Portland Architecture

Streets and parking as landscape: Alain LeTourneau on "Open Road"

Screen capture from the in-progress film Open Road (courtesy of the artist)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Today online fundraising campaigns are ubiquitous. Whether it's via Kickstarter or other sites, most of us have become accustomed to and maybe even exhausted by the continuous stream of people seeking one's contribution to any number of artistic, entrepreneurial, charitable or educational opportunities. On Kickstarter today, for example, the main page shows one project to send 1,000 student projects to the edge of space, "each one inside a ping pong ball," a photography book about vinyl album collectors, and a children's toy called The Humble Velocipede, "A desktop bamboo walking machine."

But recently I received an email about a fundraising project that gave me pause, from Portland filmmaker Alain LeTourneau for his new feature, Open Road . The film's central thesis is one of those truths that can hide in plain sight sometimes: that however much we may think of the roads and highways where we drive or the garages where we park as pass through spaces, they constitute a vast portion of the collective built environment. (The funding campaign on USA Projects, by the way, ends this Friday, August 3.)

Le Tourneau has spent the past decade or so both as a film exhibitor - he cofounded the much lauded Cinema Project screening series as well as a successor, 40 Frames - and as a filmmaker in his own right. Before writing about architecture as I do today, I used to principally write about and review movies, and the documentary LeTourneau codirected with Pam Minty about Southeastern Oregon's blend of natural beauty and agriculture, Empty Quarter, is among my all time favorites. (You can watch clips from it here.) Shot on 16mm black and white and featuring a series of long, elegant takes without the usual succession of quick cuts or narration, Empty Quarter is enveloping and beautiful even as it provides a real-life chronicle of farms, families and their dependence on the landscape.

Recently I interviewed LeTourneau about his new film and the perspective through which he sees Portland, his hometown.

Portland Architecture: Your last feature film, "Empty Quarter", chronicled the rural landscape of southestern Oregon and its agricultural communities there. What kind of connecting thread to you see between the topic of that film and "Open Road" with its focus on roads and automobiles? Is it that both are sort of familiar yet ignored in some manner?

LeTourneau I think you've touched on something that is a central focus to my film and photography work, this idea of landscapes becoming so common as to almost be invisible. The images in Open Road and Empty Quarter are not calendar and coffee table book images, which is not to say they don't possess some beauty. The images simply frame aspects of urban and rural landscapes that are seldom given much attention, at least not in popular movies, on television, etc.  

Another thread is John Charles Fremont and his expedition in the mid-1840s that brought him through southeast Oregon and up to Fort Vancouver. Fremont named Abert Rim and Abert Lake (both in Lake County) after his commanding officer. Fremont's name is also scattered across the west with town, lakes, rivers and other geography having been given his moniker. In Portland, there is of course the Fremont Bridge. As it happens, I live about a mile from the bridge’s Cook Street approach. The bridge not only figures prominently in Portland's skyline and is an icon of the city, but has some personal resonance for me as well. The date of the bridge's completion is also the year of my birth. Growing up in the metro area, my mother and I would frequently drive over the Fremont to visit my grandmother who lived downtown in the Portland Center Apartments. 

What are some roads or other structures related to automobile travel here in the Portland area that are distinctive to you or might have helped shape the thinking that is going into the film?

The way I-5 and I-405 encircle downtown and cross the Willamette I've always found very interesting. That such roads dominate the landscape is certainly not unique to Portland, one can find it in many cities, but it was these forms and structures that first inspired Open Road. The I-5 trench that cuts through North Portland is also featured in the film. Its construction had an enormous impact on the neighborhood when built, and the Columbia Rive Crossing will certain present a whole new host of impacts. 

I also became interested in the surface parking lots downtown, mostly in old town. This idea of car storage is very compelling to me. I read somewhere that in the span one year, a car is (on average) in transit (that is, moving) about 400 hours. This leaves the other 8,360 hours that the car is at rest, or parked. That's 95% of time in one year. So, for the life of a car, most of the time the car will be parked. I find this interesting, in light of traffic often being thought of as a key issue of automotive transit in America. The space required for parking is equal or greater than that required for roads. This is something worth giving our attention.

Are you someone who finds freeway overpasses beautiful? I've photographed them frequently over the years, and so have many others - eyesore though this type of infrastructure may commonly be. The short film on your USA Projects site portrays one of the most dramatic of local overpasses I've seen, where the Fremont bridgehead on the east side gives way to I-5.

The Fremont Bridge, particularly on the east side, has been featured in a number of films by local makers. I can recall seeing it in Nick Peterson and Matt McCormick's films, amongst others. It's hard to deny the striking beauty of the Fremont, or for that matter, many of the freeway structures in Portland. There is this wonderful almost chiseled or sculptural quality to these forms. They are massive, and they dwarf even the largest of landscape art by the likes of Heizer, De Maria or Smithson. 

In photographing the urban sites that appear in Open Road, I think of the conflict that photographer Robert Adams spoke of. The critique Adams was involve in when choosing his composition, in contrast to the sheer beauty of the object and the light falling on it. I think it's characteristic of the relationship many artist have to the subject of their work. On some level, you have to be drawn to what you choose to photograph or capture, even if it is something you find yourself very much in conflict with or in opposition to. Also, there is for me a desire to present images that are pleasurable to look at, even if at the same time capturing something that is need of changing. 

 

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Mark Rothko, Oregon skies, and staying or going

1921 high school photo of Mark Rothko (courtesy Multnomah County Library, via PORT)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

The Portland Art Museum has hosted countless blockbuster exhibitions over the past two decades, from "Imperial Tombs of China" in 1996 to "Hesse: A Princely German Collection" in 2005. But the museum's Mark Rothko retrospective, which opened February 18, is a different kind of blockbuster.

For starters, it's curated by the museum itself (specifically chief curator Bruce Guenther) rather than just a traveling show begun elsewhere. What's more, the show also features the one Portland visual artist to achieve international superstardom, for Rothko stands alongside Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still as one of the great abstract expressionist painters exploding onto the scene after World War II and one of the great American artists of all-time.

The Rothko exhibition at PAM would be enough of a must-see for his historical significance alone, not to mention the arresting, engrossing power of his canvasses: fields of vibrant color and layered paint that not only possess great aesthetic beauty, but also act as spiritual portals - staring into the Rothko works you see in your mind what you want to see, or fear seeing, or never expect to see. For me, it's the continually changing Oregon skies that I see in Rothko's work: the dark gray and deep blue of his later works evoking our rainy season, the vivid tones of his late '40s and early '50s paintings calling to mind the horizon at dusk.

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Museum of Modern Art)

Yet the exhibit itself also gives us the chance to ask: Would Rothko have to leave Portland today in order to achieve the same level of acclaim?

Rothko's family immigrated to the United States from Russia (but what's now Latvia) in 1913 to escape Jewish persecution in the final years of the Czarist regime. But within months of arriving in Portland, where two of Rothko's uncles set up clothing businesses, his father died. Leaning on his mother for support, the 10-year-old Rothko enrolled in a local school and, despite having to learn English as his fourth language, his intelligence allowed him to skip two grades. He graduated from Lincoln High School in 1921. He received a scholarship to Yale University, but dropped out after a year and moved to New York, embracing his career as an artist.

Rothko would return to Portland in 1933 for what became his first museum exhibition, at the Portland Art Museum. It also included works by his pre-teen art class students at a New York Jewish community center. But by this time, he was unquestionably more New Yorker than Portlander. As the Great Depression raged, Rothko's career began to flourish because he lived amongst a fertile environment of fellow artists there. It's not that there weren't artists in Portland; the acclaimed Oregon painter Carl Morris was creating murals and canvasses of both romantic realism and, later, abstraction comparable to Rothko's. Yet Portland in the 1930s would have lacked the truly varied, vibrant art community of the Big Apple. It was in New York in the years just after World War II that Rothko had his breakthrough, dropping the symbolic and representational paintings of his career thus far and embracing the abstraction for which his name would be made.

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Three Nudes), 1947 (National Gallery of Art)

It's fair to say that Rothko wouldn't have become Rothko had he stayed in Portland. After all, his representational paintings before the move to outright abstraction in 1947 are good but not great. Only in his abstract fields of color, after decades in NYC, did Rothko and his work become immortal.

But would the move to New York be essential today? Or more to the point, would it be so necessary to leave Portland? If an artist of comparable talent to Rothko lived here in Portland now, could he or she achieve the same level of superstardom Rothko did by leaving, only by staying instead?

My native's bias (and that of having gone to New York and come back) notwithstanding, I think so. Even aside from anything Portland may have done since Rothko's time to become a more cosmopolitan city with a robust artist community, the Internet and social media have created immeasurably more avenues for creative output of any kind to be seen.

It's not to say New York and Los Angeles won't always have the biggest media spotlight, or that Portland artists don't migrate there to get famous today. Director/performance artist/writer Miranda July is but the latest example. But our biggest cultural capitols no longer enjoy such domination over second-tier cities because they are no longer the only alternative. In Rothko's heyday in the first two decades after World War II, even Los Angeles was viewed as a backwater burg compared to NYC; it took Andy Warhol's first show, then the emergence of artists like Ed Ruscha to make California cool. Maybe Portland won't always have the kind of oversized pop-cultural footprint for its size that the city enjoys today, but it also feels far different from some isolated colony from which one must return to civilization.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1969 (courtesy National Gallery of Art)

Although Rothko might not have become anywhere near as famous had he stayed in Portland, I wonder if he might have lived longer. Rothko committed suicide in 1970, and maybe his depression could not have been swayed by any change of scenery or environment. After all, that which makes his post-1947 paintings so exceptionally powerful is the sense that he and other abstract expressionists were, however non-representational their forms may have been, giving visual outlet to the knot of sorrow and post-traumatic stress of World War II and the Holocaust. Maybe without being in New York Rothko would not have tapped in to that historical weight so strongly. Maybe he never would have had the epiphany that led from a good-but-not-great painter of symbols and scenes becoming a superlatively great abstract painter. But in Portland he would have had greater distance from historical burdens. He might have looked out at Mt. Hood and the natural world surrounding Portland more resonantly than nature visits Manhattan, and perhaps just that little difference might have allowed him to move on from the pain. Maybe he could have returned to Portland from New York in the late 1960s, when his canvases were beginning to foreshadow Rothko's increasingly hopeless outlook in their desaturated, enveloping darkness.

"(I spent my) youth in front of the endless space of the landscape of Oregon lying covered by wintery snows, in front of the monumental emptiness that is nothingness and at the same time part of it all," Rothko said of his time here. What if he'd spent the 1970s exploring more vibrant hues again in the Rose City?

Admittedly it's a pipe dream. And as Randy Gragg writes in a Portland Monthly article about Rothko and the PAM exhibit, we in this city may be too quick to claim favorite sons not born here and only residing here for a portion of their lives. Maybe Rothko never cared that much about Portland. Yet one sees in his canvases - in their limitless voids - the influence of a climate where the outdoors is always nearby, where clouds can roll through in spring especially with striking theatricality, piercing the gray with crystal blues and whites and yellows. One thinks of the line of generations Rothko is part of at Lincoln High alone, with Looney Tunes voice artist Mel Blanc and Simpsons creator Matt Groening walking the same halls, each a part of an iconic animated world. One thinks of Rothko in his early days painting the Willamette River from the West Hills, and wonders if he didn't have to go quite so early - from this city or from this Earth.

Kurt Cobain famously quoted the Neil Young lyric "It's better to burn out than fade away" in his suicide note. We tend to chalk up great artists' suicides to a romantic notion of the line between brilliance and madness. But personally, I feel less attracted to Young and Cobain's vision about death than Woody Allen's. Asked if he wanted to achieve immortality through his art, Allen said he'd rather achieve immortality through not dying.

Maybe the alchemy of Rothko's abstract paintings wouldn't have lasted even he had lived, but I like to imagine Rothko returning to Portland later in his life, if he hadn't committed suicide, like legendary architect Pietro Belluschi did. Freed from the expectations of hugely scaled, high-profile commissions during his years in Cambridge, Massachusetts (as dean of MIT's architecture school) like the Pan-Am Building or Lincoln Center in New York (two name two Belluschi commissions of the 1960s), he returned to Portland and designed an exceptional late-career portfolio of churches and houses.

Gus Van Sant also has left Portland at times only to return, and to remain rooted in community here - staging films locally and getting involved in charity. An aging Rothko could also have done similarly - mentored the city's art community, and perhaps attracted some of the major buyers Portland otherwise largely lacks even today. As it happens, the visual art scene is thriving here, but having Rothko as a part of the everyday fabric might have been transformative or at least impactful. If he was willing to teach art to children at a community center in New York for so long, how many people here might have been touched? Luckily though, as this comprehensive and exceptional Portland Art Museum retrospective reminds, there are always the paintings themselves. The collection is borrowed from a variety of museums and private collections, so it's not something that can remain here for long. But hopefully in time the museum, or another one here, will have a broader permanent collection of Rothkos of its own.

Hawthorne and Morrison, ready for their close-up: Tim DuRoche on "The Hidden Life of Bridges" at TBA Fest

From "The Hidden Life of Bridges" (courtesy PICA)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

From 9:00 pm to 11:00 pm on September 8-10 as part of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's annual Time-Based Art Festival (a.k.a. "TBA"), the Hawthorne and Morrison Bridges are serving a visual and auditory inspiration for an art project by Tim DuRoche and Ed Purver. “The Hidden Life of Bridges” will feature video projections (including profiles of some of the workers involved) onto the Morrison and audio recordings of sounds generated by people moving over the bridges. Audio composition can be heard from the sidewalk of the Hawthorne Bridge from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM every day from September 10th through October 9th. The audio can also be heard on the phone by dialing 503.713.5852, and the projections can also be viewed from Tom McCall Waterfront Park and the Eastbank Esplanade. Here's a video preview:

 

Recently Tim DuRoche answered questions via email about the exhibit:

I read that part of your inspiration came from routinely came from walking over the Hawthorne Bridge to work. Can you talk a little about your collective impression as you take that walk and what you see? Obviously you've got the river, the skyline (such as it is), the bridge itself, but I'd love to hear your take on that as a kind of everyday theatrical experience.

For a number of years, walking has been my major form of transport (that and Trimet), it’s one of Portland’s premiums—that ability to get from one side of the river to NE or SE easily. If you walk enough across the Hawthorne you can’t help but notice the hum of the bridge and experience the city in an intimately nested sort of way—part of that has to do with the fact the bridge is closer to the water than any of the other bridges and you really see the bowl of the hills, downtown and the river banks hugging the bridge.

From "The Hidden Life of Bridges" (courtesy PICA)

This is my fourth project sited along the river (the first was another RACC-sponsored project, a site-specific dance with Cydney Wilkes in 2004 located just under the Marquam Bridge; the next was a performance work with spoken word artist Lisa Radon along two sides of the river, inspired by Morse code and semaphore, as part of Gallery Homeland’s Scratching the Surface show in 2006; in 2007 I was one of the artists involved in month-long art/place-making projects as part of Linda K. Johnson’s South Waterfront Artist in Residence program; and for the  2008 edition of Gallery Homeland’s Scratching the Surface exhibition,  I made a sound installation on the East Bank Esplanade that dealt with the question that Urban Greenspaces’ Mike Houck says is his most frequently fielded question: “When will we be able to swim in the Willamette again.”

With all of my public work I’m really interested in the notion of the city as a large-scale structured improvisation—all around us are minimal structures that allow for maximal flexibility and varying degrees of discovery, joy and wonder…if we leave ourselves open to them.  For me, walking is a form of meditation –you’re simply taking in and allowing sensation, sight, sound to pass through you.  With both the SoWa project and this project I was very inspired by a piece of Whitman’s Song of Myself. In many ways it’s a great mantra for anyone interested in found sound or appreciating the ebb and flow of daily flow in an urban environment:

“Now I will do nothing but listen,

To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

… I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night

…I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,

Ah this indeed is music--this suits me.”

Being a musician and DJ, can you describe the kind of rhythmic musicality of the sounds one hears from these bridges? Whom might some of your musical or sound-artist inspirations been and what was it about Ed Purver that you thought would be right for this? Or vice versa?

Hidden Life of Bridges isn’t about rhythm per se– which I think you’re asking about because I’m a drummer. More and more I’m interested (in both my sound work and as a drummer) in suspension, sustain, and the notion of slowing time. Drumming and rhythm are very concerned with attack and decay, but if we begin to listen to the sounds around us, the way we encounter sounds like passing traffic, thrum of heavy machinery, birds flying past, is more nuanced than that.

The Hawthorne has incredible resonance and I wanted others to be able to (instead of just going from point A to point B) to perhaps consider stopping or slowing time to discover and appreciate the everyday music that the bridge manifests. The real impetus was to take the “choral” quality of the Hawthorne’s metal road-deck and “reharmonize” both figuratively and literally the bridge –so passersby might experience in a new way the bridge.  Running the contact microphones that are under the road through audio effects processing (developed with the deft contributions of electronics programming/music-whiz Doug Theriault ) allowed me to build specific “chords,” create pockets of sustain and harmony, humanize and heighten the musicality of the existing structure. So it’s in effect less about rhythm than it is about trying to “give voice” to the bridge and hear its song.

From "The Hidden Life of Bridges" (courtesy PICA)

The “hidden” lives of the bridges is about that, but it’s also about the miraculous old-school technology of bridge-building- the fact that a 101-year old vertical lift-span bridge is still doing its daily dance; and by incorporating the stories and voices of the engineers, operators, mechanics, maintenance workers, and inspectors who work these bridges into the “composition” it’s really about revealing the important arterial function and deeper meaning these structures have in our lives.

I’m not the first one to stick a mic on a bridge –there have been many, many projects in this vein. Bill Fontana’s project with the Tate Modern is one that springs to mind; the late sound artist Max Neuhaus’ work is another. I’ve also really enjoyed the “deep listening” approach to site and sound that artists like Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros deploy. Janet Cardiff’s audio tours are another- a great form of urban “juxtaportation.” I think however that what makes this project different from similar hey-let’s-put-a-contact-mic-on-a-bridge projects is it’s less about pure phonography or soundscape and is interested in the bridges as narrative, as a vehicle for “creative nonfiction”: one part audio-visual installation,  one part interpretive public education.

From "The Hidden Life of Bridges" (courtesy PICA)

I came into this project not in the way you’d think—considering that it’s in my own backyard. Ed Purver approached me about doing it through one of those small-world exchanges that seem to happen more and more. I’d certainly seen the RFP for projects with the bridges through RACC and Multnomah County’s Intersections program (a unique artist-in-residence/public art series that animates the fulcrum of “the art of work/the work of art”), but at the time didn’t think I had the wherewithal to put anything together. Ed, who’s based in Brooklyn, had sent an email to some friends/colleagues asking if anyone knew a sound artist in Portland and my friend Aaron Landsman (who’s a member of Elevator Repair Service, who performed their “Gatz” at TBA some years back) said, “I don’t, but my friend Tim seems to know everyone in Portland and probably does.” I proceeded to give Ed names of every sound artist in town (Ethan Rose, Heather Perkins, Seth Nehil, etc.) except myself, and as an afterthought sent him links to some of my projects.  As it turned out both Ed and I share a deep interest in the public realm and how (through media or sound) one might awaken in people a new found sense of wonder in structures and spaces they generally encounter inattentively.

What are some of your favorite bridges in Portland, in Oregon, or around the world? Have they always been an area of interest to you?

I love the Hawthorne Bridge—having now spent hours and hours up on the catwalk, underneath it, in the middle of it as it ascends the skyline—I don’t think I’ll ever tire of looking at it and experiencing it.  I’ve always loved the St. Johns Bridge—it would be another wonderful bridge for a project—for a couple of reasons. One is that, as Miguel Rosales pointed out when he was trying to design a beautiful bridge for the new Milwaukie Light Rail line (before it was oatmealed by “value engineering”), the life under the St. Johns is as important as the activity and energy of life that occurs up above. Also with its cabling, one could engage accelerometers (as Fontana did at the Tate Modern) and really investigate the aeolian harp-like sonority of the bridge in a cool way. My other favorite bridge is easily the Brooklyn Bridge—you can’t argue with the lore, the vista or Hart Crane. It’s pure poetry.

 

"To invite a narrative": Brad Carlile discusses photographing hotel rooms around the world

Photo by Brad Carlile from "Tempus Incognitus" at The Independent

BY BRIAN LIBBY

With summertime travel season in full-bloom, a lot of us are hitting the roads, airways and railways and spending nights in hotels. 

Though my inclination during hot weather is to hide in the basement or by the air conditioner, I for example, have stayed about 10 nights in four different hotels since late May. Each time the basics are the same—bed, TV, little bars of soap, buckets of ice—but the little variations can loom large. The quiet river view I’d imagined at Salish Lodge in Snoqualmie, Washington was spoiled by jackhammer-filled dam deconstruction outside, but the bathroom did have a Jacuzzi and the whole place sat atop the waterfall from "Twin Peaks". Hotel Palomar in Arlington, Virginia had the best smelling lavender shampoo, even if sausage and eggs in the restaurant downstairs were $21. Most importantly with temperatures rivaling the surface of the sun, the thermostat went down to 65 degrees and the TV had Food Network.

No matter where or what the hotel may be, staying in one puts one in a different kind of temporary, transitory society. A hotel room is an oasis from the otherwise motion-filled act of travel. Yet they are also, in most all cases, anonymous spaces that, however stylish or well-appointed, act as a common denominator in terms of style and amenities.

Hotels and the settings they provide are the theme of photographer Brad Carlile’s exhibit “Tempus Incognitus”, at The Independent gallery through August 14. Carlile was one of the winners of the 2009 Hearst 8x10 Photography Biennial, an international competition for emerging photographers, among eight photographers singled out from over 1,000 entries. The Independent is located at 530 NW 12th Avenue (at Hoyt) in Portland.

Empty hotel rooms from all over the world form the basis of Carlile’s show. Each of the 12 works was shot in multiple exposures over time in slide film, with no post-exposure or digital manipulation. The rooms are full of vivid, almost psychedelic color, yet their emptiness makes the spaces a kind of blank canvas for one’s imagined narratives.

Recently I interviewed Carlile over email, exploring the photographer’s ideas about travel, interiors and alternative theories about the passage of time.

How did you become interested in hotel rooms? Is traveling in hotels a palpable memory for you?

For this series, I'm exploring a variety of topics including time, space, and change.  To me, hotel rooms epitomize the transitory nature of modern life. Hotel rooms also put people in close physical proximity.  I'm sure the diminished stage of these rooms often heightens the wide variety of human dramas they sometimes contain.  The heightened colors of my process reflect this.

I'm fascinated at how architecture often defines our environment and feelings.  I'm a huge fan of Edward Hopper's interiors and how he uses the different perspectives and compositions to create powerful paintings.  In my series, I like working with trapezoidal compositions for tension and the sparseness of the rooms to invite a narrative.

Photo by Brad Carlile from "Tempus Incognitus" at The Independent

I describe these photographs as Edward Hopper interiors awash in James Turrell colors with David Lynch directing to make you a bit uneasy.  I feel there's a little bit of detachment from our normal lives when we're in hotel rooms.  I think the mix of colors in my images are beautiful but also convey an certain uneasiness that comes from detachment.

My love of travel certainly also plays into this series.  I took my first big trip at 6 years old when our family traveled around Europe on a shoestring.  I blame my parents for my wanderlust – one of the many reasons I'm grateful to them.  

What are some of your favorite and least favorite hotels that you've stayed in?

One of my favorite hotel rooms was also probably the cheapest.  I think it cost about $1.50 in the back streets of a small town in Indonesia.  The hotel was targeted at non-western travelers. As you can image the room was sparse and very basic.  What made it a spectacular was fantastic interactions with this incredible cast of characters that wandered up to the door to talk.

Another favorite is at the Parador in Arcos de la Frontera, Spain where my wife and I stayed.  Our friends had this amazing story there decades before.  I'm sure we stayed in the exact same room, but that is a much longer story.

My least favorite hotels and probably similar to many other people.  The soul-less and dirty ones that just suck the life out of anyone. 

Could you talk about some of the hotel rooms you chose to photograph and why you chose them?

These are rooms where Andrea, my wife, and I stay during our travels. I like to combine the element off chance with certain predetermined rules. I shoot most rooms we stay in without scouting them. I believe each room can tell certain stories. I get a feeling for the room and then set the camera on a tripod where it will remain for two days. I then set a schedule for the 3 to 9 exposures.

As I mentioned earlier, the view in the camera shows a depersonalized room.  This is to invite a narrative and not bring our particular story into it.  This of course leads to a very crowded behind-the-camera scene. Another rule I have is we must live in the room as normally as we can so our changes to the rooms – curtains changing, TV on or off, beds changing – are captured as they happen.

Photo by Brad Carlile from "Tempus Incognitus" at The Independent

I know this invitation to narrative works.  For example, one woman who visited my Houston show swore that she stayed in the exact room.  She went on to tell me the story of her stay in that room and the weekend of events in that town.  "New Orleans,” she told me. Am I right?" I nodded vaguely and smiled.  I didn't tell her that the light socket meant that it must be in Spain (Madrid). But it could be anywhere, and I want to invite those kind of connections.

The press release describes a setting in the photos in which "the perimeters of shifted space and time are blurred." I'm curious about this notion of transience on one hand (all these people passing through the rooms over time), but also its opposite on the other hand (the rooms staying more or less the same even as the people pass through interchangably).

I've always been fascinated by what changes and what doesn't.  And it seem we need something that doesn't change to show what changes.  I'll admit at first glance hotel rooms are easy to overlook, but they provide a wonderful backdrop to think about the people and their dramas passing thought.  In some sense even the dramas don't really change as the "characters" change.

In physical worked, space and time are theorized by modern physicists to be mutually inseparable.  In the mind, however, they are asymmetrically separable.

Children can think about space independent of time, but cannot conceptualize time independent of space.  It even effects our language, examples include long day, short meeting.  As the physicist Brian Greene said, "I believe in time, I think our intuition about it is wrong."  I'm trying play with some of these ideas by making time material/literal by showing time in color and not showing change as an ethereal blurring that it used in most still photography.  I think the color in these works really connects with people and inspires these and other thoughts.

Photo by Brad Carlile from "Tempus Incognitus" at The Independent

The press release also notes there was no digital manipulation of the photographs. Why was it important to convey the rooms in that kind of documentary-like, reality-orient fashion versus using digital tools to enhance a particular mood? Is it the reality of these spaces that interests you more than what we imagine there?

I like the fact that each of these images simultaneously contains moments from many different times, just as these rooms simultaneously contain stories from countless visitors. I don't think you can create these connections with colors tweaked in a digital way to create a false mood.  Yes, these are real rooms with real stories that I hope will inspire people to stop and think and feel.  

I'll end with one of my favorite quotes, which is from HH the Dalai Lama: "As your insight into the ultimate nature of reality is deepened, you will perceive phenomena as illusion-like."

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Considering graffiti's rise in Portland and the nation

Graffiti in Southeast Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In Tuesday's New York Times, Adam Nagourney reports that graffiti is on the rise in host of American cities, including Los Angeles, Nashville and Portland. At the same time, however, other major cities like New York and Seattle report that their vigilant anti-graffiti campaigns have so far held the spread of tagging at bay. All this comes as the economy continues to struggle (one stastical cause of graffiti) yet crime rates (a perceived result) remain historically low.

"In Portland, officials said taggers from other communities were defacing their property," Nagourney reports. “We’re arresting more people from out of town,” Marcia Dennis, Portland's graffiti abatement coordinator, told him. “For every one we get cleaned up, something else takes its place.”

Although to most people and in most situations graffiti is of course a crime and an eyesore, it also can be an intruiging phenomenon to deconstruct.

There is its connection between lawlessness and art, for example. In Los Angeles, an exhibit on graffiti at the Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year is being blamed for glorifying and encouraging taggers as the city's buildings and infrastructure have increasingly become festooned with spraypaint. There are also graffiti artists who have become acclaimed gallery artists, from Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 1980s to Banksy and Sheperd Fairey in more recent years. What's more, graffiti isn't a new urban phenomenon. It dates to ancient Greece and Rome. The preserved ruins of Pompeii revealed graffiti in the form of poems and bawdy phrases, not unlike today's public bathrooms. The Vikings and Mayans also wrote graffiti.

Graffiti in Southeast Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

In the Times story, Dennis acknowledges the influence: “The rush is addictive, and these guys don’t quit. They all think they’re going to end up being fabulously wealthy graffiti artists."

Graffiti also symbolizes the darkest days of the American city, from the 1960s-80s, when middle class investment left for the suburbs and central cities were overwhelmed by crime, a lack of investment captital and an eroding of infrastructure. When I arrived for college in New York City in 1990, for instance, most subway cars were still covered in spray paint. Along with the uncollected tumbleweed-like garbage strewning the streets and the all too common smell of human fluids, it contributed to a sense that my eastern pilgrimage was a big mistake.

Relatedly, though, during the 1990s New York and other cities began to revolutionalize crime fighting by applying the "broken windows theory," introduced in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling and furthered in Kelling's 1996 book Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities. It argues that maintaining ordered and well-conditioned aesthetics in a given neighborhood -- repairing broken windows, painting over graffiti -- actually helps decrease crime, or at least helps prevent an escalation in crime. The thinking goes that criminals are looking for destitute areas in which they can commit crimes with less fear of reprisal. This, in turn, explains why for some graffiti is far more than an eyesore or vandalism, but a potential tipping point for an otherwise healthy neighborhood or district becoming riddled with crimes greater than those committed with spraypaint.

Although efforts began back in the late 1980s, after taking office in 1994 New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (in tandem with police commissioner William Bratton) had the police more strictly enforce the law against subway fare evasion, public drinking, urination, and squeegee men wiping windshields of stopped cars and demanding payment. According to a 2001 study of crime trends in New York rates of both petty and serious crime fell suddenly and significantly, and continued to drop for the following ten years.

Graffiti in Southeast Porltand (photo by Brian Libby)

A 2005 Harvard University study in Lowell, Massachusetts also found a 20 percent drop in police calls in a neighborhood where authorities placed added attention on picking up trash, fixing streetlights, discouraging loiterers, making more misdemeanor arrests, and expanding mental health services and aid for the homeless.

Some of the explanation for the national graffiti upswing is that cities have curbed graffiti-fighting programs. Los Angeles's $7.1 million graffiti eradication budget was cut 6.5 percent as of July 1. Yet cities that have not cut back are also experiencing increases. Part of that can be blamed on the economy, of course. Teens, among the largest demographic contributors to graffiti, are out of school. And lots of adults are out of work with little to do and seeing that police forces, themselves sometimes experiencing layoffs and budget cuts, may be on sprees amidst unemployment and sunny weather.

Although vandalism is vandalism, I believe there is a distinction to be made between the somewhat artful, stencil-based graffiti common today and tagging that denotes gang territory. We may not like the idea of skateboard-riding kids spraypainting pictures onto walls, but that is decidedly less dangerous than organized groups of drug-dealing gangs violently fighting for control of streetcorner sales.

Even so, the broken-window theory is a necessary but delicately balanced endeavor.

The Times reports that Portland neighborhoods like Brooklyn will be stepping up foot patrols. “We will have four or five people starting out once a week around dusk walking the neighborhood with a graffiti cleanup kit,” Michael O’Connor, the head of the Brooklyn Action Corps, told Nagourney.

Yet it may be wrong to be too vigilant. Portland, after all, is celebrated for being a tolerant city where heavy-handed police action isn't tolerated. If we have the police aggressively hunting down petty criminals, it could also result in the kind of over-zealous harrassment that has led to wrongful deaths like those of James Chasse and Aaron Campbell, or reduce the influx of creative professionals moving to the city for its laid-back attitude and progressive socio-political environment.

I don't think there can ever be a definitive yes-or-no answer abut graffiti. If you're a property owner and somebody spraypaints on your property, there's little plausible response but to be upset about it, and to paint over the tag as soon as possible. Yet I also cringe at those such as Los Angeles police detective Ramona Findley, who head's the department's graffiti task force and in Nagourney's Times story blames graffiti on pop culture.

"The art world has accepted it," she tells Nagourney. "People make money from graffiti T-shirts. I was in Wal-Mart on Easter, and I saw graffiti Easter eggs.”

Graffiti in downtown Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

It's not that simple - artists are not the entirety of graffiti vandals, nor are famous artists who started with graffiti without value. We have to accept the fact that from Basquiat to Banksy, Haring to Fairey, graffiti is an expression of self. Just becuase it's done lawlessly doesn't mean that something of value doesn't ultimately come out of graffiti sometimes.

So what would I do if there were graffiti on my building? As it happens, there was some very recently. I live in a mixed-use building with an apartment, a restaurant and a dance studio. Two weeks ago there appeared on the sole windowless portion of the facade a stenciled graffiti image of a woman holding an umbrella. Immediately I felt uncomfortable thinking of someone vandalizing my building just a few feet from my bedroom window. But I also took a moment to admit to myself that the vandalism was not without attractiveness. I wondered what the tagger hoped for in the future: an art career or a pipe hit, a job or a clean rap sheet, a raise on his allowance or good  grades in the upcoming semester. Before I could make a decision about the graffiti, our landlord had it covered.

The only answer I could resolve was that the graffiti, and its author, would remain a mystery. And therein may lie the reason for society's wide spectrum of feelings about graffiti: with its perpetrators anonymous, the tagging acts as a blank canvas onto which we project our feelings about entertwined issues of crime and safety, art and expression. Graffiti is a kind of Rorschach-like code language forced upon us, in which our explanatory narrative is never as complete as we want it to be.

When I wrote two years ago about a photography exhibit of graffiti art, the comments were mixed but generally respectful of property rights. "People that find something appealing in this destructive use of spray paint could do society and taxpayers a big favor by condemning unauthorized painting and inviting the 'pirates' they seem to admire, over to their own property to paint with permission from the owner," wrote one commenter, WS. "Completely condemning a entire form of art based on one wing of that art's practice (idiot tags by idiots on inappropriate places) seems reactive and does not really help anything," wrote another commenter, Josiah. But one commenter also referenced Portland's famed Lovejoy Columns, which started out as illegal vandalism (painting columns of the Lovejoy bridge ramp) but now is displayed proudly outside a Pearl District condo as outsider art.

Meanwhile, what do you think? Does graffiti warrant zero tolerance, romantic enabling, or something in between?

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Matthew Ginn's metro city halls project: Vancouver, Washington

Vancouver City Hall (all photos by Matthew Ginn, Homestead Images)

BY BRIAN LIBBY AND MATTHEW GINN

Last year, photographer Matthew Ginn acted as a photographic correspondent for Portland Architecture with shots of each public high school in the city. Now it's time to begin a new series, in which Ginn pictures each of the metro area's city halls.

In most cases, save perhaps for Portland, these are relatively modest buildings. But given what they represent, and that, like high schools, they comprise some of the most visible and oft-used public spaces in Portland and its environs, the 29 city hall buildings in the metro area make an ideal companion to the schools portfolio.

"I started by making a map of all the city halls nearby. Some of are what you expect (e.g. Portland, Hillsboro). Others, like Gladstone, are part of the local fire/police station. And then the smaller cities (e.g. Maywood Park, Rivergrove) just use a room at a local school," he writes by email. "Some of these cities I’d never even heard of! The best might be Johnson City, which is just a renegade trailer park, so the de facto city hall is the trailer park office."

Vancouver City Hall, built in 1966, is "really cool for a number of reasons," he says. "Its architects were Nelson, Walla & Dolle (now DSP architecture). It's strongly reflective of the era—mid-century modern style, very car-friendly, etc. Also interesting, because they’re moving city hall to the was-to-be-Columbian building in a couple of months. Made me realize that Vancouver has a lot of really interesting architecture that is overlooked."

Thanks to Matthew for taking these shots. What do all of you think of the building? To me, it has aspects of the Brutalist period of modern architecture that briefly flourished in the 1960s and '70s - big on concrete and a bit uninviting for a public building, but possessing a kind of simple grandness that is not without merit. People have similar mixed feelings of Boston City Hall, perhaps the most prominent of American City halls constructed in this period.

Whether these structures will stand the test of time with future generations is of course unknown, but we should never be hasty in tearing down 50-year-old buildings before a proper historical context has had the chance to present itself. Time and time again, generations seek to tear down half-century-old structures while heaping praise on 100-year-old ones: sometimes with proper justification, but too often with ill advised haste. Here's hoping, whether it's an actual city hall or takes on a new role, that Vancouver's government center sticks around, concrete an dall.

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Crossroads of city and nature: discussing "The Forest At Fountainbleu" at PAM

"The Forest At Fountainbleu" (1864) by Virgile Narcisse Diaz de la Peña

BY BRIAN LIBBY

This Thursday (May 12) at 6PM at the Portland Art Museum, as part of the continuing Artist Talk series - in which local artists choose a work from the permanent collection that he or she loves and discusses why - I will have the honor of talking about a painting called "The Forest At Fountainbleu" by the French artist Virgile Narcisse Diaz de la Peña. Past speakers in the Artist Talk series have included Storm Tharp, MK Guth, Arcy Douglass, Jeff Jahn, Nan Curtis, Matt McCormick, Kristan Kennedy, Namita Wiggers, Jelly Helm and Jeffry Mitchell.

Although its exact year of provenance seems unknown (it is listed as 1864 in the museum, 1854 or 1859 in other academic sources), the painting has an arresting power over me. Although it's truly contemporary art in the Jubitz Center that attracts most of my attention, from the abstract desert views of local virtuoso James Lavadour to the blocky prints of Ellsworth Kelly and kaliedoscopic provocations by Gilbert & George, I always make a special stop in the museum's Belluschi Building to see this painting.

I hesitate to go into too much explanation in this post, on the eve of the museum talk. But perhaps it's worth noting that a central aspect of my love for "The Forest At Fountainbleu" is how it seems to lie at numerous types of intersections. In art history, it is part of the Barbizon School of French landscape paintings, a precursor to Impressionism that was similarly based on painters painting in open air before their subjects, abandoning the symbolism of meticuous academic painting from previous centuries for a kind of snapshot-style that relies more on the immediate surroundings - not unlike photography, which was becoming promenent for the first time during these same years.

The Barbizon painters, such as Theodore Rousseau and Diaz, most often painted in or near the Fountainbleu Forest. It was far enough outside Paris to bring a communion with nature, but close enough to visit with only an hour or two of travel - a close getaway. And you see this in Diaz's painting at the Portland Art Museum. In the center of the frame is a rickety dirt road leading to the horizon, bracketed by trees. Although firmly part of the broader Romantic movement, it's not as idealistic and manicured a version of nature as an English painter like John Constable might have chosen. You see nature in its beauty but also how it is being impacted by the encroach of development. And it's not a fuzzy soft-focused work of Impressionism either, even though its simplicity - the almost T shape of the central road and the horizon line - possesses a hint of abstraction.

This tension or dichotomy betwen nature and city has always been a particular area of interest for me. I grew up in a small Oregon town, McMinnville (which was then more of a truly tiny agricultural town, not tourist friendly wine country), and then at age 18 attended college at New York University.

Farm outside McMinnville, Oregon, 1994 (photo inferior to "Fountainbleu" by Brian Libby)

When I arrived in Manhattan that first freshman fall in 1990, it was my first time in the city. I'd never bothered (or been able) to visit first before choosing the school, so it was a veritable plunge into the deep end of urbanity's pool without quite knowing how to swim. In the long run it turned out to be the best thing I ever did, but in the short run it made for a culture shock that gave way to a romantic yearning for Oregon that I'd never had in all the years of backpacking with my parents through the Cascades growing up. Yet when I finally did return to pastoral McMinnville, it felt too small and isolated, with no good pizza or movie theaters or galleries. So that push-pull between the thrilling energy and vibrant cultural melting pot of a city and the nurturing, even spiritual beauty of nature is one that has always resonated with me deeply. "The Forest At Fountainbleu" speaks directly to this.

The Thursday talk goes from 6 to 8PM, but I don't expect to be talking for even half that time. Happy hour refreshments will be served by the good people at PAM, and hopefully I'll have the chance to listen as much as speak when it comes to "Fountainbleu", its inspirations and effects.

Gallery exhibits imagine an empty city

St. Johns Bridge (illustration by Lisa Ortlip)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Two art exhibits opening today take liberties with the notion of a people-less city, one a fictitious vision of the future and one drawn from our everyday urban landscape.

In a collaboration with PixelPool, four students from the Art Institute of Portland were commissioned to create a digital image of the chosen subject: Portland in 100 years without people. This dystopian idea has a long history. There are Hollywood movies like 1946's The Last Man on Earth, 1985's The Silent Earth or 2007's I Am Legend with Will Smith. There are also more serious literary looks, like Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us. Yet these images still, perhaps because they picture our own city sans residents, can evoke numerous feelings of alarm, sobriety and redoubled concern for progressive action.

Downtown Portland (illustration by Ann Petit)

In Ann Petit's illustration, brides and the downtown waterfront have leaned like the Tower of Pisa. Only birds can be seen moving in the frame, left to nest amongst the concrete, steel and glass. Lisa Ortlip presents the St. Johns bridge, long Portland's most beautiful span, overcome by vines. Bridges always carry symbolic meaning besides literally moving traffic; somehow the notion of a connecting span no longer doing its job adds greater poignance. Although if this were the ugly Marquam Bridge or the Columbia Crossing, one might not feel so bad seeing them abandoned.

Ankeny Plaza (illustration by Sarah Francian)

In an illustration by Sarah Francian, the arches of Ankeny Plaza have given way to ivy, with cars stopped right in their tracks as if whatever wiped away the population did so very quickly. Ankeny Plaza is today revitalizing with a new Mercy Corps headquarters and a relocated Saturday Market, yet it is also one of Portland's oldest public spaces. To see it no longer vibrant gives a sense of the city's long history halted.

Pioneer Place (illustration by Ben Fleuter)

Pioneer Place shopping mall's interior atrium is the subject for Ben Fleuter's illustration. Personally, this human being is already completely absent from this architectural space. Malls inevitably feel claustrophobic, even when they have Guggenheim-like atriums pictured here. Even so, the nod to consumerism and its absence is noteworthy in Fleuter's piece.

"PDX 2111" is a one-night First Thursday exhibit at Pixelworks, located at 308 NW 11th Avenue. The exhibit will be open from 6-8PM tonight.

Meanwhile, local artist, writer and curator TJ Norris has an exhibit opening at Anka Gallery that looks at blank signs throughout the west.

Photo by TJ Norris, from the "PresentTense" series

"In a continuation of a series of abandoned signs that I started investigating in 2008, I've traveled through the Northwest... to capture something universal," Norris explains. "These largely ignored, lonely structures are growing in number. What this says about economics and the downward spiral of advertising is a multi-tiered thing left to one's imagination. I've been entranced by the subtle, formal qualities of these mysterious gutted outposts and their ominously intimate lost messages. A great sense of emptiness is categorized by their poker-faced, sitting-bull silent nature. The phrase 'Silence = Death' emerges more loudly than ever before.  We are left in the great in-between."

Photo by TJ Norris, from the "PresentTense" series

"Back in 2008 I first started noticing a quieting sub/urban horizonline when contrasting my experiences of looking/living in the Northwest while on a trip to Los Angeles," Norris adds. "There was something pronounced about former advertising marquees now hollowed out after a closure of a big box store chain like Circuit City or even a small operation like a mechanic's garage. These totems and empty boxes, collectively growing over the past few years recede quietly into the background from Vancouver (BC) to Vernonia, from Boise and Boston."

"As the economy has contorted during this recession these quirky reminders have further dotted my consciousness. In tens of pilgrimages to regional and distant places I've recorded these 'signs of the times'. On a recent return visit to LA I noted lesser obvious signs than in previous trips compared to the implosion of such in my own surroundings, suggesting a possible paradigm shift of small vs. large cities. Not being an urban planner or economist I used this opportunity to strictly focus on the structures themselves. Looking through their devoid former message, effortlessly propped in quiet, hard-lined grandeur."

Perhaps these exhibits appeal specifically to me, because my own photographs are often people-less. The one time my work was reviewed, by The Oregonian in 2003, reviewer DK Row even noted that there was not a single person in the 25 photographs. But there may also be an appeal more universal here, whether it's a people-free city that people find eerie or one that recalls the old Chinese curse: "May you get what you wish for."

The Norris opening is this Thursday from 6-10PM at Anka Gallery, 325 NW Sixth Avenue.

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Twin towers to obsolete breweries: seeing how much has changed

Henry Weinhard brewery, Portland, 1997 (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Recently I've been spending afternoons with a new favorite toy: a scanner that can accommodate my hundreds of negatives and slides.

At first, as I began to pick and choose amongst the photos I took from 1990-2002 with a focus on New York, where I attended college and lived between 1990 and 1997. It will probably come as no surprise that the World Trade Center negatives were what stopped me in my tracks the most. The twin towers were standing for all of my time living in the city.

Particularly because I lived in lower Manhattan, in Greenwich Village, the 106-story WTC acted as a kind of compass, wherein one would look to the towers as a reference point as the streets below 14th and Union Square abandons the rectilinear grid to shoot off in countless directions.

World Trade Center from Staten Island Ferry, 1990 (photo by Brian Libby)

I'll never forget my first full day in New York City, which included a visit to the observation deck atop one of the towers. After growing up in small-town McMinnville, Oregon, I'd enrolled at New York University without ever first visiting New York. I'd arrived the night before, a sweltering late-August evening that was not only obscenely humid, but brought out the fowl aroma of a garbage strike that had left piles of trash bags bigger than automobiles.

I thought I'd made the worst mistake of my life coming to the city, a victim of my own naivete in thinking I was going to move right into a Frank Sinatra song. But as my mom and I stood atop the World Trade Center with the other tourists, looking out at all of New York's boroughs and western New Jersey, the city and my place in it made a little more sense. It was not just a spectacular view, or an unknowingly fleeting one, but a calmative just when I desperately needed one.

World Trade Center, 1991 (photos by Brian Libby)

The perusal and scanning of my old negatives also made resonant just how much of Portland has changed since I moved here in 1997. My first apartment was downtown, and I remember initially wondering why the city seemed to smell like tomato juice. The answer, which my girlfriend discovered after emailing Oregonian columnist Jonathan Nicolas, was the Henry Weinhard's brewery. Now the brewery is long gone, with Henry's been bought out by Stroh's and the Brewery Blocks having taken the place of the old brewhouse.

As you can see in these photos of the brewery from 1997, just a few years before it was torn down, the various silos and industrial buildings comprised an interesting compositions. The legendary Swiss architect Le Corbusier, on a trip to America, declared that his favorite architecture consisted of agricultural and industrial buildings. And indeed, the forms of some of these structures are so elemental as to comprise a kind of modest but massively scaled minimalist sculpture.

Henry Weinhard's brewery, 1997 (photos by Brian Libby)

Looking at the Henry's brewery photos is a reminder not only of its presence in Portland, but more generally of how large industrial works and facilities used to be so much more of a common presence in central cities. Sure, we still have plenty of it left here. Outside the Rose Garden beside the Steel Bridge is a gigantic ship repair facility. The Central Eastside is still designated for light industrial zoning. The Willamette is still a working riverfront as one travels north.

Yet a substantial amount of industrial architecture and structures have disappeared, too. That was the old identity, of course, of the burgeoning Pearl District and South Waterfront. In SoWa's case, the Zidell shipyard still abuts the OHSU Center For Health & Healing, but its days are numbered as well.

Henry Weinhard's brewery, 1997 (photos by Brian Libby)

I'm not necessarily lamenting the decreasing industrial presence in our city. Although industry brings jobs, it also seems to bring pollution and bar the riverfront from public access. I expect to be able to walk both sides of the Willamette or Columbia in their entirety, and one just can't do that in this century or the last.

Even so, looking at old photos of the Henry's Brewery, it is in its way a lamented lost architecture like the Trade Center. Thankfully, though, its razing was a peaceful affair. Unfortunately or thankfully, we remember the dramatic razings the most.

World Trade Center, August 28, 2001 (photo by Brian Libby)

On August 28, 2001 - exactly two weeks before the 9/11 attacks - I happened to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with friends while on a visit. It was only coincidence that I stopped to take what turned out to be one last shot of the twin towers. I guess I always expect architecture to be permanent, but sometimes reminders to the contrary become a jolt that shapes a whole generation. The lesson? Keep a camera at hand. Or at least save a picture in your mind. It won't fade any worse than my negatives, although I'm sure glad I kept them.

Talking with Portland's unofficial filmmaker-laureate, Matt McCormick, about "Some Days Are Better Than Others" and "The Great Northwest"

Matt McCormick's The Great Northwest (image courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In Matt McCormick's new movie, Some Days Are Better Than Others, Katrina (Carrie Brownstein) holds a postcard of Portland's decaying circa-1950s Palms motel in front of the frame as she stands in front of the Palms itself. This is also a continuing device or motif in The Great Northwest, McCormick’s new video showing at Elizabeth Leach Gallery: a quasi-documentary in which the filmmaker retraces a car trip around Montana and Oregon’s picturesque natural wonders based on a vacation scrapbook he found in a thrift store.

Holding up a postcard to the frame seems to encompass in a single shot much of what his filmmaking career is all about. It’s a way of looking at architecture and landscape with a sense of wonder: about what is there and what used to be there, wondering what endures and what fades away, and why.

To many viewers around the country or beyond, McCormick might soon be thought of as a new voice. In a few weeks Some Days, his first narrative feature, debuts nationwide. It’s already been a success at festivals around the country, including South By Southwest in Austin and the Museum of Modern Art's "New Directors/New Films" series in New York. Here's a preview...

Some Days stars Carrie Brownstein, who is currently making a splash in the TV show “Portlandia” (she previously belonged to the seminal band Sleater-Kinney), and James Mercer, singer from another hugely popular Portland band, The Shins. "Carrie is blowing up right now. No doubt about it," McCormick says. "We actually filmed this movie before they did 'Portlandia'. But my thought is it’s kind of cool because it legitimizes her as an actor. It’s no longer Carrie Brownstein the musician who is acting. " That said, Some Days is more personally a Matt MCormick fim, drawing from his own life:  romantic breakup, walking dogs for the Humane Society, even elderly friends making experimental soap films.

The film is set in Portland, and it feels so: a melancholic valentine to the city’s gritty industrial enclaves, thrift stores, parks and murals. Among the settings for the movie, an intertwining series of narratives about melancholy twenty-somethings looking for love and fulfillment, are the demolition of the Zell Brothers building downtown, a series of small houses in North and Northeast Portland (many of them condemned and boarded up during the Great Recession in which the movie was filmed), a pumpkin patch on Sauvie Island, and much more.

I’ve been covering McCormick’s work for over a decade, dating back to the early 2000s when I was a film critic at Willamette Week and he was an experimental filmmaker curating the “Peripheral Produce” screening series. (You can read two of those articles here and here, and a story from The Independent Film & Video Monthly here.)

His career began with a series of found-footage collages such as The Virotonin Decision that deftly combined old Jack LaLaine shows and other ephemera gathered from old reels discarded by Portland station KPTV. It felt a lot more like the 1970s than "That '70s Show". His career only escalated from there, with works like Sincerely, Joe P. Bear and especially The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal.

His career took a major turn with the half-joking, half-serious documentary The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal. It too is a valentine to Portland’s disappearing but still resonant brand of hallowed seediness. In viewing graffiti removal in the Central Eastside Industrial District as a kind of unwitting art unto itself, McCormick compares the guileless bands of color to the work of seminal 20th Century modern artist Mark Rothko; and of course Rothko himself grew up in Portland. It’s not to say McCormick is a Rothko for our time. Who is?

But I can’t think of any other artist, be it a filmmaker, painter, photographer, sculptor or otherwise, who has over time so captured the precise local blend of youthful creative types and the gritty yet beautiful urban underbelly of Portland that is becoming a national pop-cultural brand of its own. If “Portlandia” the TV show is quickly becoming a kind of short-hand for a certain socio-cultural tribe expanding in this city and gaining notice far beyond, then McCormick’s work, from Some Days and The Great Northwest to his older films of the past decade, are the most evocative form of long-hand I know to exist.

"These filmmakers know this type of work won't appeal to the masses," New York curator Astria Suparak told me for a 2001 article in SOMA magazine. "Without that obligation, they have more freedom to play with form, subject material, and the construction of (or disregard for) a narrative. There's less compromising, and more passion and drive." Ten years after that quote, and after filmmakers like McCormick and former Portlander Miranda July (whose shorts McCormick was the first to exhibit) have gone from experimental to mainstream narrative filmmaking, it's still true.

Scrapbook images from The Great Northwest (courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)

The Great Northwest is a combination of travelogue and documentary, all based on a scrapbook from 1958 that McCormick found in a thrift store. “Four women from Seattle went on this epic road trip and drove through Yellowstone, down the Idaho panhandle, up the Columbia River Gorge, down the coast, up to Crater Lake. It was 3,400 miles altogether,” McCormick explains. “The interstates were just about to go into construction.” As a result, the women’s trip, which McCormick retraced and filmed, is an homage to the more varied landscape that existed in the days before I-5 and I-84. Luckily they filled the scrapbook with hints about how McCormick, or anyone, could follow the journey of Bev, Berta, Sissie and Clarice headed east from seattle in their Chevy Bel-Air.

“They saved receipts, collected menus, all this weird ephemera, and put it together in this scrapbook. It’s almost like a trail of breadcrumbs. There are these hints of where they stopped for lunch, where they slept. So I retraced their road trip and attempted to go to every place where they had stopped and documented. Every postcard or menu, I tried to find that location today.”

It begs the question: what happened to these women? Who were they? “I was able to find death records for two of them from the early ’90s. They were all in their late thirties or early forties during the trip,” he explains. “I don’t think they had any children. My understanding they were all single, middle-aged women who liked going on road trips and drinking beer. They drank a lot of beer.”

For McCormick, who grew up in New Mexico and Colorado before coming to Portland in his twenties, it was a chance to see the Northwest landscape anew and to assess the transformation that has taken place. “I’d never been to Glacier National Park or Crater Lake either. There were places that I’d never been that were just amazing, beautiful places. But it was also the history. When you start to look at an old record like this, it’s like looking at a time capsule. And that forces you to realize how much change there’s been."

Oregon Highway 26 in The Great Northwest (image courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)

"One town, vantage, Washington, was flooded out by a damn. Taft, Montana they stopped and had dinner in. that was completely bulldozed over by Interstate 90. There are lot of ghost towns, essentially, that were flourishing cities. Another one, Harleton, Montana, was on the old Milwaukee road train line. It was the third transcontinental railroad to be built, from Chicago to Milwaukee to Seattle. One thing that made it unique was that over the Rocky Mountains it was powered by electricity. In this town in Montana, it made the switch over from coal and steam power to electric. So it was this really important town. But the railroad went out of business in about 1971. All these little towns that were on the Milwaukie Road are becoming ghost towns. Without the train station there, the towns are just drifting away. But then on the flipside, there are other cities just exploding: Spokane, Seattle, Portland. The Oregon coast has gone from sleepy down and out fishing and logging towns to these tourists Meccas.”

The film continuously juxtaposes images and pages from the scrapbook with his own present-day travels.

Even though he has been known heretofore as an experimental filmmaker, there is more than a little Ansel Adams in McCormick. He will patiently wait in remote locations for several hours at a time to capture the most beautiful morning or evening light. So the way in which he captures a mixture of kitsch and striking natural landscapes is magically resonant, from the Ginko Petrified Forest and golden wheat fields to surviving dives from 1958 like the Martha Inn Café, Dicks Burgers, The Flame Lodge. He passes the ghost towns of Vantage, Montana of Burke, Idaho. “On the east coast they built roads to the towns. In the west, a lot of times it was the road that was first. It’s like the towns only exist to support the road or the railroad. You can see the difference. You can see the layout of towns is affected by that.”

Oregon coast in The Great Northwest (image courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)

He’s clearly at his most comfortable in these either remote or under-appreciated portions of the Northwest, but McCormick also turns a telling eye on huge tourists attractions like Yellowstone, where his camera focuses on the visitors. “It’s wildlife Disneyworld,” he laughs. “The tourists there lose their minds.”

But he respects the tourist quartet who created the scrapbook: “It’s like they’re explorers and this was a historical document. First it was Lewis and Clark, and then it was Sissie, Bev and Bertha.”

The Great Northwest can be seen at Elizabeth Leach Gallery through April 2, and it includes a host of photography as well. Some Days Are Better Than Others opens in theaters on March 25.

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Conversations about criticism

 
L-R: DK Row, Lisa Radon, Jeff Jahn

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Yesterday, on artist Eva Lake's KBOO radio show, I was a part of a panel discussion about art criticism in Portland (which you can listen to here) along with writer/critics Lisa Radon of Ultra, Barry Johnson (formerly a longtime editor and critic at The Oregonian) and Jeff Jahn, critic-editor at PORT. The occasion for the talk was the recent announcement that longtime Oregonian art critic DK Row will be stepping down to take on a different reporting beat at the paper (on philanthropy). That means the only daily newspaper staff art critic in the Pacific Northwest is now gone.

But as architecture afficionados know, this is a slippery slope that The Oregonian and other newspapers have already been sliding down for years. Ever since the departure of Randy Gragg, for example, the paper has been without an architecture critic. Where will it all end, and how will the important issues and ideas and people in Portland's visual art and design worlds be given the attention they deserve?

One topic discussed on the show was the changing nature of a critic's role. Is it judgment, or something else? And how has the Internet and social networking changed things?

As Barry Johnson pointed out on the radio and Radon noted in her follow up post, Simone Weil has called culture “the formation of attention,” while John Dewey described the job of the critic being to "explain and explain some more". Perhaps today criticism isn't about giving a thumbs up or down to the general quality of something - passing an overall judgment on quality - but instead about sharing ideas and points of connection. It's not to say making a case and an argument for something isn't important - it is. But published criticism is today less of a final judgement than a conversation starter: a beginning, not an end.

Today newspapers are shrinking yet content online from other sources is exploding. More is being produced by blogs and social networking in terms of dialogue and conversation. One is also freer to write online in blog posts or on Facebook without any vetting or editing. Yet there is an important rigor that goes into actual journalistic criticism which is lacking from blogs. So in some respects it's a trade off: more volume of content for a smaller audience and less vetted editorial writing. It's not to say an unedited blog post can't be as good a piece of writing as an edited newspaper or magazine opinion piece; a lot of that depends on the talents of the writer. Yet it would be a shame if local and regional art and architecture coverage completely lost its generalist audience via daily newspapers and lost the opportunity to provide edited criticism and coverage.

On Lake's show, we also discussed the importance (or lack thereof) of a critic's training and involvement in what they're reviewing. Should an art critic be an artist, or collecting art? Must or should an architecture critic be an architect?

DK Row (who, in full disclosure, was formerly my editor at the paper) made a particular and deliberate point not to do become enmeshed in the art world. He possesses a strict personal code with regard to preventing conflicts of interest. It was a point of pride that he wasn't biased. Yet some found Row to be too far removed from the community he was covering. What is the right balance? Certainly the same question can apply to architectural criticism. Neither Randy Gragg nor I are trained as architects, for example, although certain acclaimed critics like the Boston Globe's Robert Campbell are. My sense is that we need both: writers and critics who's vision is shaped from being makers, and writers and critics who are more strictly observing writers. There should be no prerequisite written in stone, and if there was, it would reduce the diversity and spectrum of voices and ideas.

And besides, sometimes knowledge isn't everything. As I mentioned on Lake's radio show, just before I started writing criticism in the late 1990s as a movie reviewer for Willamette Week, of the paper's two existing critics, Kim Morgan had the much wider cinema knowledge but Dale Basye was the writer whose prose I liked best. (That said, I also liked Kim's writing better than any other critic in Portland not named Dale.) Which would you have rather read? Or should one have had to ever make that choice?

Although I'm not an objective voice on this, having previously written art reviews for the paper, if we're talking about criticism and arts coverage prompted by DK Row's exit as art critic, it's all but impossible not to talk about The Oregonian and arts coverage in general. Although daily city newspapers in America have all faced decline amongst dwindling advertising and subscription rates, I believe The Oregonian, despite having many individual talents on its roster, has been hurt as much by its approach as the challenges themselves.

Today any newspaper must have strength in its website, considering online coverage to be not a separate entity or animal, but an intrinsic part. If you go to OregonLive.com, however, it is not at all an online extension of The Oregonian. The site is broken down into sections differently than in the paper, so if you read something and print and go looking for the story online, it's not easy. And speaking of consolidation, I'd also like to see The Oregonian rid itself of the myriad names for arts coverage and simply have a section called "Arts". They could take away the names "How We Live", "O!" and "A&E" and move lifestyle and health stories to sections of their own. 

A final topic of the radio show, and one addressed by panelists like Jahn on PORT, is how criticism differs, if at all, from other journalism. This continued online via the panelists.

"Overall, journalism and criticism have some overlap but they are different creatures," Jahn wrote in his follow-up blog post. "A strong critic has a strong internal compass so that friends, influential curators, gallerists and collectors have only marginal influence on them... Criticism is not so self-serving; it's a form of sharing why things do and so not work well. It's ultimately a civic undertaking. "

Lisa Radon took up the question as well. "What do we do when we write about art? We inform, introduce, invite the reader to consider something we’ve noticed. We notice. We describe so that you can see through our words and photos what we’ve seen. We question. We ask what is this trying to do and how well does it do what it sets out to do? We ask why is it trying to do that, and can the argument be made that it is a worthwhile thing to do? We provide context, engaging history and the contemporary with a kind of conceptual peripheral vision. We engage in a discourse that contributes to the meaning-making around the work by bringing whatever considerations of theory, of philosophy, that the work raises for us. And of course, let’s admit that we also misinterpret, misrepresent, miss the point, graft our own ideas and concerns onto a consideration of the work, etcetera."

Yet I like Lisa's conclusion later, which I could say speaks for me as well: "I can answer for myself that writing is a way of thinking. That writing is a way of working through to understanding. And that writing about work is a continuation of the conversation that begins when the artist hangs her work on the wall in invitation of response. It’s a conversation I want to have with you."

A camera with wings

Above Portland cover (photo by Bruce Forster, courtesy Cameron + Company)

BY CLAIRE SYKES

We live life at ground level, held firmly by gravity. From here close up, as we walk or wheel through our days, we can feel the asphalt’s roughness, see the spiny veins of a leaf and hear an approaching siren’s wail.

But from a helicopter—leaning way out the side as Portland photographer Bruce Forster does, his camera aimed below—streets form a crossword-puzzle grid, parks patchwork themselves between neighborhoods, and traffic scurries like mice. Up here, we see the city as a whole, a living map.

Hovering at skyscraper height and soaring close to clouds, Forster takes us on an aerial tour of Oregon’s largest city and its outlying areas, in Above Portland (Cameron + Company, 2010).

The 143-page coffee-table hardbound book joins the publisher’s Above series that includes San Francisco, New York, Paris and 14 other cities around the world. Its 150-some full-color photographs accompany essays by six local historians and experts on Portland’s history, architecture, urban planning, transportation and sustainability.

Downtown Portland (photo by Bruce Forster, courtesy Cameron + Company)

“[W]e can see the layers of Portland’s story unfolding beneath us…we can see how the landscape shapes what we build; how city blocks, roads, and tracks have directed development; how buildings reveal Portland’s past tastes and present aspirations…,” writes Chet Orloff, adjunct professor at Portland State University, in the book’s Introduction. “And we can see how one photographer takes all this in.”

Forster’s lens gazes down at buildings and bridges, rivers and roadways, fields and forests, capturing postcard-perfect Portland-area scenes. Nearly every page in this book is a clear day, unlike the gray, drippy skies here much of the time. But then who wants to go up in a copter and shoot in the rain?

So you bask in Above Portland’s sunshine. And, if you know this city, you delight in the familiar: The urban skyline’s boxy geometrics, like toy blocks. The beloved Willamette marked off by bridges—a tailor’s tape measure. That braid of freeways in Southwest. A clump of Southeast city-park deciduous. Bands of trees marching between rows of houses (and is that mine down there?).

PDX and Smith & Bybee Lakes (photos by Bruce Forster, courtesy Cameron + Company)

However, some of Forster’s best photos in this book do more than document a specific place in time. They make the most of the medium, of what only photography can show from such an elevated perspective. You may traverse concentric circles when visiting the Vietnam Veterans of Oregon Memorial or curve in traffic while crossing the Vancouver Land Bridge (designed by architect/artist Maya Lin, by the way), but until you see them in Forster’s photos, you may not fully appreciate the elegance of their annularity.

The book is divided by “Downtown,” “Bridges,” the city’s quadrants (named after the four points of a compass plus the suffixes, “east” and “west”) and “The Region.” Above Portland is as easy to get around as the city itself. Once between its embossed covers, you’ll find the occasional coincidence, like the colorful stripes of a tulip field mimicking the rows of parked cars at the Port of Portland, both running at an angle within the photos’ frames. Or contrasting pictures side by side—one river carving out the Gorge, another cutting through the city.

Hawthorne Bvd., Vietnam Memorial (photos by Bruce Forster, courtesy Cameron + Company)

Meanwhile, Rob Bennett, executive director at Portland Sustainability Institute, in his essay, “Sustainability,” says, “Looking down on the city, we can witness sustainability in all facets of city building, the economy, and collective consensus. It has taken physical form as represented by transit lines, bikeways, and reinvigorated local business districts. It comes to life in the lively plazas, farmers’ markets, and college and university campuses.”

In “Green Portland,” Mike Houck, executive director of the Urban Greenspaces Institute, says, “From an eagle’s perspective, Portland is both a city in a garden and a garden in the city. Our city is embedded in nature and nature is interwoven throughout the city, at every scale, from regional landforms to the streetscape . . . Acres of ecoroofs top many downtown buildings and bioswales line neighborhood streets.”

Fremont Bridge (photo by Bruce Forster, courtesy Cameron + Company)

Architect and urban designer, Paddy Tillett, with Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects, leads us down Portland’s streets and across its bridges in “Getting Around the Region: An Urban Designer and Transportation Planner’s Perspective.” He describes the city as a “tightly woven urban fabric—and a place full of interest for those on foot or bicycle, with something new around every corner . . .”

The livable grid of Portland’s 200-by-200-foot blocks “dictates that the streets and sidewalks play a major role in the usability and accessibility of the city and its neighborhoods . . . [M]ost streets are restricted to two moving lanes of traffic, parking on both sides, and sidewalks sized for ease of pedestrian movement,” says Donald Stastny, architect and urban planner, in his essay, “Planning the City: Portland, an Urban Laboratory.”

Writer and photographer Brian Libby sums it all up in his essay, “The Portland Way,” which kicks off the book’s lively conversations: “No matter whether one prefers the local government’s official slogan, ‘The city that works,’ or a local bumper sticker urging ‘Keep Portland Weird,’ this Pacific Northwest metropolis is closer than most to finding that coveted alchemy between built and natural environments. Today Portland is not just a clearing but a way of life.”

Jamison Square (photo by Bruce Forster, courtesy Cameron + Company)

Like pages from some hymnbook, those in Above Portland praise this “way of life.” As you wing through it, looking down onto roadways and waterways, cityscapes and landscapes, you see views you otherwise may never get. And, whether you live in Portland or not, you see your city in a way you may’ve never seen it before.

© 2011 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved. Claire Sykes is a Portland freelance writer.  For more information, visit www.sykeswrites.com.

 

A conversation about light with artist Hap Tivey

"Kelly Arc" installation by Hap Tivey (image courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

This month, as part of its ongoing 30th anniversary, Elizabeth Leach Gallery is exhibiting the work of Hap Tivey, a pioneer of the light and space movement that includes fellow artists like James Turrell and Robert Irwin.

Tivey's exhibit consists of two wall projections of pure color, each shifting slowly in tones and intensity. The ceiling-mounted video projections on the wall are framed into hand-sketched half frames in black paint. Each wall is also mounted with a simple sculptural form, one linear but curved like a horizon line, the other a diagonal.  

The fields of color begin to feel like portals, in the way that a Mark Rothko painting does. As John Motley writes in his Friday Oregonian review, "the passage from soft peach and mauve tones to enveloping azures and purples" in the video projections "is barely perceptible from moment to moment, but when the chromatic saturation of the projections peak, the sculptural components of the installation trick the eye, suddenly seeming punched out and deep, not affixed to the wall."

Tivey's "Tilted Horizon" (image courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)

A few years ago I also profiled Tivey for The Oregonian, in a piece appropriately called "Light Master." I wrote then, "For anyone who has walked at night past a house with its lights on and shades drawn, wondering what goes on inside, Hap Tivey's exhibit at Elizabeth Leach Gallery ought to feel familiar." That show, "Sands of the Ganges," featured hybrids of painting and light boxes. I've been a fan ever since.

Perhaps most importantly in talking about his work here at Portland Architecture, I've long felt that Tivey, because of his passion for light as his ultimate artistic medium, would make for an interesting design oriented conversation. So that's what we tried to do by phone a few days ago.

"Light reveals our shared universe," Tivey says. "That is to say, certainly there is a tactile universe which is accessible without sight. But that’s not really a shared universe. If I say 'book' to you, you share cognition of a book with me. It’s cognition we’ve built using light. So for me, light literally reveals our shared universe. That could be the deepest universe perceived by the most sophisticated equipment. Essentially it is the characteristic that reveals to us our shared world. At the same time, we can say that there are some people who really love paint. And there are some people who love wood, or stone, or bronze, or water. It happens that I really love light."

"So how does one make light itself the artistic medium?" I asked.

Tivey's previous "Bay of Light" and "Causeway" (images courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)

"To put a viewer in touch with how light works, you have to put a viewer in touch with how they make light work," Tivey explains. "Light is the most ephemeral medium, and it’s the most viewer dependent medium. One person looking at a lavender color will have an ecstatic experience. One won’t. The way the light reveals the world to that person is important. So to me it’s the most important medium because it necessarily involves the viewer. I like to present conditions of light or situations of light to viewers in which they don’t normally engage but which they might experience under the rubric of experience. We experience a lot of that as practical: daylights or nightlights. They’re practically interpreteted, and sometimes aesthetically interpreted."

Besides his gallery and museum exhibits, Tivey has often, in his more than 35-year career, created installations in other buidings, often combining architecture and function. For a stand-alone tea house beside the Pietro Belluschi-designed home of local architect Mike McCulloch, for example, Tivey actually designed a color and light-filled shower in the bathroom. But he's also collaborated with more than one of the world's most acclaimed architects.

"It’s an interesting challenge, and one is most fortunate to be able to work with a sensitive architectic like Mike [McCulloch]," Tivey adds. "One of my first commissions in New York City as a young artist was in a Frank Gehry house. He’d rebuilt a house from Mark Rothko’s old studio on 69th street. Frank redesigned the entire interior of the building when he came to New York in the 1970s. The client asked artists to put art into various floors. I created a light installation on that ground floor that incorporated part of Frank’s design. It used a water element which was on that floor and cast light onto the water. It also took light from that room into a very small adjacent room. We created a light installation that was essentially a bath. The person would get into it and literally float. There were various veins and projections in the room that made the physicality of the room gradually disappear, in the same way that when you’re floating in water and your gravity gradually disappears. The space was small but it became infinite. The projects of light seemed like they could be from ten feet to a mile away. By organizing the darkness and the light of this room, I literally recreated the room in about six different versions."

Tivey's "Softside" (image courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)

"When I first started out…I used to build rooms that I’d take people into and surround them on a platform with light," the artist continues. "One could not see any material properties at all except what they were sitting on and their body. Once they came through the doorframe, everything around them was light. That’s called a Ganz field. Ganz means whole. The effect, which Terrell and others work with, is they cove out a room. I actually made the first one in 1968. I would take people into that space and they would experience their own response to that light."

Naturally, I asked Tivey to name some of his favorite architecture, or at least some spaces that evoke and sculpt the light like some of his installations. "There are a lot I love for how they work with light, but if I had to pick just a few, I’d probably start with the Pantheon," Tivey says. "When you get it on a reasonable day with that beam of light coming out of the sky and penetrating that space, it’s a breathtaking experience. If you look at somebody like Turrell and his skyscapes, he’s essentially making the Pantheon. There’s a hole in the building! But the Romans did it first."

The Louvre, Paris (photo by Brian Libby)

"IM Pei’s addition to the Louvre is to me also an amazing phenomenon, more in the realm of reflection than transmission. I’m quite fond of most of Pei’s buildings I’ve seen. There are some really remarkable ones in New York. The IBM building [designed by Mies Van Der Rohe] used to have this indoor bamboo forest atrium. That did a beautiful thing with the light. You were inside a building and inside a bamboo grove. So the light was coming though the building and through the grove."

"I think probably I would also cite some ancient architecture," Tivey continues. "There are some buildings I’ve been in Japan when I was a monk in the monastery there. There was some beautiful light that occurred. It primarily came from the walls rather than the ceilings. The way Japanese temple arch allows itself to open to light and the sky and particularly to changing weather is very moving."

IBM Building (image courtesy Wikipedia)

But of course it's still nature that inspires Tivey first. That's where light comes from, after all. "In nature there are some truly exceptional places," he says. "There’s something called a lava tube, which is basically a hollow tube in a lava field that’s created when the lava is still running but all of the surrounding lava hardens and the hot lava runs out. When you go into these lava tubes, you’re cold. There’s a national park in southern Idaho with very long lava tubes. Northern California has some as well. You look up into this geometry of the sky."

Tivey's show at Elizabeth Leach Gallery (417 NW Ninth Avenue) continues through the end of the month February 12. 

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Getting to know YU, Portland's new contemporary art center

Future YU Contemporary (rendering courtesy YU/Accelerated Development)

For the last several years the Yale Union Laundry building at 800 SE 10th Avenue, a striking brick Italian Renaissance space built in 1908 and listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, has sat empty. But now, it is poised to become the major contemporary art center Portland has more or less lacked since the closing of the Portland Center for the Visual Arts closed in 1987.

A few days ago organizers of the new YU Contemporary art center unveiled their vision: to transform the 40,000 square foot building between Belmont and Morrison Sreets into a dedicated contemporary art center.

Yale Union Laundry Building (photo by Brian Libby)

“The thinking is that while generalist institutions such as the Portland Art Museum serve the widest possible audience,” explains The Oregonian’s DK Row, “a dedicated center focused only on the most challenging level of contemporary art serves the art community specifically. Unlike smaller art institutions like Disjecta or the now-defunct Portland Art Center focused on local artists’, it would feature a mix of national, international and local artists. Unlike the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival, it would have a year round presence.

For most arts institutions, the biggest financial challenge is architectural: building and paying for a physical home. Disjecta tried to renovate the prominent Templeton Building at the east Burnside bridge head, but instead wound up relocating to a warehouse in North Portland. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) PICA started with donated exhibit space in the Wieden + Kennedy building, but gave it up several years ago to focus its resources on the TBA Fest each September.

Percival, Knapp and Jamison (photo by Lincoln Barbour, Portland Monthly)

YU was founded by Curtis Knapp, a 37-year-old musician and indie record producer, and his longtime friend Aaron Flint Jamison, a 31-year-old artist and publisher. Knapp’s record label, Marriage Records, has helped launch successful indie bands like Dirty Projectors, while a book of poetry he created with Tom Blood won a 2008 Oregon Book Award. Jamison founded and published the art journal Veneer and has held residencies across Europe and the US. 

If you’re thinking these guys sound a little inexperienced to be founding a major contemporary arts center, they knew it too. But Knapp and Jamison had something very important going for them. In donor-poor Portland, they found a patron willing to buy the Yale Union Laundry Building and lease it back to them rent-free and put of hundreds of thousands more in capital to help them get started. Next, the pair hired Sandra Percival, an arts veteran with the experience they lacked. Percival, a Portland native, is former executive director of New Langton Arts in San Francisco and was also director of Public Art Development Trust in London as part of a 30-year career. 

According to a report by Randy Gragg in Portland Monthly, the trio engaged local BOORA Architects to create a feasibility study for former home of Perfect Fit-McDonald upholstery company, and hope to build “a $7.2 million historical renovation with galleries, a bookstore/café, and a 100-seat flex space, all of it aiming for a LEED Platinum designation courtesy of features like a geothermal heating system tapped from an aquifer running beneath the building.” Row’s story also says there will be a recording studio, retail and office spaces, and a recording studio.

Yale Union Building (photos by Brian Libby)

YU has already introduced a rendering of a glass courtyard occupying the Morrison Street side of the old building, enabling YU to offer a more inviting, transparent counterbalance to the solidity of the original brick building.

That said, even just the Italian Renaissance former laundry and upholstery building is ideal for displaying art with its bounty of natural light and vast, wide-open spaces—particularly upstairs. Gragg writes that “…everyone who strolls the rhythmically windowed length of the Yale Union Laundry Building’s second-floor room seems to leave with the same infectious hope.”

The YU principals seem to understand the need to proceed gradually, thoughtfully and methodically. After all, most successful nonprofit arts organizations, for all the importance of a physical space to call home, start with a mission that predates and prefigures the migration there. YU can’t just fall into having a building and expect the art institution that follows to fall into place in terms of funding, public interest or quality.

"Overall, it's obvious that the 14,000 sqare feet of exhibition space is its strongest card in YU's deck so far, also meaning that the actual programming, institutional organization and general institutional vision seem under developed and hazy at best (they are seeking input)," writes Jeff Jahn of PORT. "The column-free upper gallery is reminiscent of both a larger version of the PCVA and the even vaster Mass MoCA great hall. It's a space that artists will hunger for. Only the Geffen Contemporary offers a similar theater for ambition on the West Coast, though only very adept artists could hope to handle such a space."

YU lower (top) and upper floors (photos by Lincoln Barbour, Portland Monthly)

It’s easy to get excited about the possibility of Portland having the serious, internationally renowned contemporary art center it has lacked since the days when PCVA was bringing here the likes of Donald Judd. And the success of YU could help to invigorate a the lower sections of Belmont and Morrison between the building and the bridge, which has already shown signs of flourishing with arts organizations like Oregon Ballet Theater and Zoomtopia as well as eateries like the beloved Bunk Sandwiches.

“We already have a great foundation in the building,” Percival told Gragg. “When people walk in, they stop worrying about the problems and start talking about the possibilities.”

Two Portland Art Museum architects, two divergent fates

Portland Art Museum, Belluschi Building (photo by Brian Libby) 

This Wednesday (August 11) at 12:30, I will be giving a talk in the outdoor courtyard of the Portland Art Museum (between the two buildings) as part of the “Midday Art & Cart” series. The talk will be devoted to the architecture of the two buildings and local food cart Koi Fusion (whose Korean tacos I love) will be serving lunch. The Art Museum is located on the South Park Blocks at 1219 SW Park Ave.

For those of you who can’t make it to the talk, I wanted to pass on what to me is one of the most interesting and personal narratives of the two buildings comprising the museum and the men who designed them. Both were talented, but one got famous while the other died tragically young.

Pietro Belluschi, the Italian native-turned Portlander who designed the principal PAM building (now renamed the Belluschi Building in his honor), is the famous name remembered today. After the Art Museum was built in 1932, it helped launch Belluschi to a celebrated career. His portfolio would come to include the Equitable Building, also in downtown Portland (known today as the Commonwealth), which is credited as the world’s first glass curtain walled office building, the forerunner of thousands of future glass and metal façades. Belluschi also gained fame for many midcentury modern house and church designs as well as the Pan Am Building (with Walter Gropius) and Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York.

The Mark Building, which sits next door to the Belluschi Building, was originally built in 1924, just eight years earlier. Designed by native Portlander Frederick Fritsch who learned his trade at the celebrated firm Whidden & Lewis, it is everything its next door neighbor is not. And Fritsch unfortunately had a future afterward that was as short lived and tragic as Belluschi’s was long and successful.

Pietro Belluschi, 1958 (image courtesy Life magazine) 

Fritsch, a Portland native, was just eight years older than Belluschi and had been a World War I veteran. Fritch also married Oregon’s first licensed architect female, Mary Goodin, in 1928. But unfortunately his life ended tragically early. He suffered from a painful illness that forced him to retire at the age of 38, in 1931. Which, ironically, was right about the time Belluschi’s building was being constructed. Fritsch wound up committing suicide five years later, although his wife lived to be 93.

Belluschi said in 1931 of the modern style he was fighting for the right to see built as the Portland Art Museum’s home that the “…standard mask called ‘style’, whether Georgian, Italian, or English, is just a bad formula, and only our lack of imagination has tolerated its application on buildings where a new set of ideas had to be given a new form....Let us not try to twist the body to fit the suit but let us build a new suit consistent with the body.”

The Masonic Temple didn’t just embrace a pre-existing historical style, but a whole array of them. The building itself may have been based partially on one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. It’s also got Greek influences in the stone colonnade and Persian influences in the window grilles. Then inside there were rooms with Moorish, Norman, and Louis the 16th styles.

Portland Art Museum, Mark Building (photo by Brian Libby) 

Belluschi was clearly making a statement with his building that he’d wanted to go in a different direction than this design by Frederick Fritsch. It took an intervention from Frank Lloyd Wright on Pietro Belluschi’s behalf to convince the Art Museum’s board of trustees to approve what was then a boldly clean-lined and functional space. But more than 80 years later, the two architects’ work is still bound together. And since the Art Museum purchased the Masonic Temple in the 1990s and transformed it into the Mark Building in 2005, they share exhibit space and even an underground tunnel for a connection.

Although I believe the 2005 renovation and expansion by Ann Beha Architects could have been more of an interesting hybrid of old and new building,  it was probably the right thing to do for the building to retain the Masonic Temple rather than tearing the building down to build an entirely new exhibit and gathering space, especially given that the latter building’s original ballrooms remain often used by the museum and the community. And one must not forget the practical fact that the expansion added several floors of natural light-filled space for viewing modern and contemporary art. Plus, the more you learn about the curious connection and divergent fates of Belluschi and Fritsch, the more the two buildings seem siblings.

It also goes to show that whatever the creative discipline, be it architecture, music or painting, while there are always a few iconic names who produce something lasting at a young age and are never heard from again, more often than not success is dependent on survival, and having the opportunity to put in years and years of work to make yourself a success. It wasn't a coincidence that Pietro Belluschi got that Art Museum commission. He'd been a museum member for years before his building was completed. He'd also left Italy for America at a young age and, despite his old-world personal elegance, worked his way up the ranks as a student at Cornell and then a young immigrant in Portland. Belluschi earned everything he got as a legendary architect, but unlike Frederick Fritsch, fate also gave him the opportunity.

Short films, Chinatown tours, and talking midcentury modern

Suddenly this week is filling up fast with a variety of events, all of which, in their own way, address Portland's historic architecture and infrastructure.

First of all, please excuse the shameless self promotion, but this Thursday I will be screening a new DVD collection of experimental short films called Along the Way. Each of the shorts is about three to six minutes long, and collectively they are travelogue portraits of cities around the world like Kyoto, Beijing, London, Chicago, and Copenhagen. But more often, the subject is Portland itself, as in these two films: Ocean Way, chronicling a trip from our city to the Oregon Coast and back, and Crossings, which overlaps several trips across the Fremont Bridge.

Ocean Way from Brian Libby on Vimeo

Crossings from Brian Libby on Vimeo

"Libby uses high-definition video, deft editing, and image and speed manipulation to create travel movies (ranging from Portland bridges to Asia and Europe) very unlike the boring old trip videos your relatives forced you to watch," Stan Hall wrote in last week's Oregonian. Or, as the paper's Marc Mohan wrote of my 2007 show and DVD, Travelogues, "His short films manage to meld the quotidian and the sublime, or rather perhaps expose the one within the other." Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, also called the work "beautiful" and "hypnotic". Some would also inevitably call these films "boring" - it's not for everyone, especially if you like films with dialogue or people.

The show is scheduled for Thursday evening at 7PM at Grand Detour, 215 SE Morrison St., Suite 2020.

Also this week, the Dill Pickle Club, a community organization headed by Marc Moscato that "organizes educational projects that help us understand the place in which we live", is offering this weekend "Sweet Cakes, Long Journey", two behind-the-scenes community tours of Portland’s Chinatown.

The tours, organized in partnership with the Friends of Portland Chinatown, offer a unique opportunity to learn about the neighborhood through its architecture, oral history and little-known cultural heritage. A lecture by visiting scholar Dr. Marie Rose Wong offers a broader sociological and historical view of the area.

Highlighting many of Chinatown’s lesser known landmarks, the walk encompasses Yat Sing Music Club, the New Market Theater, historic Chinese association buildings, as well as the original Chinatown on the south side of Burnside. Along the route, elders will meet the tour to share their memories. The walk will stop at sites more familiar to most, including Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Portland’s Chinatown gate and Lan Su Chinese Garden. 

A video preview of the "Sweet Cakes" tour can be found here:

Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: A Walking Tour of Portland's Chinatown from dill pickle club

The tours conclude at University of Oregon’s White Stag Building, where Dr. Wong will give a slide lecture based on her research for her authoritative book, Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon (University of Washington, 2004). Dr. Wong will place the tour in context, detailing how discrimination and public policy have affected Chinatown, from its years as home to the second largest Chinese population in the U.S., to its present-day period of development, economic struggle and changing identity. Dr. Wong is an associate professor specializing in urban design at the Institute of Public Service, Seattle University.

Mary Leong, photo by Benjamin Brink for The Oregonian 

The Oregonian's Ben Brink also has an excellent photo slideshow of Chinatown sights and some of its longtime residents (including Mary Leong, pictured above) here.

And finally, the Architectural Heritage Center has a star-studded program scheduled for this Saturday, called "Mid-Century Modern and the Recent Past: Documentation and Preservation".

"Buildings and residential enclaves from the mid-twentieth century are reaching and surpassing the 50 year mark, making them widely eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places," says the AHC website. "Yet preservationists still face a number of challenges, even when advocating for buildings that can now be recognized as officially historic. Development pressures, the economy, and aging infrastructure—along with widespread misconceptions about the role of modern architecture in the U.S.—put these resources at risk in the Northwest and throughout the country."

Memorial Coliseum, photo by Brian Libby 

"The recent discussion surrounding Memorial Coliseum brought this to our own backyard. We look at this debate as a new opportunity for our community to discuss Portland’s architectural “recent past” and work to identify the significant buildings and landscapes that make that era—and our region—unique and memorable."

The program, which runs from 10AM-4PM this Saturday at the Architectural Heritage Center (701 SE Grand Ave.), will be led by Christine Madrid French, director of the Modernism + Recent Past program with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Anthea Hartig, director of the National Trust’s western regional office in San Francisco. They will be joined by a cadre of local advocates, including myself. Admission is $20.

Cultural incubator: visiting The Lumber Room [updated]

Photo by Brian Libby 

It's a small renovation project that has been in progress for a whopping six years - usually not a good sign. It's a private space not open to the public. And it's designed by someone who is not technically a licensed architect. Yet the Lumber room is a welcome, impressive space that provides a key connection for Portland's burgeoning art and design communities.

The Lumber Room is interesting in that its program is a blend of public and private space, residential and exhibition. Owned and spearheaded by one of the city's foremost art collectors, Sarah Miller Meigs, it will serve as a residence for for visiting artists, a space for lectures by notable cultural figures, a gathering hub for major collectors and art enthusiasts, and a showcase for Meigs' hugely impressive contemporary art collection. When I visited the space last week as part of an opening reception for the Lumber Room's first artist in residence, Leoni Guyer, there were museum-caliber works on the wall by Tracey Emin, Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith.

Meigs, who lives in Corvallis (her husband teaches at Oregon State University), is the heir the founders of the Stimson Lumber Company. Although the Lumber Room name takes its cue from a book of essays by Nicholson Baker, The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (in which "lumber" is a term roughly meaning the physical embodiment of ideas and expression), it also made a nice nod to the family business that has helped to bankroll this nearly matchless private local art collection (the Schnitzer family being probably the only Oregonian with one greater).

Meigs hired designer Randy Higgins of Vizwerks to handle architectural responsibilities and tapped Nicole Misiti of the local strategic branding firm Felt Hat to design interior furnishings and a business branding strategy.

Photo by Brian Libby 

Higgins is trained as an architect (with an architecture degree from the University of Washington), but not registered as such. He was one of the three original partners of Holst Architecture, and was highly involved in some key early projects there for clients like the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Oregon Ballet Theater. I've known Randy for several years, and he's also one of the smartest, most intellectually capable people I've ever met; the guy quotes ancient philosophers and architects at the drop of a hat. (You can also read this previous post about him: "Audience With Higgins" from February 2008.)

[In full disclosure, Randy Higgins and I are both part of leading the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, the grassroots group seeking to preserve the building and its interior. Another member of that group, Don Rood, is a partner in The Felt Hat along with Misiti. So you can take my word about The Lumber Room with a grain of salt because of those connections. But I hope it's clear that I wouldn't be writing about the project, and praising it, unless I was sincere and the project was deserving on its own merits - which it is.]

Ironically, for all the time it took to complete the project, what I responded to was its simplicity. The space, part of a building constructed in 1924 as an auto repair garage. More recently, it was a large condo, owned by esteemed local art collector Ed Cauduro.

The Lumber Room's main exhibit space overlooking Ninth Avenue in the Pearl District (just above Elizabeth Leach Gallery) benefits from high ceilings and a minimal amount of columns. The wood ceiling rafters are left exposed, as are the wood floors. But like most any gallery, it's just a big, white-walled open space: a platform for Meigs' collection.

Photo by Brian Libby 

A restaurant-quality open kitchen serves as the connecting spine with the more intimately scaled portions of the Lumber Room, a trio of smaller bedroom-sized rooms and a deck looking out at the Pearl. These three small rooms border each other in part with glass walls, allowing one to stand in one room and look through the other two out to the view outside.

In conversation with Randy Higgins, he emphasized that the overriding narrative was one of nothingness. Because the Lumber Room is viewed principally as an artist-in-residence and exhibit space, Higgins and Misiti sought to make the architecture and interiors disappear in deference to both the art and also to allow visiting artists to leave the outside world behind.

"What Sarah is giving to an artist is that, unlike other residencies, there is no expectation. It’s intentionally wide open. It sounds paradoxical, but what she was giving was nothing," he said.

Citing writer Lewis Hyde, Higgins spoke of the "gift economy" (based on Hyde's 1983 book The Gift) and the notion that the Lumber Room was a place to make art or to not make art - that was its value. Most residency programs trade the lodging for a promised piece of art or a speech. Here, the idea is for the Lumber Room to be an incubator, a retreat - or whatever else (within reason - no Zach Randolph stuff) the visitor decides.

"It's when someone is allowed to have certain thoughts that may or may not lead anywhere," Higgins added. "If they produce, great, but if not, it’s the having the thoughts that’s valuable. To me, that’s what inquiry is about. Without preconceptions, you accept wherever it leads. That’s what Sara's trying to provide for these artists."

"It's a show residency about nothing!" 

Because the theme of the design is taking the visitor out of everyday surroundings and into a void-like space for viewing art or engaging in conversation, the designers sought to create architecture and interiors that also disappeared but, at the same time, had stories of their own, and thought put into every detail. Yet these intentions are deliberately subtle and hidden. A series of skylights, for example, seem to be well placed in relation to the entry stairway and the rest of the exhibit space; but it turns out that they're lined up with particular celestial constellations. Yet it's also not a familiar pastiche of top-selling building products like ipe wood or granite countertops.

"As a designer, when I look at buildings, I see catalog sheets: all the different products that went into it. It’s the diff between seeing a couch and seeing a Corbusier couch," Higgins says. "It’s like Robert Irwin talks about: seeing is forgetting the name of the thing seen.  Subconsciously we’re conditioned…a lot of people get paid a lot of money to get you conditioned to see names. So we didn’t just pick a different style. Everything had to be considered in context."

The Lumber Room, along with a handful of other projects such as the paint job at PNCA he created out of a Rimbaud poem translated into a language of squares and rectangles, represents a turning point in Higgins career, out of architecture into a kind of design practice that is at once more rigidly research-based yet also with practical, people-oriented outcomes over conceptual gestures.

"I liken spaces to reading a book," Higgins says. "The only way you can read it is if all the words are spelled correctly and the type is laid out correctly – so the book disappears. Otherwise it breaks the trance. But the art of the typographer is understanding how to put that all together in a way where if you want to become conscious of a page, it rewards that consciousness. You tell the stories of buildings the same way, so that it goes away but, if someone wants to pay attention to it, it’s able to reward beyond the attention given. You want people to stop asking questions long before the answers run out."

As DK Row's April 24 story in The Oregonian about the Lumber Room addressed, the six years weren't due only to Higgins' meticulousness. 

"One reason is that Meigs likes to take her time. She doesn't buy art impulsively. She is also married, the mother of two children and lives in Corvallis. Another reason is that even though Meigs and her team intended to finish the project within, say, two or three years, after a while, they realized: What's the rush? 

'Doing things right takes time,' Misiti says. 

Looking back, Meigs did not labor over her choice of designers because she found like-minded brains, people who more accurately approach their jobs as forums for personal expression and share an almost obsessive tendency to ruminate over the meaning and beauty of every object.

In other words, dozens of books were consumed, and countless debates, talks and meetings were held over coffee and meals, because Meigs, et al., weren't just tearing down walls and painting over Cauduro's old condo. They intended to create a perfectly crafted work of art that would house other works of art and welcome people who made art."

Photo by Brian Libby  

Row also talked with Portland Art Museum head curator Bruce Guenther about the importance of such a space. "This space will be different from a museum, galleries and colleges that bring in influential artists and others for a day or a week," he said. "It's not publicly accessible, yet it will enrich public life because of its programs and Sarah's willingness to make the space available to others." 

Portland has a fairly respected generalist museum, it has numerous fine commercial galleries, academic venues and especially a burgeoning community of young artists. The Lumber Room can be a small but important piece the city lacks: facilities for artists, designers and other creatives from outside the city to come and spend time. This space will work ideally with programs like the Pacific Northwest College of Art's Ford Institute for Visual Education, which has brought a variety of visiting artists to town. The Lumber Room will help make Portland more of a destination for talented people. Meigs, Row writes, "plans to bring individuals only a connected patron can: artists, designers and other collectors from across the country, perhaps the world, for weeks-long residencies, lectures, private events and even exhibitions. Her artists and guests will stay at the sleek, minimal two-floor condo space that can be altered to suit its various uses. Once there, they'll work in an almost ideal setting of refinement, art and silence."

In that way, the project is much more than the sum of its lumber floors, columns and rafters-especially if you go looking for the complex detail behind the surface layer of familiar wood floored, white-walled simplicity.

Tradition and eccentricity: City undergoes acupuncture treatment as part of Portland Plan

Needle installation at Mt. Tabor, image courtesy The Portland Acupuncture Project 

Over the past several years, I've received acupuncture treatment for a variety of ailments: headaches, bronchitis, a pinched nerve, even stress. Sometimes it has worked, and sometimes it hasn't. But if a person is in a lot of pain, it's worth a try. And it'd be a disservice to dismiss acupuncture's effectiveness just because it's different from, or unprovable by, standards of Western medicine.

Chinese acupuncture, which Wikipedia defines as "the procedure of inserting and manipulating needles into various points on the body to relieve pain or for therapeutic purposes" has been around since at least the second century BC. Yet there is no factual evidence proving the central idea, of placing these needles at body points situated on meridians along which qi (or "life energy") flows.

I describe this tension behind acupuncture practice in the West after thinking about the symbolism of the Portland Acupuncture Project, which is actually not medicinal but an outdoor sculptural installation by Portland artist Adam Kuby. The work, consisting of 35-foot-high steel poles made to resemble acupuncture needles, was commissioned in accordance with the current process of formulating the Portland Plan through a series of workshops. The Portland Plan just entered Phase II with a workshop on April 26, and the next one is scheduled for April 29 at Beaumont Middle School. 

Needle installation at Waterfront Park, image courtesy The Portland Acupuncture Project 

Kuby's needles are being installed - literally pricked into the ground as if it's our collective skin - at sites throughout the city such as Waterfront Park, Kelly Point Park and Mt. Tabor.

"This project explores the interface between art, regional planning, traditional Chinese medicine and the health of a city," his Portland Acupuncture Project's website explains. "Unfolding over the course of 2010, this 6-month art installation will coincide with a series of public workshops to help steer the Portland Plan, a guide for the city's growth over the next 25 years.  Needles appearing across the city will bring attention to the some of the city's most challenging problems, greatest assets, as well as places with enormous potential."

“Using the body as a metaphor for the entire city, Kuby hopes to identify those places in the landscape that are important to us as a community," added Susan Anderson, director of the Portland Bureau of Planning & Sustainability, "drawing attention not only to the significance of each focal point but also to the interconnectedness of them to each other as well as to ourselves.”

Portland has a strong Chinese medicine community for an American city, with two schools of Chinese medicine and more than 500 acupuncturists in the three-county area. As a result, the project has gained not only public donations from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Oregon Arts Commission, but also several dozen individual and business donors and the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. Yet the $40,000 fund raising goal to install the large poles/needles for six months, has not been reached. Kuby, a Mount Tabor-area artist with a background in landscape architecture and public art installations, told Keri Brenner in The Oregonian that he still needs to raise about $12,000 to $15,000 more if the project is to be able to be installed in all quadrants of the city.

Acupuncture chart from Hua Shou (1340s), image via Wikipedia

Each series of up to five needles/poles will remain in place for eight weeks before being moved to new meridian-like "points" in the city for another eight-week installation, continuing the rotation one more time after that. Brenner also reports Kuby worked with city planners to dovetail the placement of needle sculptures with strategies and initiatives identified in the Portland Plan, the city's roadmap for the next 25 years. Some of the needles/poles will be placed at sites to represent focus on transportation issues, for example, while others might stimulate discussions on housing problems or jobs creation. 

I mentioned at the outset of this post the tension between acupuncture's thousands of years of tradition and its lack of complete acceptance from Western medicine. That's because along with the general metaphor of acupuncture needles healing the city, or contributing to higher energy levels or flow between different parts of the topography, perhaps acupuncture itself may be a fitting metaphor for the current moment Portland is experiencing amongst the broader American zeitgeist as the potential model for how other American cities might look in the future. A recent article by English political magazine, for example, explored Portland as and "The new model" for "elite cities", asking, "Is Oregon’s metropolis a leader among American cities or just strange?"

Portland is building on thousands of years of tradition too, continuing compact pedestrian oriented city building of Europe and most of Western civilization. We are the descendant, urbanistically speaking, of cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Glasgow and Kyoto. And yet people in other places, even progressive urban-minded ones, still look at the city as quirky and off-kilter. But hey, what does it matter? Like the local slogan goes, Portland is, despite all its inevitable missteps, the City that Works. Or maybe it's the other, unofficial slogan, urging us to keep weird.

Incidentally, I think some of Kuby's needles are very much needed along Southeast Grand and Martin Luther King Boulevards while this streetcar construction is in progress. Traffic is a black hole there these days. Either Kuby needs to place some needles there, or I need some in my forehead and toes while slowly inching by the orange cones.

New Oregon Interview Series continues Tuesday with "Portland on Portland: Image + Word"

 

Last June host Nora Robertson first began partnering with the University of Oregon in Portland to produce the New Oregon Interview Series, looking at the state's evolving creative culture.The first installment looked at the local music scene with Kill Rock Stars record label founder Slim Moon, Mississippi Studios co-owner Alicia Rose, and rap artist Mic Crenshaw.

There have been several talks in the ensuing ten months. Roberts talked about film with Arthur Bradford, director of MTV's "How's Your News?" documentary maker Alissa Nicole Creamer and experimental filmmaker Andy Blubaugh. A writer-themed interview included local scribes Monica Drake and Jon Raymond, a food night included chefs Naomi Pomery and Greg Higgins, an art night included curator Stephanie Snyder and artist Michael Brophy, and last time around a talk about the local built environment featured Mayor Sam Adams, architect Brad Cloepfil and editor Randy Gragg.

On Tuesday of this week, the New Oregon Interview Series continues with "Portland on Portland: Image + Word". Roberts will speak with artist/curator Nan Curtis (pictured below left), writer Floyd Skloot (pictured below right), and myself. The topic is less distinct than existing past topics like music, film or art. Instead, the topic will be how Portland's creative culture is communicated.

 We've all seen coverage of the Rose City in places like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic Traveler, and even, more recently, a feature in England's The Economist called "Portland and Elite Cities." When writers from these publications try and tell the Portland story to their readers in other cities and countries, what are they telling them? More importantly, what is the relationship here between landscape and city, creativity and economy, demographics and technology, that forms a collective sense of place?

 The conversation could go in any number of directions, but in preparing for the talk, Nora and I have discussed topics like the overlap between local, national and international cultural offerings. Years ago The Oregonian ran an op-ed essay called "The Gor-Tex Vortex" that articulated the Oregon identity based on the legacy of the Oregon Trail more than 150 years ago. At a certain point heading west during the Great Migration, settlers faced a fork in the road pointing toward California to the south and the Oregon Territory to the north. Those who sought fame and fortune, the thinking goes, chose California, while those seeking to raise crops and raise a family chose Oregon. Today it's not so simple, with technology making it easy to maintain contact with the rest of the world. Yet, as a Sunday New York Times essay by Michael Kimmelman suggested, globalization has far from erased local culture, as was long feared; in some cases, it's even enhanced it.

The talk is scheduled for 6:00-8:00PM at the University of Oregon's White Stag Block at 70 NW Couch Street. Admission is free.

Sublime stillness: Donald Judd conference brings leading contemporary art scholars, Japanese architect Arata Isozaki

Donald Judd, 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, photo by Jeff Jahn 

On Sunday, April 25, the University of Oregon in Portland will host the scholarly conference and exhibition, "Donald Judd: Delegated Fabrication - History, practices, issues and implications" at the White Stag Block. The conference is curated by Arcy Douglass and Jeff Jahn.

Although Judd was of course a legendary minimalist artist, he always had the DNA of a designer and builder as well. His boxy sculptures are always seamless, hiding all traces of their construction. They are perfect aesthetic compositions in a way that architecture can’t be because of its exponentially greater practical, functional concerns – and all the more compelling as a result. Judd’s work is for designers and design enthusiasts a kind of minimalist Platonic ideal.

The day-long conference will look at Judd as an icon of the American minimalist movement, as well as issues of authenticity and fabrication that continue to have lasting implications for artists today. In addition, the conference will explore the artist's connection to the Pacific Northwest, where he created a site-specific piece in 1974 for the Portland Center for Visual Arts (PCVA).

Headlining the conference will be numerous contemporary art scholars such as Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art and past curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Also speaking will be Judd's longtime fabricator, Peter Ballantine, and Portland Art Museum head curator Bruce Guenther. The Judd conference also just announced one of the world’s great architects will be speaking: Japan’s Arata Isozaki.

 

Jeff Jahn is also curating an accompanying exhibition of Donald Judd’s work from April 25 (the conference’s opening) through May 21 at the U of O's White Box gallery in the White Stag building.

Recently I asked Jeff a few questions over email about the conference.

To someone who might be an architect but doesn't know a lot about Judd, can you just talk briefly about what you see the essence of Judd from a design standpoint?

To many Judd stands for absolute integrity of thought and execution. As a designer he was his own client, which allowed his projects an enviable level of control and clarity.  His artillery sheds at Chinati show him both as a supremely nuanced architect and artist.  He renovated those buildings and others before them to show off his work to their best advantage.  His window designs for those sheds have become standard fare for galleries, medical centers and museums everywhere.  He knew how to produce a sense of sublime stillness.  If you are interested in that, get interested in Judd.

 Judd had degrees in philosophy and art history and took a very empirical approach to his designs and art so there were never any arbitrary elements. That empiricism leads to very pragmatic and workman-like solutions, including delegating the fabrication to small guild-like craftsmen.  He hated preciousness and illusion and valued directness and surprise.

His output was remarkably consistent and whether he liked the term or not he is what the world thinks of when they hear “Minimalism.”  Whether you are looking at his art, writings, furniture or his architectural renovations he was consistently direct in execution and very Spartan in detail.  It can be characterized as very unfussy, and yet unyielding in integrity. The way he achieved all this was by not being too vain in the forms and materials he used.  He avoided extra novel arty signature elements (like Gehry’s curvy Bilbao etc), and by that negation developed a very consistent and recognizable body of work, most of it with straight lines, though he did try some rounded forms occasionally. 

He’s probably single-handedly responsible for the popularization of brushed aluminum for windows and other household items.  Judd also popularized Douglas Fir plywood in design circles. He used other basic materials too like Cor-ten steel, brass, copper, adobe, stainless, Plexiglas, concrete etc. Judd always used them to make people aware of space.  He distilled space and you can think of the materials and forms as filters which create a heightened awareness of space.  Judd called it "manifold space" and came across the idea while discussing Joseph Albers' work.  So there is a link to the Bauhaus, though Judd's thinking on space and materials was unique and somewhat of an parallel to that European tradition rather than a direct development of it.  Consequently the Europeans caught onto his work faster than Americans did, at first.  

Judd had a way of taking things back to basics in a fundamentally pragmatic way.  The European tradition is less pragmatic.  Also, Judd didn’t use silver or gold or the color white for furniture or art because he felt it was just too precious, which was a kind of arbitrariness.  Instead, Judd wanted the work to have integrity; he didn’t fetish simplicity for its own sake.

 

What made you want to do this here, now, with respect to the conference?

Well, Judd hasn’t had enough scholarly attention despite having had eight retrospectives over the years from; Ottowa, two at the Whitney and most recently Tate Modern in 2006.  There aren’t many books on Judd out there either.  Artists today are very interested in him yet their isn’t a lot of digestion.  He’s been summarized as super important yet (there are) scant amounts of detailed discussion.

When Arcy Douglass (conference director) wrote about Judd’s 1974 PCVA show for PORT in 2008 he followed up by asking questions about Judd’s process of delegating to fabricators.  The Judd Foundation directed him to Peter Ballantine who had been thinking a lot about the same issues. In fact, as a former fabricator for Judd, he had lived the question and was fascinated by the group of large plywood constructions Judd had undertaken in the 1970s (which the PCVA’s is a part of).  Peter felt the Portland piece was significant to the discussion and suggested a conference. 18 months later we have Robert Storr, Arata Isozaki, Bruce Guenther and Peter all discussing this historic aspect of Judd’s work. 

Who are some architects who you think show the Judd influence strongly?

Judd’s influence is extensive and pervasive.

Obviously there's Norman Foster, Herzog & de Meuron and Brad Cloepfil.  All have completed a lot of renovations and Judd loved old buildings. He almost always worked with existing structures. What’s more, Cloepfil’s Maryhill Overlook is a rather overt adaptation of Judd’s concrete and progression pieces.  A few years ago in an interview Brad told me how he looked to Judd, Serra and Heizer’s spatial vocabulary when he was a young architect because he felt the artists were dealing directly with space in a way the architects at that time often were not.  He’s right: I completely agree with him. 

In Judd’s final essay he mentions how he and Serra had developed a rigorous exploration of space.  I’d say that essay is required reading for every architect: Renzo Piano’s floors for his galleries like the Menil Collection (in Houston) and Broad Contemporary Art Museum (at the LA County Museum of Art), for example, resemble Judd’s floors at The Hague. Jean Nouvel’s Vision machine consists of thousands of multi angled windows. These look like some of Judd’s multi-angled stainless steel pieces from the late 70’s, though ultimately he’s more related to Smithson. Still without Judd, you’d never have Smithson. Judd was the guy that the next generation of Smithson, Serra, Heizer and De Maria and Hesse had to contend with.

Obviously Tadao Ando’s love of natural light and concrete has a relationship to Judd. David Chipperfield has a spartan flare for direct unfussy structures that is not dissimilar to Judd’s. Then there’s my cousin Helmut Jahn.  He makes extensive use of serial prefabricated progressions.

Then there is Rem Koolhaas.  The front of Prada in Beverely Hills is very Juddian. The entryway is like a huge 30-foot-wide Judd single stack.  Besides that, both Judd and Koolhaas are philosophical writers.  Their personal philosophies, though different, both directed their activities as designers.

We are pleased to have Arata Isozaki as a speaker at the conference.  Judd was very interested in eastern spatial and kinesthetic concepts and Isozaki will be discussing how Judd’s delegated fabrication relates to the Isa shrine.  That alone will blow people’s minds.

"8xPDX: Photographs of Portland Architecture" at AIA Center for Architecture

"Ziba Street" by Jeff Jahn 

Beginning with an opening party this Thursday evening and continuing throughout March, the AIA/Portland's Center for Architecture is exhibiting "8xPDX: Photographs of Portland Architecture". I curated the show, which includes (as the name indicates) the work of eight photographers: Jeremy Bitterman, Chris Hornbecker Jeff Jahn, Shawn Records, Sally Schoolmaster, Susan Seubert, Michael Weeks, and myself.

Collectively, the 20 photographs portray not only local architectural icons -- such as the Wieden + Kennedy building, the Portland Aerial Tram, Memorial Coliseum, the Jackson Tower, Portland International Airport and the Lovejoy and Forecourt Fountains -- but also unfamiliar and less obvious segments of the urban fabric. There are simple representational images but also more abstract presentations. It was important for me that the show have both familiar and unfamiliar visual imagery. On one hand I love many of the city's well known local landmarks, but on the other hand the best designed thing in Portland is the totality of the city itself. What's more, I hoped some pieces, particularly the ones of less familiar portions of the city, would speak to the textures and colors of this place.

"Forecourt Fountain" by Susan Seubert 

Artist bios (excluding my own) with a few extra personal notes are as follows: 

Jeremy Bitterman is the owner of Bitterman Creative, providing architectural photography and art direction. He is also art director for Allied Works Architecture. I've known Jeremy for several years through his work at Allied. One of his photos in the show, of Memorial Coliseum, was taken as a favor to the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, the preservation organization I'm part of. The shot was taken during last summer's Rose Parade, which originates in the Coliseum.

"Memorial Coliseum" by Jeremy Bitterman 

Jeff Jahn is a curator, artist and cultural critic. His photography has appeared in Art News, NYArts Magazine, Willamette Week, and the Portland Mercury, among others. Jahn also publishes Portland’s most-read visual arts publication, PORT.

His two photos in this show portray the Holst Architecture-designed Ziba headquarters and the Portland Tram. Jeff, whose writings I've read for years, is also a cousin of the architect Helmut Jahn and seems to be ever-present in the local visual arts world, a testament to his drive and smarts.

"308mm" by Chris Hornbecker 

Chris Hornbecker is a Portland based professional photographer who shoots portraiture, sports and fashion photography for commercial advertising, advertising agencies, editorial and directly for clients including as worked with clients including Nike, Adidas, Miller High Life, Comcast, Vonage, The Fader, Sports Illustrated, Ad Week, and Bust.

Chris is one of two photographers whose work I didn't know of before curating the show; he was recommended by Kristan Kennedy, who heads visual arts programming for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. His contributions to "8xPDX" include an ethereal shot of the largely ZGF Architects-designed airport in fog, as well as a shot and one of my very favorite Portland buildings, on SW 10th Avenue downtown, familiar for its multicolored checkerboard-paneled facade.

Photo by Shawn Records, from the Portland Grid Project 

Shawn Records is a Portland photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Castillo/Corrales Gallery in Paris and Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Camera Club of New York, and the Pomona College Museum of Art, among others. Records was included in the 2006 Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. He earned an MFA in art and photography from Syracuse University in 2003 and a bachelor’s degree in photography from Boise State University in 2000.

I first became aware of Shawn's work through his collaboration with writer Matthew Stadler a few years ago on a series about Beaverton, which I reviewed for The Oregonian. Shawn's pictures in "8xPDX" are from the Portland Ground project, in which numerous local photographers participated. One of Shawn's shots in this show also features his son, Max Records, who recently starred in the Spike Jonze movie Where the Wild Things Are.

Susan Seubert regularly photographs for National Geographic Traveler, Geo Saison, and The New York Times, among others. The Portland-based photographer was also a 1999 recipient of Columbia University’s Alfred Eisenstaedt Award. Since receiving her BFA in photography from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 1992, Seubert has exhibited continuously in the United States and abroad. Her work was included in the Portland Art Museum's 1999 and 2001 Biennials and the Tacoma Art Museum's 2009 Northwest Biennial. Most recently, Seubert received an International Photography Award for her piece entitled, "Nest". In the fall of 2010 Seubert will lead two expeditions for the National Geographic Society and is leading two expeditions through the Columbia River Gorge. I've long been a fan of Susan's work, and she's one of the only local photographers working simultaneously and successfully in both commercial and fine art.

The two photographs by Susan in "8xPDX" are from the recent book "Where the Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space," edited by Portland Spaces editor (and former Oregonian architecture critic) Randy Gragg.

Sally Schoolmaster is chair of the photography department at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. Her photographs have appeared in The New York times, Architectural Record, Wallpaper and many other publications, as well as the 2006 book "Architecture in the United States", published by Taschen. Schoolmaster received her BS from the University of Oregon and her MFA from Ohio University.

"Ominous" by Michael Weeks 

I've long been a huge fan of Sally's pictures of the Wieden + Kennedy building - the completed project by Allied Works, that is. What I didn't know about until meeting with Sally for this show was that she has just as many shots of the building before it was re-imagined and rebuilt. The photos of this former cold-storage warehouse are drop-dead gorgeous.

Besides one "before" and one "after" shot of W+K, Sally will also be exhibiting three small photos of temporary facilities designed by BOORA Architects for the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival.

Michael Weeks is a Portland photographer and owner of Weeksy Photographer as well as a student at Portland State University. I found his HD photograph of the Jackson Tower on Flickr and was blown away by it.

Bruce Forster's "Graffiti Funhouse" at Center For Architecture

The list of Portland-based architectural photographers with eye-catching talent and a long history of work is surprisingly short. Michael Mathers is one photographer who has plied his trade here with an array of acclaim, and there are others like Sally Schoolmaster and Rick Keating. But Bruce Forster is near the top when it comes to Portland picture takers focusing on architecture.

This month's show at AIA/Portland's Center For Architecture provides an ideal look at this venerable photographer's work. Called "Graffiti Funhouse: A Tribute to the Artists of Pirate Town", the show documents elaborate graffiti art that was pained on the walls of an abandoned building in Triangle Park, a 35-acre former industrial site on the banks of the Willamette in North Portland. The building was known informally as "Pirate Town" amongst those who hung out or slept there.  It was secluded haven for graffiti artists, skaters and other like-minded souls.

Forster collaborated with Infinity Images  to produce large-format prints and graphics for the show. Sections of painted wall, removed from the building, are also incorporated in the exhibit.

"The graffiti writers are not what you'd expect. They are not pre-teens scribbling their names on bridges," Forster says. "The artists would come into the space with a huge variety of paint and a concept. Their work is beautiful."

The building was recently torn down by The University of Portland, which owns the land and has expansion plans for the area.

Forster settled in Portland in 1970 after earning an MFA in photography and built a substantial client base doing fine art, magazine, corporate, and architectural photography. He also is the owner/founder of Viewfinders Stock Photography, an ever-growing archive of Pacific Northwest imagery. In his Pearl District studio, Bruce has a staff that manages the digital processing, marketing and stock image fulfilliment. He is a co-founder of the Oregon Chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) as well as a member of the Stock Artists Alliance (SAA) and the American Society of Picture Professionals (ASPP).

I don't blame Forster for getting interested in graffiti. It's long been a fascination of mine as well. I like to photograph it, as in the shot below. And the psychology of graffiti is interesting as well.

Here's an excerpt from an Oregonian story I wrote two years ago about graffiti art (and which, like most of the paper's past articles, is shamefully not available online):

In ancient Greece and Rome, artists scratched symbols onto walls. The preserved ruins of Pompeii revealed graffiti in the form of poems and bawdy phrases, not unlike today's public bathrooms. The Vikings and Mayans also wrote graffiti. During the early 20th century, graffiti attracted the art world's gaze. In 1920s Paris, Brassai photographed local graffiti, inspiring the Surrealists such as Salvador Dali and, later in the 1950s, the more socially conscious Situationist movement.

"They saw it as a kind of wild, anti-bourgeois statement, an authentic means of expression," says James van Dyke, an art history professor at Reed College. "Graffiti artists perform in dangerous spaces, and transgressing the law at night fulfills a kind of desire for adventure, of danger, of an authentic existence that jobs -- and their fears of breaking the law -- can't realize."

Forster's exhibit at the Center For Architecture began with last night's First Thursday reception (which I unfortunately missed watching the Ducks play a horrific season opener) and will continue through September.

The gallery is located at 403 NW 11th Avenue, at the corner of 11th and Flanders, and is open 9-5, Monday-Friday.

Jahn pictures the DNA of Oregon design

In the last few years Jeff Jahn has quickly risen to become one of the leading voices in Portland on contemporary art. He is a jack of all trades, acting as the co-founder and a leading critic for the visual arts blog Port as well as a working artist and a curator, in the latter case both with his own organization, Organism, but also in a guest role at other galleries. Jahn has also been involved on a volunteer basis with the Portland Art Museum.

Originally from the midwest, Jahn is also a cousin of famed architect Helmut Jahn, and perhaps for that reason, Jeff has a strong interest in architecture and design (particularly bridges and transit projects), which often figures into his Port writings. He is also, just as I might say of myself to a lesser degree, a really fervent talker with a great deal of stamina. Nor is this pony-tailed multi-tasker lacking in confidence, smarts or chutzpah.

Recently Jeff sent me a quartet of his photos with accompanying commentary by email. He talks about trying to capture the "DNA," or in other words the essence, of a design in a manner that straddles abstraction without crossing over fully. This first shot, of the Portland Aerial Tram, is included in the Visual Chronicle of Portland. Of the tram image and his architectural photography in general, Jahn says: 

"I’m essentially using photography to turn architecture into paintings... a kind of anti-architecture (a la Gordon Matta Clark) based on finding the compelling design DNA of a building and letting it exist visually without any function or physical load bearing... essentially turning a building into a visual philosophy. For this work I’m uninterested in being a documentarian and tend to present disorienting space more like an object that is both emptied and complicated for the purpose of contemplation. I like Todd Eberle too but he's way more documentary in focus, even his abstract stuff is less spatially confusing and more documentary. You can tell I’m a painter and also have made art deco-style stained glass windows as a kid (age 7+). You can really see it in the composition."

This next shot is of the Standard Insurance Building (also known as the Standard Plaza), built in 1963 and designed by Skidmore, Owings, Merrill.

In a piece for The Oregonian I seem to recall ran in late 1999, Randy Gragg listed this as his favorite Portland building, and I think it might be mine as well. "I agree it's underrated," Jahn says. "I love the escalators and the plaza around the building." 

The photo here depicts part of the open plaza design that SOM employed to give the ground level a better integration with the street. You don't see many tall buildings in Portland today where the ground floor just kind of disappears. It's always storefront retail for a mixed-use affair. The Standard stands out in this way as did many buildings by Mies and other architects of this period did.

The Standard, says Bart King's Architectural Guidebook to Portland, was also ahead of its time in having underground parking and a fireproof interior stairwell. 

The next two photos are of the Mt. Angel Abbey Library, designed by the legendary Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, and Pietro Belluschi's Equitable Building  (now called the Commonwealth). 

"I love the plate tectonics of this," Jahn says of Mt. Angel. This was Aalto's last building in the United States (and one of only two along with Baker House at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts), completed in 1970 just six years before the architect's death, and his next to last project of any kind (predating only the Essen Opera House in Germany). 

The wood detailing you see in this picture is a key attraction of the interior - it's not surprising that Aalto also designed furniture. I was also blown away visiting Mt. Angel a couple years ago by the plethora of natural light. It is organized around a central, open circular well, and then ringed by curving reading tables and radiating stacks. Even though the library is nearly 40 years old, it feels like a small Utopian society of the future.

Looking at his photo of Belluschi's Equitable Building here, the look we know is not to be found. After all, the building owns a place in architectural history as the world's first aluminum-clad structure. Jahn says of his picture, "Since the mechanicals of this building are massively important I thought I'd focus on the part of the building that houses and vents those mechanicals.  We take things like air conditioning for granted and how many buildings have good looking mechanical housings?"

Jumpsuits, tai-chi and roving theater: South Waterfront's artistic experiment

If you've ventured down to the South Waterfront district in the last year, at times there haven't been many people around beyond construction workers building condos, medical staff and patients at OHSU, and a few of the first intrepid residents to this new area of town.

But maybe you've seen a woman in a strange orange jumpsuit that's been altered into a dress. If you thought to yourself, 'What's that weird artist doing in South Waterfront?", you weren't far off. Artist Linda Johnson has been acting since September 1, 2007 as the neighborhood's official artist in residence.

What does it mean for a neighborhood to have an artist in residence? It's not necessarily the kind of situation there are rules for. But Johnson, more than presenting her own work, has brought in a steady stream of guest performers and artists (13 in all) to help give South Waterfront something that it can't achieve solely from the metal and glass of its modern towers: a sense of community.

 

Or, as their website puts it, "Artists representing all media have been invited to create time-based, temporary work that explores and promotes a sense of place in the South Waterfront district. The goal of this accumulated practice of installation, performance and written/spoken word is to inspire dialog, inquiry, curiosity and participation among the South Waterfront residents, as well as the people of Portland."

I can't think of too many neighborhoods that have tried such a thing, but SoWa is the perfect place. When you walk around this less than half-finished neighborhood, it desperately needs people to come out of their condos and establish a personality. Many of the artists' efforts may be conceptually esoteric or even a little silly, but that's all part of the fun.

Johnson has a history of art that celebrates and enlivens forgotten or under-utilized urban spaces. In 2000, her performance piece "Tax Lot 1S1E44ODD" converted a median strip near an I-5 offramp into a community garden. The year before, she was part of a group art show at the AIA gallery with architect Mark Lakeman and artists Brian Borello and Vanessa Renwick in which the crisp, modern Jeff Lamb-designed space was covered with hay bales.

Among the artists and presentations so far: In July there was Ten Tiny Dances, with site-based dance performances throughout the neighborhood. Also last month, noted public artist Bill Will created with Johnson in "Promenade" an episodic sound, light and performance piece tuned with the sunset and the landscape.

In May, artist Horatio Hun-Yan Law organized a series of interactive tai-chi workshops. In March, artist Adam Kuby actually treated the landscape itself, subject in previous generations to ruptures and injuries through the building of I-5 and the severing of the Corbett/Terwilliger/Lair Hill neigbhorhoods from the water, with giant acupuncture needles. In April, Maria T. D. ("touchdown"?) Inocencio and Mark Smith created in "Compass" an interactive map-making project with residents that put Portland at the center of the world and asked them to fill in the blanks. There have also been performances and works by the talented jazz musician Tim DuRoche and photographer Christopher Rauschenberg (son of Robert Rauschenberg), among others.

For those still looking to get in on the action, next up is the final month of the guest-Artist in Residence program. Sojourn Theater's "Built" is will investigate the essence of place with a series of games, research, performance and audience interaction. As their press release says, "Sojourn asks participants to help imagine the multi-faceted futures of cities in the midst of growth and change." Today (Saturday, August 23) will include a public dialog, and then performances of the finished piece will be held during the TBA Festival on September 5, 6 and 7.

Congratulations to Linda Johnson on a year's worth of successful efforts to create a sense of place for the architecture and people in South Waterfront to thrive.

Cloepfil's artistic inspirations

Arcy Douglass has an extensive interview with architect Brad Cloepfil on the PORT website today, focusing on how modern and contemporary art has affected his designs. Cloepfil is a big art fan, and he cites works by Richard Serra, Sol Le Witt, Robert Irwin and others:

Douglass: How did your early experience with art feedback into your own creative process as an architect?

Cloepfil: When I was younger, I tended to be influenced by the raw experience of the work itself. At first, I wasn't even aware of who created a work, whether it was Richard Serra or Robert Irwin, it was the experience of the work itself that was important. The experience makes you ask yourself about the spatial quality of that type of work and about the ideas that those artists are exploring. It just resonates with you. 

I wasn't seeing anything comparable in buildings. It just seems like those guys understood more about the intentions of the 19th and 20th century architecture than the architects did. They had clarity of thought and a practice that was built on the exploration of material that became very important to me. The singular act of focus to create a work of art was really impressive. 

I saw Richard Serra's Circuit at MoMA and it is just four pieces of steel propped up in the corners of the room. The physical presence and the mass of the steel and its ability to radiate space into the small gallery was for me a very architectural experience that I could relate to much easier than the so-called "architecture" that was being produced at that time. The experience is about the material and the way that the material is made. It was also easier to learn from the artists because their work is so pure. By that I mean, the work that I was interested in was focused on the exploration of only one or two ideas. 

Buildings tend to be more complicated. It is hard to understand buildings when you are young unless they are a pure pavilion or something. A building is full of program, structure, stairs and support spaces that are necessary for the function of the building but very different than the direct experience of seeing work by Serra or Irwin. As a young student, art was more accessible. It was easier to understand what the artists were thinking about and what they were pursuing in their work.

What art has affected and influenced the rest of you architects out there? Is it an all-black painting that captured your fancy, like Cloepfil, or is there some closet Thomas Kincaide lover out there eager to cite his influence on their quaint English cottage?

As much as art, I also remember Cloepfil talking in a previous New York Times story I wrote about how he was inspired by the landscape of Oregon. ''It's a very romantic perception of space,'' he explained. ''I think it frees you up, and allows you to think of architecture as something more than objects.''