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PRESS
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer - 15 September 2007
Before the Bridge Motel goes crashing down, artists make a big splash
STORY BY REGINA HACKETT
P-I ART CRITIC
Would-be customers were still stepping up to the Bridge Motel on Thursday, looking to rent a room for $40 a night or $200 by the week.
They must not have heard that it's closed. News travels slowly in the transient motel world, where guests are careful to mind their own business.
Seven townhouses are scheduled to replace the Bridge. They will be built with the ever-popular "green agenda" in mind. D.K. Pan, Bridge manager, estimates the average cost of these units will be $1 million each.
"That's a lot," he said, looking thoughtful.
Thoughtful is his usual look. Pan is an artist who became manager a year ago partly because he wanted to make a film about the motel, envisioning the structure as a woman. When he learned it was not long for this world, he asked if artists could take over before wrecking balls took it down.
Saturday night from 5 to midnight, the office, the 12 rooms and part of the parking lot will be transformed into what more than 20 artists and/or artist teams think of the spirit of the place. The installations and performances will be temporary art for a temporary location.
"It's an opportunity for beauty in the cracks of decrepitude," said painter Laura Corsiglia.
She's filling her room with "Slippage Drawings," which she sees as connections between the flight of birds and the flight of a building, between ducks in blue ink and crayfish that live in the air.
By Thursday she had liberated a lovely underpad ("like handmade paper") from the burden of wall-to-wall carpeting and was busy ripping out cranberry curtains to feature their gray liners. The bed she will cover in white sheets on which she might draw, especially on pillows where so many heads have rested.
"I've lived in cheap motels around the world," she said. "As long as there was a table to draw on and a good light, I took it."
Kaleb Hagan-Kerr and Erin Spencer react to the peephole aspect of a motel by creating a camera obscura to cast tantalizing images from Bridge-inspired performances into a darkened room.
Sarah Kavage is turning her room into a clearcut populated by white porcelain tree stumps in tribute to the forest that once covered the hill. Pan will fill a room with thousands of pounds of white salt. The walls will be red, and there will be a woman in her wedding gown sleeping on the bed.
Robert Zverina's "Smoke and Mirrors" promises to be an immersive installation. He's a photographer and video artist who makes life's banalities shake, rattle and shine.
Paul Rucker's sound/video installation will invite viewers to question the nature of art, whatever that means. Because Rucker's doing it, we know at least the music will be good.
Kathy Kim and Shelly Farnham are making a web. The audience that crawls around it can decide who's a predator and who's prey.
The art team known as PDL is casting itself into sci-fi deep space, a goofy guys remake of "2001: A Space Odyssey." A group called Implied Violence will wear gold clothing in a gold room and be loud. Bring ear plugs if you value your hearing.
C. Davida Ingram is a black woman who found a white man on Craigslist who wants her to make him dinner. The dinner is a performance. Meghan Guthrie's video is intended as a wide-open view.
The Vis-à-vis Society (Sierra Nelson and Rachel Kessler) painted the lobby Pepto-Bismol pink. They're handling the room keys and want you to take a survey.
In the parking lot, Mike Min of Seattle School will shut himself up in a white van and play heavy metal (Tool) really loud. Fog will drift through the door cracks as well as evidence of a light show. Maybe there will be fried chicken.
"I think fried chicken is important here," he said. "The Bridge had lots of fried chicken in buckets, and I'm willing to wager that the new townhouses won't."
As Pan pointed out, the Bridge is part of a historic chain of development. A house built in 1900 on forest-cleared land was knocked down to make way for the motel. The house was a generous two story with a wide porch, water views and cherry trees that bloomed in the yard.
The Bridge was all about the bustle of a modern age. A retired Seattle police officer built it in the early 1950s for traveling salesmen on a budget.
Over the years, that budget grew thinner.
"The worst part of my job every day was asking people for money who didn't have any," said Pan. Although there was a murder in 1994, Pan has never had to call the police during his year as caretaker.
"I threatened to call, and that was the end of it," he said.
The police were never far away. They cruised through the parking lot at least once a day to run license plates, said Pan.
The motel didn't close because it failed in its changing function. Most nights, it filled up. It closed because the land on which it sits is too valuable to waste on a low-rent enterprise.
Jack Daws and Faith Ramos stripped a portion of the roof to its rafters as a sendoff to the Bridge crowd, linking them with transients from America's past. Under the night sky, Room 12 will host a campfire pit and cowboy soul music by Hank Williams.
"Motel" was produced by Pan's free sheep foundation and Min's group, Seattle School, with a grant from 4Culture. The Bridge is part one of Pan and Min's traveling motel art show. Part two opens at the Ambassador Motel Sept. 21 and runs a week. Part three will take place in November, the site as yet unsecured. For more information, check motelmotelmotel.com.
*****
The Seattle Times - 15 September 2007
Artists bid farewell to a seedy city landmark
By Haley Edwards
Seattle Times staff reporter
Art installations at the Bridge Motel reflect its changing role in Seattle history. At right is D.K. Pan, last manager of the Bridge and organizer of the art event tonight.
The Bridge Motel, that iconic, seedy little roadhouse off Aurora in Fremont — whose red-lettered sign, M-O-T-E-L, has stood sentinel over Seattle's north end for 53 years — will be torn down next week to make way for a row of new townhouses.
Some can't wait for the paint-blistered eyesore — home of drugs, murder and ladies of the night — to go the way of the Twin Tepees Restaurant, another Aurora pit stop torn down in 2001. The more nostalgic at heart lament the symbolic demise of "the Bridge."
Tonight, a group of local artists will gather in the gutted motel to eulogize its checkered history and the five decades of guests — traveling salesman, transients and prostitutes — who've stayed in its rooms. Beginning at 5 p.m. and ending at midnight, the old motel will transform into a free-form gallery and performing-arts space.
Each of the empty bedrooms will feature murals, painting or sculpture, and a makeshift theater downstairs will host dance performances, music and a five-hour interpretive theater production by nearly 30 artists.
The artwork on display — everything from carpentry to ink drawings to "the cooking of weird food" — is inspired by a range of issues, said D.K. Pan, the last manager of the Bridge Motel and organizer of this event. Major themes? The "surreal and iconic" nature of the Bridge Motel, its changing role in Seattle and what its destruction suggests about the future of this city.
When the Bridge Motel opened in 1954, it served mostly as a way station for traveling salesman and a sentry for traffic entering Seattle from the north, Pan said. In recent decades, it has become a home to drug users and prostitutes, and the site of several murders.
Many artists worry that the extinction of these "funky, bizarre old spaces" portends the end of Seattle's vital, soulful quality, said actor Ryan Mitchell, 25.
"Our performance will be fun, but it'll also be wrought with sadness," he said. "Seattle's at the brink of destroying itself. It's saying, 'We love the art, but we hate the artists.' All the empty space, all the affordable, accessible spaces are being turned into condos."
Mitchell's play will be an act of Surrealist-style protest. Expect fake blood, bags of live crickets and "intense nonsense."
On the whole, though, neighbors of the Bridge Motel, who stand to watch their homes rise in value and their neighborhood become safer, will not mourn its destruction.
"I used to work the north end for 10 years, so I'm intimately familiar with the Bridge Motel," said Mark Jamieson of the Seattle Police Department. "All kinds of illicit activities happened there, prostitution and drugs — it was bad."
On a table in the motel's old foyer, Pan has gathered a stack of historical photographs of the Bridge Motel. Underneath the rest, there's one of a cute single-family home, built between 1910 and 1920.
"That was what was destroyed to make room for the motel," Pan said, pointing. So it goes.
*****
The Stranger SLOG - 17 September 2007
What’s That Smell?
Posted by Jen Graves
That was what I kept asking a friend who’d gone with me to the Bridge Motel Saturday night, where the soon-to-be-demolished landmark was full of artists and performers and audiences there to see off the building in style.
Rarely does an art or theater event have such powerful smells. There’s nothing abstract or indirect about a smell.
In the rotting rooms of the low-budget paradise that was erected in 1954 for traveling salesmen and this week will be razed to make way for spendy townhouses, I detected: mildew, cherries, spraypaint, sandalwood and nag champa incense, sweat, semen, Elmer’s glue, gunpowder, and much, much more, including a mysterious metallic-sweet smell coming, reportedly, from a series of microwaves “cooking a bunch of shit” behind the scenes of the Implied Violence performance.
It was a spectacle of evocation, every untouchably dirty inch of the place not blank, like a hotel wants to be, but unspeakably full of people and events and moments and touches and smells already. The whole installation, organized by D.K. Pan, was an artwork of excessive redolence, and a sense of bulging overfullness powered the night.
I don’t mean it was crowded, which I gather was a problem for plenty of people. To me, it seemed appropriate to have to stand in sweaty lines and crush up next to people in order to take in all of this too-muchness. (Note: I’m not particularly practical-minded, and I was there before dark, before things got outrageously overrun.)
For all the painful proximity of the dirty stuff itself—stained carpets, brown pillows, cracked mirrors—the one artwork that was totally distant was C. Davida Ingram’s cooking performance, the one I most wanted to see/smell/taste/touch/talk about.
I could only look through the window of the room to see a set table with wine bottles and a bowl of cut cucumbers on it, and behind that, the occasional glimpse of Ingram cooking in the kitchen. A sign on the door said “Private,” because Ingram was cooking for groups of pre-assigned people (I’d have signed up, but I was out of town), and they decided whether they wanted their meals private or public. The whole thing was based on an ad Ingram put out that said, “Black woman willing to make your favorite meal. You share the recipe. I prepare. Come hungry.” The text of that last sentence splayed on the window expanded the racial implications of the premise into startingly sexual territory, as did the “private” sign on the motel room door. Even without getting in, I loved the piece. (Does anyone care to share what went on inside?)
I’ve never seen so many people taking photographs at an art event as I saw at the Bridge Motel (and I just returned from the Venice Photogenic Biennale). What was that about? The best things about the Bridge Motel experience, called Motel 1 because there will be a Motel 2 this week at another location, were not visual.
Sarah Kavage’s Ghost Stumps, sculptures of white tree stumps embedded into the carpet in an homage to the site’s long past, were lovely but swallowed whole by the jostling event. Much more at home was Kaleb Hagan-Kerr and Erin Spencer’s The Darkened Chamber, a dark room that functioned as a camera obscura. It was hot in that camera, and stuffy and smelly, and a man performing behind the wall upside-down so he was projected onto the wall right-side up (and occasionally vice versa) was knocking himself around, in a slapstick and morbid dance. Voices kept saying, “There better not be drugs in there,” and “My wife is sick.”
Most at home of all the performances was Implied Violence’s Come to My Center You Enter the Winter. While I was there, a man and a woman dressed all in gold in a gold room performed episodes written in a list on the wall. The list said things like, “It’s very late on the plain in this desolate mountain state,” which presumably would trigger something in the performers, something both programmed and improvised, I imagine. During the course of the performance, they appeared to get drunk. At one point, he was spitting thick red blood-looking stuff on her, and then she was on the floor and he was pouring it on her and she was slightly choking and then he wedged his foot into her crotch and pushed her gurgling bloody self around on the disgusting carpet. There were several gunshots around this time, and the wall was stabbed, as were a few golden bags hanging from the ceiling. Oh, and by coincidence, a balding collie walked into the room, checked things out, and walked back out. It was a high point.
A low point was the endless performance of two modern-dance mimeish types wearing crepe-paper hats and looking, as my friend said, like Dexy’s Midnight Runners in slow motion as they scaled the facade and slunk around touching people with their crepe paper.
In the parking lot, people were jumping on dusty mattresses, and a white van was parked, rocking a little, and with smoke and the off-center rhythms of Tool coming out of it. It was, of course, called Don’t Come A Knockin, by Seattle School, and I heard it involved fried chicken, but I didn’t see that for myself. Neither did I see the campfire built by Jack Daws and Faith Ramos, who tore the roof of their room open to the sky and played country music along with the fire. I wish I had.
It was all there: the psychotic (Implied Violence), the nostalgic (the campfire), the cheap and playful (Seattle School), the political (Come Hungry), the creepy (a black-lit room outfitted in webs to crawl around in by Studio IoUP), and the slightly mad (the camera obscura performer). Adding to that was Pan’s own installation in Room #7 at the top of the stairs in the corner, a room painted a painfully bright color red and turned into a beach of salt. Clothing and notes were buried in the salt, including a letter to an inmate at King County Jail and a note to a drug addict. Where did these come from? I didn’t know, but since Pan has been manager at the hotel for a year, I didn’t think it was far-fetched to conclude they might be documents of the real past. “What was yours about? Mine was about pills,” one woman asked another, both holding notes they’d pulled from within the salt. “Really? Mine was, like, somebody lost.”
It all made me wish they were going to burn it down rather than tear it down.
Motel 2: I’ll be there.
*****
Sep 2 - Sep 8, 2004 The Stranger
COMPOSING INSANITY
With Iron Composer, Seattle School Masters the Monumental Goof
by David Schmader
Iron Composer w/Reggie Watts, Anna Oxygen
Thurs Sept 9, Crocodile, 8 pm, $8.
There are good ideas, there are ridiculous ideas, and then there is Iron Composer.
Brainchild of local composers collective Seattle School, Iron Composer takes its cue from the Food Network's culinary battle show, Iron Chef, corralling a slew of the School's most cherished themes--time, discipline, competition--into a "60-Minute Live Songwriting Competition, Drinking Game, and Aural Obstacle Course." The result is a songwriting battle royale of unprecedented diabolicalness--half Fluxus-informed composition experiment, half booze-fueled demolition derby.
Armed with source material drawn from a five-minute onstage interview with a randomly selected audience member, a pair of local entertainment personalities are made to write new songs while besieged by distractions or "turmoils," from the Sheet Music Turmoil (wherein sheet music of crappy artists--Billy Joel, Celine Dion--is wadded up and hucked at the competitors) to mandatory liquor consumption (one shot at the top of each of the five rounds). After 45 minutes, each composer--the competition has in the past included Supersucker Eddie Spaghetti, Alien Crime Syndicate's Joe Reineke, and Tennis Pro's David Drury, among many others--takes it to the stage, banging out his or her brand-new composition with the crack Iron Composer house band.
Even in its earliest incarnation, Iron Composer was a blast (full disclosure: I was asked to judge their first competition)--a fact since confirmed by three packed Iron Composer competitions at the Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC). After fielding offers from a half-dozen Seattle venues, Seattle School has set up shop at the Crocodile Cafe, which will host the first of its monthly Iron Composer competitions on September 9, pitting Reggie Watts against Anna Oxygen. But the automatic winners are the pointy-headed goofballs of Seattle School, who've somehow managed the near-miraculous: bringing post-everything experimental composition to the rock-show masses.
Created in 2002, Seattle School was conceived "as a performance group interested in exploring sound and music, primarily in terms of spatial relations, memory, deep time/wide incidence, calculus, communication/notation, and inquiries into the definitions of tone, language, and audience," in the words of the group's founder and primary architect, Mike Min. Less abstractly, Seattle School provided its five members--Min, Korby Sears, Ben Hogue, Guy Whitmore, and Erik Aho--with a natural outlet for radical ideas that rarely had a place in their musical day jobs. (They pay the bills by composing everything from TV-ad soundtracks to film and video-game scores, and Sears does double-duty as "the new guy" on standup bass in the Dudley Manlove Quartet.)
After settling on a name ("Seattle School was meant to suggest a school of thought, like Bauhaus," says Sears) the group began performing publicly in 2003, quickly incorporating their shared obsessions--described by Sears as "time, competition, and orchestrated failure"--into a series of distinctively twisted works. In Competition & Distraction, Min sought to capture the menace of the D.C. sniper attacks in the Polestar Gallery, requiring three of his School mates to perform competitive karaoke onstage while he shot them with paintballs from the back of the house for "breaking the rules in his head." In Relay (also at Polestar), Hogue used random radio snippets to spark an ever-tightening chain of repetition, with participants forced to interact increasingly more intimately until the whole thing dissolved into chaos and applause. "It's like a sporting event," says Sears.
But the Iron Composer concept started with raw meat.
After a year and a half of distinctively brainy, increasingly popular performances at a variety of Seattle venues, Seattle School accepted a residency at CHAC, which handed over its downstairs space to the five-member group for the month of July. The relationship progressed well until CHAC learned that the School's resident performance--an ambitious, free-wheeling cabaret show called Madlib MaCabaret--would feature that fundamental staple of performance art, raw meat. With CHAC's popular in-house bistro, Crave, set to debut its vegetarian menu the weekend of the show's opening, CHAC's managers lamented the "harmonic dissonance" the School's raw meat would create, and urged its resident artists to reconsider.
"They wanted us to use fake meat," says Sears over drinks at Bush Garden. "But we had moral issues with the switch." The meat, Sears explains, was to have been cooked and eaten over the course of the show, with its ritualized consumption meant to symbolize the transference and purging of pain. Symbolically, the ritual would fall flat with Tofurkey.
Refusing to sacrifice its artistic vision, Seattle School stuck to its principles and canceled the show, set on filling the vacancy with something new. With three weeks before opening, Sears and Min "pulled the idea for Iron Composer out of our asses," says Sears.
Nothing could prepare Seattle School for the howling mania that greeted what their asses had produced; audiences gamely surrendered themselves to the diabolical Iron Composer roller coaster. "Everyone talks about how Seattle audiences are lame, but our audiences have totally gotten into it," says Sears, who's overseen such crowd actions as the Composer Stare-Down (wherein the audience encircles the night's composers, at whom they stare silently for two minutes) and the instant Make-Out Party, wherein the lights go down, Donna Summer's "Love to Love You, Baby" comes up, and people are instructed to mash.
Thanks to a roster of competitors drawn predominately from Seattle's music scene, Iron Composer has found a natural home in the rock world, an arrangement that should continue to flourish at the Crocodile. "People keep coming back, so we have to keep coming up with surprises," says Sears, who guarantees no two Iron Composers will ever be alike by rigging each show with fresh turmoils and, of course, new contestants. Following this week's Watts vs. Oxygen showdown, the coming months will bring such luminaries as Kurt Bloch, Lesli Wood, Robb Benson, and Heather Duby to the Iron Composer ring.
Asked to name dream contestants for the future, Sears answers without thinking: "Steve Fisk, Calvin Johnson, Neko Case... and while I'm fantasizing, let's throw in Danny Elfman and [XTC's] Andy Partridge."
*****
August 26 - Sep 1, 2004 The Stranger
Violence, On Stage and Off
by Brendan Kiley
In less deadly theater/violence news: full-contact musicians and avant performance loons Seattle School are currently seeking a nurse to attend all their live performances. Wait--a nurse?
Seattle School member Korby Sears explained that their performances often involve audience participation and "rampant physicality." Their first solo show featured a simultaneous three-way karaoke match with a judge firing paintballs at singers for breaking rules that the judge had determined privately but didn't explain. Sears won, singing Gene Pitney's "Town Without Pity." As his prize, he got to fire three rounds at the judge, School founder Mike Min. Min bared his chest. Sears fired. After two rounds "blood started to flow," Sears said. "An older woman in the audience grabbed my arm and begged me to stop. The show ended."
Luckily, Seattle School performances have only resulted in intentional, not accidental, injuries. "I am shocked at our good fortune," Sears said. "But you should never rely on good fortune. Our ducks need to be in a row, and fast."
The Seattle School is also looking for a janitor and a lawyer. See www.seattleschool.net for details.
July 29 - August 4, 2004 The Stranger
BLOCKED OUT
by Jennifer Maerz
I'm still hazy on details, but the night involved Little Red Riding Hood, contestants doing five shots in 45 minutes, and a songwriting challenge that turned into complete chaos. The pandemonium I'm describing is called Iron Composer, an Iron Chef parody held in July at the Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC), and soon to become a monthly event at various venues. The idea behind the Seattle School contest was to bring in two "chefs" from the arts community (the night I was there, it was Pomeranian's Emory Liu and Paul Jensen from Dudley Manlove Quartet), give them a secret ingredient they have to use in their compositions (such as a Q&A session about spiders with an audience member), and present a number of distracting obstacles in the chefs' way to writing a song on the spot with an assigned house band. A screen flashed images informing the packed house of the various "turmoils" for the chefs, an audience member read from "My Burning Man Diary" while images of penises flashed onscreen, and the enthusiastic audience followed screen commands to "Dance" and "Make Out." Imaginary Girl Dana, one of the judges for the night, kept turning to me asking if she was hallucinating the whole thing (of course, she was on her second pint-glass-sized cocktail). At the end of the night, Jensen was the clear winner with an "Eight Legged Freak" funk tune--becoming the proud recipient of seven cans of tuna fish--and it seemed like we all left completely clueless as to what had just happened but sure we wanted to experience it all again.
July 22 - July 28, 2004 The Stranger
TUESDAY JULY 20:
IRON COMPOSER
(Capitol Hill Arts Center) Taking its cue from the beloved cooking competition Iron Chef, Seattle School's Iron Composer throws two local songsmiths into a booze-fueled, high-mayhem songwriting battle. The "secret ingredient" is a randomly selected audience member, the facts of whose life provide the raw material for the evening's compositions. This week's edition pits fringe theater composer John Kaufmann against Tennis Pro's David Drury, each of whom will down six shots of liquor over the 45-minute composition period, then drag their asses onstage to bang out their brand-new songs with a real live band.
DAVID SCHMADER
July 9, 2004 The Seattle Times
*****
March 31 - April 6, 2004 Seattle Weekly
Going Yoko
The wild boys from Seattle School pay tribute to an icon’s boundary-pushing early days.
by Gavin Borchert
A lot of Seattle’s musicians are looking for ways to refresh the classical concert experience: from something as simple as the performers speaking to the audience between works; to Quake’s break-the-fourth-wall spatial experiments and embrace of pop styles; to the Degenerate Art Ensemble’s move from recitals to extended-run theatrical shows. Taking this spirit to a welcome extreme is Seattle School—a collaboration among composers Korby Sears, Mike Min, and Ben Houge—which brings Dadaist showmanship, aggressive audience partici-pation, edgy comedy, and just plain damn-fool stunts to places like Polestar Music Gallery and Consolidated Works. Their first two shows lay somewhere near the intersection of new music, conceptual art, and Beat the Clock: the self-descriptive Fear, Karaoke, Discipline, and Paintball, and HUNG, a “concerto for audience” in which attendees joined in the soundmaking. With a healthy irreverence, they challenge other musicians to reconsider how they serve their listeners. Next, they’ll explore their roots with Grapefruits (8 p.m. Wed., April 7, Capitol Hill Arts Center, www.seattleschool.net), a tribute to Yoko Ono and her early ’60s work with the Fluxus art collective. The three composers sat down recently to discuss with us exactly what they do and why.
Seattle Weekly: What reactions have you gotten so far to your work?
Korby Sears: Ironically, by saying “Fuck all these normal things,” we’re getting normal people to these shows. Some of the works we’ve done split the audience. Mike had a piece called Competition and Distraction. He said he wanted to have a piece where there was fear in the room— so there’s three of us onstage, without protective gear other than helmets, singing three different karaoke songs simultaneously while he shot at us with paintballs. Half the audience was laughing their ass off, but the other half could not watch it.
SW: In this new show, you’re recognizing your aesthetic ancestors.
KS: The Fluxus thing had a lot to do with World War II ending, and the influence of Asian ideas, and the idea of no longer commercializing art as an object. Every once in a while, though, there’s a piece that’s pretty eternal, that the Greeks could have done and it would have made sense. Push [by Fluxus member Ben Vautier] is eternal. Push needs no context. Push is a piece where 10 to 20 performers are onstage and they nonviolently push each other until two people are left. It’s like kinetic sculpture. It’s gorgeous. It has nothing to do with economics or social anything. Dogs can understand Push.
[Ono’s] Sky Piece for Jesus Christ calls for an orchestra to perform a Mozart piece. While they’re performing, people come out and wrap gauze around them—around their fingers, their eyes, their mouth, until they can no longer play. Then the orchestra has to go offstage being blinded and bound, negotiating getting offstage together. I think this is beautiful—what is an orchestra if not people trying to work together?
John Cage was kind of the archangel of the movement, but also things like vaudeville and Duchamp, Spike Jones, children’s games. It started out as a music movement, but I think [Fluxus] actually did Cage’s ideas better than he did. Someone’s biting his lip right now, but Cage was still in the concert realm—Fluxus literally did stuff on the street. 4’33” [Cage’s “silent” piece] was like a reset button, and suddenly everything became theater. Theater and music have separated for way too long, and [Fluxus] kind of brought that back together.
SW: So which do you do? Talk about labels.
Mike Min: I always thought what a composer is essentially doing is notating some kind of athletics for a performer to produce a sound. So I thought, “Why can’t we expand the athletics a little bit?” When musicians start moving around more than you’re used to, is that suddenly theater?
KS: Mike has a piece called Empty Orchestra. It’s like a karaoke deconstruction: We perform the song “A Whole New World” from Aladdin, but don’t make any sound. I have [an electric] piano that I actually play that’s not plugged in. Is that music or theater?
SW: What’s next for you?
Ben Houge: When we’re throwing out ideas for pieces, it’s always interesting to see what gets a rise out of the others. There was a piece Korby said he wouldn’t do—the licking piece.
KS: No, no, I’m in on that. But my initial gut reaction was, “I don’t want to lick my bass.”
BH: Yeah, people are going to lick their instruments. It’s a fetishist thing: “You like classical music so much, your precious classical music? Well, why don’t you lick it?”
KS: My bass has been borrowed by a few people. I don’t know if I want to lick it.
SW: Anything else?
KS: I have a piece for four hamsters. I thought of that last night.
April 1 - April 7, 2004The Stranger
by Christopher DeLaurenti
Erroneously faulted by Beatles fans for breaking up the band, the truth is that Yoko Ono was a braver, bolder artist than the Fab Four were. In the 1960s, Ono was active in the New York-based Fluxus movement, which, in the words of Fluxus linchpin George Maciunas' manifesto, "forgoes distinction between art and non-art, forgoes artists' indispensability, exclusiveness, individuality, ambition... complexity, profundity, greatness, institutional and commodity value... It is a fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, vaudeville, and Duchamp."
Ono's own pioneering pieces straddled the boundaries between visual art, music, and performance. Her notorious Cut Piece invites the audience to cut away chunks of the performer's clothing until no clothes or volunteers remain. Her Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through reads, "Hang a bottle behind a canvas. Place a canvas where the West light comes in. The painting will exist when the bottle creates a shadow on the canvas. The bottle may contain liquor, water, grasshoppers, ants, or singing insects." Who couldn't fall in love with such brazen and iconoclastic creativity?
Seattle School, a gutsy collective of musicians bent on exploring the links among the human body, words, physical action, and music, has secured Ono's blessing to perform chamber works from her post-Sarah Lawrence College/pre-John Lennon era of 1960-1966. Along with Cut Piece, Seattle School will also tackle Voice Piece for Soprano, Sky Piece for Jesus Christ, Bag Piece, and Dance Piece for Stage Performance.
Named after Ono's 1964 conceptual art book, Grapefruits, this benefit for the Capitol Hill Arts Center also features works by her fellow collaborators in the Fluxus art and music movement, including George Maciunas, Anthony Cox, Emmett Williams, and Ben Vautier. CHRISTOPHER DeLAURENTI
STRANGER SUGGESTS
WEDNESDAY APRIL 7
'Grapefruits'
(PERFORMANCE) Performance art's hard to revive--yanking a scroll out of an orifice doesn't pack the same punch twice--but Yoko Ono's 1960-1966 ingenious performance works are durable, even portable, because of the simplicity of the concepts that structure each work. Tonight, the performer/composer collective Seattle School will reprise performance and chamber pieces by Ono and fellow members of the Fluxus movement. (Capitol Hill Arts Center, 1621 12th Ave, 380-0500, 8 pm, $10. ) ANNIE WAGNER
Yoko Ono’s “Grapefruits” performed live at Capitol Hill Arts Center
by Tania Kupczak
Before John Lennon ever set foot on this continent, Yoko Ono was already a rock star. She was challenging the boundaries between performance, music composition, audience and concept-driven visual art when Americans were still saying, “The Beatles? Lennon?” Given the parallels between the social climate of the 1960s and today, it’s not surprising that Ono’s works from this period represent her recognizable oeuvre, as much for their reckless requests of audience compliance as for the way in which she circumvents social protocol to cast her pieces into a larger human experience of sound, physicality and the unscripted passage of time.
Ono’s early conceptual work (1960-66) has enjoyed a re-enchantment in the last few years. As our visual culture sets itself in uncategorizable realms, many interdisciplinary artists are contextualizing their explorations in the history of performance art as established by Fluxus artists such as George Maciunas, John Cage and Ono herself. It was this root-tracing that brought Seattle School, a local performance group piloted by composers Ben Houge, Mike Min, Korby Sears, and Guy Whitmore, to a set of loosely-defined scores Ono published in 1964 as an art book titled “Grapefruits.
Seattle School member Korby Sears feels a kinship with Ono through “Grapefruits,” because, he says, “these works often involve discipline, confrontation, humiliation, endurance and surprise revelations of emotions that the audience didn’t realize they harbored, often splitting the audience in two. And yet there is always a Zen vaudeville humor that never fails to lead to haunting moments of lucidity after the guaranteed belly laugh.” You may remember Seattle School from their renegade performance “Fear, Karaoke, Discipline and Paintball” at Polestar back in November and the more recent “HUNG,” which debuted at Consolidated Works on March 18.
With the blessing of Ono herself, the help of her archivist Jon Hendricks and a cast of twenty-five performers, Seattle School will manifest their desire to offer an experiential witnessing of Ono’s “Grapefruits,” as well as construct yet another participatory performance for local audiences. “Grapefruits,” as curated by the Seattle School, will include “Cut Piece” (1961), “Sky Piece for Jesus Christ” (1965), “The Pulse for Chamber Music” (1962) and “Bag Piece” (1964) among others. “Grapefruits” will be performed at the Capitol Hill Arts Center on April 7, 2004 as a benefit for the CHAC Community Development Program. Here’s your chance to write Ono a note in grapefruit juice. The show starts at 8pm. $10 suggested donation.
December 11 - 17, 2003 The Stranger
MONDAY DECEMBER 15
SOUND OF THE BRUSH
If you missed Seattle School's packed gig at Polestar last month, here's another, albeit stripped-down, chance with Mike Min and several Seattle School chums. Ernst Karel's EKG holds forth for the second set, while the third set is an open-to-all-comers mix 'n' match improvisation. CoCA, 1420 11th Ave, 728-1980, 8:30 pm, donation requested. CHRISTOPHER DeLAURENTI
November 20 - 26, 2003 The Stranger
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 20
FEAR, KARAOKE, DISCIPLINE AND PAINTBALL by SEATTLE SCHOOL
This quartet of composer-performers sallies forth into a spectacle of strangely scored works, including Folding and Foiling for one vocalist and three electronic manipulators; Competition and Distraction for three karaoke vocalists, tape, and one person firing paintballs at them; Chains for a four-person chain ensemble; Sunday/Monday for instrumentalist and shortwave radio; Study for Air Guitar for one clothed or unclothed guitarist; and Music for Clothing for one performer. Your brainy date will love it. Polestar Music Gallery, 1412 18th Ave at E Union St, 329-4224, 8 pm, $6. CHRISTOPHER DeLAURENTI
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