The latest from the ever-thrilling Taboos of Daily Journalism Department.

Alex Schweder won the Stranger Visual Art Genius Award in 2007 for his radically bodily architectural art. That means $5,000 to Alex Schweder.

Now the $5,000 can be used to buy donuts. The $5,000 can be used to pay the rent. To go to Mexico. It's truly no-strings-attached.

But of course we secretly hope at least some of the money will go toward making more art. And I just got this note from Schweder, who's living currently in Berlin.

My award came at the moment when I needed to pay for this piece, Snowballing Doorway, to be fabricated. I initally installed it in Miami last year but it kept popping out of the aperture I put it in. Last month, in NY, and with a fancy new track system I installed it again. Now, it works beautifully, air moving back and forth, forever. The satisfaction is even greater after the struggle. Thank you again for the support.

Warmth from chilly Berlin,
Alex

You will be hearing about this tomorrow in a Suggests by Paul Constant. You will be hearing about it in a review of his new books by me on the visual art page. However, this is a fact that bears repeating: Lawrence Weschler is coming. He's reading and talking tomorrow night at 7:30 at Elliott Bay, on the occasion of his two new UC Press books: the expanded edition of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (the best book about art I've ever read) and True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney.

One should attend.

In tangentially related news, Ashland, Ore.-based artist Steven LaRose emailed me today with a link to his new blog for selling his "pre-linguistic drawings." He's named it after Weschler's book. (I do not know what he means by "pre-linguistic drawings.")

I got a very irritated voicemail last Friday morning from my new intern, Chelsea Werner, who was standing outside the Free Sheep Foundation craning for a glimpse at the supposed Japanese sloth bear in residence inside. It was raining heavily, and nothing living was in the window—there was a zoo setup, with trees painted on the walls, a canopy of mesh with leaves near the ceiling, a stump with bare branches set on the floor, and a bear-sized hole in one of the walls. The hole was empty.

Werner called Free Sheep cofounder DK Pan to let him know she was there to see the bear. Could he rouse it? Several rainy minutes elapsed. Then something fuzzy began rustling around in the hole. "It looked like the action of somebody putting on a bear costume, maybe, or—I don't know," Werner said. She was getting cold.

Pan finally came out. (We have therefore confirmed that he is not the bear; I was sort of wishing he were.) Werner, shivering, couldn't get much of out Pan. At first he said the bear was tired because at night passersby kept poking the window. Could you go poke the bear? she wanted to know. What can you tell me about it? Finally, "You'll have to talk to the Zoo to You Foundation," he told her. When she asked him how to get in touch with Zoo to You, he gave it up: "It's the PDL people," he told her—meaning the artists who, under that name, create false spectacles all around town. This one just rained on Chelsea Werner.

^{Claire Cowie's Ghost House (2008); wood, urethane resin, enamel, paper, thread, silk; 30 by 16 by 15 inches}

At James Harris. (Gallery site here.)

You could easily miss this hanging sculpture in the back room at James Harris Gallery. It's not part of the panoramic landscape painting (made of 12 paintings) that spans around the walls of the main area of the gallery, and it's not advertised on the web site. But it's new, too, and it's haunting. Inside the house hang the heads of people (and one animal) that Cowie has known who have died. She's painted each face twice, once on each side, each time from memory—so the person being remembered looks sometimes slightly different, and sometimes very different, from one side to the other. With the slightest movement or wind in the room, the heads turn, and you get to see the same face in one way and then another, the varying way they are remembered and translated by Cowie's memory working in tandem with her hand.

Someone told me they found this creepy, all these dangling heads, turning, flashing differently each time around. I see it as a reaffirming way to escape the problem of trying not to let the dead disappear, and yet trying to free them from the fixity of the photographs they're in, knowing they won't appear in any new photographs. I love it.