Category Archives: Visual Art

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)
Continue reading Forget about it Jake, it’s a Rauschenberg →

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.
Continue reading A little Brad Cloepfil wisdom coming your way →

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, Books, General, Music, Visual Art

Friday hyper-scatter

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So, what’s Art Scatter doing this weekend, you might ask… One-third is headed for Willow Lake, South Dakota, to visit its aunts and relive childhood memories. One-third is headed for the Hood Canal and oysters, glorious oysters. But what about the third that stays at home, what about that third, the third that blew his travel budget on an all-day TriMet pass last week?

1. The Ceramic Showcase 2008: We are admitted suckers for crafts — making something from the essentially nothing (clay, tall grasses, etc.) just gets us excited. It’s like alchemy! Plus they align us with John Ruskin and William Morris and the craft traditions of Asia… sweet. And actually we need a serving bowl (crash — “sorry!”) and four plates. Fire in the kiln… at the Convention Center.

2. The Stumptown Comics Fest: When we were a little kid, see, there were these three giant boxes of comic books collected by our uncle (are you starting to see the limitations of the 1st person plural? we are…), and every time I visited my grandparents, well, you get the idea. This is the most important comics event in Portland this year (and Portland is a serious comics town). Just about all of our local stars will be there, and we have lots! You don’t have to be totally geeked out to go, either. I have a feeling the “spotlight” sessions with the likes of Mike Richardson (Dark Horse Comics), Craig Thompson (long-form graphic autobiography), Brian Michael Bendis (comic book supernova), etc., will be jammed, so pick a couple and get there early. To get you in the spirit, here’s Mike Russell’s comics introduction(published in today’s Oregonian) — it’s a beauty. The convention is at the Lloyd Center DoubleTree hotel.

3. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony: The Oregon Symphony takes on the last finished Mahler symphony. It’s long (90 minutes without intermission), but I will prepare: I’ll eat right, plenty of exercise and do some puzzles for my mental agility before arriving. Maybe I’ll also drift over to Music Millennium and buy a recording of it before heading in. I like the idea of a massive Mahler overlay of the comics convention! Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

4. Portland Timbers v. Seattle Sounders: And if the weather behaves itself at all, those mighty Portland Timbers will play a bit of footie (that’s soccer) against their hated Northwest rivals. We love Chris Brown! PGE Park

General, Visual Art

Scatter news and scatter notes

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\"Gross Clinic,\" Thomas EakinsNews: The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Academy of Art have raised the $68 million necessary to buy Thomas Eakins’ “Gross Clinic” and keep it in Philadelphia. Without a city-wide effort to purchase it, “Gross Clinic” would have headed to Bentonville, Ark., and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, founded by a Wal-Mart heiress.

Notes: So, the question arises, what paintings residing in Oregon would (or should) generate a similar effort to keep them in the state? My quick, short, wrong list: 1.) The C.S. Prices at the Central Library. 2.) The Hilda Morris bronze sculpture in front of the Standard Insurance Building on S.W. 6th Ave. (and maybe her sculptures on the lawn at Reed College). 3.) The Isaka Shamsud-Din painting of the pool hall. Isn’t it at the Portland Art Museum? 4.) Cindy Parker’s big painting at the Convention Center. 5.) The multi-paneled James Lavadour that usual resides at the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute in Pendleton. But that’s a very fast, rough cut (obviously!). Help me out!

News: Francis Bacon’s 1976 Triptych goes on sale at Sotheby’s in New York on May 14 and is expected to fetch somewhere around $70 million. It’s the last major Bacon painting still in private hands.

Notes: Yesterday, we connected the British painter Francis Bacon to Portland artist George Johanson — Bacon, David Hockney and the Brits he met at the Birgit Skiold printmaking studios in London helped to confirm his decision to leave Abstract Expressionism behind and re-embrace the figure. Art Scatter has a certain fondness for Bacon, both his gruesome paintings and his tumultuous personal life, from his days in the Weimar demi-monde to Paris to London. We like the sense of dread that hovers over his paintings, his reduction of humans to slabs of beef, those famous gaping mouths that suggest torture. He prefigures, maybe even predicts, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and the Dark Ops rooms in Eastern Europe, although he was probably citing Nazi torture chambers. It’s possible that this reading is too political, though; maybe he thought he was representing the human condition period, not the human condition in extremis.

Although I don’t have the receipts in front of me, I’m pretty confident that no George Johanson painting has ever commanded $70 million. Heck, the prints at Pulliam Deffenbaugh are $850 apiece, not to equate them with Triptych, which is a major Bacon painting. But the sensuality of Johanson’s paintings, without a glimmer of S/M in sight, has a dark, mysterious element, that speaks to us, too. Things are about to happen in them, voluptuous things, sexual things, passionate things, rarely creepy things. I like their possibility.

News:The San Francisco Ballet is in the middle of a festival of new work — 10 new dances by the likes of Mark Morris, Paul Taylor, James Kudelka and Christopher Wheeldon.

Notes: Lots of those names will be familiar to White Bird and Oregon Ballet Theatre fans. And the San Francisco Ballet itself will be in town for White Bird’s “4 X 4 — The Ballet Project.”

Barry Johnson, Books, General, Visual Art

George Johanson, printed and embossed!

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The busy, intersecting circles and lines of Milton Wilson paintings catch the eye first at Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery — they are on the wall opposite the door after all and their hum is hard to ignore. But this isn’t about Milton Wilson. Take a few steps more and pivot to the right and the maneuver leads to a set of seven sweet prints by George Johanson.

Maybe they won’t read as Johansons to many of us who own Johanson prints — those great Portland night scenes, with the river below us full of rowers, the volcano erupting in the distance, a cat streaking across the frame, full of interesting textures and visual delights. The prints at Pulliam-Deffenbach date back to 1970 — no night scenes, no cats and, of course, no volcanoes. There are seven of them — part of the 10-part Juxtapositions series, that Johanson created on an Arts Advocates grant in London at the Birgit Skiold studios — consigned to the gallery by their owner. And, not to make too big a deal out of them, they make a great case all by themselves for what has made Johanson so much fun to follow during his career, namely, his skill with line, his happy refusal to allow any “school” to limit him, and his imagination, which we already know about from his later prints and paintings. (No one I can think of has re-imagined Portland to the extent Johanson has, a theatrical Portland, filled it with sensual mysteries and a taste of the surreal, where the carnival never stops, all staged on a deck somewhere in the hills above the city.)
Continue reading George Johanson, printed and embossed! →

Barry Johnson, General, Music, Visual Art

Joplin, Ditto, Duchamp, Machu Picchu, more!

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A few random events that caught our eye.

images-2.jpg Is writing about visual art just getting worse and worse? That’s what Eric Gibson, the Wall Street Journal’s Leisure and Arts feature editor, contends
in a column today. Look, I know what he means, and I don’t disagree with his primary charges (actually, he employs several other writers to make his case for him) — that arts writing often takes hundreds, if not thousands, of messy, imprecise words to make the very simplest points. Use fewer words and/or have better thoughts.

But I don’t buy the conclusions he draws from reading impenetrable criticism (the Whitney Biennial catalog is the case study). First, he blames the “unwitting” Marcel Duchamp for the current state of affairs. Come on, was Duchamp ever unwitting about anything? Gibson suggests that Duchamp introduced “philosophy” into “art,” and that gave critics the license to abandon good old-fashioned aesthetics for philosophical riffs. Decay then set it. Then obfuscation. We note that Gibson uses the word riff here as a pejorative, and so Art Scatter must take offense. After all, we are nothing if not a collection of riffs! We’re just trying to make the clear riffs, no matter how half-baked. And we love to read riffing in others, something maybe that applies Lacan, say, to Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Long live Slavoj Zizek!

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Admittedly, since the recent discovery of very early human DNA in the Paisley Caves of south-central Oregon, which we, um, riffed on in Cave doings, Art Scatter has had artifacts on its mind. So, we were attracted to the announcement yesterday that Peruvian researchers have counted more than 40,000 objects in the collection of Machu Picchu artifacts taken by Hiram Bingham in the early 1900s (after he “re-discovered” the site) and delivered to his alma mater, Yale University. That would be about 10 times what Yale said it possessed. The university and Peru reached a complex agreement last year that involves repatriation of the objects, the construction of a museum, research rights for Yale, etc., and the first step was this cataloging. So, it’s too bad things that Peru has reason to be immediately distrustful of Yale, still, more than a century later. Just for the record: Our new arts-based foreign policy initiative would have directed the U.S. to help Peru preserve, study, display and otherwise broadcast its Incan art heritage once we learned about it, not colonize the best bits. Here’s hoping, along with Eliane Karp-Toledo (writing in the Times in February), that Yale acts responsibly from here on out.
Continue reading Joplin, Ditto, Duchamp, Machu Picchu, more! →

General, Visual Art

Wednesday scatter: Viva Babylon!

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120px-babylonlion.JPGYesterday, we suggested that the obliteration of archaeological treasures in Iraq was on our mind because of a story in the Guardian about an upcoming exhibition at the British Museum. The show will document the predations on Iraq’s rich archaeological sites, primarily the ruins of Babylon, by U.S. and UK forces since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. The extent of the losses will probably never be known — how could it when you are filling sandbags from ground from the strata that holds the fragmentary artifacts at a base you’ve established right next to the site of ancient Babylon?

“It’s a tragedy of the highest cultural consequence unfolding before us and nobody is caring,” said (Dan)Cruickshank (architecture historian). “The British Museum is absolutely right to raise this issue. We need to debate what is happening to this place and the 10,000 other archaeological sites across Iraq that have not been fully documented and recorded.”

If the occupiers of Iraq were to respond to these charges, I’m sure they’d simply say that, well, they’ve done their best, and, really, aren’t bigger issues at stake? This rhetorical question inevitably trumps any list of destroyed objects, trashed sites, pulverized architecture. Aren’t there bigger issues at stake? Presumably, they mean “democracy” but perhaps we suspect “geo-political advantage in a region also rich in oil.”

But what happens if we conduct a little thought experiment: What if our foreign policy was built on the preservation and support of art-making? What sort of approaches and decisions would we have made? Would this new principle guide us more effectively than the old one(s)?
Continue reading Wednesday scatter: Viva Babylon! →

Books, General, Visual Art

Tuesday quick scatter

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unknown.jpg1. Art Scatter reader Marc Acito had a CLOSE encounter with Chelsea Clinton when she was in town to campaign for someone running for something. Too close for comfort. WAY too close and so shocking on so many levels. His blog recounts the incident in some detail.

In other late-breaking Acito news, his new book, Attack of the Theater People, hits stores soon, which is good because how else can you find out what happened to the characters from How I Paid for College? To kick things off, at least locally, you could go to the Bagdad Theater on April 29 for an official book singing, during which Mr. Acito will perform Marco! The Musical. Tickets are involved, but they’re $11.95. You won’t get a better chance to see someone who’s been this close to Chelsea all month.

2. Speaking of busy Art Scatter readers, we have scattered on news we meant to pass on about Scott Wayne Indiana, who has a show up right now at Ogle. In fact, he needs your help to help animate one of his installations — all you need to do is show up at Ogle at 1 p.m. on April 19 and stand in front of a door. It’s called “Waiting in line.” Even Art Scatter can manage that!

3. Tomorrow, we’ll move along to some items from around the globe. The main thing on our mind right now is a British Museum exhibition that documents the destruction of ancient art in Iraq by the U.S. occupation. That’s not nearly so fun as Marc Acito in full voice or the twisty concepts of Scott Wayne Indiana, but Art Scatter can NOT be diverted from its mission to spread its paranoia and its rage as widely as possible. Of course, regulars know this by now.