The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I travel there every few years and typically end up in the area during summer, missing the rain for which it’s infamous. This year I visited Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, seeing a lot of the gallery and museum scene. The Seattle Art Fair ran during the start of August. It’s mostly a small-ish regional fair, though there were booths by Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Zürcher, James Cohan, and other New Yorkers. I skipped it though, having a kind of snooty distaste for those conventions. I mean, who in their right mind would want to attend an art fair? Oof.

So I went straight for the regional institutions. There’s a lot to see. First: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. It’s set in the city’s hip and young U district, and it’s a smartly designed, well organized space. They show emerging and established artists in a variety of media. They do not have a large space, so there aren’t clusters of galleries with an expansive selection from their permanent collection. Instead, they have well-curated exhibitions and I had just missed the school’s MFA exhibition, which runs for a month, rather than the week that many New York students get.

On view while I was there was, among other things, Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: About half the air in a given space (2015), which was comprised of a large gallery filled almost to capacity by silver balloons. Visitors could enter through one of two doorways and push their way through the claustrophobic mass, being disoriented and kind of pleasantly bewildered by the balloons’ power to constrict and delight. Also on view: a handsome retrospective for photographer Ilse Bing, a show of un-stretched and shaped canvases by Allan McCollum and Karen Carson, and a solo show by Michelle Handelman, with video and photography conflating vampirism, psychotherapy, and class-and-queer antagonism. The video draws from a Silent-Film-era series about Parisian thieves, called The Vampires, so one can forgive Handelman’s melodrama. It’s richly textured in a fetishistic way, and the accompanying photographs are exciting.

A few days later I took the train down to Portland, where I met up with artcritical contributor, publishing magnate, and poet extraordinaire Paul Maziar, and his friends, who showed me the nightlife — great host and hostesses. We remarked on the aesthetic qualities in the bright redness of neon lights adorning one of the construction cranes which has been expanding the city of late. Maziar’s been consuming Marcel Duchamp, so we say, “Sure, why not? Call it industrial-scale readymade sculpture.”

Next morning I left my kind hosts and took a long walk into downtown of the beautiful city, finishing up at the Portland Art Museum. The institution is currently hosting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold (2010), which is displayed among the museum’s many galleries of Asian art and artifacts. The suite of 12 animal heads represents the Chinese calendrical zodiac, and is based on a sculpture formerly of an imperial garden outside Beijing, designed by Europeans, used by the Chinese elite, then looted by French soldiers in 1860. The scale and craftsmanship of Weiwei’s sculpture is spectacular, however, despite the didactics, I got the sense that I was missing something pretty fundamental about the subtleties of the artist’s choice of representation. Is it something about the Chinese government’s complicated relationship to Weiwei, to the nation’s own history, and the waves of European colonization and Chinese reclamation in these images? I can’t tell.

The aforementioned Asian art and artifacts galleries are really top rate. The layout of the building is labyrinthine, which can vary the experience between excited discovery and a confused, lost feeling.

Another exhibition, “Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,” collects more than 140 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the school, from between the 15th and 19th centuries. I can have a hard time with some of the flowery, academic work that the institution produced and inspired, but it’s hard to argue with some of the works on view in this show. Albrecht Dürer’s The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (ca. 1498), kind of made my jaw drop a little. And PAM also has a great selection of Modern and contemporary work, including a selection, on view now, of reductivist work by Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockburne, Judy Chicago, John McCracken, and others — stuff that really gets me going. And there’s a large display of photographs, which the museum calls a “Fotofolio,” by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston and Minor White. Their silver gelatin prints of the American West made me wish to flee New York and find an abandoned mission on top of a mountain.

Also there, now closed, was a show of David Hockney’s print suite, A Rake’s Progress (1975), along with a set of prints by William Hogarth, made in 1733, on which Hockney’s sequence is based.

Full from Portland, I went back to Seattle. I took a breather and went to the Seattle Art Museum, at which the main attraction is currently “Disguise: Masks and Global African Currents,” which was a kind of unremarkable show about artists using the imagery of African masks in their work. The hanging was gimmicky and impoverished, and several of the artists felt slight and arbitrary (no Keith Sonnier?). But, next to it was a great, like, really out of sight display of actual African masks, along with archival footage of performers at a carnival in the Côte d’Ivoire. That stuff is way more exciting and intellectually engaging than much of the show’s contemporary work.

As well, a small but nonetheless excellent show, called “The Duchamp Effect,” rounded up post-War artists making use of Duchamp’s innovations. There was a lot of toilet humor and pointing at contradictions between image, language, and actuality. One very smart touch was the inclusion of a photograph by Louise Lawler, showing two artworks in a collector’s home. Lawler’s photograph shared gallery space with the two artworks it pictures: a painting by Jasper Johns and a sculpture by James Rosenquist.

I left Seattle’s piney metropolis for an excursion north, to Vancouver. Even Canada’s border is beautiful, with enormous gunnera unfurling at the edges of Peace Arch border-crossing park, and a sculpture by Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han — a billboard-like form of negative space overlooking the Pacific inlet there. A few minutes away, Vancouver is a really, really pretty city, seemingly compacted into the natural concavity of the Salish Sea’s coast. There are tall skyscrapers, the city is sparklingly clean, and I arrived immediately after Pride weekend, with festive banners and the debris of feather boas all over the place. I mean, it’s a really beautiful city. And in Canada, HBO has its own regional programming, including mandated indigenous programs and movies, which are very cool and sort of an entertaining (if small) gesture at reconciliation after hundreds of years of genocide and oppression. I liked the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). It’s good.

There, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is hosting an enormous retrospective of Canadian sculptor Geoffrey Farmer, “How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?” I found myself thinking about Farmer’s tremendous archivist spirit, collecting and combining the pieces of National Geographic back issues, fiberglass sculptures, bits of signs, notes, tapes, vehicles, and all sorts of other things. It brought me back to a perpetual question in an era of explosive image production and distribution: is cataloguing and organizing one of the best strategies for an artist trying to cope, resist, or flow with such proliferation? I think probably yes. One small room held an archive of artist lectures and interviews on cassette tape, and invited visitors to sit and listen awhile.

On the ground floor was a great “show,” a display of works on paper from the museum’s collection, a trifle compared to the offerings that will be on view following the institution’s addition of a new space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The works on paper, over a hundred on one large wall, were intended to entice viewers to see the benefits of the costly and overdue expansion. The next gallery over showed work from another collection in “Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums,” with a handsome selection of paintings covering a spectacular historical range, while still appearing intellectually clear and to the point. Upstairs was a group show in several spaces, each artist given their own gallery. Called “Residue: The Persistence of the Real,” this exhibition of documentary photography studies the way that history is retained in images, as in Catherine Opie’s beautiful shots of Liz Taylor’s home and Geoffrey James’s absolutely just mind-blowing shots of Canada’s infamous Kingston Penitentiary, where inmates decorated the walls of their cells so ornately they could be mistaken for contemporary installation art.

Down the street, the Bill Reid Gallery shares the history and importance of First Nations’ arts, with a permanent display of work by Reid, one of Canada’s most famous contemporary indigenous craftsmen. Likewise, the museum promotes the continuing traditions of local tribes, including live, free-form Q & A with an artist working in the atrium. Sean Whonnock was there when I visited, and he told me a lot about the construction of regional iconography, about the craftsmanship of these artworks, his own life, and the traditions of his family and tribe. There’s a lot of great indigenous art and craft all over, and most of these museums had great collections, sustaining cultures that were almost completely wiped out during the preceding centuries.

Finally, back in Seattle, I hit up the city’s monthly First Thursday art walk, down at historic Pioneer Square. The galleries are, in many ways, like those in New York and anywhere else in the world: there are some you’d like to spend a lot of time in, others not so much. One major difference is the organization of openings, all on the same Thursday, with plenty of white and red wines, food, and live music. Totally alien, right? The atmosphere is festive and people are out to enjoy the scene, rather than trying to make the scene. I was taken by Greg Kucera Gallery, which had a diverse collection of works on view by self-taught artists, including Gee’s Bend quilts, Henry Darger paintings, drawings by James Castle and Bill Traylor, and so on. In the back was a show by Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic and creates large mixed-media drawings cataloguing all kinds of incidentals: dictionary definitions, sheepshank knots, flags of the world, rottweiler breeds. Blackstock was in attendance and was more open in his discussing his work than any New York artist you’ve ever met.

The whole trip, whirlwind that it was, showed me some new favorite art spots on the left coast. If you’re in the area, you’d be foolish to pass them up.

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The installation of “Mike Kelley” at LA MoCA is more comprehensive than any of its previous three presentations, at MoMA PS1, the Centre Pompidou, or the Stedelijk Museum, where former Stedelijk director (and former LA MoCA curator) Ann Goldstein first organized the show in 2012 in consultation with the Mike Kelley Foundation. The exhibition at MoCA was organized by Bennett Simpson and held in the Museum’s Geffen Contemporary, a former warehouse in Little Tokyo with 40,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Geffen’s open floor plan (with small galleries at the periphery) makes for a very different show than the most recent iteration, at New York’s PS1, which was broken up into smaller groupings due to the Museum’s diminutive galleries appropriated from former classrooms. The LA show puts particular focus on Kelley’s evocative, ritualistic and often hallucinatory video installations, which, shown simultaneously, take center stage in the Geffen’s enormous space. Here, sounds ricochet, lights flash and music drones, contributing to a feeling of sensory overload frequently attributed to the artist’s later works.

Kelley’s appropriation of kitschy stuffed animals and puppets, naughty cartoons and images from high school yearbooks have placed him in line historically with a “postmodern” rubric of production popularized by his Metro Pictures peers in the 1980s. However, rather than open-ended rejections of authenticity or originality (à la Richard Prince or Louise Lawler), Kelley’s work resonates with recurrent references to his own biography as expressed through his deep social and political investments. Be it via inquiries into the controversial subject of “memory repression” with his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000- 2006); the politics of labor with From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003); or the sanctity of art with his massive (and now iconic) More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), the artist’s work is imbued with the vulnerable politics of our discursive and manifold selves.

Day is Done (2005-2006), an epic multimedia installation composed of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2-32, opens the show and serves as an important barometer for Kelley’s ongoing artistic concerns. Central to the project is the experience of viewing each narrative from different angles and perspectives, a metaphor that aids the viewer in considering the artworks that follow. Day is Done was inaugurated by Kelley’s 30-minute video Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), which is on view on a small monitor near the exhibition’s entrance. All of Kelley’s EAPRs were staged and scripted around images from high school plays found in yearbooks. Latching onto a new cultural investment in the study of repressed memory therapy, which rose in popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s due to a moral panic over alleged satanic abuse rituals, Kelley uses these installations to examine the multiple layers of signification in American folk rituals. Understanding the slippages between personal and collective memory, Kelley crafts a series centered on “socially acceptable” forms of performance, such as school plays, Halloween, and corporate “dress-up days.” In one scene, a cherubic middle schooler wanders out alone for a haircut and finds himself at the mercy of an obnoxious, sweaty barber who morphs into a vile, red-faced devil as standup comedian. In another, the same child is chased around a creaky attic by a ghoulish Virgin Mary, while he screams “I want to wake up!” Originally designed as a live 24-hour installation, Kelley hoped to eventually film 365 tapes, a monumental unrealized undertaking.

An entire gallery is devoted to From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003), an installation that incorporates the artist’s Loading Dock Drawings from 1984. For the work, Kelley reproduced flyers that feature naughty cartoons or institutional gripes circulated among administrators at CalArts via fax. The wall facing the drawings features a stenciled fist in representation of workers’ solidarity, while a carrot dangles from the ceiling as the clichéd symbol of futile incentive. The relationship of the fist to the goofy cartoons speaks to the potential of these administrators to organize, even if only through shared grievances and blue humor. Originally, red tape was intended to connect the installation to the administrative offices of the institution in which it was presented. At MoCA, a door which reads “employees only” has been built alongside, a testament (albeit less impactful something the artist might have come up with) to Kelley’s original ideological intent.

A number of Kelley’s installation-cum-shrines are featured prominently, composed of plush toys, felt and afghan rugs which reinforce the artist’s complicated investment in childhood, memory and spirituality. Also on view is a selection of ephemera from early collaborative performance works — tape recorders, megaphones and whoopee cushions — which feel a bit precious in their given context. Perhaps the most compelling installation in the show is made up of Kelley’s monumental Kandors series of (1999 – 2007, 2009, and 2011), which taps a quality of failure that pervades the whole exhibition — not of pessimism so much as a sense of sympathy for inadequacy, the underdog, or the misunderstood. Kandors reproduces Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton, shrunken by his arch nemesis Brainiac, in a series of hyperbaric bell jars that sputter, smoke, and glow neon. Each is reproduced according to the graphic history of the comic at different historical moments as closely as possible. Again, the complicated relationship of Superman to his home, the nostalgia for childhood and an attempt to fill gaps in memory left blank are central components to the piece. In the wake of Kelley’s untimely death, his monumental retrospective encourages us to come to terms with the complicated experience of childhood, imparting a sense of trepidation, wonderment and hopefulness.

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