- — July 1, 2009
Nortorious and beloved Seattle art star Greg Lundgren takes on his Eastside roots in I am from Bellevue.
The Pied Piper of Seattle’s Dada art scene leans back at the desk of Lundgren Monuments, his sleek tombstone store on Pill Hill, and confesses his darkest secret: “My name is Greg Lundgren, and I am from Bellevue! It’s like being in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.”
He’s addicted to the idea of Bellevue and obsessed with what he considers its original sin: valuing creature comforts instead of art. “It’s the American Dream, and it’s damn expensive.” And now he’s feverishly pouring his conflicted Eastside emigrant’s heart into a major art installation, I Am from Bellevue, at Open Satellite July 10 – 31, in an attempt to come to terms with his enviable, inspiring, infuriating hometown, and with his own identity as an artist.
A portrait of the artist, Greg Lundgren, as a young man;
photo illustration by Victoria Culver
“It’s a really fantastic community,” explains the recovering Yarrow Point kid. “You had this luxury of opportunity, experimentation, building tree forts. Now, does it breed artists? It doesn’t. It’s dangerous for a child to be exposed to that much wealth and that much brand identity.” Lundgren’s exhibit will be a kind of art fort, which he plans to stock with significant objects he’s discovering in the homes of Eastside friends and strangers. His notion is that it’ll be like a “Goodwill in heaven,” the findings of a suburban archaeologist, adding up to a mosaic revealing Bellevue’s soul, and also an aesthetic self-portrait.
So far, he’s found “a large totem pole, a weathervane, a plastic goose, a stuffed bird, a set of encyclopedias, a boat and some blank canvases. Oh, and I found a million plastic flowers, which will make a lovely Wizard of Oz garden.”
But he’s having a tough time finding what he most wants: old stuff. He grew up in the pre-digital era, playing with tactile toys instead of computer games, racing heedlessly down hills helmetless in go-karts built from wood and rummaged scraps. In today’s Bellevue, he finds no hand-built go-karts, just miniature Mercedes-Benzes and Barbie Corvettes that go 5 mph, bought by overcautious parents who clothe kids in helmets and kneepads. “You go to Bellevue in the twenty-first century, you don’t see raw materials. There’s not an appreciation of vintage. Everything is brand new” — with an emphasis on the ritzy brand name. “There is a mall mentality. Bellevue Square is the most successful mall in North America. Everything is developed, manicured. There isn’t that place to have a mud fight, you know?”
Lundgren’s whole career has been a gleeful, artsy mud fight. Yet he’s natty and neat in striped pants and sandals, a handsome guy with a radio-quality voice, a boyish shock of forelock and a mole that only sets off his striking looks. The yellow post-it notes on his Mac are inscribed in flawless fin-de-siècle script, and he’s no penniless rebel. He wears sandals, but they’re nice sandals. “Like, I’m from Bellevue. I’m thirty-nine years old, I don’t want to rent a three-hundred-dollar apartment with five other guys and eat Top Ramen seven nights a week.”
Instead, he runs Seattle’s most important art bar, the Hideout, boasting the house fanzine The Vital 5 Review, scribbled by tippling patrons, and the world’s first glass-tombstone business, for people who want to honor their loved ones with something luminous instead of with inanimate granite. He oversees a seven-thousand-square-foot wood and metalworking shop in Fremont and aims to transform America’s cemeteries into sculpture gardens. He’s also crafted entryway art for the Bellevue mansion of InfoSpace founder Naveen Jain (“He’s worth eight hundred million dollars, but he’s like a big kid — he rules his company with an iron fist but he treats artists like gods!”) and perpetrated dozens of conceptual-art pranks at a workaholic rate worthy of Warhol.
Lundgren at his longest-running installation, The Hideout art bar next to his tombstone shop. Photo by Christopher Lundgren.
That’s ironic, since he first won notice in 1995 for inventing Artists for a Work Free America, whose mottoes are “Monday Should Be Fun Day!” and “Alarm Clocks Kill Dreams!” He helped install a nest of baby eaglets under Alexander Calder’s huge Eagle sculpture at Olympic Sculpture Park, and he sells unauthorized audio tours of the Seattle and Portland Art Museums. To razz the cliquish nature of the art-granting establishment, he established the Artists for a Work Free America Arbitrary Art Grant program, one of whose winners walks into Lundgren Monuments during our interview.
“Hi, are you Jennifer? C’mon up — Jennifer just won five hundred dollars for our sculpture grant. We blew a bunch of pieces of paper down a grocery-store aisle and had raw egg on the floor and an electric leaf blower, and Jennifer’s name was on the first piece of paper to stick to the egg. And therefore she wins five hundred dollars.” He hands her the tidy brick of one hundred bound five-dollar bills. The eleven 2009 Arbies (as I hereby dub the awards) will be celebrated in Lundgren’s other big exhibition this year, Dada Economics, occupying seven thousand square feet at the Seattle Center Rainier Room during Bumbershoot.
“In a perfect world, I’d walk away from this and say my tribe, my childhood actually was filled with arts and culture, in which case I’d say, ‘I am from Bellevue! I’m not ashamed!’”
His rising reputation has a lot riding on both shows, but it’s the Bellevue one that keeps him up nights. “I’ve never thought about a show so much at five in the morning, staring at the ceiling. I’m not going to satisfy 40 percent of the people who see this show. Most people are going to be disappointed. It’s not going to be what they expected, or they’ll feel slighted. It’s going to be ripped on by Seattle critics and misunderstood by Bellevue housewives.
“In Seattle they’ll rip on it for being too simple. It’s going to be too abstract for people in Bellevue and too simple for people in Seattle. It is walking a tightrope, is what it is. I do think it will succeed where I want it to, in that it’s going to open up a conversation about what it is about the suburbs that everybody’s so afraid and ashamed of, guarded and protective about. I’d rather see a conceptual show fail than see a show of, like, dogs dressed in sweaters.”
Risk is the one of the main things Lundgren wants to re-inject into the Eastside mindset. He’s intimately familiar with both fame and shame. The Stranger gave him a five-thousand-dollar Genius Award and also gave him an award for Worst Play of the Year and Worst Performance of the Year. “I’m totally OK with getting the worst-of-the-year award.”
What he vows to avoid is the creativity-thwarting experience he had growing up as a Bellevue kid subservient to conventional thinking. Since an art career was unthinkable, he went into engineering, intending to be the next Howard Hughes, building a profitable empire of flying machines. “In high school engineering, I designed a human-powered helicopter, and my physics teacher said, ‘Greg, it’s physically impossible for a human to create enough lift to get a helicopter off the ground. Forget your project.’ So I dumped it and went to USC, and the following year, Cal Poly engineering students got the first human-powered helicopter off the ground. It’s like — why am I being discouraged from trying?”
Plenty of people have tried to talk him out of trying to get his art-reform dream off the ground. “Even my mom is like, ‘Greg, why don’t you just get a job at Microsoft? It’d be easier, you’re smart, you don’t have to mess around with art.’ There’s really this strong emphasis put on security. I reject that as a model for happiness.”
One thing he may do at Open Satellite is re-create the map of Bellevue Square. “In my world, Nordstrom is the Nordstrom Center of Performing Arts. Next to the Crate and Barrel Midcentury Sculpture and Orange Julius Performing Arts Center. How much more incredible of a city would it be if all this real estate was dedicated to literature, dance, film, art school, photography, exhibitions, instead of selling expensive shoes?”
Lundgren went to LA to become the next Howard Hughes, but quit to run in the fast lane with his roommate, Harry Dean Stanton’s son. In 1994 he came home. Bill Gates, Sly Stallone, Disneyland and Nicole Kidman’s Stepford Wives kitchen have used Lundgren’s designs.
In the show, he vows, “There’s going to be a lot of signs that say ‘Please do . . . ’ People in Bellevue are really good at following instructions and they’re really bad at asking questions about why they’re doing what they’re doing.”
One sign may be attached to a towboat hung fifteen feet up, with a ski rope handle dangling down. It may say, “Please Do Not Pull the Handle, You Might Embarrass Yourself or Be Injured.” If you do pull it, fifteen dollar bills may rain down on your head — or a Tupperware container full of water. “The point is, you grow up in an environment where you don’t bring attention to yourself. Don’t do things that are going to embarrass your family.”
At the entrance, there will definitely be a gate whose gimmick I’m sworn not to reveal, but which will convey this lesson: “It doesn’t matter if you have five thousand bucks in your back pocket, it doesn’t get you a better show.”
For all his brave talk, Lundgren confesses that his cheeky I Am from Bellevue show scares him. Doors have been slammed in his face. “I do freak out. I’ve had four close family friends I’ve asked to do a tour, and they’re like, ‘Greg, I think it’s fantastic, we’re real proud of you! We don’t want to be in your show.’ People I’ve known since kindergarten.” They fear he may punk them, hold them up to ridicule. “I kind of went into it very pretentious, like a missionary, saying, ‘You need art and your life is devoid, empty, ’cause you don’t have art.’
“And what I’m finding is, people say, ‘Y’know what? Sports does do it for me. Playing racquetball at the Bellevue Athletic Club does it for me. Having this sports car collection does it for me. Or Paul Allen’s 247 planes.”
"Monday should be fun day!"
But Lundgren insists that there’s still a secret demand for art, especially among those at the top of the Eastside food chain, like his client Jain. “People that spend all of their time making money, I think they have a hunger or thirst for creative spirit.”
Lundgren’s own hunger is to shake up the art world. “My primary focus has been about destroying those rules. And destroying the way people look at art, what is and is not art. To liberate art from the definition that others have given it. The art world has the capacity to be like the NBA and the NFL and Hollywood rolled into one. Our art scene is running on two cylinders, and everyone thinks it’s running on eight cylinders.”
He blames arts critics, buyers and peers for creating a hostile environment, as if creative types need a driver’s license issued by them. “Why is it we can go into a bar and sing terrible karaoke and by Monday everything’s forgotten and forgiven? You can play basketball and have a good time and if you don’t shoot like Michael Jordan or jump like Karl Malone, no one’s gonna heckle you. But if you put your paintings on the wall or your play on the stage, you will get the wrath of God if it’s not good.” He specifically blames harsh art critics. “I wanted to make a T-shirt reading, ‘Matthew Kangas Made Me Cry.’ I know eight people he’s made break down and cry.” He also deplores the Seattle Weekly critic who notoriously opined that an inadequate string player should be found dead, “with a bow through her heart.”
Lundgren’s own success proves there’s something to be said for unleashing freedom and anarchy, and maybe both Bellevue and the regional arts scene are too staid. But not all of his stunts come off, and there is more to art than the art of the party. When Lundgren wannabes stole art from a Lundgren exhibit and other galleries for a “conceptual” show at Consolidated Works in 2005, they made fools of themselves and caused harm all around. Sometimes rules make sense. And maybe there’s more at stake in the arts than at a karaoke bar or a pickup game of hoops. There is a great, menacing divide between youth culture and arts culture, but when youth culture worships alcohol, iconoclasm and art theory, it often gets stupid.
Lundgren is the first to admit that he’s a Pied Piper who sometimes doesn’t know where the heck he’s leading people. And he grants that Bellevue has a right to rev up its jet skis and ignore his subversive preaching. “I find myself looking like a LaRouche kid on a street corner saying, ‘You have to listen to me!’”
In his Open Satellite show, he wants to incite current Bellevue kids to express themselves. “I wish that kids and high school students just knew there’s different ways of living. I don’t think you create art through a lot of the structures that are set up in Bellevue. And that’s a travesty, ’cause they are rich kids and they could be artists. Look, about half the people that are famous artists living today, they’re rich kids. I think it’s very important to try things your friends aren’t doing. To just feel free and not feel the judgment.”
No matter how kind the judges are to his I Am from Bellevue show, Lundgren will be apprehensive. “It’s gonna make my mom cry, and that’s kind of a terrifying thing.” •
To learn about future Greg Lundgren shows Vital 5.
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