Around 1974, Kim Jones, a former painter and sometime sculptor, became a sculpture himself. He called it “Mudman,” and it meant him wearing a latticework of sticks on his back, and covering his body in mud and his head in pantyhose—but interacting with people more or less normally, which often, well, freaked them out.

As Mudman, Jones walked the streets of Los Angeles and, later, New York. He gave performances that included smearing himself in his own shit while hacking at beer cans with a machete he got during his tour in Vietnam, and burning live rats to death, repeating something he and his fellow Marines had done during the war. (The rat act got him sent to court and put on partial probation.)

In his retrospective opening Friday night at the Henry Art Gallery, documents from those performances join sculpture, installation, ever-evolving war drawings, and a timeline of his life that includes snapshots from his time in Vietnam and begins with a newspaper photograph of him when he was crippled from a polio-like disease as a child.

At Friday’s opening, Jones will perform Mudman for the first time in a while. Before you meet him there, listen to him talk, on this week's In/Visible podcast.

From 6 to 8:30 tonight, in this place,

work by this artist,

this artist,

this artist,

and many others will be auctioned on behalf of this worthy cause.

(Sorry you were left off our calendar, Rivet!)

Slate has a terrific video on a secret stash of strange and beautiful photographs of Taliban members discovered by a photojournalist in 2002, after the fall of the regime. The men are covered in flowers, holding hands, wearing black eyeliner, and clutching their guns.

I just heard from curator Rock Hushka that Janet Cardiff's installation Forty Part Motet is coming to Tacoma Art Museum next summer. (Dates are still being set.)

The piece is 40 black speakers standing around a room. (The room has ranged from the austere white cube of the Museum of Modern Art to ornate churches.)

In each speaker is a recording of a single voice singing a part of Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium. Tallis, a Catholic, delicately wrote the piece—devoted to humility—to commemorate the 40th birthday of Queen Elizabeth in 1575. (For a delightfully bad film on the subject of Elizabeth's nascent midlife crisis see this.)

Cardiff, a Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist known for her audio tours, made Forty Party Motet in order to set the listener inside the music, a sensation that can't be delivered via video. But click below for an elementary idea of what the room is like:

When you're in Muenster, you have to go to the path, people said. It goes through a park, across a street, and continues through a golden wheat field over a picturesque footbridge. That's the art.

Pawel Althamer was the artist, and his Path was one of 33 sculptures scattered around the German city this summer during Muenster Sculpture Projects 2007. This was my first time seeing the once-in-a-decade public art show, and after renting a bike, I found Path on the map, with a notation: "Between the western shore of Lake Aa and Haus Bakenfeld."

But the path did not begin on the western shore of the lake. It was hard to figure out where it did begin. I stopped at an intersection where two walking paths streaked off the paved bicycle lane, and chose one. It led to a crater.

I walked to the top of the crater, looked down into the glowing, gaping hole, and saw a full-scale imitation Romanesque church spire sitting in the hole with a shovel next to it.

This was not the path. It was Guillaume Bijl's Archaeological Site (A Sorry Installation), a plaque informed me. The plaque claimed to be the marker for the archaeological dig that turned up this so-called relic.

This is the sort of thing that happens at Muenster Sculpture Projects, I began to realize. The art is out there in the world, all over the place in the city, so it's exhilaratingly difficult to tell what is world and what is art, or in this case, where the art is exactly. For the 107-day duration of the exhibition, the whole city becomes a revolutionary experiment in redefining public art. (There has been talk of Muenster not continuing after this year. That would be terrible. The combination of joy, intelligence, and, increasingly as the show goes on, history, in MSP is unmatched.)

One artist, Mark Wallinger, tied a three-mile perimeter of fishing line above the city, but it was only a fantasy to me: In several hours of biking around the city, I never caught a glimpse of it. I also didn't catch Gustav Metzger's small, unassuming heap of granite stones, which were moved to a new location in the city every day.

Here's what I didn't see (you have to squint to catch the fishing line on the left side of the image):

On the edge of the lake, Tue Greenfort's silver liquid manure truck spouting cleansing agents into the lake looked like a municipal vehicle just doing its thing, not an art project.

The art in Muenster is loose, relaxed. I started to be aware that it was playing, happily, with its own credibility.

Still determined to get to Path, I biked back to the intersection and took the other route. At the two-lane road, I got off my bike, crossed it, and entered the field, walking the bike.

The sun had come back after a flash rainstorm, and the soil was thick and frosting-moist. I followed other people's footsteps.

About 30 feet in, the footsteps ended.

In pictures I'd seen, the single-file path was shaved out of wheat. You easily could see where to go.

But without wheat, you were lost. "Between the western shore of Lake Aa and Haus Bakenfeld," the map said. Across the field, maybe two soccer fields away, was a white house with a perfect A roof.

Haus Bakenfeld. It had to be.

I walked the bike that way. On one side of the field was a stand of pine trees, on the other a row of houses with their backs to me. A teenager ran out into the muddy field to grab a ball and glanced at me.

Did he know about the path?

I started to sweat.

Was there a path anymore?

I could see into some of the houses. They weren't modest and old-fashioned, like the one I was headed toward. These were made of glass and had big, tidy Germanic gardens separated by hedges. A woman in a backyard played with a baby. Occasionally I laughed out loud. It was entirely possible that Haus Bakenfeld was not the one I was walking toward, and that my belief in art was making me ridiculous. I was in the middle of a muddy field, jetlagged, sweating, sunburning, and bleeding from a blister, and I couldn't find the art.

At the last house before the white A-roof, I caught the eye of an old woman holding a ladder while an old man up on it was reaching for a pear on a tree. I asked for Haus Bakenfeld. I pointed to the house in front of me. They shook their heads. I asked whether anybody named the Bakenfelds lived around here. They smiled gently, as at an addled person. "The people who live there are Peter and Kristin Klimke," the man said in German, spelling the names.

He pointed behind me, all the way back across the field, across the road with its tree-lined sidewalks, and into the park where I'd come from, and said, "The art is over there."

Back over there, again at the intersection where I started, a group of people had gathered. They looked at their maps and pointed in various directions, debating. When they saw me coming back along the path, they stopped me. "Is that the path?" they asked. I told them yes, considering that they'd be following my footsteps, not the artist's. I told myself that the artist would approve, because Muenster during the Sculpture Projects is that kind of place.

Seattle artist Tar Art Rat (currently based in Berlin) today posted an item on his blog about the eBay sale of a decommissioned 1950s underground missile base near Moses Lake. The base includes 16 subterranean buildings. Tar Art Rat suggests artists should buy it (price tag: $1.5 million) and turn it into "an underground art city/world and fallout shelter."

Sounds seriously dreamy.

UPDATE: Sam M. in the comments points toward Penny Arcade's great comic sendup/obsessive rant about the missile base's possibilities here.

Next week, Seattle will be host to "The 'Can't Miss' Conference for Sculpture Parks and Gardens Administrators and Enthusiasts!"

But back before the Olympic Sculpture Park opened, In/Visible hosted artists Susie Lee (whose first solo show at Lawrimore Project opens tonight) and Tivon Rice and writer/curator Suzanne Beal (whose show Help Me, I'm Hurt also opens tonight at Kirkland Arts Center).

All three of them had taken a class at UW about the park that included trekking out to the homes of the collectors who owned many of the OSP sculptures. In this great conversation, they described what it was like when the sculptures lived privately, not publicly. This, for example, lived like this

instead of like this

To me, that sculpture by Mark Di Suvero, Bunyon's Chess (1965), is the one that suffers most on the relentless, distancing slopes of the OSP.

In this week's new In/Visible, Seattle sculptor Drew Daly talks about his optically teasing furniture, which is domestic by nature. Every one of the "Siamese chairs" in his current show at Greg Kucera Gallery was determined by a process that involved cutting up and manipulating photographs. To initiate a series of mental events for the viewer including both memory and improvisation, Daly started with an IKEA chair, an object with "absolutely no shock value."

It's on our cover, it's at SOIL ...

^{Hanging (front and back), 2007, by Jennifer Zwick}

Where will it show up next and what does it mean?

This week we have the fabulous work of Autumn Whitehurst. You may remember her from this cover last April, one of my favorite Stranger covers ever.

This time (completely unlike last time), it takes the form of a civic statement. It's Thomas Schütte's Model for a Museum from this summer's Sculpture Projects in Muenster.

The piece was an invigorating and slightly crazed (though polite enough) act of public-sculpture sabotage. What Schütte did was to put a glass enclosure over another contemporary artist's cheesy fountain (with a Buddha-like figure and some rocks). On top of the glass enclosure was a bright orange sculpture resembling a high-rise building.

It may seem like a simple and amusing gesture of art criticism, but it's actually layered. Is the shape on top the only "model for a museum" or is the whole exercise a model for a museum? Meaning what exactly? I'm still trying to think all this through. (There's history, too: This was in a small plaza whose redevelopment from parking lot into gathering spot was led by a landmark sculpture that Schütte made in 1987, a pillar with a cherry on top, referring critically to Muenster architecture.)

At the very least, it's moments like these that make the Olympic Sculpture Park feel terribly staid. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: The OSP needs action. Meanwhile, consider which pieces of Seattle sculpture you might want to see get some ... creative treatment.)

Last week I promised more on Documenta 12's dark rooms, and the thought brings me to Spanish-born, Chicago-based artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's Phantom Truck.

Remember when Colin Powell told the United Nations, in February 2003, that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs capable of mass destruction? A computer drawing of one of them was presented as "solid intelligence." Then came invasion. Then came the realization that these things, buried under the ground, weren't capable of inflicting all that crazy terror.

The artist made a life-sized replica of one of the labs for Documenta. It sat in an unlit room. Because of the dark, and because I'm clumsy, I came this close to running into one of its sharp edges while I was walking, slowly, around it.

I thought how much fun it would be to explain an injury from the real fake weapons lab.

That's one of 100 9-by-6-inch intaglio prints in the series What Might Go Wrong by Jennifer Zwick. Her first solo show, at Soil through Oct. 28, is called I'm So Scared/It's All So Hard, and it's "about anxiety, awkwardness, and the accidental comedy of bodies, yours and mine."

Here's her comical tribute to the continuous strangeness of breasts. It's called Hello.

At Howard House, Matthew Offenbacher, Robert Yoder, and Sean M. Johnson are showing. Yoder seems to be beginning to admit photographic imagery into his abstractions (his tiny bits of photographs look more and more legible with each time I've seen his work recently).

And this piece by Johnson has a certain lightness I didn't see in any of his previous works at HH. It's called Brothers, and the top nightstand rests on the bottom one by virtue of the weight of books and CDs in the open drawer.

Katrina Moorhead is at James Harris Gallery. The Northern Irish artist works with an almost unbearable delicacy. She shows three paintings and a pair of finely crafted wooden DeLorean car doors. The car was manufactured in Belfast, where the factory had two entrances, one for Protestants, one for Catholics. Her memorial to the fallen company echoes her country's divisions.

I only wish there were more than just three of her paintings on display. Here's one, titled You Sat Alone, Reykjavik (2007):

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Greg Kucera Gallery, where the front rooms are flooded with a knockout display of prints and tapestries by Chuck Close. Here's an installation view, with his tapestry portraits of Philip Glass and Kiki Smith on the right:

In the back room and upstairs are the furniture sculptures and photographic collages by Drew Daly (who's talking at the gallery at noon on Saturday). A few in particular drew me in:

^Fourlean

^{Mirror Merge (there's also a virtual version of this made with two chairs and a mirrored corner)}

UPDATE: Originally I posted that there were Close paintings at Kucera, but there aren't (some of those prints are thick!). And the tapestry portrait is of Kiki Smith, not Cindy Sherman. Please forgive. It was late, I swear.

In honor of HUMP!, we bring you this photo by Slava Mogutin, from his book Lost Boys, published by powerHouse Books. Enjoy.

Jim Demetre writes critically in the piping hot new Stranger about the landscape design of the Olympic Sculpture Park:

(Landscape designer Charles) Anderson's impulse toward restoration leaves us with a design that is literal rather than aesthetic, pedagogical where it should be sensual, and—worst of all—idealized instead of pragmatic. The tendency among contemporary landscape architects to use native plants may be rooted in sound principles of sustainability, but efforts to return sites to their "natural" states by using such species often reflects a sentimental romanticism and can lead, as it does here, to ill-conceived and unappealing public spaces.

^{Photograph by Curt Doughty}

In Documenta 12, which closed recently after seeing a record number of 754,301 visitors (and 15,537 journalists on top of that, of which I was one), the dark rooms are what you remember.

The art objects were spotlit, but the rooms themselves were left to their own devices, some animated by gaudy pink and orange paint, others left dark. It was a theatrical device, really, and irritating in person. Oddly, it grows charmed in memory.

One of the continuously populated dim rooms was the one, in the Neue Galerie, that held dozens of Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov's drawings, all titled Fears (2007). It looked like this:

In one of the drawings of two men dancing, the text reads, "Two people are dancing, they feel especially happy because they have left all their daily fears aside in order to feel more free and relaxed. They will pick up the fears again later."

The graphic quality of these drawings is what you remember. They are black and white, and from afar can look like abstractions or Bolshevik graphics. In another room is Solakov's archive of his collaboration with the Bulgarian secret police, about which he is ashamed, first seen in 1990.

In Fears, the heaviness and lightness of his work are in total balance. (It's a balance that gets out of whack in his wall essay/diagram about Soviet arms production in the main show at the Venice Biennale.)

Here are some more of the conflicting and conflicted little creatures.

Text: A fearless adventurer is on his way to climb up his last mountain. After that he will only stay home, reading newspapers, drinking tea and picking his nose. This is the daydreaming in his head right now. He is used to it. Actually, this really will be his last mountain. An avalanche is coming.

Text: A big fear, a medium fear and a small fear decided to work together on a family of four.

Text: Two spooky creatures--a big fella and a little ghost, have an agreement: none of them should ever scare to death the other's friends. Only a small, healthy fear is permitted.

More on Documenta 12's dark rooms tomorrow. (And check out Seattle's own Henry Art Gallery high on a hill at Documenta.)

(Considering my last post, that is.)

I just got an email linking sex, photography, and Britain once again.

This time it seems as if a Seattle photographer, Christian Petersen, has won 2007 UK Erotic Photographer of the Year. See a catalog of his work on Flickr here. Here's one for non-clickers (it's not garden-variety erotic photography, I'll give it that):

(The release also mentions that Dan Savage's Savage Love podcast and the Seattle Erotic Art Festival were nominated for awards.)

The most innocent thing loses its innocence the moment it enters a photograph. Hence the problem of images of childhood--which was the subject of Akio Takamori's show at the Henry Art Gallery last summer. It also became the subject of a heated Slog debate.

At the time, I wrote about the toughest of the show's images, Nan Goldin's Edda and Klara Belly Dancing, Berlin (1998). Last week, Edda and Klara, two girls playing, one with her legs spread, was removed from an exhibition in Britain. Officials are still trying to decide whether it breaks child pornography laws.

In response, today Elton John removed the rest of the show, 149 photographs in total, from the museum.

The photograph has been seen in many, many places, but the police reaction still comes as no surprise to me. (It's art, by the way, not pornography, unless there's something seriously wrong with you.) It practically begs someone to cry pornography. Unlike photographs that present terrifying situations at a safe distance, this one turns a perfectly innocent event on its head simply by inserting the gaze of the camera, which is presumed to be an adult, or sexualized, gaze. This gaze is the background for all photography, maybe all art, really, which is not made for children. The funny thing is, this may be one of the few photographs I can think of that is made for children. Unless they've already been taught to be ashamed of their bodies, they'd find it funny, or silly, or familiar. We adults, meanwhile, find its innocence blinding. We can't look at it.

For that reason--not because I want to censor this thing further, but in deference to the genuine difficulty of the image for an adult viewer--I'm going to post the image on the jump. It's not that it's NSFW. It's that it's not safe for adulthood.

Continue reading "Sex and Photography" »

...is the show that's up right now, so say several people who've seen it. It's a group show called Insubstantial Pageant Faded, and one of the artists is Anthony McCall, whose life and work Jen Graves writes about in the current issue...

Back in the 1970s, he made sculpture out of the dust motes and cigarette smoke that just happened to be floating in downtown New York lofts. He'd turn down the lights, as if for a film screening, and project animated, slowly moving line drawings onto a wall. The thick, low-rent air would materialize into ghostly shapes tethered both to the projector and to the wall: enterable, cinematic sculpture. Soon, galleries and museums uptown wanted the sculptures. But in those spaces, the air was pristine. The sculptures were, quite literally, rendered invisible when they were moved to "legitimate" venues...

Read the rest of the piece here.

As Brendan says, the second installment of the Motel performance/art series is on.

Last Sunday I caught Thike Thin's (Mike Min's) performance Herding Cats, which was coincidental, since I was fresh from my first-ever visit to the Woodland Zoo, with its smashing jaguar and ocelot, when I drove up 99 to the secret location (call 206-782-8872 to find out where it is). (The name of the location is another animal reference, oddly.)

What I saw when I got there was the detritus of a meeting of cats plotting world domination. Evidently, according to videos from the performance, this meeting at one point was chaired by the artist. He presided over the group of cats as they plotted and ate snacks.

When I got there, the meeting appeared to be on break. Sheets of paper describing goals and strategies were taped to the walls. It looked like a very productive time.

Under the conference table smack in the center of the room, a fuzzy, petite black cat sat in the upright position. Judging from the Humane Society placards in the window, her name was Ginger. There were other placards describing other cats, but I didn't see any of them. (I imagined, hopefully, that they'd been adopted right out from under the performance.)

The window was open slightly, so I tried talking to Ginger. She did not respond.

For one time only, this week's installment of my art podcast In/Visible is two installments: British-born, New York-based artist Anthony McCall, and Australian artist Patricia Piccinini.

McCall, the Comeback Kid, began his career with fire performances and then moved into filmic sculptures made of air, one of which is on marvelous display at Western Bridge.

Piccinini's first American survey, amazingly, is at the little old Frye Art Museum (which, of course, curator Robin Held has spent the last few years making neither little in stature nor old in attitude). Her sculpture, drawing, video, and photography is at the intersection of art, nature, and technology. For instance, she invented a species of frightful bodyguards for endangered species, one of which is seen below. Its assigned animal is the Golden Helmeted Honeyeater, a little yellow bird. Hear her talk here.

This week's cover image, Red Bomb X, by William Hundley, comes to us from Ballard's OKOK Gallery. If you've followed OKOK's evolution from toy store (sort of) to full-on art gallery, you already know that it's one of the most consistently interesting art spaces in town.

For more of Mr. Hundley's photos, take a look here and here.

I'm sure this has the art blogosphere on fire already this morning, but for those few poor souls who get their only art news from Slog, the latest is that the Museum of Modern Art has created a new position--associate director in charge of contemporary art--for museum-director superstar Kathy Halbreich, who has spent the last 16 years making the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis an up-to-the-minute spot in terms of art, architecture, technology, and curation.

Halbreich represents everything MoMA's contemporary program needs to be: nimble, experimental, quick on the uptake. I can not wait to see what she'll do there.

As for us here in Seattle, our pipe dreams for the Henry Art Gallery are dashed. An unusually high number of museums are looking for directors right now, including the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle's contemporary museum. When the Henry's blog posted a poll of dream candidates online, Halbreich was the frontrunner by a mile. What was she thinking choosing the Museum of Modern Art over the Henry?

(Thanks go to Slog tipper and fellow art chronicler Steven Vroom.)

This year, Seattle Art Museum's Betty Bowen Award will go to a wild-card artist: Oscar Tuazon. Tuazon is based in Tacoma. He hasn't shown in Seattle. He's young. He's promising. He's getting the $11,000 prize.

I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled to be surprised by an announcement that in past years has often been predictable and staid. I'm thrilled that this is a Tacoma-based artist (and that he also appears to be Paris-based: Tacoma and Paris, sitting in a tree ...). And I'm thrilled insofar as I feel the way I feel during a thriller: I'm not entirely sure what's going to happen.

I've never seen Tuazon's work in person. (It will be on display at SAM soon, and for the entire year, thanks to the award.) Earlier this year, a show of works by Tuazon and Eli Hanson titled VOluntary Non vUlnerable (VONU) was curated by Eric Fredericksen (Eric, how did you come to find these two again?) at Bodgers and Kludgers Cooperative Art Parlor in Vancouver. I seem to remember the emailed images from the show having something to do with meth, and tiny architecture. Then, this spring, Tuazon had a solo show, I'd Rather Be Gone, at Standard in Oslo, Norway.

Since Tuazon is an unknown, I'll attach the entire press release from the Standard show:

STANDARD (OSLO) is proud to present its first exhibition of objects and photographic works by Paris-based artist Oscar Tuazon. "I'd Rather Be Gone" continues the artist's yearlong examination on how personal liberty can be embodied in architecture. Drawing on the early building experiments of the hippy commune Drop City as well as current practices in 'dwelling portably,' Tuazon's work questions the conditions for sustainability and self-suffiency.

"When I attended Deep Springs College in the mid-90s, the Greyhound would stop at an intersection in the middle of the desert, 50 miles from the college. You had to wait there until someone drove out to get you, which sometimes took a few hours. The only other thing at that intersection was a whorehouse in a doublewide. (In Nevada, prostitution is legal.) On hot days, the Madame of the house would sometimes invite us inside and offer us a cold drink. The only way in and out of the college is through the whorehouse." Tuazon's works and writings continuously return to the ideal of the bare minimum [think of Documenta's question this year, taken from a philosopher whose name I'm forgetting now: "What is bare life?"]—put forward by the writer Henry David Thoreau in the novel "Walden" (1854)—and thus also return to the question of whether isolation from civil society may gain a more objective understanding of it.

Since graduating from Whitney ISP Tuazon has produced a series of sculptures composed of urban debris: cardboard boxes, wooden pallets, printing plates, OSB boards from building sites, or melanin boards from defunct kitchens—materials gathered from the area of his Paris studio or near the various venues of his exhibitions. In an initial phase these sculptural works would take forms of geodesic domes and draw on such typologies as indigenous building techniques, DIY architecture, as well as a more determined dedication to structural clarity, advocated by the engineer R. Buckminster Fuller. More recently the works have taken on the character of full-scale building prototypes, such as the work "1:1" at the center of the show.

This assemblage of melanin boards and wooden pallets is constructed to serve as a corner of the house Tuazon planning to erect near Portland, Oregon. Approaching the building project through a series of trial products rather than drawings, the exhibition context becomes a chance to test rather than portray this situation. At the same time Tuazon exposes the shortcomings of the works as prototypes, which continuously seem to be balancing between actual functionality and a possible transcendent materiality as sculptures. Tuazon draws attention to the disjuncture of forcing one space (the un-built house) onto another space (the gallery), and underscores the impossibility of really modelling something accurately in the context of an exhibition. Adding to these sculptures are four folded and framed photographs, rendering tableaux of temporary architecture from the woods of Portland. The photographs become a surface for exploring another kind of space, while being folded also modulating the distances within the image, between one space and another.

Oscar Tuazon (b. 1976 in Seattle, Washington) received his education from Cooper Union and the Whitney ISP in New York. His works were earlier this year shown in solo exhibitions at Bodgers and Kludgers, Vancouver and at castillo/corrales, Paris. His recent group exhibitions include "Down By Law", The Wrong Gallery for the Whitney Biennial, New York; "The Elementary Particles (Paperback Edition)", STANDARD (OSLO); and "Minotaur Blood" at Jonathan Viner / Fortesque Avenue, London. "Metronome no. 10", which Tuazon co-edited with Clementine Deliss, will also be included in the Documenta 12 Magazines project.

Here are a few installation views from the Standard show:

Tuazon isn't the Betty Bowen's only news, though.

Two PONCHO Special Recognition Awards in the amount of $1,500 each will go to two deserving artists: Seattle painter Joseph Park (here's a series of his paintings from a 2004 show at Rena Bransten in San Francisco; you might remember him from his terrific survey, Moonbeam Caress, curated by Robin Held at the Frye in 2005), and Portland artist Vanessa Renwick, a filmmaker and video and installation artist.

Rounding out the five finalists--selected from the 462 applicants from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho--were Bradley Biancardi, a painter and member of Crawl Space, and Maki Tamura, an artist whose watercolor constructions were seen at SAAM in 2003.

There will be an awards ceremony Oct. 23 from 5:30 to 8 pm at SAM, including a brief slide presentation of each winner's work, followed by a reception. All is free and open to the public.

UPDATE: From Slog tipper Adam:

A side note about Portland artist Vanessa Renwick. She'll be in town presenting work and serving as a juror at Northwest Film Forum's Local Sightings Film Festival.

Come out to her program on October 6th. here's the details:

Saturday, Oct. 6, 7pm
Spotlight on Portland
STUMPTOWN SAP

A lot of trees were cut down to make Portland, but the sap still glistens fresh with new creations. Tonight, visiting filmmaker Vanessa Renwick presents a sampling of great short films by Portland artists. The program features the first two films in Renwick's ongoing CASCADIA series of Northwest portraits, Gus Van Sant's new short FIRST KISS, made for the Cannes Film Festival's 60th Anniversary, and work by Jon Raymond (writer of OLD JOY), animator Karl Lind, Marc Moscato, Gretchen Hogue and many others. Don't miss this impressive survey of Portland's cinematic lifeblood.

This is the end of it. The last of the great rooms. For those just tuning in, check out the first four parts of the terrific Venetian exhibition Artempo here, here, here, here, and here. This final segment may as well be called The Apotheosis.

This is the top floor of Palazzo Fortuny, a place flooded with light where the frescoes are peeling off the walls. After the proliferation of bodies and faces from all eras and styles on the first two floors, and after being drawn inside a cabinet of curiosities only to be deposited into chapel-like white-cube rooms on the third level, you've climbed the stairs and arrived at a synthesis of it all, filtered through the undeniable feelings of destruction and loss that pervade this living exhibition set inside an eccentric, aged palazzo whose most famous tenant is long dead. His library is even open to the viewer, visible through glass, at a titillating and theatrical distance. (It's "as if the master just got up from his worktable," Frye curator Robin Held says.)

Pictured above is an area near the entrance, where Peter Buggenhout's raw, ruin-like table sculpture The Blind Leading the Blind #11 (2007) sits near a video projected (slyly) on a closed door. (Or was it merely the contour of a once-present door left on the wall? In these rooms, it was often difficult to discern the faded shapes and shadows on the walls

from present art or architectural moments.) In the video (again, above the above photo), the only motion is the sun streaming in an open window, riding the dust. The piece is called Here Comes the Sun (2000), by Sabrina Mezzaqui.

On one end of the long room is another "curiosity cabinet," this time of televisions. Several TVs pushed together show various black and white videos at the same time, including Fischli & Weiss's 1987 extreme-dominoes classic The Way Things Go, Richard Serra's Hands Scraping from 1968, Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect, and various Gutai painting performances (including, if I'm remembering correctly, Kazuo Shiraga's seminal 1955 Challenge to the Mud, in which the artist rolled around half naked in mud). (Gutai painting is a Japanese relative of American abstract-expressionist action painting, but in Gutai painting, the process of making is more important than the product.)

Paired with these throughout the room are collapsed ceramic pots by Shiro Tsujimura, slashed canvases by Lucio Fontana, Guenther Uecker's chair with a seat covered in nails, Gotthard Graubner's now-dirty 1970 "pillow" paintings, a little wall box imprisoning a drawing of signatures by Robert Rauschenberg and Uecker, Cai Guo-Qiang's fireworks drawings,

a spare 18th-century visual poem for a tea ceremony,

cracked and burned paintings by Alberto Burri and Yves Klein, and even an accidentally burned painting by a 16th-century disciple of Tintoretto (seen below).

It's hard to leave.

This building feels like one of the few places in the world where time is invited to run at all of its various speeds at once. Loss is contained, accepted, present: presence. I told you it was magic.

In 2001, when Martin Creed won the Turner Prize and exhibited a work that was nothing but a light going on and off in a room, a great public groan was heard throughout the land. I didn't have to write about the event, and I didn't see the show, so I didn't form an opinion about it.

Since then, I've seen two Creed light pieces in Seattle, or rather, two different editions of the same piece on display in two locations. The two displays overlapped for two days this past weekend.

One was the tasseled, somewhat ornate lamp in the Henry Art Gallery's Mouth Open, Teeth Showing exhibition. The show, which closed yesterday, was a selection of works from the Bill and Ruth True Collection, and the Creed lamp sat in the miniature rotunda on the southwest side of the Henry's ground-floor gallery, flicking yellow light on and off.

The other was a quiet little bluish-tinged nightlight plugged into an outlet near the floor in the front room of Western Bridge. It's part of the new show Insubstantial Pageant Faded (well, well worth seeing), which opened to the public Friday, and which also is a selection from the True collection. (The Trues are major donors to the Henry, and own Western Bridge.)

Both pieces, the lamp and the nightlight, are the same work: Creed's Work No. 312 (A lamp going on and off), not to be confused with Work No. 227 (The lights going on and off)--the work that made headlines back in 2001. The Trues own the piece, and they checked with Creed's gallery to make sure they could borrow "another edition" for the short overlapping days, WB director Eric Fredericksen said.

Neither of the works moved me much, or sent my head spinning. I suppose I could have interpreted plenty into those little lamps, and into their themed-group-show and architectural contexts, but in the end, they didn't stand out; they didn't produce any commitment in me.

Whereas I can imagine that if a Creed light work is alone in a gallery, it is much more confrontational, and also suffers more from the pressure to bring something fresh to the conversation about the nature and history of art.

(This, ultimately, must be the difference between the "light" and the "lamp" works. And certainly there is a meaningful difference between a light and its lamp--maybe somewhere there's a good interview with Creed on this. For the record, the lamp pieces were different because Creed doesn't specify which type of lamp must be used. The recent Seattle pairing makes a nice display of this principle.)

Boston Globe short-timer Ken Johnson (who's returning to the New York Times soon) recently had that very experience, of facing one of Creed's lights alone in a gallery. For him, the work was a rebel without a cause. Or at least without the expected, revolutionary cause.

When Yves Klein did an exhibition in Paris in 1958 called "Le Vide" ("The Void") that consisted only of a completely empty gallery, it was shocking for most people but an inspirational sign of artistic and social freedom for a few. If an art exhibition could be nothing but an empty gallery, then anything was possible. The cultural revolutions of the '60s were soon to come. Half a century later, an exhibition consisting of nothing but the gallery lights going on and off excites no such utopian euphoria. It's more like high-brow business as usual. Is this what Creed means us to take from his work? The thought that art's cutting edge is no longer moving forward but going in circles, producing only more or less amusing variations on established precedents? If so, is "The Lights Going On and Off" a critique of contemporary culture, a gesture of despair, or a wake-up call?

I'm not sure what Johnson means about "a critique of contemporary culture" (which culture: pop, high, low?), but there is a good case to be made for "The Lights Going On and Off" as a gesture of despair as well as a wakeup call. A wakeup call for who or what? Art and its initiates, Johnson seems to be saying. (Interestingly, Johnson distinguishes between "most people" and "a few" in his telling of the Klein story; in the Creed version, he seems to be saying that even the "few"--with him as the representative member--find Creed's light weary.)

The idea is a reversal. It's not that the work is so radical that it's upsetting, but that it's a conservative agent for mocking the radical in order to mobilize disgust toward it. (Or to mobilize disgust for art insiders unwilling to see the cliches of radicalism for what they are.) (Note: Creed is a specialist in disgust. The last piece I saw by him before the lamp pieces was his video of people shitting and vomiting.)

Is even that critical project new? I'm not convinced.

But I am, as ever, convinced by Ken Johnson's writing, which always, elegantly, provides momentum in any discussion. Here's the whole review.

This is the second-to-last zone of the magical sphere of Artempo. (Zone I: Palace, Zone II: Bodies in the Basement, Zone III: Veils, Zone IV: Teeming.)

You've just come through the fire of the first floor, which culminates in a Turrell red room, and suddenly something completely different happens. The rooms are white.

The first guide is a 13th-century Chinese Lohan figure seated on the floor, a figure who, in Theravada Buddhism, has crossed over to the other side, and is saved forever. Lining the walls of the room are Roman Opalka's paintings of numbers in light, light gray, so that the canvases appear to be all white until you get close and can see the streams of simple counting. You can also hear the light drone of the artist's voice, counting. It's much like the Kimsooja video of a laundry woman standing still in front of the moving river on the first floor. The room is a spiritual lesson in multiple aesthetic and cultural languages, sure, and it's also pure pleasure to be in.

The next two rooms bring the same rush of pleasure, in completely different syntax. A 17th-century Japanese scroll hangs near a Piero Manzoni calendar collage from 1959 and Enrico Castellani's 1970 white canvas shaped into diamond points. From the ceiling hang two sculptures by Markus Raetz, from 2006, made of metal filaments shaped into simple boxes but continuously changing shape (from one type of box to another) as they turn and twist in silence. You can easily miss them up there, flying quiet. On the floor are four large stones in a row, progressing from round to oblong, by Dominique Stroobant.

Above all that, the palazzo's interior ceiling is ornate, like a series of red diamonds that play with the installation on yet another level.

Through one last door are Thomas Ruff's photograph of stars, an On Kawara date painting, Duchamp's two facing mirrors, and Shozo Shimamoto's gun-shot, two-sided metal panel--in a space with tall, arched windows, like a chapel.

When you get up to what the Italians call the first floor of this palazzo, Artempo explodes. (Lower floors here, here, and here.)

This photo actually doesn't come close to illustrating the heated, crowded, radical weirdness of this floor. Here's another image from the show's PR that tries, but again, fails (also featuring the five curators, with collector Axel Vervoordt second from right).

(The best images I've seen online of the show are in a slide show that ran with Roberta Smith's review--"Among the most strange and powerful exhibitions I have seen"--in the NYT.)

There are several hundred objects on display on this floor, and one James Turrell installation. Placards that act as legends for various corners of the room are splayed on tables and snatched up by visitors (when I was there, visitors were stalking each other for their placards).

The room is long horizontally laid out in front of you as you enter. To the left is a plaster cast of a classical male nude reclining (collection of Mariano Fortuny), and hanging next to it above a desk of drawers with ornate wood inlays, is a large, glowing-green Lucio Fontana slash painting.

Behind that is an installation including a cloud of neon-blue LED lights by a contemporary Japanese artist, a 1611 baroque painting of writhing bodies, and a 1675 ivory carving of Poseidon across from a 10th-century table with elephant skin as its top, the leg bones of a giraffe as its support, and the horns of an antelope as its feet.

That may sound sprawling, but on closer inspection, it's thematically tight. Consider that nearby--the walls are covered in Fortuny's Eastern-Western tapestries, by the way--a Marlene Dumas painting titled Supermodel

faces off with a photograph of the plastic surgery artist, Orlan, and between them hangs Louise Bourgeois's classic bronze double penis-cum-winged creature, Janus in Leather Jacket, from 1968.

^{(See why Bourgeois's fountain at OSP is so ... slight?)}

Also in this same fray is an antique anatomical cast of a woman's body with a baby in the belly but an empty heart cavity, and behind it is a female torso locked into a chastity corset covered by a fig leaf. Not far off is a taxidermied python, and the charred existential-disaster paintings of Alberto Burri.

In a wunderkammern (or wonder cabinet), works of art (including Man Ray's classic The Object to Be Destroyed) do not get pride of place. They're nestled right in with shrunken heads, ancient phallus sculptures, Buddhas, chunks of rock, scientific devices, and oddities like this 19th-century creature:

Mariano Fortuny's own paintings (seen behind the curators in the photo above) lead the way into a side room containing a perfectly installed wall piece called Red Shift (1995) by James Turrell. It's a cut in the wall with a zone of seemingly infinite red light behind it, and visitors were slowly, as if being initiated into something slightly occult, thrusting their arms into the murky red area. I've never seen a Turrell work its magic so thoroughly. It's not a void but a magnetic pole that draws all of the other room's fullness into it while at the same time clearing the way for the ascetic rooms to come.

^{Antonio Corradini's La Puritá, 1720-1725, made of Carrera marble}

We're now on the first floor of the famous Artempo. The ground floor display, including this Hans Bellmer (for you self-confessed Bellmer fans)

was an introduction to the overt themes of the show (body, architecture) and to the mysterious and broken-down vibe of the venue, once the palace of eclectic designer-artist-collector-entrepreneur Mariano Fortuny.

This first floor above the ground floor has only a small exhibition area, limited to only a few works, and the first one you see coming up the stairs is a video projected onto the variegated brick wall by Yael Davids called Face. In it, a young, dark-haired woman sits still while her hair rotates 360 degrees on her head, in a simple action that's nonetheless fully eerie.

One turn to your right from there is the veiled virgin. And one turn to your right from there (after you've finished marveling at the transformation of marble into silk) is this delicate 1906 head by Medardo Rosso emerging from bronze,

set next to a series of digital photographs by Jorge Molder, from 2005, of faces blurred by motion, and light and time.

But it's not until the next floor up that the exhibition's most exhilarating ideas start breaking out. Coming tomorrow ...

But a location that's still on "the dirtiest, smelliest, prostitutest, violentest strip in Seattle," according to the press release sent late last night from Motel organizers D.K. Pan, Liza Keckler, and Mike Min.

Seems Motel #1 got a little too much media attention. More than 1,500 visitors (compared to the expected few hundred) showed up to make it a smashing success! ... and to generate some serious nervousness on the part of the planned host of Motel #2, the Ambassador Inn.

At the last minute, the Ambassador backed out.

But all is not lost: Another motel has stepped in.

Motel organizers aren't saying which one--to be cautious. Instead, here are the instructions to those interested in going to this for-now-anonymous functioning motel and standing outside the window of a single room to watch the solid weekful of performances happening inside (24/7 from September 22 to 28):

Phone 206-782-8872 on Friday 21 September for location details. You can peer through the motel room window from the outside looking in to view the performances at any time during this week. This is a working motel—do NOT bother other occupants. Too many people chit-chattin outside the room and they may decide to kick us out. No more than 5 viewers at any one time. As MOTEL #1 was a whirring maelstrom, MOTEL #2 is a lasered workhorse.

I don't really know what a lasered workhorse is, but the new event sounds like a pain in the ass, and pleasantly illicit. Punishment by voyeurism, or something like that.

All the artists will perform for at least 8 hours--this is an endurance event. And for those who don't want to fool with showing up, the pieces will be broadcast online. Check the Motel site for details.

The claim that I first made Friday hasn't faded with the jet lag. I'm referring to Artempo, an exhibition of objects and experiences, both art and otherwise, on display at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice.

A little background: The Venetian government decided it would create a new modern museum at the Palazzo Fortuny, and Artempo starts things off with a serious bang. The palazzo is a relic best known for its most famous inhabitant, Mariano Fortuny (1871-1949), the fashion designer, painter, photographer, stage designer, and general man-about-the-world who lived in the crumbling-chic inland building for 50 years.

The mere list of artists in the show would make any venue blush--from memory alone, I can name Hans Bellmer, Francis Bacon, Anish Kapoor, Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana, Le Corbusier, Louise Bourgeois, Marisa Merz, Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Ruff, El Anatsui, Man Ray, Yves Klein, James Turrell, Fischli & Weiss, and Cai Guo-Qiang--but the building itself adds to the allure. It has been a place of majesty and of depredation, according to a description in the exhibition catalog, which helps to background the exhibition's themes of excess, absence, and spirituality. You're not imagining, when you look at the faded, pockmarked, and flaking walls, that this isn't your typical historic palazzo. Mariano himself set up shop in the garret,

...as misshapen and wooded as the hold of a ship, as black as a witch's cave, as high as the cupola of a Byzantine basilica. ... Paradoxically, right under his feet, in the palazzo's "noble rooms," which were transformed into residences and hovels, swarmed an afflicted humanity: desperate beggars, the marginalized, the proletariat, and the under-proletariat of a devastated but nevertheless fascinating, indecipherable, hostile, ambiguous, and pandering city. Hundreds of people occupied every room, every inch under the stairs, every step and passageway, every chamber and vestibule ...

(Can you not tell that this was written by an Italian? His name is Giandomenico Romanelli.)

This maybe helps in understanding why the ground floor, where you enter, feels most of all like a dungeon. The exhibition begins fitfully here, with ancient nude fragments and antique anatomical dolls set in some vaguely appealing compare-and-contrast with a bright yellow Francis Bacon, a small photograph of a blubbery woman on a pole by Hans Bellmer, a video by Kimsooja of a washing woman standing perfectly still as the dirty river passes her by (did we see this at the Henry a while back?), and, finally, Anish Kapoor's giant undulating gold reflective form, a piece that induces a pleasant sort of motion sickness conforming to its title, S-Curve. Kapoor's piece seems out of place until you consider its insistence on an awareness of the architecture's effect on the human body, or the architecture as a fellow body joining you on your way up through the show.

In the stairwell up to the next floor, you encounter something stabilizing again, but not too stabilizing: a second-century Zeus facing forward, and in front of it, also facing forward, a rusty and greenish bronze head by Thomas Schütte (from the collection of the artist!), on which only the eyes are shiny, alive, almost slickened by ducts. At this point, it feels like almost anything could be on the second floor. I'll write about what's up there tomorrow.

That was what I kept asking a friend who'd gone with me to the Bridge Motel Saturday night, where the soon-to-be-demolished landmark was full of artists and performers and audiences there to see off the building in style.

Rarely does an art or theater event have such powerful smells. There's nothing abstract or indirect about a smell.

In the rotting rooms of the low-budget paradise that was erected in 1954 for traveling salesmen and this week will be razed to make way for spendy townhouses, I detected: mildew, cherries, spraypaint, sandalwood and nag champa incense, sweat, semen, Elmer's glue, gunpowder, and much, much more, including a mysterious metallic-sweet smell coming, reportedly, from a series of microwaves "cooking a bunch of shit" behind the scenes of the Implied Violence performance.

It was a spectacle of evocation, every untouchably dirty inch of the place not blank, like a hotel wants to be, but unspeakably full of people and events and moments and touches and smells already. The whole installation, organized by D.K. Pan, was an artwork of excessive redolence, and a sense of bulging overfullness powered the night.

I don't mean it was crowded, which I gather was a problem for plenty of people. To me, it seemed appropriate to have to stand in sweaty lines and crush up next to people in order to take in all of this too-muchness. (Note: I'm not particularly practical-minded, and I was there before dark, before things got outrageously overrun.)

For all the painful proximity of the dirty stuff itself--stained carpets, brown pillows, cracked mirrors--the one artwork that was totally distant was C. Davida Ingram's cooking performance, the one I most wanted to see/smell/taste/touch/talk about.

I could only look through the window of the room to see a set table with wine bottles and a bowl of cut cucumbers on it, and behind that, the occasional glimpse of Ingram cooking in the kitchen. A sign on the door said "Private," because Ingram was cooking for groups of pre-assigned people (I'd have signed up, but I was out of town), and they decided whether they wanted their meals private or public. The whole thing was based on an ad Ingram put out that said, "Black woman willing to make your favorite meal. You share the recipe. I prepare. Come hungry." The text of that last sentence splayed on the window expanded the racial implications of the premise into startingly sexual territory, as did the "private" sign on the motel room door. Even without getting in, I loved the piece. (Does anyone care to share what went on inside?)

^{C. Davida Ingram's cooking performance at Motel 1 (all photos by Alice Wheeler)}

I've never seen so many people taking photographs at an art event as I saw at the Bridge Motel (and I just returned from the Venice Photogenic Biennale). What was that about? The best things about the Bridge Motel experience, called Motel 1 because there will be a Motel 2 this week at another location, were not visual.

Sarah Kavage's Ghost Stumps, sculptures of white tree stumps embedded into the carpet in an homage to the site's long past, were lovely but swallowed whole by the jostling event. Much more at home was Kaleb Hagan-Kerr and Erin Spencer's The Darkened Chamber, a dark room that functioned as a camera obscura. It was hot in that camera, and stuffy and smelly, and a man performing behind the wall upside-down so he was projected onto the wall right-side up (and occasionally vice versa) was knocking himself around, in a slapstick and morbid dance. Voices kept saying, "There better not be drugs in there," and "My wife is sick."

Most at home of all the performances was Implied Violence's Come to My Center You Enter the Winter. While I was there, a man and a woman dressed all in gold in a gold room performed episodes written in a list on the wall. The list said things like, "It's very late on the plain in this desolate mountain state," which presumably would trigger something in the performers, something both programmed and improvised, I imagine. During the course of the performance, they appeared to get drunk. At one point, he was spitting thick red blood-looking stuff on her, and then she was on the floor and he was pouring it on her and she was slightly choking and then he wedged his foot into her crotch and pushed her gurgling bloody self around on the disgusting carpet. There were several gunshots around this time, and the wall was stabbed, as were a few golden bags hanging from the ceiling. Oh, and by coincidence, a balding collie walked into the room, checked things out, and walked back out. It was a high point.

A low point was the endless performance of two modern-dance mimeish types wearing crepe-paper hats and looking, as my friend said, like Dexy's Midnight Runners in slow motion as they scaled the facade and slunk around touching people with their crepe paper.

In the parking lot, people were jumping on dusty mattresses, and a white van was parked, rocking a little, and with smoke and the off-center rhythms of Tool coming out of it. It was, of course, called Don't Come A Knockin, by Seattle School, and I heard it involved fried chicken, but I didn't see that for myself. Neither did I see the campfire built by Jack Daws and Faith Ramos, who tore the roof of their room open to the sky and played country music along with the fire. I wish I had.

It was all there: the psychotic (Implied Violence), the nostalgic (the campfire), the cheap and playful (Seattle School), the political (Come Hungry), the creepy (a black-lit room outfitted in webs to crawl around in by Studio IoUP), and the slightly mad (the camera obscura performer). Adding to that was Pan's own installation in Room #7 at the top of the stairs in the corner, a room painted a painfully bright color red and turned into a beach of salt. Clothing and notes were buried in the salt, including a letter to an inmate at King County Jail and a note to a drug addict. Where did these come from? I didn't know, but since Pan has been manager at the hotel for a year, I didn't think it was far-fetched to conclude they might be documents of the real past. "What was yours about? Mine was about pills," one woman asked another, both holding notes they'd pulled from within the salt. "Really? Mine was, like, somebody lost."

It all made me wish they were going to burn it down rather than tear it down.

Motel 2: I'll be there.

And tomorrow: the previously scheduled programming of Part 2 of "Artempo" from Venice.

At least that's what I'm calling it until I come across something better. It was "Artempo" (forgive the cheesy name) at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. The old palazzo is crumbling and grand, Miss Havisham-style, and the exhibition of painting, sculpture, video, photograhy, shrunken heads, devotional objects, corals and minerals, scientific devices, installations, and many, many other, well, things, spans the building's four floors.

Each floor is quite different in architecture and light, and the exhibition has a different character on each floor. The mashing up of all that artistic, scientific, and religious material--stuff, for lack of a better word--sounds tedious, like it would level everything to the blank relativism of anthropological looking, but instead it is absolutely, absolutely magical.

More on it on Monday morning, but for now, this Friday afternoon, I'll just leave you with an intro to the show's hundreds and hundreds of lasting images.

^{The exterior of Palazzo Fortuny with Ghanian artist El Anatsui's tapestry of recycled metal and copper wire.}

^{A closeup of the tapestry.}

^{A view of one of the rooms, featuring an elephant's ear on the right and a Lucio Fontana painting on the left. (Just out of view on the left is a stool by Le Corbusier.)}

This morning I'm on my way to check out the Muenster Sculpture Project, the Venice Biennale, and Documenta 12. I'll be back with stories and images to share after Sept. 13.

But first, I want to put in a plug for a particularly good First Thursday that I'll be sorry to miss next week.

Here's a teaser of one show: Scott Fife at Platform Gallery. Here's Fife's Quicktime video of "making Lionel Hampton." The video, in strange not-slow motion, documents the creation of a recent sculpture of the legendary jazzman in cardboard, glue, and screws, with the artist eerily erased.

And there it goes, strictly as an investment.

The opening of the Olympic Sculpture Park was (and, one hopes, will continue to be) a great opportunity to talk about sculpture.

For two weeks in a row, I got together with an awesome crew--the artists Tivon Rice, Susie Lee, and Mike Magrath, and the writer/curator Suzanne Beal--and we sat around a table, early in the morning, and figured some things out. For instance, we found ourselves arguing for the visible death of individual sculptures as a way of allowing them to fully live.

The podcast of the second gathering (you can just click and listen) hits a climax when we start talking about Terri Schiavo's shadow-life, Joseph Beuys's dried bits of fat, and Mark Dion's terrarium.

Graves: The aura of the object, the smell of the fat--where is the smell of the fat in this piece (by Dion)? Magrath: It's in the mist. It's in the smell of the tree. It has to be the energy that is in the system. ... Lee: When you talk about decaying materials, the aura is actually the viewer's projection of the end--that's the potent part. When you look at something that is living, you automatically have to assume and project the end. Beal: I agree with that completely, and I think it would be very interesting if we could just commit ourselves to saying, "This exists as it is right now with this process of decay--let it decay, let it become dust or nothingness within the box and let's just live with the memory of what it was."

Listen.

Now, just last night, Olga Koumoundouros's A Roof Upended--a sculptural installation based on death, decay, sustenance, and ideas of progress--opened at Open Satellite.

Making the installation involved raiding an abandoned and crumbling suburban shack just around the corner from the new high-rise residential tower that houses the gallery, as well as adapting the residential tower's slogan, "Beyond Just Living," into the jabbing phrase "Beyond Living Just."

In a conversation last week before the opening, Koumoundouros describes how her socially critical practice, based in the ever-problematic American dream, "breaks in" the Open Satellite program:

Koumoundouros: I was raised by my grandparents who were Greek immigrants. My grandfather had a very successful (life) and definitely moved up in class, but also, on his death bed, wished he had never left, knew how much he gave up. So what do you do with that?

Listen.

A few weeks ago, Abigail Guay gave a little criticism to the juried group show Up & Now at Photographic Center Northwest. (It closes tomorrow, Aug. 30).

Guay was being generous. It's a show of aggressive calculation. Almost every photograph seems to intend either to be elusive or revelatory, with largely flat or overstated results. Emptiness can be derived from too much effort as easily as from too little. In photography, it's always a balance.

The first images you encounter in the gallery are droll portents of the failure to connect. They're three shots of Chelsea galleries from a series of 14 photographs by Andy Freeberg called Sentry: Gallery Desks in Chelsea.

In each one, Freeberg entered a gallery and found an attendant sitting behind a high desk, almost entirely obscured. Given that you could probably get this shot in almost any gallery if you stand at the right distance from the desk, Freeberg's series is not an entirely fair critique of gallery culture--but it makes its case persuasively, providing good ammo for anyone who's ever felt excluded in a gallery (and who hasn't?). The photographer seems to be standing outside the centers of art looking in, a place photography held for decades before it was accepted as a fine art form. (Digital prints are still frowned upon; something always is.)

Here's Pace Wildenstein:

Here's Metro Pictures:

Here's Cheim & Reid:

And here's my favorite portrait in the series, taken at Andrea Rosen (it just seems slightly more psychotic than the rest):

If I were to pick a city for a weekend trip this fall, it would be San Francisco, where SFMOMA has big doses of single artists planned. There's the traveling Jeff Wall retrospective, which was worth the 20-dollar entry fee I paid earlier this year just to stand in front of and mentally riff off of this at MoMA in New York:

^{Picture for Women, 1979}

There's also Douglas Gordon's Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now. To be seen on monitors, some with headphones, others run silently and all simultaneously. (should be a show easy to take in in an afternoon, don't you think?), and in the vaunted dead-artist spot comes the seminal Joseph Cornell retrospective, Navigating the Imagination, in its only West Coast stop.

And then there's the big, first-ever American Olafur Eliasson survey, called Take Your Time, with works dating back to 1993 and two new major pieces. One of those is a kaleidoscopic tunnel that will envelop the museum's death-defying internal steel truss bridge, and the other is the transformation of a hydrogen-powered BMW race car. The car will be coated in steel mesh, stainless steel, and ice--and displayed in a room-sized freezer. (Transformed cars are a theme this fall--Liz Cohen's working on finishing up the car in Bodywork.)

Artforum.com has a description of the Süddeutsche Zeitung's visit to Eliasson's Berlin studio, which is busy with preparations for the show. In an interview, Eliasson laid out his utopian anti-utopian philosophy more clearly than I've heard him do before (even in that New Yorker piece last November).

"My observation is that the artistic avant-garde, with its visions, excluded itself from society," said the artist. In contrast to the "non-places" of modernist utopian visions, Eliasson's studio--which employs thirty people, including twelve architects--is more realistic. "My laboratory is not a satellite of society. It's feasible; there's a real economy and material that you can put your hands on."

Since Eliasson wants art to have an integrated function in society, his studio shies away from commercial fetishism. "So that art finds its place in the world today," says Eliasson, "it must leave ideas of exclusivity and egoism behind—it must be inclusive and recognize causalities. That sounds incredibly holistic, but it's not meant like that. My last book was called Your Commitment Has Consequences. That's the way I want to operate my studio. It's a part of our time."

Alex Schweder, this year's winner of the Genius Award in visual art, is a gifted thinker. He doesn't have a blog all his own, but he writes regularly on MSN's Open for design (a blog run by Nate Lippens and Peter Gaucys).

Recently he went on a ride through desire--is it driven by a positive force or by lack? how does it dissolve boundaries between thought and object?

About a month ago, he wrote a nice little piece about airports, which has me thinking, since I'll be flying to Europe Friday (I won't be on Slog) to do the the "Grand Tour" of Documenta, the Muenster Sculpture Project, and the Venice Biennale.

Here's the nugget:

Airports have conflated themselves with malls and art museums to pacify the boredom of their visitors. For the most part, this has worked. As long as the duration any individual spends in this places of passage is only a few hours their needs can be met.

Things break down, though, after a few hours. It seems that at least once a year there is a system failure due to weather or terror that makes our experience of airports last too long and grow stale. Passengers in waiting experience the spaces for hours. After eating what they can, looking through items for purchase, and viewed the publicly funded works of art, they get restless and frustrated. In the end these places that facilitate flow fail at stasis.

With hope of eliminating this frustration, I suggest rethinking the art within these walls. Currently seen as entertainment, these brightly colored works often rub through too many committees and [lose] any edge they might have had. If art could be rethought as action rather than object, stranded passengers would receive instructions for reoccupation of the space they are stuck in that might change both their current malaise and perception of how buildings work.

Imagine what would happen to air travel if Alex Schweder designed airports, or even just the art in them. Have you been to the convention center bathrooms in Tacoma?

Everybody's been talking about the artist departures at Howard House, a Pioneer Square gallery that's at the center of the art scene in the city. I caught up with Billy Howard, founder and owner of the gallery, on Wednesday.

This will be in next week's paper; here's a preview:

Emerging artists are hot. Veteran artists are eminent. The ones in the middle, well, they dangle and suffer. The same goes for galleries.

Howard House, which opened 10 years ago in July, was once the pretty young thing of Seattle galleries. Billy Howard started it in his house, hence the name, and before long it became the hub for young Seattle artists, from Dan Webb, Mark Takamichi Miller, and Robert Yoder to Joseph Park, Leo Saul Berk, and Victoria Haven.

Fast forward to this summer. Lawrimore Project, the ambitious next-generation gallery that’s been giving Howard House a run for its money, finishes its first year. Howard’s almost 5-month-old daughter gets her first tooth; his nearly 2-year-old son develops an insane enthusiasm for climbing. And Howard House loses five of its core Seattle artists: Webb, Haven, Alex Schweder, Park, and Berk.

They left dissatisfied with Howard’s service, he said.

“I guess that I have inadequacies, but it’s not because I don’t try,” Howard told me. “For some of these artists, their work is getting out there, and I don’t know, I couldn’t do anything more. If what I was doing isn’t enough, then that’s a high bar. I’m also an emotional person. There might be someone cooler out there.”

The artists declined to comment on specifics, or were not immediately available for comment.

But if the bar of artists' expectations has been raised, there can be little mystery as to why: Lawrimore Project and the start of Aqua Art Miami in 2005 (which Howard participates in). “I think Scott is really driving the dialogue in a very interesting way,” Howard said. “It’s great to be challenged. I mean, looking at what Scott’s doing and a few other galleries, I think that we’re a little more tame.”

Howard admits that starting a family has demanded that he pay more attention to the bottom line. He also says he loves the same kind of work as ever: often, stuff that’s hard to sell (he cites Sean Duffy’s recent CD-player-mobile installation as an example). He says some of the artists left prematurely.

“There are changes coming to the gallery that I can’t talk about,” he said.

Whatever the situations between Howard and his artists, a renewed fighting spirit on his part is good news for Seattle art. These past two years haven’t been easy, Howard says.

“It’s like a long love story,” he said. “There’s a natural maturation, and definite points where you get burnt out. I just said to somebody recently, ‘It could be the 7-year itch.’ It’s time to make adjustments, but by the same token, there’s the core strength of the gallery.”

As we were getting off the phone, his son, Ari, took a spill.

“See what happens? You fall,” Howard told him, sanguinely. “But you’re OK, aren’t you?”

OK, these two podcasts aren't with artists, but I'm keeping this title anyway as my weekly recommendation to listen to other people's words instead of mine.

If you're new to this, I do a weekly podcast called In/Visible. (You simply click, and you can listen. I've done 31 of them now.)

New this week is a conversation with Ken Allan, an art historian relatively new to Seattle (and to Seattle University) from LA. Old this week--and recommended as accompaniment--is a conversation with Scott Lawrimore, Seattle's newest art dealer, from last November. These are the people you won't ever get to hear at an artist lecture or a curators' talk.

Allan's area of specialty is postwar Los Angeles--the birth of the city as an art destination, really. (He's my latest find in the LA-comes-to-Seattle category, including curator Michael Darling of Seattle Art Museum [formerly of the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA] and Olga Koumoundouros [the artist inaugurating Open Satellite in Bellevue].)

How was LA built? Was LA then like Seattle now? Allan is a thoughtful guy (and a fan of Wallace Berman, seen below in a self-portrait).

Here is some of what he had to say:

(Walter) Hopps was about exposing people to the fact that great abstract painting was going on in San Fransisco, and some there in LA. So he created this--he was trying to find a venue for this show and ended up renting a merry-go-round space on the old Santa Monica pier. He installed the work in this merry-go-round building with jazz playing.

What's so great about Scott Lawrimore and the Lawrimore Project is that he seems to be forging a path to both cultivate a community here, and to try to get in dialogue both nationally and internationally.

Listen here.

That last bit makes a nice segue into a rainy November morning with Lawrimore. If it is possibly that anyone hasn't heard already, Lawrimore Project opened last summer and since then has done much to deserve attention. The gallery has hosted shows, talks, performances, and brunches.

What Allan says impresses him almost the most about Lawrimore's project is the thinking and talking that goes on slightly under the radar with Lawrimore, and I'd have to agree. When Allan and I got together earlier this week, Allan had just come from a weekly Art Klatch hosted by Lawrimore at Cafe Presse (Tuesday mornings at 7 am, open to anyone). Topics range, baguettes are chewy.

Here is some of what Lawrimore says:

Me: Why do you mistrust the eye? Lawrimore: I don't mistrust the eye. Me: You completely do! Lawrimore: Oh, well, I need an example of what it is I have shown at the gallery that does not have eye appeal. ... I admit that, unfortunately, the visual arts are still quite visual ... In reference to the Jupiter Art Fair (in Portland), 90 percent of the art there was visually driven and it ended there and there wasn't much going on behind it.

The moment of a sale in a gallery, when you're with a client and they're looking at an object, that's one thing. But I think beyond that the strength of placing work and building collections is in the dialogue that happens between those times where we're sitting in the office chatting about what what we just saw somewhere else at another gallery or in a magazine or at auction, and I start to get an idea about what it is they're collecting and why it is they're collecting this and not that.

Listen here.