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ART REVIEW BY KATE BONANSINGA "Us and
Them: Breaking Down Barriers" The great post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) painted Mont Sainte-Victoire, a mountain near his home in Southern France, over and over again. Does that make him a regional artist? It may, if you interpret Lois Allan's definition of regionalism literally. Allan was one of five speakers invited by the artist members of Blackfish Gallery to address the question of regionalism and the artist's role in the community in a round-table discussion held in conjunction with the gallery's exchange exhibition with the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (OCCCA), a cooperative gallery near Los Angeles. There were several participants in addition to the speakers, myself included, and some thoughtful responses prompted a fruitful discussion. Allan is the author of two recent books about contemporary art in the Pacific Northwest, and one of her many astute suggestions during the round-table was that regionalism--a term typically used pejoratively to denote art created outside of an artistic center--represents a conscious choice of subject matter specific to a place. She cited Dennis Cunningham, Michael Brophy and Terry Toedtemeier as examples of Portland artists who use the Pacific Northwest as their principal subject and who are therefore regional. Each of these artists creates images of the landscape that carry environmentalist undertones; Cunningham is primarily a printmaker and drawer, Brophy is a painter and Toedtemeier is a photographer. Allan's examples demonstrate how representational work is more likely to be regional than is abstraction, which tends to be disassociated from any specific time or recognizable situation and thus might have a more "universal" appeal. Allan contended that the work of these three artists is as good as anything being shown internationally--but she also turned on her argument and admitted that the most widely recognized group of artists from this area is the Northwest School of painters, most of whom worked in abstracts. Robert Adams, the well-known photographer who now resides in Astoria and whose most recent body of work focused on the mouth of the Columbia River, fits Allan's concept of a regionalist. A nationally exhibited artist who deeply explores and renders a particular place, no one would label him a "regional artist" according to the generally accepted understanding of the term. Cézanne, on the other hand, isn't regional because his local landscape was a means to a distant end; his ultimate intention was to depict a lasting structure behind the fleeting screens of color that our eyes perceive, to give natural forms cohesive pictorial unity. He dealt with formal issues of abstraction, whereas Brophy, Cunningham and Toedtemeier confront what have become political issues about our environment, rooted in this time and place. According to Allan's definition, the artists of OCCCA who took part in "Inclusion/Exclusion" are not regional, as they don't incorporate concerns overtly applicable to Southern California. But neither are they creating art that warrants exhibition, in our region or elsewhere. Patricia Whiteside Phillips' juxtaposed photographic images (Anima-Animus, for example, shows an animal's face overlaying a human one) merely parrot a technique and subject more proficiently explored over 20 years ago by the widely recognized Nancy Burson. Bart Palisi's Intruding Forces looks like a student exercise in abstract painting. Frank Miller's The Great Battle about Nothing is a large black-and-white rendering of grotesque beings under attack by smaller creatures; it seems to be a loose interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights, the puzzling Bosch landscape of birth, death and semi-sexual human interaction. Miller's flair for the finishing details is as weak as his concept--his piece is tacked to the wall with small black paper clips. How does he defend these choices? He doesn't. In the round-table discussion, Miller claimed that it's up to the viewer to interpret his work because sometimes he himself doesn't know exactly what it's about. But aren't artists, like all professionals, accountable for knowing why they have chosen to do what they do? Shouldn't they be able to elucidate their intentions, at least in general terms? The understanding of art is a two-way street: Artists create physical manifestations of their ideas for the public reflection, and in turn, viewers bring perspectives and understandings (possibly ones that the artist hadn't thought of) to art. It gives artists the potential to be "history makers," in the words of Adriene Cruz, an artist and another round-table participant. In a sense, artists cannot avoid being regional because they, like all human beings, are products of their environment, responding to and affected by it. Like many discussions about art, "Us and Them" touched on the responsibility of the artist and the gallery to make art accessible to a wider public. Art is an intellectual pursuit, to some extent, and it is consequently often considered elitist--as is the job of the gallery owner, who makes selections about what work to exhibit and support, and that of the critic, who decides what warrants consideration and interpretation. Over the past decade, Portland has welcomed an influx of committed artists who have helped the gallery system to come of age. Consequently, the standards for visual art in Portland have risen incrementally because of better artists and gallery owners taking their responsibilities seriously, having a solid understanding of their visions and intentions and finding venues for their work outside the Pacific Northwest.
originally published August 19, 1998 |
