Pioneer Square Saloon, 340-1234.

Through April 3.

Paintings by rapper, beatmaker, social activist, and graffiti writer Michael Hall (AKA Specs One) currently hang on the west wall of Pioneer Square Saloon, above a wide mirror that reflects a shimmering universe of booze bottles, young men tending the dark-brown wooden bar, and middle-aged professionals sipping good beer or cheap wine before returning to their realities. The paintings are all recent--from 1999 to the day they were hung--and represent Hall's deepening interest in matching hiphop images with hiphop sounds.

Born in Seattle, and dividing his time between our city and San Francisco (where he is laying down hiphop tracks for Look Records), Hall has two types of paintings. One type takes its cues from comic books and late-'70s/'80s science fiction cinema. The other paintings are informed--in terms of lettering (smooth, electronic knots and curves), colors (DC Comics-bright or Marvel Comics-bleak), and message (tags, street names)--by proper hiphop graffiti forms. It is the latter paintings that interest me, for two reasons. One is that they are aesthetically more interesting--especially the unnamed work (none of Hall's paintings have names), hung at the far north end of the bar, that blends the abstract quality of street tagging with the abstraction of Japanese calligraphy.

The combination is successful and effective: Here, the old and the new, the traditional and the unconventional, the East and the West, have not so much met on the canvas as collided and then cooled into shapes and colors capturing not the detail but the stimmung (a German expressionist term for mood) of an urban aftermath not unlike Chiba City, whose sky is famously "tuned to a dead channel" (Neuromancer). This unnamed painting comes closest to the kind of hiphop beats Hall makes: It's spare, messy, darkish, and winter-cold (or winter-mute).

Hall's hiphop paintings are also more complex. This aspect is apparent in a painting next to the calligraphic one. The painting, which hangs high (maybe too high) above the spanning mirror and bar tables, depicts a street wall covered with competing hiphop graffiti writing; the work is complicated not by a collision of the old and the new, but by the fusion of the outside with the inside.

This is a painting (as opposed to a print), so it still has something unique to the artist, it still has an aura; it is private and individual, yet it represents something that inspires (and is inspired by) public participation and interaction. Why not, then, get a marker or spray can, stand on a sturdy bar table, and write your own tag on the surface of this painting? And after a few hours, why shouldn't another tagger enter Pioneer Square Saloon, see the painting of the wall covered in tags, and add his or hers on top of your real tag and the fictional ones? And if one believes that one is the owner of the wall in the painting, why shouldn't one climb on the bar table and attempt to white out the tags? All of this is already within the painting, and it would seem odd or even something of a failure if it were simply arrested at that point in imagined time (the point of Hall's meta-representation) instead of being active, still in the public process of being done, undone, redone, and overdone.

This confusion--this complication of application, meaning, and codes--is marvelous, and frequently found in the best of late-hiphop graffiti works, such as those of the celebrated San Francisco graffiti artist Twist, whose pieces produce similar, confusing effects by spiraling into the abyss of the canvas the real and the fake, graffiti and meta-graffiti, representation and meta- representation.

Even though hiphop graffiti like Hall's has been displayed in galleries and downtown bars since the beginning of the end of the 20th century (as made evident by the 1982 movie Wild Style), to this day something curious, almost ineffable, vibrates within and glows around these art works--works that on one level collide the past with the present, and on another level merge the public street with the private interiors.