"The subject means little. The arrangement, the design,
colour, shape, depth, light, space, mood, movement, balance,
not one or all of these fills the bill. There is something
additional, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing,
a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness
of all things." (Emily Carr) "The most deadly picture is a
picture of nothing at all." (William S. Burroughs)
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Field Notes on Play
So often Robert Genn says just what one needs to hear ;)
There was no use in arguing with the woman. She had asked me
what I thought she should do next and now she was against my
suggestion. It was she who had complained her work was dull.
"Your work will continue to be dull," I said, "until you learn
to play." This was no ordinary girl--well read, smart in every
way, and very, very neat. She had read all the books. "Work is
play," she said. "Play frees up the inner child, empowers
confidence and invites creative elan. Play is a creative need."
She knew her Carl Jung.
I told her that my dad used to say, "If you can dream it, you
can do it." This advice was given in my early teens, and it
sent me off into some extreme fantasies. Like painting a mural
on the Grand Canyon. I recruited helpers, but it was the park
rangers who were unable to see my vision. "But you at least had
the dream," she said. "Some people never have them."
Talking some more about play, I suggested there were two more
things she needed besides a dream--a new way, and a new toy. I
demonstrated by laying in a painting with one of those small
rollers that house painters use for going around the edge of
door frames. The pay-load lasts forever. Colours dabbed and
mixed around the roller provide never ending blends. She gave
it a try.
After a while I pointed to a virgin tube in her paintbox. "It's
Aureolin hue--yellowish, I never use it," she said. I showed
her mine. "For the last week I've been mixing it with
everything except Mai Tais," I said. "Here in Hawaii it's
useful. Makes things glow. You can substitute it for white.
It's great for glazing too. New tones with every mix. Ya gotta
love it." She squeezed some out.
Artists are not always prepared to take advice from other
artists, but this one was beginning to see the light. "So, in
order to play properly you need three main things--a new dream,
a new way, and a new toy," she said. "I think so," I said.
"Maybe you just need a new toy, because then you might just
pick up the new way and the new dream." A peculiar creative
silence overtook us. A big wave could have taken us out. Later,
I noticed her wading into the surf. She was glowing. I squeezed
out more Aureolin hue.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the
intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." (Carl Jung)
Esoterica: Aureolin hue gets its name from aureole, the glow
that emanates from the figures and particularly the heads of
holy personages in medieval and Renaissance art. The head-glow
is also called a nimbus or a halo. If someone is miraculously
rising, the aureole is called a "glory," and if it's in the
shape of an almond it's called a "mandorla,"--the Italian word
for almond. The early Roman church referred to the effect as
"vesica piscis"--Latin for fish's bladder. The middle ages were
big on holy glows, their painters worked hard to make them from
fugitive, now discontinued colours. The modern pigment was
developed in Breslau, Germany, by N.W. Fischer, in 1848, was in
wide use by 1860, and is currently engaged on the Kona coast.
There was no use in arguing with the woman. She had asked me
what I thought she should do next and now she was against my
suggestion. It was she who had complained her work was dull.
"Your work will continue to be dull," I said, "until you learn
to play." This was no ordinary girl--well read, smart in every
way, and very, very neat. She had read all the books. "Work is
play," she said. "Play frees up the inner child, empowers
confidence and invites creative elan. Play is a creative need."
She knew her Carl Jung.
I told her that my dad used to say, "If you can dream it, you
can do it." This advice was given in my early teens, and it
sent me off into some extreme fantasies. Like painting a mural
on the Grand Canyon. I recruited helpers, but it was the park
rangers who were unable to see my vision. "But you at least had
the dream," she said. "Some people never have them."
Talking some more about play, I suggested there were two more
things she needed besides a dream--a new way, and a new toy. I
demonstrated by laying in a painting with one of those small
rollers that house painters use for going around the edge of
door frames. The pay-load lasts forever. Colours dabbed and
mixed around the roller provide never ending blends. She gave
it a try.
After a while I pointed to a virgin tube in her paintbox. "It's
Aureolin hue--yellowish, I never use it," she said. I showed
her mine. "For the last week I've been mixing it with
everything except Mai Tais," I said. "Here in Hawaii it's
useful. Makes things glow. You can substitute it for white.
It's great for glazing too. New tones with every mix. Ya gotta
love it." She squeezed some out.
Artists are not always prepared to take advice from other
artists, but this one was beginning to see the light. "So, in
order to play properly you need three main things--a new dream,
a new way, and a new toy," she said. "I think so," I said.
"Maybe you just need a new toy, because then you might just
pick up the new way and the new dream." A peculiar creative
silence overtook us. A big wave could have taken us out. Later,
I noticed her wading into the surf. She was glowing. I squeezed
out more Aureolin hue.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the
intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." (Carl Jung)
Esoterica: Aureolin hue gets its name from aureole, the glow
that emanates from the figures and particularly the heads of
holy personages in medieval and Renaissance art. The head-glow
is also called a nimbus or a halo. If someone is miraculously
rising, the aureole is called a "glory," and if it's in the
shape of an almond it's called a "mandorla,"--the Italian word
for almond. The early Roman church referred to the effect as
"vesica piscis"--Latin for fish's bladder. The middle ages were
big on holy glows, their painters worked hard to make them from
fugitive, now discontinued colours. The modern pigment was
developed in Breslau, Germany, by N.W. Fischer, in 1848, was in
wide use by 1860, and is currently engaged on the Kona coast.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
On Big and Small
From the lovely Robert Genn~
When we first arrived on the Big Island we were greeted by some
of the highest winds and roughest seas in several seasons.
Veteran surfers were turned away by the lifeguards. Saffron
finches huddled in low hedges behind lava walls. Standing on
our own seawall, I easily named a future big one "Storm on the
Kona Coast."
Pressing against the wind under the roar of the breakers, the
following days provided time for notes. Foam that whitened the
ocean for half a mile out. Great curlers where no
boogie-boarder dared. A black line that straddled the horizon.
Loaded with cliches (the translucent, green-lit wave, smoking
tops, Neptune's grasping claws) the scene would bring a sense
of awe to the most jaded. But here in this cinemascope diorama
of power, the love of small stuff is confirmed.
Make your mistakes with less on the table.
Have low commitment for courage and creativity.
Catch the wisdom of series and set.
Make variations on themes and motifs.
Build proficiency on the personal game-board.
Overcome the natural tendency of preciousness.
Feel the energy of the portable smug.
Use natural selection to drive potential larger work.
Just as the digital revolution has sped the learning of
photography, painting "smalls" in series speeds creative
progress. Because digital imagery need not be sent out for
developing, the travelling photographer can test settings and
see results on the spot. In the same way, learning on the go,
the series painter sees each variation develop. In either a
linear or in simultaneous (multi-tasking) process, a better way
is often found. Like the digital photographer, she crops,
tints, fills, glazes, sharpens, softens, revisits--and makes
the ultimate decision to keep or delete. It's the time-honoured
wisdom of the sketch.
It's good to be small and portable in the midst of greatness.
The act of remaining on location (unlike taking the tourist
snapshot--then back on the bus) has the effect of "burning in"
the experience and making it your own. It may be small stuff
you're doing, and your inadequacies may revisit and haunt you,
but the artist's life is big stuff indeed.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is."
(Robinson Jeffers)
Esoterica: Small work fits in with the pace of modern life. In
the time where the one liner, the quick fix, instant
gratification and short concentration-spans rule, small stuff
works. Life burgeons--family, friendship, fellowship, dining
and watching long-neglected DVD's like Al Gore's witness to
global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." All becomes part of
the matrix. Like an impossible jigsaw on the coffee table, the
paintbox is always there with its permanent invitation to
frustration, understanding and joy.
When we first arrived on the Big Island we were greeted by some
of the highest winds and roughest seas in several seasons.
Veteran surfers were turned away by the lifeguards. Saffron
finches huddled in low hedges behind lava walls. Standing on
our own seawall, I easily named a future big one "Storm on the
Kona Coast."
Pressing against the wind under the roar of the breakers, the
following days provided time for notes. Foam that whitened the
ocean for half a mile out. Great curlers where no
boogie-boarder dared. A black line that straddled the horizon.
Loaded with cliches (the translucent, green-lit wave, smoking
tops, Neptune's grasping claws) the scene would bring a sense
of awe to the most jaded. But here in this cinemascope diorama
of power, the love of small stuff is confirmed.
Make your mistakes with less on the table.
Have low commitment for courage and creativity.
Catch the wisdom of series and set.
Make variations on themes and motifs.
Build proficiency on the personal game-board.
Overcome the natural tendency of preciousness.
Feel the energy of the portable smug.
Use natural selection to drive potential larger work.
Just as the digital revolution has sped the learning of
photography, painting "smalls" in series speeds creative
progress. Because digital imagery need not be sent out for
developing, the travelling photographer can test settings and
see results on the spot. In the same way, learning on the go,
the series painter sees each variation develop. In either a
linear or in simultaneous (multi-tasking) process, a better way
is often found. Like the digital photographer, she crops,
tints, fills, glazes, sharpens, softens, revisits--and makes
the ultimate decision to keep or delete. It's the time-honoured
wisdom of the sketch.
It's good to be small and portable in the midst of greatness.
The act of remaining on location (unlike taking the tourist
snapshot--then back on the bus) has the effect of "burning in"
the experience and making it your own. It may be small stuff
you're doing, and your inadequacies may revisit and haunt you,
but the artist's life is big stuff indeed.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is."
(Robinson Jeffers)
Esoterica: Small work fits in with the pace of modern life. In
the time where the one liner, the quick fix, instant
gratification and short concentration-spans rule, small stuff
works. Life burgeons--family, friendship, fellowship, dining
and watching long-neglected DVD's like Al Gore's witness to
global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." All becomes part of
the matrix. Like an impossible jigsaw on the coffee table, the
paintbox is always there with its permanent invitation to
frustration, understanding and joy.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Letters to an Artist
Another lovely one from Robert Genn~
In 1903, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke responded by letter to a
young man seeking his advice. Rilke eventually wrote ten
letters now collectively known and much published as "Letters
to a Young Poet." They are heartfelt advice from a successful
(but still struggling) artist to another who was deeply mired
in self-doubt. The classic language of these letters soars in
beauty as well as lofty good sense. His idealism is applicable
today to all who might pursue any sort of creative activity.
Yesterday, on a pathside bench deep in a blustery,
storm-destroyed forest, I reread the letters. Here, partly in
direct quotation and partly in condensed summation, are some of
Rilke's ideas:
Your work needs to be independent of others' work.
You must not compare yourself to others.
No one can help you. You have to help yourself.
Criticism leads to misunderstandings and defeatism.
Work from necessity and your compulsion to do it.
Work on what you know and what you are sure you love.
Don't observe yourself too closely, just let it happen.
Don't let yourself be controlled by too much irony.
Live in and love the activity of your work.
Be free of thoughts of sin, guilt and misgiving.
Be touched by the beautiful anxiety of life.
Be patient with the unresolved in your heart.
Try to be in love with the questions themselves.
Love your solitude and try to sing with its pain.
Be gentle to all of those who stay behind.
Your inner self is worth your entire concentration.
Allow your art to make extraordinary demands on you.
Bear your sadness with greater trust than your joy.
Do not persecute yourself with how things are going.
It's good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult.
It's good to love, because love is difficult.
You are not a prisoner of anything or anyone.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was born in Czechoslovakia and
died in Switzerland. Dogged by fragile health and the constant
search for inexpensive and healthful accommodation, he
anxiously moved from one climate to another. Considered the
greatest modern poet in the German language, Rilke counselled
the young poet, known only as Mr. Kappus, over a five-year
period. No evidence exists that they ever met.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "Being an artist means not numbering or counting, but
ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, standing
confidently in storms, not afraid that summer may not come."
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
Esoterica: Two main themes--trust and patience--pervade Rilke's
letters. "Always trust yourself and your own feelings, as
opposed to arguments and discussions," he says. "If it turns
out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner
life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your
judgments a silent, undisturbed development, which, like all
progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or
hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let
each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to
completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable,
the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding,
and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a
new clarity is born: this is what it means to live as an
artist."
In 1903, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke responded by letter to a
young man seeking his advice. Rilke eventually wrote ten
letters now collectively known and much published as "Letters
to a Young Poet." They are heartfelt advice from a successful
(but still struggling) artist to another who was deeply mired
in self-doubt. The classic language of these letters soars in
beauty as well as lofty good sense. His idealism is applicable
today to all who might pursue any sort of creative activity.
Yesterday, on a pathside bench deep in a blustery,
storm-destroyed forest, I reread the letters. Here, partly in
direct quotation and partly in condensed summation, are some of
Rilke's ideas:
Your work needs to be independent of others' work.
You must not compare yourself to others.
No one can help you. You have to help yourself.
Criticism leads to misunderstandings and defeatism.
Work from necessity and your compulsion to do it.
Work on what you know and what you are sure you love.
Don't observe yourself too closely, just let it happen.
Don't let yourself be controlled by too much irony.
Live in and love the activity of your work.
Be free of thoughts of sin, guilt and misgiving.
Be touched by the beautiful anxiety of life.
Be patient with the unresolved in your heart.
Try to be in love with the questions themselves.
Love your solitude and try to sing with its pain.
Be gentle to all of those who stay behind.
Your inner self is worth your entire concentration.
Allow your art to make extraordinary demands on you.
Bear your sadness with greater trust than your joy.
Do not persecute yourself with how things are going.
It's good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult.
It's good to love, because love is difficult.
You are not a prisoner of anything or anyone.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was born in Czechoslovakia and
died in Switzerland. Dogged by fragile health and the constant
search for inexpensive and healthful accommodation, he
anxiously moved from one climate to another. Considered the
greatest modern poet in the German language, Rilke counselled
the young poet, known only as Mr. Kappus, over a five-year
period. No evidence exists that they ever met.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "Being an artist means not numbering or counting, but
ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, standing
confidently in storms, not afraid that summer may not come."
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
Esoterica: Two main themes--trust and patience--pervade Rilke's
letters. "Always trust yourself and your own feelings, as
opposed to arguments and discussions," he says. "If it turns
out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner
life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your
judgments a silent, undisturbed development, which, like all
progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or
hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let
each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to
completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable,
the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding,
and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a
new clarity is born: this is what it means to live as an
artist."
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Seattleites are standouts in otherwise flat CoCA Annual
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
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
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.
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