The capitalist and the art museum

For the past month, I’ve been trying to make sense of the politics around the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, the new wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Since Eli Broad (whose fortune is $7 billion per Forbes magazine) told the New York Times’ Edward Wyatt that he intended to keep his art holdings (which are considerable) in his foundation rather than give them to the new wing he’d spent $50 million trail bossing to completion, the sparks have been flying in LA.

A lot of prominent art observers, notably Christopher Knight of the LA Times and Adrian Ellis of The Art Newspaper, saw Broad’s decision as an act of betrayal against LACMA, which had allowed itself to be “bought” by Broad and had then been dumped when he’d gotten what he wanted out of the museum.

At first my reaction was a lot like that of the NY Times editorial page, which argued that a lot depended upon how the foundation conducted itself — much of the work might find itself on the walls of LACMA after all. Over at PORT, Jeff Jahn said that it might actually be good for the Portland Art Museum, because our curators would likely have better luck dealing with Broad’s foundation than with LACMA. These are sensible positions.

But somehow, the matter didn’t feel right somehow. And in the March 20 New York Review of Books, Martin Filler (who frequently writes about architecture for NYRB) explains why (he cites both Knight and Ellis’ responses above). It has to do with the tyranny of Broad and the likelihood that he (and others like him) will run roughshod over the museum for their own purposes, Filler says, and his deft argument establishes a series of contrasts that are powerful: Broad v. public-spirited patron Anna Bing Arnold; Renzo Piano (architect of the new wing) v. Rem Koolhaus (whose design was discarded); Broad’s narrower collecting habits v. those of the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. And he embeds the argument against Broad within a convincing narrative of the troubled history of LACMA.

It’s hard to see much of a connection between Broad’s maneuverings in LA and what goes on in Portland. But what about the affect of Broad as a model of philanthropy? Are we inoculated against that? I don’t think so. Gifts nearly always come with strings; they don’t have to come with chains.

Graphic novels, what’s in a name?

If someone asked me the impossible question, “What have been the most important works of art produced in Portland in the past 15 years,” I’d probably stall for time and then include Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Craig Thompson’s Blankets on my list. Most of that has to do with the quality and the startling originality of both books. But some would be because their art form, the “graphic novel,” is in its infancy and good work therefore has more influence on it.

cover War’s End, by Joe SaccoAt this point, the standing of the graphic novel as an art form needs no defense. It might need some definition, though — some of the best of what we call “graphic novels” aren’t really novels at all, by which I mean simply that they aren’t intentional fictions. They are journalism or memoir or a hybrid of the two. Sacco’s Palestine is a case in point and so is Thompson’s Blankets, one an account of two-and-a-half months traveling in the Middle East and the other a memoir of growing up in an evangelical Christian family.

So, with the purpose of taking the novel out of “graphic novel” and replacing it with… something else, I’m proposing a three-book, four-part excursion into a particular combination of text and drawing. And this introduction is Part One. Not to worry: The parts will be short.

Neither Palestine nor Blankets is on the docket. They’ve been described a LOT (even I have written about Palestine before). But both Sacco and Thompson are. French-Canadian cartoonist/graphic memoirist Guy Delisle also figures. In the three books we’ll consider, these artists share a few things in common:

1) They give a “true” account of what they witnessed and felt. I don’t mean true in the sense that a novel can be “true” to life. I mean that they explicitly hope to convey what they’ve seen and/or experienced.

2) Their accounts are in first person. We know exactly where they stand in the narrative and in relationship to the people they are representing in text or pictures. Often we can place them literally: Just outside the frame of the drawing, near enough to make out the details we see. Other times, they have drawn themselves into the frames.

3) Their own shifting states of mind figure prominently: They tell us how the way they are feeling or thinking might affect the narratives we are reading/viewing.

4) Although their drawing aims and intensity levels may differ, their visual images are at least as important as the words. In fact, we might be inclined to contest some of the text, knowing what we know about the limits of reporting and interviewing, but the drawings of all three are immediately convincing, despite their different styles. The drawing don’t just convey information, either, they create a felt world for the reader/viewer.

As we look at the work — Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage (2004, Top Shelf Productions), Delisle’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2003, Drawn and Quarterly Books) and Sacco’s War’s End: Profiles From Bosnia 1995-96 (2005, Drawn and Quarterly Books) — we’ll keep an eye out for how they do “journalism” and memoir, what problems their methods generate, what in the end makes this form and their individual descriptions of life important. The observation that this sort of graphic non-fiction shouldn’t be called a “graphic novel,” isn’t new, of course (see Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics, p. 62, for example). But maybe we’ll figure out what to call them, once we look at a few in detail.

The Echo Maker: The Positive of Richard Powers’ Thinking

Writing is the act of accepting the huge shortfall
between the story in the mind and what hits the page.

– Richard Powers

richard powers photo Richard Powers is a real test for readers in this day and age. His novels aren’t especially difficult but they are long and they do make you think. And once you taste the waters of any of his nine you’ll want to drink them all in. I’m still captivated by the cover of his first, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, with its photograph by August Sander that forms the basis for the interrelated stories of three Dutch and German stepbrothers on the eve of World War I, a computer techie in contemporary Boston, and the narrator P., who discovers the photo in a Detroit museum and brings it to life with research and imaginative musings. The novel tells the story of photography and how it has documented the brutalities of the twentieth century in a way that makes previous centuries’ horrors we only read about a little less real. But Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance is also a very personal and affecting story.

Powers’ background in physics, computer programming, music and English studies finds its way into his novels in very intellectual and sophisticated forms. He is one of the smartest writers I’ve ever read, but it is the emotional core of his novels that is so amazing. I wouldn’t miss his appearance at the Literary Arts special event, Thursday, March 6, at 7:30; Portland Art Museum Fields Sunken Ballroom, 1119 S.W. Park Ave. Tickets are $15.00: www.pam.orgor 503-226-0973.

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Bully pulpit: One more punch to the theatrical chops

“Why do I feel it is important to impress upon young readers their right to freedom of speech? Because so many of them don’t know they have freedom of speech. I’m not sure their peer group leaders give them freedom of speech. And I do know that the school library of the school they attend is under heavier attack than the public library just down the street. I think they are in the thick of the battle and many of them are not aware of it.”

Richard Peck
Newbery Medal-winning novelist, quoted on tallmania.com

If the kids at Sherwood Middle School in suburban Portland didn’t know they were in the thick of the battle, they found out with a thud last week. As Oregonian writer Maya Blackmun reported in two excellent stories — Feb. 21 on the uproar, Feb. 22 on the outcome — you can think what you say but you can’t always say what you think. At least, not from a school-sanctioned stage.

In brief: Principal Anna Pittioni postponed the winter play, “Higher Ground,” after last-minute complaints about its contents by parents of a few students involved in the show.

And that content was?

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“At Freedom’s Door”: Novels in paint, provocations in fabric

Ropes and chains and the piercing masts of slave ships at harbor pop up as boldly as the brilliant colors that command Arvie Smith‘s paintings in the exhibition “At Freedom’s Door.” Smith’s big oils of slave auctions and lynchings and other aspects of the bleak side of antebellum life are like jam-packed chapters in a vast historical novel bursting to be told. Some of his more satiric images are reminiscent of Robert Colescott, and his brown-yellow-red palette brings to mind some of the color combinations of fellow Portland artist Isaka Shamsud-din. But in their narrative urgency, their invocation of historical moment and their sometimes quizzical snatches of story (you get the feeling that you’ve been dropped into the middle of something, but you’re not quite sure where it started, although you have a good idea where it’s likely to end) Smith’s paintings also have a novelist’s sense: They make me think of Charles Johnson and his great American slave story of the beginnings of things, “Middle Passage.”

arvie1.jpg
“At Freedom’s Door,” which also includes fabric art by Baltimorean Joan Gaither and the admirable Portland artist Adriene Cruz, was originally shown last year at Baltimore’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum, where Smith and Gaither were artists in residence. Now in the Feldman Gallery of Pacific Northwest College of Art through March 8, it’s one of a pair of provocative exhibits in Portland noncommercial galleries that commemorate Black History Month. The other, on view through March 2 at Reed College’s Cooley Gallery, is “Working History”, which features work by such nationally notable artists as Kara Walker, Io Palmer, Faith Ringgold, Kianga Ford, David Hammons and Nick Cave.

The combination of these three artists in “At Freedom’s Door” plays a nice ping-pong in your head, knocking you back and forth among varying aspects of the African American experience. And they represent three intriguingly different artistic sensibilities.

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Molly Vidor and the Elephant in Bonnard’s Garden

What do you do with the elephant in the room? Do you feed it? Nourish it in other ways? Try to talk it down off the wall? Coax it into a deeper relation with furniture and family? You don’t ignore it, that’s for sure. You wouldn’t want it there in the first place if you could simply ignore it.

mv-elephant.jpgIn this case the “Elephant,” left, and a rather pinkish one to boot, is one of Molly Vidor’s five mostly abstract paintings in a show called “Destroyer” now at PDX Contemporary Art (February 5 – March 1, 2008). “Destroyer” is a curious title for the show given the peaceful, reflective nature of the paintings and the fact that in her artist’s statement Vidor correlates her work with that of Pierre Bonnard, who made the most beautiful paintings I’ve ever seen – landscapes, still lifes, and nude portraits of his wife.

But he didn’t paint one abstract that I can recall, although he eschewed naturalistic color and flattened perspective in a way that makes the composition seem like a patchwork of colors. He wanted his work to be intimate and decorative at once. The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has an amazing number of Bonnards, and they have such presence that they create their own space in the narrow confines of the converted residence where they are housed.

I have a theory about why and how Vidor’s shimmering paintings echo Bonnard’s, but it follows from my broader theory that we enter into deeper relations with abstract paintings – or, rather, the abstract quality in painting – than we do with landscapes, or still lifes, or figurative work.
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Putting the PDX in the Portland Jazz Festival

A quick note to the Portland Jazz Festival: Thanks for making the “Portland” in this year’s festival more prominent. The cluster of “outlying” shows at the hotels and clubs seemed better organized and feature more of the best local players. And featuring both the new-ish Portland Jazz Orchestra and legend Nancy King — that was sweet. In all possible ways.

images4.jpgLet’s start with Nancy King,who played Friday night. The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley turned me on to Nancy King: Live at the Jazz Standard with Fred Hersch a couple of years ago, and things started to fall into place for my relationship with jazz, specifically with jazz vocalists, whom I used to find irritating — at best. King brought me in from the cold. I listened to that CD — a lot. I’m listening to it right now (she’s scatting a chorus of “Ain’t Misbehavin'” as I type), and it’s still a delight.

King’s singing style is so unadorned — easy on the vibrato, light on the pyrotechnical displays — that it’s tempting to call it “unpolished,” as Nate Chinen did in a variable review in the New York Times in 2006. But Chinen got the basics right. Her voice is expressive from the “raspy” bottom to the “reedy” top. And she scats with the best of them (including Kurt Elling who sang with King on Friday night at the Newmark Theater), thanks to superior pacing and musical logic.
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Friday recap: Week two

Our advanced detection devices (OK, so they’re not THAT advanced) registered (OK, someone called me up and mentioned it) that more and more of you are visiting us (thanks to all of Vernon’s extended family! and thanks to Vernon for buying them all laptops so they could visit!). Some of the comment threads were pretty interesting this week. The Portland theater community was IN THE HOUSE. And the Portland Jazz Festival, among others, linked to the Wisdom of Ornette post.

Howard MandelOur first weekly Cultural Hero award goes to jazz writer Howard Mandel. After managing the feat of interviewing Ornette Coleman in a productive way, he then had to deal with alto sax magician Tim Berne on a couple of panels. I saw half of the first of those, and it was enough.

The first question was about the reception Coleman’s music received when he started playing his free jazz at the Five Spot in New York in 1959. Berne piped in early on that he didn’t know anything about that (a perfectly fine response) and was dismissive of the question (a little less fine), but the rest of the panel dug in, cited the scholarship on the matter (notably David Lee’s The Battle of the Five Spot) and sketched for the audience the rough way he was treated.

Cool. Berne then piped up again and disputed this account. Not that he had any competing information about the period to offer (he’d already professed his ignorance), and he was too young to BE there. But based on the musicians he knows now in NY, he just couldn’t imagine that musicians then behaving that way. Musicians jealous of another’s success? A concept foreign to Berne, apparently. Even if we believed him about the utopia known as the NY jazz scene now, it would have no bearing on the NY jazz scene then. “It’s all bullshit,” he muttered.

Later on, according to Tim DuRoche (Portland jazz drummer, cultural theorist and about the busiest guy I know), who moderated a second panel, Berne argued (or ranted) that writing about the arts was actually harmful to artists and audiences. Which managed to get under Mandel’s skin, since he’s dedicated his life to the proposition that such writing is actually useful to both. And he fired back. With both barrels. And things got heated.

You KNOW where we stand. But it’s not a philosophical position, really. It’s just an observation: Thinking about art improves its appreciation more often than not; the thinking of others can add to the pleasure of our own thoughts (using “pleasure” broadly); language is faulty in this regard, inevitably incomplete, but it’s what we have.

So. Three cheers for Mr. Mandel, the winner of our first Cultural Hero award, for standing up for the idea of historical evidence, reasonable argument and the creative act of listening (in this case).

Get even with the nasty Mr. Berne and read Howard’s work! There’s his book Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz available through your favorite bookstore or online purveyor. And there are his websites, his personal site and the blog he does for one of our favorite arts news sites, Arts Journal. Full disclosure: Mr. Mandel said nice things about Art Scatter’s account of the Ornette lecture below AND he linked to us from his blog. He’s a nice guy!

The Menil Collection, Pat Barker and How Artists Draw Blood

“I am a painter and I paint with nails.”

-Kurt Schwitters

sargent_sketching_in_the_alps_t.JPGI’ve been reading Pat Barker’s novel Life Class (Doubleday, $24), set in the early years of World War I. It’s the story of several young art school students whose lives and ideas about art are altered dramatically by the war.

I’d read Barker’s World War I trilogy published in the early 1990s – “Regeneration,” “The Eye in the Door,” and “The Ghost Road” – and was deeply affected by the historical and psychological realism of Barker’s writing, and by her knowledge of the era and keen sympathy for her characters. She portrays real figures such as the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and the psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers to explore the devastation wrought by the war on a generation of British men and women, both at home and on the front in Europe. Rivers is a commanding presence in “The Ghost Road,” in charge of treating and rehabilitating shell shocked soldiers to return them to the war.

“Life Class” has a similar real-life figure, Henry Tonks, a surgeon and anatomy teacher turned artist (his sketch of J.S. Sargent sketching in the Alps is above), who teaches life drawing at the Slade School of Art, a class attended by the young artists, women and men, we follow through the rest of the novel. Tonks is present only briefly in the narrative, but his spirit looms over the whole. In real life Tonks worked with a plastic surgeon pioneering techniques used on young men whose faces were mutilated in the war. In the first chapter of “Life Class,” on the eve of the war, he instructs art students on the relation of drawing to anatomy. Drawing is all about physicality, finding a way to “convey what lay beneath the skin.” “Drawing is an explication of the form,” he would say, meaning a mirror of what is there to be observed in the real world. A “real world” that will be turned upside down and inside out by the war.

I happened to be reading the book last week when I was in Houston visiting the Menil Collection (http://www.menil.org/). (For a description of the Menil, see my post “The Pilgrim in Houston: Surreal Rhymes with Menil.”) I was struck in particular by a new exhibit, “How Artists Draw,” curated by Bernice Rose, formerly a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and now the Menil chief curator responsible for the development of a new Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center, which will be “dedicated solely to the collection, exhibition, and study of modernist drawing, including its role in contemporary artistic practice.” The emphasis on “modernist drawing” separates what the Institute is about from the philosophy and classroom practice of Henry Tonks. What replaced explication of form in drawing followed irrevocably from artists’ experience in World War I and its aftermath.

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Carl Morris, early paintings

“Ascending Forms,” Carl MorrisIt seems unfair to write about an art exhibition that has already been taken down, but that’s exactly what’s about to happen. Sorry!

For a variety of reasons I haven’t been able to get to Carl Morris: figure, word, light at Marylhurst University’s Art Gym until now. But I want to say a few things about it, and Morris will come up again on Art Scatter. All of us are interested in his work; I wrote the catalog essay for his retrospective at the Portland Art Museum in 1993; and just last summer I wrote about the sublime show of his 1959 History of Religions paintings at the University of Oregon’s art museum, organized by Lawrence Fong.

So, maybe you saw the show (the Saturday I went, the Art Gym was crowded), maybe you didn’t but wanted to, or maybe you just want to start jumping on the Carl Morris bandwagon with the rest of us.

The show was described to me originally by one of the behind-the-scenes organizers as a look at Carl’s work from the 1940s — those dark, symbolic, angular paintings, with their heavily painted surfaces. That sounded promising. These paintings hadn’t really been gathered together in numbers since an art museum show in the early ’50s. A chance to give them a good look again, struggle to reconnect to their iconography, test their power to affect us, place them in their context of Northwest painting, is an excellent idea.

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