On June 14, in the dimly lit, dazzling ballroom of a former Masonic Temple, the rich and the aesthetically inclined sipped shots of cucumber soup as the Portland Art Museum unveiled its new invention: the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards (CNAA). In the museum’s main building nearby were the first byproducts, five solo shows by five artists selected to represent the Northwest. One of them, Seattle painter and sculptor Whiting Tennis, was singled out for a $10,000 prize.
By comparison to his peers—who made neon strippers, sewn
portraits of casualties in Iraq, slapstick videos, stop-motion
animation, and ceramic skulls dipped in chrome—Tennis looks like
a high formalist, the contemporary equivalent of a modernist
monochromatic monk. The triumph of his CNAA show—all the artists with the exception of Jeffry Mitchell
are exhibiting new and old work—is the new, aptly titled painting
Bitter Lake Compound, depicting a trashy backyard in Tennis’s
typical style of collaging flat shapes of varying textures to conjure a
heavy-hearted landscape. The rain of Tennis’s Northwest is especially
acidic. The people who live here are represented only by what they
throw away.
Though it’s not his largest painting, as Portland Art Museum claims,
this one is a giant survey of the techniques he uses to concoct a
sweetly sour atmosphere. Strewn across the canvas in the same style as
the bushes, rocks, piles of wood, and rusted objects of indeterminate
use in the untended backyard—seemingly haphazardly, but
representing a certain series of events, a history—are areas of
blocky, direct acrylic painting, nestled up against painted paper
cutouts, ghostly crayon sketches, and graffiti-like streaks that appear
on the painting’s surface like afterimages.
Tennis is a compelling, mature artist, and the winner of another
Northwest prize last year, the $15,000 Neddy Fellowship. But he’s also
a square choice. I’d have given the prize to the young artist whose
work throws off sparks: Dan Attoe, a highly unsettling painter of
unwholesome redneck life. What distinguishes his jewel-like,
classically painted scenes of contortionist strippers, red-faced
ministers, religious fanatics, dangerous yokels, lost souls, and alien
tourists from Twin Peaks is Attoe’s continually shifting point
of view, expressed in texts he scribbles on and around his paintings.
The texts range from confessional to aggressive, poignant to
clichéd. They ultimately beg and defer the question: Who is this
guy and what is he telling us?
He’s an outsider within an outside. The son of a forest ranger, he
lives in a cabin in the woods in Washougal, Washington, a Columbia
River outpost about 20 miles northeast of Portland. The contemporary
art world, meanwhile, is located squarely in cities, and Attoe is a
relatively successful player in it. He is represented along with
fashionable artists at Peres Projects in Los Angeles and Berlin,
arguably the two hippest centers of art today. So what, and to whom,
does he represent in his work? To what extent is he manipulating an
identity as an outsider, as one of the unsavory characters in his
paintings—one of them? And what does that mean for the
Northwest?
Attoe’s slippery, complex position creates a slippery, complex view
of the Northwest, one both primitive and knowing, a center of the
contemporary sublime but also hick heaven. He also represents the
conflicted, self-reflexive view from a place accustomed to being looked
at, rather than out from. Attoe responds with a purr to the national
fixation on pioneer wilderness, then follows up with a bite. I’m a
little afraid of him.
The other three artists in the show—Cat Clifford of Seattle,
Jeffry Mitchell of Seattle, and Marie Watt of Portland—are all
lighter in tone than Tennis or Attoe, but very different from one
another. (There is some bet hedging going on in the diversity of this
first round of awards.) Clifford, the least established artist in the
group, makes very personal, gentle interventions in the landscape,
including videos in which she impersonates what she finds in abandoned
rural landscapes, and gorgeous cut-paper animations that she displays
along with the wistful carved-paper remnants. She’s showing too many
works at CNAA, and in some, her intentions are obscure, but her quiet
determination to figure out what it means to be a fish out of water in
your own vast country remains a lure.
Where Clifford is still developing, Mitchell is fully formed. In
ceramic and paper, he creates idiosyncratic and ravishing flowers,
animals, and skeletons (the skeletons are new). In this installation,
he emphasizes the spiritual, with a large construction shaped like a
giant sphinx that looks like a dollhouse on the back. Inside every
“room,” all lit bright with naked lightbulbs, chrome- and white-glazed
ceramics sparkle, set in elaborate episodes that depict Buddhist rites.
Across the room is a commanding, meditative, black-on-black pattern
painting. Mitchell’s work can feel repetitive, but it also continuously
boggles the eye with beauty. It’s generous and seductive, an unusual
combination.
Watt’s work is based on blankets, and often is created in sewing
circles. She makes art in order to heal or to honor, and her three CNAA
pieces include a chapel-like enclosure covered in a web of sewn
portraits of soldiers from Oregon who’ve been killed in Iraq (along
with sewn portraits of women famous and anonymous, representing
mothers), and a sculpture made of a stone column that acts as a tree
trunk, with fabric blossoms and “stairs” made of felt extending from it
up to the museum’s skylight. The effect is calming, balmlike. It’s the
most literal demonstration of an impulse many artists consider
important: First, do no harm. It may be limited, but it is also
honest.
According to curator Jennifer Gately, the CNAA is modeled on a
similar competition in the Bay Area (the SECA Awards) that sifts
through the region and selects artists to promote nationally: regional
delegates. The meaning of this is that these five artists have been
selected for what regional art dealers and curators call “national
exposure.” Whether they will get it—whether this award will be
directed outward or at us, right here—remains to be seen.
But the Portland Art Museum has done these artists and the museum-going public a mighty favor. No other award or exhibition in the Northwest reflects the consensus of more than 200 nominators across the field and gives each artist ample space in the museum. (The CNAA also includes a catalog.) In order to give birth to the CNAA, PAM killed its longstanding Oregon Biennial: not a popular move, but a smart one. The museum had to sell out Oregon in order to make Portland the art capital of the Northwest. Instead of showing dozens of artists from around the state, this first round of the CNAA only includes one artist who resides in Oregon.
But the awards aren’t perfect. The territory CNAA represents also comprises Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, which is just plain dumb. The vast majority of nominators are from Washington and Oregon, meaning Seattle and Portland, meaning that it is almost statistically impossible for outliers to get a fair shot. Including Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana in the competition is not only a false construction, it’s a charade. And where is British Columbia? Including the true Northwest capital of art would only improve the quality of the work on view.
Ultimately, that’s the meaning of these awards: not how many people outside the Northwest like what they see in the catalog, but how much this process and this show serve to illuminate and improve upon what’s already going on here. This first installment is a good start. Let the debates begin.
