^{Maki Tamura’s Peekaboo (2008), watercolor on paper, 17 by 17 inches}

At James Harris Gallery. (Gallery web site here.)

^{Matthew Offenbacher’s The Freak in a State of Total Tokenism (2007), oil on canvas, 49 by 29 inches}

Matthew Offenbacher is the painter behind La Especial Norte, the latest in a spotty but notable historical lineage of artist-run zines in Seattle. (Anyone remember Redheaded Stepchild?) He talks about how this one came about, and what he wants to do with it. And, tangentially, why his newest paintings are of his cat.

The podcast is here.

Err, the engineer of certain human souls…

Steve Saroff.

“Les nuages … les merveilleux nuages.”

^{Monogram, 1955-59}

In the story of art history, Robert Rauschenberg is, among other things, the man who killed Willem de Kooning. In 1953, the young upstart Rauschenberg took a drawing by the elder de Kooning, erased it, and put the blank page on display inside a golden frame for all the world to see. Abstract expressionism was dead and had been swept offstage, and the audience was primed and ready for a new generation—the generation of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol: Pop. Erased de Kooning Drawing is a breath between movements, a final metaphorical slaying of a tottering old man, and in this version, Rauschenberg is the enthusiastic, revolutionary killer.

But a closer look at the classic story, as told in the great 2004 biography of de Kooning by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, reveals a truer Rauschenberg, one driven, ironically, as much by love of the older artist’s work as by the ambition to supplant him. De Kooning was about 50 years old and Rauschenberg less than 30 on the day in 1953 when Rauschenberg came knocking. “I was hoping to God that he wouldn’t be home,” Rauschenberg told the biographers, adding that he’d brought a bottle of liquor along for strength. De Kooning welcomed his killer “affectionately” and they talked warmly until Rauschenberg screwed up the strength to ask for the drawing—and to explain what he wanted it for. “I know what you’re doing,” was de Kooning’s response.

“He really made me suffer,” Rauschenberg recalled. De Kooning took out an entire portfolio of drawings and leafed through them. “I want to give you one that I’ll miss,” he told Rauschenberg, adding, “I want it to be very hard to erase.” The one he chose was a “dense mixed-media image that contained, Rauschenberg said, ‘charcoal, lead, everything. It took me two months and even then it wasn’t completely erased. I wore out a lot of erasers.’”

Rauschenberg died Monday at age 82 of heart failure, and looking back on his career, these moments 55 years ago seem particularly telling. After Erased de Kooning Drawing, Rauschenberg would never again put something so neat and tidy out into the world—and the physical process of the erasure was far from simple. (This was no fugitive pencil drawing.) Rauschenberg’s lifetime of messy sculpture-paintings (he called them “combines”), layered screenprints, and transfer drawings were more full of the sweeping, emotive strokes of de Kooning’s terrifically troubling women than the cool, collected attitudes of Lichtenstein or, say, James Rosenquist or Tom Wesselmann or even Rauschenberg’s one-time love, Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg erased de Kooning only to bring him back in ghost form, never adhering entirely either to de Kooning’s old-fashioned painterly romance or to Warhol’s newfangled machine love. On that fateful day at de Kooning’s studio in 1953, Rauschenberg told the biographers, “I was completely prepared to share (my liquor) with him.” Both men were legendarily hard drinkers.

Rauschenberg’s death feels like it hits harder than the death of any artist in recent memory, which sounds strange (quantifying deaths is a bad business) and makes very little sense. After all, the man was 82.

“I wasn’t surprised when I heard,” said new Henry Art Gallery director Sylvia Wolf, a new transplant from New York, Rauschenberg’s town. “But I was shocked.”

Rauschenberg feels as influential—as alive—now as he did when he joined the canon fully 30 years ago. Many critics saw his 2006 Combines exhibition, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, as unprecedented high water mark in his career. Although the works were made decades before, never before had so many of the combines—including the famous Monogram, a goat with a rubber tire around his middle—been shown together before, and as a group they knocked out pretty much every critic that came their way, and offered new insight into Rauschenberg. (I did not see the show, to my serious sorrow.)
In 2007, his creative fingerprints were all over the grand reopening of the New Museum. Its big group exhibition Unmonumental was full of assemblages by far younger artists whose work is unthinkable without Rauschenberg—who took many of his own cues from earlier trash-cobbling artists like Kurt Schwitters.

Rauschenberg famously said that he intended to operate in the gap between art and life; he also is known to have felt sorry for people surrounded by regular mass-produced objects for which they had no love. He did love them, and he used them in everything, eventually turning them against the commercializing aspects of their own reproducibility (Warhol, equally deliciously, turned them toward those aspects). In Rauschenberg, parts from a factory-made chair are as special as handmade brushstrokes because reproduction is as interesting as originality, and both, he seems to say, are deeply misunderstood ideas. In 1957, he made two nearly identical collages called Factum I and II, using not only machine-reproduced elements such as newspaper clippings but also dramatic brushstrokes. Lichtenstein deconstructed the brushstroke in his work, too, implying: one little repetition and the myth of modern painting falls to the ground. Isn’t that a little too fragile?

According to Michael Kimmelman writing in the New York Times, Rauschenberg’s mother made his shirts from scraps of fabric, but when he graduated from high school he wanted a “readymade” shirt. That mid-century economy of means paired with the genuine embrace of the average as an originating spirit accounts for the easygoing, particularly American attitude of his works. His most recognizable self-portrait is Bed (1955), which is just that, his lived-in single bed painted and hung on a wall, a twist on the abstract expressionist mode of large paintings representing the struggles of the soul. Rauschenberg’s large painted surface depicted instead the visceral struggle of a body in bed (which broadens considerably when you recall that it was 1955, and Rauschenberg was gay, like many Pop artists, in contrast to the strenuously straight generation of painters who went before them). Rauschenberg may have mocked the high and cerebral seriousness of painters like Barnett Newman—whose vertical “zip” lines Rauschenberg parodied by using car tires to make lines—but he didn’t crush it; he transformed it into something physical, more real, more everyday. In questioning the myths of art, he didn’t unseat art’s ability to rise to mythic importance. He left behind all these seemingly living bodies. It’s hard to think of his as gone.

^{Pat De Caro’s Untitled (2008), ink on paper, 12 by 9 inches}

At Francine Seders Gallery. (Gallery web site here.)

Lucien Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) has sold for $33.6 million at Christie’s in New York, beating the record for the price of a work of art by a living artist sold at auction. (Hear all those qualifiers? Hell, the whole thing is a qualifier. Don’t shoot the messenger. Is this thing worth $33.6 million? How on earth would I know what the value of $33.6 million is? I have $22 in my wallet in ones, and it’s a good day.)

These are the artists Greg Kucera Gallery lists as not part of the Video Kitchen show that opens tomorrow at the space: Matthew Barney, Isaac Julien, Pipilotti Rist, Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Shirin Neshat, Rodney Graham, Doug Aitken, and Marina Abramovic.

In other words, the making of Video Kitchen: Homemade Moving Images—the first show entirely devoted to video in the history of the gallery—involved no horde of post-productioneers, no lighting designers and crews. There may even be no (imagine!) credits. It’s just the artist, more or less 1960s-Nauman-like, with a camera.

“I’ve been seeing a lot of overblown cinematic videos lately,” Kucera said. “But I remember seeing video art in the early days, seeing it at the And/Or Gallery when I was a teenager. The form has changed so much. I’m more interested in the artist’s hand, in a much more pared-down quality. These are humble sorts of videos.”

The lineup ranges from familiar artists (Tim Roda, Reuben Lorch-Miller, Mark Newport) to artists new to the gallery (Jhordan Dahl, Daniela Libertad).

Here’s a still from Portlander Dahl’s Dreamgirls, a video in which the artist impersonates the heroines of movies from Chinatown to Belle du Jour in a tribute to her mother.

Assignment #1

When Doug Jeck got his tenure at the University of Washington a friend of his jokingly gave him the book Modeling for Amateurs. In it was the question “Don’t you wish you could just start over again and again?” The starting point for Jeck is a house, tree, yard, and sun—a simple scene that is, for most of us, the first art assignment we received in school. For the current show at CoCA in Ballard, called house, tree, yard, sun, etc., Jeck curated a select group of friends, colleagues, students, and former students, giving them the “most fundamental and thus most difficult assignment ever,” he said, depicting in any medium a house, tree, yard, and sun on standard 8 ½-by-11-inch paper.

Each piece, pinned to the wall, is hung as though it is part of an elementary school’s open house. There is no real hierarchy among the pieces and you almost take on the role of an unbiased teacher, admiring each one for its unique approach to the assignment. But there are some worth mentioning.

Elizabeth Copland made a stunning three-dimensional cityscape out of masking tape, Jamie Walker took a direct approach but showered his house with a green only-in-Seattle rain. Sean Howe photographed his elementary school art students holding their rendition of the assignment. Adrian Van Dooren repeatedly wrote the words “house, tree, sun, yard” on lined paper (as if he had to rewrite them as penance for a spelling mistake), until they formed the shape of a house, tree, etc.

Then there is Claire Cowie’s watercolor on paper. Cowie’s piece makes you forget the assignment and abandon the hunting game for each of the required elements. It gets an A+ because it reminds me of a turning point in art school when the student realizes that an assignment is meant as a guiding tool, not a restriction, and that the successful completion of an assignment is creating a piece that can stand on its own out of the context of the classroom.

At the end of the hallway there are three group murals by students in pre-school, high school, and Jeck’s UW graduate program. As with some group projects the murals do not do justice to the strengths of the individuals involved, but there is something intriguing that happens between the three pieces. All were made with white fingerpaint on black paper and the uniformity of the medium renders them all very similar—it is not instantly apparent which age group created which mural. The similarities are based in the nature of fingerpainting; it’s not that the pre-schooler’s chiaroscuro fooled me into thinking they were MFA candidates. But the fact that they are so similar suggests that our childhood creativity isn’t as far away as we make it out to be.

—Lauren Klenow

Claire Cowie

Elizabeth Copland

Mural

^{Dan Webb’s Squeeze, carved wood}

At Kirkland Arts Center. (Gallery web site here.)