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When I was 18, my Baptist grandmother gave me this morsel
of advice: "Don't go to college. It will turn you into an
atheist." She was wrong--I already was one. Actually, like my
erstwhile hero, Oscar Wilde, I worshiped only at the altars of
art and beauty. But in one sense my grandmother was right.
College did change my spirituality. It opened up the walls of
my chosen church.
To explain: I was a teenage aesthete. I spent my
adolescence in Europe, where I was more likely to haunt
museums than skateboard parks. Frighteningly, I developed a
fetish for Fragonard and gilded wood, my artistic development
arrested in the rococo. When I returned to the U.S. for
college, something dramatic happened. One afternoon as I
scoured the library in search of a Watteau biography, I
accidentally turned into the abstract-art aisles. Out of
curiosity, I pulled down a volume about some fellow named
Mondrian. I opened the book, my brain reeled, the world
changed.
Something about those primary colors twinkling inside
ruthless grids resonated in a place between my sinus cavities
and my soul. Strange new mistresses began to beckon. I
devoured Matisse's L'escargot and O'Keefe's deliciously
gynecological flowers. By the time I turned my tassel, I had
traveled from the saccharine excesses of post-Baroque Europe
to pristine minimalism and a more global cultural awareness,
becoming a walking testament to art's power to shake us out of
our ruts.
Now, a few years down the line but still susceptible to
slackjaw at the discovery of artistic terra incognita,
I find myself surveying the art scene in one of the most
defiantly idiosyncratic cities in the United States. I feel in
Portland the hair-standing-on-end static of potential energy,
on the cusp of kinetic. There's an interplay here, at the
intersection of aesthetics and politics, between behemoths
like the Portland Art Museum, groundbreaking finessers like
the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, gallery
doyen(ne)s Leach, Savage, Woolley et al., and a simmering
indie scene that occasionally boils over with events like last
year's Portland Independent Salon. Still, we need more brio,
courage, more artists with something passionate and
substantive to say about something. To insert
"Portland" into the phrase, "L.A. and San Francisco and...,"
local artists will need not only to challenge gallery owners
and collectors, but to engage the city's wider culture--to
jolt the hipsters and somnambulant yuppies from their
respective aesthetic comas.
In this quest to up the ante there will be missteps. Nic
Walker's pseudo-art deer carcass last March at the Everett
Lofts gave ammunition to those who brand contemporary art a
slave to sensation over content. The art world in the
Northwest and beyond, languishing in a post-pastiche purgatory
between populism and elitism, Thomas Kinkade and Michel
Foucault, will not be rescued by the likes of Walker's
nihilistic venison. What, then, will it take to reassemble the
pieces postmodernism deconstructed? Style--an artist's
individual style, an idea unfashionable these days in certain
circles, is the stamp of his soul. Commitment--I will take
flat-out bad art that has a commitment to itself over
sorta-kinda-maybe art any day of the week.
Art, like opera and soccer in Europe, should be a blood
sport. If artists are to remain vital in this dispassionate
era, they must mix their paints with sweat and jism and sign
canvases in menstrual blood. Yet, art's Dionysian heritage has
receded as the academy and the publicist have advanced. Line,
form and color have given way to "Where did she earn her
M.F.A.?" When it comes down to it, I am more interested in the
painting on the wall than the diplomas. I love art because I
am a sensualist. To surrender to painting, sculpture,
design--or music, food, romance--is quite simply to revel in
experience in all its diversity.
Ah, Diversity. Imagine Portland with more mélange. Picture
the radiant love child of Northwest Everett and Northeast
Alberta streets, a bourgeois/bohemian baby who grows up and
founds a new Factory, where blue rinse meets blue mohawk and
the subcultures with which this city is blessed
cross-pollinate: hippie, queer, black, Asian--hell, even
Greshamite. Is this not what art is all about: integrating
dichotomies, rocking people's worlds as Mondrian once rocked
mine? I may be an atheist (sorry, Grandma), but that kind of
art scene would make a believer out of me.
Originally published on
WEDNESDAY, 7/31/2002
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