my heroes died of syphilis

RULES FOR SELECTING ART COLLEGE PROFESSORS

In light of the recent feature written by Jen Graves, in which Michael Darling reportedly laments the sad state of the art educational system in this region, I would like to extend this sage suggestion, proffered by Otto Muehl in 1968, as a means towards reform:

RULES FOR SELECTING ART COLLEGE PROFESSORS
(elimination of favouritism)
1. selection is to be made before the assembled students.
2. exercises are to be performed in the college assembly hall.
3. short race with a paint-brush dipped in red paint. the first to paint a red spot on the top of the rector's nose is the winner. 5 points.
4. tube-biting. the first to bite open 10 tubes of lead white: 6 points.
5. a plastic swimming pool, 2.5 metres deep, is filled with blue ink. on the bottom of the pool is a paint-brush and a set of water-colours. the person who manages to fish out the brush with yellow paint on it: 10 points.
6. whoever paints all of a 10 x 10 m canvas the fastest, using their tongue as the brush, receives 15 points.
7. whoever manages to milk a goat the fastest: 7 points.
8. penis weighing: the person with the heaviest penis receives 8 points.
9. the first to bore through a canvas with his penis receives 11 points.
10. defecation competition. whoever makes the most beautiful pile, in terms of form, colour, weight, is awarded 19 points.
11. vomiting on a picture surface lying on the ground. the best picture will be awarded 21 points.
12. test of courage: the candidates are invited to cut off their left ear. anyone who succeeds in accomplishing this is immediately disqualified. he is not suited to the vocation of art college professor.
13. the candidates are invited to paint the federal president with red paint. whoever follows this instruction will be taken directly to the court-room; anyone who refuses receives 500 points; however, anyone who prevaricates and then attempts to kill himself will be immediately elected professor, even if he has the smallest prick.
14. students grab the happy victor and roll with him through a lengthy trail of bread-crumbs and hens' eggs.

Better late than never: 2nd Thursday Art Walk photos (or Syphirazzi vs. Molorazzi)

The Molorazzi was less hungover than I that day -- and I dare say he took a better set of photos and had more art-blitzing stamina than I did. But here are a few of my snapshots from the night:


Zoë Williams at Vermillion



Cryptomenagerie: Michael Alm, Jody Joldersma, Zoë Williams




Wynne Greenwood, Yoko Ott, Joey Veltkamp


Bond Huberman & Daniel Carrillo at Grey Gallery


Erin Frost, Shaun Kardinal, & Noah Grussgott


Tracey Campbell (& canine cutie Benny Frank)


Garek Druss & Dave Segal


Daniel Carrillo at Penetration


Izzie Klingels on the Unicorn dance floor

CHS also posted pictures of the night's events here.

NEPO 3: Air, Water, Fire (We Will Leave the Earth Behind)

Klara Glosova's NEPO 3: Air, Water, Fire (We Will Leave the Earth Behind) is the first NEPO I've made it to, and I'm really delighted by the concept and its execution. The house, which is already superficially compelling by itself, is turned into a kind of walk-in advent calendar, with each door, each stairwell, each window serving as a conduit to a new, curiously enchanted space or stage upon which small actions are being performed or objects are being situated for consideration. I left before the second half of the night's activities, but loved everything I did get to see....








Klara Glosova




Emily Pothast and David Golightly perform Drone Chamber

First Thursday June 2010

On the way to the art walk tonight I stopped in at SAM's Kurt exhibit with a friend. It was my second time to see the show and I came away (again) really liking it. I could linger in the Banks Violette room indefinitely.

I have to say, there were a lot of rock-n-roll visitors at the museum this evening...lots of punk hair and glamorous boots. This little girl was studying the Banks Violette drawings so intently. I was completely smitten.

  

Tyler Cufley and Heather Hollenbeck, Dumpster Strawberry at SOIL




Carol Saft, My Brother Todd (in the Backspace at SOIL)


Sol Hashemi's Proposal for an Earthwork 2010 - Object History Awareness

RIP

Louise Bourgeois Arch of Hysteria

There are a lot of RIPs lately.

RIP Howard House. (cf. Joey, Jen, Regina)

RIP Louise Bourgeois. (I agree with Jen: I wish we had more substantial Louise Bourgeoise works in Seattle.)

RIP the current incarnation of Grey Gallery & Lounge, which is moving from its current location at the end of June. I've enjoyed so many excellent, wonderfully-installed shows there. Thank goodness it's not going away for good. As an habitué of Bauhaus Cafe, may I suggest that Grey looks into the currently vacant space next-door on Pike? It may not be quite large enough for Grey, but I've always thought that that space, with the huge amount of foot traffic and the hip factor of being sandwiched between the Melrose Market, Bauhaus, Wall of Sound, etc, would be incredibly desirable as a gallery location. Just saying'.

(Worth noting: this month's City Arts Best of Art Walk Awards and After Party will be hosted at Grey Gallery on June 10, in conjunction with the Capitol Hill art walk. It will be a good opportunity to toast the 11th Ave incarnation of the venue.)

Citizen Mori @ The Living Room

Damon Mori: practice + wine.
performance rig spring/summer 2010.

I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Wednesday night for this show. If you're in the neighborhood it will be well worth swinging by to see a rare performance utilizing unique analog instruments. (You can listen to a few samples here.)

Damon also recently created a sound installation piece for Troy Gua's meet greet rinse repeat, which was installed at Monarch Gallery earlier this year.


Tympanic! (photo by Shaun Kardinal)

UW MFA thesis exhibition: a few favorites

On Friday I was able to view the thesis exhibition for this year's graduating MFA students. I'm no critic*, but I do want to note the works that most captured my attention and imagination.

Maggie Romano's (what made the wound, wound the thread) is fascinating, an emotional-ready-made, ready to assume a variety of metaphors or little narratives. In (what made the wound, wound the thread) she replicated a happy accident (a leaky pipe) that occurred in her studio: a saline drip feeds into a rubber balloon, which is also attached to a helium tank. The balloon, which has been pricked at the bottom, gently rises and falls as it respirates helium, and as it bobs around it leaks salty water onto a surface below, thereby creating a residual mineral pattern. The blatant (yet) austere excremental nature of the balloon-object is delightful, and the accretionary drawing issuing from the sac is beautiful.



I also really liked Hanita Schwartz's Elsewhere under the Monochrome. Schwartz's past work with crushed dolls and her Barthesian interest in the mythological and social role of toys is evident in the playfulness of her yellow crate peppered with peepholes and projectors and video screens and windows. Inside: remnants of furniture scattered across a parquet floor and, hovering above that, the underside of a chair cast in bronze. Scurrying around to examine the view through each lens reminded me of viewing a Victorian coin-operated stereoscopic peepshow. The piece's emphasis on a whimsical and reflexive scopophilia (one of the peepholes was filmed from the inside and hooked up to a video feed that projected on the other side of the crate, so that you could look at others looking) lent it the feel of a semi-illicit optical playground.

I lingered for a while at Samuel Payne's installation, Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass). Its references to perspective drawing and its yearning for restraint, its desire to be/communicate an entity tied down (as though to combat an impossible lightness, if I may besmirch myself with literary cliché) was compelling. The sound of wood being chopped was looped through a delay and amplified into the space all around, and the longer I stood by the piece the more light-headed I felt (all the coffee I'd just slammed probably contributed to this synaesthetic moment). The disquieting regular beat reminded me of a sound installation of Theo Beckmann's at the Neue Galerie last year, which was slightly arrhythmic yet unsettlingly biological in essence.

I also enjoyed the grotesque nature of Alwyn O'Brien's sculptures, one of which oozed a bubblegum pink informe mass at its base, all of which were punctured with holes here or there or broken apart in places to reveal a heavy layering of decorative facades. (Bubblegum pink foam and baroque gold ornament should certainly be paired more frequently. I would like to see an entire room transformed into an Alwyn O'Brien grotto filled with foamy incoherence and lacquer and gold leaf baubles.)



Maggie Romano
(what made the wound, wound the thread


Hanita Schwartz
Elsewhere under the Monochrome







Alwyn O'Brien
Objects of Unknowing: Somewhere between the Propped and the Picturesque









Samuel Payne Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass)


Jacob Foran
Gyrecraft (No. I)


The show is up through June 27.

*During a conversation at the press preview, Regina Hackett misquoted this blog as: "my best friends all have syphilis".

City Arts Magazine (&)

Two of my Clownisme drawings have been printed in the June issue of City Arts Magazine in the Ampersand(&) section.  City Arts can be found in newspaper boxes scattered all over the city, as well as in most cafes, bars, etc. Pick up a copy next time you're out!

new works: Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière

If one image dominates my imagination as a quintessential icon of the grand hysteric and also sits squarely (if suggestively) at the intersection of a hysteric, mystic, and medical theater, it's this one, a picture found in a volume of Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. An involuntary spasm of the tongue stimulated aurally. Lately I've been obsessively processing this image and its variants, scaling them to larger-than-life iterations. (The little thumbnail on the left-hand side of this blog, for example.)

"Chez une hystérique" & "Jeune possédée"
(from Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière)
mixed media (vellum, pastel, charcoal, acrylic), 76 x 114 cm

Whiting Tennis/Claudia Fitch opening + friendly altercations along the way

Joey Veltkamp is right: there's always more to do and see than anyone can do or see, etc, etc., but here's a few photos from the Whiting Tennis/Claudia Fitch opening at Greg Kucera, which I both did and saw.

Of course, I am partial to Claudia's large format drawings, which are simultaneously decadent and delicate. I especially love the faint detail on some of her drawings of overlaid pencil lines: the bold graphite lines situated over a lacework of erased and half-erased impressions of older marks, which give the impression of a palimpsest....


Sharon Arnold and Shaun Kardinal KO in Occidental Park


Whiting Tennis: Walleyed at Greg Kucera


Dawn Cerny & Whiting Tennis


Katy Stone & Gala Bent


Chez moi: Ms. Arnold says my charcoal-ridden
orange crush nails are Marilyn Minteresque!