Monthly Archives: November 2008

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Remembrance of things past: Art that pays its respects

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One of my most vivid memories from a visit to St. Petersburg, Russia, almost a decade ago is of walking into a ramshackle room in a tumbling old palace and seeing, as if they were ghosts, long-smocked artisans painstakingly copying old masterworks: eerily antique-looking men and women making giant decorative objects based on the art of the past.

St. Petersburg is and always has been something of a museum city, hermetically sealed in its own royalist aesthetic. Even in the late 1990s, as the new thuggery of the ascendant Russian opportunist class was evident everywhere, the urge to re-create the glories of the past was also busily hammering away around every corner. By rebuilding with obsessive accuracy so much that the Germans had destroyed in the Siege of Leningrad, Petersburgers weren’t just taking their central city back to the glories of the days before World War II. They were replicating the age of the czars.

Is this art, or mummification? My guess is, yes and yes. It is what it is, for better and for worse, and in St. Petersburg, which like few other big European cities has resisted the hard edge of modernism (although it does have its share of Soviet Brutalist architecture) there was an abundance of each.

The urge to retreat into the verities of the past is strong, especially when you’re not sure about the present or the future. The past in one sense is a popular commodity, with eager buyers looking for a patina of instant heritage and sellers willing to feed their nostalgic fantasies. So the art world has a furtive underground market in fakes (read Robertson Davies‘ sly and very good novel What’s Bred in the Bone for some sharp insights into the mind of a brilliant forger), and the American and English antique-furniture markets are in an uproar right now over purportedly fraudulent high-end pieces cobbled together (with exceptional skill, it must be admitted) from old pieces of semi-junk.

An obsession with the past can also rise from uncertainty over our ability to make contemporary decisions. In its early years the only art in the collection of the Portland Art Museum was cast reproductions of ancient Greek and Roman statuary: Citizens of the pioneer city were invited into a sacred space to see knockoff versions of the foundations of Western art and accomplishment, as if the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, for instance, let alone the crude vigor of the American frontier, had simply never existed.

Yet it’s equally true that to ignore the past is to fundamentally misunderstand the present. What we are is built on everything that’s come before, and one of the objects of art is to explore that past in light of the present. That’s the great gift of a good museum. And it’s what makes Homage: Re-enactments, Copies and Tributes, which continues through Dec. 7 in The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, such an intriguing experience.

Curator Terri Hopkins built Homage around Sherrie Wolf‘s giant re-creation of Gustave Courbet‘s 1855 painting The Painter’s Studio: Allegory of Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life. It’s crucial that Courbet’s painting isn’t just any old Courbet. It’s a painting about painting, a lively and affecting treatise in oil on the nature and context of making art. And Hopkins has done with it the sort of thing good curators do: She’s surrounded it with other pieces that approach the same general question from different angles. To Wolf’s audacious act of reinvention she added a liberal smattering of photographer Christopher Rauschenberg‘s passionate pursuit of Eugene Atget‘s Paris, plus a pair of largely academic projects that, while they don’t add much to the visual pleasures of the exhibition, nimbly frame it and give it context.

Continue reading Remembrance of things past: Art that pays its respects →

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Environment, General, Theater

A.E. Doyle and tearing down Portland’s past

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Over at the valuable Portland Architecture blog, which helps keep the city’s designers and planners on their toes, Brian Libby has started a fascinating conversation that’s well worth checking out. It’s about the flap in little upscale Dunthorpe over its school board’s desire to tear down the 1920 Riverdale Grade School and replace it with something fresh and contemporary. Libby and a long string of commenters have created a stimulating conversation on just what historic preservation means — on why it’s important, how old buildings can be transformed for new purposes, when it might be OK to replace a good old building, what a historical presence in architecture means to a community. So far, the consensus seems to be: Keep the building, remodel it for modern needs, make it green, add on if necessary. Well, that’s the consensus on the Portland Architecture blog. It still doesn’t seem to be the consensus on the school board.

Beyond the general interest that Art Scatter has in architecture and planning, I find this conversation interesting because the school was designed by A.E. Doyle, Portland’s most significant architect of the early 20th century, and the subject of a good new historical biography by Philip Niles, Beauty of the City, which I happen to have reviewed for The Oregonian: You can read the review, due for print publication this Sunday, here, on Oregon Live. Central Library, the Benson Hotel (and the Benson Bubblers), the Meier & Frank department store (now Macy’s), the Reed College campus, Multnomah Falls Lodge — Doyle’s stamp is all around the city and its environs, and Niles’ book helps explain both how that came to be and why it’s a good thing.

So, save the Riverdale School? My gut says yes, even though I’ve never been inside it, and, frankly, I don’t know in what ways the school board thinks it inadequate. Maybe its members know something none of the rest of us do. But from its pictures it looks like a classic old building, with great light and a simple layout that would seem easy to reconfigure — and even add on to, if necessary. Yes, it might need seismic upgrading, but hundreds of buildings have gone through that: Drive through the little Oregon wine country town of Dundee, on the way to McMinnville, and you’ll see a school that’s been successfully and sensitively earthquake-proofed in the recent past.

I’m aware that a community is a dynamic thing and that preservation, wrongly applied, can be romantic mummification. I can understand the frustration that Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe must have felt over the weight of history pressing down on design in Europe, shackling it to the past. But that’s hardly the case in the United States, and especially not in a region as young and still raw-boned as the Pacific Northwest. We’re building all sorts of new stuff (far too much of it, unfortunately, in the sprawling subdivision cookie-cutter style of the rest of the nation) and we don’t have a lot of history to give away.

So weigh in on this thing. Check out Libby’s link at Portland Architecture: It’s a lively example of what can happen at the intersection of design, politics, money and community involvement. And give Niles’ book about Doyle a spin. For anyone interested in how cities grow (and this city in particular), it’s a good read.

Barry Johnson, Visual Art

Art Scatter gets meta in McMinnville

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A couple of weekends ago, we drove down to Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore., from Portland to see a little show curated by TJ Norris, ‘.meta’, at the college art gallery, which is one medium-sized room. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. When I got back to Portland, I didn’t talk to anyone about the show because I didn’t know how to talk about it. Which means I didn’t post about it because I definitely had no idea how to write about it.

It’s very possible that I still don’t or that I’m dead wrong, and yet I’ve been worrying the exhibition off and on since then, a little like a stubborn granule of food caught between my molars. Well, maybe not so irritating as that.

The food metaphor isn’t entirely out of place, though. Norris’s notes for the exhibition start this way: “Over the past three years I’ve developed exhibitions from digested bits and pieces of found ideas.” [emphasis added] Digested. Bits and pieces. Digested by whom? By Norris, which is important to remember, I think, because ‘.meta’ asks us to do a little digesting of our own. I return to the notes:

“As a group exhibition of work, diverse artists were sought, who each confront the stoicism of incomplete thoughts or the sly double entendre of the head on. Here exists this sense of longing, of awkward limbo, like a deer caught in headlights. In ‘.meta’ you will find work that is wry, socially political and even somewhat ambiguous at first. Perhaps an offering of clues musing about why we exist in the universe at all, complete with our mortal faults.”

This is where I headed down the “wrong” path, I think. I started trying to read the eleven artworks in the show as specific examples of artmaking that thinks about the origins of things, including itself, which is the implication of “meta”. This isn’t new. A lot of the most significant art made in the 20th century commented on itself, its origins, the meaning of art, and maybe the meaning of Everything. (By “most significant” I simply mean: central to the ideas of people who make, think and write about art. Art analysts.)
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General

Scatter sez: Have yourself a Happy Thanksgiving!

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Well, of course, dear Art Scatter readers! What? You thought we were too cynical to observe Thanksgiving? Oh, sure, subjecting an entire continent to a near-death experience might be an odd thing to celebrate, but that’s where our optimism comes in. Spoil a continent and then you really have something important to do. Unspoil it. Which isn’t the same as restore it, because that would be impossible. The encounter between the industrializing West and the flora and fauna and native peoples of America was just too filthy and lethal. Combine that with a little thing called slavery and, frankly, we’ll never pay off the karmic debt — we’ll come back as cockroaches forever… unless.

I’ve always loved “unless”. What follows “unless” is always very interesting, even though frequently it’s a letdown. Either it’s obvious to the point of banality (this is the sort Art Scatter generally favors) or it’s impossibly huge and/or vague (“unless we get it together”). The implication is that the utterer of the sentence possesses a profound understanding of the equations that govern the universe. Oddly, sometimes we do. Scratch that: Miraculously, sometimes we do. Unless.

Thanksgiving. I always pictured uncomfortable early 17th century people, wearing strange hats and numbed by five hours or so of sermonizing, sitting down to a really smoky meal. Maybe the Native Peoples were there, too. Maybe they even ate corn and turkeys together. I hope so. They expressed their gratitude to God as they understood the concept. So did Lincoln when he re-started the Thanksgiving tradition in 1863 during the Civil War — but after Gettysburg, when it was becoming apparent that the armies of the Union would eventually prevail.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

Consistent with the Divine purposes. A tautology lurks in there somewhere. What are the divine purposes? Wait and see.

Divine purposes operate on a different ground than “unless”, which is an expression of cause and effect. Lincoln believed in cause and effect, and he understood his limitations sufficiently to doubt his ability to understand them. And when we doubt sufficiently our ability to get a good cause and effect chain going, then we hope for the best, we pray to the heavens (I like Lincoln’s use of the plural), we take a leap. But first we prepare ourselves. How do we prepare? First, by establishing our humility (for those perversenesses and disobediences) and thus our worthiness for a good outcome, perhaps. Then? Maybe a nice lunch. Unless. Unless we observe the rituals, the forms, the virtues of the Good, we will never get what we want. We may not even get it then.

Unless. Unless I get started on these turkeys, they’re never going to get done in time for dinner. On the other hand, without a bit of heavenly intercession, the breast meat is going to be too dry or the thigh meat is going to be not quite cooked. And if the gods are particularly prankish, both! As long as my mother doesn’t burn the pie, though, it’s all good.

And you, dear reader? No unlesses. Have a great day, however you choose to deal with it. We’ll worry about the unspoiling tomorrow.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Theater

Clive Barnes: It won’t be the same without you

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Too late we get around to noting the passing of Clive Barnes, the urbane, entertaining and zestful dance and theater critic who died Nov. 19, at age 81, from liver cancer.

Barnes, who arrived from England to become dance critic at the New York Times in 1965 (he added theater to his duties two years later) was truly a working critic: He was still filing reviews to the New York Post two weeks before he died.

A friend in New York who knows I rarely see the Post passes along this warm and truly lovely tribute from his friend and Post colleague Michael Riedel; may we all deserve such a sendoff when our own time comes. Deborah Jowitt’s memory of Barnes in the Village Voice is worth reading, too.

Riedel says Barnes was deeply influenced in his early days by the mercurial and brilliant British critic Kenneth Tynan, and that explains a lot: the passion, the omnivorian taste, the wordplay, the ability to follow his own opinions wherever they might lead him, the sense of fun. It was Barnes who, in a review for the Times of a production of “As You Like It” whose cast included Meat Loaf, famously referred to the rock star on second reference as “Mr. Loaf.”

For nine years, as lead critic in both dance and theater for the Times, Barnes held the country’s most powerful critic’s chair in two disciplines. In 1977, when the Times ordered him to choose one or the other, he instead bolted from the Pillar to the Post, accepting the tabloid’s offer to let him keep writing about both. And there he stayed, no longer in the Times spotlight but free to do what he wanted.

I met Barnes only once, and so briefly that it hardly counts. It was a dance concert in New York, on a night when the New York critics were out in force, a coalescence that can have deadly effect. At intermission the mass of critics rushed to the lobby and began lobbying one another, feeling each other out for their opinions, trying out lines on each other for possible use in their reviews later that night. Barnes stood, not aloof, but apart from the crowd, infinitely genial, greeting when greeted, but not taking part in the tribal ritual. He was, as Riedel notes, “ever a gentleman”: pleased, briefly and apparently genuinely, to meet a writer from the hinterlands. Professionally, the show was inside his mind. You got the feeling that he simply didn’t care what anyone else thought. He would end up writing what he thought (as it turned out he liked the program, while recognizing it was no barn-burner) and that was that.

And isn’t that the way it ought to be?

Television

Whitney Otto on what happened to “Entourage”

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Art Scatter friend Whitney Otto has been following Entourage on HBO, part of her ongoing submersion in the television soup for strictly professional reasons. OK, maybe not “strictly” and maybe not “professional” and were not sure that “reason” has anything to do with it, either. Nonetheless, before the final episode this year, she sent us her take on the season — which was a difficult one for Vincent and the boys. Then, she sent us an addendum after Sunday’s finale, which we appended (something about appending an addendum just makes us a little giddy). Mostly, though, we couldn’t be more excited about having her join us!


By Whitney Otto

Oh, Entourage! What happened to the golden days of moving from mansion to mansion, Malibu to Cannes; teeing off from your multimillion dollar roof, playing video games, and watching porn but only until the weed and willing party mates arrive? Where are the luxury cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? The endless freebies? The cavorting on movie sets, and the high altitude cavorting on private jets?

In short, when did this show cease to be a guilty pleasure that even a viewer far outside the show’s demographic could love, and turn into something less fanciful, a harsh lesson in what happens when art and commerce collide?

The season began with Vincent Chase living for the last six months on a Mexican beach with one-third of his entourage, Turtle, and an ever revolving cast of temporary “girlfriends.” He had taken refuge from the very public debacle of Medellin, a movie fiasco into which he poured every million he ever made, along with his heart. That movie came on the heels of his greatest triumph starring in the most successful superhero movie of all time, Aquaman.

He’s persuaded to end his sabbatical with the promise of a role her would love to play — the only hitch is that it was never a genuine offer. It was a ploy on the part of the producers to secure the actor they really wanted for the movie. Though Vince handles the humiliation with aplomb, he comes to understand that this little scenario is an indication of where his career is at the moment — that is to say, nowhere.
Continue reading Whitney Otto on what happened to “Entourage” →

Bob Hicks, Food, General

Late Monday Scatter: Sex and the single turkey

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So here it is, Thanksgiving week, and here this corner of Art Scatter sits, tied to the care of two adolescent and near-adolescent boys who’ve been ruthlessly cast out by the public education system on the flimsy excuse that teachers are entitled to a holiday. Ha.

Still, that hasn’t stopped us from reading. And curiously, what we’ve been reading about — in family newspapers, no less — is S-E-X. Or, as some quarters would have it, something to be thankful about.

First, to the Willamette Valley town of Silverton, a pretty little village that’s the gateway to the fantastic glories of Silver Falls State Park and also happens to have a mayor who’s a very public cross-dresser. Silverton seems to be just OK with that, and more power to the town. Personally we never get farther than the L.L. Bean catalog when it comes to dressing up, but we always appreciate a little black dress and some scarlet high heels on someone else. Even if it’s the mayor, and his name is Stu.

The Oregonian’s Kimberly A.C. Wilson reports on Oregon Live about what happened when a group of ultra-conservative church folk from Topeka showed up in town to denounce the mayor’s evil-doings. Silvertonians pretty much told them to shut up and go home. Seems they weren’t in Kansas any more — at least not the truculent and loony Kansas of the Westboro Baptist Church, which makes a habit of sending moral storm troopers out into the Gomorrah that is the rest of America. As for the rest of us, we’ve come a long way, baby. And that includes Silverton.

Meanwhile, down in Grapevine, Texas, the Rev. Ed Young of the evangelical Fellowship Church is preaching the gospel of love. And by love, we mean love — the scattering, as it were, of the good seed.

Rev. Young and his congregation of 20,000 (and growing bigger every day) have embarked on a quest he calls Seven Days of Sex: All the church’s husbands and wives are challenged to have sex every day (with each other, of course) in order to strengthen their marriages and ward off the temptation of extramarital affairs. Word is, according to Gretel C. Kovach in the New York Times, things have been going swimmingly, or maybe glowingly. It’s a great way to build up your congregation, and actually, Rev. Young makes a terrific theological case for his position on the subject. In Portland he’d be called a Young Creative. Which is our excuse for mentioning him on our esteemed cultural blog.

Moving on from sex to death and Thanksgiving dinner, the Web’s atwitter with the “news” of Gov. Sarah Palin’s “pardoning” of a turkey slated for slaughter (a pretty darned common seasonal photo op for politicians across the land) and subsequent three-minute on-camera chat while other turkeys were methodically meeting their maker in the background. The Huffington Post huffed. Wizbang responded with the neocon view. The nonsacrificial turkey didn’t have a clue its life had just been spared. And here in the Art Scatter kitchen, we’re looking forward to that savory vegetarian mushroom bread pudding we’re going to whip together in a couple of days.

As they say in spin-land, happy holidays. And keep America weird.

Barry Johnson, Books, Dance, Film, General

The weekend: “We scattered til our head hurt”

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Mercy, mercy, did we scatter this weekend! We scattered til our head hurt, we scattered til Michael Chabon uttered the last sentences of his lecture Sunday night, we scattered back in time as we watched Mary Oslund’s Bete Perdue, we even scattered at the now-only-newish Bond flick Quantum of Solace. The latter was hard. How many words were actually in that script, anyway? 500 or so? If that? Dear reader, we scattered anyway. We were scattering fools.

The return of Bete Perdue: I went to opening night of the re-dance of Mary Oslund’s spring show. I’m in favor of re-dances, by the way. For those who haven’t seen the choreography, which let’s face it, is 99.999 percent of the metro area, it’s a chance to come in from the cold. Those of us who have seen it get another look — and memory being what it is (a miracle, sure, but so totally unreliable), we need it.

I posted on Bete Perdue before, so I’ll just add a few thoughts: 1) I thought Oslund had changed it some, eliminating some longer solos, replacing them with more group dancing. The eagle-eyed Martha Ullman West said it was longer by 10 minutes, but I didn’t clock it. 2) Friday night it might have been danced more crisply. My operant theory: Go to the last night of a local dance performance, and you will miss opening night jitters/mishaps and second night emotional troughs. 3) I noticed the Obo Addy-Katie Griesar music more than I had before, and I mean that in a good way. I understood it as an organizing principle of the dance, and enjoyed its subtlety and rhythms (Obo!). 4) Individual dancers didn’t respond directly to those rhythms, but the dance as a whole did. Oslund moved our eyes around the stage more or less quickly by the rhythm of her animation of groupings of dancers. A very sophisticated effect. 5) The two amuse-bouche that opened the program were captivating — funny, quick, then deeply felt. Made me want a meal of small plates. Here’s the Catherine Thomas review on OregonLive.
Continue reading The weekend: “We scattered til our head hurt” →

Barry Johnson, Books, Food, General, Visual Art

Joel Weinstein and the public realm

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The public realm. At the memorial service for Joel Weinstein, who honored us by choosing to be buried in Lone Fir Cemetery, after spending the past 14 years in warmer places surrounded by Latin American art, which both he and his partner, Cheryl, love, the public realm (as articulated by Paul Goldberger in the post below) occurred to me, specifically as it related to Joel.

Because Joel was a one-man public-realm band. He generated culture for the the public realm and he transmitted culture within the public realm. He created and connected and consumed, and though he never talked about it to me in these terms exactly, I think he took some degree of responsibility for the public realm, our public realm, at the same time that he took pleasure from it. His magazine, Mississippi Mud, was his most tangible contribution, maybe, but he intersected with the city, its artists, writers, barristas and pastry chefs in lots of other ways, too.

At the ceremony, one of his close friends (far closer than I) remarked that Portland hadn’t been the same since he left in 1994. Which is true, I suppose, though I read him to mean that his own life was poorer for want of Joel, that losing Joel and his delightful community of connections, reduced him in a clear and definite way. And I found myself thinking and then saying that Joel had been with us when we needed him most, during that dismal of Portland decades, the Eighties, when the economy was grim, many of our talented friends left and news of all sorts was brutal. That’s when his one-man band, his crusade to save us from our cynicism and our ennui, tooted its way through our streets, a parade that could celebrate even those awful times. Hey, if the coffee and company and cookies were good, how bad could life really be? And if we could write and make art and maybe gossip a little on the side? How much closer to paradise could we expect to be?

The Eighties left, a new generation arrived (much of it from other places), and a renaissance of all the things Joel loved began. And he wasn’t here to enjoy it. But for him that wasn’t such a big deal — he was enjoying himself just as much somewhere else as he would have here, more so actually because he was enjoying it with Cheryl. And he left us a model for living in the public realm, for treasuring it, for enjoying it.

I don’t believe that you get what you need. But in Joel’s case, we DID get what we needed, whether we deserved it or not. I’m trying not to mythologize here. Joel wasn’t the Enlightened One. In fact, I liked that about him — his prejudices and moments of thoughtlessness, his sudden changes of emotional temperature, his heavy judgments. He was one of us, prey to the same (or similar) desires and shortcomings, and still maintained some momentum, some positive momentum, despite them. His irrepressibility was all the more noteworthy because he faced the same hurdles, of character, of the human condition, as the rest of us. So… Joel, thanks. Again.

Barry Johnson, Environment

Paul Goldberger, please save me from the Towers of Dubai

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OK, the experiment in blending semi-officially begins. Last night, I went to hear Paul Goldberger talk about the challenges facing cities in the 21st century. I blogged about the lecture at length today on OregonLive. If you’re looking for a fairly close account of what Goldberger said, that’s the place to go.

Here’s a paragraph from that post:

To my mind, the most important idea in Goldberger’s lecture is his description of the public realm It’s a squishy idea, maybe, comprising the things we as citizens of a specific city, Portland, have in common and the common ground on which we meet, the sense of community and the place of community, the generation of specific culture and its transmission through the city. The sprawling, atomized, privatized, cities that Goldberger is arguing against can’t be as vital, as integrated, as creative as the traditional city that Portland has tried to preserve, aggressively since the defeat of the Mt. Hood Freeway proposal in the 1970s and its replacement with light rail. Or at least that’s what his argument for the public realm suggests.

Goldberger isn’t the first to worry about the public realm, the erosion of our common ground, the withdrawal from the drama and information and diversity of the street. We even worry about it here on Art Scatter, if only because we worry about it in our own selves! It’s related to our concern about democracy — which can only be successful if the public realm is open and active and fluid. The promise of democracy is that it will produce BOTH better decisions AND decisions that people will support. Better decisions depend on the diversity of opinion and creativity of mind that the public realm encourages. And wide support depends on the trust and breadth of discussion that the public realm creates.

Although Goldberger couldn’t have been more complimentary about “Portland” as an attempt to produce and preserve a vigorous public realm, I think his instincts as a journalist, meaning I suppose his professional skepticism, might have made him wonder just how far-reaching and solid our achievements really are. If I could, I would have asked him about that. The popular impression, he said, is that Portland is the “anti-Houston”; but I doubt that he traveled far outside the central core of the city to areas that are as placeless as any nowhere corner at the intersection of major arterials in the Houston mega-plex. Our experiment in the “public realm” is incomplete, we’d all agree.

Ultimately, did Goldberger make me feel “better” about the future of cities? Not really, but that wasn’t his goal. He simply located some areas we should be vigilant about. But there are other more vicious threats out there. Goldberger didn’t mention climate change, for example, or even more lethal applications of technology than atomization and its resulting anomie or my own favorite — something plague-like that does an end run around our compromised worldwide centers for disease control. Or, for that matter, the social turmoil that comes from the unequal distribution of resources in a world of resource scarcity. I still see the towers of Dubai in my head…