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After losing this court case  on its attempt to redefine the standards by which artists are included in its rosters, the Washington State Arts Commission emailed me a list of its current standards:

High artistic standard
· Conceptually enduring
· High technical standard
· Cohesive body of work
· Ability to work at scale appropriate to public art
· Demonstrates experience
· Site and/or context responsive
· Potential or ability to work in media appropriate for public art
· Good image quality
· Current work, 1995 to present
· Potential to successfully create a commissioned artwork with a minimum budget of $25,000
· Not commercial

As long as they apply to new candidates instead of being retroactively applied to artists accepted under different rules, these criteria sound reasonable until the last item. Not commercial. Not commercial? If the commission is going to avoid losing future lawsuits, it’s going to have to define its terms more precisely. I think the phrase intends to exclude whoever designed the Nike swoop or MacDonald’s golden arches, but the result is to bar anybody who sells work in galleries or out of a studio.

Even if the commission better articulates its reasoning, however, that reasoning is hopelessly out of date. Take Geoff McFetridge. He is one of many artists who’ve helped close the gap between business and art. He’s not only a designer for Nike, Pepsi, Stüssy, Burton Snowboards, Girl Skateboards and Patagonia, he created film title sequences for The Virgin Suicides and
Adaptation. The Washington State Arts Commission would be lucky to have him, but according to its rules, he’d be barred from applying.

Geoff McFetridge, detail of mural at Olympic Sculpture Park, image via Damion Hayes

Two of James Ensor‘s many progeny, painting the face inside the face:

Robyn O’Neil

James Deitz Dream, Dream oil / canvas, 2009
26⅝ x 19⅛ inches

Talk about living in your head. Gala Bent’s Matrix for Praxis (Graphite and gouache, 30″ x 22″) conjures an animal that has freed itself from animal nature. Its head is celestial, its body vestigial.

Bent is in Transubstantial  at Catherine Person, along with Colleen Hayward, Renee Zettle-Sterling and Heidi Schwegler, opening Thursday night as part of Pioneer Square’s First Thursday Gallery Walk, 6-8.

Also opening Thursday night in the Square:

Made in the U.S.A., group show of gallery artists at Greg Kucera. Sean M. Johnson at Howard House. Marianne Pulfer at Grover/Thurston. Michael Kenna at G. Gibson. Margot Quand Knight and Mirror Mirror at James Harris. Elias Hansen at Lawrimore Project. Adam Satushek at Platform. Jennifer Beedon Snow at Linda Hodges. Sol Hashemi & Jason Hirata at Punch. Chauney Peck and Ben Hirschkoff at Soil. Rachel Maxi at Some Space.You’re So Cool at Ohge.Troy Gua (and 50 collaborators) at Monrach.

Sean Johnson at Howard House:

Opening Thursday outside the Square: Ray Ray Mitrano at Joe Bar. Strange Coupling at Ouch My Eye. Catherine Grisez at Traver Gallery. Julie Speidel and Tracy Rocca at
Winston
Wachter.

Joey Veltkamp from Strange Coupling:

Already open:

Ron van der Ende at Ambach & Rice,
through May 2. James Diez and Michael Dailey at Francine Seders, through April 11. Lush Life 2 at Roq La Rue through May 7, and Alden Mason at Foster/White Gallery, through April 27. Note to Foster/White: Please don’t describe Mason’s work. Your quote: “At age 90, Alden Mason returns to Foster/White Gallery with his ever-enchanting sense of humor and whimsy.”  Ever-enchanting sense of humor and whimsy? Shoot me. Mason is much better at locating his terrain. “My paintings are a private world of improvisation, spontaneity, humor and pathos, exaggeration and abandon.” Go with that and end with that.

Alden Mason at Foster/White:

Opening later in the month: 5 x 5 at Grey Gallery, opening April 8. Benton Peugh at Fetherston Gallery on April 9.

Twenty-six street bands from the U.S. and Canada are in Seattle April 9-11 at a variety of places, including Art Attack on April 10. (The Art Attack link is a month out of date. Nobody’s perfect. Locations and participants are still good. )

Think Caliban as band master, not Ariel, playing winds, strings and all manner of percussives. They are the Anti-Fascist Marching Band, Artesian Rumble Arkestra, BeatCrunchers, Bolting Brassicas Marching Band, Brass Messengers,The Carnival Band, Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band, Environmental Encroachment, Extraordinary Rendition Band, Garfield High School
Bulldog Drumline, The HBC Brass Band, Hubbub Club, Hungry March Bank, Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band (LSJUMB), Minor Mishap Marching Band, Orkestar Slivovica, Orkestar Zirkoniu, Samba Ja, Seattle Sounders FC
Soundwave Band, Seattle Seahawks Blue Thunder
Drumline, Titanium Sporkestra, Vamola, Yellow Hat Band and Yesterday’s Chonies.

Environmental Encroachment

Gone till March 27. No posting till I get back. Till then, a little traveling music.

John Wesley, 2009. Painted Bronze, 24 x 17 x 7 in. (Image via)

Henry Taylor

Kaz Oshiro Zero Case Spinner (Gun Metal – Dust) 2008-09 Acrylic and Bondo on stretched canvas, 31 x 19 1/2 x 10 1/4″

Alan Bechler Gun, 1987 color photos mounted on canvas, masonite, hardware, life-size

Todd
Simeone Suitcase, 2003
Ultrachrome Inkjet Print
Ed. of 5
24″ x 40″

What do you get when singers, dancers and actors join forces with those who work in arts industries, including but not limited to curators, publicists, ticket takers, grant writers and critics, to put on a show with strippers, lounge lizards, lawyers, librarians, social activists and hat-check boys at the roller rink?

You get punk-indie-soul-defiant-bleeding-heart love children with large vocabularies who forsake their business suits and shake their tail feathers.

Imagine Stephen Crane‘s dream world. When he reads a poem, his horse applauds. When his horse reads a poem, Crane applauds. Horses don’t read poems, but if they did, Crane would have wanted to hear them. He was interested in fostering a place in which desire counted for more than good breeding, otherwise known as technical skill.

There was a man with tongue of wood

Who essayed to sing,

And in truth it was lamentable.

But there was one who heard

The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood

And knew what the man

Wished to sing,
And with that the singer was content.

(Poem via)

Dead at 28 at the dawn of the 20th century, Crane would have been a hell of a karaoke singer, assuming he found the right bar. He’d flourish in a karaoke free-for-all run by intellectuals but open to whoever wanders in, where the silky support the awkward and even those who live entirely in their heads get a chance to revel in the life of their body.

Karaoke night at On The Boards would have been his home away from home. Called Speak & Sing, it’s run by Eric Fredericksen, an art critic who currently serves as director of Western Bridge. Wednesday night, the crowd was a spontaneous ensemble. Pros were there, yes, real singers and dancers, trading off with soulful amateurs and those who by right of natural or cultivated talent have no business on stage.

The intensity of their desire made the poverty of their abilities an asset. Any extrovert who can carry a tune can step onto a karaoke stage and be instantly forgotten. What makes this art bar worth its weight in lost keys and broken pitches is the collective commitment from the brilliant and the dim. All were willing to take their moment and turn it inside out, sometimes at a cost. A viral strain of musical longing came from a man who opened by saying, “I’m not that interesting to watch. Please look at something else.”

Mick Jagger imitations are a karaoke staple. At Speak and Sing, somebody imitated the Senator from Minnesota imitating Mick Jagger, possibly unintentionally, adding 30 pounds and 20 years to become a more intense version of his own Seattle self.

With Fredericksen on hand to offer the solace of French philosophy, the audience/performers pushed past imitation to inhabit their own experience. Hoarse from singing (he can’t sing), Fredericksen read from Michael De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life: “The presence and circulation of a representation tells us nothing about
what it is for its users.”

(Fredericksen’s intro to a Jay Z song: “Or Jay Zed, as our English friends call him.”)

My brother once had a dog who could sing like a saxophone. On a visit and hoping for a concert, I sang a few notes shaped like a howl to get the animal in the mood. It looked at me with a detached interest that verged on pity. Part Lab and part wolf with something extra furry clinging to its chromosomes, it declined to join me. “You have to put your heart into it,” my brother said.

Do the fans at a baseball game watch themselves pitch, catch a fly and slide home? That’s not quite Fredericksen’s karaoke. In his version, stars take turns with the audience to create a new game.

The stars carry dark matter, but dark matter also carries the stars. One of the stars was SoulChilde
(Okanomode) singing early Prince better than Prince is willing to sing it now, committed as he is to the hardcore body-hating religion of his youth.

“SoulChilde looks like a sculpture,” I said to Matt Richter,
thinking of Brancusi. “We all look like sculptures,” Richter replied,
“but from different eras. I’m from the textile era.”

Another star was dancer Amy O’Neal, who slid all over everybody else and hit every hot note. What she said in this YouTube interview explains her presence:

Dance is not just being in the studio. It’s the way you
express yourself physically with your friends in the world. It’s about
the way you walk down the street, about the way you open a door,
about the way you wash your dishes, about the way you put your clothes
on in the mornings: the rituals you have in order to feel like yourself
through the day. That’s all movement, that’s all dance.

In a significant policy shift,  the Seattle Art Museum has agreed to let visitors take pictures of the art in the galleries. There are a few trifling limitations, which Nicole Chism Griffin explains on the museum’s blog, called Soap. In a story I wrote late in 2008, Seattle Art Museum’s Search for Youth, this shift was part of my number one recommendation.

1. Lighten up: 
Let people take notes using a pen. Major museums in New York have no problem with pen users, but in Seattle the guards say no.
Let people take photos in the galleries. There might be outdated and tiresome copyright issues for contemporary art, but surely the work in SAM’s own collections can be photographed. Why is it OK to photograph anything at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and off limits at SAM?
Let people sketch the art using pencils, crayons, oils, watercolors, wired sketchpads or ashes and spit, like James Castle drawing in his room. Worried about safety concerns? That’s what guards are for.
Last year at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, I saw a woman in her early 20s snap a photo of a wood-carved Buddha on her cell phone. A guard rushed over to chastise her for breaking the museum’s rules. He forced her to delete the picture while he stood over her to check. His voice was loud, and her posture was one of humiliation. I can’t be sure, but I’m willing to wager she has not become a museum regular. (more)

Sheila Klein and Ries Niemi met at art school in 1972. 

Klein:

I thought he was cool, but he was so androgynous in
those days, super skinny with so much jewelry and long hair in braids,
that I didn’t think about him (romantically) until I did, and then I
really did. He was 17, I was 20. We got together in ’76 and married in
’78. Because we have such a long history, it’s impossible not to be
influenced by each other. We have two sons. Marriage is a problematic
institution, but we try not to get in each other’s way. (more)

Now sharing the gallery space at Punch, they both started
out in Seattle as part of Larry
Reid’s Rosco Louie Gallery before moving to L.A. to make a mark in public
art. When they moved back, went for the rural experience in Bow, near
La Conner, to raise two sons (Rebar and Torque) whom Niemi feels obligated to embarrass.

He
dresses like he’s on his way to a party, and he’s the cake. Instead of a cake, he’s a metal worker who likes to while away spare
hours with needle and thread. His interest sewing, knitting, crocheting and embroidery dates to his teens. In sharp contrast to his metalwork, color tends to abound in his version of the male domestic.

Speak For The Trees is a book to adorn the coffee tables of people who don’t read books. It’s excellent fluff to be picked up and paged through between cocktails and dinner.

A theme is not enough to tie a group of artists together, and the 76 featured in nice, full-color images do not belong together. Nor do they engage the quotes that hang beside them, pithy thoughts from the mostly dead and mostly famous. Observations from the artists tend to be the book’s high point, but there is little sense of shared engagement, of ideas played out in a variety of forms.

Still, in a doctor’s waiting room, it would be worth picking up, not that any doctor will share it with her customers. Too many would promptly steal it. I know a receptionist who spends her day surveying a holding tank of patients tearing articles out of magazines. Yesterday she observed a sickly soul use one as a handkerchief. When the culprit’s name was called, he returned the soiled publication to the rack.

Created by Andria Friesen of the Friesen
Gallery, proceeds from the book’s sale go to the Esalen
Institute in California and the Findhorn Foundation
in Scotland. What worthy causes! By all means let us help the wealthy be
here now. ($80 hardcover)

The Seattle version of the Friesen Gallery will host a selection of artworks from Speak For The Trees, April 1 to May 29. Missing from the lineup announced on the Web site are the books stars, such as Mark Ryden, Mike + Doug Starn and David Hockney.

(The phrase, between cocktails and dinner, comes from Grace Paley. As her sole contribution to art history, she observed that the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler  look as if she tossed them off between cocktails and dinner. )

Louise Bourgeois Swaying, 2006 Etching, ink, watercolor and pencil on paper 149.5 x 33.9 cm (Image via)

Elizabeth Jameson Red #3, watercolor on paper, 5.25in x
3.375″

Teresita Fernandez (Image via)

Katy Stone SPILLING STREAM (ODE), 2005 Acrylic on duralar, pins 73 x 7 x 3 inches

Tara Donovan

Alyson Shotz Detail of Untitled (3 Views of an Object) # 1, 2009
yarn and pins on wall
183 x 132 inches

Some waterfalls are barely there.

Fred Wilson
Viscous Risk, 2005
21 blown glass elements
120″ x 204″ x 84″ (304.8 cm x 518.2 cm x 213.4 cm)

And other waterfalls are also clouds.

Claude
Zervas, Cumulus, 2002
Receipt printer, computer, roll paper
48″ x 48″ x 48″ variable