Well, I was wrong. The new SAM is a big improvement and now deserves to be called an Art Museum. The new space is simple and unobtrusive and meanders. meanders is the important word for me. I like the sense of disorder in a museum much ore than the kind of regimented flow patterns a lot of new spaces have, esp. the National Gallery in DC (by IM Pei).
I can not remember ever seeing such an unobtrusive museum. The space is pretty much neutral, as if one took a large office building and retasked it as a museum. Of course this is also the Washington Mutual Bank building, but few banks would have the high ceilings and grand spaces needed to be a museum. The outside is, with the exception of the old Venturi Museum's entrance, one more glass sided downtown Seattle nondescript office building. Without signs you would not know that this was an Art Museum rather than the home of various corporate entities, a lawyer or two and a food court.
The best part of the museum is that it has a lot of art, a lot. Wandering through is like visiting a wealthy person's home .. lots of flotsam and jetsam and then .. wow! a Rothkow or Motherwell, or Pollack! The highlights for me were the Northwest art .. a lot of Tobey, some Graves (two really bad ones), didn't see any Callahan or Cage. Still, I have already decided that several of the Tobies are "mine." One made me cry!
Another favorite is a Korean piece of modern sculpture by Doh Ho Suh. .. a Korean dress grown huge and made out of dogtags. I remember when this piece was first shown in Seattle .. I loved it then and still do now. Glad to find that we own it now.
The worst is what is left of the original Venturi building. Fortunately there is no much left other than the stupid hammering man statue and Venturi's grand staircase. This stupidity still
goes from nowhere to nowhere. Actually, the grandiose stairs now seem utterly irrelevant to the rest of the building... more or less like an odd set of overbuilt back stairs.There is also still a sense of nouveau richeness to the place. The entry galleries had a a car show rool flavor with ugly cars turned into chandeliers for no obvious reason. And there were a miscellaneous collection of Warhols and Oldeburgs pop art. Passe, so Passe. Same for a lot of the older European and American art. One good sarget, but the rest were embarrassing .. examples of what happens when folks get rich too late to buy up the good stuff.
Aw hell .. so what? Walk around and there is a lot of good stuff t see. The Coastal Art finally has a decent spade, the African Art is .. well I need to g back. My fave? The Jacob Lawrence gallery!
This tribute to Mr. Lawrence works because it IS a tribute to a great Northwest artist rather than a tribute to a donor. Why couldn't the museum do more of this? One of the greatest art shows I ever saw was an exhibit of the Seattle School at the Tacoma Glass Museum. This was during the opening of this museum, itself a paen to Chihuly, and the curator must have wanted to connect the glass art movement to the hyistory of art i9n the Northwest. That history is unique. The settlers who came here encountered a high artistic culture. Art was an omnipresent integral part of the coastal people's culture. Raven the carving was a way of expressing the reality of raven the deity AND the unity of man and nature. It is difficult not to imagine that this spirit did not osmose into the later nature art tradition of the Seattle School.
Sorry, I have not identified the Seattle School with its most prominent artists . Graves, Tobey, Callahan, and Cage. Their joint work celebrated the same unity of nature, art as well as poetry, music as one sees in the traditional paintings of a bentwood box. The paintings at first seem to be pure geometry, but the geometry resolves itself into animal parts .. eyes, joints, feathers, and fins. Then, these same part metamorphose into people. Graves and Tobey .. consciously or not, continue this amazing tradition. Grave,s "Folded Wing" (left) is one examle .. unfortunately it really does not work online. Thats is why we need a museum!Maybe I am imagining all this, but it would be a wonderful step if the SAM brought its Northwest school works together! If the curators are reading what I write, please look at it this way ... visitors to Seattle come form Paris and Tokyo, London and Boston. Every city has a museum, some greater than others. With all due respect to Warhol, Lichenstein, Oldenburg . pop art can be seen anywhere. It is a generic form, a generic idea. Moreover, much of this work is easily duplicated. I have seen Warhol's Marilyn as an original (I think) and as a print .. which is real? Exposing these generic pieces, including the Hammering Man sculpture at the front entrance of OUR museum, implies that Seattle is no more than a lately rich community.
So, I will retract my terminology. I will accept SAM as the Seattle Art Museum rather than its former name, the Seattle Aren't Art Museum, because there are so many wonderful thngs to see. I hope thoough, SAM will begin to see itself as more of a stimulus to Art itslef, that we will see a lot more creativity and celebration of artists as opposed to collectors.
4 comments:
Hi there. I am the gal that volunteers with her husband at the museum and sat next to you at Sam Taste this weekend. I would like to continue the discussion you started here. Your comments on pop art exactly correct, although you don't know it. You state that pop art "is a generic form, a generic idea". While your tone suggests this is a mistake on the artist's and museum's behalf, I need to inform you that this is a definition of pop art and why it's important. Pop artists were concerned with the idea of commodity, of the ordinary. It is a reflection of the average consumer. You also state that you don't know if you've seen Warhol's "Marilyn" as an original or print. Of course you know that one of his favorite meduims was screen printing, right? This "easy-to-make, easy-to-reproduce" type of art was Warhol's way of inviting the viewer to question art and what is original, so your comment is the essence of the genre. I would invite you to think more on this idea and if your opinion is still that this art is "generic", at least you have arrived at this conclusion with more knowledge of its meaning. I only feel that I can challenge you this way because you seem to care about the art world and hopefully you are open to learning more.
As a final note, the artist's names are Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.
Sorry if I mis spelled Rothko or Pollock. Both are great favoprites of mine and I plan to retuern to share these works again.
On the other subject, I am not sure what your point is. Yes, I know that Warhol eta l, were practicing a kind of intellectual activity and that many people enjoyed their humor.
That said, their moment of fame has passed and the objects have little value, IMO, other than the trophy value to the person who bought them. I see no difference between collecting Warhol/Oldenberg than collecting baseball cards.
Don't get me wrong. I KNOW there are people who value this sort of thing. I know that some found this sort of thing exciting. There is some sort of historic vlaue. But, the monetary vlaue because these are originals is more of a tribute to the art finacial system than it is to the museum's taste. By putting these collectible out front, the museum values dollar value above anything intrinisic to the art.
Let me tell you a little story. Some years ago Ansel Adams honored me by requesting a piece of my work. The trouble was that this specific print took me two week to print and I doubted that I would ever print it again. So, I offered a trade. Ansel laughed, pointing out the great value of his signature. We had a good laugh about this. When I got home, however, he had sent a postcard of his work, signed on the back with "Dear Steve, this is probably the most valuable piece of art you own."
At least the museum did not exhibiot cuttings from Cristo's tarps!
With this view, what is the difference, then, between the Warhol/Oldenburg pieces and everything in the African Art collection? Aren't they both reflections of history and sociology? Don't they both take a lot of money to obtain, and become a sort of trophy? I am of course assuming you appreciate the African Art collection since you mentioned that before (however, I could be wrong). How do you define the difference between the two collections?
1. May I suggest that you post a real name? Anonymous is too, well vague.
2. The most obvious difference between the African work and the Pop culture is that the former objects were not made to please a small coterie of collectors and critics. A communist book I rad on Japanese art made the same point. Ukiyoee were NOT made for art in the western sense but as popular objects.
In the same spirit I believe there is a lot of art overlooked in the world of illustration and even pornography.
3. The objects in the African collection, like the graves and Tobeys, are each unique. They are skilled products that can not be simply replaced by their images.
Think about this in terms of Duchampe. Wouldn't a copy of a a toilet be as moving as the original? I think the answer is yes but more important is the implication of value. The Duchamp "original" only has value of validated by a certificate, signature or evidence of providence. In the same way, whether one things Warhol and Johns were wonderfully clever or not, the ONLY intrinsic value in their objects is the artificial value created by the providence.
In other words, owning the Oldenburg ice bag is evidence that someone has the money to support the artist. As art, however, a rip off may have even more meaning than the original.
3. This issue underlies a lot of my thoughts about performance4 art vs creation of objects that are art. Poets face this issue as a reality. Would you go to a museum to see Whitman's hand written words or Hemingway's typed manuscripts? In the same way, I see the Web as changinf art itself. If I wanted to announce a new insight a las Johns' flags, why make an object when I can post a graphic? The answer is obvious ..money, and only money. The result of this situation is that art becomes the creation not of the artist but of the collector.
Of course, collectors and patrons have always been important but not all collectors are equal. The WPA, for example, fostered great creativity in the US but few would give the Soviet equivalent similar credit. Somehow there is an issue of taste.
4. Part of my personal hope is that museums can replace collectors. This means that curators with courage have the opportunity to enrich art but curators who such at the popular teet will serve a lesser purpose.
A good example of proactive gallery here in Seattle is Stonington. Stoningto9n is only one of the coastal art venues in the city. It os, however, unique in tis philosophy of promoting highly original work that is carrying forward the tradition founded in Seattle by Bill Holm. Here I see an example of SAM's failure. The4 coastal art collection would be a lot more influential if it used Holm's words to help visitors interpret coastal art and if the museum were to sponsor shows of the quality we see currently at the Burke or most of the time at Stonington.
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