^{Scott Foldesi's Tabloids (2008), watercolor, sumi color and pencil on paper, 45 by 60 inches}

Check out that grid of fluorescent lights on the ceiling, organizing everything in the frame, like the grid of a Renaissance painter.

Now check out this diagonal grid of light, equally organizing. It causes an initial bewilderment about whether the bench and trees are inside or out—it keeps you looking despite the total banality of the ostensible subjects (bench, trees).

^{Scott Foldesi's Bench (2008), oil on canvas, 48 by 40 inches}

Yeah. And that's only seeing them on the internet. Imagine them in person. Meaning: ARTWALK IS TONIGHT.

These are at James Harris Gallery. (Gallery site here.)

^{Roger Fernandes's Sleeping Spirits Awaken (2001), acrylic on canvas, 30 by 40 inches}

It took Seattle Art Museum eight years to put together its current exhibition of Salish art—the art of the native people of this region—and SAM's show, amazingly, is the first major museum exhibition ever devoted to the work and culture of the Salish.

Why has Salish art been so lost for so long? What is it really about, and how does the SAM show succeed and fail in presenting it?

On my podcast this week, I talk to Salish artist Roger Fernandes—who grew up in an apartment on Capitol Hill but in a close Klallam family (the Klallam are from the Port Angeles area)—about his search for his artistic heritage, and why he deliberately makes art that his ancestors would recognize.

(My review of the SAM show is here.)

Dear Friends,

We at the Hideout have been reading the news and listening to the stories and know that our country has fallen upon difficult times. This coming year will bring hardships and challenges unlike any our generation has ever experienced, and with this change comes new ways of living. Americans are adopting leaner, more cautious spending habits and as their budgets are whittled down to the most basic needs, often art and culture take a back seat to food and shelter. We at the Hideout recognize this growing concern and have consulted with some of the greatest economic minds of our time to find a way to help alleviate the burden faced by this wave of fear and fiscal conservation.

After days of research, the Hideout announces its 2009 Economic Stimulus Plan for visual artists showcasing work at our establishment. For the calendar year of 2009, we extend discounted prices on beer and spirits, to all (80) of our artists, all of the time. You may enjoy $1.50 Rainiers, $2.50 drafts, and $3.00 well drinks from opening to close, 365 days a year. This economic stimulus plan expires on December 31st, 2009, at which time we hope the United States economy has sufficiently recovered and art sales have returned to pre-depression levels.

As an artist affiliated with the Hideout, we have a special card with your name on it, which you can proudly carry and use to receive your discount. We hope this small gesture makes your year a little easier and that the savings may be spent on rent, art supplies and other bare necessities. We would also like to see you more.

Happy New Year and thank you for bringing beauty into dark times (and our dark bar). We wish you the very best and look forward to seeing the creative output these coming months will undoubtedly produce.

Sincerely,
Your local economists at the Hideout

I came across the story Christopher posted about this morning shortly before he posted it, apparently—on my belated way through Modern Art Notes's weekend roundup from yesterday.

I'm working on a response that will go up later today.

But for now suffice it to say that I disagree pretty heartily with Christopher. Emily White is a firecracker, and I sort of fear the prospect of making an enemy of her, but I have to call it as I see it: Her weird, simplistic, and badly informed story is an example of the sickness it diagnoses—not a cure.

The artist Doris Chase, who split her life between Seattle and New York and who is most visibly represented here by two bronze abstract sculptures (one at left, atop Queen Anne) that actually don't tell you all that much about her life's work (which was just as focused on video and performance as painting and sculpture), died on December 23 at her apartment at Horizon House.

A public memorial service is scheduled for her at 2 pm January 9 at University Unitarian Church, 6556 35th Ave NE.

A public/online memorial of a sort is represented by this a great essay on her life at HistoryLink. (Deloris Tarzan Ament and Patricia Failing also have books out on her.)

But might we have an actual art exhibition to remember her and to examine her influence?

Bouguereau?: Not a starving artist.

This work of art—one of the best works of art known to be living in the city of Seattle—is back on view, at Western Bridge.

^{Marisol Rendón's At 1:00 am, charcoal on paper}

This menacing, gorgeous empty refrigerator (one from a series seen at various angles) has terrific double meaning situated in Southern California and made by an artist originally from Colombia. In wealthy San Diego, where the artist now lives, it might mean the spectre of sheer, anorexia-fueled power and glory. In poorer Colombia, well, you get it.

This drawing is up at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, where last week I came across a remarkable exhibition devoted to drawing-based works by women artists of Southern and Baja California (there also were two magnificent large-scale works in the show, by Tania Candiani—see her piece fully documented here—and Iana Quesnell, found here). It's the second in a yearlong series of three exhibitions the museum is doing on women artists of the area. I apologize to the survivors of any female artists of the Northwest who just dropped dead from hearing about the steady and intelligent institutional attention their southern peers are getting. (In a separate exhibition was this gynocentric gem from the museum's collection, an ancestor of Rendón's drawing.)

Assuming all has gone well, I'm in San Diego today, celebrating the holidays with family. That means that this weekend I'm hoping I'll get to see this show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Art-wise, there's another place I'd rather be: in St. Louis, at the Pulitzer Foundation for a show of Old Master paintings installed in varied lighting conditions, something like the way they might have looked when they were first shown, in the dim corners of medieval churches or in baroque side chapels. Here's a web catalog for what sounds like a dreamy show (shown is Giovanni Battista Caracciolo's Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian).

This image of Santa and Mrs. Claus in a state of ecstasy, replete with Santa's downy thighs and both of their spindly Cranach legs, was sent to every member of the Stranger's staff as a Christmas gift. We each received a poster of it that is about three feet tall.

The artist who made this drawing is named Jesse Higman. Find him and more of his art here.

The amazing thing about this work of art is that the artist spent eight years on it. The entire Bush administration.

Here is the incredibly sweet note he sent with this work of art, which, in its original form, is five feet tall. We here at The Stranger have to admit that we did not know we wanted this gift, but now that we have it, we are moved.

Thank you for your work at the Stranger. I read it as I eat, marking pages. I like to cut out ads, art and headlines for my bulletin board. I am proud that you are in my neighborhood, on my favorite street in town collaged with posters, stickers, stencils and paint brilliantly dribbled on the sidewalk.

I made this Christmas print to give to friends and the people I meet each year who I hope will appreciate it. Please accept it as a gift from the painted streets for the work you do to make our culture so rich.

I had a vision of this ideal couple up there on their own. It seems possible, to give, to have love and be proud, naked and getting old. It's one of those moments when you know what's important and nothing else matters. It felt like a dance to me, with grace. I mean it with all the commitment I can muster.

I drew this over eight years with a technical pen. The original is five feet tall. I drew it in the negative with black ink on white paper, then reversed it on a color copier and glued the pieces together again. Obviously, a computer has become the way to go for assembly but I would still draw it with a pen. The scribbles on the sides were to get the ink flowing in my pen. In the end they seemed like snow to me, so I kept them.

I hope you have happy holidays and a loving, productive year.

Jesse

This weird, off-scale Tintoretto nativity scene (imagine how huge Mary and Anne would be if they stood up!) in fact used to be a crucifixion—Tintoretto cut up an old death scene and reworked it into a birth, according to a brand new discovery by the conservators at the MFA Boston.

And please enjoy "Naughty Nativity" news here.

Monday, December 23, three paintings were stolen from Twilight Artist Collective during business hours. The stolen artwork included: two encaustic paintings by Cynthia Moore and a painting of a crane on canvas by Jessie Link.

Post-Katrina, Jesse Link rebuilt homes in New Orleans before moving to Seattle in 2007. Link is familiar with hard times—he served 18 months in the Army Reserves between Fort Bragg and Iraq. Mary Enslow, Twilight co-founder, informed Jessie Tuesday about the thefts; he replied “To steal from artists? That sucks.”

Like many artists, Link recently started working full-time again because art sales have dropped during the economic recession. Twilight, which has locations in Pike Place and West Seattle Junction, has also seen a drop in sales. So far, the missing art pieces are valued at $500. “This is SO LAME, especially in these already hard economic times. Not only is this a blow to our business, but also to the local artists they stole from,” says Erin Crawford, co-founder.

Ironically, Twilight still hosts a gift drop-off for foster kids. Don’t have a toy to drop off? 10% of proceeds from art sales through Thursday go to Treehouse for Kids.

Twilight Artist Collective is here.

One of the paintings that was stolen, made by Cynthia Moore.

Up on In/Visible now.

You don't want to miss this. Earlier posts and writings about Weschler here, here, here, and here.

^{Photo by David Shankbone}

For the record, the story that Weschler starts out with is about The Stranger. It turns out that once, on a book tour in Seattle, he revealed something about Tina Brown in a conversation with a Stranger writer, asking that the story be off the record. But the writer published anyway, and Brown responded to the indiscretion with a four-page screed to Weschler, which was then later published in this book.

Crazy thing is, I've searched The Stranger archives and can't find any mention of it. Does anybody recall this?

^{A painting by Craig W. Thomson, 1997, roughly five feet square.}

In my dining room.

Since nobody can get around to see much art in Seattle right now, I thought I'd "Currently Hang" something I have been able to look at—something in my own house.

I first saw this painting hanging in a cafe in Denton, Texas, in 1997. I was working at the time for a newspaper in Denton (north of Dallas), where it was pretty uncommon to run into art historical jokes in public. I fell for this painting immediately: it was a copy of Picasso's masterpiece Demoiselles d'Avignon that announced itself as a blatant fake using the famous Magritte line—"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" changed to "Ceci n'est pas une Picasso"—but it was a copy made with such old-school care! The shading, the colors, the attention to detail: it's actually not a bad copy. (The artist made it by projecting a slide onto the canvas and going from there.)

So I loved it. I called around, found the artist, and paid one month's rent for it. A few weeks later a writer at the newspaper where I worked got a call from a dance instructor named Gracie Tune, who happens to be the sister of the famous Broadway king Tommy Tune. She wanted to know where the painting of the Picasso was. The writer responded: My editor (me) bought it. It turns out that Tune had seen the painting while visiting his sister, fallen in love with it, but felt that Picasso wouldn't approve of a copy, so he hesitated to buy it. Then Tune had a dream in which Picasso came to him to give his approval. So he called his sister.

But the painting was mine. I entertained ideas about joint custody that involved me in Tommy Tune's glamorous life. But it was not to be. We never heard another word.

Until a few years later. I was ordering pizza at a restaurant when I looked up and saw that my waiter was the artist, Craig W. Thomson. I remembered him from the night we went to his house to pick up the painting. He'd had a pet squirrel and had thrown the painting on top of his truck like a mattress, in order to drive it to our apartment.

I was excited to see him again. I told him how much I continued to love his painting. Told him about Tommy Tune. I know, he said: Tommy Tune had contacted him too! "He wanted me to make another one," the artist told me, "but I refused. I didn't want to do that to you. I wouldn't want to diminish the value of yours."

I didn't have the heart to tell him: But Craig, it's a copy! Not an original! Save yourself from being a waiter! Then again, at that moment, I guess it sort of became an original. The funny thing is, since then, whenever I see the original at MoMA, it looks wrong to me, like a copy. My copy is my original because it's always in my line of sight.

Yesterday I ran into a story in this month's edition of the magazine Modern Painters that reminded me of all this all over again: It's a great piece called "How Unlike You," about Warhol's double, Allen Midgette, who continues to make art with the signature "this is not a Warhol" ("ceci n'est pas une Warhol"!).

Midgette was never a good copy of Warhol (he barely resembled him), just as my painting, emblazoned right at the top with its own fakery, would never actually be passable as the real thing. But in other ways the fakes are deeply believable, even more believable than the real things. (Why, for instance, did Tommy Tune need Picasso's own visitation to approve Thomson's work?) The Modern Painters piece reminds us that when Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest in 1915, for instance, he didn't even make the final round.

I realize this is comparatively obscure, but for those of us who follow art, this news from Los Angeles is important, so bear with me for a couple of paragraphs.

At 11 pm last night the Los Angeles Times reported that the contemporary art museum that produced WACK!, among other shows, has decided to take philanthropist Eli Broad's bailout deal rather than to merge with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. GOOD. A press conference is happening right now to explain. Director Jeremy Strick is out, a UCLA Chancellor is in as chief executive (a new position for the museum, which is basically dividing the house the way a theater does), and an artistic leader has not yet been named. Chief curator Paul Schimmel? Also: When's the news coming that the board of trustees is replacing its irresponsible self?

An aside: Last night I was catching up with a friend in LA who said that wherever he goes, he hears Freudian analysis about the relationship between Michael Govan (spurned LACMA director) and Eli Broad...

^{(She's the distracted-looking one in the neckscarf in back.)}

Snowbound yesterday, I read Marcia Tucker's new memoir, the bittersweet A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World. The book is bittersweet because it was completed in Tucker's absence: she'd written a draft and revised it some before she died of cancer in 2006, but she didn't have a chance to finish it. It's an unfinished, imperfect book for sure.

But it's also a quick, good read from a genuine personality: a museum director who reinvented the contemporary art museum by founding the non-hierarchically structured New Museum, with its ever-fresh "semi-permanent" collection (objects would come in for no less than 10 and no more than 20 years); who curated fearlessly and from the heart; whose early life is a tale of capture and release (her constricting life at home, her escapeeism in France); and most of all, someone who remained creative herself for her entire life. After stopping painting as a young woman, she went on to sing, do theater, and even do standup comedy. How many museum directors can you say that about?

Not one to back down from an implicit challenge, Tucker even gamely picks a favorite artist, and it's an obscure one: Tehching Hsieh, whose one-year performances will be commemorated in an exhibition starting next month at MoMA. (Here's his web site.)

One of the most fun passages in the book is a description of a man fighting with his own coat.

Several hours later, the studio door opened and I heard René's voice bid the visitor goodbye. It was my job to get his coat and show him back out. Smiling politely, I held the coat open for him to put on. He turned his back to me, put one arm into the sleeve, then followed with the other. He got the second arm into the armhole all right, but it refused to go through, and he pulled it out. I stood patiently while he made a second attempt and a third, without success. Exasperated, he turned to look over his shoulder at me, made a face, and with brute force and a ripping sound, pushed through the sleeve till his hand emerged triumphant at the other end. Then, with a wink, he was gone, trailing a faint whiff of cigarettes and wine.

A few minutes later, René emerged with a handful of wet brushes for me to clean, asking me as he handed them over, "Have you ever read any of his stuff?"

"I'm not sure," I said, shamefaced. "He looked familiar, but I didn't recognize him."

"That was Auden, the poet," René said. "I don't much like his books, but I think I'm probably in the minority."

Auden? I had helped W.H. Auden put his coat on? Auden had a hole in his lining? Auden had torn his sleeve?

Overall, the book could do with less anecdote and more insight, but Tucker is occasionally strikingly perceptive on why people in art do what they do. She realizes about halfway through the book that, for her, curating is partly a way to escape herself. It's not only that she can think and write about what other people make all the time, it's that she can try to jump right in behind their eyes.

When I was a little girl, I would daydream about what it would be like if you could be yourself but see the world through someone else's eyes at the same time... I imagined lowering myself down into someone else's body feet first, lining up my toes inside theirs, fitting my fingers one by one into the other person's hands as though into a glove of flesh, matching our belly buttons, and finally, eyeball inside eyeball, looking out onto the world with pellucid double vision, mind and body, theirs and mine, in perfect harmony.

Here's the book at Powell's.

1. WACK!. Here's Sylvia Mangold's painting of a pile of laundry, at Vancouver Art Gallery.

2. Robert Irwin in San Diego.

3. Dario Robleto at the Frye. (Hear Dario talk with me here and here.)

4. The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece at Seattle Art Museum.

5. Susan Robb at Lawrimore Project.

6. Multiplex at Western Bridge.

7. This Is the Worst Trip I've Ever Been On: Acculturation in a Pre-Apocalyptic Age by Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel at Crawl Space. (This is Mathern's sewn pelt version of Wentzel's chest hair. Yes, yes, we realize "that's not art." Thanks for commenting. Bye!)

8. Don't You F#{%ING Look at Me!: Surveillance in the 21st Century at 911 Media Arts Center.

9. Matt Browning: Home Field Advantage at Crawl Space.

10. Claire Cowie: 12 Views at James Harris Gallery.

On Friday I trekked out to Greenlake in order to do a podcast with the great Lawrence Weschler (which I'll put up tomorrow). One of the best parts of meeting with him was what he took out of his pockets.

The first two items to emerge were a bottle-cap-sized pin-on button of this painting and a white box a little fatter than a matchbox with the words "Rotten Luck Disappearing Dice" and "Museum of Jurassic Technology" printed on its label. The dice inside are erasers, a reference to Ricky Jay's literally disintegrating antique dice.

Next to emerge, a few minutes later, was a plexiglass box containing three delicate curved drawings easily cupped in the palm of the hand. The drawings were of a particular stretch of Chicago seen from about halfway up one of the cylindrical towers on the river, of another stretch of Chicago seen from a sidewalk, and of the silvery Anish Kapoor "bean" sculpture at Millennium Park that reflects yet another stretch of Chicago.

The miniature drawings (actually copies of larger drawings) are curved, like a segment cut out of a sphere, because the artists who made them work on a device they've made that's basically a curved easel.

They use this device because they want to reflect the curvature of human vision— because they believe that the window-view perspective of the Renaissance, which has directed basically all of art for hundreds of years, IS WRONG! Does not represent human vision at all! Instead, this is better (one of their drawings):

All of this has to do with these two artists, Ryan and Trevor Oakes, being identical twins (their own stereoscope!) who have been discussing the possibilities of human vision since they were toddlers. They would, for instance, sit on tree trunks 10 feet apart and try to imagine what an animal large enough to have eyes 10 feet apart would see.

This is a sculpture they made out of matchsticks. As in one-point perspective, every match in this dome points at exactly the same spot.

Weschler, naturally, is writing about the Oakes twins.

But there is still one more artist in his pockets: Matt Shlian. Shlian is a paper artist, and Weschler produces two tiny Shlian creations and sets them on the table. They are shaped white piles that rise into columns; columns that then collapse into neat piles, into shape sandwiches. The collapses happen in spurts, little clenching bursts, as the top level goes down, then the next, then the next. In the artist's videos, he controls their moves. Here's one.

Eventually Weschler and I went into an attic to record the podcast while sitting next to a retarded cat. The cat was his sister's. His sister happens to be Toni Weschler, a name I didn't know, but a name that's much more well-known than Lawrence Weschler. Twenty years ago Toni wrote the fertility bible "Taking Charge of Your Fertility." Her brother describes her as "the bourgeois face of hippie knowledge on the subject of fertility." She is in fact a guru.

When we finish the podcast, we go back downstairs where Toni meets me with a 17-foot laminated scroll. From afar it might look like music; it is instead a chart of her menstrual cycle. She has been charting her menstrual cycle, specifically measuring her body temperature and recording the consistency of her cervical mucus every day, for 364 cycles. Her brother tells her to please put the thing away ("She is a nice person!" he says, regarding me). He has something to show me on the computer. He pulls up her book on Amazon; it is the ninth most customer-reviewed book on all of Amazon, behind a few titles unknown to me and the Harry Potter series: her book has 1,081 customer reviews, with an average rating of five stars. He clicks on his book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, which, he would like to point out, has 27 customer reviews. "Watch out!" he tells her.

When things get a little tense between Toni and Ren, a good subject to bring up is their brother Raymond. They both like him. Raymond is a funny man, they tell me, and from what he writes on the internet, this claim seems in fact true. Here is Raymond's description of their family. Raymond also runs "The Finest Unaffiliated Email Organized Softball Community West of the Sacramento River." Here is a brief sample from those regular dispatches:

To make matters worse, more injuries followed, Jeff W. was still recovering from knee surgery, and most precarious of all, we found ourselves with only one seasoned pitcher on the entire field! Needless to say, frustration and chaos began to burgeon, and precisely because our decade-long reputation of smooth aerobic integrity was about to implode, I swiftly accepted Matt’s transformative suggestion to have each team pitch to itself. Yep, my friends, just like they do in socialism.

Now look, I totally agree that resorting to this is both tawdry and unclean, and if left unchecked, it’s an insidious source of deep recreational rot. Yeah, I get it, and yet I had a game to save and a people to calm, so please, I make no apologies for a temporary reversion to the stabilizing succor of legal self-mounding.

Regardless, it turns out that all kinds of people can pitch in a crisis, if by that verb we mean a general ability to get the ball from the hurler’s hands to within 25 feet of the awaiting batter. Of course some were more accurate than others, and thus for example, both Ramona and Pace mastered delightfully sensual throws right up the middle, and even Anthony showed a solid grasp of the stark Euclidean nature of the task at hand. Unfortunately though, he also seemed to confuse the vital conceptual distinctions between ‘pitching’ and ‘bowling,’ which would seem to suggest that his ultimate destiny remains in deep center-right. And therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11AM, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning…Ray

Needless to say, I did not want to leave the Weschlers.

On February 6, 2009, the hazily hypnotic melodies of pop duo Dean & Britta join Andy Warhol’s mesmerizing, mid 1960s Screen Tests at the Seattle Art Museum in the multi-media performance 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests.

The performance will take place at 7 pm, in the Plestcheeff Auditorium, SAM Downtown, 1300 First Avenue. Tickets are $30 and go on sale beginning January 2 through the SAM Box Office, 206.654.3121 or boxoffice@seattleartmuseum.org.

Here's more information and some audio (on the Walker's web site, where the tour also stops, because I can't find any mention of the event on SAM's).