Photoworks is another great artist's resource. I've been using them since they used to be Seattle Filmworks and I was in art school back in Seattle from 1977-1981.
As far as I know, Photoworks is the only place around that you can send any roll of film (any type or kind or brand) and get (if so selected) prints, slides, negatives, a CD ROM of the images and a private webpage where all your images reside and you can email them around.
This is a great archiving method for artist's works - you have the CD ROM to stash away, the slides to send around for competitions, reviews, etc., the prints for the album, negs for reprints and a web site to keep records of your images in case you lose all the other stuff.
And it's all done at a really reasonable price - in fact a lot less than if you take them to your local place to get just prints and negs.
Sunday, October 26, 2003
Saturday, October 25, 2003
Artnotes has one of the funniest posts (see her Oct 22 post) ever on the subject of ...John Currin, Bea Arthur, and gigantic nipples.
For anyone who thinks that art critics and museum curators are subjective and look at every show that they review or select with a clear, subjective eye, free from agendas and prejudices: Wake up!
Case in point. Today's Post has a rare Saturday visual arts review by Paul Richard, who retired a while back as that paper's Chief Art Critic.
Richard writes a very good, elegant and informative review of Mississippi artist Walter Anderson (1903-1965) from Anderson's show: "Walter Inglis Anderson: Everything I See Is New and Strange" at the Smithsonian Institution's Arts and Industries Building, on the Mall next to the Castle.
Richard was "amazed" by Anderson's work and writes that "the makers of great American watercolors -- Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, John Marin, Charles Demuth -- are a select few. Anderson is worthy of inclusion in that company."
And this brings me to the point of my first paragraph about critics and curators.
First curators: Richard informs the reader that "The Hirshhorn, the Phillips and the Corcoran glanced at the idea of exhibiting the Andersons sent on tour this year by the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs, but nothing came of it. Their mistake."
My opinion: With the exception of maybe (a looooong maybe) the Phillips, I don't think any dead American artist with Anderson's background and subject matter would ever get a microsecond of interest from the Hirshhorn or the Corcoran, unless there were a lot of other sundry variables in the offer. It's just not where these curators' interest and focus are aimed at the moment.
About critics....
Richard's replacement at the Post as the new Chief Art Critic was Blake Gopnik, who came to the Post from the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail.
And Gopnik's background, education, training and formation - and thus his subjectivity, agendas and likes and dislikes - are radically different from Richard. This gives us two men who held and now hold the same powerful pulpit with two very different views of what is good art.
I think that the chances that Gopnik would be "amazed" by Anderson's art are about the same as the chances that Laura Bush will elope with Osama Bin Laden. In fact I think that in Gopnik's books, the Anderson show may just beat the J. Seward Johnson show at the Corcoran that Gopnik brutalized a few weeks ago when he wrote: "This is the worst museum exhibition I've ever seen."
And this is where it could be fun (I've rambled too long).
Wouldn't it be fun if the Post sent both Richard and Gopnik to review the same show and then publish the former and current Chief Art Critic's views and points and words about the exact same show? And to make it more interesting - don't let them in on the idea.
It would not only be a great service to readers to see two points of view (like the Editorial page is sometimes supposed to do) applied to the fragile world of art criticism, but also a lesson to all who'll then discover that art critics, like wine critics, are a product of their own tastes, and not arbiters of what is good or bad in art.
Friday, October 24, 2003
Only a year to go for the exhibition I wish was already here: Ana Mendieta's retrospective at the Hirshhorn. Here's something I wrote about Mendieta and "Latino art" a while back.
The Corcoran's "Beyond the Frame: Impressionism Revisited, the Sculptures of J. Seward Johnson, Jr." has been brutalized in the critical press practically everywhere, and yet as bad as the show is, there's a conceptual connection between Johnson's work (take a famous Impressionist painting and make it into a lifesized 3-D tableaux of statues) and the Turner Prize-nominated Chapman Brothers in Britain.
Jake and Dinos Chapman's early work was based on Goya's series of etchings, Disasters of War. Initially they used plastic figures to re-create Goya in a miniature three-dimensional form, and like Johnson (later on), one of these 83 scenes became a life-sized version using mannequins (Johnson is a multimillionaire and thus he creates bronze statues).
This sculpture, Great Deeds Against the Dead of two mutilated and castrated bodies, was shown at the famous "Sensation" show in London in 1997.
I suspect that no museum in America would dare to show Great Deeds Against the Dead, but it is remarkable that the connection between Johnson and the Chapman Brothers is so obvious and yet the critical reaction to their work so vastly different.
I also suspect that the sickly sweet overexposure of Impressionism as the subject of Johnson's works has something to do with the negative critical reaction to his work, while the macabre nature of Goya's etchings brought to a life size display, appeals to the gimmick of "shock" that has become the standard and Achilles heel of contemporary British art.
By the way, the Chapman Brothers have moved on, but continue to use mannequins in their artwork, which they say is about "producing things with zero culture value, to produce aesthetic inertia - a series of works of art to be consumed and then forgotten." To me that brings them even closer to J. Seward Johnson.
On Fridays, Weekend section art critic Michael O'Sullivan reviews area galleries and/or museums for the Post. Today he reviews "Civic Endurance" at Conner Contemporary Art (in my opinion one of area's best art galleries) in Dupont Circle area as well as "African American Quilts From the Robert and Helen Cargo Collection" at the Textile Museum also in Dupont Circle area.
Busy night in the DC artscene last night with the Colby Caldwell opening at Hemphill Fine Arts, the BLANC opening at the Mexican Cultural Institute and the Whitman-Walker Clinic "Art for Life" charity auction held at the very beautiful OAS building on 17th Street. I was very pleased to see that most pieces of artwork donated auctioned off very nicely, raising much needed funds for the Clinic's Latino services.
Whitman-Walker Clinic is a non-profit community-based health organization serving the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region. Established by and for the gay and lesbian community, the Clinic is comprised of volunteers and staff who provide or facilitate the delivery of high quality, comprehensive, accessible health care and community services, especially committed to ending the suffering of all those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS.
You can donate to the clinic online here.
