Latest Episodes for this Channel
Wed August 20 2008
On the morning of September 12, 2001, as the United States descended into a pit of disbelief, Seattle artist Leo Saul Berk happened to be in Gua...
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On the morning of September 12, 2001, as the United States descended into a pit of disbelief, Seattle artist Leo Saul Berk happened to be in Guatemala, descending into an ancient Mayan cave. Tourists aren't allowed in, but Berk and some others bribed the guards, who then conducted the tour of the dark, totally disorienting placea place Berk was unable to get out of his head afterward. Now... read more
On the morning of September 12, 2001, as the United States descended into a pit of disbelief, Seattle artist Leo Saul Berk happened to be in Guatemala, descending into an ancient Mayan cave. Tourists aren't allowed in, but Berk and some others bribed the guards, who then conducted the tour of the dark, totally disorienting placea place Berk was unable to get out of his head afterward. Now it's finally come out of his head, and into the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, in the form of strange, surrealistic, suggestive shapes in two drawings and a sculpture-on-stilts. Listen to him talk about the whole experience.
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Wed August 13 2008
That's a still from a digital video made with clay animation by Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg. It's called Feed All the Hungry Little Childre...
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That's a still from a digital video made with clay animation by Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg. It's called Feed All the Hungry Little Children (2007), but, as you can imagine, it is not as innocent as the title makes it sound. It is, in fact, quite sickeven though nothing that happens in it is really wrong. The lascivious woman lures the hungry pack of children from their crevices in t... read more
That's a still from a digital video made with clay animation by Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg. It's called Feed All the Hungry Little Children (2007), but, as you can imagine, it is not as innocent as the title makes it sound. It is, in fact, quite sickeven though nothing that happens in it is really wrong. The lascivious woman lures the hungry pack of children from their crevices in the back side of a tenement. (See what I mean that something's wrong but not overtly wrong, just by the potential entendres in that sentence?) The children surround and grope her. They pull out her breasts. She feeds them. It is a clay-milk orgy. Then, they close their eyes like babies do after you feed them, when they go to sleep, except these babies look overstuffed, and like they might have choked to death, just a little. It's all very sinister and vague, which is basically the tone of the entire show Ask A Banana, Baby at Howard House. The show features three Swedish artistsDjurberg, Annika von Hausswolff, and Johanna Billingand their videos, animations, and photographs. It's not a big show, but it makes a definite impression. Hear curator Sara Callahan, who is Swedish herself, talk about why she chose these works, which make Sweden seem so, well, freaky and freaked out.
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Wed August 06 2008
That's Isaac Layman. He's asleep, perfectly still except for the rise and fall of his torso as he breathes. The camera is making a picture of hi...
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That's Isaac Layman. He's asleep, perfectly still except for the rise and fall of his torso as he breathes. The camera is making a picture of him that takes four and a half minutes to completeit's a digital process, but it mimics the earliest photographs, when people had to remain perfectly still for minutes on end so that they would be captured as if in a single, clear moment. Any movemen... read more
That's Isaac Layman. He's asleep, perfectly still except for the rise and fall of his torso as he breathes. The camera is making a picture of him that takes four and a half minutes to completeit's a digital process, but it mimics the earliest photographs, when people had to remain perfectly still for minutes on end so that they would be captured as if in a single, clear moment. Any movement would be tracked in the final image. Here, Layman mounts a digital back onto a traditional 4 by 5 camera, and it records one line 1 pixel wide by 8,000 pixels high and then moves to the right to record the next line. Layman is being downloaded. If you look closely, you can see that his pockets are scallop-edgedthat's not the way they really look, it's an effect from the motion of his breathing during the shoot. But that's kind of a gimme. What's stranger is the fact that Layman himself doesn't know what was going on in the mind of his subject at the time this was shothe was asleep. He's in the same position we are: seeing someone without really getting any information about him. Layman's whole show of new work at Lawrimore Projectcalled Photographs from the Inside of a Whale, and shot entirely in his Seattle homeis an investigation into how good the information you get from a photograph really is. Listen to him tell it.
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Thu July 03 2008
Oliver Herring is a Brooklyn-based artist who works relatively traditionally, in photography, sculpture, and video. But since 2002, he also has ha...
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Oliver Herring is a Brooklyn-based artist who works relatively traditionally, in photography, sculpture, and video. But since 2002, he also has had something on the side: something called Task. Task is an event involving volunteers who come together in a public place for an entire day and give each other tasks to do for the whole time they're there. While it's happening a mini-society forms. ... read more
Oliver Herring is a Brooklyn-based artist who works relatively traditionally, in photography, sculpture, and video. But since 2002, he also has had something on the side: something called Task. Task is an event involving volunteers who come together in a public place for an entire day and give each other tasks to do for the whole time they're there. While it's happening a mini-society forms. All Herring does is choose the volunteers, start things off, and then observe. This happened in Seattle June 28; my on-the-scene reporting on the first part of it is here; a longer essay considering it is running in next week's paper. In this interview, conducted on the eve of the event in Seattle, Herring talks about why Task is actually not on the side of his studio work, but instead at the heart of it. He talks about the outbreak of Task "parties" around the country. He talks about his year of saying yes to everything. Listen in. And here are two images from Seattle's Task (photographs by Duncan Scovil): These are the bleachers that lead down from the Fifth Avenue level to the auditorium. Remember 83-year-old Bob from my earlier writing? That's him up and moving around while a young woman naps.
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Wed June 25 2008
That there is Matthew Day Jackson's Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me) (2008), the centerpiece of the Henry Art Gallery's new show...
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That there is Matthew Day Jackson's Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me) (2008), the centerpiece of the Henry Art Gallery's new show The Violet Hour. It's made of a Skip Nichols race car (crashed/Corvette), steel, wool, felt, leather, stained glass, fluorescent light tubes, solar panels, fiberglass, and plastic. Like Jackson's other two works in the show, this one is a glorious ... read more
That there is Matthew Day Jackson's Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me) (2008), the centerpiece of the Henry Art Gallery's new show The Violet Hour. It's made of a Skip Nichols race car (crashed/Corvette), steel, wool, felt, leather, stained glass, fluorescent light tubes, solar panels, fiberglass, and plastic. Like Jackson's other two works in the show, this one is a glorious thing to look at and look at and keep looking at. It's also full of associations in and outside of artthe first to come to mind are Richard Prince's treatments of upstate New York, Beuys's plane crash and rescue by the Tartars, and stained-glass windows that survive in bombed-out cathedrals. Traditional Western art and pioneer stories are swirling around, too: the driver's seat is made from a leather cowboy saddle, and set in the passenger's seat like an eerie mask is a reflective astronaut's helmet wrapped in gray felt. Oh, and the entire sculpture is solar-powered. That's the "shattered" windshield of the car. There's the cowboy saddle and the space helmet inside the car. The Violet Hour is a remarkably entertaining show for being so simultaneously grim. Jen Liu's videos feature Pink Floyd standards sung in Latin plainchant, Black Sabbaths Iron Man performed by a community brass band and performed as an operatic aria for a soprano, cannibalism, brutalist architecture, and pretty young men. In Croatian artist David Maljkovic's videos, young people in a post-communist daze linger under the burdensome, overpowering modernist architecture of the Italian Pavilion of the Zagreb Fair, loitering in and around cars that have been immobilized. The overlapping themes in the show reveal themselves continually: cars, architecture, nature, text, religion, crystalline forms. It's a show in which you can do plenty of mental work while also having a great time. Talking to the artists (except Maljkovic, who had to remain in Croatia with his wife, who's expecting) was much the same experience. Have a listen.
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Art Opening Podcasts
