Ideals by Muriel Castanis

The purpose of a dealer is to make the deal, to sell the stuff and collect a commission. Prior to the internet, the NYC smoke an mirrors could be waved around these minor artists. Like H W Coe in 1920 standing in the Parisian studio, those rubes will be happy regardless.

Born in New York in 1926, Muriel Castanis began her artistic career as a painter but began creating cloth sculptures after noting the effect of glue on a rag. She is self-taught.

An Oregon Arts Commission “panel” bought this piece of artwork, Ideals by Castanis, using percent for the arts money. If from the Administrative Building behind it cost $1,000,000 to build, $100,000 would be spent on this sculpture + transport and maintenance – that’s the general idea.

Buy a postcard of it. Or buy a version yourself from the OK Harris Gallery in Soho.

Castanis has made and sold a bunch of these, all basically the same process and product, different poses, sometimes different materials.

1988 – at the University of Virginia, Untitled (Torso), 1988. Fabric and epoxy resin.

At Arizona State University, Statue of a Woman Looking to the Future. Maybe parked out in front of the library.

Here’s one at the State University of New York, up in Albany, made in 1993. Euphoria. From their web site, “Although she was involved with women artists’ groups in the early part of her career, Castanis felt she could not participate in the organizing and meetings such membership required.” Whatever.

Google gives us some opportunity for vigilance, but what’s lost in the meantime is respect. Certainly respect for the process of selecting artwork for public purchase, but also respect for the struggle to make something beautiful. The high cost of an artwork is really an accounting of the struggle, not a production line. This piece is commercial artwork, well made and curious, if not a bit gruesome, but in the end (and from the inside) not interesting at all.

 

Everyone loves Baba Wague

The Portland Police NE Portland Precinct was tasked with colonial duties beyond law and order, and as a start was plopped down in a dead zone, Killingsworth and Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd in 1994. Mrs. Terry Porter and Mrs. Buck Williams (back in the day – Blazers had wives!) chimed in with local boosters and built the Boys and Girls Club. Together, inspired by Tom Potter and with a lot of luck, a tide was turned. Some retail (including the super-friendly Reflections Bookstore) survived the transition.

Artwork, that 1% solution, helped initiate the building in its new role. It needed to be black, but not angry black. It needed to be soulful, but not hostile. It needed to be visible, but no tutorials, no politic, no comment. And the RACC has always specialized in sourcing unoffensive art.

Everyone loves Baba Wague Diakite. Even I love Baba Wague. So.

There are 28 ceramic tile sets of six squares, five in a vertical row, and a sixth at 45 degrees set below, set into the columns of three sides of the building. Animals, spirit beings, insects, fish + frogs. They’re nice and they’ve worn excellently. Bright colors!

On the East side of the building is a 5 x 60′ mural with a fountain called Pedestrian Parkway, which is joined by two sets of ceramic tiles created by kids at Dishman Community Center and at King Elementary.

Before the mural is a simple fountain with cement frog sculptures by Ronna Neuenschwander, Baba Wague’s wife. Doesn’t look like the fountain has been operating for quite a while.

Like the tiles, the mural is a pantheon of what I guess are figures from Baba Wague’s Mali stories. Frog and King Fish, monkeys and birds all clambering on a boat, perhaps illustrating a story written alongside the painting.

Attacted to the mural is one of the Mali stories Baba Wague loves to tell – of the Frog and the King Fish.

Baba Wague Diakite – The Hatseller and the Monkeys

Bio + resume at Africancraft.com

Baba Wague, workng in the schools and writing books for kids.

Baba Wague Diakite – The Hatseller and the Monkeys

Slide / lecture – Without Stories, There Is No Art

Just as cute and charming are the two sets of mosaic tiles.

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Speaking of police, today is the THIRD anniversary of the murder of Asia Bell. If you know anything about who committed this crime, immediately contact Bret Smith, NE Precinct Commander at 503-823-5700. You can send an anonymous email to wsvilar@police.ci.portland.or.us. This was a terrible crime – please help.

 

Ever shining, ever glorious

Portland has had a robust arts community for generations. It’s collectors we lack. I estimate currently artists outnumber buyers of art at least 100 – 1. Those are rough odds.

Portland’s first collector and a generous character was Henry Waldo Coe, died around 1925. A public psychiatrist he owned a madhouse – Morningside Hospital – out in rural East Portland where he provided some sort of sanctuary to Alaskan Native Americans. (No publicly financed mental health services were available in Alaska until statehood in 1956.)

Coe bought many works of art for Portland. The Lincoln by George Fite Waters, the Roosevelt, by Phimister Proctor in the Park Blocks, the Washington, by Pornpeo Cappini on Sandy Blvd, and the Sacajawea in Washington Park by Alice Cooper. And as an unusual memorial for vets returning from Europe, he bought this Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans from the studio of Emmanuel Fremiet, died 1910.

Original? Coe traveled, his Portland neighbors didn’t. Originality wasn’t important. Nah – 100 years ago if it also set in a Parisian square, it was good.

Place des Pyramides, Paris.

You can buy a poster.

There’s one in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, bought and donated about the same time. Nine copies are extant. Kinda like the Lichtenstein Brushstrokes deal at the PAM.

Here’s a nice one at the Museum d’Orsey.

This one in New Orleans. There are more.

Portland’s Joan has recently been terribly gilded by RACC, paid for in part by a grant from the Save Our Sculptures!, part of the National Institute for Conservation. I had to wait for a cloudy day to take pictures of it. The gleam is shockingly bright and dazzling. Not pleasant. Neighbors complained. Kids put pumpkins on her head and stole the flag.

She’s not situated well either. Sitting in a traffic circle, surrounded by beeping cars, this Joan is hard to see with more than a glance. Like many of Portland’s artworks, there are barriers. No parking for a block in any direction, then complicated traffic to jump through – no crosswalk. Once you clamber up to the pedestal, she’s still high out of reach, fenced by rose bushes.

But just look at her – up close!

Determined, feminine, fantastical, strident, bewitched, commanding. The horse is magnificent. Her firm face, female form, flowing scarf and flag, all excellent form. She doesn’t have anything to do with WWI, or really anything in the context of Oregon, but a slim connection to the cultural home of Paris, of Napoleon III, of civilization. This piece of Portland artwork is well-worth time and effort to see closely.

And – it’s a thoughtless tragedy this public artwork has been so badly handled, both in surrounding it with physical barriers and damaged by “restoration.” Thoughtless.

 

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.

 

Breaking News

John Buchanan was spotted yesterday checking the bolts and bulbs in the largest purchase by the PAM – well, since Waterlilies by Monet went upstairs in about 1955.

This is one of the late Roy Lichtenstein’s 1996 – 2001 Brushstrokes series, which did some time on the roof of the MOMA and at Brown University while searching the world for an owner.

Aluminum almost thirty feet tall, this thing doesn’t just drop into any old atrium and flirt. Even on Park Avenue, even from distance, it takes a moment to adjust.

Pop art meets faux Egyptian fraternal lodge with the Masonic Temple, site of weddings, comic book conventions, and a variety of sales meetings. But if Buchanan does with the interior (and I’ve peeked, but not seen enough to comment yet) the equivalent of the transformation of the Pietro Belluschi PAM, we’re blessed.

And if you haven’t had a chance to look around the Portland Art Museum web site – don’t wait. It’s one of their best improvements.

Oh, press release!

A Christo around a David Smith!?! Out from the barn and back into the light! We haven’t seen a few of these for years.

The Sculpture Garden is reopened – though the selection seems somewhat random. Certainly better than the dribbling fountain. One takes what one can get. Buchanan might say, put your donation where your mouth is, bub.

Still uncrating and tidying up. Opening is October 2, I think.

Tho small what makes it a very pleasant change from much Portland artwork is the lack of a considerable barrier between the viewer and the work. For several of the pieces this blog has already looked, such as Harvey Scott or the Manuel Neri piece at the Federal Courthouse are both hidden and high, separated space, literally difficult to see. The PAM garden provides sufficient security to allow us to draw near.

We watched a one year old girl, indulged by her gooney parents, grin and smirk, romp around the space, travail and outshine the bronze and stone. So the place is human, comfortable with a adjoining cafe and chairs, a sanctuary in the city.

I don’t like Lee Kelly’s work. (Above)

I remember when this rusty monster was a showpiece like Brushstrokes is now, up front and center with velvet ropes and gawkers on Park Avenue. Arlie, I think, about 1979.

I do like Mel Katz’s work. I haven’t seen this one, Garden Gate, but Katz has been doing his same thing for a while now. I’m a sucker for the color.

Splitting hairs, I suppose, but it’s a free country, right? Right?

PSU Prof Michihiro Kosuge, Composition. Leaves me cold. This style doesn’t translate well into this generation. (Above) Well, for me anyway.

 

Bruce West – our collection of heavy metal

Retired LC Prof Bruce West has sold a lot of his stuff. To us.

West has been sculpting abstracts of local mountain vistas for dozens of years. Chugging along, and selling a lot of them to our government. Which park them and forget them. Well, why not?

How Land Form looked in 1976 when first installed.

How Land Form looks now. Stronghold of squirrels.

I attended the Acorn Festival at Lair Hill Park recently with about 600 squirrels and this behemoth. Man is such a speck, we ponder beyond Descarte, how do we know WE exist collectively? What will be here in a thousand years? What will tell our tale?

Spray paint. Where’s RACC?

Well, squirrels. Definitely. And probably this thing. Ugly as hell.

More spray paint mess. Is this art or vandalism? A puzzle. I guess it’s art because it’s been here for years. An augmentation. An intervention. An appropriation. Something.

The squirrels did not contribute the spray paint.

Below is what the Waterfront Park Stage looked like in 1978 when it was first installed. Bruce West made the beautiful groovy backdrop to a performance space / plaza, and entrance what was at the time to only access point on the west side to the river. (Now only at Harborside Marina if you have a key or clumber down to the waterline below about Market Street.)

(Actually there’s a neat hidden bit of beach about 300 yards beyond Harborside, directly under the Marquam.)

Here it is now. The Big Dig sewer has churned up Waterfront Park leaving this piece behind cyclone fence for the past year or so. The surrounding brickwork will need replacing, and all the wood is rotten. Lamps will need to be replaced. We’ll see…

Transit Mall thing politely titled, untitled. Part of the 1976 or 77 splurg on low-maintenance art for the Mall startup.

Can we get exchange this untitled thing for a picnic table?

People forget how the construction of the Transit Mall bankrupted dozens of small businesses on 4th, 5th, 6th and Broadway.

Below, another Bruce West artwork, in the Pittock Block main lobby. Security Guard says, “That’s art? You’re kidding, right? Lemme write this down!”

 

Mad Crows

Scratched around a bit on this warm and engaging bronze in the plaza of the Linfield College Nursing School in NW Portland (about 22nd and Northrup).

It’s not big Edward “Buck” Schiwetz, tepid watercolorist who passed on in 1984. No, this big comfy bronze is by Berthold “Tex” Schiwetz, who cast this St. Francis + five pals in 1966. He died in 1971.

I am not going to tell you a bible story – suffice to say preaching to birds and other animals is emblematic of Francis. A common symbol within the hagiography, this moment has been wrought in metal and on canvas for centuries. I think, tho, Linfield is Episcopalian. Or Baptist. I don’t know. And couldn’t tell you the difference anyhow. It doesn’t matter.

I have always liked this piece, found it warm and inviting. The crows are both mad and delighted to be the subject of so much attention, rendered huge, friendly, and somewhat abstract.

Francis is a small man, humble in a thin robe. His eyes protrude weirdly, and his toes, segmented by the thong of his sandals, are anatomically awful. But he’s smiling a weird little I-know-something-you-don’t-know satisfied smarmy smile which is nice and charming in a clever way.

His dapper little beard, his intent eyes, calmly looking out, waiting, not posing for a holy picture, just calm and waiting.

His arms are around his friends, the crows. Who are these crows. Shiteaters, trash-pickers, yack yack yackers, bad luck, ugly thinks. Stupid things. Scat!

But these crows are friends. Gentle friends. Mad and delighted friends. The hands hold the birds carefully, tenderly, like a loyal dog or an obedient child. He’s tamed them? No, look at their eyes. The crows are mad. But they love Francis. And that’s the story. Love is the balancer.

It’s weathered well, moved a couple of times I think, but is in very good condition. If you visit Linfield, there are also two less interesting sculptures behind and below Francis in a sunlit but locked atrium. More interesting are three paintings inside, two in the stairwell and one up in the student lobby. Wild exuberant human figures in motion.

Van Gogh + Hitchcock + a thousand others used crows as frights. See the Hollander’s Wheatfield with Crows

 

Lost in the Matrix

Matrix II – Charles Kelly
Bought by Dept of Transportation and Tri-Met (when did the hyphen disappear?) for the opening of the Portland Transit Mall, 1977
Sixth Avenue and Oak Street, Portland.

Plus and minus. Pretty simple. There’s a sexual interpretation, but I can dish it or leave it alone.

This stylish sculptural art has been holding this spot on the transit mall, rain or shine, for almost thirty years.

It’s hard to spot because of it’s funky 70s look, it washes out and could be a piece of construction machinery or some leftover debris from a flood or car crash. It’s hard to see on closer inspection, because other surrounding things, people, pigeons, are so much more interesting.

Matrix III, below, is in Salem. I don’t know where Matrix I is, or if it ever was. Charles Kelly seems to have made these and stopped making sculpture. That’s probably for the best.

Somehow I don’t think it was meant to be on a pedestal, now up to about ten feet high. But without the pedestal pedestrians would topple over it – because it’s so invisible.

This was a typically college professor piece at the time, semi-abstract, thick, iron and stone and honest labor put it all together. Probably had some sort of earth-air-fire-water hippy dance-blessing too.

Our contemporary problem, as with Satan’s Scrotum, it this super-importantly-titled thing is protected as “art” and is also virtually indestructible. Vandals, weather, birds, being ignored hasn’t changed it. Kelly’s art could literally be sitting on this Portland streetcorner in a thousand years.

Unless! The earth opens up and swallows it whole. I’ll never give up hope.

Matrix III – Charles Kelly
Gift of Salem Insurance Agents of the Marion-Polk Agents Association
Between Library and City Hall, East Lawn, Salem Civic Center
Corten Steel and Cement

UPDATE 2007 – this sculpture has been placed in storage.

 

Satan’s Scrotum

Did I imagine this mnemonic moniker or does it float at 10th & Burnside like an unfortunate smell?

First titled Pod, built by Peterson Structural Engineers, highlighted on Oregon Art Beat, cost RACC $50,000 (Pdx Tribune + plaque says funded by Portland Streetcar Inc. [the streetcar itself was as you might remember funded by you and me taxpayers] and BBC Steel).

Ignorable amidst traffic noise and unregulated signage, it sits ominous on three immovable wheels, a heavy metal ghastly of brushed steel, managing demonic charm with a semblance of interactivity.

Reach your arms up high and push the testes and the devil dicks swing about madly.

Quite possibly Fred Allen was Satan, “Oh Portlandia!” Certainly upsets the feng shui of skid road.

Perhaps scratching Satan’s Scrotum will be a future midnight ritual for errant Foursquare Church debutantes. Whoops! The future is now already.

 

Ghosts of the Machine

Portland has three federal courthouses, all downtown, all somewhat empty, all with curious artworks attached: Pioneer Courthouse – currently undergoing a serious and controversial renovation, Gus Solomon Federal Courthouse, and the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse.

Gus Solomon, a respected Oregon jurist, died in 1986. Somehow in 1989 Congress decided to rename the courthouse on Sixth and Market after him. At the formal and always locked entrance to the building on the Market Street side, then Governor Neil Goldschmidt, Congressman Les Aucoin, and many distinguished jurists heard Solomon’s friend and former clerk, Stephen Gillis make cordial remarks before a crowd of distinguished family members, jurists and reporters.

At the close of the ceremony, Ventana al Pacifico (Window to the Pacific) by Manuel Neri was unveiled. The price tag – $100,000.

Expenses in building and decorating federal courts has also been controversial – and relatively unlimited. The U.S. Courts Design Guide (caution 1+ megabyte PDF) hold the instructions, but only Gore Vidal could explain the rational. And he hasn’t.

This freestanding relief sculpture, from Carrara marble, was commissioned by the General Service Office as part of their Art-In-Architecture program.

Neri has been making bronze and marble sculptures like these, but typically freestanding and simpler for a couple of decades. He also sells prints of his sketch drawings.

I won’t comment on his work in general, since I haven’t seen enough of it to muscle up an opinion.

My guess though is the GSA commissioned this piece with specs on maintenance, but not on integration with the larger structure. Because it doesn’t. At all.

The courthouse is a a calm, tan stone color, augmented by polished bronze armatures and doors, and near Ventana al Pacifico are two beautiful large bronze sconces. Cameras discreetly ring the building. Men with guns stand at the doors and windows.

In 1989, the tree on the east side of the sculpture was only five or eight feet high, allowing a clear view from Sixth Avenue. Now allowed to overgrow, the brush and leaves hide the artwork, not for modesty.

Like many with valuable public sculptures, vandalism is a key rational for creating a barrier between the artwork and the viewer. Like with many Portland sculptures, Ventana al Pacifico is hoisted high and away from it’s potential viewers, about 17 feet high on the east side (Market is at a slight rake) and 15 feet on the west. The clear view, from the west, is pushed off by height, by stairs, by distance.
Really there is no clear level view of Ventana al Pacifico.

But that’s a minor bureaucratic issue, rendered irresolvable by federal bureaucracy. Until the big earthquake comes, this thing’s not moving.

The larger issue is the sense of the sculpture itself. The figures are rough sketches of humans, parts are aligned, but parts – faces, hands, torsos, are roughed out, drilled with holes, punctured. The evoked feeling is of pain, of loss, of suffering, of incarceration, of the wiping out of identity, of facelessness. Of invisibility – in the middle of a big handsome city.

These are spectural guardians, ghosts of the machine of justice, stuck in the purgatory of the locked entrance, reminders of all the humans who have lost their freedoms, their identities – perhaps their lives – in this rock island of the law.