Category Archives: Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson, Visual Art

Caution: Artists at work

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Our 19th century conception of the Artist (or Poet or Actor) still stands, mostly intact, a testament to the enduring power of Romanticism. You know by now that I’m no Romantic, right? (Though I can be a sentimental old fool and sometimes the symptoms are the same.) But the Romantic idea of the “studio” or “workshop” or “rehearsal hall” is one that I’ve kept, the idea of the place where the drama of creation occurs, and I start to snort a little even as I type “drama of creation” because, come on, who am I kidding? What does that even mean?

Still, I respect the place where work takes place, creative work, and I believe it has, um, possibilities that other places don’t have. But usually it was closed to interlopers, especially casual interlopers. Until now. Until blogs! Which are admittedly mediated spaces, of course, unless someone has come up with a “studio cam.” But still.

So here are some artists’ blogs that I’ve found. I hope the artists aren’t creeped out that I occasionally drop in.

Bunny with an Artblog I’m not sure what it is about Hilary Pfeifer’s blog that keeps me coming back, but I do. Some of it is just the random personal stuff. For example, I just discovered that if she played our “movies that move me” game, she would probably choose Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle. But mostly, it’s because of the photographs of the strange creations she’s fashioning in her Studio for a show upcoming at Ogle Gallery in September. It’s called Natural Selection and after watching it blossom the past month or so, I’m definitely hooked.

TJ Norris: Unblogged When I wrote about Norris’s show at the New American Art Union, I found his blog. It’s a great mix of reportage on the Portland art scene, a little news here and there, some excellent links, and some personal events and reflections. Oh. And pictures. Very cool pictures. And enough hints about his work to constitute a peek inside his studio. UPDATE: Broken link fixed!

Craig Thompson’s Learn to Draw blog OK. That’s not its real name. (That would be Doot Doot Garden Blog.) But let’s just say I developed a powerful hankering to create a gigantic new graphic novel, a little like Thompson’s Habibi, which by his recent reckoning has a “couple” of years yet to go. Then I would go to his blog a lot, to watch the drawings unfold, because it’s like a little online classroom. Again, I discovered the blog working on a post a few months ago and bookmarked it then. Habibi looks very cool, by the way, and really, I don’t mind the wait as long as I can get little hints about what it’s going to be like on Thompson’s blog.

OK. Maybe that’s enough for now? But I would like to know what your own favorites are, if you wouldn’t mind sharing?

Barry Johnson, General, Music, Visual Art

Those tasty Tuesday hotlinks, well-scattered

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While you continue to hone your answers for the “movies that move me” confessional below — more! we want more! (it’s kinda getting a little Bruno Bettelheim-y in there) — we have some refreshing links from home and abroad.

Let the celebrity conduct Maybe this is “only on the BBC” but a new reality show is hoping to bridge the gap between classical music and pop culture by enlisting some UK celebrities, most notably drum’n’bass inventor Goldie. The key moment in the Scotsman’s story: “A giant, shaven-headed fellow with an imperious demeanour, he is dressed in a yellow T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers. Gold teeth glint from his mouth. Yet the moment he launches into conducting, I – and the entire orchestra – are spellbound.” And now I’m thinking who I’d reallywant to see conduct the Oregon Symphony…

Kindle, the new iPod? Wired speculates on the fate of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, which apparently is starting to gain traction in the universe. I’ve briefly pondered its fate before on Scatter, and Wired is rather dismissive. But still…

Art in The Oregonian Because of my professional affiliations and all, I don’t usually do this, but I gladly send you off to four recent visual arts stories by my comrades: Bob Hicks takes on Andy Warhol at the Maryhill Museum, D.K. Row on Portland sculptor/icon Lee Kelly, and Inara Verzemnieks on the 100th Monkey Studio’s mischief art show and on Caldera’s Hello Neighbor street art project.

And now, without further interruption, descend one post and tell us about your movie past!

Barry Johnson, Film

“My brain’s on fire”: Movies that moved me

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This is an audience participation post, it just takes a few paragraphs to get there.

A few nights ago, I was watching one of the old film channels on cable, the ones that I find myself watching more and more, which I take as a sign of my impending decrepitude. It was dangerously close to my shutdown time, but I started in with 8 1/2 anyway, intending to watch Marcello Mastroianni channeling Fellini for a few scenes and then up to bed. But I kept saying one more scene one more scene, even as I hovered inches above unconsciousness, and then something marvelous would happen and I’d bolt awake, before settling back. It’s not Fellini’s dreamiest film, but I was close enough to the dreamstate myself to think about it in those terms.

I was in no condition to do anything analytical with the movie, which is just as well. Start fretting over the logic or the meaning or who that character represents in Fellini’s life (Mastroianni’s mistress in the movie is the spitting image of Fellini’s mistress, for example, according to Tullio Kezich’s biography of Fellini) and maybe its pure visual poetry starts to leak out.
But as the closing credits filled the screen, I started thinking about how much I liked 8 1/2. And I thought of three categories:
1. The movies that I thought were simply the best movie I’ve ever seen, for one reason or another.
2. The movies I considered my favorite movies.
3. The movies that have created the most positive havoc in my life.

Obviously, there’s some overlap, but my unofficial rankings are almost never the same over the three categories for any one movie. The exception would be 400 Blows, which is happily playing this week at the Clinton St. Theater. It would figure in the top three in all three categories as of this evening. (I am notoriously fickle and forgetful, which I would take as a sign of my impending decrepitude, except that I’ve always been that way.)

The third category — the movies that had created the most positive havoc in my life — is the hardest to crack. 8 1/2 has come too late into my consciousness, maybe, to crack the top 3 in that category. Fellini isn’t a bolt from the blue to me, which he might have been at one time, but wasn’t; he’s more a confirmation of thoughts, an extension of lines of thought, a softly sublime puzzlement. The third category is all about bolts from the blue or red eyes in the darkness or something.

So why is 400 Blows high on that list for me? I was 17 and visiting Williams College with a friend who desperately wanted to go there (I already knew I was headed somewhere else, but went with him so I could miss a stultifying day or two of high school). One night during the visit we went to a film class, and the professor screened the movie for his students — I remember lots of turtleneck sweaters. So, I was away from home, in a strange and charged environment, watching my first subtitled movie, and it just happened to be this intensely real family drama about a “normal” kid and his “normal” family, and it all started spinning out of control for the kid, headed toward some conclusion that I feared more with every minute. I didn’t know you were allowed to make a movie like this. I was furious that no one had ever shown it to me before (the same feeling I had later when I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God). I couldn’t keep my mouth shut when the discussion period started, and even though it was January and freezing in Williamstown, Mass., my brain was on fire when I left. I wanted to know how to talk about things like this (I still do!).

And that’s how you get on that list. So what would be my top 3 movies in this category?

1. 400 Blows
2. From Russia with Love: Right on the edge of puberty, I got a blast of adult sexuality combined with some spectacular violence (for those days), a few bad puns, a fight to the death (or “to the pain”) between two gypsy women and some Cold War politics all rolled into one. My circuits overloaded big-time.
3. Blade Runner: Welcome to my brainpan Philip K. Dick, just in the nick of time to save me from death by lack of imagination.

That third slot is the one that changes with the tides of memory the most. Sometimes, I think that Blade Runner is just one of my favorites, not really a “havoc” movie. Then I’m tempted to toss Dr. Zhivago in there, because, well, Julie Christie and the sweep of it all and the music (and again I was at an impressionable age). Or maybe Raise the Red Lantern. Or possibly She’s Gotta Have It. I could go on…

… but I won’t because that’s not the point! The point is, I want to know YOUR “top three movies that have created the most positive havoc in my life.” Want to play?

Barry Johnson, Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland times 2: A Q&A about the festival’s new direction

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It’s been around since 1935, when, legend has it, a young college prof named Angus Bowmer persuaded the town fathers of Ashland, Oregon, to let him produce two performances of “Twelfth Night” and one of “The Merchant of Venice” on an old Chautauqua stage for the town’s Fourth of July celebrations. They gave him $400 and one stipulation: He’d also have to stage some boxing matches to cover the expected deficit from the Shakespearean shows. The boxing matches lost money. The Shakespeare did boffo business and covered the prize-ring losses. And with that, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was off and running.

A lot’s changed in the intervening 73 years. The festival is by most measures the biggest regional theater company in the United States, producing 11 plays annually — usually four or five of them by Shakespeare — in a season that runs from late February through October, and which uses three theaters: the 1,200-seat, open-air Elizabethan Stage (actually an outdoor Elizabethan-style stage attached to Greek-style amphitheater seating with a wraparound porch like a vintage 1930 baseball park’s); the exquisitely adaptable, 600-seat Angus Bowmer Theatre; and the sophisticated black box known as the New Theatre, which averages about 300 seats. To these shows the festival sells more than 400,000 tickets every season, making Ashland a particularly upscale sort of tourist town, with an Elizabethan purse, sweet Victorian buildings and, underneath both, the practical bones of a modern Western working town.

As the festival goes, in many ways, so goes Ashland: The commercial success of the two are intricately linked. Both have benefited from the festival’s astonishing stability. After Bowmer, it’s had just four artistic directors: Jerry Turner, Henry Woronicz, Libby Appel and, beginning this season, Bill Rauch.
Continue reading Ashland times 2: A Q&A about the festival’s new direction →

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

The Denver Art Museum deflects a hot summer day

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The Daniel Libeskind-designed addition to the Denver Art Museum, which opened in 2006, doesn’t count as “new” anymore. It seems to have settled into its home near the State Capitol building, dug in, maybe, because it reminds me of an armadillo, bronze-plated and glowing in the sun. It has that peculiar snout, though, a sharp geometric foray into space and toward the original Denver Art Museum building over a busy Denver street. But otherwise it seem perfectly suited to the hot summer day in Colorado on which I visited it – its blocky facets deflecting the heat, its low aerodynamic profile slicing through the hot wind, its situation in the plaza that Libeskind created for it roomy enough to allow its heat to radiate and disperse without warming its neighbors.

So, yes, I approved of the new building from a sculptural point of view — it also reminded me (and my wife — thanks Megan!) of a Stealth bomber. And I like the metaphor: art stealthily and lethally undermining a crude, car-choked American metropolis. But I had two questions in mind for the new DAM: 1) Would the aggressive architecture detract from the art inside, impose itself too much, and 2) how would it “fit” into downtown Denver as an urban design proposition. One visit and a little Googling isn’t going to answer those, but that’s not going to stop me from taking a stab at them… oh no.
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Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

Monday links: a Scatter round-up

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We stopped measuring our heads in the mirror long enough to do a little online investigating. (One of our number spent the day with his head pressed against his full-length mirror attempting to disprove the contentions of Major Scientists that the image his eyes were seeing in the mirror was half the size of his real head. Scatter can be so easily amused. Unfortunately, he was trying to prove this with an Outside Observer — sorry, Lynn — when it’s the subject’s perception of himself that’s at stake.)

Here’s what we found:

Over at Power Slice, art history student Luke Fidler’s blog about “art, culture and contemporary living,” we found a keen eye and lots of excellent links. And we noted a shared interest in the painter Carl Morris. We’ll be back.

Via Power Slice, we were led to Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes on ArtsJournal, specifically his post on a Richard Diebenkorn show in the making. We agree with Mr. Green! An Ocean Park series exhbition would be wonderful. We only hope that the Portland Art Museum gets a piece of the action. Diebenkorn was born in Portland (OK, we can’t get too excited; he left when he was 2), but more importantly to us, his oscillations between abstraction and figurative art were similar to those going on among Portland artists during the Fifties and Sixties (I’m thinking of George Johanson and Carl Morris, specifically, but lots of our artists worked through an AE phase, so powerful was the movement). The interaction between San Francisco and Portland artists during that time — and I understand there was a lot — would be an excellent subject for an excellent exhibition.

We went back to Culture Shock, where we found a stirring defense of the Rights of Children to access to the arts. Art Scatter regulars will know that we couldn’t agree more. In fact, we believe that society should be organized around this right. A place that encourages its kids to create is going to be a great place to live.

Culture Shock linked us to Mead Hunter’s blog, MrMead’s Pupu Platter, which featured a post about headaches, specifically weekend migraines of the most debilitating sort. If you have a remedy, I’m sure Pupu Platter would entertain it. We also noted that MrMead was in the process of, um, redefining his blog and mentioned Art Scatter, which we found flattering, but that almost caused us to slip into an orgy of self-analysis ourselves. Or maybe that was the whole mirror thing.

The week beckons!

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

Scatter looks in the mirror — and shudders

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Today, we are thinking about the mirror. It’s not our fault; it’s Natalie Angier’s. Art Scatter couldn’t hold NY Times science reporter Angier in any higher regard. She manages the difficult newspaper double of 1) telling you something, often something “technical,” you don’t know and 2) explaining it in a clear and expansive way — and all in a short space! (Art Scatter could sometimes take a lesson.)

Angier’s foray into the mirror (think Alice in Wonderland) starts with Narcissus and his reflection in the pool, brushes past mirrors of antiquity, talks about some unusual medical uses of mirrors, and then gets into some surprising psychological terrain (humans behave better, it seems, when they can see themselves in a mirror), including a few paragraphs on mirrors and self image. But the shocker was straight science:

Outline your face on a mirror, and you will find it to be exactly half the size of your real face. Step back as much as you please, and the size of that outlined oval will not change: it will remain half the size of your face (or half the size of whatever part of your body you are looking at), even as the background scene reflected in the mirror steadily changes.

Half the size? My head must be truly massive! And I thought it was rather petite all these years. Narcissus can be forgiven for falling in love with the image in the pool, then, because it is SO much more winsome than “real life,” beset as it is with Big Heads. Although Angier talks about how humans have a far higher regard for their individual beauty than the facts bear out, she doesn’t specifically address the erotics involved in the mirror. Which when you think about it, are pretty complex. There’s the possibility of watching someone furtively, by catching them unaware in a reflective surface, for example, but we begin to map a psychosexual terrain that we’ll leave for another day.
Continue reading Scatter looks in the mirror — and shudders →

Barry Johnson, Books, Theater

Three essays by Peter Nadas, two dishes, one table

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A discussion of three essays by Hungarian essayist/novelist/Nobelist-in-waiting Peter Nadas, dealing with the executions of the Ceaucescu’s, the depths of Hamlet (another killer of tyrants) and the knotty language distortions of Soviet Bloc Hungary, plus some related observations.

I picked up Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Peter Nadas based on what short story writer Deborah Eisenberg wrote about it in the New York Review of Books. I’m usually not THAT suggestible, but Eisenberg is obviously passionate about Nadas. Here’s what she said about his novel A Book of Memories in that same review: “After finishing the book, I… felt irreversibly altered, as if the author had adjusted, with a set of tiny wrenches, molecular components of my brain.”

I pictured nanobots, each armed with a multi-tool (including a wrench), scurrying about inside my own skull, opening up some gates to allow more neuronal “flow” and shutting down others. (Until this, I had no idea my mind was like an irrigation project.) Would the sensation be “pleasant”? Or is it simply necessary to experience “what it is to feel or think two mutually exclusive things at once,” which is what Eisenberg says Nadas enables us to do. That doesn’t sound SO impressive, as Eisenberg admits, but frankly we don’t expect it in literature, just our confusing lives, and we certainly don’t expect it to be revelatory in the way Nadas is for Eisenberg.

So, I randomly plucked three essays from the set of 9 short stories and 14 essays and sat down to read. I didn’t hear the clanging of nanobots up there, but I think I understand what Eisenberg has on her mind. Nadas possesses a sharp, insistent intellect that he uses to complicate our thinking, to blur our distinctions, to clog our mental templates. He manages the sweet double of demonstrating the muddiness of our intellectual apparatus in a precise and powerful way: He’s clear about the complexity. More important for my humble purposes, though, these three essays, written in 1977, 1986 and 1998, seemed immediately applicable on all sorts of levels, some of which we’ll get into shortly.
Continue reading Three essays by Peter Nadas, two dishes, one table →

Barry Johnson, Books

Summer reading ideas: Not!

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Right now, as my fingers stumble across the keyboard, the top story at the ArtJournal site is from the Telegraph in the UK, specifically a video of short interviews with prominent Brit writers who confess their sins: The classic books they haven’t read. Go ahead, click the link! It’s only 3 minutes or so, and really, it’s worth it, because it will make you feel better about some secret reading omission of your own.

The Bible, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Shakespeare, Catch-22, Ulysses, On the Origin of Species … The big books spool out, unread. As I watch the guilty rat on themselves, my favorite is playwright Michael Frayn, who suggests that he hasn’t read ANYTHING and is “in a state of perpetual embarrassment.” Which is exactly how I feel. Not that I haven’t read anything (and frankly, come on, the erudite Mr. Frayn has read a lot), but even if I’ve read it recently, important details have begun to leak out of my brainpan immediately. Was that book really great, or does it simply leave the impression of being really great…? More than regretting books not read, I regret books not remembered.

But OK. I’ll play. The book I’m most embarrassed that I haven’t read. Hmmm. Suddenly there are so many to choose from! Let’s see: Crime and Punishment. It is so big, it is so important, it is so daunting, and I know almost as much about it as books I’ve actually read and forgotten! But still… Hey, that feels better. Your confession below?

Barry Johnson, Books

Random July notes: LA Times Book Review oblivion

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Although the Los Angeles Times hasn’t made a formal announcement, four former editors of its esteemed book review section have protested the paper’s decision to eliminate it and move book reviews to the paper’s Calendar section. Their letter to the newspaper reads in part:

Angelenos in growing number are already choosing to cancel their subscriptions to the Sunday Times. The elimination of the Book Review, a philistine blunder that insults the cultural ambition of the city and the region, will only accelerate this process and further wound the long-term fiscal health of the newspaper.

I don’t live in LA nor am I a regular reader of the LA Times, so I’m in no position to judge how important to the LA basin’s literary culture its book section has been. But I suspect it’s considerable, at the very least as an important link in the book business chain and in championing the writers of the region. I know the Tribune Company, which owns the paper, is in a severe cost-cutting mode across its many papers — spend a week glancing at Romenesko’s newspaper news and gossip blog on Poynteronline if you want to find out the gory details in Baltimore, Chicago and various other newspaper points in the Tribune domain. No doubt the book section doesn’t attract lots of ads, though I suspect its readership numbers are substantial. But it does speak to seriousness of purpose: How intellectually rigorous the newspaper is.
Continue reading Random July notes: LA Times Book Review oblivion →