I just heard from curator Rock Hushka that Janet Cardiff's installation Forty Part Motet is coming to Tacoma Art Museum next summer. (Dates are still being set.)

The piece is 40 black speakers standing around a room. (The room has ranged from the austere white cube of the Museum of Modern Art to ornate churches.)

In each speaker is a recording of a single voice singing a part of Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium. Tallis, a Catholic, delicately wrote the piece—devoted to humility—to commemorate the 40th birthday of Queen Elizabeth in 1575. (For a delightfully bad film on the subject of Elizabeth's nascent midlife crisis see this.)

Cardiff, a Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist known for her audio tours, made Forty Party Motet in order to set the listener inside the music, a sensation that can't be delivered via video. But click below for an elementary idea of what the room is like:

NPR tried to interview Icelandic group Sigur Ros... it went really poorly. Apparently singing in a made-up language has not done wonders for their actual communication skills.

Sample dialog from the video:

NPR: "Is this... Do you think gonna be going forward beyond how you lyrically want to approach music? Or do you ever think you'll start to use more standard words?"
Sigur Ros guy: "Uh... I don't know." *long long pause*

I can't tell if it's the interviewer's fault or the band's fault. The questions weren't that great but can't these dudes get excited about their music and talk about it? The reason they're doing interviews in the first place is to promote their documentary video coming out soon. But if it's one giant long pause, like this interview, I'm not going to be running out to spend money on it...

Maybe Sigur Ros is secretly and silently opposing Tom Rasmussen in the City Council race.

I am at Florida Atlantic University today, which is in Boca Raton. Even the college students here act like retirees. I'm wasting time, hiding out, looking at a collection of very cool books in the library--the Jaffe Collection of Books at Aesthetic Objects. The books themselves are art, and some of them are spectacular.

This is Keith Smith's Book 91 (String Book)---a series of strings runs from front to back, and with each turn of a page, the design and shape the strings create changes. The librarians, who are very cute, do this wonderful presentation, and they point out the sound of the pages turning, the shadows the book casts, the whole experience.

Here's a book called Would You Vote For a President Who Is a Fake President? by Joan Iversen Goswell, and she uses stamps to talk about President Bush.

It's very odd to be in Florida on the day Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize, and you cannot help but wonder at how things turn out. No one here thinks George Bush would've gotten a call from Oslo this morning, had things turned out differently in 2000.

Russia has banned this photo from a Russian art showing in Paris:



The photographer said they were inspired by this Banksy work:



Side Discussion for Sloggers: Since the Russian minister is deciding what is acceptable art, I thought I would ask fellow Sloggers to decide if graffiti is art. All types? Is it ok to deface the property of others for the sake of art? Who determines what is acceptable?

Seattle photographer Chris Jordan is like the fabled prophet who is unacceptable in his hometown. He is truly a poet of the trash heap, unearthing the meaning behind the massive quantities of refuse generated by Americans every single day. Past displays have included Intolerable Beauty, which featured richly textured landscapes of sawdust and abandoned freight cars and Portraits of Katrina presenting phenomenally detailed images of the flotsam and jetsam left behind in New Orleans. Despite a slew of remarkable exhibits in New York, San Francisco and at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, we have yet to see a significant showing of Jordan's work here on his home turf.

Jordan's current exhibit at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, called Running the Numbers, is extraordinary.

From Jordan's statement:

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My underlying desire is to affirm and sanctify the crucial role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Critical Art Ensemble, "dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory," took yet another one for Team Science today. CAE (not to be confused with Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis, a goat disease) is home and playground to Dr. Robert Ferrell, a professor of Human Genetics; the scientist is known for his high-tech art involving harmless bacteria. He may be facing twenty years in prison for being innovative.

A few years ago, the Dep't of Justice slapped Ferrell with charges of bioterrorism. When those charges could not be substantiated, after lots of money and lots of time had been spent trying to make them stick, the DOJ downgraded the crime to mere mail and wire fraud. Today, a press release from the CAE Defense Fund announces that Ferrell has pled guilty to these smaller charges in order to avoid a federal trial. The mail and wire fraud charges involve some technicalities over how Ferrell and his colleague Steve Kurtz handled the transfer of funds and equipment during the research and installment of the project.

This exhibit, dubbed "The Marching Plague" and involving petri dishes full of Serratia marcescens (an anthrax simulant, albeit a harmless one), is one of the traveling installations under fire.

Looking over the case, it doesn't seem that Dr. Ferrell's so much scared of the DOJ as he is really really sick. The man has had non-Hodgkins lymphoma for the past 27 years, malignant melanoma, and three strokes since the charges were brought against him. I think he's just tired.

Come on, science! Are you going to let the government bully you around like this? At least twenty years in jail isn't as bad as decapitation or getting burned at the stake. I guess that would depend on which jail you're in, though.

I saw Brand Upon the Brain! last night at the the Cinerama, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It was an extremely rare cinema experience. Once in a lifetime, I daresay. A silent film, featuring exclusively local actors, shown with a live score performed by a 15-piece orchestra. Plus, three lab coat-wearing mad scientists (from the ever-creative Aono Jikken Ensemble) generating all of the sound effects from the floor of the theater. Their array of sound toys was just mind-boggling. A creaking door sound made by sliding together pieces of ratcheted wood. The bubbling beakers in a lab mimicked by one of those beer-straw caps. The amazingly accurate sound of a fire created with cellophane and bubble wrap. And to top it off, the film's writer and director providing narration. The choreography of these 20-odd people with the movie was flawless—beautifully conceived and perfectly timed.

All of that being said, I found the film itself to be rather silly. It started out as a very promising melodrama, as the lead character returns home to an isolated lighthouse after a 30 year absence. You get the feeling that it is going to evolve into a melancholy meditation on nostalgia and solitude, but instead it launches into 50 directions at once, becoming a campy zombie-Hardy Boys-Psycho mash-up. Buñuel this ain't. It's being screened at the Northwest Film Forum for the next four days with a pre-recorded soundtrack and narration.

As a live spectacle? I wouldn't have missed it. As a film by itself? I wouldn't bother.

...and I didn't speak up because--wait a minute. Thong panty liners? I've never heard of thong panty liners and they've already come for them? Anyway, an artist in Colorado Springs is being censored--CENSORED, PEOPLE!--because The Man, or someone, doesn't dig her thong panty liner art.

The piece is called "Freedom," and it seems that the Powers That Be hate artist Jocely Nevel's freedom. A lot. Newspeakblog is all over it.

The locally produced comedy Outsourced has landed where, in my opinion, it belonged in the first place: TV. It's being developed for a pilot by the director (John Jeffcoat) along with screenwriter George Wing and director Ken Kwapis. The majority of pilots never make it to screen, but Outsourced's heartwarming ethnic hee-haws might be just the ticket.

Her shoes:

The table cover:

Choklate's hat:

When you're in Muenster, you have to go to the path, people said. It goes through a park, across a street, and continues through a golden wheat field over a picturesque footbridge. That's the art.

Pawel Althamer was the artist, and his Path was one of 33 sculptures scattered around the German city this summer during Muenster Sculpture Projects 2007. This was my first time seeing the once-in-a-decade public art show, and after renting a bike, I found Path on the map, with a notation: "Between the western shore of Lake Aa and Haus Bakenfeld."

But the path did not begin on the western shore of the lake. It was hard to figure out where it did begin. I stopped at an intersection where two walking paths streaked off the paved bicycle lane, and chose one. It led to a crater.

I walked to the top of the crater, looked down into the glowing, gaping hole, and saw a full-scale imitation Romanesque church spire sitting in the hole with a shovel next to it.

This was not the path. It was Guillaume Bijl's Archaeological Site (A Sorry Installation), a plaque informed me. The plaque claimed to be the marker for the archaeological dig that turned up this so-called relic.

This is the sort of thing that happens at Muenster Sculpture Projects, I began to realize. The art is out there in the world, all over the place in the city, so it's exhilaratingly difficult to tell what is world and what is art, or in this case, where the art is exactly. For the 107-day duration of the exhibition, the whole city becomes a revolutionary experiment in redefining public art. (There has been talk of Muenster not continuing after this year. That would be terrible. The combination of joy, intelligence, and, increasingly as the show goes on, history, in MSP is unmatched.)

One artist, Mark Wallinger, tied a three-mile perimeter of fishing line above the city, but it was only a fantasy to me: In several hours of biking around the city, I never caught a glimpse of it. I also didn't catch Gustav Metzger's small, unassuming heap of granite stones, which were moved to a new location in the city every day.

Here's what I didn't see (you have to squint to catch the fishing line on the left side of the image):

On the edge of the lake, Tue Greenfort's silver liquid manure truck spouting cleansing agents into the lake looked like a municipal vehicle just doing its thing, not an art project.

The art in Muenster is loose, relaxed. I started to be aware that it was playing, happily, with its own credibility.

Still determined to get to Path, I biked back to the intersection and took the other route. At the two-lane road, I got off my bike, crossed it, and entered the field, walking the bike.

The sun had come back after a flash rainstorm, and the soil was thick and frosting-moist. I followed other people's footsteps.

About 30 feet in, the footsteps ended.

In pictures I'd seen, the single-file path was shaved out of wheat. You easily could see where to go.

But without wheat, you were lost. "Between the western shore of Lake Aa and Haus Bakenfeld," the map said. Across the field, maybe two soccer fields away, was a white house with a perfect A roof.

Haus Bakenfeld. It had to be.

I walked the bike that way. On one side of the field was a stand of pine trees, on the other a row of houses with their backs to me. A teenager ran out into the muddy field to grab a ball and glanced at me.

Did he know about the path?

I started to sweat.

Was there a path anymore?

I could see into some of the houses. They weren't modest and old-fashioned, like the one I was headed toward. These were made of glass and had big, tidy Germanic gardens separated by hedges. A woman in a backyard played with a baby. Occasionally I laughed out loud. It was entirely possible that Haus Bakenfeld was not the one I was walking toward, and that my belief in art was making me ridiculous. I was in the middle of a muddy field, jetlagged, sweating, sunburning, and bleeding from a blister, and I couldn't find the art.

At the last house before the white A-roof, I caught the eye of an old woman holding a ladder while an old man up on it was reaching for a pear on a tree. I asked for Haus Bakenfeld. I pointed to the house in front of me. They shook their heads. I asked whether anybody named the Bakenfelds lived around here. They smiled gently, as at an addled person. "The people who live there are Peter and Kristin Klimke," the man said in German, spelling the names.

He pointed behind me, all the way back across the field, across the road with its tree-lined sidewalks, and into the park where I'd come from, and said, "The art is over there."

Back over there, again at the intersection where I started, a group of people had gathered. They looked at their maps and pointed in various directions, debating. When they saw me coming back along the path, they stopped me. "Is that the path?" they asked. I told them yes, considering that they'd be following my footsteps, not the artist's. I told myself that the artist would approve, because Muenster during the Sculpture Projects is that kind of place.

Seattle artist Tar Art Rat (currently based in Berlin) today posted an item on his blog about the eBay sale of a decommissioned 1950s underground missile base near Moses Lake. The base includes 16 subterranean buildings. Tar Art Rat suggests artists should buy it (price tag: $1.5 million) and turn it into "an underground art city/world and fallout shelter."

Sounds seriously dreamy.

UPDATE: Sam M. in the comments points toward Penny Arcade's great comic sendup/obsessive rant about the missile base's possibilities here.

Next week, Seattle will be host to "The 'Can't Miss' Conference for Sculpture Parks and Gardens Administrators and Enthusiasts!"

But back before the Olympic Sculpture Park opened, In/Visible hosted artists Susie Lee (whose first solo show at Lawrimore Project opens tonight) and Tivon Rice and writer/curator Suzanne Beal (whose show Help Me, I'm Hurt also opens tonight at Kirkland Arts Center).

All three of them had taken a class at UW about the park that included trekking out to the homes of the collectors who owned many of the OSP sculptures. In this great conversation, they described what it was like when the sculptures lived privately, not publicly. This, for example, lived like this

instead of like this

To me, that sculpture by Mark Di Suvero, Bunyon's Chess (1965), is the one that suffers most on the relentless, distancing slopes of the OSP.

In this week's new In/Visible, Seattle sculptor Drew Daly talks about his optically teasing furniture, which is domestic by nature. Every one of the "Siamese chairs" in his current show at Greg Kucera Gallery was determined by a process that involved cutting up and manipulating photographs. To initiate a series of mental events for the viewer including both memory and improvisation, Daly started with an IKEA chair, an object with "absolutely no shock value."

This image approximates the experience of reading Nabokov:

This image approximates the experience of reading Proust:

This image approximates the experience of reading Roland Barthes:

It's on our cover, it's at SOIL ...

^{Hanging (front and back), 2007, by Jennifer Zwick}

Where will it show up next and what does it mean?

This time (completely unlike last time), it takes the form of a civic statement. It's Thomas Schütte's Model for a Museum from this summer's Sculpture Projects in Muenster.

The piece was an invigorating and slightly crazed (though polite enough) act of public-sculpture sabotage. What Schütte did was to put a glass enclosure over another contemporary artist's cheesy fountain (with a Buddha-like figure and some rocks). On top of the glass enclosure was a bright orange sculpture resembling a high-rise building.

It may seem like a simple and amusing gesture of art criticism, but it's actually layered. Is the shape on top the only "model for a museum" or is the whole exercise a model for a museum? Meaning what exactly? I'm still trying to think all this through. (There's history, too: This was in a small plaza whose redevelopment from parking lot into gathering spot was led by a landmark sculpture that Schütte made in 1987, a pillar with a cherry on top, referring critically to Muenster architecture.)

At the very least, it's moments like these that make the Olympic Sculpture Park feel terribly staid. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: The OSP needs action. Meanwhile, consider which pieces of Seattle sculpture you might want to see get some ... creative treatment.)

(Note: The following may only apply to readers of a Certain Age.)

Remember those yellow Pee Chee folders with the drawings of various healthy sports activities on the outside? The ones where the inner flap contained a measurement conversion table that could tell you precisely how many pecks were in a hogshead?

Question: Is there anybody out there who didn’t turn the runner’s baton into a lit stick of dynamite? Explain. What was your favorite method of defacement/artistic expression?

Last week I promised more on Documenta 12's dark rooms, and the thought brings me to Spanish-born, Chicago-based artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's Phantom Truck.

Remember when Colin Powell told the United Nations, in February 2003, that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs capable of mass destruction? A computer drawing of one of them was presented as "solid intelligence." Then came invasion. Then came the realization that these things, buried under the ground, weren't capable of inflicting all that crazy terror.

The artist made a life-sized replica of one of the labs for Documenta. It sat in an unlit room. Because of the dark, and because I'm clumsy, I came this close to running into one of its sharp edges while I was walking, slowly, around it.

I thought how much fun it would be to explain an injury from the real fake weapons lab.

Neo-Nazi style:

From the New York Times:

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints.

The bumpy video, evidently shot with a hand-held camera by someone who ran into the gallery with the attackers, intersperses images of the Serrano photographs with lettered commentary in Swedish like “This is art?” before showing the vandals at work.

Video via Towleroad.

From an article by Graham Harman, "On Vicarious Causation":

We are not more critical than animals, but more object-oriented, filling our minds with all present and absent objects, all geographical and astronomical places, all species of animal, all flavors of juice, all players from the history of baseball, all living and dead languages. We do not remain in the holistic prisons of our own lives where things are fully unified by their significance for us, but face outward toward a cosmos speckled with independent campfires and black holes, packed full with objects that generate their own private laws and both welcome and resist our attempts to gain information.

From James Latteier's blog, Mt Semblant.

Why don't the planets speak?' Jacques Lacan asks this question in all earnestness at the beginning of Seminar XIX in which he introduces the concept of the Big Other. He is using the exemplary case of the stars as the founding of the Symbolic order; but for all their reluctance perhaps they can be made to speak—perhaps because the event of founding is one we can never either locate or erase: that at any rate is the puzzle I want to play with. They did speak at one time, as we all know, through astrology. First, here is what Lacan of the Seminars says:

'...the stars do not speak, planets are dumb, and that's because they are silenced...We only became absolutely certain that the planets do not speak once they'd been shut up, that is to say once Newtonian theory had produced the theory of the unified field, in a form which has since been completed, a form which was already entirely satisfactory to every thinker...everything which enters in the unified field will never speak again because these are realities which have been totally reduced to language.'

From Bruno Latour's book We Have Never Been Modern:

[For the Achaur, an Amazonian tribe, in nature there are a] set of things with which communication cannot be established. Opposite beings endowed with language, of which humans are the most perfect incarnation, stand those things deprived of speech that inhabit parallel, inaccessible worlds. The inability to communicate is often ascribed to the lack of soul that affects certain living species: most insects and fish, poultry, and numerous plants, which thus lead a mechanical, inconsequential existence. But the absence of communication is sometimes due to distance: the souls of stars and meteors, infinitely far away and prodigiously mobile, remain deaf to human words.

Speaking of the Amazon, and of black holes, here is a sad story that involves the last man.

First, a bit of news. Paramount Vantage (purveyor of such global consciousness-raising fare as Babel and A Mighty Heart) has gotten into a sticky spot with director Marc Forster's adaptation of the Afghanistan-set novel The Kite Runner. A child rape scene is stirring up so much advance hysteria in the country that the distributor is considering spiriting the child stars to the United Arab Emirates. More at the New York Times.

Opening this week:

A ton of new movies and festivals are packing this weekend, but the real prize lands this Wednesday. My review of Brand Upon the Brain, part of Northwest Film Forum's curiously strong Local Sightings lineup (no longer sponsored by Altoids, regrettably), kicks off On Screen this week. Get your tickets for the live show (including live narration, an orchestra, on-stage foley magic, and a "castrato") here.

Also in the On Screen lineup: Ang Lee's followup to Brokeback Mountain, the erotic spy thriller Lust, Caution. Don't believe other critics. It isn't dull or boring in the least, though I found other flaws.

I also got the chance to talk to Lee on Monday--you can read our exchange here. He's a sweetheart, and his propensity to brag about Brokeback Mountain made me love him even more. (I had to cut the last part of the interview, when he launched into an assessment of every award he'd won, concluding that the Golden Lion for Brokeback Mountain was the only award that didn't leave him filled with mixed feelings.)

The remaining reviews in On Screen: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (includes "sustained passages of eerie, Malickian beauty [an early sequence involving a train robbery feels like one of the reasons that film was invented], mixed with increasing stretches of self-conscious artiness," says Andrew Wright), Sweet Smell of Success ("The struggle between the old and the new, the sleek modernism of the interiors and exteriors, the experimental cinematography—all of this places Success in the higher regions of post-WWII American cinema," concludes Charles Mudede), Michael Clayton ("It isn't a movie that the world will remember, nor one that will prove that [director Tony] Gilroy is much more than a Hollywood screenwriter," Charles claims), Ira & Abby ("funnier and smarter" than Dharma & Greg, insists Megan Seling), Great World of Sound ("an unbearably plodding odd-couple comedy" in the guise of a satire of the record industry, says Eric Grandy), Delirious (Sean Nelson calls it "a warm, smart, affecting movie" about the vampire world of paparazzi), and the Jew-meets-Muslim romantic comedy David & Layla ("just another movie," says Christopher Frizzelle).

And in Film Shorts this week, check out the "magnificent" 5 Centimeters Per Second at Grand Illusion, the "greatest bad sci-fi disco musical biblical parable ever told" (The Apple) at Central Cinema, the "moldily Freudian" but intermittently enjoyable tween fantasy The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, a buttload of Local Sightings screenings, a smattering of Independent South Asian Film Festival screenings, and tons more. (We're sponsoring Spice World this weekend.) Oh, and there's that little sold out thing called HUMP! 3. Refer to our exhaustive Movie Times search at Get Out for all your scheduling needs.

That's one of 100 9-by-6-inch intaglio prints in the series What Might Go Wrong by Jennifer Zwick. Her first solo show, at Soil through Oct. 28, is called I'm So Scared/It's All So Hard, and it's "about anxiety, awkwardness, and the accidental comedy of bodies, yours and mine."

Here's her comical tribute to the continuous strangeness of breasts. It's called Hello.

At Howard House, Matthew Offenbacher, Robert Yoder, and Sean M. Johnson are showing. Yoder seems to be beginning to admit photographic imagery into his abstractions (his tiny bits of photographs look more and more legible with each time I've seen his work recently).

And this piece by Johnson has a certain lightness I didn't see in any of his previous works at HH. It's called Brothers, and the top nightstand rests on the bottom one by virtue of the weight of books and CDs in the open drawer.

Katrina Moorhead is at James Harris Gallery. The Northern Irish artist works with an almost unbearable delicacy. She shows three paintings and a pair of finely crafted wooden DeLorean car doors. The car was manufactured in Belfast, where the factory had two entrances, one for Protestants, one for Catholics. Her memorial to the fallen company echoes her country's divisions.

I only wish there were more than just three of her paintings on display. Here's one, titled You Sat Alone, Reykjavik (2007):

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Greg Kucera Gallery, where the front rooms are flooded with a knockout display of prints and tapestries by Chuck Close. Here's an installation view, with his tapestry portraits of Philip Glass and Kiki Smith on the right:

In the back room and upstairs are the furniture sculptures and photographic collages by Drew Daly (who's talking at the gallery at noon on Saturday). A few in particular drew me in:

^Fourlean

^{Mirror Merge (there's also a virtual version of this made with two chairs and a mirrored corner)}

UPDATE: Originally I posted that there were Close paintings at Kucera, but there aren't (some of those prints are thick!). And the tapestry portrait is of Kiki Smith, not Cindy Sherman. Please forgive. It was late, I swear.

It's official! The biggest local hiphop show will happen at Neumo's between December 18th and 22nd. The mad extravagance, which is called Blue Scholars present The Program, will feature the very best in Seattle hiphop, and has Mass Line, KEXP, and The Stranger as the cause of its curious existence.

The Program, curated by the Blue Scholars, represents the peak of a new movement of local hiphop that began in 2005 (or 2004, if you want to be accurate) and is currently expanding like something furious at the corner of the known universe.

The schedule:

Tue 18 - Blue Scholars, Unexpected Arrival, Siren's Echo :: DJ DV-One (ALL AGES)

Wed 19 - Blue Scholars, Common Market, D. Black, Can-U :: DJ Vitamin D (ALL AGES)

Thursday 20 - Blue Scholars, Saturday Knights, Khingz Makoma (of Abyssinian Creole), Grynch :: DJ B-Mello (ALL AGES)

Friday 21 - Blue Scholars, Dyme Def, J. Pinder, GMK :: DJ Jake One (ALL AGES)

Saturday 22 - Blue Scholars, Grayskul, Cancer Rising, The Physics :: DJ BlessOne (21+)

On Monday, October 8th there will be a limited presale with the password of STRANGER. General public onsale starts October 12th at 10:00 a.m. at TicketsWest.com.)

(Neumo's :: 925 E Pike, Seattle WA :: 8:00 pm Doors :: Advance Tickets $15)

The greatest artistic achievements to rise from the American experience are found only in two art forms: jazz...

and cinema...

No great work of literature, poetry, philosophy, visual art even comes close the the bottom of the best that exists in either jazz or film form. That is a fact. You must live with it.

Jim Demetre writes critically in the piping hot new Stranger about the landscape design of the Olympic Sculpture Park:

(Landscape designer Charles) Anderson's impulse toward restoration leaves us with a design that is literal rather than aesthetic, pedagogical where it should be sensual, and—worst of all—idealized instead of pragmatic. The tendency among contemporary landscape architects to use native plants may be rooted in sound principles of sustainability, but efforts to return sites to their "natural" states by using such species often reflects a sentimental romanticism and can lead, as it does here, to ill-conceived and unappealing public spaces.

^{Photograph by Curt Doughty}

In Documenta 12, which closed recently after seeing a record number of 754,301 visitors (and 15,537 journalists on top of that, of which I was one), the dark rooms are what you remember.

The art objects were spotlit, but the rooms themselves were left to their own devices, some animated by gaudy pink and orange paint, others left dark. It was a theatrical device, really, and irritating in person. Oddly, it grows charmed in memory.

One of the continuously populated dim rooms was the one, in the Neue Galerie, that held dozens of Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov's drawings, all titled Fears (2007). It looked like this:

In one of the drawings of two men dancing, the text reads, "Two people are dancing, they feel especially happy because they have left all their daily fears aside in order to feel more free and relaxed. They will pick up the fears again later."

The graphic quality of these drawings is what you remember. They are black and white, and from afar can look like abstractions or Bolshevik graphics. In another room is Solakov's archive of his collaboration with the Bulgarian secret police, about which he is ashamed, first seen in 1990.

In Fears, the heaviness and lightness of his work are in total balance. (It's a balance that gets out of whack in his wall essay/diagram about Soviet arms production in the main show at the Venice Biennale.)

Here are some more of the conflicting and conflicted little creatures.

Text: A fearless adventurer is on his way to climb up his last mountain. After that he will only stay home, reading newspapers, drinking tea and picking his nose. This is the daydreaming in his head right now. He is used to it. Actually, this really will be his last mountain. An avalanche is coming.

Text: A big fear, a medium fear and a small fear decided to work together on a family of four.

Text: Two spooky creatures--a big fella and a little ghost, have an agreement: none of them should ever scare to death the other's friends. Only a small, healthy fear is permitted.

More on Documenta 12's dark rooms tomorrow. (And check out Seattle's own Henry Art Gallery high on a hill at Documenta.)

That's what native New Yorker Gil Sorrentino and I used to call suburban Californians, commiserating with the blinds drawn against the sun in his California university office, where he, like all poets with academic jobs, seemed a little chained. (Listen to audio files of the late, great Sorrentino here.)

Sometime Stranger contributor Travis Nichols this week has an interview on Weird Deer Media with the poet Eileen Myles that reminds me of Sorrentino.

The interview contains a link to a terrific, long profile of Myles that focuses on her stranding in San Diego, and the dirt of art. Written by one of Myles's former students, it was published in January.

Hannah Arendt was wrong about many things but right about this: philosophers should not be leaders.

The life of dialectics is the continuous movement towards opposites. Mankind will also finally meet its doom. When the theologians talk about doomsday, they are pessimistic and terrify people. We [the philosophers] say the end of mankind is something which will produce something more advanced than mankind. Mankind is still in its infancy.

(Considering my last post, that is.)

I just got an email linking sex, photography, and Britain once again.

This time it seems as if a Seattle photographer, Christian Petersen, has won 2007 UK Erotic Photographer of the Year. See a catalog of his work on Flickr here. Here's one for non-clickers (it's not garden-variety erotic photography, I'll give it that):

(The release also mentions that Dan Savage's Savage Love podcast and the Seattle Erotic Art Festival were nominated for awards.)

The most innocent thing loses its innocence the moment it enters a photograph. Hence the problem of images of childhood--which was the subject of Akio Takamori's show at the Henry Art Gallery last summer. It also became the subject of a heated Slog debate.

At the time, I wrote about the toughest of the show's images, Nan Goldin's Edda and Klara Belly Dancing, Berlin (1998). Last week, Edda and Klara, two girls playing, one with her legs spread, was removed from an exhibition in Britain. Officials are still trying to decide whether it breaks child pornography laws.

In response, today Elton John removed the rest of the show, 149 photographs in total, from the museum.

The photograph has been seen in many, many places, but the police reaction still comes as no surprise to me. (It's art, by the way, not pornography, unless there's something seriously wrong with you.) It practically begs someone to cry pornography. Unlike photographs that present terrifying situations at a safe distance, this one turns a perfectly innocent event on its head simply by inserting the gaze of the camera, which is presumed to be an adult, or sexualized, gaze. This gaze is the background for all photography, maybe all art, really, which is not made for children. The funny thing is, this may be one of the few photographs I can think of that is made for children. Unless they've already been taught to be ashamed of their bodies, they'd find it funny, or silly, or familiar. We adults, meanwhile, find its innocence blinding. We can't look at it.

For that reason--not because I want to censor this thing further, but in deference to the genuine difficulty of the image for an adult viewer--I'm going to post the image on the jump. It's not that it's NSFW. It's that it's not safe for adulthood.

Continue reading "Sex and Photography" »

There was a mistake and two short reviews of Vanaja (mine and Lindy's) were sent to the film editor, Annie Wagner.

Annie published Lindy's review:

Fourteen-year-old Vanaja, the fisherman’s daughter, wants desperately to be a dancer—and it looks like she might get her wish, after sassing her way into a job at the rich landlady’s house. But plans are derailed when the landlady’s hot son, Shekar Babu, arrives from America, and youthful flirtation begets grown-up horrors. The sight of bendy, stompy, preternaturally graceful Kuchipudi dancing is worth the price of admission—but it’s Shekar Babu’s beautiful menace (“Sometimes I want to hurt you because… how should I explain? So that I can then protect you”) and Vanaja’s willowy resilience that give the film its heft.

And not my review:

As a work of art, Vanaja’s greatness has nothing to with its story but with the tension that exists between the way it looks and what it is about. Vanaja looks like a Hollywood film, but it’s about an Indian peasant. It looks expensive, but its subject is dirt poor. The amount of the money that went into the cinematography, lighting, and set design does not correspond with the simple life of the villagers, fisherman, and servants. Even the richest person in the film, a woman who teaches the poor girl magnificent dance moves, has a quality of life that does not match the quality of the filmmaking. But the direct conflict between the film’s look (First World) and its story (Third World) generates visual surprises that are more often successful than not. In this film, photographing a poor girl in a chicken coop is a big production.

I will say no more about this matter.

I've been out of the country for a couple of weeks, most recently in Paris, where I saw two astounding things. One:

That rat display case? In Ratatouille? It's real. I had no idea.

Two: Persepolis, which is awesome, at least in (the original) French. From this New York Film Festival review, I gather that the English version won't mess with the wobbly-accented wonder that is the "Eye of the Tiger" scene.

But back to Seattle. I've been bitching for what seems like years about the Seattle-produced and filmed Brand Upon the Brain! not being presented in Seattle as it was originally conceived: a "live spectacle," with an orchestra and live foley artists and a "castrato" and a narrator. But I can bitch no longer, as Brand Upon the Brain! is coming to the Cinerama October 10 and 11, as part of Northwest Film Forum's Local Sightings festival. I'm thrilled. Mark your calendars and by your tickets now.

Opening this Friday:

In an extra-long On Screen this week: the Jon Krakauer adaptation Into the Wild ("A simplistic, dewy-eyed paean to a conflicted young man whom [director Sean] Penn would rather canonize than investigate," says Brendan Kiley)...

... The Kingdom ("feels much more successful when it downshifts into a rock 'em, sock 'em action flick," says Andrew Wright), Trade ("tries to avoid the stench of sexual exploitation, but lands in a mess of sentimentality—red roses, pink bikes—which is far more revolting," say I), King of California (it may romanticize manic depression, but it's charming, concludes Kiley), The Jane Austen Book Club (great actors, a painfully pseudointellectual script--why the hell is Emily Blunt costumed like Miranda July?, I ask), Feast of Love ("The worst thing about Feast of Love," Charles Mudede observes, "is that the sex scenes are not sexy."), December Boys ("an episodic coming-of-age drama," according to David Schmader, featuring an orphan named Harry Potter--err, Daniel Radcliffe), and the mumblecore standard-bearer Hannah Takes the Stairs ("seems like an empty parody of the form," says mumblecore admirer Josh Feit).

And on an island of its own: Lindy West's much-admired but hardly admiring review of The Game Plan.

And in limited runs this week, available via Get Out: Angels in the Dust, Apart from That, events in the Independent South Asian Film Festival (which is totally free this year), the last of the Paramount's Charlie Chaplin series, an advance screening of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, and Vanaja. Enjoy.

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.

Kant tried to solve this problem by universalizing subjectivity. He failed miserably. Marxist criticism tried solve this problem by politicizing the function art. The art object, according to this school of thought, was like any other consumer object and so could be analyzed as such. As Marx removed the fetish magic from consumer products in Das Capital, the Marxist critic attempted to remove the aura from the art object. Also, the Marxist critic tried to expose the art object's idealogical function--to show that the art object was made to reinforce certain beliefs, ideas that supported the reproduction of a given society's means of production.

But the problem with the Marxist approach is this: it cannot make sense of the fact that some art objects made in societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production are great (Blade Runner) and critical of the system from which they arise; and some art objects made in former socialist societies are very weak (Cement) and support the anti-capitalist system from which they arise.

Though the best of all modes of criticism, Marxism is still too loose, too vulnerable, too inconsistent. If art criticism is to become invulnerable it must be grounded not in economics but in the body, the head, the physical brain itself. The critic must argue that this or that thing is good because the biological processes that made it happen are good processes. But how does one do this? Neurology offers the critic a solution.

To become valid, art criticism must turn to the biological processes of memory retention and retrieval. What we know about this process is that not single or individual neurons react to single or individual complex images, faces, experiences, but instead a network of them. Memory is associational. Memory patterns are formed from short and long term storage potential. Those who suffer from Alzheimer's are unable to make connections between these short and long term memory patterns. They suffer from weak or broken associational powers.

The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde had the right idea at the end of the 19th century when he called all things, all ideas, inventions, a matter of associations. Everything is a society. The brain is a society of cells. And the way the cells work, and the way memory works, and the way art works, is by associations. As there is bad food and good food, there are strong associations and weak ones. Here are some examples of weak associations.

The new criticism is not emotional or personal but associational. We can say that a bad work of art is much like Alzheimer's: it is the artist's failure or inability to make good or new associations. Here is our ground! A work of art is an association. An idea is an association. All is made from associations. We critics can judge every art object on this biological basis and no longer be vulnerable to our enemy's sole weapon: "this is just an opinion." From now until the end of all time, this is bad and that is that.

As Brendan says, the second installment of the Motel performance/art series is on.

Last Sunday I caught Thike Thin's (Mike Min's) performance Herding Cats, which was coincidental, since I was fresh from my first-ever visit to the Woodland Zoo, with its smashing jaguar and ocelot, when I drove up 99 to the secret location (call 206-782-8872 to find out where it is). (The name of the location is another animal reference, oddly.)

What I saw when I got there was the detritus of a meeting of cats plotting world domination. Evidently, according to videos from the performance, this meeting at one point was chaired by the artist. He presided over the group of cats as they plotted and ate snacks.

When I got there, the meeting appeared to be on break. Sheets of paper describing goals and strategies were taped to the walls. It looked like a very productive time.

Under the conference table smack in the center of the room, a fuzzy, petite black cat sat in the upright position. Judging from the Humane Society placards in the window, her name was Ginger. There were other placards describing other cats, but I didn't see any of them. (I imagined, hopefully, that they'd been adopted right out from under the performance.)

The window was open slightly, so I tried talking to Ginger. She did not respond.

For one time only, this week's installment of my art podcast In/Visible is two installments: British-born, New York-based artist Anthony McCall, and Australian artist Patricia Piccinini.

McCall, the Comeback Kid, began his career with fire performances and then moved into filmic sculptures made of air, one of which is on marvelous display at Western Bridge.

Piccinini's first American survey, amazingly, is at the little old Frye Art Museum (which, of course, curator Robin Held has spent the last few years making neither little in stature nor old in attitude). Her sculpture, drawing, video, and photography is at the intersection of art, nature, and technology. For instance, she invented a species of frightful bodyguards for endangered species, one of which is seen below. Its assigned animal is the Golden Helmeted Honeyeater, a little yellow bird. Hear her talk here.

Remember Motel #1?

Remember the camera obscura, the roomful of sand, the indoor campfire?

Motel #2 is a different affair—a week of single performances in a single room in a working motel, not a defunct one.

You can peer through the motel room window from the outside looking in to view the performances at any time during this week. This is a working motel – do NOT bother other occupants. Too many people chit-chattin outside the room and they may decide to kick us out. No more than 5 viewers at any one time. As MOTEL #1 was a whirring maelstrom, MOTEL #2 is a workhorse. Performance artists have committed to working shifts of no less than 8 hours, 24/7, during which they will clock in their intense and sometimes grueling pieces.

It's happening right now. You can see the performances happening on a webcam on the Seattle School site. (Right now the group Curry/Dillon is in there, and it wants stories—call 851-9462 or email performance.memoirs@gmail.com.)

The schedule is here.

I'm sure this has the art blogosphere on fire already this morning, but for those few poor souls who get their only art news from Slog, the latest is that the Museum of Modern Art has created a new position--associate director in charge of contemporary art--for museum-director superstar Kathy Halbreich, who has spent the last 16 years making the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis an up-to-the-minute spot in terms of art, architecture, technology, and curation.

Halbreich represents everything MoMA's contemporary program needs to be: nimble, experimental, quick on the uptake. I can not wait to see what she'll do there.

As for us here in Seattle, our pipe dreams for the Henry Art Gallery are dashed. An unusually high number of museums are looking for directors right now, including the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle's contemporary museum. When the Henry's blog posted a poll of dream candidates online, Halbreich was the frontrunner by a mile. What was she thinking choosing the Museum of Modern Art over the Henry?

(Thanks go to Slog tipper and fellow art chronicler Steven Vroom.)

This year, Seattle Art Museum's Betty Bowen Award will go to a wild-card artist: Oscar Tuazon. Tuazon is based in Tacoma. He hasn't shown in Seattle. He's young. He's promising. He's getting the $11,000 prize.

I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled to be surprised by an announcement that in past years has often been predictable and staid. I'm thrilled that this is a Tacoma-based artist (and that he also appears to be Paris-based: Tacoma and Paris, sitting in a tree ...). And I'm thrilled insofar as I feel the way I feel during a thriller: I'm not entirely sure what's going to happen.

I've never seen Tuazon's work in person. (It will be on display at SAM soon, and for the entire year, thanks to the award.) Earlier this year, a show of works by Tuazon and Eli Hanson titled VOluntary Non vUlnerable (VONU) was curated by Eric Fredericksen (Eric, how did you come to find these two again?) at Bodgers and Kludgers Cooperative Art Parlor in Vancouver. I seem to remember the emailed images from the show having something to do with meth, and tiny architecture. Then, this spring, Tuazon had a solo show, I'd Rather Be Gone, at Standard in Oslo, Norway.

Since Tuazon is an unknown, I'll attach the entire press release from the Standard show:

STANDARD (OSLO) is proud to present its first exhibition of objects and photographic works by Paris-based artist Oscar Tuazon. "I'd Rather Be Gone" continues the artist's yearlong examination on how personal liberty can be embodied in architecture. Drawing on the early building experiments of the hippy commune Drop City as well as current practices in 'dwelling portably,' Tuazon's work questions the conditions for sustainability and self-suffiency.

"When I attended Deep Springs College in the mid-90s, the Greyhound would stop at an intersection in the middle of the desert, 50 miles from the college. You had to wait there until someone drove out to get you, which sometimes took a few hours. The only other thing at that intersection was a whorehouse in a doublewide. (In Nevada, prostitution is legal.) On hot days, the Madame of the house would sometimes invite us inside and offer us a cold drink. The only way in and out of the college is through the whorehouse." Tuazon's works and writings continuously return to the ideal of the bare minimum [think of Documenta's question this year, taken from a philosopher whose name I'm forgetting now: "What is bare life?"]—put forward by the writer Henry David Thoreau in the novel "Walden" (1854)—and thus also return to the question of whether isolation from civil society may gain a more objective understanding of it.

Since graduating from Whitney ISP Tuazon has produced a series of sculptures composed of urban debris: cardboard boxes, wooden pallets, printing plates, OSB boards from building sites, or melanin boards from defunct kitchens—materials gathered from the area of his Paris studio or near the various venues of his exhibitions. In an initial phase these sculptural works would take forms of geodesic domes and draw on such typologies as indigenous building techniques, DIY architecture, as well as a more determined dedication to structural clarity, advocated by the engineer R. Buckminster Fuller. More recently the works have taken on the character of full-scale building prototypes, such as the work "1:1" at the center of the show.

This assemblage of melanin boards and wooden pallets is constructed to serve as a corner of the house Tuazon planning to erect near Portland, Oregon. Approaching the building project through a series of trial products rather than drawings, the exhibition context becomes a chance to test rather than portray this situation. At the same time Tuazon exposes the shortcomings of the works as prototypes, which continuously seem to be balancing between actual functionality and a possible transcendent materiality as sculptures. Tuazon draws attention to the disjuncture of forcing one space (the un-built house) onto another space (the gallery), and underscores the impossibility of really modelling something accurately in the context of an exhibition. Adding to these sculptures are four folded and framed photographs, rendering tableaux of temporary architecture from the woods of Portland. The photographs become a surface for exploring another kind of space, while being folded also modulating the distances within the image, between one space and another.

Oscar Tuazon (b. 1976 in Seattle, Washington) received his education from Cooper Union and the Whitney ISP in New York. His works were earlier this year shown in solo exhibitions at Bodgers and Kludgers, Vancouver and at castillo/corrales, Paris. His recent group exhibitions include "Down By Law", The Wrong Gallery for the Whitney Biennial, New York; "The Elementary Particles (Paperback Edition)", STANDARD (OSLO); and "Minotaur Blood" at Jonathan Viner / Fortesque Avenue, London. "Metronome no. 10", which Tuazon co-edited with Clementine Deliss, will also be included in the Documenta 12 Magazines project.

Here are a few installation views from the Standard show:

Tuazon isn't the Betty Bowen's only news, though.

Two PONCHO Special Recognition Awards in the amount of $1,500 each will go to two deserving artists: Seattle painter Joseph Park (here's a series of his paintings from a 2004 show at Rena Bransten in San Francisco; you might remember him from his terrific survey, Moonbeam Caress, curated by Robin Held at the Frye in 2005), and Portland artist Vanessa Renwick, a filmmaker and video and installation artist.

Rounding out the five finalists--selected from the 462 applicants from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho--were Bradley Biancardi, a painter and member of Crawl Space, and Maki Tamura, an artist whose watercolor constructions were seen at SAAM in 2003.

There will be an awards ceremony Oct. 23 from 5:30 to 8 pm at SAM, including a brief slide presentation of each winner's work, followed by a reception. All is free and open to the public.

UPDATE: From Slog tipper Adam:

A side note about Portland artist Vanessa Renwick. She'll be in town presenting work and serving as a juror at Northwest Film Forum's Local Sightings Film Festival.

Come out to her program on October 6th. here's the details:

Saturday, Oct. 6, 7pm
Spotlight on Portland
STUMPTOWN SAP

A lot of trees were cut down to make Portland, but the sap still glistens fresh with new creations. Tonight, visiting filmmaker Vanessa Renwick presents a sampling of great short films by Portland artists. The program features the first two films in Renwick's ongoing CASCADIA series of Northwest portraits, Gus Van Sant's new short FIRST KISS, made for the Cannes Film Festival's 60th Anniversary, and work by Jon Raymond (writer of OLD JOY), animator Karl Lind, Marc Moscato, Gretchen Hogue and many others. Don't miss this impressive survey of Portland's cinematic lifeblood.

The most that we owe to the language of Arabs is for the word "zero":

zero 1604, from It. zero, from M.L. zephirum, from Arabic sifr "cipher," translation of Skt. sunya-m "empty place, desert, naught" (see cipher). A brief history of the invention of "zero" can be found here. Meaning "worthless person" is recorded from 1813. The verb zero in is 1944, from the noun, on the notion of instrument adjustments. Zero tolerance first recorded 1972, originally U.S. political language.