On a political note...

Read this story in the Columbian, by friend and fellow Reedie Celia Hassan about her detention in Israel. Serves as a reminder of the shortcomings of Obama, as well as the problematics of an apartheid state.

PAM's hidden gems...

Three things I recently discovered at the Portland Art Museum that are worth checking out:

1. Michael Spafford's Rape of Europa. This painting hangs on the 4th floor of the Belluschi building. Most of Spafford's works deal with Greek imagery, but very few of his pictures approach the visual complexity of PAM's one. It's a large, powerful work that sucks you in and pushes you around.
2. Go one floor down and The Graphic Work of Melville T. Wire is tucked away, unpublicized and only on display until August. A series of prints and etchings, his landscapes are of rural and frontier scenes, opening up a fast vanishing world. The series is a fascinating glimpse into a pre-industrialized Portland...this mention from Willamette is about the best I can find on the artist. Go find it!
   
3. My favorite moment in PAM is the display of Franz Kline's Rue opposite Annie Liebowitz's photograph of Steve Martin in costume as the painting. Apparently it was Rolling Stone's worst-selling cover of 1982. Compare...

P.S.

Mu Xin is my favorite artist of the day.

Art intersecting with POLITICS

This interview with Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei is a wonderful example of the problems facing artists today, especially those who attempt to work in a political paradigm. Because of his superstar status in the international art world Ai Weiwei is able to speak relatively freely about Chinese politics, in a way that most of his contemporaries aren't; his recent refusal to work with government on the new Olympic stadium went largely repercussion-free.

Art, he argues, is not separate from politics. Rather it is an extension of the human condition; which necessarily includes politics and social change. Max Beckmann (more posts on him later) disagrees, separating politics and art into two separate realms. As far as I can see, however, the debate swings in Ai Weiwei when art enters into culture and becomes used by a political system. The political consequences of artistic creation can be argued over, but the moment art becomes a tool, or shapes a culture, it's politics and power must be critically examined by the artist.

Food for thought.

3 things I like about art

This post is dedicated to THINGS I LIKE ABOUT ART. Being an art major can be difficult, and sometimes you have to remind yourself why you're doing what you're doing-thankfully there are those moments that help you remember what's so special about all that paint and canvas...

1) Coming across an unfamiliar artist and dropping whatever you're holding in sheer astonishment.

This week I bring you Kathe Kollwitz. After being knocked flat by her woodcuts and lithographs I bought a Bertolt Brecht play because it featured her art on the cover. She breathed life into print making in a way that a lot of her contemporaries couldn't.

2 - Enlightening moments in art museums.

After months spent mocking Kenneth Noland's No. One (right) for it's boring qualities, I walked past it in the Portland Art Museum and everything about the painting came together. I realized that it's almost a paint-by-numbers (pun intended) evocation of spatial harmony. It carves out a piece of non-Chuangtzian resolution, all the way acknowledging the limits of any such attempt. Thus, Kenneth Noland I salute you.

3 - Good writing about art.

Reading John Berger's essay Article of Faith, I figured out what has bothered me about Mondrian (below) for so long. Like other De Stijl artists he attempted to paint a universally objective sum (perhaps read blueprint) of human experience. He tried, as Berger quotes, "to be as objective as possible". I have always been struck, however, by an absence in Mondrian-despite his reduction of life to it's essentials of primary colors, background, shades, and line, he misses the curve. What made life with living for Lucretius and the Epicureans (the swerve that lent humans agency) is missing. As Berger puts it, "what is missing is an awareness of the importance of subject experience as a historical factor." Thank you, oh non-pretentious critic for being a catalyst for epiphany.

Links

A real post forthcoming this evening. Until then:

• Kenneth Baker's review of Frida Kahlo asks why her fame tops her husband's. Perhaps because post-modernism has sacrificed the narrative?
• Whiting Tennis won the Contemporary Northwest Art Award. Check out a podcast with Jen Graves of The Stranger.
• Interesting post on Bldg Blog about an empty mall in China.
  

PAM updates

It's all change at the Portland Art Museum this weekend, as both Ed Ruscha and the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards go up. In preparation, PORT interviews Ed Ruscha (who else is excited as hell?!), and I start finalizing a post on Klaus Moje so that I can pretend to be up to date.

In other news- Zhang Huan has his first museum survery at the Vancouver Art Gallery. My dad liked it, if that helps.

So Jackson ain't crazy after all!

Interesting note. The University of New South Wales discovers fractal patterns in Jackson Pollock paintings. "Rather than mimicking Nature, he adopted its language", according to the study. Are they really that different? As far as I can see Pollock, in a mix of conscious and consciously dissociative action created works that speak to both sides of the argument.

Jess

So I've been promising this for a while, thoughts on Jess: To and From the Printed Page, the exhibition showing at Reed College's Cooley Gallery. A chemist at the Manhatten Project, Jess Collins quit the DOD to explore the bohemian world of 1950s San Francisco where he become the lover of the poet Robert Duncan. The exhibition collects work in various mediums from a number of points in his career.

While his painting is distinctly uninteresting, Jess' collages are worth the trip alone. They combine rich imagery from the occult, the homoerotic, and the everyday, opening up alternate worlds were Victorian gentlemen play darts with sphinxes and Dick Tracy. As social commentary they're devastatingly leftist, as works of artistic creation they're laced with interesting narratives. There's a plethora of lines to follow in each image, and they come together to make a forbidding prolific display of creativity.

The artist's sense of humor pervades his work, but there's a dark side too. The exhibition is an immersion in the American avant-garde, but also a trip in to a psyche that became disillusioned with the culture and thought structure of society. As the Cooley Gallery website points out, Jess' work has much in common with the surrealist collage of Max Ernst, both artists who were traumatized by the global cataclysm of war and rebuilt new lives.

Quick thought.

Zheng Zaidong discusses how his exploration of the sites of traditional Chinese paintings connected him to a culture of art production, the experience moving him to understand the relationship between nature and art. He's totally right. Far too much of art these days is almost entirely self-referential, stuck up it's own Greenberg-inspired arse. All the avant-gardism of the early twentieth century helped create a narrative of painting-inspired painting. When done well it's a great exploration of a medium and a breaking of limits, a reconceptualization of the relationship between art and artist, audience and narrative-but when done poorly, or in the grand spirit of mediocrity, it's artistic masturbation.

Which is why it's great to see an artist who is unafraid to create without undue recourse to the market, to the 'fashion', or to the world of abstract conceptualization that-while vitally important-tends to suck the unintellectual benefits out of art.

Would you look at that...

Bob Dylan paints too.

Pretentious Artspeak

Test your artspeak skills, or simply marvel at the art world's ability to be obscure and ridonkulous over at C-Monster.

Olympic sculpture park roundup

Richard Serra - Wake

The Olympic Sculpture Park has come a long way since I saw it first, at the inaugural opening in 2007. It's now installed most of its holdings and has got enough momentum to start showing traveling exhibitions. Geoff McFetridge's introduction to the park at the PACCAR pavilion adds another dimension.

The traveling exhibition, Dennis Oppenheim's Safety Cones seems less like a 'sly pitch for a greater awareness of the space that surrounds us', as SAM bills it, but rather an easy way to separate the park from the city. The giant orange cones (right) are displayed at key points and boundaries. This is a pity, because the potential of the park lies in its ability to integrate with the city. Alexander Calder's Eagle is fast becoming an iconic part of the skyline, while the controversial Oldenberg piece on loan from the Allen collection (below) has become a familiar landmark for passing cars. Speaking of those cars; the park, which spans a road, a railway, and a popular jogging/cycle path ought to be able to develop some sort of relationship with its thoroughfares right?

Wrong. The pieces themselves, such as Tony Smith's Stinger and the Richard Serra's popular Wake are great examples of art that interact with space in such a way to transform the viewer's experience. But Mark di Suvero's Bunyon's Chess is the only piece in the entire park that truly looks like it belongs to the Northwest, and integrates itself into a narrative of sea, mountain, and sky. It works in a way that most of the other sculptures do not, when taken in relation to the world beyond the park.

Links Links Links...

I disagree with Jonathon Jones' discussion of Banksy, but a great introduction to the work of Cy Twombly. Whose graffiti is 'real world' enough to inspire street artists like the aspiring Basquiat, but also riddled with intellectualisms...

In another news, two Reed profs have been nominated for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards. Gerri Ondrizek and Michael Knutson are both among the 28 finalists whose work will be hanging at the Portland Art Museum June 14th to September 14th.

Mimi Gates

The Stranger on the retirement of SAM's Mimi Gates, "the single most powerful person in art in Seattle."

Updates

The last few days have been post-free, due to my recent move. However here's what should be coming up in the next week:

• Klaus Moje at PAM;
• Thoughts on Cao Fei's RMB City;
• An expanded post of the Olympic Sculpture Park;
• FINALLY a post on Jess: To and From the Printed Page.

Stay tuned...