Mirrors, crapola, booze & chaos
by AMANDA MANITACH March 26, 2013
MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL
Sunday afternoon I arrived to the Seattle Art Museum premier of Doug Aitken’s MIRRORfashionably late, but still early enough to have to wait forever for the unveiling. While I stood behind a raised platform crammed with VIP guests with really beautiful, toned legs and $600 shoes, a homeless man at the 1st and Pike barrier screamed “HOW DO I GO TO THE OTHER SIDE?” at the top of his lungs like a broken record until he was (I assume) escorted out of earshot. Which illustrates a slight disconnect between content of the piece and its proposed intent (if we can muster a half-assed complaint about an otherwise great, fitting, flashy improvement to an art museum facade). The piece is a real-time kaleidoscope receiving input from the environment, like “weather information, pedestrian movement, atmospheric conditions,” which is electronically remixed to reflect an abstract image of the city back at the city. Aitken collected hundreds of hours of footage from our city, but it’s the stock stuff of brochures: prettily rippling puddles, high contrast b&w vistas of raindrops and people walking importantly and hurriedly down 1st Ave. Not that screaming dude.
Overheard at the event:
“Ooooooh!”
“Ahhhh!”
“Seriously, what do you think about an artist from LA doing this?”
“This could have been funded by the Seattle Tourism Bureau.”
“Tokyo called and said welcome to 1985.”
But seriously, seeing musical legend Terry Riley in person was pretty mind-blowing.
THAT’S 56 IN DOG YEARS.
This Saturday, The Hideout turned 8. The party: appropriately artsy and raucous. Picture one artist in a dark corner upstairs vomiting Bacardi 151 while Jed Dunkerley danced half naked behind frosted windows (the two incidents presumably unrelated).
Sometimes this place really is our Cabaret Voltaire or Chat Noir. Maybe a dash of Studio 54.
NEW VENUE ALERT!
In 2010, Tel Aviv native Hanita Schwartzgraduated from University of Washington with an MFA in interdisciplinary studies. I vividly remember her piece in the thesis show: a large, bright yellow industrial container with peepholes cut into the sides and top. If you bent down low (or climbed a stool) to look through the windows, you were privy to a series of tableaux and miniature installations. The container was essentially a mobile gallery and, as far as I know, was intended to serve such a purpose (not sure it was ever used that way, outside of the UW exhibition).
Schwartz’s practice is varied—always smart and surprising. At this year’s NEPO 5K, she spent three hours bent over one of her animated videos, assiduously blowing large bubbles across the projection. As the bubbles slid across a piece of glass, they cast delicate shadows against the video, “drawing” ephemeral bicycle wheels and other objects to interact with and complete the image.
So Schwartz opening her Columbia City home, NEPO House style, as a gallery space is exciting and I have no idea what to expect. Schwartz wants the emphasis of the space to be performance-based work. The inaugural show on April 10, Dreamland Sinkhole is the brainchild of Graham Downing and Ian Schempp and promises “a show about visual art inspiring improv inspiring visual art.” Improv visual art is potentially horrifying, but from what I know of Downing (a brilliant wit with good aesthetic), I’m hoping for something better than a train wreck (just kidding! I’m expecting something great!). Artists involved include Britta Johnson, NEPO House founder Klara Glosovaand Downing’s longtime collaborator Max Kraushaar.
Unfortunately, the name of the space—Andralamusya—doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue (my tongue, anyway). Schwartz says the word means “chaos” and was appropriated by the Hebrew from Ancient Greek. Bring it.
(Max Kraushaar, Michael Fettig and Graham Downing)
ACTUALLY, IT’S MADE OF CHEESE
I’m going out to dinner with Charles Krafft on Friday night. Which, I realize, happens to be Good Friday. Is that terrible or funny?
Many Seattle artists have been asking me what I think about Krafft lately. Most of them are uncomfortable with how this dialogue has gone down, don’t think Jen Graves was fair in the nuances of her public flogging. Others think of Krafft as that awkwardly racist uncle: he’s part of the family and we just don’t know quite what to do with him.
One of the things I’ve noticed about Krafft is that he’s generally pretty funny. Pretty tongue-in-cheek. Which brings me to something Nicole Brodeur of The Seattle Timesrecently quoted Jerry Saltz saying about Krafft: “Whatever the politics of this guy, his work is unoriginal crapola one-liner kitsch. The only label I would write about this guy’s work would be: ‘Any museum that thinks this work is anything other than kitsch needs to rethink itself.’”
Saltz’s jab is apropos in a few ways. Kitsch makes much of bad taste. It embodies, celebrates it. Kitsch, like Krafft, errs on the side of cheesy. Kitsch and popular conspiracy theories go well together. Faked moon landings, 911 conspiracy theories, Holocaust revisionism…people who really get into this stuff are usually also looking for Bigfoot. They’re chasing truth outside the mainstream, canonized narrative. But God forbid kitsch question our American sense of identity, morality and truth. Because dammit, Americans are Indiana Jones: the good guy melting the faces off the black-hearted Nazis. Our narrative of international big-brother heroism can’t possibly be as fictional or harmful as the banner-waving theatricality of nationalist extremists like the Nazis. Is that what makes people bristle deep down? Krafft exposing mainstream national pride (of all flavors) as kitsch? Isn’t that what caused people to enjoy his black humor in the first place? Krafft is, after all, the essential devil’s advocate with exceptional bad taste. Or was it never so much about the message in the work? We woke up one day and realized we were enjoying the bad taste a little too much. We caught ourselves laughing at our uncle’s dirty jokes.
The fact that many are suddenly aghast at his outed politics seems a touch dishonest (Krafft never suppressed any of his political views or commentary). The mock shock says more about us than it says about him.
But because I’m all-American, I have a short attention span and I’m getting bored of this subject already.
DO THIS:
Wednesday at 8pm: A POET, A PLAYWRIGHT, A NOVELEST AND A DRAG QUEEN. I went to this “competitive storytelling event” last year and it was bizarre and funny and wonderful. Last year, Jackie Hell stole the show. This year, competitors include Elissa Ball, Neil Ferron, Peter Mountford and Cherdonna.
Thursday at 6:30 at Frye Art Museum: Scott Lawrimore, Klara Glosova, Greg Lundgren, Todd Jannausch, Matthew Offenbacher, Joey Veltkamp and Sierra Stinson give an overview of the contemporary art scene in Seattle.