Oliver Herring at the Frye
Through September 18th

William Carlos Williams, one of the great American poets of the last century, left behind one of the most important artistic maxims of all time, “No ideas but in things.”

During an era rife with idea-based art, we often find ourselves contemplating objects which have little presence on their own; they rely instead upon the artist’s own contextual exegesis – and personal charisma – to transmit significance. In the case of German-born, New York-based Oliver Herring, whose recent works are currently on display at the Frye, we find this phenomenon occurring with varying degrees of severity.

Only Herring’s Oliver -- a life-size self-portrait sculpture comprised of photographic fragments cut and spliced together – manages to arrest our attention. The texture of fabric, flesh, and hair is glossy and flattened, but something stirs from within the Polystyrene. The act of self-imagining or self-creation -- suggested by the exhibition’s title, Taking and Making – is conveyed on its own.

The work, at once life-like and disjointed in its meticulous construction, brought to mind Wallace Stevens' “The Man with the Blue Guitar”:

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

Unfortunately, Herring does not achieve this same effect with the other, less focused works that surround it. Among these are his five-channel, synchronized DVD installation Little Dances of Misfortune. As jarring as it might be to see video at the Frye for the first time, the sensation quickly dissipates upon closer inspection. Set to his own Baroque music remix, the dark monitors reveal fading, stop-action human forms that diminish first into spent bones, then mere shadows. While the movement has a Swankmeyer-like furtiveness, the tone of the piece is too mild to suggest action or evoke contemplation.

Less compelling still are his Do Two Monologues Make a Dialogue? and Dans La Cour Vitree Task Performance Documentation. The first is an intersection of two series of unframed snapshot-sized photographs each documenting the life of a more or less random individual. The second is a collection of photographs that highlight one of his “task” performances. These are gatherings in which groups of strangers are given and ultimately give each other fun, challenging, or mundane assignments to carry out. The objective is collaborative creation, but for Herring the more important outcome is each participant’s understanding of him or herself as someone daily involved in the act of creating.

When he was in town last month, the artist spoke with a subdued passion about both the process and result of these works. Well-spoken and physically appealing, he made a persuasive case for them. On there own, however, they conveyed little of the electricity he claimed to have experienced in their making.

Many of the younger, critically-acclaimed artists who have visited Seattle recently (Ellen Gallagher, Trisha Donnelly, Doug Aitken, etc.) have shown themselves to possess the kind of brains, looks, and personal charm that would enable them to succeeded in any field of their choosing. They can be so persuasive, in fact, I have often needed to go back and reevaluate my response to their work just to make sure I’ve not somehow been had.

While Herring could no doubt hold his own with them in conversation, his work – unlike theirs – does not quite hold up without him.

Chinatown: Red Series
The Collins Pub, Smith Tower, in Pioneer Square
through August 2005

Seattle's Chinatown / International District and its impressionable details on and inside the historic neighborhood's weathered buildings are the subjects of Daimian Lix' photographs. Featured inside the dark walls at The Collins Pub in the Smith Tower, Lix's images in the small exhibition Chinatown: Red Series capture a glimpse of architectural details and objects that inform the neighborhood's historic character and diverse cultural context.

The exhibition's emphasis on the color red invoke cultural associations to the sun, happiness and good fortune, and it fills out the surfaces of restaurant ceilings, Chinese-language posters, and building details.

Self-taught, Lix' photographic lens, at times, borrows from Cinematographer Christopher Doyle's candy jar palette and his exposure of neon-tinged nocturne. In Dragon, the China Gate restaurant lung dragon near the ceiling arcs towards the center of the image, edges blurred in soft visual focus. The mid-century neon signage in the image Seafood Restaurant beckons patrons against rouge-colored moldings — with hints of wear — from an earlier era in a neighborhood celebrating fresh food.

Lix documents these community details, framing close-ups of objects, advertising, and other distinctive remnants with a cinematic focus for exposed cracks and overlooked corners. The images dissolve on the edges like faded snapshots from memory, but substantively evoke the neighborhood’s architectural ambience and its weathered past.

To be sure, Lix sees a value in capturing these details on film before they’re erased in the district’s quiet gentrification. Efforts to restore several vacant hotels into market-rate apartments and condominiums are in the planning stages, and new life to energize the neighborhood’s bright mix of restaurant, retail, and local attractions — like the Grand Pavilion in Hing Hay Park — serve to remind us that the International District is on the move.

Linda Farris
1945-2005

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Regina Hackett reported on Saturday that Linda Farris, once Seattle’s premier gallery owner and for decades the city’s first and foremost art personality, died on Friday after a two year struggle with cancer.

I remembered one day a few years ago walking down the street with a friend of mine when an unusually-looking woman walked briskly by us. After I said hello to her and she replied in kind without slowing down, my friend – who was not an art person -- turned to me and asked “What was that?”

This determined woman -- with her curry-hued hair, faux-fur coat resembling some unknown, yet-to-evolve mammal, shiny purple boots, dangerously low-cut lycra top and tight leggings decorated with patterns that appeared to have been lifted from the Alhambra -- required some explanation.

And just how does one explain Linda Farris to the uninitiated? In a city woefully short on flamboyant characters, she always stood out. Without her dynamic personality -- combined as it was with her business savvy and spot-on artistic judgment -- it is simply not possible to imagine Seattle’s vital art scene today. Try imagining your Perrier without the fizz.

Farris opened her Pioneer Square gallery in 1971 and soon ushered in an exciting new era in Seattle’s cultural life. While most galleries represented older artists associated with the Northwest School or University of Washington faculty, she sought out a new generation of artists, many of whom had recently graduated from the University of Washington School of Art. The group -- Dennis Evans, Nancy Mee, Norie Sato, Sherry Markowitz, Peter Millett, Mary Ann Peters, Jeffrey Bishop, Randy Hayes, Andrew Keating, Ginny Ruffner, and Ann Hamilton -- would become very familiar to Seattleites. Not only were they widely shown and collected, many of them also went on to receive large public art commissions that will be with us for some time.

In subsequent years, Farris brought distinction to her gallery by showing big-name artists such as Louise Nevelson, Robert Rausenberg, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Alice Neel, Eric Fischl and Alex Katz. At a time when there were few venues to see this sort of work in Seattle, Farris played a crucial role in exposing its citizen’s to it.

By the time her gallery closed in 1995, its best days were behind it. But Farris soon returned to the scene, as strong as ever, with her Contemporary Art Project. Drawing together a group of intellectually-minded members who each contributed $15,000, the CAP Project -– under her tutelage -- collected works by young, up-and-coming artists from around the world. Most of the CAP Project artists -- a list that includes Kim Dingle, Zhang Huan, Sue DeBeer, Cecily Brown, Deborah Mesa-Pelly, Inka Essenhigh, and Brad Kahlhammer among others -- have gone on to art world acclaim. After rotating through members’ homes, the works were donated to the Seattle Art Museum, which did not have much in the way of contemporary art in its holdings and had shown little inclination to add to its collection.

As Hackett astutely points out, Farris’ most significant and lasting contribution to Seattle may well be the development of the art culture of Pioneer Square, a key factor in its subsequent revitalization. While the neighborhood -- with its unique blend of contemporary art galleries, artist studios, architectural firms, Internet companies, advertising agencies, and independent retailers -- is regarded today as the cultural heart of the city, this was not always the case.

For people not around at the time of Farris’ arrival there, it is difficult to describe how bold and forward thinking a move this was.

In 1971, Pioneer Square was comprised primarily of dilapidated buildings that housed either flop houses or factories that produced clothing and outdoor gear. Going to visit the Lasley Knitting Company on the 4th-floor of the Washington Shoe Building with my father as a boy was a completely different experience than having coffee at the Zeitgeist today, watching crowds of people partake in the ritual known as the First Thursday Gallery Walk.

It would be hard to underestimate the role that Farris’ passion for art and overriding sense of fun had in shaping the character of the place.

River Styx at Western Bridge
Through Sept. 26

One of the hallmarks of recent contemporary art has been its enshrinement of the difficult, the obscure, and the challenging. For many artists, work that is “accessible” and “easily understood” can seem uncomfortably close to the superficial. Partly as a result, viewer incomprehension and mystification in the face of many modern artworks is a familiar experience. But is not “getting it” a problem? And if it is, is it our problem, or the artist’s?

River Styx, the central installation in the current show at Western Bridge, will certainly present a puzzle to the uninitiated. A site-specific work, it was commissioned by Western Bridge founders Bill and Ruth True from the German artist Daniel Roth, who was invited to visit the area and create a work based on his experiences. The resulting piece, an extension of work previously exhibited elsewhere, is spread out between two very spare rooms, one directly above the other. The upper room is centered on the most interesting object in the installation, a shallow, rectangular pond, filled with ominous black water. On the wall a fragment of text discusses the relations between the living and the dead, and two framed panels display photographs and drawings alluding to buildings, dark basement spaces, and passages.

The lower room is centered by a large scale model of an Olympic coast sea stack, realistic in color and detail save for the deep hole in its surface surmounted by a round wooden tower. On the wall are photographs of similar coastal rock forms paired with enigmatic architectural drawings of stairways and elevator shafts.

According to the artist, the installation expresses his vision of an imaginary tunnel connecting a correctional facility in Chicago with the wild Pacific Coast, a transition between the worlds of the living and the dead like the mythical underground River Styx.

Everything about this installation expresses skill, taste, intellectual sophistication, and an affinity for progressive currents in contemporary art, but it’s still a failure. Like a connect-the-dots drawing with too few dots, the Roth piece appears as a collection of intriguing fragments, fragments which stubbornly refuse to coalesce into a compelling vision or experience, certainly not the vision the artist himself describes. Open-endedness can be a successful way to engage viewers with an artwork, but here it seems more a dodge than a tool: “Okay, here’s some parts - you do the work.”

Another major work in the exhibit, a 1996 piece by Roni Horn called You are the Weather, also left me unmoved. Here 100 closely cropped photographs of a single woman’s face fill all four walls of a huge white room, with the images arranged in groups – black and white, washed out color, high contrast. The photos, taken over several weeks in various outdoor hot springs in Iceland, are purposely composed to be as identical as possible, the only variation being slight changes in expression, changes which presumably grow all the more dramatic and telling as our familiarity with the subject increases. This turns out to be too thin a concept to animate a work so big and sprawling, and what was meant to be subtle and engaging seems instead dry and monotonous - more like the face on a sheet of postage stamps than an evolving close-up in a film by Ingmar Bergman, clearly the sort of model the artist had in mind.

Perhaps photographer Horn’s desire to capture a sense of emotion and intimacy over time is also inspired by the far more successful series on a similar theme by Nicholas Nixon, installed in the apartment gallery upstairs. Nixon’s deservedly-famous documentary project portrays the four Brown sisters in group photographs taken over a 30-year span. The resulting portraits are astonishingly revealing and uninhibited, the women completely at ease before the camera and with each other. Particularly remarkable is the variety that Nixon achieves within the tight limits of his formula – the photographs are all identical in format, the sisters always in the same order, yet the resulting compositions manage to be both surprising and inventive, the depicted connections between the women always evolving. Although these photos have been included in many books, it’s instructive to see the original works, as the images are taken with a large format camera and contact printed for maximum detail and resolution.

Also engaged by the theme of time and mortality is Seattle-based video artist Gary Hill, here represented by a harrowing but powerful work from 2000 entitled Wall Piece. In the video, projected life-size, Hill appears to throw himself repeatedly against the gallery wall, each impact punctuated by a burst of strobe light and the concussive sound of a body hitting a solid surface. The artist recites – with difficulty – his own essay on aging and disembodiment: “I feel (BAM) abandoned by the (BAM) real…I’m (BAM) going, watching (BAM) myself go (BAM)….movement (BAM) eludes me.” What is this wall, and why is the artist throwing himself against it? Is it the barrier between him and us, between the depicted and the actual, or is it that thin membrane separating life and death? Is the rawness of the physical act meant to shock, or simply to denote frustration? What is our role in this drama, as spectator?

When a piece of contemporary art works, it can bring up such issues in a fresh and unexpected way, doing something important, for perhaps the first time. This is the attraction in collecting such works, but it is also the challenge. After the passage of time, an inevitable sorting process makes the job of the museum or collector much simpler – witness the relatively short list of artists now considered significant from the 1940s or 50s. For collectors like the Trues, on the other hand, devoted to the art of Now, there are far fewer guideposts as to what’s worthwhile, other than the judgment of a relatively small group of dealers, curators and critics, and their own intuition. The resulting collection, with its hits and misses, is certain to provide interesting viewing at the Western Bridge for some time to come, the best local vantage point that we have, besides the Henry, on the Latest . . . if not necessarily the Greatest.

Deborah Butterfield at Greg Kucera
Through August 27th

It is far too easy for people who follow contemporary visual art to dismiss sculptor Deborah Butterfield as “the horse lady.” While it is true that her bronze-cast driftwood and scrap-metal constructions are immediately recognizable -- even to those with only the most fleeting experience of her work -- no visit with them can fail to stir the viewer.

With their seemingly elemental and sketch-like construction, her horses have the vibrant energy of the pre-historic cave paintings of Altamira or Lascaux. What remains disarming about them, however, is their weight and scale.

Butterfield re-animates heavy, discarded material itself once subject to powerful, dramatic phenomena. The life force within her horses becomes a metaphor for the transformation of all earthly matter, and vice-versa. In the worn wood fragments, we experience the germination, growth, and destruction of massive trees. In the bent and torn metal, we feel the extraction, forging, and oxidation of industrial steel.

Looking at any specific point on these sculptures, we always recognize their essential “horseness” and see it as well within the commonplace materials from which they have been constructed. Contemplating Butterfield’s composition process – her ability to identify a horse’s rear end in a gnarled stump or a graceful neckline in a broken dumpster lid – contributes to our sense of fascination.

The larger works constructed from bronze-castings of wood are in the main gallery; the heavy metal beasts are in the back. Her most riveting equines, however, are the compressed, reclining ones, which appear ready to rise up at any moment.

Recantations: Two Artdish Epilogues

The O.C.
Fox Television

Air America Radio
Seattle’s Progressive Talk AM 1090

I have taken it upon myself to go back and discuss some recent writings on subjects that over the course of time have gone on to surprise or disappoint me. In one instance, my hopes for a novel and insightful television drama were dashed; in the other, a new talk radio format I dismissed now has me hooked.

Last year the Fox series The O.C. had me tuning in every Wednesday to see how Ryan, the imperiled, world-weary kid from Chico, would fare in the household of Newport’s affluent, enlightened Cohen family. Would temptation, misunderstanding, or the ill intentions of those around him lead to an expulsion from this troubled paradise and send him back to the impoverished, crime-ridden streets of his hometown? Each episode was full of challenges for him, his supportive new family, and his often-suspect new neighbors. The O.C. — unpredictably harrowing or funny — was one of television’s best explorations of class in America. At its best it reminded me of Joshua Logan’s film Picnic, with William Holden and Kim Novak.

Because it moved to Thursday night for its second season, I did not have the opportunity to watch any episodes during the show’s run. I have since found time to watch a few reruns, however, and have been dismayed to see the show recycling the same plots and situations with new characters standing in for the old ones. In one episode I sat through, Marissa was leading on a young Ryan-like Latino boy from the other side of the tracks while Ryan was struggling to express his feelings to Kristin’s illegitimate half-sister, just as he had done with Marissa last season. Is this the best they can do?

When we discover that Seth’s dangerous new love interest — a tattooed blonde hottie who manages a nightclub — is bisexual, it is difficult to care. As a dramatic moment, it pales in comparison to last year’s outing of Luke’s gay, car-dealer dad. I loved last season’s alluring, witty Anna and fallen alpha-male Luke. Why can’t we have intriguing, psychologically complex supporting characters like that this year?

One of the things I enjoyed the most about last season was the emotionally-charged final episode, when Ryan — now an expectant father — returns to Chico with the future mother of his child to face an uncertain future without the Cohens. It seemed then that the writers understood that the show’s set of circumstances had allowed the characters to more or less play themselves out and that new contexts (Chico, anyone?) were required. Unfortunately, they have chosen instead to keep the setting, estrange the characters further from one another and add new ones, empty figures who are mere shadows of their first season antecedents who continue to walk freely among them.

Since mourning the loss of AM 1090’s "Classic Country" format last October, I have grown to love Air America Radio. My appreciation is twofold; not only do I find the morning programming extremely entertaining, I also hear about news items (the Downing Street Memo, for instance) weeks before they filter up to the mainstream media or NPR.

Morning Sedition co-hosts Mark Maron and Mark Riley are hilarious and well informed. They have an energetic, wisecracking New York sensibility that is a refreshing change from the public conversational tone one usually hears in Seattle. The highlight of the show is the presence of fictional character Lawton Smalls, a die-hard Bush loyalist who appears on the program regularly to rebut the positions of the liberal hosts. I do not think I have heard a better (or more humorous) portrayal of the fear and self-delusion that lays at the heart the president’s most fervent supporters.

Although I had criticized Franken for choosing politics at the expense of satire, I now s recognize his amazing ability fuse the two. If there was a particular moment when I was won over by Franken, it was during the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library when he chose to broadcast a segment he called "Richard Mellon Scaife Theater." Named after the billionaire who financed the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that sought to bring down the Clintons (read David Brock’s Blinded by the Right in case you missed this), Franken produced this old-fashion radio show to dramatize the more colorful and absurd rumors surrounding the then-president, such as his supposed drug smuggling and acts of murder. It was both shocking and delightful.

More recently he brought up — with his usual mixture of amusement and horror — the disturbing farewell speech by retiring Illinois congressmen Henry Hyde, during which he re-introduced himself to his colleagues as a 997 month-old stem cell. While this was too bizarre to find its way to the mainstream media, Franken — the old Saturday Night Live writer — understood its absurdity and significance.

What Franken and co-host Katherine Lanpher offer Seattleites is, above all else, a compelling alternative to the often listless morning programming on KUOW. Franken’s star power guarantees on-air visits with the nation’s best political journalists and authors.

The other hosts on Progressive Talk AM 1090, Ed Schultz and Randi Rhodes, have their place as well. Schultz has an ear for the concerns of the workingman who has largely left the Democratic Party and Rhodes is a consistent voice of alarm and indignation about the lies of the Bush administration. Unlike Maron and Franken, however, they are not entertainers.

It is Maron the stand-up comic and Franken the comedy writer/actor — Air America Radio’s two holy fools — who keep us laughing through this ugly chapter in our nation’s history while calling truth to power.

The biggest disappointment on Air America is Janeane Garofalo, whose repetitive, amateurish psychological analysis of right-wing true believers grows tiresome after a few rancorous minutes on the air. It is sad that Garofalo, an actor and comedian of great talent who has a considerable following, can’t find the right tone for her show, The Majority Report, co-hosted with Sam Seder. Unless there is another Bush in the White House in 2008, she can never expect to get material this good again. And let’s hope that never happens.