Richard Lacayo, Time's critic and blogger, recounts a recent walk through London's Trafalgar Square in which he admired the unusual public art venue of the Fourth Plinth—a pedestal made to support a statue in 1841. The other three plinths in the square were topped, but money ran out for this one, so it remained empty. Now it's a site for changing contemporary works.

Why can't every American city have a spot such as this, just one little place "that was the focus of so much public attention and curiousity? It might even be worth all the political squabbling and artworld intrigue you would have to put up with to have it happen."

In Seattle, where would it be?

On top of one of the arms that holds up 99? In that weird amphitheater of Greekish columns where Pike and Pine start to slope downtown? It has to be prominent. Do we have to resort to in front of the doors to Nordstrom?

When Dear Science roped me into a podcast, I figured I'd sit around on my hands while he talked, occasionally becoming the butt of a joke for not knowing something incredibly scientifically basic, like whether mosquitoes only come in the female variety (no, but it's only the female ones that drink blood, so those are the only ones you ever see).

Instead, we got into it about fraud in art and science, starting by fully spoiling the movie My Kid Could Paint That, but moving into fake science reporting, fake stem-cell research progress, and the foolproof way to test whether a woman is having an orgasm (it involves sweaty feet).

Check it out.

... Are when I truly love—LOVE—the Internets and the blogs.

PORT's Arcy Douglass wrote the hell out of the Robert Irwin show in San Diego. I mean, thousands of words, dozens of scrolls, handfuls of images.

Irwin's work needs this kind of time, attention, and space. His complicated architectural installations and adventures in experience are not easily explored in review form.

Don't miss this one, and here's my "review" of the 25-year-old classic book about Irwin by Lawrence Weschler.

From some mosquito at Artdish:

Charles Mudede's arguments are themselves too reliant upon the "association" theory that he posits in his Slog post. Perhaps this is because he has spent so much time pouring over the writings of Hegel and his intellectual descendants. Like most of the Continental philosophers who have followed him, Hegel's idea of argument was to make every phenomenon a metaphor for his theory and then extrapolate this theory into a metaphor for everything else.

This takes me back twenty years to when I was a college sophomore. At that time, I could not write a paper or have a conversation without grafting the names of everybody I had read over the last few semesters onto my own thoughts. So it is with Charles: he can imbue his romantic and child-like observations with all the weight of the Western intellectual tradition, but it only succeeds in leaving the more astute reader somewhat embarrassed for him.

As one who has taught at the college level, I can assure the old bean that a vast distance exists between what I produce and what college students frequently produce for their professors. Also, it's very American of him to believe that once you are done with college, you are done with reading and mentioning hard books. Also, sir, do your best, your damnedest not to play the Hegel game with me. And remember this for future contests: I received a European education and so European thought dominates my thought. Your education or background might find that kind of thing hard to accept. The problem might be a matter of you becoming accustomed to people who don't exactly look like you but take ideas very seriously.

America's favorite reclusive objectivist turns 80 today.

I wrote here last week about Brad Biancardi, the most promising young painter in Seattle—and the one who's leaving for Chicago later this month.

Now you can hear him talk for himself, on In/Visible, my weekly conversation with people in art.

I never know exactly what's going to happen when I turn on the tape. Some artists don't seem to notice it; for others, it freezes their blood. Biancardi treated it like an old friend he hadn't seen for a while, making confessions and sharing observations about his work and his doubts. He opened up.

This is one you shouldn't miss.

Here are a couple of teasers:

The Millennium Falcon (doubling, unintentionally, as a Marsden Hartley soldier painting):

1983 Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue "Made in
America" (his first car):

Golden Gardens, Seattle
Photo by sonoazure, from The Stranger's photo pool.

John Wesley's Leda and the Man, part of Dave Hickey's list.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Donald.)

Jim Dine's not the only one making a visit in the next few months.

Robert Storr is a dean of the art world. He's a gifted writer. A painter. Held the top curatorial job at MoMA for a decade before becoming head of Yale's fancypants School of Art. This summer, he directed the Venice Biennale.

For his efforts in Venice, he was roundly criticized, especially for his central exhibition, Think With the Senses, Feel With the Mind, and rightly so.

The show felt stale and disjointed, with an emphasis on blue-chippers like Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Elizabeth Murray, Ellsworth Kelly, Susan Rothenberg, and with every artist given a separate space. Things sat silent, strangely anesthetized, and unfortunately, the real fun was had in the 76 national pavilions outside the main show, and in other shows around the city. (The best total rundown is at Richard Lacayo's Looking Around blog for Time magazine).

Kim Jones ("Mudman") was in one of those quiet corners of Storr's biennale show, and Storr's visit to Seattle coincides with the close of Jones's retrospective at the Henry Art Gallery.

Storr will be at UW's Kane Hall Thursday, January 10, at 7 pm. Cost is $15 general, $12 students/seniors; 616-9894.

Correction: What a dumb mistake. Storr was never the chief curator at MoMA; he was a senior curator under Kirk Varnedoe. I'm reading Varnedoe's "Pictures of Nothing" now. Duh.

Rainier Brew House, First Floor
Photo by Theater Off Jackson, from The Stranger's photo pool.

Two particularly juicy works from the 1960s await in the prominent Pop display that introduces the galleries of the new Seattle Art Museum: Jim Dine's Vise and Window with Ax and Objects.

In Vise, a monochrome white canvas is stabbed by a steel tube stuck in a clamp on a table in front of the painting.

In Window, a black window is hacked at by an ax. Tools have been Dine's language for years; as a midwestern kid, he worked in the hardware stores of his family.

Clumped in with the Pop artists, Dine has said of himself that he's too "subjective" for Pop. He'll say more about himself on Wednesday Nov. 28 at 7 pm at the museum, when he'll talk to SAM mod & contemporary curator Michael Darling.

Dine has a strong connection to SAM; he spends most of his time in New York but has lived in Washington state and worked extensively with the Walla Walla Foundry. Two Dine works have been in SAM's collection for more than three decades: Rainbow Faucet (a 1966 painting) and Untitled (a 1973 lithograph). Six more pieces were promised in honor of SAM's 75th anniversary this year, four from the Wrights and two from the artist himself.

(The fine print, from the press release, says this thing is docent-driven: "This lecture is presented in memory of former docent Elizabeth Hambleton. Hambleton was a long-time docent of the museum until she passed away a couple years ago. Hambleton’s husband donated to the docent fund in her memory in order to make this lecture possible. Current SAM docents are also contributing additional funds to support the lecture and reception that will follow.")

Why does it seem like Seattle museum and gallery web sites are in a competition for world's worst web site?

Art is visual and associative, people. As is the web. They should be natural friends.

Not in this city.

Yesterday, I was scrolling around on Seattle Art Museum's site when I made a delightful discovery: You can "curate" your own collection online by compiling images, with your "wall label" comments, from the site's bank of images from the permanent collection. Great, good.

Except that the bank of images is so thin that when I went to do this, I couldn't get most of the pieces I wanted to use.

There's not a single page devoted to images of what's at the Olympic Sculpture Park—there's an art map, and a list, but no comprehensive series of visuals. And somehow—somehow—when you search for Alexander Calder's Eagle, the museum's flagship work of art, all that comes up is a blue box with the word "Eagle" in it.

Is this web site built and maintained by a woodpecker?

Not that anyone else is doing any better. In fact, at least SAM has some of its collection online (and a refreshingly complete set of images from the current Japan Envisions the West exhibition).

The Henry Art Gallery is in the midst of putting its collection online, but there is absolutely nothing there now, in 2007.

There are no slide shows of images accompanying exhibitions (the code for doing this would be approximately as difficult and time-consuming for a web master as the code for the this blog post is for me). There is not even a slide show of images for the permanent James Turrell Skyspace installation. There are no links to reviews about exhibitions, or past reviews, or past images, or artist's web pages, or gallery sites, or other museums, or other blogs, or ... But hey! you say. The Henry has its own blog! True! Yes! I like it!

But good luck finding it from the Henry's home page.

Then there's the Frye Art Museum's web site. Crickets. All the same problems as the Henry, plus that the site's lead color is vomit brown.

These are dark alleys of the Internet, places you want to get away from as fast as possible, places where you're liable to see something so ugly that it will make you want to scream.

Are we not Seattle? Are we not the land of technology and honey?

The galleries have plenty of images, but not much information or many links, either. For the most part, their web sites are deadly ugly, and just completely awkward to use.

On Lawrimore Project's site, every page is a one-million-mile scroll. Platform Gallery is best at the standalone slide show feature--images pop up and are viewable horizontally rather than vertically, but there's not much more there there. Howard House has one of those useless, I-am-a-logo front pages that requires you to waste your time clicking on it and waiting for the real home page to load. Once that happens, the real home page is so stuffed together, you find yourself longing for the clean emptiness again.

Many of the galleries, unlike the museums, don't list their future itineraries--I realize things change, but would it kill them? On James Harris Gallery, it's not pretty, but the information's mostly all there. Same goes for Greg Kucera Gallery.

Examples abound, but I'll stop there and pose this question: Is there any Seattle web designer mortified enough to take on this job pro bono? If so, call the Henry. Call SAM. Hell, hack in and fix it up.

Just make it stop.

This weekend I got my hands on an advance copy of The Believer's annual visual issue (out in November), and it is hot.

OK, yes, I do have a piece in it--a Q&A with artist Liz Cohen, represented in Seattle at Lawrimore Project--but that's just a tiny morsel of the meal.

Writer Dave Hickey not only talks trash (as usual), he also lays out 10 of his favorite works of art. (One is John Wesley's hysterical 1972 painting Leda and the Man, with the swan being chased by a fellow wearing just socks and garters. In its absence online, I give you another Wesley: The Mouse Tells Jokes, from 2002.)

UPDATE: Thanks to Slog tipper Donald, here's Leda and the Man!

Artist Ai Weiwei--he of the fallen doors at Documenta--describes the (malfunctioning) system of contemporary art in China, and talks some shit of his own. (This is a fairly Bukowskian issue, come to think of it.)

There are also three portfolios: Unsentimental contemporary portraits of muses, Las Vegas carpet patterns, and temporary tattoos (by Raymond Pettibon, Ai Weiwei, and Gregory Blackstock, among others).

And there's an essay linking Michael Landy's 2001 performance Break Down, in which he destroyed all of his belongings (including valuable artworks and a car), Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York (the self-destructing machine that self-destructed unsuccessfully),

Corbu's vision of a cleaned-up New York with skinny soundproof skyscrapers amid big parks, the 1958 fire at MoMA--amazing photos here, and Sept. 11. Now that's a Believer piece.

This just in from Hot Tipper S:

I don't know how often staff from The Stranger meander down the Ave in the University District, but if you take a look at the old tiger Tiger building across from the University Bookstore, you'll see that the Church of Scientology is putting in its Psychiatry: An Industry of Death exhibit to run for two weeks (Nov 1-14). The anti-psychiatry posters currently in place are at least 10 feet tall and make all psychiatrists throughout history sound like mini-Hitlers running rampant without ethical obligations. It's worth a laugh, at the very least. For information on the same exhibit in California, check this out.

Everything old is new again!

Blade Runner: The Final [really final] Cut opens in Seattle at the Cinerama. The Stranger offices went berserk after I accidentally hollered the replicant/non-replicant status of Deckard. In my defense, Ridley Scott revealed it first, in the New York Times.

The Darjeeling Limited is being paired with its companion short, Hotel Chevalier, in Seattle theaters starting today. Of course, you could have seen it on iTunes billions of years ago, but who's complaining?

Northwest Film Forum organized a touring program of Shohei Imamura films—count 'em: 18, ten of which aren't on DVD—that opens here tonight. Charles Mudede writes about Imamura's rebellious oeuvre (which doesn't really get messy, he asserts, until 1963's Insect Woman on Tuesday) in this week's film lead. If you want the book Charles refers to, go tonight--it's being given out free.

Also old, as in no longer with us, but new, as in died young, is Ian Curtis, the subject of the new biopic Control. Eric Grandy assesses the man-to-legend ratio in his review ("Corbijn's film just looks perfect, as if one of his bleak, black-and-white Joy Division stills had come to life").

Also old, as in played at SIFF, is the limited run of For the Bible Tells Me So ("the best gay doc since The Celluloid Closet, says David Schmader").

And new, but no good: The entire On Screen lineup, from Sleuth (a remake of the old--ack--movie and play, botched by Kenneth Branagh and his superflat surveillance motifs) to Dan in Real Life ("Everything that you expect to happen happens, in a mild, inoffensive, and okay way," says Lindy West) to Desert Bayou (Katrina evacuees get relocated to Utah, where they encounter racism, mistrust, and hysteria... but no Mormons?).

See Get Out for all your movie times needs. Notable stuff only in film shorts: Let's Get Lost at Northwest Film Forum, Vincent Price Double Bill at Grand Illusion (that's The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Theatre of Blood), Murnau's Nosferatu and Herzog's Nosferatu at the Metro, and—last but by no means least—UW Special Collections: Selected Shorts at Northwest Film Forum tomorrow. Enjoy!

I'll get to This Weekend at the Movies shortly, but first I must obsess about The Godless Girl. You've probably never seen this exuberant, schizoid epic--by Ten Commandments maestro Cecil Blount De Mille--because it was produced without a soundtrack when silent films were going out of style, lost money at the box office, and fell into obscurity. It's newly available on DVD, thanks to the National Film Preservation Foundation, whose third immense DVD box set of American film "treasures" I review in this week's DVD column. Here's the bit of room I had for The Godless Girl:

The most thrilling entry in the 739-minute set has to be Cecil B. De Mille's silent The Godless Girl, from 1929, starring Lina Basquette as a popular vixen who leads her high-school godless society with a combination of sexual allure (spit curls and costumes by Adrian!) and exotic intimidation (the initiation ceremony requires the novice to swear on the head of a capuchin monkey). When her rival, handsome student body president George Duryea, gets permission from the principal to suppress the outbreak of atheism his own way, De Mille stages a teenage riot like you've never seen. It begins with hurled eggs, spans four floors of complete mayhem, and ends with a beautiful blonde finding God on her deathbed (and forcing Basquette into an unmistakable pietà). The godless girl eventually converts too, following a stigmatic encounter with an electric fence at reform school, but even then De Mille can't resist a decidedly pagan nude scene in which she frolics, nymphlike, by the side of a stream. No excuses! You must see The Godless Girl.

Obviously you want to see the monkey. Here is "The Goat"--comic relief Eddie Mullan--being forced by Godless Society ringleader Lina Basquette to forswear Christmas:

I officially disapprove of the use of primates in the motion picture industry (by the way, did you read this sad AP article?), but this little cutie is long gone. Watching him disrupt the oh-so-high-school initiation ceremony is hilarious. (Later, during the teenage riot, the monkey tries to climb up the Goat's pant leg. Also adorable.)

The film stills the NFPF provided are not ideal, but believe me when I say the riot is astounding. Garments are rent, hair is pulled, the bodies of children fly abruptly across the room and tumble tragically down spiral staircases, the atheist and the Bible boy cast epithets and flirt across battle lines—it's choreography worthy of an epic. Which, on the modest scale of high schools and juvenile detention centers, it is.

Though The Godless Girl bombed in the US, it was a hit in the Soviet Union, where it was shown without the cheesy final reel in which our heroine comes to understand there is a God. You may prefer this version as well. But there is a delicious irony to De Mille's delirious conclusion: The godless girl discovers God and sensual pleasure at the same time. (I wish I could illustrate this with a still from the soft-focus scene in which Basquette plashes nakedly in a stream. Alas, you'll have to get the DVDs.)

Dawn Cerny—hear her in her own voice here—is the most anarchic of the emerging talents of Seattle. Her work cannibalizes history and spits it out on cheap paper.

In a solo show at Gallery 4Culture in May 2006, wild dogs painted directly on the wall terrorized each other, but they didn't affect the delicate, framed paintings of noblemen on which they were superimposed. The two realms rebuffed each other like opposing magnets.

At Catherine Person Gallery in March, Cerny installed a large grid of dozens of scraps of drawings and paintings on the wall in the form of questions and answers, based on the Victorian magazine Notes and Queries.

Now, she has an eccentric, multimedia double marriage portrait of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln up at Kirkland Arts Center, as part of Suzanne Beal's excellent Help Me I'm Hurt show.

What is this woman up to? Time to find out. Here are two older works:

Postscript: In the print edition of this week's paper, we promised a podcast with Mimi Gates about her love of Chinese art. But between the time of publication and podcast, the poor Seattle Art Museum director contracted a nasty cold. She's promised to get on tape as soon as she's back at work.

Brad Biancardi strikes me as one of those young artists I haven't written enough about—and now I find out he's moving to Chicago.

He graduated from UW with an MFA in painting and drawing in 2005, and has been a member of the artist-run Crawl Space Gallery pretty much ever since.

Last year, Piss President, the series of drawings and paintings he showed at Crawl Space based on government buildings in Washington, D.C., was the most restrained protest show imaginable—which gave it a sort of majestic tenseness. I regret not reviewing it fully.

Each building was depicted in skeleton form, like a computer model outlining its structure and its emptiness. The spaces were haunting, and some seemed even to seethe in the dim light of the gallery. Here's one:

This month, Biancardi has a solo show of four paintings (including this one, with animalistic imagery I haven't seen before in his work)

at Crawl Space; he's also got a floor piece in Jim O'Donnell's A Spectral Glimpse at Platform Gallery.

Those shows opened Saturday. (I haven't seen them yet but can't wait.) The openings onto other worlds in the center of Biancardi's paintings are unsettling and inviting, wormholes for modernism's sublime-in-paint to slither into the present through the cracks in the walls, grab you, and take you back with it, or maybe forward.

Regina Hackett's attack:

[Mudede] says he's a Marxist, but a more accurate description would be an art-for-art's sake Marxist. He writes about historical inevitability, but in a random way. He plucks a premise from the air and defends it into life.

The problem with criticism in all of its forms (art, film, literature) has been its susceptibility to the charge that, ultimately, it is nothing more than the product of someone's opinion. Criticism is not truth; it is an opinion � or what the Greeks called doxa. We can all agree that opinions are no good.

Nonsense. Who agrees that opinions are no good? Only those who believe in the Word made flesh. Mudede cannot claim to be one of them. "We can all agree" is his way of signaling his con job. He knows to his bones that a critic can't hand down the law to the people.

My defense:

Marxism for me is simply this: Art and politics cannot be separated. A political truth is an artistic truth. But what is politics? It is the social space in which ideas of how a society should or should not distribute its wealth meet and compete for the prize of realization. So wealth is what matters in politics. And the matters of politics are also the matters of art. Because those who have the most wealth mostly determine the results (realizations) of politics (a government, laws, management of the armed forces, law enforcement, and other institutions that organize and express the power of the state), art must either be in the situation of reinforcing the state (status) of power or resisting it.

This basically is my position, and it is not without problems. However, opinions (doxa) are bad for art because they are bad for politics.

And why are opinions bad for politics? Because you are free to have as many of them as you want. Recall this: When Bush is directly criticized for going to war, he often tells his critic that he/she has the (American) right to have and express that opinion. What is the meaning of this? America is great because it permits people to have opinions. As for Bush, he has more than just mere opinions; he has the right to act on his beliefs. You can enjoy your opinions while the king controls the power to act.

Alain Badiou puts it this way:

Everyone knows that there is a precious 'freedom of opinion', where as the 'freedom of truth' remains in doubt. In the lengthy succession of banalities pronounced on the 'dogmatic', 'abstract' and 'constrained' character of the idea of truth--banalities forever invested in defense of political regimes whose (general economic) authority to exercise power is concealed behind the 'freedom of opinion.'

In the case of the present war (and they are many other such cases), at the center of Bush's right to act is a lie. Not an opinion, but a lie. If he can act on a lie, then it is up to his critics to act on the truth.

In politics, a lie and a truth have a much higher value than an opinion. Why? Because for a lie to be worth anything it must assume the character of a truth, not an opinion. Bush never acts on an opinion. He would never degrade his decisions to such a low status. The lie he used to call up the war had the power of the truth.

As it is for politics, it must also be for art. The value of politics is close to nothing if all it can offer is a space for the exchange and circulation of opinions; the value of art criticism is close to nothing if all it can offer is a market place for opinions.

That is my point.

Martin Puryear's

Roy McMakin's

Conor & David's (with research!)

Narrowly Disqualified: Cris Bruch's Only Connect (2006)

Found this gorgeous and horrifying film on Ubuweb. Proceed with caution: you'll never look at your lover's skin the same.

If you're unfamiliar with Ubuweb, it is a stunning collection of classic and current avant garde work in sound, film, and writing. There are amazing catalogs of movies and MP3s available for perusal. Prepare to spend your afternoon there.

Recently, in writing about Nan Goldin's controversial photograph of two girls, one with her legs spread—Edda and Klara Belly Dancing, Berlin (1998), I called it one of the few works of art I could think of that was made for children, that set adults on the outside.

I just remembered another that purports to be: Tseng Yu-Chin's Who Is Listening?, a series of five scenes, two of which I saw at this summer's Documenta 12 in Kassel.

They're uncomfortable, to say the least. In one, the faces of giggling children are spurted with milk or yogurt, which makes them giggle more. In the other, a mother and son wrestle intimately.

Their title, Who Is Listening?, makes them even creepier. In the end, I disliked them deeply. They were much more calculated than Goldin's photograph of two girls at play, at home. It is a more courageous act to capture something innocent that appears to be taboo, and then make the decision to show it, than to stage something that will simply rehearse the effect of a taboo.

This fall, with the post-Vietnam photography of An-My Le and the post-Vietnam sculpture, video, and drawing of Kim Jones, the Henry Art Gallery is a war zone.

When Jones returned from the war, he burned rats to death in two art performances. "That's what we did in Vietnam," he said.

Terrible idea, to say the least.

And here's another Henry artist heard from: When light artist (and Quaker) James Turrell (who has a Skyspace at the Henry) returned from Vietnam, he worked as a peacenik—and it put him in jail. From David Pagel's LA Times story:

Before Turrell had made a name for himself as an artist, he was drafted, served in the military and returned to the West Coast, where he began graduate studies in art at UC Irvine. Turrell the Vietnam vet became active in the peace movement, working on a committee that provided information and counsel to conscientious objectors and other draftees who opposed the war.

Informing citizens about their options was perfectly legal. Encouraging them to take any kind of action was not. "We knew better," Turrell recalls, "than ever to try to convince someone to take a particular path because then you are party to a crime. Of course it is true that we were trying to get people off as conscientious objectors, if they came anywhere near meeting that kind off criteria or even perhaps stretching the criteria."

It was 1966. Turrell had graduated from Pomona College the year before with a bachelor's degree in perceptual psychology. He was a 23-year-old Quaker advising 18-year-olds from all walks of life. "You might be surprised," he says, "what you say over a period of six months. There was a couple. I took the woman to be the man's mother. She was not. She was an FBI agent."

The 18-year-old had not been receiving notices sent by the government. But the letters, Turrell says, "were made up. Everything [the couple] said was in truth a lie, and they just wanted to find me saying one thing—that I thought he should do this. I was positive I never had, I told my lawyer I never had, and then they had a tape of me out in the parking lot and apparently I said this is what he should do. And that was enough. I was arrested and served time in prison. They essentially convicted me of a treasonable offense.

...

In a wide-ranging conversation at Griffin Contemporary Exhibitions, Turrell's Santa Monica gallery, he concluded the story of his incarceration by saying, "I don't think a democracy should have a mercenary force that is voluntary because it becomes very much like a banana republic, where the military is actually a political arm. I mean, these are total Pollyanna kinds of viewpoints, but I subscribe to them. And art is another one."

When Kim Jones first began performing Mudman, he was a young man in Los Angeles emerging from two worlds: art school, and, before that, a tour in Vietnam. (Once a Marine, always a Marine, as he says in a generous podcast in which he recites his service number.)

In photographs from the time, around 1974, he is sexual, superpowered, muscular as a machine—not tall, but compact, with his face masked. He's an animal. He wears sculptures on his naked body as he stands on a rooftop and is photographed by a girlfriend. He poses for a punk magazine shoot. Even when he's not trying to look tough, he does.

Those days are over. On Friday night at the Henry Art Gallery, Jones performed Mudman in the gallery. He hasn't performed the sculpture for some time, but he decided to do it here because Seattle was the last stop on his retrospective's national tour.

Mudman has changed.

In front of an assembled audience, Jones removed his clothing down to white boxer shorts and a pair of black boots. He dipped his hands into a silver bucket, covered his body in light-colored mud, then eased into a squat so he could slip into a lattice of sticks like putting on a heavy backpack.

When I got there, he hadn't moved very far from the bucket, and there was a reception line to talk to him, as if he were a bride or a kid who'd just taken communion.

"You're like an insane, wonderful hero," a jumpy guy wearing a bowling shirt told him. Their interaction was awkward, because the bowling-shirted guy seemed to treat Mudman like a rock star, to not notice his inherent weirdness.

Jones doesn't act out a part when he's performing Mudman, which is part of what's strange about it. He answers people's questions, talks to them gamely about sculpture. "What do you think it is?" he retorts to a trio of skeptical kids in a video on display at the Henry. They walk away.

Here, people stayed, and talked, most of them amongst themselves. "He looks like a tree," one woman whispered. One guy rubbed his finger in the mud on the floor and applied it to a drawing he was making.

I shook Mudman's hand and got mud on mine. I didn't know how else to greet a person-sculpture who also happened to be a person I'd met once before. When I'd interviewed him, he told me that sometimes, he lifts the pantyhose that cover his face because it freaks people out too much when they try to talk to him. But that night, he kept the pantyhose on, and it crushed his left eyelid, which left him disfigured. There was something incredibly soft about this quiet, besieged Mudman, with his white, saggy stomach and his crushed eye.

He was also tired. By the time I got to him, he'd been wearing the sculpture for almost an hour. "I'm about to take a shower," he said, forcing the smile of a person who has been trying to escape a situation for several minutes. His shoulders were red, rubbed raw by the straps. Ever since he walked along Wilshire Boulevard from sunrise to sunset, and sunset to sunrise, Mudman has been a feat of endurance. By performing now, Jones admits the fatigue of age into the performance. The commanding, totem-like power of the sculpture and the flabby reality of the body throw each other into relief. Mudman as King Lear.

Mudman makes his move toward the wall, and the crowd hushes. He's sliding around on the muddy wood floor, constantly catching his balance, and a maintenance woman in purple plastic gloves is wiping up the area where the audience is standing. He half-slides, half-falls to the floor and slowly, carefully, removes the sculpture. He keeps on the pantyhose. He gets up, picks up his clothing, and walks out.

Everyone, immediately, misses him.

Last week, when Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes was building his blogroll, he asked for a link directly to art posts and art posts only on Slog.

Here it is.

If you want to see both art and architecture posts, bookmark The Stranger's visual art home page, where Slog art and architecture streams in below the fold.

In the show Help Me I'm Hurt up at Kirkland Arts Center, Seattle artist Samantha Scherer displays a grid of little square watercolor paintings of murder victims from Law & Order.

The paintings are numbered according to episode and order of death within episodes, but there's no further information about these characters, and the tender little paintings have made me curious. (I don't watch the show.)

If you can identify any of the characters, tell me: What happened? How did they die? Why were they killed?

All fifty-three portraits (!) are on Scherer's web site here.

Tons of stuff opening this week—and we're ramping up into quality cinema season, so there's a lot worth paying attention to.

In a crowded On Screen lineup, we've got reviews of three winners right off the bat: My Kid Could Paint That (Jen Graves says it's "the most honest, direct movie about the dark side of art that I've ever seen"), Gone Baby Gone (Andrew Wright: "Ben Affleck's adaptation of the [novel] absolutely nails the dismount, keeping the book's thorny sense of morality while adding a living, breathing Boston atmosphere that most veteran directors would be proud of"), Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl (Lindy West points out that "Lars doesn't want to exploit [his sex doll] Bianca, and Lars and the Real Girl doesn't want to exploit Lars.")

The list wraps up with 30 Days of Night (Andrew Wright says: "Impressive as the episodes of full-blown splatter are, it's the quieter moments, such as an insta-classic extended overhead tracking shot of the town under siege, that make you kind of sort of wish that they had never flicked off the theater's house lights"), Things We Lost in the Fire (Andrew Wright again: "The film has yet to be made that fully does justice to Benicio Del Toro's alien transmissions, but director Susanne Bier comes awfully close"), a cartoon The Ten Commandments (Lindy West: "the animation fell out of 1995's butthole"), the torture thriller Rendition (Jeff Kirby says it "could be celebrated solely for the fact that it's a political thriller that actually has something relevant to say about politics"), and finally, the hit-and-run drama Reservation Road (Andrew Wright again--yes, I overworked him this week--says it "fails to make much of an impression").

In amusing but pointless film publicist news, I received a press release regarding Lars and the Real Girl earlier this week. It said, in part,

Hello, I need to let you know that one of the images from the Sidney Kimmel Entertainment film LARS AND THE REAL GIRL has been removed from the press site and the studio would like it removed from circulation completely. The photo is the shot of LARS and the “pink bowling ball.” Essentially, the studio is asking that this image NOT be used in ANY opening day reviews or breaks.

What it so dangerous about the "pink bowling ball"? Well, I've been banned from showing you (though, curiously, the image has not been removed from the press site), but you can find it over at MSNBC. The bowling ball is so pink. So subversive. So mysterious. I've become obsessed.

There's also lots worth checking out in this week's limited runs. I love the sweet, smart Blame It on Fidel and defend the abortion closeups in the (overall mediocre) Lake of Fire. The microcinema series Independent Exposure has a Halloween showcase next Wednesday at Central Cinema. I'm intrigued by the "cinema of transgression" doc at Grand Illusion. There are small festivals for Vietnamese and Taiwanese cinema at the UW. Robert Horton is doing one of his fabulous Magic Lantern talks on David Cronenberg. Landmark is starting its Wednesday director series with Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo at the Metro. Northwest Film Forum is doing an evening with renowned avant-garde landscape filmmaker (and father of Sadie Benning) James Benning. And the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival continues with a boatload of queer titles (check under SLGFF). Enjoy!

I'm in a cafe on Lummi Island. Bob Marley is playing on the stereo. The chorus of his song: "Think you are in heaven/But you are living in hell." The subject of the song, a rich person, believes he/she is in a rosy situation, but in actuality he/she is living in the mud. The problem with Marley's assertion? If you believe you are living heaven, and live like you are heaven, you are in heaven. If you believe you are poor, and live like you are poor, you are poor. Condemning the rich for living like the rich is empty. luxury has always been an illusion.

That look!
I cant find words for that look.

By the Ugandan-born artist Zarina Bhimji.

In other words, the Turner Prize show is up.

In related international-slash-award news:

1. I just finished Simon Schama's 8-hour BBC documentary series The Power of Art.

Considering his scenery-chewing, his embarrassing pronouncements (of the bombing of the Spanish town, he declared dramatically, "Guernica had gone Cubist"), and the skin-crawling cheesiness of some of his historical recreations (a sweaty Caravaggio thrusting his sword into empty air comes to mind), the following should not be possible: I love Simon Schama. My feelings are not entirely in my control. Check it out for yourself: The series goes Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rothko. (Schama is especially fun in the pre-modern period, so if you must choose, skip Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko.) (Note: The Netflix "long wait" is really only a couple of weeks.)

2. Wednesday the 52nd Venice Biennale announced its awards for this year's show, which is ongoing into November. The only one I want to call out here is the Golden Lion given to an artist under age 40, which went to Palestinian-born Emily Jacir for her installation Material for a Film.

The work was an archive of an assassination—the assassination of Wael Zuaiter in 1972, one in a series of killings by Israeli agents of Palestinian intellectuals, artists, and writers. Included were letters, books, media accounts, and photographs, including the image below, of the copy of The Thousand and One Nights that Zuaiter had on him when he was killed; it was pierced by a bullet.

Just days after the scaffolding came off of a four-story abstract sculpture outside the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, its top was blown off in a windstorm at about 2:35 pm today.

"It was a big gust that came along and blew off a portion of the top of it," said center spokeswoman Christi Loso.

No one was hurt, she said. A broad area has been cordoned off around the sculpture, and a shuttle bus rerouted to protect people should any more of the sculpture collapse.

Here's a rendering by the artist, Portland-based Ed Carpenter, of the lattice of aluminum, glass, and steel, called Vessel:

Carpenter has been notified about the incident, but no decisions have been made about the future of the sculpture, Loso said. The structure was completed, but the installation had about a month's worth of work left on it, she said, mostly in finishing the base and landscaping.

A scientist who formerly worked at the center, and who is remaining anonymous, is paying for the artwork. Loso said the center's official figure to describe the sculpture's worth is $500,000, but she couldn't say for sure whether that referred to an estimated value or the budget of the commission.

Obviously, the sculpture, which was selected in a competition process last year, will have to be reengineered and maybe, redesigned.

It reminds me of one of the works by a star of Documenta 12 this summer in Kassel, Germany. It was a piece by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a massive majestic assemblage of antique doors formed together to create an architectural scale arch that people could stand under.

But when I was there, two-and-a-half months after the opening, I didn't see that. I saw this:

Organizers of the exhibition passed it off as a fortuitous accident, adding meaning to the piece. Buh. This photograph was taken from the one good remaining angle, the one dramatic viewpoint where chaos still looks meaningfully formed. From every other perspective around the sculpture, the ugly, jagged edges of beautiful doors forever destroyed stuck out of a sorry trash pile. The artist's monument to the life of old culture in rapidly developing China instead joined in the killing, because of sloppy engineering.

I'm not necessarily opposed to the potential of destruction in art. Several years ago, I advocated that Seattle artist Iole Alessandrini's gorgeous, several-block-long installation of light in the dark heart of downtown Tacoma shouldn't be restored after it was damaged in a windstorm weeks before it was supposed to come down.

That piece, called Season of Light, was intended to be temporary, and the ruthless instead of planned ending seemed perfect in the context of an urban block that had become blighted because of the cruel whims—we're interested, tear the historic buildings down, no, nevermind—of a couple of Seattle developers (one of whom, Paul Schell, later became Seattle's mayor).

Art and people are never safe in windstorms.

(Thanks for the tip, Anne S.)

The novel that most directly speaks to the critic, that defines, describes his/her function, mission, purpose, is Heart of Darkness. The narrative of Conrad’s short book is the narrative of any work of criticism. Marlow’s journey to the core of the colonial world has its double—its secret sharer—in the critic’s journey to the core of a work of art. That core is never apolitical. That core is always its truth. Upon reaching the point from which the work (a system of associations) radiates, glows, derives its power or aura, the critic must ask this: does it liberate or does it enslave? It’s one or the other. At the core of the colonial world, Conrad found an oppressor, Kurtz; at the core of other works, the critic might find the opposite: a liberator, a Moses, a Christ, a Muhammad.

Around 1974, Kim Jones, a former painter and sometime sculptor, became a sculpture himself. He called it “Mudman,” and it meant him wearing a latticework of sticks on his back, and covering his body in mud and his head in pantyhose—but interacting with people more or less normally, which often, well, freaked them out.

As Mudman, Jones walked the streets of Los Angeles and, later, New York. He gave performances that included smearing himself in his own shit while hacking at beer cans with a machete he got during his tour in Vietnam, and burning live rats to death, repeating something he and his fellow Marines had done during the war. (The rat act got him sent to court and put on partial probation.)

In his retrospective opening Friday night at the Henry Art Gallery, documents from those performances join sculpture, installation, ever-evolving war drawings, and a timeline of his life that includes snapshots from his time in Vietnam and begins with a newspaper photograph of him when he was crippled from a polio-like disease as a child.

At Friday’s opening, Jones will perform Mudman for the first time in a while. Before you meet him there, listen to him talk, on this week's In/Visible podcast.

Portland's Northwest Film & Video Festival has just handed out its jury awards. Among the winners are Seattle's James Longley, in the category of... um, "The Regarding The Pain of Others Award" (for the truly extremely empathetic Sari's Mother).

The other awards are as follows:

THE LIFE IS MORE SUBTLE THAN WE THINK AWARD Creamery Birds-Director Brian Libby, Portland, OR

THE CHALLENGING HOLLYWOOD AWARD
By Modern Measure-Director Matthew Lessner, Nehalem, OR.

And, my personal favorite,

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL TROUBLED ENERGY AWARD Patterns II and Patterns III-Jamie Travis, Vancouver, BC.

You can get a copy of the award-winning Sari's Mother as an extra on the Iraq in Fragments DVD, available here.

Yes, yes, the Oddfellows Hall—home of the Century Ballroom, Velocity Dance Center, Freehold, two well-loved fringe theaters, and bunches of arts organizations and non-profits—has been sold.

Or is about to be sold. Or something.

Neither the current nor the future owners have returned our calls, but rumor says it's pretty much a done deal (pending one small legal matter, allegedly about property lines, that should be resolved within days if it isn't already).

Those rumors have been breathless and panicked, as members of the aforementioned arts organizations and nonprofits have wondered if their beautiful old brick building will be torn down to build a stack of ugly—if lucrative—condo units.

The panic is premature. According to current tenants like Kara O'Toole, executive director of Velocity, the current owners have said repeatedly that they don't want to sell to anyone who will annihilate its spirit and current community function.

Another good omen—the purported buyer is one Mr. Ted Schroth, developer of the Trace Lofts, admired for its smart blend of preservation and renovation.

And one of Schroth's development collaborators, Liz Dunn, was described in our Political Genius Shortlist this year as "our kind of developer... rather than gutting existing urban shops and stores and shoehorning in awkward condo developments, Dunn's kind of development... fits in and brings more life to the street."

Of course, Schroth can buy the building and do whatever he wants, but if his record is any indication, he'll do some tasteful renovation, overhaul the retail on the first floor, add some residential floors up top, and let well-loved community organizations (Century Ballroom, Velocity) stay.

Isn't that what a smart developer would do?

(In other not-terrible news for arts spaces in Seattle: Jim Kelly of 4Culture says the county has made an offer on the Washington Hall at 14th and Fir—former home of On the Boards, current home of the Sons of Haiti, an African-American Masonic lodge. Kelly says the SoH hasn't answered yet, but he's confident they can make a deal "Either we’re going to save some of these buildings to help preserve some of the independent arts in Seattle," he says, "or we’re going to have to face the consequences.")

From 6 to 8:30 tonight, in this place,

work by this artist,

this artist,

this artist,

and many others will be auctioned on behalf of this worthy cause.

(Sorry you were left off our calendar, Rivet!)

The family of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz is upset about a new Schulz biography.

A recent International Herald Tribune story reported:

Monte Schulz said that when he read Michaelis's manuscript in December, members of the family were shocked by the portrayal of a depressed, cold and bitter man...

Today's installment of Peanuts in the Seattle Times

The sun, Alain Badiou, and a bird.
The one, the man, the life. The absolute, the thought, the being. Philosophy says almost nothing else than what is in this image.

Fantastic news, in my opinion. According to David D'Arcy at Greencine Daily, Persepolis will not be released in the US in the dubbed version that's been frightening me over at IMDB for months. (Sean Penn and Iggy Pop were among the credited voice cast.)

The dubbed version already exists --and might show up as an extra on the DVD--but theaters will show the version originale.

Slate has a terrific video on a secret stash of strange and beautiful photographs of Taliban members discovered by a photojournalist in 2002, after the fall of the regime. The men are covered in flowers, holding hands, wearing black eyeliner, and clutching their guns.