Through April 20, 2008
Kurt Weiser
Semi-Conscious
Porcelain
There’s a small pencil drawing in the Kurt Weiser retrospective at BAM, made, according to the label, during a Board meeting of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts. The drawing, a doodle-like study of lumpy, humanoid globes on little stands, is a nice summary of the narrative arc of the exhibit itself, which traces the career of a pottery artist (he spent years running the Bray operation) who reinvents himself by discovering a way to combine his obsessive sketching with his ceramics.
I have no doubt that the early, pre-doodle Weiser work in the exhibit represents a potter at the top of his craft. The various plates, teapots, and vessels on display have striking, nature-derived patterns and intriguing shapes (especially a two headed Toucan jar from 1981), but it’s the sort of thing I’ve spent years not noticing. For me, the business of high-fire versus low-fire, hand-thrown versus slip cast, functional versus decorative is someone else’s conversation. I’m personally most drawn to work where the craft is in service of an idea, not the main impulse behind a piece. Pottery folks can get excited about the quality of a glaze, its depth, purity, and color; I want the glaze to depict something.
And so, it turns out, did Weiser. According to the catalog and descriptive text accompanying the show, Weiser led a double life until 1989, filling stacks of notebooks with intriguing, freely associative imagery (they remind me of drawings by Salvador Dali or Frieda Kahlo), but making ceramics without any direct link to that work. He felt constrained, it appears, by his role as director of a major ceramics center, where he felt bound to work in the tradition of the craft like his predecessors in the job, keeping the decorative surface of the pieces he made subordinated to the form and function of the piece itself, abstract or abstracted in nature.
All that changed radically when Weiser left the center and took a teaching post in Arizona. The shift in environments and professions seems to have liberated him to take a completely different approach to his pottery. The older works were objects with intriguing surfaces, typical of traditional pottery; with the new work, one notices the painting first, the object it is painted upon, second. The surrealist imagery Weiser explored in his pencil and ink sketchbooks, newly expressed as porcelain paint, emerges as a shimmering vision, greatly enhanced in detail, depth, and color. The musty old art of hand-painted china gets a kick in the behind, and the results are often spectacular.
A breakthrough 1991 piece, done after a trip to Thailand, is entitled Bird Merchant. The foot-high teapot is vaguely misshapen, like all of Weiser’s more recent work; it’s as though the fluid forms of the vessels are acquiring some of the qualities of the people and animals they display, caught in some midpoint of their evolution.
Crowding much of the teapot surface is the somewhat sinister face of a poorly shaved man, his smoking cigarette about to burn the forehead of a tightly gripped yellow songbird, with a lush landscape of tropical foliage behind. One froggy eye seems to bulge out of the man’s head, an exact counterpart of the domed lid just above, and his forehead is wavy like the pot’s curving upper edge; the vertical white spout echoes the vertical white smoke plume from his cigarette. But using a teapot as support for this drama seems rather arbitrary; the last thing one imagines is actually drinking from such a vessel, and what does making tea have to do with a man selling tropical birds?
Elsewhere Weiser uses less clearly functional objects as canvas, torso-like forms derived from a traditional Chinese model called a ginger jar. Though these pieces are also modest in size, they support a teeming Technicolor world, dreamy and highly sexual in mood. Detailed flora and fauna is everywhere, recalling the natural history illustrations of earlier artists like John James Audubon, whose Birds of America were made into a set of dinner plates years after his death.
There is also much to remind one of the surrealist painters Frieda Kahlo (moody figures; jungle life) and Paul Delvaux. Delvaux in particular shares with Weiser a fondness for idealized, nearly look-alike young female nudes, expressionless but evocative of a state of uncomplicated sensuality. Weiser, unlike Delvaux, doesn’t tend to repeat himself; each of Weiser’s self-contained narratives represents an interesting, unique twist on his ongoing exploration of natural urges and their consequences. Animals are fondled on a vessel front, then eviscerated on the back; women are decoratively abducted , then unceremoniously discarded; a randy swan prepares to ravish a sleeping Leda, while a lovingly-rendered civet looks curiously on.
Sometimes the imagery seems to threaten the very solidity of the ceramic surface itself. In the most beautiful of the ginger jars, Semi-Conscious, the jar has sprouted a Siamese twin, with the head of an exotic looking female filling the surface of one jar, her gesturing hand occupying the surface of the other. Both jars are leaning dangerously to one side, as though the figures they support are about to break free of their existing containers. Perhaps this is the ultimate craftsman’s revenge: the dream of shedding the physical constraints of form and substance entirely; here, it’s the tension between the two that’s compelling.
There seems little danger of Weiser losing his edge anytime soon. The most recent piece in the exhibit is also the most ambitious. Europa continues the theme of sexual conquest being part of the natural order, with the namesake maiden being carried off by Zeus in the form of a bull. Europa sits on the watery upper half of a large peanut-shaped ceramic globe, complete with metal stand. Below the watery world sits a naively drawn miniature civilization, a sepia-toned medieval village with features of both the East and the West: pagodas and bell towers, schooners and strutting potentates sheltered by servants holding umbrellas. Other globes, not in the exhibit, are even more imaginative and extravagant in their imagery, but they never threaten to be merely oil paintings on a round surface – the imagery always responds somehow to the nature of the materials and support. It’s the combination that works, not the paintings on their own.
Perhaps Weiser himself is unsure where his particular exploration is leading. Those who practice craft without art can enjoy being certain; art at its best is a journey into the unknown.
Through Saturday, January 26
The story of James Martin has all the trappings of a local legend: early success, followed by years of neglect and struggle, followed by rediscovery by a new generation of collectors and critics. The artist himself - reclusive, eccentric, with a more-than-colorful life history – perfectly fits the bill. The work is both cartoony and erudite, with enough art historical references to please the cognoscenti, but at the same time rude and outlandish, befitting Martin’s rough and tumble working-class roots. And there’s a number of popular Northwest artists who have also specialized in faux-naïve storytelling, including Fay Jones, Joe Max Emminger, and Ed Kamuda.
To be honest, I have not reviewed a Martin show up until now because I was put off by his work. I found it messy, awkward, and repetitive, and I had trouble getting past its cheapness – both in the materials that the artist chooses to use (mottled-looking gouache painted on wrinkled, non-archival Kraft paper), and in the rock-bottom prices that it sells for. In the current show, there are prices as low as $650 for a finished work, which is a far lower price than any other artist of similar seniority. It’s a mixed message at best, since on the one hand Martin is promoted as heir to the legacy of the Graves/Tobey group and a true Diamond in the Rough, and on the other hand his artwork is being sold for much less money than any other local artist of similar experience and standing. His prices are basically the same as they were in the 60s, when gas was 30 cents a gallon. If he is so good, why is his work so cheap?
I don’t think this low-balling of Martin’s work is primarily the choice of the gallery; it seems more likely that the key to the technique/price/value conundrum is the artist himself, whose attitude towards such matters as degree of finish, longevity, and the economics of the art marketplace is defiantly casual, even dismissive. He seems to have made the conscious choice to work small (15” x 20” is about average), quick, and cheap as a way of being an Artist Outside the Art World, an implicit criticism of those on the inside who are snobbish, precious, and over-sophisticated, not to mention money-grubbing.
It is hard to imagine any artist who would look good with so many rapid-fire, unedited pictures on view in one place at one time. Of the hundred-odd images in the show, I would immediately cut out at least 30, particularly the nearly identical compositions with a beat-up car in profile and an interchangeable cast of characters taking exactly the same poses. Sure it’s amusing to see Christ acting the part of a grease-pit mechanic (along with the artist in a Mickey Mouse cap at the other end of the car), but it loses something when a nearby picture simply swaps him out for a naked girl. Can such loaded images really be shuffled around that easily, like so many Tarot cards? I’d also edit out several of the School of Chagall floating figure groups, remove a few lions, and cull several still lives and pianos.
Of the dozens of works that would remain on view after my thinning, we’d still be left with a very mixed bag: full of intriguing parts, but often perplexing in overall effect. What I like the best about Martin is his uninhibited energy and his narrative ambitions - he takes on very interesting subject matter, but the results are frequently muddled.
Take the painting On the Steps of La Californie, for example. It’s an homage to the two greatest masters of Spanish painting, Velazquez and Picasso. Martin’s picture is vaguely similar in composition and palette to Picasso’s painting of the interior of La Californie, his Cannes studio, but here we’re on the outside rather than the inside. Flitting about is a cast of characters drawn from Las Meninas, and Picasso’s late-career takeoff on Las Meninas. Between Velazquez’s royal dwarf and Picasso’s version of the Princess stands the sketchy figure of a Spanish nun. Most intriguingly, reaching out of a mysterious void to one side of the studio, we see what looks to be the black-clad arm of Velazquez himself, his empty hand waving at the air, beckoning from beyond.
It’s a sort of a buddy picture, with the artist making it clear that he’s on good terms with his erstwhile predecessors, reinterpreting them in a vaguely expressionist style like Ensor or Chagall, only with much messier paint. Such borrowings, in fact, are a major theme in Martin’s work; the current show contains a version (one of many) of Van Gogh’s room, with the addition of a temptress in a blue dress and a duck, as well as a mystic sky a la Morris Graves, a Mona Lisa, and many more appearances by various characters from Velazquez. But the La Californie painting doesn’t go anywhere with its mélange of styles and references – being buddies isn’t the same as making an interesting point, which here seems to be the fun of bringing dead artists back to life.
I want to like these paintings better than I do. Martin is full of ideas, and he’s willing to try nearly anything. He channels a huge variety of sources – cartoons, modern art, television, literature and music (Siegfried and Proust make an appearance) – and his color is frequently electric. My favorite picture in the show is also the simplest. A self-portrait entitled the Wooly Award, the artist’s lemon yellow shirt fills most of the picture. Pinned to his enormous chest is a medal with the image of a wooly mammoth, apparently one of the artist’s current preoccupations. Martin himself, with shaggy white hair and bird, looks not at us but off to one side at a robin perched on his shoulder, his lips pursed in something between a whistle and a smile. It’s a picture of a man more comfortable in his imagined world than in ours, a world where he can take on the role of impresario and ringmaster, living vicariously through his animal alter egos and imaginary girlfriends.
Sheila Farr, art critic of the Seattle Times, has been Martin’s main champion in recent years. In 2001 her monograph on the artist, she refers to his work as “deliciously beautiful”. Personally, I’m not able to get through to the beauty past the debris of Martin’s awkward compostion, wobbly technique and endless recycling of the same ideas. It’s almost a great story, but not quite, in spite of the avid collectors snapping up dozens of paintings at bargain-basement prices. Someday, a smart curator will cull the gems and shelf the rest, and we’ll all have a great time celebrating the genius of our home-grown hero.
Beware of Knife-Wielding Clowns!
Seattle Opera performs Pagliacci at McCaw Hall through January 26th
Ah, the sad, murderous clown! Where would opera be without you? Well, we certainly wouldn’t have Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (or Verdi’s Rigoletto, too, but we’re not talking about that). We might as well do away with ample sopranos in horned helmets, if we really need to get rid of opera clichés. Be that as it may, Pagliacci’s popularity speaks for itself. It was the first recording to sell a million copies. The year was 1907. There was nothing to do, except buy copies of Caruso (Enrico, not David) singing Vesti la giubba, otherwise known as that big, overblown aria from Pagliacci. But it doesn’t end there; it was also the first opera to be recorded in its entirety (on 15 78 rpm records) and the first opera to appear on film in 1931. OK, it’s only a very manageable hour and a half long, but that really doesn’t have anything to do with its enduring appeal. It promises and delivers lots of over-the-top drama. People seem to dig it for the drama, its music, its art-imitates-life plot and its pro-clown agenda. That much was in evidence from the packed house on a freezing and dreary January night.
I found Seattle Opera’s production quite excellent, but two things about it really had me in a quandary. We’ll get to those later. First, the excellence: the singing was first-rate, top-notch and whiz-bang. Antonello Palombi was great as the insanely jealous Canio. His voice seemed to suit the music perfectly. His version of Vesti la giubba was really quite powerful in a flying-spittle, stage-pounding, rolling-around kind of way. After all, he was being cheated on by his wife, Nedda, sung very well be Nuccia Focile. She turned Leoncavallo’s purplish verse (he also wrote the libretto) into something that doesn’t make you wince. Yeah, there are a lot of lines about birds and flames; awful stuff, but it didn’t matter when she sang it. Her soprano was clear and lovely. Seattle Opera mainstay, Gordon Hawkins, took the part of Tonio, and Morgan Smith rounded out the principles with his role as Silvio. First of all, let me tell you that each of the main characters is kind of a crappy person; Silvio is a callous ladies’ man, Tonio is a spiteful cripple, Nedda is kind of a floozy and Canio has a real knack for knife-play. This museum of flaws spells tragedy for everyone, except Tonio. This production confirms two things that I’ve long suspected: that Gordon Hawkins is a tremendous singing actor and that Morgan Smith is an incredible singer. Over the years, Hawkins has fleshed out roles from Wagner to Britten and has consistently shown a flair for the dramatic in each part. It was great to see that he is still in fine form in this production. Smith has one of the best voices that I’ve heard in a long time. His baritone is powerful, yet capable of infinite nuance. It was a pleasure listening to him. If this is any indication of things to come, see him while you can, because he’ll soon be off to bigger and better things. This guy is the real deal. I heard him sing the title role in Don Giovanni last year (he gets to ride around on a motorcycle) and knew right away that he was the genuine article.
Now that we’ve established that the singing was excellent – and the orchestra, with Dean Williamson at the helm, sounded great, too – let’s move on to its shortcomings. The action is set in a Calabrian village in the 1950s. In other words, we’re in the middle of nowhere fairly long ago. A troupe of players shows up, proclaiming that they will perform some broad comedy about adultery. The townspeople are thrilled. But it’s the fifties. People have television. They have a few Fellini movies. Why on earth are they getting so excited about a quartet of hack comedians coming to their town? The time doesn’t justify their enthusiasm for the players. It’s the dawn of the modern age. Even rural Calabrians have more than one entertainment option. If you’re going to play around with history, the period should be moved back, not forward. Set it during the Renaissance or during the Gothic invasions; just don’t move it forward six decades and expect for everyone to follow you there. I’m well aware that opera requires the constant suspension of disbelief, but this time frame just didn’t sit too well with me.
Although it was a very good idea to present Pagliacci as a stand-alone production (it’s usually paired up with Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana; also short and tragic), I had the distinct impression that the time was being padded in order to make it seem like a full evening of opera, what with the 35-minute intermission and the so-called “interlude” before the start of the second act. This segment featured tumblers and acrobats performing to music that Leoncavallo had written for the circus and bills itself as Canio's dream sequence. Although it’s always nice to see some tumbling during an opera, this didn’t seem to go with anything that came before or after. The music was light and almost frivilous, a great contrast from the more brooding fare in either act of the opera. And while the rope acrobats were impressive, I found myself wanting to see the opera more than people shimmying up ropes. After it was over, we were once again returned to the full-throttle Italianate bathos that ends in a fit of jealousy and double-homicide. Pagliacci clocks in at around a mere hour and a half. Even so, I’d appreciate it if it was presented in a more straightforward way; no long intermissions and no stray bonus materials. I can handle a short opera. The running time has nothing to do with quality. In the case of this production, less is more.
