Portland Public Art Quiz – #6

Use the comments below and name the artist and where this public artwork is located! Extra bonus points if you can tell anything about how this artwork was purchased or mounted. Check back for the answer tomorrow. Hint – By a well known artist, but not in his well known style. (Of course it’s in Portland – also.)

25 HOURS LATER – Okay, this is a hard one and you’re clearly stumped. I’ll give you half – and the easier, much more interesting half – The painting above is by Louis Bunce. Not his well known style at all. Now – the challenge – where is this piece of Portland public art hanging? Another hint, cause I know you’re lost – it’s in a public building which contains about 40 other pieces of art, all parts of the “State Office Building Collection.”

25 HOURS LATER – It’s Louis Bunce, View #2, date created unknown, hanging on the fourth floor of the Oregon State Office Building on NE Oregon Street.

Artwork in this building is rarely visited because the surroundings are stultifying dreary, matched by the trollish work of civil servants. One enjoyable aspect, beyond finding the artwork, was the absolute ease of access. Although this building is one of the very few where Homeland Security provides it’s service, doors throughout the building were open and unguarded.

The collection – available for the first time in an online gallery here – includes work by Michele Russo, James McGarrell, Gary Thomas Sutto, Dyann Alkire, a monoprint with pastel by Rick Bartow, Goodwin Harding, Karen Guzak, Robert Dozono, PSU Prof Manuel Izquierdo, U of O’s LaVerne Krause (the blue landscape Spring Poetic above), Jim Shull, Lewis & Clark’s Bruce West, Douglas Campbell Smith, the Museum Art School’s surrealist Dean Harry Widman (his painting Three Three and Two is above), two enormous 2D sculptural pieces of cast glass by Ruth Brockmann (detail of The Legend of Multnomah Falls is shown here), and Robert Hanson.

Several of these pieces is another context, perhaps with proper lighting, could be interesting. The glass piece by Brockmann is enormous – two pieces, each ten feet by twenty-five feet – and exceptional.

Portland Public Art looked at the prominent outdoor sculpture Ideals by the late Muriel Castanis in 2005 at the corner of 9th Avenue and NE Oregon.

The collection is OAC warehouse circa 1985. I had several nice chats with the inhabitants who had no idea of what the artwork is, who made it, or whether it was interesting or not. I could smell the Halcion, tho. No mention elsewhere of the “State Office Building Collection.” Like the artwork, the program which collected and mounted it, has been forgotten.

 

Louis Bunce at PDX

This fantastic 1958 Louis Bunce (1907 – 1983) painting has blithly hung in the Portland International Airport mall for decades – which is actually not a bad place to kill time.

About 25 x 35, it’s not currently well lit and is set, as you can see, above the entrance to a Coffee People. (Is that part of the lease agreement? The decoration is worth more than the annual revenue!)

Cool! This site reviews airports and mentions the Bunce, as well as artworks by Jack Portland, Larry Kirkland and Pete Beeman.

Bunce gave a long interview to Rachel Rosenfield Lafo in 1982. Very interesting.

Bunce showed at the Heller and Meltzer galleries in NYC during the 1950s. His catalogue keeps going and is repped by Laura Russo Gallery. His work is in dozens of collections all over the world. He traveled the world too – meeting the great poets and artists of the day.

And then he came back to Portland.

When you look at this painting its important to remember Portland in the late fifties was a rough, blue collar town with no galleries, no night life, where the museum was run by the Arlington Club fellows, where the news was manufactured by lumber lobbyists and where the cops + politicans were if not crooked, certainly looking the other way.

It takes both a certain kind of courage and a certain kinds of dedication to remain in the provinces. A small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond? Who shall I be? But for Portland this wasn’t the right question. There were no fish and this wasn’t even a pond at all. What did his neighbors think? My his mother must have worried!

 

Portland Art Annex

Well worth visiting is Portland’s best public art annex, the Portland Convention Center.

First – don’t go with the crowds. The place is open, free and comfortable to visit almost any reasonable hours, including it seems most weekends. Tourists are a drag. I’m not your tour guide, so figure things out for yourself.

Just a short list – six fairly uninteresting Carl Morris abstracts, a badly hung Louis Bunce, a perhaps one of Portland’s great paintings, Bilalian Odyssey by Isaka Shamsud-Din, a weird fairly awful Lucinda Parker – too large to see clearly from any position, literally as large as a Clear Channel billboard, dozens of “literary” brass plaques, all nicely designed (the Kesey quote has a pic of Brautigan who grew up in outer NW Portland but is ID’ed as a SF poet by bardologists, oh well) but uninformative, and a long wonderful poem by Olympian Gail Tremblay which is badly rendered on another set of plaques and, badly lit, is almost unreadable.

Oh here’s a tour guide thing. Don’t miss the bathrooms (which is another reason to go when no one else is around!) They are also filled with artwork, mostly glazed tiles, but also mirrors and painted tiles. Some with geographical gems, some with historical figures. See if you can find Joaquin Miller.

NYC artist Ming Fay wins the contest for big big big, has a thing about making fruit large large large. I’m not sure why. I tried to read a couple of essays from his web site (which tried to crash my machine) and averted my eyes just prior to slashing my wrists. Oh Tom Wolfe! The Theories!

One of the most impressive public rooms in Oregon, the new main hall of the Convention Center, facing Martin Luther King Blvd, holds the two LARGEST ginkoberrys in the world.

What’s a ginkoberry? Dunno. Fay proposes it’s an ancient fruit of some sort the size of a truck. It’s green like frosted bronze, smooth, beautiful, precious. I like them very much, but they would be just as interesting if they were the size of my thumbtip and tasted like pineapple.

The two ginkoberrys are set on high pedestals next to escalators which give a good, in motion view. Between and flying above are thick brown branches carrying bright ginko flowers (look like poppies) of blown glass. Every color of red, and the center globs of blue, clear and red glass turn purple in the changing light.

For the branches + flowers the hall is a distraction with noise and moving light, no neutral background, and lofted 25 feet above the viewer. From a accessible balcony the view is better.

The craft and execution of the work is fine, but Fay presents huge for the sake of huge. Ginkoberry Gwa is designed to fill up huge space, commissioned within the context of public construction. Fruit – how politically neutral can you get? Ah, make them prehistoric mythical fruit! Sweep up those percent-for-the-art contracts! What does this mean?

Think about it as the San Simeon Problem. Government contracts are almost inherently corrupt and present interesting public relations problems. Who benefits from airports, convention centers, dams, freeways? The people? No, foremost it’s Bechtel or Walsh Construction or other similar forces. And when the public discovers the truth? We get bread and circuses.

Take the smallest percentage possible, like 1%, giftwrap it as a windfall, and buy local decorative art or politically neutral art for these billion-dollar spaces. Subways, prisons, public colleges, tunnels. I wonder if FEMA reconstruction pays a dividend to the arts? In Portland, see our Transit Mall, our parks, our airport, our beautiful city hall and the Central Library.

Critics might describe most of this work as abstract, or decorative. Builders might describe it as inoffensive. Politicians avoid describing art at all, preferring for once silence.

Art should be evocative, provocative, and tell a story. Fay’s work at the Convention Center does all this, but within its context is pointlessly large and its neutrality points toward its selection as manipulative. The selectors, often co-op’ed artists within this tiny and conflicted community, please their masters and leave tourists pondering, “am I in Boise?”

I’ll write about art outside the Convention Center soon.

 

Arlene Schnitzer

I was just going sit down and write about the WOW bright orange Alexander Liberman sculpture just sitting by itself behind the Jamieson Fountain, but to understand why the Liberman is sitting there, you have to understand how it got there.

You have to understand why Maya Lin ISN’T there and that Tanner Creek Park thing is a placeholder workup. And you need to know Ed Cauduro is Portland’s great collector of sculpture, and helped get the short-lived Pearl Arts Foundation off the ground.

If you’re interested in Portland and interested in its art, know Arlene Schnitzer pushed open the doors past Mr. Otis and the Arlington Club titterers, first with the Fountain Gallery which colonized what Bill Naito much later labeled “Old Town.” (The Fountain Gallery folded in the 80’s into the Laura Russo gallery.) All sorts of extravagant art + culture waded into provincial puddletown via Arlene.

So give Arlene the floor – and tell her story. Take a few minutes and read her brief oral history of her civic and aesthetic work.

From the enormous Louis Bunce in the Portland Convention Center to the Performing Arts Center, for decades Arlene has been a light hand, gently urging folks to consider something nicer to look at. Or listen to. Or feel.

Start with Arlene. Then I can write about the rest.

Above is just a section of the impossible-to-photograph Louis Bunce at the Portland Convention Center.