2010-03-18T08:01:14Z PORT is an online visual arts publication dedicated to critical discussion as lensed through Portland, Oregon. tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1 Movable Type Copyright (c) 2010, Alex Rauch 2010-03-18T08:01:14Z 2010-03-17T14:46:59Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1948 2010-03-17T14:46:59Z

Part I of PORT's interview with Inigo Manglano-Ovalle discussed his his shows Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With at Mass MOCA and Happiness is a state of inertia at Max Protetch Gallery, in continuation here the conversation digs deeper into the artist's sources and process. Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With, MASS MoCA Alex: Switching gears: How does Sergei Eisenstein's movie Glass House relate to Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With at Mass MOCA? Inigo: In the beginning I was interested in uncompleted projects. These uncompleted projects were also located historically in a similar sort of period - these were projects by individuals in a period of modernity. So I was interested in Eisenstein's Glass House because that was the title of what would be his first film in the US. Which was to be based on We (the novel by Zamyatin)... (more)

Alex Rauch http://alexrauch.com/ alex.rauch@hotmail.com Interviews Part I of PORT's interview with Inigo Manglano-Ovalle discussed his shows Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With at Mass MOCA and Happiness is a state of inertia at Max Protetch Gallery, in continuation here the conversation digs deeper into the artist's sources and process.


Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With, MASS MoCA

Alex: Switching gears: How does Sergei Eisenstein's movie Glass House relate to Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With at Mass MOCA?

Inigo: In the beginning I was interested in uncompleted projects. These uncompleted projects were also located historically in a similar sort of period - these were projects by individuals in a period of modernity. So I was interested in Eisenstein's Glass House because that was the title of what would be his first film in the US. Which was to be based on We (the novel by Zamyatin). I'm really interested in this. Also I'm interested in that when you read We his architecture is very similar to 1924-6 theoretical projects happening in Europe, which Eisenstein would have seen when he went to and had seen when he went to premier The Battleship Potemkin, right? SO when he went to Berlin to view the Potemkin he talked about this architecture-on-paper. And the architecture-on-paper were actually drawings because they were unbuildable projects. One of them certainly would have been Mies' Glass Skyscraper for Friedrichstrasse. So Mies' Glass Skyscraper for Friedrichstrasse could very well be a building in Zamyatin's book "We", right? Mies is not reading Zamyatin and Zamyatin was not necessarily seeing "We", but Eisenstein has both read Zamyatin and is looking at Mies.


Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With, MASS MoCA

Then Eisenstein's idea is to make this project called the "Glass house" in Paramount studios and he get contracted for this and actually starts to talk to engineers and movie set people to figure out how to build glass rooms that he can shoot from underneath and so forth. He starts to actually talk about it, then starts to narrate some - making some minor kind of sketches on what his screen play would be, right? Who his protagonist would be. Etc.

Next, one of the next that Eisenstein did that I really liked is that in his proto-screenplay his protagonist doesn't necessarily identify himself as the mathematician in We. Eisenstein says you don't know if the character is a mathematician, a priest or a clown, right? And at this moment in some of Eisenstein's notes - he's very sparse on this - he talks about this character getting in to such things that he's banging his head against the glass wall to call attention to people on the other side on the wall, right? Because this literal and physical transparency in We can only exist if one ignores that transparency of the glass walls.

In other words the transparency isn't really there for us to see other people but in We it is more for us to be seen by some monitoring device. So it's a very large and fluid panopticon, right. That character tries to break that panopticon and he tries to make the other person see him. That moment in Eisenstein's film that was never made was something I was really intrigued with. And what I had originally wanted to do was to make Eisenstein's film, right. So Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With is a collapse of Mies' unfinished project and Eisenstein's unfinished project. And so what happens is that the We… we are Eisenstein's "Glass House" and he says it gets played out in two places. One is through the phone calls, where the protagonist is absent. And the other is with what I call the only way to experience the house is actually "cinematically" right? The way that you move around the house you are basically tracking a shot. You become the camera… so two deflections for Eisenstein's uncompleted project.

Would you say that all your work is best viewed in a cinematic mind frame?

Only in this sense right? That one of the reasons I'm interested in quoting Eisenstein is that he had also written an essay on architecture. His father was an architect. And he was supposed to go to architecture school but he didn't want to. But Eisenstein wrote about architecture and he was very natural about architecture. Hence when he was in Berlin he went to go see architecture, right. He went to see these theoretical projects. He wrote essays on how architecture works as not as a singular image or object but as an experience. That we need to move through it that architecture unfolds to us as we move through it. This was really important to me early on.


Le Baiser - The Kiss (1999) multi-channel video installation and projection, cd audio recording, and mixed media dimensions variable

That essay was actually really important in developing The Kiss or La Blassiare as an installation. It was actually floating in space, right. Where the projection was something that you came to and moved around in and there was no correct space to stand. You could even go inside the building or outside the building. So at that moment I decided it was seminal for me. When I think of the viewer viewing work, how they take in the work, even the kind of criticality and the paradox that occurs in real locations real corporal locations; that's a phenomenological experience. You are standing with this "thing." This "thing" occupies the same space with you and time with you and so it is contrary to conventional cinematic experience. Which for me is a Quarto Centro experience and what I mean by that - in the renaissance you have a perspective painting and the painting is meant to bring everything to a center spot. This is our usual experience with film. So when you go into a movie theater lets say you might come in late and the good seats are gone. And your off to the side maybe too close to the front. But once you sit down in that black box you especially experience the self and some how project yourself to this natural sector. So that is one kind of cinematic experience, that the consumer cinematic experience. And the other is the camera, right. In other words that you actually move through space.

Isn't that a mindset though? You can always move around space and acknowledge it, but is there a particular mindset that you engage in? …because there are certain moments where life seems more cinematic than others?

Well I guess it depends on the term. Like when you say "there are certain moments where life seems more cinematic," for example and those moments tend to be the ones that are beyond real experience. So you say "this is like a movie." I think I'm more interested in what the cinematic experience tries do. We do it all the time too but we aren't being conscious of it.


Phantom Truck (2007) 32'9" (10m) long x 8'2" (2.5m) wide x 13' (4m) high
project for Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany, 2007

The camera is an apparatus and film making as an apparatus has to actually create a situation into which we can project ourselves into experiencially, but remove all the apparatus so we never see it. We never see the lights, we never see the dolly tracks. The apparatus has to be invisible. Ok? Then what I'm interested in is bringing back the apparatus, but the apparatus is you, you're the apparatus. So in Documenta 12 the hybrid right? You go into a dark room and it takes about 30 seconds for you to even realize something is in there with you and even a little longer for you to realize the scale of it to discern what it might be, right? It might end up to be just be a truck. And that's it - that all you know. You might not know anything else that I've put into it… about Colin Powell, his speech and what not. But if you just get that… that to me is really important. Because what happens there is that you become the apparatus for making this thing visible. And then if you understand what the piece refers to. Then you, in a sense, have become part of the apparatus that has, in a sense, made it appear. You've colluded in the grand lie, you are the mechanism for allowing the lie to produce itself. And it's actually a physical experience, it's not optical, it's physical. It's standing in a space, it takes time and it is not immediate. It's an almost psychological apparatus that we have to engage in. And once again, I am here with this thing and this thing is in this space here with me. It is more of a phenomenological experience than an intellectual experience.

Would you say that self similarities appear in your work and if so does your work relate to fractal geometry and/or chaos theory at all?

I think that in some of the work I'm definitely pointing towards that. There's a piece of mine called "Vanishing Sky" and its just a mathematical problem that creates universes, always creating universes. Lets call them stars, right. As the universes are being created the program is extinguishing them star by star. So your watching these universes being created and your also watching stars going off. Also it is generated, so there is definitely a notion of that pointing to the basis of evolution… that is version of fractal equations or the notion of the arbitrary.

I actually started doing that very early on because I had problems. I had this piece called "Sonambulo" which is a summer rain storm that last 11 minutes. It starts off as a thunderstorm. It's kind of like a new age meditation, 11 minute new age track. But its single source is a gun shot. But then is morphed into all the sounds that you're hearing. And one of the problems was with rain drops. You couldn't create raindrops that sounded like raindrops because every thing would sound like rhythm. So that's the first time back in 1998 that I had to engage a mathematician to help me to create a fractal equation. That would allow the generation of all these thousands upon thousands of rain drops to fall without rhythm and at different distances and different weights with each other. To me it was it was almost like "I need to resolve a technical problem." Later on maybe I'm referring to these things in the work. In here (Max Protetch Gallery) I am definitely referring to it within the photographs.


Iceberg B15 (12/18/03 05:20 GMT), 2010

Or the Rorschach inkblots.

Or the kaleidoscope, or the fact that we may not know what these photographs are about. And it may be very difficult to understand what they are and where they come from. But there is a sense of familiarity when you look at these photographs because I think culturally we have become really acclimated to the notion of the fractal. And the geometric patterning, which is a very high end math is actually palpable within culture. We see it we use it, we're familiar with it. So although one of the things that these photographs do, or that they want to do at first. Is that they want to present themselves that way. If you come in and see them for the first time it's some psychedelic New Agey image that you are looking at. That's fine, that's what it wants to do, and then maybe later on you locate what the source is and you begin to understand that there is time that shows up in this set of photographs.

What inspires you to make art/work? What inspires you to be active?

Lately I've been thinking that… it depends on what project I'm working on. But a lot of times I think that part of my activity, I can't label or have a harder time labeling as art. In other words I don't need that thing for myself - {labeling} what I do in the world as art. Sometimes what inspires me the most is that there is something that I have to see for myself. There are questions I have to pose and I have to pose them - for myself. And I don't have to answer them. I just have to pose them. And some of those questions or situations are creating this. And the question is never just purely intellectual, right. It's never purely conceptual in a sense. It is actually situational. You create a situation for an inquiry to exist into something. Some of those inquires are things I want to share. I want other people to experience them. I don't necessary want the situations to answer the questions or to find a correct answer.

I try very hard to tell people who may represent my work or what not, "Don't tell them what it is. There is no answer. You don't get it. There isn't something you're suppose to get." You might say where the source is from but the subject of the work is never the source of the getting of the work, right. So I think that what inspires me is… I don't know. Wanting to experience something. Really wanting to experience something.

So its foremost for yourself… but what makes the work successful for you? And do you get satisfaction out of every work or is there works that give you more satisfaction than others?


Cloud Prototype No.1 (2003)
fiberglass and titanium alloy foil
installation view at Max Protetch Gallery, 2003


Certainly there are works that are more successful than other. And certainly you keep making work because its never been truly successful.

Successful seems like such a bated word… how about self-satisfaction?

Satisfaction… You know its really interesting because successful is very different. You are right. Success if very different. You want work that is very different. You want work that is "working" not that "works." But that is working. Some work works better than others. It is working.

The notion of working is a larger concept and so some of it does it better than others. Or you suddenly find something that works and have to go back to it.

You pose these intense questions that are in essence unsolvable. I'll relate it back to myself for a second. When I pose intense questions if one person has a particular relationship whether it is "right" or "wrong" I am satisfied.

I think when I'm experiencing the work. Because a lot of my work I experience literally the first time when installing it. A lot of the important work for me is work that is special/based on time. Even though it might be a static object or something. There's no way too… your creating a situation. I definitely... I think that I am very good at creating situations but I can't know all of the things that will come froth from those situations, a totality of them. So a lot of the satisfaction comes from surprise, right. When I'm again surprised by something. But also equally and maybe perhaps even more so when somebody experiences the work with me and says something that I had never planned for that I had never realized was in the work but it is totally true. And at that moment there is this incredible rush because I start to realize the work is working. In other words it is generating meaning, right.

Yeah.

It's not didactic. It's not communicating meaning. In other words its not communicating my meaning to you. But it's generating meaning. That has as its source meaning not everything that I put into it. But another source which is the viewer, another viewer, the other.

And that brings it alive.

And to me - that's a big rush. There are big questions that I am still trying to ask. The fish tank here I'm grappling with whether I should call it "Bauen." I've been wanting to call it "Bauen"


Bauen (2010) aluminum, glass, water and Astyanax fasciatus mexicanus (Blind Mexican Cave Fish)

Bauen?

B A U E N right? Because its an essay I've read very early on. Very early on, I was very young by Heidegger, on dwelling. So bauen as a word for dwelling. But dwelling also as a verb and building as word for building the building. And the notion of dwelling as a way to contemplate how we exist. Dwelling as a notion of existence. The fact that we can not actually exist or be conscious of existence without dwelling, right. Without actually the notion of dwelling. We are just set out there in a vacuum so we have to construct a habitat. And the habitat isn't physically floors and walls. But we have to construct a habitat. And that as humans we're always constructing habitats or destroying habitats, right. So, I'm rereading that now because of this piece. I'm rereading that and I'm trying to come to grips with whether I 'm dwelling. Or if I'm actually dwelling the right way. Whether we are dwelling the right way. Whether we are consciously building and taking care of what we build the right way. And by "building" here I am not talking about "architecture" which is almost everything. Like…

Society…

Right. So in this exhibit you have this large global picture, right. This massive expansive land that is imaged. Bodies of water and ice environment are imaged, right. And then you have this small, small ecosystem that's trapped in this piece of architecture. And both are sites of dwelling, right. And one of them is actually an inquiry back to us, back to our selves. Kind of a Rorschach test that tries to analyze our own state of denial, right. That we're not actually recognizing that our dwelling is something bigger and more complicated, and maybe perhaps more essential and more primordial than what we think about our dwelling is, right. What we go about seeking for our dwelling, right. Our house, our apartment, our car, our clothes these are things that we apply to most dwellings. This is how we live, right. How do you live: I have this apartment, I have these records, I have this car, I have these clothes. This are the structures that define how we live. But Heidegger was talking about a different notion of dwelling. And I am asking that with myself. What does that mean right?


Inigo Manglano-Ovalle installing (right), Alex Rauch (left)

Now, for the viewer these are big heavy questions and you have to understand when I'm talking to you… For me and you I think it's this kind of privileged situation. We get to hit these big things. But how does the regular viewer acknowledge this. They just come in. Well I think its very simple in many cases. Like this piece here you just look at this object. It's a dead sort of dumb modernist object. You might as well go over to Zwirner gallery right now and look at the Larry Bell's, McCracken's, Robert Irwin's and all its doing is sort of riffing off those kind of things. Except that moment when you realize that the fish you are looking at are blind. There is in that moment… I have built in a situation in which I am guaranteed and I am guaranteeing that my viewer with just that little bit of knowledge enters into this moment of this kind of existential moment. Because humans will always - blindness for humans, right. I'm not talking about impairment. Just the notion of blindness. We approach it in a very profound sort of way. Because it's a state. It's a state that we can think about but can't necessarily conjure up. And so this is what I mean about that state of existence, right. Its kind of built in. it drives the piece. These are blind fish. For a moment I know they'll be thinking about; there're blind, I'm not blind.

Are they going to laugh?

They might, you know.

On a level it seems like a stripped irony. If you do self reference it. If you don't put blind fish in a clear fish tank…

That's lit. These guys should be in the dark. So there all this built in irony, right. Like this cave is fully of light and all the walls are glass so you can't cast a shadow. So vision wouldn't help you gain knowledge this time.

Can they feel the heat from the light?

Well the lights are very low heat.

Do the blind fish just run right into the glass? Sometimes they don't but that one did…

I think they're working it out all right.

It's interesting, I don't know how they function. Would they do that in a cave?

Yeah. They're probably going at this particular speed that they probably know how to function at.
I talked to this guy about the cave and says its totally smooth. You have to be really careful walking in these caves because the bottom is so smooth. I mean its undulating. Its so smooth. So they're always hitting smooth surfaces. Hard but smooth. In this they're hitting something at a right angle.

I was reading this paper on Happiness Inertia (Happiness Inertia: Analytical Aspects of the Easterlin Paradox) and economics There is this quote "if Happiness Inertia is to be more than a transitory phenomenon, we should be focused on the long run. Further, one interesting case surfaces whereby the most consumption and habit-rich societies are the "least happy" (have the lowest welfare)." Which leads me to the question: Where do wealth and welfare come to an equilibrium? Which I also narrated into this piece as a commentary on global warming.

Yeah, this is a commentary on our state of denial and also our ability for escapism and ironically the piece is almost at first a glance denial what they are. And then we read them formally as graphic things and they are kind of escapist. So the Rorschach test is the very thing it is trying to analyze… it's becoming that. The Rorschach test is already a system of denial.


Andy Warhol - Rorschach, 1984

It's a denial of an ink blot?

It's a kind of denial. In a way what I'm saying is, because the image by very subtly mirroring itself starts to deny what it is. It flattens itself of what it's actually looking like. It denies what it's looking at and suddenly you are shifting… what was originally the center focus is now the margin. And in the center (of the original picture) is this thing that isn't interesting.

Also, there is this denial of what we are looking at, even if just at first glance you can't really tell what they are and then it has that kind of kaleidoscope. It's a kind of psychedelic poster; there's that sense of escapism within that. Good or bad right? Even as a mandala that kind of escapism from reality. Even a spiritual escapism. Which can be seen as good or as a negative a kind of social escapism. Escaping the condition.


Not necesarily a positive or negative comment on happiness inertia?

I think its a negative in the term that I use.

Are you familiar with the term affluenza?

Oh yeah.

It means you are trying to keep up with the Jones and you can't be happy because your trying to keep up to date.

Right. And when I say "happiness is a state of inertia" is kind of like Happiness. Not the happiness that should be a kind of fluid and profound state or joy or bliss or just happiness. But what we think of as happiness is actually stagnant set. I think I'm referring to that obliquely. I don't want to be didactic.

And that is an interesting problem for me as an interviewer because that's the one thing I want to do as an interviewer is to get a concrete statement out of you. Even though its agents the idea of the work. But at the same time you have to create some narrative about the piece.

The title of the show basically came... Its an interesting side because there another site for work and discourse its: there is an image that we produce for a magazine that we have announced the show and the show at mass moca. Mass Moca has this title Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With. And so its on this image. And I start to title this piece in response to the other show. It's almost like there is this moment they wanted to put these big letters up there on the window Happiness is a state of Inertia. I said no, that's not the site. The site of that where that is already exists. it exists in the big ad.

In between the two?

It exists in the art forum ad. And that's another site. So you can throw up the statement there Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With at Mass Moca and Happiness is a state of Inertia at Max Protetch both at the same time. So Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With has multiple levels of understanding. Physical gravity which is the gravity of the situation. You know that something is actually serious.

That something I've had to wrap around my mind. As a physical force or allegory?

Yeah I think it actually comes back to what you talked about you not wanting to talk about success. So happiness here in the title may refer to - do you want a clear answer from me?

Yes.

I can give you one. Happiness here refers to that... success. Its a state of inertia, a tractor. There's no real movement.

It's a falsehood

Huh.

A falsehood is like a false state of reality.

Yeah, it's a false happiness.

So you are focusing on the thing that is not making you happy, but something that you think should.

Yes, acquisition.




Black Jack (2006) carbon fiber and aluminum

That "goal" of that thing you are getting, rather than happiness?

So there is this one piece called Black Jack. That was here in this show called Paradise. I was doing these works about Dante's Inferno. So Paradise was part of it was this big sculpture. This is what you get this is what you are. This is your paradise. But of course It is the opposite of an inferno. But here is this glorious object, the weapon, the stealth, the power, the beauty, the blackness, the power. This is your paradise. I think this title has that similar type of irony. I mean that's a child's toy made into a ballistic weapon. Its carbon fiber its totally sexy and beautiful. And then next I thought this is it. I started with purgatory which was the cloud. Which is a cloud but also an explosion. I thought by the time I did this one we were practically into what Bush had created and the state we had arrived in. I just said here, "you are this… is this what you wanted, this is your paradise, this is it."

Would you ever be tempted? I mean we're obviously talking it out and you are elaborating on a narrative. As a piece would you ever write out a narrative that would relate to your works?

My works?

As an overall body. The fractal geometry question I asked earlier on an integral/literal level relates to mathematical things you've used in your work. Which makes me think of self-similarities like a forest. There are patterns to a forest but you can't really see them on the surface. Do you see your work like a forest?

That's an interesting question because the other day someone who knows my work came into the gallery and said "this is the el nino effect" this is this thing I've done before. This is the weather systems and warm bodies of water. And yeah there is some sort of... I continue to do some kind of work here there is a hidden pattern but I can't discern it. I can't discern it. And so its not going to be a line. There isn't a thread some sort of progression.

And that is the relationship I was wondering about chaos theory and how it might relate within work?

Right, from what I understand about chaos. There are two different types of chaos. There is one which is fractal, the non-pattern… it is turbulence. And we're beginning to learn that turbulence has a pattern. You look at it long enough and let it flow there is an actual pattern. Therefore within what we consider chaos there is a kind of stability. And then there is a primordial chaos. And in primordial chaos is this strange situation because in primordial chaos there is actually nothing. Its lack of pattern, its also lack of anything. (Turns and walks toward the latest picture in the timeline of the photographs in Happiness Is a State of Inertia) If anything, here in chaos it wouldn't be the fractal aspect there. We're defining it this way now, right?


Iceberg B15
(02/15/05 21:55 GMT)
2010 Archival Giclee Prints
26 x 20 inches and 40 x 52 inches

Yeah, we're defining it as the void.

You know what I mean. The "nothing." Total uncertainty. Total uncertainty. And so chaos has a heavy connotation if your thinking about it philosophically or theologically, but primarily theologically. If you are looking at the midst of creation chaos is very important.

De-void the void.

Right. And that carries with it a huge weight. And you transfer chaos/chaos theory to then fractals it continues to carry that weight. That term continues to carry that weight. And maybe its actually the opposite. Maybe its not chaos that math is trying to figure out.

But that's the beauty in it. When would we know? When will we know? Is there a pattern or is there not? But there is that possibility.

You could be a astrologer trying to derive patterns, a Greek astrologer, out of that non-pattern. So you put up your consolations and so you get a pattern to that non-pattern, pitter-patter. And that is one way to deal with chaos. Or you could be a macro-physicist and look at that and look at a nebula. And say that this thing is beautiful. And just think that turbulence is beautiful in and of itself. I don't need to order it. Even though I'm going to try and figure out how turbulence occurs. I don't need to order it.

It's the process rather than the answer.

And there are two different ways to define the terms. A lot of times I'm more interested in the etymology of the term. Because it ties it to cultural history. And just like when people say to me, "your so interested in science or collaborative science" I'm not interested in science per-se all by itself. I'm interested in science as one of many very complex cultural manifestations. In other words what science produces actually responds to culture. If I believe that the artist doesn't exist solely within their studio, I also don't believe that the most creative brilliant scientists doesn't exist solely within their lab. They are being blemished and tarnished and driven by forces outside. Science, because of politics and the mechanisms of politics, primarily economics, produces what we desire.

Like inherent problems that exist within 3-D space that even mathematicians based within theoretically perfect worlds had to acknowledge?

A lot of genetic engineering has been driven by the fact that there is a potential consumer out there. If there wasn't a potential consumer out there for what genetic engineering might provide I bet you it wouldn't progress further. So we see cultural in trends. I am interested in that permeation, and that has always been my interest. So I would locate my interest in science being as a part of a cultural engine that isn't driven in isolated spaces. There are actual walls; the walls of the lab and the walls of the art studio are full of holes, permeating. These things are coming in and out. And we're responding. We're never in a isolated hermetic situation. It's impossible. It's uninteresting. Totally uninteresting. The artist who believes himself to be totally hermetic is totally uninteresting to me. In fact I think it's an impossibility.

It is an impossibility. Because you are part of a society even if it is a society of one.

And if you look at it the fractal is inherent in the title because inertia is a place where chaos would stop, supposedly. Inertia is a place where things would come to a standstill. (laughing) The beauty of this (points to the piece) ... in a way it is very hard. Even though I'm trying on a very simple minded level.

Do you feel like there is a point where rhetoric and art jargon is ridiculous?


Joseph Kosuth Five Words in Green Neon 1965

Yeah at a certain point. But at another point. Someone asked me when I was doing activist work, "will your work actually change things?" And I go - I learned very quickly that in all the places it can change, in all of those places art can provide real change. Art can actually change power. One of the places where art can change power is language and if someone writes about something or develops a new term or changes the definition of another term because of what art does. Then we're actually making change in language. And language is something that is in the hands of many different elites, but none the less elites. So the place where art can have social/political change might actually be within language. But not within the work. But not within what the work does or what it says by itself. But how it impacts later on in discourse. So yes I have this strange skepticism about art jargon but it is in art jargon where the redefinition takes place. The invention of the term "the other" is huge and has HUGE political impact. And then subsequently the other in that terminology, that way of thinking and its impact on art allowed for the existence of strategies called multiculturalism. Once multiculturalism moved away from the linguistic into a more or less another stylized way of working it lost it's power but it also lost the other. What happened is that we stopped talking about the other. We don't speak about the other. We talk about community. That's a more benign, less incisive, and a less critical term.

More innocuous.

Right more innocuous, and benign. So you can see that power comes back and recovers itself. But where? In language.

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Sayre Gomez Fourteen30 presents Self-Expression by LA-based artist Sayre Gomez. Writer John Motley, in his continued collaboration with the gallery (writing essays for each exhibition): "[Gomez] works in many media, shrugging off the trappings of style, to insistently reiterate a single idea in countless ways, and assert the fragmented nature of identity in the process. As a result, the work in Self-Expression is diverse enough to scan as a group show." Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 19 Fourteen30 • 1430 SE 3rd • 503.236.1430 The next round of Portland2010 openings is happening this weekend. Catch work by Holly Andres, Corey Arnold, Pat Boas, John Brodie, David Eckard, Damien Gilley, Jenene Nagy, and the Oregon Painting Society at the Templeton Building, and Stephen Slappe at the Leftbank. Portland2010 Biennial • Openings Part II • March 20 Templeton Building • 230 E Burnside @ SE 3rd • 6-10pm Leftbank • 240 N Broadway • 6-9pm

Megan Driscoll driscollm@gmail.com Openings & Events
Sayre Gomez

Fourteen30 presents Self-Expression by LA-based artist Sayre Gomez. Writer John Motley, in his continued collaboration with the gallery (writing essays for each exhibition): "[Gomez] works in many media, shrugging off the trappings of style, to insistently reiterate a single idea in countless ways, and assert the fragmented nature of identity in the process. As a result, the work in Self-Expression is diverse enough to scan as a group show."

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 19
Fourteen30 • 1430 SE 3rd • 503.236.1430




The next round of Portland2010 openings is happening this weekend. Catch work by Holly Andres, Corey Arnold, Pat Boas, John Brodie, David Eckard, Damien Gilley, Jenene Nagy, and the Oregon Painting Society at the Templeton Building, and Stephen Slappe at the Leftbank.

Portland2010 Biennial • Openings Part II • March 20
Templeton Building • 230 E Burnside @ SE 3rd • 6-10pm
Leftbank • 240 N Broadway • 6-9pm]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-16T19:33:04Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1947 2010-03-16T19:33:04Z

Crystal Schenk, "Have and Have Not," currently on view at Disjecta for the Portland2010 Biennial March's Art Spark is happening at Disjecta. They're celebrating the Portland2010 Biennial and offering attendees a chance to win a show at Disjecta (for individual artists or curated group shows). Submit a one-page synopsis of your proposal along with images before 5pm on Thursday and be ready to present your project to the Art Spark crowd if chosen. Art chat • 5-7pm • March 18 Art Spark @ Disjecta • 8371 N Interstate • 503.286.9449

Megan Driscoll driscollm@gmail.com Openings & Events
Crystal Schenk, "Have and Have Not," currently on view at Disjecta for the Portland2010 Biennial

March's Art Spark is happening at Disjecta. They're celebrating the Portland2010 Biennial and offering attendees a chance to win a show at Disjecta (for individual artists or curated group shows). Submit a one-page synopsis of your proposal along with images before 5pm on Thursday and be ready to present your project to the Art Spark crowd if chosen.

Art chat • 5-7pm • March 18
Art Spark @ Disjecta • 8371 N Interstate • 503.286.9449]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-15T17:56:18Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1946 2010-03-15T17:56:18Z

Local landmark Pittock Mansion is seeking submissions for their upcoming juried exhibition, Uncertain Times: Contemporary Art Views on the Fate of the Newspaper: "Newspapers today face an uncertain future, as television and the Internet erode print media’s traditional customer base. This exhibit interprets the challenges that newspapers face today through paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and multimedia art." The submission deadline is May 15, and you can get more details and a registration form on their website. (More! Open call for PSU's Littman & White galleries, environmentally conscious art for the renewable energy round-up, and wearable art for Anka.)

Megan Driscoll driscollm@gmail.com Calls for Artists Uncertain Times: Contemporary Art Views on the Fate of the Newspaper: "Newspapers today face an uncertain future, as television and the Internet erode print media’s traditional customer base. This exhibit interprets the challenges that newspapers face today through paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and multimedia art." The submission deadline is May 15, and you can get more details and a registration form on their website.


PSU's Littman and White Galleries are seeking show proposals from local artists. Applications are due by April 15. For more details, contact littmanandwhite@gmail.com.


The Renewable Energy Roundup & Art Show in Ellensburg, WA is seeking submissions for their 2010 exhibition over Memorial Day weekend. They're interested in work that includes "concepts, and/or themes that relate to renewable resources, global climate change, conservation, clean and sustainable energy." Submissions are due May 1. Visit their website for more info.


Mark Woolley and the Anka Gallery have invited artists to submit work for a new line of "wearable art." The winning artist will receive a percentage of net revenue on the clothing line. The winning art and pieces by select finalists will be exhibited in April in Anka Gallery. Submissions are due by April 8. Lots more details on their website.]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-13T01:09:23Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1945 2010-03-13T01:09:23Z

I have been thinking about motivations for criticism lately. Art criticism is more than a simple popularity contest aimed at amusing or endearing oneself (or your employer) to the art scene or an exercise in lazy caricatures that ignore the details and context at hand for snark's sake (that has a place as social theater but isn't criticism). Instead, it's about context and sharing a process of perceptual evaluation. What's more it seemed like it was time to explore a group of current shows with a mutual thread around the darkness of Winter and Portland's predilection for niorish arcana: Matthew Green's Nibog at Fourteen30 (photo Jeff Jahn) Dark: A Show to Winter at Fourteen30 appropriately ends tomorrow (a week before the Spring Equinox). Typical of the Blood Family Rainbow's curatorial collaborations it has a dark, gothic, even occult focus. It's a good show with the first room being significantly stronger than the others. This is partially because 3 of the 4 best pieces (By Matthew Green, Sven Stuckenschmidt and Molly Vidor) are in the first room... (more)

Jeff Jahn http://www.jeffjahn.com jeff_at_NOSPAM_portlandart_dot_net Reviews

Matthew Green's Nibog at Fourteen30 (photo Jeff Jahn)

Dark: A Show to Winter at Fourteen30 appropriately ends tomorrow (a week before the Spring Equinox). Typical of the Blood Family Rainbow's curatorial collaborations it has a dark, gothic, even occult focus. It's a good show with the first room being significantly stronger than the others. This is partially because 3 of the 4 best pieces (By Matthew Green, Sven Stuckenschmidt and Molly Vidor) are in the first room. The strongest by far is Matthew Green's Nilbog (goblin spelled backwards), which has become the show's mascot. If it were a person it would be the cult leader of this group of dark souls. What makes Nilbog important is it is quite genuinely the product of a ritualized burning. By fetishing a simple chainsaw sculpture and burning the piece becomes a totemic anthropological place marker, an analog of a bog man that preserves its ritual killing, freezing it in a silent yet horific/humorous state. Nilbog mutely stands as a proxy sentinel of some mute set of laws and social codes we the non Blood Family members as visitors must confront.

Its mute provocation stands for "the other"… we have clues to its condition but nothing further. Frankly, Nilbog is the only thing in the show that is significantly better or at least more genuine than anything Banks Violette has ever done. Let's just say Violette is the show's neo-goth, dark metal lov'n patron saint and a lot of the other work in the show has the same semi-crafty, semi-subculture riffing we've all been seeing en masse for over half a decade because of Violette's success.


Alex Hubbard, The Paranoid Phase of Nautical Twilight I-III, Video Still

Nilbog is better because it isn't fetishing some obvious subculture lifestyle as much as a manifesting a legitimate primal urge, transformed and given form through ritual. Till now Green has been a merely promising recent art school grad making still very "art school" work (i.e. it riffed on subcultures in clubby, "ha I get it so we are both cool" ways). Nilbog is something else and goes much deeper, nobody gets it, nobody can... it's not just a dark piece, it's a silent apophenia producing sentinel; simple, hilarious, serious and terribly effective. The fourth strong piece in the show is Alex Hubbard's excellent video, The Paranoid Phase of Nautical Twilight I-III… a dark channeling of Gordon Matta Clark style structural cutting in video. His other video in the show though is an unimaginative and twee rip-off of Fischli and Weiss' classic the Way Thing's Go, we expect better of the former Portlander.


Caleb Charland's Demonstrations series at Bluesky

Another excellently dark show is Caleb Charland's Demonstrations at Bluesky. His haunting black and white time lapse photographs of moving light sources recall Nicolai Tesla's fantastic coils (which are most easily visualized as the devices used to bring Frankenstein's monster to life in the 1931 film version). There is something haunting about Charland's photographic mad scientist antics… like a really talented poltergeist at work. Bean Gilsdorf wrote this excellent review of a related photographic show The Eye of Science.


O. Winston Link's Living Room on the Tracks, Lithia, Virginia, 1955

Right next door another at Charles Hartman Fine Art is O. Winston Link's show of uneasy railroad photographs The Last Steam Railroad in America. This show also ends on Saturday. Normally one doesn't associate choo choo's with a gothic sensibility but some of these like Living Room on the Tracks could be right out of a David Lynch's Twin Peaks. There's just something alchemical about transforming hard dark coal into steam to propel giant cast iron and steel machines. Don't miss this show… the iron horse as a niorish demonic force or at least a symbol of unstoppable fate is quite compelling and it says a lot about America's drive. Is that drive gone with the great steam locomotives?


Jack Ryan at PCC Cascade Gallery (photo Jeff Jahn)

Another excellent but dark show is Jack Ryan's Scriabin's Moustache at PCC Cascade Gallery. Featuring somewhat arcane sound/sculpture, flickering light sources and a video called "Moon Rise" of the moon cycling from full to crescent with unnatural speed, the show feels like a séance for the haunting genius that was composer Alexander Scriabin. This is yet another excellent show from PCC cascade, which has become the most consistently adventurous university gallery in Portland this season. Sculptural/sound elements like the piece Black Parallelogram/after Tony Smith explore the arcaneness of Scriabin the composer and highlight a similar arcaneness in sculptor Tony Smith's black forms. Sometimes to be ahead of your time the things that artists create have to feel out of their time… or "weird" (weird is a word derived from the Old English (via Nordic) idea that one can know their fate or "wyrd"). Scriabin was a brilliant if completely eccentric composer and died of a carbuncle, which grew in his moustache then ruptured with tragic results. Perhaps Ryan is creating a metaphor for odd fate and its effects as the legacy of an artist, which others then inherit and similarly pass on? Very moving and reminiscent of shows at Small A gallery, except better because it substitutes odd arcaneness for that onetime Portland venues' Brooklyn-esque irony fetish (something I often find an easy audience finding crutch, others love it).


Of Walking in Ice @ White Box Gallery, U of O Portland

Similarly, Jack Ryan has also curated a show called, Of Walking in Ice at the U of O's White Box Gallery in the White Stag Building. It shares a lot of similarities with his solo show, not the least of which being both are rather arcane. Of Walking in Ice comes from Ryan's interest in a text by the rather arcane filmmaker Werner Herzog where he chronicled a chilly walk from Munich to Paris by a young filmmaker. The interpretations, be they Melody Owen's intertwined infinity symbol snowshoes, Anna Fidlers' Daniel Richter-esque figures in a landscape or Anna Gray and Ryan Paulson' literary index, all display an elliptical sense… perhaps because when walking on ice there is this sense of endlessness. On an iced over lake or ice cap the surfaces is relatively uniform and white, giving little hint of scale, direction or shelter. Once again fate seems to be at play here but since Herzog is involved one senses there is an utter conflation of the absurd, artistic and legitimate documentation.

Overall, this theme of darkness isn't anything new for the area, In 2002 Stuart Hordoner curated the noirish "Northwest Narrative" at PICA's once glorious full time exhibition space. More recently Laura Fritz, Carl Diehl, OPS, Stephen Slappe, Paula Rebsom, Patrick Rock, Arnold Kemp, Michael Brophy, Dan Attoe have put on haunted sanity challenging efforts. In the tradition of David Lynch, this noirish suspension of reason for generating apophenia is a great strength of Portland's art scene because it deals in intangibles and the unknown (all very common themes for a settlement carved out of the deep dark woods rather recently). ]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-12T18:07:39Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1944 2010-03-12T18:07:39Z

Megan Driscoll driscollm@gmail.com Openings & Events
Bob Ostertag and Pierre Hébert

Artist and filmmaker Bob Ostertag is lecturing tomorrow at PAM in conjunction with Disquieted. "Ostertag explores the common ground and points of friction among music, creativity, politics, culture, and technology. In [his] lecture, "Between Science and Garbage," Ostertag will explore the notion that today's cutting-edge technology is tomorrow's garbage. The title of his lecture is drawn from a performance and film of the same name, which Ostertag created with his partner in Living Cinema, Pierre Hébert."

Artist lecture • 2-3pm • March 13
Portland Art Museum • 1219 SW Park • 503.226.2811]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-11T19:20:08Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1943 2010-03-11T19:20:08Z

The Judd Conference now has its own blog and Arcy has laid out a very helpful reading list with links. Remember to register early, the cost goes up after March 22nd and space is limited. If you are an installation artist, designer or architect this event will be of capital interest. Todd Eberle is doing some fine blogging and always great photos on Marina Abramovic's latest. Nicolai Ouroussoff's fascinating article on Claude Parent is definitely worth a read, contextualizing the architect who has influenced younger designers like Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas. Call him the father of the current strain of counterintuitive (yet good) architecture. Tyler Green contemplates the ethical legacy of curator Edward Fry in the Gugg's new Contemplating the Void exhibition. The WWeek reviews the Blakely Dadsen show at Chambers.

Jeff Jahn http://www.jeffjahn.com jeff_at_NOSPAM_portlandart_dot_net News Judd Conference now has its own blog and Arcy has laid out a very helpful reading list with links. Remember to register early, the cost goes up after March 22nd and space is limited. If you are an installation artist, designer or architect this event will be of capital interest.

Todd Eberle is doing some fine blogging and always great photos on Marina Abramovic's latest.

Nicolai Ouroussoff's fascinating article on Claude Parent is definitely worth a read, contextualizing the architect who has influenced younger designers like Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas. Call him the father of the current strain of counterintuitive (yet good) architecture.

Tyler Green contemplates the ethical legacy of curator Edward Fry in the Gugg's new Contemplating the Void exhibition.

The WWeek reviews the Blakely Dadsen show at Chambers. ]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-11T17:28:22Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1942 2010-03-11T17:28:22Z

Portland's latest stab at a Biennial begins this weekend. Curated by Cris Moss and running from March to May 2010, exhibitions will be held at Disjecta, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, the Marylhurst Art Gym, Rocksbox, the Templeton Building, the Leftbank, the Alicia Blue Gallery, and Alpern Gallery. You can already see shows at Elizabeth Leach and the Art Gym by Melody Owen (both), and the following is opening this weekend: Ditch Projects Are You Ready for the Country? brings Ditch Projects to Rocksbox. "Finding inspiration in the apocalypse of vacancy that marks urban failure, Are You Ready for the Country identifies and celebrates the urban center's sudden and full submission to the rural margin. Refusing the iconography of idealized naturalism, the members of Ditch Projects opt, instead, to frame rurality as the physical lack of constant urbanity." Opening reception • 6-10pm • March 13 ROcksbox Fine Art • 6540 N Interstate • 503.516.4777 Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas Six shows will be opening this Saturday at Disjecta (the hub of the Biennial): Bruce Conkle & Marne Lucas' Warlord Sun King, David Corbett's New Work, Sean Healy's Muscle Car Memory/Carcinoma, Tahni Holt's Culture Machine (in progress), Crystal Schenk's Recent Work, and Crystal Schenk & Shelby Davis' West Coast Turnaround. While you're there, pop over to the Vestibule to see Evertt Beidler's Cured of Second Chances (not part of the Biennial). Opening reception • 6-10pm • March 13 Disjecta • 8371 N Interstate • 503.286.9449

Megan Driscoll driscollm@gmail.com Openings & Events

Portland's latest stab at a Biennial begins this weekend. Curated by Cris Moss and running from March to May 2010, exhibitions will be held at Disjecta, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, the Marylhurst Art Gym, Rocksbox, the Templeton Building, the Leftbank, the Alicia Blue Gallery, and Alpern Gallery. You can already see shows at Elizabeth Leach and the Art Gym by Melody Owen (both), and the following is opening this weekend:



Ditch Projects

Are You Ready for the Country? brings Ditch Projects to Rocksbox. "Finding inspiration in the apocalypse of vacancy that marks urban failure, Are You Ready for the Country identifies and celebrates the urban center's sudden and full submission to the rural margin. Refusing the iconography of idealized naturalism, the members of Ditch Projects opt, instead, to frame rurality as the physical lack of constant urbanity."

Opening reception • 6-10pm • March 13
ROcksbox Fine Art • 6540 N Interstate • 503.516.4777



Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas

Six shows will be opening this Saturday at Disjecta (the hub of the Biennial): Bruce Conkle & Marne Lucas' Warlord Sun King, David Corbett's New Work, Sean Healy's Muscle Car Memory/Carcinoma, Tahni Holt's Culture Machine (in progress), Crystal Schenk's Recent Work, and Crystal Schenk & Shelby Davis' West Coast Turnaround. While you're there, pop over to the Vestibule to see Evertt Beidler's Cured of Second Chances (not part of the Biennial).

Opening reception • 6-10pm • March 13
Disjecta • 8371 N Interstate • 503.286.9449]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-10T23:04:00Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1941 2010-03-10T23:04:00Z

MP5 presents Avantika Bawa's yesterday. Yellow. Bawa writes: "My altered and seemingly 'perfect' construction aims to transform the objects beyond their perceived banality into a dynamic phenomenon that reinvents the mundane. Ordinary, discarded material is used to construct a landscape, where the common place is glorified. Here, the flawed is perfected and the familiar obscured, rendering an emergent and difficult communication to be examined and relearned." The exhibition is on view from March 12 - April 30, 2010. Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 12 MP53 • 900 NE 81st Avenue • Gallery space of lofts building Shaun Jarvis Alpern Gallery presents Shaun Jarvis' Hard Luck. The photographs are part of a decade-long ongoing project photographing the artist's associates in available light without post-production. Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 12 Alpern Gallery • 2552 NW Vaughn • 503.477.7721

Megan Driscoll driscollm@gmail.com Openings & Events

MP5 presents Avantika Bawa's yesterday. Yellow. Bawa writes: "My altered and seemingly 'perfect' construction aims to transform the objects beyond their perceived banality into a dynamic phenomenon that reinvents the mundane. Ordinary, discarded material is used to construct a landscape, where the common place is glorified. Here, the flawed is perfected and the familiar obscured, rendering an emergent and difficult communication to be examined and relearned." The exhibition is on view from March 12 - April 30, 2010.

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 12
MP5³ • 900 NE 81st Avenue • Gallery space of lofts building



Shaun Jarvis

Alpern Gallery presents Shaun Jarvis' Hard Luck. The photographs are part of a decade-long ongoing project photographing the artist's associates in available light without post-production.

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 12
Alpern Gallery • 2552 NW Vaughn • 503.477.7721]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-09T15:01:38Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1939 2010-03-09T15:01:38Z

Bill Gilbert Bill Gilbert has been the Lannan Foundation Chair in the Land Arts of the American West program at The University of New Mexico since 2000 and is the author of Land Arts of the American West. He took time to answer a few of PORT's questions on the eve of his talk for The Museum of Contemporary Craft this coming Wednesday at PNCA: Alex: Michael Heizer has indicated he'd like to fix Double Negative because it has deteriorated, isn't that the Land art equivalent of George Lucas redoing Star Wars? How do you feel about artists tinkering with their early earth art? Bill: Heizer has gone back and forth on this one. I really appreciate his ability to be inconsistent and answer depending on how he’s feeling or who his audience might be at any given time in the over the forty years it has been since the piece was completed. We artists all have complicated relationships with our work. So, I understand the... (more)

Alex Rauch http://alexrauch.com/ alex.rauch@hotmail.com Interviews
Bill Gilbert

Bill Gilbert has been the Lannan Foundation Chair in the Land Arts of the American West program at The University of New Mexico since 2000 and is the author of Land Arts of the American West. He took time to answer a few of PORT's questions on the eve of his talk for The Museum of Contemporary Craft this coming Wednesday at PNCA:


Alex: Michael Heizer has indicated he'd like to fix Double Negative because it has deteriorated, isn't that the Land art equivalent of George Lucas redoing Star Wars? How do you feel about artists tinkering with their early earth art?

Bill: Heizer has gone back and forth on this one. I really appreciate his ability to be inconsistent and answer depending on how he’s feeling or who his audience might be at any given time in the over the forty years it has been since the piece was completed. We artists all have complicated relationships with our work. So, I understand the impulse and the difficulty of attaining detachment from your work once it enters the public sphere.

On the other side is the perspective expressed by John Link in his essay “The Hardness of Art”. He argues that all that matters to society is the art and artists are merely the necessary vehicle to deliver the work. So then the question is separate from Heizer and his ego and it becomes what is the essence of Double Negative as a sculpture in the public sphere. Is the work the actual clean walled geometric cut in the ground that needs to be maintained in perpetuity. Or is the work the sharp graphic image in the aerial photograph in Art Forum. If so, is the photograph sufficient? Or is the work the imposition of Heizer’s intentions on a landscape and the slow process of its erasure? What is the frame of the work? My interest is in the work as a site piece across time. I find the erosion taking place, the reclaiming of the site through natural forces to be quite beautiful. I don’t expect LA MOCA or Heizer to agree with me.


Spiral Jetty May 2009 (photo Jeff Jahn)


Spiral Jetty partially came about because the environmental standards around the Great Salt Lake were relaxed, now the water levels are threatened and the piece could become landlocked. What is your take on the preservation of Spiral Jetty?

I guess as the director of an Art Ecology program I should be interested in the “environmental standards” issue. But I’m not. It’s hard for me to see Spiral Jetty as a big environmental issue. The oil jetty next to it and the possibility of it being reactivated is of much more concern that some rocks piled in the water. That said the work is a jetty. It reaches out into the lake and interrupts the water flow across the lake shore, catches slit and will slowly be subsumed. What a smart piece!.... a work whose form is a symbol (The spiral) for the cyclical nature of existence that then acts out its own image, appearing on the lake, disappearing for decades under water, reemerging only to be covered by the silt its structure entraps. The piece is poetry, they should let it continue to speak through its absence as well as presence.


How does your training with Rudy Autio in Montana play into his current work with land arts of the American West?

Indirectly, Rudi was a great artist and teacher and a wonderful human being. His work came out of the western movement in ceramics led by his buddy Pete Volkous. They endeavored to bridge the gap between the craft history of ceramic vessels and contemporary art issues of painting and sculpture. While that’s where his interests were located Rudi never tried to get us to make work like his. I learned a lot from Rudi about artistic integrity, about the necessity of taking risks and following your own vision and that certainly effected my path to the Land Arts program, but we didn’t really ever talk about Land Art except in the sense that he understood that I was looking for my own way to build upon his generations’ efforts to take ceramics into contemporary art.


There is a quote on page 85 of your book Land Arts of the American West, “It’s about being conscious in everything that you do as a way of learning how to be in the world.” Could you speak a little bit about your holistic mentality of art and life?

Okay, that’s a big question. Let me take a deep breadth and dive in. Here goes, I hope it is coherent.

I got into art because of the Vietnam War and my sense that our culture had lost its bearings, its ethics, that it had become, on a certain level, unbalanced, insane. I was at Swarthmore College at the time and the inability of the intellectual left to stand up to the immorality of the war made me question everything about my education. The sciences were totally compromised by their association with the war effort, the Christian religious tradition in which I was raised seemed corrupt, so I turned to art as a methodology to pursue the truth in a more holistic way in the hopes that it might lead me to a more balanced life. I was searching for a reintegration of mind, spirit and body.

I had the good fortune to fall into Paul Soldner’s studio in Claremont. Paul very much operated on the basis of approaching everything in life as an artist, not just your studio practice. His studio was a community in which we lived, worked, ate and slept together. We made our own tools and kilns, cooked communal meals and danced and it was all a seamless expression of an artist’s life.

That idea of an integrated life got taken forward in my work with Mary Lewis Garica at Acoma Pueblo. I started teaching a course with Mary in which I took the students out to Acoma to study pueblo pottery. We spent the first half of the course gathering our materials. We’d go one Friday to a spot in Chaco Canyon to dig clay, another Friday to a hill by the Rio Puerco to search for paint stones, another Friday to an old sheep camp at Acoma to find pot shards. Each Friday Mary would tell us the stories that were attached to the specific place. Before long I came to understand that the pottery practice was a way for Mary to reinforce her identity as an Acoma woman and not just through the forms and designs on the pots but through her connection to place.

Each week we would share a communal meal. They would go on forever and I tended, at first, to become impatient, to want to get back to work. Mary would give me this stare and say “Bill you white people are always in such a hurry, slow down”. After a while I got it. Mary put as much attention into cooking the food for our meals, sewing leggings for her children to dance in the ceremonies, etc. as she did into her pottery. In her view, she isn’t a professional potter, she is an Acoma woman who makes pots, cooks, sews, etc. They are all an equal part of building a cohesive identity.


What are some of the connections between the ancient traditions of ceramics and the contemporary practices in land art?

We tend to think of art practices in mutually exclusive boxes. Michael Heizer and Mary Lewis Garcia belong to different traditions that are kept separate in our culture. Well they both work in direct response to the earth. When I got hired to teach Ceramics at UNM, I was operating in the zone of Environmental Art in my own work. I started looking around for a living tradition in ceramics of environmental artists and that lead me to the pueblo potters. Their work is completely place based. Their materials are all extracted for the local environment. They waste nothing. The earthworks artists superficially appear to be operating in a similar zone. Heizer’s Double Negative and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty are both site based, silica and alumina sculptures. Their interests are in fact quite different. Pueblo potters would never say that they work in Nevada because the land is cheap (Michael Heizer). The entire concept of the landscape as a blank canvas on which to inscribe your image is foreign to their thinking.

As Land Art has evolved from Earthworks to Environmental Art and Eco Art the connection to place, the reverence for the earth on its own terms has grown much stronger. Contemporary Artist such as Hamish Fulton, Basia Irland, Lynne Hull and even the Harrisons share a fundamental understanding of their practice in relationship to place with the pueblo potters though their work tends to be less object oriented in its final expression.


Paraphrasing Ann Reynolds, "The problem of return: It can be lamented as loss, or its limitations can be embraced to propose something new – a Smithsonian balancing act between loss and insight." How do you think about this problem as paradox or pattern and why?

Smithson’s concept of the site non-site relationship is a central concern to anyone working in response to place. It acknowledges that as soon as the site is detached from the audience (as in all the early Earthworks which most people know from their images in ArtForum not from actual haptic experience on site) the artist becomes involved in the role of translation. What Smithson postulated is that there is an inherent loss in this translation. The physical reality of the non-site is never the same as the physical reality of the site. What occurs in the non-site of the gallery is never a direct equivalent with what occurs on the actual site. The key in Smithson’s terms is to see this loss as an opportunity, a freedom to create a parallel expression rather than attempt a direct representation.


Acoma Pueblo, c1910 (source Charles Francis Saunders)


Land art is about experience yes? How would you describe the experience?

The Land Arts program experience centers around creating a mobile artist community to investigate/to become intimate with place. We provide students with direct, physical engagement with a full range of human interventions in the landscape, from pre contact Native America architecture, pictographs and petrogylphs to contemporary Earthworks, federal infrastructure, and the constructions of the US Military. We are looking at how culture has interacted with the environment of the desert through gestures both grand and small, directing our attention from potsherd, cigarette butt, and track in the sand to human settlements, monumental artworks, and military/industrial projects such as hydroelectric dams and decommissioned airfields.

We balance the investigation of cultural sites such as Chaco Canyon, Roden Crater, Hoover Dam, Wendover Complex of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Juan Mata Ortiz, Spiral Jetty and the Very Large Array with time spent in the variety of eco-niches that together make up the environment of the southwest. Land Arts gives students seamless time to explore the environment for over fifty plus days each fall. We have work sites in places such as the Grand Canyon, AZ, Grand Gulch, UT, San Rafael Swell, UT, Gila Wilderness, NM, Bosque del Apache, NM and Otero Mesa Grasslands, NM. Our current focus is on the issues of sustainability with a particular interest in food production and water use in the southwest. Perhaps most important, Land Arts is an experience in community. We live, work and travel together as a mobile arts studio. Each year we complete two collaborative projects bringing this communal aspect into our art practice, as well.

Is there a dialectic within ideas of local and international within land art? How does the global community interact with the specific sites?

I don’t see it as a dialectic. I see it as different layers. The local version is much more involved in an intimacy with the specifics of a site. As a result, this work has deeper vertical connections (roots) in community and environment. The international tends to operate more from the idea of place or site. The issues are broader, the connections to other communities and environments more evident, more web like, less rooted.

I see this as similar to the small local vs large national organic food question. My thought is that we need both.

I believe you started out with more of an intellectual approach to art – with more experience now in ceramic and land art where has the equilibrium fallen for you when it comes to intellectuality and action?

The great thing about starting out in ceramics is that it is physical. Ceramists are doers. It was a great way for me to begin with integrating body and mind. I see Western Culture as valuing the mind over the body and I talked earlier about the dysfunction that has resulted. That said, I happen to like ideas and I have certainly followed a conceptual course in the progression of my work, but the proof is still in the pudding for me. Don’t tell me about, do it. Bring the idea to life.

My path from ceramic pottery to ceramic sculpture to native material installation, to mixed media installation to Land/Environmental/Eco Art for me has a clear conceptual thread formed as I try to figure out my place as a human in this world, as I attempt to weave the social and environmental back together. While driven by intellect, the expression of that path has tended to require long hours of physical work. I tend to think with my body as well as my brain, to believe in body knowledge as a more grounded truth.

The Land Arts program has certainly thrown me a curve. From the start I saw it as a means to bring my role as teacher and artist together. It is imperative that I work alongside my fellow LandArtians. Being in the field for fifty days each year has required me to develop a new methodology in my work. I can’t take a lot of tools. I can’t cart around a lot of materials. So I have turned from native material installation to something that is more like performance. My body is now my tool. I take ideas about place as expressed in the mental abstraction of maps and attempt to act them out on the ground. In short, I walk, record what happens and then transpose my physical experience back onto the maps. The irony is that for every day spent walking the work requires ten days in front of the computer to complete.

Could you speak about your approach when it comes to the juxtaposition of native or naturally available materials and architectural [man-made] materials?

Early on in my work as an Environmental Artist I would pit the presence of native materials against architectural settings as a dialectic between man made and natural definitions of spaces. I soon realized that was too easy. Now I look for points of harmony or symbiosis. As Jerry Brown said there is no opposition between environment and technology. ”use satellites to track whales.” I like to combine low and high tech, to dig up my backyard to make forms that house digital videos. Culture and the environment are not involved in a dialectic. Culture is merely a small part of nature. Let’s start to see ourselves as conjoined. ]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-09T14:10:21Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1940 2010-03-09T14:10:21Z

Whiting Tennis, "Bitter Lake Compound," 2007 PAM's artist talk series continues this week with Matthew Stadler, a novelist who also writes about art and architecture for various publications, including Frieze, Artforum, Volume, Fillip, and Domus. Stadler will discuss Mark Tobey's Western Town, 1944, and Whiting Tennis' Bitter Lake Compound, 2007. The group will meet in the Hoffman Lobby, walk around the museum, and return to the lobby for happy hour after. Art lecture • 6-8pm • March 11 Portland Art Museum • 1219 SW Park • 503.226.2811 Daniel Joseph Martinez PNCA presents a lecture by Daniel Joseph Martinez via the MFA in Visual Studies program: "A strategic provocateur with a keen intelligence and a wicked sense of humor, Martinez deploys the full range of available media in his practice, having used at various times (and in various combinations) text, image, sculpture, video, and performance to construct his uniquely tough-minded brand of aesthetic inquiry." Artist lecture • 6:30-8pm • March 11 MoCC in partnership with PNCA • 724 NW Davis • The Lab

Megan Driscoll driscollm@gmail.com Openings & Events
Whiting Tennis, "Bitter Lake Compound," 2007

PAM's artist talk series continues this week with Matthew Stadler, a novelist who also writes about art and architecture for various publications, including Frieze, Artforum, Volume, Fillip, and Domus. Stadler will discuss Mark Tobey's Western Town, 1944, and Whiting Tennis' Bitter Lake Compound, 2007. The group will meet in the Hoffman Lobby, walk around the museum, and return to the lobby for happy hour after.

Art lecture • 6-8pm • March 11
Portland Art Museum • 1219 SW Park • 503.226.2811



Daniel Joseph Martinez

PNCA presents a lecture by Daniel Joseph Martinez via the MFA in Visual Studies program: "A strategic provocateur with a keen intelligence and a wicked sense of humor, Martinez deploys the full range of available media in his practice, having used at various times (and in various combinations) text, image, sculpture, video, and performance to construct his uniquely tough-minded brand of aesthetic inquiry."

Artist lecture • 6:30-8pm • March 11
MoCC in partnership with PNCA • 724 NW Davis • The Lab]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-08T17:34:32Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1938 2010-03-08T17:34:32Z

David Shaner, "Garden Slab," 1964 The Museum of Contemporary Craft presents Land Art: David Shaner. The exhibition explores the relationship between craft and the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s through the work of a "potter's potter." Land Art includes works from the artist's estate and the museum's collection, as well as photos and personal notes taken by the artist, which "reveal a concurrent, domestically-scaled yet quietly sensual relationship between art and the landscape of the American West." Exhibition • March 10 - August 7, 2010 Museum of Contemporary Craft • 724 NW Davis • 503.223.2654 On the first day of the exhibition, William Gilbert will present a concurrent Craft Perspectives lecture via PNCA/MoCC on "Land Arts of the American West." Gilbert "will discuss shifts in contemporary understanding of the genre of Land Art, tracing connections from his own study of ceramics in Montana with Rudy Autio to the innovative 'Land Arts of the American West' program he co-founded with Chris Taylor." Artist lecture • 6:30 - 8pm • March 10 PNCA • 1241 NW Johnson • 503.226.4391

Megan Driscoll driscollm@gmail.com Openings & Events
David Shaner, "Garden Slab," 1964

The Museum of Contemporary Craft presents Land Art: David Shaner. The exhibition explores the relationship between craft and the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s through the work of a "potter's potter." Land Art includes works from the artist's estate and the museum's collection, as well as photos and personal notes taken by the artist, which "reveal a concurrent, domestically-scaled yet quietly sensual relationship between art and the landscape of the American West."

Exhibition • March 10 - August 7, 2010
Museum of Contemporary Craft • 724 NW Davis • 503.223.2654

On the first day of the exhibition, William Gilbert will present a concurrent Craft Perspectives lecture via PNCA/MoCC on "Land Arts of the American West." Gilbert "will discuss shifts in contemporary understanding of the genre of Land Art, tracing connections from his own study of ceramics in Montana with Rudy Autio to the innovative 'Land Arts of the American West' program he co-founded with Chris Taylor."

Artist lecture • 6:30 - 8pm • March 10
PNCA • 1241 NW Johnson • 503.226.4391]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-05T22:46:12Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1937 2010-03-05T22:46:12Z

Jeff Jahn http://www.jeffjahn.com jeff_at_NOSPAM_portlandart_dot_net News the Koons curated New Museum show, Skin Fruit. To me it seems like a show calibrated for 2007 and people are going to hold the New Museum to higher standards because of the mission statement and presence of "New" in its name. The problem isn't Koons or the collector, it's the fact that the New Museum can't really afford to be behind the curve the way other New York Museums are... or even behind the those other institutions for that matter. Everyone wants the New Museum to be bleeding edge, but it isn't. Perhaps large group shows are simply the wrong way.

It's part of the reason PORT didn't get all Whitney-excited (even if several Portland friends are in it and the Museum linked to several of our articles). To me its like a cliff notes version of the art world and this iteration's focus on being conveniently self-conscious felt dated (anyone remember 2002?). Also,why must they always have a car or other wheeled vehicle in each version? Overall, the Whitney can get away with being a little behind the curve, in fact I think that is part of being a venerated museum and its a valuable way to intersect with those who are not 100% art world creatures. Honestly, Id like to see Museums put on more small group shows 3-5 artists... politically that's a rats nest to navigate as a curator but that is what these times require. Will the Portland Art Museum's CNAA's be up to that challenge regionally? Balancing politics and freshness is difficult for large institutions.

The NYT's also did a piece on the Armory, a confab which in my mind has somewhat overshadowed the Whitney Biennial.... even in this diminished economic climate. PORT's award winning Amy Bernstein will have a report soon. ]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-05T01:00:17Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1936 2010-03-05T01:00:17Z

Stefano Minzi Gallery Homeland presents Guten Tag Meine Fruende, a collection of six contemporary emerging and established artists living and working in Berlin. The show grew out of the ongoing relationship Gallery Homeland has been building over the past 6 months with the creative community of Berlin. Featured artists include Nicole Cohen, Ali Fitzgerald, Stefano Minzi, Holger Pohl, Adam Raymont, and Katharina Trudzinski. Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 5 Gallery Homeland • 2505 SE 11th Ave • info@galleryHOMELAND.org (More: Transverse at Worksound, Incubate at PNCA's Hybrid Gallery, Susan Burnstine at Newspace, and Midori Hirose at the new Nationale.)

Megan Driscoll driscollm@gmail.com Openings & Events
Stefano Minzi

Gallery Homeland presents Guten Tag Meine Fruende, a collection of six contemporary emerging and established artists living and working in Berlin. The show grew out of the ongoing relationship Gallery Homeland has been building over the past 6 months with the creative community of Berlin. Featured artists include Nicole Cohen, Ali Fitzgerald, Stefano Minzi, Holger Pohl, Adam Raymont, and Katharina Trudzinski.

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 5
Gallery Homeland • 2505 SE 11th Ave • info@galleryHOMELAND.org




Worksound presents Transverse: "It's a painting show." Featuring work by Vanessa Calvert, Jaclyn Fronzack, Ruth Lantz, Jud Richardson, Jason Vance Dickason, and Salvatore Reda.

Opening reception • 7pm (live music at 9pm) • March 5
Worksound • 820 SE Alder • mojomodou@gmail.com



Julie Orser

PNCA's Hybrid Gallery presents Incubate, an exhibition of work by former artists-in-residence in their Intermedia Department. Artists include David Cipriano, Fei Disbrow, Cris Moss, Julie Orser, Patrick Rock, Stephen Slappe and Intermedia Department Scholarship Alumni Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen, Tyler Jackson, Claire LaMont, Mack McFarland, and Nickolaus Typaldos.

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 5
Hybrid Gallery / Indigo @ 12 | West • 430 SW 13th



Susan Burnstine, "Bridge to Nowhere"

Newspace presents Susan Burnstine's Within Shadows. In this series, the artist "explores the fleeting moments between dreaming and waking - the blurred seconds in which imagination and reality collide... The images are created entirely in-camera, rather than with post-processing manipulations. To achieve her unique look, Burnstine created twenty-one hand-made film cameras out of plastic, vintage camera parts, and random household objects, with single element lenses are molded out of plastic and rubber."

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 5
Artist lecture • 12pm • March 6
Newspace Center for Photography • 1632 SE 10th • 503.936.1935



Midori Hirose

For their first exhibition in their new space, Nationale presents Midori Hirose's L Sub to the Polynomial, an installation of new works on paper. "In analyzing and trying to reduce elements of her studio vocabulary to bare visual elements, Hirose took two distinct directions. For Series 1, Hirose thought about jokes and extracted the idea of happiness by reducing it to a moment of laughter...In Series 2, Hirose's abstract objects play between figure and ground, paying attention to the space and form with precision, while melding quilt-like geometric patterns with hazed gradients of color."

Opening reception • 6-9pm • March 5
Nationale • 811 E Burnside Suite 122 (in the back) • nationale.portland@gmail.com]]> 2010-03-17T07:53:52Z 2010-03-04T21:35:54Z tag:www.portlandart.net,2010://1.1935 2010-03-04T21:35:54Z

Jeff Jahn http://www.jeffjahn.com jeff_at_NOSPAM_portlandart_dot_net News
Poster for Judd Conference featuring image of Judd's 1974 piece at the PCVA (photo Maryanne Caruthers)

The University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts and PORT are pleased to announce what promises to be a major highlight of Portland's 2010 cultural calendar; a scholarly conference and exhibition, "Donald Judd: Delegated Fabrication; history, practices, issues and implications" on April 25th 2010. With keynote speaker Robert Storr and other notables like Peter Ballantine, this promises to be a conference where Judd's most radical artistic contributions are examined and discussed. Space will be limited to encourage discussion so this wont be one of those static lecture and listen style events.

Furthermore, I'll be curating the exhibition Donald Judd, which will support and encourage the conferences discussion. It opens on conference day and runs through May 21st at the U of O's White Box gallery in Portland. The event is sponsored by the University of Oregon's School of Architecture and Allied Arts, PORT and through the generous patron support of Bonnie Serkin and Will Emery.

Official Website for registration
$65 early registration (through March 22)
$35 students

Sunday, April 25, 2010
University of Oregon in Portland
White Stag Block
70 NW Couch Street, Portland, OR 97209

So why Portland? First of all, there needs to be more scholarship on Judd. Judd completed his first full room sized installation here in 1974 and wrote about the piece in his last essay, "Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular." Also, Judd's Douglas Fir plywood mostly came from Oregon (in fact industrial plywood was invented in Portland and showcased in the 1905 Worlds Fair). Overall though, Portland is kind of "Switzerland" or neutral ground in terms of Judd history, we aren't New York or Marfa and though those were his two main centers Judd was active globally till his death in 1994.

Arcy and I have been hard at work on this for over a year now and the whole process began when Arcy wrote his piece on Donald Judd's important 1974 exhibition at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts. It was Judd's first full room installation and part of a series of little known plywood works in London, Portland, Bern, Los Angeles... etc. (most will be familiar with the slant piece at Dia Beacon). That article lead to the Judd Foundation pointing Arcy to longtime Judd fabricator, restorer and curator Peter Ballantine and the wheels were set in motion. Tremendous thanks should go out to those responsible for making this important event happen, Bonnie Serkin and Will Emery, Peter Ballantine, Kate Wagle (University of Oregon Portland), Arcy Douglass (Conference Director), Sarah Meigs, Paige Saez (graphic design), PAM's chief curator Bruce Guenther and The Portland Art Museum's Crumpaker library whose PCVA archives made this all happen.

For April art venues in the Portland metro area will have Judd Conference related programming:

Elizabeth Leach Gallery will present a show of Judd prints and Museum of Contemporary Craft, PDX Contemporary Art, Reed College's Cooley Gallery, Froelick Gallery and Linfield College will all have related shows. Add that to the Portland Art Museum's continuing Disquieted and Twombly shows... plus PICA's TADA party the night before on the 24th and you have got one great Portland art weekend.]]>