The
View From Here: Finding, Marking and Living on the Line
Riverside
Park, Clackamas, 242-2330.
Sunrise Friday, July 16, to sunset Saturday, July 17. Free.
To get to Riverside Park, take I-205 to the east Clackamas
exit (Highway 224), then follow SE Evelyn Street to SE Water
Avenue.
Johnson will repeat the performance at six other locations.
Linda K. Johnson is camping, but instead of getting out of
the city, she's living on the edge of it.
Sticking out among the picnic huts, baseball diamonds and
boat ramp of Riverside Park in Clackamas, Johnson's 100-foot-square
structure of muslin and cedar looks more like a small home
than a tent. A front porch holds a scrawny plant and two
chairs. Despite the minimal furnishings, Johnson is an image
of domesticity: reading the paper, drinking coffee, chatting
with visitors.
"If someone hasn't seen performance art," says Johnson,
"they might not know I'm performing."
From a distance, Johnson's 36-hour occupation of Riverside
may look like a cross between a sit-in protest and upscale
homelessness. On closer inspection, though, the artistic
purpose of the temporary bivouac becomes clear. On the porch
sit a comment book, stories from Italo Calvino's Invisible
Cities and information about Portland's urban-growth
boundary, a section of which lies 20 feet away from Johnson's
abstract abode.
To Johnson, the UGB is a symbol of community identity.
While she sees the boundary as a progressive idea, she's
disturbed by what's within its borders: a surge of modular,
homogeneous housing units stripped of personality and dictated
by developers. Her public art project on the edges of the
UGB raises questions of how Portlanders want to live in
the future.
"The urban-growth boundary is a complex issue affecting
the next 20 years of the Portland metropolitan region,"
Johnson says, referring to the requirement that the boundary
enclose enough land for two decades of development. "It
preserves the quality of life, agricultural land and recreational
land we value. Who wants urban sprawl?"
While the boundary defines our common space, Johnson notes
that it remains an abstraction for most. "Most people don't
know what or where it is," she says. "The boundary isn't
like the Berlin Wall. It follows natural pathways like creeks.
It's a mutable, invisible map that settles over the metropolitan
area. I wanted to live on the line, and the river is the
line."
Johnson's excursions to the boundary's edges revealed contradictions
in its function as a land-preserver. "The irony of making
space and reducing traffic is that it's completely a driving-based
culture," she says. "You have to drive on the freeway or
through complex suburban subcultures to get to the natural
line." The line skirts a maze of mini-malls and housing
developments that, in Johnson's words, are "frightening
in their banality." Johnson extrapolates that visual landscape
to a social one. "We've built a habitat to be safe, controllable
and accessible, but instead of being authentic, it's uniform,"
she says.
Every few hours, Johnson will tear down and reconstruct
her collapsible residence into different shapes. "I'm manipulating
the structure to invite reflection about the regularity
of the building process," she says. "We can look at the
same environment from many points of view. Portland's urban-growth
boundary is held as a model for its vision of long-term
growth. We should be proud of it. But we should also take
pride in our visual environment, how we create it, what
it looks like. Our desires shape the outcome, but the outcome
also shapes our desires.
"My piece isn't neutral," says Johnson, "but I hope it's
reflective. I want it to inspire reflection about the visual
environment we're creating and will continue to create."
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published July 14, 1999
|
