Art Review Revue

Bellevue Arts
Museum

Through Nov 30.

In the long line of men making art in the wilderness, John Grade
represents a break. He is not like the artists who compete with nature,
the ones who make mountains in the desert

using bulldozers (Michael Heizer) or outdo the woods with tricks of
light and composition (the Hudson River School), or like the ones who
just tickle nature and let it shiver beautifully (Andy Goldsworthy). He
labors on obsessively refined sculptures that look like nests or
hives—gridded, postminimalist, human versions of animal
creations—and then he sinks them to the bottom of a bog to lie
with the rotting bones of people frozen there decades ago, or he
submerges them in an oyster bay, or he posts them to the front of his
pickup truck and drives through clouds of bugs. He signs up for decay
and lets go of form, but he keeps the old dream of form alive in the
meticulous structures that persist under the pockmarked surfaces.

Bellevue Arts Museum has done Seattle a favor by mounting an
exhibition on the front end of what is shaping up to be this
significant Seattle artist’s middle period. He didn’t have to have a middle period. For a while there he was making sculptures and
drawings that sold well and were plenty good enough. He possesses
Leonardo-like—demigod-like—reproductive powers of the hand
and eye, especially on paper. Some of his semiabstract pencil drawings,
often nothing more than fuzzy gray fields with bright spots, are so
soft and atmospheric that they seem to introduce new zones into the
world. They don’t have to be of anything; they are things, without playing head games or touting theories. Their attitude
is something like the art of Cris Bruch’s: Do whatever you like; I’ll
just be over here working.

A few drawings are on display at BAM, in the exhibition
Disintegration: Sculpture Through Landscape (which was curated
by Stefano Catalani and has a very nice catalog to go with it), but for
the most part the show comprises sculptures that have been subjected
to, or are about to be subjected to, the out of doors. The four major
works are Fold, Collector, Host, and
Meridian. Their dates are all given as either 2007 or 2008, but
the truth is that they undermine the idea of dating a work of art,
fixing it in time. Meridian, for instance, is a giant, carefully
lit spectacle that looks a little embarrassing all tarted up and given
its own darkened room. You can stand inside the giant hollowed-out
hive, which is somewhat fun because of the way its translucent rubber
surface traps and changes light, but in the gallery it is like a
costume waiting for an actor.

The point of these sculptures is that they migrate from indoors to
outdoors and back. They are always in transition. Anything might happen
to them, and I’m not sure Grade knows yet exactly what he wants to
happen to them. What is their end point? When does he decide to stop
moving them, to freeze them in time? Or will their destruction be
forever deferred? Eventually, will the photographs and the itineraries
of the sculptures stand in for the sculptures? I get the feeling that
the answer to this question is no, that the bodies themselves have to
persist. The reason why is their physical majesty. Take Fold, a
seven-and-a-half-foot-tall object that looks like a slice of a tunnel,
its surfaces all crumpled and irregular as if it were made of foil. But
it’s made of hard wood and even harder resin, and its surface is like
honeycomb, all rectangular holes. These are chambers where termites
will be able to crawl inside and make themselves at home when the
sculpture is sunk into the sand in the Great Basin Desert in Nevada,
like a great, curvy, Zaha Hadid–inspired insect apartment complex
jutting up out of the earth only slightly. After the termites eat
through the wood, they—and we—will still have the resin.
Right? JEN GRAVES

Seattle Art Museum

Through March 1.

Edward Hopper, the wall of Seattle Art Museum tells me, liked to
look in people’s apartment windows and see what they were up to. “He
would like to get into the apartments but there’s no excuse,” wrote the
New York Post in 1935, the year my father was born. In the year
my father was born, it was still something of a novelty for a lady to
go eat a sandwich by herself in a restaurant. Today, only one
generation later, I, a lady, can do pretty much whatever I want, which
is exciting. But also, duh.

Edward Hopper’s Women is not exciting. Because
DUH.

The walls of SAM, in the two rooms that contain Edward Hopper’s
Women, say a bunch of stupid shit. They tell me nothing that I want
to know about Edward Hopper’s women. Instead, they offer heaps of
historical context (“Women were on public display as never before”),
excessive literality (America, like chop suey, the food in Chop
Suey the painting, was all mixed up! All mixed up, you see!), and
mushy, squishy study questions, which I did not write down because it
seemed impossible at the time. Too boring. But they went
something like this: “What is this woman thinking about? Is she tired?
Is she sad? Where does she live? Is she enjoying her fucking sandwich?
Is your mind blown by Edward Hopper’s Women yet?”

All the information SAM offers is about content. It is literary.
Nothing is about composition. But what the fuck is the point of looking
at a painting if you don’t tell me anything about why it’s a
painting? Isn’t composition kind of the entire point? Because without
it, you could just tell me, “There is a woman sitting at a table,” and
we could sit there and talk about women in the workforce and the male
gaze and whether or not we think this woman sitting at a table is sad
and enjoying her fucking sandwich. What I would like to know
about Edward Hopper’s women is this: Why so many corners? Why is she
over there instead of over there? Why is this shade of green the
prettiest shade of green that ever greened?

Edward Hopper’s Women is very pretty, in fact. But I feel
like I learned nothing about it. Teach me, SAM. I need you. LINDY
WEST

Free Sheep Foundation

Through Nov 28.

The heart of the current film and video installations at Free Sheep
Foundation is Merely Mouthpiece. This core is a wall
that’s wide and faces a line of video projectors. What’s executed on it
are 10 short experimental films directed by Adam Sekuler. Each short
has no real beginning or end, but a strange sequence of actions,
objects, faces, and spaces. The table supporting the projectors also
supports a number of radios. Crackles, hisses, and strains of lost
music—rap, classical, rock—phantom-drift out of the little
speakers as each film runs a sequence that’s set in some known or
unknown part of Seattle: Cal Anderson Park, a bar near Madison Street
and Boren Avenue, an anonymous attic. Let’s go to the attic.

The sequence involves a furry rabbit mask, a handsome man and woman,
white blankets, and a closed world of wood. In one part of the
sequence, the camera, which is directed by Matt Daniels, moves
Steadicam-backward from a closed door. From the right, a woman in a
rabbit mask walks swiftly across the attic’s space and confronts the
man. Stop. Something important has happened here. This something
relates to the success of this installation. The movement of the woman,
which is dancelike (in fact the majority of the actors in these films
are dancers), and the movement of the camera, which is noirlike,
connect to form a cinematic code. A look at each of the shorts on the
wall reveals more and more of these types of codes. In the Hollywood
movie, this code would express a moment of danger, or mystery, or
suspense. What letter is she writing? What do those secret words have
to do with the murder that was committed last night? That’s the code in
the condition of Hollywood. However, in these experimental films, which
have no story, just sequences/situations/spaces, these codes are what
they are: codes of pleasure, mystery, and suspense.

That is the core. Orbiting it is a project called Search and
Rescue—16 mm films Adam Sekuler and Matt Bakkom have rescued
from destruction—and Interpretive Site: Kosmos, a short
shot by Benjamin Kasulke set in a grassy area that was once a real town
called Kosmos. Back in 1968, the State of Washington destroyed the town
with water redirected by a dam. Not too long ago, for environmental
reasons, the water was removed, and what’s left of Kosmos is just roads
and grass. In the film, people dance and do other activities on this
gone town. But because the history is not stated in the installation,
there is no way to enjoy the meaning, and the meaning is the most
enjoyable part of the film. It’s a meaning that has even more resonance
when one considers the transient nature of the art space itself, Free
Sheep Foundation, which is leasing its Belltown rooms temporarily from
a developer, until the day he decides to destroy the building. CHARLES
MUDEDE