I Like That

Thomas Michelli at Art:21 muses on the artist’s character.

Susan Platt lays it out for all in her writing on the film “Sweet Crude” at Art and Politics Now.   “There is a straight line from [peoples of the Niger Delta] ruined lives to our plush comforts, connected by oil pipelines.”

Stunning photographs by Jonathan Torgovnik over at Slate, of survivors of the Rwandan genocide.  (Oops, according to the U.S. government it conveniently wasn’t a “genocide”.)

Sharon Butler and Willa Koerner have a great idea over at Two Coats of Paint: to blog on a regular basis about the adventures and difficulties of a newly graduated art student with a BFA.

Susanna Bluhm muses on regionalism and the Seattle art scene at Getting To Know You Better.

Gala Bent has some delightful tenderness and artistic sensibilities over at Drifts & Scatters.

Aleksandra Kopff’s drawings.

Aleksandra Kopff, "Cabezas"

Tomoo Gokita’s paintings.

Tomoo Golita "Solid State Survivor", 2009

Photography Exhibition

The Gail Gibson Gallery just opened a new exhibit of three photographers on June 4, 2009 through July 11, 2009.  I get tired of verbally interpreting paintings and photography and sometimes just like to enjoy them visually, which I did this past weekend.  There’s plenty to be said about the work on exhibit currently.  Give some thought to purchasing a few prints this month.  Below is the press release from the gallery.  Freese recommends.

View Master is an exhibit of three artists, LORI NIX, GRACE WESTON, and JONAH SAMSON.  The common denominator for these artists is in their masterful fabrication of intricate 3-dimensional sets, which are then photographed and later disassembled.  The resulting works examine highly imaginative worlds, which illustrate humor, decay, and sexuality.

LORI NIX builds tabletop dioramas in a spare bedroom of her Brooklyn apartment. In her newest body of work, The City, Lori’s sets have become incredibly detailed as she creates scenes from an imagined urban environment that have succumbed to the nature of decay. Taking months to assemble, these dioramas show evidence of human abandonment, and take on a life of their own as nature slowly reclaims them.  Church,  Laundromat, and Botanical Garden are the latest additions to the ongoing series. 

 

Lori Nix, "Laundromat", 2009

Lori Nix currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, but spent most of her life in the rural Midwest.  Taking cues from the disaster movies of the 1970s and her memories of growing up in disaster-prone rural Kansas, Lori has blurred the line between truth and illusion with ’in-house’ set ups and dioramas.  In her first series, Accidental Kansas, she recreated floods, fatalities, tornadoes, and insect infestations.  In the series Lost and Some Other Place, neighborhood sidewalks, city parks, and forays into the wilderness are reconstructed, playing out dark little dramas before the camera. 

Lori’s work has been exhibited nationally. Recent museum exhibitions include Picturing Eden, a traveling exhibition from the George Eastman House in New York, and Fresh: Contemporary Takes on Nature and Allegory at the International Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA. Lori’s honors include a 2004 Individual Artist Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a 2001 Light Work Artist-in-Residence in Syracuse New York. Work by Lori Nix is included in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle WA; Microsoft Corporation; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; the Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas City; Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA, Progressive Insurance, Cleveland, Ohio and Fidelity Insurance, Chicago, Illinois.

 GRACE WESTON is a Portland photographer who creates narrative imagery with staged vignettes that combine humor, wit and psychological tension.  The constructed sets, built from fabricated and found props, are whimsical stages that address personal and universal dilemmas, joys and fears.  With the use of human and animal figures, her characters act out an internalized drama that often remind the viewer of a long forgotten nightmare or daydream.

Grace Weston, "Current Affairs", 2006

Grace Weston’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the northwest. She was recently included in the 2008 Photography Biennial: Nine to Watch, Northwest Photography Biennial, at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, WA, curated by Scott Wallin.  Additionally, Grace was a recipient of a 2006 Individual Artist Fellowship and a 2009 Artist Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission. She will use the later to travel to Madrid this summer for the upcoming Photo España’s Descubrimientos Madrid, a portfolio review and exhibition.  Grace is among the 70 photographers chosen from a field of 900 to participate in this June 2009 event.

 Photographs by Grace Weston are included in the collections of King County’s 4Culture Portable Works, Seattle, WA; the City of Seattle Portable Works, Seattle, WA; Portland Community College, Portland, OR; and University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and Erb Memorial Union, Eugene, OR.

JONAH SAMSON’s dark sense of humor and fascination with the macabre influences his recent body of work Pleasantville. His hand-assembled and painted sets of murder scenes and sexual encounters are born out of our cultures attraction to sex and violence as entertainment, and walk the line between humor and tragedy.  Works in this exhibit focus on the voyeuristic sex scenes; titles include Peeping Tom, Happy Trails, and F*cking.

Jonah Samson, "Fucking", 2006

Jonah Samson celebrates his first commercial gallery exhibit as a contributing artist to View Master, and will enjoy his first solo exhibit this fall at Chernoff Fine Art in Vancouver, BC.  Jonah has been writing, curating, collecting, and making art for over a decade. He is a contributor to the daily blog Cool Hunting, and his writing on photography has been included in several magazines across North America.  Jonah recently published a collection of his Polaroid images of couples kissing in a book called Kissing Pictures 1998-2008.  Tickl magazine will feature a spread of these playful and erotic Polaroids in their next issue due to be released in summer 2009.

Jonah currently lives in Vancouver, Canada with his French Bulldog named Beckett, and works as a family doctor focusing on inner-city health issues.  He is presently working on a new series of dioramic photographs called Noir, based on early 20th century crime scene photographs.

Art=Truth?

Who is Kim?

UW MFA

Keeping my MoFA blog post in mind, I went to the University of Washington’s 2009 MFA show at the Henry Art Museum this past weekend, a couple of blocks from my home.  It was a nice little walk with my wife and we spied on the work of the UW’s MFA students’ work with a head of attitude.  To my surprise, the show was excellent, significantly better than the last few year exhibits of UW MFA students.  The highlight of the show was the paintings of Hugo Shi.  What can make a painting so revolutionary is the physicality of the painted surface, and Shi’s paintings we absolutely gorgeous to view in person.  Most MFA grads move on to obscurity after grad school, but Shi armed with a treasure trove of painting skill should continue on to greater heights.  If Hugo Shi sees this blog post, please contact me, I’d like to talk to you about your work.

Provisional Painting

One of my favorite writers on art, and painting in particular, is Raphael Rubinstein.  His 2006 essay “A Quiet Crisis” has been one of the most relevant contemporary articles on art and painting for me personally.  What has always seemed apparent in his writing is an impression that he truly does understand the process of painting, and that he’s not just interpreting the products of  visual (painting) culture from the outside in.  Earlier this month Rubinstein published in the May edition of Art in America an essay on what he has coined “Provisional Painting“, trying to illuminate an as yet unclassified thematic approach in contemporary painting.  His essay moves the ball forward a bit in discussions concerning contemporary painting.

Rubinstein writes of an increasing awareness of provisionality in the practice of painting that “deliberately turn[s] away from “strong” painting for something that seems to constantly risk inconsequence or collapse.”  The deliberate turning away might be due to a foundational skepticism that can be found in the genealogy of modern art, beginning withCezanne.  This foundational skepticism is born of a struggle with the medium of painting, and in the case of younger artists, an attempt to “spurn the blandishments” of the art market.

Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2007

Five contemporary painters are cited that illustrate this provisionality.  Raoul De Keyser, “constantly asserts the impossibility of painting free of touch ups, mistakes, accidents, set on laying bare the seams, the second tries, the failures” (quoted from Jean-Claude Vergne); Albert Oehlen, whose “work, which manages to be at once antiseptic and messy, continues to draw great pictorial force from its abject awkwardness.”  Christopher Wool’s “paradoxical pictures in which the artist seems to have obliterated a painting-in-progress and then presented this sum of erasures as the finished work.”  Mary Heilmann, whose paintings “[suggest] that treating painting as if it were ceramics, that is, as a medium free of weighty cultural expectations, is key to Heilmann’s art.”  Michael Krebber“appears to say, Painting is what I do but let’s not get sentimental about it or waste unnecessary time or materials; this is all you’re getting for your money.  And yet Krebber’s disdain for painting could equally be interpreted as a sign of overvaluation of the medium”.

Rubinstein calls up reference to three other painters with recent exhibits as historical context for the five artist’s above.  Joan Miro, Martin Barre and Kimber Smith.  Miro’s work from 1927-1937 and “lack of finish, aggressively crude figuration, and extensive doodling and cancellation marks suggest a painter at war with his medium.”  Barre’s work “could well appear as anti-painting, whereas what [he] wanted to show, through the traces or points of impact in a clear surface, was what painting could be if disencumbered of object, color and form.”  Smith, as a second generation Abstract Expressionist in the most hostile decade to painting (1970’s), “splashed Matissean insouciance over the serious minded legacy of Abstract Expressionism” yet “does not fight at the fore, but neither does he fight at the rear; indeed, he fights not at all.” (Hal Foster, Artforum 1979)

Raoul de Keyser, Untitled, 2002

Rubinstein co-ops the argument concerning the “impossibility” of painting, explaining it as “a conviction that an earlier generation of artist has left only a few scraps to be cleaned up” or that “nothing could seem more presumptuous or inappropriate … than to set out to create a masterpiece.”  The entertainment of the impossibility has led many contemporary artists “to reject a sense of finish in their work, or to rely on acts of negation.”  Provisional painting is “the finished product disguised as preliminary stage” or “major painting masquerading as minor painting.”  Rubinstein concludes with a suggestion that the provisionality of contemporary painters’ works “is an index of the impossibility of painting and the equally persistent impossibility of not painting.”

Is painting impossible?  This idea seems prescient only to a painter that is concerned with making a name for him or herself on the history of painting.  This is a big art market concern.  There are enumerable painters making traditional landscape, still life or other abstract paintings who either ignore or don’t know about the alleged “impossibility” of painting.  Painting is not impossible to them, it has consequence to them personally, and to his or her audience.  But those painters are not the ones that will be written about in art history books. 

I’m not sure I accept the notion that painting has no viable role in society today.  I admit that the thought is widely accepted critically and academically.  But like many times in the history of art, this may end up being a wrong turn of thinking.  In the 1970’s painting was “dead”, only to be reinvigorated by the post-modernists.  Painting was “pure” in the 1950’s which led to the celebration of monochromatic, dull and lifeless paintings by many artists in New York, and which I believe history will not be kind to in the long run.  Painting is never going to have the influence on society that television or photography or digital media has had and will continue to have, but it never did.  Show me the era, or the example, when the genre of painting cast such a big shadow on society.  It never existed!  Even before the inventions of other media in the 19th and 20th century, painting always had a limited role in society throughout history.  This ideology of “failure” and “impossibility” feels like too much thinking wholly unrelated to the practice of painting.  It feels gimmicky.  It smells like marketing hyperbole.  Nevertheless, fifty years from now you can bet that college art history books will have a section on painting after the millennium, perhaps entitled something like “Provisional Painting: The Impossibility of a Dead Medium” followed by the next chapter “The Resurrection of Painting”.

Everyone who studies art to some extent has to struggle/acknowledge the leading persuasive ideologies in art during their time.  Someone who is an artist, or who aspires to be an artist has to make decisions as to who they want their audience to be.  If you’re a painter in a smaller market, you’re not going to be working out problems in painting at the forefront of art criticism, you’re going to be painting traditional imagery in a style that’s your own, but traditional nonetheless.  If you’re shooting to be a painter in New York, or London or Cologne, you’re going to be pushing the envelope academically.  You’re going to be primarily concerned with the overriding themes and ideologies being marketed and sold in the large media centers.  The leading ideologies in painting today marginalize the craft of painting and favor the ideology behind the imagery.  Those “paintings” are conceptual but often not much to look at aesthetically.

The thing I object to often is the critical claim that traditional forms of painting are somehow obsolete, boring and/or not culturally relevant.  You have to really wonder if critics know what actually goes into creating a painting, or if they have the faculties to view a masterfully constructed painting.  I would exclude Albert Oehlen’s work from the category of provisionality in painting.  Oehlen’s intent in painting does deal with the subject of the impossibility of painting, but his canvasses are certainly not dashed off or unfinished.  They have a complexity and an extent of reworking and correction to them.  They’re not a struggle with the medium but a celebration of the medium.  The other artist’s works I would not consider painting at all, but a kind of crude decoration.  As I’ve written before, a painter whose work is excessively conceptual is usually masking an underlying lack of knowledge and skill as to how to paint.  I still believe that, but nobody keeps track of these kind of things.  Question: is provisionality a euphemism for lack of skill or ability?

Albert Oehlen, Gericht, 2006

Bad Blogger

 

Freese has been mostly absent from this blog for a month and a half.  I have three draft posts on various subjects that I never could complete due to personal commitments and an irascible series of new abstract paintings that I’m working on.  The core of the three draft posts concerned:

(1)  Jerry Saltz’s criticism of Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings.  The article was for the most part fine, but he wrote a couple of items in his essay that I found delirious:  “Those who say Yuskavage’s figurative skill makes her paintings good don’t grasp that if rendering figures realistically equals skill then the makers of nineteenth-century Victorian nudes and painters like Bouguereau would be the greatest artists of all time.”  Am I the only one to see a problem with that statement?  Rendering figures realistically does equal painting skill, there’s no exception to that fact.  Perhaps I’m not understanding his use of the term “realistically”.  Does he mean to say “figuratively” instead?

(2)  Regina Hackett’s blog on Diana DeAugustine’s work at CalArts spurred me to contact Diana to discuss her work.  I hope to have a transcript of some discussions we are having for a blog post in the next month or so.

(3)  Jen Graves at SLOG details an upcoming exhibition at Seattle Art Museum, which I am planning on being upset about this summer.  (It’s nice when you can plan your annoyances ahead of time.)  It appears to be a good show for SAM, but undoubtedly will further the popular belief in the pluralist art world that painting is dead.  Painting is out, and I’m a painter.  (Edward Winkleman says identifying oneself as a painter today is like saying “I’m rooting for L’il Kim on Dancing With the Stars”.)  Lovely…

Other items concerning Freese that have been transpiring below the radar involve some discussions with my favorite painter Patti Oleon about her work and hope to have a transcript of some of our discussions later in the month.

James Van Patten offered an interesting testimonial on his career and professional development in response to my MoFA post.  If you haven’t seen James’s painting, I urge you to take a look.  He’s a fantastic painter.

A quick thank you to Cafe Presse and The Lawrimore Project for their continuing series of Art Klatch discussions.  Last Tuesday’s was great, and breakfast is always great at Presse.  If I didn’t have a day job we all could have gone to my place nearby for some post-discussion libations.

Last, have you read the blog writing of Julie Steimetz this week at Art21?  Her writing stands apart from most and is lively, clear and thoughtful.  Her post this week on Art, Marxism and Capitalism was great, as have been all her posts this week.  Freese recommends.

And now for your listening pleasure and to atone for my absence on-line, I offer the Jackie Davis cover of the Peggy Lee song “Manana (Is Soon Enough For Me)”.

MoFA

Regina Hackett (”Another Bouncing Ball”?  Really?…Another Bouncing Ball as a blog name?) blogs about MFA degrees here, and clips the very same quote from Sarah Thornton’s book “Seven Days In The Arts World” that I have in a draft blog post on Diana DeAugustine’s work and the CalArts masters program, and takes a similar look at MFA degrees as I generally do.  Some additional information on MFA’s seems due.

For the past 30 years the study of art in higher education in the U.S. has exponentially grown into a minor industry in and of itself.  While the theory behind MFA’s is that the course of study is to get you (the artist) to be more truly you expressed in the work, everyone knows that the real reason to get an MFA has always been to get a university job that would eventually lead to tenure, meanwhile still having enough time to devote to one’s primary concern, that of creating art work.  But that prima facie reason for taking on the expense and dedication to one’s artistic vision is becoming a thing of the past in the commonly understood art world.  The market for university positions in art is flooded.  MFA degree holders must now travel the country for several years, taking an assistant professor position for a year, then relocating the next year to another school, until hopefully somewhere along the line a position will stick.  Assistant professorship position openings are usually met with hundreds of applicants, to which only one can be selected.  The supply of MFA degrees now far exceeds demand in universities.  For those that do somehow get into a teaching position, the prospect for future earnings as a university professor do not appropriately exceed the amount of debt one incurs to get the advanced degree in the first place.  The whole justification for advanced degrees is that it is expensive, but it pays off because the higher degree makes one a higher wage earner in the job market.  This is not the case in the art world, where art jobs have significantly lower salaries (in general) than most other careers requiring advanced degrees.

But that fact has historically not stopped yound artists from seeking out the traditional MFA route.  MFA study isn’t like law school or an advanced research degree, where massive amounts of information are digested and repetitive exercises reassemble one’s brain to fit a compartmentalized segment of society.  But it is a concentrated studio practice (along with history and criticism) that allows a large amount of time to be devoted to ones craft and intent which ordinarily can’t be achieved in day to day life.

Artists today are increasingly becoming shrewd about these realities and taking their works directly to market after receiving their BFAs.  It’s true that investors and galleries like to see an MFA behind the name of the artist because it shows a level of dedication and goes a long way by acting as a salve to investor and gallerist anxiety and uncertainty over whether or not the work is actually any good (many don’t know what their eyes tell them, instead relying on written critical opinions and what other buyers say).  But as artists continue to become more cognizant of the professionalism necessary in the market, and other technologies make art careers more DIY friendly, the trend of artists forgoing the MFA route will continue.

There are examples of artists who thrive without MFA degrees, and those who grew because of advanced study.  Two great examples of each are William Betts, who hit the ground running after undergraduate study and never looked back, while Kristine Moran used the opportunity for graduate study to evolve and grow exponentially as an artist.  There are hundreds more examples for each camp. 

The unspoken, yet much more important career necessity to MFA study and art careers, which makes all these issues moot, is the patron, usually a family member or spouse who works to pay the bills.  It’s an informal number but probably 9/10ths  of all artists rely on some form of patron to pay the bills while the artist works on less economic concerns.  Take away an artist’s patron, and they would not survive in the market and would have to find other work after a short time.  Creating art takes time, years of time to formulate and work out.  The patron is the far more important career necessity than an MFA degree.  Word to the wise.

Sure Shot

An astute photographer captured this photo of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, laughing while shaking hands with Mexican Monsignor Diego Monroy during a visit to the Virgin of Guadeloupe’s Basilica in Mexico City, Thursday, March 26, 2009.  Note the Monsignor grasping Clinton with both hands, as if dragging her to stand before the image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, while Clinton nervously eyes the image.  The shot begs for comment.

Ode to San Suzie

Light blogging over the next couple of weeks, I think, although  I’ve been known to change my mind now and again.  Instead of blogging about other people’s work, I’m working on a series of paintings, and preparing for a vacation to Vancouver, B.C.  I’ll be blogging from Vancouver and will have a review of exhibits around town.  But I have to say that I ran across one of the most amusing blog posts I’ve ever seen over at C-Monster yesterday.  The one known as San Suzie apparently took a trip to Naples, Italy and posted a travel log entitled “Naples: Where Low Climbed Out Of A Volcano And Whupped High Upside The Head“, which just might make Anthony Bourdain blush…then wish he’d thought of it first.  In her travels she managed to find her way to a sculpture of the Greek God Pan putting the moves on a goat, several small carved statues of deities with over-sized, elongated penises, classic Roman wall frescoes of coupling men and women, ate so much baba au rum yeast cake she had to change her pants and apparently hallucinated while looking at Mount Vesuvius.  Just your average day trip to Naples.  Oh yeah, and a couple of Caravaggio paintings were seen.  Something tells me a spot on the Travel Channel is in her future.  Here’s to you San Suzie.

Image via C-Monster

Orientalist Art

Sotheby’s is having an auction of Orientalist Art on March 18, 2009.  The painting above is by Rudolph Ernst, entitled “A Hard Bargain”.  Ever hear of Rudolph Ernst’s paintings in your college history of art classes?  Probably not, yet his works sell today for millions of dollars, and Orientalist Art is growing in popularity and demand among collectors.  If I had millions I’d buy the whole lot, and would receive a damn fine return on them in the future.  Paintings such as Ernst’s put contemporary art to shame.  There’s nothing more amazing than a painting that took an artist’s whole being to create.  In my career, I’m shooting for getting my paintings into the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., to preserve them as historical documents like the one above.  That’s where it’s really at.