Late of Seattle, Fionn Meade will be in charge of the lineup at the Sculpture Center. A video installation by Meade and his wife, the artist Mary Simpson, titled Young Americans, is at the Seattle Art Museum through Aug. 30. Podcast interview with Meade and Simpson here. Their Web site here. … [Read more...]

HorowitzOnly thing wrong with this story: It isn't true. BRAVO's Untitled Art Project did not add auditions in Seattle, Boston, San Francisco and Dallas. Richard Lacayo on the addictive quality of watching live coverage of the 4th Plinth:Thirty five years ago Chris Burden put himself on a platform in a New York gallery for 22 days. But since Burden was an artist, that made what he did "art" in a more -- is the word here "official"? -- way. Gormley has democratized Burden's work by letting anybody perform it, which of course is what all of us … [Read more...]

Last Saturday night, the Seattle artist team of John Sutton, Ben Beres and Zack Culler celebrated their ability to keep on keeping on through a morass of ecological setbacks and bureaucratic hurtles by throwing themselves a small party at their site.The party had to be small, because they have no right to occupy the premises on which they pay rent. Nobody has occupancy rights, not even the owner. The EPA doesn't want people to hang around unless they're in hasmat suits.Dealing with the EPA was never part of their plan. Their original idea was … [Read more...]

In 1974-75, Alfred Leslie painted Virginia Wright, as part of his Red Painting Series. (Who she is here.)The color can't be said to describe her politics, which tend to be casually, even indifferently, Republican. She broke with the party in the early 1990s over the Culture Wars and their impact on the NEA. (Story here.) Her husband Bagley waited till 2004 to follow her lead, reasoning that the world couldn't take four more years of George Bush. Leslie painted Virginia Wright as if she were decades older than she was at the time. In his … [Read more...]

In Randy Kennedy's NTY story about artists trying out for BRAVO's yet unnamed reality show, he featured Jesse Edwards, late of Seattle and now, wrote Kennedy, living "hand to mouth" in New York, the only artist quoted at length and the only one identified in a photo caption.He looks somebody invented by Flannery O'Connor, maybe the hero in The Violent Bear It Away. It's hot in New York in July, but if an artist is going to stand out, he might as well do it in a dark suit. Behind him, pikers look as if they're waiting for the bus.Here's Edwards' … [Read more...]

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning -- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.ViaThe new version of the green light: Yana Paskova photo in the New York Times, accompanying a story about using a dumpster as a hot tub.Free floating on the Internet, via Nathan Lippens:From FlatChestedMama (Amy Ellen Trefsger) … [Read more...]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an artist in possession of a gallery must be in want of an artist statement.Will this do?Mark FloodBen Beres took another option, going on and on: Artist's Statement, Etching, relief roll, chine colle.12 x 9 inches.Detail: … [Read more...]

If Frank O'Hara were alive, chances are he'd be published at Wave Books, founded in Seattle four years ago by Charles Wright, former director of the Dia. Wave specializes in poetry that can be mistaken for conversation but cannot be entered by a conversationalist. Wave poetry isn't as consumer surreal as John Ashbery, as lyrical as Charles Wright (no relation to the publisher), as war-haunted as Charles Simic or as romantically charged as Olga Broumas. Wave poets are not in love with bars and do not want to be fish leaping in a river. They do … [Read more...]

When I interviewed Frank McCourt and Mary Gordon in Seattle in 1998, he took issue with the idea that alcoholism is a disease.Cancer is a disease. You can walk away from the bottle. A disease is something you can't walk away from.He died today at 78 of metastatic melanoma.Here's the interview:Neither Frank McCourt nor Mary Gordon had childhoods anybody would envy, but as McCourt points out, "the happy childhood is hardly worth your while." The pair of New Yorkers shared the stage last night as part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures series at … [Read more...]

For more than three decades, Merrill Wagner has tracked the transmutation of form and the shifting vagaries of tone. She has incised lines of color into fragments of marble and let them erode, and she has painted rectangular bands across steel panels already marked by the erosions of rust and industrial sanding.She tends to participate in her own aesthetic process instead of commanding it, but not, apparently, when making flowers. Below, Thistle, rust preventative paint on steel, 90 x 47 inches. Individual pieces held in place on the wall with … [Read more...]

Siegel's Squeeze 2, from 1998-99. What does it look like now? Earth to earth, dust to dust, newspaper wall to soil.Wrote John Perreault: Steven Siegel elected to start with a grove of trees. A seemingly solid mound or wall of newspapers interacts with the trees and slumps to fit the slope; the newsprint stratum is topped by turf, further uniting the piece with the environment. This, the most unusual artwork in the exhibition, makes gravity, geology, and even time visible.Time visible indeed, especially for those of us who thought we had … [Read more...]

Today from The Independent, via AJ: In her coronation robes, Elizabeth I looks formidable and stately - the Virgin Queen in her pomp, an image to propel rivals into battle. Some 400 years after her portrait was painted, that is precisely what she has done. Hers is one of more than 3,000 images from the National Portrait Gallery uploaded onto the free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia in April by Seattle-based Derrick Coetzee. The gallery, founded in 1856, responded last week by threatening legal proceedings against the PhD student. That action … [Read more...]

Tom Phillips began by finding his own lyrical poetry inside obscure Victorian text in 1970. (The Humument)Tim Rollins & Kids of Survival, founded in 1982 (MoMA image), engaged text in a battle.Christopher Wool (Apocalypse Now 1988) amplified the impact of a classic line.Glenn Ligon  (Untitled (I Do Not Always Feel Colored), 1990), amplified it by obscuring it.Ann Hamilton turned the rudiments of text into a floor at the Seattle Central Library in 2004.Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow from 2006 (Wave Books) circles back around to … [Read more...]

Birk is in West Coast Drawing VIII at Davidson Galleries, through Aug. 1. Below, A View of the Ruins of the City of Chicago, 2001 Acrylic and ink on canvas. 44 x 66 inches. … [Read more...]

Previous posts here and here.Missed Rachel Maxi's one-day show July 11 at the Carport Gallery (her car port), featuring hand-sized oil paintings of Seattle's terrain. (Sorry, Rachel. If I didn't know where I was right now, I'd lose me.)Still have a chance to see Rick Araluce is at Traver through Aug. 2. Below, The Very Last Breath, 3 x12 x 2.5 inches.In the looks-intriguing-online category: Kevin Yates, who was at Ditch Projects in Eugene till July 2. (Matt Browning and Anne Mathern are there now.) Below, Yates' Garbage Bags, image via. … [Read more...]

Seattle painter Alden Mason, almost 90, leads an urban life without having acquired an urban viewpoint. His work is full of the things that moved him as a child, including the sparrows that flew around his head as he offered them carrots on his parents dairy farm in the Skagit Valley. While realizing that his art owes a lot to his early environment, he also credits a mail-order cartoon class. He earned the tuition by trapping muskrats. I feel guilty about those muskrats, but I loved cartoons, with figures jumping, hopping and smooching. They … [Read more...]

W. Scott TrimbleBrent SommerhauserLinda BeaumontLeo Saul Berk: … [Read more...]

Previous plinth post here.Go here for live Web stream coverage.On July 24, 1 a.m. Seattle time, Seattle's Ellen Ziegler takes her turn.Says Ziegler: I may regret this, but everyone might as well see me do it... And give the Web site a check from time to time. You absolutely never know what you're going to see. Some of it is unbelievably lame, some is brilliant, and most of it is a collage on a grand scale. The project reminds her of what Karlheinz Stockhausen said about musical composition: Hide what you compose in what you hear. Cover what you … [Read more...]

Via … [Read more...]

Robert Mitchum's Harry Powell is a murderous evangelical who stalks through Night of the Hunter muttering about love and hate, which are tattooed on his knuckles.Powell:Lord, I am tired. Sometimes I wonder if you really understand. Not that You mind the killin's. Yore Book is full of killin's. But there are things you do hate Lord: perfume-smellin' things, lacy things, things with curly hair.John Currin:Currin is our Fragonard. For rougher trade, go to Grant Barnhart and scroll till you get to Midnight Special, 100 percent not safe for … [Read more...]

Before Yinka Shonibare appeared at the Brooklyn Museum as part of Sensation, he was at the Seattle Art Museum with a gallery devoted to him, a rare case of Seattle being in the lead on the work of a fast-rising, international force.Trevor Fairbrother, at the time SAM's Deputy director of art and curator of modern art, had seen Shonibare's work in London and bought an installation titled Nuclear Family more or less on the spot.Back in Brooklyn once again with his own exhibit I plan to see before it closes September 20, Shonibare has become … [Read more...]

The gift in Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) remains one, despite legitimate criticism: Its message to Bible Belt literalists who thump others with their version of morality. Florida told them their principles are costing them money. Because nobody wants to live nearby, their towns deteriorate and die.Florida has continued to expand his notion of whose presence is desirable, but it's still not broad enough.It needs to includes janitors (via)who dance in Antarctica, not just artists who focus on an appreciation of menial … [Read more...]

Claude Zervas:Sadamasa Motonaga … [Read more...]

Cars are common in galleries and museums, beginning with Ed Kienholtz's Back Seat Dodge, 1964. (Post here.)Rarely, however, is there an installation that puts viewers inside the experience of life in a broken-down, barely-running van. The pure products of America go crazy:No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car Created by Eric Thompson and Aubrey Birdwell, the front room installation at OHGE Ltd has an air of inevitability. You're where you never wanted to be but knew you were going, slipping fast from middle class to teeter … [Read more...]

Wouldn't it be lovely if this piece by Alison Brady from I Want You (Magazine) via Pilot Books (here)were labeled a tribute to the late Hannah Wilke, whose S.O.S. Starification Object Series in the 1970s featured her body and chewing gum? … [Read more...]

Rebecca Shapiro to the rescue, with embroideries on muslin, via.If You Held My Breath, You'd Know What It Felt LikeAfter the war … [Read more...]

Tyler Green on Bruce Nauman and the reality of torture, here. In the future, if we manage to climb back up the cliff we fell off during the Bush years, people will look to art for evidence that we grasped the horror of our situation. Green's writing serves as an affirmative:Nauman's sculptures were not about the United States. In 1981 Nauman couldn't have had any idea that America would become a kind of modern-day post-colonial force in two occupied states, Iraq and Afghanistan. He couldn't know that 20 years on America would become a nation … [Read more...]

The outer limits of what constitutes a photograph do not include spray paint on a spider's web, unless its shape minicks a Polaroid gone to seed. By asserting itself outside the definition, Josh Tonsfeldt's web expands the category to include it.Curated by Bob Nickas for Vancouver's Presentation House Gallery, phot(o)objects made a seamless leap from nonprofit to commercial space, setting up shop at Lawrimore Project.If the audience were frequently in motion from Portland to Seattle and Vancouver, a Seattle stop for a Vancouver exhibit wouldn't … [Read more...]

Joseph Park, L'evier, 2008, oil/panel ViaIsaac Layman Sink with Lettuce, 2008, Archival ink jet print  Via … [Read more...]

Veteran of Helter Skelter at MOCA in 1992 and the 1999 Venice Biennale, Los Angeles painter Richard Jackson participates in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 at the Seattle Art Museum (review here) by pouring paint on canvases and smearing them in arcs on a museum wall. They comprise something like a painting tornado, with a passage of dead white calm at their center. SAM documented the process on YouTube.Jackson explains, via: It is my idea to try to expand painting, not just in size but to see how far it could be extended or … [Read more...]