Short Stories
Henry Art Gallery, 543-2280.
Through May 12.

Shaping Stories
Bellevue Art Museum, (425) 454-3322.
Through March 1.

If two concurrent exhibitions with the word "stories" in their titles is the symptom, what is the disease? I'll take a stab at diagnosis. Since the institutions housing these shows tilt to the educational--the Henry with its alliance to the university, and the Bellevue Art Museum with its snappy tag line "Inquire Within"--I'm going to guess that both of these neatly curated shows have something to do with teaching people to look at art. So the disease is a waning (or a perceived waning) of interest in art.

Or perhaps this is preventative medicine, an inoculation against future atrophy of interest. In their titles, Short Stories and Shaping Stories suggest that narrative has something to do with art's reason for being. This is a bit misleading, bringing to mind the reading-club imperative to find the character in the novel you "most identify with." These shows do not ask you to forgo imagination, but rather to place yourself squarely in its path. They are about perception, about the various ways of participating, about the fine art of looking, about the reification of art.

Learning about looking and understanding how perception works is a slow process, but an exhilarating one. It's best illustrated by Vik Muniz, the Brazilian-born artist whose work is a chapter of Short Stories. Next to the intricate and quite forgotten landscape etchings by Corot, Lorraine, and Constable are Muniz's breezy, wispy interpretations, which, after a beat, you realize are photographs of work executed in thousands of yards of continuous string. In an interview, Muniz likened the moment of illusion's unmasking to the experience of hearing a joke. "Suddenly," he said, "there is an enormous vacuum in your mind that the cognitive apparatus registers as pleasurable, because that's what the mind likes to do: to fill these places with wild and abstract thoughts." This explanation thrilled me; what Muniz had described is the feeling of being fully engaged, of meeting what art has to offer with respectful and mutual effort. (The photograph reminds you of the artifice all over again; the image you see above is a half-tone reproduction of a photograph of a work made to look as if it is made up of half-tone dots.)

Looking at any work requires the same involvement, although the payoff is not usually a punch line. Sometimes what you think about is process, about how Richard Long collected all that driftwood from around Puget Sound and how it's now all in one room in the Henry. It's worth going to BAM just to see Phil Roach's tiny diorama-take on Long's work, the shrinking of an environment-in-a-gallery into an even tinier white cube. Ernesto Neto's sculpture Flying Gloup Nave (which everyone says looks like a vagina; I think it's more like a throat) is a walk-through exercise in delicate give-and-take, forcing your attention toward the materials--how they are constructed, and how they change when you're inside them.

And, yes, story is an element of perception. At BAM, three pieces in particular ask questions about narrative expectation. In Salon, an installation by the performance group the Typing Explosion, you sit under hair dryers and listen to whispered conversations; you paw through purses filled with things that suggest life stories without proscribing them. All in all, it's more like an expectant stage set than a work of art; the viewer's participation completes the loop.

Working at opposite ends of the scale, both Jason Salavon and Bill Viola use pace and attention span to work against what we expect from entertainment. Viola's three photographic portraits are actually 90-second videos stretched out over an hour, so that you have to watch with absolute vigilance in order to register tiny changes in expression.

Salavon, on the other hand, condenses music videos into single image abstractions by shrinking each frame into a square represented by its average color. When whole narratives--and, implied, the work it takes to create them--become a mere stream of color, something has been overdigested, something has been transformed. Wondering what that something is becomes the viewer's obsession, and the cure has begun.