Terry Winters speaking at Reed College

When you walk into the excellent exhibition of recent prints by Terry Winters at Reed College's Cooley Gallery, you are confronted by a remarkably consistent body of work that is the product of both a sustained rigor and an unflinching critical thought. Winters's work is a complex, evolving fusion of material and image while refusing to allow itself to be only defined as one or the other. His recent work often includes a series of self-generating forms that he describes as knots. The knots often intertwine with one another so that positive and negative space merge to create new kinds of forms with are in turn explored and expanded with additional layers of information. These forms serve as a guide to the pictorial and critical transformations that guide the intent behind most of the prints in the exhibition... (more)

"The goal of our intellectual efforts cannot be a static, polished possession...In our many efforts toward knowledge, science, math, logic as in life itself, it is the process, not the terminus, that should concern us - if we are wise." Bruce Aune Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism

The fall season is in full swing, I've been here a little over a decade now and PORT is heading towards its 5th anniversary, so it seems like an opportune time to take full stock of the development of the Portland art scene. Part I is general and interrelated (nine ways to improve, Portland as a model city, and our recent past). Part II will be more specific, discussing artists - young, mid-career and old - different types of institutions, etc.


Broadcast at Lewis and Clark College (Dara Birnbaum's Hostage, 1994, in background)


Rose McCormick's Grande Ronde concluded NAAU's Couture series last weekend

There have been many excellent shows this season so far, including Rose McCormick's Grand Ronde, Broadcast at Lewis & Clark, Tom Cramer at Laura Russo, Jesse Hayward & Ethan Rose at TBA, Jordan Tull at Littlefield, Vanessa Renwick at Blue Sky, Ryan Pierce at Elizabeth Leach, and Processions at PSU, plus China Design Now and Raphael's Valeta at the Portland Art Museum. Portland definitely has a strong scene by anyone's standards, but it's not without its challenges. Only recently have our two top visual arts institutions (PAM and PNCA) embarked on serious campaigns with major donor education components. With PNCA celebrating its centennial this month, it's important to remember that they were the same entity a mere decade and a half ago and that only recently have the two organizations concentrated heavily on endowments and legacy gifts. The situation reminds me of the odd and sometimes beautiful combination of youth and age I come across in Portland. Now we seem to be at a tipping point where Portland could be more than just a great place for artists and become a better place for art. It's a subtle distinction that everyone should be considering..... (much more)

The view from SW Terwilliger Boulevard looking east toward Mt. Hood in the neighborhood in which Rothko spent most of his time in Portland.


"(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.'" -Mark Rothko


Marcus Rothkowitz arrived in Portland, Oregon in early September 1913 with his sister Sonia and his mother Kate. They had been in the United States for less than a month, having arrived in Brooklyn, New York on August 17, 1913 from Libau, Russia's main emigration port. Marcus, who would later change his name to Mark Rothko, was just a few weeks shy of his eleventh birthday. He was born on September 25, 1903 in Dvinsk and was, with his mother and sister, looking forward to starting a new life with his father, Jacob, and his two older brothers, Albert and Morris in Portland. The family had not been together in nearly three years.

Portland marked the end of a long journey. It was a place that this family, like most immigrants, believed that their hard work would pay off and they could start anew. The Rothkowitzes were not alone in Portland. Jacob's brother, Samuel Weinstein, was already here and owned a successful wholesale clothing business called N & S Weinstein. The Weinsteins were important to the Rothkowitzes on both the West and East coasts. When Kate, Sonia and Mark arrived in Brooklyn, their first stop was to visit the Weinsteins in New Haven, Connecticut. It must have been a way for them to recharge their batteries after the long boat trip across the Atlantic and enjoy the comfort of family in an otherwise unfamiliar land. More...



One of the my all time favorite photos of Rothko. If you wanted to know what Portland meant to Rothko, this is it. The photo was taken in 1968 and he his hugging Dorothy Reiter, Morris' daugther and his niece. They both look radiant, happy and absolutely content. The photo is very different than any comparable photo of Rothko taken in New York during the late 1960's. Portland remained a source for him until the end of his life.
Image courtesy of the Oregon Jewish Museum.

John Wesley's Battle of Przemysl, 1969, 34 x 96 inches

One of my favorite works in the Portland Art Museum's permanent collection is John Wesley's simultaneously hilarious and wickedly dark painting, Battle of Przemysl. It's a sphynx like painting that may or may not be making a strange comment on; military expectations, conformity, homoeroticism, politics, the weird ideals of war, wartime music and historical head scratching all in one neat package with a thick black border. That border is not unlike...(more)

Last night I attended one of the meetings about the integration of the Museum of Contemporary Craft and Pacific Northwest College Craft (PNCA). It was an interesting discussion because it was an honest look at how museums and university galleries address the changing needs of their respective audiences. It is revealing that most museums and galleries now find themselves asking fundamental questions about their existence such as asking what do people want out of the experience of going to a museum? Or what is the best way for museums to leverage their expertise in a changing and dynamic society? In other words, how does a museum stay relevant?

Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913 [1914-15]
The painted area of the Black Square is reinforced by the square canvas itself. The painted internal space of the square is removed and,at the same time,the painting takes on a three dimensional form by assuming the physical propeties of the canvas that exists in the space of the room. The result is that painting exists not as a window to somewhere else but as physical, tangible presence of the space of the viewer. Malevich created a new type of pictorial space that spoke as much to the space outside the boundaries of the painting as the space contained within it.


"A non-objective art, phenomenal art is about seeing-about seeing, "feeling," and determining its aesthetically. Yet it seems every time we get a glimpse of this power of our seeing, we quickly give it away by attributing to it someone or something outside ourselves. We act as if we've seen a mirage or had a visitation; we make a mystique or a religion of it, instead of accepting the responsibility for what it is-that we perceive. It doesn't just happen to us- we make it happen, we participate directly in the forming of that envelope of the world and our being in it, and we do so at every moment of our lives. There is nothing more real, more interesting, more powerful, more informative, more important, or more beautiful"
-Robert Irwin, Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Conditional Art , 1985

After I wrote in Art and Nature, I realized that there was something else there that placed the idea of process into context. It is the link that connects the artist to the viewer's experience and I think it is intention. What does intention mean? How could that change your experience of art?
When Malevich paints a square, it is deliberate. It is something that he knows we are all familiar with. He is using a shape that we are all familiar with to establish a direct connection to the viewer beyond the edges of the painting. It is the vehicle and not the subject. It might not be clear at first glance, but Irwin was right, the subject is the viewer. This is why Maelvich changed what was considered to the potential of painting. The painting exists as much in the space of the room as it does in the boundary of the canvas. Malevich's intention to make art was to establish a direct connection to the viewer's experience of their own awareness. The viewer is the subject of the Black Square.


Robert Irwin, Varese Scrim, 1973
One of Irwin's early scrim pieces and was installed in a dedicated room in Panza's villa in Varese. Like many of the works that we have been discussing, the experience of the work is not the experience of the srim, it is the relationship between the scrim and the space. They work together and are inseparable. Like the zips in Newman's paintings, the scrim defines the room and the room defines the scrim. The scrim is the material but the art is the experience of the entire space.

Robert Irwin, Installation at the Chinati Foundation, 2006-7
The scrims are freestanding in the spaces of the barracks. The frames are exposed so you are more aware of their edges. Some are painted white while others are black. Both challenge and redefine your perception of walking down the rooms. The works can't exist independently of the rooms in which they are placed.


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(Or an exploration of the emptiness of form and natural ordering systems)

Albert Bierstadt, Mount Hood, Oregon 1869, Portland Art Museum.
Every time I see this painting I am a little bit surprised, it always reveals a little something more about what it is like to live in the Pacific Northwest. I think that it was painted on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge looking south to Mt. Hood. Like most Bierstadt paintings, he s interested creating a representation of the mountain that might convey a larger truth about the land, or at least as he saw it.


"It is quite commonly thought that the intellect is responsible for everything that is made and done. The intellect is a hazard in artwork. I mean, there are so many paintings that have gone down the drain because somebody got an idea in the middle."

Agnes Martin in "Thin Gray Line" Vanity Fair, March 1989, p.56

Artists have always tried to find ways of translating and transforming nature in their work. In the Lascaux caves 25,000 years ago, it was the animals that they saw during their hunts. For the Greeks it was the beauty of the human body although I think that they were interested in the ideal of beauty rather than particular shapes of a single, living human being. Still, it was form of beauty and perfection that was based on the expression of natural forms. For painters like Leonardo Da Vinci nature was a system to be studied to make their paintings more true to our experience of daily life. He studied botany, anatomy and hydrodynamics to make his paintings more realistic and accurate of the creative forces of nature. For the best Chinese painters over the last thousand years, the natural world could be re-created in paintings and became a unique refuge where a person could get in touch with the forces of nature and find peace from busy lives. The paintings were never representational of a specific place but were literally formed by the creative forces of nature. A visit to a waterfall or a tall mountain was the direct experience of the contrasting forces of yin and yang by understanding all of the ways that they manifest themselves in nature. For the Chinese, the direct experience of nature, rather than its representation, was proof that we were a part of nature and that we had our own place in the universe.



Hubble Space Telescope,Milky Way Galaxy,2002.
This essay has attempted to reframe the terms in which it is possible for an artist to address their relationship to nature. Artists do no have to be satisfied with engaging nature in a superficial way and that it is possible to use some of the deeper systems that nature uses to organize itself to create an experience that might be called art.

Double Negative in the late afternoon


Like most things in life, it always takes you a little longer to find it than you had anticipated. I was driving across the top of Mormon Mesa, outside of Overton , Nevada, looking for Michael Heizer's Double Negative. Double Negative was conceived in 1969 and completed in 1970. Incredibly, Heizer was only 24 years old when it was completed. I had been to Double Negative a couple of times about ten years earlier. I lived in Las Vegas at the time and experiencing the work changed my life. I suppose in some way, I still I am trying to coming grips with what I had experienced during those trips.

When Heizer went out to the edge of Mormon Mesa in 1970 his tools were a bulldozer, dynamite, probably a survey kit and a crew talented and brave enough to be able to make his conception a reality. He received funding for the lease of the land and support for the construction costs by the gallery owner Virginia Dwan. At the time the cost of the work was about $9,000. The work itself is two channels cut into opposite sides of the mesa. Each channel is approximately 9 meters deep and 10 meters wide. The western cut is about 230 meters long while the west cut is shorter, 100 meters long. Approximately, 244,800 tons of sand stone and rhyolite were relocated to make the work. The work is so large that there is not really an equivalent in the history of Western Art. It is longer than the Empire State Building is tall. When I was looking for the work and I was examining some of the valleys on the road to Double Negative, I was impressed with the fragility of the edge of the mesa. The edges are, after all, in a constant state of erosion. After the work had been marked, it must have taken an extremely brave person to make the first cut, maybe 6" or a 1' deep, and push it off the edge of the mesa. The drop off is extremely steep. There was no guarantee that the bulldozer would not just the follow the material off the edge of the mesa if the edge had given way and fallen down toward the river below. Everyone must have been holding there breaths because there would have been no way to know if the edge could support the weight of the bulldozer until they tried it. As work progressed it probably got a little easier and any large rocks that could not have been removed by the bulldozer would have been dynamited. After approximately, two weeks the excavations of the cuts were complete and the Heizer's initial conception of the work was complete. More...


Double Negative soon after completion

This post is a bit of an experiment but I have been thinking a lot about the way a photo can tell a story a about specific time and place. The photograph becomes an embodiement of an idea that is sometimes separate from the work itself. This essay is a study about the way that certain photos become more than just about the visual records of experience that exist in the worlds of art and architecture.

At the same time, I would like to add that the photograph undermines any emphasis on any geographical location outside of the field of view of the camera. Images are one of the few things that available to everyone because all you need to have is a camera and access to the internet. The reason that I chose these images in the post is that they all convey a story. They seem to be closer to conveying an idea about a person or work rather simply documenting an experience. The ideas in these photographs seem to me to be essentially about place.

A camera is extremely specific, it can only record what is in its field of view. If it is outside the field of view of the lens, it wouldn't be recorded. For me, that means that a camera is essentially about a specific place at a specific moment. The great thing is that that place can be anywhere now and availible to anyone. Everybody has the opportunity to participate. In a world that is becoming increasingly universal, there is still something compelling about the specific. The camera also separates the viewer from the event. The image can be used to convey a specific idea which might be different than the experience of the actual event.

This post is probably closer to a slide lecture that happens to be on the internet rather than a normal post. There are plenty of artists with a few architects and architecture thrown in. It is worth noting that a piece of architecture is not easily relocated. Unless people make the effort to visit it, it will only exist for most people as an image. For me that is important lesson for artists. Within the confines of a camera you can create your own world that may or may not have anything to do with where you live on the planet. The camera is a great equalizer.

As I was doing research for this post I was surprised that artists and architects have been using images this way since the very beginning.






A self portrait of Brancusi in his studio. The idea behind the photo is the integration of a man and his work. In this photograph he is completely subordinate to his work, his figure barely fills up a third of the image. It is a photograph about the juxtaposition about his sculpture Bird in Space and himself. The rest of the studio comes into focus through our periperal vision and the long exposure also gives the studio an otherworldly light. He is literally one with his work. More...

It's Disjecta, again... and again... and again. Long time Portlanders are probably pretty familiar with this promotional routine, and have already formed their opinions. For those of you who don't know the history, PORT takes a look back and a look forward after the jump. (More.)

"It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful." -Donald Judd in his essay Specific Objects



Donald Judd rafting down the Clackamas River with Bob Peirce
Photograph taken by Bruce West at the Bottom of the Carter Bridge
Rapids
November 1974


The Portland Center for Visual Arts (PCVA) was based on a very simple premise: artists talking to artists. The PCVA was founded in 1971 by three artists Jay Backstrand, Mel Katz, and Michele Russo. The exhibition space was located on the third floor of 117 NW Fifth Ave. Katz wanted to give something to the community as well as bring to Portland some of the things that he missed from New York. Usually, the PCVA sent a letter to an artist explaining that they wanted to have a exhibition of the artist's work in the Northwest and could they follow up with a phone call the following week. This was a strategy that proved to be tremendously successful and they were soon able to attract some of the best artists in the country to come to Portland and have a show. The PVCA was unique in every sense of the word. The artists liked working with the PCVA because although there was a limited budget for each of the shows, there was never any limit to an artist's ideas. After the first few New York artists had a good experience working in Portland, the PCVA had an excellent reputation and the original artists often recommended other artists who might be willing to come out here.

The founders set three objectives for the PCVA. First, they wanted to exhibit the best contemporary art that was being done in all regions of the United States. Second, they tried to stimulate commnuntiy awareness of the diversity and excellence of contemporary art through both exhibitions and others programs. Last, they wanted to bring the artist themselves to Portland to discuss their work. Over the 17 years they were able to put on an exhibition schedule that would have been successful and relevant even to MoMA. To give you some sense of the caliber of artists that have spent time in Portland because of the PCVA: Carl Andre, Yvonne Rainer, Lynda Benglis, Sol LeWitt, James Rosenquist, Daniel Buren, Ed Moses, Allan Kaprow, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Alice Neel, John Baldesari, Chuck Close, Richard Serra, Chris Burden, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Lucinda Childs, Andy Warhol and Agnes Martin just to name a few. It is hard to think of an arts institution that would have been more dynamic and relevant during that time period. The PCVA put on ten to fifteen visual arts exhibits every year as well as equal number of dance, music, and theater performances. There were a lot of things that were different about the PCVA and a comparable institution would not be created on the East or West Coast until the Dia Center was created in the late seventies.


Donald Judd
Untitled, 1974 (Detail)
3/4" Plywood on 2" x 4" subframe
65'-4" x 46'-3" x 40'-6"
Installed at the Portland Center for Visual Arts in November 1974
(c) Donald Judd 2008


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Polykleitos
Doryphoros
450-440 B.C.


When we look at art, are we only seduced by what we think is beautiful? Do we only respond to things that resonate with our sensibilities, our taste, or our history? As an artist is it our role to make beautiful things (paintings, sculptures, film, ideas etc...)?



Janine Antoni
Saddle
2000


Everyone has their own path, so everyone will have to choose for themselves but for me, I do not think that art has anything to do with the beautiful. In my own experience, my tastes are constantly evolving as I am interacting with the world and learning new things. How can I stand in judgment of what is beautiful and what is not? What I find ugly today, I might that I find that is urgently needed and beautiful tomorrow.

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"The Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide did not concern himself with the inconsequentials that made up the opulent social rivalries of the Northwest Coast Indian scene, nor did he, in the name of a higher purity, renounce the living world for the meaningless materialism of design. The abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding. The everyday realities he left to the toymakers; the pleasant play of non-objective pattern to the women basket weavers. To him a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable."

-Barnett Newman , The Ideographic Picture 1947


Haida Totems Queen Charlotte Island 1890's

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