Skip to main contentI wanted the Biennial to cold-cock me. Kick my teeth in, throw me down on the ground, and take me by force. Do what art is supposed to do--scare and scar, ennoble or eviscerate by its beauty or brutality, above all to transform by any means necessary, including aesthetic assault. I wanted the Biennial to scandalize, vandalize and sodomize me. Alas, it only pecked me on the cheek.
While the show features a few pieces that take no prisoners, it also features more than a few mediocre ones and as a whole suffers from a flat feel and lethargic layout, an energy more static than kinetic. This is in spite of curator Bruce Guenther's valiant efforts to continue providing a sampling of young artists, which began with Katherine Kanjo's last outing as Biennial curator. In his second go-around as the Biennial's point man, Guenther whittled a field of 928 entrants down to 26 selectees, 14 of whom are under 40, six of whom are under 30, and all of whom, according to him, "are doing post-conceptual work, meaning they're making art that's about the idea of making art." Meaning they're so damned meta- they've lost touch with just making art.
Yet there's no battle between old guard and new. Here quality and crap span the generations. First, the quality. James Boulton gets the cordon bleu for his spark gap transmission, an enormous oil and enamel painting, boldly colored and composed, with invigorating rhythm and a cornucopia of influences ranging from graffiti to computer circuits. Boulton is this Biennial's ascendant star. If he's capable of this caliber of work at 28, he'll really rock as the clock ticks on. Erin Kennedy's work is more subdued but inventive in its own way. She shops at Claire's, buys teeny-bopper accessories and paints them close up and flat in compositions that Guenther says "walk the line between abstraction and representation."
Scott Sonniksen's One Day in Pompeii is an ode to a giant chain, with bubbly surfaces and curvy shapes complementing the geometric structures enclosing the chain's links. James Lavadour is here, represented by the first work you see upon entering the exhibit, and as always, his uncanny neo-Expressionist landscape-photography fakeouts transcend the inexplicable novelty of his technique. G. Lewis Clevenger contributes one of the largest and most impressive pieces on board, a horizontal oil-and-wax number in black, white and gray. Clevenger is a first-rate rectilinear abstractionist, but Guenther should have chosen one of his more vividly colored works, perhaps one of the deliciously garish lime-green or fuchsia riots recently shown at Pulliam Deffenbaugh.
Jan Reaves' organic forms, with their deep reds, contrast nicely with Clevenger's more somber shapes and are among the show's boldest statements. Liz Cheney's intriguing charcoals on paper feature black shapes that look like fox tails, feather boas or chalky X-rays of somebody's large intestine.
Photography is well accounted for, but the offerings come across as pedestrian or gimmicky, with the exceptions of Erik Palmer's forest superheroes, Julia Grieve's enigmatic seductions and Nathan Sutton's immaculately composed allegories.
Among the sculptural works are Lisa Conway's come-fuck-me seashells, Amanda Wojick's marvelous Home Depot paint chips nailed to styrofoam, and Angela Haseltine Pozzi's fuzzy-wuzzy embarrassments. These last Guenther describes as "the juncture of sci-fi and cartoons." I describe them as Fraggle Rock rejects masquerading as high art.
And then there is the rest. David Andersen's semi-Surrealist acrylics are derivative and trite. Taravat Talepasand's homoerotic Greek boys in Speedos make a better case for a summer in Mykonos than an afternoon at the museum. Michelle Ross' ambivalent accumulations and pencil scribbles test the gag reflex. Cynthia Star's precious Boys will be Boys series depicts Fifi dogs in flagrante delicto.
What about video/film pieces, installations and performance art? You'll grow old searching for them here. Guenther's excuse as he walked me through the show: "Video and performance pieces made up less than 1 percent of the entries we got, and most were sophomoric."
"PICA always makes room for video work," I sniffed.
"Of local artists?" he shot back.
Touché.
Still, this exhibit badly needs video, installations and performance pieces to liven up its layout, which is oppressively blocky. Matthew Picton, the curator's most egregious omission, could have really juiced things up spatially with his arcing installations, deployed with such spunk last November at Mark Woolley and more recently in Jeff Jahn's The Best Coast. Picton could have woken this party up. So could David Eckard or Chandra Bocci, both of them Biennial also-rans.
It goes without saying that curating a Biennial is a thankless job. Everybody second-guesses you, especially critics. This being my duty, I asked Guenther what he was going for in 2003 that he wasn't in 2001. After the obligatory ruse that he was simply responding to slides submitted by the entrants, he conceded that "perhaps a different point needed to be made this time." What sort of point? "Perhaps I made more of an allowance for whimsy."
If whimsy means Sesame Street puppets and rutting lapdogs, maybe we should all stay home and look at the real thing. It's unconscionable that the first post-911 Biennial has whimsy as its leitmotif. Oregon artists and the curators who love them should stop tickling us and start punching us in the gut.
Portland Art Museum
The Oregon Biennial is widely regarded as the state's most prestigious invitational exhibition. Begun in 1949, the Biennial features work by artists across the state and from Clark County, Wash. For the second time in a row, sole curator of the exhibition is Bruce Guenther, Portland Art Museum's chief curator as well as curator of modern and contemporary art.
WWeek 2015