Monthly Archives: August 2008

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

The Denver Art Museum deflects a hot summer day

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The Daniel Libeskind-designed addition to the Denver Art Museum, which opened in 2006, doesn’t count as “new” anymore. It seems to have settled into its home near the State Capitol building, dug in, maybe, because it reminds me of an armadillo, bronze-plated and glowing in the sun. It has that peculiar snout, though, a sharp geometric foray into space and toward the original Denver Art Museum building over a busy Denver street. But otherwise it seem perfectly suited to the hot summer day in Colorado on which I visited it – its blocky facets deflecting the heat, its low aerodynamic profile slicing through the hot wind, its situation in the plaza that Libeskind created for it roomy enough to allow its heat to radiate and disperse without warming its neighbors.

So, yes, I approved of the new building from a sculptural point of view — it also reminded me (and my wife — thanks Megan!) of a Stealth bomber. And I like the metaphor: art stealthily and lethally undermining a crude, car-choked American metropolis. But I had two questions in mind for the new DAM: 1) Would the aggressive architecture detract from the art inside, impose itself too much, and 2) how would it “fit” into downtown Denver as an urban design proposition. One visit and a little Googling isn’t going to answer those, but that’s not going to stop me from taking a stab at them… oh no.
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Books, General, Language, Vernon Peterson

Jenny Diski fights sleep, wins

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“Reality cannot stand too much wakefulness.”

America could use a Jenny Diski.

Joan Didion, Annie Dillard and Janet Malcolm exercise a comparable ruthlessness, waged against received opinion on subjects of comparable range, but they are not as unrelentingly unreserved as Diski. America cannot abide too much wakefulness, which is why I resist sleep. And Diski, post-empire British to the core, is one of the things that keep me up nights.

Check her “Diary” column in the latest London Review of Books, (31 July 2008), one of the select items the Review posts online. “If you set aside the incomparable cruelty and stupidity of human beings, surely our most persistent and irrational activity is to sleep,” she begins. In the next paragraph she turns to “the second most absurd thing we do: wake up.” In the space of a page and a half she describes the several levels of wakefulness through which we descend in and out of sleep—for descend out of it we do, she convinces us, in an endless spiral, with occasional freefall.

In Diski’s hands, such a tale is magic. There’s humor: “As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep.” And she can tap the nostalgia for those “delicious,” slightly anxious moments we never outgrow: her earliest memory of “sensual pleasure,” lying in bed, “the bedtime story told, lights out (not the hall, leave the door open, no, more than that),” perfectly comfortable, “falling slowly into sleep.”

Read it, and marvel how this brief essay–a miniature novel–slips in such short space from human cruelty and stupidity to Raquel Welch saving our beleaguered world!

If you enjoy reading and re-reading this piece, click Jenny Diski’s blog for more.

Diski is a novelist, but I’ve only read her non-fiction. I’d like to report that she grasped Portland’s unique essence in her American travelogue, Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions, but, alas, her night journey from Spokane to Portland, on the Empire Builder, the train she had boarded in Chicago, is recalled only for the fact that it was a non-smoking leg, except for a brief stop in Pasco, where she stood on the platform and inhaled “the best part of two cigarettes.”

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

Monday links: a Scatter round-up

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We stopped measuring our heads in the mirror long enough to do a little online investigating. (One of our number spent the day with his head pressed against his full-length mirror attempting to disprove the contentions of Major Scientists that the image his eyes were seeing in the mirror was half the size of his real head. Scatter can be so easily amused. Unfortunately, he was trying to prove this with an Outside Observer — sorry, Lynn — when it’s the subject’s perception of himself that’s at stake.)

Here’s what we found:

Over at Power Slice, art history student Luke Fidler’s blog about “art, culture and contemporary living,” we found a keen eye and lots of excellent links. And we noted a shared interest in the painter Carl Morris. We’ll be back.

Via Power Slice, we were led to Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes on ArtsJournal, specifically his post on a Richard Diebenkorn show in the making. We agree with Mr. Green! An Ocean Park series exhbition would be wonderful. We only hope that the Portland Art Museum gets a piece of the action. Diebenkorn was born in Portland (OK, we can’t get too excited; he left when he was 2), but more importantly to us, his oscillations between abstraction and figurative art were similar to those going on among Portland artists during the Fifties and Sixties (I’m thinking of George Johanson and Carl Morris, specifically, but lots of our artists worked through an AE phase, so powerful was the movement). The interaction between San Francisco and Portland artists during that time — and I understand there was a lot — would be an excellent subject for an excellent exhibition.

We went back to Culture Shock, where we found a stirring defense of the Rights of Children to access to the arts. Art Scatter regulars will know that we couldn’t agree more. In fact, we believe that society should be organized around this right. A place that encourages its kids to create is going to be a great place to live.

Culture Shock linked us to Mead Hunter’s blog, MrMead’s Pupu Platter, which featured a post about headaches, specifically weekend migraines of the most debilitating sort. If you have a remedy, I’m sure Pupu Platter would entertain it. We also noted that MrMead was in the process of, um, redefining his blog and mentioned Art Scatter, which we found flattering, but that almost caused us to slip into an orgy of self-analysis ourselves. Or maybe that was the whole mirror thing.

The week beckons!

General

Books for those who don’t read too much into them

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The display windows of Anthropologie at 11th and Couch in the Pearl are filled with reading matter —that is, books considered as matter. Books that have been cut in half or thirds, very raggedly, with a band or crosscut saw, the pieces folded back against the spine and stapled or screwed together with bold black screws, and hung in the window displays in heavy swirling ribbons of pulp.

Fascinating.

The hangings look like the stylized curves and coils of waves and flecks of foam in Japanese prints, but I suspect they are meant to suggest the rough delicacy of lace, currently featured in a line of women’s clothing—lace that has been “coaxed into modern silhouettes.” (Check out “Enlightened Lace” under “Points of View.”)

These are old, mostly yellowed or browned paperbacks ready to be pulped in any event (one fragment is stamped “Discard from Dickey Prairie School”). I recognize a few titles: On Writing Well, Diet for a Small Planet, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, something by Peter Maas. Fragments send one spinning ironic metaphors: “Otherwise there can be big problems up high.”

Or, one can find—well, found poems:

Recipe for Black Bean Soup

Family Together
Modern Home
In waking insects
John Powell breaks his way
“These same Babysteps are what we all have to
selves to take . so many times in our quest to get”
Edit > Preferences > Default

I have no love for old books. The dust triggers my asthma. Looking through the windows at this odd display, I feel my lungs trickle and tighten. I remember the lace doilies that my grandmother laid across the arms of chairs and sofas, and that my mother hand-washed and ironed and folded and saved. And I remember, too, the blue-veined hands of the old ladies who pawed through this stuff when we sold it all at auction after my parents died.

A shudder of nausea on this smart, bright corner in the Pearl.

(Photos by Lynn Peterson.)