• The Abramovic Stare: COULD YOU HANDLE IT?

Thousands of people waiting in line just to sit across from the Serbian-born artist, stare at her, and have, you know, feelings and experiences. Christiane Amanpour and Lou Reed, Abramovic was looking at you!

And a cast of re-performers was hired to stage highlights from Abramovic's past works, including, most famously, the performance in which Abramovic and Ulay stood naked in an Italian gallery doorway people had to pass through in order to see the rest of the art.

People called the whole thing alternately wondrous, life-changing, problematic, and narcissistic. But nobody ignored it—and it caused lots of minds to wonder about the continuing future, and continuing past, of performance art in museums.

How was it being one of those re-performers? When did MoMA exercise too much protectiveness, and actually change the nature of the work? What was the interview to get the job like?

Heather Kravas, a performer who lives part of the year in Seattle, tells about it in this week's online-only version of the paper, here.

• A mural in the biennale that includes Christ, a skeleton cop and donut handcuffs, the Green River Killer, and the Barefoot Bandit.

Street artists are in demand because it turns out they may be the best weapon against... street artists. They're being commissioned by private property owners and government agencies—the same authorities that would look to punish them for "night" work rather than "day" work.

Here's the whole piece.

• At the Street Art Biennale.

Will the Mayor's Arts Awards, to be held right next door to the street biennale, be tense this time around? Hmm...

• Charles Parrish's carvings and drawing, the late James Washington Jr.'s tools.

• Parrish's Oprah and the late James Washington Jr.'s machine.

• Meghan Trainor's greenhouse sound/sculpture

At the opening, featuring work by Charles Parrish (soon to show at Art/Not Terminal Gallery), last month's resident artist, Nickolus Meisel, and DXArts doctoral student Meghan Trainor, I couldn't get the people I'd brought with me to leave, they were so fascinated by the place. Trenton Doyle Hancock, the Houston artist whose installation opened last Friday at the Olympic Sculpture Park, was one of the people who didn't want to leave—and, in fact, I hope he'll come back for a residency sometime. (Word has it the artist Fred Wilson also wants to take up there if the foundation expands its residencies to artists outside Washington state, which I seriously hope happens. The place is fantastic; it'd be an inspiration for any artist.)

• Ship of Cool

• Ediphone!

Ask for the tour from Tim. And check out the amazing folk art house two doors down.

• Goodbye, Keith and Juan.

I've been back to the Warhol show at least five times. I will miss the haunted hallways where 20 of Warhol's Screen Tests have been playing, and I will miss it when the ads for love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death that have been wheatpasted up all over the city get postered over—because I have loved, dearly loved, the prominent sight, everywhere I go in this town, of Keith Haring holding on tight to his beloved Juan Dubose, both men naked from the waist. I can't think of the last time an art museum has so boldly disseminated a portrait of gay love all across a city, without even thinking twice about it or making an issue of the gayness of the love.

Kurt Cobain was a real person, and many people in this town actually knew him. I didn't, and I didn't relate that closely to his music, either. For that reason it wasn't easy to review Kurt, but I tried:

Kurt the art exhibition, like Kurt the person (and Kurdt the rock star, as he called himself), is complicated. One fan on opening day at Seattle Art Museum last week had been at the memorial 16 years ago; he'd loaded up his iPod with Nirvana to walk the galleries. But he wasn't satisfied. The songs, his memories, and the art weren't coming together.

Kurt is an exhibition of drawings, photographs, paintings, sculptures, videos, and sounds by artists from Seattle and around the world in response to Kurt Cobain's life, music, writings, and death. Would Kurt like Kurt? The question collapses under its own paradox: Kurt wouldn't exist if Kurt were here.

I have sympathy for the unsatisfied fan I ran into at Kurt and the others who will show up looking for some approximation of the other public gatherings around Kurt Cobain: the memorial, the rock shows, the invisible gatherings of nostalgia that happen in the minds of listeners every time his pleading/furious, pull-you-in/push-you-back-out voice plays in a bar or a cafe, especially in Seattle. Rock and art do not abide by the same rules, but they share some roots. Kurt is colder than Kurt because it is one step removed, and that step is death. Kurt knows how the story ends.

• Charles Parrish's works in the basement of the Washington Foundation, where he has access to the carving tools of the late James Washington Jr. Parrish's works will be up at Art/Not Terminal Gallery this month.

• Andrew Rubenstein's Squint Precision

Lawrimore Project 2.0 is opening in Pioneer Square. The details are murky but the show will be by Isaac Layman. Who knows what's next for this now-legendary dealer? Stay tuned at the gallery's site as Thursday approaches.

Another legendary dealer, Billy Howard, who closed his space recently, starts a series of projects presenting artists at Collins Pub. First up is Andrew Rubinstein.

At Art/Not Terminal Gallery, the sculptor Charles Parrish will show the results of working for three years in the basement studio of the late James Washington Jr. (at the Washington Foundation).

Recent UW grad Ben Waterman takes the stage at Gallery4Culture.

• Amy Blakemore, Raleigh Xmas (2008), at James Harris.

Eric Eley's got an installation based on photographs taken by his grandfather, a bomber pilot during World War II, over at Platform.

Photographer Amy Blakemore, who's got a 20-year survey at Seattle Art Museum—where curator Marisa C. Sanchez says Blakemore is one of the most underappreciated photographers working—is showing new works at James Harris.

And the late, unbelievably great Merce Cunningham gets his due in a multimedia exhibition as part of a whole series of events at Cornish, where he was once a student!

Take off work early this month. Do it up this time.

You ought to know that the Vancouver Art Gallery has pulled together Kerry James Marshall paintings from all over the country. This is quite a big deal. Marshall is one of the great living American painters. Let's start with an epic, history-sized painting that became a classic the minute the artist finished painting it. It's called Souvenir I; it's the angel in her living room.

But it's the faces that keep you coming back, those blacker-than-black faces with the firm lines and the weight, the weight. Marshall vowed when he was young never to paint a white person, and his African Americans are not brown but the darkest possible black he can mix. This show also includes a stunning recent painting of a domestic scene in which a black couple is in bed—but the entire scene is black. It's black on black, so you can barely see them, Glenn Ligon/Invisible Man-style. The couple are having an intact private moment, but they also disappear under the weight of being seen as black. (The painting is hard to make out in photographs, but here's one.)

This was one possible future for religious painting.

I just ran into photographer Alice Wheeler on the street, and she delivered a great speech. All artists are either obsessive or funky, she said. She is on the funky side. This means the artist works when moved, and is moved to work often enough to be an artist. This means the artist is not a professional, with expensive equipment and working hours and a tendency to take up a lot of room. Alice says look for more of this work now that the recession is here and settled in.

• The Shangri-La tower

Offsite happens to be at the base of a luxury hotel called the Shangri-La, where a room costs upwards of $300 (Canadian) a night. The hotel occupies the first 15 floors of the tallest building in the city, which rises 61 stories.

Both the shacks and the tower are figments of the imagination; each one represents a world that feels ungraspably foreign, exotic, and always past. The two appear to be opposing each other, but they're also cut from the same stuff, and in this way their polarized appearances are actually working in concert. They sing a song you want to hear more of.

Now that's some good public art. (Again!) One more image on the jump.

• Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre/Ruins of Detroit

Say the artists:

Nowadays, [Detroit's] splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization.

(In the unlikely event you are in Stockholm in the coming weeks, you can see the exhibit in person at The Gun Gallery through September 19.)

Vancouver artist Myfanway MacLeod intended it as a humorous take on a stretch of newly developed waterfront, where the new construction's focus is on sustainability (the humor writes itself in such a place).

It's immediately funny-scary to come upon a pair of 18-foot-tall sparrows with their beady eyes presiding over a series of new condo developments in "Athletes Village" with names like Pinnacle Living and Millennium Water (a billboard reads, "99 homes under $400,000!").

But there's also, for now, an added dimension the artist couldn't have anticipated: The buildings are empty. Only lone condo balcony is decorated (eerily, it's a tableaux of cream-colored patio furniture and a faux-Roman nude sculpture). Pinnacle Living is the pinnacle of loneliness at this point.

The attractively modern buildings present an ethic of green living—the kind of green living the rich can afford. Apparently the rich are not interested, or there just aren't that many of them right now. Two guards sitting in a police K-9 station said this place was packed with Olympic athletes just months ago, but the athletes only slept here. They weren't allowed to use the brand-new appliances that were already installed in the fancy condos, and that were taped closed. When the athletes left, nobody else came.

It's a luxury ghost town, as the friend I visited with said. This was the last large tract of available waterfront near downtown Vancouver, and just two blocks back from the pretty waterfront the zone is still grimy and industrial, abandoned in an entirely different way. One of those older buildings is a large hangar-like space with some broken windows and a sign dangling in the breeze, presumably also leftover from the Olympics, that says, "British Airways." The birds, meanwhile, are grounded. It's like they're waiting, a little disgusted and a little amused. What an environment they've found themselves in.

The perverted animations of Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg are perfectly matched with this fucked-up ad for what I don't know.

• ROWR!

Djurberg's work was last seen in Seattle at the Frye, and before that at Howard House, in a show that caused me to ask, "My goodness, is Sweden okay?"

By exposing a certain madness in the world—the kind that makes this ad possible—Djurberg's work is utterly sane. YouTube clips of her videos here. Full T Mag story here.

Lists like this are always fun. Like Charlie, I'm a sucker for this Matisse. It's my favorite of all his works. I think. Or maybe I'm just nostalgic for it (I studied it in college but never have seen it in person, and it rarely shows up anywhere). It's The Conversation—a scene in which absolutely no conversation is taking place. It's the anti-conversation, achingly so. This is a divorce in the making. The painting lives at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

(Finally, an artist uses Costco smoothies as a medium!
Oh, the humanity of the Northwest!)
[poem interlude]

Here are some thoughts on Aaron Jamison's Peeling Layers Yields Brief Openmouthed, "Oh!"

• From Ballet Austin's Cult of Color: Call to Color, with visuals by Trenton Doyle Hancock.

Trenton Doyle Hancock lives in Houston. But for the next two years he'll have a major presence in Seattle. On August 28, his giant installation A Better Promise opens in the Olympic Sculpture Park's pavilion (it will be up for SAM Remix the night before).

The piece is an opposing response to a 2008 painting he made called The Bad Promise, a dystopic portrait of a weepy, disintegrating hand—maybe grabbing and taking, maybe giving its disease.

In a quick conversation yesterday the artist confirmed that this swing from utopia to dystopia is the basic subject of all of his work, which features various characters trying to move through a world ruled by hope, despair, and, above all, color. In that context, the "Call to Color" he's issuing can be read in a number of ways.

Talk to the artist yourself if you happen to run into him this weekend at the pavilion. (More of his work at James Cohan Gallery.)

• Art Makes You Feel Better Department: Bert Rodriguez gave foot massages to tired walkers at 2008's Frieze Art Fair in London.

Warhol: "Muscles are great. Everybody should have at least one they can show off."

Meyer: "I think people are so hungry for Warhol still today because he gives us all permission to be consumers."

I Tweeted the whole thing here (@JenGraves), where I also Tweeted Tuesday morning's Art Klatch with Bert Rodriguez, who was courted by Bravo for the reality show "Work of Art."

They told him they were afraid he would try to turn his appearance on the show into an artwork, and he didn't lie: Yes, he would, he said. They turned him away after that.

Too bad. Rodriguez might have spiced up the awful "Work." Or maybe it would have swallowed him whole, the way it did seemingly everyone else who had anything to do with it. (Karen Rosenberg wrote a pretty damning review of the enterprise in the NYT yesterday.)

The Rodriguez klatch was quite an event indeed. There was talk of fake marriages that led to real divorces, private investigators, chiefs and shamans, the ethics of making art with prison inmates, muggings, and the Virgin Mary. Even if you missed it, I tried to make sure you did not miss it entirely.

If you haven't seen Warhol's Screen Tests at SAM yet, take today or tomorrow as the opportunity because there are two talks worth going to in the evenings at 7 and you can see the art first, step out for a drink, then come back.

Talks are scholar Richard Meyer tonight and performance artist Kalup Linzy tomorrow. Meyer's talk will be called A Reason to Get Up in the Morning, which sounds right-good, but if you need to choose, go with the artist. I just met him in a quick presentation he did for the staff at SAM that I snuck into, and I can't wait for his performance.

Here's a YouTube clip from one of Linzy's classics, a reinterpretation (with lipsyncing) of a song that was banned in the 1930s, Lollypop.