Monthly Archives: April 2008

Barry Johnson, General, Music, Visual Art

Joplin, Ditto, Duchamp, Machu Picchu, more!

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A few random events that caught our eye.

images-2.jpg Is writing about visual art just getting worse and worse? That’s what Eric Gibson, the Wall Street Journal’s Leisure and Arts feature editor, contends
in a column today. Look, I know what he means, and I don’t disagree with his primary charges (actually, he employs several other writers to make his case for him) — that arts writing often takes hundreds, if not thousands, of messy, imprecise words to make the very simplest points. Use fewer words and/or have better thoughts.

But I don’t buy the conclusions he draws from reading impenetrable criticism (the Whitney Biennial catalog is the case study). First, he blames the “unwitting” Marcel Duchamp for the current state of affairs. Come on, was Duchamp ever unwitting about anything? Gibson suggests that Duchamp introduced “philosophy” into “art,” and that gave critics the license to abandon good old-fashioned aesthetics for philosophical riffs. Decay then set it. Then obfuscation. We note that Gibson uses the word riff here as a pejorative, and so Art Scatter must take offense. After all, we are nothing if not a collection of riffs! We’re just trying to make the clear riffs, no matter how half-baked. And we love to read riffing in others, something maybe that applies Lacan, say, to Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Long live Slavoj Zizek!

600px-macchu_picchu_panoramic.jpg
Admittedly, since the recent discovery of very early human DNA in the Paisley Caves of south-central Oregon, which we, um, riffed on in Cave doings, Art Scatter has had artifacts on its mind. So, we were attracted to the announcement yesterday that Peruvian researchers have counted more than 40,000 objects in the collection of Machu Picchu artifacts taken by Hiram Bingham in the early 1900s (after he “re-discovered” the site) and delivered to his alma mater, Yale University. That would be about 10 times what Yale said it possessed. The university and Peru reached a complex agreement last year that involves repatriation of the objects, the construction of a museum, research rights for Yale, etc., and the first step was this cataloging. So, it’s too bad things that Peru has reason to be immediately distrustful of Yale, still, more than a century later. Just for the record: Our new arts-based foreign policy initiative would have directed the U.S. to help Peru preserve, study, display and otherwise broadcast its Incan art heritage once we learned about it, not colonize the best bits. Here’s hoping, along with Eliane Karp-Toledo (writing in the Times in February), that Yale acts responsibly from here on out.
Continue reading Joplin, Ditto, Duchamp, Machu Picchu, more! →

General

Thursday scatter thinks local

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images.jpgYesterday, Art Scatter thought about replacing whatever constitutes the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy (I know, we don’t really have one, a guiding principle, I mean) with a new one — the preservation, encouragement and support of art-making around the world. Today, we move from the global to the local and dream about what would happen if our city (in this case Portland, Oregon) did the same thing and organized itself around the same idea.

We are prompted to this by the news yesterday that the mayor had developed a budget that was shy on support for the arts, the pet project of one of his rivals on City Council (who may well succeed the mayor in the top spot). If you live in Portland and environs, you know I’m talking about Mayor Tom Potter and Sam Adams.

This is not an explicitly political site. We don’t know much about the mayor’s budget, just what we read in the paper. Now, we have no evidence that what the paper implied — that this was Potter getting back at an antagonist — is true. And we aren’t even clear about what Adams was proposing specifically. We’d probably disagree with his priorities if we did! We do know that, with former mayor Vera Katz, Adams has championed the city’s artists, designers and the creative economy in general more than any other elected official we can remember, though Portland has had its share of arts-friendly council members (cheers to Mike Lindberg!). Now, we are imagining that he has seen the wisdom of throwing all his chips into the pot on the creativity card. And we are loving the city of our dreams.

We at Art Scatter consistently underestimate the power of art, of creative thought, mainly because we frequently see it honored more by its suppression (direct or cultural) than by its application. The freedom and the tools to make — a poem, an urban plan, a building, a pop song, an art installation, a great pair of hiking boots, whatever — there’s just nothing quite like it. And a great pair of boots, it turns out, is a far greater invention than a sub-prime mortgage instrument.

So, yesterday we imagined peace in the Middle East; today, the most inventive city we can think of. We’re getting off this Utopian kick tomorrow and back into our usual modes — which involve gloom and decrepitude. Yummy!

General, Visual Art

Wednesday scatter: Viva Babylon!

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120px-babylonlion.JPGYesterday, we suggested that the obliteration of archaeological treasures in Iraq was on our mind because of a story in the Guardian about an upcoming exhibition at the British Museum. The show will document the predations on Iraq’s rich archaeological sites, primarily the ruins of Babylon, by U.S. and UK forces since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. The extent of the losses will probably never be known — how could it when you are filling sandbags from ground from the strata that holds the fragmentary artifacts at a base you’ve established right next to the site of ancient Babylon?

“It’s a tragedy of the highest cultural consequence unfolding before us and nobody is caring,” said (Dan)Cruickshank (architecture historian). “The British Museum is absolutely right to raise this issue. We need to debate what is happening to this place and the 10,000 other archaeological sites across Iraq that have not been fully documented and recorded.”

If the occupiers of Iraq were to respond to these charges, I’m sure they’d simply say that, well, they’ve done their best, and, really, aren’t bigger issues at stake? This rhetorical question inevitably trumps any list of destroyed objects, trashed sites, pulverized architecture. Aren’t there bigger issues at stake? Presumably, they mean “democracy” but perhaps we suspect “geo-political advantage in a region also rich in oil.”

But what happens if we conduct a little thought experiment: What if our foreign policy was built on the preservation and support of art-making? What sort of approaches and decisions would we have made? Would this new principle guide us more effectively than the old one(s)?
Continue reading Wednesday scatter: Viva Babylon! →

Books, General, Visual Art

Tuesday quick scatter

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unknown.jpg1. Art Scatter reader Marc Acito had a CLOSE encounter with Chelsea Clinton when she was in town to campaign for someone running for something. Too close for comfort. WAY too close and so shocking on so many levels. His blog recounts the incident in some detail.

In other late-breaking Acito news, his new book, Attack of the Theater People, hits stores soon, which is good because how else can you find out what happened to the characters from How I Paid for College? To kick things off, at least locally, you could go to the Bagdad Theater on April 29 for an official book singing, during which Mr. Acito will perform Marco! The Musical. Tickets are involved, but they’re $11.95. You won’t get a better chance to see someone who’s been this close to Chelsea all month.

2. Speaking of busy Art Scatter readers, we have scattered on news we meant to pass on about Scott Wayne Indiana, who has a show up right now at Ogle. In fact, he needs your help to help animate one of his installations — all you need to do is show up at Ogle at 1 p.m. on April 19 and stand in front of a door. It’s called “Waiting in line.” Even Art Scatter can manage that!

3. Tomorrow, we’ll move along to some items from around the globe. The main thing on our mind right now is a British Museum exhibition that documents the destruction of ancient art in Iraq by the U.S. occupation. That’s not nearly so fun as Marc Acito in full voice or the twisty concepts of Scott Wayne Indiana, but Art Scatter can NOT be diverted from its mission to spread its paranoia and its rage as widely as possible. Of course, regulars know this by now.

Books, General

TURNING 60: YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS

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“Funes remembered not only every leaf
of every tree of every patch of forest,
but every time he had perceived
or imagined that leaf. “
-Jorge Luis Borges “Funes, His Memory”

haystacks1989.jpgI turn sixty today and my memory plays tricks. At any moment I can forget a word, like “deck” or “cup” or “knife.” It’s there in my mind’s eye, a clear picture, but the word refuses to skip past the tip of my tongue to finish my thought.

I struggle with the word “sofa,” in part because growing up in my family in my corner of the Midwest it was called a “davenport.”

In frustration, I ask for a little help. “It’s that thing with numbers, on the car,” meaning license plate. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just say ‘license plate’?” responds my unsympathetic son.

But there are other memory flips that I think of as structural. I catch myself bewildered whether I’ve actually done something I meant to or merely think I have. Did I lock the door? Turn off the downstairs light? Or I turn to do one of those things and realize I did it moments before.

At the health club I hang my towel on a hook and unless I consciously make a mental note, look back and confirm its position and signature fold, I’ll emerge from the shower with no idea which towel is mine. By habit I have a primary hook and a back-up, but in these moments, who knows? At times I just grab and run. Folks can be very unforgiving if you use their towel.

And here’s another odd short-term memory thing. I read a chapter in a book. A half hour later I skim the same passage. Some details are as if new, others spring up vividly in memory, but with the same patina of recognition as memories that are ten or twenty or thirty years old.

And there’s that curious feeling of panic, forgetting the names of folks I know well when it’s time to introduce them. Or forgetting a person’s name fifteen seconds after we’re introduced. That may be as much social anxiety as faulty memory. But even in moments of quiet reflection, I’ll stammer. Who’s the female lead in my favorite movie, “Love at Large”? Elizabeth Something? Ah, yes. Perkins. Who wrote “One Hundred Brothers”? James Wilcox? No, he wrote “Modern Baptists.” The other quirky writer working in utter obscurity is Donald Antrim.

This is disconcerting because my mind for books and authors, even the most marginal ones I’ve never read or never will read, is usually of the same absorbent variety as others’ minds for baseball trivia or wines. Now that faculty skips a beat, too. So folded in my billfold, tattered and worn, I keep a short list of books, writers, movies and CDs, so I can browse in book or music stores without panic.

9780521834247.jpgFinding myself in this predicament more and more often, it’s no wonder Douwe Draaisma’s book Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past (Cambridge University Press, $18.99) caught my eye in an ad in The London Review of Books. I neglected to note it on my billfold crib sheet, though, so a day or two later in the bookstore I recalled, vaguely, “Why Memory, Something, Something…” and no more (until I looked it up again in the Review).
Continue reading TURNING 60: YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS →

Books, General, Theater

Ken Kesey: Sometimes a Great Notion Takes Root

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“Remember William Carlos Williams’ description of the pioneer
women who shot their children against the wilderness like cannonballs. Do the same with your novels.”
— Nathanael West

sometimes_notion_150.jpgDismantling Paradise is hard work. Accomplishing it by proxy, such as in writing a novel, also takes its toll. Perhaps that’s why Ken Kesey abandoned the novel form after completing Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964.

He dismantled the myth of Eden at the end of the Oregon Trail.

Americans claimed Oregon, in the words of John Quincy Adams, with the promise “to make the wilderness blossom as a rose, to establish laws, to increase, multiply and subdue the earth.” But the idea that the West is a storehouse of riches to be extracted from raw wilderness, is counterpoint to that other potent myth – that the West is a natural, unspoiled Eden. Many folk long to spend their pilgrimage here in refreshing hot springs, even as money folk see the quick buck in resources, renewable or not.

As Aaron Posner’s stage adaptation of Sometimes a Great Notion premieres at Portland Center Stage, and related lectures and discussions explore Kesey’s importance and place in Oregon culture, let’s recall how Kesey exposed that myth as baldly as a clearcut and covered a theme as old as Europe’s invention of America. The empire with no clothes. An empire as precarious as the Stamper house cabled and sandbagged on the brink, the river’s edge.

Here’s D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature:

“Always the same. The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the underconsciousness so devilish. Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! Hums the underconsciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! Cackles the underconsciousness.”

And Charles Olson in Call Me Ishmael:

“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.”

Olson is writing about Melville and Moby Dick, but he’s thinking of the continent and “the restless thing” that is the American in action, out to conquer that stretch of earth between oceans. “It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning.” Americans fancy themselves as democrats, “but their triumphs are of the machine. It is the only master of space the average person ever knows, oxwheel to piston, muscle to jet. It gives trajectory.” For Olson’s Melville “it was not the will to be free but the will to overwhelm nature that lies at the bottom of us as individuals and a people.”
Continue reading Ken Kesey: Sometimes a Great Notion Takes Root →

Barry Johnson, Books, Film, General, Music, Theater

Cave doings

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The news last week that archaeologists rooting around an Oregon cave found coprolites containing human DNA and dating back 14,000 years has shaken Art Scatter right down to the toes of its foundation myth. Art Scatter emerges from lithic scatter, the circle of rock shards and shavings that stone-age men and woman created as they bent themselves to the task of making objects.

photo25.jpgThe findings in the Paisley Caves in central Oregon on what were then the shores of once-great Summer Lake, connect us to that image — and expand it. Because along with flaked stone spear points, grinding stones and other tool-making remnants, the archaeologists based their most important claims on the coprolites, a word we use to avoid the less elegant “dried dung” or worse. Art Scatter’s concept of itself, it turns out, was a sanitized idea, and the shudder generated by the new evidence involves the implications of this addition to our “image.”
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General

Save our dance critics

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Art Scatter is NOT a lamentation site dedicated to cataloging the disappearance of critics from newspapers. It just seems that way sometimes. And this is one of those times. Though we won’t wallow as we lament.

The specific occasion of this post is an LA Observed post on the resignation of dance critic Laura Bleiberg from the Orange County Register, which leaves the Los Angeles mega-plex with exactly zero professional dance critics. The story says she left the paper to work in the development office of a prominent theater company, South Coast Rep. It does NOT say she was forced out, and it’s possible that the Register will hire someone to replace her. But given Lewis Segal’s buyout from the LA Times and Deborah Jowitt’s departure from the Village Voice (see our post on Jowitt below), I guess that’s hard to imagine.

So what’s missing exactly when the critic at a regional newspaper leaves her post? I did a quick scan of Bleiberg’s recent stories for the Register. She struck me as knowledgeable about her subject, a clear writer, a solid reporter. Is she on Jowitt or Segal’s level? She certainly doesn’t have their advantage of location — they get to see and comment on a far greater array of dance companies, and that’s difficult to compensate for. BUT… two stories stood out among those I read, a preview and a review of an Orange County-based dance company, Backhausdance.

Here is the lead of Bleiberg’s review:

The final ovation showered on the two men and six women of Backhausdance Friday night had a poignant, underlying significance that transcended the normal curtain-call applause.

To this viewer, it heralded a symbolic victory – for both this promising contemporary troupe of homegrown dancers, and for Orange County.

I googled in vain for more reviews of Backhausdance’s concert. Bleiberg’s was the only one. She had followed the company for the five years of its existence; she knew its founder and choreographer Jenny Backhaus and what her aims as a choreographer are; she understood where the company fit into the ecology of dance in Orange County; she was confident enough to make a strong assertion about the company’s importance. For Jenny Backhaus and the potential audience for her work, Bleiberg is FAR more important than Jowitt or Segal, and it’s a blessing to Backhaus and her audience that she’s as good and sympathetic as she is.
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