Nora Robertson – PLAZM

William Damiano: “Art Show” in Portland

Nora Robertson — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:20:10 +0000

Burnside Street gallery Nationale hosts the watercolors of William Damiano through the 27th of this month. While a multitude of pop-cultural and historical figures–Sonic the Hedgehog, Marilyn Monroe and Busby Berkeley among them–appear in or are referenced by Damiano’s broader body of work, Nationale’s selection, entitled “Art Show,” spotlights characters of Damiano’s own invention.

The allure of “Patricia Poodle”– a purple miniskirted, floppy-eared, gogo-booted canine–accumulates over the a series of smaller works and culminates in a larger format portrait of Patricia posing like a pinup. Damiano depicts a family of foxes–mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, baby–in a range of moods and modes: the family at work on a movie project, the family clad as Lonely Hearts Club band members.

Damiano investigates how group dynamics might manifest under extraordinary circumstances. What if the Fox Family were a poker deck? Who would play the joker? Damiano’s wry wit and wisdom are revealed through his reorientation of funny page figuration. Damiano is one of many artists working at Project Grow. Nationale’s May Barruel will curate a group show of Project Grow artist work at Stumptown Coffee this summer. —Elizabeth Pusack

Light Structures

Nora Robertson — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:50:50 +0000

Laura Fritz

Show preview by Elizabeth Pusack

Prisms, projections, and shadow play are among the previously employed strategies of the five artists featured in False Front’s forthcoming show of light installations, curated by Canadian-born Portland artist Laura Hughes. False Front is keeping the particulars in the shadows pre-show, but Hughes conjures the history of human conceptions of light in her curatorial statement.

Sydney S. Kim

“In ancient times, it was thought light was contained within the eye itself: emitting onto the seen object like aiming a lantern. We now understand light through modern science as electromagnetic radiation visible to the human eye measured by wavelength, frequency, speed, and direction.” She, and presumably the show, explore perception and visual engagement with everyday life.

Adam Ekberg

Artist Laura Fritz, who exhibited an intriguing installation at Plazm’s 20th Anniversary event last summer, contributes new work to “Light Structures.” Says the Seattle Post Intelligencer, Fritz’s work involves “the inside of your brain, the place where you process light, make memories and filter out stray things. In your account of what happened on any given day, you may not include the strand of hair that fell across your face, the inanimate objects that appeared to jump at the edge of your vision, the moth you saw trapped on a screen or the cat waiting behind a door. Those stray things appeal to Fritz.”

Also eagerly anticipated is an Adam Ekberg “minor spectacle–” his works often pass for especially charming screen-shots–as well as new works by Cay Horiuchi, Sydney S. Kim, and Scott Rodgers.

Cay Horiuchi

The show opens on April 7th, with an opening reception from 6-9, and runs through April 29th. Viewing hours are Saturday and Sunday from 12-3 or by appointment. False Front’s mission is to provide regional artists and curators with with an exhibition option beyond the conventional gallery.

[PANK] Invades Portland

Nora Robertson — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:18:33 +0000

[Pank] Magazine is bringing its national reading series, [PANK] Invasion, to Portland this Friday at E.A.T Chapel with readers Monica Drake, Gigi Little, Ryan Bradley, Marcelle Heath, Rebecca Olson, and Domi Shoemaker. I caught up with editor M. Bartley Seigel to ask him a few questions about [PANK] and the imminent invasion.

[Pank] fosters access to emerging and experimental poetry and prose. What is the edge of things these days?

The edge of things tends to find us, and all we can really do is decide whether or not to publish it.

Find out more about what you can expect from a [PANK] invasion and running an arts collective on peanuts and duct tape after the jump.

[PANK] is an arts collective based at Michigan Technological University. Is it still important for a literary outlet to be attached to a university or based in a city?

Don’t kid yourself about institutional affiliation. We’re not the Virginia Quarterly. We run [PANK] on peanuts, duct tape, and a lot of hustle and volunteer labor. Both of our institutions provide us a kind of safe haven and stability, but not much else. Think Cormac McCarthy at the Sante Fe Institute.

And, god no, lit outlets needn’t be based out of universities or cities. Journals put out by MFA or English programs aren’t generally very good in my opinion, what with committees and boards of trustees doing their best to kill what makes art tick. Cities, in my opinion, tend toward myopia in the same ways. Cliques form. There’s enough people in the near vicinity that cities cease to engage much beyond their limits. That’s not always the case, but you see it a lot.

How do you decide where to invade?

The Portland and Seattle readings began with me having a conference in Seattle. To date, we’ve invaded Chicago, DC, Brooklyn, New Orleans and San Francisco.

What can we expect from an invasion?

Poetry and prose readings from [PANK] contributors and friends. And drinking. There is usually drinking.

The Romans would go in to expand their territory. After we’re invaded by [PANK], will we be part of an empire when you leave?

I like to think of us more like Visigoths, invading and sacking Rome. [PANK] is coming for your treasure and your women, figuratively speaking.

Catch more of [PANK] this Friday the 23rd at E.A.T. Chapel, 850 NE 81st St., 7PM. Co-presented with Burnside Review and Housefire Publishing. This interview was edited for clarity.

Neon Frontier on 107.1 FM: Skatepark Revolution

Nora Robertson — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 02:41:29 +0000

By the early 90’s, skateboarding was in a slump again. The sport had gotten to a new level in California in the 70’s when skaters brought surf-style moves to the empty swimming pools and decaying urban infrastructure that littered the edges of towns like Venice Beach. But then, street skating ran into community opposition in most parts of the country, and skate parks were having liability issues. Mark Scott, Dreamland Skateparks owner and one of the original builders of the Burnside skatepark, sat down with me to discuss how it took a DIY community of Portland skaters building an indie skatepark under the Burnside bridge, in cooperation with the local business community and retroactively approved by the city, to kick off what Mark described to me as the skatepark revolution.

Check out the podcast on 107.1 FM here.

Neon Frontier on KZME 107.1 FM: Food Pioneers

Nora Robertson — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 02:13:59 +0000

The American system for producing food seems pretty broken at this point. In the October food and drink issue of NY Times Magazine, food writer Mark Bittman said that for people to eat well, live well and be healthy, for agriculture to be sustainable, for life in rural areas and even the way we live in cities to be sustainable, the food system has to change. This summer, I drove out into the dry flat grasslands down five miles of bumpy dirt road in the High Desert of eastern Oregon to go to a party ranchers Doc and Connie Hatfield were having at their house for people interested in the ranching cooperative they founded, Country Natural Beef, that supplies Burgerville, New Seasons, Whole Foods, Higgins Restaurant and the Japanese restaurant company Kyotaru to name a few places. I talked with Doc and Connie and award-winning chef, Greg Higgins, on pioneering new ways of producing local, affordable, sustainable food that also is economically viable for the small producer. The Hatfields’ story of how a cooperative of 100 Northwest ranchers has made it work since 1986 for themselves, for the land, and for the people eating their beef holds out hope for how food is made in this country.

Listen to the podcast here.

For the reading series segment podcast, listen here.
For the Crow Arts Manor segment podcast, listen here.

Artist As Activist: Politics + Creativity

Nora Robertson — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 05:46:04 +0000

Art can either instigate or reflect political movements, but once social change is accomplished, it’s hard to get the toothpaste back in the tube. This Thursday the 10th at PNCA, New Yorker cartoonist Shannon Wheeler (author of Oil and Water on the oil spill in the Gulf), editorial cartoonist Matt Bors, author/activist Lidia Yuknavitch, novelist Monica Drake, God Is Disappointed in You author Mark Russell and a climate change expert sit down with Nora Robertson to dig into how art can lead to political action. Community discussion to follow the panel at 7:00, door at 6:30.

The New Oregon Interview Series: Linda K. Johnson

Nora Robertson — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 16:53:00 +0000

Finding the Forest. Image: Julia Keefe and John Klicker.

Taller than the Other Trees:
An Interview with Linda K. Johnson

By Nora Robertson

In 2008, I sat down with dance artist Linda K. Johnson in her shady Portland bungalow. Johnson moved around her kitchen with a loose gait, dressed in a hoodie and yoga pants, to make us tea. In the ‘90s, Johnson was intimately involved in the early beginnings of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). PICA’s Time Based Art festival, an international performance festival, had in the fall of 2008 just presented collaborators Johnson, Randy Gragg and Third Angle Music’s City Dance, an installation of over 30 dancers in the four downtown fountains designed by architect Lawrence Halprin. City Dance celebrated how Halprin drew on the participatory performance work of his wife, the modern dancer Anna Halprin, to avoid the gutting of the urban center typical of ‘60s urban reform and instead invited participation by passersby going about their daily lives. Lawrence Halprin’s innovation became part of the common vocabulary of public space today. Johnson’s work shares many of these concerns with how we use our spaces.

Learn more about the fertility of Portland’s creative space and our new national relevance after the jump.

City Dance. Image: Julia Keefe and John Klicker.

There Is a Fertility Here That Makes Things Possible

Nora Robertson: Portland is getting a lot of national attention lately compared to fifteen years ago. What do you think is going on?

Linda K. Johnson: I think there has been this slow bubbling up of the audience. People would say that we were moments away from a renaissance. The creative community was starting to happen. People started moving here. It was years and years and years of regional planning. All those things started to create the perfect storm for a certain kind of culture that we have now. We are still the city on the West Coast that does whatever it wants. We live in this state that has the bottle bill, the death with dignity act, and the urban growth boundary. The artists are just another group of people in this climate of complete authenticity.

NR: The writer [and Plazm editor] Jon Raymond said that Oregon historically is a place where people moved to get away from history. What history do you think people are moving here to get away from?

LKJ: People came here to get away from history, but they knew the history. The West Coast and Oregon are places that traditionally people have gone to start over and have the freedom to do what they want to do. I think people view it as a place where they can come and adopt any posture, that there is space for new ideas to live here. They are going towards an open space.

Part of why it was possible was that the infrastructure isn’t so clamped down. I could make a piece in Forest Park that went on for eight hours, and people weren’t sure if it was an installation or nature. I saw there was space for me to make things that existed in the cracks. I got rewarded for that in that they got funding, they got written about, they created dialogue with my peers, and they created new opportunity. It is not just that people came here, but that people could stay here too because there is a fertility here that makes things possible.

Image: Susan Suebert.

NR: Would you say that a concern with the spaces we live in is typical of your artistic concerns? For example, your installation, Tax Lot 1S1E4ODD, made a temporary garden out of a vacant lot by a freeway.

LKJ: What I was trying to get at there was to make us look more carefully at density and urban planning. That garden was really about asking everyone to consider more deeply how we use this land out there. For me, it was a performance piece. The gardeners and the plants were performers and the buses, cars, automobiles, and walkers were the audience. I think the thing that has always been very important in my work is that it is not done until there is a blurred line between performer and participants. How do you get people to re-map and change their three-dimensional sense of where they go and the potentiality of what that new space means? People began to have a poetic sense of that space.

Image: Susan Suebert.

NR: One thing I found fascinating in City Dance was how the hardscape you were celebrating was in itself a marriage between architecture and dance in some ways.

LKJ: [Lawrence Halprin] felt like public spaces should be stages for theatre. They should be stages for participation. When you think of public plazas before Halprin and the early sixties, you came and sat on a bench. Those fountains were revolutionary. They really invited you to move into them and participate with them. Now we take it for granted because he changed the way we used public space. I still think possibility is still really highly prized here, possibility and authenticity of thinking.

City Dance. Image: Julia Keefe and John Klicker.

No Tree Can Ever Grow Taller than Another Tree

NR: What do you think about the issue of ambition? When is it making a living, and when is it selling out?

LKJ: I think it is more subtle than that. For someone living in a household with two independent artists, I think it is reasonable for us to think we can own a modest home and make a living with what we do. I think that is separate from a certain pomposity about fame or fortune. I think those things can be separate, but unfortunately, they can get confused. I think every artist needs to have a little more fear in there. I think things need to get really gritty again for a while in counterbalance to being really sophisticated. Whatever gets made here needs to be really honest.

Finding the Forest. Image: Julia Keefe and John Klicker.

NR: That makes me think about Anna Halprin because she was someone working on the West coast who was ignored, and this gave her the freedom to push boundaries.

LKJ: She did outrageous stuff. She has been kicked off the dance tree three times, the history dance tree. Once because she moved out to the West coast out of the limelight. The second time was because she took off her tights and leotard and left those behind. And the third time was because she really started dealing heavily with emotion and one’s personal life. People thought she was not making art anymore. Her path has been painful for her. Now she is, in her nineties, finally fully re-embraced for what she has done. She would be an absolutely different maker if she had stayed in Manhattan.

NR: Sounds like a lot of the influence of Portland was that it wasn’t nationally relevant.

LKJ: That is the truth of things. One of the mothers of modern dance here, a dance mentor for me, was getting National Endowment for the Arts funding in the seventies and no one was getting that sort of national attention in dance. She told me the hardest thing about Portland is no tree can ever grow taller than another tree. We are so supportive of each other to a certain point, but that keeps everyone at this interesting level. There was a very subtle withdrawal of support or tension that kept people from moving out in a way. She was very poised to work on the national level. She was brilliant, a very unusual maker, a Fellini of dance. That was her feeling about staying here, and other people have moved away for periods of time in order to move themselves into a different conversation, to make connections and relationships to see where they could actually take their work. Other people have left. Certainly places like PICA have pushed open some of those conversations. I do think there is a slow and steady potential for some of that weight to lift.


Yvonne Rainer performing Trio A in 1970 at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts. Courtesy Linda K. Johnson.

NR: One thing I wanted to ask you about was Yvonne Rainer’s seminal post-modern work Trio A. How did you become a custodian of that piece?

LKJ: I used to go to New York three or four times a year to look at art. I remember it was pouring rain. I got out of the cab and ripped my backpack. I went in and in the far corner, there was a little movie playing on the wall with three pillows around it, and it was Trio A. I sat down and must have watched it for three hours. I thought, “I don’t even know how to move like that. I don’t even understand that. Is that dance?” It really went into me. A couple of years later, I got an Oregon Artist Fellowship from the state, so I used my fellowship to go to New York to learn Trio A from her. It opened huge doors for me. I ended up meeting Shelley Senter, and we wrote Yvonne and said we wanted to have the rights to teach it so we can keep it alive. Now Shelley and I are two of three official custodians of this work. Yvonne, this is the dance of hers that will live on because it is really considered the citadel of postmodern work. All these people ended up finding one another in 1961 at Judson Church and becoming this melting pot of rebellion. Anna [Halprin] is in there. Her embrace of improvisation, embrace of the walls, evaporation of the traditional stance. She is so influential on all these artists. There is such rigor there.

That is the thing about Portland. Rigor looks a little different here. It is in the nature of how the region thinks about itself. I think there is huge potential for the rest of this country to see us as this very fertile creative environment.

Neon Frontier on KZME 107.1FM: Reading Series Get National

Nora Robertson — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:55:00 +0000

People often have mixed feelings about readings. Readings can be long and boring, Or they can be performances, parties, political rallies, scenes. Portland, like a lot of other cities, has a long history of underground readings through many cultural moments, from Ken Kesey’s Poetry Happenings to today, when Portland is on the national tour circuit. Nora Robertson sat down with 90’s slam host Reuben Nisenfeld, Smalldoggies’ Matty Byloos and Carrie Seitzinger, Bad Blood’s Zachary Schomburg, Literary Mixtape’s Erik Bader, and Loggernaut’s Erin Ergenbright, Jesse Lichtenstein and Paul Toutonghi on Portland series then and now. Neon Frontier is a segment of KZME radio’s Artclectic show and explores Oregon’s evolving cultural space. Check out the broadcast on 107.1 FM on Sunday, October 9th, 5PM.

The Father of the Modern Comic Novel: Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco in Conversation at PNCA

Nora Robertson — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 04:32:00 +0000

Photo credit: Craig Sietsma

“Narrative and pictures are the core of the artistic project these days,” Art Spiegelman told moderator Joe Sacco in front of a hushed crowd at PNCA recently. Part of PNCA’s Focus Week, the evening was held in the long concrete hall of the Swigert Commons, and was packed from the floor to the balconies with students and representatives of the Portland arts community. Sacco, himself the author of American Book Award-winning graphic novel Palestine, was understated and collegial—the format was one of my favorites, a renowned artist having a conversation with another well-known artist. Spiegelman, casual and slouched in his chair, said this experimentation with words and pictures “is what became the graphic novel.” In fact, Spiegelman is often described as the father of the modern comic novel. To which Spiegelman said in a Literary Arts talk the next night, “If so, I want a paternity test.”

But the truth is, Spiegelman has influenced Watchmen author Alan Moore, Chris Ware, and a host of others in the generation of comic artists that followed his own. One of Spiegelman’s core ideas, visible throughout his groundbreaking comic memoir of his parent’s experiences in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, Maus, and his surrealist collection Breakdowns, has been that comics can pull apart words and pictures to reorder time in ways that are similar to what contemporary art has done. “Comics work the way our brains work. We think in icons,” Spiegelman told Sacco. Events can be re-sequenced, memories juxtaposed, and perception made more difficult in order, like art theorist Victor Shklovsky described, to make the reader’s experience of reality new again. Pulling up an image of an early 70’s panel as an example, Spiegelman called this reordering “the grammar of comics.” He has often stretched this to conceptual levels, an experimental sensibility he blames on early exposure to Mad Magazine.


Photo credit: Matthew Miller

“I was oddly imprinted very early like a baby duck with Mad. It was like tree, rock, Mad,” Spiegelman said. “Once I realized that comics were made by people, I wanted to be one of them.” As the child of immigrants, Mad served as a fractured guidebook to American culture and values. “I was nurtured by Mad Magazine, basically.” In addition to Mad, his father bought him vintage comics because they were a bargain, not knowing comics had been censored starting in 1954 for violence and sexual imagery. “Comics were giving us important toxins,” Spiegelman said at Literary Arts the next night, “Horror comics were a way of post-Holocaust Jews to deal with that horror.” His awareness of using comics as a vehicle for cultural commentary had begun.

Spiegelman’s father did not share his son’s enthusiasm for his choice of profession and wanted him to be a dentist. “In Auschwitz, even doctors were dentists,” Spiegelman, in his gravelly Brooklyn voice, said his dad told him. “If you’re a dentist, you can draw cartoons at night, but if you’re a cartoonist, no one will see the dentist at night.” Sacco’s parents, also immigrants, wanted Sacco to join the family business, and thought even studying journalism was a stretch from a practical perspective. “You have more of a chance of becoming an NFL quarterback than being a cartoonist who makes a living,” Sacco said, a little wryness in his voice. “If there’s something else you can do,” Spiegelman agreed, “you should consider doing it.”

After college, Spiegelman’s early and only 9-5 job was at Top Bubblegum designing Wacky Packs—work Sacco described to us, while slides of the Garbage Pail Kids and “Nooseweek” came up onscreen, as “low art.” This seemed like a compliment, especially considering high art and low art have been a theme in Spiegelman’s work, partly because he has taken what was once considered a low form of culture and made it do the work of high art. Spiegelman outlined for us the hierarchy of cartooning, which he said runs, from top to bottom: painter, illustrator, strip artist or gag cartoonist, and comics books, which were considered junky and just above tattoo artists. Sacco asked Spiegelman whether his work at Top represented him as an artist or was merely a response to the market. “My explosive rage with a smile on my face,” Spiegelman answered. “It represented me at the time.”


Photo credit: Matthew Miller

It was through connections made at Top that Spiegelman met R. Crumb in 1966 and was influenced by him to move into more underground comics. “Get in touch with your inner psychopath was the basic idea,” Spiegelman said, gesturing with both hands. “Very unsettling stuff,” Sacco said. The late 1960s were a cultural moment interested in pushing the boundaries of the acceptable, and underground “comix” were the opposite of the safe, censored comics of the ’50s.

However, Spiegelman did not quite find his groove. “I’m not proud of my Viper period,” he said. Not just the heavy crosshatching and big feet, but also the deliberate attempt to shock. He alarmed R. Crumb’s wife once with a strip where Viper cut off the head of a guy performing oral sex on him and had intercourse with the neck. Crumb’s wife refused to allow Spiegelman back in the house. This self-described trial and error seemed to me like the formative period usually seen in any significant artist’s development—he was just doing in the company of R. Crumb and other comic revolutionaries. Sacco said, leaning towards Spiegelman, “I went through a similar period where I was just vomiting out stuff.” Shortly after the Viper incident, Spiegelman made the first Maus strip. He said, “I realized I was better off making a comic about the horror in my own life than trying to evoke horror.”


Photo credit: Matthew Miller

The use of animalsin Maus, which has always read to melike a horrifying Disney reference, did come in fact from a lecture given by afriend of Spiegelman’s, the filmmakerKen Jacobs, on the similarities between blackface minstrels and anthropomorphicanimals in Disney cartoons as a mirror of American racism. Spiegelman haswritten that he thought the Nazi’smetaphor of Jews as vermin could be used in a similar way, and an earlythree-page strip titled “Maus” portrayed the Jews as mice and theNazis as cats. Another short strip, “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” depicted his mother’s suicide when he was a young man,further exploring confessional territory that would develop into thebook-length Maus. Coming afterSpiegelman’s early conceptualwork, Maus benefits from some of hisexperiments with juxtaposition and characterization while breaking new groundin long-form comic storytelling. “After Breakdowns,” Spiegelman said to us, “I was looking for a more accessibleway.”

Photo credit: Matthew Miller

The conceptualwork in Breakdowns was partly aresult of his friendship with Jacobs, who called Spiegelman a “slob snob” and convinced him to visit museums with him. “Just think of them as giant comicspanels,” Spiegelman saidJacobs told him. Spiegelman began experimenting with musical structures thatrepeated phrases, or Cubist representations of faces and settings. Looking at “A Day at the Circuits” up on the screen behind him,Spiegelman pointed out how there is more than one way for the eye to travelacross the page, and none of them were right to left as we usually read. Onepanel could encompass a lot of time, or only a minute. One page sometimes tookhim eight months to draw. “Itwas a comic for comics’sake,” Spiegelman said, “not just for kids.”

Although Maus is a monument of long-form comicstorytelling, it might be his embrace of what comics are when they aren’t just a storytelling device that isSpiegelman’s greatestaccomplishment. “I was pullingwords and pictures apart to make them do things they don’t do,” Spiegelman said. “So they weren’t just digested and thrown away.”—Nora Robertson

Story + Song

Nora Robertson — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 04:37:00 +0000

An evening of words and music with Emily Chenoweth, Margaret Malone, Gigi Little, Nora Robertson and indie quartet Leaves Russell. Two cans of food benefits the ASPSU Student Pantry food bank. Backspace, 5-7:30PM, FREE.