Category Archives: Barry Johnson

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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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.
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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…

Barry Johnson, Dance, General

Kidd Pivot’s got the power at Kaul

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Let’s say you’re in Portland and you don’t anything on for tonight, or maybe you have something on, but you’re dreading it. Or Saturday night. If you are in that circumstance, then Art Scatter suggests that you drop in on Kidd Pivot, at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. It’s that good.

Kidd Pivot is the brainchild of Crystal Pite (rhymes with kite), a Vancouver, B.C., choreographer, who danced with Ballet B.C. and Ballett Frankfort, where she worked with William Forsythe. She founded Kidd Pivot in 2001, though she continues to choreograph for other companies.

For the White Bird series, Pite and her company of six are performing Lost Action (2006). It’s a 70-minute, one-act (no intermission) concert that only lags a little toward the conclusion, primarily because of false ending or two. Until then, though, the action, lost or not, is totally engaging. For this dance, Pite has borrowed a little hip-hop, knitted things together with repeated actions and tableaux and employed a propulsive movement device: The dancers typically run pell-mell through a phrase that stops stock still; then they sprint off again. And even when they are doing slower phrases, they frequently end motionless.

She favors movements of the arms extended or bowed and shoulders, though in one delightful moment a leg extended above a dancer’s head descends in a soft S curved, a remarkable effect, which fortunately repeats! The dance is gestural, definitely, and some of the sections seem to tell a little story. In a recurring motif, a dancer collapses and other dancers stand above him looking down, eventually picking him up and “reviving” him in a sort of “passing” ritual. There’s a little parka section (O Canada!). There’s drama and tension and sadness. The solos are uniformly excellent, primarily because the dancers are, I suppose. Swift, athletic, open to the moment. They partner the same way: You don’t notice the precision at first because they make even difficult moments, and there are lots of those, look easy.

I especially liked the sections for the four men in Kidd Pivot. The specific physical attributes of men are frequently under-realized on dance stages, but Pite takes advantage of the power and speed and abruptness her men bring. Which isn’t to say that the other women are overwhelmed here. Pite is an amazing mover — powerful, agile, quick, bristling with kinetic energy. And Marthe Krummenacher and Francine Liboiron bring some specific talents to the table, one longer and expressive and the other smaller and sharper.
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Barry Johnson

A little note from the ex-editor

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Most Art Scatter readers know that I work at The Oregonian, right? Editing the writers of the arts staff (and a fine band they are!) insofar as they will let me? I haven’t talked about this much directly, mainly because I didn’t want Art Scatter to be a place where people came to criticize the paper or its arts coverage. That part of things has worked out well! I’m not sure how exactly I would characterize Art Scatter, but it isn’t a newspaper kvetch site, that’s for sure.

I bring all of this up now because my assignment at the paper is changing. Starting soon, though maybe not until the first of the new year, I’ll be writing a column for The Oregonian with a significant online presence on OregonLive. I’m not exactly sure how Art Scatter will fit into this for me, but I’m hoping that the two can work together somehow, and I’m definitely hoping that you, the wisest and best blog readers in the whole dang blogosphere!, will take a peek at my posts on OregonLive from time to time. If I’m clever enough (stop that snickering!), the two should work together (that’s what links are for, after all), with more reported stuff at OregonLive and more, um, speculative and scatter-y stuff over here.

For me, this is a good change, one that I wanted, even though I’ll miss working with the arts writers and editors as closely as I have. That was really great. As I told them, I learned so much from them the past 7 years or so, so much about EVERYTHING, that I’ll never really be able to pay them back. But writing here at Art Scatter has rekindled my interest in writing in general (not to mention writing generally) and I’ll be able to do that full time now. I know. Be careful what you wish for.

But I should be able to explore and write about the cultural life of the city more directly than I have as editor. I’ll be out more, I’ll talk to more of you, and then I’ll try to report back . I’m counting on you to keep me honest, to give me suggestions and tips, to challenge me when I need it, to provide alternate (and better) descriptions and meanings of things that I have tried to figure out. Anyway, I’ll keep you, um, posted on developments with column and blog, and in the meantime, I should be building up lots of material for Art Scatter.

By the way, David Stabler has blogged about this himself, from his point of view meaning altogether too charitably, if you want to take a look.

Barry Johnson, Books, Music, Theater

A Monday quick chatter

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Art Scatter hereby congratulates the winners (and the nominees, for that matter) of this year’s Oregon Book Awards, especially Steve Patterson, whom we track on his Splattworks blog, for winning the drama award for his “Lost Wavelengths.” If you think doing theater is hard in the provinces, writing theater is even less rewarding, and Steve had written something like 25 plays (per his website). So, bravo Mr. Patterson. UPDATE: We recommend that you link to Mr. Mead’s pupu platter for a longer take on Mr. Patterson!

Two other items grabbed our attention in our Monday morning Oregonian. First, Marty Hughley’s unabashedly positive review of Thom Pain (based on nothing) and its star Matthew DiBiasio, which requires us to go to Beaverton to see Will Eno’s one-man rumination about, well, pain.

Second, we were happy to see that James McQuillen concurred (mostly and more learnedly) with our happiness over Tomas Svoboda’s new string quartet and much of the rest of the Third Angle show. Art Scatter needs all the validation it can get for its musical taste, so thank you for that Mr. McQuillen. On a side note, in a comment to our original post on Svoboda below, Jane Jarrett mentioned that Bill Eddins had blogged about it. Well, our report of Eddins’ performance yesterday afternoon with the Oregonian Symphony couldn’t have been more positive — a full and interesting sort of lecture-demo of Brahms’ first symphony.

Barry Johnson, Music

Hail! A new quartet by Tomas Svoboda!

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Third Angle New Music Ensemble gave the world its first listen to Portland composer Tomas Svoboda’s newest quartet, String Quartet no. 10, Opus 194. I’m not adept enough to enter it very deeply from that one encounter, but I liked its spirit and its invention. The program notes said that it is dedicated to violinist Lubomir Havlak of the Martinu Quartet, which recorded eight of Svoboda’s earlier quartets in Prague recently, and so “positive, energetic and playful with harmonic language of Bohemian flavor.” Which all seemed plausible at this first hearing.

Svoboda has Czech roots himself — his parents were Czech, though he was born in Paris in 1939 and spent the war years in Paris, returning to Prague in 1946 (according to his website), where he continued the musical studies begun in Boston. He was a sensation. He completed his first symphony at 16, and it was performed by the FOK Prague Symphonic Orchestra. He impressed the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu enough for him to leave his unfinished work to the young Svoboda at his death in 1959. Svoboda’s family moved to the U.S. in 1964, and he went to U.S.C., before coming to Portland State University in 1969 to teach. Here, he’s conducted a wide-ranging musical exploration, from brilliant and edgy small chamber works to a marimba concerto.

I bring up this all up simply to make the point that the occasion of a new quartet by Svoboda is a big deal and that I wish more of us had been at the Old Church last night to hear it: the rhythms that Hamilton Cheifetz dug out of his cello, the seemingly simple melodies that violinist Ron Blessinger started to toss off, only to have them complicate and deepen considerably, the sonorous trade-offs between cello and Brian Quincey’s viola that mirrored the activity in the upper registers between Blessinger and violinist Peter Frajola. Every time things started to get, well, obsessive and aggressive, Svoboda gave us an escape, a little musical gesture maybe, a touch of whimsy, even the crankier third movement. And the last movement, which started almost inaudibly with a melody that did indeed sound like a folk song, rolled into a full-throated barn dance that Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor would have been proud of. Terrific stuff.
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Barry Johnson, Books, General

Farewell to Joel Weinstein, a proto-Art Scatterer

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Today’s newspaper contained the sad news that Joel Weinstein, the publishing genius behind one of the city’s late, great magazines, Mississippi Mud, had died of lung cancer in Puerto Rico. (I wrote the obituary.)

I was surprised to calculate that Joel left the city in 1994 — my memory of him is still so vivid. The Joel I remember is smart and intense and intensely opinionated. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but on the other hand he can sometimes get a little goofy, which definitely takes the edge off. He always is working on something “important” and always is the carrier of good gossip. And every year or so he has a little stack of Mississippi Muds under his arm, a magazine of many parts and many sizes, a little bizarre at times (in a good way), with odd graphics bursting off the page and dense, intimate packets of writing alongside. A chance encounter with Joel was a challenge; it brought out your good side, your creative side. You leaped to unfounded conclusions, made up outlandish opinions, imparted barely credible stories to him just to impress him a little. And then, after he left, you were left with your own mental mess AND the similarly strange stuff he had delivered himself. It was wonderful.

I would say I’ll miss him. But I’ve been in that state since 1994, really. So, I’ll just say what I’ve already said — I’m sad about it, deeply sad. Art Scatter’s heartfelt condolences to his partner Cheryl Hartup. Bye, Joel.

Barry Johnson, General

Art Scatter says vote often

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When I was much younger, I marveled at Election Day, this First Tuesday in November when Americans en masse, from sea to shining sea, returned to the polls to exercise the primary ritual of a democracy. The idea of it as a collective enterprise, the voting I mean, just made me happy somehow, even when I despaired over the outcome and had profound doubts about those we elected, even on the rare occasions when I actually voted for them.

That was when I equated voting with democracy, before I realized that people could vote and have almost no effect on their government or its policies or that the manipulations of skilled and extremely well-funded propagandists (and I use this charged word deliberately, though I could simply have used “ad men”) could change an election. And over time, erode the democracy itself by diminishing our very capacity to make informed choices. Voting is not the same as democracy. I can’t show up every four years to vote for the lesser of two evils and think of myself as doing anything so important as participating in a democracy. A lot of the time, that’s what I’ve done. Democracy requires a lot more participation than that.

We know this has happened. Fully one-quarter of us aren’t registered to vote. Of those of who are, one-third won’t. So fifty percent of us acknowledge the futility of voting, understand that once our representatives get to Washington they make thousands of decisions that have nothing to do with our welfare, nothing to do with “representing” us, become entangled in networks of power that defy their abilities to change things, if they still have the heart. Those of us who do vote have become cynical about it. Let me re-phrase that: I have become cynical about it. Because I don’t want to speak for you. I vote and I walk away. I vote and I turn my nose. I am bad for democracy.
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