The cat’s name is Turtle. He once got stuck in a tree. Credit: courtesy howard house

Matthew Offenbacher’s third solo show at Howard House is called
C.A.T., after a series of 1917 drawings dubbed “Conventions
for Abstract Thoughts” by the artist Charles Burchfield. This show
consists entirely of paintings of and about Offenbacher’s cat.

It may sound funny, but it’s not a joke. At a recent talk
Offenbacher gave, someone asked him whether he’d ever dreamed of being
a standup comedian, and while Offenbacher in person is not at all
jokey, the question made a certain amount of sense. The connection is
embarrassment.

The new paintings are made on a thin Stainguard fabric that resists
the paint, meaning that the paint literally sits uneasily on its
surface. This happens on a stylistic level, too. Certain passages
resemble the crayon-resist paintings made by grade-school children,
while others look like high modernist abstraction (Orphism in
particular, which was like cubism plus color and cosmic longing). In
the past, Offenbacher has made geometric abstractions that ask you to
imagine they were made by beavers, or self-described “repulsive color
combinations,” or depictions of owls and wolves patterned after
macramé and yarn art. In a 2007 review, I described his work as
flirting with the tradition of bad painting, but that’s not quite it:
It’s embarrassing painting. There is something deeply embarrassing
about Offenbacher’s paintings. They are embarrassed to be
paintings—as if it were just an embarrassing thing to be a
painting, so fancy and loaded and ambitious—and you are
embarrassed to be looking at them, and in this way a connection is
made. A house cat may have no shame, but that’s the luxury of the
subject of an artwork. The viewer and the artist have no such luxury.
We have to wonder what this thing art is, and we have to justify our
belief in it. And doing that—explaining a faith in something as
insecure as art—is really hard and definitely embarrassing. This
is where half-truths, clichés (creative types are just so
weird!), and egos come in.

Offenbacher pushes his paintings beyond all this into a sort of
awkward, liberating confidence. To proudly present a large painting of
your cat’s face upside down on fabric that rejects the paint
itself—it is an act of freedom, of perverse strength.

Offenbacher’s art-making is centered on painting but not limited to
it—his paintings take up just a corner in the salon he’s
invisibly organizing. No other Seattle artist is so unassuming and yet
such a power source. He’s not charismatic in any traditional
sense—he has floppy, curly hair; boyishly large eyes; and a
feminine way about him (he’s straight), like one of those delicate
figures hanging out improbably in the corner of a history painting,
away from the action—yet he is Seattle art’s community
organizer.

Since moving here in 2006 from San Diego, Offenbacher has not only
had three solo shows but also organized two substantial group shows
with Seattle artists (at Helm Gallery in Tacoma and the back room at
Howard House). He has founded, edited, and published five editions of
La Especial Norte, a broadsheet zine with essays, porn, and
stories by artists living and dead. He has written two terrific
long-form essays for La Especial Norte (on “green” gothic and
on shit in Northwest art). He recently won Seattle Art Museum’s 2009
Kayla Skinner Special Recognition Award. And now, he is running the
defunct gift shop at the Henry Art Gallery as The Gift Shop,
an ongoing installation with changing displays that will raise subtle
questions about how a place run by artists inside a museum might be
different from the rest of the museum.

Offenbacher’s vision for art is one without cults or cliques, but
not without dreams. In a letter he wrote in 2005, he described his
nostalgia for 1960s ideas about communal living that he remembers from
a book of photographs he found at his grandparents’ cottage in Vermont
when he was young. “I wanted [my paintings] to show more the
possibility for construction, connection, communication, for hope and
belief in painting’s transcendent endowments.” In the same letter, he
acknowledged, “I mostly wanted these to look sort of familiar, but also
strange, alien, off.”

That “off” quality is the essential ingredient in Offenbacher’s
work. His curled-up cat painted in a riot of swirling colors exudes
eyes-closed bliss and belonging—but the painting is also
“strange, alien, off,” streaky, and tentative in places, the cat’s back
elongated in an unsightly way. In another painting of the cat sitting
upright, its paw is stretched into an oversize, monstrously webby foot.
Its eyes, again, are closed. We are made forcibly aware of this alien
quality, even though the cat is oblivious. Painting is a state of mind
suspended between doubt and belief. It’s private but public. Bringing
private and public together, wanting to believe, always means being
embarrassed. But what’s the alternative? recommended

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...

8 replies on “Art Is Embarrassing”

  4. Matthew Offenbacher is probably my favorite Seattle painter right now, for reasons I have not yet attempted to put into words.

    I’m interested in digging deeper into this “embarrassed” quality you describe. I see a rather anachronistic expressiveness and disarming sincerity, but I’m not personally embarrassed by it. If anything, I’m embarrassed by all the other art that does not have this quality (specifically the stuff that really wants to be “smart”).

    I think both Joey Veltkamp and Jeffry Mitchell share this disarming sincerity, and I find it refreshing.

  5. “Painting is a state of mind suspended between doubt and belief. It’s private but public. Bringing private and public together, wanting to believe, always means being embarrassed. But what’s the alternative?”

    These words touched a deep, deep note within me (whether in regards to Matt’s work or in more general terms) — but I would like to suggest a slight shift:

    Making art [Painting] is a state of mind suspended between doubt and faith[belief]. It’s private but public. Bringing private and public together, wanting to believe, always means being vulnerable [embarrassed]. But what’s the alternative?

  7. Hi, Jen,

    I remember that question to Matthew asking if he ever considered being a stand-up comedian. Right off, it didn’t seem a correct question to ask an artist at an opening but he clearly invited any kind of question with a certain panache and what seemed, not maybe as a challenge but as a posture of some kind of holistic and extremely friendly gesture, a wanting to share thoughts openly. He so often laughs and giggles while engaged in answering questions you’d swear he works on the level of a stand-up comedian. He stated he couldn’t be one because he can’t deliver the simplest joke without it going flat. But his easy social charm and levity suggests he may be, in some sense, a natural comic in art or other things with the insight to the really real as Robin Williams, Chris Rock, George Carlin and Margaret Cho. It’s the vision you know. It’s funny but not. And, with Matthew, there’s some kind of wonderfully strange painting impulse going on for us to marvel over.

    Then comes Matthew’s answers to questions and his respect for the other person which all seems so serious and deep except for more giggles and laughter. I think Matthew is a natural performer before an audience and it may even explain his role in the local art community. His presence promotes such ease and sincerity and jovialness. Also he seems so adept at working with people and making just about anything they asked become a provocation for him to spin off an enormous tale related to his art or whatever. Also, he seems to bring an amazing broad base of perspective that fuses his art with the humanity, the world and the universe at large that easily moves us.

    I’ve just come from a weekend painting workshop were near everybody was wedded to painting more realistically conservative than the Gage Academy and being certainly resistant to contemporary painting. They are largely frozen in archaic gestures. To these romantic plein air realistic painters of fall foliage and riversides, Matthew’s work might seem kind of dark and appear as something like colorful chicken scratches. They would probably have deep difficulties with De Kooning, Frank Stella and color field paintings that send up rose bushes in fall.

    But Matthew’s work seems historically fresh yet connected to painting’s history. His work is full of light compared to the fellow artist in the other room at Billy’s place. His work knows so many things a simple minded painter doesn’t yet has romance in it. He says he loves the sixties and one senses a Burchfieldian-like LSD color moment in his work. He is celebrating and saluting so much of painting of the past yet with such a new vision. He is romantic in embracing Burchfield, animals, naturalism, the universe, the moon and Mars and all their questions brought to the present age. He seems to have embraced the great American Transcendentalist’s love of natural things. He is intense in a contemporary view. This brings up the stand-up comic thing; they are often said to have a darker side in how they are aware of the mistakes of culture. Comedians are often said to be bipolar or depressed. I’m not thinking Matthew represents this but, like stand-up comedians he is extremely garrulous and aware. The truth might be that comedians aren’t depressed but SEE the underlying reality others don’t. Matthew seems to hold a very personal real awareness. We easily lust to see what he is seeing.

    Being garrulous is a fault of writers and makes us consider the larger being Matthew is. Writers are thinkers not just word stringers. They support analyzing and pondering before putting things to pen or brush. In fact, is his brush or words more prominent? He may be a kind of eccentric Renaissance Man in our modern times with dreamy yet very perspective stoned out visions. His foreshortened painting (untitled) looking down the trunk of an evergreen tree borrows the perspective of a young artist exploring tight perspective rendition and also the view of a cat caught in a tree. It’s so witty. There is a lot of oneness here.

    Your segue from artist as stand-up comedian to artist embarrassed certainly probes artists’ psychological and sociological worlds via a marvelous conceptual extension. In contrast to the comment of Emily P., we find your embarrassment discursion, Klara Sen’s workaround your discursion and Bruce Nauman’s statement to consider:

    “To present yourself through your work is obviously part of being an artist. If you don’t want people to see that self you put on makeup…You spend all this time in the studio and then when you do expose the work, there is a kind of self-exposure that is threatening.”

    Need we say more about this embarrassment? Let’s just conclude that Matthew is a mysterious force who we should probably keep an eye on because he’s doing something off the wall but significant. It is kind of interesting too that he’s apparently changed his approach to titling his pieces. We are now lost in sea of untitled vs. his older elaborate titles. What’s up with this?

    …..

    And then we have to deal with that all-caps apparently conceited idiot, LaRiiiiM0RrrHAwtiiii696969, who constantly asks us to engage in a leap of faith and accept their wild-ass posts. Male or female this person would seem a very stuck on self irritant but we must be open and consider the possibility that this is credible presentment. We are damned if we do and don’t. This person knee jerked on my use of the word musicology once apparently thinking I was using two bit lofty academic vocabulary. They missed the fact that I was using it in a comic tongue in cheek parody of the realities of the museum universe. I think much of what goes on in museums is nuts as many have pointed out in recent decades. The role of the museum to art is still suspect and SAM does not always act with a kind of sanctified beauty. Yes, I’ve slammed some of the goings on at SAM because they are an extremely suspect and large institution speaking for the arts as if they are automatically leaders and right no matter what they say or do. I don’t think so. Sam’s behavior is ever so political and guaranteed distant from the realities of the artist’s world. Duchamp had this problem with the Solon and the question as to the fitted ness of art being placed in these spaces is still of concern. Do they really speak for us? They are museologists of some ilk like putting forth smooth media spin and careful avoidance of political mistakes, like it or not. We all have to deal with their affront and posturing.

    So, LaRiiiiM0RrrHAwtiiii696969, you know were you can stick it. Take your utterly cool conceit somewhere else. You missed the point as a simple minded reactionary.

    What if LaRiiiiM0RrrHAwtiiii696969 was a major power in the arts community? Truth and beauty are never easy in recent times. Is it stand-up comedy or embarrassment we should detect? And whose? Viewer, reader, artist, or blogger? Embarrassment or discomfort? Awareness of the real? Disturbing isolation of the self? What the hell is going on here? Peace out.

    GaryyyyyyyyyWWWWWWWFinholtttttttt

  8. That’s museology not musicology that LaRiiiiM0RrrHAwtiiii696969 knee jerked to in the above. (Dang, Mr. Gates spellchecker is never a total friend.)

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