In a talk this afternoon at Cornish, art dealer Scott Lawrimore mentioned that the Henry Art Gallery has been steadily, but subtly, exploring political issues in its exhibitions over the last two years.

He's right. The Henry has been doing a great job at this, peppering every rotation of exhibitions with at least one trenchant show. The war- and international-politics-related works of Walid Raad, Kader Attia, Kim Jones, An-My Le, and Dawn Cerny coalesce into a group show in the mind when you think back on them—Raad's technically degraded photographs from a violently degraded Beirut, Le's portraits of battle rehearsals and re-creations, Attia's thin but insistent boundaries and borderlines, Jones's aggressive vulnerability, and Cerny's paper soldiers and waiting rooms stocked with tissues.

^{Walid Raad}

^{Kim Jones}

Coming in June, a topical cherry on top?: Curator Sara Krajewski's show The Violet Hour opens June 21, and it comes with this description, taken from the Henry's website:

Artists Matthew Day Jackson, Jen Liu, and David Maljkovic imagine alternative realities that could emerge from the sociopolitical strife and environmental degradation now accumulating on the global stage. The Violet Hour features video, sculpture, and two-dimensional works that address the physical and emotional weariness of our time in an attempt to overcome the cultural amnesia preventing us from learning the lessons of history.

^{A still from Jen Liu's 2006 video The Brethren of the Stone: Comfortably Numb}

Have at it.

^{Eli Hansen's Skagit River Delta 1 (2008), C-print, 18 by 24 inches}

At Howard House. (Gallery site here.)

The star show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York right now is a solo exhibition by explosion-happy Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. The show's big centerpiece, snaking all the way up inside the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral, is Seattle Art Museum's Inopportune: Stage One.

Looks good, no?

But wait—the same piece is up at SAM right now. How's that possible? Is the piece editioned?

This morning I ran across this little caption under an image of the installation on the Guggenheim's web site: "Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Robert M. Arnold, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006. Exhibition copy installed at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008."

Now hang on.

I'm imagining that the defense for doing this is that the work is conceptual. Essentially: that the art is an idea that can be executed over and over again, rather than an idea that rests in specific materials—in this case, the white Mercurys and Ford Tauruses—themselves. The museum's text describing the piece says as much: "The concept of Inopportune: Stage One has been reconfigured..." (emphasis mine).

But if that's the case, if there is no physical original, then why is this one called a "copy"? And why not make exhibition copies for every work in the show, rather than going to the trouble of gathering together originals? (See the curatorial model of Triple Candie—unauthorized retrospectives and copies all around!—for the truly radical take on this idea.)

More likely than any artistic motivation are career-based, logistical, and publicity justifications. The artist and the museum probably simply wanted the spectacular piece (first created at Mass MOCA) to get a New York audience. That's fine, but let's not confuse it with theoretical reasoning. Sol LeWitt, to my great dismay, is dead, and the practice of artists, galleries, and institutions using conceptualism as an all-purpose cover needs to die, too.

^{Cai Guo-Qiang's Illusion, seen in its 2004 installation at Mass MOCA}

You know that strange little area at Seattle Art Museum, the one off the main lobby and overlooking the Hammering Man entrance of the museum? The area where nobody goes?

It's where the artwork seen above is installed. It's Cai Guo-Qiang's Illusion, a video of a car being immolated "in" Times Square, displayed in conjunction with the burned-out car itself. (You can see the video here.)

That work is coming down in May (the flying cars will still be up for a while; Darling couldn't say how long), and, eventually, in its place, the entire area will be transformed into a zone for video art, according to SAM modern and contemporary curator Michael Darling. The room will no longer be a weirdly shaped open zone—a land that architecture forgot—but it will become gallerylike, with temporary walls and such. (One hopes the museum will also find a better way to direct people toward the area, which is continually overlooked now.)

The area doesn't naturally lend itself to the idea of showing video. A big bank of windows across the southern lobby pour natural light into the space. But with a buildout, it could work. And it will be great to see the area activated.

The first exhibition? The video survey of 19 Northwest artiststhat Darling put together for Art Basel Miami Beach this December. As far as I can tell, it marks the first time any curator has put together a Northwest video survey, and even if we had to wait a few months, it's terrific that it will show in its homeland. Stay tuned for dates; Darling said the buildout could take several months.

^{Diana Falchuk's Behind Time Even Sweeter (2008), screen-printed wallpaper, confectioner sugar icing, acrylic media, gouache, and spackle, 6.5 feet by 13 feet}

At McLeod Residence, which was recently the subject of Bethany Jean Clement's lovely writing. (Gallery site here.)

Thanks to the marvelous Sasha Anawalt on ARTicles, I just finished reading David Byrne's entertainingly disinterested account of going to the Broad Contemporary Art Museum opening with Cindy Sherman, whom he refers to only as "C."

I got myself down to BCAM (in LA) on the first day it was open to the public, back in February. With the exception of the "C" room, it was flashy, flashy, flashy, and dull, dull, dull.

^{From Tomoko Yoshitake's show All About Me (2008).}

At Art/Not Terminal Gallery. (Gallery info here.)

I'm still waiting to hear what's actually coming to Seattle Art Museum from the Vogel gift of largely minimalist and conceptual art announced last week. (The National Gallery of Art is handling the PR strangely, but I'm told that soon, SAM should be able to release the list of works that SAM curator Michael Darling says the acquisitions committee already approved. The NGA is gagging SAM with the explanation that the list may still be inaccurate—does SAM still know what it's getting if the list is wrong?—but says that it wants to release the info as soon as possible. Yup, I'm confused, too. But moving on.)

To tide you over in the meantime, and since some commenters on last week's post got excited about Sol LeWitt's name on the artist list, here are two of the four works we know are coming. These are both miniature sculptures, the first an untitled, 12-inch high piece made of painted resin panels from 1990 by LeWitt, and the second a 9-inch long, 1971 study in heavyweight paper for a larger sculpture by Tony Smith. Perhaps there will be more like this, and SAM will have the makings of a tabletop sculpture exhibition on its hands.


^{Sol LeWitt, courtesy the National Gallery of Art}

^{Tony Smith, courtesy the National Gallery of Art}

This week at SAM: hot young things Eli Hansen and Oscar Tuazon open a collaborative installation on Saturday; the brothers are so hot-young that they're also having a show at Howard House, opening Thursday, and next week (opening April 24), they have a piece in the new Western Bridge exhibition, You Complete Me. Here's Tuazon's 2007 folded photograph mounted on aluminum, titled Arroyo Hondo.

^{Jana Brevick's Thinking of You (2008), fabricated sterling silver and copper, 2 by 2 by 1.5 inches}

At SOIL. (Gallery info here.)

^{Su-Mei Tse's L'Echo (2003), DVD video projection, 4-minute, 54-second loop}

At Seattle Asian Art Museum. (Gallery info here.)

This is some great news. New Yorkers Dorothy and Herbert Vogel are giving away their art collection not all at once, in a great big pile, to an already overstuffed New York institution, but to museums all over the country—including Seattle Art Museum.

Fifty works—mostly minimalist and conceptual works, where SAM could use a boost—are going to a selected institution in each of 50 states. (This is all possible with the help of the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.)

Here's what's coming to SAM (the museum only knows specifically about four works and has a list of all the artist's names, according to a spokeswoman):

-- Stephen Antonakos's Nov #2, 1986 (1986), colored pencil on vellum, 23 5/8 by 20 inches
-- Tony Smith's Untitled (1971), heavyweight paper, adhesive, and paint, 6 1/4 by 9 by 3 3/4 inches
-- Sol LeWitt's Untitled (1990), synthetic resin panels, adhesive, paint, and graphite, 12 by 8 3/8 by 5 1/2 inches
-- Terry Winters's Hand Line Reflection Method 15/100 (1995), ink on paper, 13 by 8 1/2 inches

And this is the artist list:

Stephen Antonakos
Will Barnet
Robert Barry
Lynda Benglis
Peggy Cyphers
Richard Francisco
Michael Goldberg
Don Hazlitt
Alain Kirili
Cheryl Laemmle
Ronnie Landfield
Sol LeWitt
Michael Lucero
Robert Mangold
Richard Nonas
Lucio Pozzi
Edda Renouf
Judy Rifka
Tony Smith
Daryl Trivieri
Richard Tuttle
Terry Winters

^{Elatia Pearl's Sweet and Sour (2008), collage, 4 by 6 inches}

At Faire Gallery/Cafe. (Gallery info here; the opening is tonight from 7-11 pm, including a DJ and live performance.)

I've already written about Seattle artist Dawn Cerny's installation We're All Going to Die (Except for You) at the Henry Art Gallery—about its 150-year-old photographs of dead infants, its drawings of invented heavy-metal logos, its paper soldiers with string blood, its photograph of Ana Mendieta's silhouette in the ground in Iowa, and its 19th-century landscape paintings.

The show closes April 27. Yesterday I visited it again, for the third time, and again found myself lingering in the waiting room. It's a gallery turned into a waiting room. It looks like the waiting room of a funeral home. It has tissues, dark-wood coffee tables, and, in a totally unexpected detail, the most supportive, bouncy couch this side of paradise.

In a roped-off area of the waiting room, landscape paintings (and one photograph) taken from the Henry's collection hang on the walls and Cerny's own dead paper soldiers come streaming down from a corner of the ceiling onto the floor, where they constitute a big, gory old-fashioned battlefield scene.

Cerny's own brother is in training for the military, but the people who sit in this waiting room—the dead-in-waiting, sitting in the grief-stricken survivor environment as if they were exempt—don't know about Cerny's brother. They do get the dark jokes—the cover story on a National Geographic Traveler magazine titled "Sudden Journeys: Adventures in Last-Minute Travel," and the awful Costco brochures for coffins. I know that they get the jokes because that's what some of them wrote about in the guest book sitting on the coffee table.

But several also wrote about real deaths, about dead relatives, some who died during the show. Their survivors came to this place because, after they passed through the funeral home and the church, they still needed another place to go. Reading the guest book, I was taken aback at how effective this place seems to have been as an actual grieving room.

Over on one wall of the room there's a short bookshelf. I walked over to it and started picking up books randomly. The first thing I landed on was Joan Didion's attempt to recount the clinical description of the bleeding in her daughter's brain. Next I opened to John Berger telling the story of drawing his father after he died. I got James Ensor's portrait of his dead mother in the catalog of a 1951 exhibition of his paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. In "The American Way of Death" (a 1963 paperback that sells for $4.95 unless you are a member of the clergy, in which case it is $1.95), I read what Jessica Mitford wrote: "A much newer concept, that embalming and restoring the deceased are necessary for the mental well-being of the survivors, is just now being developed by industry leaders."

I'm not sure why this place has worked so well, but it has.

Yesterday afternoon, I put on my coat and mittens and spent some time at the newly finished Robert Irwin sculpture at the University of Washington. (I'm coming to the end of a nice, long Irwin season: see here, here, here, here, and here.)

<sup>Nine Spaces, Nine Trees by Robert Irwin (Photos by Kurt Kiefer)

An aerial view</sup>

The life story of this piece is the reverse of the story behind Alexander Calder's Eagle at the Olympic Sculpture Park downtown. Eagle was born a nomad and, decades later, was finally completed when it found its perfect home; Irwin's Nine Spaces, Nine Trees was made in response to a place, but that place was torn down, and the artwork's original meanings went down with it.

I wrote the full story last June, when the new Nine Spaces, Nine Trees was under construction at UW. Here's an excerpt:

They called it jail for trees. It was a grid of nine flowering plum trees, three to a side, each one enclosed in blue chain-link fencing, on the top of a parking garage at the Public Safety Building in downtown Seattle. It was a work of art, not well liked. ... It was in 1982 that Irwin designed Nine Spaces, Nine Trees for the cold, dark, northern-facing courtyard at Seattle's Public Safety Building, where the sun-starved trees stayed anemic and lonely. The nearby sheriff's office had requested that the fencing be transparent enough not to shelter escapees. The chain-link fence was of the no-climb variety.

Today, instead of law enforcement officers and prisoners and a sketchy downtown, Nine Spaces, Nine Trees is surrounded by fresh-faced college students, green lawns, and pretty brick buildings. When I was there yesterday I got the distinct sense that most people don't know what to do with it. They don't know whether it's art or a little mini-park. (This would please Irwin.)

A tour group stopped and admired the big bronze George Washington next to Nine Spaces, Nine Trees, but they didn't cast a glance over at the purple chain-link construction. A lone man sat inside on one of Irwin's benches, eating a sandwich, and he looked out at the people passing by almost jealously, as if he were in prison. That was the closest the piece got to summoning up a hint of its past.

I talked to the guy. He didn't know he was in an artwork. He didn't know what it was. He said he felt a little lonely in there. We decided that maybe it needed more paths leading into it. Then I noticed that one of the paths leading out of it runs into a short wall, a dead end. For those in the know, it's an almost overt cue that this thing doesn't belong here. For everybody else, it's just weird and slightly creepy.

For those who already love Irwin, the piece has its pleasures. Like all of Irwin's work, it acts as a screen, a frame, a lens—a device of perception—rather than an object of perception. Depending on where you stand, the walls appear to be different shades of purple: lightest when you're looking through just one, darker when you stand so that two of them line up to create a visual layer, and darkest when you get three of them "stacked" in your vision. The appearance of an almost edgeless object that fades in and out of view is an old favorite effect for Irwin, not intended simply as optical fun but as a proposition about how to see the world.

(Irwin made another piece involving purple chain-link fencing and trees on a university campus: his Two Running Violet V Forms at the University of California San Diego, made in 1983, right around the same time as Nine Spaces, Nine Trees. Two Running Violet V Forms is weird, too—it's like a zigzagging volleyball net hung way too high in the middle of a dark grove of eucalyptus trees on an otherwise sun-soaked campus. But there's something audaciously open-ended in that act of pointless camouflage. It's not a place you go to sit and think and look, it's a place you pass through. The two pieces are very different.)

When the original Nine Spaces, Nine Trees was demolished, the University of Washington and the Washington State Arts Commission got together to "save" it, meaning to hire Irwin to reinvent it for another location. Irwin didn't reinvent, he tweaked: he designed new planters, he substituted hawthorn trees, and he darkened the fencing. But it remains a response to an urban core transplanted to picturesque academe. Its strands of DNA have all been untwisted. Now it's just waiting, for whatever meanings it will acquire over time in this new location.

^{Issei Watanabe's Art Is Commodity (Shopping Bag) (2007), ceramic slip, luster glaze, pen, opaque stain, ceramic sealer, tubes, wire, Plexiglas, water, 26 1/2 by 18 by 16 inches}

^{Issei Watanabe's Commodity Is Art (French Fry Container) (2007), ceramic slip, luster glaze, pen, opaque stain, ceramic sealer, tubes, wire, Plexiglas, water, 12 by 10 by 10 inches}

At SOIL. (Gallery info here.)

It's not just that Spencer Moody sells great things formerly owned by now-dead people, or that he hosts an art gallery on the top floor of his store, The Anne Bonny, but this month he also is hosting free performances lasting 15 minutes or less every night, starting at 6 pm.

So if you're going to be in the neighborhood, here's what's on the schedule this week, according to an email from Mr. Moody (the Anne Bonny is closed on Mondays, by the way):

Wed the 9th: Eric Ostrowski (you may know him from Noggin)

Thu the 10th: Standup from Derek Sheen

Fri the 11th: Performance by Ezra Dickenson

Sat the 12th: Seattle's #1 funny lady Jen Seaman

Sun the 13th: The Portland-based arts journal YETI celebrates the release of YETI #5 with mirth and music and copies of the new issue which is only $11.95. (Okay, this event will last longer than 15 minutes.) YETI #5 is packed-to-the gills: An 80-minute CD with 25 rare tracks and 228 perfect-bound pages plus a gorgeous metallic 4-color cover by Saul Chernick.

Last Thursday, a show opened at Greg Kucera Gallery, of nine new paintings and a print by Seattle artist Jeffrey Simmons. It's hard to see why when looking at the flattened JPEGs online, but Simmons's paintings have historically caused disbelief. According to Kucera, viewers often think they're lit from within. Sometimes, it's hard convincing people otherwise, he says, and it's easy to see why: they glow.

I've been writing about Robert Irwin's work for the last week. Irwin, unlike Simmons, a painter's painter, has been all over the place in his career, as his current show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego—with architectural drawings and models, installation, sculpture, and painting—demonstrates. (The show closes April 13, and doesn't travel.)

But Irwin has his roots in the "light and space" art of Southern California. Imagine the opposite of Tony Smith's six-foot, black, minimalist cube, "Die," and you have the work of the light and space artists. Their objects melted into the light around them, or their planes of colored light, as in James Turrell's work, seemed to solidify.

The typical lighting schemes of art—light created in paint, from "within," as Simmons's work plays with (Simmons also plays with the conventions of photography, despite the fact that he only ever uses paint), or applied from without, in gallery spotlights—were either toyed with or thrown out entirely.

The "dot" paintings were the last paintings Irwin made, his last stop on the line of traditional depiction. They are white canvases marked by hundreds of tiny, hand-placed, almost indiscernible colored dots. The dots are like swarms of insects, gathering most tightly in the center of the canvas and dissipating out toward the edges. In them, you can see the coming of the curved discs, which did not depict disappearing edges but had disappearing edges.

The single dot painting in the San Diego show was dimly lit and hung just outside the elevator, so you saw it out of chronological order, as both an introduction and a farewell to his early period, which is laid out on the museum's upper floor. The piece functioned less as itself than as a prop in the story about Irwin's career. Considering that Irwin directed this museum's installation, the way the works were installed functions the same way as the selection of words in an autobiography. In one sense, the artist was having his say about this work: Like the columns, Irwin considered the dots, ultimately, to be failures. But there's another reason, too, why the fact that this one was hard to make out seems right, even if it looked wrong. Irwin has spent his career making objects that exhibit a marked ambivalence about being seen, about being the center of attention. Instead, they want to direct attention. The way the dot painting was displayed in uncertain shadow meant that this central crisis—shared by many artists, not just experienced by Irwin—had its moment in the show.*

Coming up: What's happening with Irwin in Seattle right now.

^{* There's no image with this post because the museum hasn't provided one. The PR office, typically helpful, hasn't responded at all to two requests for an image of the dot painting. Nobody, apparently, wants it spotlit.}

^{UPDATE: The poor press agent is home sick, but they may not have an installation shot. I suppose I'll post a slide of a dot from another collection (MOCA), findable here:}

^{Allison Manch's The Producers (Rza) (2008), handkerchief, embroidery}

At Gallery 4Culture. (Gallery info here.)

^{Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon}

The Rothko children want to move their dead parents, the New York Times reports. It brings back a painful episode from the history of 20th-century art, and it's also just ... weird.

^{Brian Tolle's Stronghold (2007), cedar lumbar, 23 feet in diameter}

On the University of Washington campus, on the east side of the William H. Foege building.

With a free artist lecture Thursday at 7 pm at the Henry Art Gallery.

Last week I spent some time explaining why Robert Irwin was so particular about the way his objects looked, why they had to be just so—why he was dubbed one of the "finish fetish" artists.

And now, for an abrupt change, I want to talk about a big, fat flaw smack in the middle of his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through April 13.

It's in the show's largest installation, in a piece called Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue. (More about other parts of the show here and here.)

^{Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann}

The piece, whose title references a Barnett Newman painting of the same name, was first installed, in 2007, in a spacious New York gallery. But the old refurbished train depot that would be its home in San Diego was even bigger.

So Irwin added to it.

First, the basic structure: All the panels are made of lightweight aircraft aluminum and painted with dozens of layers of super-shiny acrylic so that they end up looking like pools, not paintings. With like colors hung above and below one another, and with the succession of the three colors influencing each other in their reflections as you walk past and see them from different angles, the piece is a playground of perception. At certain points, because of the depth of the reflections bouncing off each other from top to bottom and back again, people in the gallery appear to be two stories below the surface of the floor panels, or two stories above the panels that are suspended from the ceiling. (You can't make it out in this image, but this image gives you an idea.)

But the funny part, the part you can completely miss, is that Irwin allowed a mistake into his work: In adding two panels to each color in order to make the installation larger for San Diego, he let in two panels of a slightly darker blue than the other four blue panels. You don't notice it at first. But once you do, you can't stop. It's a major gaffe for an artist as exacting as Irwin, but it's sort of endearing, too, an admission of ease late in his career.

A guard in the gallery on the day I visited said an art historian who came to the exhibition asked about the darker color, then refused to believe it had been a mistake, knowing that Irwin plans everything.

The guard couldn't convince the art historian, and they ended up in a deadlock. But the guard told me he was there when Irwin was overseeing the installation in the gallery, and he saw Irwin's realization and response. The artist smiled, he said, and shrugged.

Does the flaw detract from the piece? Yeah, it sort of does. It compromises the uniformity of the blue pool—is this area deeper because it is darker?—and it takes away from the finessed perfection of the piece. It also is harder to see the reflection in darker panels. At the same time, it makes me smile and shrug, too. Finessed perfection has its limits.

Coming up: Why the bad lighting on one of Irwin's paintings is perfect, and what's up with Irwin in Seattle right now.

^{Mickalene Thomas's When Ends Meet (2007), two screenprints with hand-applied rhinestones on four-ply museum board}

At James Harris Gallery. (Gallery website here.)

^{A detail from Robert Campbell's installation Yellow (2008), video, plaster, glass, projection}

At 911 Media Arts Center. (Here for more info.)

Back in the day, a handful of California artists were accused, often not so subtly by New Yorkers (a la Woody Allen's depiction of skin-deep LA in "Annie Hall"), of being too finicky about their works. They had to be installed exactly the right way, exactly according to specifications, right down to the smallest details. They were accused of being "finish fetishists."

Robert Irwin was a major target for the criticism (which later became more of a benign descriptive term, "finish fetish"), and he was, in fact, extremely particular about the way his works were installed and the purity of their surfaces according to his intentions. But those critics largely missed the point that, for Irwin, the places where the art met the world were not surfaces, they were thresholds, and if they were misapplied, all was lost.

I've written here and here about the social aspect of Irwin's project, his determination to alter the visual weight of things in order to change the importance they're assigned in the world. For instance, his discs are artworks whose edges seem to disappear into the room, sending the eye seamlessly from artwork to environment and back again.

After the discs, Irwin made clear, thin columns. They were designed to do the same thing, but even more extremely. Irwin wanted the column to act as a centering device, something that centered a room, something that attention bounced off of to reflect the rest of the room.

Instead, they were often presented like jewels, with ropes around them, and treated as centers of attention. (There's still one shown this way in a Southern California mall, I believe.) Because of this, Irwin considered them failures.

But in Irwin's show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (half of which is closed, half of which remains open through April 13), he forbade ropes—or any other marking devices around the column. And his column succeeded: It was knocked over and broken. Meaning: It disappeared enough for somebody to miss seeing it entirely and to walk right into it.

When I was at the show in February, the room where the column had been was empty. It was a tribute.

Coming up: The blatant but largely unobserved flaw in the show's centerpiece, why the bad lighting on one of Irwin's paintings is perfect, and what's up with Irwin in Seattle right now.

^{Maysey Craddock's Lines in the Sand (2008), gouache and silk thread on paper bags, 38 by 53 inches}

At Francine Seders Gallery. (Free reception Sunday at 2.)

Here is my review of Kader Attia's show at the Henry Art Gallery.

In a lengthy email I've posted below and in the jump, Attia takes me to task for it. The dialogue is a part of the work, he writes.

He wrote a kinder, gentler response to Regina Hackett's P-I review of the show, which she posted on her blog. Disappointingly, both emails end on the same patronizing note: "What you see is not what you get."

But that is a low point in his rhetoric. I really recommend reading the whole email. It is, in many ways, much more informative than anything else I've read about the show, and more informative than the artist talk Attia gave at the Henry. It is also far more personal—including Attia's incredible narrative about being detained and questioned by Seattle authorities—and fills in certain gaps I found in the work.

Attia attributes the gaps to my imagination. He accuses me of misunderstanding, wholesale, the nature of art, reality, and journalism. Hey, if you're going to go for it—really go for it.

Continue reading "The Artist Responds" »

It's not just Robert Smithson's world-famous Spiral Jetty in Utah that's in need of public testimonials about its importance. South King County is a haven for incredibly little-known works of earth art, including, pictured above, Herbert Bayer's Earthworks at Mill Creek Canyon in Kent.

The art, made 25 years ago, is an entire landscape sculpted into geometric shapes at the base of a canyon with a creek running through it. The water of the creek flows down toward the artwork, and when it reaches the art, the art functions as a water detention dam.

On Thursday, April 24 at 5 pm (at Kent City Hall Council Chambers, 220 4th Avenue South), there will be a public hearing on the historical significance of the piece. It has been nominated for City Landmark status by the Kent Arts Commission, and if the nomination is accepted, it will be the first historic property to be designated by the City of Kent.

But most importantly, a landmark designation will help to protect the work from future interventions by bureaucrats—although there is one such intervention that's in the works already. Construction will start this summer to alter the landscape enough to bring it up to new state flooding codes—something about preparedness for the sort of flood that happens once every 10,000 rather than once every 100 years.

Cheryl dos Remedios, Kent's visual art coordinator, has been working for more than a year on this. She's been trying to see that the alterations to the piece's formal aspects are as minimal as possible, while still maintaining the piece's function, which was crucial to the artist, Bayer, who died in 1985.

To try to offer city engineers as many options as possible, dos Remedios enlisted the help of professor Nancy Rottle and her students in the UW landscape architecture department. They made a proposal that involved leaving Bayer's shapes relatively untouched, and providing another outlet for the water by lowering the parking lot that's adjacent to the landscape.

But recently, dos Remedios found out that this option—which she was pushing for—wouldn't cut it, technically. She's accepted the upcoming construction as a fair solution. "If you presume that you do (need to protect for a 10,000-year storm), this is a very responsible way to address the situation," she said in a phone conversation.

But if the artwork becomes a historic landmark—and it should—then things might work a little differently next time.

"The decision-making process becomes consultative, meaning that—well, I don't think I need to define that," she said. "It would probably get me into trouble."

It's a delicate situation she's handled well since she took the job less than two years ago. Go and testify not only to support Bayer's art, but also to support the people who fight for art behind the scenes.

If you haven't seen the piece, there's a tour at 4 pm preceding the hearing. It's at 742 E Titus in Kent, and it's open year-round.

It's a book that's about to come out from powerHouse Books, featuring the funny and touching paintings by Lurie, a musician/actor/artist (remember him in Jim Jarmusch's films?).

Here's a sneak preview of what's in it.

^{Man Without Erection Selling Christmas Trees}

^{The Bible Doesn't Mention It, But Jesus Loved to Sleep Twelve to Fourteen Hours a Day}

^{The Indians Didn't Like the Looks of This}

Yesterday, I wrote about Robert Irwin's almost 50 years of art as a social project devoted to rearranging the hierarchy of what we pay attention to in the world (and what we either thoughtlessly or willfully ignore).

His breakthrough moment, his great contribution to the history of art, is this:

^{Photograph by Philipp Scholz Rittermann}

Maybe it doesn't look like much. But it's a solid, convex disc attached to the wall by a thick arm and sticking out several feet into the room. And yet even when you're right there seeing its heft, it can disappear.

This installation is the best I've seen of a Robert Irwin disc. Irwin, who lives in San Diego, arranged it so that the museum would open up a skylight in its roof for the piece. The light is natural, and it falls down like a shower. (In the absence of natural light at many venues, Irwin was induced to devise a way of showing the discs that involves spotlights and a field of shadows on the wall behind the disc, which is how you often see the discs presented; the closest one to Seattle on public view, as far as I know, is at the Portland Art Museum.)

This installation isn't up anymore. It was at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, where I saw it, until the end of February; the other, newer half of the Irwin retrospective is still up at the museum's second building until April 13. (The show is not traveling; it will soon exist only in a very nice hardback catalog.)

Every time Irwin got bored, he moved on to something else, and he got bored early and often. For that reason, his career is defined by a constantly shifting, almost aggressive chronological narrative (gestural abstraction to line paintings to dot paintings to discs to scrims to installations to public works and gardens).

These days, Irwin doesn't make freestanding objects. Eleven years ago, he made a piece that was like a eulogy for the whole basic premise of art objects, like a tribute to the empty space they leave behind when they go. Asked to complete a commission for the La Jolla branch of the MCASD, which sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean and may have the best view of any museum in the country (anybody care to differ?), Irwin selected the room with the panoramic view of the water.

Instead of hanging art on the walls of the room, he cut three 24-by-26-inch holes out of its windows. He cut absences out of a material designed already not to be seen. It takes a few minutes to discover that there's even art in the room at all, and then you smell the sea air.

^{Photo by Pablo Mason}

(Like the discs, I consider this work to be one of Irwin's best. But it wasn't installed during the Irwin retrospective. The La Jolla branch had other, unrelated shows on display, and the "view" room was set up as a reading area. It was confounding.)

Coming up: The blatant but largely unobserved flaw in the show's centerpiece, why the bad lighting on one of Irwin's paintings is perfect, why I'm glad the glass column in the show was knocked over and broken during the first weeks of the show, and what's up with Irwin in Seattle right now.

^{Justin Gibbens's Bird of Paradise XII: Medusa Anhinga (2008), watercolor, graphite, gouache, colored pencil, and oolong on paper, 40 by 26 inches}

At G. Gibson Gallery. (More images here.)

Every morning, I think, "This should be the day. I should write about the Robert Irwin show today."

I'm talking about the Irwin show in San Diego through April 13, the one everyone's been talking about and writing about, the one I flew down the West Coast specifically to see in February.

So I'm going to do it a little bit at a time, starting now, and for however many days it takes.

In the first place, it should be known that I'm a sucker for Irwin. I think I'm still in the place on the feedback loop where I like him because of what he's done, not where I like what he's done because I like him, but I can squarely be called a fan. I'm not sure whether that amounts to a caveat or not.

Irwin is not only a terrific and important artist, he also, as Tyler Green pointed out, seems to inspire exceptional writing. Last year, I called Lawrence Wechsler's classic 1982 book about Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, the best book about art I've ever read. Specifically, Irwin inspires clarity. I'll do my best.

First, the basics. If you had to boil down Irwin's accomplishment into a single sentence, you could say he dissolved the border between the art object and its environment. It wasn't an academic exercise. He did it to upset the hierarchy of which things in the world we pay attention to, and which things we ignore. His career can be considered a social project. But it never feels like a social project. Let me explain what I mean.

Here's where we start: In 1960, with Irwin piling paint on canvas, pushing it into the center of the picture. That was where the eye went. Not so different from any other painter. Things were about to seriously change.

Coming up: The blatant but largely unobserved flaw in the show's centerpiece, why the bad lighting on one of Irwin's paintings is perfect, why I'm glad the glass column in the show was knocked over and broken during the first weeks of the show, and what's up with Irwin in Seattle right now.

^{Kristen Ramirez's A City Makes Herself (2007), vinyl-mesh mural, 14 by 100 feet}

At Union Street Electric Gallery ("Gallery").

^{Cordy Ryman's Strap Slope (2005), acrylic and enamel on wood, 33 by 15 inches}

At William Traver Gallery Tacoma.

Spotted today in New York at the new(ish) MoMA exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind:

It's the Hulger P*Phone—a mid-twentieth century handset, "loosely based on the Henry Dreyfuss Bell 500," that plugs into your cell phone.

Also in beige. Available here.

^{Bill Jones's Vertebrae Dancer with Old Brown Whalebone Face, whalebone and balleen, 15.5 inches high by 33 inches wide by 9.5 inches deep}

At Stonington Gallery.

^{Alden Mason's The Farmer's Wife (1997), acrylic on canvas, 60 by 50 inches}

At Foster/White Gallery.

Two weeks ago, 20/20 did a story on local artist Ariana Page Russell. Russell has a skin condition called Dermatographia. She uses her own skin in her art, but not in a yicky Goth kind of way. The reporter for the segment asks the most annoying questions in the universe, but it's an interesting subject. Ariana (who once posed for a salacious Party Crasher photo for me, years ago) is terrific, as is her work.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Maggie.)

^{Rashid Johnson's The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Thurgood) (2008), lambda print, 69 by 55.5 inches}

At Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York, where Carrie E.A. Scott, director of James Harris Gallery in Seattle for the last two years, will become director soon, therefore leaving Seattle. Congratulations, Ms. E Period, A Period. For the rest of us, regrets all around.

Adam Sekuler, the programming director at Northwest Film Forum, introduced the 2006 documentary about Zinedine Zidane last week by describing it as a nature film about a footballer in his native habitat. He's absolutely right. Zidane comes across as a creature on the prowl. He has a loping gait, characterized by mindless toe-tapping. He spits like he's hissing, and he sweats profusely. When he breaks into a run, the camera struggles to follow his unpredictable motion. His stony expression changes only once the entire 95-minute film, into a smile directed at fellow player Ronaldo. Instead of following the ball, the film sets all cameras—17 of them—on Zidane, for the duration of a match that took place in Madrid on April 23, 2005. The cameras' devotion to Zidane is total; it's hard to figure out what's going on in the game.

The makers of "Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait" are conceptual artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno. (Gordon's earlier work includes "24-Hour Psycho," in which he stretched the Hitchcock movie so it takes a full day to screen.) They weren't the first to have the idea: In the 1970 movie "Football As Never Before," which Northwest Film Forum is also screening this week, German director Hellmuth Costard trained eight cameras on the Northern Irish player George Best for a whole match.

Best disappeared into alcoholic obscurity after the film about him was made. Zidane, on the other hand, a highly decorated French player of Algerian descent, exploded into worldwide infamy. In the 2006 World Cup final against Italy, seemingly out of the blue, Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi in the chest, throwing the Italian player to the ground and provoking cries of "Why?" from French commentators. (Materazzi later admitted to insulting Zidane.) Zidane was kicked out of the game. He had already announced his retirement; this was his last act on the field. The French lost, 5-3, in a penalty shootout.

In retrospect, "Zidane" becomes unintentionally loaded, like the mundane details of a school shooter's life. It adds another dimension to an already complex portrayal—in which the halftime show is a montage of what else happened on the day of the filmed game on April 23, 2005, from the director's son coming down with a fever to an Iraqi bombing at which a survivor is wearing a Zidane jersey—of Zidane as philosophical as well as animal. The few words that scroll silently across the screen are from interviews with him.

"The game is not experienced or remembered in real time," he says. Neither is the film, with its range of visual depth and its mesmerizing manipulations of the sounds in the stadium, its sonic zooms. It breaks through its only restriction—real time—and flows.

The movie plays next weekend (April 4-6) at NWFF.