Category Archives: Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

Resolutions for MOCA and the new year

14 Comments

Art Scatter has taken an obsessive interest in watching the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art as it tiptoed along the crumbly edge of the abyss. After all, MOCA is an internationally important arbiter and collector of new art with big curatorial ambitions (at this point, some might say too big), and its effect on how we consider the general “drift” of art in our times is out of proportion to its $20 million per year budget. Which is to say the museum gets a lot for its money.

Somewhere along the line, both the board and museum director Jeremy Strick made a nearly fatal error — when their income didn’t reach $20 million a year, they didn’t adjust. They just covered the shortfall from their endowment, which had peaked around $40 million and by this fall had dwindled to $7 million or so. Strick didn’t cut expenses sufficiently. The board and development staff didn’t find new sources of income — even during the height of the LA real estate bubble. And so, the museum found itself near extinction in November.
Continue reading Resolutions for MOCA and the new year →

Barry Johnson, Music, Television, Theater

Eartha Kitt and the economy of desire

14 Comments

Martha Ullman West reminded us below in the comment section that Harold Pinter wasn’t the only death of a prominent artist over the holidays. Eartha Kitt departed, too. I imagine her in a heaven populated by Wall Street plutocrats, seducing a healthy portion of their ill-gotten gains out of them, though how the plutocrats got there in the first place, I have no idea — maybe they were just placed there to please Eartha. That’s not an electrical storm in the sky, that’s just Eartha Kitt sizzling.

When Ms. Kitt (to adopt New York Times formality for once, because frankly, it just feels right) was in the fullness of her celebrity-hood, in the ’50s and early ’60s, I didn’t quite get it. I was just too young. So yes, I remember her Catwoman turn on the old TV Batman and occasional turns on the variety shows of the time, to which my parents were addicted — the Dean Martin show maybe? Andy Williams? Or was she too hot for Andy? Probably. Because I followed politics and the Vietnam War, I remember her protest in LBJ’s White House. Her honesty extended beyond her frankness about all things sexual, apparently.

The New York Times obituary by Stephen Holden this morning connected a lot of the dots, or at least suggested what a lot of the dots were — Mae West on one end of her life and Madonna on the other, and then mostly European (or Europe-based) chanteuses, Josephine Baker and Edith Piaf, in the middle. I liked his description of sitting a little too close to the stage one night and falling under Ms. Kitt’s gaze — intense, frightening, captivating.

How much of this was representation, an elaborate and effective role-playing game, and how much was real? I suspect it was mostly enacted, the specifics anyway, though not the edge, the anger, the idea that “you have made me into this and now you will pay” she conveyed between such lines as “Give me a frank account/How is your bank account?”. We all have that edge somewhere, don’t we? We just don’t have Ms. Kitt’s legs or laser-beam eyes (well, I certainly don’t; I wouldn’t want to speak for the appendages of our well-proportioned Art Scatter readers!).

Golddigger. In the West it goes back to commedia dell’arte, yes? The rich old man marries the young fetching woman. And then she ignores him for a string of younger men, or if we’re feeling sentimental, for one true love. In short, he doesn’t get what he paid for. The Golddigger herself, we are mixed about, right? We don’t like the, um, naked desire, on the one hand, or the obscene gesture tossed at the Romantic Ideal of Love. On the other hand, though, we like the self-reliance, the moxie, the determination, maybe even admire the sheer cold-bloodedness of the exchange. During the ’50s, Marilyn Monroe made the Golddigger cute; Jane Russell reminded us that it wasn’t so easy.

The male version is the gigolo, who has turned into the pimp, I suppose, in these times, in the same way that entrepreneurial golddiggers turn into madams. This is what is below the tightrope that Eartha Kitt walked or rather vamped on until she died on Christmas day. She never fell off.

Barry Johnson, General, Music, Theater

So long, Harold Pinter

5 Comments

Harold Pinter had one of those deep, dark provocative minds, the scary kind, and he used it to create characters that resembled almost exactly the furtive and often malign creatures that burrow around inside our heads and heart, alternately bullying us and cringing in the corner. I’m thinking of early Pinter here, the Pinter of The Caretaker, The Homecoming and The Birthday Party, plays written between 1957 and 1964 that Portland theaters still occasionally produce. Which makes sense, because there’s really nothing quite like them, the plays that gave us the “Pinter silence” — the tear in the fabric, the hole in the dike. Except for Betrayal, I don’t know the rest of his work nearly as well, and I only know Betrayal because of the excellent film version, adapted by Pinter and starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge. It has a wistful tone, maybe it’s the score, that takes some of the sting out.

Back to Pinter, who died on December 24, having fought cancer since 2001. As his playwriting career began to wind down, he became more and more political, and his Nobel acceptance speech in 2005 excoriates the role America has played in the world, that record of supporting dictators and expanding our economic interests, and the consistent support Britain provided for our “adventures”, including Iraq.

We leave you with that 46 minute speech, or rather with a link. It circulated widely after he delivered it — by turns angry and bitter, the notes of a man betrayed. But if you didn’t hear it then, maybe it’s a fitting way to see him off today.

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 →

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.

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 →

Barry Johnson, Dance, General

The smooth meets the idiosyncratic: Skinner/Kirk+Bielemeier

1 Comment

Let’s just say we’re about to face-plant along a truly scouring patch of financial gravel road. Let’s just say. And those responsible for the emotional health of the citizenry (who would that be exactly?) start looking for a way to cheer us up, bread and circuses before we become an angry mob. Who should they call?

Here’s a vote for Gregg Bielemeier, because nothing brings a smile to your face faster than a Bielemeier dance. His dances are a little like those old Tex Avery cartoons, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, with maybe a little Fantasia thrown in to class up the act a little, the amusing bits of Fantasiaanyway. They have their own madcap illogic, the same happy spirit, the same invitation into an absurd world. And at the end of the day, or the show, they are gentle somehow, too, even Utopian a little bit. We dance, and that is good.

As I was grinning through the “+Bielemeier” contribution to the Skinner/Kirk+Bielemeier dance concert, which runs through Sunday, Half of Some, Neither of Either, I finally just clicked my pen and put it back in my pocket, leaving the note-taking to someone else. I just wanted to connect to the jazzy mix of David Ornette Cherry’s winsome music and Lyndee Mah’s scatty vocals, to Bielemeier’s own madcap solos, to the sweetest duet imaginable from Habiba Addo and Eric Skinner, to the funny little bits and general joy of living tossed off by the rest of the dancers as if they didn’t have a care in the world.
Continue reading The smooth meets the idiosyncratic: Skinner/Kirk+Bielemeier →