William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

Buster Simpson's laundry

To prep for the retrospective of Buster Simpson's work opening this weekend at the Frye Art Museum, I looked up the artist's name on Wikipedia.

Turns out he's referenced in entries for other artists, but does not have a Wikipedia entry of his own!

This in spite of a body of work in public, metropolitan spaces (New York, Boston, Seattle, probably others) over decades.

The search result has me thinking: how does one live in an open, thoroughly engaged manner that nevertheless resists digitization? In philosophical terms, what behaviors will not be assimilated into the Singularity? In terms of the news of the day, what is it about certain kinds of information in plain sight that causes the surveillance state to not know how to see?

One answer may be to not consume anything.

Resisting commercial supply chains certainly seems to be the operative guideline for how the Simpson show was installed at the Frye. At a preview of the show, Curator Scott Lawrimore explained that no new materials were used in the installation. Instead of cutting new vinyl for signs to identify and explain pieces, curators wrote on the walls. To support a sculpture needing a base, geometric sections of drywall were sawed out and folded to make a table. In order to provide seating to permit viewers to relax while watching looped videos, Simpson fashioned stools using screens from discarded televisions.

I plan on being at the Frye Saturday, June 15, at 2 pm, when Simpson and Lawrimore are scheduled to lead a public tour of the show. Meantime, you can go visit a Buster Simpson installation of clean laundry in Post Alley, off Virginia Street, just north of Pike Place Market, or the southern edge of the Belltown neighborhood in Seattle.

At a preview of the show at the Frye, Curator Lawrimore joked that Simpson had spent as much time writing letters and seeking permits for the outdoor laundry installation as he did prepping the interior of the museum. "In the old days," Simpson rejoined, "we just put things up." (That may not be an exact quote.)

Hats off to Linda Thomas whose early morning tweet confirmed that the Simpson laundry was flying. I went down and snapped photos.

Construction at Eighth and Seneca

A construction site well worth keeping an eye on is one in Seattle at the northeast corner of Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street.

The site slopes aggressively from south to north, so the best view is probably from the north. A walkway from Freeway Park permits you to survey the whole site, and even affords a look almost straight down onto the northern line of the site.

I check in most weekday mornings, but can't pretend I know what's really going on. I am most impressed with the coordination of the workers, however. They are moving earth and steel and concrete sleeves with precision belied by the size of their machines.

One morning, a man in a windbreaker, a sightseer like me, explained how they had to drill a hole wide enough to drop a steel casing into, which in turn would permit them to drill a slightly smaller hole underneath the casing. He seemed to know a lot about the machines and about the intended structural support for the eventual building.

I asked him if he were a mechanical engineer, and he said, no. He studied mechanical engineering in school, but went on to have a career in a field completely unrelated. Now that he was retired, he said, he could indulge his passion for construction.

Sockeye for Memorial Day

I just bought a 5 pound Sockeye salmon from the Market.

I'll cook it tomorrow in a small, round, Weber grill, lid on.

Bitter Seattlite

You can now find a genuine, English-style bitter in Seattle.

It's made at the Machine House Brewery in Georgetown, by a bona fide Englishman named William, no less.

It's got the right amount of carbonation (none), and is served in a proper pint glass at room temperature.

I actually like the very new style of canned beer - Hillyard's Saison foremost - that are replacing Red Hook and Pyramid and that 1990s generation of fizzy IPAs.

But how fine to finally find a bitter in the Northwest.

San Francisco

Assessing the weather conditions for my walk to work this morning, I saw that it was drizzling, and cool.

It's the Friday before a three-day weekend, I thought, so it shouldn't be a problem if I wear a sweatshirt in the office for the morning, before a series of meetings beginning at noon.

I knew I had a dress shirt at work I could change into midday.

Well, midday has come and gone, and I've gotten through several meetings while still wearing the sweatshirt. Too busy to change.

What gets me is that no one has called me out about the San Francisco appellation!

Christopher Martin Hoff

Sometimes, walking around Seattle, I snap photos of construction sites, wondering how the late plein air painter, Christopher Martin Hoff, might have framed the scene.

My framings, on screen, are always wrong. The eye in my head distorts proportions, gives significance to meaningful details and squeezes or stretches what's in the peripheries, according to some hierarchy of attention I consistently fail to map to two dimensions.

Hoff's frames are always right. Whether grand, of a vista, or telescoping from a disadvantaged angle as at right, as from under the shadow of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

What's unique about his work is more than framing, of course.

I don't know if Hoff was a great painter, but he was very much an original, in the sense that you can always immediately recognize his hand. Earnestness is the first thing you see. Then I think it's the perpetual wetness of everything he renders.

Here's (what I think is) a photograph by Lars Tunbjork, taken in a different decade than Hoff's work and using a different vocabulary of the street.

This photo borrows its motion from a Mondrian or Calder-like play of geometric shapes that shimmer and cascade, mostly on a flat plane. The chromatic brightness of the palette seems to go hand in hand with such an aesthetic.

The contrast with Hoff makes me think that Hoff was more interested in seeing the space between things, in the volume of relationships, almost as though he were illuminating the empty dark matter than binds everything in outerspace.

Vespas on parade

This was fun: encountering a parade of motor scooters in the Central District of Seattle on a sunny, summer-like, Friday evening.

 

We stumbled across it like you happen to encounter things in nature, as you might hear a honk and look up to see Canada Geese flying overhead.