The 2003 Oregon Biennial: Narrowly beautiful art, and quite safe, too

First the good news. The 2003 Oregon Biennial, which opened at the Portland Art Museum last month, is just as smart, bright, witty, opinionated, brash and charming as the curator who chose it. This is a show that makes you think that contemporary art, contrary to popular belief, actually makes sense. The work is beautiful. It's sophisticated. It's -- wink, wink -- knowing, in that precious way that makes postmodernists very happy.

Then the bad. As in the past, the "Oregon" Biennial, which strives to celebrate the art of Oregon, really ought to be called the Portland Biennial. No, let's rethink that. It really ought to be called the Biennial of Artists From All Over the Place Who Happen to Live This Year in Portland. That's a roundabout way of saying you won't find a lot of Oregon here, at least not in any familiar terms. There's little sense of place to be found here. You won't even find very many native Oregonians - only four - among the 26 artists selected for this year's show. Two of the artists don't even live in Oregon.

Erik Palmer

The show is even more selective than that. In a state full of potters, sculptors, textile artists, book makers and artisans whose media can barely be described, the Oregon Biennial is almost entirely about painting, with a nod toward photography. With a quirky exception or two, sculpture might as well not exist. There are no installations or art videos. You won't find any evidence that woodworkers or printmakers or weavers live in Oregon. There's no found art or outside art to be seen here, nothing odd -- nothing, in fact, at all unusual or surprising. This is a show of safe academic art, of cerebral
paintings by well trained artists with master of fine arts degrees, of works by artists who speak the same visual language, largely learned at art schools or universities. It is a show that is very, very narrow. And, within those bounds, it's very, very good.

Bruce Guenther, the brusque chief curator at the museum, selected the Biennial. He is unapologetic about his elite choices. He feels no obligation to be inclusive or to look deeply outside the Portland art scene. He shrugs off the idea that more might be going on in the arts in Oregon than he found by reviewing 3,600 slides from 900 artists. If there were another artist out there worth including, Guenther suggests, he would have heard of him or her by now. (The Eugene Mayor's Art Show could use some of Guenther's elitist energy to create more bite and coherence in its annual exhibit of local art. And the Biennial could, perhaps, use a little of Eugene's humor and democracy.)

Guenther is a man with a nearly unerring eye in matters of taste, and the Biennial's greatest strength is that the works by its 26 artists actually do create a conversation in the galleries. Paintings play off one another, not obviously or directly, but giving you the sense that all these artists are dealing with the same set of thorny issues: What is there left to paint about when painting is about nothing else but painting?

Plenty, or so it seems. Take the work of Carla Bengtson. A Eugene artist and University of Oregon professor, her two large ellipse-shaped oil paintings "Chalice" and "The Fourth Circle" look vaguely like large doughnuts seen from an oblique perspective, their surfaces reminiscent of reflective water. They're not exactly abstract paintings in the 1960s sense, and yet they're only slightly representational of anything in the natural world. What they may best be described as are experiments in the interplay between different kinds of paint strokes and surfaces and colors. And yet that sounds too brittle to sum up her work. The two canvases have a solid presence, a warmth and personality that's wonderful to be around. They have a pull to them and a heft that are delicious.

Amanda Wojick

A perfect counterpoint to Bengtson's work are the oddly shaped, nearly clownish canvases of Richard Martinez, who plays with simplified Baroque painting elements in bright combinations of loose gesture and stenciled pattern. Martinez, who lives in Ashland, is a card-carrying postmodernist who talks about "appropriation" and "the language of painting." But behind the jargon, once again, it seems he's on to something, having captured in subtle caricature some barely grasped facet of existence. Contemporary art, so often, is the art of the small: the tiny gesture, the subtle nuance, the whisper of unrealized sensation. It's as though we no longer trust our ability to grasp the big issues of life, so instead we concentrate all our energy on artistic haiku. The best paintings in this show have just that quality, of exploring tiny interstices of reality. Portland painter Amy Ruppel mentions just this aspect of art in her statement in the Biennial catalog. "Art helps me realize the existence of small things," she begins. Her paintings, small works of delicate beauty, create tiny, imaginary worlds with simple images: a few lines, a few gradations of color, nothing more.

The photography in the Biennial is more straightforward and, for the most part, not as engaging. Among the most interesting are two very large -- 40 by 60 inches -- digital prints of male nudes by Erik Palmer, a Portland photographer who postulates the vulnerability of superheroes through his Bang Comics! series. Ann Kendellen, also of Portland, shoots conventional black-and-white cityscapes that look like Robert Frank photos from the 1950s, with the people removed. And Nathan Sutton of Portland has some nice color landscapes.

Moving into the third dimension, you won't find any bronze sculpture or wood or anything remotely resembling a statue. What you do find are Amanda Wojick's three-dimensional wall pieces, "Red Cliff" and "Green Cliff." A UO art professor, Wojick fashioned the two sconce-like pieces from Styrofoam, roofing nails and paint chips from Home Depot, creating a clever aspen-like shimmer on their surfaces. And then there are Angela Haseltine Pozzi's fiber sculptures, "Cadmium Reef" and "Lost Chair," in which the Vancouver, Wash., artist creates something that looks like Pacific tide pool meets the Muppets. Even Guenther admits it's sometimes hard to tell fine art from kitsch. He's right.

In the past couple of decades, the art world has felt used up, not confident, unable to look ahead, and so it's looked to the past and to artistic and political theory for guidance. At its worst, contemporary art, with its incessant borrowing and appropriation and intense self-consciousness, feels like the smart adolescent who's always quoting T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound or "I Love Lucy" -- witty, and wearing.

The Biennial provides a good, well edited window on the professional art scene in Portland and around the country, and for that it's worth going to see. All the tedious theories aside, contemporary art is working at finding a coherent voice. Right now it may be an art of small things. One day, we hope, it will be bigger. 

July 13, 2003