Art Scatter

Oh man, we left you hanging there for a couple of days with Thomas Hobbes! Art Scatter can be SO cruel. What can I say? We watched some debate. We watched some Project Runway (Leanne won!). We prepared to meet a roomful of students in Linda K. Johnson’s dance appreciation class at Portland State University. We didn’t blog.

Maybe I should say a few words about that dance appreciation class. First of all, it sounds like a great class. Linda, who has been involved in some of the very most interesting projects around the city in the past decade (and more!), including the Halprin fountain City Dance event and overseeing a year of artist-in-residencies in the South Waterfront district, has set up a pretty rigorous course of study. For example, the class sat in on a rehearsal of Swan Lake, which became a sort of lecture-demonstration because artistic director/choreographer Christopher Stowell was so open to explaining what he was trying to do. Their writing assignments sound quite interesting, too, which maybe was where I came in — to talk about writing about dance.

This is something I love to talk about, even though I’ve actually done it far less than I would have liked. Time machine time: In 1978 I wrote about a visit to Seattle by Twyla Tharp’s modern dance company. That was the first time I committed an act of criticism with intent. To publish, I mean. And it caused me a great deal of grief and excitement and a couple of all-nighters spent writing and re-writing and throwing my hands up in despair. How could I possibly bottle in words what I’d seen onstage (not to mention the interviews I’d conducted with the dancers; Twyla wasn’t along on the tour), for consumption in a newspaper (the Seattle Sun, RIP)? Well, I had an excellent guide, who was in the process of developing a deep understanding of newspapers, though he knew even less about dance than I did, and we muddled through.
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As Art Scatter stoops to post, it’s a Monday night and all the major markets were up substantially, around 10 percent during the day, making up a big chunk of the beating they took last week. Actually, I hate to anthropomorphize the “markets” like that. Took a beating? I don’t think so. They are just numbers. We know how illusory they can be, right? Real and illusory at the same time. Neat trick. Do we think that the “fundamentals” have been fixed so everything is all right now? Pour a few hundred million into some banks, take an equity stake in them, and it’s all good? Art Scatter doesn’t know its economics but … all we can do is shrug.

So, last night we were seeking solace in philosophy, the refuge of scoundrels. Often we turn to Rousseau — we don’t even really count him as a philosopher. “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains!” But we were in a darker mood. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” was more like it. That’s Tennyson, but he pointed the way to the philosopher we wanted. Thomas Hobbes: “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Pretty close to “red in tooth” if you ask me.
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The comment thread on the On the edge (of cities) post right below shows there is a lot of passionate interest in the topic — Thomas Sieverts’ idea that architects need to lift their eyes from the city core and regard the outer limits of the city with the same intensity and, well, we’ll say it, love that they have for the traditional European city center. Whether that interest is also broad we’ll test with another post on the matter, this one arising from two Monday night events: Metro president David Bragdon speaking with Portland Spaces editor Randy Gragg at Jimmy Mak’s; and a big-name concluding panel at PNCA that featured Sieverts, architect Brad Cloepfil, Reed Kroloff (who runs Cranbrook Academy, supervised our tram design competition and who was dean of architecture at Tulane when Katrina hit), and Matthew Stadler as moderator.

The topic of both the panel and the Bragdon-Gragg exchange went something like this: What can governments do to encourage good design? And it frequently kept to the question, though this “healthy” topic also generated a number of tasty digressions and frankly was never as dry as the question seemed to promise. And thanks to Stadler, the Sieverts analysis/prescription was always lurking in the background.

I know from the clock on the wall that I won’t be able to give a full account of what happened in this post (I know what you’re thinking: O sweet mother of the Titans, don’t tell me there’s a third post brewing; what is this, the Halprin fountains?), but I will get a few thoughts out there, and perhaps the Scatter regulars at the event can fill in some details.

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We’ve been MIA on Suddenly the set of exhibitions, lectures and events exploring the shape of our cities through the lens, primarily, of German urban designer/theorist/architect Thomas Sieverts. But we did make it to Sieverts’ lecture and a panel discussion Friday afternoon at the UO’s new architecture school branch in the White Stag building in Portland’s Old Town, a suitably central (or maybe, paradoxically central) spot to consider the remaking of suburbs, I suppose.

Matthew Stadler (a Scatter friend) did the introductions and moderated the panel, which was appropriate, because it was his reading of Sieverts’ book Cities Without Cities that suddenly changed his thinking about where the energy in cities really is these days and started this “movement” going. I think I’m getting ready to argue that Matthew’s was a creative misreading of Sieverts, though I’m waiting for one more event, another panel on Monday night, to confirm my first impressions, especially since I haven’t read the book(!).

Fairly early on in Sieverts’ lecture another friend of Scatter wondered about the intelligibility of his argument. But I think I understood the gist. The thought line he presented went something like this. 1) European cities are “splash” cities, meaning they no longer have compressed central cores. Instead, they sprawl a lot like American cities. In Sieverts’ powerpoint, charts and graphs showed just how “splashy” specific German cities had become. 2) The edges of this sprawl are chaotic and featureless. 3) German cities are shrinking in population, which makes it hard to change the edges through growth: It takes transformation. 4) Architects should address the problems of the edge, supplying aesthetic “meaning” and cultural coherence to them, even though planners tend to ignore them because they are so nondescript. 5) If these “edge cities” are going to compete in the global economy, they are going to have to attract “creatives” (Richard Florida’s young creatives, though Florida wasn’t mentioned), and that makes the transformation of these featureless suburbs, between spaces, crucial.
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With the late September sun blazing and the pinot noir grapes sweetening by the minute, Scatter attempts to move its attention from dreams of wine-y complexity to almost anything else.

1. The New Carissa. We met the news that the salvage of the stern of the New Carissa on the coast near Coos Bay was nearly complete with some unexpected sadness. Remove it as though it never happened? The derelict New Carissa was a formidable adversary, defying our best efforts to… well, do anything with her that we wanted. Just the saga of the bow section — towed (with great difficulty) out to sea for burial, it breaks free in a storm and re-grounds near Waldport, gets a tow back out to deep water where it is blasted by a destroyer and sunk by a torpedo into 10,000 feet of water — is incredible. It would have all been completely comic if oil from the ship hadn’t leaked and destroyed marine wildlife nearby. Put us in the camp with those who would have left a hunk of stern on the beach, not as a tourist attraction, mind you, which would have been silly, but as a monument to our folly, a permanent metaphor. (That’s Henk Pander’s Wreck of the New Carissa, above.)

2. WaMu, Seattle misses you. We linked you to Regina Hackett’s story in the Seattle P-I that detailed some worry about the fate of Washington Mutual and the building-sharing agreement it has with the Seattle Art Museum. Now, of course, WaMu has turned into a subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase & Co. and her new story with John Marshall talks about the worry at many other Seattle arts organizations that WaMu’s extensive arts funding will diminish or disappear. This is just the direct fallout from the sub-prime loan mess; we have yet to see how much deeper this blade will cut.

3. Mark Rothko at the Tate. Scatter follows Rothko pretty closely — he went to Lincoln High School, after all, and was a friend of Portland painters Carl and Hilda Morris — even though we sometimes don’t know what to make of him. Or maybe it’s that we think different things about him at different times. In any case, the show of his late work (1958 when he famously withdrew from his Four Seasons restaurant commission in the Seagram buildling until his suicide in 1970) at the Tate Modern in London is drawing similarly mixed responses. We recommend a reading of Laura Cumming’s review in the Observer, which describes an exhausted Rothko and locates the figurative elements threatening to bust loose in all the abstraction. Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the London Times, however, finds something altogether different — a lighter, brighter, soaring Rothko. Let’s see: exhausted or soaring? Maybe a trip to London to sort all of this out would be in order if only the Scatter piggy bank didn’t rattle so forlornly.

Art Scatter made its way to a book “opening” Thursday night at the spiffy new p:ear digs in Old Town, which was jam-packed with fans of Terry Toedtemeier, John Laursen and the Columbia River Gorge. They will become devotees of Wild Beauty, the history of photography that Terry and John have assembled/written/curated, too, because the book is beautiful, plain and simple. Not that I’m a neutral observer. The ways I’m mobbed up here are countless — I’ve known Terry for decades, I’ve collaborated on a museum catalog with John, my wife Megan helped them get the project rolling and did various sorts of things to keep it that way, I’m fascinated by both the geological and human history of the Gorge… I could go on. But still, I like to think I’m a tough sell. Wild Beauty convinced me. You can look it over yourself at a bookstore (Oregon State University Press is the co-publisher), buy a copy through the Northwest Photography Archive online or pick one up at the Portland Art Museum, where an exhibition of photographs from the book will open on Oct. 4. It’s not cheap ($75) for a book, but it is cheap for a work of art, and that’s what it is (and produced entirely in Oregon). I’ll probably talk about it more once I get a chance to live with it for a bit.

I forgot to let you know about the publication of Art Scatter friend Chelsea Cain’s new book, Sweetheart, which continues the crime-fighting saga of Detective Archie Sheridan and his face-off with the sultry but deadly serial killer Gretchen Lowell. The serial killer thriller is usually not a genre I sample, but I scarfed up Chelsea’s first book in the series, Heartsick, even though a few early pages made me wince (a hammer, nail, ribcage, you get the picture), and now I’m launched on Number Two. Not that she needs the pub, really — the New York Times Book Review took good care of her. (Congrats, Chelsea!). Again, I’m mobbed up here… Chelsea writes a delightful column in The Oregonian that I’ve had some association with.

I’m also a fan of Hawthorne Books, which makes winsome, high-quality trade paperbacks of work by interesting writers from Portland and beyond (I wrote about Monica Drake’s Clown Girl in a post below, way below). So, I’ve also just begun The Tsar’s Dwarf by Peter H. Fogtdal, a Dane who spends time in Portland, and translated by Tiina Nunnally, who was the translator of Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow. I can already tell that I like it’s rhythms and picaresque sensibility. But again, more later, especially since its publication date isn’t until November.

Bernard-Henri Levy (BHL, as he is known in France) arrived at Powell’s last night (Tuesday) just a little late, fashionably late, actually, because he looked great in his black suit and deep purple shirt. He’s been here before, two years ago, to read from American Vertigo, his travelogue through American places and faces, and so he knew the landscape — the smallish Powell’s lecture nook packed with… well, really I have no idea, maybe “fans.” The woman sitting next to me had heard him on OPB and decided to come hear him in person. She was grading papers from a high school French class and speaking French with those around her. Which gave me pause when I first took my seat. Would BHL be lecturing in, horrors, French?

No, he would not. Accented English, yes, but confidently employed, expressive English. And what was his subject? One of his favorites since his first big book (Barbarism With a Human Face) more than 30 years ago — the problems with the Left. Of course, the problems then were much bigger than now, specifically the embrace of Stalinism, either actively or passively, by Left and Left-leaning parties and intellectuals. Now, the Left in Europe is ineffective and practically “broken,” or so it feels in France, I suspect, after the election of Sarkozy, an old friend or “buddy” of BHL’s, who appeared in BHL’s talk (and the beginning of his new book) several times.

So what’s left to criticize? BHL argued that the Left (or Liberals, in the American formulation, though Liberal doesn’t quite have the historical depth or granularity of the European Left) has abandoned many of its core principles to embrace another ideology, another Grand Narrative, that of anti-Imperialism, American Imperialism. And in dividing the world into Evil (the U.S. and Israel and their supporters) and Good (the rest of the world), the Left manages to overlook little things like the genocide in Rwanda, the bloodbath in Darfur (BHL doesn’t think it qualifies as genocide at this point), the suppression of democracy in Iran or the rights of native peoples in Ecuador. These don’t fit the Narrative.
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I thought I was done with the Halprin fountain “event” or “happening” or “dance” — I still can’t quite name it — that ended the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland last Sunday (that would be Sept. 14). But I keep getting flashbacks of the performance, replaying little bits in my mind, thinking about some of the music I heard. You know what that’s like: Something more than random neurons firing.

I’ve had a couple of aids in this. The first is visual. Art Scatter received a very nice email from writer Brett Campbell, who was also very taken with the Halprin happening and said he was working on an essay of his own. When he completes it, we will link to it. This is right down his alley: He’s working on Lou Harrison book and Harrison was in the middle of the San Francisco milieu of Lawrence and Ana Halprin. But as a memory igniter, Brett’s wife, photographer CaroleZoom, was actually more important, because she sent us some images of the event. Quite beautiful ones, which explain the adulatory comments I heard about the first piece of the performance choreographed by Tere Mathern — which I was unable to see (I was late, it was too crowded). So, I’ve posted those here.

And there was the thread to the original post… Randy Gragg, one of the key organizers, responded a couple of times. Carolyn Altman, who was a Portland dancer/choreographer/writer, wrote in from Georgia, where she now lives, with memories of the fountains. Dance writer Martha Ullman West got things going and left us wanting more of her eye on the dances themselves.

And realizing that I missed Martha’s eye made me understand how inadequate the description of things in the original post was/is. If I could do it over, I would try to tell you how the dancers moved, more than simply saying it was “old-style” modern dance, carving space, attending to changes in topography and water flow, operating at scales tiny and grand, how they rolled and buckled and ran, the qualities in the momentary tableaux, the muscle groups engaged and relaxed, the dancers and the way their dance personalities emerged. The music would be harder for me — help us, Brett! — fleeting, sporadic, in search of original impulses to propel it, guide it, original impulses to communicate to us.
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So we will continue our meditation on the connection between art and money. Which really, we hate to do — the connection makes things messy in so many ways, and when we are thinking about the connection we aren’t thinking about the art. But we are thinking about the conditions that make art possible, for better or worse, so we will persevere, at least through a series of related links.

First, of all, Bloomberg’s Lindsay Pollack notes that bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers has something on the order of 3,500 contemporary art works in its collection and wonders what will happen to it now. There must not be an accessible list of the art, because Pollack’s own list is rather sketchy — though it includes work by Louise Nevelson and Jasper Johns, not to mention Damian Hirst. But the article does give us a sense of the long history of the Lehman name in art circles — there is a Robert Lehman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, after all, named after the grandson of the founder of the bank.

Closer to home, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Regina Hackett notes the VERY close connection between the Seattle Art Museum and Washington Mutual, the huge savings and loan which is both under great financial pressure and looking for a buyer as we type this. The two share a building in downtown Seattle in a complex arrangement that the museum used to finance the extension, designed by Portland’s own Brad Cloepfil. The museum says it has its bases covered, no matter what happens to WaMu, but Hackett has found some folks who aren’t so sure.

Closer still, Art Scatter friend David Stabler, at The Oregonian, found out that the Oregon Symphony hasn’t detected any deterioration in the financial commitments of its patrons. This could be a “Planet Arts” phenomena (see post below), but it is encouraging, nonetheless. And he found the silver lining in all of this:

How many times have we heard that the arts should be run more like businesses? Well, Brian Dickie, General Director of Chicago Opera Theatre in Chicago (the small company, not Lyric Opera), hopes he never hears that again, “given what CEOs with MBAs from the major business schools have managed to do to some of the country’s largest financial institutions.”

All we can say is, sweet!

And finally, speaking of Brad Cloepfil, he’s at the heart of the beast in New York City, where his redesign of 2 Columbus Circle is unveiling. Another Scatter friend, Inara Verzemnieks, is there and she’s been posting about it on OregonLive and had a front page story about it in today’s Oregonian. For us the key quote came at the end (consider this a spoiler alert):

One of the criticisms that has been leveled at Cloepfil’s building is that it is not bold enough, not enough of a break with the past. But this blurring of past and present seemed to be what Cloepfil wanted. He seemed to like playing with the tension between what you thought you remembered — is that the lollipop building? — and what you now see. That it was possible for the two to occupy the same space.

“The ambiguity of memory,” he said. “Isn’t that sometimes the nature of cities?”

We’d much rather end with the ambiguity of memory than the ambiguity of money.

When the economy gets bad, Recession bad, the common understanding is that the arts suffer even worse. And the Wall Street, sub-prime loan crash looks like it may kick the rest of the economy into R-word land, once and for all. So, arts groups are headed for the hills, where they will attempt to hunker down and hold out to the last mime, right? Well, no, not according to David Segal and Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post, who surveyed arts groups in New York, mostly, but also Washington to see what the mood was.

Segal and Trescott, perhaps expecting to find panic, ran into a pocket of relative calm. Maybe it’s that corporate giving to the arts is so low in the U.S. — the article says 3 percent of all contributed income — or maybe it’s just blind optimism, but the executive directors refused to buckle. The key quote came at the end:

It’s an article of faith among theater honchos that when the going gets depressing, the depressed go to the theater.

My own theory is that Planet Arts, as the article colorfully calls it, is used to operating near the edge all the time and has confidence in its coping skills. The garden out back. The chickens. The Dumpster diving. Or maybe, as the article suggests, it simply takes a while for economic problems to reach the far-flung planet. Portland isn’t Wall Street, and we have missed much of the direct sub-prime misery that has afflicted California and Florida. But we are not in a bubble here, and the indirect effects are now hitting us (checked your stock portfolio lately? Art Scatter refuses to investigate the one share of Bear Stearns our granny left us).

So, what happens here on our little piece of Planet Arts? I’m not sure. I’ve heard rumblings of majors in trouble for some time now. How resilient will they be if we are facing a one- or two-year Recession? And if the majors ramp up their requests for money from individuals and foundations, will the mid-sized and smaller groups start to feel the pain, too? That’s an honest question… I know lots of Scatter readers work for or are near to arts groups in town. What do you think? What have you heard? Where are we headed? Use the comments section OR if you need more anonymity than that, email us at artscatterpdx@gmail.com.