Oregon Humanities Spring 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring 2008
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published triannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 812 SW Washington Street, Suite 225, Portland, Oregon 97205.

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Field Work: Of Time, the River, and Big Shiny Buildings

Artists are working amid the steadily rising mixed-use towers on the banks of the Willamette River in Portland. Although they work in various media--some write, some photograph, some dance, some compose--all invite the public to join them during the creative process as part of the year-long artist in residence program. The program is the brain-child of dance artist Linda K. Johnson. A native Portlander, Johnson says that South Waterfront is the first neighborhood she's witnessed being built from scratch, which made her wonder, "When does a place move from being a concept to being a community?"

After successfully pitching the idea of an artists residency with a strong public participation component to developers Homer Williams and Mark Edlen, Johnson enlisted the help of thirteen guest artists to create an experience that she describes as "an authentic discovery of a place through an aesthetic process." Johnson manages the project from the Storefront Studio in the basement of the John Ross Tower and also keeps a daily movement journal to record her physical interactions with and interpretations of the neighborhood.

The program continues through August 2008. For more information and a complete listing of artists and events, please visit southwaterfront.com/art_and_design/artist. Writer David Oates was the January 2008 resident. The following is an excerpt of the journal he kept during his residency.

8:03 a.m.--Thirteen minutes past sunrise but who can tell. My mood is subdued but somehow glad to be gray. Drizzles sketch the winter grayscale, slates to charcoals to umbers, sky water island shore.

My walk as usual along the riverfront path. River the eye-magnet, the must-watch, can't help it. A river is motion in motion telling us something we can never quite hear. Our eyes are listening though, drinking it in. This river, today, an ocher plane all drift-silt and misty rain-pelt pattern. Mottled skeins of mocha. But slender lanes of clear water appear between the occluding scud, pathways of a darker smoothness linking and disconnecting on the ever-sliding surface. They're like spaces between blown cloud, or like streams themselves, streams of clarity no one can follow, gone in a minute: evident, connecting, vanishing.

The perennial consolations: all as it ever was. Something moving us we cannot name.

Or is it the perennial illusion. I turn to return and my eyes are drawn up almost to worship: towers tremendous, glass and steel, the Atwater all Bauhaus severity; the Meriwethers East and West softened by butterstone granite. This "neighborhood" is, in fact, four new condo towers in varying states of habitation, two more half-built, with a medical high-rise on one edge. South Waterfront is a sliver of land wedged between the Willamette River and the I-5 freeway. It was industrial low-rises and brownfields until planners and developers noticed the potential for better things so close to downtown.

The John Ross turns its thirty-one-story oval elegantly sideways to the view, imperial, convincing, beautiful. Between the completed high-rises, a one-block New York view: Slice of sky. Verticality. Wind funnel. The next blocks are dirt (left) and tower-in-the-making (right). Into the view leans a crane hoisting potties high into the morning. Above them, from an even taller gantry, a perfect, windowed wall-section dangles between the towers, blue sky through the window in the sky, Magritte moment for hardhats and idlers.

Pieces rise and swing into place. The tower is flying together in slow motion like a demolition in reverse.

Next morning: Walking in the dark. Cold sky clear, river of obsidian glass. Whatever the river means is not yesterday's meaning. Or, I'll bet, tomorrow's.

Most of the thirteen monthly guest artists are visual--dancers, sculptors, photographers. I'm the writer. I guess we all have the same slanting relation to the public though. Why are we here? Who cares?

I invite people to write. What language roots us to this place? We have built a shining new community on clean-scraped ground, but we have not scraped away time. When we try to write the present we find it pregnant with darkness that rises from the past and casts shadows toward the future. Here are pictures, old and grainy--saloons of drunk workmen, stumps, vanished streams. Here are maps speculating future ocean levels that could drown us. Yet our moment is beautiful, complete.

We sit on the banks of rivers no one owns--rivers of generations and seasons and words. All has been given us.

People do see, they record their visions a detail at a time. Giants in squares and rectangles, many eyes staring ... You don't expect the sky to feel this vast ... I silenced the word rain and felt the actual rain ... falling from darkness, shining in metaled light ... rubble we have used up...the sacred sky...

We make these gestures: a word, a sentence, a listener.

People: friendly if you can find 'em. Towers like this amount to vertical gated communities. Concierges control the entry, residents are behind their doors. So I contrive to meet them in elevators or at six-o'clock meetings and committees. Friends of Ross Island. Transportation. Greenway.

"Come up to see the view," they say. So of course I do. Twenty-fifth floor, riverside, Mount Hood visible today. Fourteenth floor, cityside, lovely in lights on a clear winter's night. Thirtieth floor penthouse, 180 degrees for 2.4 million dollars. Down on second floor (in the guest unit) I peer over the parking entrance. But the silent silvery gondolas of the aerial tram twinkle, and the spans of bridges.

Like other good intentions, art shows up, disappears. It washes away in forgetting or not caring then reappears unexpectedly.

A riverside greenway is planned, ignored. A regional artist I've long admired, Buster Simpson, committed it to paper and comes into town looking to resurrect it. The architects have other ideas. I walk with Buster and he's an old hand, calm. He knows how the world works.

Buster lets me spray-paint language onto the drift-fences snaking the riverfront. FLUX, I write, then FABRIC. Then IT BECOMES YOU. The river does, I mean. Is this funny? Touching? Who knows.

We make a few gestures.

I remember seeing Mount Hood from the penthouse, and the snowy remains of Mount St. Helens. Maybe I'll spray this: MOUNTAINS MELT LIKE SUGAR BENEATH THE RAIN.

The river flows by.

We make a few gestures.

--David Oates

David Oates writes about nature and urbanity from Portland. His books include City Limits: Walking Portland's Boundary (OSU Press, 2006) and Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature (OSU Press, 2003). He thanks Portand artist Peg Edera for her collaboration on the drift-fence poetry.

Published in the Spring 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities