All posts by Bob Hicks

I've been observing Portland and its culture since 1974, for most of that time as a writer and editor at The Oregonian and the Oregon Journal. I finally left The O in December 2007 so I could spend more time hanging around coffee shops and catching up on good books. My journalistic wanderings have led me into the worlds of theater, dance, music, the visual arts, literature and food. I'll continue writing about those and broader cultural subjects for Art Scatter. They're terrific windows onto the great mysteries of life, and thinking about them makes the mendacities of our wayward national political culture a little more bearable.
Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Sitting on the SOFA: room with a view

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Geoffrey Gorman's invented creatures at SOFA West, from Jane Sauer Gallery, Santa Fe.

By Bob Hicks

“I didn’t do it!” the woman barked, pointing a long bony finger accusingly at another woman who stood in shell-shocked horror. “It was her!”

Not for the first time in his life Mr. Scatter felt a mild urge to strangle someone he’d never actually met. In moments of crisis the scramble for self-preservation is a natural human impulse, but there are times when it really ought to be held in check.

Jan Huling, "Kewpo Libre," 2010. Mixed media, beads, 16.5 x 9 x 4.5 inches. Lyons Wier Gallery, New York.For one thing, it was obvious how the accident had occurred. For another, the woman who had unknowingly swiped against the beaded kewpie doll, which was perched in a high-traffic zone in Lyons Wier Gallery‘s booth at the SOFA West art fair, obviously felt horrible: tiny little colored beads were scattered all over the floor, the doll itself was lying there smashed among the litter, and the artist who had so meticulously made it, Jan Huling, stood by gazing dejectedly at the wreckage. Stuff happens, especially in crowded rooms crammed with expensive breakable items, and a little empathy goes a lot farther than a pointing bony finger.

After attending last week’s second annual SOFA West in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Mr. Scatter can imagine a few other pointing fingers, and maybe a few pointed sniffs. Both are predictable, and say more about the mood of the art world than they do about SOFA. This popular art fair, larger versions of which are also held annually in Chicago and New York (SOFA stands for Sculpture Objects & Functional Art), represents a lot of things that much of the contemporary art world hold to be unworthy of serious attention.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Conduit at 15: the art of failing

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By Bob Hicks

Let’s hear a great big round of applause for failure, art’s best friend.

Conduit turns 15!Mr. Scatter got back to Puddletown just in time to take in Sunday night’s final performance of Conduit‘s four-night 15th anniversary benefit celebration, for which he’d been asked to give a little halftime talk with drummer/writer/arts instigator and general man-about-town Tim DuRoche.

We’d had about a minute and a half to compare notes, but of course, we’d both been thinking about it, and Tim’s comments were, as usual, as sharp as a full-lather shave in a Wild West tonsorial parlor.

Pressed into speech, Mr. Scatter found himself to his own surprise abandoning his sparse notes and talking instead about the joys of failure. Over the years, he confessed, he’d seen some things in the Conduit space that had made him shudder. Then he’d gone home and thought about them, and after he’d thought a bit, sometimes he’d still shudder. But other times he’d think, “Aha! That’s what they were getting at!” and his window of perception would open a little wider.

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Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Hump does art: an Albuquerque tale

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By Bob Hicks

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — “Guys, guys, gimme a break, will ya, please? Just pipe down a little bit. Other people are complaining about the noise.”

Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. Wikimedia Commons.The guard at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, a tall friendly fellow in his 30s, is smiling a little sheepishly. But he has a job to do.

The objects of his shushing are a couple of geezers who’ve obviously taken a swat or two at life. They seem in their 70s: “Far as I’m concerned, the world didn’t exist before 1936,” the one named Hump has made known. A quarter Indian, a quarter Hispanic, half European grab-bag and all New Mexican leatherskin, Hump has been responding loudly and personally to the stuff he and his friend are seeing in the museum’s gallery of historical art from this Southwestern state. If they seem like a couple of old bulls in a china shop, there’s not a shred of doubt that they’re eagerly engaged with the china. And that, I think, is why the guard is disposed to caution them in a kindly manner.

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Bob Hicks, Cities, Food, General, Visual Art

Santa Fe: a cultural lightning strike

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"Apache Mountain Spirit Dancer," Craig Dan Goseyun, San Carlos Apache. Museum Hill Plaza, Santa Fe; bronze; 1995.

By Bob Hicks

CRACK! DOOM! CRACK! DOOM!

The sky splits above the high desert. Great bursts of lightning roil the midnight blackness with a frenzy of white heat. The thunder rattles deeply like the cries of gods at war, and the rain is rain — hard, fast, fierce, a gullywash of frantic energy that, soon spent, will sink meekly back into the sand.

In the morning the sun is out, the air has the fresh bite of swiftly drying earth, the small life of the arroyo a few dozen yards beyond our windows chirps placidly on. A couple of years ago we watched transfixed as a sudden storm turned the same dry creek bed into a swift flood of churning water, a rampage that rose rapidly from nothing almost to the undercurve of the little bridge on the nearby road. Hours later the arroyo was dry again, but these torrents can shift a creek’s course: in the desert, water makes up its own mind.

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General, Martha Ullman West, Visual Art

Delores Pander memorial Wednesday

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Delores Pander “was made of stern stuff, but laughter and a zest for life itself were so much a part of her it’s hard to believe, or accept, that she’s gone,” Martha Ullman West wrote in this recent tribute.

Delores Pander, by Henk Pander, oil on canvas, 2009Friends and admirers of Pander, who died June 24 at age 71, are invited to a  memorial service on Wednesday, July 7. It will be at 7:30 p.m.  at St. David of Wales Episcopal Church, 3422 SE Harrison St., Portland.

Pander, wife and partner of artist Henk Pander, also worked many years with authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Jean Auel, as well as with the old Portland Dance Theater.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Don’t look back: Here comes Orphee

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Portland Opera didn’t exactly go to Hell and back to make its first commercial recording. Or maybe it did.

Can it really have been only last November that Philip Glass‘s opera Orphee, based on Jean Cocteau‘s celebrated 1949 film version of the myth about the man who lost his love by looking back at her as he guided her out of the Underworld, was the talk of Puddletown? When perhaps the world’s most famous living serious composer was in town, taking in rehearsals of the opera company’s revival of his 1993 musical drama?

Courtesy Portland OperaGlass decided he liked the Portland cast so much that it should be recorded, leading to a double first: Portland Opera’s first-ever commercial recording, and the first full recording of Orphee, part of a Cocteau trilogy by Glass that also includes La Belle et la Bete and Les Enfants Terribles.

Now it’s here. Today, Portland Opera’s Julia Sheridan sent out word that the two-disc set, released on the Glass-centric Orange Mountain Music label, has hit the shelves. You can buy it online at the opera company’s Web site, or at its box office south of OMSI, and soon, we imagine, at all the usual places.

Portland Opera’s version of Orphee, in a production that originated at Glimmerglass Opera in Upstate New York, was terrific, and fellow Scatterers may recall that we covered it like a Methodist missionary desperately throwing wet blankets over the sunbathers at a nude beach. Here is the outcome of our group interview with Glass, which came before Mr. Scatter blogged live from the Keller Auditorium on opening night: the results of that act of impertinent bravado are here, here, here, and here. A little later, Mr. Scatter offered empirical evidence of why his fellow blogger Storm Large was besieged by autograph hounds and he was not.

Time to slip that CD into your stereo and raise a Glass in a toast. Just don’t look over your shoulder.

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West, Theater

So much dance we can’t keep up

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It’s not just rock around the clock in Puddletown: It’s dance around the calendar. Autumn, winter, spring and even summer, you just can’t keep this town’s dancing feet down. Art Scatter senior correspondent Martha Ullman West has done her best to keep up with the action, and reports here on some of what’s been kickin’ in town lately.

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By Martha Ullman West

Portland is having a dance boom, even though those who swim in Terpsichore’s wake are having a hell of a time staying afloat.

Danielle Vermette, Darren McCarthy in "Backs Like That." Photo: Sumi WuUsed to be things were winding down by the time you reached the summer solstice, and there definitely was a time when addicts like me found it impossible to get any kind of movement fix once the Rose Festival was over. Not this year — I actually had to make choices, not having managed the art of being in two or three places at once. So to several emerging choreographers as well as some much more established ones, I apologize for not making it to their performances and herewith offer some thoughts on those I did see.

I’ll start with Carol Triffle’s new musical Backs Like That, which I saw on June 18th. It’s the latest in her series of quirky commentaries on what Balzac called the human comedy, with more than a little irony implied, and as usual with an Imago piece, it is greatly involved with movement.

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Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Birth of Impressionism, death of kings

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Stéphane Mallarmé. 1876. Edouard Manet (1832-1883). Oil on canvas. 11 x 14 inches. RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski.

By Bob Hicks

SAN FRANCISCO — Two clichés come to mind today: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “Familiarity breeds contempt.”

I wouldn’t call my attitude toward Impressionist painting contempt, exactly. Far from it: This is great stuff, and you’d have to be a fool not to recognize that, even if, as in my case, your attention has been elsewhere of late.

I confess to having had a touch of fatigue, a sense of been-there-seen-that, a feeling that yesterday’s artistic revolution had become today’s wallpaper, the essence of nice. (Another cliché pops into my head: “guilt by association.” I gradually came to undervalue the real thing, I think, on the evidence of innumerable encounters with contemporary paintings in which a sort of generic, Impressionist-lite fuzzing of the image attempts to obscure the artists’ inability to be compelling or precise.)

Birth of Venus. 1879. William Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905). Oil on canvas, 9 ft. 10 1/8 inches x 7 ft. 5/8 inches. RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé LewandowskiThank you, Musee d’Orsay and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, for shaking me out of that nonsense. Birth of Impressionism, the show of masterworks from the Paris museum on display through Sept. 6 at the Fine Arts Museums’ de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, reinvigorates the Impressionistic moment by putting it in the context of its own time and the art world that existed when it knocked on the door and was found unsuitable company for dinner with the establishment.

That historical grounding had been absent from my thinking for a while. It reminded me of why the Impressionist movement was groundbreaking, and reawakened my fondness for works whose value should have been self-evident. (A followup exhibition from the d’Orsay, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, opens Sept. 25 and runs through Jan. 18, 2011.)

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Bob Hicks, General, Martha Ullman West, Visual Art

Delores Pander, 1938-2010

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Henk Pander, portrait of Delores Rooney, December 2009. 54" x 64", oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist.

Graceful, intelligent and hard-working, Delores Pander generally stayed behind the scenes of Portland’s arts world, where she had a habit of making sure the scenes were working precisely the way they ought to. Born on Aug. 16, 1938, she died of cancer on Thursday, June 24, 2010. For many years she was the wife and partner of the Dutch-born Portland painter Henk Pander, one of our best and most important artists, whose work has fused the long tradition of Dutch art with the frontier edge of the Pacific Northwest and a keen outsider’s feeling for the American psyche. Art Scatter senior correspondent Martha Ullman West, a longtime friend of Delores, offers this personal tribute.

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By Martha Ullman West

Delores Pander died early Thursday morning after a long, hard, painful battle with cancer. Her accomplishments were many, her passion for knowledge profound, the reach of her love and loyalty and friendship broad and deep.

Henk Pander’s extraordinary portrait above of his beautiful wife, made in December of last year, says it all: she is surrounded by images representing the things that were most important to her — a ceramic made by her granddaughter Mary-Alice; the house she shared with Henk and Mary-Alice and several dogs for a number of years; a pile of books; and in her hand a book by Ursula Le Guin, another artist whom she helped with the practical details of work. Her favorite color was the deep, dark red that saturates the painting, and the lighter red shoes she’s wearing are emblematic of her love of pretty clothes.

Delores was years away from becoming an artist’s wife when I first met her in the fall of 1973 at David Nero and Associates, where I was an incompetent technical writer and she was the highly competent secretary for an educational research project to study Follow Through, a shortlived offshoot of Head Start. With her dark hair and sparkling eyes, her clear intelligence, her love of laughter, and the incredible speed, organization and efficiency with which she ran the office and kept our motley crew in line, she reminded me at once of my mother, who put all those attributes, including the dark-haired beauty, to work in the caring and feeding of my artist father.

Delores’s refusal to put up with any guff from those of us who were above her in the pecking order also reminded me of my mother. I’m ashamed to say I was a bit uppity with her at some point, and for Christmas she gave me an engagement calendar inscribed “to the writer from the typer-writer.”

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Bob Hicks, Cities, Food, General, Visual Art

Art & funk; the happy crunch of kimchi

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Mr. Scatter hasn’t been writing a lot lately, at least not for print. Lots of notes, lots of transcriptions, lots of interviews and looking at stuff and thinking about it, but not so much for instant gratification — Mr. Scatter’s or his readers’.

Tabor Porter, carved devil figure, courtesy Guardino GalleryIn case you missed it, he did have this piece in last Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, a reflection on that not-so-polite (and extremely loosely organized) form of art known variously as folk, outsider, naive, primitive, self-taught, you name it.

A recent trip to the Bay Area has got him to thinking about artists like The Hairy Who (from Chicago, but they had a big influence on the Bay Area Figurative Art scene) and Robert Arneson, and of course the splendidly loony master cartoonist R. Crumb, whose surprising take on the Book of Genesis is at the Portland Art Museum right now, and fun and funk, and the disappearing distance between high and low art, “taught” and “outsider” art. That’s what the A&E piece is about, in the context of Portland’s variously beloved and maligned Alberta Arts District scene. ‘Nuff said. Read it for yourself.

The view from Mr. Scatter's window: the pagoda in San Francisco's Japantown. Wikimedia CommonsWhile he was in Baghdad by the Bay, Mr. Scatter stayed in Japantown, where the view out his window was the pagoda at right. Best thing about the very good hotel where he stayed, thanks to an excellent online deal: the long deep Japanese soaking tub, which he filled with hot water nightly to wash away the stress of those up-and-down hills. He tried not to think about the ungodly amount of water he was using. Sometimes, a person splurges.

San Francisco is a great place to eat, maybe right up there in the United States with New Orleans and New York, and Mr. Scatter had a bite or two. About a third of the city’s population is Asian, and it follows that eating in Asian spots can be a good bet, even little ones that don’t get much press. That was the deal with a little Korean diner he found one night: good bubbling stew with soft tofu and little oysters. But the side dishes, or banchan, were knockout: nine little bowls of kimchi and other various fermented sprouts, cucumbers, radishes and the like, including a dish of dried anchovies that had been partially reconstituted with oil, giving them a sharp funky taste and a chewy, almost woody texture. Outstanding. San Francisco treat or not, Rice-A-Roni didn’t stand a chance.

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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

— Tabor Porter, carved devil figure, courtesy Guardino Gallery.

— The view from Mr. Scatter’s window: the pagoda in San Francisco’s Japantown. Wikimedia Commons.