Archives for February 2010

From Alon Levin’s Things Contemporary:

Leviathan is the title of Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 work on social order and the creation of an idea state. The cover art illustrates a giant made of individuals in the form of a monarch. In the book, Hobbes argues for a social contract and absolute sovereignty.

Has a place for her stuff.

(Made by journalist and occasional purse-maker Linda Thomas.)

From Jason Kottke:

Steven Levy on how
Google’s search algorithm has changed over the years.

Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which
words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal
says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say,
‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that
told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also
learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning
semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

But there
were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was
similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded
that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed
in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As
Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it
analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found
in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball
games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what
“hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type
‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if
you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

Or in simpler terms, here’s a snippet of a conversation that Google
might have with itself:

A rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a
boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in
front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark.
Unless Noah is around.

Image via:

My instincts are wrong for this. Watching artists draw in a bar seems a little like watching animals in a zoo. Paul Simon thinks they love it if you do, but there’s room for doubt. From an impeccable source I once heard of a monkey in Sacramento who’d hold a mouthful of water while doing a little dance. After a crowd had gathered around his cage, he’d soak as many as he could reach with his soggy calling card.

Seattle painter Robert Hardgrave created Drum of the Draw to be a bridge between artists and audiences. Participants tonight at Grey Gallery include Joel Astley, Rachel Maxi, Julie Alpert, Diane Calhoun (wrong in gallery material) Culhane, Patricia Hagen, Daniel Mitchell, Joseph Keppler, Brian Cypher, Michael McGovern and of course Hardgrave tonight, 5 to 9 pm.

All artwork will be available for purchase, and will be priced from $20- $200.
Grey Gallery is a lounge and stocks a full bar and menu, so come join us!

Hardgrave:

Can collect different shades of ice queen.

(Matt Sheridan Smith)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. An artist walks into a bar.

You live in the Northwest, you’ve heard it, but not, apparently, if you hail from New York. That’s why Northwest context is the only thing lacking from Charles McGrath’s elegant essay on Theo Sim’s conceptual Irish bar in Vancouver, with real alcohol served inside by two real Irish bartenders.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — This city is not just temporary home to the Olympics, it’s a hotbed of conceptual art and conceptual artists. There are also a lot of bars here, some so crowded during the Games that people have been spilling out onto the streets. Fittingly, a new installation on the third floor of the Playwrights Theater Center on Granville Island, the touristy, artsy part of town, examines the subtle conceptual difference between drinking and “drinking” and between the bar as mere watering hole and as self-activating performance space.

The biggest Northwest name in art impersonating architecture is SuttonBeresCuller. Lawrimore Project debuted in July, 2006, with the group’s Chinese restaurant inside the central gallery space.

Titled 3 Dragon, it was a homage to the neighborhood. Because SBC built it inside a crate, Scott Lawrimore was as surprised as anybody else to see a restaurant inside his gallery. When the three artists were ready, they collapsed the walls and stepped out. Inside the restaurant, people were eating. (What else would they do in a restaurant?)

Also from SuttonBeresCuller, an art gas station still in the works, progress slowed by underground sludge left over from the real gas station. If they solve this problem, they’ll be the patron saints of the EPA. One more in the same vein: SBC’s There Goes The Neighborhood.

Justin Colt Beckman, Honky-Tonk, 2008 An installation and performance as a bar, with sawdust on the floor, a deer head bought on eBay and real beer in the fake bar. The paintings of mountains came from Goodwill and the light came from candles in jelly jars. Beckman was on stage in a video, lip-synching to Hank Williams III and looking like the cowboy he isn’t.

After the gift shop at the Henry Gallery closed and the space went dark, Seattle painter Matthew Offenbacher proposed
turning it into an artist space. (Story here.)
Different teams of artists continue to run it on themes of their devising. My personal top pick is The Gift Exchange by Claire
Cowie, Sol Hashemi
and Jason Hirata.

It was
based on a come-one, come-all version of a  potlach. Anyone could bring a
gift and take one, or bring several and take several. Cowie, Hashemi
and Hirata set a high standard for the exchange by seeding the original
stock with their work. Inside a museum gift shop was the art version of a gift shop, a success inside a failure.

Back to Scott Lawrimore: At the Aqua Art Fair in Miami in 2005, 2006, Lawrimore built a bar inside his room and served drinks as the art flew out the door. (Those were the days, my friend.)

Lawrimore in green shirt with his artists and one collector. Right to left, Tivon Rice, Susie J. Lee, Ben Beres, somebody who looks like collector Ben (Swallow Harder) Krohn but isn’t, John Sutton and Zac Culler. Behind Sutton and Culler, a landscape by Chris Jordan.

Lastly, from the department of credit where it’s due: None of this would be possible without Ed Kienholz’s Barney’s Beanery from 1965.

In the distant past, the wide sweep of desert and dark sky enfolded travelers in what is now part of Western New Mexico. Little has changed in that small corner of the world, except the 400 stainless steel poles inserted into the ground in a mile-wide grid: Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field.

Indoors at Lawrimore Project, Tivon Rice‘s installation, A Macrocosmic Zero, offers a claustrophobic version of De Maria’s exhilarating vista. Instead of poles sunk into the ground, there are tubes hanging from the ceiling in a circular maze. Inside it, viewers see themselves in some kind of motion drag, being processed into the blurred center of the experience and heading toward oblivion.

There’s still awe, but it’s heavily laced with apprehension – the implication of a disaster covered by a televised feed, with a motorized panning tripod stabilizing robotic feedback. Nobody comes to the experience fresh or leaves unsullied. Rice agrees with what Francis Bacon said about the mediated image:

I think one’s sense of appearance is assaulted all the time by photography and by film. So that, when one looks at something, one’s not only looking at it directly but one’s also looking at it through the assault that has already been made on one by photography and film.

A series of videos in a portrait gallery offer a series of faces that lose their grip on their molecule structure.

One screen located outside the gallery features the artist. Rice
permanently burned his own image into the screen, where it hovers,
ghostlike, after the video is turned off.

Through March 27.

When giving a gift that can keep on giving, why leave anything to chance? (image via)

Some art objects arrive in public with elaborate titles and some with none at all (untitled), their makers fearing titles will be held against the work or unnecessarily narrow the frame of its references. For every title that makes the piece and sends it like a surface to air missile into the stratosphere, there are plenty that limp along, poisoning the goods.

The non sequitur is an infrequently used but fertile stratagem. I thought of it while reading about Bookseller magazine’s prize for the oddest title of the year, via Diane Mapes.

Calling an individual piece the Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter would guarantee it a second look. Other potential winners in the name-that-artwork game include Collectible Spoons of
the Third Reich, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous
Robots, and, my personal favorite, Reusing Old Graves.

If Anne Siems had called her painting Reusing Old Graves instead of Velvet Forest, I would have begun to look in a better frame of mind. (At Grover/Thurston Gallery)

By turning their slurs into art.

Jane Hammond:

Patrick Lakey:

SuttonBeresCuller: They sandblasted every word of a patronizing, crap review onto Mexican beach pebbles.

Ries Niemi uses a phrase from a withering essay as a tag to his signature:

Bad Ideas, Bad Imagination, and Bad Motives

The three bads also appear on Niemi’s Web site under the headline, the critics are raving about Niemi. Other samples:

“Dad is a Fool.” -Torque Niemi

“Lounge Lizard gone Country Boy…”
-Regina Hackett

“You’re not that funny.” -Sheila Klein