Category Archives: General

Barry Johnson, Film, General

Must-see TV, really, I must

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The couch. Yes, the couch.

End of the work week, the daily trudge home, the brain dull and the eyes glazed. Time for some TV! And some of America’s finest television is available, just over the cable, no iTunes or websites or DVDs necessary. TV, the way Apollo intended it! Apollo, god of prophecy (not to mention health, music and poetry, and salty snacks). Apollo, speak through this vehicle, this Toshiba, not flatbellied (er, screened) with muscular definition, no, but prepared to absorb your Delphic pronouncements.

Speak, Apollo. Let’s see: the last bit of “My Name is Earl” and then “The Office” vs. “Grey’s Anatomy.” We can watch both, no problem, and even bits of “BloodRayne” on the SciFi channel. Hey! Ben Kingsley, vampires and thus blood, swordplay, provocative costuming, hilarious dialog. Is that Meat Loaf? Yes, it is. Oh no, not Geraldine Chaplin… but alas, yes again. And Michelle Rodriguez, who used to be in “Lost.” Perfect. Because “Lost” follows “Grey’s Anatomy,” and during commercials “ER” still hangs in there, verily concluding its 14th season, and who should show up on that episode but Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi. There is a LOT of acting talent available to us tonight, but Buscemi’s going to triumph over all comers — from Steve Carell to Ben Kinglsey. Even Meat Loaf doesn’t stand a chance. Steve Buscemi has channeled Apollo: He chooses, he suffers, the Mob wants him dead. He does his duty. He gets under our skin.

Time for a commercial. Don’t touch that remote!
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General, Vernon Peterson, Visual Art

Forget about it Jake, it’s a Rauschenberg

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My first sense of the modern is in what Roger Shattuck said about Marcel Duchamp: “Can one produce works that are not works of art? He tried; we wouldn’t allow it.”

One might say of Robert Rauschenberg: “Can one throw out something that is pure junk? We tried; he wouldn’t allow it.”

My second sense of the modern is in Rauschenberg’s famous early work, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). Which is exactly that: He talked Willem de Kooning into giving him a drawing to erase. He wanted to start with a drawing that was “a hundred percent art,” which he thought his own might not be. De Kooning gave him something hard, a heavy-lined piece drawn with grease pencil, ink and crayon. It took Rauschenberg a month and forty erasers, but he finished his un-drawing. (Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World)
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Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

A moment for Robert Rauschenberg

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The Robert Rauschenberg appreciations have begun to proliferate (Michael Kimmelman’s obit is excellent; D.K. Row’s account provides a Portland dimension), and it seems appropriate to write something about him and not because I knew him or have special insights into his work. I don’t. It’s just that it’s difficult to imagine the last part of the 20th century without him in it. He always seemed so contemporary, ahead of the cultural curve, always seeming smarter in retrospect, once I had a chance to catch up to him. I suppose I’ve always thought of him as the closest thing we have to Duchamp, without the chess but more productive, more curious, more open, more American. So maybe not Duchamp at all, though they both were determined to push life and art together as closely as they could. There was enjoyment involved, actual enjoyment (and I think of Duchamp as merely amused). I don’t know his son Chris, who lives in Portland, especially well, but that’s the impression that I get from him, too. The capacity to enjoy life, to enjoy the creative experience. When we are creating, we are at the center of things: Rauschenberg was always creating, was always at the center of things. My reaction to his work usually unfolded as a series of questions: what is it? what is it saying? why is it important? how did he think of that? And the strange thing is, I could go through the same set of questions multiple times about the same work of art. Which I suppose is just another way of saying that as “alive” as I always thought Rauschenberg was, he doesn’t have to be alive to pose the most puzzling and most important questions. But still…

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

A little Brad Cloepfil wisdom coming your way

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So Monday night I was jammed against a wall at Jimmy Mak’s, scribbling down words of wisdom from Portland’s reigning creative economy king, architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works. I got there a little late: Cloepfil had already been introduced by Randy Gragg, editor of Portland Spaces magazine, the sponsoring organization, and had begun a preparatory slide show of his recent work, most notably his remake of the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle in New York. And the room was completely filled; I was lucky to get my little piece of wall. But even in my scrunched state, I found it difficult to resist Cloepfil. He’s clear-headed, speaks directly, has a dry sense of humor, doesn’t conceal his real feelings (maybe the martinis had something to do with that) and most important, has an obvious passion for Portland, what it is and what it could become.
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He was also comfortable with Gragg’s moderation, maybe because Gragg was a Cloepfil supporter during his years of writing architecture criticism for The Oregonian (full disclosure: where I edited him for several years). It’s hard to get the gist of 90 minutes of talk, so I’ll resort to picking out the most provocative quotes, roughly in the order in which they occurred Monday night.
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Books, General

American Earth: environmental writing for the age(s)

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“He had merely waked up one morning again in the country of the blue and had stayed there with a good conscience and a great idea.”
–Henry James, “The Next Time”
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau arrived on April 22, Earth Day. Edited by Bill McKibben, with a Foreword by Al Gore, and published by Library of America on acid-free paper, it is a volume designed to last for generations. But will the selection from 102 writers have relevance past our own age? Can environmental writing focus the debate on critical issues in such a way that, as Al Gore suggests, “American environmentalism will shape our standing in the world”? Will folks spend $40 to find out? Lugging around this thousand-plus page book will alter my gait, but will it change my “environmental perception”? The answer to that may be weeks away as I dig in. Here, scatter-shot, are my initial reactions.

Most overrated of the 102 writers. Edward Abbey. I know I cut against the grain here. McKibben describes Abbey as funny, crude and politically incorrect, “a master of anarchy and irreverence.” I don’t buy it. He was a misanthrope with a sense of privilege he expected others to respect. To wit, McKibben’s description of a day spent with Abbey at his “beloved” Arches National Monument: “Because he refused to let me pay tribute in the form of a $5 dollar admission fee to park rangers at the gate, we instead drove for miles, took down a fence, and forced my rental car through a series of improbable rutted washes to reach our goal, cackling the whole way.” Why not an all-terrain vehicle?
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Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

Artists in China: Good foreign policy

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A Jeff Koons planted in the yard of the new American embassy in China. And not just a Koons “Tulips” sculpture, either. Work by Maya Lin and Louise Bourgeois will also be there. Robert Rauschenberg and Martin Puryear, too. According to the Art Newspaper, the U.S. government is spending $800,000 on (mostly) commissioned artworks for the embassy, a mix of Chinese and American artists. And for once, I’m totally aligned with American foreign policy. China needs the subversion of Puryear, the gentle suggestions of Lin and maybe even the imaginative flights of Koons, which should fit in well in the go-go Chinese economy. A very small number of people will see them, of course, but it’s the idea of the thing: Art suggests an alternative reality, an alternative foreign policy, a new way of thinking about things. And if I were a Kantian, I might suggest a new Spirit.

Here’s Arthur C. Danto in The Nation, describing the work of Puryear at a MoMA exhibition late last year:

Once in a while, an artist appears whose work has high meaning and great craft but, most important, embodies what Kant, in the dense, sparse pages in which he advances his theory of art, called Spirit. “We say of certain products of which we expect that they should at least in part appear as beautiful art, they are without spirit, though we find nothing to blame in them on the score of taste,” Kant wrote. I’d like to revive the term for critical discourse. Not a single piece here is without spirit, which is in part what makes this exhibition almost uniquely exhilarating.

As the American experiment in democracy has foundered in recent decades (we could argue about this, but let’s just let the assertion stand for now, yes?), American artists have become more acute about it — pointing out failures, suggesting repairs, expressing anger and embarrassment. The most concentrated dose of oppositional politics I get in Portland, is in the art galleries (and maybe you could add the clubs, theaters and independent cinemas). At its best, it achieves the nuance of Puryear, which is what attracts philosopher Danto the most, perhaps, but it is awash in spirit. And I find I need it.

China? Yes, China needs it, too. The Chinese paintings described in the linked article show that artists there are just as sensitive to the human and environmental costs of China’s Market Authoritarianism as our artists are to their situation. And the idea of dropping Francis Bacon paintings into Qatar and raising Guggenheims and Louvres in Abu Dhabi, as we’ve remarked earlier? It will be fun to see the Picassos do their stuff — I suspect that the locals won’t be allowed to see them after a while. Too hot to handle.

Barry Johnson, General

Aesthetic politics: Obama, Dewey, Potter, IFCC

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Last night, watching the primary results roll in (and a strange Gregory Peck movie on Turner Movie Classics), I was struck yet again by the John Dewey in Barack Obama’s victory speech. I know, I know: I’ve managed to locate Dewey in just about everything. I didn’t post about it, but I even detected him in Dark Horse Comics chief Mike Richardson in his speech at the Stumptown Comic Fest. Richardson was terrific, by the way. So maybe I’m monomaniacal on this subject, as obsessive readers of Art Scatter already know.

Dewey and Obama. It has to do with process. Embedded within this speech and all of the others that I’ve heard Obama give (not a VERY large number), he tells you how he thinks he is going to bring about the change he talks about (to health care, foreign policy, education, etc.). He believes that Americans want their problems solved and are “looking for honest answers about the problems we face.” He believes they have the capacity to understand when they hear something that makes sense. He thinks they are ready to sit down and listen. And he is committed to “telling the truth — forcefully, repeatedly, confidently — and by trusting that the American people will embrace the need for change.” Not just the American people, either, because his foreign policy is built on the same process: talk. And he describes what he thinks freezes our process now — “I trust the American people’s desire to no longer be defined by our differences” — and why he thinks we can change, the hopes we have in common. And all of this is straight out of the American Pragmatism playbook.
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General

Art New$: Rothko, Ferriso, financial advice to children

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From time to time, events remind Art Scatter, even resolutely non-commercial as it, that in many precincts of the dominion money is commonly thought to make the world go ’round. It certainly sets the art world to spinning when some falls its way. Two recent examples:

Mystery buyer of record-setting Rothko revealed! Way back last year, when the dollar was still worth something, a painting by Mark Rothko, White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), 1950, sold for $72.8 million at Sotheby’s New York. Thanks to the Art Newspaper, we now know that Emir of Qatar and his wife bought it, along with Francis Bacon’s Study from Innocent X, which fetched a mere $52.7 million. We don’t usually report art auction doings, but in this case, we must point out that Rothko went to Benson High School Lincoln High School in Portland: Study art, kids!

Portland Art museum Director makes big money! D.K. Row’s thoughtful profile of Brian Ferriso contained one little nugget that might have raised some eyebrows — Ferriso makes $295,000 a year, which is still far less than his predecessor John Buchanan was paid. That’s still a lot of pizza, which Ferriso dined on at yummy Hot Lips Pizza when he first moved to town. But it’s on the low end of what museum directors are getting these days — $300,00 to $650,000 at small and mid-sized museums in the Midwest and South, according to artsmanagement.net, which explains the phenomenon. Hey kids, forget the art: take arts management classes instead!

Books, General, Vernon Peterson

Joseph Conrad our contemporary

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“At one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the best way of cheating the time allotted to us whether we want it or not; but now I have done with observation, too.”

“Dreams are madness, my dear. It’s things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.”

— Joseph Conrad, Victory

During this past week of “Mission Accomplished” ironies I have thought often of Joseph Conrad and his novel Victory, written before World War I began but not published until 1915. The book has nothing to do with war; if anything, it is one individual’s personal victory over his own skeptical detachment. In an author’s note Conrad said he had considered altering the title so as not to mislead readers, but decided against it because he thought Victory was the appropriate title for his story, based on “obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity.”

Do we have some bit of that glimmer of “awe and wonder” in our age of “shock and awe”? The one story I read at least once a year is “Heart of Darkness.” “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth,” Marlow begins his tale. And we know what he means. Wherever we are as we read these words we know the green grass or concrete beneath us covers something in the past dark and bloody. A flight of a few hours can take us to one of several of those dark places. Our “here” can become a dark place overnight. No, Marlow says, the conquest of the earth is “not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

What makes a long-dead writer our contemporary? Why do we feel such a direct connection to a nineteenth century Polish exile and sailor who began writing in English, his third language, after he turned forty? Polish drama critic Jan Kott wondered the same about Shakespeare. In Shakespeare Our Contemporary Kott writes that “Shakespeare is like the world, or life itself. Every historical period finds in him what it is looking for and what it wants to see.” And that is not because Shakespeare foretold things to come, but because, whatever the subject of his story, he filled the stage “with his own contemporaries.” Shakespeare aimed for “a reckoning with the real world.” For Kott, in mid-twentieth century Eastern Europe, it was “the struggle for power and mutual slaughter” in Shakespeare’s history plays that struck a chord. Kott also notes that in Conrad’s Lord Jim, the hero owns one book, a one-volume edition of Shakespeare. “Best thing to cheer up a fellow,” says Jim.

Why do Conrad’s novels and stories resonate with us in our time? Simply because conquest–of those inhabiting the earth, and, the earth itself, in all meridians–IS the story of our times. And, because, damned if they don’t cheer up a fellow like me!
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Barry Johnson, General

It’s the end-of-the-week scatter

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By the numbers now:

1. Sister city Oregon has its tweakers, we know this because they steal our sculpture and sell it for scrap. (Well, we know it for all kinds of worse reasons, too.) Is it any consolation that we aren’t alone? The city of Brea, California, which has an active public art program, has had three bronze sculptures stolen in the past 18 months. The Wall Street Journal explains the problem as only the WSJ can (at least until Rupert Murdoch makes mincemeat of it): The main component of bronze is copper; three years ago, the price of copper was $1.50 a pound; today, it goes for $4. Walk off with a 250 pound sculpture as thieves did in Brea, and that’s a pretty nice haul.

A good source for local art theft news? Portland Public Art, a blog that’s a little more various than its title suggests (it takes time out for other sorts of cultural history and is devoted to local indie music), has tracked the theft of Sacagawea in Astoria, for example, and the theft of sculptures by Tom Hardy and Frederic Littman from the Vollum estate. The site also has a rockin’ blogroll, though it’s a little out of date: Art Scatter isn’t on there!

2. Walk in the garden I am still mesmerized by the notion that Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler spent four hours chatting together in the Dutch town of Leyden for the express purpose of improving Gustav’s marital, um, relations with Alma. And that Freud decided that Gustav had a mother fixation. Gustav later said that he didn’t agree with Sigmund, but there had been therapeutic benefits in any case. The story pops up in the entry below. They may have even walked through the botanical gardens, at left!

3. Save the past The Guardian newspaper has championed the preservation of artifacts in Iraq. In the latest development Iraqi officials are calling for a world-wide ban on the sale and purchase of Iraqi antiquities, hoping to remove their commercial value to looters, who have stripped 15 percent of the archaeological sites in the country, according to experts. We’ve talked about this before: Whatever your position on antiquities (should they always be returned their country of origin or not), this sounds like a good idea.

In other artifact news: German police uncovered 1,100 pre-Colombian antiquities — Mayan, Incan and Aztec — in a Munich warehouse. Several South American countries are claiming ownership, though a Costa Rican doctor insists that he obtained them all legally. Masks, gems and sculptures were part of the treasure trove. Der Spiegel has the report.

Note on sources: We visit the ArtJournal site every day, as we’ve said before. These stories were aggregated on the AJ site (which contains an impressive list of blogger/columnists as well).