Posted by Amy Bernstein on September 05, 2011 at 15:32 | Comments (0)

Wednesday 06.29.11

Murderer and the Victim: An Interview with Silvia Levenson

Silvia Levenson's Something Wrong? (2005)

Silvia Levenson is an international artist who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1957 , lives and works between Buenos Aires and Italy. Her work is part of Fine Art Museum, Houston; USA, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; Corning Museum , Corning USA; Bullseye Glass Company, Portland, OR; Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung , Munich, Germany and many others. She was in town this last weekend for Bullseye's BECon 2011 and Crossover so I had the opportunity sit down and talk with her.


Alex Rauch and Silvia Levenson (Photo Steve C. Immerman)

AR: Your interplay between title and the work seem salient. How important is word play for your pieces? Do the titles imbue more meaning?

SL: Yes-for me titles are an important part of the work. I work in the space between reality and imagination. The title's help me extend... (more)

Posted by Alex Rauch on June 29, 2011 at 13:20 | Comments (0)

Tuesday 05.24.11

The Beginning of the End Of Us: a Conversation with Deborah Kass

"Day After Day", 2010, Oil and Acrylic

Deborah Kass's paintings are revelations. Written and designed with brighter times in mind, she appropriates art history and pop culture in order to comment on the now as well as the then. Recontextualized and upended, the result is an existential question shrouded in glamour. Employing seduction and nostalgia, . . .(more)

Posted by Amy Bernstein on May 24, 2011 at 6:37 | Comments (0)

Thursday 02.03.11

Staring: An Interview with Catherine Opie

©Catherine Opie, "Jenny (Bed)," 2009, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Best known for her multiple series of portraits of lesbian, butch, and transgendered women, Catherine Opie is a remarkably versatile photographer with an eye for the powerfully personal and the formally sublime. Images from her series Girlfriends are currently up at the Portland Art Museum (through February 6, 2011). I caught up with her after her lecture at the museum to discuss identity, politics, historicity, and minimalist photography.

(More.)

Posted by Megan Driscoll on February 03, 2011 at 19:53 | Comments (0)

Sunday 01.30.11

2011 Curatorial Roundup

Posted by Jeff Jahn on January 30, 2011 at 21:54 | Comments (7)

Tuesday 11.30.10

Interview with Alison Saar

Alison Saar is a well known and sometimes controversial sculptor who recently completed a commission at Lewis and Clark College campus called York: Terra Incognita. She also has a career spanning exhibition titled,Bound For Glory, at the nearby Hoffman Gallery and runs through December 12th. To discuss her work, PORT sent Gabe Flores to talk with Saar and learn more about how she mixes life, art and history.


York: terra incognita (2010) photo Jeff Jahn

Gabe: How did you end up at Lewis and Clark?

Alison: Well there was this call for artists to do a... (more)

Posted by Guest on November 30, 2010 at 15:51 | Comments (0)

Friday 11.05.10

Interlocution: an interview with Robert Storr

Robert Storr is one of today's most eminent curators as well as an artist and arguably a philosopher. Currently he is dean of the Yale School of Art. He was the artistic director of the 2007 Venice Biennale and Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA for over a decade. I had the opportunity to listen to him lecture this April at the Donald Judd conference "Invenit non fecit." I spoke with him after the conference and he agreed to this interview.

Q. Kirk Varnedoe has had a huge influence on many, how has his example influenced you and your work?

A. Those most influenced by Kirk were his students, and beyond that people who worked under his direct supervision on the various exhibitions he organized. Frequently his assistants were... (more)

Posted by Alex Rauch on November 05, 2010 at 12:11 | Comments (0)

Wednesday 10.06.10

Interview with Mark Grotjahn

Installation of Untitled (Dancing Black Butterflies) at the Portland Art Museum

Mark Grotjahn's Untitled (Dancing Black Butterflies) is currently on display at the Portland Art Museum until October 17, 2010. The exhibition includes a series of very large drawings with a remarkable tactile and material quality. Mr. Grotjhan is represented by the Gagosian Gallery in New York and Blum and Poe in Los Angeles.


What was it like growing up in California? Did you go to LACMA in Los Angeles or SFMOMA in San Francisco?
I was born in Pasadena, but we moved to the Bay Area when I was nine months old. In terms of museums that formulated, shaped or exposed me to art, it was SFMOMA. Having said that, I did see the first King Tut exhibition at LACMA in the '70s.

Was there anything about growing up in the Bay Area that continues to influence your work today?
I grew up in Marin, and I'm sure being in the redwoods and fresh air was probably good for me. I played baseball.

Were there any artists who were influential to you growing up? What about California artists like Robert Irwin or John McLaughlin?
In my late 20s, McLaughlin became important to me because he made rigorous abstractions and was the first California artist to break out and have an international career. But I read Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual In Art at age 15, I liked Paul Klee, and looked at my grandfather's books on Picasso.


Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Green Butterfly), 2003

Posted by Arcy Douglass on October 06, 2010 at 14:42 | Comments (0)

Sunday 10.03.10

Interview with Charles Atlas

Charles Atlas (photo Josef Astor)

GW: Lets start with a brief synopsis of your work.

CA: I started out doing media dance combining dance with video or film. I worked with Merce Cunnigham for years. I have done feature length documentaries, multi media video installations, I've done live electronic performances and since 2003 I have been mainly focused on exploring different ways of using live video with performance or as performance or in installation.


Charles Atlas Tornado Warning, TBA install (photo Jeff Jahn)

GW: I would like to talk about Tornado Warning, the piece you have installed here at the ON SITE section of the TBA festival.

CA: I had a retrospective and I realized that I wanted to show recent work. But all my recent work is live so there is nothing that exists. The last two pieces I have done have not been live - no live elements - but are influenced by the work I did in live video - so I could install something and then leave. Which was good. This piece - I made the first version of it in 2008 and I showed it in a gallery in London - It's called Tornado Warning. It was conceived as a two space piece, for two adjacent rooms... (more)

Posted by Gary Wiseman on October 03, 2010 at 11:07 | Comments (0)

Friday 09.24.10

Interview with Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Jessica Jackson Hutchins in her Studio, Portland, 2010

Jessica Jackson Hutchins' work is a mined animal. Its disparate elements are found and forged from the mud of surrounding detritus and soliloquy. Her work culls from a playful existentialism; Kafka telling a rare joke. It is raw and irreverent and does not adhere to trend or pomp but instead concentrates on a vibrant subterranean mythology. Hutchins is the conduit through which these things are born. They are seismic musings of the absurd and profound, informed by both philosophy and what it is to walk down the street. They are totemic fragments of the efforts to describe pain and joy as lived. They are the spiritual mud and love pie made by the freest child, who dips her hair in ink and, with the swank of the mime and the prophet, draws with it. As I walk into her studio, she purposefully presses a turquoise magnetic letter "C" to the surface of one of her piano prints to be shipped to London the following day. . . .(more)

Posted by Amy Bernstein on September 24, 2010 at 16:02 | Comments (3)

Friday 09.17.10

Interview with Nina Katchadourian

Mended Spiderweb #8 (Fish Patch), Cibachrome, 20 x 20 inches, 1998


GW: You spent a lot of time in Northern Europe it seems?

NK: I have a mother who comes from Finland. So I have spent part of every summer of my life growing up there. It's a place that my family convenes in every year. It is a little island off the south coast. It's very, very far away mentally at least. from the rest of my life. Very different from Brooklyn where I live. This Island has, over the years, become a really important place for me to go to on occasion to make work. There are a lot of projects that...(more)

Posted by Gary Wiseman on September 17, 2010 at 14:52 | Comments (0)

Monday 08.09.10

No Fake: An Interview with Ai Weiwei

AR: Is the trend of distilling information down to 140 characters impairing society's ability to craft refined ideas?

Ai: No refined ideas should be longer than 140 characters.

AR: It is said that Duchamp lived as if he was dead. And that Warhol lived without individuality. How do you live?

Ai: I live through awareness of my surroundings.

...(more)

Posted by Alex Rauch on August 09, 2010 at 1:43 | Comments (2)

Friday 05.14.10

Interview with Adam Stennett for Disquieted

I met Adam Stennett on a sunny, Saturday afternoon in May. Seated on a park bench outside the Portland Art Museum, we discussed the development of Stennett's working process, growing up in Oregon, and his life in Brooklyn since 1994. Stennett's video piece, Mouse Swimming Overhead, is featured in the PAM Disquieted exhibition. Disquieted closes Sunday May 16, 2010.


Adam Stennett in the South Park Blocks, Portland Or.

"...you have to grab them from across the room and then punch them when you get them up close." - Adam Stennett

Gary Wiseman: Let's begin with your impressions of the [Disquieted] exhibition.

Adam Stennett: First of all when Bruce [Guenther] contacted me and said that he had a video of mine that he had borrowed from the collection of Ben And Aileen Krohn, and then he started telling me about the exhibition and who was going to be in it, you know, it was kind of like my dream team. So many artists whose work I really reacted to... (more)

Posted by Gary Wiseman on May 14, 2010 at 15:32 | Comments (0)

Tuesday 04.20.10

Hannah B. Higgins: An Interview of Primariness

Hannah Higgins

Hannah B. Higgins is an Associate Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also the daughter of the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins and noted author of Fluxus Experience, and will be lecturing in tandem with Gestures of Resistance this Thursday at 6:30 pm at PNCA.


> Is there a right or better way to experience "primary phenomena or ecological information?"

The point of a primary information orientation is not that there is one way or a better way to access it. Walter Ong's writing on sense ratios and hierarchies demonstrates that the ranking of sensations is cultural (the primacy and isolation of vision, the low rank of smell, for instance, reflecting western values). So sensation is always filtered through values and value systems... (more)

Posted by Alex Rauch on April 20, 2010 at 9:06 | Comments (0)

Wednesday 03.17.10

Interview with Inigo Manglano-Ovalle part II

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)

Posted by Alex Rauch on March 17, 2010 at 6:46 | Comments (0)

Tuesday 03.09.10

Interview with Bill Gilbert

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)

Posted by Alex Rauch on March 09, 2010 at 7:01 | Comments (0)

Saturday 02.27.10

Interview with Inigo Manglano-Ovalle Part I

Le Baiser - The Kiss (1999) Ovalle (pictured)

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle was born in Madrid, Spain in 1961, lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He was educated at Williams College and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he has exhibited his works widely since his first solo exhibition in 1991. Ovalle teaches at the University of Illinois and has been a MacArthur fellow since 2001.

Recently I took a trip to the East Coast to see Manglano-Ovalle's two shows Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned with and Happiness is a State of Inertia(Max Protetch Gallery). This is the conversation we had about his work in the Max Protetch Gallery on February 5th before the opening.


Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With at Mass MOCA (photo Dylan Lathrop)

...(more)

Posted by Alex Rauch on February 27, 2010 at 17:44 | Comments (0)

Friday 11.13.09

East/West interview with galleryHomeland by Gary Wiseman

East/West storefront in Berlin, Mitte district (all photos: Jackie Friscia)

Gary Wiseman - East/West is an innovative project. It is very compelling to me. The first time I heard Paul mention something about it was two years ago.
Paul Middendorf - That's about right

GW - Tell me about the development of the project, who you're working with, who is involved...

PM - Sure. I guess the earliest incarnation of EAST/WEST happened in 2007 when galleryHOMELAND went, representing Portland, to the Art Basel Fair, in Switzerland. We did a project called Attache' Case where we brought 15 artists [work] in this case that we showed at the various fairs like Scope and we would bring it outside Art Basel, we went to Munster, Germany to see the the sculptural fair that happens every ten years, went to Documenta, presented at some places there. Through these travels we were forming many relationships. I was also, for part of the time, traveling with Leah Stuhltrager, one of the main directors of Dam, Stuhltrager.

GW - The gallery you work with in Brooklyn?

PM - Yah. So, basically in Basel, Switzerland we had met a lot of European [specifically] Berlin gallerists. We were fascinated by a lot of the similarities that we shared in projects and artist relations. So...(more)

Posted by Gary Wiseman on November 13, 2009 at 14:27 | Comments (0)

Friday 10.30.09

An interview with Tom Cramer

Tom Cramer, September 2009

Somewhat predictably, Tom Cramer's most recent show is his best to date (and it ends October 31st). It is an inventive mixture of cosmic energy, German Romanticism and hard nosed discipline, which helps make his work both unique and exquisite. In fact, for at least the last decade Tom Cramer has been Portland's best selling artist and what's more with his art cars, murals and totem statuary, no artist is more ubiquitous. Perhaps no artist represents Portland's character more, being at once both hermetic and brash, Cramer embraces the contradictions of making "earthier" art that is anything if not transcendent. He's also a bridge between the Portland artists of the 60's and the latest tidal wave young émigrés and was way overdue for an interview with PORT. We interviewed him in his North Portland home and here's what Portland's all but official artist laureate had to say.



...(more)

Posted by Jeff Jahn on October 30, 2009 at 15:51 | Comments (1)

Thursday 10.08.09

Anne Wilson: A Portable Interview

Anne Wilson's Portable City 2008

What do you learn from your students - and how does/has that impacted your own practice?
I have been thinking a lot about this question. Before I took the recent rotation as department chair of Fiber and Material Studies at SAIC more...

Posted by Alex Rauch on October 08, 2009 at 14:21 | Comments (0)

Tuesday 09.08.09

Interview with Gregory Green

Posted by Alex Rauch on September 08, 2009 at 9:08 | Comments (0)

Friday 08.28.09

Mel Katz has the last laugh

Mel Katz at his March 2009 show

Of all of Portland's many longstanding art world figures, none commands the respect of younger generations more than Mel Katz. He's an impressive sculptor who hasn't grown so comfortable with his reputation that he's become stagnant. Though I've watched him for a mere decade, Katz appears to be the opposite… he seems to get more curious and take more risks as the years go by.

What's more, no other local artist deserves a serious retrospective than Mel Katz (though one wonders what institution could do it justice?).


Mary Randlett, Mel Katz, (Summer, 1972)

Katz was also a driving institutional force for the PCVA and PSU's art program and during the 70's was somewhat single-handedly responsible for Portland not being isolated from the art world and contributing to the careers of major artists. In fact, the Portland Center for the Visual Arts was ahead of the time doing shows with Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Robert Irwin, Chris Burden and Donald Judd etc. He's the dean of artist driven initiative and intervention in Portland and he has more in common with the constant waves of new artists than CS Price... (more)

Posted by Jeff Jahn on August 28, 2009 at 16:37 | Comments (3)

Friday 05.15.09

East Meets West: An Interview with Sanford Biggers

Sanford Biggers, Blossom, 2007


Sanford Biggers is a New York artist whose 2007 work Blossom will be at the APEX Gallery at the Portland Art Museum starting on May 16, 2009. Bigger's work is a fusion of east meets wests, Buddhism meets Hip Hop, that takes places from the train yards of Los Angeles, Zen Temples of Japan to the galleries of New York.


I read that you grew up in South Central Los Angeles. What was that like?

I grew in the early seventies in Los Angeles. I was influenced largely by the artwork that my parents had in their home which were prints by important American artists like Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, John Biggers and Ernie Barnes.

It was largely figurative and Afro-centric images which were influential for me as well the graffiti that I would see on the streets of Los Angeles and in the train yards.

It seems like your art experiences were coming out of your home rather than say being influenced by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) or the Pasadena Art Museum. Is that true?

As a kid, I mainly only went to museums on field trips, so my earliest experiences with art were in my parent's and their friends' homes. I did, however, spend time as a teenager at LACMA and California African American Museum where I took art classes on weekends.


You mentioned that you remember being exposed to graffiti while you were growing up in Los Angeles and it would go on to influence your later work. What was your relationship to graffiti at the time?

I spent a lot of my teenage years with a graffiti crew going out and bombing (spray-painting), various walls and train yards with graf murals. That was a big part of my early years as a B-boy and I still reflect on some of those forms that I was interested in and I try to bring them back into my work.

A few years ago, I did a few different types of sand paintings, one of which was a graffiti version of the Sanskrit word/sound, "OM". It was made of colored sand, poured directly on the floor. A technique that was not too dissimilar from that of Tibetan monks.

More...



Sanford Biggers, Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva II, 2000

Posted by Arcy Douglass on May 15, 2009 at 22:00 | Comments (0)

Saturday 05.02.09

What's next for Mickalene Thomas

All she wants to do is dance (Fran) 2009 courtesy Lehman Maupin

Mickalene Thomas is currently the toast of New York for her rowdy painted and rhinestone riots of patterns and personality, finishing up a successful solo show at Lehman Maupin. The work has consistently struck me as some of the boldest being done today. She's also a former Portland-based model who left to study art at Pratt then Yale (she discovered her interest in art at PSU). She still visits Portland frequently and we have a lot of mutual friends... but for a change PORT caught up with her in her Brooklyn studio to talk about her first New York solo show, her work and what is next.

Jeff: Forgive me but I have to ask, why rhinestones?

Mickalene: At the beginning I didn't know why. One, I always worked in different materials like sequins and glitter, all of these untraditional craft materials that I seemed to gravitate towards for my process. Once I started using... (more)

Posted by Jeff Jahn on May 02, 2009 at 9:54 | Comments (0)

Friday 04.24.09

Interview with Okwui Enwezor

Portrait of Okwui Enwezor by Jeff Weiss, Courtesy Bard College

I had the lovely opportunity to speak with Okwui Enwezor this month as he was in town to speak at the annualFATE conference that took place the weekend of April 3rd. Enwezor is currently the Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute and has curated a variety of renowned exhibitions around the world. He took some time early one morning to discuss his views on subjects ranging from the notion of excellence in education to his take on the recent election of Barack Obama as president. . . (more)

Posted by Amy Bernstein on April 24, 2009 at 0:16 | Comments (0)

Tuesday 02.17.09

An interview with Glenn Adamson

Leading craft writer, researcher, educator and theorist Glenn Adamson is the Author of Thinking Through Craft an introduction for artists and craftspeople dealing with the common perception of craft. He will be giving a lecture entitled Craft in the 21st Century: Directions and Displacements Saturday, Feb. 21 for more information check out the Museum of Contemporary Craft's events calendar.

(more... PORT's interview with Adamson after the jump)

Posted by Alex Rauch on February 17, 2009 at 6:00 | Comments (2)

Saturday 02.14.09

Interview with Laura Fritz by MK Guth

Laura Fritz at NAAU, photo Jim Lommason

MK Guth: I wanted to start with the basics like, what is your background? What brought you to art? Where did you go to school? Where was your area of focus and does that connect to how you are making work now?

Laura Fritz: Well, I grew up in the Chicago area and I started out being really interested in lights in darkened rooms. They fascinated me. Sometime between Preschool and Kindergarten age there was this one grocery store that had an aisle where the lights weren't working. It was the peanut butter and jelly aisle and all the jars were just glowing because the aisle next to them allowed light to come through the side. I would just run up and down the aisle because I thought it was so interesting... (more)

Posted by Guest on February 14, 2009 at 18:00 | Comments (0)

Sunday 12.14.08

Jonathan Lasker at PAM

Jonathan Lasker at PAM Jonathan Lasker is a painter's painter. His work has answered the call to move and change and be something relevant during an era when the medium of paint was pronounced dead. Lasker's oeuvre speaks to the notion of possibility and invention within the ideas of material and symbol while speaking to the experience of this time as well. Over the last thirty years, Lasker has distilled this language into something almost audible, wrought with the eloquence of a haiku. I had the opportunity to speak candidly with Lasker about his life's work at the Portland Art Museum, where his work will be on view until January eleventh. PORT: Do you see a great disparity between the east and west coasts? . . .(more)

Posted by Amy Bernstein on December 14, 2008 at 20:46 | Comments (1)

Wednesday 11.05.08

Interview with Storm Tharp

Storm Tharp in the studio, October 2008 (photo Jeff Jahn)

"We Appeal to Heaven," Tharp's last solo offering in Portland, in 2007, caught the artist at his most consistent: a gallery of uniformly sized ink portraits and some peripheral text pieces. It was a successful cementing of his promise, and many speculated that he'd found 'his thing.' At a solo show that closed last month at Galerie Bertrand & Gruner in Switzerland, as well as a two-person show at Nicole Klagsbrun in New York this month, Tharp has continued to develop and display this tangent of his work. But in "Arm & Arm," Tharp ventures into other realms, exploring a newly intimate and familial conceptual terrain...(more)

Posted by Ryan Pierce on November 05, 2008 at 9:39 | Comments (2)

Friday 10.17.08

Vito Acconci at the Nevada Art Museum's Art + Environment Conference

Vito Acconci at the Nevada Art Museum's Art + Environment Conference, 2008


I recently had the opportunity to attend the Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Art Museum, October 2-4, 2008. Guided by the comments of the Lead Moderator William L. Fox, who is also the Lead Strategist for the Art + Environment Intiative, it was three days of excellent and thought provoking presentations from artists, writers, curators and even a biologist. The intention of the conference had been to bring to together as many ideas and perspectives on the environment as possible to see how ideas from different disciplines might cross polinate. It was under these circumstances that I had the opportuntiy to speak to Mr. Acconci. The interview ranged from Marina Abramovic's recreations of Acconci's performance art and that of others from the 1970s and Acconci's perspective on his current architectural practice.


In your early work, how did you know that using the experience of your body would be enough to make art? You understood early on that you did not necessarily have to create a painting or a sculpture but that your body and your experience could be the raw material for a new kind of art experience.


Because of the time. It was the late '60s and early '70s and the common language of the time was one of finding oneself, as if the self was something to contemplate. It was as if, at the time, that the self was a kind of precious jewel to concentrate on. Also it was the time of face-to-face encounters and encounter groups with an emphasis on person-to-person relationships. There were a lot of books at the time about non-verbal language, you know, how do people sit facing each other or whatever. It was a time when a lot of authority figures were being toppled, demonstrations against the Vietnam War, which was probably the most important thing about the time. It was also the time when the first Feminist writings were beginning to emerge. It was a time when, I do not think that I could say all of us, but some of us started to think that there was something wrong about art. There is something wrong about museums. We would ask questions like why do museums have no windows or few windows? Is art as fragile as all of that? Probably the answer is yes but, in other words, a lot of us wanted to see if art could be a kind of encounter. Can art be a kind of interaction? I am still not sure, but it was something that we wanted to explore. (More...)


Vito Acconci
Follow Piece, 1969
Photograph
(c)Vito Acconci 2008

Posted by Arcy Douglass on October 17, 2008 at 12:59 | Comments (1)

Tuesday 10.14.08

Interview with Garth Clark (exclusive)

Garth Clark

Alex Rauch: You have been called a visionary. You are a gallery owner, curator, writer, historian and one of craft's preeminent intellectuals, associated with everyone from; Peter Voulkos, Anthony Caro, the Natzlers and George Ohr to Ken Price. And this Thursday you will be giving a lecture entitled How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement: An Autopsy in Two Parts.

I guess a good place to start is how you would define the craft movement?


Peter Voulkos, Untitled, c. 1960; ceramic; 13.5 x 8 x 18 inches; Collection Museum of Contemporary Craft, Gift of the Margaret Murray Gordon Estate; 2004.10.03

Garth Clark: This you know has been a bit of a problem. The crafts themselves have really defined themselves as a kind of purgatory...(more)

Posted by Alex Rauch on October 14, 2008 at 1:00 | Comments (0)

Tuesday 10.07.08

Use and Space. An Interview with Brad Cloepfil, Part II

Part II of PORT's conversation with architect Brad Cloepfil focuses on the spaces he creates for use by art and people. Part I dealt with Cloepfil's many artist influences. Part II picks up right where it left off, continuing our single marathon discussion of aesthetics, intent and buildings with Portland's most noted architect.


Cloepfil's Museum of Arts and Design (photo Michael Oman Reagan)

Arcy: Now that your generation is in charge you can see where ideas and institutions can lead you astray or have deep value… having grown up during Vietnam you can see both sides of the equation. What are the implications of the solace of organization and the danger of thinking as a culture rather than as an individual?

Brad: Well I wonder if seeing those images of bamboo being mowed down by machine guns night after night didn't produce a quest for more connection. I mean there was a period of art and a period of architecture when they kind of serialized culture; where the LA school of architects turned everything into collage, where the attitude was, "the world is chaos, so we will make architecture chaos." It's a kind of caricature almost, or can you create a counter voice and create something that is still? I definitely think I'm in the counterforce camp...(more)

Posted by Jeff Jahn on October 07, 2008 at 0:22 | Comments (0)

Saturday 10.04.08

Fritz Haeg Interview at Reed College

Fritz Haeg's Animal Estates @ Reed's Cooley gallery

Fritz Haeg is one of those people for whom definitions like; architect, artist, curator and activist, miss the broader picture of his efforts. For example, even though he was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and will be addressing the Frieze art fair this year, he could care less about conquering the art world.

Instead, he wants to change the way we see and engage the world and his contribution to the Suddenly: Where We Live Now show at Reed's Cooley Gallery is both a resource and a prompt for engagement. In this show about understanding our shared environment and context Fritz's Animal Estates projects draw attention to many the wild animals that also live in Portland. The show end's tomorrow at 6:00 (with Fritz in attendance) so get on down to see this show while you still can.

Jeff: Tell me about the Animal Estates project at the Cooley gallery's Suddenly: where we live now?

Fritz: On the perimeter there is this Animal Estates repository or archive where each city adds material and it keeps growing from city to city. Each place is represented in very... (more)

Posted by Jeff Jahn on October 04, 2008 at 16:31 | Comments (1)

Monday 08.11.08

Art and Architecture: An Interview with Brad Cloepfil Part I

Allied Works Architecture
Maryhill Overlook, 1999
Photo by Sally Schoolmaster



Brad Cloepfil is the principal of Allied Works Architecture in Portland, Oregon. Allied Works is a nationally recognized architecture firm that has recently completed projects like the extension to the Seattle Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis and is currently finishing the Museum of Art & Design at 2 Columbus Circle in New York. PORT recently sat down with him to ask about the impact artists have had on his work.

How did your early experience with art feedback into your own creative process?

When I was younger, I tended to be influenced by the raw experience of the work itself. At first, I wasn't even aware of who created a work, whether it was Richard Serra or Robert Irwin, it was the experience of the work itself that was important. The experience makes you ask yourself about the spatial quality of that type of work and about the ideas that those artists are exploring. It just resonates with you. I wasn't seeing anything comparable in buildings. It just seems like those guys understood more about the intentions of the 19th and 20th century architecture than the architects did. They had clarity of thought and a practice that was built on the exploration of material that became very important to me. The singular act of focus to create a work of art was really impressive. I saw Richard Serra's Circuit at MoMA and it is just four pieces of steel propped up in the corners of the room. The physical presence and the mass of the steel and its ability to radiate space into the small gallery was for me a very architectural experience that I could relate to much easier than the so-called "architecture" that was being produced at that time. The experience is about the material and the way that the material is made. It was also easier to learn from the artists because their work is so pure. By that I mean, the work that I was interested in was focused on the exploration of only one or two ideas.



Richard Serra
Circuit II, 1972-86
Hot Rolled-Steel. Four Plates
Each: 10' x 20' x 1"

Posted by Arcy Douglass on August 11, 2008 at 20:09 | Comments (1)

Tuesday 06.10.08

I will see where it takes me from here: A conversation with Ed Ruscha

A portrait of Ed Ruscha by Dennis Hopper from 1964


Ed Ruscha is one of America's greatest painters. During the last forty years of producing an amazing body of work, he is best known for his recontextualizations of words and environments. These often jarring juxtapositions have helped us to reexamine the world we live in. An exhibtion of Ed Ruscha's work will be at the Portland Art Museum from June 14 to September 21, 2008.


I read that you studied with Robert Irwin at the Chouinard Art Institute. What was he like as a teacher?

That's right. Well, he was very rigorous and interesting. He was a task master. He taught a watercolor class and he went through elaborate steps to teach every student how to prepare the paper for the watercolors. You would have to prepare this paper by wetting and stretching it and the paper would be taut like the head of a drum. Irwin was a committed abstract painter and he was a vital person in my estimation during my early years. It just went on from there. He was one of several people that I studied under. Although I got quite a bit, not just from the teachers, but also from the students themselves, just being in that atmosphere.

At one point you mentioned that in the sixties, you were the biggest collector of your own work. What was that like?

There is more than a shred of truth there. It was about 1961 when I really got swinging into my own art. I had it for a few years before I exhibited it, and I didn't sell too much of my early work. Even during exhibits I would only sell one or two things. So I held on to quite a bit of my own work during the early years. (More...)

Posted by Arcy Douglass on June 10, 2008 at 1:15 | Comments (2)

Friday 06.06.08

Justine Kurland interviewed in Portland

Ghost Ship, 2001
Satin finish UV laminated C-print
30 by 40 in. 76.2 by 101.6 cm.
All images Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

Photographer Justine Kurland has spent the past decade staking her claim in the vast territory of American myth. Her color landscapes, most often stages and backdrops for figurative tableaus, are portals to an adjacent world, a Siamese twin world comprised of unseen moments from this one.

Kurland earned early accolades for her neo-romantic scenes of teenage girls adrift in the overlooked spaces of suburban wildlands. Tough, tender and imbued with the awkward grace of those years... (more)

Posted by Ryan Pierce on June 06, 2008 at 11:28 | Comments (0)

Friday 05.16.08

CA @ PCVA

"There is no true way except for that which is true for oneself. My way does not invalidate the way of anyone else."
-Carl Andre in an interview with Paul Sutinen in 1980


Carl Andre
144 Blocks & Stones, 1973 (Detail)
Concrete blocks and found and store bought rocks and minerals
Installed at the Portland Center for Visual Arts in March 1973
Image courtesy the PCVA Archive at the Portland Art Museum
(c) Carl Andre 2008


Here are ten questions that I asked Carl Andre about his installation 144 Blocks & Stones at the Portland Center for Visual Arts, March-February 1973.


In the early correspondence for the exhibition at the PCVA, the installation was described as a "scavenger" show. When did you decide to use river stones and concrete blocks for the installation?

When I arrived in Portland.


When you were looking for river stones, what qualities were you looking for? The found river stones were complemented by specific geological samples purchased from stores. How did you decide which samples to buy? Do you remember where you found the river stones?

I selected ones that interested me. I found them in the local river.


Looking for stones by a local river for the installation at PCVA
Image courtesy the PCVA Archive at the Portland Art Museum

(more)

Posted by Arcy Douglass on May 16, 2008 at 0:22 | Comments (3)

Monday 03.31.08

Between Heaven and Earth: The Work of James Lavadour

James Lavadour Star House, 2008 oil on panel 24" x 30


"My main interest has always been about the properties of paint, what paint does. One of the things that paint does is that it is organic and does the same sort of things that dirt does, anything in the natural world does. It has the same processes: erosion, sedimentation, flow... I saw in that microcosm of a landscape. I saw the same processes in watercolor settling in on a piece of paper as rivers and mountains. That was the first principle that struck me early on and I realized that ever since I was a child I was fascinated by those particular processes.

I realized that I had two basic things that I work with in my paintings: the first is organic flow which is the landscape. The second was an architectural grid or abstraction which is based on the human perception or response to the natural world. Those two ideas have always been my right hand and my left hand. They were polar opposites of one another. I used to do either abstracts or landscapes. At this point, they intersected in this collision. After that I had no idea what was going to happen then. The abstracts became more like landscapes and the landscape became more like architectural structures with a cellular structure that had spaces within spaces within spaces.

When I experienced that microcosm of the cosmos, everything else just fell away. (More)

Posted by Arcy Douglass on March 31, 2008 at 20:29 | Comments (1)

Thursday 01.31.08

Portland Curatorial Roundup 2008

Whether you are an artist or an art lover, curators are the people in your community that you need to know and the job involves a lot more than simply selecting who gets to show in a space.

Last year's roundup was hugely popular and this 2008 roundup will take things even farther. It is still by no means comprehensive as Portland has seen an explosion in interesting alternative spaces. It goes without saying that there is a whole new crew in Portland these days.

Participants for 2008 are: Bruce Guenther, Linda Tesner, Josh Smith, Nathan Gibson, Patrick Rock, Namita Wiggers, Kristan Kennedy, TJ Norris, Paul Middendorf, myself, Stephanie Snyder, and Damien Gilley... (more)

Posted by Jeff Jahn on January 31, 2008 at 2:15 | Comments (2)

Tuesday 01.08.08

Interview with MK Guth

Portrait of MK Guth by Marne Lucas

"I have no life," confesses MK Guth with a chuckle. "But that's off the record." What the overachieving Portland artist means, of course, is that outside of an accelerating art practice that has her touring a new project across the nation-state-hopping her way to the Whitney Biennial-and heading the new Masters in Visual Studies program at PNCA, she doesn't have a lot of time for hobbies. But Guth seems to be taking both her hectic schedule and success in stride. The Wisconsin transplant, who has lived and or shown in Portland for...(more)

Posted by Ryan Pierce on January 08, 2008 at 9:51 | Comments (4)

Thursday 10.04.07

An Afternoon with Mary Henry

Mary Henry- Metaphor, Acrylic on canvas 1995.
Image courtesy of PDX Contemporary Art Portland, Oregon


I wasn't sure what I was expecting as I drove up to Seattle with my wife on an early on a Saturday morning in June. I knew that I was traveling to meet with one of the great painters of the Northwest, Mary Henry. I was familiar with her paintings with their beautiful colors and meticulous craft. The paintings have such a remarkable clarity that they ring with a distinctive tone, not unlike hitting a bell at a Japanese temple. Perfect, complete and clear. More...

Posted by Arcy Douglass on October 04, 2007 at 12:10 | Comments (0)

Wednesday 04.11.07

Printmaking, Pollock and Poetics: A Conversation With Terry Winters

Vermilion 2005

A Conversation With Terry Winters:

"I hope to be clear in describing the process, but the experience of making the painting isn't linear. The best things tend to come by surprise or emerge from the circumstances"...(more)

Posted by Arcy Douglass on April 11, 2007 at 11:52 | Comments (1)

Tuesday 03.20.07

An Interview with Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt is one of the most exceptional and prolific photographers in the field today. Born in 1928, he's been photographing steadily (and indulging in his hobby on the side) for over half a century. Erwitt's Leica has captured iconic figures from Che Guevara to Marilyn Monroe, as well as countless slices of daily life, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of dogs, and the ever-evolving social landscape of America, Europe and points beyond. A selection of images culled from his latest book, entitled Personal Best, is on view at the Portland Art Museum through April 29th. Mr. Erwitt recently spent a few days in Portland in order to deliver a lecture at PAM, and kindly shared a little of his time for the following interview.....................(more)

Posted by Jessica Bromer on March 20, 2007 at 0:50 | Comments (10)

Wednesday 01.03.07

Port's Curatorial Roundup 2007

Curators are the people you need to know in the art world and Portland is full of them. To begin 2007 we thought we'd poll a few of them and learn a little more about how they see their roles. Now prepare yourselves, this is one long article. Also, as expected the term curator was incredibly loaded. Some reserve the term only for nonprofit work, others admitted to acting in a curatorial role without actually claiming to be curators. For some being a curator seemed to be like breathing. To be sure there are as many types of curators as there are curatorial roles. From old pro's to rookies, these 13 are only a sampling of the curatorial voices in town:


Terri Hopkins by Joe Macca (detail)

Terri Hopkins: Director & Curator of the Art Gym, Marylhurst University

How did you get into curating? It was a circuitous process of career sampling and elimination. I prepared for a career teaching art history, which
............(much more)

Posted by Jeff Jahn on January 03, 2007 at 23:23 | Comments (4)

Wednesday 12.27.06

An Interview with Marne Lucas

Marne Lucas, MLSP: Alphorny, archival pigment print 2006

Artist Marne Lucas and I took brief respites from our densely packed holiday schedules to sit down for an electronic bi-coastal conversation about her current exhibition, Sitting City: Portland Artist Portraits. The images of local artists created for Sitting City were partially funded by a RACC (Regional Arts and Culture Council) project grant, and represent a small cross-section of Lucas's ongoing project of capturing the appearance and essence of her artistic peers.....................(more)

Posted by Jessica Bromer on December 27, 2006 at 9:11 | Comments (7)

Tuesday 06.27.06

Interview With Matthew Day Jackson

Jackson's Viking Burial Ship at PS.1's Greater New York show (2005)

Isaac D. Peterson
Matt D. Jackson (P.I.C.A. artist in residence)

IDP:
I was thinking about what we discussed earlier about the new structure of information, and I noticed in one of your sculptures you made this connection between Punk Rock and a Viking ship. This is one of those associations that couldn't normally exist in a linear structure but clearly Punk Rock culture may have some Viking undertones.

MDJ:
That piece was really a suicide piece.

IDP:
It was a funeral pyre, right?

MDJ:
Well, it wasn't historically accurate, but I'm not even concerned with that, I'm concerned with maybe the Hollywood representation of Vikings. Basically I had come to the point where I realized I was fulfilling someone else's legacy of making art. I was operating within this formal strategy that was completely developed by my predecessors. You know from Modrian to Reinhardt to Philip Guston to Jonathan Lasker. Basically what they were making were super-narrative abstract structures. I realized that what I was doing was something that was not entirely a part of my generation, and that my ideas and creativity were constantly struggling against this. I wanted to put it all to rest, so I started making this funeral vessel for my own ideas and it took the form of this very heroic funeral practice. Of course the whole idea is pure Hollywood myth, there would be no artifacts of these ships if they had all been set on fire and pushed out to sea. I would say that that definitely didn't happen, but I wasn't as concerned with that. I was more concerned with heroic death and how it was represented in the media. I wanted to focus on death in relationship to all of this iconography. The sail refers exactly to a pattern from a specific Mondrian painting, and that leads in to the idea that these modern icons have narrative potential.

IDP:
That seems pretty radical to think of Mondrian as having narrative potential.

MDJ:
But it is! We've gone there! It's on clothing, it's on swatches, it's on furniture!

IDP:
Regardless of what Mondrian intended, the work has acquired a narrative.

MDJ:
Yes, and that's the world that we live in. I think of the Brancusi heads I'm making now, they are stacked up like cannonballs. The original sculpture was called the Sleeping Muse, and its eyes are closed, but in my version their eyes are wide open! The Sleeping Muse has been awoken from its slumber of the last 83 years. It's a statement about modernity to think of Brancusi used as a cannonball. We are at the tail-end of the industrial revolution, and that thing that was calm and banal is essentially being used to knock you out.

IDP:
I wanted to ask you about your interest in Bosch and Breugel.... (more)

Posted by Isaac Peterson on June 27, 2006 at 1:30 | Comments (2)

Sunday 10.02.05

Well Within the Realm... A Casual Conversation with Hamza Walker

The back-story for this interview is that I met Hamza in Cincinnati as a graduate student. He was a guest lecturer in our visiting artists program and sat in on critiques for a couple of days. I bumped into him again at the Affiar, I'm transcribing this conversation as faithfully as I can remember it...

Isaac: Hi Hamza, do you remember me from Cincinnati? I was on the visiting artists committee and we went out to dinner after your lecture. My name is Isaac.

Hamza: Oh yeah! What was that place called?

Isaac: Biagio's

Hamza: That's right.

Isaac: Some of your critiques became the stuff of legend in Cincinnati.

Hamza: Oh really?

Isaac: Yeah, there was a color field painter you were critiquing and you told him to look at Frank Frazetta....

Posted by Isaac Peterson on October 02, 2005 at 17:49 | Comments (0)