This Week in the Mercury
Friday, September 9, 2011
News Win a TBA Immersion Pass
Posted by Alison Hallett on Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 5:09 PM
I wound up with an extra pass to this year's festival. Gets you into any show (except Mike Daisey). Best art-critic review of this picture of my cat's head on William Adama's body wins (keep it short, for the love of god). Contest closes at 2 pm tomorrow—caveat being, the winner will have to figure out how to touch base with me tomorrow evening to pick it up. Make sure there's a valid email address attached to the account you're logged in with, OR include your email in your comment. I'll email the winner by 2:30 tomorrow.
If you're not accustomed to writing fine-art reviews, my "how to speak TBA" guide might come in handy.
1
Clearly a study in containment, the artist argues for comportment in lieu of feeling - as if she is moments away from throwing paint on a wall and calling it good. Frakking magnificent.
2
One can conjecture that this piece, simply titled "Q + A" and produced during the artists' self-imposed exile to the wilds of Outer Gresham, is a direct statement on the perceived lack of virulent, self-actualized males in her generation combined with her own conflated ideas of love, honor and fluffiness. "Q + A" was the start of a great prolific time for the artist, culminating in her most famous, if controversial piece to date, "DR/CA/TS/".
4
Allison Hallett is an Abstract Expressionist. This style has gone underground. One rarely sees it anymore. Hallett carries the torch well. This picture of her cat’s head superimposed on William Adama’s body is lush and primal, impulsive and a bit unsettling. From a ground of industrial crap, a steel pole forces its way down the face of the painting, describing that difficult-to-grip space between “restraint and recklessness.” Hallett gives us the inexorable language of longing.
6
The piece describes that one day... through sheer determination, bravery and with the ability to stack beer kegs better than they could ever have been stacked before... you can has.
9
New Works By Alison Hallett. (Admiral Whiskers?)
In new work artist, curator and critic Alison Hallett, doesn't stray much from her typical self made digital styling and as usual her well thought out digital collage are at times, nothing short of breathtaking. This particular piece, one that I have no doubt is a preview of a much larger body of work responding to the absurdity of popular culture icons such as LOLCats and made up admirals in interstellar-wars-with-robots-that-are-people, is just a bit shy of breathtaking. The concept, of social dissent is a new one for Hallett and one that I think suits her work quite well,. However this particular piece is just a bit too straightforward in its approach and simple in its composition. While simpler is typically better in this case it has the effect of giving the appearance that a potentially eye opening work of art has collided with an issue of Cat Fancier magazine. I half expected to see the caption "Oh Admiral Whiskers, you look so dapper in uniform!" The lack of whiskers in the likeness of the cat may indicate a lack of balance within the artists life and her relationship with current events. Or the whole thing could be as simple as and open letter to the feline in her life. He truly is fetching and even more so in uniform.
In new work artist, curator and critic Alison Hallett, doesn't stray much from her typical self made digital styling and as usual her well thought out digital collage are at times, nothing short of breathtaking. This particular piece, one that I have no doubt is a preview of a much larger body of work responding to the absurdity of popular culture icons such as LOLCats and made up admirals in interstellar-wars-with-robots-that-are-people, is just a bit shy of breathtaking. The concept, of social dissent is a new one for Hallett and one that I think suits her work quite well,. However this particular piece is just a bit too straightforward in its approach and simple in its composition. While simpler is typically better in this case it has the effect of giving the appearance that a potentially eye opening work of art has collided with an issue of Cat Fancier magazine. I half expected to see the caption "Oh Admiral Whiskers, you look so dapper in uniform!" The lack of whiskers in the likeness of the cat may indicate a lack of balance within the artists life and her relationship with current events. Or the whole thing could be as simple as and open letter to the feline in her life. He truly is fetching and even more so in uniform.
10
"I'm No/Pussy" by A@Halletdot.com, at the Bridgebridge Gallery 902 EW Burnside
With a wink to neo-post post-modernists everywhere, this eerie homage to B.G.'s "Adama" (read "Obama", captain of a lost ship...groan) seems to fall flat in all areas of art save "existence". It more eerily evokes 9/11 security workers juxtaposing it with Schrödinger's fabled cat. While positing the tired Twin Towers anniversary conundrum "Is irony still dead?", this pussy certainly is... D.O.A.
But as luck would have it for you out-of-towners, "I'm No/Pussy" has arrived just in the nick of time to fend off the sentimentality that so often accompanies such a somber anniversary. It also fends off taste, caution and your lunch. This pleasing little piece of art-fluff will draw the Portlandia tourists like flies to the litter box, but you won't see any of the First Thursday Gonna-be's (or Last Thursday wanna-be's) wasting their contempt on this uninspired inkblot.
While the "dog days of August" seem to be trotting right into these "feline fortnights of September", you'll want to make your way to the McClure paper shredding Glee fest at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. Or, just stay home, you'll have just as much pleasure deconstructing what the (real) cat dragged in.
(Special thanks to F. Cassano School of Journalism correspondence course)
With a wink to neo-post post-modernists everywhere, this eerie homage to B.G.'s "Adama" (read "Obama", captain of a lost ship...groan) seems to fall flat in all areas of art save "existence". It more eerily evokes 9/11 security workers juxtaposing it with Schrödinger's fabled cat. While positing the tired Twin Towers anniversary conundrum "Is irony still dead?", this pussy certainly is... D.O.A.
But as luck would have it for you out-of-towners, "I'm No/Pussy" has arrived just in the nick of time to fend off the sentimentality that so often accompanies such a somber anniversary. It also fends off taste, caution and your lunch. This pleasing little piece of art-fluff will draw the Portlandia tourists like flies to the litter box, but you won't see any of the First Thursday Gonna-be's (or Last Thursday wanna-be's) wasting their contempt on this uninspired inkblot.
While the "dog days of August" seem to be trotting right into these "feline fortnights of September", you'll want to make your way to the McClure paper shredding Glee fest at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. Or, just stay home, you'll have just as much pleasure deconstructing what the (real) cat dragged in.
(Special thanks to F. Cassano School of Journalism correspondence course)
11
Alison Hallett’s nameless new work, being displayed as part of the TBA (Totally Bitchin’ Adama) Festival, seems to feature a feline head atop the body of our beloved commander. “Seems to” because the raw, even brutal overlay of the image cautions against searching it for any deep meaning, or even for a quantum string of meaning. Sometimes the head of a cat is simply a cat’s head. Barrels in the background may be filled with comestibles, with nothing at all, or perhaps neither or both at once, the uncertainty evoking a Schrödinger's cat food paradox.
Hallett’s palette, while palatable, is as subtle as a mallet. This is “arte brutale,” if not on a grand scale, and if not with great skill, then at least with cheap photo manipulation software. The message is the medium here, a medium rare enough to truly earn the hyphenated honorific “medium-rare.” The image is simultaneously fin-de-siècle and avant-garde, a combination often attempted, but rarely less successfully. Of the piece as a whole we should perhaps quote Catullus, who wrote “Why is it that hate comes out so easily…”
I forget the rest.
Hallett’s palette, while palatable, is as subtle as a mallet. This is “arte brutale,” if not on a grand scale, and if not with great skill, then at least with cheap photo manipulation software. The message is the medium here, a medium rare enough to truly earn the hyphenated honorific “medium-rare.” The image is simultaneously fin-de-siècle and avant-garde, a combination often attempted, but rarely less successfully. Of the piece as a whole we should perhaps quote Catullus, who wrote “Why is it that hate comes out so easily…”
I forget the rest.
12
It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.
13
My thumbs do not twittle
No energy for that
I am drained.
DRAINED
From standing here having to watch
the hipsters prowl around
installation art
from room to room
with glum looks on their faces
I yearn to lap up some
Kiefer
No energy for that
I am drained.
DRAINED
From standing here having to watch
the hipsters prowl around
installation art
from room to room
with glum looks on their faces
I yearn to lap up some
Kiefer
14
Hallett's most recent work, Man Pussy No. 3, is a full-throated critique of the reactionary and patriarchal elements of American culture. While many may blanch at the stark and staggering political message of the work, the bold truths that Hallett shows us by photoshopping the head of an adorable widdle kitty-cat onto a gruff and ultra-masculine space admiral cannot be denied by any sensible viewer of the piece. Gone are the pockmarks, the gruff voice, and the ash-grey hair that spoke of male authority. Hallett has exposed the hidden fuzzy cat-like feminine nature that lies within even the most hardened commander of a battle-scarred battlestar. Indeed, that fuzzy-wuzzy cuddly interior may hold more truth, more meaning, and more of our authentic selves than the outward, hardened appearance ever could.
After viewing the work (And the accompanying pieces, Man Pussy No. 1, 2, 5, &17) one cannot help but retreat inward and cajole with one's own inner cute little fluffy kiddy-widdy cat. In the aftermath of an evening with Hallett's work, the viewer is helpless, and has no choice but to reach out for their own pussy.
After viewing the work (And the accompanying pieces, Man Pussy No. 1, 2, 5, &17) one cannot help but retreat inward and cajole with one's own inner cute little fluffy kiddy-widdy cat. In the aftermath of an evening with Hallett's work, the viewer is helpless, and has no choice but to reach out for their own pussy.
15
By transposing her feline's head with Adama's, Hallett evokes the Kilrathi of the Wing Commander saga; a spacefaring, human-hating Cat race that--despite their dark intentions to obliterate humanity--are just too furry and cuddly to hate. In this juxtaposition Hallett reminds us that whether cold-blooded Cylon or purring Cat, these fragementations of the Lacanian Imaginary Order are crucial in synthesis of the Symbolic relationship with the Self. Here, she asks through Bill Adama's regal pose: "Are you cat lover, like me? Or are you an unknowing Cylon Frakker, like Tigh?"
16
Artist Hallett’s seminal piece commands a pivitol role in the disjunctive perturbation of the critical facture theory of the universe on the anvil of pop culture. It exists in a powerful resonance with the substructure of current Internet-mediated thought. The facile use of feline imagery simultaneously references early Egyptian beliefs in the immortality of cats, believing them Gods, and the indelible stain of the modern condition: the Internet cannot be erased. Thus, the artist’s relationship with the companion animal is forever cast in immortality. Further, the sublime beauty of the sexual signifier visually and conceptually activates the postmodern condition of game theory as the basis for all reality. The minimal and foreboding background avoids the all to common gesture to overspecificity. The artist sharpens the long knives of sampling to deviously demolish the art world patriarchy in a savvy Paglian gesture.
17
This was the hardest decision I've ever made. Due to the high level of submission I scrounged up an extra pass and am giving out TWO: one to #2, one to #11.
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