Monthly Archives: December 2008

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General

Architecture notes: Doyle’s demise, Sam’s folly

8 Comments

At the risk of making Art Scatter look like an architecture and planning blog (we’re deeply interested, but others cover the territory fare more systematically) a couple of things are sticking in our craw. Well, my craw, at any rate.

First, the Riverdale School District’s decision to tear down an A.E. Doyle-designed elementary school in Dunthorpe, a move that’s far from surprising but depressing and exasperating, nevertheless: You get the feeling that the board never took the preservation case seriously; it just bulled ahead and did what it wanted to do. Noblesse, you might say, without the oblige. We wrote about this a while back. Now, we can’t think of any response better than those from Scatter friends Tim DuRoche, on his Portland Spaces blog, and Brian Libby, on his Portland Architecture blog. Read ’em and weep. Or get angry. Or both. This 1920 school building isn’t major Doyle, but it’s a model of how to do a modest building the right way — and after all, aren’t most buildings in most places modest? If you get the modest buildings right, the major buildings will follow suit.


Second — and not wanting to pick on Mayor-elect Sam Adams, who has a lot of energy and a lot of ideas — but what in the pluperfect hell is with his insistence on building that white elephant of a convention center hotel? I thought Metro had finally stuck a silver spike in this 600-room monster’s heart, but no: Sam just won’t let it die the death it deserves. This truly seems to be a case where money interests are overruling common sense and good public policy, which really ought to go together.

Let’s be clear about a few things.

— First, the chances of this $227 million project ever paying for itself are about as good as Bill O’Reilly’s shot at acing out Hillary and becoming Obama’s secretary of state. And let’s not even get into how much that estimated $227 million would actually end up being.

Continue reading Architecture notes: Doyle’s demise, Sam’s folly →

Barry Johnson, Cities, General, Visual Art

A scatter: Museums, bridges, noses, money

Leave a comment

Some things just must be cleared up by the New Year, yes? Like what’s happening at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which threw up its hands last month and cried out for help as its financial position (or at least its endowment) withered away to next to nothing (well, $7 million or so).

The New York Times’ Edward Wyatt reports that the MoCA board will decide today whether it will merge with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or go it alone with “help” from Eli Broad, who has offered MoCA what amounts to a $15 million matching grant to rebuild its endowment and funding for five years of exhibitions (at $3 million per year).
Continue reading A scatter: Museums, bridges, noses, money →

Barry Johnson, Cities, General

Gil Kelley and the height of the Skidmore district

7 Comments

Many days, I find myself Max-ing along First Avenue, once we ramp down from the Steel Bridge, and I have come to enjoy it immensely. It’s the buildings. There’s nothing quite like them. Two or three stories, mostly, elegant and tastefully restored, they are an instant invitation to consider the very beginnings of Portland as a city, because First Avenue, and the rest of the 20 blocks north and south of Burnside as far as Third, was the heart of the city’s first downtown.

It’s now the heart of the Skidmore historic district (or the Old Town/Chinatown neighborhood — they have overlapping, though not quite congruent, boundaries), far from the center of town and far from the major development activity that has re-made the Pearl and is now remaking the West End. Thanks to certain accidental economic forces and planning “failures”, around one-third of the original wonderful cast-iron facade buildings in the Skidmore district have been preserved, enough for it to have earned recognition as a national historic preservation district.

These aren’t the only old buildings in Portland, not by a long shot, but they are the greatest collection of cast-iron architecture still standing in the country. More importantly, they are beautiful — I love the human scale, the almost whimsical details, even the brickwork. And the renovations that have kept them “alive” as buildings have shown them to be deserving of more centuries of life, meaning simply that they can adapt to new circumstances, new technologies, new generations of tenants.

So, that’s how I enter the territory of two recent columns in The Oregonian, one by Steve Duin in ardent opposition (along with the preservationist community) to raising the height limits for new buildings in the district from 75 to 130 feet on five specific sites at the district’s edge, and one by Anna Griffin (online it inexplicably suggests that Renee Mitchell is the author; it’s Griffin) about how Mayor-elect Sam Adams’ reorganized planning director Gil Kelley out of a job and what this might mean. The two are related, because Kelley is the one who proposed changing the height restrictions, pending approval from the national historic district people.
Continue reading Gil Kelley and the height of the Skidmore district →

General

Terry Toedtemeier: a new book, a memorial service

Leave a comment

UPDATE: Via the Port site, we pass along the news that KBOO’s Art Focus (90.7 FM) will hold a tribute to Terry Toedtemeier at 10:30 a.m. Thursday. Scheduled guests: Jane Beebe of PDX Contemporary (his dealer), John Laursen and curator Prudence Roberts, Terry’s wife.

From what I understand, Terry Toedtemeier had two “dream” photography books he hoped to publish. The first, Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957, was just published by Oregon State University Press and the Northwest Photography Archive, and as we have said it’s magnificent. (More importantly, though, book buyers feel the same way — we stopped at Broadway Books today and Roberta told us that the book was selling very well.)

The second was a book of his own photographs. Maybe the striking images of the Oregon headlands he’d captured at minus tide from vantage points most of us never reach. But since his death last week, a broader retrospective seems to be more in order, and the photography archive, the non-profit that Terry founded with John Laursen, has decided to take it on. As their plans for the book become clearer, we’ll let you know.

They’ll need help, of course, and for those who want to pitch in, the archive is collecting money for the new book at its website. It’s a way both to honor Terry and support the organization and its mission — to preserve the region’s heritage of great photography. The site also reports that a memorial service honoring Terry will be held at the Portland Art Museum on Sunday, January 4. More details to come.

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Martha Ullman West on the Ghost of Nutcrackers Past

4 Comments

Nobody knows her Marzipans from her Sugarplum Fairies as well as Martha Ullman West, the distinguished dance writer and charter member of Friends of Art Scatter. We here at Scatter Central are pleased as holiday punch — and with the right additives, that’s pretty darned pleased — to turn our space over to her for some insights into Oregon Ballet Theatre’s “The Nutcracker” and the long line of Nutcrackers leading up to it. Read on!

When George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker premiered at New York City Center in 1954, critic Edwin Denby reported that a “troubled New York poet sighed, “I could see it every day, it’s so deliciously boring.” I thought of that remark while viewing the same choreography, excellently danced, when Oregon Ballet Theatre opened its current run on Friday. I think the poet, not named by Denby, but possibly W.H. Auden, must have made his backhanded comment at intermission, following the first act party scene. I don’t know if he ever went back, but I have, again and again, in many versions, including a Nutcracker God-help-me on ice, and the boredom becomes less delicious each time.

So on Friday, my mind wandered a bit — well, more than a bit — during that family party, notwithstanding adorable children in their party clothes, naughty Fritz and dancing dolls, all of whom performed just as they should have, harking back to the ghosts of Nutcrackers past — specifically James Canfield’s at OBT and Todd Bolender’s, which is still being performed by Kansas City Ballet. Both Canfield and Bolender (who danced in Balanchine’s 1954 production) have enlivened the party considerably, the former with mechanical dolls that are somewhat reminiscent of Dorothy’s companions in the Wizard of Oz (and they accompany Marie on her journey, in Canfield’s case to the palace of the Czar) and the latter with hordes of small boys galloping around the staid gathering tooting toy trumpets, and less formal social dances than Balanchine’s.

Nevertheless, there are elements of Balanchine’s party that I love and look for, particularly the Grandfather dance, which begins in stately decorum and concludes with a lively little pas de deux by the Grandmother and Uncle Drosselmeier, here performed by apprentice Ashley Smith and principal dancer Artur Sultanov, who will be seen in later performances as the Sugar Plum Fairy’s Cavalier. Moreover, his Marie is performed by a little girl and not an adult dancer pretending to be one. Julia Rose Winett, who danced the role on Friday night, has a jump that makes you think she has springs in her slippers. She can act, too. You know she’s scared to death during the battle of the mice and toy soldiers, even though the Mouse King really doesn’t look very frightening.
Continue reading Martha Ullman West on the Ghost of Nutcrackers Past →

Barry Johnson, Cities, Environment, General

Critic face-off: Brad Cloepfil and the battle against kitsch

11 Comments

The primary piece of writing on my reading list this weekend was Inara Verzemnieks’ profile of Brad Cloepfil, which was a hybrid of sorts, marrying facts about the architect and his buildings, but also offering an account of life on the ground inside those buildings and an approach to thinking about his work. It even gets, gulp, philosophical. I was a little too close to the process of this story to supply a full-fledged analysis of it, let alone a “judgment”, but it is the jumping off point for the rest of this post.

Lurking within Inara’s story is a debate between Ada Louise Huxtable and Nicolai Ouroussoff, and not just over Cloepfil’s renovation of the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle, either. About everything. I’ll start with Huxtable just because she’s just the best. She puts Ouroussoff on notice immediately in the lead of her review in the Wall St. Journal: “the reviews have set some kind of record for irresponsible over-the-top building-bashing,” she writes, and she must be referring to him, because no one was quite as vitriolic as he was (that I’ve found in print, anyway).
Continue reading Critic face-off: Brad Cloepfil and the battle against kitsch →

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

The time of Terry Toedtemeier

2 Comments

We’ll start with some links to various tributes to Terry Toedtemeier that we’ve found, and then turn to his photographs.

Photographer Craig Hickman has compiled a series of photographs of Terry during his younger days. They are amazing. And if you’ve just known Terry since the 1980s, I think they will change the way you think about him a little. Well, more than a little, though perhaps not essentially. Culture Shock has some memories and some links. The Portland Art Museum’s Facebook page is gathering remembrances — which are very moving. KINK-FM has posted a podcast of Terry talking about Wild Beauty, and here’s OPB’s Think Out Loud episode dedicated to the book.

I’ve known Terry since, I don’t know, maybe the early 1980s? We would meet because he had an exhibition of some sort in the works or maybe just because his path randomly crossed mine. We would talk about the business at hand or gossip or kvetch. What I liked about talking to him was that it felt a little conspiratorial, as though we were sharing secrets about matter of importance that, really, the rest of the world shouldn’t know about. His voice would lower, he would look at me over his glasses, and then attempt to WILL his love for some photograph onto me. It was very effective, because I started to enjoy the same old photographs from Oregon’s past, by Carleton Watkins and Lily White and Al Monner, that he did. Of course, I never lived them as he did, couldn’t place them so exactly in the history of photography, the history of the state, the history of the landscape, as he could. But still, my level of interest was enough encouragement for Terry. I teased him about how all his conversations eventually touched on … basalt.

The Art Gym did a show of Terry’s photographs in 1995 called Basalt Exposures. As I recall, it wasn’t ALL basalt, though that’s what I remember most, the lesson in Oregon basalts — 15 million years ago a magma chamber in Northeast Oregon burst and leaked a LOT of basalt, a flood of basalt, into Eastern Oregon and Washington, producing the cliffs and columns we see today, especially along the Columbia River. (Actually, it wasn’t one eruption, more like a couple of million years of eruptions, and when I say a lot of basalt, I mean enough to cover 62,000 square miles to a depth of up to 3 miles, in the Columbia River flow alone.)

At the time, I don’t think I got it, didn’t understand Terry’s purposes, even if I found those basalts beautiful in an “abstract” sort of way. But come on, if you’ve seen one basalt cliff… I was wrong, of course. Terry was making me stop and consider — time. Long stretches of time. Time without people in it, when all time meant was the collision of natural forces, a burst magma chamber here, a volcanic eruption there, steady erosion everywhere. How can we relate to that time, to those natural forces, and not feel completely alienated by them?

“As the nature of human life and our knowledge of ourselves and our universe gain bewildering levels of complexity, the quest for unity becomes increasingly important. Without it, things have no meaning, no place in a “larger scheme of things.” The pervasive existence of beauty is a quality that I value greatly. I’ve become attracted to depicting specific geologies as a way to express beauty inherent in the world through time.”

I found this quote by Terry on a Flintridge Foundation PDF file. Was it from that 1995 show? I think maybe so, though perhaps Terri Hopkins at the Art Gym might be able to confirm or deny. “Pervasive existence of beauty.” Frankly, I love the boldness of that assertion: How can we be alienated from something so beautiful? How can we fail to honor it and take care of it? When I look at the young man in Craig Hickman’s photos, I think maybe this is what he was trying to say, preparing to spend his life trying to say, understanding that any such talk was going to seem … naive… when in reality it was had nothing to do with naivete and everything to do with thinking deeply about things. And maybe hoping.

One basalt isn’t like another. Thanks for teaching me that, Terry. One photograph of the Gorge isn’t like another. That, too.

And maybe something more. Terry spent much of his life attempting to show us that the landscape around us contained enough. Enough. And more than that: The people around us (some of them, anyway) are enough. Enough to occupy us for geological periods of time. Which, I am sad to say, is more than enough.

General, Visual Art

The region loses the irreplaceable Terry Toedtemeier

6 Comments

I just heard the news that Portland Art Museum photography curator Terry Toedtemeier died last night in Hood River, where he and co-writer John Laursen were signing copies of their magisterial Wild Beauty. No details as of yet. We’ll talk about Terry and his immeasurable contribution to the culture of our region later. For now, our deepest condolences to his partner, Prudence Roberts, and John and all of his friends and family. We just can’t believe it.

UPDATE: David Row was a whirlwind yesterday, making calls and collating information for his story on Terry on OregonLive (and The Oregonian this morning). It’s beautiful. David’ review of Wild Beauty, the ongoing Portland Art Museum exhibition, is also excellent, and Jeff Baker reviews the book written by Terry and John Laursen. Finally, David and Terry talked before Wild Beauty opened, and here’s the interview.

Barry Johnson, General

Scatter gives the money tree a shake, shake, shake…

3 Comments

In this particular phase of the recession, which might actually be worse than a recession, all that anyone can think about is money. Cold hard cash (an expression that implies coinage, actually — I’m imagining Scrooge McDuck’s vault, where he dances a jig and tosses said coinage in the air above his head). Where was I? Yes, cold hard cash. Art Scatter is no different. We can’t help ourselves. We nervously glance at the stock market results, call to make sure our major (and imaginary) patrons are healthy and flush, concoct money-making schemes, pass out the sweaters and vow to save on electricity. And truly, NO money is involved at all in Art Scatter (we’re all about barter), but like we said, we can’t help ourselves.

So, some links to money. Not actual links to actual money, mind you…

DK Row reported that PNCA has nabbed a $500,000 Meyer Memorial Trust grant, with another $400,000 on the way from yet another foundation, part of the art school’s $32 million capital campaign, which will refurbish its building at N.W. 12th and Johnson, among many other things. It’s still $3 or $4 million short, and that doesn’t include another round of fundraising necessary to renovate the 511 Building on Broadway. Some other capital campaigns that could use a boost — Portland Center Stage’s campaign to pay for the Armory building (which was $9 million or so short, the last we heard — looking for an update here!) and P:ear’s campaign to pay for its new home at on Northwest 6th and Flanders (which needs another $1 million).

Oregon arts organizations didn’t do so well in the latest round of NEA grants, at least compared to Washington, which trounced Oregon by a 3 to 1 margin. The list of winners was supplied by colleague Scott Lewis of the Northwest Professional Dance Project, which nabbed $10 thousand. And speaking of dance, Oregon Ballet Theatre received $10k as well and White Bird found its name on a $20k check. Congrats to all and sundry.

Hey, Art Scatter’s got a Senate seat to sell! A Senate seat is worth something, Rod Blagojevich teaches us, so what are we bid? The Chicago Tribune (talk about money problems!) reports that the comedy troupe Second City is excited about the turn of events with the Illinois governor (we are NOT typing Blogojevich again… oops). It’s all about the material, honey, all about the material.

If it’s Wednesday in America, then a Shakespeare theater must be closing (Milwaukee), an opera company has joined the Tribune company in Chapter 11 (Baltimore) and they are talking about the money (and perhaps enjoying the art, too), at an art fair (Miami). Has it ever been thus? Maybe so. But we are reading the tea leaves SO intently these days.

Barry Johnson, Visual Art

Today in Art Scatter: MoCA meets James Ensor

1 Comment

We have theorized (another way of saying “joked”) that Art Scatter is nothing but loose ends, a collection of them, maybe a little like “fringe” except not all the same length or so linear. But when I say, that I have some loose ends to tie up this week for you, I actually DO have something specific in mind.

1. MoCA on the brink. Last week over at OregonLive I posted on the situation at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which is dire — big deficits, crashing endowment, soaring expenses, oblivious staff and board of directors. Exactly how you let these things happen is a mystery: The endowment was shrinking even before the stock market crash, which has demolished everybody’s endowment, but now it’s down to $6 million or so for a museum that spends $21 million a year. For comparison’s sake, that’s less than one-fifth of the Portland Art Museum’s endowment for one of the world’s most important contemporary art museums. Which is crazy.
Continue reading Today in Art Scatter: MoCA meets James Ensor →