One of my favorite things to do these last few months has been to pay a visit to the throne at the Henry Art Gallery. It's the humblest possible throne, made of splattered mud and sticks, beset by a pair of van Goghish boots that push it almost into ridiculous cliche, but don't.

^{Photo: Youth in Focus}

That photo was taken before the black boots were added, not long after artist Kim Jones's brief performance in October in that spot in the gallery, as a tired Mudman with an eyelid crushed under a pair of hose. The hose are on the chair.

Jones is old and thoughtful now (listen to him on podcast). Robert Storr, in his lecture tonight at UW, will talk about why he chose Jones for this summer's Venice Biennale. Surely, it had something to do with war—Jones's war drawings on the backs of shirts echoed plenty of other politically minded photography and installation work at the Arsenale.

When he was young and stupid, not long after he'd returned from duty in Vietnam, Jones burned live rats as an art performance, repeating an act that was fairly common among American soldiers in Vietnam. It earned him probation and the lifelong hatred of plenty of people, some of whom know nothing else about him and never fail to comment every time I write anything about him here. (Hi again!)

Burning rats is pathological, but Jones is not. See his haunting, violent, rickety, quiet work before the Henry show closes January 27.

They're a wave, according to sources I talked with yesterday for the story about Sylvia Wolf coming to the Henry.

And Tyler's got a Q&A with one of them today: Dorothy Kosinski.

After an eight-month search, the Henry Art Gallery has appointed Sylvia Wolf, 50, as its next director. She will take over at the contemporary art museum, located at the University of Washington, on April 14.

By all accounts, Wolf is not a household name, a flashy personality, or an agent for radical change. Instead, according to colleagues around the country, she is a respected thinker and connoisseur, an impassioned professor, and an effective fundraiser who represents a wave of promising new women directors at American museums.

“It’s long overdue,” Indianapolis Museum of Art director Maxwell Anderson said of her entry into museum administration. “I wish she’d made the transition earlier, for the good of our industry.”

Continue reading "The Winning Candidate: The Henry Art Gallery's Incoming Director Is a Curator, a Professor, and Part of a National Wave of New Women Directors" »

Here's the auction preview. Uneven as usual, but here are a few good ones.

Ben Chickadel

Kristen Ramirez

And check out this portrait of Kelly O by Ellen Forney:

The Henry Art Gallery has just sent out a release announcing that Sylvia Wolf will take over as director in April 2008, following her 20-year career as a curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

She takes over from Richard Andrews, who has run the Henry since 1987 and who solidified its standing as a center for contemporary over historical exhibitions. Andrews made the Henry known for working directly with artists in original commissions. He called Wolf "terrific."

"She will probably move it in a different direction, which is appropriate," Andrews said in a phone interview, declining to specify what he meant.

Much more to come.

Since the Museum of Glass in Tacoma lost its inaugural curator in 2003, it has hobbled along with contractors, administrators, and pre-packaged exhibitions. Finally, the museum—which recently announced its decision to collect—has decided to devote a staff position to the job of, you know, overseeing the art.

The new curator, effective this week, is Melissa G. Post, most recently assistant director of the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design in Hendersonville, North Carolina. She has a curatorial background at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, and she holds a master's of arts degree in the history of decorative arts, design, and culture from the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.

Click here for the interview with the Philly photographer who has a residency and exhibition at Open Satellite in Bellevue through Saturday.

She took that one somewhere around here, but I couldn't place it. Anyone?

That's what Ad Reinhardt, painter of deep black canvases, wrote was "the one thing to say about art and life." Seattle's best advocate of art for art's sake is Jeffrey Simmons, a painter whose watercolors slay me.

They just seem physically impossible. I don't know how he does this with watercolor. The control is superhuman; they're as precise as if they were made in wet concrete. (It scares me a little.)

At the same time, they're vulnerable, unlike Simmons's abstractions in acrylic or coated in resin. The fact that all this fine-toned achievement will fade, however subtly, is unthinkable. Yet the fuzzy planes of color in the watercolors look like they're disappearing, hovering the way only paint made from water can, and interrupted by subtle light splotches, as if errant fingerprints have stolen away a little color already.

A color theorist might have a field day with these. Not being one, I'm inspired to devotion instead. Art like this doesn't need life; it's the other way around.

Below is Sift, made in 2007. It's well worth seeing in person, along with six other Simmons watercolors, in the group show Unexpected Watercolors at Seattle U's Lee Center. Closes this Saturday (hours are 1:30 to 6 pm daily until then).

^{Photo courtesy the artist and Greg Kucera Gallery}

Since 1999, Creative Capital has funded three major projects by Seattle artists: Zhi Lin's history painting series "Five Capital Executions in China," Deborah F. Lawrence's cycle of collages titled "Utopia," and Lead Pencil Studio's temporary land installation "Maryhill Double."

Now there will be two more: SuttonBeresCuller's "Sun Hill Mini-Mart City Park," and Trimpin's "Gurs Zyklus."

Creative Capital, the New York foundation that has been supporting artists with up to $50,000 for each project since 1999, last night announced this year's winners in visual arts and film/video. The other visual arts recipients include Sanford biggers, Joseph Grigely, Kalup Linzy, Naeem Mohaiemen, Otabenga Jones & Associates, Eve Sussman, and Mario Ybarra, Jr. In film and video, Seattle's David Russo, a Stranger Genius (like SuttonBeresCuller and Lead Pencil Studio) is a winner.

More on "Sun Hill Mini-Mart City Park" and "Gurs Zyklus" in next week's In Art News ...

He has been director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1977. The news comes from the New York Sun via Artsjournal.

UPDATE: The New York Times weighs in on possible successors (not a woman in the bunch, notably), Michael Kimmelman registers his adoration, and Richard Lacayo is deferential, but offers almost no praise at all.

Last month, my friend Adam was riding his bicycle when a fucking asshole in a Porsche decided to run over him. Then Adam lived at Harborview for many days while the shards of his exploded vertebrae slowly fused back together. Adam's doing better now, but the point of this post is to show you the following piece of art, which hangs on the wall of Harborview to comfort its broken and battered residents:

So it's a crazy-eyed duck, but it's also a...samurai? And it has squiggly human fingers, and it's cuddling its faithful pet toucan, or possibly strangling it with a shoelace. And the toucan is eating sardines.

Now, first of all, Harborview, everyone knows that toucans are FRUGIVOROUS, and most Japanese people don't have beaks. Racist. Second of all, though I am not a doctor (surprised?), I'm pretty sure terrifying avian hallucinations don't speed up the healing process. For example, I've got like a permanent face palsy just from looking at that thing. Maybe. Third of all, birds are gross. Take it down, please. Arigato in advance!

Sure, they're different. But maybe they should get together and talk, huh?

Views of an installation from a three-month residency Bell just did in Japan, combining video and natural elements in a contemplative way:

Bell's web site. Lee's web site. Another comparison point: Bell just returned from Japan, Lee is leaving this spring for a residency and exhibition in Salerno, Italy.

Back in early December, while I was guesting on Modern Art Notes, I posted a love letter to an art collection held almost entirely underground in my hometown of Albany, New York.

At the time, I wished I'd had images of a beautiful Conrad Marca-Relli collage-painting (Marca-Relli was a pal of de Kooning, Kline, and the gang on Tenth Street), and the incredible pairing of a Donald Judd and an early New York City taxicab inside the state history museum.

Thanks to Martin Bromirski at the great Anaba (which reminds me—I do seriously need to update my blogroll, and I will), here are the pictures.

The Marca-Relli:

Judd and cab (look at that!):

From beneath the Judd, looking upward through it:

And cc'ed to The Stranger (and the Seattle Times, the PI, King 5, and Komo 4):

To whom it may concern,

My family and I live in Belltown, very near the new Olympic Sculpture Park. I am writing because I am very concerned about the way the security staff treats visitors to the park.

When the park first opened my family and I had no trouble at all and my two-and-a-half year old son fell in love with his trips to "see the art." And, even though he is very young, he understands when we tell him "no touching."

We live so close to the park that we thought it would be a park, where we could play and run and engage "park"activities.

Instead we are approached when we are merely minding our own business, by security guards, clad in very police-like uniforms, and reminded not to touch what we are not touching and not to do what we are not doing.

On three different occasions, my son has been told not to touch the art, when he was not touching the art.

I could understand this heavy-handed security guard behavior in a museum or a store or an airport, but not at a park.

Most of us in America have a strong cultural reference to what a park is and what we can do there. The security guards behavior either needs to change, or the word park should be removed from the name of the Olympic Sculpture "Museum?"

My son is now scared to go in the park, he tells me hears fears the security guards and doesn't want to go there any more.

This is sad for him to be afraid of uniformed men so early in life, especially when that fear was generated in a place where most of us feel free to play.

The Museum needs to publicly announce it's mistakes and correct them, or I will persist in making the very borderline behavior of the security staff public.

Sincerely,
Paco Jones

According to Seattle Art Museum spokeswoman Erika Lindsay, this summer you'll be able to roam the meadows at the Olympic Sculpture Park. No more fences keeping you from coming anywhere near—let alone standing under, as by design the artist seems to invite you to do—Bunyon's Chess. This means, essentially, that the people of Seattle will experience this early Mark Di Suvero sculpture for the first time this summer. (The "experience" right now is nothing more than an image held visually—imagine if you weren't able to walk into Richard Serra's Wake and you have the idea.)

^{Mark Di Suvero's Bunyon's Chess (1965)}

In other OSP news, Glenn Rudolph's photographs of the way the site used to look and Pedro Reyes's wall sculpture and swinging structures will be removed from the pavilion in March to make way for an installation by Geoff McFetridge. The installation hasn't been finalized, but from preparatory drawings, Lindsay described it as a billboard that extends from the wall with parts that reach the floor. I love that the pavilion is a place in the park to consider the relationship between the wall and the floor, and to consider the history of relief.

^{Battle of the Gods and Giants, from the north frieze of the Treasury of the Siphnians, Delphi (ca. 530 B.C.)}

^{Untitled by Robert Morris (1967)}

This one got cut from the print edition:

Jen Graves does not regret her June 13 story exposing the strange process behind the rejection of a proposed sculpture by Felix Gonzalez-Torres proposal for Western Washington University in 1992. But she does regret describing the sculpture, which was finally built for this year's Venice Biennale, as "The One That Got Away," because that implies that the sculpture is good, and when she arrived at the Venice Biennale, she discovered that—at least in this posthumous version—it is not.

Many items on this year's Stranger annual regrets list are jokes. This one isn't.

Jen Graves, The Stranger's visual art editor, regrets that she was so judgmental about Matthew Kangas on Slog, because it caused Slog to become a referendum on her ethics rather than Kangas's, and that meant that her comments were not only ethically questionable but stupid. But she does not regret the resulting March 8 story about Kangas.

In a strong little collection show up at MoMA now (which includes a piles sculpture and a vaguely sexual video by Lynda Benglis that sets the stage for the ur-'90s video Head with Cheryl Donegan drinking from and spitting milk back into a carton for 3 minutes), two works are engaged in total mutual mockery—unintentional.

Gilbert & George (pictured above), in a 1972 video, sit around in a posh parlor, drinking, to pompous music by Wagner and Elgar. As they do this, they chant, "Gordon's makes us drunk," which is the title of the piece, adding as time goes by, "Gordon's makes us very drunk," and then, "Gordon's makes us very, very drunk."

If you take this seriously, there is no way to take the museum seriously, and if you take the museum seriously, there is no way to take this seriously. This is the bind Gilbert & George set up when they declare the regular actions of their lives art, and it comes to a head here.

Meanwhile, in the gallery next door is John Baldessari's 1971 "I Am Making Art," in which he chants, "I am making art," while waving his arms around ridiculously.

I wonder if Baldessari has seen Trisha Donnelly's Canadian Rain (2002), a video that turns the arm-waving into a ritual rain dance. Like both Gordon's Makes Us Drunk and I Am Making Art, it raises questions about what makes an authentic artist—or an authentic person, for that matter.

Roberta Smith has called for the banishment from art writing of the word "practice," as in, "it's a part of the artist's practice." Jeff Jahn of PORT has piled on: "one has to have a receptionist and a lobby to have a practice."

Smith writes: "The impetus behind practice may be to demystify the stereotype of the visionary or emotion-driven artist, and indeed it does. It turns the artist into an utterly conventional authority figure. First off, there’s the implication that artists, like lawyers, doctors and dentists, need a license to practice."

OK, OK, fair enough. "Practice" is, undeniably, used in excess in the art world, and we should decree that it be doled out only to those who can use it without being haughty. (A search of our archives shows I've used it 3.5 times per year; I vow to be more sparing.)

Except I'd like to put in a little plug for the word before it is totally discredited.

The noun "practice" refers not only to the proprietary concern of a businessperson, but also to rehearsal, to a field of open play, to an event during which self-betterment is more important than who wins or loses. There is no reason to think that, when applied to art, the labor-oriented definition trumps the rehearsal definition. In fact, they overlap nicely.

Furthermore, what's a better noun to describe the play/labor that artists do over time?

That's what Seattle Art Museum may as well be saying to the New York Times today. The Times got interested in SAM's excellent show Japan Envisions the West: 16th-19th Century Japanese Art from Kobe City Museum, but only to run a story on it in the Antiques column.

Making matters worse, the story, by antiques columnist Wendy Moonan, was edited sloppily (in print, there are references to the "Seattle Museum," which doesn't exist, and "Nambam" instead of "Namban" art). Moonan also writes as if she didn't see the show; SAM's spokespeople say she contacted them from New York.

What's a drag about this is that Japan Envisions the West is a rich, layered art experience (my review here) deserving of serious attention. If it's an "antiques" experience, then so is the Matisse sculpture show Roberta Smith reviewed on the Times's arts front page today.

Because many of the artworks in Japan Envisions the West are delicate, this exhibition is in fact two shows. Nearly half of it changed over at the beginning of this month, so if you saw it before, it's worth another visit. Here are a few examples of what's new.

This is a view of Washington, D.C., unlike any other—based on a fantasy vision of the American capital. It's a woodblock print by the artist Utagawa Yoshikazu, made in 1861, after the forced opening of Japan with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry. The concept of naturalistic perspective was a European one, and in this triptych it's applied, but not naturalistically. The discrepancy in scale between the two women in the foreground and the two men in the background in the central panel is collage-like and disordered. These people don't really exist in this place, they float. The two little men, though, also pull the eye back into the right panel (where the women look like miniature versions of the spires behind them), as if the panels are coalescing into a single, readable landscape. In other places, the three panels feel like different times and places. The architecture itself would make for a great study, with its weird industrial-religious shapes—curator Yukiko Shirahara says the countryside is based on images of Italy from a common source of imagery from that period, the London Illustrated News. The artist is adapting the imagery and calling it an American scene in order to feed the curiosity of the Japanese about their new trading partner.

And what's with the monochrome? The blue color gives everything a dreamlike quality, not unlike this other woodblock print from the same artist.

In this one, which was on display during the first half of the exhibition, the view is doubly alien. Not only is the color weird, but the title calls the picture Steam Locomotive in an American Town and yet what's pictured looks like a ship on land. Shirahara says the thicket of figures in the foreground is there to cover up the fact that the artist didn't know what a train wheel looked like.

These are woodblock prints and sketches for a double portrait of Americans from that same period, of Matthew Perry and Captain Henry A. Adams, by the artist Hasegawa Sadanobu. In the catalog for the show, the portraits are described as "devil like ... but they do not inspire fear." They're both decorative and action-oriented—Perry has his hand on his gun and his face engaged. Here's another, similar view of Perry, by an unknown Japanese artist.

Compare those to this pose-y portrait of Perry from exactly the same time by German artist Wilhelm Heine. Which portrait would you prefer if you were the subject?

Finally, there's one point I have to take issue with in Seattle Times critic Sheila Farr's oddly piecemeal recent "report card" for SAM. Farr complained that Japan Envisions the West should have been at the more "intimate" Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park, rather than in the white-box galleries at SAM headquarters downtown. I disagree on two grounds: One, the show is too important, quirky, and fascinating to hide away in the park. Unlike Farr, I believe it demonstrates what SAM does best (and not often enough). Two, the show benefits from the blankness of the walls. Lacking a theatrical installation that would make the artworks look immediately exotic, they are instead themselves more enterable. You disappear into their world, not them into yours.

On another point in Farr's story, I have to agree with her—with a twist. She criticizes SAM for raising its admissions prices, both for special exhibitions and for access to the regular collections. What Farr doesn't point out in her gripe about standard collections admission is that this charge is suggested only. This is one of SAM's most admirable policies, and the museum does it out of sheer goodness. (By having a suggested admissions price rather than a fixed fee, SAM is in the minority nationally.) The rates have gone up, but SAM allows people to determine whether they can pay. There's nothing to criticize there.

What's not admirable is that admission to special exhibitions is not pay-what-you-can. In order to see those shows—and the rate is rising to $20 for Roman art from the Louvre in 2008—you have to fork over the high asked-for fee.

That's a violation of the spirit of the suggested policy, and it amounts to cheating. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, often looked to as a model in its suggested-donations policy, applies the policy to all of its shows across the board. That's how it should be at SAM.

^{Shawn Patrick Landis at Gallery4Culture: Where Paul McCarthy meets Archigram}

In 1998, when the Urban Center in New York hosted a show called "The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in '68," then-New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp spent the last paragraph of his review drifting off: "The best time I had in the last 10 years was spent floating on a Batman raft in the blue water off Capri …"

There's something utopic about inflatables that goes all the way back to the 18th-century invention of the hot-air balloon. In the 1960s, French anti-establishment architects and designers used inflatables as a form of protest. That same decade, American Pop artists proposed giant inflatable anti-monuments to regular household objects, and blow-up toys have never been out of art since.

This month inside Gallery4Culture, young Seattle artist Shawn Patrick Landis has built a semi-soft backyard riddled with inflatables. The parts of the backyard itself are real: a real wood fence built along a gallery wall, a real motorcycle parked behind the fence, a real fire pit, pile of wood, ax in a stump, ladder, folding chair, and charcoal grill. A readymade stage set for a Northwestern home-improving bachelor.

Except that each of those real objects has an inflated box of clear vinyl stuck to its side like a growth. Each box is connected to a thicket of big, wormy pneumatic tubes that gum up the scene, leaving you to walk carefully through it. Which gives you time to look and to think.

Are these boxes surrealistic thought bubbles, suggesting that each of these strong-and-silent type objects has something to say for itself? Are they joke vitrines, riffing on the fact that anything can be art as long as you put a glass case on it? Are they metaphysical abstractions, carvings of air that imply uncertain potential, make space for the unseen?

Yes, no, I don't know. I only know they're pleasure cubes that keep my mind moving. And my eye. Due to internal air pressure, one wall of each inflated box is pressed onto the surface of the object it's attached to, outlining the object perfectly, as if it were being cast. In each clear box, this counterintuitively collapsed wall is made of nylon fabric the texture of a tent and the color of blue tarp.

Alex Schweder, the Stranger's Visual Art Genius this year and someone with whom you can tour a moldy building for charity, is now doing this:

What: Seattle artist Alex Schweder will create an ice sculpture on the steps and plaza of Tacoma Art Museum. Using 7,800 pounds—nearly four tons—of ice, a team of art installers will carve and shape blocks with a chainsaw to create the temporary installation, which is only on view until it melts. This is the first sculptural installation on view on Tacoma Art Museum’s front plaza. Inside the museum, a video will be projected onto snow falling in the center of the lobby. The two installations are called Melting Instructions and are being created for Snowbound, Tacoma Art Museum’s new winter festival.

When: Sunday, December 16, Snowbound Community Festival, 12 – 5 pm (Snow in the lobby with video projection: 3–4:45 pm)

It used to be that the story of Seattle galleries and artists at Art Basel Miami Beach was simple: Underdog prevails.

Now, the plot has twisted.

It all began three Decembers ago. Frustrated that the Northwest was invisible at the major annual art fair in Miami—the biggest fair in the country—Seattle artists Jaq Chartier and Dirk Park decided to start their own. They found an open-air motel called Aqua across the street from the beach, and turned it into Aqua Art Miami during the run of the main fair at the nearby convention center.

The first year, 2005, was an innocent thrill: We're here! There were only a handful of satellite fairs like Aqua.

By the second year, Miami was a cash cow for some Seattle galleries as well as the fuel behind a new sense of national and international ambition for Seattle artists. (The connections artists and dealers make in Miami can be as important as the sales.) Here's my report from the front.

But there was a dark side: The number of satellite fairs had risen to more than 12 and it was next to impossible to see everything, let alone for everybody to come away with sales.

And then, the franchise exploded.

More Seattle galleries than ever went to Miami to sell art last week: 10.

Aqua itself doubled, spinning off another satellite from its original hotel satellite, this one called Aqua Wynwood and held in a high-ceilinged warehouse where booths with permanent walls could house art better than a series of hotel rooms.

And the number of satellite fairs rose to a totally unmanageable 21.

Not everybody came away satisfied this time around.

The greatest discrepancy between this year and last happened at Lawrimore Project. Last year, LP sold more than $100,000 of art in a matter of hours and, over the four days, placed seven pieces by four artists in museum collections.

This year, "it was dramatically different," dealer Lawrimore said.

It was supposed to be dramatic: Lawrimore moved from the hotel to the large loading dock area in the Aqua warehouse fair, and hauled several of his artists down to Miami in order to make large new installations for the occasion.

^{At the Lawrimore Project booth: LED screen by Sabrina Raaf, wire sculpture in mid-air by Lead Pencil Studio, floor sculptures by Cris Bruch, blinking neon sign by Anne Mathern, photographs by Liz Cohen (left) and Susan Robb (right), "black box" area at back right with work by Tivon Rice, Susie Lee, and Charles LaBelle.}

^{At the Lawrimore Project booth: Alex Schweder's "snowball" doorway with horse cops.}

The gamble didn't pay off. Technical difficulties riddled the most prominent of the new works, by Alex Schweder, and another piece, a gravitron by Sami Ben Larbi, was very loud and required loads of electricity. "I just didn't make any friends whatsoever," Lawrimore said of the Aqua organizers and the other dealers in the warehouse.

Lawrimore Project made a few sales, including Lead Pencil Studio's 4 Corners and Susan Robb's Toobs (and an Isaac Layman photograph to SF dealer Rena Bransten), but he lost money and made a fraction as many connections as he'd hoped for.

He blames it on a lack of traffic at the new Aqua Wynwood, and says he won't be working with Aqua organizers Chartier and Dirk again: "Next year I feel like we either have to get into the big fair, Pulse, or NADA, or nothing."

Chartier said she's aware that Aqua Wynwood didn't get enough foot traffic, but that next year will be better. There were other problems, too, said Carrie E.A. Scott of James Harris Gallery, another Seattle venue that showed at Aqua Wynwood this year—the warehouse was hard to find and a lack of signs made things worse. Plus, the fair didn't have a swanky opening party to announce itself.

But James Harris Gallery fared better than last year, selling artists across the board and placing work internationally, Scott said.

^{At the James Harris Gallery booth: works by (clockwise starting at lower left) Tania Kitchell, Marcelino Goncalves, Scott Foldesi, Mary Ann Peters, Steve Davis, Claude Zervas, and Rashid Johsnon.}

"We sold more than last year, and we loved the fair, and we thought it was a huge success," she said. "If I'm perfectly honest, it was quiet. There were moments where we needed critical mass, and it wasn't there. Aqua knows that and they know what they need to do to fix that. But I think that they will next year. The buzz that was built by that program—it was a kickass building. It really was a clever buildout."

James Harris wants to return to Aqua Wynwood next year, Scott said.

Portland's Elizabeth Leach Gallery was also at Aqua Wynwood. Gallery director Daniel Peabody said sales were parallel to last year, when the gallery was at the Aqua hotel fair. He echoed the concerns of the other dealers about the lack of foot traffic ("there was not much parking, and not much signage"), but said, "Our experience was good this year; we anticipate it being great next year." Elizabeth Leach wants to return to Aqua Wynwood.

Where Seattle galleries were once housed exclusively at Aqua, now they've become scattered. The Aqua hotel still hosted four Seattle galleries this year: Howard House and Platform, returning, and Roq La Rue and G. Gibson, first-timers to Miami.

It was an unmitigated success for Howard House, said dealer Billy Howard. "It was better than last year. I can not tell you how happy I am. It felt good, and people were really happy, and everybody we took we did really well with," he said.

Aside from sales of work by Gretchen Bennett, Mark Miller, Robert Yoder, and John Haddock, a trustee of the New Museum of Contemporary Art bought a Cat Clifford piece.

^{Outside the Howard House room at Aqua: work by Lauren Grossman and Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen.}

"The hotel fair at Aqua is a true Miami fair—it's about art and about being in Miami," Howard said. "After the first, like, three hours, I went down and told Jaq that I wanted to come back next year because things had been flying off the walls."

Platform sold a Scott Fife sculpture within five minutes of opening, and also sold several works by almost all of the gallery's other artists, a lineup that included Jesse Burke, Carlee Fernandez, Matt Sellars, Marc Dombrosky, and William Powhida.

But "I just think that the saturation point was reached with so many fairs," said Platform co-director Stephen Lyons. "In terms of overall sales, it was less than last year."

Platform is not sure yet whether it will return to the hotel next year. "We'd like to check in with other dealers," Lyons said. "See how Pulse did, how (Aqua) Wynwood did."

Greg Kucera Gallery and Winston Wächter Fine Art found themselves at Art Miami, a fair formerly held in January but moved to coincide with Basel, and targeting blue-chip dealers.

^{At the Greg Kucera Gallery booth: Greg Kucera standing, with works by (l-r) Margie Livingston, Dan Webb, Chris Engman (photograph), Jack Daws (penny), Peter Millett (sculpture above).}

Kucera said this year was a total success. The gallery sold works by Deborah Butterworth, Margie Livingston, Marie Watt, Whiting Tennis, and others. The floor was a little lumpy because the fair was built on an empty lot, but it didn't bother Kucera much, he said. For next year, he plans to stick with Art Miami. "That's the fair that has the most to gain, because there's a lot of dealers who want to find a venue that will really compete head-to-head with Art Basel," Kucera said.

Winston Wächter, which has locations in New York and Seattle, was in both Art Miami and a fair called Flow, and "we were very pleased," said Seattle director Stacey Winston-Levitan. "We made money plus a lot of contacts." Susan Dory and Betsy Eby were the only artists from Seattle that the gallery represented in Miami.

Roq La Rue and G. Gibson, also at the Aqua hotel, both want to return to Miami for a second time next year. Both made profits and connections, just as they'd hoped. "They say if you break even, it's a good fair; if you make money, it's a great fair; and we made money, so it was a great fair," said Gail Gibson. "It's like paying for a great big advertisement."

Two more Seattle galleries—Miami first-timers—could be found at the new hotel fair Art Now, another spinoff of a spinoff.

There, Viveza Art Experience made only one sale but hopes to do it again next year. "It's freeing not having to worry about making local sales or focusing on the first-time buyer market as we have," Viveza director Michael Rivera-Dirks wrote in an email. "It's really exciting to be developing our aesthetic and receiving confirmation from national perspectives that we are on the right track."

Patricia Cameron Fine Art also plans to return to Miami. "All my artists received incredible attention," Cameron said. "We met some very important curators, so that was exciting to me."

Ironically, all four of the Seattle galleries new to Miami this year—in addition to the veterans—complained that the fair was far too crowded. Several people said they thought this was the breaking point.

Nobody said they were staying away next year.

What it is:
Christ Town, Quincy, FL (2006, ultra-chrome ink jet print, by M. Laine Wyatt)
Where it is:
Punch Gallery

This is a sneaky, sneaky photograph. At first it looks like a randomly disheveled scene. But is it? In the folksy mural of John the Baptist and Christ, the reflection of light on the ripple of the water around Christ's waist is painted on. But there's also a lamp set up in front of it that confuses things visually and symbolically. The lamp appears to be clamped to an aluminum tub that may or may not hold a little body of water itself. Four levels of greenery are visible, maybe five: real plants outdoors, fake plants indoors (real plants indoors?), painted trees, and the shadows of trees cast by light coming from the window at left and from an invisible source seen obliquely in a ray on the right wall. The ray points to the hands of the two men, which point at two different versions of the lamp—John's hand toward the real lamp and Christ's hand toward the shadow lamp. The shadow lamp points to the pew, which zigzags in a gesture unmistakably directed right at you.

I recommend.

Our cover illustration, inspired by the coverage of Northwest hiphop in this week's music section, comes to us from the inimitable Dan James. I've posted it here sans logo and text so you can appreciate it in its full glory...

Seattle-based sculptor Dan Webb's problem is that he can make anything with his hands. He could build a perfect monument, but he doesn't believe in perfect monuments. So he builds things that warp and disintegrate, that survive with compromises.

Twice he's been on the Stranger Genius Award shortlist (2003 and 2007) and his new installation Little Cuts immediately became a part of the regional canon when it was first shown last December. It's up now—just until December 21—at Western Bridge, in a terrific group show with work by Martin Creed, Jordan Wolfson, Anthony McCall, Jeppe Hein, Rachel Harrison, Alex Schweder, Neil Goldberg, Julia Schmidt, and Roger Hiorns. (Northwest readers: Miss it at risk of serious regret.)

Little Cuts (pictured above, at right) is the process of Webb carving a man's head out of a block of wood. In a series of 40 photographs, the man's face emerges from the wood and then grows old; his flesh decomposes leaving only his skull, and then even his bones wither to dust. The dust—all the sawdust from the carving—is encased in a Plexiglas box, set on a pedestal in the center of the room, with the 40 photographs hung on the walls around it.

Next month, Webb has a solo show at Acuna Hansen Gallery in LA. I caught up with Webb in his unheated studio for a peek at the work that will be in that show.

The show is titled Dandelion, in a play on the artist's name (though the down-to-earth sculptor is neither really dandy nor lion), and on his most common theme through the years, survival in sculpture. At left is his floor installation, Dandelion in America. In it, a weed made from the pages of old issues of art magazines like Art in America sprouts up from a pile of the magazines, as if in homage to all the now-forgotten names inside the periodicals.

At right, Rubber Dandelion is a cast-rubber dandelion held up by a bronze wire armature. It will be set on the floor on a platform with springs. Whenever anyone walks near it, the rubber will wobble, invoking the tough malleability of weeds but also, thanks to the wire maze, the appearance of limbs gone slack and on life support.

Listen to the artist talk about these and other dandelions, made of bronze, paper, and Sculpy—and about the chopped-off finger of Galileo, on this week's In/Visible.

After looking at Seattle artist Claude Zervas's Miamiblog, I have the distinct feeling that if he were narrating my life, it would be much more fun.

Check out the unMiami get-together over on Modern Art Notes, where I've been writing in addition to Slog this week. (I also spent a little time there yesterday loving up the Nelson Rockefeller collection in my hometown of Albany, New York.)

And—do you know about the multitudinous, multidimensional genius of this Seattle man?

It goes way beyond the fact of his relation to this guy.

In a comment on yesterday's Seattle at Sotheby's post, Will in Seattle complained of "art that is worth maybe 40 to 50 dollars to the average American, but is sold at auctions for ridiculous sums ..."

It's a throwaway line, like most of the art-related comments on Slog, but it points to a popular misconception that the economics of art are the same as the economics of just about everything else.

Unlike just about everything else, art often ends up owned essentially by everybody and nobody, by museums and galleries that hold the art but put it on free or cheap public view. It's disingenuous to imply that art that's expensive is inaccessible "to the average American."

In fact, if those paintings are worth $40 or $50 to the average American, then they'd be a cut-rate bargain at the Seattle Art Museum, where they'd go on view for a suggested donation—suggested donation—of $15.

For cheap, righteous classism, almost any target will do better than art.

Alison Knowles, performing tonight (December 5 at 7:30 pm at Good Sheperd Chapel in Wallingford—thanks to the inspired programming of Steve Peters’ series Nonsequitur and Robert Mittenthal’s Subtext Reading Series), is a pioneering sound/visual/performance artist. She made prints with Marcel Duchamp. She was pivotal in early Fluxus. She turns making a salad into a work of art.

And this is the first time she has ever performed in Seattle. Do not miss it. But if you do, at least you can hear her talk, and hear her playing some of her “instruments” from the performance, on In/Visible, the Stranger's weekly conversation with people in art.

For more information on Knowles, the artist's web site is here.

(My sincere apologies for the late notice—Knowles just got into town yesterday for our interview, and the Slog blackout earlier today kept me from doing this sooner!)

A week ago today, I went to an auction of American drawing, painting, and sculpture at Sotheby's in New York. It was my first Sotheby's auction. Quite what you'd expect: Bidding wars across the room, phone bidders jumping in at the last second, Norman Rockwell selling for a lot of money, and a handful of older men whose baseball caps and sneakers could not disguise the hale good looks of their wealthy lives. It was great.

I eyed the room for Seattle buyers, since Seattle Art Museum is known to be beefing up its American collection, and since Tom Barwick, a leading American collector, lives in Seattle. I didn't see anybody, but that's because I had to stand in the back, not in among the seated bidders up front.

But they were there. SAM confirmed that American curator Patti Junker was at the sale, and that other Seattle collectors were there, too. SAM wouldn't say whether Junker bought anything.

The sale was not a roaring success for Sotheby's, but it came in within estimates.

I have no idea what Junker et al might have been on the hunt for (she was also at a Christie's American sale last week—a record-breaking sale there), and these are not meant as guesses, just playful imaginings.

Here are a few of the things sold at Sotheby's last week that could conceivably come to SAM someday:

^{Milton Avery's The Reader and the Listener, which sold for $2.505 million, breaking the artist's record of $992,000.}

^{John Singer Sargent's 1901 portrait of John Ridgely Carter, sold for $1.833 million.}

^{Charles Burchfield, another record, for $1.329 million.}

^{Thomas Hart Benton, $575,000}

^{Albert Bierstadt, $103,000}

^{Well, maybe not this one for the museum, but it went for the most money that day so I figured I'd picture it: Norman Rockwell's Gary Cooper as 'The Texan', $5.921 million.}

Full auction list, with results, here.

(Sadly, the lone Morris Graves in the sale, Ecstatic Gander from 1952, was passed by at a bid of $65,000, $15,000 shy of the low estimate.)

Jordan Wolfson's Nostalgia Is Fear and Rodney Graham's Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 both combine two old technologies to make a new work.

In Wolfson's piece from 2004, which is here in Seattle through December 21, the technologies are radio and pre-computerized car.

In Graham's piece from 2003, the technologies are the noisy old Victoria 8 film projector in the room combined with the 35-mm film appearing on the screen, and the 1930s typewriter that's the subject of the film.

But what they really have in common, the thing that fuels the engine of recollection, is snow. It's pouring out, patently falsely and fantastically, and all I can think about, when I'm not Shop-Vac-ing my flooded basement today, is that the rain just doesn't have the same a(e)ffect.

Here's my first (quick) post there, which will explain why I haven't been around for a week.

And in the name of double-blogging, I'll be on Slog this week for all you UnMiamis, too. To start off, let me recommend something I meant to write about before I left for New York: Joan Jonas's classic Vertical Roll, hiding in plain sight in the breezeway at the Frye here in Seattle. I was reminded of it when I saw it in another entryway: MoMA's.

Look, you can just about miss it at the Frye: The breezeway is small and unheated, so you just go right through it to the door. But this is where Robin Held has squeezed regular video displays into the programming at the Frye (kind of like the regular-ish videos in the Henry's elevator).

Held has titled her under-the-radar breezeway video series—based on task-based performances for the camera—It is not a question of knowing whether this interests you but rather of whether you yourself could become more interesting under new conditions of cultural creation.

The title is taken from the manifesto of the avant-garde movement that essentially represents the last gasp of manifesto-based avant-garde movements, the Situationist International, based in Paris in the 1960s and led by Guy Debord, who wrote those words. Remake thyself at will.

It seemed appropriate to wait for scarf weather to run this image by Christopher Silas Neal, who has a ton of great work at redsilas.com.

Seattle Art Museum modern/contemporary curator Michael Darling has flashed his well-concealed muscle again.

When Art Basel Miami Beach (coming up December 5-9) invited him to curate the fair's Video Lounge--a video-art center set up in a building adjacent to the convention center hosting the massive fair--he agreed.

Video Lounge curators typically sift through material submitted by the various galleries in the fair, try to suss out some general themes, and then put together a program for the video lounge.

Darling threw out that model.

He decided this would be a Pacific Northwest show. And it is.

The 19 artists in the 90-minute loop that will play all day during the fair include Anne Mathern, Jack Daws, Mary Simpson, Hadley + Maxwell, Rodney Graham, Vanessa Renwick, and Euan McDonald. (Some of the artists don't live in the Northwest anymore, but all have connections to this region.)

In addition, Darling put together three evening programs, by theme. One is "Return of the Wild West," with work by Damian Moppett, Simpson and Fionn Meade, Matt McCormick, and Renwick. Another is devoted to Miranda July. And a third, called "Storytelling," features Gary Hill, Judy Radul, Renwick, and Harrell Fletcher.

The show is a quick-chute escape from one corner of the country to its opposite, both geographically and culturally.

What sort of work is in the show?

"There's definitely a nature theme: people filming in forests and addressing the beauty of this location, but also in an ironic way and poking holes in that, so it's not just rhapsodic," Darling said in a phone conversation. "There's definitely a rock-and-roll and music-related interest that bubbles up in different ways. As a counterpoint to the natural beauty thing, there's also a sense of simmering violence, maybe, that comes out in pieces from Vancouver and also here."

Darling says he hadn't planned on bringing the loop to show in Seattle, but I desperately hope he'll be able to. When was the last time anyone did a video survey of the Northwest?

^{A still from Rodney Graham's A Little Thought (2000)}

In honor of this week's interview with Dr. Adolf Von Hasselhoffen, Professor Emeritus at the Sigmund Freud School of Child Psychiatry in Klagenfurt, Austria—regarding Fantagraphic's Unseen Peanuts exhibit—I bring you:

Seattle artists Thom Heileson and Wyndel Hunt have teamed up at SOIL to create an environment in which buildings—and sounds—stretch to the point of disappearance.

The piece is titled Free Dissociation, and it combines sound by Hunt with Heileson's imagery, especially of construction sites around the city.

By the time Heileson's photographs make it to the screen, their surroundings have been washed out. The hollow, half-built buildings themselves are almost unintelligible as they float by, on the wave of Hunt's heavy drone composition.

With projections on three sides, there's the sense of constantly missing something that's being projected right in front of you.

The first section of the installation is different. The images are more abstracted, the sounds are sharper, and the whole thing is synced up so they flash together, sort of like the high-art version of a trailer for a summer blockbuster. It's the watery "film" that follows that's worth waiting for.

SOIL is open noon-5 Thursdays to Sundays, and the show, also including an interactive laser installation by Iole Alessandrini, is up through November 30.

Special to everyone going to Art Basel Miami Beach this December: you're fine. (Naturally, I'm missing this year's fair.)

Next year (the year I'm likely to go back), forget about it.

^{By William Powhida, of course.}

(Forgive the crass sales label -- or maybe it's just right.)

...with 38 counts of theft for allegedly embezzling $300,000 from the museum.

There's an event tonight at Lawrimore Project that involves a fashion show, a clothing store, a movie premiere by a couple of unheard-of Seattle-by-way-of-Iowa artists, and some things called "Zones," which I believe involve drinks and conversation.

Here's the film trailer.

I do not know exactly what is going to happen.

It starts at 7, costs 5 bucks, the film plays at 9, and the party continues until midnight.