Initial Reflections on PDL Artist Tryouts // Friday, 3 April 2015

Location: Pike St., South side, loading bay between Bimbos & Big Marios
Weather: clear and upper 40s, windy, full moon
Dual Hypotheses:
A) Pessimistic- Friday nights on Capitol Hill have evolved into something intractably hideous.
There is now a critical mass of 20-something-year-old cool-seekers who strut around in peacock feathers, being variously entitled, violent, abusive, disrespectful to any constructive
form of civilized society, and oblivious to the higher functions of the human brain. They are
completely unaware of Capitol Hills history as a gay neighborhood and its designation as
an Arts District. They are there to tie one on, find sex partners, or alternately beat the shit
out of someone to prove their rightful place in the social order of human animals. Any attempts to interact with them on an artistic or intellectual level will be met with deep stares of
ignorance, vulgar or vapid dismissals ending in the words Bro! or Woooo!, or aggressive
physical behavior. We will constantly be warding off bodily harm, theft, and untoward psychological abuse, involving the derogatory use of the word faggot.
B) Optimistic- Friday nights on Capitol Hill have changed hands to a younger crowd, but the
spirit of creativity lies latent in the ambitions of these energetic social folk. With proper outlets and a hands-on presence, the Friday night crowd can become educated and, if
prompted, contribute to the artistic life of the neighborhood. We will spend our night delightfully navigating a horde of curious, talented, potential artists, with whom we will have
intelligent conversations and cathartic interactions, helping to unleash a desire to make
more, do more, and be more than just someone who wants to wait in line for shots of Fireball, have sex with ill-chosen partners, or cling to the slick tenets of mass-produced pop culture.
Observations:
We began the night around 7:30. Greg had talked the managers of Caffe Vita and Bimbos into
letting us park in the loading dock space between their businesses. The food truck wasnt going
to be there that night. We re-parked the van 3 times to get the perfect distance from the curb,
locked it tight, and ran final errands. Greg and I ate burritos at Bimbos and watched the light
change to night. The large white panel sign for Big Marios gave our sidewalk wonderful bright
illumination. By 9:30, we had screwed the easel rig together and leaned it on the side of the van,
set out 4 panels, primed the paint pens, and loaded the rail up with colored pencils. Our first
participants came over IMMEDIATELY- 2 girls who had just eaten pizza next door. They
claimed not to be artists but spent upwards of 20 minutes on a portrait of a girl dreaming of
pizza. It wasnt bad. Before they girls were done, there were artists on every available canvas.

The pace of the night was consistent and lingered somewhere just on the tolerable side of my
personal discomfort threshold. Large groups would congregate near us on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes and eating pizza, but for the most part, we werent crowded against our rig, people
werent pushing and shoving, and folks were respecting what we were doing and gave us requisite space. Although the majority of people just jostled by in groups on the way to meet up with
others at a place, we had a remarkably constant supply of artists at the tryout easel. They ranged
from a pack of young asian street-artist boys to a middle-aged black homeless man, from a local
architect who quickly sketched the street scene around him to a neighborhood artist/activist
who drew and wrote a detailed homage to her aged apartment building. We only had 2 guys
draw dicks.
There was only one near-fight, between a well-dressed skinny white man dramatically waving
his bloody hand around, threatening to rub it on people, claiming he had AIDS. Some Latino
kids were standing him down, and I feared the rumored gay-bashing meme was going to avail
itself right before our eyes. However, upon closer examination, it became obvious that HE was
the problem, not the kids. Reminiscent of Crispin Glover in his affected eccentricity, the kid
genuinely seemed to desire some kind of dramatic pummelingwhich he, in the end, didnt get.
There were pockets of the famed bro types in baseball caps and muscles, drunkly commanding
high-fives and hollering as they barreled their way through the sidewalk congestion. There was
one group of girls led by a blonde, tight-black-dressed alpha in a sequined sash, but they didnt
scream Wooo! in our presence. Other noteworthy characters were the shit-faced Irish 31-yearold who wore suspenders and told offensive jokes on command. He claimed it was his birthday,
and he was already sloshed, alone, at 10 pm. Then there was the sweet girl from Texas who
couldnt get enough doodling, but time and again she was coerced away from the easel by a male
companion who didnt want her messing around with this kind of stuff. He jawed with us at the
end of the night that he was convinced that we and our fancy haircuts were doing this to get female attention, and that we were going to make money off of selling the art. He would alternate
between a kind of calculated sweetness to get information and then stick knives in when we
opened up to him. He had a teardrop tattoo. I extrapolated the horrors of home life with a guy
like that and felt sorry for the girl.
Otherwise, the majority of the folks I observed in the nearly five hours we were on the sidewalk
werent definable by any damning social normalcy. There was diversity in dress, age, race,
socio-economic status, and sobriety. South-end black guys in dreadlocks mixed with longhaired Asian kids, buzz-cut Latinos, skinny white girls, tattooed goths, flamboyant gay men,
bearded hipsters, restaurant workers, street performers, homeless, mentally-ill, well-muscled,
overweight, thug, intellectual, loner, wolfpacker, smoker, busker, cabbie, and cop. There were
folks from a conference on sustainable neighborhoods who had been drinking at the Cha Cha
and talked with us for a while; employees of local coffee shops, bars, and restaurants who had
just gotten off shift; all variety of young kid, every shade of drunk or stoned, who made elaborate
tags, scrawled stylized faces, and generated an unforeseen amount of written material.

Data:
The data generated in this exercise consisted of the answers to the questionnaire which we gave
each artist (with varying levels of participation) and the art itself, most of which is on display at
the Factory (there were many double-sided panels, but little in the way of remarkable work is on
the back of them.)
As for the questionnaire, the average age of participants whose answers seemed to be genuine
(someone wrote that they were 102) was 26, with a range from 52 to 18. The mode (most common age) was 22. As for residence, 11 people claimed to be from the Seattle neighborhood,
while 9 folks said they lived on Capitol Hill, and 2 were from Spokane. Individuals came from
Fremont, Yesler Terrace, Mountlake Terrace, Edmonds, Rainier Beach, Bellingham, and one
man claimed to be homeless. We believed him. Nobody claimed to be from the East Side. As
for occupation, there were 4 students, 2 worked from home (whatever they did), 2 were designers, and 1 chef, hairstylist, busser, social worker, architect, film editor, valet, picture framer,
Hyatt employee, landscaper, dishwasher, researcher, BBQ cook, apartment manager, and someone involved in SDE, which we took to mean software development engineer. By a wide margin, the favorite artist was Salvador Dali. Good job marketing yourself, Salvador! 2 credited
Banksy, and 1 vote each for artists Goya, R. Crumb, Frida Kahlo, Ralph Steadman, Miro,
Magritte, and Pollock. Votes were also recorded for Ozzy Osbourne, skateboarder Chris Milic,
Funkadelic, Bjork, Jack Kerouac, Brian Eno, Cirque de Soleil, and even local performer Alice
Gosti! Favorite bar elicited 4 votes for Big Marios, 2 for Cha Cha, 1 each for Grimms, Vermillion, Cafe Presse, Petti Rosso, Mercury, and the Comet. None of the others were in the neighborhood. And finally, the favorite drink was overwhelmingly gin, whether mixed with tonic,
soda, or as a martini (9 votes)! 3 voted for whiskey in some form. No others got more than one
vote.
As for the art, well.the art wasokay. You can judge for yourself. The majority of the
works could be regarded as tags - either words, handles, or quickly done cartoons- reproductions of simple marks that the artists had made over and over before. And, yes, we acknowledge
that the dynamic of the exercise was rife with limiting factors- people were in groups, people
were on their way somewhere, it was cold, etc. And yes, people were all across the spectrum of
chemically altered states of mind. So lots of the work might not have been folks best effort.
But there were some participants who really went for it. One introspective kid took his board
and sat against the wall for upwards of 45 minutes, crafting his meticulous expression. There
was the woman who drew and wrote about her aging house on Capitol Hill- she was there for a
half hour, easily. But the middle-aged Asian man with long hair bunned up in a pair of nice
chopsticks was by far the most inspired of the group, using water and his fingers to help create a
gradated, modernist landscape over the course of an hour. Youd have never guessed the medium was paint marker. For all the rest of the work, it was obvious. Out of an estimated total
participant count between 60 and 70, the number of folks who really engaged in the exercise
with inspired creativity, past a couple of minutes, was less than 10.

Conclusion:
So, based on 5-plus hours of observation, we conclude that our second, more positive hypothesis
was more accurate. As for the general nature of the Friday night scene, the crowd was decidedly
more diverse, less averse, and more inclined to art-making and intelligent interaction that our
fears and the harshly-flung public opinions of late. There was still tell of deviance- a critical
mass of blinking police lights just west of Broadway on Pike St. around 1 am. A friend reported
that she had read of several violent acts perpetrated in that block of Pike between Harvard and
Boylston recently. Another friend expressed that a different scene took place up on 11th, at the
confluence of the lines to get in Bara, Grimms, and the Rhino Room. Thats only a few hundred feet away, mind you.
As for the art, there was a feeling that the vast majority of people who participated were interested in a quick fix, and they primarily employed tried-and-true styles and methods for markmaking which conveyed simple identity-based or glib messages. Roughly 10 percent of all who
made art, though, seemed to experience a raw creative moment- using drawing to express something that they grappled with while making it- whether writing a testimony, crafting a spontaneous image, or exploring the limits of the media provided. How that stacks up against the larger
numbers of people who make art involves statistics I cant even fathom how to compile, but I
imagine that its not too far from the norm.
In closing, several questions have emerged that could perhaps be the fodder for further study:
- Could it be that Pike/Pine has become so dense that in fact it should be further subdivided by
block? In other words, are there microenvironments developing in this social grid that render
any general consideration of the neighborhood as a whole to be a moot exercise?
-Is it just the vast number of people who flock to the area that increases the odds of deviance
and not a general assessment of the attitudes and demeanor of the majority of folks gathered for
good times and casual presence?
-What would further study and intervention look like? Immediate reflection yielded the following 4 future projects: 1) conduct more of the same Artist Tryouts on different blocks in the
neighborhood on Friday nights, 2) conduct the same but on a weeknight, 3) create a carnivalgame-like contest, where artists exhibit their skills competitively to win stuffed bears or some
such prize (a can-you-draw -this? kind of thing), and 4) art lessons, provided by a rotating cast
of local artists, who came up with simple techniques or subjects to teach. Who knows, maybe
even a how to draw dicks like a pro tutorial. Stay tuned
-PDL