The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: Jen Graves

Squishhenge, Come to Maryhill!

Jen Graves — Thu, 23 May 2013 08:46:01 -0700

Seattle collector Ruth True has thrown out the idea for an art parade in Seattle. Last fall she suggested Mungo Thomson's sticking a pin in Michael Heizer would make a good anchoring float. Thomson's earlier Skyspace Bouncehouse—a bouncy castle version of a Seriously Meditative James Turrell sky room (one's at the Henry Art Gallery)—had been a hit at Western Bridge.

For the Olympics last year, Jeremy Deller created Sacrilege, another deflationary inflatable: bouncy Stonehenge. It's now in an inflatables exhibition at the inaugural Art Basel Hong Kong, but may I suggest that if Sacrilege needs a permanent home, it could do no better than somewhere on the land of this eccentric outpost at the border of Oregon and Washington. Are you planning summer day trips and do you like cliffs, peacocks, Rodin, Romanian queens, and failed dreams? Go to Maryhill! The museum even has a new wing, financed by wind turbines.

Photo by Jeremy Deller
Squishhenge, come to Maryhill!

And while we are on the subject of artflatables (Paul Constant: "My kid could inflate that"), please enjoy the story that inspired the headline "Sudden downpour takes the wind out of poop art."

(Also in Hong Kong: Log Lady and Dirty Bunny. A quick check in the office revealed that we need help figuring out: What's Dirty Bunny from?)

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Currently Hanging: Name That Bar

Jen Graves — Thu, 23 May 2013 08:04:41 -0700

Courtesy the artist
Well? Can you name this Seattle bar and bartender?

Jessica Jorgensen is a figurative painter who moved from California to Seattle, and kicked off her stay here by getting her art very, very drunk. She immersed "herself in this local subculture"—Seattle bars—for her new series of oil paintings. They go on display ~~tonight~~Friday (May 24) in a reception from 7 to 9 pm at the Broadway Market Gallery above QFC in Capitol Hill.

Want her to paint your favorite bar? Shoot her a note. Her paintings are up through June 23.

Find out which bar is pictured, on the jump.

Jorgensen writes in an email:

The painting I submitted is "Mel at the Bar" (Mel is the bartender) and it's at the Burgundian in Wallingford. Other paintings include the bars: Gainsbourg, Stumbling Monk, The Pine Box, Uber, Brouwer's, and The Back Door.

Which bars do you want to see in paint?

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No More Affairs at the City

Jen Graves — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:41:18 -0700

What was the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs has become Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. I might even argue to remove "Office of," too. Officiousness begone! (It is also possible that I have been driven to a mad desire for minimalism by lo those many years of Affairs. AbsurD with a capital D.)

A new logo comes with. It was designed by the Seattle crew Civilization, and it's this:

Says the press release:

The new logo features the clean lines of "A & C" for Arts and Culture with an embossed "C" evoking forward movement. The logo is frequently presented at small dimensions on partner-produced collateral, so a mark that is easy to recognize at small scale was essential. Reducing the elements of the previous logo to the basic A & C makes the new logo simple, efficient and elevated.

Old logo:

There's a new tagline, too: "Making Art Work." There was no old tagline.

It's all part of there being a new sheriff in town: Randy Engstrom, who took over a few months ago and was recently formalized in the position of director of the Office (where there are no Affairs).

Says Fidelma McGinn, Seattle Arts Commission co-chair, this is "a new era for the arts office in our city. Seattleites can expect many exciting developments in the future."

A new logo does not exactly rise to the level of exciting development, but the new logo is certainly better than the old logo. As you were.

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Ai Weiwei Has Made a Metalish Music Video About Prison

Jen Graves — Wed, 22 May 2013 07:23:27 -0700

On the second anniversary of his time spent in prison, the Chinese artist parades around a foggy jail cell with two oversexed young guards, and even does a little drag.

Watch it here.

The subtle lyrics, which can be published by few news organizations, are:

Dumbass (Explicit)

When you're ready to strike, he mumbles about non-violence.
When you pinch his ear, he says it's no cure for diarrhea.
You say you're a mother-fucker, he claims he's invincible.
You say you're a mother-fucker, he claims he's invincible.
Fuck forgiveness, tolerance be damned, to hell with manners, the low-life's invincible.
Fuck forgiveness, tolerance be damned, to hell with manners, the low-life's invincible.
Oh dumbass, oh such dumbass! Oh dumbass, oh such dumbass!
Oh dumbass, oh such dumbass! Oh dumbass, oh such dumbass!
Lalalalala, lalalalala Lalalalala, lalalalala
Lalalalala, lalalalala Lalalalala, lalalalala

Stand on the frontline like a dumbass, in a country that puts out like a hooker.
The field's full of fuckers, dumbasses are everywhere.
The field's full of fuckers, dumbasses are everywhere.
Fuck forgiveness, tolerance be damned, to hell with manners, the low-life's invincible.
You say you're a mother-fucker, he claims he's invincible.
You say you're a mother-fucker, he claims he's invincible.
The field is full of fuckers, dumbasses are everywhere.
The field's full of fuckers, dumbasses are everywhere.

Twitter is already calling it the most dangerous music video ever made, and Ai the greatest punk dissident in history. And what do we think of Ai Weiwei's debut as a music video star?

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Did You Cry at the Tornado Dog Sweeping the Internet?

Jen Graves — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:26:58 -0700

Anna posted the video in Morning News. It has made the rounds like crazy.

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Currently Hanging: Warning Sign

Jen Graves — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:09:02 -0700

BY LEMUEL CHARLEY At Wing Luke Museum.

This is Lemuel Charley's version of the yellow-and-black school-crossing sign you see on American streets, with little children holding the hand of an adult. Drivers are warned to be careful. Charley's warning Native Americans.

Charley, as you'll see in the video below, grew up on a Navajo reservation during a time of land disputes between the Hopi and the Navajo. He became an Army paratrooper and heavy equipment engineer serving in the first Gulf War, Bosnia, and Haiti. Now he's an artist.

Scroll to 1:20 to hear how Charley learned that a gun barrel gets hot:

Charley's road sign is part of Under My Skin: Artists Explore Race in the 21st Century at the Wing Luke Museum.

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Would You Like to Be Entertained for a Shorter Period or a Longer Period?

Jen Graves — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:41:45 -0700

Courtesy Warner Bros
THICKER, UGLIER, BETTER Leo is becoming Brando by the minute.

After watching Baz Luhrmann's movie The Great Gatsby Saturday night (Paul's review), a local 12-year-old who had insisted even before the film began that it was too long decided to test whether she could read the book in a shorter time than it took her to watch the movie.

The movie lasted 142 minutes. She clocked in at 156. She declared the book better, with the added implication that she should not have been dragged to the movie. Yes, but then she wouldn't have spent her Sunday reading the book. She had to admit this was logical.

A few years ago at On the Boards, a New York theater company performed the entire book while reading it line by line onstage in a production called Gatz, and that took more than six hours. And people loved it.

Paul's written before about folks making time-to-entertainment equations for themselves to determine how much they think things should cost: That, say, a book offers more hours of entertainment than a movie or a play, so it should cost more. I've honestly never thought about it this way, and it seems batty. But everybody's busy, time is at a premium, etc etc (I don't even have time to flesh out this concept in this sentence, for instance), so... do you think time should be money when it comes to movies and books and theater? And if you do, is longer better, or is shorter and more "efficient" better?

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Is It Safe? Art That Profiles You

Jen Graves — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:36:11 -0700

Courtesy of Henry Art Gallery
Sanctum is reading his "soft biometrics" right there.

Before the Boston bombing—before surveillance first saved the day and then re-terrified us when a phone conversation between the bomber and his wife was revealed to have been recorded because every phone call period is being recorded by the government now—two technology artists at the University of Washington created an artwork that profiles people who walk by it 24 hours a day. The art piece, called Sanctum, is as innocent as warm pie compared to the National Security Agency. It opened May 4, projected on the facade of the Henry Art Gallery. The museum commissioned it; it will run for two and a half years. Before that, it spent two years in development, artists James Coupe and Juan Pampin not only building and programming its system, but consulting with lawyers and UW's Office of Risk Management to make sure Sanctum wasn't violating whatever remaining privacy we have in public places.

You activate Sanctum.

Keep reading >>

No Rain for You

Jen Graves — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:09:59 -0700

In the new Rain Room installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, there's a room where a big pretend storm is dumping hundreds of gallons of water per minute. None of this water will fall on you as you walk through it because sensors detect human bodies and give each one a 5-foot berth. Unless, that is, you wear a raincoat:

In order for the technology to work most effectively, visitors are discouraged from wearing dark, shiny, reflective fabrics, fabrics made of raincoat material, or skinny high heels.

I don't think I'd be able to go in there without hoping for a malfunction.

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Late-Night at SAM

Jen Graves — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:00:00 -0700

Have you ever wanted to yell in an art museum? Here's your chance! by Jen Graves

The last time I was at Seattle Art Museum after-hours on a Thursday—it’s open until 9 p.m.—I was virtually alone. In addition to communing with a venerable cache of visiting European oil paintings by Van Dyck and Gainsborough and Wright of Derby (to be removed May 19), I took in SAM’s permanent collection, currently in especially fine form. A minimalism-through-color-field-painting display on the third floor is full of virtues and curiosities, and organized like a book waiting to be read closely. It begins with works lightly described and sketched, then culminates in two giant, hot Frank Stellas, made in the 1960s. STELLAAAAA! It’s a Thursday for the ages. (Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, seattleartmuseum.org, 10 am–9 pm, $20 to see the European paintings or pay-what-you-can for the rest)

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MIRROR's Other Face

Jen Graves — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:47:18 -0700

Ginny Ruffner's painted glass sculpture of a water cycle on display inside Traver Gallery, with the rainy bars of Doug Aitken's video installation MIRROR running on the northern facade of Seattle Art Museum across the street.

I've been vocally unmoved by Doug Aitken's big new video installation on the facade of Seattle Art Museum, called MIRROR.

But yesterday the rain was coming down outside, and I was visiting the new exhibition at Traver Gallery by Ginny Ruffner, the most exuberant and kindly artist who ever graced the grounds of this rainy city, and what you see above appeared before my eyes, and I was glad. I had forgotten that MIRROR is not limited to its more narrative/decorative/flashy displays on the western facade of SAM—it also turns the corner and extends into these skinny little rain bars best seen up inside Traver Gallery. It was a good moment.

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Bea Arthur Nude

Jen Graves — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:04:55 -0700

All I can say is that Bea Arthur deserved better.

(h/t Todd)

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Is It Safe?

Jen Graves — Wed, 15 May 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Art That Profiles You by Jen Graves

Before the Boston bombing—before surveillance first saved the day and then re-terrified us when a phone conversation between the bomber and his wife was revealed to have been recorded because every phone call period is being recorded by the government now—two technology artists at the University of Washington created an artwork that profiles people who walk by it 24 hours a day. The art piece, called Sanctum, is as innocent as warm pie compared to the National Security Agency. It opened May 4, projected on the facade of the Henry Art Gallery. The museum commissioned it; it will run for two and a half years. Before that, it spent two years in development, artists James Coupe and Juan Pampin not only building and programming its system, but consulting with lawyers and UW's Office of Risk Management to make sure Sanctum wasn't violating whatever remaining privacy we have in public places.

You activate Sanctum. Six surveillance cameras capture passersby and broadcast their images onto video screens in the windows at the museum's entrance. It is perfectly legal, Coupe said, to film people in public; you run into trouble only if you show them in a false light or project a narrative onto them. Walking past Sanctum and being briefly broadcast is one level of interaction. At the second level, you enter Sanctum.

"Sanctum" refers to a covered area under the overhang of the museum's entrance. Two of the six surveillance cameras are mounted in the windows, and these are different than the others. They profile you, using "soft biometrics" to guess at your age and gender. (Signs warn you not to approach too closely if you don't want to be recorded.) Your information is sent into Sanctum's system, which, within seconds, formulates a response.

The screens go blank, Sanctum blinking to think. When they light up again, there are three channels of programming. One group of screens shows the site where you're standing, but windblown and empty. You, close up and live, appear on a second set of screens. On the third and final set, there's pretaped footage of prior visitors standing where you're standing. They reflect your data in age and gender: Sanctum instant-imports you a clique.

Then come captions also tailored to you—status updates from Facebook users the system identifies as similar to you. Sanctum's status-update donors are all volunteers. Anyone can join. All the status updates, past and present, of those who do are fed into Sanctum. (Somebody will probably find a way to punk Sanctum at least once during its run, and the artists fully expect people might try to plant fake stories in the hopes of seeing them show up in the art. The system is set to weed out only harsh curse words and explicit material.) The "stories" are spoken by a synthesized voice on overhead speakers, and the voice changes pitch according to whether the system has identified you as male or female. If it pegs you as younger, it talks faster.

On opening day, the first story Sanctum assigns me is from a mom driving her kids around. I am unsurprised that I am demographically predisposed to this. I'm gazing at a preposterously limited version of even my already limited measurable identity, an impoverished data reflection. If I were transgender and black, would I still just read as mom-age lady?

We already know that surveillance is disturbing for its two entwined failures: Its vision for us is violently reductive, and it never sees from inside. What you're actually doing and what it looks like you're doing can be at complete odds. It might even be true that the most basic divide in the world is the one between subject and object, between being and being watched. As I'm smugly thinking this a few days after the opening, I catch a fuzzy glimpse of orange puffs in my peripheral vision. I turn my head to look at it and immediately exclaim, to no one, for I am alone, "Azalea!" Reaffirming the plant's completely arbitrarily given name—its enforced identity by systematic classification—is so viscerally satisfying, I'm distracted entirely from what I was thinking about.

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‘Whitewashed’

Jen Graves — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:00:00 -0700

A heartfelt love letter to dead animals. by Jen Graves

White boxes mounted on the walls—they have slices of wood from a zillion-year-old tree, painted white, on their fronts—turn out to be drawers. Pull their handles and you open up a world of color: rainbow graphs of DNA, paintings, drawings, skins, an old photograph of a sedated tiger strapped to a lab table, the muzzle of an actual rifle pointed at your face. Whitewashed is Joseph Gregory Rossano’s love letter to animals that are already gone or going extinct, like tigers and basking sharks and polar bears. Accompanying each piece is an essay written by a scientist and a dollop of fierce affection. (CoCA Georgetown at Seattle Design Center, 5701 Sixth Ave S, Ste 258, cocaseattle.org, 9 am–5 pm, free, through July 19)

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More Heartbreaking Twists in the Story of 87-Year-Old Painter David Byrd

Jen Graves — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:11:10 -0700

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GREG KUCERA GALLERY
Still not sold: Making Bed in Coal Country, 2002, oil on canvas, 20 by 24 inches.

If you haven't seen the large exhibition of nearly 100 paintings, drawings, and sculptures by 87-year-old David Byrd at Greg Kucera Gallery—up through Saturday—you really need to go now, for several reasons tied to the following facts. (Full review.)

Fact one: This is Byrd's first commercial gallery show. Ever.

Fact two: This will be the last time for a long time that all this material will be seen together. Sixty-six of the pieces have sold.

Fact three: People aren't buying the paintings to match their sofas. The imagery is tough, most of it taken from the decades Byrd spent working quietly as an orderly in a VA hospital mental ward.

Littlest-known fact, fact four: The day before Byrd was supposed to fly out to Seattle from his central New York home for his big opening, he was diagnosed with lung cancer that had already spread to his brain. Now, he's undergone a few weeks of punishing radiation and decided to quit treatment, according to Kucera. (Byrd is not keeping it secret.) He may not have much strength to make art this year. But he already has future shows lined up that I hope he'll beat that thing long enough to celebrate (and many more), such as...

Still not sold: Filling Station at Night, 1997, oil on canvas, 20 by 24 inches

Fact five: SUNY Oneonta is mounting a Byrd exhibition for November. Plus, New York gallery representation may be in the works.

I'm posting here three of my favorite works in the show, none of which have sold. The Agway filling station especially reminds me of where I'm from in upstate New York, those dark roads and hard forms. And...

Fact six, one for the nerds: Byrd's early teacher in New York City, the French cubist Amédée Ozenfant, did a stint in Seattle! He taught at the University of Washington in 1938. Kucera: "I learned this from Virginia Wright over the weekend. After I told her that he also showed up in Richard Artschwager's obit in the NYT, he joked that maybe he was 'the Zelig of the art world.' Francine [Seders] suggested that he left France on several teaching stints, and probably came here at the invite of Walter Isaacs, then head of the U of W Art School. ...David was amused when Jody [Isaacson, Byrd's friend, neighbor, and fellow Kucera artist] told him this."

On the jump I'm attaching the outlier painting in the show. There's nothing else like it in Byrd's whole body of work, as far as I can tell, and I think Ozenfant would have loved it. It's a portrait of his refrigerator. Next to it stands one of his sculptures, two segments of staircases stacked. (One of these sculptures is at Kucera.) It's called Refrigerator with Ghost, as if his art is haunting his domestic life, which clearly, it has been for all these years while he kept painting and painting and painting, but never showing or selling anything. The stiffness of it feels both funny and sad to me. It's so perfectly Byrdian-strange; he just went for it. He only made it in 2012. It makes me wish he could go on making art forever.

It's still not sold. Byrd, who doesn't have family, says he's considering giving the money from his sales to a nonprofit that works to support psychiatric patients.

Refrigerator With Ghost, 2012, oil on canvas, 33 by 42 inches

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Suburban Impressionism at its Finest

Jen Graves — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:02:22 -0700

Parked in Ballard last night.

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Dematerialized

Jen Graves — Wed, 08 May 2013 04:00:00 -0700

The Exhibition So Good It Becomes an Artwork by Jen Graves

When the exhibition 557,087 opened in 1969, John Voorhees, the Seattle Times reviewer, railed against it as "artistic pollution, every bit as annoying and dangerous as that in the air." Voorhees wrote of its curator, "It's hard to think of such a charming slip of a girl as Lucy Lippard as being a revolutionary." Voorhees was, perhaps, a charming slip of a critic.

Today, 557,087 looks like nothing much, just a few black-and-white photographs, a glass case containing rows of index cards with typing and handwriting on them, and a wall label. This may be the first time that SAM has memorialized one of its previous exhibitions by treating it as a work of art in its own right.

The exhibition in question was extraordinary, and is more so with time. This is the first time it's appearing in SAM's galleries since it happened, September 5 to October 5, 1969. It was called 557,087 and was created by New York–based writer and curator Lippard, about whom two books have been released in the last year. One, published by Afterall Books, focuses on Lippard's "numbers exhibitions," each taking the population of its host city as its title. The very first of those was Seattle's 557,087 (1960 US Census figure). The concept traveled to Vancouver, Buenos Aires, and Valencia (California), before touring the US and going to London.

557,087 did not leave behind paintings and sculptures—it left behind a "catalog" of these four-by-six-inch index cards filled out by artists whose names are now the canon from this period. Lippard invited more than 60 artists to submit their proposals on the cards. Volunteers executed most of them. Only a few pieces materialized in the conventional sense—including works by the late Eva Hesse and artist/writer John Perrault—in SAM's contemporary-art "Pavilion," a hall near the former amusement park at Seattle Center (where Chihuly has a showplace now). The rest of the art was scattered about the city or confined to the cards. It included: grease marks five feet long on a floor, one for each letter of the name of the man who engineered the regrade of downtown Seattle (artist: Rafael Ferrer). Paintings of a local landscape, Lake Washington, by local artists (artist: Bruce McLean of Scotland). A provocation: the story of a group of art students led by their professor to chew up, spit out, and ferment a copy of Clement Greenberg's modernist bible, Art and Culture, borrowed from their school's library, leading to the firing of this artist/professor (John Latham). Instructions to remove a chunk of earth 15 feet deep and 100 feet in diameter, making a subtraction from the world rather than adding a new object because "Art is only memory anyway" (artist: Michael Heizer).

"When computers provide artificial memories, our 'private collections' will be unlimited, and the mind will be freer to pursue its own expanding awareness," Lippard wrote in her prescient essay for 557,087, on display on the index cards at SAM. Earlier in the decade, Ernst Gombrich had written, "All art originates in the human mind, in our reaction to the world rather than in the visible world in itself," which Lippard quoted, and which sets the stage for the era of dematerialization, minimalism, and conceptualism.

All people fight when they hear a statement that begins, "All art." From the audience, the Times reported a mixed response, one still perfectly imaginable today. "If anybody else smeared some tar on the floor, they wouldn't get away with it," an unnamed man grunted, while a 26-year-old named Rocky Wilson was quoted to have said, "It puts art on another level, a more real level instead of just pictures hanging on the wall over a mantel." This debate is never-ending.

Some of the ideas and pieces in 557,087 were very good, some were tedious, and some were goofy, but overall, 557,087 was exceptionally of-the-moment and self-aware. Its concept was its largest work, in the same sense that a museum's building can be considered the largest work in its collection. 557,087 presaged what would become forefront cultural concerns of scale and geography, and a rising fascination with the origins of things, from art to people to food. Lippard described McLean's piece featuring local painters' landscapes as "a 'regional art' made by foreigners through remote control," raising associations with colonialism, corporate-style reach, and surveillance, all pressing issues still today.

For Seattle's historically redlined Central District—bankers literally drew red lines around an area and refused to give loans to the African Americans forced to live there—John Baldessari and George Nicolaidis adapted a piece they'd done in San Diego. Titled Boundary, it consisted of black and silver labels attached to telephone poles and street signs demarcating the CD. Seattle had only just voted to end racist housing discrimination in 1968.

Robert Morris's proposal was related to violence, Vietnam, and the way legends blow up. He ordered a shotgun blast at a gallery wall, using "heavy shot in the shells," then a photograph of the wound blown up to an 8-by-10-inch photograph. The exhibition's next venue would hang the photograph, shoot that, and make a larger blowup, enlargements coming at every venue. It makes me think of chauvinism, Niki de Saint Phalle's "shooting paintings" of the early 1960s (she wore a catsuit), Chris Burden's later piece (1971) in which he was shot in the arm as performance, and arena rock.

Should you spend a little time at 557,087, either dismissing this charming slip of an exhibition or turning over the art that's originating in your mind, maybe I could direct you to an additional pleasant surprise. 557,087 is embedded in an exhibition of SAM's permanent collection, a temporary minimalism-through-color-field-painting display full of virtues and curiosities, organized carefully like a book waiting to be read closely. It begins with these lightly described and sketched works, and it culminates in two giant, hot Frank Stellas from the 1960s. Right now, SAM is pushing exhibitions of old European paintings and a supposedly super-hot video display on the museum's facade, which acts more as a movie for the wealthy trustees living in the luxury apartments at the Four Seasons building across the street. Meanwhile, SAM's collection is rarely in this fine a form, and it hardly matters whether the museum thinks that will sell tickets.

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David Stein Is David Cole, the Jewish Holocaust Revisionist

Jen Graves — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:47:49 -0700

Years of talk-show appearances followed by a death threat, 15 years of "hiding" among Republican Party Animals, and now, an outing.

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A Market Is Born: The Selling of Gang and Prison Photography

Jen Graves — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:31:26 -0700

What a story by Pete Brook, a Portland writer whose blog is on prison photography. In a post yesterday, he tracked how a cache of 400 images shot by young, incarcerated gang members in 1980s Southern California made its way to an art fair where it sold for $45,000.

It's a doozy.

Brook writes*:

If these images deserve a $45,000 price tag, they deserve a vast amount of research to uncover the stories behind them. Who knows if the (presumed) new owner has the intent or access to the research resources required?

Along that same vein, here we identify a difference between the art market and the preservationists; between free trade capitalism and the efforts of museums, historians and academics; between those that trade rare items and those that are best equipped to do the research on rare items.

Whether speculative or accurate, the $45,000 price is way beyond the reach of museums. Photography and art dealers who are limber by comparison to large, immobile museums are working the front lines of preservation.

“Some might say that selling [images such as these] is exploitation, but a dealer’s willingness to monotize something like this is one form of cultural preservation,” argues [Myles] Haselhorst [owner of Ampersand Gallery and Fine Books in Portland, which originally acquired the collection at the Portland Postcard Show for a price in the low four figures, he said]. “If I had not been in a position to both see the collection’s significance and commodify it, albeit well below the final $45,000 mark, these photographs could have easily ended up in the trash.”

Prison polaroids are emerging online, Brook also writes. Many of the shots are taken in visiting rooms or with contraband cameras. Then there's this Tumblr, In Duplo, where mugshots are juxtaposed with Facebook portraits.

^{*Good on you, sir, for calling out Harper's Books dumb, offensive conflation of gangs and rap.}

Thanks to Jen Kagan for the tip.

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Name This Building

Jen Graves — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:48:39 -0700

Hint: It's in Pioneer Square. Hint 2: It functions like a big terrarium. Sort of.

Also, this is not a test: I don't know what it is, so you'll be telling me. I saw it last night during art walk.

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Ten Years Ago Today, Tacoma's Art Museum Made of Mist Opened

Jen Graves — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:20:40 -0700

The dreamy New Mexico-based architect Antoine Predock always intended his silvery Tacoma Art Museum to dissolve into the sky. It worked so well that some people actually had trouble finding the place.

I loved this "problem." TAM was the opposite of the modified-phallic, extroverted Museum of Glass just across the waterway. And they were a pair.

Now, ten years later, Tacoma Art Museum is planning a big, heavy, earth-colored addition for its new Western art wing. Like that whole endeavor, the success or failure will be in the execution. If Western art means cowboys, we're in trouble. If this earthiness turns up drab or imperious, likewise. This will be Tom Kundig's first completed museum. The renderings don't thrill me.

Courtesy Tacoma Art Museum and Tom Kundig

I'm curious about what's going on in the middle area, where there's that screen that extends down to street level. Its back leg will block part of the glorious view out the top floor of TAM. Will it bisect Mount Rainier? Please tell me it will not. Probably that's a dumb question. Nobody would let that happen.

You can also see from the next rendering that the screen section creates a plaza where before there was only longing. Those figures-for-scale almost look like they're enjoying a feeling akin to standing outside at the Kennedy Center in DC, under that overhang with views to the water on one side and the street on the other—know what I mean? (The entrance always was the weakest moment of the building—its interior is a freaking wonder—and that was partly because the original design was "value-engineered" away, meaning they didn't raise enough money to make it happen.) Three cheers for a real entrance.

But what's with the brownie with blinds?

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Who Knows What Will Happen When Storm Large Performs with the Oregon Symphony

Jen Graves — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:12:00 -0700

Storm Large 8 MILES WIDE music video from James Westby on Vimeo.

(Benaroya Hall) Portland singer Storm Large's song "8 Miles Wide" goes like this: "My vagina is eight miles wide/Absolutely everyone can come inside/If you're ever frightened, just run and hide/My vagina is eight miles wide." With the visiting Oregon Symphony, she'll sing Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins, but who knows what her banter will be. Also on the program is Phenomenon, a work by Thailand's leading young composer, Narong Prangcharoen, Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony, and Ravel's La Valse. Uruguayan-born Oregon Symphony music director Carlos Kalmar conducts.

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Currently Hanging: How to Turn 700 Perfect Spendable Dollars Into Nothing

Jen Graves — Fri, 03 May 2013 09:53:13 -0700

This is how Sean Johnson felt during the last election.

Sean M. Johnson needed 70,000 pennies, or $700 worth. What the Seattle artist had in mind was a pyramid-shaped sculpture, but with the top mostly sliced off, leaving only a gently rising base—a shape that gives the suggestion of building up to something but doesn't. Johnson had originally envisioned a full pyramid, but when he built a test model, he found the shape so recognizable that it shut his mind down—he just went, Oh, right, pyramid, and stopped looking. Instead, he wanted a shape that draws the eye and keeps it, that isn't a known quantity, so that trying to see it whole, you have to break it down and consider its parts, too. The pennies would be the only material. They'd rest on each other unattached, like loose shingles

To get the pennies, he had to call ahead; it seems banks don't have vast penny populations just lying around. ...

Isn't it funny how people distrust contemporary artists more than banks?

Keep reading about this sculpture, the artist "honored" with redesigning the back of the American penny in 2010, and this other sculpture that went crashing into the wall when I was at the gallery recently, here.

'How Goes the Battle?'

Jen Graves — Thu, 02 May 2013 11:00:00 -0700

Tessa Hulls survives a breakup by creating women warriors and confessional comic books. by Jen Graves

Tessa Hulls thought she’d just make a painting show, and she did—she brought to life an entire grouping of part-Klimt, part-mosaic paintings of women warriors in animal skins, tired of fighting. Each bright painting is paired with a poem by Kay Ryan. But at the last minute before the show opened, she realized these works were code for what was really going on: She was making art in the aftermath of a breakup. So she created a confessional comic book, too, and amazingly, she pulled it all off. You’ll not only enjoy getting to know this onetime Stranger art intern, you’ll see yourself in her. (Joe Bar, 810 E Roy St, joebarcafe.com, 7:30 am–9:30 pm, free, through May 7)

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Renoir the New Movie: Better Than Renoir the Painter?

Jen Graves — Thu, 02 May 2013 09:44:08 -0700

The Barnes Foundation
Good lord, that's an awful painting. It lives at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

As I've written before, Renoir painted fruit well, and he painted women. Problem is, he painted women like fruit. Exhibit A above. So I was none too excited by the prospect of reviewing Renoir, the new film. But! My review:

There would appear to be nothing promising in a film that takes place when Renoir is creating his late nudes on the sunny French Riviera: They are kitsch for repressed pervs. Renoir is one of the most uneven artists in the history of brush to canvas. But Renoir, this new feature film by Gilles Bourdos, is actually interesting. It begins with the death of his wife, and throughout, women are far more than pretty subjects for looking at. It’s 1915, the war is ongoing, and Renoir’s injured son Jean—the eventually famous film director—comes home to convalesce. He meets Renoir’s beautiful red-haired nude model, the woman who eventually becomes Jean’s leading actress and first wife. What happens onscreen involves dappled light, yes, and a hallowed painter, but also delicately, and in few words and not too much melodrama, raises the subjects of art’s place in wartime, the early tension between painting and cinema, and the power and variety of women despite their regular flattening into a crew of fleshy nudes. Yay for the closing credits, an encouragement to seek out the real-life films that feature said model, Catherine Hessling. She died an unknown; she’s less so now.

Here's a clip of Catherine Hessling. She just got such good roles! Um...

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The Library at Guantanamo

Jen Graves — Thu, 02 May 2013 07:28:14 -0700

Prisoners are never free to go, even when they have been given release orders years ago, even when they are starving themselves to death.

But they are free to read Standup Paddling magazine and play Angry Birds.

Here's New York Times reporter Charlie Savage's blog entirely devoted to the library at Guantanamo.

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Art in a Van, Man

Jen Graves — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:24:49 -0700

It's beautiful out and this woman is trying to give you some art. What are you going to do? Jennifer Schwartz was at Pike Place Market and Cal Anderson Park today. Next stop is Chicago.

Artists are always trying to get somebody to consider what they've made, even just for a second. (Have you listened to the second act of this episode of This American Life? You must.)

"Can I interest you in some free art today?"

That's the refrain of the five Seattle photographers stationed outside an aquamarine 1977 VW bus next to Cal Anderson Park this afternoon. Earlier they were at Pike Place Market, but they were asked to relocate by complaining vendors. No problem. Jennifer Schwartz packed up the bus and came up the hill to find another high-foot-traffic area. Seattle is one of 10 cities she's visiting on her Crusade for Art, "a passion project," she calls it.

In advance of her arrival, Schwartz picks five local photographers. Each brings 10 prints, all the same image. They ask people whether they want to stop and talk, people say yes or no (mostly no, but it's only 10 anyway), and if the people want the print after hearing about it, they can take one with them. The artists can exchange information with their new "collectors," if they want to.

"Maybe somewhere down the road it will change the way they feel around art," she said, wearing sunglasses and jeans and acting as a street dealer who charges no fee and takes no cut.

This is what she did rather than stationing herself at IKEA.

"If I could stand at the register at every IKEA in the nation when people were up there buying their mass-produced tulip posters, and I could stop them and say, 'Hey, here's this original artwork and here's the artist,' I really feel that most people would choose the original," Schwartz said.

Schwartz has a gallery specializing in emerging photographers in Atlanta. It's simple: Emerging artists need emerging collectors. "How do you find people that aren't looking for you?" she said. Crusade is how. She bought the bus on eBay and set out for two total months on the road (away from her husband and three children). Her next stop is Chicago.

Seattle photographer Ray Rogers and her naked self-portrait in the mountains. For today, Jennifer Schwartz was her art dealer.

The Seattle artists featured included Rebekah Rocha, who brought a tintype of a dead bird (she's also working on a series of people in their backyards); Larry Larsen, a street shooter who's a retired boilermaker welder and therefore probably responsible for the light you're experiencing if you're sitting under one in Seattle right now; and Ray Rogers.

Rogers brought along an image of a frolicking naked person in a white-out storm in the mountains. The figure is seen from behind, wearing snow boots and throwing up hands. The gender is not quite definite. Rogers explained it's a self-portrait she shot one day when she was all alone in the Cascades. As the snow came down, she turned a stump into a makeshift tripod and let loose. The portrait has a certain something.

"Making self-portraits with a camera has helped me to see myself with totally different eyes," Rogers said brightly, giving her thoroughly lovable two-minute artist lecture at this pop-up shop. "It's so much different from seeing yourself in a mirror."

Art, ladies and gentlemen. Come and get it.

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Penis, China

Jen Graves — Wed, 01 May 2013 12:18:29 -0700

You want, you got.

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WTF, Neil

Jen Graves — Wed, 01 May 2013 11:03:03 -0700

From the archives of bizarrely questionable songs.

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Renoir: An Artful Film About a Wildly Uneven Artist

Jen Graves — Wed, 01 May 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Renoir: An Artful Film About a Wildly Uneven Artist by Jen Graves

There would appear to be nothing promising in a film that takes place when Renoir is creating his late nudes on the sunny French Riviera: They are kitsch for repressed pervs. Renoir is one of the most uneven artists in the history of brush to canvas. But Renoir, this new feature film by Gilles Bourdos, is actually interesting. It begins with the death of his wife, and throughout the story, women are far more than pretty subjects for looking at. It’s 1915, the war is ongoing, and Renoir’s injured son Jean—the eventually famous film director—comes home to convalesce. He meets Renoir’s beautiful red-haired nude model, the woman who eventually becomes Jean’s leading actress and first wife. What happens onscreen involves dappled light, yes, and a hallowed painter, but also delicately, and in few words and not too much melodrama, raises the subjects of art’s place in wartime, the early tension between painting and cinema, and the power and variety of women despite their regular flattening into a crew of fleshy nudes. There are boobs in repose in this movie, yes (in both senses of the word), but the director does not really have titillation in mind. Yay for the closing credits, an encouragement to seek out the real-life films that feature said model, Catherine Hessling. She died an unknown; she’s less so now.

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