• Steven Miller
• GOING TO CALIFORNIA WITH AN ACHING IN MY HEART Riding down I-5 with Yann Novak.

The last time sound-and-sight artist Yann Novak had a solo show in Seattle, it was mesmerizing—subtle and abstract, but you knew just what it meant for you. It happened at Lawrimore Project, on the occasion of Novak's moving to Los Angeles after eight years in Seattle. I wrote,

But Relocation, as the show is called, tells a larger story, too, about all kinds of movings on, from any position of relative comfort into a newness, and the way the process itself changes the terms you thought you understood about each location when you made the decision. The place you decided to leave is better than ever; along the way, you keep reading the landscape for clues that won't matter anyway; and arriving is not arriving but starting something from a weird and awkward distance away from where you'll eventually locate yourself. (Do you ever have this experience, where your mind roams back to the way you saw your apartment for the first time? That'll be your last view, too.)

Now Novak has a new show, also made of recorded sounds and images, this time captured at dusk at Joshua Tree National Park. It's called Blue.Hour, it's at Jack Straw, and it opens tonight at 7.

• Courtesy Lawrimore Project

Seattle artist Cris Bruch has released a new series of limited-edition woodcuts based on designs from World War II ration stamps. They feel timely and just right coming from Bruch, given his longtime emphasis on bold formal gestures as well as committed politics.

He says:

The rationing program was instituted to ensure adequate supplies of necessary commodities for the war effort, to prevent civilian hoarding, and to provide for an equal distribution of food and commodities to the civilian population of the US. I was struck by the magnitude of the program, and that the US government had made such a huge effort to get across messages that seem both quaint and utterly timely.
Given our current political environment, where any government effort to promote, however timidly, an equitable distribution of resources is decried as anti-American, I realize our national attitudes have become selfish and narrow by comparison. Rather than look for solutions to our economic problems in conservation and considered consumption, we are told that the answer lies only in stimulating consumer demand. Convinced of the inevitable good of wealth, excess, and economic expansion, we have completely lost touch with the concept of "enough."

The prints—woodcuts on rag paper, 8.75 by 8.75 inches per stamp, are only $125 each; get them by emailing here. (A full, uncut sheet of 6 stamps is 18 by 27 inches.)

There are those who will dismiss this video game because you don't kill anybody in it, or even really win. The point is making your way through the story—which means navigating a seriously pleasurable landscape that combines collage, Persian and Indian miniature painting styles, and comics. The game is called The Cat and the Coup. It's also a work of art by Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad. (Cue debates about art and video games.)

Somebody does die in the course of the game: its central character, Mohammad Mossadegh. He's the democratically elected Iranian prime minister who supported the nationalization of the oil industry and was ousted in 1953 in the CIA-backed coup that installed the Shah. (In real life, he died in house arrest.) In the game, you play the character of his cat. At the end, Mossadegh floats to his death on a cloud/wave of oil.

The Cat and the Coup is part of the exhibition Asian American Arcade at the Wing Luke Museum. It opens tomorrow, I got to see it yesterday, and I recommend it. It's a layered collection of playable games and works of art that link video games and identity—paintings of cheat codes by Seattle's Jonathan Wakuda Fischer, for instance, plus a documentary called Gold Farmers, about a mind-boggling shadow industry in which Americans pay Chinese workers for video-game characters that have already been played at the lower levels of games and now come stocked up with privileges and extra lives, wealth and weapons, etc. Boggle.

• Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London

That's a better image of the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) figure I posted about yesterday, in the Gauguin & Polynesia show at SAM. You can see more clearly here from the extreme curvature of his spine that he was meant to be held, not to stand. (He is incapable of standing alone; I don't know what kind of photo-voodoo here makes him look like he's doing it.) You can't quite get the intensity of his stare in this picture. There's no single image that's capable of capturing his power, really.

Gauguin & Polynesia was in Copenhagen first and will not be seen anywhere else after this. It's already proving to be a crowd magnet at SAM, but it's much more than that. Rather, it contributes to the historical processing of not just one lone guy named Gauguin but the entire colonial-modernist adventure. By the time you come to the end of the show, my guess is you'll no longer think of it as "a Gauguin show."

Lots more images and thoughts to come.

• Pacini Lubel Gallery
• Tip Toland's 5-foot-tall ceramic Boy, Oh Boy (2008)

Pacini Lubel's Seattle incarnation was voluptuous and uncalculating. It felt uneven, but I saw works of art there that stunned me into adoration.

And since it never seemed like the gallery was jockeying for position in the scene, when you found something great there, it felt like a discovery.

Fare well in Palm Springs, Pacini Lubel.

The art site Hyperallergic wrote today about a new discovery of paintings that are—we think—thousands of years older than any other art objects ever found. They were made by Neanderthals. We're talking possibly 43,500 years ago.

So, maybe you should think twice before calling someone a Neanderthal.

• By Delphine Diallo
• Is this what the art of world change looks like?

Cissé, the Senegalese artist whose post-Basquiat expressionist creations have made him a rising star on the international circuit, is not a surprise announcement; Lenhardt has said before that his work was coming.

• By Delphine Diallo
• Or is this what the art of world change looks like, too?

Firm dates haven't been set yet for these next shows, but they give Seattle more of an idea of what Lenhardt means to do with MIA. At first, the word was that it was a gallery devoted to contemporary African artists, but she quickly corrected me when I asked her about that a month ago. "I don't have any limits," she said, "except, and this is egocentric, I'm going to show how I see the world. I believe in social change. I want to say, 'Okay, the world is changing.'"

• By Paul Gauguin/Courtesy the National Gallery of Scotland
• What are you lookin' at?

This morning, Seattle Art Museum is hosting the press preview for Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise. The exhibition opens Thursday. There are virtually no works of art in the Pacific Northwest by the Peruvian-descended French artist Paul Gauguin, according to an essay in the big, fat, hardcover catalog by former SAM director Derrick Cartwright.

This is the first time the museum has ever held a significant display of his works—driven in part by the fact that SAM's Polynesian holdings eclipse its Gauguin non-holdings.

And this show is meant to be different from the rest of the Gauguin shows, which over the years have tended to exacerbate the awfulness of Gauguin's racist, sexist adventures on the "primitive" islands of French Polynesia at the dawn of the 20th century.

"This time," organizers of the show write, "the artworks of Polynesia do not merely serve as a visual background."

How do you solve a problem like Gauguin? We are about to see.

• Platform Gallery - Suzanne Opton
• Crumm-255 Days in Afghanistan, 40 by 50 inches

Sometimes simple images capture the most complex information. It's impossible to know, for instance, all that's going on inside the heads of the soldiers pictured by Suzanne Opton.

Tonight at the Henry Art Gallery, Opton will talk about why she took their pictures, and what the process was like for her and the soldiers. For the Soldier series, she framed them simply, isolating their heads, each one lain on its side. There's a double association; they appear to be daydreaming, sort of, but in context they also appear to have been shot down.

Opton had trouble getting access to soldiers; she was turned down by several bases before Fort Drum allowed her to come on and take pictures of the soldiers who'd just returned from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The titles of her portraits include their names and the length of their most recent tour: Williams-396 Days in Iraq or Pry-210 Days in Afghanistan. Pry has his eyes shut; he looks like he is grateful to be back. One says, Mickelson-Length of Service Undisclosed. Mickelson looks worried, like he's not going to getting comfortable in front of the camera, or maybe for a very long time.

Of course, the truth is that there is really no information at all in these photographs, or none that's conclusive in any way. You cannot compare one man's 210 days to another man's 255 days in Afghanistan by looking at their faces on film any more than you can really compare them at all, ever. Events have slipped into the folds of their memories; some will never come out again. And what is one day in combat compared to another?

But taken as a group, the series provides an impression of a moment—which is again only a construction: the moment between being over there, and being back here. Opton took the pictures on a view camera, the kind of contraption that seems to slow down time, which gave the soldiers the chance to get used to their position, to get out of and then back into their heads, to let their minds wander. The posed heads in the pictures look like screens where thoughts and feelings are in the midst of crossing, but with her choice of the shared time frame of her subjects, Opton is also capitalizing on the eventful here-nowness of a snapshot.

In 2008 and 2010, the Soldier photographs were seen as billboards in nine American cities. Now, they appear much closer to life size, at Platform Gallery in Seattle. The exhibition remains up at the Pioneer Square gallery through February 11. (Details are here of tonight's talk.)

Seattle artist Marie Gagnon (the viaduct painter soon moving to the East Coast, unfortch), also happens to work at the Pride Foundation, and she sent me a note this morning.

Yesterday I arrived with my coworkers at the Capitol in Olympia to witness the historic Senate vote on SB 6239 for marriage equality. It was a powerful experience and I hope to share more about it after I’m rested. (I've been working 12 plus hour days this week.)

But very late last night as soon as I uploaded my photos and saw this particular photo I immediately thought of one of my all time favorite paintings, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit by my art god, John Singer Sargent. I studied his use of whites quite a bit during my research fellowship in the late '90s.

In addition to the similar composition, I was powerfully struck by the idea behind the two pieces: Anticipation.

The painting has a sense of four young girls possibly unaware of their anticipation for their burgeoning maturity whereas my photo depicts a conscious anticipation for the evolving maturity of our society as we work to embrace greater justice for all people.

• Marie Gagnon

• John Singer Sargent

There's a new juried show at Gallery 110, Matthew Clifford Green's Excitable Boy at Lawrimore Project, Guy Tillim's contemporary photographs of Tahiti (just in time to compare them with Gauguin's paintings coming on view at SAM) at James Harris Gallery, June Sekiguchi's Within/Without installation after her residency in Laos at ArtXchange (with video!).

And this is your last chance to see San Francisco photographer Sean McFarland's transporting large-format photographs of dark forests, at Greg Kucera. Looking at them in the gallery, they exert a force field, pull you in...

• Greg Kucera Gallery

Dear whomever this may concern,

Tomorrow starts the first day of a full month of Erotica Art in LaConner, WA.

There will be a peaking point, February 24th...where thee Jezebel Rebels will be performing, also live music and an artist's reception. See attached

Please let me know if you have any questions at all~

Sincerely,

Lucy Mae

• Courtesy G. Gibson Gallery
• Bill Brandt, Northumbrian Miner At His Evening Meal, 1937, gelatin silver print, signed, 11 by 14 inches

This is one of those pictures that doesn't need any commentary. Just look at it.

It's part of an exhibition of classic 20th-century photography at G. Gibson Gallery through February 18.

What may need explaining about this photograph is not what you see, but just how collecting it would work. How many prints of it are out there? How does the print that's for sale in Pioneer Square relate to the one that hangs on the walls at the Museum of Modern Art?

Tomorrow at 2 pm at the gallery, Michelle Dunn Marsh will give a free talk on the fascinating business of collecting photography.

Dunn Marsh is a longtime editor of Aperture magazine who happens to be based in Seattle as well as New York, and she's also a collector herself, mainly of black-and-white 20th-century photography. (She is also a straight shooter and just an interesting woman.) To get a sense of her ideas about photography and collecting, check out the Q&A Peggy Roalf did with her here. For instance,

PR: The 2012 exhibition season has launched with the announcement of dozens of exhibitions of black-and-white photography, from coast to coast, from vintage mid-20th century prints to contemporary work. It’s inevitable that there would be a black-and-white backlash, but have you had any thoughts on why, right now?

MDM: I’m so glad you asked that. I think the industry decline of many aspects of traditional photography has brought the scarcity and preciousness of black-and-white to the forefront. The travails of brands like Kodak and Polaroid speak to the masses—but photographers have been grappling with these changes for some time.

I think that many collectors are now responding to the craft of the print, in our increasingly digital age. We’ve finally accepted the photograph as object again, not just an image. Where once darkroom work was perceived as mechanical compared to the artistry of painting, now the “wet” darkroom is seen as a place of alchemy, and digital printing is deemed, by many, as rote (but it is no easier to get a consistent digital print than it is to get a consistent darkroom print. Finesse is required in either process).

I find a richness and a depth that is seductive in a silver or platinum print. I take respite primarily in black-and-white images because I experience the world each day in color, so the graphic quality of a tonal range from light to dark, free of chroma and without a light source burning into my eyes, transports me. That said, I recently bought a William Christenberry print because his green warehouse is the exact shade of the barn I grew up with.

With the general state of the world feeling a bit fragile these days, I think that many people are turning away from the physically monumental to the wonder that can exist within an environment the eye can absorb in a glance, and then revisit slowly, over time.

• Stolen! Tribute to the Concussed Skier by Jud Turner, valued at $800.

This heist just cannot get any respect.

"This art heist unlikely to be made into a movie," was the headline in the Eugene Register-Guard. The works were for sale for only $1,400 combined. The headline on HuffPo: "Thieves Steal Art Valued At $1,400?!"

Here are pictures of the two pieces taken. The thieves went to the trouble to rappel down into the gallery through the skylight. From the HuffPo report:

"Tribute to the concussed skier" is over four feet in diameter while Williamson's "Horizons II" measures over four and a half feet. The thieves arguably could have taken smaller pieces with higher values, leading some to believe it was a matter of taste. "I have far more expensive pieces in the gallery," Jo Gallaugher said to the News Tribune. "The pieces they chose are the pieces that are most often admired by men in their 20s." (Ouch.)

The artist, Rivaelino, financed it himself, so the government couldn't say no to a huge system of roots—a sculptural installation all over the capital—growing up and around, snaking through, Mexico City.

Very cool video of the project here, and images and story by the Associated Press here.

• Courtesy the artists and Suyama Space
• Rick Araluce and Steve Peters created UPRISING, a system of pipes that appears to have sprung from within the walls and floor, with sounds traveling through them.

This installation looks like it has the potential to be psychologically haunting in that return-of-the-repressed-Louise-Bourgeois-spider kind of way, with an industrial twist. It's a perfect way to end a snowstorm.

Tonight's opening is from 5 to 7, and tomorrow, the artists will give a (free) talk in the gallery at noon.

Whenever Bellevue Arts Museum becomes open again, if you can even envision a post-snow universe, you will see this giant sock puppet by Seattle artist Mike Simi. It was, in fact, made from machine parts formerly used to make Chryslers.

Here is your latest Chrysler news. Please also recall Simi's Nyquil Darth Vader in a rocking chair, at Season last year.

The French newspaper Le Monde reports that the latest installation by 35-year-old Palestinian artist Mohamad Abusal is an imaginary subway system underneath Gaza.

It is the idea of an artist, the vision of a poet, halfway between a surreal dream and self-derision: what if we built a metro in Gaza? There would be seven underground lines between Erez in the north and Rafah in the south, the two checkpoints that mark the borders with Israel and Egypt. There would be 200 stations, along the seafront and in the refugee camps, and line 7 would allow them to connect with Gaza International airport if and when it is ever rebuilt.

It would be an environmentally-friendly metro run on renewable energy, with no male-female segregation and no political interference from the Hamas government. From their side, the Israelis would have to agree not to bomb the network and to prevent the power cuts that punctuate Gazan daily life.

The actual construction of the metro will not be a problem: in Gaza, where the number one industry consists of contraband tunnels under the Egyptian border, locals have a certain reputation when it comes to moving earth.

And so, some 1000 Gazan metro maps have been distributed, along with ticket samples, to give the country a nudge in the right direction.

That’s the same type of nudge that turned Mohamed Abusal, the 35 year old Gazan artist, into the self-appointed father of the virtual metro in Gaza. He built a pole with a big ‘M’ on top and carried it around Gaza wherever his inspiration took him, taking photos of pretend metro stations – at the beach or the port; in front of a mosque or a market; with palm trees, a donkey cart or a bombed building.

Read more on the Metro.

The story also says there are two art galleries in Gaza. If you want to check them out, they both have web sites. They are Eltiqa and Windows.

• Mohamed Alhawajri's installation Cactus. Alhawairi is represented by Eltiqa gallery in Gaza.

I received it this morning. Subject line: "Romanian painter inspired by Michael Jackson."

We hear about many musical artists inspired by the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, but not many painters and even fewer Romanians...

In Romania, Dalina felt the death of this icon like no others did. After months of so-called spiritual occurrences, Dalina decided to pursue art to reflect on the life of Michael Jackson. In her new book, Twilight, Dalina not only supplies readers with the way Michael Jackson touched her life, but it also reflects on the impact Michael Jackson had on the art community throughout the world and how his life is a legacy.

Do you have any interest in reviewing Dalina's book or in speaking with her?

From what I gather, Dalina was not even an artist—let alone a writer of vampire chronicles—before Michael Jackson's death came into her life.

• Courtesy the artists
• Kukai: Sea and Sky at SOIL: Everything shimmers and mutates.

"Ravishing" was the word I had to use the last time I experienced a digital animation rising and setting over a tiny ceramic city in a darkened gallery by the artists Robert Campbell and Yuki Nakamura. That was in 2006, and a new installation based on a similar structure remains beyond the need for or quite the reach of description, especially the way it rolls through time, waves of light patterns passing across faceted and reflecting surfaces in a dazzling stream of constant change.

But certain pieces of information open up new associations. The artists live across Puget Sound from each other, on facing rocks: Campbell on Vashon Island and Nakamura (who is originally from Japan) in Old Town Tacoma. Their mutual view is like an infinite mirrored regress. The artists have written that since the tsunami hit Japan, when they look out at the ships and detritus drifting between them, they can't help but think about bits and pieces of people's homes—which are, in fact, making their way toward the American West Coast.

CONTINUE READING...

Keith Haring's art is about the only attractive thing about this condo in Brooklyn—where, just in case you didn't know whose art was plastered all over the walls, the artist's signature is splashed up the refrigerator door.

• Kelly O
• Herbert Steiner is such a cool guy.

It's a think-global-act-local solution to the weird problem that arose last year when it looked like Dia had somehow let the lease of the world-famous artwork lapse. At that point, an even weirder thing happened: Herbert Steiner of Seattle, a nearly 90-year-old retired math teacher-cum-train aficionado who happened to also be the patron of a piece of land art in Utah—and a blind man—stepped forward to say he might want to take over the Spiral Jetty lease.

That wouldn't have made much sense, either for Steiner, who is hardly made of money, or for Smithson's artwork. But it was a gesture of love, like the rest of Steiner's amazing life.

Kusama is a fascinating figure well-known to artists, but not a household name. In her 80s, she continues to be a major force, respected and loved. She's known for her polka dots, for their ability to obliterate her if she uses enough of them. And she's also known for her obsessiveness. She lives in a psychiatric hospital, where she checked herself in.

Today she's in Japan. But she made her first great impressions—and friendships with artists like Joseph Cornell (her one great love? It seems that way from the autobiography), Andy Warhol, and Donald Judd—in 1960s New York.

And in Infinity Net, I find that her American journey started in Seattle.

Seattle was the first American city I set foot in. The owner of Seattle's Zoe Dusanne Gallery, who had helped debut such artists as Mark Tobey and Kenneth Callahan, had offered to exhibit my work.

Continue reading »

A few years ago, when Joshua Tree-based, internationally exhibiting artist Andrea Zittel was featured at Vancouver Art Gallery, I asked the question, "Is Andrea Zittel a self-help artist?" I mentioned her 2005 list of "things I know for sure," but this morning, departing Frye curator/incoming Reel Grrls director Robin Held emailed me the list, and I thought you might like to see the whole thing. Some of them are obvious to me, but others I need.

THESE THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE by ANDREA ZITTEL

1. It is a human trait to organize things into categories. Inventing categories creates an illusion that there is an overriding rationale in the way that the world works.

2. Surfaces that are "easy to clean" also show dirt more. In reality a surface that camouflages dirt is much more practical than one that is easy to clean.

3. Maintenance takes time and energy that can sometimes impede other forms or progress such as learning about new things.

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