When Stu Smailes died in 2002 at age 69, he left a challenge to Seattle. If the city would commission an artist to create a  "fully articulated, realistic male nude" and place it in a prominent public spot surrounded by a fountain, he'd underwrite it with $1 million. Naturally, the city punted. (Where did Smailes think he was living, Florence?) The city passed Smailes' proposal to the Seattle Art Museum, then in the process of creating the Olympic Sculpture Park. Lisa Corrin, then SAM's curator of contemporary art, commissioned designs … [Read more...]

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, ... The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.W. H. Auden Poets matter to poets, musicians to musicians. Tributes to dancers come from other dancers. Rare are artists who inspire a legacy outside the arena of their endeavor. Sixteen years after his death, the poet of power chords continues to matter to musicians, but the exhibition bearing his first name at the Seattle Art Museum isn't about them. Curated by Michael Darling, it's entirely about Cobain's afterlife in visual art. … [Read more...]

Note from Greg Lundgren:Dennis Hopper is dead.. At 74 years old, it's kind of a miracle that he lived that long. For all of the crazy things he did in his life, for all the drugs he consumed with great enthusiasm, for the very address he resided at, it is amazing that something like cancer was what took him down. Tomorrow most of us get the day off for Memorial Day. And I think Memorial Day should be broader than paying our respects to the military men who have protected our freedom for the past 234 years. There are those that defend our … [Read more...]

In a repeat of an event in Berlin,titled, Its Form Will Follow Your Performance, Alex Schweder is looking for five people in Seattle who want free architectural advice from a performance architect. Ideally, he says, the five will not be directly connected to the art world.From Lawrimore Project, where the results will be exhibited:These people need to be of limited means, and willing to have this process documented and agree to him exhibiting or publishing this documentation. He will then meet with these 'clients' for about an hour at … [Read more...]

A great gallery is a rarity in any city. For thirteen years, starting in his living room and moving into Belltown before establishing himself in Pioneer Square, Billy Howard had a great gallery. As each year ends and I look back on the memorable shows, Howard is consistently at the top of the list. Howard House will close June 12, Seattle's first major gallery to fall victim to the economy.Nothing illustrates the depth of the gallery's lineup than the fact that five of its most stellar artists (Dan Webb, Victoria Haven, Leo Saul Berk, … [Read more...]

No water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles Marianne Moore 1887 - 1972Modernism scorned the decorative. More than a century later, its patterned flourishes are a kind of ghostly garden for Claudia Fitch, now showing at Greg Kucera. THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, 2010 Graphite oil pastel on Strathmore drawing paper 45.5 x 37 inchesThe door leads nowhere, but the windows wake you up. So do her figures. Pried from plinths and niches, they wrap themselves in cultural influences and jump into 21st-Century space, landing lightly. FLATSCREEN, … [Read more...]

Loose from their strings or using them as weapons, puppets in contemporary video, collage and sculpture tend toward the coarse and the brutal. They clump through their lives with a relish that is almost obscene, hypnotized by their own desires.Artists who stand out in this crowded field include Nathalie Djurberg, William Kentridge, Paul McCarthy, Sarah Anne Johnson, Cat Clifford, Kiki Smith, Nayland Blake, Kara Walker, Dan Webb, Dennis Oppenheim, Anne Chu, Thomas Schutte and Pierre Huyghe.Add to that list Martha Colburn, whose Puppet Regime is … [Read more...]

Magritte, The Lovers, 1928 (via)Part 1: Big KissTanya Batura, Intricacies of Dreaming 1  2004 Clay, airbrushed acrylic paintAriana Page Russell, Heat Wave 2008, archival inkjet print, edition of 5 18 x 26 inchesPart 2 - can't breatheTanya Batura Inhale, 2003, Clay, glaze, china paintDan Webb, SHROUD, 2008 Carved wood (Redwood) 22 x 7.5 x 11 inches Collection of the Seattle Art Museum … [Read more...]

If as John Russell maintained, a "painting is a vegetable construct that changes in time," a sculpture is a mineral construct whose longevity is marked by change.Greek and Roman statuary is famous for the thousand-yard stare in its wide and empty eyes, but the Greeks and Romans who made it wouldn't know it from Adam. They painted their product with dark eyes and even eyelashes. (Think Goth, ancient world version.) Part of our relationship with the work is with what time, not artists, made.Los Angeles sculptor Tanya Batura makes earthenware … [Read more...]

The princess who couldn't bear the burden of a pea was not an artist. She is an emblem of the useless sensitivity of a blue blood. In the human garden, royalty is a hot house flower on luxury's life supports. Ariana Page Russell is more sensitive (and hearty) than that. She has dermatographia, which means her immune system is always on red alert for blistering news from the outside world. Even the lightest scratch will cause her capillaries to dilate and welt. While the situation doesn't scream opportunity, Russell turned it into one. In … [Read more...]

From Charles D'Ambrosio's Seattle, 1974, collected in Orphans, published by Clear Cut Press:The Seattle of that time had a distinctly coma-like aspect and at night seemed to contain in its great sleepy volume precisely one of everything, one dog a-barking, one car a-cranking, one door a-slamming, etc., and then an extravagant, unnecessary amount of nothing. Beaucoup nothing. The kind of expansive, hardly differentiated, foggy and final nothing you imagine a coma induces. I read the silence as a kind of Nordic parsimony. An act of middle-class … [Read more...]

Can wrap a stair in one.From Kader Attia: Casbah Jonction Stairs 2 … [Read more...]

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day has proved unpopular with Pakistani censors, who did what they do best: block access. Here are two of my favorites, anonymously posted to avoid death threats. And death. To avoid death. You want to kill for your fanatical understanding of your religion, we need to beam you back to the 14th Century, where you belong. … [Read more...]

Anybody who writes a blog that allows comments gets pseudo-comments, otherwise known as spam. Why do spammers want to be published on blogs? I have no idea. As my grandmother used to say, when asked, for instance, how electricity works, "It's a mystery." (The Catholic imagination leaves little room for scientific inquiry.)The language of spammers could be called English as a non-language. No matter how brief a comment, it can be counted on to contain a grammatical error. Its chief characteristic, however, is vagueness. When in doubt, I check … [Read more...]

In the mid-1980s, when Kurt Cobain was a high-school dropout with a guitar, Alice Wheeler was a punk girl with a camera, enrolled in Evergreen. They met in Olympia, both drawn to the music scene. Later, when everybody wanted to take his picture, he'd clear the room but let her stay. Charles Peterson was the only punk-rock intellectual to graduate from Bothell High School in 1981. By the time he enrolled at the University of Washington, he had a Hasselblad tattooed on his left arm and was heavy into the Seattle music scene. He remembers the … [Read more...]

Laura Casatellanos Castellanos collects messages written in the pavement, before the cement hardens. The one below she found across the street from Seattle's Millionair's Club Charity in Belltown, on Western near Wall St.Previous message here. … [Read more...]

The content in painting is always the painting, the question being not who but how. That's why it's possible for a painter to tip his hat to Max Beckmann with a bird painting even though Beckmann concentrated on the human, not the avian. Max Beckmann, Double Portrait 1946 Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Image via) Beckmann, Still Life With Fallen Candles, oil/canvas 1929 Detroit Institute of the Arts (Image via)Brooklyn's Andrew Keating picked up on Beckmann's essential qualities and spun them into a feathered form whose fluid … [Read more...]

Why is it, despite their evocative shapes, that clams and mussels rarely make an appearance in art? Is it because of Marcel Broodthaers? To use them again is to stand in his shadow. (Image via)Andre Petterson, opening in June in Foster/White Gallery, is giving it a go from a different angle: Shells as evidence of geological layering bursting from the innards of an outdated machine. Except for the inexplicable addition of red, I'm with him. Of course, the outdated machine he chose has already unraveled as a kind of signature for William … [Read more...]

Mutations make language stronger. A cheap toy becomes a treasure through its description.What notebook has ever loved you more?Both images from Engrish.com, via Christine Tokunaga. (First post, The Curse of the Monolingual, here.) … [Read more...]

In 1991, Chris Burden wanted to hang a fishing boat off the side of the Seattle Art Museum, designed by Robert Venturi. Over my dead body, said Venturi. The architect is still alive. It didn't happen.Fifteen years later, the idea reappeared in the work of his wife, Nancy Rubins. He was thinking of something rough and working class - roots music for a city with a working waterfront. For another waterfront town, she delivered a flamboyant tiara. Pleasure Point, 2006, nautical vessels, stainless steel, stainless steel wire. Museum of Contemporary … [Read more...]

It's ignorance, of course, especially for those who don't understand a language that is printed on their shirt or tattooed on their body. Case in point: Visiting a sister who lived in an apartment a short train ride from Tokyo, I joined her and her two small sons in a visit to a nearby park. Also in the park was an impeccably dressed young mother of my sister's acquaintance. The legend sewn in pink lettering on her crisp white sweatshirt was an invitation to engage in oral sex disguised as a platitude: Kiss All My Lips.I wanted to tell her. My … [Read more...]

In response to this post, which notified the avid public that Seattle's Charles Krafft and Mike Leavitt are showing at London's Stolen Space Gallery, Krafft sent the following comment:We (Mike Leavitt and I) were taken to dinner the night before last by Jason Zeloof a partner in the Stolenspace Gallery which is on Brick Lane in The Old Truman Brewery in London's trendy East End. Our fourth at the table was Robert Lands of Finers Steven & Innocent LLP who is the personal solicitor of the mysterious and beloved Banksy. Afterwards we repaired … [Read more...]

In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praiseAudenConsider the case of Bruce Nauman. Along with David Hammons, Nauman is point person for the late 20th Century, early 21st Century divide. He's the Samuel Beckett of the visual realm, documenting his body in space, from its most routine motions to its grunts and sighs, its failed dime-store dreams and dashed desires. Because his work has been absorbed into the body of contemporary art, it mutates every day into other people's uses of it. In his studio on his ranch in New Mexico, … [Read more...]

Among the Seattle exhibits I missed writing about last month, when I was first in New York and later part of ArtsJournal's malware attack that shut the site down, is Adam Satushek's Annex at Platform Gallery. His photos have a whistle-while-we-work nuttiness. With the lightest of touches, Satushek documents the exuberant irrationality of never-say-die. Missing is any sense of disdain, as if the photographer also believes that mice can be men, and a Mr. Fixit approach to decor can turn a tracked home into a forest. … [Read more...]

The sun hangs like a phlegm in the dirty handkerchief of the sky in Oscar Tuazon's recent installation at Maccarone: post-apocalyptic desolation in a fine-boned body, corrosive content merged with grace. (Tuazon images via)Meanwhile, in Seattle, his brother Elias Hansen talked about his exhibit at Lawrimore Project last Saturday, the show's last day. Here's Eli's sun:It's a lens, the kind used to spark a fire in the woods, or maybe the bottom of a Coke bottle. Tuazon and Hansen see darkly, like fogs condensed, but there are differences. The … [Read more...]

Seattle's Charles Krafft and Mike Leavitt are showing at London's Stolen Space Gallery, May 14-30. London is a tea and toast town, and that's exactly what Krafft and Leavitt have to offer - tea and toast.Krafft:Leavitt: … [Read more...]

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Becomes a headline.Dash Snow, Untitled, 2007, Collage on wood, 70 x 70 inches … [Read more...]

Somebody's always throwing bricks...Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.Vachel LindsayRobert Arneson Brick with Hand of 1991 modeled 1972 bronze 9 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 4 inches Before Robert Arneson achieved his signature style, he was so enamored by Peter Voulkos' corrosive clay that Arneson almost followed him from the Bay Area to L.A. Instead, Arneson went North to teach at U.C. Davis, where the West Coast Funk dynasty took root and grew, partly inspired by Chicago's Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, key Hairy Who figures in briefly California, drawn by the … [Read more...]

ViaStill the best word on art & DNA is Robin Held's 2002 exhibit, Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics at the Henry Gallery, my review here.  … [Read more...]