Category Archives: Visual Art

Bob Hicks, Dance, Environment, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

A bridge too far: Connecting Portland’s performance halls

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“While you’re catching up on weekend papers,” our blogging compatriot Mighty Toy Cannon of Culture Shock writes, “I’d be interested in your comments on the Oregonian editorial regarding the renovation of the Schnitz and the possible enclosure of the Main Street Plaza (Saturday, August 30).”

As Mighty Toy points out, the editorial got lost not only by running on a Saturday but also because it was buried beneath the flurry of news about vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin (pre-grandma version) — and wasn’t that an artfully worded baby announcement, by the way.

The editorial’s gist is this: Even though most Portlanders could care less about the symphony and opera and ballet, these things are important to our economy and our sense of civic pride. The city’s most prominent performance space, downtown’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, is in need of big fixes — at least $10 million, maybe a lot more — partly because its acoustics are subpar, and it’s used 60 percent of the time by the Oregon Symphony, a group for which acoustics are exceedingly important.

So far so good. But then the editorial gets down to what really seems to excite its author: the possibility of reviving the idea of some sort of bridge between the Schnitz and the theater building that houses the Newmark and Dolores Winningstad theaters right across Main Street. It’s an idea that was part of the original 1982 blueprints for the Portland Center for the Performing Arts but was scrapped for financial reasons. And it would include permanently blocking off Main between Broadway and Park Avenue to create a plaza that would connect the two buildings.

“In the offing now,” the editorialist writes, “is an opportunity to finally connect the two buildings, to animate their too-often-dormant lobbies, to cleverly create downtown’s long-sought ‘gateway’ to its cultural district.”

OK, first a little history. When the performing arts center was being planned in the early 1980s, it was all to be built on land donated by Evans Products adjacent to Keller Auditorium, which was then known as Civic Auditorium. That plan would have created a Portland version of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts — an arts cluster near downtown but not quite at its center. And except for the old Civic, all the halls would be built new, so the acoustics and seating would be up-to-date and you wouldn’t run into any of the surprises and compromises that go along with historical renovation. (The Schnitz at the time was known as the Paramount, and was a shabby onetime vaudeville and movie house that was being used for rock ‘n’ roll concerts.)

But downtown business and political interests pushed through a swap so the new center would be housed instead along a stretch of Broadway that had become run-down, creating an economic spur to help the center of the city out of its recession doldrums. The Paramount, with all of its problems, became the key player in the switch, and the city took over the block across from Main to build its two smaller theater spaces. Economically, the plan worked like a dream (for the business district, at least: the arts center itself, and the companies that used it, still suffer because the center’s financial structure covered only the costs of construction, with no regard for maintenance or operation).

Flash forward to 2008 and the latest push to create a “gateway” to the cultural district, which also includes the Oregon Historical Society and the Portland Art Museum along the South Park Blocks. And forget for the moment the nasty realities about actually funding any sort of project, because that’s a subject far too complex for this post. As the Oregonian editorial stresses, it would require plenty of individual, corporate and foundation support in addition to tax money.

Continue reading A bridge too far: Connecting Portland’s performance halls →

Bob Hicks, Dance, Film, Food, General, Music, Visual Art

Pre-Labor Day Scatter: Red shoes, hot peppers, art scams

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So here it is just hours before Labor Day (to be celebrated by much of America by a trip to the mall, where many people will be working for minimum wage or a skoosh over it) and this corner of Art Scatter is thinking about a few things.

Such as Josh White, who is playing on the stereo (we reveal our age by using such an antiquated term), who has just finished singing and playing “Strange Fruit” (if you think Biilie Holiday‘s astonishing version is the whole story, give this one a listen) and has moved on through his hilarious, haunting “One Meat Ball” and is now into his definitive “St. Louis Blues” and — hold it — a killer “Careless Love.”

And Art Scatter’s wife’s amazing ability with a dirty martini.

And the hot peppers of Hatch, New Mexico, where his 92-year-old father lived for two years in the 1920s, and one of which has entered a soup still simmering on the Art Scatter stove, and which (the town, not the pepper) this corner of Art Scatter did not visit on a recent eight-day trip to Santa Fe and environs, which experiences this corner of Art Scatter will discuss shortly. (A shout-out to Southwest Airlines, perhaps the last of the decent air carriers.)

And now Josh White is singing “Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin’ Bed,” and this corner of Art Scatter could almost die happy.

But not before recommending a few things.

Such as Alistair MacAulay’s excellent revisit to the 1948 Michael Powell/Emeric Pessenburger movie The Red Shoes, which Friend of Art Scatter First Class Martha Ullman West has recently promoted as one of the greatest movies of all time. If you’ve done what we often do on holiday weekends and let your newspaper sit untouched, do pick up your Sunday New York Times.

You’ll also find in your Sunday Times a wonderful story by J.D. Biersdorfer about a late 18th century art scam that pulled in the American painter Benjamin West and eventually other leading painters with its promise of revealing the secrets of the great Venetian ancients. It was, of course, a hoax, of P.T. Barnum proportions. A ruefully delightful tale.

Finally, check out Friend of Art Scatter D.K. Row’s challenge to the Portland art scene in the Sunday Oregonian, a piece bemoaning the city’s lack of a contemporary art center to goose the city’s art scene and push it into the national mainstream. We couldn’t agree more. The city that thinks it’s cool has a long way to go, and it’s lucky it has a few people like Row to speak the truth to its press-ageantry-lulled sense of self-satisfaction.

Happy Labor Day!

Barry Johnson, Visual Art

Beach scatter: final chapter

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Nose pressed to the glass, we watch mist clouds roll wetly off the Pacific onto the beach and when we get to the point of exposing our own flesh to the elements — mostly water in various incarnations and sand — we remark that this feels like the memory of an amniotic bath, except that it’s cool not warm, even though we know that we can’t have this memory, couldn’t possibly, though we don’t abandon it because we like the metaphor, the need it expresses and our need to express it.

The visual “play” outside that window all week is why we come, every bit as much as entering those scenes ourselves, nudging long strands of kelp and other sea “trash” left at high tide or feeling that chilly north Pacific nipping at our ankles and, watch out, knees and thighs. Everyone who comes here is affected about the same way, yes? Sky, surf, land in perpetual rearrangement, sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic, three elastic elements readjusting to each other. You don’t have to watch every second, that’s not necessary — but every short while you look up and locate the difference, how the pattern has changed.

I’m not sure what this has to do with Titian, or specifically the two Titians that the 7th Duke of Sutherland (only seven?) is hoping to sell to “balance his portfolio.” These are great paintings, no doubt, and the Duke is willing to sell them to the UK’s National Gallery for one-third the price they would likely bring at auction, which is estimated to be 300 million pounds. And the scrambling for money and the gnashing of teeth over the public interest in keeping the paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland, where they have lived since 1945, has been intense and reminiscent of Philadelphia’s citywide debate over the future of Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic, which was headed to Arkansas until $68 million was raised to keep it where it was.
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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?

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Warhol at Maryhill: Putting on a good face

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High above the windy hollow of the Columbia River Gorge, Sitting Bull and Geronimo and Gen. George Armstrong Custer seem right at home.

And Andy Warhol? Surprisingly, him, too.

Warhol, the epitome of a certain sort of New York sophistication — a self-created phenomenon of the 20th century, pointing the way to the 21st — is the focus of a new show in the upper galleries of the Maryhill Museum of Art, “Andy Warhol and Other Famous Faces,” assembled from the contemporary print collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation.

The exhibit, with images mostly by Warhol plus a sprinkling of supporting pieces by the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Red Grooms, Chuck Close, Jasper Johns and Jeff Koons, proves once again what has become a mass-culture commonplace: In a world of celebrity-soaked informational sameness, we are all from Manhattan, all from Iowa, all from the sparse deserts of the West. Red state or blue, right wing or left, Elvis and Marilyn and Campbell’s Tomato Soup have brought us together and made us alike — or at least, given us the same pop-cultural preoccupations.

Maryhill, one of the unlikeliest of American art museums, sits in a concrete castle on a high bluff on the Washington side of the Columbia River, about 100 miles east of Portland and well on the way to desert country: It’s practice territory for the Middle of Nowhere. The fortress was built as his residence by the visionary road engineer and agricultural utopian Sam Hill. (His Stonehenge replica, a World Wat I memorial, is nearby, and the next time you head for Vancouver, British Columbia, you should stop on the border at Peace Arch Park to take in another of his monuments, the International Peace Arch, which sits with one foot in Blaine, Washington, and the other in Surrey on the Canadian side. Both monuments are as clean-lined and populist as any of Warhol’s works, and a good deal more interactive.)

Hill’s mansion was transformed into a museum by three of his high-powered women friends, including Marie, Queen of Romania, who was related to the royal houses of both England and Russia. As a result its collections are heavy in memorabilia of the good queen’s life (including some furniture she designed), plus objects related to another benefactress, the great dancer Loie Fuller; a goodly amount of Rodin; a good sampling of Native American art; many fine Russian Orthodox icons; quirky attractions such as the French high-fashion stage scenes of Theatre de la Mode (even Jean Cocteau took part in this immediately post-World War II artistic attempt to give French haute couture a sorely needed economic kick-start); and an amusing, sometimes amazing sampling of international chess sets.

But the museum’s permanent fine-art holdings are largely romantic landscape, plus Victorian and American realist paintings. As a result, it relies largely on temporary shows for things a little closer to modern times.

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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, 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.
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Barry Johnson, General, Music, Visual Art

Back to the caves for some paleolithic multi-media

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Art Scatter has declared its keen interest in Cave Doings in the past. What attracts us? Maybe it’s just that we see ourselves. Not ourselves specifically, of course, not with our sense of direction, not rooting around in the back of a cave where carbon dioxide levels are high enough to induce hallucinations and strange blind fish look up at us from cold, mineral drenched water, perhaps attracted by the pungent aroma of our dingy torches. Do fish smell? I mean with their own olfactory devices? I digress.

Those cave people, homo sapiens, were us, at least in terms of the intelligence they brought to bear on their environments. I haven’t ever seen any studies that suggest the human brain has evolved dramatically during the past 50,000 years or so. If you have, please let me know, because that would be interesting, too. So, their brains were operating in the world like ours, except without the same sort of technology, which has “evolved” over time. What we can piece together of their creativity in the face of the universe can’t help but be interesting in a deep way.

So we are preambling toward something — Judith Thurman’s story on cave art in The New Yorker. Thurman’s story examines a couple of recent books on cave painting, tests their propositions with experts studying the caves on the ground and then eyeballs those paintings itself (or rather herself). In her lead-in she cites the famous Picasso observation about the Lascaux paintings, reported by his guide: “They’ve discovered everything.” The list of painting “advances” includes perspective, Pointillism and stenciling, various colors and brushes and as Thurman points out, the “very concept of an image.” What I like about the article was the sense of amazement that Thurman conveys at just how perceptive the cave painters were — both about the caves themselves and the surfaces they offered for image-making AND the animals they created on the walls. But the primary point is to describe the dispute among cave historians, which basically comes down to this: To what extent is it possible to interpret accurately the “meaning” of the paintings.
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