As a challenge to this:

Art builds this:

^{Cameron Martin's painting Untitled (CM054) (1999). (Martin curated Neonoir, which I saw this afternoon at Howard House. More on that in next week's print edition.)}

I walked by the other day, and there it was for the first time: Vermillion, a new art gallery in Capitol Hill, featuring as its first show Bad People Have to Eat Too, a series of photographs by Portland ad man Jim Riswold.

Riswold's whole shtick--and his work--is hit or miss for me. He belittles dictators literally, by making photographs of them as dolls in toy settings. The titles are things like, Kim Jong Il Is a Big Sucker!, Chairman Mao Is a Big Yummy Yellow Cookie, and Adolf 'n' Eva's Wedding Cake, and they're accompanied by labels describing unpleasant and amusing relevant facts (about the appetites of Hitler's deputies, for instance, or the origins of the Caesar salad).

(And according to a label on Riswold's photograph of a skull made of colored sprinkles, titled Make Believe Damien Hirst For the Love of God, Riswold is working not only on dictators but also on artists in a forthcoming series called Make Believe Artist.)

I'd love to show you images of the photographs directly, but they aren't movable from Riswold's web site. But in shots from gallerist Diana Adams's Flickr site of the opening, the gallery's plentiful wall space is in full evidence. Some of Riswold's installations--of photographs of chocolate-frosted cupcakes decorated with hammer-and-sickles (on the right in the image below)--climb all the way up the double-height space.

Adams e-mailed this about the gallery:

I'm going to focus on narrative and representational artists in all mediums. I have a soft spot for people who have worked in editorial, advertising, book illustration, comics and graphic design. I'll touch on some urban contemporary, pop-surrealism, and contemporary figurative work.

Some of the artists she wants to show are Zohar Lazar, Hope Gangloff, 14, Joe Sorren, Lyle Motley, and Joel Dugan.

I got a sneak preview last Friday of Portland-based sculptor Mike Rathbun's giant, eye-popping installation Geographical Coordinates: N47°36.878’ W122°20.788’. It opens at Suyama Space September 10. [UPDATE: The artist has decided to drop "Geographical Coordinates" from the title. And while the show opens September 10, there is a public reception at the gallery September 7 at 5 pm and an artist talk at noon September 8.]

Since 1995, when Rathbun made a 70-mile solo voyage across Lake Superior in a handmade sailboat, he has been making objects titled by their geographical coordinates. (This one refers, for instance, to the precise location of Suyama Space.)

It's a plane that rests (having crashed?) on a floor of waves, in a forest of nettles that extends all the way to the ceiling. The gallery is hoping to find a way to let people walk inside the installation despite its steep edges and the pointy black thorns, which would be ideal, because navigating the wavy floor with your flat feet is transporting.

It facilitates the effect Rathbun has said he's going for, of creating an experience that's specific to a place and time, but senseless and dislocated and larger, too, like a dream. Here's a passage from his faculty page at Lewis & Clark College, where he teaches:

I am trying to find Epiphanies. These are moments when for reasons that I can not explain, I seem to be connected to something outside of myself. This happens when a set of circumstances arise and are triggered by something: a song, a view, an idea. I then feel an emotional swell that is so profound that it becomes physical. I experience a moment of clarity; clarity about what I don't know. It is a glimpse of something that seems to be the most important thing! It is like something that is up and just to the right of my vision and when I turn in that direction it seems to move and keep pace with my turning. Then another set of circumstances cloud it and it is gone. The feeling lingers and leaves me with a hope and a feeling that it is something bigger than I am. It is like waking from a dream. The longer I am awake the less I remember, and the more I try to remember the less sense it makes. But, even after the specifics of the dream are gone, the way it made me feel can last for a very long time. What is that thing, that clarity?

In the center of Seattle artist Gary Hill's Glass Onion (seen above, at 911 Media Arts Center through Sept 15)--if it could be said to have a center--is a monitor on the floor.

It is surrounded by three concentric rectangles, two of speakers on the floor, and a third, the outermost layer, of upright monitors where images and text appear. The text, a complex sentence having to do with "the frame of reference within a rectangle," is heard in a scrolling incantation that moves around the speakers and also crawls across the bottom of the monitors.

Although the installation seems designed to undermine the traditional notion of a kernel of pure meaning at the center of something, the monitor in the center of the room does feel like the center, or the epicenter, or the center of the episode of Glass Onion.

Mounted on the ceiling directly above the monitor is a camera with an automatic zoom. As it continually self-corrects in zooming in on the monitor, the rectangles that appear on the monitor keep growing smaller and smaller, and the camera approaches something like maximum self-consciousness. It freaks out, and basically pulls back out to screen size and starts over. The images this generates are beautiful and mind-blowing."It's as though, staring itself in the eye until all surfaces catastrophize, the image can no longer hold the information of its pure reflection," the poet George Quasha wrote in a prose piece that goes along with the installation, which was first seen in Seattle at and/or, the predecessor of 911 Media Arts, in 1981. "In what sense can the mind monitor its own activity? Does it know itself only in bouncing back from an other? Can it think directly and what happens when it tries?"

You the visitor are a part of this whole thing, too, because the installation picks up your presence, too, and circulates your image around the room. It begins to feel like a closed system, this rectangle, like what is inside this rectangle is an endless task--figuring out the words, following the images, watching the camera frustrate itself, finding your place.

If you saw this piece in 1981, it's worth revisiting. Hill entirely reworked the presentation to make it digital. Maybe he'll do a podcast with me to explain how and talk more about Glass Onion (which seems to me superior to--and gloriously nerdier than--the piece of his on view at SAM, House of Cards).

Two other typically mind-mining pieces of Hill's are on view at 911 Media Arts Center (open Monday through Friday noon to 6) in a show curated by new executive director Misha Neininger: Clover (1994, top image below), a quadrupling of a man walking in the forest; and Twofold (Goats and Sheep) (1995/2002), a doubling of a man signing language and speaking (so, a multiple multiplying). Three works of another artist would be a small number; with Hill, they're an afternoon.

If these intrigue, go tomorrow to the Henry Art Gallery and descend the stairs into the lower floor, where Hill's early two-channel video installation, Facing Faces (1996), continues the mindplay. It's one man on two screens--one is always looking at the other.

Until about 20 minutes ago, there was some question whether the fourth installment of Susan Robb's toobs--written about Jen Graves last month here--was going to happen today. (The piece is solar-powered. Gotta have sun.)

Robb just made the call: There is enough sun. It's on. It'll be up at Volunteer Park from noon to 6 pm today. It's free. Pack a picnic.

A preview:

^{The City by Marla Olmstead}

So a 4-year-old cranks out big abstract paintings, some people buy them for thousands of dollars, other people gloat about the sham of modern art, and, inevitably, doubt is raised over whether the 4-year-old is getting help on her paintings from one of her parents. Sounds simple enough, and like something that has happened plenty of times before.

But Amir Bar-Lev's new documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, is a mystery. (It will open this fall in Seattle; I saw an early screening today.) Bar-Lev travels so far into the center of the situation that he makes the human lust for "real" art--especially in a context where everybody declares that they know nothing about art--seem suspect, vain, and almost criminal, while at the same time utterly natural.

The film closes with a Bob Dylan song:

Someday, everything is gonna be different, when I paint my masterpiece.

Or, everything is gonna be different when you find a masterpiece, connect with it, and somehow make it yours, either by buying it or simply recognizing it, seeing it, and having it see you. Doesn't everybody feel that way at least a little bit?

The toddler's name is Marla Olmstead. She lives in Binghamton, N.Y., with her brother Zane, who is two years younger than she is, and her parents, Laura, a dental assistant, and Mark, an amateur painter and night manager at a Frito-Lay factory.

The first note I made in my notebook was about Marla's art dealer, Anthony Brunelli. He introduced the family by describing every member as "perfect," especially Marla and Zane, who "could be in Gap ads."

Brunelli is probably the most unsavory character in the film. But he is the most revealing, too. Through all the twists and family dynamics--according to that footage, it looks like Marla made that painting, but according to this footage, it looks like she didn't, but ...--Brunelli looms in the background. He extols Marla's genius on "60 Minutes" and praises the beauty of her paintings to his clients.

But he also divulges, when he's exhausted of the publicity and when sales have slowed down because of the questioning, that he doesn't like modern art. That he thinks it's a "scam." That it's only through marketing that abstract art gains meaning. (Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times comes damn close to agreeing with Brunelli on this point, making the analogy to the relationship between Jackson Pollock's raging persona and his wild paintings.)

Of course, by that logic, then, Brunelli is in the middle of perpetrating his own scam: selling Marla instead of the paintings. But Brunelli reveals more. We see him making his own photorealistic paintings, spending hours on details that the art world will not appreciate.

With Marla, "now, finally, I've got a way in," Brunelli says.

The tensions between husband and wife, toddler and camera, are gripping. And there are deliciously painful sequences involving stereotypically clueless, Humvee-driving rich collectors that serve as reminders that, like laws, you don't want to see how the art market is made. Or maybe you do.

By the end of the film, the biggest question is not about whether Marla has made the paintings alone, but whether the documentarian, Bar-Lev, will reveal to the family that he has his doubts. He so badly wants to believe, but he can't get Marla making a painting from start to finish, and that missing footage becomes the magnetic black hole at the center of the movie. It's the hole at the center of art, too--what exactly is in there, and why does it have such sway over us? When is it real, and when is it bullshit? What is it made of? Can it even be caught on film?

When the movie comes, watch it. It's terrific.

This week marks the occasion of my 30th podcast with artists, dealers, curators, and collectors. In case you're new to this, the podcast is called In/Visible, it's accessible to anyone who's capable of reading Slog (you just click and it plays), and it means you get to hear people in art speak for themselves instead of being filtered through the likes of me.

In honor of the 30th installation--something about 30 feels like a substantial archive--I'm going to start recommending old podcasts every week at the same time as I steer you to the new ones.

New this week is the artist trio PDL, those three guys (Jason Pucinelli, Jed Dunkerley, and Greg Lundgren) who started out working together as, like, "miniature doppelgängers" of the artist trio SBC, and graduated into ... well, you'll see.

Here's a taste of what they talked about all locked up in the Stranger's recording "studio" (a conference room with a quite heavy stained-glass door).

You gotta start somewhere. If you can't be kings of a tiny world, you're never gonna make it in the medium-sized world.

I do believe when you take something out into a public environment and drop it on the ground or glue it to a wall or chain it to a post, it's not yours anymore. Don't expect to get it back.

If you put a chair in the grass at the Olympic Sculpture Park, is it a sculpture?

Listen here.

Alex Schweder is this year's Stranger Genius Award winner for visual art, and his work is anxious and physical and strange and gorgeous. His podcast was last November, only the third one in the series. Here's where he went with it:

How do you eat from a vertical surface, how do you construct a wall as edible?

Where we are cleaning ourselves, while we are making ourselves perfect, when we are sloughing off those parts of our body that are time-based, that point to us as objects in time, that's where a kind of exchange happens between bodies and buildings. When we use a toilet or use a urinal or use a sink, we're leaving parts of our body, we're putting parts of our body into the building.

Listen here.

^{The City by Marla Olmstead}

So a 4-year-old cranks out big abstract paintings, some people buy them for thousands of dollars, other people gloat about the sham of modern art, and, inevitably, doubt is raised over whether the 4-year-old is getting help on her paintings from one of her parents. Sounds simple enough, and like something that has happened plenty of times before.

But Amir Bar-Lev's new documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, is a mystery. (It will open this fall in Seattle; I saw an early screening today.) Bar-Lev travels so far into the center of the situation that he makes the human lust for "real" art--especially in a context where everybody declares that they know nothing about art--seem suspect, vain, and almost criminal, while at the same time utterly natural.

The film closes with a Bob Dylan song:

Someday, everything is gonna be different, when I paint my masterpiece.

Or, everything is gonna be different when you find a masterpiece, connect with it, and somehow make it yours, either by buying it or simply recognizing it, seeing it, and having it see you. Doesn't everybody feel that way at least a little bit?

The toddler's name is Marla Olmstead. She lives in Binghamton, N.Y., with her brother Zane, who is two years younger than she is, and her parents, Laura, a dental assistant, and Mark, an amateur painter and night manager at a Frito-Lay factory.

The first note I made in my notebook was about Marla's art dealer, Anthony Brunelli. He introduced the family by describing every member as "perfect," especially Marla and Zane, who "could be in Gap ads."

Brunelli is probably the most unsavory character in the film. But he is the most revealing, too. Through all the twists and family dynamics--according to that footage, it looks like Marla made that painting, but according to this footage, it looks like she didn't, but ...--Brunelli looms in the background. He extols Marla's genius on "60 Minutes" and praises the beauty of her paintings to his clients.

But he also divulges, when he's exhausted of the publicity and when sales have slowed down because of the questioning, that he doesn't like modern art. That he thinks it's a "scam." That it's only through marketing that abstract art gains meaning. (Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times comes damn close to agreeing with Brunelli on this point, making the analogy to the relationship between Jackson Pollock's raging persona and his wild paintings.)

Of course, by that logic, then, Brunelli is in the middle of perpetrating his own scam: selling Marla instead of the paintings. But Brunelli reveals more. We see him making his own photorealistic paintings, spending hours on details that the art world will not appreciate.

With Marla, "now, finally, I've got a way in," Brunelli says.

The tensions between husband and wife, toddler and camera, are gripping. And there are deliciously painful sequences involving stereotypically clueless, Humvee-driving rich collectors that serve as reminders that, like laws, you don't want to see how the art market is made. Or maybe you do.

By the end of the film, the biggest question is not about whether Marla has made the paintings alone, but whether the documentarian, Bar-Lev, will reveal to the family that he has his doubts. He so badly wants to believe, but he can't get Marla making a painting from start to finish, and that missing footage becomes the magnetic black hole at the center of the movie. It's the hole at the center of art, too--what exactly is in there, and why does it have such sway over us? When is it real, and when is it bullshit? What is it made of? Can it even be caught on film?

When the movie comes, watch it. It's terrific.

From the Guardian comes the news that a book of visual art by the young Sylvia Plath (she gave it up at age 20) is to be published in October.

(Via ArtsJournal.)

That's the title of the short essay by the artists Stanya Kahn and Harry (Harriet) Dodge in last November's Modern Painters about their 25-minute video Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out. I was bowled over by it in the Hammer Museum's show Eden's Edge, and for inexplicable reasons forgot to mention it in my column this week on LA.

That's Kahn. Her character wears a Viking helmet and a green polkadotted dress, and carries a big foam Swiss cheese. Dodge is behind the camera.

At the start of the video, Kahn appears to have suffered some kind of trauma--has she just gotten off work at the Medieval Times, after a particularly medieval shift?--and she gets defensive when the camera trains on her.

But soon, she's leading a tour of mostly deserted public spaces in LA, promising the filmmaker places where there's "action," surmising that the filmmaker is doing a sweep of the city for Rodney King-style abuses of power.

No action ensues. Instead, this mad, possibly divine, seemingly homeless Valkyrie regales the filmmaker with stories about her life. There was the time when a Vietnam vet got all PTSD in her backyard, or the time she saw her mother's boyfriend get stabbed, or the other time she walked on water. "You should have been there for that" is her goofy catchphrase.

The video is hilarious and disturbing, and all of its parts are open to interpretation. What does the filmmaker want? What happened to the Valkyrie? Where is everybody in LA? How are the distant wars in Iraq and Afghanistan connected to this warrior?

In another Kahn/Dodge video also on view at the Hammer, parents and a child play together at home--all wearing neon detainee masks with smiley faces on them. The result, again, is hysterical, in both the comedic and the pathological senses of the word. It's torture refashioned as slapstick with a veneer of cheesy horror films.

Count me a major fan of these two women. I can't wait to see what they do next.

"Even the physical history is evaporating, so that soon, you won't be able to tell what this was," Seattle artist Victoria Haven tells the camera in the 15-minute documentary "Heart & Sold," about Paul Allen's rapid gentrification of South Lake Union. "It's just gonna be a big shopping mall."

Haven used to live in South Lake Union, where once there was inexpensive housing. She also had a studio there; she still has one, but she's there on a month-by-month basis depending on the whims of the landowners. CoCA has gone, ConWorks has gone. Only 911 Media Arts (a partner in producing this film), the Wright Exhibition Space, and a handful of commercial galleries remain.

Vital 5 Gallery owner Greg Lundgren points out that it's not as simple as Paul Allen versus Art, but the melancholic film, made by Faith Ramos, Andy Royer, and Arash Shiva, contests that view. (I found out about the movie at PORT, thanks to Jeff Jahn.)

Paul Allen's company, Vulcan, refused to comment for the film. Worst is the poor representative of the mayor's office who was dispatched to share these drab sentiments:

"The mayor has said that he isn't so certain that, you know, putting skyscrapers right across the street from such a fantastic park is such a great idea, but he is willing to listen to what the neighborhood has to say, so the neighborhood is going to be having that discussion," he says, concluding: "The city will be listening, and the developers have largely been very good partners to work with, both for the city and for the community."

Susan Robb's creepy, beautiful, black macro-follicles--she calls them Toobs--will be doing their thing at Volunteer Park this Friday from noon to 6 pm. I haven't seen the Toobs yet, but word is they are amazing. (If you're just joining us, Robb took home a Stranger Genius Award in 2003.)

This installment is the fourth Robb has done of this work. It's called Warmth, Giant Black Toobs no.4. Lawrimore Project--the gallery that represents Robb--will be providing snacks, but you are encouraged to bring blankets and whatever food you like and make a picnic out of it. How could you not? The video alone--and there's no way a video can capture what it's actually like--is transfixing:

If it's overcast on Friday, Warmth, Giant Black Toobs no.4 will be postponed. Because the work is solar powered. Check Slog Friday morning to see if it's still on.

Modern Art Notes has the word this morning that the National Gallery of Art is sucking up to a Seattle collector. He also points out, humorously, that the last time this happened, it didn't exactly pay off for the DC institution.

MAN questions the exhibition itself, devoted to the collection of Robert E. Jackson, described as "an analyst for a large global asset management company" in Seattle. My question is, who is Robert E. Jackson? I haven't heard of him and I'm not finding out much about him online. Enlighten me?

I was disheartened earlier today to receive an announcement that the great little art space, McLeod Residence (I wrote about it here), sent to its members yesterday:

This is a difficult email to write, but we owe it to our members to be transparent about our situation. Simply put, McLeod Residence is in big trouble, as in financial trouble. The short story is, we're running out of money. Our initial personal and angel investments are dwindling, and due to circumstances that have not allowed us to fully implement our business plan, our revenue hasn't yet caught up to costs. McLeod Residence will have to close its doors unless we are able to raise a hefty amount of cash on the order of $40-$50,000 and quick.

The problem, according to the letter, has been the discovery that McLeod Residence needs to do serious work on its 100-year-old building in order to bring it up to code to get a liquor license--at which point, the sales of drinks are intended to support the art.

I called Lele and Buster McLeod immediately, and talked to Lele, who informed me that the notice was old news--and that everything was going to be fine with McLeod Residence.

"We have some very nice friends," she said. "We raised the money, yes."

The McLeods sent another notice to members this afternoon, updating them as well. It was a little less emphatic about having raised the money, but indicated that things were looking up.

Yesterday we sent an email to our members to alert them of a financial crisis caused by unforeseen (and therefore unbudgeted) building construction expenses. We wanted to search for investors from within our base before we widened the net. We received a tremendous response from our members and are currently in talks to secure new business partners. We are feeling very positive about the future of McLeod Residence and incredibly grateful to our generous members who answered our call. McLeod Residence is committed to its mission to be a home for art, technology and collaboration. We will follow up with everyone who responded with offers to help within the next couple days.

Godspeed, McLeod!

For anyone who loves art, it has, in the past few years alone, become easy to love L.A. I happened to be down there last weekend, thinking about Andrea Zittel and the art of the West Coast, and I found plenty to consider.

L.A. owns sculpture. This was the entire point of the Thing show at the Hammer Museum at UCLA in 2005,

^{A Touching Moment (Tooting My Own Horn) (2005) by Nathan Mabry}

but last weekend there were other sculptors lurking there, too. In Eden's Edge, Gary Garrels's show of 15 L.A. artists at the Hammer, I was stopped in my tracks by Anna Sew Hoy's fired ceramic hives, draped in jewelry, feathers, and other detritus ("feathers are everywhere in L.A. lately," noted fellow art writer Jori Finkel). They are baroque, sciencey, glam, funk: on fire. (More feathers: Elliott Hundley, Liz Craft.)

^{Dark Cloud Version II (2006) by Anna Sew Hoy}

^{Black Noir (detail) by Anna Sew Hoy}

^{Ballad of the Hippie (2003) by Liz Craft}

The handful of Matthew Monahan's sculptures and drawings at the Hammer mystified me, but over at LA MOCA, his solo show was like a West Coast, contemporary version of the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum in New York: works for the ages on war and mythical subjects, in a space aptly flooded with light. Monahan's Janus-like figurative columns and his drawings of faces on paper, crumpled and mounted on pedestals made of Sheetrock (one owned by the kingly Michael Ovitz), are contemporary ruins and preemptively toppled monuments.

Making the rounds, I encountered much more than just sculpture worth recommending: video, photographs, and a text piece from artist-writer-activist Allan Sekula's Shipwreck and Workers (a version of which is also at Documenta) at Christopher Grimes; Chen Xiaoyun's arresting video Lash, in an impromptu back-room screening from Christian Haye, founder of MC Gallery and New York's Project Gallery;

^Lash

and, at Susanne Vielmetter, Allie Bogle's roomful of movie snow that feels like cool gelatinous tapioca between the toes, and Timothy Tompkins's still-life paintings of marked-down leftover items at department stores.

^{Target Still Life - Spring (after Chardin) (2004) by Timothy Tompkins}

I missed Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (it closed July 16 and will be coming to the Vancouver Art Gallery in October 2008), but made Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Suzy Lake 1972—1978, curated by Finkel at Santa Monica Museum of Art. Antin, Lake, and Hershman, all influences on Cindy Sherman and working just before she began her film stills series, are, compared to Sherman, more haunting, funny, and powerfully weird. Not to mention overlooked.

^{Portrait of the King (1972) by Eleanor Antin}

At the Dan Flavin retrospective (at Los Angeles County Museum of Art), I found myself totally reconsidering his reputation as a minimalist. I left reeling. What pathos. Two works stand out: the portrait-like 1962 icon V (Coran's Broadway Flesh) and, in a dark, dead-end room, his blood-red 1966 monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death). I left that room to avoid breaking down in tears.

^{icon V (Coran's Broadway Flesh)}

Sometimes artists stick to one subject their entire lives. Other times, subjects seem to stick to artists.

Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio were having a perfectly normal conversation with Philadelphia-based architect Peter Bohlin when he informed them that they were finalists for a project involving Sam Hill.

Yup, that Sam Hill--the eccentric early 20th-century roadbuilder who ended up, in spite of himself and with the help of the Queen Marie of Romania and a modern dancer named Loie Fuller, founding the Maryhill Museum in remotest Washington, near the border of Oregon.

This was the same Hill that the artists lived with for three years in the research, construction, and experience of their terrific outdoor installation that stood across the Columbia River from the museum last summer, Maryhill Double.

"What are the chances?" Han said when she explained the story on the phone just now.

Turns out that, in time for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, the border-crossing between the U.S. and Canada at Blaine, Washington, needs to be seriously expanded. It will basically be torn out and replaced.

The GSA--which in this region is headed by an art-loving Bush appointee, a Republican art angel, really--will be overseeing the rebuilding, led by Bohlin's architecture firm. The artist's names had been thrown into a list of artists from the Washington State Arts Commission roster without their knowing.

And the monument that will remain untouched on the site?

Sam Hill's 1921 Peace Arch, one of the several odd monuments he left strewn about. (Another is a World War I memorial that's the first American copy of Stonehenge. It stands near Maryhill Museum.)

The artists, who operate under the name Lead Pencil Studio (and who won last year's Stranger Genius Award), have been selected to make a piece for the reconstruction of the border-crossing, on property that butts right up against Hill's Peace Arch. (No, they are not planning a double.)

"The coincidence is really something, I have to say," Mihalyo said.

"We just started," Han said. "We make a proposal on the 30th, three days before we leave for the Rome Prize." (They'll be at the American Academy in Rome for 11 months, but can travel back occasionally.)

The budget for the project is about $200,000, and the site was once a fishing ground where four Native American tribes overlapped. Trains roar through it. And it's the only property in the U.S., Mihalyo said, that's co-owned by two nations.

Maryhill Double was only up for three months. It's remembered only in photographs, videos, memories, and writing. Now it gets another (unwitting) memorial. Sam Hill strikes back.

^{Maryhill Double - Sky Section, Lambda print, 2007}

I couldn't help but notice that Dear Science this week takes on the topic of fluorescent lights and whether they "fucking suck." (Postman would disapprove.)

In Los Angeles this weekend, I made it to see the Dan Flavin retrospective that's been traveling around the country, and I was floored.

It's one thing to see Flavins one by one (there's a corner piece up at SAM now), and even the whole gallery of Flavins at Dia:Beacon didn't tip me off to Flavin's insane range as an artist using formal, architectural, sensual, psychological, and romantic-emotional means. Wow.

Here's a piece that knocked me over.

^{monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death), 1966}

The Henry Art Gallery permanent collection is going online, thanks to a $148,916 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. That means a database with images of and information about 23,154 works of art, like these (currently up in the exhibition Viewfinder):

^{3.3.98, 6:30 PM. (1998) by Richard Misrach}

^{Landstrasse (Country Road) (2002) by Oliver Boberg}

^{Untitled (Winter Pool 32) (2004) by Amir Zaki}

The town of Thorp, Washington, doesn't have a bookstore; it doesn't have any stores at all. There was a store not far from the fire station, but it burned down in February in a chimney fire. The lady who ran the store used to stoke the fire real good before she left for the night so that the place wouldn't be freezing come morning. Apparently she stoked it a little too good.

That house to the left is connected to a building with a sign out front that says F. C. Porter. Hanging from the rafters inside is a sign indicating that F. C. Porter sold tools, furnishings, novelties, and shoes, but now F. C. Porter is storage and studio space for artist Justin Beckman (who took the above photo).

As for the fire station, Howard and Lorri Barlow, both artists, bought it a couple years ago and turned it into a home. One downstairs room is full of Howard's sculptures of babies covered in brightly colored foam earplugs; in the next room is a depiction of the family dog, made by Lorri, out of the dog's own hair.

In addition to there being no stores, there are no bars in Thorp, and no hotels, and not many people. (The population in 2000, according to the census, was 273.) As of last weekend, however, Thorp has something a lot of towns don't: a summer festival, consisting this year of about 40 people and intended to be annual. According to the schedule, it's a festival of "art, beer, food, music, and friends." It's put on by the artists who run Pioneer Square's Punch Gallery, most of whom live in Thorp and commute to Seattle—about an hour-and-a-half drive—every First Thursday. The festival is called Punch Summerfest, although there are those in the Punch crew who wanted it to be called Über Neat Summerfest, and a contingent of three (me and two ladies) insisted on calling it Thorpfest. The three of us set up tents and camped on the lawn outside Justin Gibbens and Renee Adams's house, which houses Punch's "satellite gallery."

We went for the art, the beer, the food, the music, and the friends, but really we were there for the Yakima River. The heart of Punch Summerfest/Über Neat Summerfest/Thorpfest was a five-and-a-half hour raft ride. We lucked into a raft with Barlow ("Captain Howard" written in crayon and stuck into the front of his cap); a sculptor from Tacoma; and someone's mom. Some of us dove in. No one died.

Afterward, there were studio visits, followed by a dance party at F. C. Porter. Here is a picture of Captain Howard with a Miller High Life taped to his hand.

Most people, however, were drinking SangioPepsi. Two years ago, a nearby winery ran out of storage barrels, bought a bunch of used ones from PepsiCo, and cleaned them out. But they came to learn that the taint of Pepsi is forever. There isn't a market for wine that tastes faintly of Pepsi, so the whole batch had to be trashed. The Punch guys found out and relieved the winery of 500 cases of the stuff for the cost of the bottles and the corks, about 30 cents a pop. The people of Thorp have been drinking SangioPepsi for two years now.

From the LA Weekly, an eerie portrait (and, seemingly, the most complete and accurate one out there).

That's where I'll be this weekend: far from the Blue Angels, which, despite what anyone says, I still hate.

But! For the Erica C. Barnetts of this world, there will be not one but two ways to experience the Angels this weekend: outside, neck craned, sure -- but also at Western Bridge, where the planes will become part of the ambient sound installation there today and tomorrow at 1:30 pm.

Should be intense. (My review of Bill Fontana's installation here, and a vodcast with Fontana himself here.)

Oh, and this from WB director Eric Fredericksen:

After Saturday, Western Bridge will close until mid-September, when we open "Insubstantial Pageant Faded," with work by Martin Creed, Trisha Donnelly, Neil Goldberg, Rachel Harrison, Jeppe Hein, Anthony McCall, Julia Schmidt, Alex Schweder, Dan Webb, Jordan Wolfson, and a few others.

In Miami last December, I met a guy handing out cards for a newish organization he'd just started. He was a refugee from a museum (the Denver Art Museum, I believe) who wanted to work somewhere more like a laboratory. So he opened the Belmar Lab just outside Denver.

The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar (The Lab) is a unique institution that combines elements of a museum, think tank, and public forum. Focused on contemporary art and culture, The Lab offers international art exhibitions, lectures, performances, symposia, and publications. A small organization with a big cultural vision, The Lab offers all audiences the opportunity to engage in both personal reflection and public discussion on contemporary art.

Could be BS, right?

Except check out the swoony lineup this summer. (Instead of standard artist-and-curator lectures, the lab focuses on subjects (subjects like the sort the library means when it asks whether you want to search for a book based on author or subject). Passionate lovers of the subjects, people who know a ton, do presentations together, on the same bill.)

Swiss Typography & TV Theme Songs Thursday June 7, 2007 with Joel Swanson & Scott Kinnamon

Kurt Cobain & Solar Eclipses
Thursday June 14, 2007
with Patrick Brown & Jim Downing

Practical Democracy & Deadly Jellyfish
Thursday June 21, 2007
with David Hildebrand & Alyce Todd

Carnivorous Plants & Color-Field Painting
Thursday June 28, 2007
with John Bayard & Dean Sobel

Earth Art & Goat Cheese
Thursday July 5, 2007
with Elissa Auther & Michele Wells

Capoeira & Le Corbusier
Thursday July 12, 2007
with Canto de Galo & Bob Nauman

Chinese Opera & Alfred Hitchcock
Thursday July 19, 2007
with Joanna Lee & Thomas Delapa

Walt Whitman & Whole Hog Cooking
Thursday July 26, 2007
with Jake Adam York & Joe York

Tequila & Dark Energy in the Universe
Thursday August 2, 2007
with Matt Ortiz & Ka Chun Yu

Soul Food & Existentialism
Thursday, August 9, 2007
with Adrian Miller & Maria Talero

Prairie Dogs & Gertrude Stein
Thursday, August 16, 2007
with Jonathon Proctor & Julie Carr

Japanese Anime & Zora Neale Hurston
Thursday, August 23, 2007
with Alexandre O. Philippe & Philip Joseph

Marxism & Kittens, Kittens, Kittens
Thursday, August 30, 2007
with Gillian Silverman & The Denver Dumb Friends League

Ben Beres's exquisitely detailed prints went on display last night at Davidson Gallery in Occidental Square. My favorite, Artist Statement, is impossible to read--like so many artist's statements. This time, it's not because of the density of the language or the blankness of the cliches, but because the letters are just too small to make out. (Although I did see a few "shit"s.)

It reminded me of two other recent "Artist Statement" works in Seattle: Tony Weathers reading his artist statement on video, letter for letter, using NATO and aviation code words like "alpha" and "bravo," and Wyndel Hunt's installation including his art-world-weary, self-conscious artist statement.

From my review of Hunt's show last summer:

The Sharpie drawings, the environment, and Hunt's artist's statement, which he considers a part of the work, are the basis of something fascinating. "Exhausted skepticism that statements of intent or explanations of creative process refer to actual theoretical entities or mental events has lead [sic] me to believe that for artists, these statements and explanations are themselves fictional objects," he wrote in his statement. Artworks, then, are not lost limbs whose purposes remain but lost purposes whose limbs remain.

Seems a great moment in the city when its artists are asking themselves not only what they ought to be making and how, but what—and whether—they (and artists in general) have to say or to give in the first place. Big work can come from there.

In this week's edition, I write about Open Satellite, a new contemporary art project envisioned by Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio (Stranger Geniuses) that will bring artists from all over the country to Bellevue to work and show for three months at a time.

The first artist, who arrives this weekend, is LA-based Olga Koumoundouros. Here are some examples of her work, which has been seen at the Hammer and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other spots.

^{Town Meeting; After Acconci (2003), top view}

^{Town Meeting; After Acconci (2003), side view}

^{Town Meeting; After Acconci (2003), interior views}

^{Huck and Jim's Excellent Adventure, FL (2000)}

Seattle doesn't have many residency programs. CoCA used to do short-term residencies, but in its current incarnation, the space it's in isn't appropriate (Shilshole Bay Beach Club).

But Crawl Space, the little engine that could on Capitol Hill, is starting an annual short-residency project of its own. Here are the details:

In an effort to challenge early career artists in the power and scope of their art making, Crawl Space announces its new Studio Intensive Residency, during which the resident artist will be confined to Crawl Space grounds for one week to prepare an exhibition. The resident artist will commit to a full seven days and seven nights of working at Crawl Space. Arriving at the gallery with whatever art-making and survival supplies he or she brings along, the artist will establish a studio workspace and squatting quarters for the week. A hot plate, refrigerator, toilet, sink, and sleeping cot will be provided. During this week of confinement, the artist is expected to generate completely new works, either as a continuation of a body of work or as a special project or installation. No completed or in-progress works will be admitted. Crawl Space hopes that confining the artist to an unfamiliar and entirely un-recreational art making space where he/she cannot get away from his/her work will spur that artist to break away from characteristic approaches and methods of art making.

Crawl Space is just taking applications now, so no word yet on who'll be first. Can't wait to see.

Every artist burns to make a masterpiece. Every collector burns to own it. And every critic burns to discover it before anyone else does.

It has been discovered.

The first person to find it was a hungry writer, a man without money enough to buy shampoo. It had been abandoned in the apartment building where he lives, and when he came across it, he was--as you soon will be--stunned by its power.

He brought it to this office, where I caught sight of it.

Before I talk about this remarkable work of art, I'd like to stress its place in the canon. With a work like this, you have to begin with the Byzantine madonnas, like this one from 1325, by Paolo Veneziano.

In addition to drawing from the divine geometries set forth in compositions like these, the contemporary artist in question--we do not know who this hero is!--has also mastered the skill of sfumato, or "smoky" drawing, that was such a specialty of Leonardo da Vinci. Here's his drawing of an old man's face. Our contemporary artist uses the technique on the female nude's majestic head of hair.

But it isn't fair for me to make you wait any longer to see this masterpiece. Because she's nude, I'll mark it NSFW. But how could a work of this subtle, sensitive glory not be safe--nay, nourishing--for any environment?

Thank you for bringing this into the office to show me, Brad. You've done a service not just for yourself and for me, but for the whole of humanity.

View image.

If you're a goof about maps, http:strangeMaps.wordpress.com, with things like "China's World Map 1418," is the place for you.

It's also got handy dandy maps like—where all the single boys and girls are:

Looks like the ladies have the better deal in Seattle. According to this map there are 40,000 more single men in Seattle than women.

1. The artist talking at MoMA about Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller, and Landscape Model for Total Reflective Abstraction:

2. The artist spelunking in the Henry Art Gallery's collection and emerging with a story about a team of glassblowers inspired by their fantasy of the boss's wife (further inspiring a fashion show on Saturday):

3. The artist in a summer romp of death, modernity, vanity, and decoration at the Tacoma Art Museum:

4. The artist spinning another elusive tale: The Only Known Grave of a Glassblower at Seattle Art Museum.

(SAM doesn't have an image, and I couldn't find one anywhere online.)*

^{* I concur with Culturegrrl that SAM's web site is in need of a serious overhaul. The Henry's, thankfully, is under renovation as we speak.}

To reverse the experience you'd have outside right now, go to the Henry Art Gallery, march down the entry ramp, make your first left, your first right, and your first right again.

Sit in the dark room and take in Oliver Boberg's Country Road (Landstrasse), one long rainstorm with the sound of a dog bark in the distance and the on and off of a light in the house behind the hedge. The fact that it's a stage set makes it even more beautiful, not to mention service-oriented for the Summer-SAD Northwesterner. (A short loop plays here for the deskbound.)

Last week, an artist named Jeremy Blake was seen wandering into the ocean off of Rockaway Beach. Nearby, his clothing, wallet, and a suicide note were found under a boardwalk. The week before that, Blake's girlfriend of 12 years, Theresa Duncan, had committed suicide in their apartment. (Duncan was a filmmaker with a blog called The Wit of the Staircase.)

At first, the story of Duncan and Blake was blurry and sad. It looked like he had walked to a watery death out of mad grief over his lost love. It brought to mind Ophelia, without the floating body. The 35-year-old Blake was just missing, gone, disappeared. I thought of Bas Jan Ader, who, for his final work of art, sailed out to sea alone in 1975 after his friends sang him a romantic shanty, and never returned. He, too, was never found. (Jan Verwoert has a really terrific recent book about Jan Ader's alternately heartbreaking and rationalistic, fake and real, art.)

Yesterday, the LA Times published a story titled "The Apparent Double Suicide of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan." Evidently, the lovers had been convinced that Scientologists were after them. Friends and family who expressed doubts about the pair's claim were shut out. Blake and Duncan became something like a cult of two themselves.

And then comes today's news, linked on Artsjournal, that a fisherman has found a body in the area. The story is all talk of physical details: a body marked by "brown eyes brown hair, but no scars, tattoos or any other distinguishing features except for several teeth with gold crowns," the investigators' search for "any dentists or doctors who might have worked on Blake's teeth."

Blake's best-known work outside the art world, where he has shown at big museums and even has a major exhibition scheduled to open in October at the Corcoran in DC, is the abstract color sequence he did for the film "Punch Drunk Love." The sequence is set right into the middle of the movie, like a visual intermission from plot. The movie has been underappreciated, but it is a thing of strange, popping beauty, full of rage and uneasy love. I'm going to watch it again and think about the media image of Blake's blank skin and gold teeth.

New York is Now and Ghost World by Charles Mudede:

The future of Africa is Miller's next and most important step as an artist.

Chad Wentzel and a Star-Studded Celebration of Infinitude and Perpetual Beauty by Peter Gaucys:

As in his previous show at Crawl Space, the cut-paper extravaganza Everything I've Ever Wanted All at the Same Time, Wentzel makes a genuine attempt to pin down his euphoria and share it. His vision is ecstatic. He wants to bring it to the gallery. And yet, as his own larger-than-life rhetoric acknowledges up front, he knows that he will fail to.

UPDATE: Christopher Frizzelle just alerted me to the fact that this post makes no sense. Charles Mudede and Peter Gaucys did not make any art. They wrote about art made by Paul D. Miller and Chad Wentzel, respectively. They wrote about this art in our paper, this week, which has just been posted online. Basically, I wanted to point you toward two reviews worth reading about art worth thinking about.

Oh, and what's with all the attitude about the cat in my post from earlier today? I mean, I thought the cat thing was sweet, but here everyone seems to think the cat is causing the death? Wouldn't you want to have a cat around to notify the nursing home to notify you so that you could get to the nursing home in time to say goodbye to your dying relative? That cat is performing a service! And it's not just a service to you, it's to the one who's dying, too. Give a cat a break!

From Alec Soth's photography blog.

If you see one of these (or a moose or a bear) around the city, it's the work of artist Lars Bergquist. There's a video about him at the newish blog Dodge & Burn.

James Gaddy, associate editor of PRINT magazine, has a lyrical story, Shadow Boxer, about the aspiring abstract expressionist who, in his day job, designed the Brillo boxes that helped make Andy Warhol famous.

For two artists whose aesthetic philosophies and levels of success were diametrically opposed, Warhol and Harvey had much in common. They both came from blue-collar, immigrant families. Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928, Harvey a year later in Toronto before his family moved to Detroit when he was three months old. Warhol earned a degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), moved to New York, and started illustrating for Glamour. Harvey studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago; after a brief move back to Detroit, where he designed window displays for retail giant J. L. Hudson (Warhol designed windows for Bonwit Teller), he moved to New York to break into the art world.

Imagine Harvey's surprise when he saw Warhol's Brillo boxes in their 1964 gallery debut. Harvey had despised the commercial process of making them, Gaddy writes. Harvey's gallery, the Graham Gallery, responded to Warhol's use of Harvey's design.

The Graham Gallery was less amused. It issued a feeble press release on behalf of Stuart and Gunn (and Harvey) that stated: “It is galling enough for Jim Harvey, an abstract expressionist, to see that a pop artist is running away with the ball, but when the ball happens to be a box designed by Jim Harvey, and Andy Warhol gets the credit for it, well, this makes Jim scream: ‘Andy is running away with my box.’” But the final line practically admitted defeat: “What’s one man’s box, may be another man’s art.”

But Gaddy doesn't stop there. He details more of the undoing of James Harvey, an unknown abstract expressionist who arrived a generation too late.

History has been as kind to Warhol, the aesthetic maestro, as it has been harsh to Harvey, the romantic on the cusp of the age of irony. James Harvey’s last show, at Graham in November 1964, presented paintings that were “dynamic, restless, and painted with rich skill,” according to the Times. But by July 15, 1965, Harvey was dead in New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital. He had succumbed to what was described in his obituary as a “long illness” (according to Washburn, this was a cancer of the blood). His family came and picked up his photographs, unsold canvases, and remaining possessions, and took everything back to Detroit, where it remains.

The image Gaddy uses for his story in PRINT is a Brillo box held in the apartment of the art historian Irving Sandler.

One of the few surviving examples of Harvey’s box is owned by the art historian Irving Sandler, who keeps it in his Manhattan apartment encased in Plexiglas. When Warhol was autographing copies of his Brillo Box at the Stable Gallery for $300, Sandler suggested that Harvey sign copies of his Brillo boxes at Graham—and sell them for 10 cents. Harvey signed only one and sent it to Sandler as a gift, a half-hearted gesture to reclaim something he never much cared for in the first place.

Check out the classified ad if you're art-curious...

Raymond Loewy designed trains, planes, cars, desks, lipsticks, jukeboxes, dishes, refrigerators. He created the logos of Lucky Strike, Hoover, Shell, Exxon--even the US Postal Service. He was a Frenchman, born in 1893, but he came to the United States in 1919 (after both his parents died in the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-19). Once here, he changed the look of modern American life completely, streamlining everything from the Greyhound Bus to Air Force One.

There's an exhilarating show about him at Bellevue Arts Museum. If you're in the area for the art/craft fair this weekend, don't miss it. (Drawings for failed designs--it is barely believable that someone ever proposed a fecal unit remover--are fascinating, too.)

This is a perfect show for Bellevue Arts Museum, although it's presented terribly on the disjointed spaces that act as galleries on the second floor, instead of on the unified third floor.

It made me wish that this museum that has struggled so much to get its mission right would drop the art angle completely and limit itself to industrial design and craft instead of trying to exploit old ideas about art and design and art and craft. (As for the permanent Pilchuck glass galleries at BAM, they rightly belong at the Museum of Glass.)

My visit also made me hope that BAM will dust the bronze stack of chairs by Peter Pierobon in the middle of its lobby. It is covered--covered--in dust.

It's Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Suzy Lake 1972-1978 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art--LA-based NYT writer Jori Finkel's curatorial debut.

Holly Myers of the LAT liked it, too.

Congratulations, Jori.

(I'm going to see the show in two weeks; Finkel is an old friend and mentor of mine.)

^{A still from A Natural Way to Draw by Suzy Lake, 1975.}

Parts of Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise--a masterwork of Renaissance sculpture--are coming to Seattle.

Back in May, I noted here on Slog that the Art Institute of Chicago's web site named Seattle Art Museum as a stop for the famed gilt panels, which have never before been seen in North America and will only be in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, and Seattle before returning to Italy, where the government says they will not travel again.

SAM sent out its press release this morning for the traveling show, tentatively scheduled to make its Northwest visit January 26 through April 6, 2008.

In the show are three original panels and four sculptures, two before restoration and two after.

It will be a classical moment: Also on view at SAM during that time will be Roman Art from the Louvre (February 21-May 11, 2008).

Tacoma Art Museum announced Tuesday that it has hired Margaret Bullock, formerly of the Portland Art Museum, as its new curator of collections and special exhibitions--filling the last of two second-in-command openings on Seattle-area museum staffs.

The first was filled in April, when Marisa Sanchez arrived as Seattle Art Museum's new assistant curator of modern and contemporary art.

(Sanchez replaces Susan Rosenberg; Bullock fills the spot once held by Rock Hushka, who now heads up TAM's curatorial department. Patricia McDonnell used to be TAM's chief curator, but the museum dispensed with the title after she left. Hushka is in charge, but he's not called the "chief": his title is director of curatorial administration and curator of contemporary and Northwest art.)

Bullock comes from the Harwood Museum of Art at the University of New Mexico in Taos. Before that, she was at PAM from 1998 to 2001, working her way up to associate curator of American art. She has dual master's degrees, one in anthropology from WSU and one in art history from the U of O, and a dual bachelor's degree in art history and English from the University of Colorado, Boulder. In Portland, Bullock curated exhibitions ranging in subject from 19th-century American silver to Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, Norman Rockwell, and Grandma Moses.

We'll get to know Bullock in time, but for now, are you curious about what SAM's Sanchez is like? Tune in to an In/Visible podcast on www.thestranger.com this afternoon.

When Lawrimore Project opened a year ago with an exhibition that involved SuttonBeresCuller building and then unveiling a trompe l'oeil Chinese restaurant in the gallery, I got an email from a Seattle curator letting me know about another artist who makes Chinese restaurants: Montreal-based Karen Tam.

Tam has been doing it since 2002. Her restaurants, unlike SBC's, are fully functional. (SBC did occasionally serve Shanghai Garden in theirs.) She builds kitchens as well as eating areas, and she serves.

From August 3 to September 1, Tam will build a restaurant installation at Centre A in Vancouver, as part of a group show about Chinese restaurants called REDRESS EXPRESS:

Providing the starting point of this project, the exhibition brings together recent artworks that explore the Chinese restaurant as an iconic institution and bring forward critical discourses in relation to the head tax redress [the head tax was a fixed fee charged for each Chinese person entering Canada] and identity politics in general. The Chinese restaurant installation by Karen Tam exposes the cultural underpinnings and ethnic stereotypes that define family-owned Chinese restaurants in Canada as well as the evolution of Chinese Canadian cuisine. Kira Wu's photographic series of the exteriors of Chinese-Canadian restaurants in the neighbourhood initiate a review of signage and cultural arbitrage. Shelly Low's self-portraits and Rice-Krispies squares sculpture intimates a self-conscious projection and representation of the consumable ethnic or exotic 'other'. The Yellow Pages (1994) by Ho Tam provides a video primer from A to Z of past and present Asian experience within North America. Gu Xiong's series of hanging banner portraits of present-day and historical figures important to the development of Chinese Canadian communities gives face to the historical moments of redress.

I wonder whether Tam's restaurants have misspellings on the menus--the classic misspellings of English words that are so common at Asian restaurants. This is something that arose in my mind when I first saw SBC's installation. I asked about it, and the artists explained to me that they felt it would be disrespectful to leave the misspellings of local restaurant menus intact in their artwork, even though they said the artwork was an homage to local restaurants. That elision points to a larger question about cultural voyeurism. And one thing missing from SBC's Chinese restaurant was the Chinese people who live in the surrounding International District and/or work in its restaurants.

I wonder about the conversation that Tam's installation will kick up. If you're curious to see, there's a symposium about the exhibition Aug. 2 and 3 in Vancouver.

It's in the Wall Street Journal, it's conspicuously late (although not as late as the maybe-never New York Times), and Lee Rosenbaum has a middling opinion of the new Seattle Art Museum.