Articles

Different Time, Same Story

It’s hard to explain to people today, when it seems that everyone wants to be Italian, that our neighbors once targeted my family. 

We’d only lived in Connecticut a few weeks. Because, by God, my father wasn’t about to raise his kids in the big, bad apple. And then, in broad daylight, someone painted “DIRTY WOPS!” on our garage door. 

I think the way in which I perceived myself changed the very moment I saw those words.

My mother thought it was one of the neighbor kids. I remember her saying something like, “kids do crazy things.”

I didn’t believe it was a kid at all, but I didn’t argue. Not on your life. My opinion was called talking back. So I kept silent about a certain neighborhood grownup who shook his head whenever our car drove by. Even at my young age, I could detect his contempt for all the European problems he never had to face. And for all the Europeans he did.

My father has said that imagining the “American dream” was the only thing that got him through the Second World War. But he didn’t carry the streets-paved-in-gold generic illusion. He defined the “dream” as living in a peaceful country. I’ll never forget the look that came over him when he saw the slur on our door, as if part of his dream had been ground out like one of his cigars. As if he’d finally witnessed something he’d been afraid of all along. 

It was a different time then, of course, when lots of us still believed that the police always did the right thing, and so my father might have pretended to agree with my suggestion to call the police, but he never did. “It’s nothing,” he said, “a joke.” And then he got out the hose and a scrub brush.

And now I wonder: do we all see what we want to see, or can handle seeing, and make light of the rest just so we don’t have to turn a small but obvious cruelty into something much bigger?

That night, I heard my dad cry for the first time. I felt his tears would wash me away. I buried my head in my pillow.

My mother cried too, but I was used to that.

There was another clue that my father was a little less secure in our new neighborhood than he let on. He likes to say that everybody in this country loves to eat, but nobody wants to farm. He was proud of his garden, yet he planted it in our shady backyard, not in the sunnier front. See, all of the men in our neighborhood wore suits to work. My father left the house in overalls. He still does. 

And today, with all the renewed discriminatory rhetoric we face, well, I hope something else my dad likes to say is true: this too shall pass. 

It’s the little memories that have the largest effect.

I have my reasons for why I didn’t change my name once I married. But the memory of my father scrubbing our garage door is one of the strongest.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Sanelli works as a writer and speaker. Her latest book is A Woman Writing. For more information, visit www.marylousanelli.com

Ukranian-born American sculptor Alexander Archipenko set out to do the impossible. He sought to represent movement in sculpture. In “Archipenko: A Modern Legacy,” on now at the Frye Art Museum, the artist’s lifelong quest to expand the definitions and possibilities of sculpture raises a larger question about what it means to be an artist. About what an artist’s role in society can be.

For Archipenko, the role of the artist was one of provocateur. Of driving forward and instigating social change through artistic production. Aligning himself with avant-garde artistic and literary groups quite early on in his career and all through it, Archipenko consistently experimented with what the sculptural form could (and couldn’t) do. 

Walking through the exhibit at the Frye, which is organized chronologically—(the historian in me rejoices!)—visitors can trace the evolution of these experimentations in his abstract figurative sculptures. The moments where Archipenko really nails it, where the single curve of a hip or outline of a shoulder can suggest the most graceful saunter or the most delicate repose, are made all the more successful when seen next to the drawings and sketches where he was working out these ideas. 

At the beginning, Archipenko’s more modern, abstract sculptures are juxtaposed against an equal number of works adhering to more classical representations of the human form. A lifelike, white marble sculpture from 1921 effortlessly reads as a figure: the face is abstracted and one arm is truncated, but the all-too-familiar form of the reclining female nude is easy to discern. In case you still had doubts, just read the title: “Reclining.” Case closed.

Right next to “Reclining,” however, is “Walking” from 1912-18, a bronze sculpture that gestures at the human form, but abstracts and breaks it apart as much as constructing it. Here, Archipenko pushes the boundaries of what signifiers are needed in order for a sculpture to read as “human figure.” A vertical rectangular form at the bottom suggests “leg,” while the hourglass shape above reads “torso,” and the circular form on top suggests “head.” Much like the Cubists with whom he was often associated, Archipenko questions the very forms of representation themselves. “How much can I abstract the shape of the body,” he seems to be asking, “until it no longer reads as human at all?”

While many of Archipenko’s sculptures walk the line between representation and abstraction, many fall over into pure abstraction, where the human form is hardly recognizable at all. In “Boxing,” the sculpture is so abstract that the title might be the only way to discern what he is representing.

Forms and masses meld together and are barely readable as two figures dueling. In the middle of the sculpture is a hole—Archipenko’s trademark move. Putting negative space in the middle of a sculpture, the medium that is supposed to be about form and mass. This is what Archipenko is known for: sculpting the void. Representing nothingness. In so doing, Archipenko seems to be asking, “What are we trying to do here, anyway?”

Because the larger question informing Archipenko’s work is not so much about representation vs. abstraction, positive vs. negative space, movement vs. stasis. It’s about what the artist can do. It’s about how far an artist can push the boundaries of representation, can push the limits of what’s acceptable, and still be understood. 

Archipenko’s most successful works are the ones where he stretches these limits to their max, reducing the form down to its most essential parts, stripping away the layers of excess. “Torso in Space” from 1935 is nothing more than two curves and a line. But it nevertheless reads as a torso in the clearest, most modern way. Here, Archipenko proves that testing the boundaries of what’s possible can yield highly elegant results.

We know that the history of Western art is a history of vanguard movements. It is a history of artists pushing the limits of what’s acceptable in art making. We remember those artists who went against the grain, who questioned their culture and tried to critique it in some way. Picasso, Monet, Rodin, Van Gogh, Warhol. We tend to forget it now, but all of these artists were considered radicals in their owntime. Add Archipenko to that list—his experiments in sculptural abstraction parallel that of Brancusi or Boccioni. 

What Archipenko and the rest of these artists tell us is that the status quo will always be there. There will always be rules and guidelines about what is possible or acceptable, in the world of art and in the larger culture by extension. It’s the role of the artist, the cultural provocateur, to challenge this status quo. To test its limits and possibilities, to experiment and question. Or, in the case of Archipenko, to blow a hole right through the middle of it.

Lauren Gallow

Lauren Gallow is an arts writer, critic, and editor. You can read more of her work and learn about her immersive art project “Desert Jewels” at www.desert-jewels.com/writing.

“Archipenko: A Modern Legacy” is on view through April 30 at the Frye Art Museum, located at 704 Terry Avenue in Seattle, Washington. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission is always free. For more information, call (206) 622-9250 or visit www.FryeMuseum.org.

Here We Are

I’m not unlike many professional artists. My work means piecing together a career from teaching, publishing, speaking fees, grants, honorariums, and applying to choreograph in far away places, which satisfies my addiction to traveling, and my love of dancing. Dancers are my mobile community. Wherever I go, here we are.

I’m in KeriKeri, New Zealand, first studio on a North Island tour.

And it’s not every day that I get to teach Polynesians, so, quickly as possible, I’m going to write this and press SEND. I’m sitting outside a private home, pilfering the wireless. My lodging doesn’t have internet, possibly what I like best about it. 

Talia walked into the studio slowly, but I didn’t get the feeling it was because she is bigger than most people, only that she comes from a humid place in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and slowly is just how people move due to the heat.

“I know nothing about your kind of dancing,” she said, “I worry I make fool of myself.” But as soon as she started moving her hips, it didn’t take long to see how there is nothing slow about her dancing.

“Hula is an amazing dance form,” I whispered to the director.

“We have a lot of Samoan dancers,” he said. “We had to have our floor reinforced.”

I liked Talia right away. When I think more about why, I consider all the people who are moving to Seattle lately with lots of money and, oftentimes, airs to match. But Talia has the nature of someone who’s had to work physically hard to earn her place in the world, and I can identify with that.

“I got the sugar,” is how she put it, meaning she is diabetic and suffering from peripheral edema caused by bad diet and excessive salt and/or sugar intake. A lot of Polynesians, I’ve found, have a hard time giving up Spam for whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.

I’m fascinated by Talia’s jet black braid winding into a bun on top of her head; by her long skirts in all colors of the rainbow worn by people back home in a parade maybe, but not out and about, not in Seattle anyway…except maybe in Fremont; by the way she places her hand in front of her mouth as if trying to hide her laughter because she naturally wants to laugh off her errors more than the rest of us. What she does next is rub one hand over her stomach while the other rubs the small of her back, as if she is literally trying to rub out the mistake. It’s the funniest thing.

We talked about her sons who went to America to serve in the military; how she had her first baby at fifteen, nine others after. Nine! “Catholic, that’s why,” she said.

While the director is speaking, Talia says softly, “Fa’afafine,” raising her eyebrows. Later, she explained how Samoan’s don’t believe there is any such thing as “homosexual.” Fa’afafine is simply a third gender, well accepted and “celebrated in my culture,” she said, just as a stripe of sunlight washed over the tattoo of a gecko slithering up her thigh.

No one could have choreographed the effect any better.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Sanelli’s latest book is “A Woman Writing.” She is speaking at Town Hall Seattle and joined by dancers from Cornish College of the Arts on April 27, 2017, 7:30 P.M. 

For more information, visit www.marylousanelli.com.

Art’s challenge

The sacred challenge of art — even graffiti —

 is to remind us of our commonality;

 that whatever our gender, race, or creed, we share so much:

 eyes to weep as well as see — or look away;

 ears to listen or close; mouths to smile or curl in disgust;

 arms to hold, resist, or fight; hearts to love or wound…

Diane Walker is a poet, artist, and actress living in the Northwest. 

To view her work, visit www.facebook.com/contemplativephotography 

or www.contemplativephotography.com.

The painter’s lament

Whenever someone asks,

“How did you get from here to there;

How is it that you saw the possibilities?”

it’s easiest to tell the truth —

I honestly don’t know:

I sat and stared

and then followed my heart;

I let my chosen colors do their work,

and tried to balance light and dark;

to allow it to become

whatever it was born to be.

Creating art

is a quite bit like parenting,

except —

the outcome’s slightly more

in your control.

Diane Walker is a poet, artist, and actress living in the Northwest. 

To view her work, visit www.facebook.com/contemplativephotography 

or www.contemplativephotography.com.

Divine Ammunition: The Sculpture of Al Farrow at Bellevue Arts Museum

Over 50 years ago when Eisenhower gave that speech, violence had reached a tipping point in the United States, and across the globe. World War II brought death and human conflict at a scale the world had never seen before. Nearly 70 million people died as a result of that war. As a result of human violence and combat. At that particular historical moment, making guns had become more important—and more financially lucrative—than ever before. 

We make guns, but what do guns make? Do they make violence, or do they make stability and structure? And who decides? These are just a few of the questions Al Farrow asks with his show, “Divine Ammunition,” on now at the Bellevue Arts Museum. Farrow meticulously crafts sculptures of religious structures and devotional objects—scale models of mosques and cathedrals, along with menorahs, reliquaries, and icons—all out of guns and ammunition. For him, guns make religion.

A scholar of both religion and war, Farrow has long been interested in the historical connection between violence and religion. In “Divine Ammunition,” he seems most interested in the forms and objects that emerge from the two—objects like guns and reliquaries. Bullets and flying buttresses. Church domes and Uzis. In Farrow’s work, the forms of violence and religion become almost interchangeable. You might not notice that the dome of one of Farrow’s mosques is made entirely out of intricately arranged copper bullets, or that a cathedral buttress is actually a handgun. But look closely, and the munitions reveal themselves.

As Farrow reminds us, it is in objects that we as people come to locate intangible concepts like war and religion. Violence lives in our guns, the tools we use to inflict it. Religion resides in cathedrals and mosques, the structures we build to house it. Religious identity lives in menorahs and reliquaries, the devotional objects we use to invoke it. 

With his work, however, Farrow questions all of this. For him, guns are no longer tools of violence, but instead are used as building materials. They become the foundation of the synagogue or mosque. They are creative rather than destructive. Stripped of their firepower and force, Farrow’s spent ammunition and dismembered guns are left only to their forms, becoming bronze circles and cylinders, miniaturized roof tiles and building columns. 

Of course, we know that guns don’t make violence and churches don’t make religion. Humans make these things. It is we who are responsible for our technological advancements, for our industrial developments. It is we humans who figured out how to make double-barreled shotguns and double barrel vaults. And it is we who determine to what use these objects and forms are put.

Hearing Farrow talk about the process of acquiring his materials—spent ammunition and hundreds of thousands of guns and munitions parts—one is reminded of this very fact. “I used to be very anti-gun and unsympathetic towards the American gun community,” Farrow notes. “I’ve shifted on that, though.” Now, he says, he is more understanding of the various uses to which armament can be put. “I’ve come to realize,” he says, “that gun culture and gun collecting is not so much about violence.” It’s about the object and the appreciation of its historical and cultural significance. Guns are not so far from antiquities and artifacts in that way. 

“I am a part of that culture now, gun culture,” Farrow admits. His use—artistic creation—is just one of the many uses to which guns and ammunition can be put. The same object can be an instrument of destruction or of creation. It can kill and it can save. And as Farrow reminds us, creation and destruction will always be intimately intertwined—it’s impossible to have one without the other. The danger, though, is when we cloak that destruction and violence in the shroud of something generative, like religion. Because, as Eisenhower reminded us so many years ago, military strength can bring great power and possibility. But the real power comes in how we choose to use it.

Lauren Gallow

Lauren Gallow is an arts writer, critic, and editor. You can read more of her work and learn about her immersive art project “Desert Jewels” at www.desert-jewels.com/writing.

“Divine Ammunition: The Sculpture of Al Farrow” is on view through May 7 at the Bellevue Arts Museum, located at 510 Bellevue Way NE in Bellevue, Washington. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday from 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. For more information, visit www.bellevuearts.org.

Tabaimo: Utsutsushi utsushi at the Asian Art Museum in Seattle, Washington

The fascinating exhibition by the world renowned artist Tabaimo at the Asian Art Museum tells us that the world is not what it seems. Behind mundane objects, in a clothing chest, in a toilet, in a bedroom, lurk other forces, other realities, other creatures, even escape to magic spaces. 

The exhibition, which the artist also curated, includes four new videos that respond to works in the Asian Art Museum’s permanent collection. Tabaimo invented the tricky title of her show, “Utsutsushi utsushi” based on the underlying idea of “utsushi” copying or studying a master artist’s work in order to not only understand it, but to grasp its deeper spiritual meaning, to connect across time to it and to honor it. She has turned the concept into an active verb, as becomes clear in viewing the exhibition. She does not just explore the style of the historic master works that she chose for the exhibition, she expands on them, imagining a narrative that takes place inside or beside, or above or below them. 

Tabaimo’s work perfectly suits the present moment: uncertain, unsteady, unsafe, unpredictable, but it is also deeply poetic. The artist began by paying homage to her mother, Tabata Shion, a ceramic artist, who inspired the unusual title of the exhibition. Tabaimo’s mother practices “utsushi” as a ceramic artist. The exhibition begins with her work juxtaposed to her master, the artist Ogata Kenzan from the Edo period in Japan.

Tabaimo practiced her own “utsutsushi“ with specific historical works in the collection of the Asian Art Museum, all of which are included in the exhibition. The most straightforward example, and perhaps the thematic heart of the exhibition (although it appears in the last gallery), is Tabaimo’s video in response to the Museum’s unique early seventeenth century six part panel “Crows.” The original awes us with its brilliantly conceived “murder” of crows (as a group of crows is called). The artist discovered that the crows were so subtly drawn, that she actually had to trace them for her own work, “Crow.” In her video a gold wall opens up into a receding space, as crows fly into it, or land above it. But crows also pop up, and fly into several of the other works in the exhibition. You can look out for them. 

For another “utsutsushi” her point of departure are two hanging scrolls of “Dragonflies” and “Butterflies,” detailed naturalistic ink drawings and verses, the result of collaboration among over 70 late Edo artists. Tabaimo “liberated” the dragonflies and butterflies in her video, formatted like the scrolls. Now they fly free and disappear from view. But she explored the original work carefully as she recreated the creatures. 

At the beginning of the exhibition, she pairs two 16th century Chinese wooden chests and a video called “Two,” 2016, which appears on the back of a transparent wall behind the chests, so that their silhouette frames the video. Here we see what I referred to in the beginning, the forces lurking behind the mundane. Initially we see a chest full of bed covers, but then an arm reaches out from a pillow! And it goes on from there. I won’t spoil the experience with too much detail. 

“The Obscuring Moon” develops a narrative for a shadowy woman who barely appears behind a screen in an original print by Hiroshige. Tabaimo places her in the center of an elusive story. But she carefully emulates  Hiroshige’s colors, and we are treated to a roomful of his prints in order to enjoy that connection. 

Another reference to women is “aitaisei-josei,” a story of suicide, based on a  seventeenth century story and a modern novel, “Villain,” by Yoshida Shuichi. Tabaimo creates connections between Ohatsu and Kaneko Miho, the main female characters of the two books, through metaphor and symbolism. 

Among the pre-existing work, each surprises us in a different way. Most amusing is the “Public ConVENience,” 2006, a three walled walk in with projections of life size Japanese public toilets. The characters come and go with many unexpected actions.  

“Hanabi-ra” gives us what appears to be a representation of a man covered in flowered tattoos and “haunted house,” on loan from the Asia Society, is a large screen city scape with unpredictable scale shifts, and narrative jolts. Tabaimo utsushi’d the spirit of the voyeuristic aerial cityscape from a 17th century Japanese painting that details the daily lives of city dwellers. We see the original example in the next room. 

This exhibition is another Asian Art Museum coup, a cutting edge artist in our wonderful “other” museum in Volunteer Park. Just to give you an idea of Tabaimo’s status, she represented Japan in 2011, at the Venice Biennale, and her work is in the collection of Asia Society in New York.  

Don’t fail to go, as the Asian Art Museum will be closing when it is over, for two years of remodeling and expansion, its first real remodel since it was built in 1933.

Susan Noyes Platt, Ph.D.

Susan Noyes Platt, Ph.D. is an art historian, art critic, curator, and activist. She continues to address politically engaged art on her blog www.artandpoliticsnow.com. 

“Tabaimo: Utsutsushi utsushi” is on view through February 26, Wednesday and Friday-Sunday, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. and Thursday from 10 A.M. to 9 P.M. at the Asian Art Museum, located in Volunteer Park at 1400 East Prospect Street in Seattle, Washington. For more information, visit www.seattleartmuseum.org/visit/asian-art-museum.