^{Jamey Braden's Ruptured Painting I (big)}

At Project Project Gallery, 619 Western Avenue, fourth floor, one night only (tonight, 6-10).

Eric Eley struggles with illusion. He doesn't like it. He's a facts man, and the depth in his resin drawings is literal depth, with pigment embedded in layers of resin.

^{Plane Drift, resin and dry pigment, 2007}

"I'm showing you what I want to show you," he says of his outer-spacey geometric abstractions, which share affinities with Julie Mehretu's works. These are maps only of themselves, he likes to say. "This isn't a piece of a larger world."

He used to be certain about that. But now, his lines, points, and planes are beginning to lead off the edges of his drawings and to fade away into deep space—and he's trying to figure out why, and whether he likes it, and where he wants it to go.

This is an artist who started by making teapots and became a professional seamstress (seamster?) before he studied in the MFA ceramics program at UW.

His newest works are at Platform Gallery in Pioneer Square through February 9, including this drawing, titled In Place of Three (2008)—the dry pigment is applied with makeup applicators—

and the installation/spatial drawing Prospect Fields, which fills the gallery.

Listen in.

"Hello, I am a dolphin. I was, unfortunately, drawn by someone who considered Lisa Frank her own personal idol. That's my cousin in the water below. He's bigger because people who draw pictures as retarded as this one don't understand the idea of scale. When you look at me, I hope you'll think restful thoughts even though there is a volcano in a state of eruption behind me. If you can't fall asleep, if this picture is too 'hectic' for you, good luck taking me down because my picture has literally been screwed into the walls."

"Hello, I am a duck's ass hole. Someone took a photograph of me and put me in your hallway, next to the door, to greet everyone who came inside. Just like the dolphin picture, I've been drilled into the walls, so good fucking luck taking me down. God I hate being involved in such a cliche picture. I'm sorry I'm on your wall. Also, I'm sorry for being born."

^{Renoir's Seated Bather, circa 1897.}

^{Renoir's Bust of a Young Woman (Mademoiselle Diéterle), circa 1899.}

In Renoir as Printmaker: The Complete Works, 1878-1912 at Tacoma Art Museum.

^{Linda Davidson's Genie, oil on linen, 76 by 22, 2007}

At Catherine Person Gallery.

^{Bratsa Bonifacho's Elegiaque, oil on canvas, 54 by 54, 2007}

At Foster/White Gallery.

^{Cynthia Norton's Apple Suckling Tree, mixed media video installation, 2007}

At McLeod Residence.

That's the title of my column this week, a column that leaves me feeling ambivalent.

It describes how, last week, I tried to explain in print that there wasn't enough room in print for everything I'm writing about art—that there was more room online. But then, there wasn't enough room in print for that column.

The second-to-last paragraph of the column is a compilation of what we've been doing online in the last few weeks (with links to the 22 items), if you're interested.

Add to that, since the column came out yesterday: a podcast with Ellen Forney and Kelly O at the R. Crumb show; my review of the great Nazi art-looting movie "The Rape of Europa"; and Nancy Stoaks's encouraging words for the Bellevue Arts Museum in light of the new traveling show of sculpture there.

Online is where it's at. It still makes me feel weird to say that.

^{Ross Sawyers's Untitled (Blue, Sky 1), archival inkjet print, 35 by 50, 2007}

At Gallery 4Culture.

In this episode, the cartoonist and the porn-columnist come together at the Frye Art Museum to talk about the R. Crumb exhibition, Forney's new hardback book LUST (opening party for the accompanying art show Saturday at Fantagraphics), and whether they would let R. Crumb jump on their backs for a ride. (Video coming soon...)

LUST is a collection of Forney's Lustlab cartoons, which appear every week on her blog, in addition to on the Stranger's site. Here's the latest, a tribute to a woman who likes Odd Nerdrum, Zdzislaw Beksinski, and Joel-Peter Witkin:

Yesterday I saw a screening of the new documentary film The Rape of Europa, opening in Seattle next week. I can't believe this movie hasn't been made before. It tells the comprehensive story of the Nazi march on Europe—not through field battles, but battles for art.

That picture is of a guard at the Louvre in 1939, standing in front of an empty frame that held a Veronese painting before the museum was evacuated on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Paris.

There is plenty of eye-popping footage like this from the period: more than 6,000 paintings found hostage in a deep, dark mine; the Victory of Samothrace rolling treacherously down a flight of stairs. The interviews are also incredible. One is with the daughter of the family charged with watching over the Mona Lisa while it was in hiding.

No question: the film is a towering achievement, based on the book by Lynn H. Nicholas, narrated by Joan Allen, and written, produced, and directed by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newnham.

In one scene, a current docent at the Warsaw Royal Castle says people ask why the castle was rebuilt after being demolished by the Nazis. "The answer is the same as the reason it was destroyed. The Poles could not live without the castle."

Obviously, the systematic crushing of souls is nothing compared to mass murder. But unlike murder, some crimes can be reversed. This film is the Nuremberg trials for what might be considered the misdemeanors of the Nazi regime: the theft and destruction of art and monuments across Europe. These may only be objects, but for many people, there is life in these objects, too.

There's Maria Altmann, the old woman whose (successful) quest to see her family's Klimt paintings returned is also her battle to expose Austria's historic complicity with Hitler. There's the middle-aged Christian German man dedicated to reuniting confiscated Torah ornaments with the families of their rightful owners. There's the Utah curator who hopes that the return of his museum's prized Boucher to the daughter of a looted Jewish dealer "will confer a little humanity back on all of us."

Like the saga of the Holocaust, the plunder of Europe—not modern, Jewish, or Slavic art, of course, but Italian, French, and old art—is made that much more chilling by the organization with which it was carried out. Before invading countries, Hitler would compile lists of the artworks he wanted, from Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine in Warsaw (see it recovered after the war, below) to Rembrandts, Raphaels, and Vermeers in France, Russia, and Italy. At the end of the war, 49 train car loads of stolen art and artifacts were carried away from Hitler's hiding place at the Neuschwanstein Castle.

On the other side of the equation was an equally determined army, made up of people who wanted to keep art out of criminal hands. This included museum staffers (some died in the freezing cellar of the Hermitage); the little-known American "Monuments Men," who worked for the military but were often at odds with its attack plans; and mousy little Rose Valland, the French spy.

In many ways, The Rape of Europa is timely. New claims to recover art stolen by the Nazis are constantly coming to light, and museums are cooperating. (Seattle Art Museum returned a Matisse in 1999.) But in other ways, it represents a distant, unrecognizable time. Tragically, a time when art mattered to invaders of all kinds now seems quaint.

by Nancy Stoaks

While three panels from the famous "Gates of Paradise" are on view at SAM, the exhibition Material Terrain: A Sculptural Exploration of Landscape and Place (through May 4 at the Bellevue Arts Museum) may remind you of another set of celebrated gates: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,503 saffron-colored fabric panels that reframed NYC’s Central Park for 16 days in February 2005.

In the exhibition catalogue for Material Terrain, Glenn Harper (editor of Sculpture magazine) writes that The Gates were remarkable for their element of “aesthetic surprise”—prompting awareness of what normally remains unseen. Material Terrain is based on a similar premise. It brings together 11 artists who, through various means, make us look more closely at our surroundings.

There's a reason why the exhibition title sounds ambiguous. Curator Carla Hanzal, from the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, would like the works to bridge diverse issues, among them the tension between what is natural and artificial, the allure/possible folly of genetic engineering, cycles of cultivation and consumption, and a nostalgia for landscapes that no longer exist. Roxy Paine’s scientifically precise depictions of dry rot and fungi meet, for example, Dennis Oppenheim’s reindeer with flaming antlers.

Ursula von Rydingsvard and Kendall Buster provide some of the most evocative works in the show. Like Joseph Beuys, von Rydingsvard uses a medium replete with symbolic associations. Her cedar constructions—minimal in form, based on the simple structure of a column or a set of stairs—boldly feature cracks and roughly textured surfaces, challenging the rationality and perfection that we like to create in built environments. By contrast, Buster’s steel armature aspires to that rationality and perfection, yet remains unsettling. Hovering in air and familiar only in its resemblance to the molecules we studied in high school science classes, her model for an architectural space could be meant to protect or to control.

^{Ursula von Rydingsvard's Hej-Duk, cedar, 9.9 by 8.9 by 11.8 feet, 2003}

^{Kendall Buster's Parabiosis III, steel, electrical cable fasteners, shadecloth, 2.5 by 3 by 6.7 feet, 2004}

Material Terrain was designed to expand beyond the museum into the landscape surrounding it: more than half the works in the exhibition are suitable for installation outdoors. In this regard, I regretted seeing BAM’s presentation of Material Terrain largely confined to gallery spaces. Of course, the museum’s location in the heart of downtown Bellevue prevented them from doing much else, but I have to wonder what the impact of works like those above or Donald Lipski’s cast-resin logs (“believable” in every way except for their improbable shapes) would be outside the walls of the gallery.

Still, Material Terrain represents a step in the right direction for a museum that is still in the process of inventing itself. While BAM's tagline advertises art, craft, and design, the latter two disciplines have been dominant since the museum's reopening in 2005. Maybe this exhibition signals a healthier balance between all three.

In a small dark room painted forest green tucked into the third floor of the Seattle Art Museum, you'll find Lorenzo Ghiberti's 500-year-old Gates of Paradise. The Gates are not really gates; they're three gleaming golden panels, spotlit like diamonds on dark velvet, held inside clear oxygen-free cases filled with nitrogen.

The heist-movie lighting is more fun—and, literally, more illuminating—than the way the panels appeared when I caught them two months ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, they were subsumed in another tableau, installed in the reconstructed patio of an early 16th-century Spanish governor's castle, slightly overcome by the natural light streaming in.

Truth be told, there is no bad way to see Ghiberti's gilt-bronzed reliefs. They are spectacular objects. To make them, Ghiberti revived the Roman lost-wax casting technique. He created 10 panels to be installed in the door of the Baptistery of the Duomo in Florence—and all together, they stood 20 feet tall and weighed a mighty three tons. It was a project that took Ghiberti and his crew 27 years to complete, from 1425 to 1452. Legend has it that Michelangelo dubbed them "the Gates of Paradise," and Michelangelo's famous Adam-and-God-touching-hands moment at the Sistine Chapel echoes Ghiberti's depiction (see bottom left below).

The panels—3 of the 10 are at SAM, each 31.5 square inches—synthesize tradition and innovation. In keeping with medieval style, Ghiberti portrayed several scenes in a single panel: the creation of Eve from Adam's rib (see front and center above), Adam and Eve with the serpent (back left), the expulsion (front right).

He dispensed with other traditions. He blended emerging perspectival rules of painting and the in-the-round depth of sculpture. He scrapped the limited frame of the Gothic quatrefoil seen on other sides of the Baptistery. These panels are open squares, waiting for action.

They get action. Seemingly every millimeter of depth is used to create the range of relief. Figures and objects in the farthest distance are given the least detail. And relief is related to time: At the top right of the Adam and Eve panel above, check out the angel at the middle right, coasting through the archway and into the real space of the viewer. She becomes dimensional as she moves.

Some of the objects in the highest relief have broken off over time, but for the most part, the panels are in mint condition.

In a single panel, Ghiberti makes room for an army of soldiers, and an entire cityscape. Here's his teeming, urban vision of the David and Goliath story:

If you're wondering why that one is more worn, it's because it hung lower. It suffered from the affections of admirers.

The third and final panel is the tale of Jacob and Esau, using the trope of the raked floor and graduated arches to achieve perspective.

(As an aside, this summer I visited Borromini's perspective gallery in Rome, where an attendant walks the distance to puncture the illusion. Here it is:

The distance looks 37 meters long, but is only 8 meters long. The sculpture at the far end looks life-size, but is only 60 centimeters high.)

This exhibition, The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece, is at SAM through April 6. It stopped in Atlanta, Chicago, and New York before this, and marks the first time the panels have traveled outside Italy to be displayed. SAM is the last stop before they return to Florence to be mounted permanently at the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. It's said they'll never tour again.

The current tour is a way to show off the restoration of the panels, which were ravaged by the elements in all their years outdoors, culminating in a 1966 flood of the city that tore six of the panels right off the doors. Today, when you visit the Baptistery, you see replicas. The originals have been undergoing restoration for more than 25 years.

There's much explanation in the exhibition about the cutting-edge laser technique that has cleaned the reliefs while preserving the gilding—so that you're seeing what Ghiberti and company actually did (look for gilding brushstrokes), not a restorer's in-fill—but the real drama takes place in the art, not the restoration. I've seen this show twice already. I'll be back at least that many times.

^{Liza vonRosenstiel's Whirlwind, oil on canvas, 30 by 30, 2007}

At Davidson Contemporary.

Tyler over at MAN just forwarded a very worrisome letter from Robert Smithson's widow, the artist Nancy Holt. To protest, respond today. It reads:

Yesterday I received an urgent email from Lynn DeFreitas, Director of Friends of the Great Salt Lake, telling me of plans for drilling oil in the Salt Lake near Spiral Jetty. The deadline for protest is (today) Wednesday, at 5PM. Of course, DIA has been informed and are meeting about it today.

I have been told by Lynn that the oil wells will not be above the water, but that means some kind of industrial complex of pipes and pumps beneath the water and on the shore. The operation would require roads for oil tank trucks, cranes, pumps etc. which produce noise and will severely alter the wild, natural place.

If you want to send a letter of protest to save the beautiful, natural Utah environment around the Spiral Jetty from oil drilling, the emails or calls of protest go to Jonathan Jemming 801-537-9023 jjemming@utah.gov. Please refer to Application #8853. Every letter makes a big difference, they do take a lot of notice and know that publicity may follow. Since the Spiral Jetty has global significance, emails from foreign countries would be of special value.

They try to slip these drilling contracts under the radar, that¹s why we found out so late, not through notification, but from a watchdog lawyer at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the group that alerted me to the land leasing for oil and gas near Sun Tunnels last May.

I'm remiss in not yet writing about The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece, which opened Saturday at Seattle Art Museum. (I'll make up for that later today.)

But there's another SAM question I want to address. The 16th-century wood room on the fourth floor is closed, and so is the room adjacent to it (with the Uccello). Beneath them on the third floor, Gary Hill's installation has been removed, the area taped off.

When I asked a guard what was going on, he said there was a water leak in the museum. But SAM spokeswoman Cara Egan says there has been no water leak, and no damage to any of the art.

Egan says the closures have been caused by an HVAC malfunction. Museum engineers refused to provide details, but Egan insists the art is not in danger.

As for when the areas will open again, she says the museum hopes to make the repairs in a month or so, "but you never know."

^{Still a weird dead zone.}

On another note: The Second Avenue entrance of SAM—the entrance at the top of Venturi's grand staircase—is once again moot. It has been locked for the duration of the Ghiberti show and the upcoming Roman art from the Louvre exhibition. "It's a test to see if that improves circulation," Egan said.

^{A detail of Matt Mitros's Merlot, resin and wood, 36 by 84 by 16, 2007}

At Crawl Space.

^{Molly Norris's Vandalized Wingtip, watercolor, glue, and thread on paper, 30 by 26 by 7}

At Gallery 110. (Today's the last day to see the show.)

I don't really like to flog shows here, but these are exceptions worth breaking the rule for. I saw them all yesterday, and they're all opening this weekend, so if you find yourself with any free time at all—

Jean-Luc Mylayne at the Henry

Dawn Cerny at the Henry

R. Crumb at the Frye

^{Ken Fandell's A Spider, Long Ago and The Same Spider, Shortly Thereafter, diptych, archival ink on paper (2008)}

At Howard House.

^{Alice Tippit's Authority, oil on panel, 9 by 12 inches}

At Grey Gallery & Lounge, having a grand opening party at 8 pm tonight.

Southern California museums were raided early this morning by federal agents in a looting investigation involving ancient art allegedly stolen from Thailand, China, Myanmar, and Native American archeological sites.

Included were the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pasadena's Pacific Asia Museum, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego.

In the case of the Bowers and the Pacific Asia museums, the warrants clearly suggest that museum officials were aware that the objects were looted and overvalued and accepted them anyway.

According to the warrants, Markell at one point told the agent that LACMA was "a stickler" for checking the background of pieces but also suggested the museum had found a loophole to import restrictions on some objects.

Read it all.

Vanessa Beecroft, who inserted herself into Sudan, breastfed twins whose mother had died (their father remarried), became inordinately attached and decided to adopt them, then decided not to. At the end of all this solipsistic mindlessness, she photographed herself as a lily-white madonna holding two black babies to her breasts, nursing one. Editions of the photograph have been selling for $50,000. Now there's a documentary, premiering at Sundance. Naturally, Beecroft says her photograph was mean to "provoke" viewers. (Lazy, stale avant-garde intentions, meet real human issues.) Says Beecroft, "Sudan is a microcosm of Africa and of the blacks in the world, and I know it is presumptuous of me to take this subject under my wing, but I actually want to. It is my interest now." Next up: naked Sudanese refugees standing in galleries wearing heels. (Via Artsjournal.)

^{Ken Kelly's Theory, oil and enamel on canvas, 2007}

Behind the desk at James Harris Gallery hangs a dirty-white painting by Squeak Carnwath that reads, in pencil scrawl in the center, "Painting is no ordinary object." Right-o. A painting is an extraordinary thing. Or: painting is a verb, not a noun. Fine. Whatever. While you're trying on the various attitudes toward painting, Carnwath's scratchy, splotchy surface, with its assertions, glitches, and erasures, takes over. Painting always wins. A writer I know says painting never dies because, deep down, we love it so much that we want it to succeed.

It's painting month at the major galleries in Seattle—a rarity: Adam Sorensen's semi-toxic/semisweet landscapes painted on thin pieces of panel and Claire Cowie's watercolors are at James Harris, Darren Waterston's smooth apocalypses and Katy Stone's painted Mylar stacks are at Greg Kucera; Lawrimore Project is showing Prom: A Semi-Formal Survey of Semi-Formal Painting; and Howard House recently opened with new abstractions by Ken Kelly.

Of all these (though admittedly I haven't been yet to The Prom), Kelly's laconic paintings draw me in. His restricted palette (red, black, white, and tones of these) and repetitive grids of little rectangles are out of step with fashionable (and, often, let's face it, fun to look at) psychedelia and pictorialism. They're also a departure from his signature style, which set slick stenciled imagery on thick, heavily worked surfaces—a style he cultivated for almost 15 years.

Now, the Seattle painter's new works are portraits of patterns, or to be more evocative, systems, painted by hand in rows of dots of varying sizes that seem to stream across the surface of the paintings like encoded back-end information. They fuse the digital, the modern, and the ancient, and they also provide a recording of the decisions that went into making the painting.

The grids—strictly geometric from afar but blurry and idiosyncratic up close—evoke not only computer chips and early video games, but also traffic patterns, photographs of cities at night, Morse code, Native American basketry, and traditional African textiles. They also emit the surprising feeling—for grids—of having been improvised.

What's more, like a perspective painter, Kelly applies an underlying grid before he starts making his daubs inside it. In certain paintings, he leaves the grid visible in the end, which cuts the painting visually, turning it into a seeming collage, where one segment has been excerpted from a particular world or system and the one right next to it represents another place entirely. Grouping the smaller paintings in a grid on the wall has a similar effect. Where is all this information from, and where is it going? It's a pleasure to wonder.

^{Robbert Flick's Untitled, gelatin silver print (1977)}

At the Henry Art Gallery, in Silver See, A Portfolio of Photography from Los Angeles.

The man with his back to us in the photograph above is Seattle artist John Grade. Mounted on him is his sculpture Collector: two horn shapes made of interlocking wood parts, first displayed at Davidson Contemporary Gallery last year. Back then, the piece hung on the white wall—in a refined state. That was before Grade took it hiking.

Now, the piece has acquired a mane of seaweed: It lies among the oysters—watched over by some oystermen—in Willapa Bay. Here are views of it there.

Later this year, Grade will take it out of the water, remove the oysters that have grown on it, and eat them in a formal feast on the site. After that, the horns will be mounted onto the front of Grade's red pickup truck, where they'll acquire a layer of bug guts as he drives them down to a slot canyon in Utah.

This particular canyon was the driving force behind the shape of the horns in the first place—that and an experience Grade had with hostile Ugandans during a trip a few years ago. (For the full story on that, you have to listen to the podcast.) The horns were shaped to fit snugly into the canyon, and in the spring, the rushing water that goes through the canyon will either scrub the horns bone-clean, or destroy them. Grade will wait to see.

Until recently, Grade was known mostly for his small, intensely controlled charcoal and graphite drawings, like this one, Bog (2005).

His other familiar work was finely wrought, faux-weathered sculptures. The new work comes out of both these traditions. It's formally tight, at least to start. It's not faux-weathered, it actually weathers. It changes with its site, like the process work of Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, and according to the lapsing of time, like (Turner Prize nominee) Darren Almond's videos. (Grade admires both British artists.)

Bog is a drawing that refers directly to an installation Grade unveiled last week: a giant, sagging false ceiling dotted with craters, made of paper pulp and hanging in Suyama Space in Belltown. That's where I met him to talk for this podcast.

Seeps of Winter is the new installation's title. Grade first got the idea for it during a residency near a bog in Mayo County, Ireland. Running by, Grade couldn't help thinking about the human beings frozen under the thick surfaces of bogs for thousands of years—the ones who surface occasionally, staring upward. In Suyama Space, the false ceiling acts as the bog surface; you can lie on the floor to look through at the natural light above.

Like Collector, Seeps of Winter has an adventurous life ahead of it.

Hear about it here.

^{Fire Retard Ants (Fred Muram and Mike Simi), Why Do You Piss With the Door Open? (2007)}

At SOIL.

Because this is the kind of work she made for more than two decades before she died in 2002, this is what a work of art by Niki de Saint Phalle is generally understood to look like:

But there's another, far lesser-known Niki de Saint Phalle: Niki the Shooter. According to the Tate Modern's web site, de Saint Phalle started attaching paint-filled bags to backings and shooting them in 1960—and she stopped in 1963, saying, "I had become addicted to shooting."

Continue reading "La Femme Niki" »

^{Roxy Paine's Dry Rot, fiberglass, epoxy, lacquer, and oil (2001)}

At Bellevue Arts Museum.

^{Squeak Carnwath's A Painting, oil and alkyd on canvas over panel, 55 x 45 inches (2006)}

At James Harris Gallery.

As promised, this week's In Art News column takes a look at what Creative Capital is paying Seattle artists to do (and here's the list of all projects around the country):

To Five Executions in China, Utopia, and Maryhill Double, add Sun Hill Mini-Mart City Park and The Gurs Zyklus. The first three are major projects already completed by Seattle artists, each paid for—up to $50,000—by the New York foundation Creative Capital. Now Creative Capital has thrown its considerable weight behind the other two, meaning that you may soon find yourself inside an abandoned convenience store turned into a postapocalyptic conservatory by SuttonBeresCuller, or wandering through a performance installation titled after the word that has haunted Trimpin since his childhood: Gurs.

Trimpin and SBC (2005 Stranger Genius Award winners) were selected from more than 600 artists around the country to get Creative Capital's coveted support. (Seattle filmmaker David Russo was a winner in the film and video category, for a fictional short involving male miscarriage.)

SBC's idea for a recycled mini-mart refers to an earlier piece by the three artists, who built an idyllic haven of tranquility replete with grass, rocks, and a bench on a flatbed trailer, then parked it in the homelier parts of the city as a tiny, temporary greenbelt. For Sun Hill Mini-Mart City Park, the artists want to transform an eyesore—at a brownfield that was once a gas-station site, say: got one to recommend in your neighborhood?—into a wild indoor park with the hulks of industrial refrigerators but also meandering paths, trees, seasonal plantings, and benches. It could stay open for a few months or indefinitely, as long as the funding holds out.

Ben Beres says they envision "elements of the architecture or its previous life, whether it's Slurpee machines or empty candy-bar racks growing plants. It will be a nice landscape, but postapocalyptic. Nature has taken over. We want birds to come in." They're looking for a location. (Originally the work was going to sit at the northernmost stop of the monorail, where instead of mass transit and art, there's now a T-Mobile store.)

Trimpin's project is also a long-mulled-over idea. As a boy in 1950s Germany, he wandered into his village's Jewish graveyard and learned that two dozen Jews had been taken by the Nazis to an internment camp in the French town of Gurs. Many died there; survivors went to death camps.

The barracks at Gurs had also been used as a camp for political refugees from Franco's Spain in the 1940s. When Trimpin met and collaborated with composer Conlon Nancarrow, he discovered Nancarrow had been a prisoner there. Then, when Trimpin made passing reference to Gurs in a New Yorker profile, a man whose family died at Gurs contacted him. Trimpin has letters from the time, and interviews with relatives of victims, and he'll ride the train from his town, Efringen-Kirchen, to Gurs for the first time this summer.

The final work will be performed in Germany and the U.S., he hopes. He's not sure what form it will take; something with song and sculpture, certainly, and maybe video appearing on a screen of steam.

MAN this morning has a weird situation on its hands. After an admiring and enticing two-part Q&A with Village Voice critic Christian Viveros-Faune, Tyler hit a serious snag on the third part: Viveros-Faune not only manages/organizes two commercial art fairs, he's not the least bit concerned about the conflict of interest.

And neither is the Voice.

In response to Green's perfectly reasonable questions, Viveros-Faune snaps back, "We're not nuns here."

Well, the implication that most critics work on the commercial side of the art world in addition to their editorial work is just plain wrong. Most of us don't sell art. We write about it. I guess in the world of Viveros-Faune and the Village Voice, that makes us nuns.

UPDATE: Viveros-Faune is out at the VV.

^{Tomory Dodge's Epsilon, oil on canvas, 14 x 16 inches (2007)}

At Lawrimore Project.

^{Robert C. Jones, All or Nothing, oil on canvas (2007)}

At Francine Seders Gallery.

^{Doug Keyes, multiple-exposed diptych, Museum of Natural History, New York (2007)}

At G. Gibson Gallery.

Here's the mind-blowing item. (Via the great, great, read-it-every-day C-Monster.)

So if we had to take a simulated city in Seattle, which one would it be and which neighborhood would you want to get rid of to make room for it? (Lyons-Dubai is 700 acres.) What about a little Tacoma downtown?

(I love you, Little Bird. I miss your pictures.)

^{Eric Eley's Prospect Fields, two views.}

At Platform Gallery.

^{Claire Cowie's Homunculus Sketch, Girl with Moose (2007), watercolor and pencil on paper, six by six inches}

At James Harris Gallery.

^{Kim Jones, Self Love}

Robert Storr's talk last night at the University of Washington was by turns thoughtful and impatient—the work of a man waiting for something new. "What the New Museum needs is a New Museum," he said in response to a question about the health of art given the drop in the number of alternative spaces around the country. "Start-ups. Adaptational activity."

Storr is not an official representative of start-ups or of adaptational activities. He runs the Yale School of Art, formerly worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and championed older artists at the Venice Biennale he curated this summer. Joking about the lists that Artforum publishes at the end of every year, he said he's been listed, dropped, and made a comeback in his career, and now, "I think I'm going to be dropped definitively."

But Storr did shine a few lights forward last night, with his belligerently moderate opinions. He's not buying the purist myth of the avant-garde, but he also said, "I frankly don't want somebody else's skull with a bunch of diamonds on it," he said. He's tired of art that's about the market, or about money, and he's tired of Marxist-based 1980s critical theory.

"Critical theory has bred its own Frankenstein," he explained. "There are so many artists that ironize, jam, play, and flip the system of art evaluation. ... There's also a lack of honesty [among artists]—and I see it among my students—about their engagement, their relationship, with the market and with marketing."

Fair enough.

Getting a jab in, he dissed the journal October for its visual asceticism and overtone of somber seriousness: "Ros [Krauss, who split off from Artforum to form October after artist Lynda Benglis posed with a dildo on the pages of Artforum] didn't mind when Bob [Morris] put in a photo of himself all buffed up, because she was living with him and she liked his work, but that a beautiful woman would be sassy enough to show up him at his own game..."

But when someone in the audience followed Storr's lead of criticizing Artforum for its lists, adding that it is fat and overrun with ads, Storr made an about-face. He retorted that those who think the magazine is shallow should consider their own reading habits: do you actually read the magazine or do you mostly just look at the pictures?

Storr was in the mood to be contradictory: his slide lecture, before the spirited Q&A period began, was about the artist Kim Jones, whose retrospective is at the Henry Art Gallery through Jan. 27.

Storr made a great case for Jones's work as a stalemate between vulnerability and aggression. In his war drawings, the allegory is literal. Jones sets the dots and the Xs against each other, but he plays both sides. And consider his Mudman costume—the sticks of the armature jut out in a way that's threatening to the people around him, but they also cut into his soft body as he wears them. He's both the attacker and the victim when he walks the streets (or in the Henry's case, the gallery) with that thing on.

Storr skipped over the episode early in Jones's career, when he burned live rats to death in a public performance after having done the same thing casually and privately as a member of the Marine Corps in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. At the end of the Q&A, I asked Storr how he felt about it. Here's what he said:

"I feel like if I had seen it, it would have hurt me. I wouldn't have done it. I also feel like it was undertaken with the utmost of seriousness, and that it meant something that it was done."