Today's Inside Higher Education has a piece about the University of Oregon's controversial decision this summer to make the university museum answer to the university fundraising department. The logic? Unclear.

But in light of several attempts lately by universities to sell off artworks to pay for financial deficits in non-art departments, the U of O's decision has professors in an uproar.

More broadly, the shift in structure underscores a question that’s been raised as a number of college leaders have raided their art museums to raise funds in recent years: To what degree is a college art museum considered central to an academic mission, and to what extent is it seen primarily as a financial asset?

The U of O's University Senate has submitted a request to the provost that the provost's office resume control of the museum once a permanent executive director is hired. (An interim director is at the reins now.) Let's hope that happens.

Dominic Holden, you're completely wrong when you say:

The best thing about the Olympic Sculpture Park is Wake—graceful and industrial. The worst thing about the Olympic Sculpture Park is the concrete warehouse right behind Wake—a “historical site.”

The concrete warehouse is terrific. It is perfect. It is the only thing within 30 blocks that speaks the same damn language as the sculpture.

And you are rooting for some glassy high-rise architecture as a backdrop for the sculpture?

Pot should be outlawed.

While Modern Art Notes worried over LA MOCA's announcement/decision to place a Louis Vuitton boutique in the center of Takashi Murakami's retrospective at the museum, and LAT critic Christopher Knight, known for getting tough on institutions, praised the cleverness of the store in art-historical terms, Jori Finkel of the New York Times was thinking bigger.

She was wondering why the exhibition itself (at a nonprofit museum) was funded by three powerful private dealers who sell Murakami's art out in the real world—for real prices, not the chump change of handbags.

And why one of the dealers, Blum & Poe, chartered a jet so that a particular artwork made it into the show.

The story Finkel wrote is evenhanded, but there are damning moments, and one comes about halfway through the piece.

The worst case, most interviewed agreed, would be for a museum to accept money from a gallery to stage a show of new or available work that the gallery could essentially sell straight off the museum walls. ... (O)nly a handful of the 90-plus works in the Murakami exhibition are for sale, most prominently the “Oval Buddha” sculpture, offered by Blum & Poe.

Oval Buddha is the newest work in the show, the 19-foot platinum and aluminum sculpture that Blum & Poe chartered a jet for. Add to this that the commercial gallery is also underwriting the exhibition, and the situation starts to stink.

But as Finkel explains, the museums she includes in her story—most prominently (but certainly not only) the Guggenheim (with its Richard Prince retrospective) and LA MOCA—solicited the ethically shaky support of these private dealers.

It's a fascinating read about the state of the world of art today.

Does the compromised context change the way we see Murakami's commercially minded art? If Knight had known the full story about the show's funding when he wrote his review, would it have altered passages like this one, or simply underscored them?:

The show is unambiguously titled "© Murakami." The copyright symbol reads as a defiant, paradoxical assertion that the artist -- not the private collector or public museum -- retains perpetual ownership of the art-idea. That's something we need to hear, especially as the mindless hand-wringing over today's art market escalates faster than most stock portfolios.

In capitalist society, art objects are a species of money, not a consumable commodity (as they're often mistakenly purported to be). Art is a medium of exchange, but artists establish its enduring value -- not some hedge-fund gazillionaire with a shopping list.

The claim gets reasserted in the show's newest work, recently completed and never before exhibited (although anticipated in a small figure drawn at the bottom of the mural-size Gero Tan painting). A Buddha-like self-portrait of Murakami is seated atop a lotus, riding on the back of a mythical beast, like Elizabeth "Cleopatra" Taylor entering Rome astride a colossal Sphinx.

Formed in aluminum and more than 18 feet tall, the silvery sculpture is covered in platinum leaf. It's the world's biggest bowling trophy -- an Oscar®™ the artist awards to himself.

Oh, and one other thing I'll say because MAN didn't: Why didn't the LAT get this story?

In this portrait by Roger Shimomura, a young boy—a stand-in for himself—finds himself painting the tar-papered barracks of a Japanese internment camp, as well as the Idaho landscape in the distance. Shimomura was in a camp from age 2 to 4, but this isn't based on a memory. It's a projection of his adult self backwards, a foreshadowing that this camp will always edge his way onto his canvases.

Shimomura's show at Kucera through December 22 takes up the entire first floor of the gallery. I've always been a little undecided on his work, feeling that his heavy black cartoon outlines contain the heavy emotional content of the work in a way that's slightly uncomfortable. All that rage refusing to roar. It's using pop backwards, not to flatten affect but to heighten it in relief. Looked at another way, I suppose the lines seem about right for imprisonment.

When I visited the gallery yesterday, I was won over to their range. Kucera pointed out in particular a nice detail: that the shadowy portraits—the ones where the black oozes out of its outlines and into the subjects themselves—take on nuclear overtones.

This one's called Bad Dream:

This one is Shadow of the Enemy:

In this one, Shimomura goes right for it and asks, Would you have done it to Ichiro?

Here's another in the rash of tales since Sept. 11 about all sorts of photographers being questioned and detained for taking perfectly legal pictures.

KING-5 reports today that the Snohomish police cuffed an associate professor of fine art at UW, Shirley Scheier, for taking pictures of power lines.

Now the ACLU is suing the department.

Here's a good primer on what you can and can't shoot when you're out there—and with few exceptions, the cops and the security guards crying "security" are wrong.

Keep shooting.

(Thanks for the tip, Betsey.)

Jen Graves on the Lawrimore Project phenomenon:

It would be insulting to other contemporary galleries to say that Lawrimore Project is the center around which the art world in Seattle orbits. But it's fair to say that Lawrimore Project is the closest thing contemporary art in Seattle has to a center, and the only place that feels like a center, like a place where, at one point or another, everybody--and everybody's energy--collects.

It pulls things toward it. Kids coming out of art school talk lustfully about Lawrimore Project. The most uniformly exciting bloc of young artists in the city is represented by Lawrimore Project: Anne Mathern, Tivon Rice, Isaac Layman, and Lee. Cris Bruch, the long-unsung local hero, is represented by Lawrimore Project. Four of the five visual artists who've won Stranger Genius Awards—Susan Robb, SuttonBeresCuller, Alex Schweder, and Lead Pencil Studio—are represented by Lawrimore Project, even though The Stranger has been through three visual art editors in that time...

And:

"I think that, in the end, Scott will have developed one of only two art spaces here in Seattle that were distinct from what everybody else did," Greg Kucera said of his former protégé the other day.

And:

Lawrimore may be the first dealer in Seattle for whom winning means playing. He's cashing in on the gamesmanship that's been a part of art since Marcel Duchamp (his hero) declared a urinal a work of art in 1917...

And--well, you really should just go read the whole thing.

This morning, United Artists Artists announced its picks for 2007--artists who'll receive $50,000 each--and Philadelphian Zoe Strauss is on the list.

By coincidence I was glued to Strauss's web site yesterday, looking through dozens of her photographs, which form a portrait of her neighborhood in Philly. The influence of Robert Frank is unmistakable, especially this side of Frank (SAM recently had this up but the museum changed photography exhibitions two days ago):

Here are a few of Strauss's images:

Strauss will be the next artist-in-residence at Open Satellite, the new contemporary art space in Bellevue fascinatingly funded by a developer. The space is designed to bring artists from around the country to the Seattle area to work—and to work on the Seattle area.

LA-based Olga Koumoundouros inaugurated the program in September, with an installation inspired by a couple of little brown abandoned houses nestled, still strewn with household goods, in the middle of downtown, beneath the construction cranes and rising skyscrapers of developing Bellevue.

Strauss will focus not on downtown Bellevue, but on Factoria:

In the Seattle metropolitan area, Strauss continues her visual study of broken promises engendered by failed social and economic programs. Specifically, she looks to the Factoria neighborhood of Bellevue, citing the district’s ambitious intentions–suggested by its name–to become an industrial manufacturing hub. These plans never materialized, and the area’s name endures as a reminder of unfulfilled aspirations. Open Satellite presents Strauss’s new Seattle-area photographs, as projections and large-format prints, alongside a selection of her earlier work.

The exhibition opens December 1, with a party and a slide show from 6 to 9 pm.

Also on the list of USA visual arts winners are Uta Barth, Allan Sekula, Ann Hamilton, Edgar Arcenaux, Charles Gaines, and Paul Chan.

The only Seattleite to win a grant is Maggie Orth, in the craft and traditional arts category. Her electronic textiles have been on display at McLeod Residence.

Go ahead, say it: Eeeeeeeew.
Yes, it's gross. But it's also somehow quintessentially Northwest, don't you think? This image comes to us from Emily Martin via the Stranger's Flickr photo pool.

In my review of Jim O'Donnell's beguiling A Spectral Glimpse show up now at Platform Gallery (great slide show here), I mentioned Chicago-based artist Adam Ekberg only briefly.

His two photographs in the show depict the rainbowy flare of the sun on the camera's lens as it points toward the sky from the floor of a forest. They're large and gorgeous, and in their hippy-dippy awestruck way they nod to a video by Ekberg I've only heard about and never seen, of a light show on the top of a mountain in the dark. Here's a still:

This, in turn, reminds me of this (an illuminated tree photograph by Charles LaBelle):

(It also reminds me of an illuminated tree series by Rob Fischer, an example of which I can't put my finger on online.)

But what I really wanted to share is Ekberg's series of hospital ceiling photographs, which are not in the show (but are on his web site). He didn't compose them; he took them by flopping himself down on the beds and shooting whichever way he fell.

As much as these images are all thick with death and dying, their abstraction pulls away the melodrama and leaves only the image, the last thing you might see.

More on this later, but here are the basic facts: For its first round of Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, Portland Art Museum has selected Dan Attoe, Cat Clifford, Jeffry Mitchell, Whiting Tennis, and Marie Watt.

My first impression is: Go Seattle. Three of the five are from here. And: Where are all those amazing Portland artists we keep hearing about in every news outlet in the country?

Details:

Recent and new work by these five artists will be featured in the Museum’s inaugural Contemporary Northwest Art Awards special exhibition, June 14 through September 14, 2008, which will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue and Museum programming. Each award recipient will receive an honorarium. During the exhibition’s opening celebration, one artist will awarded the Arlene Schnitzer Award for Northwest Art, a $10,000 cash prize named in honor of philanthropist and longtime Museum patron Arlene Schnitzer.

From a piece on the endlessly grinning artist Yue Minjun in today's NYT:

Karen Smith, a Beijing expert on Chinese art, suggests that Mr. Yue’s grin is a mask for real feelings of helplessness.

“In China there’s a long history of the smile,” Mr. Yue said. “There is the Maitreya Buddha who can tell the future and whose facial expression is a laugh. Normally there’s an inscription saying that you should be optimistic and laugh in the face of reality.”

“There were also paintings during the Cultural Revolution period, those Soviet-style posters showing happy people laughing,” he continued. “But what’s interesting is that normally what you see in those posters is the opposite of reality.”

Mr. Yue said his smile was in a way a parody of those posters. But, since it’s a self-portrait, it’s also necessarily a parody of himself, he added.

“I’m not laughing at anybody else, because once you laugh at others, you’ll run into trouble, and can create obstacles,” he said.

"Obstacles" were especially dangerous in China in 1989, when Yue developed his style in the aftermath of the student uprising at Tiananmen Square.

Several of these famous smiles are found in a single piece at Seattle Asian Art Museum in the exhibition Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art through December 2:

^{Yue Minjun's Garbage Dump (2005-2006)}

Another artist in the exhibition, Xu Bing, will give a talk called Between Vision and Language at SAAM Thursday night at 7. The talk is free with museum admission.

Here's the text of the classified ad.

Wanted: Stranger Visual Art Intern

Three months of Shangri-La with my wry and well-outfitted viz-art intern, Jamey Braden, are about to come to an end.

The good news for any incoming intern is that she'll train you, and she is worth knowing. The job involves putting together the art calendar every week, and occasionally Slogging about what you see out there, art-wise. It's probably an 8-hour weekly commitment that lasts about three months, and you should be able to come into the Capitol Hill office to work.

My ideal candidate is someone who wants to be an art critic eventually—and while the internship is unpaid, most of my interns write at least one published review, if not more, by the end of their time—but minimally, I have to have somebody who knows the basics about contemporary art and the local scene (who'll notice if a big gallery is missing from the listings, for instance).

What else? Attention to detail, naturally. Sense of humor, I beg you. No flakes. Send me a note and a resume if you're interested: jgraves@thestranger.com. And tell me, if you could transport yourself to any art show in the world right this second, which one would it be, and why.

Here's a depiction of the work:

Free aside from repairs, of course. But seriously: is this the kind of deal anyone will be interested in?

I'm on a deadline and headed for an airplane at the same time, otherwise I'd look into this more deeply, but this is the word that I and a bunch of other reporters just received from Scott Lawrimore, owner of Lawrimore Project downtown, which is next to the building in question:

It has come to my attention that the City of Seattle has released its hold on a permit to acquire the GIGANTIC, historical and long-fallow Immigration Building next to my gallery here in the International District.

This building was offered by the Government Service Administration and its Regional Manager to the City of Seattle for $1 if they would dedicate it for an arts or cultural purpose.

The City of Seattle ignored this offer.

The City of Seattle instead tried to get it for a developer to turn into mixed-use office space as part of their larger plan to turn my entire block into condos, retail and office space (for which it is not yet zoned).

The Government Service Administration and its Regional Manager now have a very small window of time where they can hear from ANY, I repeat ANY arts organization that can utilize this building for the greater cultural community's benefit and make a "Public Benefit Transfer" of the property--essentially 'give' the building to an organization that will shepherd it for a cultural purpose. Whether it's Artist Trust or the Gage Academy or Cornish or The Henry or U.W. or SAM or The Frye or On the Boards or A.C.T. or... THIS IS THE TIME FOR THEM TO LET THEIR INTEREST BE KNOWN!!!

If this interest is not made know within the next week, the G.S.A. will be forced to put the building up for public sale and the noble, altruistic intent of the GSA's Regional Manager will fall by the wayside as it inevitably falls into the hands of a developer.

This is an amazing opportunity that should not go ignored.

Beyond this being an "arts" story, there is a larger issue with what the City of Seattle has set forth as its priorities.

ANYTHING you can do to get this story out there or spread the word to organizations that might benefit from this knowledge would be great.

By Germaine Greer.

(Thanks, ArtsJournal.)

I linked Monday to the review of Irwin's new show in San Diego by PORT's Arcy Douglass, who emailed me this description:

You might enjoy this and I did not know where to include in the review so it was dropped. During the media preview, Irwin is giving a short lecture on the background of his work. He goes on to say that the questions are always more important than the answers and a few minutes later asks for questions by the audience.

Even though there only 40 people in the room, if someone asked a question, Irwin would leave the pedestal to be closer to the audience and make direct eye contact with the person who asked the question the whole time. Keep in mind that if you ask Mr. Irwin a question that you will proabably get a 10 minute answer. Proximity and what he would call being "tuned in" is as important in a conversation as it is in his work.

Because she is your art museum director.

Just in case you weren't aware, here's more evidence that Seattle's own Jim Woodring is one of the greatest living comic artists. Check out more of his art here and here.

Earlier today, I linked to a nice long piece on Robert Irwin's show at MCASD, which ends with a consideration of art's role while the city burns.

I also got an email from Seattle artist John Feodorov: Native American performance artist James Luna's home burned to the ground during the fires. To help:

If you would like to help please send your contributions to Circuit Network at 2940 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. You can make your checks payable to James Luna or if you would like to have your donation be tax deductible, make the check payable to Circuit Network.

Circuit Network is James Luna's management organization, a non-profit arts service organization. 100% of all donations will go directly to James and Johanna to help them rebuild their home.

Richard Lacayo, Time's critic and blogger, recounts a recent walk through London's Trafalgar Square in which he admired the unusual public art venue of the Fourth Plinth—a pedestal made to support a statue in 1841. The other three plinths in the square were topped, but money ran out for this one, so it remained empty. Now it's a site for changing contemporary works.

Why can't every American city have a spot such as this, just one little place "that was the focus of so much public attention and curiousity? It might even be worth all the political squabbling and artworld intrigue you would have to put up with to have it happen."

In Seattle, where would it be?

On top of one of the arms that holds up 99? In that weird amphitheater of Greekish columns where Pike and Pine start to slope downtown? It has to be prominent. Do we have to resort to in front of the doors to Nordstrom?

When Dear Science roped me into a podcast, I figured I'd sit around on my hands while he talked, occasionally becoming the butt of a joke for not knowing something incredibly scientifically basic, like whether mosquitoes only come in the female variety (no, but it's only the female ones that drink blood, so those are the only ones you ever see).

Instead, we got into it about fraud in art and science, starting by fully spoiling the movie My Kid Could Paint That, but moving into fake science reporting, fake stem-cell research progress, and the foolproof way to test whether a woman is having an orgasm (it involves sweaty feet).

Check it out.

... Are when I truly love—LOVE—the Internets and the blogs.

PORT's Arcy Douglass wrote the hell out of the Robert Irwin show in San Diego. I mean, thousands of words, dozens of scrolls, handfuls of images.

Irwin's work needs this kind of time, attention, and space. His complicated architectural installations and adventures in experience are not easily explored in review form.

Don't miss this one, and here's my "review" of the 25-year-old classic book about Irwin by Lawrence Weschler.

I wrote here last week about Brad Biancardi, the most promising young painter in Seattle—and the one who's leaving for Chicago later this month.

Now you can hear him talk for himself, on In/Visible, my weekly conversation with people in art.

I never know exactly what's going to happen when I turn on the tape. Some artists don't seem to notice it; for others, it freezes their blood. Biancardi treated it like an old friend he hadn't seen for a while, making confessions and sharing observations about his work and his doubts. He opened up.

This is one you shouldn't miss.

Here are a couple of teasers:

The Millennium Falcon (doubling, unintentionally, as a Marsden Hartley soldier painting):

1983 Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue "Made in
America" (his first car):

John Wesley's Leda and the Man, part of Dave Hickey's list.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Donald.)

Jim Dine's not the only one making a visit in the next few months.

Robert Storr is a dean of the art world. He's a gifted writer. A painter. Held the top curatorial job at MoMA for a decade before becoming head of Yale's fancypants School of Art. This summer, he directed the Venice Biennale.

For his efforts in Venice, he was roundly criticized, especially for his central exhibition, Think With the Senses, Feel With the Mind, and rightly so.

The show felt stale and disjointed, with an emphasis on blue-chippers like Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Elizabeth Murray, Ellsworth Kelly, Susan Rothenberg, and with every artist given a separate space. Things sat silent, strangely anesthetized, and unfortunately, the real fun was had in the 76 national pavilions outside the main show, and in other shows around the city. (The best total rundown is at Richard Lacayo's Looking Around blog for Time magazine).

Kim Jones ("Mudman") was in one of those quiet corners of Storr's biennale show, and Storr's visit to Seattle coincides with the close of Jones's retrospective at the Henry Art Gallery.

Storr will be at UW's Kane Hall Thursday, January 10, at 7 pm. Cost is $15 general, $12 students/seniors; 616-9894.

Correction: What a dumb mistake. Storr was never the chief curator at MoMA; he was a senior curator under Kirk Varnedoe. I'm reading Varnedoe's "Pictures of Nothing" now. Duh.

Two particularly juicy works from the 1960s await in the prominent Pop display that introduces the galleries of the new Seattle Art Museum: Jim Dine's Vise and Window with Ax and Objects.

In Vise, a monochrome white canvas is stabbed by a steel tube stuck in a clamp on a table in front of the painting.

In Window, a black window is hacked at by an ax. Tools have been Dine's language for years; as a midwestern kid, he worked in the hardware stores of his family.

Clumped in with the Pop artists, Dine has said of himself that he's too "subjective" for Pop. He'll say more about himself on Wednesday Nov. 28 at 7 pm at the museum, when he'll talk to SAM mod & contemporary curator Michael Darling.

Dine has a strong connection to SAM; he spends most of his time in New York but has lived in Washington state and worked extensively with the Walla Walla Foundry. Two Dine works have been in SAM's collection for more than three decades: Rainbow Faucet (a 1966 painting) and Untitled (a 1973 lithograph). Six more pieces were promised in honor of SAM's 75th anniversary this year, four from the Wrights and two from the artist himself.

(The fine print, from the press release, says this thing is docent-driven: "This lecture is presented in memory of former docent Elizabeth Hambleton. Hambleton was a long-time docent of the museum until she passed away a couple years ago. Hambleton’s husband donated to the docent fund in her memory in order to make this lecture possible. Current SAM docents are also contributing additional funds to support the lecture and reception that will follow.")

Why does it seem like Seattle museum and gallery web sites are in a competition for world's worst web site?

Art is visual and associative, people. As is the web. They should be natural friends.

Not in this city.

Yesterday, I was scrolling around on Seattle Art Museum's site when I made a delightful discovery: You can "curate" your own collection online by compiling images, with your "wall label" comments, from the site's bank of images from the permanent collection. Great, good.

Except that the bank of images is so thin that when I went to do this, I couldn't get most of the pieces I wanted to use.

There's not a single page devoted to images of what's at the Olympic Sculpture Park—there's an art map, and a list, but no comprehensive series of visuals. And somehow—somehow—when you search for Alexander Calder's Eagle, the museum's flagship work of art, all that comes up is a blue box with the word "Eagle" in it.

Is this web site built and maintained by a woodpecker?

Not that anyone else is doing any better. In fact, at least SAM has some of its collection online (and a refreshingly complete set of images from the current Japan Envisions the West exhibition).

The Henry Art Gallery is in the midst of putting its collection online, but there is absolutely nothing there now, in 2007.

There are no slide shows of images accompanying exhibitions (the code for doing this would be approximately as difficult and time-consuming for a web master as the code for the this blog post is for me). There is not even a slide show of images for the permanent James Turrell Skyspace installation. There are no links to reviews about exhibitions, or past reviews, or past images, or artist's web pages, or gallery sites, or other museums, or other blogs, or ... But hey! you say. The Henry has its own blog! True! Yes! I like it!

But good luck finding it from the Henry's home page.

Then there's the Frye Art Museum's web site. Crickets. All the same problems as the Henry, plus that the site's lead color is vomit brown.

These are dark alleys of the Internet, places you want to get away from as fast as possible, places where you're liable to see something so ugly that it will make you want to scream.

Are we not Seattle? Are we not the land of technology and honey?

The galleries have plenty of images, but not much information or many links, either. For the most part, their web sites are deadly ugly, and just completely awkward to use.

On Lawrimore Project's site, every page is a one-million-mile scroll. Platform Gallery is best at the standalone slide show feature--images pop up and are viewable horizontally rather than vertically, but there's not much more there there. Howard House has one of those useless, I-am-a-logo front pages that requires you to waste your time clicking on it and waiting for the real home page to load. Once that happens, the real home page is so stuffed together, you find yourself longing for the clean emptiness again.

Many of the galleries, unlike the museums, don't list their future itineraries--I realize things change, but would it kill them? On James Harris Gallery, it's not pretty, but the information's mostly all there. Same goes for Greg Kucera Gallery.

Examples abound, but I'll stop there and pose this question: Is there any Seattle web designer mortified enough to take on this job pro bono? If so, call the Henry. Call SAM. Hell, hack in and fix it up.

Just make it stop.

This weekend I got my hands on an advance copy of The Believer's annual visual issue (out in November), and it is hot.

OK, yes, I do have a piece in it--a Q&A with artist Liz Cohen, represented in Seattle at Lawrimore Project--but that's just a tiny morsel of the meal.

Writer Dave Hickey not only talks trash (as usual), he also lays out 10 of his favorite works of art. (One is John Wesley's hysterical 1972 painting Leda and the Man, with the swan being chased by a fellow wearing just socks and garters. In its absence online, I give you another Wesley: The Mouse Tells Jokes, from 2002.)

UPDATE: Thanks to Slog tipper Donald, here's Leda and the Man!

Artist Ai Weiwei--he of the fallen doors at Documenta--describes the (malfunctioning) system of contemporary art in China, and talks some shit of his own. (This is a fairly Bukowskian issue, come to think of it.)

There are also three portfolios: Unsentimental contemporary portraits of muses, Las Vegas carpet patterns, and temporary tattoos (by Raymond Pettibon, Ai Weiwei, and Gregory Blackstock, among others).

And there's an essay linking Michael Landy's 2001 performance Break Down, in which he destroyed all of his belongings (including valuable artworks and a car), Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York (the self-destructing machine that self-destructed unsuccessfully),

Corbu's vision of a cleaned-up New York with skinny soundproof skyscrapers amid big parks, the 1958 fire at MoMA--amazing photos here, and Sept. 11. Now that's a Believer piece.

Dawn Cerny—hear her in her own voice here—is the most anarchic of the emerging talents of Seattle. Her work cannibalizes history and spits it out on cheap paper.

In a solo show at Gallery 4Culture in May 2006, wild dogs painted directly on the wall terrorized each other, but they didn't affect the delicate, framed paintings of noblemen on which they were superimposed. The two realms rebuffed each other like opposing magnets.

At Catherine Person Gallery in March, Cerny installed a large grid of dozens of scraps of drawings and paintings on the wall in the form of questions and answers, based on the Victorian magazine Notes and Queries.

Now, she has an eccentric, multimedia double marriage portrait of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln up at Kirkland Arts Center, as part of Suzanne Beal's excellent Help Me I'm Hurt show.

What is this woman up to? Time to find out. Here are two older works:

Postscript: In the print edition of this week's paper, we promised a podcast with Mimi Gates about her love of Chinese art. But between the time of publication and podcast, the poor Seattle Art Museum director contracted a nasty cold. She's promised to get on tape as soon as she's back at work.

Brad Biancardi strikes me as one of those young artists I haven't written enough about—and now I find out he's moving to Chicago.

He graduated from UW with an MFA in painting and drawing in 2005, and has been a member of the artist-run Crawl Space Gallery pretty much ever since.

Last year, Piss President, the series of drawings and paintings he showed at Crawl Space based on government buildings in Washington, D.C., was the most restrained protest show imaginable—which gave it a sort of majestic tenseness. I regret not reviewing it fully.

Each building was depicted in skeleton form, like a computer model outlining its structure and its emptiness. The spaces were haunting, and some seemed even to seethe in the dim light of the gallery. Here's one:

This month, Biancardi has a solo show of four paintings (including this one, with animalistic imagery I haven't seen before in his work)

at Crawl Space; he's also got a floor piece in Jim O'Donnell's A Spectral Glimpse at Platform Gallery.

Those shows opened Saturday. (I haven't seen them yet but can't wait.) The openings onto other worlds in the center of Biancardi's paintings are unsettling and inviting, wormholes for modernism's sublime-in-paint to slither into the present through the cracks in the walls, grab you, and take you back with it, or maybe forward.

What, you thought we'd dress up as the Weekly for Halloween? Jack Hornady channeled the spirit of Seattle Metropolitan for this week's cover illustration. He can also draw a mean Frito Pie.

Martin Puryear's

Roy McMakin's

Conor & David's (with research!)

Narrowly Disqualified: Cris Bruch's Only Connect (2006)

Recently, in writing about Nan Goldin's controversial photograph of two girls, one with her legs spread—Edda and Klara Belly Dancing, Berlin (1998), I called it one of the few works of art I could think of that was made for children, that set adults on the outside.

I just remembered another that purports to be: Tseng Yu-Chin's Who Is Listening?, a series of five scenes, two of which I saw at this summer's Documenta 12 in Kassel.

They're uncomfortable, to say the least. In one, the faces of giggling children are spurted with milk or yogurt, which makes them giggle more. In the other, a mother and son wrestle intimately.

Their title, Who Is Listening?, makes them even creepier. In the end, I disliked them deeply. They were much more calculated than Goldin's photograph of two girls at play, at home. It is a more courageous act to capture something innocent that appears to be taboo, and then make the decision to show it, than to stage something that will simply rehearse the effect of a taboo.

This fall, with the post-Vietnam photography of An-My Le and the post-Vietnam sculpture, video, and drawing of Kim Jones, the Henry Art Gallery is a war zone.

When Jones returned from the war, he burned rats to death in two art performances. "That's what we did in Vietnam," he said.

Terrible idea, to say the least.

And here's another Henry artist heard from: When light artist (and Quaker) James Turrell (who has a Skyspace at the Henry) returned from Vietnam, he worked as a peacenik—and it put him in jail. From David Pagel's LA Times story:

Before Turrell had made a name for himself as an artist, he was drafted, served in the military and returned to the West Coast, where he began graduate studies in art at UC Irvine. Turrell the Vietnam vet became active in the peace movement, working on a committee that provided information and counsel to conscientious objectors and other draftees who opposed the war.

Informing citizens about their options was perfectly legal. Encouraging them to take any kind of action was not. "We knew better," Turrell recalls, "than ever to try to convince someone to take a particular path because then you are party to a crime. Of course it is true that we were trying to get people off as conscientious objectors, if they came anywhere near meeting that kind off criteria or even perhaps stretching the criteria."

It was 1966. Turrell had graduated from Pomona College the year before with a bachelor's degree in perceptual psychology. He was a 23-year-old Quaker advising 18-year-olds from all walks of life. "You might be surprised," he says, "what you say over a period of six months. There was a couple. I took the woman to be the man's mother. She was not. She was an FBI agent."

The 18-year-old had not been receiving notices sent by the government. But the letters, Turrell says, "were made up. Everything [the couple] said was in truth a lie, and they just wanted to find me saying one thing—that I thought he should do this. I was positive I never had, I told my lawyer I never had, and then they had a tape of me out in the parking lot and apparently I said this is what he should do. And that was enough. I was arrested and served time in prison. They essentially convicted me of a treasonable offense.

...

In a wide-ranging conversation at Griffin Contemporary Exhibitions, Turrell's Santa Monica gallery, he concluded the story of his incarceration by saying, "I don't think a democracy should have a mercenary force that is voluntary because it becomes very much like a banana republic, where the military is actually a political arm. I mean, these are total Pollyanna kinds of viewpoints, but I subscribe to them. And art is another one."

When Kim Jones first began performing Mudman, he was a young man in Los Angeles emerging from two worlds: art school, and, before that, a tour in Vietnam. (Once a Marine, always a Marine, as he says in a generous podcast in which he recites his service number.)

In photographs from the time, around 1974, he is sexual, superpowered, muscular as a machine—not tall, but compact, with his face masked. He's an animal. He wears sculptures on his naked body as he stands on a rooftop and is photographed by a girlfriend. He poses for a punk magazine shoot. Even when he's not trying to look tough, he does.

Those days are over. On Friday night at the Henry Art Gallery, Jones performed Mudman in the gallery. He hasn't performed the sculpture for some time, but he decided to do it here because Seattle was the last stop on his retrospective's national tour.

Mudman has changed.

In front of an assembled audience, Jones removed his clothing down to white boxer shorts and a pair of black boots. He dipped his hands into a silver bucket, covered his body in light-colored mud, then eased into a squat so he could slip into a lattice of sticks like putting on a heavy backpack.

When I got there, he hadn't moved very far from the bucket, and there was a reception line to talk to him, as if he were a bride or a kid who'd just taken communion.

"You're like an insane, wonderful hero," a jumpy guy wearing a bowling shirt told him. Their interaction was awkward, because the bowling-shirted guy seemed to treat Mudman like a rock star, to not notice his inherent weirdness.

Jones doesn't act out a part when he's performing Mudman, which is part of what's strange about it. He answers people's questions, talks to them gamely about sculpture. "What do you think it is?" he retorts to a trio of skeptical kids in a video on display at the Henry. They walk away.

Here, people stayed, and talked, most of them amongst themselves. "He looks like a tree," one woman whispered. One guy rubbed his finger in the mud on the floor and applied it to a drawing he was making.

I shook Mudman's hand and got mud on mine. I didn't know how else to greet a person-sculpture who also happened to be a person I'd met once before. When I'd interviewed him, he told me that sometimes, he lifts the pantyhose that cover his face because it freaks people out too much when they try to talk to him. But that night, he kept the pantyhose on, and it crushed his left eyelid, which left him disfigured. There was something incredibly soft about this quiet, besieged Mudman, with his white, saggy stomach and his crushed eye.

He was also tired. By the time I got to him, he'd been wearing the sculpture for almost an hour. "I'm about to take a shower," he said, forcing the smile of a person who has been trying to escape a situation for several minutes. His shoulders were red, rubbed raw by the straps. Ever since he walked along Wilshire Boulevard from sunrise to sunset, and sunset to sunrise, Mudman has been a feat of endurance. By performing now, Jones admits the fatigue of age into the performance. The commanding, totem-like power of the sculpture and the flabby reality of the body throw each other into relief. Mudman as King Lear.

Mudman makes his move toward the wall, and the crowd hushes. He's sliding around on the muddy wood floor, constantly catching his balance, and a maintenance woman in purple plastic gloves is wiping up the area where the audience is standing. He half-slides, half-falls to the floor and slowly, carefully, removes the sculpture. He keeps on the pantyhose. He gets up, picks up his clothing, and walks out.

Everyone, immediately, misses him.

Last week, when Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes was building his blogroll, he asked for a link directly to art posts and art posts only on Slog.

Here it is.

If you want to see both art and architecture posts, bookmark The Stranger's visual art home page, where Slog art and architecture streams in below the fold.

In the show Help Me I'm Hurt up at Kirkland Arts Center, Seattle artist Samantha Scherer displays a grid of little square watercolor paintings of murder victims from Law & Order.

The paintings are numbered according to episode and order of death within episodes, but there's no further information about these characters, and the tender little paintings have made me curious. (I don't watch the show.)

If you can identify any of the characters, tell me: What happened? How did they die? Why were they killed?

All fifty-three portraits (!) are on Scherer's web site here.

by Jamey Braden

This message tacked to BLVD Gallery's door greeted me before I pushed my way into the packed crowd during last Friday's opening of the Scion Art Installation Tour 4: It's a Beautiful World:

"Please take note that you are entering into an event where you may be videotaped or photographed.

By entering YOU AGREE THAT THE SPONSORS AND ITS DESIGNEES MAY PHOTOGRAPH AND/OR RECORD YOUR NAME, LIKENESS, VOICE, ... AND USE, MODIFY AND EDIT SUCH PHOTOGRAPHS AND RECORDINGS (IN WHOLE OR PART) FOR ADVERTISING, PROMOTIONAL AND OTHER PURPOSES IN ANY MEDIA NOW OR HEREAFTER KNOWN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD, IN PERPETUITY, WITHOUT NOTICE, FURTHER CONSENT, OR PAYMENT OF ANY KIND."

The notice foreshadowed the heavy-handedness that seemed to inform much of the art there. Scion is no master of subtlety, brazenly coopting youth culture in an aggressive attempt to win over the demographic. The labels identifying the art have no prices (the work will eventually be auctioned for charity)—they have Scion logos. That night there were Scion gift bags to take. There was sponsor-supplied Colt 45 to drink.

The show's first strike against subtlety is Sage Vaughn's Untitled (Bat and Bottle). A bat appliqued with warm, aged-looking butterfly cut-outs is weighted down by an explosion of rusty nails, redundantly juxtaposing battle and beauty. Still it manages to be sweetly dangerous, looking like something your great aunt could have made in a delusional vision of grand self-defense. But wait! It's paired with a grungy 40-ouncer, as if the bat-butterfly dichotomy weren't enough to beat the viewer over the head.

Yoskay Yamamoto's Negai contains a delicate globe adorned with soft coral and goldenrod mossy-looking stuff, capped by a small, whole bonsai tree. It is a beautiful world, inventing a new season on a planet where the Little Prince might camp under soft pink pine needle tufts. But this pretty piece is anchored to an ogre, a 4-foot-tall roughhewn ghost/monster/statue THING that looks like, well, a sculpted turd.

I walked through the gallery continually beaten over the head with proto-metaphors of opposing forces and preachy messages like "hope" and "preserve habitat." As I was about to exit, the sour taste in my mouth was slightly sweetened by the vibrant collage Wodabe Sundance by Kelsey Brooks. It is a mess of National Geographic-looking images, composed in post-iPod ad campaign fashion. Planted coolly on a large white canvas, exotic animals peg the corners of a spread-eagled lady centerpiece modestly restored by an explosive, bright pile of cross-cultural creatures, people, places, and foods.

And right next to it was Cody Hudson's painting I'm Starting to Feel Better, a day-glo orange eruption of light bulbs, diamond shapes, and obsessive lines. It is a breath of fresh air. It feels personal. Neither its title nor its imagery tell me what to think or feel, yet thankfully, because of it, I am starting to feel better as I leave.

By the Ugandan-born artist Zarina Bhimji.

In other words, the Turner Prize show is up.

In related international-slash-award news:

1. I just finished Simon Schama's 8-hour BBC documentary series The Power of Art.

Considering his scenery-chewing, his embarrassing pronouncements (of the bombing of the Spanish town, he declared dramatically, "Guernica had gone Cubist"), and the skin-crawling cheesiness of some of his historical recreations (a sweaty Caravaggio thrusting his sword into empty air comes to mind), the following should not be possible: I love Simon Schama. My feelings are not entirely in my control. Check it out for yourself: The series goes Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rothko. (Schama is especially fun in the pre-modern period, so if you must choose, skip Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko.) (Note: The Netflix "long wait" is really only a couple of weeks.)

2. Wednesday the 52nd Venice Biennale announced its awards for this year's show, which is ongoing into November. The only one I want to call out here is the Golden Lion given to an artist under age 40, which went to Palestinian-born Emily Jacir for her installation Material for a Film.

The work was an archive of an assassination—the assassination of Wael Zuaiter in 1972, one in a series of killings by Israeli agents of Palestinian intellectuals, artists, and writers. Included were letters, books, media accounts, and photographs, including the image below, of the copy of The Thousand and One Nights that Zuaiter had on him when he was killed; it was pierced by a bullet.

Just days after the scaffolding came off of a four-story abstract sculpture outside the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, its top was blown off in a windstorm at about 2:35 pm today.

"It was a big gust that came along and blew off a portion of the top of it," said center spokeswoman Christi Loso.

No one was hurt, she said. A broad area has been cordoned off around the sculpture, and a shuttle bus rerouted to protect people should any more of the sculpture collapse.

Here's a rendering by the artist, Portland-based Ed Carpenter, of the lattice of aluminum, glass, and steel, called Vessel:

Carpenter has been notified about the incident, but no decisions have been made about the future of the sculpture, Loso said. The structure was completed, but the installation had about a month's worth of work left on it, she said, mostly in finishing the base and landscaping.

A scientist who formerly worked at the center, and who is remaining anonymous, is paying for the artwork. Loso said the center's official figure to describe the sculpture's worth is $500,000, but she couldn't say for sure whether that referred to an estimated value or the budget of the commission.

Obviously, the sculpture, which was selected in a competition process last year, will have to be reengineered and maybe, redesigned.

It reminds me of one of the works by a star of Documenta 12 this summer in Kassel, Germany. It was a piece by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a massive majestic assemblage of antique doors formed together to create an architectural scale arch that people could stand under.

But when I was there, two-and-a-half months after the opening, I didn't see that. I saw this:

Organizers of the exhibition passed it off as a fortuitous accident, adding meaning to the piece. Buh. This photograph was taken from the one good remaining angle, the one dramatic viewpoint where chaos still looks meaningfully formed. From every other perspective around the sculpture, the ugly, jagged edges of beautiful doors forever destroyed stuck out of a sorry trash pile. The artist's monument to the life of old culture in rapidly developing China instead joined in the killing, because of sloppy engineering.

I'm not necessarily opposed to the potential of destruction in art. Several years ago, I advocated that Seattle artist Iole Alessandrini's gorgeous, several-block-long installation of light in the dark heart of downtown Tacoma shouldn't be restored after it was damaged in a windstorm weeks before it was supposed to come down.

That piece, called Season of Light, was intended to be temporary, and the ruthless instead of planned ending seemed perfect in the context of an urban block that had become blighted because of the cruel whims—we're interested, tear the historic buildings down, no, nevermind—of a couple of Seattle developers (one of whom, Paul Schell, later became Seattle's mayor).

Art and people are never safe in windstorms.

(Thanks for the tip, Anne S.)

by Jamey Braden
The new Tacoma venue surely wants to do the same for you. The gallery is warm both literally (soft white light, honey-brown wood floors, a seeming 80 degrees on the thermostat) and figuratively—the first show was called the The Kindness of Strangers and owed its existence to the charity of artists that co-owners Peter Lynn and Sean Alexander mostly did not know.

The artists were solicited by e-mail, for a donation of artwork to be shown and sold to benefit the gallery. They came from near and far. Painter Zach Marvick is rumored to live next door to the gallery, and much of the rest of the work is international. Sweden, Singapore, Paris, Moscow, Denmark, Japan, and Australia were represented in the show, which closed last Wednesday. Daniel Johnston even sent up some prints from Texas, with an invoice, scratched out and re-scrawled as "no charge."

Kindly, Lynn held the show over for an evening so I could catch the packed salon-style show. On the drive home, my carful was pressed to find one preferred piece among the 200-plus works. I had a family of favorites: the reserved, minimal, and quietly emotional "line-scape" drawings by Jennifer Nazzaro; the lush and uncomfortably close ink portraits by Londoner Mitch Blunt; the faded acid-bright portraits by Xin that felt fractured and re-patched, as if the artist was lovingly remembering her friends as a collection of characteristics and sewing them together with memories.

The Helm has come a long way since its inception as a "let's do it better" call-to-arms after Tacoma's progressive art venture, Critical Line, closed up last winter after producing only four shows.

On one day in April, Lynn and Alexander gave birth to the concept for The Kindness of Strangers—not only an exhibition but a way to build a nest egg for the new space, especially since its directors have ambitious plans that include a residency program—and about five days later, Lynn recalls, he got the keys to an old lighting showroom in an area of downtown Tacoma known as Antique Row.

The excitement in an overnight (over-week?) decision like this carries over into the energy of the gallery. Lynn talked about the work with an unpretentious passion and expressed high, even rigid, ideals for the space. Shows will change every month, and Lynn insists on displaying work "people have never seen before," in a balance of local, regional, national, and international artists. Viewers can regard The Kindness of Strangers as an epic trailer for the life the Helm would like to lead.

This Thursday, the Helm opens a show of brand new work by Seattle-based Chauney Peck and Whiting Tennis.

Peck's work "draws inspiration from unconventional living situations in third-world countries," the gallery's web site describes. "Peck has created two-dimensional and sculptural work that imaginatively illustrates the lifestyles of the poor and downtrodden."

Tennis, winner of this year's Neddy Fellowship for painting, makes work that "explore(s) the spiritual nature of everyday objects and materials...and through painting and sculpture will display how the completely ordinary can be imbued with life by the simple act of observation."
Or the simple act of making a decision and going with it.