Afternoon links

I promise a real update soon. In the mean time, three things you should check out if you're in Portland:

• Reed professor Michael Knutson has a show at Blackfish Gallery, opening this Tuesday September 2nd.
  
• Art in the Pearl takes place over Labor Day weekend; last year it pulled over 70,000 visitors. Over a hundred artists! Food! Community! Theoretically good weather! Should be fun.
• A new exhibit opens at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Manuf®actured:
  The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects.

Morning links

• NY Times on the opening of India's first Contemporary art museum.
• Suddenly: Where We Live Now opened yesterday at Reed College's Cooley Gallery. After taking a quick look yesterday, it's worth checking out.
• The Minnesota Star-Tribune on public art.

Check out...

Eadweard Muybridge at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art, up until August 30th. (PORT blogs on Muybridge and The Matrix).

Morning Links

• Bldg Blog on mapping the interiors of Mayan ruins.
• MoMA and the Guggenheim fight to protect their Picassos.
• Tim Crouch's England will be at the TBA in September-mark it in your calendar.
• Maya Lin's local commissions kick off.
• Today is the last day of the Portland Zine Symposium at PSU.
• If you're in Seattle, check out this public art opportunity.
  

Mark Jenkins

Today I bring you the street installations of Washington D.C. based artist Mark Jenkins, whose interventions into the daily grind are both thought-provoking and alive with black humor:

Friday links

• Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye made from legos.
• Life Without Buildings on David Byrne's Playing the Building.
• Artdish reviews Geoff McFetridge and Leo Saul Berk, two Seattle installations.
  
• Edvard Munch's Madonna was stolen at gunpoint 4 years ago today, so I'm celebrating its freedom by displaying it below.

Kienholz

Everyone's talking about Ed Kienholz after LACMA purchased his The Illegal Operation. I've been working on a post about PAM's first-rate Kienholz, Useful Art #5: The Western Motel (above), which should rear it's head in the next couple of days.

P.S.

OPENWIDEpdx is a new photoblog of Portland exhibitions. Also, I've been thinking about Robert Motherwell's At 5 in the Afternoon (below) ever since I saw it on a recent visit to the De Young. Impressively, it's one of the few paintings that can rival Herzog and de Meuron's architecture.

Kanye West's living spaces...

...from Dezeen. Also, Kanye's way into Andy Warhol, apparently. His apartment was designed by Claudio Silvestrin, and is in a midtown Manhatten block.

Shows in Portland right now

• I've already linked to Lee Kelly's show at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, up until August 30th. His Mouth of Night (above) is on display.
  
• Catch Surface Tension at the galleryHOMELAND an exhibition of Scratching the Surface artists. Up until September 7th. Make sure to check out the work of TJ Norris and Marc Dombrosky.
• Ethan Jackson converts the New American Art Union into a camera obscura. August 20th through October 5th.
• The ceramics of Gertrud and Otto Nazler are at the Museum of Contemporary Craft until January 25th 2009 (image right).
• A first stop should be the photography of Donald Weber and Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine at Blue Sky Gallery.
  
• A pretty exhaustive list of PNCA alums that have shows around town.
  

Tuesday links

• Bldg Blog on the work of photographer David Maisel, who photographed the cremated remains of the Oregon dead.
• NY Times on Catherine Opie.
• The Oregonian reviews the latest show at Laura Russo.

Zhang Huan and Rebecca Belmore at VAG

Zhang Huan's Altered States exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery is an overview of a career that encompasses both the visceral and the contemplative. Major works, like 12 Square Meters, are presented alongside more recent sculpture and photography.

Much space is devoted to his Memory Door series, of 2006 (below). It is a highly effective meditation on the rapidly changing landscape of Chinese society; their fusion of history, memory, and pliable material, speak to the didactic quality of the pieces, as well as their grounding in a Chinese visual language. In an accompanying video Zhang Huan emphasizes their position as products of a peculiarly Chinese environment: "It was easy to find a foundation," he remarks about his return to Shanghai after living in New York.

His ash sculptures look understated next to the more spectacle-driven works of his earlier career, like 1/2 or My New York. They work quietly, and grow in the gallery with each re-evaluation. Meanwhile, his more recent sculptures of 'Buddha fingers' would look far better uncovered in an urban wasteland. Representing sacred relics transposed into the materials of the industrial modern age, they are uncomfortable reminders of the role spirituality plays in that age, as well as a commentary on ideology-driven iconoclasm.

Rebecca Belmore's retrospective, across the hall from Zhang Huan, pales in comparison. The sheer intensity of Zhang Huan's personality threatens to overwhelm his own exhibition and certainly towers over Belmore's. It's simply a case of wrong place, wrong time.

'Krazy' at VAG

Two things are immediately obvious at Krazy, the Vancouver Art Gallery's take on the world of comics. 1) it is an unparalleled visual feast of pop culture, and 2) it is a very effective populist draw, pulling in crowds that wouldn't normally set foot in VAG.

The use of practitioners as co-curators (immensely respected names in the comic world, such as Art Spiegelman) makes for an accessible entry to an exhaustive overview of the medium, as well as lending an air of authenticity - presenting the big names in dialogue with their heroes. It does, however, lose the meaty scholarship that usually goes into VAG's smartly curated shows. That said the visual art section, curated by VAG's sen, Claes Oldenberg, Marcel Broodthaers, Ray Lichtenstein, Vancouver Art Galleryior curator Bruce Grenville, has some gems for the intellectual crowd. Seeing Lichtenstein (below) and Oldenberg next to their pop culture inspirateurs puts them in a different light than when seen in generalist institutions of 'high' art. The context also brings Marcel Broodthaers' slide installation Ombres Chinoises to life, slap in the middle of its references. Cao Fei's seminal Cosplayers (still left) comes into its own here, a welcome jolt that dramatizes the audience/work relationship in an exhibition that largely views comics on their own terms.
The Ghost in the Shell exhibit is the high point, an extended meditation by a number of artists on the ideas of character and representation, deconstructing and re-constructing the medium of comics in a way that Rauschenberg did for print media.

The oversized store on each floor is both strangely appropriate and barely separable from the exhibit.

Spiral Jetty update

The drilling permit that threatens Robert Smithon's Spiral Jetty has been temporarily rejected, due to "inadequate response to detailed questions regarding their proposal". Short term victory, but as oil becomes scarcer and more valuable, art-lovers will have a fight on their hands in the near future.

Architecture and PDX links

• PORT interviews Brad Cloepfil of Portland-based Allied Works Architecture. Good stuff. Also, Jeff Jahn reviews Jacqueline Ehlis' Serenade show (image below) at the NAAU.
• Studio Klink's newest project photos; complete with rabbits.
• D.K. Row reviews Lee Kelly at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, up until August 30th.
• A sneak peak of Portland-based artist T.J. Norris' new video installation.
• The BBC goes in search of De Klein and Sterling, who claim to make an "open source" version of Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull..."we are the end of art".

The Myth of the American West 2: SAM Next

On display until October 26th at SAM is the first piece commissioned for the Next series, a site-specific-installation by Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen. Its spatial simplicity and material focus evoke the minimalism of Robert Morris and Donald Judd, while the use of Douglas fir orients it squarely in the constructive tradition of the Northwest. Michael Darling, SAM's curator of modern and contemporary art, writes that "Tuazon and Hansen's explorations of stripped-down architecture are inherently concerned with function". The architectural points that the artists choose to include act like flags that mark all the points needed to create a functioning shelter. An underwhelming experience at first, the piece takes a while to work its magic, but resonates quietly and more effectively than most of its conceptual influences. Perhaps that's just the Northwest in me speaking, but it stimulates a reflection on both the conditions of living space and the narrative of human/nature interaction of the Great Northwest.

The Myth of the American West 1: Frederick Church at SAM

Downstairs from the Impressionists at SAM is a monumental Frederic Church (A Country Home). After Monet and co. I was struck on a recent visit by the extent to which he relies on the voyeuristic intent of the viewer to people his landscapes. They reference both the cultural meme of the frontier myth (the Turner thesis), and the Romantic idealization of nature.

Morning links

• Bldg Blog on inflatable churches.
• The trial over the 1978 theft of a Cezanne continues.
• Grinnell's Donald Bartlett Doe on why the University of Iowa shouldn't sell it's Jackson Pollock. Also on the story: MAN interviews Des Moines Art Center director Jeff Fleming.
  
• FBI finds a 'treasure trove' of stolen art.
• The Times of London on OMA's newly completed CCTV building.
• Jonathon Jones has a fit of nausea over video art.
  

Impressionism at SAM

The Inspiring Impressionism exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum works surprisingly well, presenting major works by Cassatt, Monet, and co. in conjunction with both direct inspirations and contextual frames of reference. It is well curated (although some captions left a little to be desired, such as the gushing over Renoir's "lovely still lifes"), and the evolution of Impressionism as a coherent visual language is articulated with little jargon or unnecessary frills.

The most telling part is the acknowledgment of the Impressionist debt to 16th and 17th century Flemish still life painting; the juxtaposition of Cezannés fruit with the opulence of his Dutch forebears emphasizes both his debt to them and the revolutionary way that Impressionism broke with their traditional language.

Northwest links

• The Tacoma Art Museum announces the finalists for its 2009 Northwest Biennial.
• Jen Graves reports that Cat Clifford is moving to Houston.
• Deborah Butterfield's well known horse sculptures are on display at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle until August 23rd.
• I am just a little bit in love with Vancouver artist Roy Arden's photographs of radios at the Galerie Tanit:

The next couple of days...

...will be Seattle and Vancouver themed as I make my way up the I-5. A favorite Northwest art moment: Vancouver-based photographer Jeff Wall has always impressed me, but I gained a new appreciation for his The Pine on the Corner (above)after Peter Galassi pointed out its possible evocation of Vancouver painter Emily Carr's Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (below).

Evening links

• OMA's CCTV building gets closer and closer to completion.
• Jonathon Jones on the Turner show at MoMA:

  Perhaps he's just too sublime for the shrunken artistic spirit of 21st century New York.

• The Oregonian reviews the Warhol show at the Maryhill Museum of Art.
• Dezeen interviews Patrizia Moroso.
  

Howard House

There's a great show up at Howard House gallery in Seattle curated by Sara Callahan titled Ask a Banana Baby: Contemporary Swedish Video and Photography. Nathalie Djurberg's video In Our Neighborhood (still below) steals the show. Martin Klimas' photos are also worth a look.

Tseng Kwong Chi

Tseng Kwong Chi's trademark black and white self-portraits are part performance art, part photography, all social commentary on a complex level.