Category Archives: Visual Art

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

Congratudolences, and other fables of the clear-cut economy

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Update: Photographer David Paul Bayles’ free lecture at 23 Sandy Gallery, discussed below, has been postponed a week. Originally set for this Saturday, April 18, it’s been rescheduled for 6 p.m. next Saturday, April 25, at the gallery, 623 N.E. 23rd Ave., Portland.

Falling Tree #3, copyright David Paul BaylesA person of my close acquaintance (all right, she’s my daughter) has been laid off from a job she detests — indeed, a job which for at least a couple of years she’s harbored elaborate fantasies of quitting in grand-tragedian style. They beat her to the punch. She outlasted many of her friends at this Dilbertian company, who, she says, have created a greeting for new members of the formerly-employed-by-idiots club.

“Congratudolences,” they say, and they mean both halves of the word.

A person of my even closer acquaintance (all right, she’s my wife) is leaving a job she loves, because as a part-time worker she’s in recurring jeopardy of being laid off, and the industry in which she works, while a noble one, seems sadly to be circling the drain of no return.

Tim-berrrrr!

The clear-cut just keeps getting closer, doesn’t it? If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and it smacks you upside the head, are you too dazed to feel it?

For our daughter, the timing isn’t too bad. In fact, it could scarcely be better. In the fall she’s off to seven years of grad school, maybe in Tucson, maybe in Austin, probably in Seattle, from which she’ll emerge with a Ph.D. in Gothic literature and perhaps a whole new set of occupational challenges.

For my wife, who departs her long-loved job with a modest yet under the circumstances generous severance agreement that will keep the wolf from the door for a year even if if she doesn’t find another source of income between now and then, this is what they call an opportunity. For reinvention, for redirection, for a fresh start, for the edge-of-the-seat thrill of making things up as she goes along. And she’s embracing it, almost cheerfully. More control of her schedule. A chance to freelance. Time at the beach. Is this what they mean by the “creative economy”? Among her many skills, which include organizational abilities that leave me fairly gasping for air, my mate is an excellent writer, with a rare and subversive wit. Perhaps that will make her fortune, as it has for us here at Art Scatter’s gilded world headquarters, where we’re envied by all as the Warren Buffetts of the blogosphere.

I think we’ll plant a garden this year. Tomatoes, herbs, lettuce, maybe a few cukes … does asparagus grow OK in a parking strip? Actually, in a weird way, this could be fun.

*******************

I like the intelligence and energy at 23 Sandy Gallery, an eastside Portland gallery I got to know when I wrote a story about its recent exhibit of on-demand fine photography books. The gallery emphasizes photography, hand-made books and graphic arts, all areas that are congenial to my own interests, and owner Laura Russell has a smart eye and an open mind.

This month the gallery is showing photos by David Paul Bayles of trees being felled — that’s his Falling Tree #3, which I shamelessly employed for metaphorical purposes, pictured above. And although I haven’t seen it yet, the show seems to suggest some insights into the world of tough economics as it’s been known in the Pacific Northwest for a long time. Here’s how the gallery’s Web site describes it:

From his early days as a logger in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to his present home on Dreaming Forest Farm outside Corvallis, David Paul Bayles has lived and worked from, with and in the trees. Of his many bodies of work focusing on trees, this group of 12 photographs features trees falling while being logged on one magical morning. Shot with an 8×10 view camera under demanding technical and physical conditions, these images capture the beauty of the forest and the grace and power of a tree in motion. It’s a haunting peek into a dangerous world that few ever experience — a world of rough men and “widow makers.”

Bayles, who considers himself a committed environmentalist (“In a forest I see communities of beings, creating and collaborating in the rich cycle of living and dying,” he says), speaks at the gallery at 5 p.m. April 18, and it could be well worth a visit.

The gallery is also featuring some hand-made, collage style books by Linda Welch that look bright enough to infuse a little happiness into a day dampened by the drizzle of the dismal science.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Visual Art

Monday scatter: Ballet blues, theater dreams, Gypsy Rose Lee

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Update: After posting this I ran into Jon Ulsh, OBT’s executive director, who pointed out that OBT isn’t cutting all live music: There’ll be some, but not the full orchestra. That’s an important distinction. Even a pair of pianists can make a huge difference, as OBT’s recent premiere of Christopher Stowell’s version of The Rite of Spring showed so satisfyingly. Cutting the full orchestra, Ulsh said, saved $300,000. That still left $1.7 million to cut elsewhere. After explaining the cuts, he excused himself. “I’ve got to go raise some money,” he said.

OBT Nutcracker, 2007The news today isn’t good, and it isn’t unexpected: Oregon Ballet Theatre, faced with tumbling income because its ordinary donors don’t have the money to give anymore, is slashing its budget by 28 percent. That’s an overnight cut from $6.7 million to $4.8 million, as Grant Butler reports in The Oregonian.

These are the times we live in, and Scatter partner Barry Johnson talks about their effect on the city’s arts scene in his Portland Arts Watch column this morning on The Oregonian’s Web site, Oregon Live.

Oregon Ballet Theatre is very good: This rising company has been making a genuine mark nationally. But in today’s shell-shocked economy it’s not enough to be good. You also have to have a cushion. And that, OBT does not have. It has no endowment, and its always-thin budget is brittle to the point of breaking. Butler reports that the number of full-time dancers will drop from 28 to 25, which isn’t precipitous, although none of these dancers is exactly striking it rich, and three more high-quality artists will now be out of work.

As troubling from an artistic view is the sacrifice of live music for at least the next season. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big deal — maybe the world of contemporary dance has got you used to the idea of canned music — but they call it “canned” for a reason: It’s prepackaged, unchanging, from a dancer’s view metronomic, or at least predictable: It doesn’t have the edge that live musicians supply. Ballet thrives in the thrilling uncertainty of the moment, when conductor and musicians and dancers all respond to the others in real time and everyone’s attention is heightened. Great ballet requires live musicians. Now, the dozens of talented musicians who make up this orchestra are out of a job, too.

Live music, including full orchestration, has been one of the prime aspirations and foundations of Christopher Stowell’s vision for this company since he took over as artistic director. I’m sure he hasn’t changed that determination. But he’s had to put it on hold. Sometimes being able to establish a holding pattern is a triumph. At least for now, this is putting the brakes on a company that was going places. Now, it’s hunker down and survive.

*****

If a recession or a depression is something that we think ourselves into, maybe it’s something we think ourselves out of, too. For years it’s been obvious that both Oregon Ballet Theatre and Portland Opera need a better place to perform. Although both dip occasionally into the 900-seat Newmark Theatre, home base for both companies is the cavernous, 3,000-seat Keller Auditorium, a hall that puts performers and audiences alike at a disadvantage. It’s too big; it swallows sight and sound.

Over the past year I’ve talked a few times unofficially with the ballet’s Stowell and Portland Opera’s general dirctor, Christopher Mattaliano, about the possibilities of creating a new theater for the two companies to share — something actually designed for the art forms rather than as an all-purpose barn, which is essentially what Keller Auditorium is. Stowell and Mattaliano happen to get along very well, and for the long-term health of both companies, both men would love to see this happen.

A new hall would be as intimate as the economics of the business would allow it to be — somewhere between 1,400 and 2,400 seats, and if that seems like a wide range, it is: There’s plenty of room for honing this dream. It could also encourage other partnerships: the development of a full-time orchestra for the ballet and opera to share; combined marketing; even (and this last part is me speaking, not Stowell or Mattaliano) combined administrative and fund-raising services.

Is this a crazy time to be bringing this sort of thing up? Yes, and no. Obviously nobody’s going to start a bricks-and-mortar campaign now, with the economy circling into the sewer. Portland Center Stage is still roughly 9 million bucks short of paying off its move to the Armory, for crying out loud, and the meter seems stuck on that one.

But I keep remembering that Portland voters approved construction of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts in the midst of the city’s last bad recession, in the early 1980s, when the city’s and state’s economies weren’t as diverse as they are now. Sometimes people think biggest when things look the worst. And I know that if you don’t have goals even in the toughest of times, you won’t get anywhere. Call this one a dream deferred — temporarily.

*****

Gypsy Rose Lee, 1956/Wikimedia CommonsOn a lighter note, a trip to North Portland for a puppet show got me thinking about the great ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee, she of the most celebrated stage mom in show business. (That would be Momma Rose, in the musical Gypsy.) You can see the results of my puppet adventures, as related in Monday’s Oregonian, here.

The puppet company Night Shade was performing at Disjecta, the warehouse-like arts space in the shadow of the Paul Bunyan statue that marks the rapidly reviving Kenton district (a revival sparked partly by the Interstate MAX light-rail line). The district does have its holdovers, which is part of its charm, and one of them is a strip club across from Disjecta called the Dancin’ Bare.

Here’s what the club’s reader board said:

Amature Night

Hot Girls Cold Beer

Well, Gypsy Rose Lee was a literary-minded stripper (note her firm familiarity with the keyboard in the photo) and I can’t imagine that in the heyday of burlesque she’d have put up with a misspelling as glaring as that, any more than she’d have put up with any amateurs horning in on her profession.

And when Gypsy Rose danced, she danced to live music.

*****

Quick links: I’ve also been hitting the galleries lately, and have a couple of reviews in this morning’s Oregonian. The print-edition reviews are briefs. You can find the longer versions online at Oregon Live:

— Photographer Paul Dahlquist’s 80th-birthday show at Gallery 114, and photos by Terry Toedtemeier from the 1970s, at Blue Sky. Review here.

— Glass art by Steve Klein and Michael Rogers at Bullseye Gallery. Review here.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

The craft of merging: Thoughts on a museum in flux

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Tip Toland at Bellevue Arts Museum

What is craft? What is art? What is folk art? Outsider art? Contemporary art?

Are the distinctions real? Do they matter, or are they intellectual games people play, rococo road blocks in the path of direct emotional response to aesthetic objects?

Oh — and what’s a museum supposed to be, anyway?

Dumb questions, maybe. Or, as I prefer to think, basic questions — and sometimes, when you’re staring a big change in the face, basic questions are very good things to ask.

Here’s another one: How many museums does a city need to have a healthy critical mass?

Like a lot of people, I’ve been pondering the impending takeover of Portland’s financially sinking Museum of Contemporary Craft by the expansion-minded Pacific Northwest College of Art, a merger that might become final next month. The question at this point is no longer, “Is this a good idea?”. Barring the sudden swooping down from the heavens of a previously unsuspected angel, some sort of merger seems necessary if the museum is to survive, and this is the one that’s been worked out. So the question now is, “How will this work to the best long-term advantage of both institutions?”

Continue reading The craft of merging: Thoughts on a museum in flux →

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General, Theater, Visual Art

Scatter links: Yes, we still cover actual art

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The Importance of Being Earnest/PCS/OWEN CAREY

I’ve been writing so much about art politics lately, some of you might have forgot that Art Scatter also writes about arts and culture. That’s our main goal, actually. It’s just that all this politics stuff keeps happening.

In fact, between bouts with the Oregon Legislature (which didn’t seem to notice I was in the ring) I’ve been writing a fair amount about exhibits and performances. But not here — mostly for The Oregonian. So in lieu of writing something fresh (I’m a little tired, and I have other assignments due) I’m going to link to some of those stories.

First, though, a tip of the Scatter hat to Owen Carey, one of the unsung heroes of Portland’s performance scene, whose photographs have been documenting the movable feast of the city’s theater scene for decades. It’s more than documentation, really: It’s collaboration, and a distinct artistic contribution on its own. Like a great dance photographer — Lois Greenfield, for instance — Owen has the gift of disappearing even as he captures the perfect moment of movement that defines the style and liveness of a show. The photo above, from Portland Center Stage‘s current production of The Importance of Being Earnest, is a brilliant case in point: the airiness, the bubbles, the froth of the tea as it flies from the mouth of Gwendolen (Kate MacCluggage) while Cecily (Nikki Coble) sips daintily away, perfectly encapsulates the mood of Oscar Wilde’s comedy. If only the production had done the same!

Now, on to those links:

What if they gave a Depression and there weren’t any artists to record it? From Monday’s Oregonian, this piece about a small exhibit at the Portland Art Museum of WPA and other national arts program works from the 1930s and early ’40s, along with some comparisons to the Madame de Pompadour special exhibition and a bit on some paintings in the museum’s permanent collection by some of the Pompadour artists. The online caption, by the way, is wrong: That’s not a Joseph Stella, it’s a Maude Kerns.

Hayley Barker at The Art GymNeil Simon, American comedian: Also from Monday’s Oregonian (the full review ran online; a shortened version ran in print) is this look at Profile Theatre‘s production of Simon’s 1992 play Jake’s Women, a morose comedy about a guy whose marriage is falling apart — but also a play with a fascinating, Pirandellian subtext about the nature of writing and observation. Simon argues, therefore he is.

In the deep dark wood something wild and woolly waits: From last Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, this review of a couple of linked exhibits at The Art Gym — Wolves and Urchins, with work by Wendy Given, Hayley Barker and Anne Mathern (that’s Barker’s elegantly hideous monster in the illustration to the side, and Mathern’s wide-eyed photograph at bottom); plus Warlord Sun King: The Genesis of Eco-Baroque, a collaboration by Marne Lucas and Bruce Conkle.

The world is flat, and other artistic fables: From last Monday’s Oregonian, this review of Mixografia, an expansive exhibit at the Portland Art Museum of prints from the Los Angeles press and graphic arts center that’s created a name for itself by coming up with a technique to create prints that have three dimensions — in other words, multiples with height and depth. Nice trick — and artists from Ed Ruscha to Helen Frankenthaler to Louise Bourgeois and even sculptor George Segal have taken advantage of it.

He’s a real nowhere man, living in a nowhere land: Isn’t he a bit like you and me? Finally, from the Feb. 13 A&E, this essay about the planning disasters of our urban edges, prompted by a viewing of the architectural constructs of artists Jesse Durost and John Sisley at Fourteen30 Contemporary gallery, along with a consideration of the imaginative work of architect Robert Harvey Oshatz through the prism of an exhibition at the AIA Gallery. A bit of a hybrid piece of writing; maybe even a leap too far. That’s Scattering, friends.

Anne Mathern at The Art Gym

Barry Johnson, Books, Cities, Dance, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Please Coraline, save the economy!

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The Warhol EconomyAfter the dust settles, the tsunami recedes or the cookie crumbles, depending on your metaphor of choice for our present economic condition, who will be left standing? More specifically, what regions of the country can expect to rebound quickly and which ones are headed for even deeper trouble?

That’s the provocative topic of Richard Florida’s Atlantic Monthly essay this month, which is the starting point for my column in this Monday’s newspaper. It’s long (Florida’s article, not my column!). And it contains some predictions of doom for certain cities and states that must give them pause. For the record, he expects the Pacific Northwest, from Vancouver, B.C., to Eugene, to do just fine — he jumped on our bandwagon in his book “The Rise of the Creative Class” way back in 2002, after all. He doesn’t think the same for Phoenix, Cleveland and Detroit.

Early in that article, Florida mentions Elizabeth Currid’s book, “The Warhol Economy,” as he explains why he thinks New York City, even though the hit it has taken from the collapse of the financial sector is massive, will continue to thrive. Currid, who teaches at USC, did a “case study” of the creative class in New York, specifically the music, fashion and art scenes, and found that these interwoven “industries” were 1) far more important to the city’s economic health than commonly understood, and 2) when linked to the national media outlets and the rest of the city’s creative economy of designers, theater, and the other arts, were absolutely crucial to the city’s identity as an international center.
Continue reading Please Coraline, save the economy! →

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Hard, hard times all around — look at that art before you hit the ground

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Krider National Youth Admininistration

OK, so we’ve had a New Deal. Time for a New New Deal.

And time to look back for inspiration at the old New Deal, which is exactly what the Smithsonian Institution is doing, as reported by the online magazine Art Knowledge News. 1934: A New Deal for Artists will run Feb. 27 through Jan. 3, 2010 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. D.C.

Here’s part of what the museum has to say about the show:

“As the Smithsonian American Art Museum prepares to open 1934: A New Deal for Artists, the nation is engaged in a great discussion about how to restore confidence during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “One contentious issue is whether and how cultural initiatives should play a role in government recovery efforts. This exhibition, which focuses on the first U.S. government program ever to provide direct support for artists, is relevant to that discussion. The legacy of New Deal cultural programs seems indisputable today as we cherish and mine the resources these ‘workers’ left us.”

1934: A New Deal for Artists celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Public Works of Art Program by drawing on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s unparalleled collection of vibrant paintings created for the program. The 56 paintings in the exhibition are a lasting visual record of America at a specific moment in time. George Gurney, deputy chief curator, organized the exhibition with Ann Prentice Wagner, curatorial associate.

Federal officials in the 1930s understood how essential art was to sustaining America’s spirit. During the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration created the Public Works of Art Program, which lasted only six months from mid-December 1933 to June 1934. The purpose of the program was to alleviate the distress of professional, unemployed American artists by paying them to produce artwork that could be used to embellish public buildings. The program was administered under the Treasury Department by art professionals in 16 different regions of the country.

Artists from across the United States who participated in the program were encouraged to depict “the American Scene,” but they were allowed to interpret this idea freely. They painted regional, recognizable subjects—ranging from portraits to cityscapes and images of city life to landscapes and depictions of rural life—that reminded the public of quintessential American values such as hard work, community and optimism. These artworks, which were displayed in schools, libraries, post offices, museums and government buildings, vividly capture the realities and ideals of Depression-era America.

Looking back, the stress on “the American Scene” was too jingoistic, and while the art from this program is fascinating as a snapshot in time, much of it suffers from the constraints of uplift laid on the artists. We can do better with the New New Deal — allowing our artists more freedom in their efforts to interpret the times we live in, without the paternalistic guiding hand. But the time is now: Let’s get them to work.

General, Vernon Peterson, Visual Art

What kind of bird are you? Looking at Max Ernst

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ernst49
“Surrealism and Painting” Max Ernst (1942)

I celebrated Scatter birthday by revisiting the Menil Collection in Houston, the source for my posts last year on the extraordinary art collection amassed by two Europeans, John and Dominique de Menil, who brought their oil business and modern art collection to America at the beginning of World War II. Located in a park-like complex that is surrounded by a neighborhood of modest bungalows, the Collection of more than 16,000 pieces includes a gallery devoted to Surrealism and offers individual shows, such as last year’s idiosyncratic “How Artist’s Draw,” curated by Bernice Rose.

Last week I spent two days at the Menil, most of it wandering through the gallery housing “Max Ernst in the Garden of Nymph Ancolie,” then in its last two days. The show focused mostly on the evolution of Max Ernst’s themes and motifs between the two World Wars, culminating with a view of a huge (nearly 14 x 18 feet) oil on plaster mural he produced for a Zurich nightclub, which has been transferred to plywood panels and restored.

51xkfrth46l__sl500_aa240_Surrealism and Ernst are the Collection’s core. The de Menils met Max Ernst (1891-1976) in Europe before World War II and became unalterably infected with his Surrealist vision. The show included a new film about the installation of a 1973 Ernst exhibit at nearby Rice University, supervised by Dominique de Menil. The film, “Max Ernst Hanging,” was produced by Francois de Menil and John de Menil, son and grandson of the de Menils, and features vintage black and white footage of Dominique de Menil organizing the show, as well as incredible coverage of Ernst, then in his early eighties, walking through the space while the exhibit is being hung, looking at pieces he hadn’t seen in years, and then mingling with Houston’s art patrons during the opening. Many of the pieces in the 1973 exhibit were on view in the current show. (Olga’s Gallery is a great place to get a quick look at a cross-section of Ernst’s work.) The experience sparked a few reflections.

“What kind of bird are you?” (A question from a patron at the 1973 opening in “Max Ernst Hanging.”) A good question. Ernst and his work are filled with birds, so much so that the painter adopted an alter-ego, “Loplop,” a phoenix-like, anthropomorphic bird that is at once image and observer in his work, and appeared again and again in his paintings and sculpture. Birds that are cut-out drawings or photographs used in collages, dotted-line or cartoonish birds in cages lightly painted on the surface of otherwise detailed paintings, sculptured birds, and strange biomorphic creatures that share bird and human and even vegetal and insect forms and characteristics. At times the birds seem trapped and isolated, at other times spiritual and free, and then, as in, “Surrealism and Painting,” shown above, the bird-human form – is it one figure or are there three? – suggesting an almost sentimental notion of family. It is serene, secure and a bit claustrophobic. But birds. Birds everywhere.
Continue reading What kind of bird are you? Looking at Max Ernst →

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Dance, Environment, Food, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Tom Coburn and his wilderness of ideas

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UPDATE, 1:55 p.m. Friday, Feb. 6: MISCHIEF WINS, “SMALL POTATOES” LOSE: I didn’t think he could do it, but he did. Today the U.S. Senate, by a ridiculous 73-24 vote, passed Sen. Tom Coburn’s amendment to the economic stimulus bill to bar anything with even the faintest whiff of culture from getting any stimulus money. Here’s the requisite passage from Congressional Quarterly:

“Lawmakers also voted 73-24 to adopt a Tom Coburn , R-Okla., amendment to place tighter restrictions facilities that can be built with money from the bill. The Coburn amendment would bar spending on casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses, swimming pools, stadiums, community parks, museums, theaters, art centers, and highway beautification projects.

“That’s broader than prohibition in the House-passed bill, which applied only to casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses and swimming pools.”


The vote is astonishing, and preposterous, and I can only guess that the amendment was passed with so little thought or debate simply because the Senate is in a pedal-to-the-metal rush to get this thing off the assembly line and onto the streets. Coburn may be a fool, but he’s a canny fool — he knows how the system works, and he knows how and when to manipulate it. This ugly bit of mischief could still disappear from the final bill, of course, but now it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of ruckus-raising. It’s officially time to get mad, get on the horn, bug your congressional delegation and get something done about this.

Timberline Lodge, funded by the WPA/Wikimedia Commons

News flashes from all sorts of fronts today about the latest Molotov cocktail from Sen. Tom Coburn, the Republican from Oklahoma known for his quixotic attempts to deliver America from the clutches of common sense. It was Coburn, Oregonians might recall, whose threat of filibuster scuttled last year’s otherwise certain passage of the Lewis & Clark Mount Hood Wilderness Act. That act finally passed the Senate last month, as part of a broader wilderness bill, on a 73-21 vote — over Coburn’s objections.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OklahomaThis time out Coburn’s tackling the omnibus economic bailout plan — surely a target for some tough critical thinking: How many Dutch boys with their fingers in the dike does it take to keep the thing from bursting, anyway? Unfortunately, it’s not just Coburn’s finger that’s all wet. His Amendment No. 175 to the economic stimulus bill is tough, and it’s critical. But it’s utterly lacking in thinking.

Here’s how Coburn proposes to guard your pocketbook:

“None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, arts center, or highway beautification project, including renovation, remodeling, construction, salaries, furniture, zero-gravity chairs, big screen televisions, beautification, rotating pastel lights, and dry heat saunas.”


Note that. No money for museums, theaters, arts centers, aquariums, zoos, highway beautification, apparently any sort of beautification at all. I’m not really sure what a rotating pastel light is, but none of that, either. Fortunately I don’t golf. But I do like a good sauna now and again.

It’s easy to laugh this off as just another crackpot amendment that’s going nowhere — except that Coburn has a history of making this sort of thing stick, at least temporarily. I doubt it’ll work this time, because with the Democratic gains in the Senate from the last election he’s lost his biggest tool, which was his ability to forestall a 60 percent Senate vote to halt filibuster. His power has always been the power to make mischief, not the power to actually create anything.

Still, it’s a very good idea to call your senators (the Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121) or zip off an email to them. If you live in Oregon, that means Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley. If you live in Washington, it means Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray. If you live in another state, check here for contacts. The danger isn’t that anywhere near a majority of senators agree with Coburn. The danger is that, in their eagerness to get some sort of broad-stroke stimulus package passed as quickly as possible, a majority will be willing to horse-trade away this “small potatoes” stuff. In D.C., that’s how mischief’s made.

It seems silly to even have to bring it up, but here goes: Museums and theaters and aquariums are part of the economy, too. And they’re a potentially multiple-payoff part of the economy. They don’t just create jobs for themselves, they feed tourism, hospitality, construction (which means such things as logging and mining and steelmaking). Increasingly, in our information-driven society, the arts play a big role in driving entire regional economies: People move to cities specifically for their arts scenes. That’s certainly true of Portland. Oh: And all that “beautification”? It creates good, lasting things. The picture at the top of this post is of Timberline Lodge. It’s on Mt. Hood, and it was built during the Great Depression as a project of the federal government’s Works Progress Administration.

The WPA was good to the arts, and in return the arts were good to America. From murals in small-town post offices to architectural treasures like Timberline Lodge to theater and dance and music projects to photographic documentation of the Depression to the wonderful, sadly unfinished, collection of writings about American foodways, our previous mass economic stimulus package had the good sense to recognize that an “economy” is only a financial blueprint of a whole society.

Am I nervous about the economic stimulus plan? You bet. But I’m a lot more nervous about the Tom Coburns of the world than I am about helping a museum keep from falling into the abyss of economic failure. Keeping our shared culture alive, I’m confident, is a very good idea.

Barry Johnson, Books, General, Visual Art

Arts management ideas from Focke and Weinstein

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Dennis Cunningham's Willamette White Sturgeon. He was a Mississippi Mud artist. OK, this one’s a little long, but it tries to get at some important issues of how we organize ourselves, operate in the world, through the lens of two “artist managers,” Seattle’s Anne Focke and the late Joel Weinstein.

I was rummaging around the Matthew Stadler-edited The Back Room: An Anthology, and after I’d found what I was looking for (and it really wasn’t), I flipped to Anne Focke’s essay “A Pragmatic Response to Real Circumstances”. Which turned out to be what I should have been looking for all along — the tao of managing an arts organization artfully.
Continue reading Arts management ideas from Focke and Weinstein →

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Film, General, Language, Music, Theater, Visual Art

From Lar to PAW: a Monday link and scatter

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Lar Lubovich Dance Company. Photo: ROSEThings have been busy here at Scatter Central the last few days; so busy that we haven’t had a chance to post since we left poor Jean-Paul Belmondo in the clutches of all
those nasty French critics. Never mind, Jean-Paul. As far as we’re concerned here on our far side of the puddle, you’ll always throw a mean left hook.

So, time for a little update.

Lar Lubovitch, a genuine. living and working part of American dance history, shows up Wednesday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, and the White Bird dance series reports it still has good tickets available. The Lubovitch company hasn’t toured in 10 years, and it’s been a good deal longer than that since it’s been in Portland, so this is a good opportunity. The program looks intriguing, and all of the dances are relatively recent: last year’s Jangle, Four Hungarian Dances, set to Bela Bartok’s Rhapsodies #1 and #2 for Violin and Piano; 2000’s Men’s Stories, A Concerto in Ruins, with audio collage and original score by Scott Marshall; and 2007’s Dvorak Serenade, set to Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade in E Major. Plus, Lubovitch will be on hand for a question and answer session after the show.

White Bird has some deals on tickets, including 30-buck Level 3 seats, in addition to its usual student/senior rush tickets two hours before the 7:30 curtain. Details here.

mandy_greer_dare_alla_luce_05Over at his alternate-universe home, Portland Arts Watch (or PAW, as we like to call it), Scatter impresario Barry Johnson has been following the proposed merger between two Portland art stalwarts: the financially struggling Museum of Contemporary Craft and the recently vigorous Pacific Northwest College of Art. Good idea? Bad idea? Necessary idea? In his Monday column in The Oregonian and on Oregon Live, Barry comes down with a case of cautious optimism. Read it here.

And speaking of synchronicity (we were, weren’t we?) my review of the craft museum’s two newest exhibits, by installation artist Mandy Greer and textile artist Darrel Morris, will run on Friday, Jan. 30, in The Oregonian’s A&E section and on Oregon Live. Look for it then.

Did we say alternate-universe homes? We’re embarrassed to reveal that only recently have we discovered the second virtual home of one of our best online friends, the ubiquitous and perspicacious Mighty Toy Cannon of the invaluable Portland arts and culture site Culture Shock. Seems MTC also maintains a fascinating, if less regular, music site called, appropriately, Mighty Toy Cannon. From Nick Lowe and Richard Fontaine to Ruth Brown and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, MTC takes a welcome and refreshing curatorial approach to the wonders of the YouTube musical world. Give it a look, and a listen.

Henry James, by John Singer Sargent, 1913Meanwhile, who’d have guessed that the path to understanding Henry James runs through William Shakespeare’s most infamous stage direction? (That’s “exuent, pursued by a bear,” from The Winter’s Tale, by the way.) The grapevine that slithers through our mutual abode tells us that Part Five of Laura Grimes’ running riff on all things Jamesean, coming Sunday, Feb. 1, in The Oregonian’s books pages and on Oregon Live, is going to be a doozy, complete with Shakespearean bear. In yesterday’s Part Four, Grimes — Friend and Supporter of Art Scatter First Class — gets caught up in a neighborhood book group and unveils a Henry James contest, complete with a prize. Read it here.

Portland’s stages have been simply aburst with fresh new work, thanks to the citywide Fertile Ground festival of new plays. At The Oregonian, Scatter friend Marty Hughley kept up with some of the most recent action in Monday’s paper: Read it here.

Scatter’s been hitting the festival, too. We’ve already run our report on Apollo and Vitriol and Violets. And my review of Northwest Children’s Theater and School‘s new jazz version of Alice in Wonderland also ran in Monday’s Oregonian; read it here.

reGeneration: 50 photographers of Tomorrow, a traveling exhibit that’s just landed in the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, is a chilly but pretty darned fascinating look at 50 young photographers worldwide whose work, the shows’s curators believe, will still be vital and important in the year 2025. My review ran in brief in Monday’s Oregonian; for the much more complete version, see it on Oregon Live here.

Finally, we’ve been amused and bemused by the misadventures of operatic tenor Jon Villars, who walked off the stage during a dress rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, reportedly because he didn’t like the conductor’s tempo. Here at Art Scatter, we confess to skipping out on a show early a time or two over the years, too. But not when we were part of the cast.