Oliver Herring is a Brooklyn-based artist who works relatively traditionally, in photography, sculpture, and video. But since 2002, he also has had something on the side: something called Task.

Task is an event involving volunteers who come together in a public place for an entire day and give each other tasks to do for the whole time they’re there. While it’s happening a mini-society forms. All Herring does is choose the volunteers, start things off, and then observe. This happened in Seattle June 28; my on-the-scene reporting on the first part of it is here; a longer essay considering it is running in next week’s paper.

In this interview, conducted on the eve of the event in Seattle, Herring talks about why Task is actually not on the side of his studio work, but instead at the heart of it. He talks about the outbreak of Task “parties” around the country. He talks about his year of saying yes to everything.

Listen in.

And here are two images from Seattle’s Task (photographs by Duncan Scovil):

^{These are the bleachers that lead down from the Fifth Avenue level to the auditorium. Remember 83-year-old Bob from my earlier writing? That’s him up and moving around while a young woman naps.}

In this very special, very gay episode, Jonathan Golob and David Schmader talk about the possible causes of homosexuality. Did your mother make you gay? Probably.

That there is Matthew Day Jackson’s Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me) (2008), the centerpiece of the Henry Art Gallery’s new show The Violet Hour. It’s made of a Skip Nichols race car (crashed/Corvette), steel, wool, felt, leather, stained glass, fluorescent light tubes, solar panels, fiberglass, and plastic.

Like Jackson’s other two works in the show, this one is a glorious thing to look at and look at and keep looking at. It’s also full of associations in and outside of art—the first to come to mind are Richard Prince’s treatments of upstate New York, Beuys’s plane crash and rescue by the Tartars, and stained-glass windows that survive in bombed-out cathedrals. Traditional Western art and pioneer stories are swirling around, too: the driver’s seat is made from a leather cowboy saddle, and set in the passenger’s seat like an eerie mask is a reflective astronaut’s helmet wrapped in gray felt. Oh, and the entire sculpture is solar-powered.

^{That’s the “shattered” windshield of the car.}

^{There’s the cowboy saddle and the space helmet inside the car.}

The Violet Hour is a remarkably entertaining show for being so simultaneously grim. Jen Liu’s videos feature Pink Floyd standards sung in Latin plainchant, Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” performed by a community brass band and performed as an operatic aria for a soprano, cannibalism, brutalist architecture, and pretty young men. In Croatian artist David Maljkovic’s videos, young people in a post-communist daze linger under the burdensome, overpowering modernist architecture of the Italian Pavilion of the Zagreb Fair, loitering in and around cars that have been immobilized.

The overlapping themes in the show reveal themselves continually: cars, architecture, nature, text, religion, crystalline forms. It’s a show in which you can do plenty of mental work while also having a great time.

Talking to the artists (except Maljkovic, who had to remain in Croatia with his wife, who’s expecting) was much the same experience. Have a listen.

On the beleaguered morning after the opening party for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards last Saturday, the five winning artists sat down in a conference room in the Portland Art Museum and gave each other insane love. This recording is the result of that union.

There was Whiting Tennis,

Dan Attoe,

Marie Watt,

Cat Clifford,

and Jeffry Mitchell.

Gather round, children—and learn all about nuclear energy. How does it work? What’s a neutron again? What was the difference between the disasters at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island? If a radioactive spider bites you, do you get superpowers? Science tells all.

The Bellevue Arts Museum hasn’t exactly had an easy time of it, what with the shutting down, the “signature” (read: impossible) architecture, and the embezzling.

Okay, but what does its contemporary curator, Stefano Catalani—who has produced more exhibition catalogs in the last few years than any other local curator—have to say about working at BAM?

Here he is. (And here’s a site that says he is actually an Italian prince. He does have a princely mustache…)

Welcome to this week’s Setlist!

What you’ll hear this week:

Deer City - “McIntyre Prom Queen”
The Preons - “Conflict of the Cobra Kai”
“Awesome” - “Shape Song”
Smile Brigade - “Reflektor”
Hey Marseilles - “To Travel and Trunks”
The Intelligence - “Dating Cops”
Shenandoah Davis - “We, Camera”
Priests & Paramedics - “Places”

Click to listen.

Click here to listen.

^{Laylah Ali’s Untitled (from the Greenhead series) (1999), gouache on paper, 10 by 11 1/4 inches}

A few months ago, I wondered what Seattle Art Museum planned to do with its gallery devoted to artists of African descent. There was talk of residencies? Group shows?

The new group show, Black Art, is not only the first broadly themed effort in the small gallery, it’s also a self-reflexive exhibition about the function of the gallery itself. It asks, how useful is the term “black art”? What if blackness were looked at as broadly as possible?

The show is a harvesting of SAM’s permanent collection for “black art,” plus a handful of loans. The results are sometimes surprising.

Listen to Jackson-Dumont tell it.

Here are more of the images in the show:

^{Randy Hayes’s Victor/Victim (1982), pastel on paper, 83 1/4 by 50 7/8 inches}

^{Halford Lembke’s Crouching Negress (1932), wood, 6 3/8 by 3 1/16 by 2 7/8 inches}

^{Max Beckmann’s Jahrmarkt (Annual Fair): Der Neger (The Negro) (1921), drypoint, 29 by 26 cm}

^{Mark Tobey’s Broadway Girl, Head (1957), sumi ink on paper, 23 1/2 by 15 1/2 inches}

This week, hear songs from Man Plus, Allecia Clemons, Police Teeth, the Animals at Night, At the Spine, Coco Coca, Nazca Lines, the Bismarck, and this week’s Band of the Week, Song Sparrow Research. Listen to get the lowdown on the shows these bands are playing this week. Also—senseless chitchat!
Click to listen.

^{Sergio Vega’s Paradise on Fire 5 (2007), photograph}

Sergio Vega, who was born in Argentina and now lives in the foresty middle of Florida, has been working on a project called Paradise in the New World for 10 years.

Using his own writings—in voices from academic to confessional—plus photography, sculpture, and video, Vega goes in search of the promised paradise. He treks to the area of Brazil where explorers once said this paradise could be found (pictured above, in a 2007 fire), and he looks at our estranged relationship to tropical paradise as moderns, often distinguishing between First-World and Third-World definitions of modernity.

^{The parrot phone is one example of modern systems mimicking natural ones. A talking bird becomes a talking machine.}

Vega’s newest additions to the project, photographs and a video of two men who discovered and worked in the Brazilian gold rush of the 1970s, are on display at the young contemporary art space Open Satellite in Bellevue, in an exhibition curated by Pablo Schugurensky. Facing off with the Bellevue gallery’s gigantic window wall is a blackout curtain cut to look like a giant silhouette of a jungle canopy.

Vega sits down in the gallery and talks while his home—or at least his home town in Florida—is burning.

Jonathan Golob and Dominic Holden talk about the politics and science of weed in a predictably fascinating, but rambling conversation.

San Antonio-based artist Dario Robleto has two shows up currently at the Frye Art Museum, but that’s not why In/Visible decided to do two podcasts with him rather than only one. It’s because he’s too interesting to cover everything in one sitting.

In part one, recorded and posted in late April, Robleto talked about his personal history in and around hospice and honky tonks in Texas, and about his philosophy of “attainable magic.”

The wild materials he uses in his artworks are all real things in the world, as far-fetched as they sound—for example, there’s trinitite, glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, when heat from the blast melted the desert sand.

In part two, recorded May 15, Robleto focuses on his materials, explaining how he gets them and what they mean to him. (Here are a few examples of what he uses: bones from every part of the body, ground seahorse, men’s wedding bands excavated from American battlefields, residue from female tears of mourning overlaid with residue from male tears of mourning, pain bullets, tracheal extractor, ground pituitary gland.)

His latest find? A multimillion-year-old blossom, perfectly preserved, and a multimillion-year-old raindrop, caught in amber. Those objects will be part of an upcoming group exhibition (called Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet) with Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton, Xu Bing, and four other artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Robleto is also in a group show called Old, Weird America (the title comes from Greil Marcus’s take on Dylan’s basement recordings) at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.

His 10-year survey, Alloy of Love, opened last weekend at the Frye in Seattle. Below are two of the many works in the show.

^{Sometimes Billie Is All That Holds Me Together (1998-99), hand-ground and melted vinyl records, various clothing, acrylic, spray paint. Several new buttons were crafted from melted Billie Holiday records to replace missing buttons on found, abandoned, or thrift-store clothing. After the discarded clothing was made whole again, it was re-donated to the thrift-stores or placed where it was originally found.}

^{Detail from A Color God Never Made (2004-05), cast and carved de-carbonized bone dust, bone calcium, military-issued glass eyes for wounded soldiers coated with ground trinitite (glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, c. 1945, when heat from blast melted surrounding sand), fragments of a soldier’s personal mirror salvaged from a battlefield, soldiers’ uniform fabric and thread from various wars, melted bullet lead and shrapnel from various wars, fragment of a soldier’s letter home, woven human hair of a war widow, bittersweet leaves, soldier-made clay marbles, battlefield dirt, cast bronze teeth, dried rosebuds, porcupine quill, excavated dog tags, rust, velvet, walnut}

Here’s what you’ll hear on this week’s Setlist:

The Quiet Ones “O Mexico”
Gary Reynolds & the Brides of Obscurity “Rolling Over”
TacocaT “Bike Party”
The Lonely H “Hair”
Cancer Rising “Let’s Start Some Shit”
Reptet “Redemption”
Lonesome Rhodes & the Good Company “Sunshine on My Mind”
Molly Shannon, Molly Shannon “Jane Cannary”

Click to listen

^{Matthew Offenbacher’s The Freak in a State of Total Tokenism (2007), oil on canvas, 49 by 29 inches}

Matthew Offenbacher is the painter behind La Especial Norte, the latest in a spotty but notable historical lineage of artist-run zines in Seattle. (Anyone remember Redheaded Stepchild?) He talks about how this one came about, and what he wants to do with it. And, tangentially, why his newest paintings are of his cat.

Malaria, meet Traveler. Traveler, Malaria! Well, you two should have a lot to talk about…
Listen in as intrepid scientist Jonathan Golob and intrepid explorer Steven Blum (the Public Intern) talk about all the nasty bugs one can encounter while trotting the globe. Science taunts all the gathering microscopic diseases of the planet by declaring the human immune system to be “totally bad-ass.” Bring it on, little guys.
Also, learn Science’s miracle anti-diarrhea elixir, free of charge!

Here’s what you’ll hear on this week’s Setlist:

The Maldives - “Cold November”
Circles - “One by One”
Common Market - “Black Patch War”
Hungry Pines - “Blood Eagle”
Song Sparrow Research - “Dry Sun”
Thee Emergency - “Holdin’ On”
Shenandoah Davis - “We, Camera”
Type - “Hobby Rap”

Thee Emergency

Hear all these local bands and find out where you can see them over the weekend!

Click to listen

Maxwell Anderson (who, yes, is grandson of the playwright) was in Seattle a few weeks ago to discuss issues of international art repatriation at Seattle Art Museum—in conjunction with the Roman Art from the Louvre show that’s closing this weekend.

We caught up with him at an absurdly late hour after his talk (11 pm PS, 2 am his time), but he was as eloquent as ever. The fact is, Anderson is one of the smartest and most up-to-date museum directors in the business, and in this podcast, he describes many of the philosophies that make him so good.

Just listen.

And check out the best museum web site in the country at the museum where he’s director in Indianapolis. Next year, the IMA will open its 100-acre art and nature park, which sounds something like what the Olympic Sculpture Park could have been but isn’t. Anderson says it won’t be about “trophy hunting and monument building.”

Oh, and here he is doing one of his regular YouTube videos about the art at the museum. (Yes. Imagine a director making time to do that.)

This week on Setlist hear…

Pleasureboaters - “Andalou”
Grey - “Taker of Souls”
Elder Mason - “In Defense”
Skullbot - “Superego”
Molly Shannon, Molly Shannon - “Bianca Montale”
Goldie Wilson - “Vivian”
Type - “Junk Punter”
Stand Up and Shout - “Stand Up and Shout” (Dio cover band)

Click to listen! All local music for free, beacuse we’re nice like that.

Click to listen

^{An installation view of Dario Robleto’s An Instinct Toward Life, in his show Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others at the Frye. (Photos by Adam L. Weintraub)}

2008 is not even half over, and I’m putting money on Dario Robleto’s new exhibition at the Frye Art Museum as the Seattle exhibition of the year. Basically, Robleto, a San Antonio-based artist, went in search of a dead Seattle woman, Emma Frye (co-founder of the museum), and this show is the story of his dark travels.

^{A closer view of An Instinct Toward Life, with two madonna-and-child paintings from the permanent collection.}

Not much is known about Emma, except that she was married to Charles, had a miscarriage, and never after had children. Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others is an imagined walk through her life led by a call-and-response of 19th-century paintings from the Frye’s permanent collection and 21st-century “sampled” sculptures made by Robleto using such materials as melted-down audiotape of the longest-married couple talking about their marriage, melted lead excavated from various wars, and fulgurites, or glass made from lightning striking the desert. The show is also a story about the making of an art collection, about war and love, and about loss and the remix—but this is enough to start with.

^{A detail from Robleto’s sculpture Time Measures Nothing But This Love.}

Just listen to the artist talk.

Resident scientist Jonathan Golob and resident Marxist Charles Mudede discuss the cold intersection between science and economics. Learn how the mortgage crisis is like a can of Pringles.

For the record, Science is “excited to see it all unravel in a horrifying way.”