"Portland's most fashionably scandalous writer, Richard Speer has a romantic flair and uses language to color by his own numbers..."
-- TJ Norris, visual arts blogger, OregonLive.com"Speer obviously has an Oedipus complex and should return to the whorehouse where his inspiration is born..."
--Willamette Week letter to the editor
Being a writer rocks. You get to follow people around, ask them intimate, borderline rude questions about the things that make them tick, then share their stories with readers here and there and everywhere. The only thing better than being a writer in general would be to be an art critic on the West Coast in the year 2008, which happens to be my gig. I'm based in Portland, Oregon, which The New York Times pretty well thinks is the Coolest City Ever. Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Art Alexakis, the Dandy Warhols, the Decemberists, Chuck Palahniuk, and Katherine Dunn seem to agree.
How to describe this place, its mise-en-scène, its je ne sais quoi, its pâté de foie gras: hipster meets hippie, glam meets grunge, pagan meets vegan. There's a fluidity of class and gender here that's refreshing. We're all so scruffy, it's hard to tell who's homeless and who's just on their way to the Country Fair. We're all so androgynous, it's hard to tell whether the cutest guy you see today might actually be the cutest girl you see today. When the sun sets over the West Hills and the lights twinkle over Burnside, class becomes a phantom, age a construct, sexual orientation an irrelevancy. It's delightfully confusing and confusingly delightful.
"A hedonist-critic in the tradition of Apollinaire and Cocteau,
Speer has a dramatic, baroque flair to his prose."
--Jeff Jahn, NWDrizzle.com
"...a radiantly self-absorbed bon vivant..."
-- Eric Bartels, The Portland Tribune
"Willamette Week arts critic Richard Speer sashayed happily down the long metal staircase
to the tune of '60s rock, apparently in communication with his mothership."
-- Harvest Henderson, society column, The Oregonian
The arts scene in the Northwest is on fire without being on fire. Kind of like a stick of incense: It permeates the room without burning down the house. If everybody in L.A. is an actor, then everybody in Portland is either an artist or a rock star. Which is appropriate, since to me, artists are rock stars. I worship them and their creativity, even though I deal with them daily in my job and am occasionally compelled to write really bad reviews of their shows.
There are two main alternative papers in town keeping everyone on their toes. I happen to write for one of them, Willamette Week. I love WW because my editors give me the freedom to say what I believe without prior restraint. I've never been censored at Willamette Week. That being said, WW doesn't hesitate to publish negative letters to the editor about me. One reader wrote: "Speer obviously has an Oedipus complex and should return to the whorehouse where his inspiration is born." This letter happened to be published the week my mother flew up from Florida for her annual visit. I suppose I should be grateful that WW readers are literate enough to know what an Oedipus complex is. Over at our competitor, The Portland Mercury, the reading level is a little lower. They published a letter to the editor calling me "a pussy" and "a douche-bag."
Richard Speer (What is Sex?) by Gwenn Seemel
acrylic on canvas, 34"x28"
Frankenspeer Cannot Be Controlled
digital media by Corbett J. Myers
Richard by Alexis Mollomo
oil on canvas, 20"x18"
"Richard Speer strikes me as a really cute dilettante..."
-- "Anonymous Art Critic," Eva Lake's ArtStar, KPSU-FM
Richard Speer x 2 by Weihong
photograph from installation 255 - 0 + TEA (Portland Tea Guests)
Richard Speer
drawing by Ben Jensen
Richard Speer by Scott Wayne Indiana and Josh Arseneau
from The Portland Art Coloring Book
Richard at Oba!
Photograph by Martin Thiel
Richard at Doug Fir
Photograph by Tim Gunther
"PORTLAND ABSTRACTIONISTS ARE MINIONS OF THE DEVIL"
by Clay Hawthorne, editor, Portland Art News"...Willamette Week critic Richard Speer, who some think is a low-level priest in a diabolical cult, was recently seen on First Thursday wearing bondage pants and a shirt emblazoned with a red pentagram. Speer was witnessed giving secret handshakes at Elizabeth Leach and Pulliam Deffenbaugh galleries before typing up yet another favorable review of a Technicolor travesty. Speer is one of the more outspoken evil doers, calling on artists to "mix their paint in jism and sign canvases in menstrual blood." Speer wrote that he was disappointed when the Biennial did not "kick my teeth in, throw me down on the ground, and take me by force...scandalize, vandalize and sodomize me," and was so angry that veteran formalist painter Lucinda Parker had the audacity to use muted earth colors in her work that he advised her to stab herself with a palette knife!"
Clay Hawthorne, interviewed in The Organ:
ORGAN: Clay, you reported the rumor that Willamette Week critic Richard Speer heads a Satanic cult devoted to promoting garishly colored abstract painting. Yet I haven't seen any comments from you about Speer's personal website, where he describes himself as the "unholy spawn of a three-way between Oscar Wilde, Ayn Rand, and Timothy Leary." Are there some places you just don't want to go, or is anything fair game?HAWTHORNE: What a boring question. No wonder Speer calls you a pulseless post-mod... Since breaking the Satanic abstractionist story, Speer emailed me to identify himself as the high priest of the cult, not the low-level one Portland Art News reported. This cult is a serious threat and involves several big-name galleries. I believe that Speer is the product of an experiment that has gone horribly wrong. Frankenspeer cannot be controlled. He has dared to walk into the Lawrence Gallery and can be seen walking the streets of Alberta. The Satanic powers that be will not tolerate this behavior.
"A cross between a Beau-Brummell bon vivant... and a wobbling-Pinocchio version of Marilyn Manson."
-- UltraPDX.com
"Speer is probably 10-plus years younger than Ian McCulloch of The Bunnymen, but the two look as if they were separated at birth -- double-sided mirror images of one another, with only slight degrees of cool separation..."
--TJ Norris, visual arts blogger, OregonLive.com
I love being a critic, but nobody said it would be easy. Half the artists in town love you, the other half want you strung up from the Hawthorne Bridge. When you're a critic, your honesty is your only integrity. If you love an artwork, you praise it; if you hate it, you pan it. Extravagantly or mercilessly, as merited. You seek out work that sets you aflame with ecstasy or disdain. You avoid work that makes you yawn. Naturally, you make lots of friends and enemies. When you trash somebody in print, rest assured, you will see them at a party the day after your review comes out. They will be prissy, you will be pissy, and all will be strained and strange. But what's your alternative--give everybody a critical blowjob? You have to trust that artists have thick skin and won't take your pans personally. I say this with with the full authority of someone who has very thin skin and takes everything personally.
So back to Portland and the life of an arts writer. It's all about checking out the Everett Station Lofts or walking into Butters Gallery and going jelly-kneed at the sight of a David Geiser installation spreading across the wall like the monoliths of 2001 turned horizontal and expanding outward with the very universe.
Omar Chacon's riots of psychedelic circles at Motel.
Jo Ann Kemmis' Hans Hofmann-like swaths of pushing/pulling color.
It's about Matthew Picton's pink-and-silver map pieces at Pulliam Deffenbaugh, and his honeycombs made from glass beads and cake sprinkles at Mark Woolley, suspended from the ceiling by a hundred Slinkies.
Matt Proctor's and Leroy Klausmeyer's installations at Ogle.
James Boulton and Tim Bavington and Brenden Clenaghen and Jen Pack at Pulliam Deffenbaugh.
Eva Lake's vibratory pulsations at Augen.
Walt Curtis' gloriously vulgar fantasias at Mark Woolley.
Chandra Bocci's Gummi Bear Big Bang at The Modern Zoo and the Oregon Biennial.
William Pope.L's rotting hot dogs and curdling condiments at PICA, which I endured with my mind open but my nostrils closed.
And it's about the parties: opening parties, closing parties, after-parties, house parties, basement parties. Rake, Sugar, Wonder, Someday Lounge, Launch Pad. Gallery 500 and Haze in their day, spaces where art, music, and socializing mingle. I always remember what Roger Black wrote about Hunter Thompson: "He is one of those guys who wants the lifestyle and the art all mixed up together. It may be impossible for him to separate them."
I feel that way, particularly when it comes to the kind of people you find in the Portland art scene. Mark Woolley out on the dancefloor at Lola's Room, twirling his glowstick nunchucks like a majorette on E. Karen Plemons flitting about a VIP room like a flapper Tinkerbell. Scott Wayne Indiana at Galaxy, turning karaoke into cringe-inducingly cathartic performance art. Carly L. gliding around Gallery Homeland on glitter-spangled rollerskates. Justin Oswald throwing gobs of cash at the strippers at Union Jack's. Randy Calvert tailgating with crystal tumblers and Gentleman Jack. James Boulton and me swilling cheap Côtes-du-Rhône under the Fremont Bridge, a couple art-geek winos. Joe Thurston holding forth in his studio, with its candles and incense and techno and Caprese salad. Jack Shimko back in the day, swinging from the ceiling water pipes like a monkey on acid. Tom Cramer holding forth on Ayn Rand and Alan Watts and the alleged common ground between the two. Jeff Jahn and me as Doppelgänger at a Halloween party, his hair up like Don King's, mine down in bangs á la ABBA. Mark and Marne and James and Bruce Conkle and me crashing Sam and Eugenia Pardue's hot tub at Lauren Mantecon's birthday party. Organic wrestling. Voodoo Doughnuts. Naked sushi. Opium tea. Condom clotheslines. Eight-foot-tall interactive vaginas. And those are just the boring parts.
It's a vie bohème, it's a vida loca, it's funky-glittery decadence all tripped out and piled up in the cuddle puddle from granola hell -- and damnit, I wouldn't trade a moment of it for the world.
--Richard Speer, © 2008
