Monthly Archives: October 2008

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Craft commits suicide; art envy arrested on suspicion

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The victim pulled the trigger on itself, detective Garth Clark says, but it was under the influence of Art.

That’s Art, no last name, sometimes known as Fine Art. And though the corpse keeps getting tricked out for public events like the stiff in the movie comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, the actual time of death was, oh, somewhere around 1995.

That, more or less, is the argument Clark gave to a packed and sometimes steaming house last night in the Pacific Northwest College of Art‘s Swigert Commons. Clark, a longtime gallery owner, curator and prolific writer on craft (the guy knows his porcelains), was lecturing on “How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement: An Autopsy in Two Parts,” and he meant every word of it.

As he delivered his wry and scholarly Molotov cocktail, Clark reminded me a bit of John Houseman in The Paper Chase, measured and severe but with a, well, crafty twist of humor to his delivery. He knew he was going to be tromping on some toes, and while he delighted in the process, he did so en pointe so as not to cause too many hurt feelings. “Hi, my name is Garth Clark,” he greeted the crowd. “I’m a recovering art dealer.”

What is this art envy? Good question.

Surely it has something to do with money. Clark quoted one excellent potter of his acquaintance who says he and his friends have a word for potters who make a living entirely from their craft. It’s unicorns, “because we’ve never seen one.”

And surely it has something to do with reputation, with being taken seriously. Artists are simply thought of more highly, as more creative beings, more intellectual, and therefore more important (and, let’s underscore, more worthy of high prices in exchange for their work).

Perhaps it has something to do with escaping an eternal past. “Craft has been overdosing on nostalgia,” Clark averred. “This is craft’s Achilles heel.” That’s not surprising, he added, since the modern movement (which he stretches back 150 years, a very long time for a movement of any sort) was born as a revival, and thus looking backwards from its beginning.

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Barry Johnson, Dance, General

Art Scatter goes to dance appreciation class

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Oh man, we left you hanging there for a couple of days with Thomas Hobbes! Art Scatter can be SO cruel. What can I say? We watched some debate. We watched some Project Runway (Leanne won!). We prepared to meet a roomful of students in Linda K. Johnson’s dance appreciation class at Portland State University. We didn’t blog.

Maybe I should say a few words about that dance appreciation class. First of all, it sounds like a great class. Linda, who has been involved in some of the very most interesting projects around the city in the past decade (and more!), including the Halprin fountain City Dance event and overseeing a year of artist-in-residencies in the South Waterfront district, has set up a pretty rigorous course of study. For example, the class sat in on a rehearsal of Swan Lake, which became a sort of lecture-demonstration because artistic director/choreographer Christopher Stowell was so open to explaining what he was trying to do. Their writing assignments sound quite interesting, too, which maybe was where I came in — to talk about writing about dance.

This is something I love to talk about, even though I’ve actually done it far less than I would have liked. Time machine time: In 1978 I wrote about a visit to Seattle by Twyla Tharp’s modern dance company. That was the first time I committed an act of criticism with intent. To publish, I mean. And it caused me a great deal of grief and excitement and a couple of all-nighters spent writing and re-writing and throwing my hands up in despair. How could I possibly bottle in words what I’d seen onstage (not to mention the interviews I’d conducted with the dancers; Twyla wasn’t along on the tour), for consumption in a newspaper (the Seattle Sun, RIP)? Well, I had an excellent guide, who was in the process of developing a deep understanding of newspapers, though he knew even less about dance than I did, and we muddled through.
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Barry Johnson, Books, General

Would Hobbes approve of the Dow Jones bounce?

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As Art Scatter stoops to post, it’s a Monday night and all the major markets were up substantially, around 10 percent during the day, making up a big chunk of the beating they took last week. Actually, I hate to anthropomorphize the “markets” like that. Took a beating? I don’t think so. They are just numbers. We know how illusory they can be, right? Real and illusory at the same time. Neat trick. Do we think that the “fundamentals” have been fixed so everything is all right now? Pour a few hundred million into some banks, take an equity stake in them, and it’s all good? Art Scatter doesn’t know its economics but … all we can do is shrug.

So, last night we were seeking solace in philosophy, the refuge of scoundrels. Often we turn to Rousseau — we don’t even really count him as a philosopher. “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains!” But we were in a darker mood. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” was more like it. That’s Tennyson, but he pointed the way to the philosopher we wanted. Thomas Hobbes: “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Pretty close to “red in tooth” if you ask me.
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Bob Hicks, Environment, Food, General

Farewell to Papa Pinot: An Oregon legend dies

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I remember David Lett a lot of ways, and not nearly as many as I wish I did: Here was a man, I always felt, I’d really like to know well. I didn’t. Although I’ve drunk a fair amount of his wine (again, not nearly as much as I’d like to have) we didn’t move in the same circles. Our paths crossed infrequently, and mostly anonymously — that is, I knew who he was, but he didn’t know who I was.

This morning’s Oregonian arrives with the news that Lett, founder of the pioneering Eyrie Vineyards, died late Thursday at his Dundee home. He was 69. The Associated Press filed this report, and gave the cause of death as heart failure.

Lett had passed the winemaking duties at Eyrie Vineyards to his son Jason three years ago, but it’s always been David’s spirit that’s defined the place. And what a place: a true slice of Oregon grit, a pioneering venture with a global impact, a place that knew what it wanted to do and stuck to its guns. Lett and Eyrie produced Oregon’s first commercial pinot noir in 1970, and to this day, despite the winery’s international acclaim, it’s still a little, musky-smelling, no-nonsense small-manufacturing joint in an old turkey-slaughtering plant across the railroad tracks in the McMinnville flats — in short, a glorious place to visit. No shimmering hillside chateau for David Lett: For him, it was all about the wine.

Lett had at least a couple of public images, and I suspect both had their measure of the truth. One was Papa Pinot, the genial elder statesman of the Oregon wine industry, a twinkling, silver-streaked Santa Claus of a man. The other was David Lett the irascible iconoclast, the fierce defender of making wines his way, which was, he believed, in the true traditional French manner. This David Lett believed in subtle, elegant, understated, long-lived wines that revealed their secrets in a whisper and were meant to blossom in companionship with food, not to stand out in a long line of gut-busters in a marathon tasting. He had little patience for younger winemakers who built high-alcohol fruit bombs and priced them through the roof, and he was outspoken about it, which didn’t endear him in some circles. I suspect he was proud of that. At heart he was a farmer and a chemist and a small manufacturer and an artist, and although he could be smooth, these are also identities that encourage a certain bluntness.

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General

Art Scatter considers worst-case scenarios

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Look, Art Scatter is not an economics advice site. We only know what we read, and frankly, that’s pretty dismal these days. Where should you put your money? What money!?!?!?! We do think that there’s a moral dimension to all of this, though, beyond the obvious, and maybe a suggestion that the way we at Art Scatter have thought about the world, even the way we have conducted ourselves, hasn’t been quite “right”, hasn’t acknowledged certain “realities” that may turn out to be the realities we should have been paying attention to. We are so easily distracted in the monkey tree.

Worst-case scenarios. How bad are your worst-case scenarios? This isn’t a competition. You don’t get extra points for having a bleaker worst-case scenario in your mind than your neighbor does in hers. Your worst-case scenario is a fantasy, after all. Or maybe a nightmare. It’s hard to manage a worst-case scenario once it’s planted in your head. Maybe you should just play with it — stretch it, take it in some strange directions, try to get to know it a little better so you can test it with what you can actually see and touch and taste. Right now, I’m picturing myself in a long line of refugees walking eastward on the other side of the Cascades. (I’m wishing right now that I had a better backpack.) Where are we walking? I have no idea. I have this image in my head from various newsreels/documentaries/movies I’ve seen over the years. I’ve never really imagined myself IN the line before.

I don’t think I can prepare for my worst-case scenario. Maybe no one does, if only because we aren’t actually living it. Maybe we just keep pushing our worst case back as actual conditions worsen and we realize there’s room for yet more deterioration. But that doesn’t mean I can’t act at all. And figuring out what to do, maybe that’s the ultimate reductive act: So very little really matters. And yet I do so very little of it.

Art. Art points us to places we can’t talk about, where the idea of “this matters” is somehow forged and spit out into the universe. Among other things. I like to think of art as a description of things as they are, even interior things, a description that is more or less useful to me. I imagine a photograph of an expensive condo tower, maybe like one in the paper today. Today, it’s ironic. A suggestion of “things I don’t need”. Two year ago, it might have described something else: the dense, successful city of the future. Although that description might have been intended ironically, too. Things we don’t need: “Cities of the future.” (Maybe we need a city that works today and works better tomorrow. And maybe it includes condo towers; in fact I rather suspect it does.)

Art won’t tell you what to do with your assets, the shreds of your remaining assets, or the big fat zero that describes your “net worth”. It might make you reconsider what net worth means, though. So does a financial crisis, apparently. How is art like a financial crisis? They both give you an appreciation for what’s real.

This is Friday. Art Scatter has no idea what Monday will bring. (You knew that, of course.) Art Scatter can only promise that it will try to have a little more insight into what its business really is.

Environment, General, Visual Art

Turning up the “Volume” on planning in Portland

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Art Scatter regular Tim DuRoche, a man of wide-ranging interests, has allowed us to post this account of Portland’s “Summer of Planning”, which is rapidly becoming a “Fall of Planning”. We’re especially happy to have his report of Portland planning chief Arun Jain’s talk on the last day of the “Volume” art exhibition, organized by Portlandart proprietor Jeff Jahn, in some ways the clearest expression of the uneasy relationship between art and urban planning. Tim writes about planning, urban design topics for Portland Spaces’ Burnside Blog.

By Tim DuRoche

With all the hubbub about cities and planning in arts circles—Sojourn Theatre’s Built, the Lawrence Halprin Fountain-centric City Dance, visual arts group shows Volume and the Thomas Sieverts-inspired Suddenly for starters, you kind of have to wonder—is urban planning the new black?

Or in the context of the lo-fi, local artscape, is an embrace of placemaking and the language of planning yet another double-coded, wink-wink social-practice gambit from the legions of folks making art that’s rife with sewing circle/swap meet simplicity?

The marquee-prominence of planning in cocktail-conversation Portland thrives because of civic engagement, while on the viz art end, Portland’s social-practice artists bank on a street-level participation that’s one part community charrette, part tea party, part cracker-barrel confession, and many parts Tom Sawyer whitewashing.

So what happens when an architect-planner meets a young-and-restless art posse head on?
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Bob Hicks, General, Journalism, Language

Newspapers: Leaner, meaner, livelier or else

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I have been devoted to newspapers since — oh, since I was 6 or 7 and getting caught up in the ongoing adventures of Gasoline Alley and Our Boarding House and Little Orphan Annie and other daily heirs to The Yellow Kid.

My print addiction built with my childhood passion for baseball and the after-game quotations of heroes such as Ted Williams, whose fondest phrase, as passed along by sportswriters and dutifully cleaned up by copy editors, was “blankety-blank” — as in, “That blankety-blank umpire couldn’t call a blankety-blank pitch in a blankety-blank grade school game!”

Those were the days.

And these are these days, when the daily newspaper is teetering on the brink of (choose one or more):

— Irrelevance.

— Extinction.

— Rebirth.

Not a lot of people are betting on that third option. By the time I bailed out of the full-time journalism racket almost a year ago, after nearly 40 years of writing and editing for other people’s publications, we in the working press had pretty much taken to referring to ourselves (or at least, our institutions) as the Titanic, muttering with grim humor about rearranging the deck chairs.

And we did so in pretty much a vast silence, as onetime readers and never-bothereds ignored our flailings in droves — at the same time our advertisers were scuttling toward the greener pastures of Craigslist and television and direct mail and, if we were lucky, those preprinted inserts that arrive on your sidewalk with the morning news but don’t pay the newspaper what an old-fashioned ad on the page pays.

Long before Wall Street’s spectacular tumble, newspapers started taking it on the chin. Massive layoffs and buyouts, from the Washington Post to the New York Times (100 lopped from the newsroom) to the Los Angeles Times to The Oregonian, where I was one of nearly 30 members — all with decades of experience — of the Buyout Class of 2007. Now The Oregonian is in the process of another huge voluntary buyout, cutting 50 people from the newsroom and lots more in other departments. In Portland and across the country, it’s a journalistic brain drain of astonishing proportions.

What brought a great American institution to such a pass? Over at Culture Shock, the sharply inquisitive blogger Mighty Toy Cannon has begun a fascinating conversation on newspapers and readership and the link between a critical press and a city’s cultural life. It’s a great discussion, right up Art Scatter’s alley, and I encourage you to join the fray. But the existence of broad and lively cultural coverage in the local press also depends on the health and stability of the press in general, and that’s a deeper discussion. So here goes. You’re going to read a lot of generalizations here, and a lot of tentative ideas. But it’s a start. Feel free to pitch in.

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Books, General, Vernon Peterson

Crimes of art

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Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks while we’re tryin’ to be so quiet?/We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it.
Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna

After what’s happened the last couple weeks, I wonder if we don’t need to take a deep breath, or hold our breath and count to 700 billion, for a start. No colorful displays of Wall Street or Main Street pyrotechnics. No illustrations. Black and white. Or black. Simply dark night and our eyes closed.

The argument whether 2000 or 2001 launched the new century ended on 9/11. That is the defining moment, we are told, in speech after speech, book after book, dividing our lives into “before” and “after.” Why this desire for a life-altering shift? The Wall Street bailout is characterized as a 9/11 rerun, the mortgage crisis as involving instruments of mass destruction. Too bad the president didn’t launch the bailout bid this last 9/11. It would have added a touch of, I don’t know, fearful symmetry to the last seven years.

Art is not immune from this crisis and re-boot mentality. Even literary criticism is burdened with its share of this cataclysmic dread and re-tread. An extreme example is the 2003 book, Crimes of Art + Terror, by Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe, professors at Duke University. I read it when it was published and thought at the time it was something worth a later revisit, a reality check, after hysteria became cliché. Now we need the hysteria before the morning cup of coffee.
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General

Scatter gives its dear readers a break

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Art Scatter could generate yet another lengthy post on the nature of an American city that looks a lot like Portland, with special attention paid to its remotest precincts. But the reptilian side of Art Scatter’s hard drive is twitching at the very thought of it. Art Scatter’s tongue just darted out to gather in more protein on the wing — thwiiiip! (Yuck, a moth…)

OK, so instead, we’ll search the horizon for tasty links:

Director Julie Taymor’s Broadway version of “Spider-Man” may cost something on the order of $40 million to produce, according to the New York Post. Scatter hopes that local designer and Taymor regular Michael Curry is getting his fair share. Aw, c’mon. We KNOW he is!

And speaking of Money and the Theatre, much of the rest of Broadway and the not-for-profit theater world of Manhattan is cowering in the corner because of the Wall St. meltdown down the block, at least per the New York Times. The Conventional Wisdom that in bad times people flock to the theater to forget their troubles is going to be tested.

Louise Bourgeois is not a brand, she’s a creator of some of the most provocative art work in the past century, almost all of which she’s lived through (she’s 98). How potent is she? Just read the very personal account of Guardian critic Will Gompertz on how the Bourgeois show at the Tate Modern gave him a good wrenching. That’s her spider above. Julie Taymor, take note!

Barry Johnson, Environment

More thoughts on the edge (with a little gloom attached)

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The comment thread on the On the edge (of cities) post right below shows there is a lot of passionate interest in the topic — Thomas Sieverts’ idea that architects need to lift their eyes from the city core and regard the outer limits of the city with the same intensity and, well, we’ll say it, love that they have for the traditional European city center. Whether that interest is also broad we’ll test with another post on the matter, this one arising from two Monday night events: Metro president David Bragdon speaking with Portland Spaces editor Randy Gragg at Jimmy Mak’s; and a big-name concluding panel at PNCA that featured Sieverts, architect Brad Cloepfil, Reed Kroloff (who runs Cranbrook Academy, supervised our tram design competition and who was dean of architecture at Tulane when Katrina hit), and Matthew Stadler as moderator.

The topic of both the panel and the Bragdon-Gragg exchange went something like this: What can governments do to encourage good design? And it frequently kept to the question, though this “healthy” topic also generated a number of tasty digressions and frankly was never as dry as the question seemed to promise. And thanks to Stadler, the Sieverts analysis/prescription was always lurking in the background.

I know from the clock on the wall that I won’t be able to give a full account of what happened in this post (I know what you’re thinking: O sweet mother of the Titans, don’t tell me there’s a third post brewing; what is this, the Halprin fountains?), but I will get a few thoughts out there, and perhaps the Scatter regulars at the event can fill in some details.

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