Visual Art

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Get Your Souvenirs at the Henry's New Gift Shop

by Jen Graves

Last Friday night, hundreds of people showed up for the Henry Art Gallery's opening of five vibrant new exhibitions: roomsful of Polaroids by Robert Mapplethorpe and lumberjack-country photographs by Eirik Johnson (Johnson proposed that both shows be retitled "Got Wood?"), an entire level of the museum devoted to sculptures and bathhouse shoes and videos and prayer rugs from the permanent collection, and, on the mezzanine, an explosive little hanging of the "anti-photojournalistic" images shot by Allan Sekula in the middle of the WTO protests.

Inside the front door is a show that people passed right by, in the darkened room that was once the bookstore and gift shop. The windows are covered in black curtains, and an electric moon hangs on the wall. The clumsiest possible impression of a romantic seaside scene is created. A canoe sits on supports on the floor. Under it, a department-store fan, a silvery blue garland, a clear Plexiglas box, and a couple of footlights make reflective magic, sending "moonlit" "water" skittering and shimmering across the wood floor and the empty retail shelves.

Standing inside the canoe are two life-size cutouts of Seattle artists Jenny Zwick and Joe Park. Videos of the artists, dressed as doppelgängers and playing and singing a duet, are projected onto the cutouts. The song they're doing is "Tonight You Belong to Me," made famous by the beach scene with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in The Jerk. In the movie, he whips out a ukulele and she a cornet; here, she's on guitar and he plays a melodica. The sweetness and comedy are underscored by the fact that the silly twinkling across the floor and shelves is actually kind of transporting.

Zwick and Park are the first participants in Matthew Offenbacher's The Gift Shop, a series of shows by teams of Seattle artists over the next year. After November 14, Zwick and Park will be replaced by Claire Cowie, Sol Hashemi, and Jason Hirata. Offenbacher selects the teams by picking names out of a hat, then each team has two weeks to build an installation. By design, the installations will be collaborative, makeshift, and independent from (but located inside) the museum. How are artists supposed to behave in a museum, anyway? The entire system is built on their existence but also on their absence: on them being gone, their stuff needing life support forever. Their actual appearance can be awkward.

Zwick and Park show up as lovable jerks in paradise. They wore their costumes from the video to the party. In additional videos at the entrance, they pose as action figures turning on lazy Susans (she is poised and perfect, he cracks up and falls off his pedestal). Drawings tacked on a sidewall inside the room show other ideas they had for the gift shop. One sketch remakes Velázquez's Las Meninas in lamps—the infanta as a fat, low-hanging chandelier; Velázquez as a standing lamp with a no-nonsense shade. Who knows what will happen next?