photo borrowed from Jen Graves

My highlight of First Thursday last night was meeting Wynne (who is lovely), seeing her Strap-on TVs, and witnessing an exchange between Scott Lawrimore and a hapless art viewer (“what are these? you can’t even pick them up!”) in which Scott demonstrated through miming what a strap-on is.

The guy was not as satisfied with the demonstration as everyone else was, and asked to see the “flyer that goes with the art.”

Incidentally, Scott Lawrimore is doing really nice work with his new space and the “flyers that go with the art.” Each show in the white small space is being paired with thoughtful writing about the work as well as a page from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés.

My impression of the new Lawrimore Project is that while the physical space has shrunk exponentially, the work of/by Lawrimore Project is much bigger.  Part of this is due to the fact that Scott Lawrimore has big plans that include opening a satellite space in Berlin and an artist residency program in Seattle; his overarching goal is to bring Seattle artists out of Seattle and outside artists in. He is also thinking about how to facilitate the conversations that can/will happen when these displacements happen. This is so much what Seattle needs, and very exciting.

Additionally, I think the pairing of the work with writing contributes to this feeling of the gallery being somehow bigger. There is this small space, and some art, and some writing that can serve as a view into the art if you want it to. With no other distractions, it’s a simple pairing that is surprisingly fulfilling if you let it be. The gallery director is present, unshielded by staff, desk, computer. He will happily talk about art with you and will even demonstrate what a strap-on is, if necessary.

They’re also little compared to Alpert’s typically big, space-encompassing site-specific installations.

With both the paintings and the installations, bits of environmental information mate with a chosen aesthetic to offer a narrative that straddles fiction and nonfiction. A window frame might be exaggerated and multiplied, or the bricks of a house might tumble off to bloom in the street. Alpert’s sensibility is both delicate and assertive; or perhaps she’s asserting the intricate delicacies that surround us.

I do feel, looking at these paintings of backyards, that I’m being shown an intensified glimpse of what’s really there. There is wonder in this giant cloaked thing.

There are voyeuristic rewards to be had here, peering into the parts of people’s yards that they think are just for them. Sunlight splashes around shamelessly and trees take on map-like shapes. The compositions are driven by a depth in perspective, and the color is pitch-perfect. We are clearly being invited/seduced into these odd, semi-private spaces with sheds and tarps and backyard detritus. It is more than enough if all we do once we get there is look.

As writer of this little art blog (I assume), I was invited to the Press Preview for the Picasso show at SAM this morning. I don’t know who added me and the other blogging artists in town to the Press list at SAM, but whoever you are: thank you. The gesture (a repeated one; SAM invites us every time) adds class and relevance to the art scene here, and reminds us that artists and writers and arts organizers are making this community together. (As I’m writing this, I’m thinking of other ways SAM has included newer artists in its programming, like Ryan Molenkamp‘s wonderful project The Portrait Challenge in the “Think Tank” space, on the second floor mezzanine of the museum.)

I looked at the show and the work within it differently than I would have if I hadn’t been invited to this special preview tour. I was there with a sense of purpose, rather than with the presumption that Picasso and I have little to do with each other. While I’ve respected his sturdy spot in Art History, I’ve never been particularly moved by his work. (I realized today that it’s probably because he wasn’t that great with color, and color is usually what gets me with paintings.) But today, seeing this much of his work in person, and with the feeling that it was somehow appropriate for me to be there, I was moved.

{photo by Damon Mori}

Picasso was a genius with line and form; you can see the genius when you see the work in person. A single line somehow contains the complications of a personal history. A goat with milk bottle udders is a broken beast marching towards its own abstraction. A boundless freedom spins through all of these genius moments; Picasso was utterly free to do whatever he wanted. He just got to make stuff. As I walked around the show, I wondered a lot about if contemporary artists are anywhere near as free.

{photo by Damon Mori}

The show is fairly modest, with no dramatically persuasive wall text shepherding you along. The work does the talking, and mostly it’s sex everywhere. The show is basically organized by lover-as-subject-matter, with each of Picasso’s lovers having her own room. Lover as subject matter; lover dissected into subject matter. I’d always taken it for granted that Picasso painted his lovers with all of their parts multiplied and stretched and exposed; but to think of this as something relevant to me, as a freedom I myself might have as an artist: this is interesting.

I think it is.

Like Erin Shafkind, I spent my childhood in the 1980s in Los Angeles, yet I somehow have never seen Xanadu. (My parents weren’t purists or hippies, but if I wanted to bite snowflake shapes out of Velveeta cheese and watch non-PBS TV I had to go down the street to Tracy Clark’s house and I guess I was never there when Xanadu was on.) At this point I don’t feel like I need to see Xanadu now that I’ve seen how several artists have used Xanadu.

Xanadu, the film, is about the frustration, then celebration, of an artist. It’s about fantasy clashing and exploding into reality; utopias and dystopias. It’s about color. Xanadu: A Stately Pleasure Dome, curated by Erin Shafkind at SOIL, is about letting yourself have a hot relationship with media. By “hot” I mean Marshall McLuhan hot. McLuhan wrote about how different media are hot or cold, and our responses to them are hot or cold. TV (a show on a box in your living room), he said, is cold because it’s easy to control; it’s smaller than you. Film (a movie in a theatre) is hot because it is huge and enveloping and becomes your world. Hot is engaged, cold is distanced. In inviting these artists to participate in this show, Shafkind was essentially inviting them to let themselves have a hot response to Xanadu. The same invitation is extended to the viewer of her curated exhibition– except here the invitation is to have a hot exchange with hot art.

That is a lot to ask on both counts, when hot isn’t what’s cool.

In Chromophobia, David Batchelor writes succinctly about how color has been uncool for much of the lifespan of the Western world. Throughout art, history, and literature, color is associated with base desires, sex, the feminine, intellectual decay, loss of control, fall from grace.

Charles Blanc in 1867:”The taste for colour, when it predominates absolutely, costs many sacrifices; often it turns the mind from its course, changes the sentiment, swallows up the thought. . . The lower strata of nature takes the first place instead of human beings [who] alone represent the loftiest expression of life, which is thought.”

Roland Barthes, 1970′s: “Colour. . . is a kind of bliss. . . like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell.”

L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy, on leaving colorful Oz to return to black-white-gray Kansas, 1900: “East, West, Home is Best.”

Kant, 1790: “The colours which give brilliancy to a sketch are a part of the charm. They may no doubt, in their own way, enliven the object for sensation, but make it really worth looking at and beautiful they cannot.”

In more subtle, less specific language, contemporary art criticism still often communicates a preference for non-color. I think of Jen Graves’ writing about Isaac Layman’s photographs at Lawrimore Project. She explains how this photograph

is fine as a cover for The Stranger, but it lacks the conceptual rigor of the “darker, almost morbid, and therefore interesting” Hot Dog Wrapper.

Aside from the fact that Otter Pops is colorful and Hot Dog Wrapper is not, I can’t find any differences in the conceptual implications of the two works; except to say that the mere use of color is meaningful, with its own host of conceptual implications and seedy association with pleasure.

Xanadu the art show has helped elucidate for me this quiet yet persistent discourse about color. During the Xanadu artists’ talk at SOIL, Cable Griffith talked about how participating in this show gave him the excuse he needed to finally use the neon colored acrylic paint he always pined for in the art supply store.

Cable Griffith, Pleasure Pan-Portal, 2010

Andy Arkley and Julie Alpert talked about their giddy opportunity to use colored laser beams in their collaborative video Gene’s Got Lasers, Who Could Ask For Anything More?

Color is a forbidden fruit that the artists in Xanadu: A Stately Pleasure Dome let themselves eat for the purpose of this show. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz and Sonny in Xanadu, they had a dream/lapse/fall/trip into color. Like Dorothy and Sonny, I expect they’ll need to return to Kansas/Earth/greyness. Though I’m not sure I buy the reason why.

{photo by Stewart McCullough}

p.s. Also in the show, and fitting with this post was Joey Veltkamp’s PINK portrait of Gretchen Bennett and Amanda Manitach’s “hermaphrodite, bathing in the fuchsia and banana yellow glow of Gene’s Got Lasers, Who Could Ask for Anything More?“

Amanda Manitach, Glory, Utopia (the head of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the body of Terpischore)

A neat pile of pink bubblegum lies at the rollerskates of this blushing hermaphrodite who sheepishly, daintily, resides somewhere between utopia and dystopia.

Erlinger found a negative in his parents’ archives and painted a picture of it. It’s an image his mom took of her friend playing a guitar in her bedroom. The painting is exactly representational of the negative, except that Erlinger painted the eyes differently. The painting is hung on the wall.

About three feet out from the wall is a video camera on a tripod. It’s on, and it’s filming the painting on the wall as well as whatever/whoever crosses the space in front of the painting.

The live video is being projected on a monitor that is hanging on the wall opposite the painting. The video camera is inverting the negative/positive imagery, so that what you see in the monitor is the opposite of what is being filmed. Therefore, a live, inverted version of the painting is facing the actual painting. (Which, remember, is a negative.)

This is complicated and wry, and could be mistaken for one-liner trickery. But there is so much more going on. The live-filming/inversion process is not the punchline of a joke, but the mechanics of perception of a much bigger conversation.

I, and maybe other excitables, could go into orbit finding the duets within this duet. It is a duet of painting and video. Past and present. Positive and negative. And here’s the best one: historical scrutiny and nostalgia.

That’s a Mammy Doll on the shelf behind Erlinger’s mom’s friend, to the left. Unbeknownst to these guitar-playing 60′s youngsters, their Mammy Doll would implicate their inherent racism for decades to come, to be sorted out by their progeny. Erlinger had intended to do a precise representation of the negative, but was so distressed by the Mammy Doll that he had to paint its eyes on the girl with the guitar.

The girl’s new eyes are the Mammy Doll’s eyes; they are the artist’s eyes; they are a check on nostalgia and a self-conscious rendering of history. They are regret, an indictment, and the subject of the riddle. Because in the end, the girl is left with the Mammy’s eyes, and the Mammy Doll is not a Mammy Doll anymore. She’s white.

chose this

as his favorite work of the art walk. At the after party Kelly explained for a moment why he chose McGraths’s show, and while I don’t remember exactly what he said, I think he touched on that weird, refreshing limbo this work puts you in. There is no safety net of easy sophistication, though the sophistication is there. There is also humor, and also just an honest peek into McGrath’s work and play. These critters are not trying to be anything they’re not, and what they are is exuberant and true, but undefinable. Are they forest boogers, perched on logs for you to find and admire? Or Hobbit turds, as the show title and font choice might suggest? They are friendly, messy little things that are almost embarrassing with their show of affection. Thanks, Bahogkins.

Chris Buening talked about how Mad Dog is a kind of abstract “portrait” of his fifteen-year-old self drunk on a date with his much older boyfriend.

Derrick Jefferies found the body for Anatomy in cinnamon and mint chewing gum, stretched and and molded together to shape sinews and nakedness.

I’m using The Song of Songs from the Bible as a way to paint the trajectory of my love song to my wife and son.

Related: Erin Shafkind’s take on the Saturday Talk.

In 2005 I was an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. For four months, Anna and I lived on the grounds of the museum with eight other international artists. The museum was formerly a veteran’s hospital, built in the 1600′s; the carriage houses in the back were converted into artists studios and apartments.

I have never felt so fortunate as an artist as I did at IMMA.

I had just graduated from grad school, where all of my professors warned (just as my undergrad professors had) that once we all graduated no one would care about our work. (They didn’t word it so dreadfully, but basically that’s what they were saying.) No one would be knocking on our studio doors demanding to ponder with us the details of our projects for two hours straight, engaging in heated debate with colleagues over the intent of our work.  Also, I suspected that this probably was not a degree that would earn much money.

But then there we were at IMMA. In short, we resident artists felt like rock stars. We were living in a museum. They were giving us money, studios, and apartments. Museum curators were visiting our studios, genuinely interested in what we were doing. Perhaps most thrillingly, there were giant iron gates that opened for us when we came home at night, and then closed behind us. Once, a few guys trailed us home from a pub. We cackled with delight when the giant gates closed in their faces. I thought, Our teachers were wrong! THIS is what it’s like to be an artist!

(HA!)

And then we came home (well, after another residency that is another Fond Art Memory), or rather to my parents’ house, where we would then live for four months, before we moved to a friend’s lightless basement in the dead of winter to sleep on an air mattress on the floor for three months, jobless, in much debt, and warding off depression with many episodes of Alias.

I guess one of the advantages and disadvantages of being an artist is that there isn’t just one reality. IMMA was real (I have pictures to prove it, in times of doubt), and so was the subsequent reality of being homeless (though thankfully not shelter-less), moneyless, prospect-less.

Anyway, there’s no moral to this story. Except that if you’re an artist, you should apply.

It seems that when one is trying to communicate something in a language that isn’t one’s own, the words are pared down to what is absolutely essential.  Crafty banter is left out, and the resulting message is more like a plea or a recipe than an essay.

The very short statement by Dutch artists Ilona Hakvoort, Matthijs Hendriks, and Tanja Isbarn reads this way. It is simple, direct, and necessary to experiencing their show at SOIL the way they’re hoping you will:

“The show Undeclared Goods allows the viewer to see the works in the expanded domain of painting. Ordinarily painting is defined as an image on a flat surface.  The third dimension, however, transforms painting into a total, physical experience.  [The observer is invited] to perceive the whole gallery space as a landscape, which also applies to each individual work.”

I think if I hadn’t read this, I would have directed my attention to the rather modernist art objects and assumed it was some tribute to minimalism. Knowing their intent, though, I let myself fall into the individual “paintings” as though floating in a pool. Each of the paintings, drawings, and resin pieces has the effect of pulling you in and getting you lost, if you let them.

Tanja Isbarn  {This is one drawing in a series that lies in a little cardboard box in the gallery. Visitors are invited to put on white gloves and pick up, handle, and put down each drawing, enabling an elaborate act of looking.}

While Hakvoort, Hendriks and Isbarn value the physical work they’ve made, equally important is the distance between the objects and their viewers. What process connects the two, and what methods are used?  These artists want us to look at their work, and they want us to experience the act of looking at it. It is a complicated, quiet request, and they traveled across oceans and continents (and an active volcano) to make it. I’m grateful for it.

Matthijs Hendriks

I took my parents and Grandma to see the Soil in Residence show yesterday and had yet another fulfilling experience with Joey Veltkamp‘s Rainbow Bears.  I am totally pleased that they’re luxuriously spread across this giant wall. They bring humor, sex, and possibly dismay to a building that is predominantly filled with lamps. (The strangeness of this show has not left me.)

Some of the bears seem to be smiling sheepishly, some growling, and I’m not sure if it is a wrestle of love or war between the man-bear and bear-bear.  The not-knowing makes for an unsettling feeling that floats delicately with the rainbow parade.

I think it is the combination of the medium (paint on paper), the tacks holding them to the wall, the curiosity of emotion, the vast space they traverse, and the resulting odd staccato rainbow that makes me certain that these bears need to be here.