Cut to THE CORE
Sample a week's worth of Portland's most exciting work at the
multivenue Core Sample.
BY RICHARD SPEER
It's been a hell of a few months. With PCAC's Modern Zoo,
Jeff Jahn's The Best Coast, PAM's Biennial, PICA's TBA, and now Core Sample--not
to mention the ongoing meta-aesthetic digestif of all the above in The Organ,
the City that Works has been working its ass off to prove itself worthy of national
and international attention. There's something both pathetic and noble about
all this "Hey, look at me!" hoopla. Pathetic because it sometimes
smacks of chip-on-shoulder desperation; noble because it reminds us of something
we forgot somewhere between the studio, Coffee Time, Dots and the bong in the
back room: that the only way to raise the creative bar and elevate a reputation,
whether an artist's or a city's, is to aspire and follow through.
Core Sample, the entreaty du jour, is doing plenty of raising. Over an eight-day
period, the "temporary consortium" of artists, writers and volunteers
will showcase a total of 30 discrete exhibits, installations, performances and
screenings, promising enough fat and cud for all of us solipsistic Stumptowners
to chew on for at least a few months.
The event (organizers don't like to call it a "festival") grew out
of a lunchtime conversation between Oregonian writer Randy Gragg and Clear Cut
Press co-founder Matthew Stadler. According to Gragg, the men wanted to document
the current moment in art with "a rigor and self-scrutiny that wasn't going
to come from the institutions here in town." They also wanted to lure the
bigwigs who'll be in Seattle for the opening of Seattle Art Museum's Baja to
Vancouver down to Portland to discover, if they didn't already know it, that
we're not a bunch of lumberjacks who paint watercolors of Mount Hood on the
side. Well, not many of us, anyway.
At first, Gragg and Stadler invited some key local DIY-ers to dinner and suggested
they build a show around new works based on a Portland theme. Cheesy was the
immediate consensus. "They wanted to do their own work," Gragg told
WW, "not to conform to some kind of art assignment." Gradually the
idea evolved into something approaching Core Sample's current incarnation, an
exploration of "regionalism but not provincialism," which aims to
chronicle an extraordinary synergy of under-employed, overeducated and highly
creative young artists and the elder generations upon whose shoulders they stand.
To preserve this auspicious moment in time, Clear Cut will release a catalog
in April with a lead essay by Lawrence Rinder, curator at the Whitney Museum
and one of Portland's most vocal and credentialed champions to the wide world
beyond, i.e., Manhattan Island.
So what can you expect from the festival's--sorry, the "temporary consortium's"--eight-day
run? Here are some highlights:
Red 76 (sans Sam Gould, who can't make it back due to prior commitments in Chicago)
is staging a multimedia project called Community Jukebox, which will somehow
parlay cell phones, wireless Internet connections, voice-mail services and vending
machines into a meditation on communication technology that will prove that
"the jingling of keys can be louder than the megaphone."
Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July will offer yet another installment in their
Learning to Love You More series, which we pray they will infuse with more edge
and less maudlin-masquerading-as-profound mush than in previous outings. (Don't
hold your breath; the current entry's goal is "the creation of an article
of clothing to be crocheted.")
Curators galore will round up artists to prove their various theses. Robert
Gamblin gathers a century's worth of painters to examine the evolution of the
Oregon landscape and Portland cityscapes, while Jeff Jahn will survey the interplay
between the natural and artificial in our state, in which those elements are
blended with especial incongruity. Maria Jensen curates Draw, featuring the
likes of Henk Pander, Melody Owen and Laura Ross-Paul. Flush features such up-and-comers
as Chandra Bocci, Paige Saez and James Boulton. Nan Curtis reminds us in Later
of innovative local DIY-ers who were shaking things up before the current generation
of whippersnappers were shaking their rattlers.
Abstraction be damned, Andrea Borsuk focuses on how figurative painting can
elucidate the dark themes of violence, sexuality and fantasy. In Second Cycle,
Stephanie Snyder and a grab bag of multimedia artists examine our fair city's
obsession with thrift stores, vintage clothing, yard sales and recycling, and
the paths by which garbage winds up in galleries.
In the realm of performance art, damali ayo continues in her preoccupation with
race relations by panhandling for slave reparations. David Eckard will use dirt,
clipped grass, scrub brushes, improvised tools and his own body to inscribe
perfect circles on a variety of surfaces. Eckard's work is either very powerful
or utterly pointless, transgressively original or embarrassingly derivative,
depending on what mood you're in when you see it. Pop a Xanax beforehand and
you'll love it.
If the Biennial left you thinking there isn't a single film or video artist
in a 300-mile radius of the South Park Blocks, Core Sample will rectify your
misimpression with works by Steve Doughton, Bill Daniel, Greg Pond, Matt McCormick,
Lee Krist, Steve MacDougall, Chris Rhodes, Johnne Eschleman and Philip Cooper.
Independent projects round out the lot, among them James Harrison's meditation
on "the mystery and eroticism of the humble two-by-four." Be sure
to bring a condom--the splinters can be a bitch. Bruce Conkle indulges his longstanding
fascination with Sasquatch by interior-decorating a mock-up mountain chalet
for the elusive furry fella.
Charm Bracelet's Brad Adkins and Christopher Buckingham stuff a life-size elephant
made of clear vinyl with five years' worth of art-gallery press releases. What
does the elephant symbolize? Adkins and Buckingham can't agree, so they decline
comment. Finally, M.K. Guth and friends provide a pair of magic red slippers
to fatigue-footed Core Samplers; click your heels together three times, say,
"There's no place like [evening's next venue]," and they'll whisk
you away in a fancy-schmancy art van. Toto, whatever Portland once was, I have
a feeling we're not there anymore.