By Matthew Kangas
Portland Art Museum Northwest art curator Jennifer Gately, guest juror for the 2006 CoCA Annual, visited studios in addition to reviewing slides to select the artworks now on view at the Center on Contemporary Art. She chose 16 artists from Seattle, Portland and New York City from nearly 1,000 entries. Three artists split the meager prize money: Robert Yoder ($500); Lucas Blalock ($250); and Jennie Thwing ($250).
An artist-supported alternative space founded in 1980, CoCA in 1989 took over the duties of the venerable "Northwest Annual," which the Seattle Art Museum (originally Seattle Fine Arts Society) had hosted between 1914 and 1975. In 2002, CoCA's board decided to junk the regional focus and open up the competition nationwide. Was it worth forsaking the 74-year-old tradition?
Probably not, but this year's effort by Gately is a valiant, even charitable, effort. CoCA's annual can no longer be compared with the remaining Northwest juried shows (the biennials at Tacoma Art Museum and Gately's own Portland Art Museum), because it is much smaller, with a fraction of the prize money. But the CoCA Annual is the only annual competitive show held in the Greater Seattle area since the old Bellevue Art Museum closed. Maybe it's time to re-orient the CoCA Annual back toward Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon and Washington exclusively.
Emphasis is put on the seamy, sleazy and ill-constructed in the works of Oregonians Alicia Eggert, Stephanie Robison and Sean Healy. As to the New Yorkers, Gately found Margarida Correia, Christine Gatti and Shen Wei. Photography plays an important role in their work but fails to reveal any original ideas. Were they and the Oregonians really worth including?
The Seattleites, on the other hand, leave the others in the dust. Elise Richman's paintings contain hundreds of tiny built-up strands of oil paint and are intensely physical, optical and abstract. Susanna Bluhm's quirky mixed-media paintings of awkward abstract shapes could lead somewhere I'd like to go. To be disappointed but to want to see more is always a good sign.
Like Bluhm, Tim Cross' work has a light touch. However, it has firmer, more easily identifiable imagery. "Heater Beach" and "Black Bridge Beach" (both 2006) mix trees, fire and metal pipes in landscape settings. All are drawn with ink, soot, liquid paper and, of course, coffee.
Ross Sawyers' computer prints of big beautiful empty rooms are also big, beautiful and empty. They're too similar to many other artists and demonstrate an awareness of trends more than an individual vision. (This is a frequent criticism of regional artists who are often unable to see originals and must make do with art magazines.)
2006 CoCA Annual, noon-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays, through Dec. 30, Center on Contemporary Art, 410 Dexter Ave. N., Seattle; free (206-728-1980 or www.cocaseattle.org). Robert Yoder and Scott Foldesi are the stars of this year's Annual. Yoder's vinyl-and-metal-tape collages are colorful and highly structured. With several New York shows under his belt and a sterling reputation locally, Yoder should retire from competitive shows and leave them to the younger generation.
Foldesi has got to be the most talented young Seattle painter still without a gallery. His large photo-based scenes are part paint-by-number satire and part David Hockney. They are remarkable for how much they can convey with so little paint. Like Cross and Bluhm, he treats a blank white background like a big piece of paper. Included in last year's Annual, Foldesi raises another question: What happened to the CoCA tradition of giving the best of the Annual artists their own solo shows? Foldesi should be at the top of the list.
As to the Portlanders, Sean Healy is the one to watch. His circular relief of hundreds of cigarette butts is hilarious and timely. And don't miss "Egghead" (2006), his tribute to Melville Dewey, the founder of the Dewey Decimal System common to library-card catalogs. An upended library table has a likeness of Dewey rendered in hundreds of used chewing gum wads. Remember when you stuck your gum under the library table? Go see it.
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Friday, December 08, 2006
Emily Hall's Farewell
The Road of Good Intentions Is Paved with Painted Pigs
The Stranger’s Departing Visual Art Critic Re?ects on Ambition, Naiveté, and Why Seattle Still Isn’t a Great Art Town
BY EMILY HALL (From 2004)
Well, goodbye.
Even as I hate the valedictory impulse to generalization (I much prefer the small specific), I'd be remiss to leave this city without some sort of fond or not so fond farewell. Even as I write this I'm swinging pretty wildly between feelings of nostalgia and good riddance--not entirely surprising, since Seattle's art world is rife with the kinds of contradictions that so firmly cement us somewhere between backwater and art capital, and that pulled me regularly between pleasure and despair. Good work by really very talented artists on the one hand; a patronizing, social-work-driven attitude about art on the other. A whole lot of lip service paid to the idea of art, but very little money backing it up. There's sophistication, and there's naiveté. In my very first weeks of writing The Stranger's art calendar, in 1999, I got an indignant letter from a woman whose show--in Bellingham, quite out of the range of The Stranger's purview--we had failed to include in our visual art listings. It was cruel of me, she wrote, to ignore her show, because art had--literally, she said--saved her life.
Probably you already know that I take a dim view of ascribing life-saving qualities to art. I tend to take a view more in line with critic Dave Hickey's in his essay "Frivolity and Unction": "We could just say 'Okay! You're right! Art is bad, silly, and frivolous... Rock and roll is bad, silly, and frivolous. Movies are bad, silly, and frivolous. Next question?' Wouldn't that open up the options a little for something really super?--for an orchid in the dung heap that would seem all the more super for our surprise in finding it there? And what if art were considered bad for us?--more like cocaine that gives us pleasure while intensifying our desires, and less like penicillin that promises to cure us all, if we maintain proper dosage, give it time, and don't expect miracles?" (Good God, but the man can write!) In Seattle, the general drift is toward penicillin, toward the cure-all, and also toward a rigorously democratic idea about art, one that encompasses album covers and industrial design and accessibility and education. In many ways it's fitting, if not emblematic, that Seattle's progress in art, to much of the art world, is tied to glass: The Studio Glass movement, with Dale Chihuly at its prow, is characterized by a distinct defensiveness about taking a medium out of the realm of craft and trying (forcefully, willfully) to place it in the realm of fine art.
The contradictions we face here make for both good and bad news. The bad news: Seattle is not a great city for art or for artists. The question of what it would take to make it a city taken seriously by the rest of the world (local artists sought out by collectors from elsewhere; artists moving here from elsewhere; local art writers regularly represented in national and international publications) has no simple answer, perhaps no answer at all. What I can tell you is that there isn't enough of anything: not enough good galleries showing risky work, not enough money available to artists to try new things and possibly fail (a great deal of the available funding is project-dedicated, so that failure is not an option), not enough critical outlets, and not enough critics, in the outlets available, thinking interestingly and hard about how art does what it does and how the work in this city compares to work in other cities, or (perhaps most importantly) willing to risk letting the public know when the art or the curatorial practice fails. And, of course, there are not enough collectors (though God bless the ones there are) willing to tear their gazes away from New York and Los Angeles and London and Berlin and buy the work (quite often the peer in quality of work from those other cities) right under their noses.
This is an inelegant knot of a situation, because it's not entirely clear which problem should be solved first. It's a series of exquisite dead ends. If there were more money for artists, there'd be more good art, and more galleries would open. If more galleries opened, there'd be more opportunities to see good art, and the Seattle viewership would increase--maybe skyrocket--in sophistication and collecting. If Seattle artists were getting more national attention from critics, national agencies and foundations would direct more money to artistic production, and there wouldn't be this constant stream of artists leaving for places where they'll get noticed. But my instinct is that no single advance would create the rising tide that Seattle needs. Somehow the base has to expand all at once.
What must happen, what absolutely must happen, is for this city to get over its ambivalence and distaste for ambition. You don't become a great art city by filling the street with painted pigs. You become a great art city by supporting artists doing what artists do. Everyone, from the National Endowment for the Arts on down to teachers and well-meaning citizens, likes to yammer on about how important art is to how we see ourselves as a civilization, to advancing as a civilization, and yet where funding is concerned, art is consistently lumped in with education and social work and even tourism. This attitude produces a lot of bad art and, instead of creating respect for artists, makes artists into propagandists, educators, and decorators. It's an unfortunate contemporary convenience that so many disparate activities--from after-school programs to public art to unrestricted money for artists--are collected under the same rubric, under the same innocent-seeming word. To do this is to make conflicting claims for art, as Bruce Bawer wrote in a pointed critique of the Poets Against the War anthology (which included, alongside poems by established writers, poems by children): "What does it mean to profess the inestimable value of the poet's role in society... and then to suggest that even an 11-year-old can fill that role?" This sort of confusion about what art is for produced such disasters as Pigs on Parade, the "arts tourism" championed by Michael Killoren at the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs a few years ago, and the repurposing by committee that transformed BAM from an interesting contemporary museum into a community crafts forum.
Think of it this way: Should Little Leaguers play in Mariners games? It's the same sport, after all. But of course not. Somehow acknowledging that some are more talented than others (to say nothing of higher paid) doesn't rankle so much when it comes to building stadiums. I am so tired of the pummeling taken by what's commonly known as elitism, this insistence (itself quite sniffy) that art is somehow out of the realm of common experience, that its pleasures are not available to everyone. Certainly it's become more common to have to, you know, read something (a plaque on the wall, an article in a newspaper, an artist's statement) in order to begin to understand a work of art, but this is what great contemporary art does: It advances through ideas, by engaging our minds. And art galleries are perhaps the only venue where art, any art form, is free to the public. It's all there, available and wanting nothing more than your attention.
Don't get me wrong: It's nice that Seattle is so concerned with human enrichment and better lives for everyone. It might very well be the case that the Bellingham woman's life was saved by art. And it may well be the case that art keeps kids off drugs, cures cancer, enhances self-esteem, and makes America great. But please understand that I write this only out of real ardor for and delight in art: All of those things, and other positive aspects (like helping the economy, like attracting the so-called creative class to Seattle) are not art's problem. To demand that art fulfill such a role is to limit the scope of what it can do. Art is good for us only because it's art, because it exists outside the realm of advertising and politics, and it is only good for us (whatever that means) when it presents an object with which our relationship is not already bossily mediated. In the best possible scenario, we create our own relationships--intellectual, emotional--with art, so that the most elevated claim it's possible to make for art is that it makes us more thoughtful, perhaps more complex, people.
The good news--finally, the good news--is that despite this handicap, there's a lot of real forward movement around here. Artist Trust continues to plough a lonely furrow by giving artists project grants and fellowships (and the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs has recently given a generous handful of artist grants as well, a development that's long overdue). The renovated Toshiro-Kaplan Building provides artists live/work space (a rarity), bringing a cluster of working artists back to Pioneer Square, saving that neighborhood from being so removed from the world of art as to be irrelevant. Rhonda Howard and her organization Thread for Art supports artist-driven exhibitions and produces lovely catalogs, so that artists have documentation of their work as well as exposure. The collectors Bill and Ruth True have opened Western Bridge, a good-looking space in which they'll be showing works from their collection as well as commissioned works, which brings to Seattle works that we might never otherwise see. The renegade stencil gang Beware the Walls invigorates public space with the kind of surreal street moments that reframe everyday experience. The ceramics program at the University of Washington (which is only tangentially concerned with ceramics and has amazing teachers Doug Jeck, Jamie Walker, and Akio Takimori) produces interesting young artists. There's a cluster of newish galleries on Capitol Hill (including 1506 Projects and Crawl Space) that have a lively artwalk and some appealing (if not yet fully realized) shows. There's Platform Gallery opening in the fall, run by four artists who have a taste for the difficult, and who don't kowtow to usual gallery practices. Billy Howard and Jim Harris also aren't afraid of difficult work; the shows in their galleries seem to revel in it. Greg Kucera, in his gallery, has taken on some interesting younger artists, and brings news from the rest of the country. Greg Lundgren is still around, plotting his next move (the openings of his shows at Vital 5 Productions rate among the high points in the social life of art in the last few years). And it would be disingenuous, if not modest, if I failed to mention that The Stranger's Genius Awards allow the paper's editors to take a break from relentlessly criticizing everything and shower affection and money on artists they like.
There have been casualties. We lost Walter Wright to Atlanta (after his two good exhibition spaces, Project 416 and Fuzzy Engine, fell to the manifest destiny of development). Artists Jennifer West and Nicola Vruwink moved to Los Angeles. Curator Meg Shiffler is in New York for graduate school, and will probably stay there. Many of the artists behind RedHeaded StepChild, an artist-run zine I had the privilege of working on (they made an exception for me, since I was good at grammar) for the two years of its existence, have dispersed for other cities. Every one of these departures (and all those I can't remember at this moment, sitting here in a cluster of people tapping away at their iBooks at Victrola) made me sad, and soon I'll be leaving, too. Well, perhaps that won't make anyone very sad. But at least--and it seems I've got the valedictory impulse after all--I got the last word.
Emily Hall was The Stranger's visual art editor from 2000-2004. She now lives in New York City.
The Stranger’s Departing Visual Art Critic Re?ects on Ambition, Naiveté, and Why Seattle Still Isn’t a Great Art Town
BY EMILY HALL (From 2004)
Well, goodbye.
Even as I hate the valedictory impulse to generalization (I much prefer the small specific), I'd be remiss to leave this city without some sort of fond or not so fond farewell. Even as I write this I'm swinging pretty wildly between feelings of nostalgia and good riddance--not entirely surprising, since Seattle's art world is rife with the kinds of contradictions that so firmly cement us somewhere between backwater and art capital, and that pulled me regularly between pleasure and despair. Good work by really very talented artists on the one hand; a patronizing, social-work-driven attitude about art on the other. A whole lot of lip service paid to the idea of art, but very little money backing it up. There's sophistication, and there's naiveté. In my very first weeks of writing The Stranger's art calendar, in 1999, I got an indignant letter from a woman whose show--in Bellingham, quite out of the range of The Stranger's purview--we had failed to include in our visual art listings. It was cruel of me, she wrote, to ignore her show, because art had--literally, she said--saved her life.
Probably you already know that I take a dim view of ascribing life-saving qualities to art. I tend to take a view more in line with critic Dave Hickey's in his essay "Frivolity and Unction": "We could just say 'Okay! You're right! Art is bad, silly, and frivolous... Rock and roll is bad, silly, and frivolous. Movies are bad, silly, and frivolous. Next question?' Wouldn't that open up the options a little for something really super?--for an orchid in the dung heap that would seem all the more super for our surprise in finding it there? And what if art were considered bad for us?--more like cocaine that gives us pleasure while intensifying our desires, and less like penicillin that promises to cure us all, if we maintain proper dosage, give it time, and don't expect miracles?" (Good God, but the man can write!) In Seattle, the general drift is toward penicillin, toward the cure-all, and also toward a rigorously democratic idea about art, one that encompasses album covers and industrial design and accessibility and education. In many ways it's fitting, if not emblematic, that Seattle's progress in art, to much of the art world, is tied to glass: The Studio Glass movement, with Dale Chihuly at its prow, is characterized by a distinct defensiveness about taking a medium out of the realm of craft and trying (forcefully, willfully) to place it in the realm of fine art.
The contradictions we face here make for both good and bad news. The bad news: Seattle is not a great city for art or for artists. The question of what it would take to make it a city taken seriously by the rest of the world (local artists sought out by collectors from elsewhere; artists moving here from elsewhere; local art writers regularly represented in national and international publications) has no simple answer, perhaps no answer at all. What I can tell you is that there isn't enough of anything: not enough good galleries showing risky work, not enough money available to artists to try new things and possibly fail (a great deal of the available funding is project-dedicated, so that failure is not an option), not enough critical outlets, and not enough critics, in the outlets available, thinking interestingly and hard about how art does what it does and how the work in this city compares to work in other cities, or (perhaps most importantly) willing to risk letting the public know when the art or the curatorial practice fails. And, of course, there are not enough collectors (though God bless the ones there are) willing to tear their gazes away from New York and Los Angeles and London and Berlin and buy the work (quite often the peer in quality of work from those other cities) right under their noses.
This is an inelegant knot of a situation, because it's not entirely clear which problem should be solved first. It's a series of exquisite dead ends. If there were more money for artists, there'd be more good art, and more galleries would open. If more galleries opened, there'd be more opportunities to see good art, and the Seattle viewership would increase--maybe skyrocket--in sophistication and collecting. If Seattle artists were getting more national attention from critics, national agencies and foundations would direct more money to artistic production, and there wouldn't be this constant stream of artists leaving for places where they'll get noticed. But my instinct is that no single advance would create the rising tide that Seattle needs. Somehow the base has to expand all at once.
What must happen, what absolutely must happen, is for this city to get over its ambivalence and distaste for ambition. You don't become a great art city by filling the street with painted pigs. You become a great art city by supporting artists doing what artists do. Everyone, from the National Endowment for the Arts on down to teachers and well-meaning citizens, likes to yammer on about how important art is to how we see ourselves as a civilization, to advancing as a civilization, and yet where funding is concerned, art is consistently lumped in with education and social work and even tourism. This attitude produces a lot of bad art and, instead of creating respect for artists, makes artists into propagandists, educators, and decorators. It's an unfortunate contemporary convenience that so many disparate activities--from after-school programs to public art to unrestricted money for artists--are collected under the same rubric, under the same innocent-seeming word. To do this is to make conflicting claims for art, as Bruce Bawer wrote in a pointed critique of the Poets Against the War anthology (which included, alongside poems by established writers, poems by children): "What does it mean to profess the inestimable value of the poet's role in society... and then to suggest that even an 11-year-old can fill that role?" This sort of confusion about what art is for produced such disasters as Pigs on Parade, the "arts tourism" championed by Michael Killoren at the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs a few years ago, and the repurposing by committee that transformed BAM from an interesting contemporary museum into a community crafts forum.
Think of it this way: Should Little Leaguers play in Mariners games? It's the same sport, after all. But of course not. Somehow acknowledging that some are more talented than others (to say nothing of higher paid) doesn't rankle so much when it comes to building stadiums. I am so tired of the pummeling taken by what's commonly known as elitism, this insistence (itself quite sniffy) that art is somehow out of the realm of common experience, that its pleasures are not available to everyone. Certainly it's become more common to have to, you know, read something (a plaque on the wall, an article in a newspaper, an artist's statement) in order to begin to understand a work of art, but this is what great contemporary art does: It advances through ideas, by engaging our minds. And art galleries are perhaps the only venue where art, any art form, is free to the public. It's all there, available and wanting nothing more than your attention.
Don't get me wrong: It's nice that Seattle is so concerned with human enrichment and better lives for everyone. It might very well be the case that the Bellingham woman's life was saved by art. And it may well be the case that art keeps kids off drugs, cures cancer, enhances self-esteem, and makes America great. But please understand that I write this only out of real ardor for and delight in art: All of those things, and other positive aspects (like helping the economy, like attracting the so-called creative class to Seattle) are not art's problem. To demand that art fulfill such a role is to limit the scope of what it can do. Art is good for us only because it's art, because it exists outside the realm of advertising and politics, and it is only good for us (whatever that means) when it presents an object with which our relationship is not already bossily mediated. In the best possible scenario, we create our own relationships--intellectual, emotional--with art, so that the most elevated claim it's possible to make for art is that it makes us more thoughtful, perhaps more complex, people.
The good news--finally, the good news--is that despite this handicap, there's a lot of real forward movement around here. Artist Trust continues to plough a lonely furrow by giving artists project grants and fellowships (and the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs has recently given a generous handful of artist grants as well, a development that's long overdue). The renovated Toshiro-Kaplan Building provides artists live/work space (a rarity), bringing a cluster of working artists back to Pioneer Square, saving that neighborhood from being so removed from the world of art as to be irrelevant. Rhonda Howard and her organization Thread for Art supports artist-driven exhibitions and produces lovely catalogs, so that artists have documentation of their work as well as exposure. The collectors Bill and Ruth True have opened Western Bridge, a good-looking space in which they'll be showing works from their collection as well as commissioned works, which brings to Seattle works that we might never otherwise see. The renegade stencil gang Beware the Walls invigorates public space with the kind of surreal street moments that reframe everyday experience. The ceramics program at the University of Washington (which is only tangentially concerned with ceramics and has amazing teachers Doug Jeck, Jamie Walker, and Akio Takimori) produces interesting young artists. There's a cluster of newish galleries on Capitol Hill (including 1506 Projects and Crawl Space) that have a lively artwalk and some appealing (if not yet fully realized) shows. There's Platform Gallery opening in the fall, run by four artists who have a taste for the difficult, and who don't kowtow to usual gallery practices. Billy Howard and Jim Harris also aren't afraid of difficult work; the shows in their galleries seem to revel in it. Greg Kucera, in his gallery, has taken on some interesting younger artists, and brings news from the rest of the country. Greg Lundgren is still around, plotting his next move (the openings of his shows at Vital 5 Productions rate among the high points in the social life of art in the last few years). And it would be disingenuous, if not modest, if I failed to mention that The Stranger's Genius Awards allow the paper's editors to take a break from relentlessly criticizing everything and shower affection and money on artists they like.
There have been casualties. We lost Walter Wright to Atlanta (after his two good exhibition spaces, Project 416 and Fuzzy Engine, fell to the manifest destiny of development). Artists Jennifer West and Nicola Vruwink moved to Los Angeles. Curator Meg Shiffler is in New York for graduate school, and will probably stay there. Many of the artists behind RedHeaded StepChild, an artist-run zine I had the privilege of working on (they made an exception for me, since I was good at grammar) for the two years of its existence, have dispersed for other cities. Every one of these departures (and all those I can't remember at this moment, sitting here in a cluster of people tapping away at their iBooks at Victrola) made me sad, and soon I'll be leaving, too. Well, perhaps that won't make anyone very sad. But at least--and it seems I've got the valedictory impulse after all--I got the last word.
Emily Hall was The Stranger's visual art editor from 2000-2004. She now lives in New York City.
The Fabulous Nate Lippens
We were lucky to have a superb substitute for our "Propulsion of Art in a Viral Age" course last week. Gretchen Bennett and friends were off to Miami for Art Basel (have a cocktail and a stroll on the beach for me).
Nate was the art critic for the stranger for years, he's writing for the P-I now if I remember correctly. Here's a sample of his writing, and its back to working for the final push of the semester :)
Assume the Position
A Critic's Unsentimental Education
BY NATE LIPPENS
"What are your credentials?" the gallery owner asks me. He's smiling. He's jocular, but he's also dead serious. Art-world humor--it's a killer. It's my first official art walk as this paper's art reviewer, not an Eames side chair critic, and it feels a little like speed dating: There's a lot of ground to cover and everything has potential. Are you the one? Or you?
It's also the first Thursday without longtime Stranger art critic Emily Hall. And while I had fully expected scrutiny and the second-best feeling of being the replacement cast for a beloved cultural doyenne, I was a little unprepared for the veiled--and just plain naked--hostility directed my way. When I weakly tell the gallery owner that I've written for this paper in every arts section for the last four years, he snaps, "Not good enough." It's played as a joke but it isn't. Then he adds, "Do you even like art?" I'm flustered and I fumble some lame response; I want to get away from him fast.
This interaction comes directly on the heels of another opening reception for a much buzzed-about show during which I met an artist who said, "Don't you write a country music column?" Yes. "What are you going to review--a quilt show?" Fair enough. That's funny.
While the personal reception hasn't been wonderful, what sticks with me at the end of the night is the feeling that I have trespassed into somewhere I don't belong and have been swiftly reminded of my place. The issue of elitism in the Seattle art community is something Emily Hall wrote about--and tried to debunk--in a farewell essay in last week's paper ["The Road of Good Intentions Is Paved with Painted Pigs," July 8]. "I'm so tired of... this insistence that art is somehow out of the common experience," she wrote, "that the pleasures aren't available to everyone." Her impliction is that elitism doesn't exist, that everyone is welcome at galleries. But based on my experience that simply isn't true. There is a mentality and an attitude about art--perhaps stemming from a protectiveness toward it, since it can be so easily dismissed--whose core conceit is exclusion: You don't have the tools to understand this; you shouldn't be here. Elitism has driven me away from the art world several times over the years--in Chicago, in New York, and, yes, in Seattle. (Curiously, in London of all places, I never encountered such starchiness.) And this has been true for many of my friends--smart, credentialed people. It's the real crisis--more than funding, more than education--that plagues contemporary American art.
Before July's First Thursday, I had never existed on any of these people's radars. I see art all the time, but I've usually avoided openings and gone to galleries on weekdays when no one is around and I don't have to be surrounded by the less-charming aspects of the art world. I'm not an artist and I didn't study art history or criticism. I didn't study anything formally. I cobbled together my own art education like a magpie, pulling from many different sources to find my way, and wandering down a lot of dead ends. I read (and still enjoy reading) Lynne Tillman, Peter Schjeldahl, David Rimanelli, Gary Indiana, Roberta Smith, and Holland Cotter--not to mention the inspiring (and inspired) New York School Poets, who brought their chatty abstraction to art writing. My version of an education, whatever its drawbacks, freed me from being stuck in a rigid theoretical rubric. I don't want to be frozen into a stance that dictates my opinions neatly, where expectation always becomes experience. You can turn yourself into little more than a prop plane of other people's ideas by adhering too closely to theory. It's a great (and sometimes helpful) place to visit, but it's too constraining to live there.
But none of that is the point. Or is it? If pedigree is truly what matters, then admit it once and for all that art is not for everyone--that it's for the rich, the blue-chip collectors, the lavishly educated. And stop asking the rest of us to care, to nurture, fund, and support it. If you think we are beneath understanding art, then don't ask us to revere it.
Last week, Hall, quoting art critic Dave Hickey, wrote that art in this town should be more like cocaine and less like penicillin--more intellectually decadent and less curative. And while I agree with her that art shouldn't be a prescriptive, what she didn't mention is that this town is buried in art cocaine. People are paranoid, they talk all the time, and they have nothing to say.
Just observe the strange parade at First Thursday: bobbleheaded girls, yammering on cell phones, in low-slung jeans with dorsal cleavage showing, standing beside a young man in a Jean-Michel Basquiat T-shirt from Urban Outfitters, next to someone having an insular, sibilant art-world conversation (artists say meaner things about other artists than any critic ever would). It's glorious and uncomfortable, communal and fractured, with people oohing over work that I think is crap and whizzing by the stuff I think is transfixing.
I love those moments, especially when they pry open the gap between thought and expression, when the work slips the noose of easy description, when it flatters writers by making them think that it needs them to translate, to capture--but it's only a cock tease. Art doesn't need a writer. It does need a viewer. And that's where I will write from: What does it look like? Why am I looking at it? What is it doing and does it succeed?
I've never articulated it this plainly but I suppose this is my mission statement: I want to go out and report back. My allegiance, as it were, is to the reader, to the layperson. Can I really recommend that show? Separate of connections, pedigree, social life--is it good?
Perhaps this is what I should have conveyed to the gallery owner who took so much delight in deciding I was unqualified to think about the work he had on sale: I don't care if you went to Columbia or grew up in a trailer by the Columbia River, I'm interested in the work. I'm very much aware that an artist's background directly influences their work, but it shouldn't be the only thing supporting it. I don't want to have to see the strings. Everything you need to know should be in the work itself.
At the end of First Thursday I'm exhausted, a little wounded but not too much worse for the wear. Art gives way to a complicated experience; it's one of the few things about which we aren't told directly what to think, and that can be intimidating. What's damning--not to mention disheartening--is when you're told you're not allowed to think about it. Art is also, for me, a source of wonder and mystery, and its seductive pull keeps drawing me back to it, elitism be damned.
Nate was the art critic for the stranger for years, he's writing for the P-I now if I remember correctly. Here's a sample of his writing, and its back to working for the final push of the semester :)
Assume the Position
A Critic's Unsentimental Education
BY NATE LIPPENS
"What are your credentials?" the gallery owner asks me. He's smiling. He's jocular, but he's also dead serious. Art-world humor--it's a killer. It's my first official art walk as this paper's art reviewer, not an Eames side chair critic, and it feels a little like speed dating: There's a lot of ground to cover and everything has potential. Are you the one? Or you?
It's also the first Thursday without longtime Stranger art critic Emily Hall. And while I had fully expected scrutiny and the second-best feeling of being the replacement cast for a beloved cultural doyenne, I was a little unprepared for the veiled--and just plain naked--hostility directed my way. When I weakly tell the gallery owner that I've written for this paper in every arts section for the last four years, he snaps, "Not good enough." It's played as a joke but it isn't. Then he adds, "Do you even like art?" I'm flustered and I fumble some lame response; I want to get away from him fast.
This interaction comes directly on the heels of another opening reception for a much buzzed-about show during which I met an artist who said, "Don't you write a country music column?" Yes. "What are you going to review--a quilt show?" Fair enough. That's funny.
While the personal reception hasn't been wonderful, what sticks with me at the end of the night is the feeling that I have trespassed into somewhere I don't belong and have been swiftly reminded of my place. The issue of elitism in the Seattle art community is something Emily Hall wrote about--and tried to debunk--in a farewell essay in last week's paper ["The Road of Good Intentions Is Paved with Painted Pigs," July 8]. "I'm so tired of... this insistence that art is somehow out of the common experience," she wrote, "that the pleasures aren't available to everyone." Her impliction is that elitism doesn't exist, that everyone is welcome at galleries. But based on my experience that simply isn't true. There is a mentality and an attitude about art--perhaps stemming from a protectiveness toward it, since it can be so easily dismissed--whose core conceit is exclusion: You don't have the tools to understand this; you shouldn't be here. Elitism has driven me away from the art world several times over the years--in Chicago, in New York, and, yes, in Seattle. (Curiously, in London of all places, I never encountered such starchiness.) And this has been true for many of my friends--smart, credentialed people. It's the real crisis--more than funding, more than education--that plagues contemporary American art.
Before July's First Thursday, I had never existed on any of these people's radars. I see art all the time, but I've usually avoided openings and gone to galleries on weekdays when no one is around and I don't have to be surrounded by the less-charming aspects of the art world. I'm not an artist and I didn't study art history or criticism. I didn't study anything formally. I cobbled together my own art education like a magpie, pulling from many different sources to find my way, and wandering down a lot of dead ends. I read (and still enjoy reading) Lynne Tillman, Peter Schjeldahl, David Rimanelli, Gary Indiana, Roberta Smith, and Holland Cotter--not to mention the inspiring (and inspired) New York School Poets, who brought their chatty abstraction to art writing. My version of an education, whatever its drawbacks, freed me from being stuck in a rigid theoretical rubric. I don't want to be frozen into a stance that dictates my opinions neatly, where expectation always becomes experience. You can turn yourself into little more than a prop plane of other people's ideas by adhering too closely to theory. It's a great (and sometimes helpful) place to visit, but it's too constraining to live there.
But none of that is the point. Or is it? If pedigree is truly what matters, then admit it once and for all that art is not for everyone--that it's for the rich, the blue-chip collectors, the lavishly educated. And stop asking the rest of us to care, to nurture, fund, and support it. If you think we are beneath understanding art, then don't ask us to revere it.
Last week, Hall, quoting art critic Dave Hickey, wrote that art in this town should be more like cocaine and less like penicillin--more intellectually decadent and less curative. And while I agree with her that art shouldn't be a prescriptive, what she didn't mention is that this town is buried in art cocaine. People are paranoid, they talk all the time, and they have nothing to say.
Just observe the strange parade at First Thursday: bobbleheaded girls, yammering on cell phones, in low-slung jeans with dorsal cleavage showing, standing beside a young man in a Jean-Michel Basquiat T-shirt from Urban Outfitters, next to someone having an insular, sibilant art-world conversation (artists say meaner things about other artists than any critic ever would). It's glorious and uncomfortable, communal and fractured, with people oohing over work that I think is crap and whizzing by the stuff I think is transfixing.
I love those moments, especially when they pry open the gap between thought and expression, when the work slips the noose of easy description, when it flatters writers by making them think that it needs them to translate, to capture--but it's only a cock tease. Art doesn't need a writer. It does need a viewer. And that's where I will write from: What does it look like? Why am I looking at it? What is it doing and does it succeed?
I've never articulated it this plainly but I suppose this is my mission statement: I want to go out and report back. My allegiance, as it were, is to the reader, to the layperson. Can I really recommend that show? Separate of connections, pedigree, social life--is it good?
Perhaps this is what I should have conveyed to the gallery owner who took so much delight in deciding I was unqualified to think about the work he had on sale: I don't care if you went to Columbia or grew up in a trailer by the Columbia River, I'm interested in the work. I'm very much aware that an artist's background directly influences their work, but it shouldn't be the only thing supporting it. I don't want to have to see the strings. Everything you need to know should be in the work itself.
At the end of First Thursday I'm exhausted, a little wounded but not too much worse for the wear. Art gives way to a complicated experience; it's one of the few things about which we aren't told directly what to think, and that can be intimidating. What's damning--not to mention disheartening--is when you're told you're not allowed to think about it. Art is also, for me, a source of wonder and mystery, and its seductive pull keeps drawing me back to it, elitism be damned.
Review of Bo Bartlett from ArtDish
Bo Bartlett at Winston Wachter Fine Art
Through January 4, 2007
The Bo Bartlett exhibition at Winston Wachter is a winner of an exhibition, and because it contains so many different kinds of work, it gives us a good overview of the artist’s strengths and weaknesses.
Very much on the plus side of the ledger is the way Bartlett’s fierce intelligence, taste, and painterly virtuosity informs nearly every work. There are few, if any, contemporary American artists who can match Bartlett’s ability to conjure people and places in paint, and the inventiveness and energy of his brushwork is a joy to behold. The faces of his sympathetically-observed subjects gaze out at us with a directness and intensity that is at times almost disconcerting. Everywhere we look, there is a dramatically painted, highly aware person staring back. Few of his subjects glance away, or for that matter, glance at each other. They want very badly to gain our attention and to let us in, albeit obliquely, to their secrets.
Equally striking is the sense of place that informs these realistic, but highly stylized images. Bartlett has long been associated with the sort of landscape setting familiar from the works of Andrew Wyeth (a friend and mentor of the artist), particularly the stark, elemental coastline of Maine, conceived as a place where only the jagged pyramid of crashing waves interrupts the cleaving marriage of rocky land, churning water, and featureless sky. Bartlett uses the starkness of this setting to lend drama and weight to the stories of the people he portrays, life-sized, in the foreground. These coastal narratives are iconic, timeless, and freighted with a sense of significance. Though Bartlett paints the world of today, since the early 90s he has allowed barely a glimpse of the familiar artifacts of contemporary life, things like sprawl, billboards, and television, the better to focus on the human subjects that are the center of his interest.
So linked is Bartlett with the primal Northeast that it comes as something of a shock to come across several walls containing modest-sized images of Seattle landmarks, everything from Mt. Rainier to the Space Needle, with the container docks and the headquarters of amazon.com thrown in for good measure. Several of these paintings contain rather anonymous figures – not looking in our direction, for once - but for the most part they serve as a sort of catalog of regional attractions, observed with the fondness and attentiveness of a new arrival. It’s as though Bartlett is trying on the local landscape for size, considering which elements to use in narrative paintings yet to come. He’s also making nice with the local clientele, something we can well forgive him for when the baubles are as luscious as his amazing, molten-paint depiction of the spotlit Smith Tower, or his close-up of a container of Starbucks coffee, lit and rendered with the attention and reverence we associate with depictions of holy relics. It’s your basic $30 thousand-dollar cup of joe, and it’s sold.
Given the importance Bartlett clearly assigns to the niceties of his physical location, which has changed, it’s no surprise that movement, transition, and change looms large as a theme in the show. His companion Betsy – an artist at the same gallery - figures in several of these images, here seen meditating while voyaging on Puget Sound ferries, there accompanying the artist on a highway voyage to the opposite coast.
In this latter painting, entitled The Good Traveler, Bartlett the driver stares directly at us through his side window (rather than at the road ahead) while his companion examines a map. The featureless landscape they pass through is a slice of nowhere, a place to be gotten by on the way to somewhere else. The neutral green-grey palette used for car, clothing, and land is set against the light on Betsy’s face and the vivid blue of several lakes on her map. An incongruous tiara glitters atop her forehead – is she for real? But she’s clearly the focal point of the painting, for it’s she who is engaged in the moment, taking care of business. He’s conflicted about the journey – why isn’t he watching the road? --and we’re led to wonder how far he would get (and where he would go) if he was left to drive alone, which I take to be the point of the painting.
Other large narratives feature beautiful, solitary figures enigmatically meeting our gaze with theirs, or groups of figures lost in their own thoughts. A bus full of everymen and everywomen metaphorically enacts their individual journeys through life; a gorgeous, nearly nude girl with a baby portrays a modern Madonna; two figures lounge on a couch.
If there’s a weakness to these large narrative paintings, it’s clearest in this last image, attractive and competent, but lacking in narrative tension. In his perfectly controlled sense of design and lighting, and his preference for a particular slim, attractive, and preppy physical type, some of Bartlett’s work inadvertently brings to mind the faux-American scenography of fashion advertising, the perfect WASP universe of Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, and Abercrombie and Fitch. It’s one of the curses of contemporary art that the line that separates art from fashion can at times seem so fuzzy, and at times Bartlett seems to veer across that line.
Perhaps it’s also my discomfort with this brittle perfection that make me so enamored of the most interesting and provocative painting in the show, the disturbing Au Matin. While the subject of Au Matin is also transition and displacement, this time the transition is ominous in the extreme, and the imagery is skewed, starting to break up.
Here the Maine coastline of the setting may or may not be a figment of someone’s imagination, since cliff, sea, and waves are seen through a mysterious wall, one which fades in and out of view.
Walking towards the edge of this phantom cliff and away from us are three figures – two identical men in overcoats and fedoras holding a woman in a bloodied straightjacket. Equally unsettling is the posture of the three figures, all of whom lean to one side in a highly choreographed, highly stylized manner, further destabilizing the image. The materiality of the paint shifts in a way that makes us doubt the substance of nearly everything, except for the coagulated blobs that depict the burnt out embers of a fire in the foreground, made of the artist’s palette scrapings. It’s a great picture, and an open-ended one, whatever its place in the artists’ ongoing autobiographical saga.
Au Matin is also interesting in that it represents a new direction for the artist, one in which the dreamlike and the surreal plays a larger role. Already at the top of his game technically, Bartlett clearly aspires to more deeply probe the mysteries just beyond the visible surfaces he has so long, and so skillfully, depicted.
Through January 4, 2007
The Bo Bartlett exhibition at Winston Wachter is a winner of an exhibition, and because it contains so many different kinds of work, it gives us a good overview of the artist’s strengths and weaknesses.
Very much on the plus side of the ledger is the way Bartlett’s fierce intelligence, taste, and painterly virtuosity informs nearly every work. There are few, if any, contemporary American artists who can match Bartlett’s ability to conjure people and places in paint, and the inventiveness and energy of his brushwork is a joy to behold. The faces of his sympathetically-observed subjects gaze out at us with a directness and intensity that is at times almost disconcerting. Everywhere we look, there is a dramatically painted, highly aware person staring back. Few of his subjects glance away, or for that matter, glance at each other. They want very badly to gain our attention and to let us in, albeit obliquely, to their secrets.
Equally striking is the sense of place that informs these realistic, but highly stylized images. Bartlett has long been associated with the sort of landscape setting familiar from the works of Andrew Wyeth (a friend and mentor of the artist), particularly the stark, elemental coastline of Maine, conceived as a place where only the jagged pyramid of crashing waves interrupts the cleaving marriage of rocky land, churning water, and featureless sky. Bartlett uses the starkness of this setting to lend drama and weight to the stories of the people he portrays, life-sized, in the foreground. These coastal narratives are iconic, timeless, and freighted with a sense of significance. Though Bartlett paints the world of today, since the early 90s he has allowed barely a glimpse of the familiar artifacts of contemporary life, things like sprawl, billboards, and television, the better to focus on the human subjects that are the center of his interest.
So linked is Bartlett with the primal Northeast that it comes as something of a shock to come across several walls containing modest-sized images of Seattle landmarks, everything from Mt. Rainier to the Space Needle, with the container docks and the headquarters of amazon.com thrown in for good measure. Several of these paintings contain rather anonymous figures – not looking in our direction, for once - but for the most part they serve as a sort of catalog of regional attractions, observed with the fondness and attentiveness of a new arrival. It’s as though Bartlett is trying on the local landscape for size, considering which elements to use in narrative paintings yet to come. He’s also making nice with the local clientele, something we can well forgive him for when the baubles are as luscious as his amazing, molten-paint depiction of the spotlit Smith Tower, or his close-up of a container of Starbucks coffee, lit and rendered with the attention and reverence we associate with depictions of holy relics. It’s your basic $30 thousand-dollar cup of joe, and it’s sold.
Given the importance Bartlett clearly assigns to the niceties of his physical location, which has changed, it’s no surprise that movement, transition, and change looms large as a theme in the show. His companion Betsy – an artist at the same gallery - figures in several of these images, here seen meditating while voyaging on Puget Sound ferries, there accompanying the artist on a highway voyage to the opposite coast.
In this latter painting, entitled The Good Traveler, Bartlett the driver stares directly at us through his side window (rather than at the road ahead) while his companion examines a map. The featureless landscape they pass through is a slice of nowhere, a place to be gotten by on the way to somewhere else. The neutral green-grey palette used for car, clothing, and land is set against the light on Betsy’s face and the vivid blue of several lakes on her map. An incongruous tiara glitters atop her forehead – is she for real? But she’s clearly the focal point of the painting, for it’s she who is engaged in the moment, taking care of business. He’s conflicted about the journey – why isn’t he watching the road? --and we’re led to wonder how far he would get (and where he would go) if he was left to drive alone, which I take to be the point of the painting.
Other large narratives feature beautiful, solitary figures enigmatically meeting our gaze with theirs, or groups of figures lost in their own thoughts. A bus full of everymen and everywomen metaphorically enacts their individual journeys through life; a gorgeous, nearly nude girl with a baby portrays a modern Madonna; two figures lounge on a couch.
If there’s a weakness to these large narrative paintings, it’s clearest in this last image, attractive and competent, but lacking in narrative tension. In his perfectly controlled sense of design and lighting, and his preference for a particular slim, attractive, and preppy physical type, some of Bartlett’s work inadvertently brings to mind the faux-American scenography of fashion advertising, the perfect WASP universe of Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, and Abercrombie and Fitch. It’s one of the curses of contemporary art that the line that separates art from fashion can at times seem so fuzzy, and at times Bartlett seems to veer across that line.
Perhaps it’s also my discomfort with this brittle perfection that make me so enamored of the most interesting and provocative painting in the show, the disturbing Au Matin. While the subject of Au Matin is also transition and displacement, this time the transition is ominous in the extreme, and the imagery is skewed, starting to break up.
Here the Maine coastline of the setting may or may not be a figment of someone’s imagination, since cliff, sea, and waves are seen through a mysterious wall, one which fades in and out of view.
Walking towards the edge of this phantom cliff and away from us are three figures – two identical men in overcoats and fedoras holding a woman in a bloodied straightjacket. Equally unsettling is the posture of the three figures, all of whom lean to one side in a highly choreographed, highly stylized manner, further destabilizing the image. The materiality of the paint shifts in a way that makes us doubt the substance of nearly everything, except for the coagulated blobs that depict the burnt out embers of a fire in the foreground, made of the artist’s palette scrapings. It’s a great picture, and an open-ended one, whatever its place in the artists’ ongoing autobiographical saga.
Au Matin is also interesting in that it represents a new direction for the artist, one in which the dreamlike and the surreal plays a larger role. Already at the top of his game technically, Bartlett clearly aspires to more deeply probe the mysteries just beyond the visible surfaces he has so long, and so skillfully, depicted.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Masi Oka: Coder, Actor, Hero
Masi Oka: Coder, Actor, Hero
Millions of viewers of NBC's Heroes know actor Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura, the bored young Japanese office worker who discovers he has the power to alter time and teleport. What they probably don't know is that he's been working behind the scenes for years as one of Industrial Light & Magic's top programmers.
In an ensemble cast that features solid acting all around, Oka steals the show every time he's on the screen. The show literally has his Hiro living out the exploits of his own comic book, 9th Wonders.
Since graduating from Brown University in 1997, Oka has worked on more than 30 big-budget Hollywood films at ILM. During that time he has written more than 20 programs and 100 plug-ins for the leading special-effects house. While audiences might not have known his name or face until Heroes, they've seen his programming magic on the big screen in films like The Perfect Storm, Star Wars: Episode II, Terminator 3 and the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
"I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college," said Oka. "ILM offered me an entry-level position at its Marin, California, headquarters, but they refused to fly me out for the job interview. Fortunately, Microsoft also was interested in hiring me and they flew me out to Seattle, then down to San Francisco and back to Providence."
Oka ended up taking the job with ILM and remains with the company to this day, despite his hectic TV production schedule. He said ILM was a great place to start in the industry because he learned a lot about the pipeline and how the company worked.
"It was also a way for upper management to determine how much drive we had," said Oka. "If we wanted to, we could always start our own projects."
After a year and a half of training, which included some work on Star Wars: Episode I and Rocky and Bullwinkle, Oka got his first big "show" with The Perfect Storm. He worked with John Anderson to create the computer-generated water effects for the film. All of the water effects in that film, as well as water effects in more recent films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, were the result of code written by Oka.
"That allowed me to get my name out in the ILM community and people wanted me to do a lot of particle work, fluid stuff and modeling for different shows," said Oka. "I became more of a firefighter, going around from show to show doing short-term work as a hired gun to solve problems on a very quick basis."
A lot of the software Oka wrote became applicable to other shows. For example, the computational fluid dynamics he worked on in Terminator 3, which allowed liquid metal to take shape, handled the drool in Dreamcatcher. His surface-cracking technology from Star Wars: Episode II worked well for Pirates of the Caribbean.
"The key to digital effects is to do things that are visually accurate but done cheaply and approximated," said Oka. "I would simulate viscosity or advection, things that are specific to the way water moves. We'd do a cheap simulated effect for these movements and they were used for things like the spray and wakes in The Perfect Storm."
Oka managed to get his Screen Actors Guild card by performing in a few industrial videos. After working on The Perfect Storm for nearly two full years, Oka moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career in 2001. He appeared in a number of TV shows (Scrubs, Reba, Without a Trace) and films (Along Came Polly, Legally Blonde 2, House of the Dead 2) before Heroes thrust him into the spotlight.
Working remotely from ILM's Los Angeles studio, Oka has remained active with movie effects, although now he's limited to one or two days of ILM work a week because of his production schedule.
"I love both acting and programming equally," said Oka, who enjoys challenging both sides of his brain. "I think it enriches me and enhances me as an artist. I have a lot of appreciation for what people do in front of the camera as well as behind the camera. I don't think I could like one without the other. Eventually, I think the road will lead me down to producing or directing, because it's more about problem solving."
Should Heroes' early success continue for NBC, Oka said he would love to be able to direct an episode in season three or four and bring all of his ILM cronies in to help out.
"I'd make use of my employee discount -- buy two effects and get one free," joked Oka.
Millions of viewers of NBC's Heroes know actor Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura, the bored young Japanese office worker who discovers he has the power to alter time and teleport. What they probably don't know is that he's been working behind the scenes for years as one of Industrial Light & Magic's top programmers.
In an ensemble cast that features solid acting all around, Oka steals the show every time he's on the screen. The show literally has his Hiro living out the exploits of his own comic book, 9th Wonders.
Since graduating from Brown University in 1997, Oka has worked on more than 30 big-budget Hollywood films at ILM. During that time he has written more than 20 programs and 100 plug-ins for the leading special-effects house. While audiences might not have known his name or face until Heroes, they've seen his programming magic on the big screen in films like The Perfect Storm, Star Wars: Episode II, Terminator 3 and the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
"I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college," said Oka. "ILM offered me an entry-level position at its Marin, California, headquarters, but they refused to fly me out for the job interview. Fortunately, Microsoft also was interested in hiring me and they flew me out to Seattle, then down to San Francisco and back to Providence."
Oka ended up taking the job with ILM and remains with the company to this day, despite his hectic TV production schedule. He said ILM was a great place to start in the industry because he learned a lot about the pipeline and how the company worked.
"It was also a way for upper management to determine how much drive we had," said Oka. "If we wanted to, we could always start our own projects."
After a year and a half of training, which included some work on Star Wars: Episode I and Rocky and Bullwinkle, Oka got his first big "show" with The Perfect Storm. He worked with John Anderson to create the computer-generated water effects for the film. All of the water effects in that film, as well as water effects in more recent films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, were the result of code written by Oka.
"That allowed me to get my name out in the ILM community and people wanted me to do a lot of particle work, fluid stuff and modeling for different shows," said Oka. "I became more of a firefighter, going around from show to show doing short-term work as a hired gun to solve problems on a very quick basis."
A lot of the software Oka wrote became applicable to other shows. For example, the computational fluid dynamics he worked on in Terminator 3, which allowed liquid metal to take shape, handled the drool in Dreamcatcher. His surface-cracking technology from Star Wars: Episode II worked well for Pirates of the Caribbean.
"The key to digital effects is to do things that are visually accurate but done cheaply and approximated," said Oka. "I would simulate viscosity or advection, things that are specific to the way water moves. We'd do a cheap simulated effect for these movements and they were used for things like the spray and wakes in The Perfect Storm."
Oka managed to get his Screen Actors Guild card by performing in a few industrial videos. After working on The Perfect Storm for nearly two full years, Oka moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career in 2001. He appeared in a number of TV shows (Scrubs, Reba, Without a Trace) and films (Along Came Polly, Legally Blonde 2, House of the Dead 2) before Heroes thrust him into the spotlight.
Working remotely from ILM's Los Angeles studio, Oka has remained active with movie effects, although now he's limited to one or two days of ILM work a week because of his production schedule.
"I love both acting and programming equally," said Oka, who enjoys challenging both sides of his brain. "I think it enriches me and enhances me as an artist. I have a lot of appreciation for what people do in front of the camera as well as behind the camera. I don't think I could like one without the other. Eventually, I think the road will lead me down to producing or directing, because it's more about problem solving."
Should Heroes' early success continue for NBC, Oka said he would love to be able to direct an episode in season three or four and bring all of his ILM cronies in to help out.
"I'd make use of my employee discount -- buy two effects and get one free," joked Oka.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
AHHTV
WASHINGTON, DC—The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-1 Monday to require electronics manufacturers to make all television sets ADHD-compatible within two years.
To adhere to the guidelines, every program, with the exception of The Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi Show, will have to be sped up to meet the new standard frame rate of 120 frames per second.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin characterized the move as "a natural, forward-thinking response to the changing needs of the average American viewer."
"In the media-saturated climate of the modern age, few have the time and energy to sit still for an entire episode of King Of Queens," Martin said. "Although the FCC will leave it up to the television networks to make the necessary programming changes, we are recommending, in accordance with the ADHDTV standard, that all shows be no more than six minutes in length, and that they contain jarring and unpredictable camera cuts to shiny props and detailed background sets."
"We're also advising that intra-episode recaps occur every 45 seconds," he added.
The ruling represents a growing shift toward ADHDTV, a television format designed to meet the needs of an increasingly inattentive and hyperactive audience. The tuner includes a built-in device that automatically changes channels after three minutes of uninterrupted single-station viewing, as well as a picture-in-picture-in-picture-in-picture option.
According to Sony, the leading manufacturer of the ADHD-compatible sets, the new technology will allow viewers to play up to three simultaneous video games while watching television.
"Many of our ADHDTVs will come with a motorized base," Sony spokesperson Richard O'Dell said. "In the event that the viewer turns his attention away from the television, it will begin to rotate and emit sirens and piercing shrieks."
The mandate to conform to the new format has already been met with some resistance, particularly from movie channels like HBO, live programs such as ABC's Monday Night Football, and the History Channel, whose ambitious five-part, 10-hour historical documentary about World War II, slated for completion in late 2007, will have to be shortened to a six-minute montage of the war set to a medley of Ashlee Simpson hits.
Some networks, however, are embracing the change.
"A majority of our shows are only watchable for a few minutes at a time anyway," said Fox president Peter Liguori, whose recently unveiled fall 2007 TV schedule includes over 850 new series. "We're going to roll out an exciting lineup of major sporting-event highlights, late-night yell shows, and a brand-new season of The O.C. that will feature 37 new characters and—well, I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say it will have a lot more guys jumping up and down, saying, 'Hey! Hey! Look over here!'"
On standard 4:3 televisions, ADHDTV programs will be shown in letterbox format, with the top and bottom of the screen alternately filled with bright, flittering butterflies, undulating rainbow-colored patterns, and singing hamsters in top hats.
Skeptics say the switch to ADHDTV will likely be delayed in favor of other projects or even completely forgotten by next week. However, the FDA is fast-tracking approval of the new drug Entertainalin, developed in anticipation of the modified programming. In clinical trials, the drug has been effective in helping viewers concentrate not only on the new TV format, but also on their immediate surroundings, the couch fabric, a dog passing by the window, and pieces of lint floating in the air.
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