested in her work in the first place.
In a conversation at the gallery, Livingston talks about her beginnings as a bad expressionist painter, her ongoing love affair with the German romantic Caspar David Friedrich, and her turning point with hair balls.
It’s well worth a listen.
Structure (thin violet) (2006) by Margie Livingston
Structure (blue over blue) (2005) by Margie Livingston
Structure (end of summer) (2006) by Margie Livingston
Bruce Nauman’s 100 Live and Die is a spectacle. It’s 100 phrases of double-layered neon words paired with either “live” or “die” (“eat and die,” “red and live,” “come and die,” for example).
And it’s hard to shoot on film. Which is actually reassuring.
We did try. This video from the lowest level of the Henry Art Gallery testifies to the piece’s flashing, dislocating effect, but you can’t actually make out any of the words—until the end. Henry chief curator Liz Brown and I talk about Nauman, James Joyce, history painting, and 4:20, and then you get the money shots.
For more about the Nauman retrospective (at the Henry through May 6), my review is here.
Seattle-based sculptor Dan Webb’s problem is that he can make anything with his hands. He could build a perfect monument, but he doesn’t believe in perfect monuments. So he builds things that warp and disintegrate, that survive with compromises.
The show is titled Dandelion, in a play on the artist’s name (though the down-to-earth sculptor is neither really dandy nor lion), and on his most common theme through the years, survival in sculpture. At left is his floor installation, Dandelion in America. In it, a weed made from the pages of old issues of art magazines like Art in America sprouts up from a pile of the magazines, as if in homage to all the now-forgotten names inside the periodicals.
At right, Rubber Dandelion is a cast-rubber dandelion held up by a bronze wire armature. It will be set on the floor on a platform with springs. Whenever anyone walks near it, the rubber will wobble, invoking the tough malleability of weeds but also, thanks to the wire maze, the appearance of limbs gone slack and on life support.
A still from Marie Jager’s 12-minute 2006 collage film The Purple Cloud.
Another still from The Purple Cloud.
A still from Marie Jager’s 3-minute 2001 film Machines Also Die.
