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? 
