Dimestore Alchemy Revisited: Ethan Rose at Tilt

Ethan Rose (of the music/film group Small Sails) is a rarity among electro-acoustic artists: he’s unafraid of dust, loose springs, or static electricity—and in fact revels in “a love of the archaic mechanizations of gears spinning and paper scratching… .”

The ambient universe of his “New Olden Days” sound (a gorgeous composite of melody, electro-acoustic contours, and an innovative use of automated musical antiquities— music boxes, player pianos rolls, and a carillon, 23 chromatically tuned bells housed within a monolithic multi-ton tower, no less) is a wonder. Just ask Glenn Kotche (Wilco drummer and solo auteur) or Gus Van Sant—they’ll agree that Rose’s work is superbly crafted, highly elevated mood music, rich in glacial development—not without precedents or neighbors, but truly singular work.

He shares with folks like pianist/composer Hans Fjellestad an element of scavenged sounds, a wunderkammer of bell tones, hand-cranked tidal melodies ebbing and flowing, ambient hum and incidental clatter; traffics in similar moods as an Angelo Badalamenti or a Harold Budd —but eschews fussiness, glowing, rhapsodic qualude smugness or facile, serene blankets of calm in favor of slowly unfolding textures that are seductively circumambient in their elegant jockeying between ancient and future strategies. Pitchfork Media nailed his “sense of rustic unity. . .Anachronistic is the right term — nostalgic is not.”

Rose artfully mines the ruins of the Old Weird America (both the gimcrack music-box detritus and the avant-garde trajectory) that produced lone prophets on the order of the Utopia Parkway surrealist Joseph Cornell and composer Conlon Nancarrow, a mad-monk who refashioned the path of compositional possibility for the Ampico Reproducing Piano, slipping a mickey to the pianola’s rolls.

He shares Joseph Cornell’s practice of, what the poet Charles Simic termed, “Dimestore Alchemy”: that restless drive that solders connections between seemingly dissimilar, random odds and ends, renewing and transform materials, sounds, images and experiences—igniting cast-off, forgotten things with a combustible beauty and mystery. His recombinant approach suggests, that like Andrei Tarkovsky’s definition of cinema, music and sound are where we go to “receive time.”

Rose has commented that, “Every sound happens in an environment: it has a context and a history. Capturing this can be as important as choosing the sound itself…This approach should apply to anything. . .Say you’re recording a bird–know why it’s singing, and you’ll know what to record next.”

He can’t help himself, shards of fragmented melody or compositional reanimation of music-boxes or player pianos seem filmic and ready-made for viewing— imagined sonic film treatments, like Cornell’s text/image piece “Monsieur Phot (Seen Through the Stereoscope), no. 5″ from 1933 that embody, “The rippling music of the harp sounds like a fountain playing into water.” Or one could see Rose mind-warping update of Jesuit Father Louis-Bertrand Castel’s “ocular harpsichord,” an 18th-century instrument that simultaneously produced sound and an associated color for each note of the scale (e.g. C# =pale green).

It becomes, at a certain point, about more than just doing the next gig.

Which is why it makes perfect sense that Tilt Gallery (625 NW Everett, #106 in the Everett Station Lofts) would invite Ethan Rose to create an automatonica sound installation featuring a Player Piano “performing” notes from manipulated paper piano-rolls (reams of Morse code-like dots and lines resembling Sperry punch cards) which are then electronically altered before establishing the scene of the crime through a speaker system in the gallery space.

When asked the best way to experience his work, Rose (who’s released something appropriately titled “Ceiling Songs”) replied: “Laying down and looking up. Or live. Or both.”

Sure to be the highlight of the month—and one more reason Tilt is consistently one of most rewarding visual art venues in Portland.

Opening reception is this Thursday, March 6, 6-9 PM.

–Tim DuRoche

Monsieur Rancière at PNCA

I once attended a talk that the philosopher Jacques Derrida gave in the ‘80s and the philoso-paparazzi effect was incredible: hungry graduate students clambering for seats, female art students fawning, palpable electricity abounded. In times of numbing political tide and cultural sea change where a sense of revolution is in the air to the point where we can taste it, (in 1776, 1968, during the Reagan years, or now—take your pick) it never fails that a swarthy Gallic figure emerges capturing our imaginations and setting cocktail parties ablaze with chatter and new brazen ideas.

Enter: Emeritus professor of philosophy Jacques Rancière, a strikingly original and distinctive social thinker who wet his feet during May 1968, co-authored the seminal Structural Marxist classic Reading Capital with Louis Althusser, and of late has sent the artworld’s heads spinning with his rich writings on visual culture, aesthetics and their relationship between politics and modernity.

You can expect that an evening spent with Rancière and his “cartography of the visible” and other touching-down points from his seminal en-vogue Politics Aesthetics will leave you feeling moved, maddened, inspired, and transfixed by continental thought with very serious street-cred. Unlike other big-time French rockstars of the intellectual armchair-Marxist variety (such as Bernard-Henri “God is dead but my hair is perfect” Levy, a man who developed his “immoderate taste” for the power of media glitz by allegedly watching the entire 1968 revolt on television), Rancière is the real deal—a vivid thinker who’s easily had as much influence as Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, Derrida, Gilles Deleuze or Michel Foucault.

Never mind Mother Mary and Joe DiMaggio—in times of trouble, turn to politically grounded, “sensuously impenetrable” French social thought. Rancière’s appearance this evening at PNCA (part of the PNCA+FIVE “Idea Studios” lecture series) promises to be one of the great events in Portland’s noosphere this year.

Jacques Rancière : What Makes Images Unacceptable is tonight, February 29 at 6:30 PM at PNCA (1241 NW Johnson)

–Tim DuRoche

Here Be Dragons: Alaska

Argentine choreographer Diana Szeinblum’s new work Alaska is a raw and unapologetic piece of dance-theater that simultaneously inspires mystery, hope and a worrisome sense of helplessness (think of the voyeuristic discomfort of seeing Gena Rowlands’ unraveling in Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence). “Gloriously alive,” Alaska marks the choreographer’s first visit since her 2003 Secreto y Malibu, a fantastically arch piece that seemed one part Buñuelian tease, one part a nod to Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures.

Trained in the tanztheater weltanschauung of Wuppertal’s Pina Bausch, Szeinblum is a cunning synthesist who avoids the trappings of overly mannered and emotive, Ach-Ich-Bin-So-Unglücklich-und-Existenzial costume/set-driven Ausdrucktanz–instead mining a dance dialectic of frenzied releases and collapsed resignation. Rigorous dance, athletic and precise, yet unafraid of small inward gestures, Alaska, “speaks of that place that we all recognize, but where no one has ever been.” Like Glenn Gould’s “idea of North,” “Alaska,” remains (in the words of Gould), “a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid.”

Danced by two women and two men to an original, tensely cinematic score, the evening-length work charts the terra incognitae of bodies rising and falling apart, stolen snapshots exposing intimacy, dominance, and obsession. From the comedic to the cathartic, the piece is brutal and fiercely seductive. Szeinblum successfully exploits many of Bausch’s hallmark devices—angst, alienation, frailty of human connection, the blurring and loss of self—and tempers them with her own wickedly dark humor, extremes of movement (from the pedestrian, workaday to mechanized, operatic violence), a minimalist/conceptual mise-en-scène, and shards of hope producing a pandemonium of “interior spaces,” disturbing little lonelinesses. Some of the best unsettling movement poetry you’ll see this season.

PICA presents Alaska at PSU’s Lincoln Hall, 1620 SW Park Avenue, on Tuesday and Wednesday, January 29 & 30, 8 pm. $25 ($20 PICA members). Tickets: (503)242-1419

Tilt Gallery is TWO

“Little Crumb Bun” (detail) by Lauren Clay, handcut paper and acyrlic, dimensions variable, 2007.

Count on it. Exhibitions at Tilt Gallery and Project Space (625 NW Everett #106) are hands down among the most interesting, critically acclaimed, and talked about of those at any gallery in Portland. Tilt has made space for installation work that is happening in few other places in Portland, and they do it month after month, exhibiting work both visiting and Portland-based artists.

Count two: two is for Tilt’s two-year anniversary, celebrated with a party January 25 from 7-11 PM at the gallery. And two is for the number of Tilt’s gallery directors/curators: Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith (“Wondertwin powers, Activate!”). Nagy’s APEX installation at the Portland Art Museum opening February 16 is bound to be one of the notable visual art exhibitions of the year. She has been curating good work into the Autzen Gallery at PSU and she also teaches. And Smith makes incredible work somewhere between furniture and fine art (more on his work soon) and is currently at OCAC.

The Friday night celebration doubles as closing reception of ONE NONE DONE, a site-specific project by Portland artist Jesse Hayward.

“Worry” by Rebecca Ripple, styrofoam and acrylic, 2006.

On the eve of the anniversary, Tim DuRoche asked co-directors/co-curators Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith a few questions about what’s next for Tilt:

What do you look forward to in the coming year?
We look forward to working with several new artists. Our highlight for the year is Lauren Clay from Brooklyn. Also bringing in Rebecca Ripple from LA who will participate in PSU’s Monday Night MFA Lecture Series. A Portland artist we’re excited to host is Ben Buswell in his follow-up from the 2006 Oregon Biennial.

With established players like Motel and Portland Art Center vanishing and larger galleries taking fewer big risks do you see Tilt stepping up to fill an emerging/divergent niche?
We specifically opened Tilt two years ago to fill that niche. As a non-commercial space we feel like our agenda is different form both of these venues. Tilt is run with the rigor and professionalism commonly associated with commercial galleries and the risk-taking and innovative programming of a nonprofit. We continue to specialize in emerging and under-recognized artists, both regional and national. Primarily, we exhibit experimental and difficult to show work.

What are some watchwords for Tilt’s curatorial momentum?
Diverse, experimental, challenging, educational, enthusiastic.

What is the nature of the universe, permanence or change?
Permanently changing.

What are three things you’d love people to know about Portland art (and/or artists) that they don’t know?
Mostly that the artists who live and work here are incredibly supportive of one another, making it a really great community. Although opportunities are limited, it feels like the artists are genuinely excited when peers succeed. Also, there’s so much happening here, something for everyone on many different levels: Crafty Wonderland, the Alberta scene, the Pearl, of course, mixed-use venues like Jace Gace and Ogle, and great academic institutions like the Cooley Gallery (at Reed) and the Archer (Clark College in Vancouver).

Paris Changing

More than 100 years ago, an intrepid French photographer named Eugène Atget set about the systemic visual cataloguing of Paris, the “city gorged with dreams.” In 1888, “with the marvelling lens of dream and surprise” (as the poet Robert Desnos remarked), Atget began a 20 year project documenting the cobbled grit of city streets, the merchant’s stalls of jardin du Luxembourg, shop windows, parks, all manner of people from flâneurs to flower vendors, crafting a meticulous visual lexicon of Paris’ urban, architectural and social history.

Nearly a century later, Portland photographer Christopher Rauschenberg (Blue Sky Photographic Gallery founder and son of legendary artist Robert) spent a year taking his own walks along la rue des Mauvais Garçons and streets that Atget trudged down with his primitive 18 X 24 cm view camera to rephotograph Atget’s beloved city. Not unlike The Portland Grid Project, Rauschenberg et al’s decade-long project, his new book,  Paris Changing: Eugène Atget’s Paris, presents a moving and evocative (albeit slightly more exotic) stand off between history and progress, preservation and decay.

Like Cartier-Bresson or Saul Bellow’s Sammler, who trawled the streets of New York taking in “aesthetic consumption of the environment,” these kinds of discrete projects give us a lens into the found poetry of the city that is priceless. As Rauschenberg’s said elsewhere, “You can see the effects of acid rain on them; you can see the effects of graffiti; most of
all, you can see that the magical streets of Paris are now thickly covered with parked cars. . .among all the other Parises that co-exist so thickly in one amazing city, Atget’s Paris is still definitely and hauntingly there.”

Rauschenberg will sign copies of his book—published by Princeton Architectural Press and featuring 74 of the photographer’s sublime echoes of Atget—on Monday evening at 7:20 PM Powell’s (1005 W Burnside).

–Tim DuRoche