• The Corner of Sweet and Bitter at Open Satellite

I've written plenty about Koizumi already here, so you probably want a rest. But last night he gave a talk that was also a performance, so I just want to share it for those following the issues involved in his work. The central issues are freedom and abuse, as I wrote last week ("On Whether the Artist Is Cruel").

And then he brought up an image of the movie poster for "The Last Samurai," and Tom Cruise's giant serious face (surrounded by long, flowing hair) came onto the Henry's projection screen. Music (I can only assume the movie's soundtrack) began to play over the sound system—cheesy and effective music, the kind of music that moves you to cry if the movie director wants you to cry.

Koizumi explained that he saw "The Last Samurai" on the plane. ("It's like 'Dances with Wolves' but about Japan," he said.) Its nationalistic, hyped-up portrayal of Japan was so pseudo and so absurd that he found himself laughing out loud—until he looked around and saw two women crying. He stopped laughing and started being amazed: what was this work of art that could make one person fall down laughing and another cry her eyes out?

He thought of "The Last Samurai" versus "Kill Bill"—the "sick" image of multiculturalism versus the "healthy" (aware, smart, edumacated, post-PC, etc.) image of multiculturalism.

Which would he rather make in his own art?

He delivered the answer as if he were channeling "The Great Dictator," his voice rising as the music got louder and louder. It's hard to see and hard to understand, but I tried to capture it on video as soon as I saw it happening. (Video on jump)

Remember: American men don't do art unless it involves naked ladies, unless the men have thin shoulders. I hate you, Garrison Keillor.

• Confrontation at the Bridge

• Lawyers and Clients

Lawrence is the star. The show encourages you to consider his figures aside from their cultural context—the sociopolitical stuff we normally talk about when we talk about Lawrence. It's an easy thing to do; there's enough going on in Lawrence's work that it's not necessary to know what story or situation each piece specifically refers to.

Three of his paintings are in the show: Confrontation at the Bridge (1975), Struggle #2 (1965), and Lawyers and Clients (1994).

Struggle #2 is the starkest. It gives the purest impression of Lawrence's use of line—it's essentially a study in what happens when all kinds of lines come together.

• Seattle Art Museum
• Jacob Lawrence, The Struggle #2, 1965, ink and gouache on paper

And what happens! Lawrence can make a line that's smudgy and crayon-like. Smooth and silky as a new marker (look at the horse's ears). Graphite-sketchy. Buzzed and confident as a Matisse. There are almost no straight lines anywhere here; the single exception to that rule creates the central tension from which the rest of the wild movement of the painting flows: the constable's left side pulling on the horse's reins. There's no escaping comparison to this. The terrible, bloody hooves are coming down on five victims, but then a ghostly sixth face appears below the horse's huge back thigh. You could just keep looking at this, and just keep finding. Like: THE HANDS! See?

• The Answer, My Friend...

SBC's latest show at Lawrimore Project is marked by frustration and exhaustion. To Make Ends Meet, leaning on one wall, is a stubby revision of a giant pencil sculpture they showed in 2006 when Lawrimore Project first opened. Back then, the pencil was ceiling-height, and it towered on top of a piece of paper on the floor—its own wishful phony receipt of sale made out to the Whitney Museum of American Art. It announced the ambition of the artists (and of the new gallery, too), but the Whitney has not yet bought that pencil, or anything else by SBC. Now, the pencil (again built around a real core of graphite) has been whittled down to the height of a stool and on it is printed (as a reference to the type of graphite, but also a double-entendre), "Hard." Hard to make ends meet. Hard to keep whirring in a box.

• To Make Ends Meet

In one corner there's a scale model of the monster project that has been consuming most of the artists' time for more than a year: the Mini Mart City Park they're building in Georgetown. They're transforming a vacant, highly polluted gas station site from the 1930s into a community center and pocket park, and the process has been almost farcically onerous. King County is involved. Community councils. The EPA. And beyond the environmental cleanup factor (a tester who came out and drilled 16-foot holes into the ground told the artists, "This is a good demonstration of worst-case scenario"), the site is unstable fill over an old riverbed in a liquefaction zone. "Everybody has told us to stop," Ben Beres told me when I visited this summer. "But we intend to persevere, to exhaust every possibility," John Sutton said. "It feels really good to be working on something that's larger than us."

Here's a video I shot of the model, with Ben "performing" at the end.

Last night was a first for Derrick Cartwright. He's run three other museums, and not once has anyone suggested he get together with the artists of the city.

"I thought, well, what are art museums for? Oh, right, art. Artists," said Roy McMakin, the artist who hosted a party for artists to personally welcome Cartwright to his post at Seattle Art Museum, and to ask him questions.

Dozens of artists were there, and even oldtime rabble-rousers Larry Reid and Charlie Krafft showed up, wearing Cheech-and-Chong name tags. ("I don't think I've seen Larry Reid out since Linda Farris's funeral," somebody quipped.)

It was a good night.

• Wall Piece

The new book on Gary Hill's art is an excessive book. It is 639 pages and I have carried it repeatedly in the rain and become very, literally, tired of it. It is also a very good book, I am coming to admit.

I haven't read the whole thing yet, so this is not a review. It is a recommendation, I guess, for anyone deeply interested in art, philosophy, Hill—Seattle art's antithesis to Chihuly: world-famous, successful, respected, brainy as hell—video, and language. It makes the case very convincingly that Hill is a language artist as much as any other kind of artist. He is often called a video artist, which is pretty insufficient, and this book elaborates on why.

In addition to being an excessive thing—Hill, at a talk Thursday at the Henry Art Gallery, called it "an elephant of some kind"—the book is an eccentric thing. It was co-created by Hill and his longtime friends George Quasha and Charles Stein, who are philosopher-poets. It is not definitive, or art-historical in any regular sense. (A 2002 catalog raisonne was edited by Holger Broecker.) In an introductory essay, Lynne Cooke argues that cinema and art history are fairly "infertile sources" for considering Hill; much better are "literary and philosophical discourses."

Quasha and Stein sometimes refer to Hill as "the art identity 'Gary Hill'" and use words such as "psychosm" and "prolegomena." But they also probe Hill's art in warm and welcoming and evocative ways, and there's a lot to probe, and so all the mental masturbation adds up to some very good orgasms along the way. The book is also a way to get a handle on Hill, which is notoriously difficult to do. He has made a lot of art, and there is no one place to go to see and consider it all.

At the Henry right now his Wall Piece is on view (pictured at top). In it he throws himself at a wall while he recites a text he wrote during a period of particular depression, he explained at his talk. With every word he throws his body on the wall. The sentence that sticks with me is, "It wants to bring me to my knees." (The whole text, many parts of which are difficult to understand in the video, is printed in the book.) That sentence means eight body-slams. It also means that a strobe light in the gallery flashes eight times, only mostly synchronously with the flash of light that's hitting Hill in the video itself. An excerpt from the book on Wall Piece:

What might be called repetitive startle—a seemingly self-contradictory notion, since the startle response presumes the unexpected—embodies the "neurotic" language bind of involuntary psychological pattern and its attendant undesirable emotion. Here an almost Beckett-like driving urge to express depressed questioning of life's value is countered by arbitrary interruption, cross-currents of action, speaking, and illumination; the slam of the body, the burst of the word, the disjuncture of light. The strobe that created the image in the first place, illumination the body each time it hit the wall by flashing at the point of body contact, runs against a second strobe in the installation flashing about once per second, laid on top of the projected image in a cross-rhythm. This second strobe sometimes sustains, sometimes off-sets, sometimes obliterates the image. As the body hits the wall, each time configuring differently, a word torques into audibility, a twisted echo of the thwarted body... The word is made flesh, quite newly—incarnation as act of self-aggression, perhaps in some sense echoing all boundary-breaking violence, right down to the sexual act and sperm's penetration of the egg.

Whew. But, yeah.

One of my favorite moments in the book is Quasha recalling a recurring dream in which he is trying to get his arms around something but just can't. He can't know the thing, take it in. Years after this dream begins he sees an alabaster Jean Arp sculpture in a gallery and seizes the moment. When the guards aren't looking, he picks it up—it's maybe a foot in diameter—and rolls it around in his palms. He never has the dream again. This anecdote is the start of an essay about Hill's piece Cut Pipe, in which the artist's hands are touching and touching a loudspeaker seemingly inserted inside a cut pipe...

I could go on and on. Instead I'll simply say, check out the book if you have the dough (75 bucks), try to avoid having to carry it for any distance (it's a book to be read over time, not all at once)—or just watch Hill's videos here. I particularly recommend his 1980 Around & About.

John Boylan's Next Conversation
This episode: "Courage and Confidence"
Tuesday, November 17, from 7 to 9 pm
Admission is free. Tell your friends.

This roundtable conversation series happens at Vermillion, a wine bar and art gallery at 1508 11th Ave, Seattle (http://www.vermillionseattle.com/). For more information on the series, call John Boylan at 206-601-9848. jboylan@speakeasy.net

This month we'll be looking at courage and confidence. Most art and culture can't be created without them. Any nation-state that suffers from a lack of them is doomed to fail. Is ours one of these? I'm not talking about cockiness or bravado, but rather a clear sense of where one is going, with a faith in the potential for positive results. And then there's the flipside, with the dangers inherent in confidence, the world of confidence men—and women.

The Guests (see bios below)
Elizabeth Rose, aerialist and dancer
Storme Webber, poet, performer, activist
Deborah Lawrence, artist and activist
Toby Crittenden, youth organizer

This video is projected on a screen inside a shack set in a strawberry field in the gallery. Inside the shack, everything from the video shoot is still there; it is like an abandoned torture chamber. You see where Medina sat. The hot dog is there, rotting. The little flag. The weight bench. Outside the shack, the strawberry field is real. The plants are alive and growing in neat rows that belie the labor that went into getting them there.

There were two kinds of labor that went into this installation: what might be called art labor, and regular manual labor. The art labor is what Medina went through in the video. He was hired and paid by the artist, who met and interviewed him for the part at the nearby Home Depot. Medina worked for one 8-hour day and one 6 1/2-hour day in order to create the final, 15ish-minute video. The video begins with the artist asking Medina his name, his age, his background, and whether he has an American passport. (To me, the question about the passport is the cruelest moment in the video.*) The manual labor, on the other hand, was performed by the artist and a few volunteer helpers. They carried sacks and sacks of soil into the gallery to build the field, filling the garden halfway with mulch only to be told that the mulch was too smelly; they had to start over. They worked as builders and farmers—doing work that Medina normally does, on days when he's not being hired by an artist (lifting, gardening, moving, digging, cutting). Medina was not hired to do the manual labor (the artist did that), only the art labor.

The name of the gallery is The Telephone Room, run by Heide Fernandez-Llamazares, Marty Gengenbach, and Ellen Ito. Email them to get in. Perhaps they will also allow you to use the phone. Depending on your age, your fingers will either experience nostalgia or confusion.

When you see this photograph in the gallery, you can read the words on the sign if you stand within a limited area in front of it and slightly to the right of the center of the image. Otherwise, the words blur together.

Here, on this screen, they seem to blur too much to read. (Am I right? It's hard for me to get perspective because I already know what the words are, so I can read them, but that might just be my memory filling in for my lack in perception on the screen.)

In case you can't make it out, the sign says, "Any day on this side of the flower bed is a good day."

The photograph is by Michael Van Horn. It's a straight-ahead image taken from another, specific time and place—this night, this church, these weedy dianthus flowers in bloom. But it also is a site you visit now, as you are trying to decipher the sign, moving your body around the hanging photograph the way you would move your body around the sign itself. It's a conflation of there and here, a superzone.

Van Horn's photographs, along with works by his UW colleagues Rebecca Cummins, Paul Berger, and Ellen Garvens, are at Benham Gallery. This is the gallery's last show ever. It closes December 12.

Roadblock, by Chris Engman, 2008.

For Jeffry Mitchell.

I'm rooting for William Pope.L in the artist category, and Hamza Walker in the curator category. (Link to press release here.) Giving it some thought this morning I came across a recent Rodney McMillian essay in Afterall reconsidering Pope.L, this image of Pope.L doing one of his crawls in Japan in 2001

—the crawls always raise the question: what does it mean that a black man is crawling down the streets of this city? (sometimes he's wearing a Superman costume or a business suit)—

and this unsettling video, which relates to why Pope.L has been McMillian's "bogeyman."

Thank you, thank you, Artforum.

Stranger Geniuses travel far and wide. Meet this year's amazingheads at the Moore Friday. Details:

The Stranger's Genius Awards
November 13, 2009
The Moore Theatre

The 2009 Stranger Genius Awards issue, with profiles of this year's winners, hits streets November 12th. This year's geniuses are Jeffry Mitchell (art), Zia Mohajerjasbi (film), Stacey Levine (literature), The Cody Rivers Show (theater), and Pacific Northwest Ballet (organization).

Doors Open 9 PM
Throw Me the Statue
They Live!
USF (Universal Studios Florida)
Emerald City Soul Club
21+
$5