Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City) is compiling a list of artists who've appeared on the Colbert Report. She mentioned two, both investigating systems of surveillance.

Add Seattle's Chris Jordan.

Johnson might not be thrilled to hear it.

Last January, when she put together a list of the 10 worst art Web sites, his was on it, for which I took her to task, here. She responded, and I still love this, "Chris Jordan made the list for the worst of the WEB because his work was very popular on a number of heavily weighted websites, and exhibited meme qualities." But she didn't say she was compiling a list of sites that are heavily tracking memes into her parlor. She said worst.

I'm way too high-minded to need the last word, so I'll end this post with something she wrote on another day, "Will somebody stop Regina Hackett before she does some serious damage?"

(Maybe the chipmunk was over the top.)

Little handpainted people have been left alone in London to fend for themselves. They may be alone, but they've also been photographed, Web-posted and are for sale as badges. (A set of three is about $8, converting from pounds.)

Manhole Swimming

Manhole Swimming 2

Looking at this site brought to mind Charles Simonds. In New York in the '70s, he built tiny towers, craters and houses, brick by miniscule brick, and left them in the streets. I know of only one that survived, and it's in the stairwell at the Whitney Museum. (More on Simonds.)

Charles Simonds, "Dwelling," 1978, image via chez.com

Charles LeDray tried to sell his miniature handmade books on the street in Seattle, but the police told him to move along.

Protesting the commodification of art is a utopian project from the '70s, but through the '90s major artists (Felix Gonzales-Torres and Bruce Nauman) gave away open-edition prints as part of museum shows. There's art that's uncollectible at any price, usually temporary and nearly always illegal. I'd rather see almost anything in that vein rather than what advertising throws up on billboards.

Advertising drives sales, but art is the rainbow sign. As Carl Dennis suggested in "Relatives," art tells the universe we exist, that we crawled from the sea when seafood was plentiful and the land bare, hobbling on tender fins painfully in the sun's glare.

Moby

When asked on "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!" to name the instrument with the most sex appeal, Moby chose electric bass.

"It's the most confident," he said. "If you look at bands, it's always the singers and guitarists in rehab or throwing the TV out the window. Bass players are always the loudest and nobody ever tells them to turn down. They can drown everyone out. As a small, physically challenged white guy, whenever I play bass, I feel slightly sexy."

The Seattle art equivalent of the bass player is Joseph Park. His silky, supple work can drown everyone out, and nobody will ever tell him to turn down.

Joseph Park, "Summit"

The New York Times reported this morning that Chinese artists are angry about a Sotheby's auction that featured their work last month. (Story here.)

The same thing happened to Robert Ryman. He says that Charles Saatchi led him to believe he aspired to own the best and most complete collection of Ryman's work. Ryman helped him get it. A few years later, Saatchi dumped it at auction.

Get it in writing or kiss it goodbye. Chinese artists also need to brace themselves for when the fad's over. I'm not referring to photo and performance-based artists such as Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Song Dong, Xu Bing, Ai Weiwei , Sui Jianguo and Cai Guo-Qiang.

I mean the painters: Zhu Wei , Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang, the Maragret Keane of his time, and Zeng Fanzhi.

I'm not sure why, considering that Chinese painting is historically powerhouse, but the painters making a big impression on the market need to clear and salt away as much Western enthusiasm as possible. Where it's there, the light it shines is blinding. When it's gone, it will be as if it never existed.

Update:

and quotes himself saying so.

Larry Reid at Fantagraphics, Grant M. Haller, PI photo, 2006

In a press release Larry Reid wrote about an upcoming Peter Bagge exhibit at Fantagraphics Bookstore, Reid called Peter Bagge "one of the most accomplished and admired cartoonists in the world." OK, it's florid but (stretching here) understandable. Bagge's a fixture on the Seattle scene, and Seattle sees itself as some kind of wonderful for its alt comics.

Here's the part that stopped me. "In the opinion of Fantagraphics Books' resident curator Larry Reid, 'Peter Bagge's HATE is the most fully conceived and executed comic book series ever published.' "

Quoting himself quoting himself. Then there's the content of the quote. Surely "ever published" is going a tad far. Bagge draws as if there's a dead cat tied to his wrist. He draws as if he's middle-aged but stuck in seventh grade. Generations have come and gone and he's still there, carving obscenties into his desk.

All that could be a good thing. (See Jim Nutt and the Hairy Who.) I don't mean it to be. Bagge is a lousy artist. There's not a doubt in my mind, except one. Every time I tell Reid he's wrong, hindsight says otherwise.

I met him when he ran Rosco Louie Gallery in Pioneer Square. With George Chacona, Ries Niemi, Peter Santino, Sheila Klein, Bill Whipple and Lynda Barry, Reid jump-started the dead engine of the gallery scene. He closed it in 1982 and opened Graven Image Gallery, a punk rock skateboard gallery nightclub (83-'85), focusing on performance (Jesse Bernstein, Johanna Went, Karen Finley and Eric Bogosian) and musicians from what became the grunge scene (Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden.)

As director of CoCA, 86-92, he attempted to fuse music and visual art, giving a platform to graphic artists (especially Art Chantry), comic book illustrators and poets. He wrote a column titled "That Ain't Art" for The Rocket. He was a kick in the pants at EMP and now he's at Fantagraphics.

At 54, he says he's too old to run a comic book store but doesn't mean it. He might be too old to back Bagge, however. Bagge appeals to the boys in the back of the class flunking English.

"You're an art critic," Reid said in a patient tone, as if explaining aesthetics to a dead hare. "I'm talking about comic books, not the ones considered art, but the ones kids buy to break the spine and shove in their backpacks and leave in their tree fort. The ones that speak directly to attitude. Bagge is the best at appealing to that audience. When he's embraced by art critics, I'll find something else to do."

Jordan Crane opens at Fantagraphics on May 10. Bagge opens May 17 and Shag May 24.

Also May 10 is the Georgetown Art Attack, organized by Reid.

Eli Hansen/Oscar Tuazon, "Skagit River Delta," c-print, 2008, 18x24"

Brothers Eli Hansen and Oscar Tuazon, "This World's Just not Real To Me" at Howard House. PI review here.

Anybody looking at this sculpture...

Tip Toland, "Wanting It Both Ways," image via her Web site

might feel safe in assuming it was influenced by this:

Ron Mueck's "Tipping the Scales," image via Brief Epigrams

It wasn't. Seattle's Tip Toland (working in ceramics) has been making painted ceramic sculptures in this vein at least as long as London's Ron Mueck has been making plastic ones and probably longer. Just because he's internationally famous and she's not doesn't mean she owes her vision to his.

Personally, I find their literalism suffocating, but if somebody's looking for art that sucks out the air in a room, either Toland or Mueck can fill the bill.

Where he beats her is size. The creepy power of his sculptures comes in large part from their enormity. Hers are often life-size or just over, and his are giant-size. They grind our bones to make their bread. She beats him in the intensity of her handmade delivery. His sculptures are movie-prop industrial. Hers are loony domestic.

When people exclaim over either one, I see space opening between us. Skill thrills, but what Charles Wright wrote about a spider's web without the spider is true of this kind of art: It can catch, but it cannot kill. Another way to put it, also from Wright: The world is without appendages, no message, no name. Here's an old poem of his, called....

The New Poem

It will not resemble the sea.
It will not have dirt on its thick hands.
It will not be part of the weather.

It will not attend our sorrow.
It will not console our children.
It will not be able to help us.

Selma Waldman, from "Naked Aggression" series, image via Art and Politics Now

Selma Waldman died last month of cancer in Seattle. She was 77 and had spent most of those years at odds with whatever version of the art establishment she happened to encounter.

My obit here.

Good essay on her "Black Book of Aggressors" series here on Susan Noyes Platt's blog, Art and Politics Now.

Images of Waldman's work here, at the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

Cleaning my desk today, I found a statement she sent me several months ago, titled, in bold and all caps: "ON REFUSING TO BE NOMINATED FOR THE 4TH TIME AROUND IN THE TWINING HUMBER COMPETITION: AN OPEN LETTER TO ARTIST TRUST."

Here's the first paragraph from her 8-page, single-spaced, well-argued and heartbreaking missive:

When I might die sooner rather than later in 2008, the decision was forced upon me not to repeat the earlier fiascoes of wasted time, effort, and expense that entered into my hopeful ignorance about the Realpolitik of the Twining Humber contest and interrupted my attempts to do the work that actually mattered. 2007 was a very compromised year for me, including two major surgeries, weeks of hospital and rehab, and confrontation with a rare but aggressive cancer. Nevertheless, I have managed to work in the margins of survival: after all, my will to survive is unconditionally linked to my capacity to work and to my conviction that the current Naked/Aggression cycle explicit to torture and war crimes is the work of my life, and that it is urgent work.

Remove from the equation Waldman's commitment to combat injustices wherever she found them, and she had more in common with Yvonne Twining Humber than anybody who has won the award in Humber's honor and on her dime.

Selma Waldman protesting the Iraq War, image via Art and Politics Now

(My 2004 Humber obit here.)

Neither had any traction in Seattle art circles. Humber was unknown in Seattle till 1999, when she donated to Artist Trust the $250,000 she realized from the sale of her house. The money funds an annual $10,000 fellowship for women artists in the region who are at least 60 years old and have continued to make art.

Every artist selected for the award deserves it, and yet if someone exactly like Humber applied, she'd be unlikely to win. Humber wanted to honor women who keep going no matter what. The award does that but ends up adding another qualification. Winners are all important as people in the art of the region. They reach out to other artists. They have public careers.

Waldman, who lived uncomfortably under the poverty line and was not a member of anybody's art community, could have used the money. While I appreciate everyone selected, I wish quality and perservance could be the only standards.

Over the years, I've discussed this issue with Artist Trust repeatedly and to no conclusion. I intended to talk to Waldman but didn't. She wasn't wrong about AT, which puts a layer of process between artists and the money, but AT isn't wrong either. Winning is not an inside job. Through its peer panels, AT is not picking its friends. But in its attempt to find standards to buttress the subjective question of quality, it leaves artists such as Waldman and Humber at a decisive disadvantage.

A number of Waldman's paintings are now at the James Harris Gallery.

Humber's exhibit last year at the Frye Art Museum reviewed here.

is Richard Lacayo's from Looking Around, discussing his attempt to be cool when seated in a theater next to Jack Nicholson: All the while my inner fanboy banged at the bars of his cage.

For surrealists drawn to the dark side in the 1920s and 1930s, dolls came in handy. Their glassy-eyed stare is instantly sinister when moved from nursery to studio. Sweet on the surface, they are the perfect emblem for the free fall behind the illusion of safety.

That's why they continue to pop up in art, internationally from Jeff Koons and Zoe Leonard to Takashi Murakami. Most recently in Seattle, there's John Sloan at Shift Studio. Sloan describes his exhibit, "Tainted Dream," as a "photographic exploration into the manufactured culture of stereotypes and desire found in children's toys."

Koons, Leonard and Murakami are bigger names, but the most original use of toys in the contemporary era remains Igor Vamos and the crew behind Barbie Liberation in 1993. By switching voice boxes and returning to stores hundreds of Barbies and G.I. Joes, Vamos offered children a moment of sex-stereotype Zen: Joes who simpered, "Math is hard," and Barbies who thundered, "Dead Men Tell No Tales!"

"The Yes Men," a movie: Saving the World, One Prank at a Time

Vamos is best known for his subversive work in the "Yes Men" (more Yes Men here), yet he was already on track to make Yes Men history while a student at Reed College. In 1990, he helped organize a reception for Vice President Dan Quayle: a dozen demonstrators who vomited streams of red, white and blue. (Story here.)

A year later, Vamos and his band changed the name of a downtown Portland street to Malcolm X Street, in response to the city's proposal to change a street named after Martin Luther King Jr. to something more local.

"Also in 1991, Vamos responded to the Bush government's Operation Desert Storm by hanging an enormous U.S. flag, composed of human silhouette targets, off a bridge directly in front of U.S. Navy ships in Portland. Passing himself off as a documentary film maker working for a local television channel, Vamos filmed the authorities as they dramatically ripped the flag to shreds before the homecoming audience." (Story here)

While I'm impressed with his work with Melissa Stone and the Center For Land Use Interpretation, "Suggested Photo Spots" (sample here,) my favorite Vamos moment remains his installation "Kindness, Clarity and Insight" at Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art in 1991. It featured 10 teddy bears sitting on a couch and exchanging a series of daffy affirmations with a teddy on TV.

''You're the best," says the TV teddy. ''You're the best bestest!" the couch teddies sang back, nodding their heads and blinking blind eyes. If self-esteem could be pumped up like a bicycle tire, TV's Barney and his cohorts would be creating the most confident generation of Americans since the Boston Tea Party.

Speaking of the power of positive thinking, a New York Times' feature on the movement's big mama, Louise Hay, is illuminating: If "our thoughts create our circumstances, then we are always, in the end, to blame. When I asked (Hay) if, since people's thoughts are responsible for their conditions, victims of genocide might be to blame for their own deaths, she said: 'I probably wouldn't say it to them. I don't go around making people feel bad. That's not what I'm after.' I pressed harder: Did she believe they are to blame? 'Yes, I think there's a lot of karmic stuff that goes on, past lives.' So, I asked, with a situation like the Holocaust, the victims might have been an unfortunate group of souls who deserved what they got because of their behavior in past lives? 'Yes, it can work that way,' Hay said. 'But that's just my opinion.'

That opinion is worth millions in America. Isn't it nice to know that all who die in the Iraq War create their own reality and, in the end, have it coming? Wake me when it's over, Yes Men.

If there were an award for taking your own time too seriously, The Washington Post's Blake Gopnik would have won it with his Takashi Murakami review.

Gopnik is entitled to call Murakami's retrospective (review here) one of the most gripping shows he'd seen in years. If only he'd stopped there. Alas, he continued with the following: It is also one of the most caustic. Its work outdoes Goya in revealing our folly, though it puts on a lighthearted air. That makes it even more chilling.

Takashi Murakami, image via Saatchi Gallery

Goya? Murakami outdoes Goya in revealing folly? And in being chilling? Why not say that Chuck Close towers over Hugo van der Goes, and Charles Simic's poetry makes us forget John Donne's?

The last person to maintain he was living in the best of all possible worlds was fictional. His creator thought him a fool. The Post needs to send Gopnik to Madrid to enable him refresh his memories with originals.

Francisco Jose de Goya, "Saturn Devouring His Children," 1819-1823, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Charles LaBelle, detail from "Exterior Song-Hollywood (Cracked Actor)," 2003, image via Lawrimore Project

In the back gallery at Lawrimore Project is Charles LaBelle's "Exterior Song-Hollywood (Cracked Actor)," left over from the last show. What a perfect piece of goodbye. "Exterior Song" lingers as a backward glance at the audience, offering it a chance to appreciate what's already gone.

To shoot it, LaBelle had to stage it. He spent three weeks walking around Hollywood, looking for mattresses. When he found one, he spray painted a phrase from David Bowie's song, "Cracked Actor," 36 mattresses in all, and photographed the results.

Spike Mafford, "Spoons, Michoacan, Mexico," 1994

Catherine Eaton Skinner, "Reflection - Jaipur Palace (silver urn)," 2004

Suzanna Eaton Skinner, "Avery in Mama's Shoes," - 2007

Adam L. Weintraub, "Arenas con Cielo, Ica-Peru," 2008

Sunday, 2-4 p.m., one of the best photo exhibits in the region closes after a brief run with a come-one-and-all party at C. E. Skinner's studio, 1428 Tenth Ave. on Capitol Hill, south of Pike St. and across from Moe's.

The four featured artists will be there to collect applause.

Spike Mafford

Adam L. Weintraub

Catherine Eaton Skinner and Suzanna Eaton Skinner.

Block out the window, and this is the kind of gallery space critics find acceptable. It is not at all like the gallery space discussed here. (Image via fortyfivedownstairs.com)

Say you're an artist who doesn't get any local play. You do fine outside the region, but inside, the tradition in which you work is too conservative to rouse the interest of those who pride themselves on being up-to-date.

You decide to open an industrial-style gallery to showcase not only your work but the work of others left out of the conversation.

If you build it, will critics come? You e-mail them to ask.

I didn't respond because I didn't notice the message. It zipped by me on the way to the delete folder, which isn't to say I would have hustled over had I read it. There's more art I'm eager to see than I have time to see. Art that cuts against the grain of my training and inclinations, especially if its genre isn't new to me? I give it a pass.

Everybody else did, too, except for Sheila Farr at The Seattle Times and freelance art critic Matthew Kangas.

Farr wrote back right away to say she doesn't review galleries run by artists. Fair enough. She's a woman with standards, however bizarre. It's not personal. She said the same thing when Platform Gallery opened. As long as galleries have existed, artists have run them, especially when other exhibition options are not available. Even so, if Farr wants to create arbitrary barriers between her and the art she's employed to contemplate, she's within her rights. Nobody can look at everything.

In the context of her automatic rebuff coupled with silence from others, however, Matthew Kangas deserves credit for putting in an appearance. Afterward, he e-mailed the artist/dealer his reactions. As usual, he was frank.

"Frankly," he wrote, "I was very disappointed. What you have made has to be one of the ugliest galleries I have ever set foot in. I don't know what you think you're up to, but I can't imagine considering it seriously as a real art gallery. The poor lighting, the dreadful cheap-looking pedestals, the horrible furniture, why? You had mainstream credibility; now it's shattered. It's always a problem when artists decide to open their own galleries, as any visit to New Orleans demonstrates. ... I'm sorry to have to be such a downer, but I don't want to lead you on to think that I might someday review anything in your gallery as it now exists."

Only because I happened to notice this gallery on my way to somewhere else did I finally stop by. Much to my surprise, I was surprised. The artist who runs it (who doesn't want to be identified in this context) and the artists who exhibit there deserve better than Seattle critics have given them.

Nazi poet laureate Hanns Johst came up with the catchiest sentence of the Nazi era. Literally translated, it's "Whenever I hear of culture ... I release the safety-catch of my Browning."

The English essayist Malcolm Muggeridge reversed it after the war with "When I hear the word gun, I reach for my culture."

Way to go, Malcolm. Mostly though, variants on Johst appear in approving contexts, as if his hostility were a harmless joke from an old stand-up routine.

Not to pick on Andrew Berandini and his jaunty art blog, "The Expanded Field," but ...

his current post about art and money (dubious throughout and full of unearned contempt) contains this shining example of the scurrilous genre: "if I hear someone say Warhol one more time, I'll reach for my gun."

Warhol. Warhol. Warhol. Warhol.

Andreas Zybach, "0-6, 5PS," image via Western Bridge

"You Complete Me" at Western Bridge takes a you-scratch-my-back, I'll-scratch-yours, approach. The audience is expected to do something other than look at the art.

One of the featured artists, Andreas Zybach, wants people to walk through his large tube made of yellow silk and polished plywood. Its self-mockingly pompous title, "0-6, 5PS," suggests that exactitude rules. Every dimension and every seam is perfect, although the path is rocky. The weight of the audience passing across it pumps the floor up and down, creating the hydraulic pressure that releases streams of dark gouache onto surrounding walls.

Hey presto. We've got paintings.

Review here.

The birds ate the bread crumbs leading out of the forest, and Paula Abdul lost her way. Her stumble was breaking news all over the blogosphere and made the front of The New York Times arts section, here.

Why? Few watch "American Idol" without realizing she can't think her way out of a bag. She imagined that she'd listened to two songs when only one was sung? OK. She had mixed reactions and gave herself two songs to carry them. Big deal.

Abdul's much-discussed disconnect brings up the controversy over Annie Leibovitz's photo of Miley Cyrus (here). The image is mild next to the 15-year-old's come-hither stage performances. If all these people are upset about an unrevealing photo, why weren't they upset before? They seem to get upset together, as if they were wind-up toys somebody wound up.

"Idol" continues to be the most-watched show on TV, with 24 million viewers each week (says The New York Times) and ballots cast by phone running somewhere between 30 million and 40 million (says "Idol").

Plenty have contempt for it, probably because they don't watch it. Take "Come Together," John Lennon's tribute to abandoned people who won't go away. Lennon sang it with a feral edge and a hiss on the backbeat. Carly Smithson, now gone, turned it inside out without toning it down. She added sex and stirred. Outcasts, shake your tail feathers.

(posted by SkippyTheGoat)

(posted by jaheltee)

She can't touch him, but she didn't try. She highjacked his song with a powerhouse thrill and a bold shine.

Why is she gone? Some say (here) it's because she sang "Jesus Christ Superstar" on Andrew Lloyd Webber night. He encouraged her, not remembering where he was, in the U.S.A., where fundamentalist Christians tend to vote cultural preferences in blocks. It's a corny song at any rate, and she died inside it, belting her way through the lyrics as if they mattered.

I want to hear more from her, and she's not the best. The best is so out of scale with the rest, he's a shock every time he steps up to the mike. Wait till David Cook picks his own band. And his own material.

(posted by mgdrummond)

Back to Abdul. She may not, in Dorothy Parker's famous phrase, know how to get from A to B and back again, but she knows pop music. In spite of his radically limited vocabulary, so does Randy Jackson and so does the cranky/smart Simon Cowell. If they had a vote and they don't, they'd choose Cook. He might not win, but they've made it plain that he should.

One more thing: Idol is a school for critics. Note that the only one any of the artists seem to respect is the guy who's both blunt and smart. No soft soap for Simon. As Dolly Parton said, "Somebody's got to tell the truth."

(Discussion of race and sex stereotypes played out by the judges here.)

Grant Haller, photo, Seattle PI, 2008

We humans crave to be in the presence of beauty. It's a drive as fundamental as hunger or sex, underlying everything from buying flowers for the dinner table to our creation of national parks. And it's the only thing that explains the irrational, unconscionable and devastating expense of building, buying and keeping a boat.

(PI architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek, "The Beauty of Boats," here.)

Now that Randy Gragg has left the Oregonian, Lawrence W. Cheek has to be the finest newspaper writer focused on architecture in the Northwest and maybe the West Coast.

Besides the architecture of boats, Cheek also wrote this week about ungainly modernism in Seattle, what to save, what to let go.

Grant Haller, photo, Seattle PI, 2008

What shall we do with the buildings now pushing 50 and deemed "historic"? How do we sort through the midden of midcentury modernism, which many people see as the most desolate, aloof and dislikable period in the history of architecture, and rescue the jewels?

It's time to start making some decisions, even though there may be a generational dissonance in the debate. Here's a basic truth about architecture: A style is almost always held in contempt by the children of the generation that produced it. It's the grandchildren who finally begin to treasure it. (Review here.)

Glenn Weiss, 2006

Glenn Weiss has accepted the job of director of art projects for the Times Square Alliance. Although the TSA has worked with artists for decades and frequently collaborates with Creative Time, Weiss, 51, is the first to hold this newly created position.

"They want to start an assertive public art program for Times Square, including more temporary performance events," he said.

It's notable that the TSA chose Weiss, who lives just north of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Although he has a blog on ArtsJournal titled "Aesthetic Grounds: Public Art Public Space" and lived in New York decades ago, he's nothing like a New York art world insider.

"I don't think that's as important anymore," he said.

Weiss became director of 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle in 1986, following Jill Medvedow, who went on to a notable career in Boston. Although I distinctly remember him dragging a giant cross through downtown Seattle, he said I was wrong.

"It was a dog house," he said. "It was part of 911's "Home Street Home" project after the city passed an anti-begging law."

Before Seattle, Weiss ran the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. While in Seattle, he was also director of the King County Public Art Program. After returning to the South (he was born in North Carolina), he managed the Delray Beach Cultural Loop, the Broward County Public Art Program and is currently the soon-to-be-ex-planner for public art, architecture and urban design in suburban Coral Springs.

His blog brought his career into focus in public art circles around the country. "Who knew the Internet would bring back writing?" he asked.

He's not sure what the New York job will entail but doesn't think it will be completely focused on New York artists. (Good guess. If it were, he wouldn't have been hired.)

So FYI to public artists around the world: E-mail Glenn Weiss through his blog with your proposals, especially if they are socially engaged and capable of stopping people in their tracks.

To follow: What the Times Square Alliance envisions.

Tony Weathers, "Guns in Butter," 2008, image via Crawl Space

Butter is an interesting choice for Tony Weathers. Its point is to grease passage, but Weathers wants people to work for what he gives them. In "Artist Statement," he reads the record of his hopes and dreams in the phonetic alphabet of international aviation. To see "Dinosaur Days," you have to look under a bench.

Tony Weathers, "Dinosaur Days," video, 2006, image via Mahesh Thapa

Early in his career, Matthew Barney produced barbells made of Vaseline, but he backed his bet with wax. Weathers' guns are butter through and through. He'll scrape them off the shelves when the show's over, assuming they don't melt before that and drip onto the floor.

"Fencing Youth" is in the back. It's a skateboard loop, full-scale in height but condensed in width to fit the room's dimensions. Made of plywood, it might be functional had Weathers not blocked it down the center with a wall.

Think of Kristen Stoltmann's "Boys and Flowers," the hypnotic beauty of motion, grace and focus. "Fencing Youth" is that motion's dead stop. No youths will fence their styles in this aborted loop.

Butter guns and a blocked park: Dry wit makes pessimism matter. Through May 11.

To celebrate the Seattle Art Museum's 50th birthday, Dennis Oppenheim baked a cake. It blew up, just as he intended, but with more of a fizzle than a bang. It burned at both ends and didn't last the night. I remember consternation, which was fun amid the institutional well-wishing.

One of Oppenheim's cones in Miami at last year's Scope Fair, Alicia Boll photo via flickr

Twenty-five years later, he's back with a series of 18-foot-high fiberglass traffic cones. They'll be installed at the Olympic Sculpture Park in mid-May and continue through summer.

Wednesday night at 7 (April 30) he's speaking at the Seattle Public Library auditorium. (Free admission)

Opening Thursday night, 6-8, at Gallery4Culture is an exhibit of his drawings, models and photos.

SAM hasn't announced plans to show his "Caged Vacuum Projectiles" from 1979. It's in the collections and rarely (ever?) trotted out.

Scrolling through his first-class Web site, I noticed that he was born in Electric City, Wash., another tiny town that tossed out a major artist, like Tobias Wolff from Concrete, and Terry Allen, Robert Rauschenberg and Janis Joplin from Lubbock, Texas.

Staying wasn't an option for any of them, including Oppenheim. CityTownInfo.com suggests that Electric City is tidy-minded as well as small, which isn't a good base for an artist who Eleanor Heartney says celebrates the "triumph of irrationality and chaos." His is a carefully crafted chaos, but granted, he walks on the wild side.

There's no wild side to the cones. I was surprised to learn they were his when I saw them in Miami. He claims they suggest "stay aware, beware, danger," which is ridiculous. They're cute as buttons. Formally, they borrow a play from Claes Oldenburg's book and add nothing.

Oppenheim's "Caged Vacuum Projectiles," on the other hand, is lord of all it surveys. Baroque in its excess and hellish in its evocation of heavy industry, it come from the heart of his practice, not his public art bon bons.

His best work has a rigor that is not always blunt but nearly always suggestive of some kind of onimous. Here are a couple of images from his Web site.

"Lighting Bolt"

"Brick house"