Since “Pacific Standard Time,” the comprehensive survey of art in Southern California from 1945 to 1980, organized in 2011 at multiple venues, documentation of artists from that innovative and experimental period has been on reset. The early 1970s, in particular, were a watershed, as young artists emerging in the wake of the game-changing 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, turned to conceptual and performative practices the boundaries between them blurred. Some, like Ed Ruscha, extended the notion of object making into specific sites of investigation, the surreal nature of Southern California itself chief among them.

Raul Guerrero was born in 1945 in Brawley, California, and is currently living and working in San Diego. He was an active part of the groundbreaking scene of the early 1970s, and has continued in the decades since to contextualize the hybrid culture of Southern California.

In his second solo show in New York City, and his first at Ortuzar Projects, we’re introduced to over 20 years of Guerrero’s ongoing trajectory, from 1971 through 1993. That he began his career at a unique moment in Southern California isn’t lost on Guerrero—this is the time of Chris Burden’s most notorious performances, the 1972 Womanhouse of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, and the work of David Hammons, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari (his first teacher) and Doug Wheeler. Al Ruppersberg, Jack Goldstein, Vija Celmins, William Leavitt, and James Welling were all Guerrero’s peers.

In conversation, Guerrero often uses the phrase, “by coincidence,” usually in appreciation of the fortuitous events that marked his journey and aesthetic.

“Since I was a child, every summer my family and I would travel north and work as migrant workers,” he says. “All the accoutrements we’d need for the summer, the pots and pans, everything, were loaded into the back of my father’s flatbed truck. As we’d go over the 101 Freeway, from the back of the truck I’d gaze out at the Capitol Building, and think, ‘Wow, this is Hollywood.’  We’d stop and cook our meals right by the side of the road, and join the encampments by the Merced River, and suddenly there’d be so many other people, Anglos, Oakies, African Americans, gypsies, Mexicans, and Mexicans from Texas. My aspiring family eventually became middle class, and at 16, I’m lying under a vineyard, wondering, what I’m going to do with my life? I hitchhike down to Mexico City and 4 years later I’m in Chouinard Art Institute. On the first day of class, I found myself sitting next to Jack Goldstein. Can you imagine? He looked just like Paul McCartney, and we became close friends.”

At the Chouinard, which later became part of CalArts, Guerrero understood Duchamp’s work instantly and found it liberating, the essential foundation of his aesthetic philosophy. Not only was he drawn to the concept of the assisted readymade, but also to the subliminal power of a single, iconic object or image. This, for Guerrero, resonated with another influence—Carl Jung’s theories of archetype and the collective unconscious.       

Among the 46 pieces in the exhibition, the earliest are Guerrero’s Moroccan watercolors from 1971, shown here for the first time. These come with the intriguing backstory that sparked their creation. At the suggestion of his friend and mentor Ed Kienholz, Guerrero sold all his belongings and headed to Europe. “By coincidence” (again) he managed to meet everyone right away: sitting next to Francis Bacon at dinner in London, he meets Lee Miller, (Man Ray’s model and muse), and meets his idol, Richard Hamilton, and this is just the first week. He ventures down to Morocco, and soon was living on a few dollars a day in El Ksar Seghir, a small village outside of Tangier. The series of watercolors are intimately sized, as they were created to be postcards for his girlfriend. He shares the dazzling ambiance in beautifully patterned, detailed, and hallucinogenic pieces in which teapots, tiles and other domestic objects with their exotic symbols and arabesques vibrate in talismanic bands of energy—reverberations from the local hashish.

After that summer, Guerrero returned to LA blazing. In just a few years he made significant bodies of work in photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and video. Each of these directions could have fuelled a lifetime of work. Guerrero is a gifted and emotional photographer, as evidenced by his California Sur Photographs from 1972. (He cites the Mexican movies of Luis Bunuel as a childhood passion.) These photos were his personal documentation of a two week road trip through Baja with artist friends. The compositions are effortless. Throughout his photographs, Guerrero’s utilization of light is mysterious, otherworldly, and exquisitely tender, as in the ethereal portrait, for example, of his elderly grandmother, who seems to hover between the tangible and spiritual realms.

Another standout in his multifaceted career is the assisted readymade: Rotating Yaqui Mask(1974) is a seminal, declarative work. Guerrero describes this piece as a formal exploration of, and direct response to, Duchamp’s “Rotating Glass Disc,” but the personal choice of the Yaqui mask can be unsettling. For me, the psychic energy released from the mechanized spinning of this ritual object multiplies seismically in a fearsome way, the context feeling both taboo and dangerously displaced. Similarly, in his movie “Primitive Act” of 1974, Guerrero is squatting and naked among rocks and shrubs, reenacting the primitive discovery of fire.

Seeking a more subjective, and pliable medium, since the 1980s Guerrero has focused on oil painting. Among those on view are four selections from his Oaxaca series from 1984 plus La Mujer of the Puerto from 1993. The Oaxaca series was done on location and, like the Moroccan watercolors, he entrenches himself in the history and culture of this particular place. Guerrero treats stylistic representation like a local language and adapts a flat colonialist style relevant to his theme. Like many of the painters he admires —Walter Robinson, Neil Jenney, Lisa Yuskavage and Alida Cervantes — Guerrero opens the door to Kitsch and pulp desire. As if he is writing a detective novel, heembeds layers and clues in his post-conceptual approach.

Much of Guerrero’s process involves honing his attention and allowing his emotional responses to connect him not only to his own history but to that of the culture at large.He interprets his painting Vista de Bonampak (1984) for me:  “I want to capture not only what represents the place for me, but also a critique of the culture, so after visiting the archeological ruins of  Bonampak, once a Mayan city near Chiapas, Mexico, I imagined a jaguar, coveted within Mayan culture for ferocity and strength, stumbling on the scene of the murals, depicting men dressed as jaguar knights, in jaguar skins, capturing enemies for sacrificial purposes who are also dressed in jaguar skins.  Although I might question who is the most vicious creature in the jungle, I also want to make paintings that are interesting and beautiful.

“There’s a lot that can be said about the brutality of the system, especially with our current president, but I prefer images that don’t delve into it overtly.”

After 40 years of structured study of North America, Guerrero has a new theory:  “Because we’re living on a continent that was occupied by indigenous people through millennia, and their voice has been suppressed, their culture, especially in the artworld, is changing things subliminally by gaining a voice though artists, one way or another. It’s a philosophical and cultural virus that’s spreading. For example, John Baldessari grew up in National City, like I did, ten miles from the border. Now, here’s a major artist, he goes to Mexico and is exposed to all this stuff that you see coming out of Mexico that’s really interesting, but in fact it’s all indigenous culture.

“If you dig tacos, you’re being affected by an indigenous culture. You’re consuming part of that philosophical virus. It’s full of indigenous material: tortilla, beans, corn, the way it’s prepared—it changes the way you see your reality. What that reality is I’m not sure, but somehow that essence, that philosophy, is expressing itself nonetheless into the culture unbeknownst to us.

“In this encounter between culture and things,” he says, “your sense of reality is shifted. Artists like Baldessari, who’s making art about culture on a large scale, has had his view shifted, and then he turned all these other guys on at CalArts. Bizarre, right?”

Guerrera is planning a trip to the Amazon sometime later this year.

The post A Multifaceted Career: Raul Guerrero talks with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

“Why Not Judy Chicago?” at CAPC/Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (March 10 through September 4, 2016)

Most people, when they see smoke, run in the opposite direction. Not so Judy Chicago. This Olympian of feminist art sprints toward fire–that is if she didn’t ignite it herself (literally, in her pyrotechnic works). With hair the color of smoldering embers and a razor-sharp wit, Judy Chicago is entering her 77th year with as much determination to combat prejudice and redress the deficit of women’s work in the art world as when she appeared in boxing drag in a Los Angeles gym. That was back in 1970, when women were still barred by law from the ring.

“Why Not Judy Chicago?” at CAPC in Bordeaux, France examines the artist’s career from her graduate student years in California in the mid-1960s, through her Resolutions series of early 2000. Organized in collaboration with Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao and curated by Xabier Arakistain, the exhibition traces her multifaceted contributions as an artist, teacher, writer and activist. Arakistain, a longtime advocate for gender parity within museums and cultural institutions, has foregrounded two lines of Chicago’s work: her creation of a feminist iconography that denounces the oppression of women, and her efforts to invest the teaching of art and history with their contributions. It is particularly instructive to see this exhibition in France where the seeds of feminism were sown nearly two hundred years earlier than in the United States.

Presented in the Entrepôt Lainé, a vast warehouse built in 1824 for colonial goods (a story of dominance in itself), the exhibition unfolds through a sequence of arches and stone passageways. The diverse media and historic themes of Chicago’s oeuvre are well served by this cloistering, resonant architecture.

Mother Superette (1963), a work on paper made when Chicago was a graduate student, contains abstract figures that could be Cycladic female bench-pressers, but they also resemble Byzantine patterns from The Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones’s monumental survey of international decorative design, published in England in 1856. Though situated securely within a tradition of architectural and design history, her work was criticized by male professors at UCLA for imagery that was “too-feminine.” Conflicted by her desire for acceptance while repeatedly being told that “you couldn’t be a woman and an artist too,” she switched gears and began to employ abstraction in a more subversive way. Her goal was to use color, surface texture, and form to develop a vocabulary of embedded meanings relating to women’s knowledge, sexual independence, and agency. She had by then changed her name (matching the city she grew up in) and enrolled in an auto body painting class — the only woman out of 250 students. There, she mastered lacquer and spray-painting techniques — de rigueur in LA’s car and surfboard culture — that became an aesthetic foundation for her work for the next several decades.

Pasadena Life Savers Yellow Series #2 (1969-70), rendered in airbrushed mists of blue/green, yellow, and violet on reflective acrylic panels, represents a crucial turn in Chicago’s investigation of the perceptual and emotional impact of color, geometric diagrams, and spatial systems. But these are not just intellectual Op-Art exercises. The iconography of the Life Savers paintings is a visual code that plays out on all quadrants of a complicated field. Circles and hexagons stood for the cunt in both word and image, challenging its socially constructed, demeaning connotation. At the same time, Chicago employed her brand of abstraction in the macho arena of Finish Fetish, the West Coast version of Minimalism. Finish Fetish artists were inspired by California’s surf culture, light, air, and smog, making slickly perfect sculpture in glass, polished metal, plastic, and resin. Chicago’s art reflected these prevailing ideas yet denounced the phallocentrism of a culture in which women artists were essentially absent from major gallery exhibitions, museum collections, and university professorships. Only recently have the women who worked in this milieu, such as Helen Pashgian and Mary Corse, been “rediscovered” in important museum exhibitions.

Chicago’s pyrotechnic works addressed another set of concerns about war, the environment, and women’s rituals. In Immolation IV (1971) Faith Wilding is engulfed by orange smoke from burning flares that encircle her grey-tinted seated figure. This was one of Chicago’s Atmospheres (Duration Performances with Fireworks) of 1968-74, staged throughout California, sometimes with her students as participants. Utilizing colored smoke to soften and feminize the landscape, these ephemeral performances also called attention to the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, and the self-immolation of monks in protest of the war. Haunting documentary footage of the Atmospheres (accompanied by the music of Miriam Cutler) combines Impressionist fascination with the obscuring effects of smoke and fog and a contemporary artist’s outcry against violence in its many forms.

The revolutionary, pedagogical experiment of the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts is displayed in a series of documents from Womanhouse (1972) and never-before exhibited works by students of Chicago and co-founder Miriam Schapiro. Their inclusion in the exhibition is important in signaling the impact of the other women students who were part of the program. Collaborators Dori Atlantis, Nancy Youdelman and Karen LeCocq, for instance, were staging cheeky photographs that skewered gender stereotypes several years before Cindy Sherman began making photographs of constructed feminine identities in her Untitled Film Stills.

Rarely seen test plates portraying the physician Elizabeth Blackwell and the astronomer Caroline Herschel represent Chicago’s best known work, The Dinner Party (1974-79), her epic tribute to 1038 women who shaped the history of Western civilization. Vintage exhibition posters tell the story of the artwork’s international impact, the hundreds of volunteers and skilled artisans who contributed to its production, and its reverberating power as a cultural monument, now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum.

But beyond The Dinner Party, Chicago has yet to be fully assessed in relation to the socio-political history of narrative and mural painting in America. In Cartoon for the Fall (1987) images of labor, violence, and religion are delineated in the model for a monumental tapestry (woven by Audrey Cowan) for The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985-93). The project was the outcome of extensive research into Chicago’s Jewish heritage and created in collaboration with her husband, the photographer Donald Woodman, together with skilled artisans. I see the Cartoon as philosophically and visually linked to Thomas Hart Benton’s mural America Today (1930-31), and Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940-41). Benton’s mural represents the utopian dream of a new society but it also warns of the dangers of overconsumption. Lawrence’s narrative cycle (although more intimate in scale) confronts the harrowing journey of African Americans seeking economic and social equality during the interwar years.

The 18th-century French playwright Olympia de Gouze was a self-educated butcher’s daughter who in 1791 wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Women. “The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man,” she argued. “These rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.” Judy Chicago, the daughter of a medical secretary and post office employee who embraced civil rights, still runs with a torch that illuminates the achievements of women, and resists oppression in all its forms. If only there were a way to bring this exhibition to America.

The post The Boxer: Judy Chicago Retrospective in Bordeaux, France appeared first on artcritical.

Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock at the Institute of Contemporary Art
April 29 to August 14, 2016
118 South 36th Street (at Sansom Street)
Philadelphia, 215 898 7108

Entering “Louise Fishman: A Retrospective,” at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, NY, feels like balancing on a raft that is inadequate to cross the ocean it is floating on. The exhibition, organized by chief curator Helaine Posner, comprises more than 50 paintings and drawings created between 1968 and the present, and demonstrates the achievement of an artist whose work has invigorated the language of abstract painting. A concurrent exhibition, “Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, offers an instructive companion to this long-overdue survey. That show, curated by Ingrid Shaffner, explores a selection of small sculptures, leporellos (folded artist’s books), and five large paintings that reveal the breadth and scale of Fishman’s oeuvre.

My respect for Fishman’s work did not come automatically, as I initially perceived a bluntness in the work; it resisted entry. Over time, and with experience in the thicket of artmaking, her paintings have worked me over, and the Neuberger retrospective’s tight selection facilitates this effort. Posner’s mindful arrangement within the museum’s galleries gives Fishman’s work plenty of room to breathe, explicating the artist’s conceptual and spiritual concerns and revealing her creative trajectory. Smaller works on paper, arranged on freestanding walls in the center of the main gallery are less effectively supported. In the cavernous space of this gallery, they may have resonated more powerfully if positioned in tighter clusters. Seen in its entirety, however, the retrospective inspires a sense of awe, and finally, situates Louise Fishman within the tradition of American painting rooted in Abstract Expressionism and furthered through her singular vision and endeavor.

The earliest work in the exhibition, In and Out (1968), contains four wing-like shapes, flatly painted in pinks and black that open in an irregular symmetry from an implied vertical line at the canvas’s center. Graphite lines visible through the white ground reveal subtle adjustments to the hard-edged shapes as color creates a strong spatial pulse. To my eye, the painting speaks to the central core imagery that was being developed by feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, though Fishman attributes it more directly a response to Al Held’s black-and-white abstractions of 1967–69.

During the 1970s, in the crucible of New York’s emerging feminist movement, Fishman became acutely aware of gender discrimination and acknowledged her own isolation as a lesbian. As if to destroy the influence of the male-artist power structure, Fishman cut apart her canvases, reworking them into small sculptures oriented along a grid. Confronting her disdain for traditionally feminine work, she employed stitching, dying, and weaving. Untitled (1971), reminiscent of an abacus, is made of rubber, graphite, string, and staples on tracing paper. Transversed by a twisted thread, the amber hue of the rubber resembles skin knitting itself together or the ruled lines of an illuminated manuscript, influenced by Fishman’s childhood exposure to Hebrew texts. Fishman knew Eva Hesse, but her encounter with the 1971 memorial exhibition of Hesse’s work at the School of Visual Arts was the catalyst for her decision to work with that material.

The Angry Paintings of 1973 came out of Fishman’s deepening self-awareness in the consciousness-raising gatherings she attended. Her pain and rage were unleashed in a series of 30 text-based paintings identifying the artist’s contemporaries and predecessors. Ti-Grace Atkinson and Djuna Barnes were among those whose names were inscribed in bold letters obscured by slashes and drips. While they are the least formally interesting of Fishman’s works to me, these protestations are nevertheless unique documents of the living history of feminism, even today, when women who express anger still risk stigma.

Life has been drained from the tempered grays, ashen blacks, and steel blues of Fishman’s Remembrance and Renewal series. Inspired by a 1988 visit to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezín, Fishman made a group of paintings that were given Hebrew titles from Passover. Into her colors, Fishman mixed silt collected from the Pond of Ashes at Auschwitz, creating the granular surface of Haggadah (1988). Dybbuk (1990) comprises a reddish-black grid, like prison bars enclosing a sequence of dimly lit windows — the result of swiping brushstrokes dragged through the oily pigments. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is the earthbound soul of someone who has died, unable to be released. These elegiac works reflect Fishman’s concern with painting’s capacity to reflect psychological and physical states of imprisonment, just as they became a medium for transforming her grief upon witnessing the Holocaust sites.

Seven monochromatic paintings from the early 1990s represent an exponential leap in subject matter, scale, and surging physical gesture. Iron Sharpens Iron (1993) contains three charcoal-black bands on a white ground that stretch 10 feet up the canvas, then diverge. Fishman’s use of drywall knives and trowels yields a textural vocabulary of scraped and crusted surfaces, absorbing and reflecting light like hammered or rusted metal. The title, from a passage in the Book of Proverbs, means that through interaction and conflict we sharpen one another. Her history as a competitive athlete is also embedded within the aesthetic concerns of this work. Fishman relates her command of the boundaries of the canvas, gestural velocity, and physical confidence to pitching hardball and playing basketball as a teenager.

For There She Was is a magnificent, darkly luminous painting of 1998, whose title is appropriated from the last sentence in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The relationship between two characters who metaphorically merge into one comes to mind, as every color is turning into another. With interlocking passages of blue, gray-violet and black shot through with cadmium red-orange and burnt sienna, Fishman has created a vibrating field that reminds me of a Chinese garden at dusk. A collector of Chinese scholar’s rocks, Fishman also acknowledges that the landscape surrounding her old farmhouse upstate, as well as the practice of Buddhism has given her the ability to better understand her work as an artist.

Using paint’s viscosity as a metaphor for the power of water to buoy, submerge, and destroy, Fishman’s arm makes rapid swipes, cuts, and scrapes throughout her Raft of the Medusa (2011) and The Salty-Wavy Tumult (2012). J.M.W. Turner’s gory whaling pictures, with their allover facture, were not far from the artist’s mind as she smeared and twisted her reds around spumes of white in Margate (2015). Kreisleriana, (2015), divides the canvas into vertical bands of fiery yellows, reds, and blues that suggest the emotional contrasts of Robert Schumann’s work for solo piano. Because music is the most abstract art form, paintings in response to it can often be lame (illustrative) equivalents. That doesn’t happen here.

I see Fishman’s paintings in this domain as a reflection of her deep intellect and nuanced understanding of spatial and rhythmic structure. They are influenced by the focus and attention of a deep listener, but they are independent objects. At the top of her game, Louise Fishman translates aural, physical, and visual experiences into radiant and muscular works of art whose tension is maintained by the grid that anchors her fierce gesture. Her hard-won joie de vivre, born of new travels, immersion in music, and a contented relationship, underscore this substantive, if belated retrospective.

The post Fully Fathoming Louise Fishman: Two Surveys of Her Work appeared first on artcritical.

The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I travel there every few years and typically end up in the area during summer, missing the rain for which it’s infamous. This year I visited Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, seeing a lot of the gallery and museum scene. The Seattle Art Fair ran during the start of August. It’s mostly a small-ish regional fair, though there were booths by Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Zürcher, James Cohan, and other New Yorkers. I skipped it though, having a kind of snooty distaste for those conventions. I mean, who in their right mind would want to attend an art fair? Oof.

So I went straight for the regional institutions. There’s a lot to see. First: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. It’s set in the city’s hip and young U district, and it’s a smartly designed, well organized space. They show emerging and established artists in a variety of media. They do not have a large space, so there aren’t clusters of galleries with an expansive selection from their permanent collection. Instead, they have well-curated exhibitions and I had just missed the school’s MFA exhibition, which runs for a month, rather than the week that many New York students get.

On view while I was there was, among other things, Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: About half the air in a given space (2015), which was comprised of a large gallery filled almost to capacity by silver balloons. Visitors could enter through one of two doorways and push their way through the claustrophobic mass, being disoriented and kind of pleasantly bewildered by the balloons’ power to constrict and delight. Also on view: a handsome retrospective for photographer Ilse Bing, a show of un-stretched and shaped canvases by Allan McCollum and Karen Carson, and a solo show by Michelle Handelman, with video and photography conflating vampirism, psychotherapy, and class-and-queer antagonism. The video draws from a Silent-Film-era series about Parisian thieves, called The Vampires, so one can forgive Handelman’s melodrama. It’s richly textured in a fetishistic way, and the accompanying photographs are exciting.

A few days later I took the train down to Portland, where I met up with artcritical contributor, publishing magnate, and poet extraordinaire Paul Maziar, and his friends, who showed me the nightlife — great host and hostesses. We remarked on the aesthetic qualities in the bright redness of neon lights adorning one of the construction cranes which has been expanding the city of late. Maziar’s been consuming Marcel Duchamp, so we say, “Sure, why not? Call it industrial-scale readymade sculpture.”

Next morning I left my kind hosts and took a long walk into downtown of the beautiful city, finishing up at the Portland Art Museum. The institution is currently hosting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold (2010), which is displayed among the museum’s many galleries of Asian art and artifacts. The suite of 12 animal heads represents the Chinese calendrical zodiac, and is based on a sculpture formerly of an imperial garden outside Beijing, designed by Europeans, used by the Chinese elite, then looted by French soldiers in 1860. The scale and craftsmanship of Weiwei’s sculpture is spectacular, however, despite the didactics, I got the sense that I was missing something pretty fundamental about the subtleties of the artist’s choice of representation. Is it something about the Chinese government’s complicated relationship to Weiwei, to the nation’s own history, and the waves of European colonization and Chinese reclamation in these images? I can’t tell.

The aforementioned Asian art and artifacts galleries are really top rate. The layout of the building is labyrinthine, which can vary the experience between excited discovery and a confused, lost feeling.

Another exhibition, “Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,” collects more than 140 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the school, from between the 15th and 19th centuries. I can have a hard time with some of the flowery, academic work that the institution produced and inspired, but it’s hard to argue with some of the works on view in this show. Albrecht Dürer’s The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (ca. 1498), kind of made my jaw drop a little. And PAM also has a great selection of Modern and contemporary work, including a selection, on view now, of reductivist work by Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockburne, Judy Chicago, John McCracken, and others — stuff that really gets me going. And there’s a large display of photographs, which the museum calls a “Fotofolio,” by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston and Minor White. Their silver gelatin prints of the American West made me wish to flee New York and find an abandoned mission on top of a mountain.

Also there, now closed, was a show of David Hockney’s print suite, A Rake’s Progress (1975), along with a set of prints by William Hogarth, made in 1733, on which Hockney’s sequence is based.

Full from Portland, I went back to Seattle. I took a breather and went to the Seattle Art Museum, at which the main attraction is currently “Disguise: Masks and Global African Currents,” which was a kind of unremarkable show about artists using the imagery of African masks in their work. The hanging was gimmicky and impoverished, and several of the artists felt slight and arbitrary (no Keith Sonnier?). But, next to it was a great, like, really out of sight display of actual African masks, along with archival footage of performers at a carnival in the Côte d’Ivoire. That stuff is way more exciting and intellectually engaging than much of the show’s contemporary work.

As well, a small but nonetheless excellent show, called “The Duchamp Effect,” rounded up post-War artists making use of Duchamp’s innovations. There was a lot of toilet humor and pointing at contradictions between image, language, and actuality. One very smart touch was the inclusion of a photograph by Louise Lawler, showing two artworks in a collector’s home. Lawler’s photograph shared gallery space with the two artworks it pictures: a painting by Jasper Johns and a sculpture by James Rosenquist.

I left Seattle’s piney metropolis for an excursion north, to Vancouver. Even Canada’s border is beautiful, with enormous gunnera unfurling at the edges of Peace Arch border-crossing park, and a sculpture by Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han — a billboard-like form of negative space overlooking the Pacific inlet there. A few minutes away, Vancouver is a really, really pretty city, seemingly compacted into the natural concavity of the Salish Sea’s coast. There are tall skyscrapers, the city is sparklingly clean, and I arrived immediately after Pride weekend, with festive banners and the debris of feather boas all over the place. I mean, it’s a really beautiful city. And in Canada, HBO has its own regional programming, including mandated indigenous programs and movies, which are very cool and sort of an entertaining (if small) gesture at reconciliation after hundreds of years of genocide and oppression. I liked the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). It’s good.

There, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is hosting an enormous retrospective of Canadian sculptor Geoffrey Farmer, “How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?” I found myself thinking about Farmer’s tremendous archivist spirit, collecting and combining the pieces of National Geographic back issues, fiberglass sculptures, bits of signs, notes, tapes, vehicles, and all sorts of other things. It brought me back to a perpetual question in an era of explosive image production and distribution: is cataloguing and organizing one of the best strategies for an artist trying to cope, resist, or flow with such proliferation? I think probably yes. One small room held an archive of artist lectures and interviews on cassette tape, and invited visitors to sit and listen awhile.

On the ground floor was a great “show,” a display of works on paper from the museum’s collection, a trifle compared to the offerings that will be on view following the institution’s addition of a new space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The works on paper, over a hundred on one large wall, were intended to entice viewers to see the benefits of the costly and overdue expansion. The next gallery over showed work from another collection in “Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums,” with a handsome selection of paintings covering a spectacular historical range, while still appearing intellectually clear and to the point. Upstairs was a group show in several spaces, each artist given their own gallery. Called “Residue: The Persistence of the Real,” this exhibition of documentary photography studies the way that history is retained in images, as in Catherine Opie’s beautiful shots of Liz Taylor’s home and Geoffrey James’s absolutely just mind-blowing shots of Canada’s infamous Kingston Penitentiary, where inmates decorated the walls of their cells so ornately they could be mistaken for contemporary installation art.

Down the street, the Bill Reid Gallery shares the history and importance of First Nations’ arts, with a permanent display of work by Reid, one of Canada’s most famous contemporary indigenous craftsmen. Likewise, the museum promotes the continuing traditions of local tribes, including live, free-form Q & A with an artist working in the atrium. Sean Whonnock was there when I visited, and he told me a lot about the construction of regional iconography, about the craftsmanship of these artworks, his own life, and the traditions of his family and tribe. There’s a lot of great indigenous art and craft all over, and most of these museums had great collections, sustaining cultures that were almost completely wiped out during the preceding centuries.

Finally, back in Seattle, I hit up the city’s monthly First Thursday art walk, down at historic Pioneer Square. The galleries are, in many ways, like those in New York and anywhere else in the world: there are some you’d like to spend a lot of time in, others not so much. One major difference is the organization of openings, all on the same Thursday, with plenty of white and red wines, food, and live music. Totally alien, right? The atmosphere is festive and people are out to enjoy the scene, rather than trying to make the scene. I was taken by Greg Kucera Gallery, which had a diverse collection of works on view by self-taught artists, including Gee’s Bend quilts, Henry Darger paintings, drawings by James Castle and Bill Traylor, and so on. In the back was a show by Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic and creates large mixed-media drawings cataloguing all kinds of incidentals: dictionary definitions, sheepshank knots, flags of the world, rottweiler breeds. Blackstock was in attendance and was more open in his discussing his work than any New York artist you’ve ever met.

The whole trip, whirlwind that it was, showed me some new favorite art spots on the left coast. If you’re in the area, you’d be foolish to pass them up.

The post Northwest Notes: Dispatch from the Pacific appeared first on artcritical.

“The second year looks good,” commented Washburn, the type of dealer who makes returning to The Armory Fair Modern a pleasure. Her long-term dedication to a core group of New York School artists has paid off: she has material that no one else even has access to—rarities from estates and other connoisseur gems. Seen here: a 1960 Ray Parker and 1957 Nicolas Carone, with a 2006 Gwynn Murrill feline in the foreground.

SITTING PRETTY

It just wouldn’t be an art fair proper, without Botero and Francis. And those two works provide a provenance for the future: the recent Damien Hirst spin painting directly beside.

THE HAVE KNOTS

A sidelong glance from Knoedler’s Anastasia Ehrich says it all—everyone loves Catherine Murphy’s paintings.

This solo show features the first works Murphy has ever made as a series. She became “obsessed with seeing repetitive things in her house,” I was told. In each, she depicts the ring stains that wood knots make through common house paint, leaving ghost-like circles. Murphy, a master of visual double entendre, locates these within larger plays of geometry and perception.

PAPERWORKS POWERHOUSE

Reinvigorated by their recent move to 11th Avenue, and their launching of the new Senior & Shopmaker space with a show of paper pieces by New York hometown hero, Thomas Nozkowski, these paired dealers are taking their act on the road in search of greater visibility.

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Suggesting fractured reality, this piece was originally made by the French stripe master for a show at the Hirshhorn Museum, according to the New York dealers offering it.

FISTS OF FURY

Schultz is a globalist, with branch galleries in Seoul and Beijing and a pan-international neo-pop stable of artists. The work he stands before was sold at the outset of the fair for 130,000 euros, he told me. “Tonight, we eat good meat,” he crowed, with Teutonic glee, shaking his fists.

ECCENTRIC ABSTRACT

One hardly expects to see such outré sophistication coming out of a gallery from the rural heartland. Here, geometry is played against personal idiosyncratic vision by three extremists of post-war non-objectivism.

HAIL TO THE CHEF

Art writer Lilly Wei strikes a supplicating pose in the presence of Julian Schnabel’s massive 2007 self-portrait at Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki.

PHOTO BOOTH

From 20th Century photography masters to odd ephemera from newspaper vaults and police mug shot files, here’s a trove of American Studies-worthy artifacts. “The hippest buyers are museums, like the Metropolitan and the Modern,” Winter told me. “They’re willing to buy something more edgy than collectors.” He expanded, “in painting and sculpture, you don’t have the museums leading.” The reason?  “Maybe it’s because they don’t have to re-sell the stuff,” he added, wryly.

MARRIAGE COUNCIL

East End of Long Island veteran dealer Borghi mounted a series of Elaine de Kooning ink nudes, Portrait of Bill—An Intimate View, unflinching and direct. A show of comparative small works by the abstract expressionist couple rounded things out.

A DEALER’S SECRET

Parsons helped launch Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko, among others. Her own contribution as an artist is overshadowed. In this rangy survey, viewers were left to connect the many dots: with evocations of Forrest Bess, Milton Avery and Robert Motherwell.

TONGUE AND GROOVE

New York’s Gary Snyder/Project Space Gallery takes a curatorial approach, working the gap between pop and abstraction. Both artists pictured here were represented by Pace Gallery in the 1960s and then fell between the cracks. Maybe the time is right to take another look.

And that’s the art of art dealing at The Armory Show Modern—instinct and timing.

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