Oregon Biennial lacks people and passion

TAKE A WALK through the Oregon Biennial '97, which has at last worked its way to Eugene for a summer run at the University of Oregon Museum of Art, and you may be struck, as I was, by a bizarre question: Where did all the people go?

We're not talking about flesh and blood people visiting the museum - that's a question for another time - but artistic depictions of people in what bills itself as a sample of the best contemporary art in Oregon. Look around the gallery space. As reflected in its finest art, the culture of our state must be well crafted but arid, precise but lifeless, and intelligent but mannered to the point of sterility. There is plenty of textile, pattern, design and irony at play in these works from 33 top Oregon artists. But there is no passion. You'll actually find more pictures of insects here than pictures of humans.

Does all art have to be about people? Of course not, although ultimately, all art is. What the art of this show is certainly about, though, is estrangement and alienation, a high-toned coolness that, no longer willing to dirty its hands with humanity, occupies itself with textured craft and finely spun visual haiku. Instead of art about people, the biennial presents us with art about art. This is not to say that any individual piece is bad. On the contrary, the show is excellent on almost every level. The works are highly professional and well presented, with an artistic gloss that approaches Hollywood movies in production quality.

Plenty of individual works brought me back for a second look, from Christine Bourdette's energetic pastels of whirling-dervish root crops (yes, you read that right) to Rae Mahaffey's sumptuously designed acrylics, stenciling wallpaperish designs out of fruit.One of the best, and best-displayed, pieces in the show is Michael Brophy's large and somber monochrome oil painting of a slash heap, showing the new Oregon landscape at its most ominous. Other pieces delight out of sheer whimsy. William F. Moore has built a door-sized tripod of large hunks of maple accented with bronze. Whatever the thing is - it's titled "Tholos" - it's certainly neat.

And then there are the insects and flowers. Dianne Kornberg made an enormous - 40 inches by 50 inches - photographic silver print of a display case full of dragonflies, entitled "Insecta 3Ó; Geraldine Ondrizek took the idea even further, creating an entire installation of old-fashioned museum cases full of flowers in "Collectors Chamber." Yet, taken together, the biennial show offers an extremely polished look at a very small vision. Some of this has to do with where the art comes from. The biennial show was selected by Kathryn Kanjo, curator of contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum; although it claims to represent all Oregon, it really is almost entirely a Portland show.

Check the artists' bios. Practically every one is Portland born, Portland educated, Portland bred. The show, you might say, is Portland inbred. As a result, the biennial seems less regional than just provincial. Instead of drawing on the entire state, it gives us the work of a small club of like-minded, university-educated, middle-class artists all working within the same limited context. That's too bad. Oregon has much more going on within its borders, both geographically and artistically, than Kanjo managed to find for this show. Of course, not everything happening artistically in the state is as polished as the Portland scene. But I'd be happy to trade polish for passion. If we're lucky, we'll get to see both in 1999.

July 31, 1998