Bruce Nauman’s 100 Live and Die is a spectacle. It’s 100 phrases of double-layered neon words paired with either “live” or “die” (“eat and die,” “red and live,” “come and die,” for example).

And it’s hard to shoot on film. Which is actually reassuring.

We did try. This video from the lowest level of the Henry Art Gallery testifies to the piece’s flashing, dislocating effect, but you can’t actually make out any of the words—until the end. Henry chief curator Liz Brown and I talk about Nauman, James Joyce, history painting, and 4:20, and then you get the money shots.

For more about the Nauman retrospective (at the Henry through May 6), my review is here.

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, Seattle visual artists Roy McMakin and Jeffry Mitchell, and New York performing artist Suzzy Roche, a member of the Wooster Group, a solo artist, and one-third of the band the Roches, will perform in the pavilion at Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park at 7:00 pm February 14.

They’ve never performed together before, and the event came about when SAM asked McMakin to give a standard artist’s talk about his sculpture near the water’s edge in the park, Love & Loss. The piece consists of cast concrete benches, a sidewalk-like pathway, a small, circular reflecting pool, and a double-trunked crabapple tree that spell out the words “love” and “loss.” Jutting up from the middle is a red neon ampersand.

McMakin told the museum he had about 90 seconds of interesting commentary to deliver about the piece—but in this conversation at the chilly site of Love & Loss with Stranger art writer Jen Graves, McMakin, Mitchell, and Roche reveal quite a lot, even when they’re being guarded, about their attempts to be vulnerable, to balance romanticism and naturally occurring cynicism, to make art that “wears its heart on its sleeve,” McMakin says.

This is a conversation you might expect to hear from Mitchell and Roche. But listen for the McMakin surprises.

^{A mockup of Roy McMakin’s Love & Loss (2005-2006) at the Olympic Sculpture Park. The installation is still unfinished but can be seen through a fence near the water.}

^{Jeffry Mitchell’s Tulips (1989), engraving with china colle and watercolor}

^{Suzzy Roche (rightside up) performing the Wooster Group’s House/Lights with Ari Fliakos (upside down) and Kate Valk.}

Hear the Roches’ songs for free on their MySpace page, including music from Moonswept, their album coming out in March.

^{The Second Attack in Three Months at the Same Falafel Stand in Tel Aviv (2006) by Josh Weintraub}

How does a single artist respond to a distant war unjustly perpetrated in his name? Or a series of disasters?

Richard Serra scratched out a hooded Abu Ghraib figure with the words “STOP BUSH.” Manet obsessively painted and repainted the execution of an Austrian archduke who was installed as the emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III in a failed power grab. Gerhard Richter made a book pairing news articles from the first days of the Iraq War with photographic details of one of his abstract paintings. Teams of photographers flew south to document Katrina, including Seattle’s Chris Jordan. Josh Azzarrella of Chicago (showing now at Lawrimore Project) remade video footage of September 11 painstakingly, frame by frame, so that the plane flies right by the tower and on into the sunny sky.

Josh Weintraub, a painter who grew up in Seattle and now lives in New York, made a series of abstracted paintings of newspaper photographs of disasters, now showing at William Traver Gallery. Their titles are the headlines that accompanied the stories.

Weintraub expected that painting these scenes would bring him closer to the events, but in fact he felt more dissociated than ever. He found himself documenting his isolation from them, leaving sections of the primed canvases empty. The areas he did paint are stylistically voracious, with marks ranging from drips and dots and impressionist hatchmarks to spray paint, and in bright, metallic colors with plenty of contrast.

As a result, the best of these paintings attract and repel, with an effect similar to Walid Raad’s photographs of the siege of Beirut shown recently at the Henry, in that both artists aestheticize their surfaces while their imagery, and the possibility of “relating” to it, recedes almost completely.

Standing in front of his paintings at the gallery, Weintraub talks about their dilemma.

Listen in.

^{Car Bomb Kills 13 (2006) by Josh Weintraub}

^{Israel Bombs Downtown Beirut (2006) by Josh Weintraub}

^{Hurricane Katrina Victims Suffer Primitive Conditions in the New Orleans Superdome (2006) by Josh Weintraub}

^{Louise Lawler’s cibachrome, crystal, and felt paperweight Untitled (Martin and Mike) (1992), from the exhibition Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne.}

With great art come great cults of personality, whether it’s the boozy abstract expressionists at the Cedar bar, the waifish weirdos at Warhol’s Factory, or the “non-productive” iconoclasts of Cologne in the 1980s and early 1990s, as Josef Strau calls them in Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne, the show currently at the Henry Art Gallery. The artists in Make Your Own Life—Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley, Jutta Koether, and Andrea Fraser, among others—often referred to each other in their work, or to earlier figures like Joseph Beuys and Eva Hesse.

So where are the cults of personality in Seattle art? Where is Seattle’s scene?

Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel are best friends and artists at Crawl Space. They’ve been accused of being scenesters (and they are ever so young and attractive, true), but they say that’s not possible. Because Seattle doesn’t have a scene!

Does it? Mathern, Wentzel, and The Stranger’s Jen Graves discover it’s awkward to talk about scenes. It seems embarrassing to want one and dull not to have one. And what’s the effect on the art?

Listen in.

^{Hans-Jörg Mayer’s photograph The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1991) (l-r Charlene von Heyl, Michaela Eichwald, Jutta Koether, Cosima von Bonin, Isabelle Graw), from the exhibition Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne}

^{Anne Mathern’s photograph Plaid (2006)}

^{Anne Mathern’s photograph Yacht (2004) (she’s also the model)}

^{An installation view of Chad Wentzel’s last exhibition at Crawl Space, Everything I’ve Ever Wanted All At the Same Time (2006)}

^{An installation view of Chad Wentzel’s last exhibition at Crawl Space, Everything I’ve Ever Wanted All At the Same Time (2006)}

The lineup of artists for Tacoma Art Museum’s biennial, opening February 10, reads like a who’s-who of the gallery scene regionally, with a few exceptions and a few omissions. Of nearly 900 artists submitting to the museum’s open call, TAM curator Rock Hushka and David Kiehl, curator of prints at the Whitney (famous for its own biennial) selected 41—mostly based not on the images they’d sent, but on their track record.

Why not just curate the show? Hushka talks to Jen Graves about his philosophy for this biennial, his hopes for future ones, his ambivalence about regionalism, his attraction to cheesy-looking landscapes, and what SuttonBeresCuller are making for the show that requires a construction crane.

Here’s a sneak preview of what will be in the exhibition:

Accretion #34 (2006) by Daniel Attoe

California State Prison, Corcoran, California (2006) by Buddy Bunting

Recycled (2006) by Ellen Garvens

Ship in a Bottle (2007) by SuttonBeresCuller

Peaches with Buffalo (2006) by Sherrie Wolf

Promenade (doorknob) (2005) by Robert Yoder

Eric Fredericksen, former Stranger staffer, is a man who loves Highway 99, longs to live on Sesame Street, and who once, in the year 1999, laid out a list of punishable offenses, put on a suit, and posed for the photo you see of him here, with the warning “DON’T YOU DO IT!”

In short, he is worth clicking for.

And what did we discuss when we sat down earlier this week and turned on the recorder? Why, what else could we talk about this week? Sculpture. Western Bridge, the exhibition space where Fredericksen is now director, has a new show, called Kit Bashing. We agreed the show has at least two bona-fide sculptures in it: Steven Brekelmans’s Kit Bashing, a drum set made of balsa wood and tissue paper, and the second is Ryan Gander’s Phantom of Appropriation, which would spell out the words of the title in various fonts from other neon artworks, except most of the neon letters have been smashed to bits on the floor. (The show also has works by Gretchen Bennett—these sticker creations are incredible, almost entirely indescribable, and were commissioned by the Trues, so are brand new—Ben Rubin, Steve Roden, and Carsten Höller.) Beyond that, we veered from Trisha Donnelly’s mental sculpture of a solar eclipse to Frank Stella’s inability to get his architecture career off the ground to clicheacute;s about rivers versus rocks. Rocks win.

^{Installation view at Western Bridge of Ryan Gander’s A Phantom of Appropriation (2006), photograph by Mark Woods}

^{Detail from an installation view at Western Bridge of Ryan Gander’s A Phantom of Appropriation (2006), photograph by Mark Woods}

^{Installation view at Western Bridge of Steven Brekelmans’s Kit Bashing (2006), photograph by Mark Woods}

Next week on In/Visible: Anything, anything but sculpture.

Ars longa, vita brevis, right? The common wisdom about art—especially sculpture built to live outdoors and withstand the elements, like the works at the soon-to-open Olympic Sculpture Park downtown—is that it will outlive its makers. But in a disposable culture saturated in rapidly obsolescent technologies, what is contemporary sculpture’s relationship to time? Can an artwork ever die? If so, what does its death actually look like, who gets to declare it, and how long should it be kept on life support first? And what about sculptures, like Mark Dion’s Seattle Vivarium at the park, made of a decaying nurse log housed in a greenhouse open for study?

The artists Tivon Rice, Susie Lee, and Mike Magrath (he of the recent salt-based, melting sculptures of Iraqi figures in Occidental Square), and writer/curator Suzanne Beal talk about their own works, their own desires for the lives of artworks, and Stranger art writer Jen Graves jumps in, too, in a follow-up to last week’s In/Visible (Sculpture Study Group, Part I).

Next week on In/Visible: Eric Fredericksen and the new show at Western Bridge.

Jen Graves Talks to Tivon Rice, Susie J. Lee, and Suzanne Beal

Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park opens in two weeks, providing essentially another entire outdoor museum to the city. It’s a place Richard Serra has called “fucking magnificent,” and he says it makes him happy “not only for myself, but for sculpture, and the culture of the country.” All righty then. Let’s start really talking about it. (To hear Serra, watch the PR-style documentary Art Without Walls: The Making of the Olympic Sculpture Park, which premiered last night on KCTS and is airing a bunch this month.)

In the first of at least two conversations on In/Visible about sculpture, The Stranger’s art writer Jen Graves talks to the artists Tivon Rice and Susie J. Lee, and the writer/curator Suzanne Beal. The three of them took a UW class on the park, taught by former SAM curators Lisa Corrin and Susan Rosenberg, back in the spring of 2005, when the park was still just a glimmer in the museum’s eye.

For the class, they toured the art-spangled homes of the Wrights and the Shirleys, the two major donors to the sculpture park, and as the earliest students of the park, these three have thoughts, observations, wishes, interpretations, and complaints on what’s going in on the waterfront.

Next week on In/Visible: Permanence in sculpture. Should it be everlasting, like Calder’s Eagle? How can it change and still stick around?

Miami makes a spectacle of itself every December during Art Basel Miami Beach, a contemporary art fair that has enough satellite fairs (what will Aqua do for a photograph next year unless Ben Beres comes up with an even better costume?) and events to take over the entire city. Selling, networking, looking, and drinking: in which order? Artists and SOIL Art Gallery members Jennifer Zwick, Deb Baxter, and Randy Wood reminisce about last year’s red dots and Parisian curators, and fantasize about what’s to come, days before they leave Seattle.

Billy in the Lowground is the first live-action film by artist Mary Simpson and writer-curator-musician Fionn Meade, and it’s built around the haunting, centuries-old murder ballad “Pretty Polly,” performed in the film by the Foghorn String Band. In a conversation that ranges from Alaska to Joan Didion and the Greek word nostos, Meade, and Simpson circumnavigate the dark heart of what they’ve made, which is on display at Punch Gallery.

Check out Jen Graves’s short review of Billy in the Lowground here.

For more of Mary Simpson’s work, see Graves’s review of her show earlier this year at 4 Culture Gallery.

Walid Raad was 15 years old and toting around a telephoto lens in the summer of 1982 when he shot the photographs of the Israeli attack on Beirut that are currently on display at the Henry Art Gallery.

This week, Jen Graves spoke with him about the logic of hot wars, the legitimacy of counterfeits in the context of a “surpassing disaster,” the hysterical symptoms of chronic violent attacks, and a rare neurological disorder—a perceptual talent?—in which sufferers view reality as a series of frames instead of a continuous and seamless fabric.

Click here to listen.

More:

Jen Graves reviews Walid Raad’s Henry show.

Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group Archive, a multi-media project documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon.

As the calmly fearless artist Alex Schweder talks about his “persistent obsessions,” he wears Roman work pants that make him look a little like a fireman. He discusses Murmurs (his current show with Richard Barnes and Charles Mason at Howard House), ancient Roman toilets, A Sac of Three Rooms Three Times A Day coming up at Suyama Space in January, the messy way that “your body is a tube that the world flows through,” biodegradable Milanese plastic, the Seagram building versus the Blur building, and the most transgressive piece of public art in Washington state—his Lovesick Walls at the Tacoma Convention and Trade Center. He jokes about his misunderstood intentions for the piece: “And then let’s put some vaginas in there because who doesn’t like a vagina!” What more could you want?

Click here to listen.

The Stranger’s review of the show:HERE.

See more of Alex’s work HERE.

You’ve seen his project, now hear Scott Lawrimore’s velvety voice as he talks to Stranger art critic Jen Graves about how size matters, his brief but spectacular history as a drawing prodigy, the pure questions his parents ask about art, and why he recently posted an “Open” sign.

Lawrimoreproject.com

More photos HERE.

Listen now.

Lead Pencil Studio, AKA the artist-architect team of Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, are the winners of this year’s Genius Award for visual art. Their most recent project, Maryhill Double, funded in part by Creative Capital Foundation, included rejection, high winds, Queen Marie of Romania, crying like a girl, and a yellow bird—all of which they talk about in this interview, done October 17, with Stranger Visual Art Editor Jen Graves. The pair also are known for installations and sculptures that investigate spaces at the Henry Art Gallery (Minus Space, 2005), at Suyama Space (Linear Plenum, 2004), and outdoors at Sand Point Arts and Cultural Exchange (Stairway, 2003). In January, they’ll make work in the derelict top floor of the former Woolworth building downtown (currently housing Ross Dress for Less).

Listen now.

Read a previous review of Han and Mihalyo’s work.