Last week in a group of artists, collectors, and writers, the
painter Matthew Offenbacher handed out a stack of two folded 8 1/2 by
14 sheets of brownish paper printed on both sides and with the title
LA ESPECIAL NORTE 1 across the top. It is a brand-new Seattle
artist “newsletter”—a thing like a zine, but not the kind put out
by snotty teenagers. It’s made by artists. Career artists. Artists like
Offenbacher, Joe Park, Gretchen Bennett, and Eli Hansen. Still, I
worried it would be tragic. As a rule, writers are writers and artists
are artists.
I was wrong; the thing is great.
The main attraction is an essay about the role of shit in Northwest
art (hence the brownish paper color?) by Offenbacher, and it’s better
than most of what passes for essay writing
in art magazines. Best
of
all is that it articulates big ideas about Northwest
identity—read it to find out why he thinks “art that
daylights shit has moral force here”—using examples ranging from
Susan Robb, who is literally transforming her dealer’s shit into gas
power at a show at Lawrimore Project now, to studio painter Eric
Elliott. (In a perfect designation, Offenbacher declares Stranger
Genius Award–winner Alex Schweder “our old master of [the shit]
genre.”)
What else is in there? Porn and a theory of architecture by
Hansen; Bennett’s personal, narrative philosophy of street art (“I have spent time out here on the street, leaving my mark, and it’s
you I am talking to”); Park’s self-conscious interview with old-time
Seattle curator Chris Bruce; and a reprint of Robert Smithson’s 1972
essay “Cultural Confinement,” which seems to suggest that Seattle
artists are bristling below their polite surfaces.
There are no pictures of art in La Especial Norte; there are
drawings of art, which is better. There’s a detailed scribble of Jenny
Heishman’s Mud Thing, for instance, and a sketch of a 2005
staged wedding between artist Steven Miller and a pile of dirt. (Bonus
fact: Steven Miller married a pile of dirt in 2005.)
Copies are available, and apparently going fast, at the Pioneer
Square gallery Howard House. I’m not sure where
else. But the
masthead-like thing on the back says to contact northern.special@gmail.com for
more information. It also says La Especial Norte will come out
two or three times a year—just infrequently enough to keep you
longing. 
