Yesterday I wrote about how Seattle Art Museum's Double Elvis was recently damaged, and that the museum isn't sure when the damaged half—the blank half—will be repaired. I also promised a little more information on how the blank got to SAM.

It's a good story. Starting in 1963, Warhol began making monochrome "blanks" for many of his paintings, and here's what he had to say about it, as quoted in an essay called "Carnal Knowledge" by Rosalind Krauss:

You see, for every large painting I do, I paint a blank canvas, the same background color. The two are designed to hang together however the owner wants. ... It just makes them bigger and mainly makes them cost more."

Warhol was riffing, among other things, off the mid-century heyday of large-scale, heroic, and, yes, very expensive paintings. Also, what could be more perfect for the man who told interviewers to fill in the blanks to their own questions than blank canvases tacked on seemingly needlessly? Then again, they could be, and have been, seen as highly charged voids.

Chiyo Ishikawa, chief curator at SAM, remembers a particularly affecting display of a Warhol "blank" diptych in the city where she used to work, Boston. It was Red Disaster at the Museum of Fine Arts, which is dated twice, 1963 and 1985. The two parts hung across from each other and "when you walked between them you were caught in this psychological space," she said.

^{The Boston Museum of Fine Arts's Red Disaster (1963/1985)}

In Seattle, the blank on Double Elvis was not Warhol's idea.

It was the idea of Charles Cowles, who runs a gallery in New York. Back in 1976, he was not in New York, he was in Seattle, and acting as modern and contemporary curator of SAM. He was organizing an exhibition of Warhol's portraits for the museum (its contemporary shows then were seen at Seattle Center rather than in Volunteer Park) and Cowles thought Double Elvis, which was going to be included in the show, would be better as a double. Or maybe he just wanted SAM to get a double; the museum acquired the piece later that year.

Ishikawa tells it as a perfectly Warholian story of unmotivated casualness: "The painting was made as a single, and Charlie Cowles thought it would be great to have a blank. I guess in Andy's work there's not really a logic about which works get blanks and which don't. But Andy thought it would be great."

The blank was then made by local framer John Denman, who spraypainted a canvas of matching size to the original Double Elvis panel a silver metallic radiator paint that to this day looks slightly different from the earlier Warhol.

When Warhol came for the show, he signed the back of the blank, and Double Elvis was redoubled. The early canvas is dated 1963, the blank 1976. According to SAM assistant modern and contemporary curator Marisa Sanchez, "the closest precedent to the Double Elvis “blank” is a silver Liz painted in 1964-65."

The panels don't have to be shown together, she added, but the blank "should never be shown alone."

Here's one more for the road this late Friday.

^{MoMA's Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963): And Nick, this is how I feel about you leaving.}

^{Carl Pope's 2005 text piece, being used as the poster for the Black Is, Black Ain't show at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.}

Wednesday I spent some time at Seattle Art Museum with Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the deputy director for education at the museum and also curator of a new show in the Gwen Knight and Jacob Lawrence Gallery on the third floor, called Black Art.

A podcast with Jackson-Dumont will come out next week. In it, she talks a little about a future fellowship program attached to the gallery, the gallery's future as a place devoted to artists of African descent—and she reveals that the next artist showing there will be this one:

^{Titus Kaphar's Conversation Between Paintings #1: Descending From a Cross to Be Nourished at the Breast of Our Mother (2006-2007)}

But the main event of our talk was Black Art, the first themed group show in the space. It's a gathering of works, almost entirely from SAM's permanent collection, that in one way or another address blackness either in terms of race, color, or metaphor. The hang is crowded, salon-style, and there are no wall labels, only info sheets set on the benches for the taking. Some of the artists are completely obscure, and some of the objects haven't been out of storage in a while. Nowhere does the museum reveal which artists are black and which aren't, although some of them are too well-known to evade racial identification: Richard Serra, Kara Walker, Chris Ofili, Mark Tobey, Kerry James Marshall, Stephen Shore, and Louise Nevelson, to name a few.

After the podcast, Jackson-Dumont told me a story about the title, Black Art. She considered using "Black Is Beautiful" instead, but liked the simplicity—and yet inherent complication—of the one she finally chose. It has paid off, too. One woman came in to the show, saw the title, and asked whether the curators hadn't considered calling it "African-American Art."

This person wasn't seeing a show, she was seeing an empirical category. Her quick impression was that just as there was a modernism gallery, a contemporary gallery, and a photography gallery, so there was a "black art" gallery.

But solid categorization is what the show is designed to defy, as the woman discovered when she started to look around.

Jackson-Dumont was working at the Studio Museum in Harlem when director Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon coined the term "post-black" to refer to a generation of artists finding more restriction than comfort in always being seen as "black artists." ("Post-black [is] the new black," Golden wrote.)

That's the underlying subject of Jackson-Dumont's Black Art at SAM, and it's also the subject of a show up now at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago called Black Is, Black Ain't (poster image above, brought to my attention by Seattle independent curator Jim O'Donnell, who just returned from seeing the show).

The best explication of this I've seen is in a 2004 essay called Black Light written by Glenn Ligon in Artforum.

Ligon quotes David Hammons:

Turrell, he's on a different wavelength. He's got a completely different vision. Different than mine, but it's beautiful to see people who have a vision that has nothing to do with presentation in a gallery. I wish I could make art like that, but we're too oppressed for me to be dabbling out there.... I would love to do that because that also could be very black. You know, as a black artist, dealing just with light. They would say, "How in the hell could he deal with that, coming from where he did?" I want to get to that, I'm trying to get to that, but I'm not free enough yet. I still feel I have to get my message out.

And then Ligon writes:

It's hard to leave your body behind, especially when your body is always being thrown up in your face. But being heavy is a motherfucker. The question is: How to remove weight, to move toward lightness, as Hammons has? How to do this while still acknowledging the particular history of a body that has been used, as Stuart Hall suggests, "as if it was, and often it was, the only cultural capital we had"? These questions now occupy several young artists who walk the threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body.

More on Black Art in print.

^{Anna McKee's Spring Shoots (2007), etching with chine collé, 8 by 6 inches}

At Francine Seders Gallery. (Gallery site here.)

This is the piece I referred to earlier, that has been damaged and is in the conservation studio for repairs.

Sadly, what you see in the gallery now is just the left panel, and it's going to be that way for a little while. (SAM spokeswoman Cara Egan said this afternoon that conservators are backed up preparing the Inspiring Impressionism show (opening June 19) and won't be able to reinstall it until after then.)

Seems as good a time as any to recall how the piece got its belated right panel. I'll be back with that sometime soon.

PUNCH gallery has sprouted new life. Clusters of faux moss nestle into cracks and corners; small creatures extend from the walls and ceilings. These new organisms inhabiting the gallery were created by Renee Adams, Ariana Boussard-Reifel, Shannon Conroy, Misako Inaoka, Kristina Lewis, and Amber Stucke.

The group show, titled Homegrown, addresses biology on a very fundamental level: the creation of organisms. Artist and curator Renee Adams chose work that conveyed “a sort of invented biology,” with subjects that fall into the category of animal, mineral, or vegetable, but don't mimic anything pre-existing.

Adams's own creatures—Blowpod, Bindybop, Flinderspindle, Suckerling, and my personal favorite, Pufferpot—are made of clay, wood, sea pods, shoe polish, and leather. They mix imagination with such detail that they could just as easily be archaic bugs as organisms from the future.

An Accumulation of Small Things I and II by Shannon Conroy are two pieces of concentrated, embroidered knots on an expanse of white paper. The slight variations of color, the shapes of the clusters, and the way the knots overlap conjure thoughts of beautiful bacteria in a petri dish, a small colony of life slowly multiplying.

^{Shannon Conroy}

Kristina Lewis also accumulates materials to suggest life forms but uses zippers and drinking straws. Her zipper pieces, such as Specimen #3, do not hide the recognizable form of the material, but by using so many of them, Lewis suggests that the zippers have taken on a life of their own and are determined to continue multiplying.

The straw sculptures are more complex and mask their material almost completely. By slicing lateral layers of brightly colored straws, Lewis creates colonies and cross sections of organisms. The small magnifying glasses incorporated into these pieces nod to the scientific realm and reinforce the references to biology. Lewis falls short, though, of fully exploiting the potential of the instrument: the magnification is low and the piece can easily be seen without it. If it were a true specimen, much more would be happening on a microscopic level.

^{Kristina Lewis}

Ariana Boussard-Reifel’s Litost begins with a rope tied to the rafters, from which all sorts of organisms emerge. Some look like new species of seaweed pods, others are more like organs or complete specimens. They transition in color and grow more complex as they extend further away from the rope, achieving their own type of evolution.

Misako Inaoka’s moss piece, Untitled, is the only one that involves movement. A small sprout grows from an artificial moss cluster and swivels back and forth waving at passersby. The way the clusters are sporadically placed on the wall replicates the seemingly spontaneous and rapid growth of moss and algae, presenting the most convincing example of a living, multiplying organism.

^{Misako Inaoka}

In a show about biology, it's surprising that movement, or even implied motion, is not incorporated into more of the pieces. Movement, however slow or fast, is an inherent quality of something living. The fact that most of the pieces are so static makes them feel more fabricated and contrived. Accordingly the show does feel Homegrown, a title Adams felt gave a quaint feeling of domesticity, like “something handmade that you might cob together in your basement.” And it does succeed in being a lovely, organic interpretation of the world of biology, even if these “basement” experiments don’t exactly breathe life.

--Lauren Klenow

A young girl visiting Seattle Art Museum recently fell into and damaged the blank silver panel of Andy Warhol's Double Elvis (1963)—because she tripped over the barrier on the floor meant to protect the painting.

One of the two panels is still on the wall (the one with 1 1/2 Elvises on it), and the other is in the conservation studio, having what spokeswoman Cara Egan calls "a dent" in it repaired.

Meanwhile, the unprotected artworks at SAM are doing just fine.

^{Justin Colt Beckman's 323:4X4 (2008); 1984 Mazda 323, dried mud; 53 by 68 by 164 inches}

At Central Washington University. (More images here.)

^{Sergio Vega's Paradise on Fire 5 (2007), photograph}

Sergio Vega, who was born in Argentina and now lives in the foresty middle of Florida, has been working on a project called Paradise in the New World for 10 years.

Using his own writings—in voices from academic to confessional—plus photography, sculpture, and video, Vega goes in search of the promised paradise. He treks to the area of Brazil where explorers once said this paradise could be found (pictured above, in a 2007 fire), and he looks at our estranged relationship to tropical paradise as moderns, often distinguishing between First-World and Third-World definitions of modernity.

^{The parrot phone is one example of modern systems mimicking natural ones. A talking bird becomes a talking machine.}

Vega's newest additions to the project, photographs and a video of two men who discovered and worked in the Brazilian gold rush of the 1970s, are on display at the young contemporary art space Open Satellite in Bellevue, in an exhibition curated by Pablo Schugurensky. Facing off with the Bellevue gallery's gigantic window wall is a blackout curtain cut to look like a giant silhouette of a jungle canopy.

Vega sits down in the gallery and talks while his home—or at least his home town in Florida—is burning.

Hear it here.

^{Jeffry Mitchell's Untitled (Bunny) (1998), etching, 22 by 22 inches}

At Seattle artREsource. (Gallery site here.)

(As far as I know.) I'm just glad it exists. It's called Fundamentalism, and it's by a Florida-based artist named Sergio Vega, who does have a show up now (that doesn't include this piece) at Open Satellite in Bellevue.

And—an In/Visible podcast with Vega will go up tomorrow.

^{David Russell Talbot's Origins of Butch: Katharine Hepburn, acrylic on canvas, 12 by 12 inches, part of the "Hollywood Pulpcore" series}

At Vermillion. (Gallery web site here.)

Charles, screw that clipart. This is beautiful:

From the Datamining blog's Mapping the Blogosphere gallery.

One should waste an entire afternoon browsing swivel.

^{Katie Miller's Fence (2008), watercolor, ink, and pen on paper, 11 3/4 by 12 inches}

At Cornish College Terry Avenue studios. (Gallery site here.)

It's an image that made me stop for a moment...

...It's not original, and it's from a page for an ordinary online merchant, but somehow it perfectly visualized something that Yuri Lotman, a Russian semiotician, once wrote: "Information is beautiful."

On my way home last night, I stopped at 11th and East Pine Street to take this photo of a wheat-pasted booze poster when a lanky hipster yelled, “Free art show!” Which seemed like a strange thing to get exited about. Galleries don’t generally charge admission, so art shows are usually free. It's the art that I can't afford. But, as it turned out, this wasn’t a free art show. It was a free art show. And this guy was trying to wrangle folks over to take some free art. Here are a few.

A few of the pieces on display were simplistic, but other pieces were smart. Jen Graves, resident art critic, calls free art “very exciting.” One of them, Sharpie on Plexiglass, is above my desk now. The artist called it a buffalo. I call it a holy cow.

Pedestrians were sort of hustling past to get out of the rain, adopting pieces one by one. “Last time we put it up, we went over there for ten minutes,” said one of the guys pointing at Cal Anderson Park. “When we came back, every thing was gone.”

“Seattle Street Art group on Flickr,” said another guy, Flickr name starheadboy, “that’s how we know each other.” He made me promise to check it out when I got home. So when I walked in the door, two pieces under my arm, I told my housemates that I had to check out this Seattle Street Art group. “I started that Flickr group,” says my housemate Kimberly. Sure enough, she did. And now there are 861 members, meeting each other, standing in the rain, and giving away free art. How awesome.

San Antonio-based artist Dario Robleto has two shows up currently at the Frye Art Museum, but that's not why In/Visible decided to do two podcasts with him rather than only one. It's because he's too interesting to cover everything in one sitting.

In part one, recorded and posted in late April, Robleto talked about his personal history in and around hospice and honky tonks in Texas, and about his philosophy of "attainable magic."

The wild materials he uses in his artworks are all real things in the world, as far-fetched as they sound—for example, there's trinitite, glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, when heat from the blast melted the desert sand.

In part two, recorded May 15, Robleto focuses on his materials, explaining how he gets them and what they mean to him. (Here are a few examples of what he uses: bones from every part of the body, ground seahorse, men's wedding bands excavated from American battlefields, residue from female tears of mourning overlaid with residue from male tears of mourning, pain bullets, tracheal extractor, ground pituitary gland.)

His latest find? A multimillion-year-old blossom, perfectly preserved, and a multimillion-year-old raindrop, caught in amber. Those objects will be part of an upcoming group exhibition (called Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet) with Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton, Xu Bing, and four other artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Robleto is also in a group show called Old, Weird America (the title comes from Greil Marcus's take on Dylan's basement recordings) at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.

His 10-year survey, Alloy of Love, opened last weekend at the Frye in Seattle.

Click here for the new podcast.

Below are two of the many works in the show.

^{Sometimes Billie Is All That Holds Me Together (1998-99), hand-ground and melted vinyl records, various clothing, acrylic, spray paint. Several new buttons were crafted from melted Billie Holiday records to replace missing buttons on found, abandoned, or thrift-store clothing. After the discarded clothing was made whole again, it was re-donated to the thrift-stores or placed where it was originally found.}

^{Detail from A Color God Never Made (2004-05), cast and carved de-carbonized bone dust, bone calcium, military-issued glass eyes for wounded soldiers coated with ground trinitite (glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, c. 1945, when heat from blast melted surrounding sand), fragments of a soldier's personal mirror salvaged from a battlefield, soldiers' uniform fabric and thread from various wars, melted bullet lead and shrapnel from various wars, fragment of a soldier's letter home, woven human hair of a war widow, bittersweet leaves, soldier-made clay marbles, battlefield dirt, cast bronze teeth, dried rosebuds, porcupine quill, excavated dog tags, rust, velvet, walnut}

From the twisted tradition of Katsushika Hokusai's Dream of the Fisherman's Wife...

...emerges Toshio Saeki's Octopus.

Saeki is "the godfather of Japanese erotica."

^{A print by SHAG, from SHAG: A to Z}

At Fantagraphics. (Gallery web site here.)

^{Michael Brophy's What Did You See There No. 1 (2008), gouche on paper, 10 1/2 by 13 inches}

At G. Gibson Gallery. (Gallery web site here.)

^{Robert Hardgrave's Djorge, mixed media on paper collage, 18 by 24 inches}

At BLVD. (Gallery web site here.)

^{Detail from Dario Robleto's A Color God Never Made (2004-05), cast and carved de-carbonized bone dust, bone calcium, military-issued glass eyes for wounded soldiers coated with ground trinitite (glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, c. 1945, when heat from blast melted surrounding sand), fragments of a soldier's personal mirror salvaged from a battlefield, soldiers' uniform fabric and thread from various wars, melted bullet lead and shrapnel from various wars, fragment of a soldier's letter home, woven human hair of a war widow, bittersweet leaves, soldier-made clay marbles, battlefield dirt, cast bronze teeth, dried rosebuds, porcupine quill, excavated dog tags, rust, velvet, walnut; 51 by 48 by 21 inches}

At the Frye Art Museum. (Museum web site here.) The artist will talk about his work at the museum at 1 pm today.

^{Gregory Glynn's Tended (two views) (2008); cedar, beeswax, painted steel; 44 inches by 9 inches}

At Catherine Person Gallery. (Gallery web site here.)

This show—er, two shows (in one)—sounds mind-blowing. If you are in New York right now and you don't go to see this, I'll never forgive you.

Here's a link to images totally worth clicking—there are 24 of them (and check out that Picabia!).

Sylvia Wolf has been director of the Henry Art Gallery for four weeks now, and already we have a few indications of what she's made of.

First, Wolf's exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's Polaroids—documenting for the first time the young photographer's first lens love—opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art May 3. This morning, Karen Rosenberg of the New York Times wrote about the show in the context both of Mapplethorpe and the endangered camera. "The beloved instant photograph could not have hoped for a better sendoff," Rosenberg wrote. I need to get my hands on a copy of the book (cover above), which The Art Newspaper called "compact but surprisingly weighty."

I met Wolf for the first time on Tuesday, and she struck me as lively and friendly, with a fierce edge. As both a longtime academic and a longtime museum person, she said she feels at home at the Henry, a museum embedded in a university. "It just feels right. I see people with pink hair in slippers holding a cup of coffee at 8 in the morning, and I think, 'Yeah, this is good.'"

It will probably be some time before we see Wolf's imprint out in the galleries (not as a curator—she's said she doesn't intend to curate—but as a new guiding force), but her first item of business is putting together a department of education and university relations for the museum. In the past, the Henry had an education curator but not a distinct department devoted to education.

During her interviews for the job, Wolf persuaded the UW administration to agree to split the cost of an annual resident for the museum—a scholar, artist, or curator who will bring fresh blood to the city every year. That will probably begin next spring, Wolf said Tuesday.

"The fact that the administration has actually put up some new money to support the Henry's initiatives is huge," she said. The fact that Wolf persuaded the administration is huge, too.

^{Ron van der Ende's 727, bas relief in wood, 122 by 55 by 6 inches}

At OKOK. (Gallery web site here.)

^{Maki Tamura's Peekaboo (2008), watercolor on paper, 17 by 17 inches}

At James Harris Gallery. (Gallery web site here.)

^{Matthew Offenbacher's The Freak in a State of Total Tokenism (2007), oil on canvas, 49 by 29 inches}

Matthew Offenbacher is the painter behind La Especial Norte, the latest in a spotty but notable historical lineage of artist-run zines in Seattle. (Anyone remember Redheaded Stepchild?) He talks about how this one came about, and what he wants to do with it. And, tangentially, why his newest paintings are of his cat.

The podcast is here.

^{Monogram, 1955-59}

In the story of art history, Robert Rauschenberg is, among other things, the man who killed Willem de Kooning. In 1953, the young upstart Rauschenberg took a drawing by the elder de Kooning, erased it, and put the blank page on display inside a golden frame for all the world to see. Abstract expressionism was dead and had been swept offstage, and the audience was primed and ready for a new generation—the generation of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol: Pop. Erased de Kooning Drawing is a breath between movements, a final metaphorical slaying of a tottering old man, and in this version, Rauschenberg is the enthusiastic, revolutionary killer.

But a closer look at the classic story, as told in the great 2004 biography of de Kooning by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, reveals a truer Rauschenberg, one driven, ironically, as much by love of the older artist's work as by the ambition to supplant him. De Kooning was about 50 years old and Rauschenberg less than 30 on the day in 1953 when Rauschenberg came knocking. "I was hoping to God that he wouldn't be home," Rauschenberg told the biographers, adding that he'd brought a bottle of liquor along for strength. De Kooning welcomed his killer "affectionately" and they talked warmly until Rauschenberg screwed up the strength to ask for the drawing—and to explain what he wanted it for. "I know what you're doing," was de Kooning's response.

"He really made me suffer," Rauschenberg recalled. De Kooning took out an entire portfolio of drawings and leafed through them. "I want to give you one that I'll miss," he told Rauschenberg, adding, "I want it to be very hard to erase." The one he chose was a "dense mixed-media image that contained, Rauschenberg said, 'charcoal, lead, everything. It took me two months and even then it wasn't completely erased. I wore out a lot of erasers.'"

Rauschenberg died Monday at age 82 of heart failure, and looking back on his career, these moments 55 years ago seem particularly telling. After Erased de Kooning Drawing, Rauschenberg would never again put something so neat and tidy out into the world—and the physical process of the erasure was far from simple. (This was no fugitive pencil drawing.) Rauschenberg's lifetime of messy sculpture-paintings (he called them "combines"), layered screenprints, and transfer drawings were more full of the sweeping, emotive strokes of de Kooning's terrifically troubling women than the cool, collected attitudes of Lichtenstein or, say, James Rosenquist or Tom Wesselmann or even Rauschenberg's one-time love, Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg erased de Kooning only to bring him back in ghost form, never adhering entirely either to de Kooning's old-fashioned painterly romance or to Warhol's newfangled machine love. On that fateful day at de Kooning's studio in 1953, Rauschenberg told the biographers, "I was completely prepared to share (my liquor) with him." Both men were legendarily hard drinkers.

Rauschenberg's death feels like it hits harder than the death of any artist in recent memory, which sounds strange (quantifying deaths is a bad business) and makes very little sense. After all, the man was 82.

"I wasn't surprised when I heard," said new Henry Art Gallery director Sylvia Wolf, a new transplant from New York, Rauschenberg's town. "But I was shocked."

Rauschenberg feels as influential—as alive—now as he did when he joined the canon fully 30 years ago. Many critics saw his 2006 Combines exhibition, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, as unprecedented high water mark in his career. Although the works were made decades before, never before had so many of the combines—including the famous Monogram, a goat with a rubber tire around his middle—been shown together before, and as a group they knocked out pretty much every critic that came their way, and offered new insight into Rauschenberg. (I did not see the show, to my serious sorrow.)
In 2007, his creative fingerprints were all over the grand reopening of the New Museum. Its big group exhibition Unmonumental was full of assemblages by far younger artists whose work is unthinkable without Rauschenberg—who took many of his own cues from earlier trash-cobbling artists like Kurt Schwitters.

Rauschenberg famously said that he intended to operate in the gap between art and life; he also is known to have felt sorry for people surrounded by regular mass-produced objects for which they had no love. He did love them, and he used them in everything, eventually turning them against the commercializing aspects of their own reproducibility (Warhol, equally deliciously, turned them toward those aspects). In Rauschenberg, parts from a factory-made chair are as special as handmade brushstrokes because reproduction is as interesting as originality, and both, he seems to say, are deeply misunderstood ideas. In 1957, he made two nearly identical collages called Factum I and II, using not only machine-reproduced elements such as newspaper clippings but also dramatic brushstrokes. Lichtenstein deconstructed the brushstroke in his work, too, implying: one little repetition and the myth of modern painting falls to the ground. Isn't that a little too fragile?

According to Michael Kimmelman writing in the New York Times, Rauschenberg's mother made his shirts from scraps of fabric, but when he graduated from high school he wanted a "readymade" shirt. That mid-century economy of means paired with the genuine embrace of the average as an originating spirit accounts for the easygoing, particularly American attitude of his works. His most recognizable self-portrait is Bed (1955), which is just that, his lived-in single bed painted and hung on a wall, a twist on the abstract expressionist mode of large paintings representing the struggles of the soul. Rauschenberg's large painted surface depicted instead the visceral struggle of a body in bed (which broadens considerably when you recall that it was 1955, and Rauschenberg was gay, like many Pop artists, in contrast to the strenuously straight generation of painters who went before them). Rauschenberg may have mocked the high and cerebral seriousness of painters like Barnett Newman—whose vertical "zip" lines Rauschenberg parodied by using car tires to make lines—but he didn't crush it; he transformed it into something physical, more real, more everyday. In questioning the myths of art, he didn't unseat art's ability to rise to mythic importance. He left behind all these seemingly living bodies. It's hard to think of his as gone.

^{Pat De Caro's Untitled (2008), ink on paper, 12 by 9 inches}

At Francine Seders Gallery. (Gallery web site here.)

Lucien Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) has sold for $33.6 million at Christie's in New York, beating the record for the price of a work of art by a living artist sold at auction. (Hear all those qualifiers? Hell, the whole thing is a qualifier. Don't shoot the messenger. Is this thing worth $33.6 million? How on earth would I know what the value of $33.6 million is? I have $22 in my wallet in ones, and it's a good day.)

These are the artists Greg Kucera Gallery lists as not part of the Video Kitchen show that opens tomorrow at the space: Matthew Barney, Isaac Julien, Pipilotti Rist, Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Shirin Neshat, Rodney Graham, Doug Aitken, and Marina Abramovic.

In other words, the making of Video Kitchen: Homemade Moving Images—the first show entirely devoted to video in the history of the gallery—involved no horde of post-productioneers, no lighting designers and crews. There may even be no (imagine!) credits. It's just the artist, more or less 1960s-Nauman-like, with a camera.

"I've been seeing a lot of overblown cinematic videos lately," Kucera said. "But I remember seeing video art in the early days, seeing it at the And/Or Gallery when I was a teenager. The form has changed so much. I'm more interested in the artist's hand, in a much more pared-down quality. These are humble sorts of videos."

The lineup ranges from familiar artists (Tim Roda, Reuben Lorch-Miller, Mark Newport) to artists new to the gallery (Jhordan Dahl, Daniela Libertad).

Here's a still from Portlander Dahl's Dreamgirls, a video in which the artist impersonates the heroines of movies from Chinatown to Belle du Jour in a tribute to her mother.

Assignment #1

When Doug Jeck got his tenure at the University of Washington a friend of his jokingly gave him the book Modeling for Amateurs. In it was the question “Don’t you wish you could just start over again and again?” The starting point for Jeck is a house, tree, yard, and sun—a simple scene that is, for most of us, the first art assignment we received in school. For the current show at CoCA in Ballard, called house, tree, yard, sun, etc., Jeck curated a select group of friends, colleagues, students, and former students, giving them the “most fundamental and thus most difficult assignment ever,” he said, depicting in any medium a house, tree, yard, and sun on standard 8 ½-by-11-inch paper.

Each piece, pinned to the wall, is hung as though it is part of an elementary school’s open house. There is no real hierarchy among the pieces and you almost take on the role of an unbiased teacher, admiring each one for its unique approach to the assignment. But there are some worth mentioning.

Elizabeth Copland made a stunning three-dimensional cityscape out of masking tape, Jamie Walker took a direct approach but showered his house with a green only-in-Seattle rain. Sean Howe photographed his elementary school art students holding their rendition of the assignment. Adrian Van Dooren repeatedly wrote the words "house, tree, sun, yard" on lined paper (as if he had to rewrite them as penance for a spelling mistake), until they formed the shape of a house, tree, etc.

Then there is Claire Cowie’s watercolor on paper. Cowie’s piece makes you forget the assignment and abandon the hunting game for each of the required elements. It gets an A+ because it reminds me of a turning point in art school when the student realizes that an assignment is meant as a guiding tool, not a restriction, and that the successful completion of an assignment is creating a piece that can stand on its own out of the context of the classroom.

At the end of the hallway there are three group murals by students in pre-school, high school, and Jeck’s UW graduate program. As with some group projects the murals do not do justice to the strengths of the individuals involved, but there is something intriguing that happens between the three pieces. All were made with white fingerpaint on black paper and the uniformity of the medium renders them all very similar—it is not instantly apparent which age group created which mural. The similarities are based in the nature of fingerpainting; it's not that the pre-schooler’s chiaroscuro fooled me into thinking they were MFA candidates. But the fact that they are so similar suggests that our childhood creativity isn’t as far away as we make it out to be.

--Lauren Klenow

Claire Cowie

Elizabeth Copland

Mural

^{Dan Webb's Squeeze, carved wood}

At Kirkland Arts Center. (Gallery web site here.)

This one I really feel. (I'm working on writing an appreciation.)

Here's the New York Times obituary. If you want to pay a visit today to Rauschenberg's work locally, there's a combine painting (one mixed with sculpture) called Octave up on the third floor of the Seattle Art Museum, next to a great work incorporating a thermometer by Rauschenberg's longtime friend and one-time love, Jasper Johns.

Here's Rauschenberg's famous 1955 work, Bed.

This is the last Rauschenberg show I wish I'd seen.

And if you're flying through SeaTac Airport today, visit Rauschenberg's serigraph on mirror-coated Plexiglas, Star Quarters. It's on Concourse C.

Speaker #1. Last night, South African-based photographer Roger Ballen spoke at the Henry Art Gallery and I missed it. I'm disappointed I did, because his photography makes me curious. It's a small consolation this morning to note that he has an informative web site with dozens of images, interviews, and articles. Here are a few of his works:

Speaker #2: Last week Seattle had a visit from Dennis Oppenheim that came and went quickly, and left in its wake the promise of large orange traffic cones that will go on display at the Olympic Sculpture Park on May 14. They were formerly in New York City. (Is there much more to say than that they are large orange traffic cones?) I did not catch Oppenheim's talk, but I got an email the next day from a disgruntled listener:

Mr. Oppenheim's lecture was dumbed down horribly for the audience of about 30 people, most of whom I have seen in attendance at other more brilliant lectures around town, and who can be heard chatting eagerly with each other before said lectures about what country they were just visiting and what artwork they saw while they were there. Normally I would excuse an artist for giving a remedial lecture to a group of well informed adults simply because it was taking place in a public library. However in this situation it seemed that Mr. Oppenheim, being a local boy-wonder and all, knew many members of the audience before giving this lecture.

What burns me the most about this lecture is how Mr. Oppenheim sounded almost apologetic for creating work that exists in "real time." It seems that he was maybe going with the flow, doing what the cool kids were doing at the time and seeming to make fun of the fact that he had done it at all. I guess it's time to take him out the history books. Unfortunately I think that the only reason he gets shortlisted for public art commissions is because he got the MOMA stamp of approval back in the day.

Despite my negative lecture experience I still plan to go see the work at Gallery4Culture, and his earlier works like Annual Rings (1968), and Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970) were not ruined for me.

Side note: I just ran into Mr. Oppenheim while he was standing out in front of the sculpture park. He was there taking a look at the potential sites for his traffic cones to sit. I asked him about the cones because he didn't talk about them at all last night (I had thought that the lecture was meant to educate about the work that is being brought to Seattle). He doesn't feel that this work is representative of his general oeuvre. Unfortunately he was whisked away by a dude in a Jaguar before I could ask him if he thought the work would play nice with the other works in the sculpture park. He had been in the middle of casually reminiscing about how the work had functioned in NYC in this time of paranoia that we live in. His summation was that they were not received well.

^{Chuck Close's Self-Portrait (2006), 103 by 79 inches, jacquard tapestry based on a daguerreotype}

In next week's paper, I've got a piece coming out about Chuck Close, who right now has a show at Tacoma Art Museum with the poet (and his old friend) Bob Holman. But before that, this weekend, Close will be in town, at the Pantages Theater in Tacoma, giving an informal talk with Holman (Sunday at 2 pm), and the two of them together are said to be something like Laurel and Hardy, so get down there. ("It's a dog and pony show, and I'm not sure whether I'm the dog or the pony," Close told me.)

Links here to video of Close's interview with Charlie Rose in
2007 and audio of Holman reading "Elizabeth Murray," the praise poem he wrote for his wife.

^{Saul Becker's Vista (Study) (2006), 30 by 22 1/2 inches, ink and gouache on paper}*

At Platform Gallery. (Gallery web site here.)

^{*Aislinn, this one's for you. I have no idea whether you'll like it, but at least you know I'm thinking of you this morning.}

Maxwell Anderson (who, yes, is grandson of the playwright) was in Seattle a few weeks ago to discuss issues of international art repatriation at Seattle Art Museum—in conjunction with the Roman Art from the Louvre show that's closing this weekend.

We caught up with him at an absurdly late hour after his talk (11 pm PS, 2 am his time), but he was as eloquent as ever. The fact is, Anderson is one of the smartest and most up-to-date museum directors in the business, and in this podcast, he describes many of the philosophies that make him so good. One of the best things about him is that despite the crazy workload of a museum director these days, Anderson makes time not just for doing the job, but for thinking about how to do the job.

Just listen.

And check out the best museum web site in the country at the museum where he's director in Indianapolis. Next year, the IMA will open its 100-acre art and nature park, which sounds something like what the Olympic Sculpture Park could have been but isn't. Anderson says it won't be about "trophy hunting and monument building."

Oh, and here he is doing one of his regular YouTube videos about the art at the museum. (Yes. Imagine a director making time to do that.)

^{Tony Weathers's Guns N' Butter (2008), brass rods, butter, wall installation}

At Crawl Space. (Gallery web site here.)

^{Katina Huston's Mechanical Repeat (2008), ink on mylar, 36 by 36 inches*}

At Davidson Contemporary. (Gallery web site here.)

^{*Hint: See the pedals?}