Picked RAW Peeled: Allan Morrow - Drawings to Constructions

by Patricia Frischer

It is always a joy when yet another artist of talent is discovered hiding in plain site in San Diego. I had no knowledge of the work of Allan Morrow before Friday when we attended the opening of his one man exhibition at Perry Meyer Fine Art on Kettner as part of Kettner nights.

A glance at Mr. Morrow's resume reveals an extensive exhibition history and a BA in Painting and Printmaking from San Diego State University in 1979 and then in  2002, an AA in Graphic Design from San Diego City College. His first one-man show was in 1981 and he has also been exhibited at the Pacific Beach Library Gallery. With more than 70 group shows and a recent write up by Robert Pincus in 2010, he is just the sort of artist that we need to support with sales to make it possible for galleries like Perry Myers Fine Art to exist. The work is first class, extremely reasonably priced for someone with his track record and deserves a larger audience and buyers. We understand that Mr. Morrow is now retired and able to dedicate even more of his time to his art.  If this new direction is any sign, we can't wait to see more.

Median Right

Middle Town

Picked RIPE: Why soup? A theory unfolds

from Christopher Knight and the LA Times

Digital Image / The Museum of Modern Art

Why did Andy Warhol paint pictures of Campbell's soup cans?

Why not, say, cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli? Or B&M baked beans? Why not Alpo, one of the first commercially available canned dog foods? Alpo was manufactured in Allentown, Pa., across the state from Pittsburgh, Warhol's hometown.

Supermarkets stocked lots of canned goods, circa 1960. Any one of them could have signified the ubiquity of commercial imagery in contemporary American life. Any one of them could epitomize modern mass production at its most banal. Those are the usual reasons given for Warhol's full-bore move into Pop imagery, which began in 1961-62 with "Campbell's Soup Cans."

This weekend marks the 49th anniversary of their controversial public debut. Warhol's renowned suite of 32 small canvases was shown for the first time at a Los Angeles gallery, the only gallery willing to take a chance on the virtually unknown New York artist. The mundane commercial subject matter bewildered an art world more used to avant-garde abstraction, not to mention a public already skeptical of Modern art. Bemused, a neighboring gallery stacked a pyramid of actual soup cans in its window, along with a sign that boasted, "Get the real thing for only 29 cents a can."

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Picked RAW Peeled: From El Greco to Dali

by Patricia Frischer

Great Spanish Masters from the Pérez Simón Collection at the San Diego Museum of Art July 09, 2011 through November 06, 2011. 

The San Diego Museum of Art is rightly proud to be the only U.S. museum to show this survey of Spanish master artworks from the 16^th century to the 1970s with 64 works out of a collection of approximately 2000 owned by the Pérez Simón Foundation. The collection, normally housed in the private estates of Juan Antonio Pérez Simón in Mexico City, Spain and San Diego, was started in 1970 and has already traveled to Paris and Quebec on loan.  The actual show covers over five centuries of art as we travel chronologically through religious themes to court paintings, Impressionism, Symbolism and ends with the Surrealist and Minimalist movements.  In this report, I would like to concentrate on the tiny shining stars of the show before the blockbusters.

There was only one El Greco but it is a sweetheart miniature of the head of Christ. See in real life and do not judge it by the reproduction here. The light in back of the head and the gleam in the eyes is luminous. The whole world of religion belief is caught in this tiny rectangle of oil on paper.

Domenikos Theotokopoulos, Called El Greco
Head of Christ  Ca.1600
Oil on paper, mounted on wood /10.5 × 8.6 cm

RIP: Cy Twombly

from Randy Kennedy and the New York Times

Ferragosto IV, 1961, Rome*
© Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly, Idiosyncratic Painter, Dies at 83

Cy Twombly, whose spare childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died in Rome Tuesday. He was 83.

The cause was not immediately known, although Mr. Twombly had suffered from cancer. His death was announced by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work.

In a career that slyly subverted Abstract Expressionism, toyed briefly with Minimalism, seemed barely to acknowledge Pop Art and anticipated some of the concerns of Conceptualism, Mr. Twombly was a divisive artist almost from the start. The curator Kirk Varnedoe, on the occasion of a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that his work was “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.” The critic Robert Hughes called him “the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.”

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* All images, where subject to copyright, are used purely for illustrative purposes and on the assumption that their reproduction at a lower resolution than the originals satifies the requirements for fair use and neither competes nor conflicts with the copyright holder's use of the original material.  Cy Twombly is represented by Gagosian Gallery.

Picked Honna: Souvenir from Mexico

by Keikichi Honna



So, this is it. Balls of twine.

1 3/4" or 40mm in diameter. One of the worst hand crafted stuff I've ever seen. The quality is so poor that it's almost crime to put a price and sell them. 6 pesos each (like $0.5), or 60 pesos for a dozen. Hadn't they been placed among toys, I couldn't have guessed they were intended for children. Nor had they had dark colored strings for decoration, I couldn't have told that they were supposed to be soccer balls. I was laughing, and of course bought a couple.
 

They don't bounce, they are not round enough. I was laughing at their quality and thought that bundled up rubber bands would work much better as balls. Then, I'd think "oh, you can't waste rubber bands. They are expensive." I realized the desperation of those who made them - they couldn't use better materials, and those who would buy them - that's the best they could afford.
  

This is the poorest hand crafted stuff I've ever seen. However, this is also the most honest product I've ever seen. There is no deception, no over-decoration - you pay for exactly what you see, and you get what you pay for - nothing more, nothing less.  For only 6 pesos, you can buy the poorest quality yet the most honest hand crafted products. That's fucking steal!

I was thinking to make them myself. I can make better looking ones for sure. Probably I can even sell them for $6.00 each on ebay! But I can never duplicate the desperation and honesty of the original.  Bought them as a joke. Now they remind me of (my lack of) honesty.

Email: Keikichi Honna

Picked RAW writers

Out and About in June, 2011

by Patricia Frischer

I viewed a wonderful video talk sent out by Dan Springs about shattering your miss-conceptions by Jared Cohen and realized yet again how important it is to have an open mind to allow creativity to flow. I also know that we can’t just talk about ideas we have to do things and do them with passion and conviction. That is why I am so excited about the DNA of Creativity project. I spent a day and a half at the Art of Science Learning Conference at Calit2 and then we held a DNA of Creativity meeting where 28 professionals gathered to further discuss the project, give in put and feedback. This was our third meeting and I think we now have a project which has legs and will help us meet the goals not only of SDVAN but to follow the mission to fuse the art and science communities.

Now that Art Meets Fashion is almost over, I have had a chance to go to a few exhibitions and boy has it been fun to see what is up and about in San Diego. I am not claiming to have made a survey of everything out there, but I just visited the shows that were in my path.

Italo Scanga mini retrospective is at the Oceanside Museum of Art to Aug 21 and I am looking forward to seeing a selection of his more intimate objects at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library. He broke new ground in San Diego but I think it is the way that his colleagues speak of his zest for art and his welcoming spirit that adds to his status. Also at the OMA is Beatrice Wood Drawings and Ceramics to Sept 18, a charming eccentric women with an exciting love life that she captured in her often naïve way which makes art so accessible to all. Jeff Yeoman was a star at the Gold Coast Paintings of Southern California, California Arts Club now over. There were a few other paintings that made the show worthwhile. I liked Eric Merrell and Ken Goldman and I imagine these lush landscapes were a treat for the Oceanside audience.

Daily Art Nag: Sushi closes

from Kinsee Morlan and CityBeat

photo: San Diego CityBeat

Sushi gone

A local arts group is no more and I, for one, am ready to rant

Shame on me. Shame on you. Shame on anybody interested in keeping this city's cultural scene alive.

When The San Diego Union-Tribune reported last week that Sushi Contemporary Performance and Visual Arts is closing its doors, most people acted shocked and surprised, but as board chairman Indra Gardiner Bowers put it to me over the phone last Friday, "It's like, 'Really? How many times did you go to a Sushi performance? How much money did you donate?'"  For my part, I should have done a better job at covering Sushi's plight.

The story started writing itself the moment the once homeless, cutting-edge arts organization moved into its new East Village digs just as the recession hit.

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Picked RIPE: Katherine Sweetman Presentation Videos: Americans for the Arts Public Art Preconference's panel on Media Infrastructure

Part 1: The Back Story (AKA The Real Story)
from Katherine Sweetman on Vimeo.

Parts II, III, and IV can be found here.

Picked RIPE: Museum School Art Auction - Tonight!

JETT Gallery
989 W. Kalmia St.,
San Diego, CA 92101

Engine28

Sent to us by Kim Richards is news of Engine28 temporary website that pops up just for a set of art events and then disappears. it is always fascinating to see what others are doing and it must morph into something else but we am not sure what that will be. They are hoping to address the problem which we certainly experience in SD of ”Hey You! critic” when a hapless news journalist ordered by an editor to switch beats overnight and cover the arts because somebody hadn’t been planning ahead. We think this sounds rather like the super heroes of journalism, flying in to save the day. Wouldn’t we like to have that great team here!

Daily Art Nag for June 15, 2011: Art Must Be Revolution

by Kevin Freitas

The French philosopher Alain Badiou said the other day in a lecture at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, “Art must be revolution.”

The topic, in which Matthew Barney also headlined, was billed as Can Art and Politics Be Thought? I immediately misread the topic as Can Art and Politics Be Taught, which, to this writer, is an infinitely more interesting question. Helas, I agree with Badiou and feel any sort of revolution (if not activism) in art would be a welcome one. I would be happy to throw a few pavés in the general direction of change.

In a separate article, Sebastian Smee, art critic for the Boston Globe and this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism writing on the Venice Biennale, commented, “Contemporary art likes to pretend it has no past. Every year, artists shamelessly recycle conceits that established others’ reputations mere decades earlier. Aging geniuses are relegated to the history books well before their time is up. Amnesia reigns.” More importantly, though, he made a comment about how the "gesture" in art these days has replaced the idea. “The received wisdom is that contemporary art is mostly about ideas. In truth, however, it’s mostly about gestures. Sustained engagement and the kind of mental activity that generates actual ideas are rare. In today’s art world, one gesture is completed, and a new one must be dreamed up.”

I also agree with Smee. There’s a certain level of comfort knowing that gesture has to some extent replaced any real meaning or ideas in art; it helps one to accept the inadequacy and quality (the missing content) of a lot of work I see these days – especially in San Diego.

It might also be a convenient label I can slap on any work that doesn’t meet my approval. Who's to say? But there is a fine line between "gesture" as a means to an end, a sort of justifiable irresponsibility in an artist’s intent or production (the artwork), and "gesture" in the form of, say, personal investigation, which might have more to do with ideas and a process (method, technique, material) fueled by a passion and the resulting fruitful labor of its outcome.

And so while we can pretend to effect change within our cultural ranks – for the good of the cause – there are those who gesture and leave us rotting in jail and those who point decisively. I much prefer the latter and artists who can do so with works that can lead the way.

Article first published as Art Must Be Revolution on Blogcritics.

Daily Art Nag for June 10, 2011: Heath Fox goes to the Broad

from Mike Boehm and Culture Monster

Eli Broad's museum names veteran of San Diego museums -- and U.S. Marines -- as second-in-command

Heath Fox, a retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who made a second career helping to run art and photography museums in San Diego’s Balboa Park, was named Wednesday to serve as second-in-command at the Broad –- the downtown art museum that will house Eli Broad’s contemporary art collection and is expected to open in about two years.

As deputy director of operations, Fox, 57, will report to museum director Joanne Heyler. He begins June 27 and will spend the coming two years helping to devise the museum’s operating plan and management approaches. When the Broad opens, he’ll be responsible for planning and operations.

After retiring from the Marines in 1996 after 20 years of service, Fox became associate director of administration at the Museum of Photographic Arts from 1997 to 2001; he oversaw its $6-million expansion in 1999-2000, which increased the museum's size from 7,500 square feet to 31,000.

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Picked RIPE: "Bare It All" at the Bluefoot

Angela M. Sahyoun

Creator/Director

Arte Fresca Events
619.850.7096
www.artefresca.webs.com

Daily Art Nag for June 5, 2011

Shawnee Barton, contributor to the UT's Sketchbook blog, published a recent article on how she was taking steps to become a better arts patron.  While her efforts are certainly admirable, I came up with a few of my own that I believe might have a longer lasting affect within our community.  Here they are:

1. Open a gallery or alternative exhibition space, commercial or otherwise.

2. Buy a piece of artwork. Get your FB friends to buy artwork. In fact, get everyone who lives in your apartment complex or on your block to buy artwork. Prices for work in SD are extremely reasonable and affordable.

3. Buy art supplies for an artist. Sponsor an exhibit or installation. Help stretch a canvas. Buy a frame.

4. Take a friend to a museum or gallery, and then buy them the catalog.

5. Take a collector to lunch (if you know one). Introduce yourself as Delacroix and hand them your wet paint brushes (to paraphrase Larry Rivers & Frank O'Hara).

6. Start an art publication, a real one, on paper - not a blog. Newsprint is still cheap and so is Kinko's.

7. Write about art, no seriously, write about it. Trust me on this one.

8. Buy a building, property, an empty warehouse, a tool shed if you have to. Stake a claim, build your empire, and invite other artists to join.  Live there, invite others to live with you, make lots of art.

9. Instead of sending an email to your local city council, become a city council member yourself.  You can affect change from the inside - it's warmer. If this isn't possible, protest, take to the streets, throw bricks. Kansas is going to end up biting us all in the ass if we are sitting on ours.

10. Make the best art you can and get rid of the rest. Become an arts editor, your own.

11. Get educated. Knowledge is power and history is good but art history is better.

12. Yours?