Why is visual art a part of Bumbershoot at all? This year, it’s to
teach you that anyone can be an artist. “The visual art’s integrity is
really strong this year,” says Bob Redmond, the programmer with a
background in literary arts who, in the past year, has absorbed the
duties of the visual art curator into his job because Bumbershoot has
decided it no longer needs a visual art curator.
“It’s about populism,” Redmond says.
“We’ve been thinking of powered by the people,” interjects
Bumbershoot artistic director Michele Scoleri, who is seated next to
Redmond and whose background is in rock music.
They describe the headlining art show this year: documents and
performances by the Olivers, a Seattle family (neighbors of Redmond’s)
whose six members have completed all the assignments set out in Miranda
July and Harrell Fletcher’s art project Learning to Love You
More.
Learning to Love You More began in 2002 and has been
documented in shows around the country, including in a West Coast
survey coorganized by Seattle Art Museum in 2003 and at the Whitney
Biennial in 2004. How it works is the artists post on their website a
list of poignant but plain assignments to be performed by regular
people—”make an encouraging banner,” “lip sync to shy neighbor’s
Garth Brooks cover”—and the regular people send their results in
to the website, where the results are posted. A book about the project
will also debut at Bumbershoot.
“The other one that performs highly on our goals,” Redmond says, is
the exhibition of photos and videos about cult ’70s musician Nick
Drake, A Place to Be, organized by Drake’s estate. “We’re
really getting things to blur, genre-wise,” Redmond says.
Hmm. A charming but outdated headliner. A music show. And what
else?
A room commandeered by the Henry Art Gallery featuring Canadian
artist network Instant Coffee will house a series of nooks. In those
nooks, “very intimate” performances, talks, readings, parties,
screenings, karaoke, and craft making will happen. It will be a
“sculptural installation designed… for social interaction,” according
to the press release. Could be interesting.
In another room is Claimin’ Space: Context and Urban Art, a
show curated by Damion Hayes, owner of Belltown “urban art” gallery
BLVD. In the press statement, Hayes poses the old question, “Is
graffiti still legitimate once it is displayed in a gallery or museum?”
and tidily answers it: “Art is art regardless of its venue.”
Claimin’ Space sounds like a rehash of an earlier Bumbershoot
show (Beyond Reason, which already considerably postdated the
1980s trend of graffiti artists coming into galleries). It also sounds
like a simple best-of survey of BLVD’s roster.
There’s also the Seattle-Havana Poster Show, a series of
silk-screened posters for music, film, theater, and art events from the
two cities—another “genre-blur.” Meaning only sort of an art
show.
Finally, the Northwest Rooms will be home to the Seattle art trio
PDL: Jason Puccinelli, Jed Dunkerley, and Greg Lundgren. Each of them
will man a single “Portable Confessional Unit,” where you’re invited to
go inside and talk. In return, you get the ear and, if you want it, the
advice of an artist—or an artist’s mutual confession. “We have a
warning on each of our confessional units,” which are wood boxes
painted in slick bright colors to look like machines, Lundgren says.
“It’s a disclaimer about who we are and what we are doing it for, which
is simply to encourage people to express themselves.” On trial runs,
Lundgren says, the confessions have been startlingly intimate, even
meaningful.
Those units, I’d like to experience—and there’s nothing saying
there won’t be high moments at Bumbershoot art this year. But it’s hard
not to question the festival’s motives when it comes to visual art. For
six years before this one, art at Bumbershoot was a fairly high-concept
(not to be mistaken with highfalutin) operation, led by Yoko Ott, who
now oversees programs at the Frye Art Museum. She did the impossible:
made art people attend a music festival, and made music fans care
(briefly) about other forms of art. Under her regime, a fashion-as-art
show would come up against an exploration of technological art. Rock
posters faced off with esoteric sound art. Bumbershoot never was an
ideal art venue, but Ott made it work.
When she left, after working as an art minority in what was
increasingly a commercial music festival focused on a few big names,
her job disappeared.
And now comes the first year without a staff art curator, peddling
the ostensible theme of “populism” in a way that seems little more than
a lazy way to justify not having anyone on staff who knows or cares
about visual art. If the purpose is to condescend to Seattleites about
art—It’s not scary! Anyone can do it!—then consider how
Bumbershoot would go over if it behaved the same strictly touristic way
toward music. The difference, of course, is that music sells the
tickets at Bumbershoot.
But if Bumbershoot isn’t making money on art, then why does it hang
on to art? Along with theater and dance, art provides an anchor of
legitimacy that keeps Bumbershoot from being just another rock-and-pop
fair. But when an art curator position is no longer funded, and the
rest of the crew puts together a lineup of stale ideas opposed to the
very notion that there’s any difference between artists and anyone else
(while lionizing commercially attractive rock and pop
artists)—then something has gone sideways.
