Friday, March 08, 2002

AFTER TWO DAYS official threats/promises, the ultra-rare March snow came to Seattle Thursday night. It was bee-yoo-tee-ful. I was out in it on my regular First Thursday gallery crawl, and saw the city itself become a temporary art installation, an arrangement of pointillist streaks and abstracted white textures. Of course it didn't last; it never does. But during the mini-storm's eight-hour life, it was a mini-vacation from dreary late-winter reality.

EARLIER THAT EVENING, I attended the release party for the Spring issue of Arcade, the Northwest's regional architecture-design journal.

I knew some of my Signifying Nothing images would be in it, in de-colorized form. I was pleasantly surprised that one of them made the cover! The thing's available for $6 at the Elliott Bay Book Co., Peter Miller Books, and a few other select outlets.

posted by clark 6:43 PM

SERIOUS SCHOLARLY WRITING about people fascinated with other people whose sex lives might be duller than their own.

posted by clark 11:57 AM

NOW YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN abstract art, motel-style.

posted by clark 11:55 AM

Thursday, March 07, 2002

"OURS IS THE MOST VIBRANT NATION on Earth because it is the most childish, and therefore the most creative and daring."

posted by clark 12:12 PM

DUE TO NUMEROUS REQUESTS, more of the print-only articles from the first three broadsheet MISCs will be posted on this site over the next few weeks. Details will be announced in this space.

posted by clark 12:09 PM

"ALL WE HAVE OF THE PAST is the good stuff; our ancestors threw away the rest."

posted by clark 12:08 PM

Tuesday, March 05, 2002

THE CURRENT PRINT SCHEDULE: It now looks like yr. humble editor will indeed get to attend the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in glamorous Stamford, Connecticut on Ides-O-March weekend. Thusly, production schedules for the spring print MISC will be adjusted.

The new ad and copy deadline is March 23.

The issue will be out April 7, in plenty of time to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Seattle World's Fair.

The summer issue will either be about parents and kids or the long-promised "more sex, less gender" theme. Email your preference now.

posted by clark 4:47 PM

Monday, March 04, 2002

TODAY, MISCmedia is dedicated to 51-year TV veteran Mary Stuart, who has finally found the "Tomorrow" for which she had searched.

OUR 'SIGNIFYING NOTHING' PHOTO SHOW at the spendid Zeitgeist Kunst & Kaffee (2nd & Jackson in Seattle's nicer-than-you-think Pioneer Square) ends this Wednesday. See it immediately.

However, this will not be your last chance to see our haunting color photos of abandoned signage. Another whole batch of these images will appear in the Spring issue of Arcade, the Northwest architecture-and-design journal. A release party for the issue will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. this Thursday, March 7, at the picturesque Panama Hotel Tea House, 605 1/2 South Main Street in Seattle's Chinatown/International District. Be there or be longitudinal.

WHY bad habits can actually be good for us.

A LOVING TRIBUTE, complete with audio clips galore, in honor of '70s TV shows and commercials.

posted by clark 1:15 PM

Sunday, March 03, 2002

IT'S SAD TO SEE WOMEN FIGHTING OVER A GUY: Tablet ran a story (not yet on the paper's website) about a dispute between Benham Studio Gallery (one of Seattle's top photo-art galleries) and Patricia Ridenour (one of Seattle's top art photographers).

Ridenour made a series of 18 (fantastic) female and male nudes, in poses inspired by famous old paintings of women. About half the images include nude male figures in various states of repose. Benham displayed the pix in its front room for two weeks. But some customers of Benham's portrait-photography service apparently expressed discomfort at the explicitness level of some of Ridenour's works. (Hey, isn't that what art's for?)

One particular image, based on Manet's painting Olympia but featuring a particularly endowed specimen of masculine desire, turned off so many portrait customers that owner Marita Holdaway felt she had to do something.

Just before the official opening of the show on Feb. 7, Holdaway moved Ridenour's works to the gallery's back room. Ridenour thought this was an act of censorship, publicly asked Holdaway about it at the opening reception, then personally took her pictures off the back-room walls.

The Tablet piece tried to interpret this unfortunate series of events as an example of a woman's troubles trying to confront a male-dominated art establishment--even though both parties in the dispute are female, and Benham (which has shown many male nudes in the past, albeit mostly by gay-male photographers) is more of a feisty indie space than the center of art-world power.

Anyhow, a third woman, fashion-boutique owner Darbury Stenderu, has adopted Ridenour's show and is displaying it at her store, 2121 1st Ave. Rather than simply denouncing ad-imagery, it posits an alternative vision, a healthier way to look at people and life. I didn't see it as a work of confrontation but of celebration, of a woman daring to proclaim to the world that she actually likes men and men's bodies, and wants to retroactively give them the loving display art's historically awarded only to female figures. Female artists deserve the right to express their loves and desires and joys (toward themselves AND toward others) AS loves and desires and joys.

And you don't have to be male to find that weird--or even disturbing to your preconceived gender-role ideas.

That's because an artist like Ridenour faces two, equally restrictive, gender stereotypes--the older one that says women aren't supposed to espress their sexuality, and the newer one that says women can like sex, but only in lesbian or self-directed contexts. In this restrictive worldview, anything a woman says about men is expected to be critical, even vengeful. Anything less than total negativity toward a woman's Other was dismissed, in this ideology, as a mark of weakness, of subjugation to male dominance. (Not much different from the previous stereotype, in which a woman who "put out" was condemned as "loose.")

The Tablet reviewer, Karla Esquivel, appears to have bought into the modern stereotype, by proclaiming Ridenour's clear adoration of male beauty to really be a righteous attack on what '70s critics used to call "The Male Gaze." In the Weekly's piece about the fiasco, Ridenour said she intended the show to confront both viewers' body-image notions and the ever-somnombulant succession of "sexy" images in advertising. She did this by employing that one visual element (the male body, without the disarming justification of gayness) already identified as a symbol of threat by many females and some males.

I say "some males," because millions of men under 35 have come of age with hardcore porn, and have spent some of the happiest moments of their adolescent and early-adult lives with images that included other men's erections in full view.

And I, for one, am not afraid of the female gaze. In fact, I kind of like the idea that a non-gay male such as myself could conceivably be so pedestaled, openly craved for.

(Which leads to an even more provocative notion: What if the way men depict women in art has really, all along, represented (at least subconsciously) the way (at least some) men wished they would be seen by women?)

But going back to Ridenour's work, it could very well have a therapeutic value. By showing explicit, photographic phallic imagery in the context of familiar PoMo deconstruction, she might help viewers (of whatever gender) overcome their fear of the phallus; helping, in a small-scale and personal way, to contribute toward a healthier sexual outlook toward themselves and others.

posted by clark 7:15 PM

THE STRANGE BUT PREDICTABLE FATE of all those merchandise donations to NYC.

posted by clark 7:10 PM

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