Airborne

Flying to the Left Coast today. On the way there I'll be reading Gerardo Arenado's Cada Quien Con Su Destino.

State of the Arts

Three years ago the Arlington Arts Center closed down for repairs and refurbishment. It was supposed to take nine months to complete the task.

Three years later, the newly renovated space re-opened its galleries (all nine of them) with a 69-artist group show showcasing 104 works by artists from various Mid Atlantic states. I am told that the opening night was huge, with around 800 people attending throughout the night.

Curated by five different curators, this re-opening group show nonetheless manages to hang together well and as with most group shows, offers a tremendous range of quality, subject matter and skill.

Titled "State of the Arts, A Mid Atlantic Overview," the exhibition was curated by Symmes Gardener, Director of the Center for Art and Visual Culture and an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, Carole Garmon, Associate Professor at Mary Washington University in Fredricksburg, Virginia, J. Susan Isaacs, Consulting Curator at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, and also an Associate Professor of Art History at Towson University, by Cindi E. Morrison, the Executive Director of the Lancaster Museum of Art in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the DC area curator was Stephen Phillips, Curator of the Phillips Collection.

And orchestrating this massive effort to cover all the states (and DC) that are the Center’s geographic focus was Carol Lukitsch, the Center’s curator and a DC area painter who exhibits with Gallery 10.

Of the 69 artists, 34 are from the District, Virginia and Maryland, and of these, I recognized 15. I was not familiar with the work of any of the artists from the other states.

The exhibition, like most group shows, has some superb work as well as some head scratchers, but unlike a lot of group shows, especially shows in a nine-gallery venue, it is rare when the best piece in the show is the first one that you see as you enter the Center.

I am referring to Claire Watkins' "Untitled (Parasites)," a kinetic, electrical wall sculpture that weds motors, magnets, painting, iron shavings, pins and a sharp, professional presentation that draws you in by its intimate size, and then fascinates and somewhat repulses you, with its almost organic, planned movement.

Watkins writes about her work:

The digestive system turns food into eyelashes.

I am in awe of the minutiae and delicate actions that make up everyday life. The machines I build reflect this awe and wonder. My work is intimate, curious and mesmerizing in its movement and gesture. The translation of energy is both a functional and conceptual part of my work. The circular movement of a motor is translated into a gesture that turns peacock feathers into entomological organisms. With movement, I make machines that become creatures.

Watkins is right, and she has brilliantly translated her awe of the minutiae into a superb vision with a work of art that boasts technical skill, beauty, repulsion and a hypnotizing ability to grab your attention. It is a rare marriage of these things, but it works well. The piece sold, and whoever acquired it got a steal and has a very good eye for an up and coming artist.

One does not have to walk far from Watkins to come across another strong piece, in this case Rachel Waldron’s large charcoal and acrylic painting of a group of girls playing the children’s game "Dog Pile." I haven’t seen Waldron’s works since she graduated from GWU a while back (and disappeared), but this piece marks a significant departure from her previous works, as its absence of any color is a full reversal of Waldron’s lavish employment of color in her previous works. The painting, full of movement and energy, does continue Waldron’s interest in narrative and action, and is one of the best paintings in the show.

Walking straight through, one enters the Tiffany Gallery, so named because one of the walls in the room is made of three large stained glass windows.

And there's a story worth telling here.

Three years ago, Arlington County staff rescued 13 stained glass windows from the Abbey Mausoleum, which was slated for demolition. Upon closer examination, someone discovered a signature pane on one of the windows that read "Louis C. Tiffany, NY."

Today three windows have been restored to their original beauty and are now installed at the renovated Center. It is a great story and we're lucky to have saved them. Unfortunately for the artwork, during sunny daylight hours, it casts a confusing blanket of colors all over the room, which is somewhat distracting.

Here Charles Ritchie's Self-Portrait with Night II and Self-Portrait with Night III stand out in an otherwise somewhat weak room. These mixed media pieces seem to employ anything that paper will hold, and Ritchie mixes watercolor, litho crayons, gouache, ink and graphite on paper to come up with dark, brooding works in spite of the colorful lights from the stained glass windows.

Also in this room are three pieces by Jiha Moon that are sort of a contemporary Sumi-esque (I think). I found them somewhat bland and lacking presence, but it proves the truth in the trite saying that "art is in the eyes of the beholder," as two of the three pieces had sold, proving that some art lover obviously disagrees with me! Good for Jiha, and good for art.

Most of the other artists in this gallery, mostly from Delaware and Pennsylvania, tend to come under the representational umbrella, but in my opinion fall too deep into the chasm that haters of representational work like to label “traditional,” such as Stephen G. Tanis’ "Lillies, Bowl and Vestment," a superbly crafted painting that offers only that. Interestingly enough, some of the other work in the artist's own website is a lot more interesting to me, so I think that the choice of a still life was perhaps a bad one.

The Upper Level Gallery offers us more work from Linda Hesh’s well-known "Safe and Suspect" series where she pushes racial and ethnic buttons through the manipulation of photographic portraits to morph the subjects into various skin and racial characteristics. Also in this gallery is Andy Moon Wilson’s small drawings (over a thousand of them) for five bucks a pop. Placed inside small zip-lock bags and then mounted onto the wall with pushpins, the drawings cover all subjects, styles and ideas and are a joy to anyone who takes the time to study the work of an artist clearly in love with art.

Other than Hesh’s works, photography is one of the weak areas in this group show, overcrowded with boring snapshots of buildings, walls and other mundane subjects, but one notable exception is the funny and contrived photography of FEAST, a Virginia collective of five artists (Terral Bolton, Terry Brown, Sherry Griffin, Stephanie Lundy and Chris Norris). In "Drunk on Doughnuts (lick)," a voluptuous, well endowed woman (looking remarkably like the actress that plays Karen in Will & Grace) licks her fingers as she’s about to embark in a massive doughnut consumption orgy.

In the lower level, the Experimental Galleries A and B are host to five installations, the best of which is Galo Moncayo's clever marriage of sound art with powdered pigments.

In this "Richard Chartier meets the Dumbacher Brothers" installation, Moncayo has arranged a series of speakers on the floor, and placed small amounts of powdered pigment on the diaphragms of the speakers. As sounds pop from the speakers, the diaphragms moves, constantly rearranging the pigment, in a pleasant organized cacophony of pops and movement. I was somewhat distracted by the mess of speaker wires all over the floor, but Lukitsch assured me that Moncayo slaved over the right placement of the wires. I am somewhat curious as to what this installation would be in a wireless environment.

Finally, I also liked Andrew Christenberry’s "Cross Wall Cabinet," a gorgeous wall sculpture showing a remarkable exploration of the cross as a symbol, and Annet Couwenberg’s "Act Normal and That’s Crazy Enough," a set of seven large cotton pieces that look remarkably like those neck ruffles that one sees Spanish nobles wearing in El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz. Each piece also has embroidered within it one of the words in the title. Couwenberg is the Chairperson of the Fiber Department at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

The new Arlington Arts Center brings back a familiar voice to our area’s art scene, and if this show is a vision of things to come, that voice comes back full of strength, diversity and vigor.

Welcome back!

Capitol File: New Magazine Coming to Town

From today's Reliable Source in the WaPo:

For the High-Gloss Lifestyle, a High-Gloss Magazine

Jason Binn publishes slick city mags that cater to glamorous people: He's behind Ocean Drive in Miami, Gotham in New York, Hamptons on Long Island, Aspen Peak and Los Angeles Confidential. Now he's wagering that his formula will work in Washington. During inauguration week, Binn, 37, came here to schmooze and talk up Capitol File, a quarterly that he says will launch in the fall.

"We're going to bring together some of the biggest boldface names in Washington as contributors," Binn tells us. "We're looking to give Washington a really luxe, full-color, glossy, comprehensive read. It'll be like a coffee-table book." The fast-talking, name-dropping Binn, a fixture on the New York party circuit, says Capitol File won't just focus on pretty faces, social climbers and fashionistas but also will cover politics, business and art. (Local angle: Binn's older brother, Jonathan P. Binstock, is curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran; he uses the family's original name.)

In competing with Washington Life and the monthly Washingtonian, Binn says his mag will be mailed free "to all the homes valued at over $1 million." He's also craving another rich market: Capitol File's promo for advertisers boasts of "a unique distribution partnership with NetJets," a private jet outfit. "With an average customer's net worth of $25 million, you will be in good company." Lofty targets indeed.

If Binn will really cover art in this new magazine, then he's already one up on Washington Life and Washingtonian, neither one of which have regular art coverage, much less reviews, etc.

Welcome to DC!

Gopnik on Rembrandt

The Washington Post's Chief Art Critic, Blake Gopnik, has a superb and interesting review of "Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits," opening today at the National Gallery of Art.

Critical Alignment (Is this the beginning of the U-turn?)

Witless, forgettable and silly Brit critics (and fools like me who take the hook), still debate why painting is King of the Hill, or is it? Or is it dying again?

Yawn... read it here.

The height of traditional, academic, old-fashioned, typical, elitist Artspeak writing is reflected in these words about Damien Hirst's overrated "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (... you know... that shark in formadelhyde that's now rotting and that, as Kriston points out, is heading to NYC):

To think of the shark gone makes me feel oddly uneasy. Lord knows, we British have had enough opportunities to see it, especially since it was the main attraction at County Hall until only a few moments ago. But it still seems a bathetic end for the old death threat, to be installed in Manhattan's Moma [sic] and inspected as an English eccentricity by the lizards of Fifth Avenue between a spot of brunch and some light shopping at Barney's.

Lizards! Fifth Avenue Lizards! Do they look like that GEICO Lizard?

Ooops! I mean Gecko; not Lizard.

I assumed that a Gecko is a Lizard, with apologies to all Lizard-Americans and Gecko-Americans... in case that I am wrong.

Geez...

Opportunities for Artists

The Whitney Museum of American Art has announced the two curators of the forthcoming "2006 Whitney Biennial Exhibition," considered by many to one one the nation's leading shows of contemporary American art.

The 2006 exhibition is being organized by Philippe Vergne, the French-born senior curator at the Walker Art Center and who has been named director of the new François Pinault Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, and the other curator is the Whitney's own Chrissie Iles, curator of Film and Video for the museum.

As originally discussed by ANABA, and according to the museum's website , artists who wish to submit materials for the show should send proposals to:

Biennial Coordinator
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave.
New York, N.Y. 10021

All submissions to be considered for exhibition in the Biennial should include the artist's biography or resume, a brief description of the proposed work, and between six and eight images. Recommended formats for images include slides, computer printouts, digital images on a CD_ROM, audio CDs, or VHS videotapes. They do not accept original artworks in the submission package.

A word of warning: The forementioned website page appears to be a leftover from 2004, but I suspect that it would be all the same for 2006. Deadline is unclear, but for the 2004 Biennial it was August of 2003, so assume that the deadline for the 2006 Biennial will be August of 2005.

I join Martin in calling for everyone to submit a package. With a foreign curator from the wilderness of Minnesota, there may just be a crack in the "New York only" filter this coming year.

I suggest that everyone also send their home movies to Iles. Who knows what great undiscovered art may be found in your kid's birthday party celebration? And if you've got any kinky sex home videos, even better - look how far it got Andrea Fraser!

P.S. I'll gladly (cough, cough) review any of the latter type home videos, in case you want an artsy opinion before you ship them to Iles.

Lucelia Artist Award Nominees for 2005 Announced

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has announced the nominees for the museum's 2005 Lucelia Artist Award. According to the press release, "nominated artists show a sustained commitment to distinctive work that challenges conventional thinking and expectations about the nature of art. This award is part of the museum's continued commitment to contemporary art and artists through awards and acquisitions."

The 15 artists nominated for the award this year are Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney, Andrea Fraser, Tom Friedman, Ellen Gallagher, Roni Horn, Byron Kim, Maya Lin, Jennifer Pastor, William Pope.L, Fabian Marcaccio, James Siena, Catherine Sullivan, Lisa Yuskavage and Andrea Zittel. Nominated artists work in a diverse range of media including architecture, film, installation, mixed media, painting, photography, sculpture and video.

"The Smithsonian American Art Museum is pleased to acknowledge the significantc ontributions by these selected artists to the vibrant conversation taking place in the contemporary art world today," said Elizabeth Broun, the museum's Director.

The Lucelia Artist Award, established in 2001, annually recognizes an American artist under the age of 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity. Jurors nominate artists who will be recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of his or her time.

The $25,000 award is intended to encourage the artist's future development and experimentation. Previous winners were Kara Walker (2004), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2003), Liz Larner (2002) and Jorge Pardo (2001).

The award winner is determined each year by a panel of five distinguished jurors elected from across the United States, each with a wide knowledge of contemporary American art. Jurors determine the award winner in a day of discussion and review and remain anonymous until the winner is announced. Past jurors have included John Baldessari, Dan Cameron, Lynne Cooke, Richard Flood, Gary Garrels, Elizabeth Murray, Jerry Saltz and Robert Storr. The jurors remain anonymous until after the award is announced.

Sidra Stich, executive director for the Lucelia Artist Award, and not the SAAM, is the one who invites jurors to participate and she coordinates the nomination and jurying process. Since the 1970s, she has specialized in contemporary and modern art as a curator, teacher and writer. Stich is also the director of "art SITES," a series of contemporary art, architecture and design handbooks published in San Francisco. Applications are not accepted for this award. The 2005 winner will be announced in April.

The New York-based Lucelia Foundation, which funds the award, supports the visual arts, specifically 19th-century American and contemporary art.

By the way, SAAM is scheduled to reopen on July 4, 2006.