What Is Portland's Artistic Future?

Theater is Portland's artistic future.

Amanda Hunt and Disjecta's "Portland2014," partially exhibited at Southern Oregon University's Schneider Museum of Art through December 6, respectfully nods to studio art's 2D past while drawing focus to its interactive and performative future.

The body of Portland2014 is 2D: Modou Dieng and Devon VanHouton's Tranquilo references public mural. Travis Fitzgerald represents tapestry with Objects of Permanence I & II. Blair Saxon-Hill's double-sided quilt Shifting Ground and Occupation hangs in the center of the gallery, and D. E. May's geometric musings hang towards the far end. Abra Ancliffe's interactive Personal Libraries Library nestles in a corner near the entry. The its membership card reads,

"The Personal Libraries Library is a lending & subscription library located in Portland, Oregon. The Library is dedicated to recreating the personal libraries of artists, philosophers, scientists, writers and other thinkers & makers. It, and the books, function as a locus for research, connections, convergences, discoveries, curiosity & happenstance.

"The PLL Press produces and disperses printed matter that investigates the material, conceptual, textual and social presence of the Library."

Enhanced white noise emanates from Kelly Rauer's Locate, a triptych of video loops meditating on human movement with its locus in the spine, in the back antechamber. Studio art, dance and video converge in this geographically isolated yet aurally pervasive piece.

PLL and Locate stand out by their difference. In a space dominated by satisfying but ultimately predictable work, these two pose questions: what is a lending library doing in a museum? what is that noise coming from the back? Without ignoring the pedigreed place that 2D art holds in such a venue, Portland2014 guides museum art towards the interactive and performative. Hunt and Disjecta are telling their artists and venues to think theatrically.

We're used to the two dimensional in art museums. There's not a lot of ground left to cover. If artists want to grow, they need to encourage their audience to engage with their work, like Ancliffe. They need to pull divergent media together like Rauer. They need to think like theater makers. 

Americana Passé

How can we open galleries up to people of color to make them more than simply white man's land? Not by focusing on Caucasian nostalgia, like Royal Nebeker does at his ongoing exhibit at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University.

America's demographics are changing. We are increasingly becoming a brown nation, but we wouldn't know that by going to look at the art at Schneider. If we want our cultural resources to represent our whole community, then we need to exhibit work that doesn't present such a narrow view of American culture.

Nebeker is a neo-Expressionist who utilizes collage in nearly all of his work by juxtaposing text with his images. His painting is rich in texture, and vibrant in color from the sylvan blues of The Blue Bike to the oppressive shadow of Hands of Healing to the lonely maroon of Til Østbon. Twilight, in fact, is a favorite theme. It infuses everything in The Blue Bike and Til Østbon, and it approaches just off frame in Marbles at Twilight. Americana also weaves throughout his oeuvre. It's passive in his 1971 piece Mrs. Senior and Fern, but dances with twilight and violence in The Blue Bike, Marbles at Twilight and War Cry. The latter juxtaposes silhouettes of Indians and Arabs with a placard for Gene Autry's The Cowboy and the Indians which reads "war whoops ring.. war paths flame."

His Americana demonstrate exhibits nostalgia for a time of innocence, untouched by the brutality of racism and xenophobia. It negates the American-ness of experiences that have always been fraught by one race's ongoing oppression of the others. It's a comfortable fit for a venue as rooted in white privilege as an art gallery. It's a great fit for the America of the 1950s, but not for the America of 2014.

Cultural resources ought to be for everybody in the community, not just the white and/or privileged. To exist for the whole community, they need to exhibit work by and about more than just the white and/or privileged.

Humor of "Horrors"

Ashman and Menken created their iteration of Little Shop of Horrors during a moment of cultural pessimism. It's current popularity belies a certain amount of anxiety in our modern society.

Howard Ashman and Alan Menken created their musical adaptation of the 1960 horror comedy during the beginning of the Reagan administration, when the former Hollywood B movie actor was ramping up the arms race with his "Star Wars" program and cutting funding to public goods like art and education. This poppy musical about the extinction of the human race is currently playing in two TCG member theaters (the Bristol Riverside Theatre in Pennsylvania and A.C.T. in Seattle), and at least one university theater (Southern Oregon).

Loveable loser Seymour Krelbourn (played by Andrew McNath at Bristol, Joshua Carter at A.C.T. and Ethan Niven at Southern Oregon) works at a flower shop whose cash flow is drying up. He's in love with the beautiful Audrey (Laura Giknis at Bristol, Jessica Skerritt at A.C.T. and Alyssa Birrer at Southern Oregon), who's in an abusive relationship with a sadistic dentist (Danna Vaccaro - Bristol, David Anthony Lewis - A.C.T., Cameron Gray - SOU). Seymour's luck turns around when he discovers a mysterious flytrap (voiced by Carl Clemons Drake and puppeteered by Nate Golden at Bristol, by Ekello Harrid, Jr. and Eric Estebb at A.C.T., and Karen Fox and Michael Hays at SOU). People flock into the flower shop to see the curiosity, unaware that Seymour is keeping it alive by feeding it his own blood. As the flytrap Seymour realizes he doesn't have enough blood to keep her alive. And thus he sets out on a path of serial killing in exchange for fame, fortune and the girl of his dreams.

 

When Little Shop of Horrors premiered off-Broadway in 1982, our country was facing the possibility of another World War, except this time with more nuclear weapons. Reagan's emphasis on military build-up only exacerbated anxieties. Between the two of them, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had enough fire power, anecdotally, to obliterate human life several times over. Little Shop's humor comes from a place of powerlessness: if we can't stop human extinction, we might as well make a joke about it. While he was moving money into defense, Reagan was taking money from the arts. If arts were to succeed, they would have to adapt to the capitalist model that the nation was pushing them into. Hence, Little Shop of Horrors needed to be a poppy musical with a laugh a minute and songs the audience would hum in the lobby. Its continued popularity is a statement on our national mood. All the defense and public safety infrastructure we've accumulated couldn't stop the 9-11 attacks, or the Boston Marathon bombing. We can't even stop non-political violence like the Isla Vista killings. And even if we don't die in some awful instance of mass violence that all our defense spending apparently can't protect us from, how's our quality of life? The students at and in SOU's Little Shop of Horrors will earn their bachelors hopelessly in debt, and then they'll have thin opportunities to get the kind of employment that will dig them out of that debt. For all it's frolicking, Little Shop of Horrors opines that, if the earth is going to hell with all of us on it anyways, then we might as well just sing.

The Little Shop of Horror's perennial popularity tells us something about our relationship with the 80s, specifically, that we're not a whole lot happier or more secure than we were then. As such, it's an enduring indictment of Reagan's presidency. Sure, he thought he was helping the country by building up our defense infrastructure and pushing his brand of capitalist ideology on us, but look where we are now. If all theater's political, and every artistic choice is a social statement, then surely Little Shop of Horrors is one of the most nihilistically leftist plays there is. Bristol, A.C.T. and SOU's choice of Little Shop belies an unhappy acquiescence to unpredictable violence and the economic blight of neo-liberalism.

Our Town

This is the 75^th anniversary of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Hence, everybody’s doing it: it’s playing at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, as well as three Portland theaters. It was the third most produced full-length play in high schools last year. And yet, Southern Oregon University’s auditorium was only about two thirds full, while the devised piece next door was sold out.

Director Paul Barnes cites an unnamed “many” who consider Our Town to be “the great American play.” Why, then, doesn’t it pack them in?

Our Town is the dream of American conservatism: to take the idolization of Main Street and the insularity it represents and cover the earth with it. It takes the mystique of the American small-town, the simplicity of a bygone era, and explodes this nostalgia to universal proportions. Wilder’s universalization of historicized white American culture smacks of Manifest Destiny. For example, Professor Willard’s historical prologue spans millions of years. His mention of the indigenous inhabitants of the area serves only to underpin Caucasian claim to the land: the Indians were not there that long; they have entirely disappeared; if anything’s left of them, it’s an implied secret in three families’ genealogy.

The paradox is that Our Town maintains an inordinate amount of American stage time by playing into fantasies of American universalism, and yet it can’t compete with the unknown devised piece White Fugue next door. Do I think Our Town should be abandoned? No, Wilder has something to say about white American conservatism, and he really says it beautifully. Should it be done less? Well, we’re not all white conservatives, are we?