On this vacation, which lasts the entirety of next week, there is no phone, no internet, and no TV. Therefore, you, Slog, will be free of me!

I'll be back to torment you with my "art critic ways" bright and early on Monday, September 15.

"Amazing Body Art from the 2008 World Bodypainting Festival in Daegu, South Korea."

(Thank you Scott!)

On Wednesday night I posted a quick note about the Frye Art Museum's elimination of the education programs of Yoko Ott. Now I have the full story.

Facing a potential deficit of $266,000 on a $4 million annual operating budget, the Frye announced to Ott and to the rest of the museum staff on Wednesday that Ott's position, manager of youth and community outreach, would have to be cut (and Ott's programs shut down) in order to balance the budget.

The decision was not a reflection of Ott's performance on the job, said museum director Midge Bowman.

"We sweated over this," Bowman said. "What is lost is Yoko's spirit."

Ott, who joined the museum in 2006, is one of three managers in the education department, which is overseen by education director Jill Rullkoetter (formerly of Seattle Art Museum). The other two managers handle programs for adults and for younger children; Ott was in charge of teens and community partnerships.

But Bowman is right: what the museum has given up is far more than a demographic. Ott is known through the city—and beyond—for her innovative, thoughtful ideas. What the other managers in the Frye's education department do is important; it's also highly conventional (organize K-12 school tours and oversee lectures and studio classes for adults, for instance). That's the stuff of every education department in every museum in the country.

Ott was trying to go further.

Her SHFT teen studio program provided an introduction to the ideas behind contemporary art. In response to every exhibition in the galleries, Ott would invite an active, working artist in the city to develop a class that would engage teens in the same issues as those in the exhibition, and then their work would result in an exhibition on the publicly viewed walls of the education wing at the Frye.

Artist Gretchen Bennett, for instance, taught a sampling and storytelling class in conjunction with Dario Robleto's exhibition Alloy of Love; in preparation for the upcoming Napoleon on the Nile and Empire exhibitions, artist Susie Lee taught a geocaching class that revolved around exploring the city on assignments from artists (Steve Roden of L.A., James Coupe of Seattle, and Charles Labelle of New York all contributed assignments for the students), and using the city itself as an art medium. This fall, Stranger Genius Award winner Wynne Greenwood was scheduled to teach a video class called "Video and the Self-Governed Self." But that has been canceled.

Ott's other main program was Friday at the Frye, which on the surface was simply an opening night for the exhibitions. But actually, it was an interdisciplinary event curated by Ott in conjunction with—again—artists from around the city. Through that program, Ott brought artists and organizations into the Frye for collaborations, including Book-It Repertory Theatre, Richard Hugo House, Slide Rule (independent animators), Kristen Rask (DIY crafter), food critic and restaurateur Donna Moodie, KEXP, On the Boards, Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey (a team of dance and visual artists), Arts Corp, 11th Hour Productions (slam poets). She was working on an upcoming collaboration with Stranger Genius winners Seattle School.

Her projects were technologically savvy, tracked on YouTube and networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Her newest idea, which was to be implemented this fall, was to turn the museum into an interactive gaming site during the exhibition Empire.

What Ott did was not the bread-and-butter of the museum's education department—it was what made the museum's education department interesting and unique.

"She's one of my two favorite arts educators in this country," said San Antonio-based artist Robleto. "Education departments at museums really are the frontline of arts education in this country, and what she was doing was amazing."

In particular, he praised the way Ott's programs connected teens with professional artists, and rewarded them with the life-changing experience of showing work in a public, art venue as opposed to a school hallway.

"I got a lot out of those classes," said Tacha Stolz. "I'm not kidding. I really, really learned a lot. It was the gateway for how I feel about the arts. It made me want to go to First Thursday [Artwalk] or want to go and see other exhibitions at other museums."

That wasn't all, though.

"Those classes changed my course of direction," Stolz said. "They inspired me to do what I'm doing today."

Stolz just finished her first week at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She says she never would have gone into art if all she'd known was the high-school art classes she took at the International Community School in Kirkland and Lake Washington High School in Seattle.

"For me, art is really about conceptualizing and thinking and creating art from your own thought and concept and being able to use whatever means to create," Stolz said. "In high school art, you draw a grid, you look at a picture, and you draw what you see. That's not how you learn how to draw. You have to really learn to see and then learn how to create, and it's all about process. I felt like at the Frye, you go through this class, but then they tell you you can make whatever you want out of whatever medium, and they give you the tools you need to do that with. If you want to do something with tagging, they'll go into depth about tagging. Talking with Dario Robleto about his artwork was a really good experience. It's really, really meaningful to have those experiences."

In her first week, Stolz already feels ahead of her fellow students: "Since I've been here going to these slide shows at school of artists our teachers are looking at, like, those slides come up and I know where that's coming from: I've seen those exhibits, whereas most students don't get to see that and they only know a couple pieces by the masters but they would never be able to recognize different periods, because everything is always so focused on iconic art rather than just art."

Ott, who also curates Seattle University's gallery at the Lee Center on Capitol Hill, spent six years curating critically acclaimed and popular shows at Bumbershoot before going to the Frye. Bumbershoot, also in a belt-tightening move, did not replace Ott's position after she left.

"I kind of feel like I'm reliving a little bit of that heartbreak," Ott said in a phone interview Thursday. "I guess I need to do some soul-searching. I'm going, huh, how much do I believe in the nonprofit arts sector? Is it time for a career change?"

To develop SHFT at the Frye, Ott studied models for teen programs at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

"I wanted to look at what programs don't exist for teens, and then build that program, putting at the heart of it not just the professional working artist like Susie and Gretchen and Susan [Robb, another Stranger Genius who taught a sound art class] and Dario, but actually creating a platform for teens and believing that these are the future artists, and that we really wanted to support and mentor critical thinking and introduce a conceptual framework to them," Ott said. "In my mind, it was like, you [the Frye] have embraced being risky for so long, couldn't you have believed a little longer?"

Ott's program didn't bring in the same numbers as the school-tours program, especially because the brand-new program was slow to fill up at first. But it could easily be argued that its impact on those students it did affect was great, and that those students couldn't have received that kind of instruction anywhere else.

The Frye's financial woes come from the economic downturn, which has meant fewer rentals on the Seattle warehouses the museum owns. Income from the warehouses makes up more than half of the museum's budget, because the museum, unlike most, is not a not-for-profit corporation—it is a private foundation.

If the economy continues to adversely affect the rental market, the Frye may need to establish a fundraising program for the first time in its history. The Frye may need to ask for donations, like other museums.

"Stay tuned for that," director Bowman said. "When we were slightly smaller, we could live on [this structure], but we've got a bigger vision now, and we can't support it as our current funding structure is."

That bigger vision is reliant on programs like Ott's. If the museum is truly devoted to smart art education that places the museum among the best in the country, then it will move swiftly on fundraising—and take as its first project raising the money to reinstate Ott's programs as a part of the core mission of what has become a museum identified with intelligent innovation.

Business as usual is not what we have come to expect from the Frye.

Jubilation T., you asked what I thought of the painting I posted in the last Currently Hanging. I hadn't yet seen it in person, so I didn't comment except on the painting's back story.

I went to see the painting yesterday in person, and I just want to report back that it is some powerful stuff. That "spill" that covers the guy's head and runs upward is encaustic, and the unpainted canvas is left raw.

But it was the hands that got me: they're made of thick paint piled on top of the canvas, and then actually burned.

I've always loved the way that the thickness of Miller's paintings imply an excess of information that stands in place of any knowledge Miller has of his subjects, since they're always taken from found photographs. The artist can only guess about his subjects' characters, their situations, what they might make of him if they knew he was doing this, or how they might behave in a formal portrait sitting that actually gave the artist permission. Miller puts himself in a position that's the reverse of the all-knowing "cone of vision" effect you get in Renaissance perspective, or even the locked-in knowledge that comes straight from the artist's soul in much of modernism. Miller doesn't know these people, but he's determined to paint them, and what you see in each piece is the evidence of him figuring out how.

I couldn't get any details tonight, but I do know that Yoko Ott, the terrific curator of education at the Frye, has been let go and her programs have been axed. These were some great programs; I followed along on a class one Saturday in July. I'll describe later.

The "changes" were announced to the staff today, said Frye spokeswoman Rebecca Garrity-Putnam, who added:

I think that this was a very difficult decision, and a decision that was made for purely financial issues. It was very, very hard. I know that everybody at the museum is impacted, very much, and I know the community will be as well.

More on what this means for the Frye and the city's art ed offerings tomorrow.

And I hate Sarah Palin.

But in other news, the inevitable art onslaught featuring her offensive face has begun.

^{Sarah Palin Alaska Fur Bunny Pancake Breakfast Art}

L.A.-based artists Harry Dodge (born Harriet, but now not identifying as either male or female) and Stanya Kahn are as uncompromising as they are hilarious. The entertaining but unsettling performances in their videos—both in front of and behind the camera—are plainly spontaneous, but the final works are carefully crafted. To get a sense of what they do, watch a segment of their Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out here (that's Kahn you see in the frame, and Dodge is shooting).

Then listen in to a sprawly phone conversation with them here.

For more, there's a comprehensive New York Times profile of the artists here, and a nice Time Out piece about them here.

Their 2006 work Masters of None (pictured above) is screening at TBA:08 in Portland through October 4, and the artists will talk at the Back Room Friday night, September 12.

^{Mark Takamichi Miller's Thieves: Man at Party (2008), acrylic, wax, urethane, oil, and glass spheres on canvas over board, 48 by 72 inches}

At Howard House. (Gallery site here.)

I can't get the story of this painting out of my head. A man goes to his car. Everything is normal except that a roll of film is lying on the seat, with a business card rubber-banded around it. The business card says "Associated Counsel for the Accused."

The man figures he's been attempted-robbed. But nothing of his is gone. Instead, he's come away with something from the robber: this film. He gives the film to a friend of his, an artist who specializes in making painting from photographs of people he doesn't know, photographs he only half-understands. The artist makes paintings from the pictures. The pictures end up in a gallery in Pioneer Square.

Tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of the day that Jason Sprinkle attached a 700-pound ball and chain to Jonathan Borofsy's Hammering Man in front of Seattle Art Museum.

In remembrance, Sprinkle's friends, family, and other artists will be meeting at 10 am at Hammering Man to set a memorial sign there. The memorial is both for Sprinkle's art, and for his life--he was killed when hit by a freight train in 2005.

The organizer, Doug Parry, says:

Please feel free to bring cut flowers to place around the memorial sign (no jars or cups of water for the flowers and no candles--just cut flowers, please).

This is an unofficial gathering, although our goal is to invite SAM to recognize Jason's artistic contributions to the city of Seattle, and, especially, his Ball and Chain. Therefore, this will also be a peaceful gathering and if we are asked to disperse (by either SAM or the SPD), we will peacefully comply. Cool?

The memorial gathering will last from 10:00AM to 10:30AM and will end with a moment of silence before we all go our separate ways.

Yesterday Metafilter linked to The Guardian's list of the 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube—and I just disappeared into it for about three hours. Go ahead: let it swallow your Memorial Day weekend. It's so worth your time.

My favorites so far:

1. A screen test for East of Eden wherein James Dean tells Paul Newman to kiss him, and Newman responds, "Can't here."

2. Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit" not long before her death.

3. Jackson Pollock, filmed by Hans Namuth, saying pretty much everything that needs to be said about Pollock's painting, including that he got the idea from Native American sand painters.

4. Samuel Beckett's only film project, running in two parts (although like me, you may have to go three parts to piece together the whole thing, because of the original linkage) at about 15 minutes long, starring an old, wrinkly, terrifying, and still hilarious Buster Keaton. It's silent. Do watch it through to the end.

5. Kurt Russell trying to get the part of Han Solo.

There is also far, far more. I have to get back there. Now go!

Last week, when I posted an item announcing that local artists (including NKO) were starting work on a large mural on the side of the Monique Lofts, I asked this question:

Are they covering up all the ghost signage? I sincerely hope not.

Which brought this response from Gurldoggie:

I agree with preserving context when it's meaningful, but the importance of a decades-old service station ad eludes me. What's the history you want to preserve? It's not like it's a stop on the underground railroad - it's just a place people used to get their oil changed. To me it doesn't seem like anything worth preserving.

Except that ghost signs are part of a long history of sign-painting. Advertising may be corporate today, but back in the day, itinerant sign painters would go door to door offering their services to small businesses. That's how those signs went up. They represent a very cool, mostly lost tradition of independent craftspeople.

Which is exactly what the artists on the mural said they're thinking when I finally got out to ask them on Friday. They're not covering up the ghost signs.

We like them. We have histories as sign painters, too. It's part of the history of this wall, and it adds a layer of depth to the ground.

Photos of the project in process will be appearing here.

Check out this story and slide show by Pilar Viledas of Seattle artist/designer Roy McMakin's latest creation, a house on Vashon for the personal manager of K.D. Lang. From the outside, it looks like a Whiting Tennis painting, and on the inside, the cloudy concrete, gray paint, and vivid woods look like a blend of American Gothic, Northwest rustic, and Kafkaesque bureaucratic. If you can believe it, it's also child-like.

McMakin's the one who made the steel storage box, bronze lawn chair, and concrete bench at the Olympic Sculpture Park, not to mention his installation Love & Loss there.

McMakin has a solo show at James Harris Gallery coming up this fall.

^{Sam Davidson}

For those of you who prefer the bow to the hanging (straight? long? what is the formal name for a regular tie?), please enjoy longtime Seattle art dealer and bowtie-wearer Sam Davidson's thoughts on why bowties are better, how bowties help people talk about art, and why he refuses to join any bowtie clubs even though he has been invited.

To listen to the entire podcast with Davidson, click here.

Work began yesterday on the Monique Lofts Mural project, next to Value Village on 11th Avenue (very close to our offices). Here's a shot from the start of the work late yesterday, forwarded to me by a bystander (thank you, Ryan!) who happened to catch it:

I've been looking forward to this, but my only question is: Are they covering up all the ghost signage? I sincerely hope not.

Yesterday, Ed Schad, the author of the really great blog I Call It Oranges (and also curator at the private Broad Foundation in LA), wrote a post in response to my Currently Hanging post about an Alec Soth photograph that reminded me of my parents' failed marriage.

After I described my personal connection to the image in the post, I backtracked. Schad calls me on my insecurity, explains why I didn't need to backtrack, and talks about his own family and August Sander.

Over this:

A man has been hospitalized after recently going on a hunger strike in response to this. What a wuss! He's been eating happily for years while this thing has been in existence, tormenting, absolutely tormenting the sacredness of human life. What I mean is, this art's old. The artist, Martin Kippenberger (a good, spicy one, as you might imagine), has been dead since 1997. Here's the best overview of his work that I've found on the web.

^{Recumbent Bear Drinking by Marcus De Bije (Dutch, 1612-1670), from 1664, is one of many prints in Davidson Gallery's Antique Print Department, which is catalogued online.}

Lately, it may seem like I've been hammering on Seattle Art Museum, but this time, it's not me who's complaining. I sat down with Sam Davidson, the longtime Seattle dealer, for a podcast a few weeks ago, and he revealed (in his incredibly soft-spoken way) that he has a major bone to pick with the museum. He says SAM pretty much ignores prints, and is losing out on, or will lose out on, local collections from contemporary to Old Masters.

For the entire podcast with Davidson, click here.

^{Allison Manch's I'm on Fire, embroidery on handkerchief}

At Grey Gallery. (Gallery site here.)

"Whoh-oh-oh, I'm on fire." The moment you see it, you hear it. You hear Bruce. That's why I like this work.

I say it's "Currently Hanging" at Grey because that's what the press release says, but when I was at Grey last week, I didn't see this one. The one I did see, and liked, featured the lyrics "Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, can't you see, sometimes your words just hypnotize me," which put the song in my head for a solid two days—until, coincidentally, just driving down the road in my car one afternoon, I came across the song on the radio, which seemed to close the circle and put the song out of my brain.

Many artists work across the senses (vision to hearing, that is), and one of the best is Dario Robleto, whose Alloy of Love exhibition at the Frye Art Museum includes several works that form a sort of silent concert in the galleries—a concert that takes place in your head only. That show, in case you haven't seen it, must be seen. And it closes Sept. 1, so get over to the Frye.

Bonus: The Frye has a brand new web site! It's here. I haven't done much roaming around on it yet, but my first impression is that it's much improved—you can see the entire founding collection there, as far as I can tell. (Next stop: the Henry's getting a new site this fall, and I can't wait. That's another great collection that needs to be online.)

After I wiped the tears from my eyes when Michelle finished her awesome speech, I found myself bereft. Oh, so far from the action! (I miss you Eli, Annie, and Charles!)

So I went online to look at the online gallery of Obama art sponsored by moveon.org during the convention. It's here. Most of the art, as expected, was terrible.

How terrible?

Well, yes, you can, but I can't believe you did: A "Barack-in-the-box" by Heather Courtney of San Jose, California.

Continue reading "More Obama Art" »

The sun.

^{Aflo's Starburst Sun Above Clouds in Blue Sky}

For the moment, anyway. Please. I beg you to stick around for a few hours.

UPDATE, 8:01 am: It's gone.

As the curtain rises, curator Lisa Corrin is finishing her explanation of why Cai Guo-Qiang's installation of flying cars would be perfect for the new Seattle Art Museum lobby. (We're back in the day.)

It sounds like a done deal, but when the executive committee of the board takes a vote, there are a few whopping nays, including from Mimi Gates, the museum's director.

Bagley Wright starts to explain. He's a nay, too, along with Susan Brotman (another powerful longtime board member), and Bagley's wife, the longtime collector and super-power-broker Virginia Wright.

What do the nays want?

They want to take the $6 million that would be spent on the cars, invest it in a trust, and instead spend $25,000 a month until 2030 buying art by regional artists.

"Sure, these flying cars would look good for a postcard," Wright says. (He, and in fact most of the people at the meeting, can not pronounce Cai's name, anyway.) "But I'm not going to stand behind a six-million-dollar chandelier to spruce up the lobby."

Virginia and Mimi chime in, also cheerleading for local artists, and for the museum's connection with them.

The joke is that SAM has a mostly deserved reputation for being imperious and disconnected. (Witness the frantic don't-touch signs at the Olympic Sculpture Park, or SAM's recent no-go on the whole idea of hosting painters in the galleries, or the fact that SAM does not get involved in the business of regional biennials the way TAM and PAM do.) The Wrights in particular are the force that has brought (often great) work by New York artists to Seattle throughout the last three decades.

This recorded conversation, of course, never took place (and I don't believe a cost figure for "Inopportune" was ever released).

But it's the conversation that contemporary artists wish would happen at SAM.

Unfortunately, SAM did buy the cars, and we're left to marvel at how shallow an experience they are, and how bad they look in the chopped-up architecture of SAM's various lobbies.

But you can revel in this artists' fantasy nonetheless, on the Unauthorized Seattle Art Museum Audio Tour by PDL here:

To receive other tracks on the tour, free of charge, email the artists here.

That there is a line from the first chapter of Peter Plagens's brand-new online novel! I say again, Peter Plagens has written a novel!

Yes, Plagens of the criticism. Plagens of the paintings. Plagens has written a novel—called The Art Critic—and judging from the first chapter, which went up Friday on artnet.com, it's going to be a hell of a read. (It's quite the Roman a clef, but it's also written for people who don't know SoHo from Chelsea.)

The protagonist is Arthur, the critic who loves to shower, and who finds himself perplexed both by the squares and the cool kids of the art world. He's a perfect outsider. He can't even get a date because he's so involved in a world he's outside of. (I can completely relate to this; thank goodness for externally secured spouses.)

The first chapter is set largely on Arthur's gallery walk through Chelsea, which begins with this caveat:

Don’t misunderstand me, Arthur argued with himself while he put his coffee cup into the dishwasher in his compact but smartly appointed downtown apartment, it’s not the real estate bonanza nor the wussification of a formerly gritty Noo Yawk neighborhood that gets me down. (I’m il wusso del tutti wussi.) Nor is it walking up and down those Alphaville Streets in desperate search of art with feeling rather than strategy at its core; nor is it, particularly, the monotony of one deluded, aspiring David Thornton wannabe after another displaying -- to the accompaniment of laughably pseudo-enigmatic publicity material -- another artist they think to be the next enfant terrible. (I can usually assent to either half of the term, but hardly ever the whole.) No, it’s the art itself that gets me down.

How many paste & doodle shows am I condemned to see today? he asked himself as he plodded up the subway stairs at 18th Street. How many discarded supermarket flyers drawn on in attention-deficit anger spasms with crayons or Sharpies, à la Jean-Michel Basquiat, will assault my eyes? How many dentist-diploma pseudo-academic "texts" with every other word ending in "-ification," written by artists acting as their own theorists-at-law, embalmed on birch plywood under glossy layers of polyurethane, will I be forced to read while I stand on fucking cement? How many Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show-­meets-Fashion-Week performances will I be forced to endure? How many Granny’s-attic-on-crystal-meth installations need I stumble through? How many huge Cibachrome prints of exquisitely posed suburban-gothic banalities, produced with budgets that must have consumed whole trust funds in a single gulp, must I try to decode?

Obviously, I recommend it. It will appear "at the rate of about a chapter a week," Plagens says. There are 24 chapters. I love serials.

Ms Graves, I am a former grave digger, prom king and sergeant of Marines. I discovered truly hot by falling into the campfire at age 4 and have been to Winlock, Wa. to see the world's largest egg. Currently I'm an eastside parks maintenance worker and Artist's Trust Edge graduate who is pasting 20 photographs from a new body of work to the wall in Post Alley below the pig. I am pleased to invite you to view them on 1st Thursday, August 7 or whenever you're at the market. Thank you, Daniel Kencke

These photographs "of the daily commute," together titled Pedestrian will be on the poster wall on Post Alley below the Pike Place Market pig "until all images are torn/weathered off, posted over or otherwise assimilated."

A tiny book of them the artist sent me includes several alluringly blurry prints shot from down low, with these poignant and to-the-point explanations in the front of the book:

Tech: 2-5 second exposure, a loosely aimed camera at waist level, inspired by John Waters movie "Pecker"

Impression: personal interactions mostly with cellphone and ipod, very little eye contact, no spontaneous conversation, determined movement and agenda; sad, lonely

I say go.

Girl, if your precious gymnasts even looked like they heard the music while they were doing their floor routines, then your point would stand. As it is, your deafsters are about as "synchronized" to their music as baseball players to their at-bat theme songs.

And here is hilarious musical warmup to tonight.

^{The Adam and Eve page from the St. John's Bible project}

At Tacoma Art Museum. (Museum web site here.)

Several things make me uncomfortable about the traveling show of a contemporary hand-written and illustrated bible that's now at the Tacoma Art Museum.

First, almost all of the illustrations are terribly, terribly ugly, like this one of Adam and Eve. They are in the style of religious craft-fair materials, or mass-produced religious posters, the kind you saw hanging in the offices of progressive churches in the '80s. It is painful.

Second, and keeping that in mind, why is this show at an art museum in one of the least religious states in the union? When the Minneapolis Institute of Arts announced it was organizing a national tour for the show on behalf of Saint John's University, it boasted that the show was looking for audiences in major cities, including New York, LA, Chicago, Seattle, and Detroit. Instead, according to that same web page, the exhibition only found exhibition venues in Collegeville, Minnesota; Mobile, Alabama; and Tacoma.

The presentation at TAM is unquestioning. In sweeping script on the walls and in labels that came straight from the organizers and were not allowed to be altered, the TAM presentation supports the project's own elevated claims of importance.

But does this bible really matter to average Christians, or is this tour just a way to drum up money for the project? Is this bible really engaging any debates about the rapidly growing differences between fundamentalist and progressive Christian practice? If it has no art value—and believe me, it doesn't—then does it even have any religious value?

And on a more general note, why does the Tacoma Art Museum lately feel like a red state inside? The history of that museum is one of innovation, progress, and underdog successes. Recent shows of children's illustrators and quilters seem to send the message that the museum thinks Tacoma doesn't know from art and might be intimidated if the museum put some up. As a former Tacoman myself, I take umbrage.

The one thing TAM still has going for it is curator Rock Hushka. He's responsible for fighting to bring Janet Cardiff's "Forty Part Motet" to TAM simultaneously with this bible show, and because of his determination, a trip there this summer isn't a total loss. The spirit of Cardiff's show is to experience and question the gaps between individual and collective experience, and between hearing something and knowing its full meaning. Now those are subjects that give religious people of all types something to relate to and consider.

^{Leo Berk's River Full of Blood (2008), drawing in sparkly pen [photographed by Mark Woods]}

Here's the third and final view of the three-kilometer-long Mayan cave Naj Tunich at the Hedreen Gallery of Seattle University. In glittery ink drawings of tunnels that look like X-rays of fishnet-stockinged legs, and with sinuous, hand-sanded limbs of painted resin, Seattle artist Leo Berk has re-dreamt his wanderings in in the cave seven years ago, and leads you on a similar way-losing journey. Berk, it turns out, was inspired by Claude Zervas and a dinosaur:

To listen to the entire In/Visible podcast with Berk, click here.

FOR MORE INFO!: The artist will be at the Hedreen Gallery (901 12th Avenue, between Marion and Madison) to talk about this work tomorrow at 1:30 pm!

^{An ancestor of Stephen Colbert (see the resemblance?): a bust of Jean-Baptiste Colbert by Antoine Coysevox, 1677}

Most people don't even know that museums have libraries, and they contain treasures. Seattle Art Museum is no exception, and this Saturday from noon to 5, it's hosting its first-ever book sale—on the lower level of the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

I was curious about what's going to be for sale, so I called SAM librarian Traci Timmons, and she gave me the scoop.

Among the gems:
• The three-volume set "French Sculptors of the 17th and 18th Centuries," by Francois Souchal, published in 1987. Retails for $400; SAM price: $200.
• The rare "New Works by Claes Oldenburg" catalog from a show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1970. SAM price: $10.
• A Sam Durant catalog with an essay by SAM curator Michael Darling from 2002. SAM price: $15.
• Asian material galore, including "The Book of Snuff and Snuff Boxes" by Matton Curtis, a rare book from 1935. SAM price: $10.

In addition to art books from every period and style that SAM collects, exhibition posters and K-12 art education materials will be for sale.

SAM will take cash, check, and credit cards. Full details here.

I'll fight you for some of this stuff.

^{Mmm... snuff boxes.}

Remember the Carl Andre sculpture I posted about a couple of months ago that was, according to the artist, "RESCUED FROM MUTILATION AT THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART"?

Well, now this victim of institutional abuse has come to rest at the Seattle Art Museum (thanks to rescuers Virginia and Bagley Wright). 12th Copper Corner is one of many artworks in SAM's latest round of acquisitions, which the museum made public this week. Other highlights include works by Marcel Broodthaers, Victor Vasarely, Man Ray, Walter Oltmann, and Seattle artists Gretchen Bennett, Eli Hansen and Oscar Tuazon.

The full list is on the jump.

Continue reading "12th Copper Corner Safe!" »

Unknown artist's untitled work (2008), newsprint on concrete, 5 feet by 5 feet

Photo by Slog tipper Ronald

^{A detail of Leo Berk's Rattling House (2008) [photographed by Mark Woods]}

And one more view of this seemingly bemuscled, hand-sanded, surrealist object:

Yesterday I posted the story of how Seattle artist Leo Berk ended up in a Mayan cave on the morning of September 12, 2001. Now here's the short story (interrupted by a siren, so told in two audio files—sorry!) of how the cave made it out of his brain and into the gallery.

To listen to the entire In/Visible podcast with Berk, click here.

Here is a screencap from a video:

It is of a man who is lighting exploding bananas that are mounted on a mask on his face. I have absolutely nothing to say about this.

(Via The Inferior 4+1.)

^{Leo Berk's Dark House (2008), drawing in sparkly pen [photographed by Mark Woods]}

On the morning of September 12, 2001, as the United States descended into a pit of disbelief, Seattle artist Leo Saul Berk happened to be in Guatemala, descending into an ancient Mayan cave. Tourists aren't allowed in, but Berk and some others bribed the guards, who then conducted the tour of the dark, totally disorienting place—a place Berk was unable to get out of his head afterward.

Now it's finally come out of his head, and into the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University. The above drawing is one of three complex perspectives of the cave that Berk created this year, two drawn and one sculpted. He describes what it was like down there:

To listen to the entire In/Visible podcast with Berk, click here.

Back in 1962, the show [of the original 32 Campbell's Soup Cans] met with such derision that a rival gallery across the street stacked some actual soup cans in their window and printed a sign: "We Have the Real Thing for 29 Cents."

^{From Richard Polsky's book I Bought Andy Warhol.}

P.S. I learned while watching the documentary "The Birth of the Cool" "The Cool School" earlier this year that those first soup cans were not hung but displayed on shelves, theatrically, as if they were framed, but still in a grocery-store. I think it was the idea of Irving Blum. When I was at the Museum of Modern Art a few months ago, I noticed that they're displayed that way there. It's sort of like an early music performance on period instruments.

^{A production still from Kathy Slade's 16mm color film Tugboat (2007)}

(Formerly at Or Gallery in Vancouver, B.C. Artist web site here.)

I saw this looped projection a few months ago in a show called Hold On. In the silent film, a tugboat slowly chugs into view (the film was shot in Burrard Inlet in Vancouver) and begins to turn.

Before long you realize: It's doing donuts. This burly, practical thing has sort of, somehow, lost its shit.

The boat continues spinning, sending water radiating out from it in concentric circles. The mind is swallowed into turning along with it. Is this the way a tugboat plays? Or is this sorry boat languishing? Is this a mind that has gone haywire, an absent mind? Or are we seeing the effects of steely determination and singular focus? It's a sad, slow slapstick routine. Maybe it has something to do with the state of shipping, of the stuckness of the economy. Maybe not.

Finally, when the boat rights itself and chugs out of view, you miss it, and wish it would come back.

To me it's a reminder of how simple and easy art can be. I doubt it was simple or easy to commission a tugboat to do circles, but the result isn't afraid to appear that way.

While I wait my turn for the library to lend me the new book, "Spiral Jetta"—a travelogue of the earth art of the American West—I ask you: why don't any art pilgrims go to Mount Rushmore? Where's the love?

Not just that, but Rushmore is the very prototype of a contemporary art project, conceived and designed by a big personality, then executed by a horde of assistants while the artist is off doing other things. I've never seen it, but would love to.

At Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum was the big artist personality.

To give some more thought to the unloved Rushmore, go to Matthew Buckingham's current show at the Henry Art Gallery, where you'll find this 1923 declaration by South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson, who conceived the Rushmore project:

"God only makes a Michelangelo or a Gutzon Borglum once in a thousand years."

At the start of this year, I discovered Niki the Shooter. Now there's Dorothy.

Have you ever heard of Warhol's Shot Red Marilyn? I can't believe I hadn't. I discovered it reading Richard Polsky's book I Bought Andy Warhol last week. (An earlier post about the book, in which I do not recommend the full read, is here.)

Turns out a stack of Warhol Marilyns were, well, shot in the head as they leaned innocently against a wall. The woman reponsible was Dorothy Podber, an artist in her own right and all-around bad girl (pictured above, slumping and scowling in her animal prints). She died earlier this year. From her obituary:

Certainly the most outrageous [trick] was her unsolicited contribution to a few of Warhol’s “Marilyn” silk-screen paintings. In the fall of 1964 Ms. Podber, a friend of the photographer and Warhol regular Billy Name, visited Warhol’s Factory on East 47th Street in Manhattan with her Great Dane (named Carmen Miranda or Yvonne De Carlo, depending on the account). Ms. Podber asked Warhol if she could shoot a stack of the “Marilyn” paintings; he apparently thought that she wanted to take pictures of them and consented.

But she produced a pistol and fired at them, penetrating three or four. One of them, “Shot Red Marilyn,” with a repaired bullet hole over the left eyebrow, sold for $4 million in 1989, at the time setting a record at auction for a Warhol work.

“After she left,” Mr. Name told Ms. Bergmann, “Andy came over to me and said: ‘Please make sure Dorothy doesn’t come over here anymore. She’s too scary.’ ”

Warhol made the Marilyns shortly after Monroe died, based on a press image from the filming of Niagara, featuring her face in all its gobsmackingly constructed glory. In the name of cosmetic realignment, even the Shot Red Marilyn has been repaired, and, why, you can buy a print of that unblemished face here, with a frame to match the sofa.

^{Diem Chau's Boy and Girl, carved crayons and wood, 3 inches high}

This, or actually some just like it by the Seattle artist, are currently "hanging" in the September issue of Harper's, where they illustrate a story called "Tyranny of the test: One year as a Kaplan coach in the public schools." You can kind of see them here, but if you want to get a close look you have to pick up a copy or become a subscriber.

Judging from this web mini-view, though, which is appropriately Lilliputian, I especially like the use of the sculpture perched on the tip of a pencil, like some post-"Sesame Street" Giacometti.

And now, please enjoy a "Sesame Street" clip from 1972 involving Stevie Wonder, a vocoder, a vest, and a classic song that is marginally about counting.

(Thanks for the tip, Steven.)

This weekend, I finished reading Richard Polsky's 2003 book I Bought Andy Warhol, which is ostensibly about the second-tier art dealer's quest to purchase a great Warhol painting on a budget of $100,000—but which is actually just an excuse for Polsky to tell all the stories he knows about fellow art dealers behaving badly. Because Polsky himself is a few shades darker than schmuck—something like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, if that show weren't a comedy—the book is a little bit of an uncomfortable read, and feels a little bit like a waste of time. There are good bits, but overall, I don't recommend it.

But the view Polsky provides of the crassness of the upper-end art market is amusing, and put me in the mood to watch a little Ab Fab ("those frozen blood heads filled with blood").

Susan Robb's creepy, beautiful, black macro-follicles are back--they grow suddenly out of the grass at Volunteer Park rarely, on lucky sunny days, and they're stunning. Today is one such day. They've been up since 11 am and they're only going to be there until 5 pm. They look an awful lot like freakish, unasked-for accidents of nature, some sort of biological phenomena writ large--moving, sensing, aggressive, almost sexual. Or they look like an outgrowth of Earth's hairs, blowing languidly in the atmosphere. They're also kind of sausage-y, and it complicates everything to know they're made out of trash-bag lining, filled with the breeze, tied off at the ends, and powered by the sun: the sun heats up the air inside, the heat expands, the toobs move.

They are called Warmth, Giant Black Toobs and have taken the artist--who makes conceptual art about the natural world--to several states in the last month. See them while you can. It's free. Here's a map of where you can find them in Volunteer Park, courtesy of Lawrimore Project.

Here's a documentary video by the artist (taken at Volunteer Park):

For the love of god, I've been meaning to post about this for a couple of days. Sorry! This week's non-Slog work kept me from being diligent about reading comments, and it turns out that, as some people pointed out, the fireworks for the opening ceremonies did< happen, but they were substituted on the broadcast for ones not obscured by the foggy Chinese air. Fine. That's just dubbing (and not dubbing that humiliates a little girl). No big deal.

What is weird, though, is that I could have sworn that MSNBC's original story claimed just what I said when I linked to it: that the fireworks were completely nonexistent. (Anybody?) Now, the story looks quite different from what I remember it as. Is this just a case of online journalism being infinitely mutable? Wouldn't it be nice if corrections were handled as corrections, or as a new story? At least that way, I'd feel less crazy.

I guess when digital media gets involved, something somewhere gets erased or covered over.