“He was continually unprepared for class, and his examples were
irrelevant and boring,” one student wrote in a teacher evaluation for
Joe Park. From another student, Park got this response to a question
about the best part of the class: “The hotness.” Both of those
are hanging on the wall at the Cornish College of the Arts Gallery, a
subterranean space that has become pleasantly unquiet in the months
since curator Jess Van Nostrand took over.
The Hotness: A Sort of Retrospective is packed with stuff:
personal student IDs, featuring inadvisable hair fashions, from the
eight art schools Park attended; elegant drawings of nudes in
clear-plastic sleeves taped to the wall; framed prints and charcoal
drawings; a 1988 video of a kinetic sculpture that climbs a slide, then
slides back down; a “pimiento chair” (it has a red center) and a
folding lamp; a delicate abstract wall sculpture made of ovals of
plastic and blue highlighter; a copy of Sam Durant’s 1990s Klein
diagram with terms including “Entropy,” “Scatological Structures,”
“Neil Young,” and “Kurt Cobain,” updating the famous art historian
Rosalind Krauss’s hard-nosed Klein diagram from her 1970s essay
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field”; an affectionate drawing of Park’s
grandmother’s house in Seoul, Korea; a bucket of water representing an ill-fated performance piece that got Park banned from a
venue; copies of the Dan Clowes comic Art School
Confidential—oh, and some paintings, both early (more
cartoon-influenced) and recent (especially a Pollock-influenced tree
and a wispy portrait of Seattle artist Alfred Harris against a buttery
background). The show also has a fun, artist-narrated (“omg, this was
probably the worst idea ever”) online catalog.
Park is an established artist who was a good enough sport to
expose the underbelly of his career—the perfect subject
for the kind of retrospective Van Nostrand wants to do. She’s planning
these once a year; she hasn’t chosen next year’s artist yet. In
addition to showing a new side to someone familiar, Van Nostrand
intends the retrospectives to demonstrate that an artist’s career is
not the smooth, straight trajectory you see in the standard
survey, with everything unsightly tucked (or thrown) away. Here the
studio is turned upside down and put out on the curb to see. The
pleasure is simple and clear. 
