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.
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