The Way Things Are
The Way Things Go by the Swiss artist team Peter Fischli and David Weiss documents a 100-foot-long kinetic sculpture in which various materials interact, causing an absurd chain reaction that ranges throughout some anonymous warehouse. A balloon is blown up and pushed against a board, the board tips over a can, the can spills a viscous liquid, the liquid spreads across a table, and on and on for a half hour. I’ve come across the video (made in 1987) twice in the past year, once in Toronto at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation (a project similar to Western Bridge) and again at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. I was directed to Ydessa Hendeles by one of the gallery owners along Queen Street, the Toronto mecca for small, independent galleries, and wouldn’t have learned about it if I hadn’t asked him for recommendations–it’s only open five hours a week and doesn’t do much publicity. In D.C., I happened upon the video while I was thinking about my first trip to Hirshhorn as a teenager and didn’t know how to look at, much less think about, art. In both cases, people crowded the room and stood slack-jawed or sat on the edge of their seats, watching the achingly slow progression of cause and effect. I think of this video often and how it says so much about how art is made. A recent interpretation: It also describes how Seattle’s galleries and artist-run spaces start up, move, go underground, fold into other organizations, disappear, and reappear.
The Tashiro Kaplan (or “TK”) Building is now, or soon to be, home to several such entities. The Forgotten Works Gallery (formerly in the 619 Western building) opened its new space there last Thursday with the Forgotten Works Challenge. More than 50 artists completed 30 paintings in one month and the 8 x10 pieces were hung salon style–stacked from floor to ceiling, one on top of the other–and were selling for 40 bucks each. I immediately found one I wanted but was beset by a moment of art-buying panic. (I just bought a painting, do I really need another one? Do I love it enough to pack it if I move? Is it worth 40 bucks?) Answering yes to all of the above, I turned back to grab it off the wall. It was gone. When I scanned the room and saw a woman cradling it in her arms, I wanted it even more.
Garde Rail pulled up its Columbia City stakes and opened last week in the TK Building as well. Platform Gallery is the latest kid on the artist-run block but the founders, Carol Bolt, Dirk Park, Blake Haygood, and Stephen Lyons, have opted to go commercial from the outset and will also be exhibiting national artists. Plus, Soil reopens at TK in September. Soil holds an annual auction, which means another missed art-buying opportunity is on the horizon….