July 21. 2QQQ * J u s t o u t 37
N ice L ittle Q irl’s W onderful D ressing-up
R oom by Minako Nishiyama
f you’ve never visited the Portland Art
Museum because you think it’d be stodgy or
dull, now is a good time to dispel that
notion.
On view through Sept. 17 is the traveling
exhibition Let’s Entertain, a multimedia
extravaganza put together by curators from the
Modem Museum in Paris and the Walker Art
Center in Minneapolis. Their goal was to
explore the intersection of pop culture and
contemporary art, and the result is anything
but dull.
Although the show has a heavy emphasis
on nontraditional media and immerses viewers
in a raucous atmosphere, the contemplative,
static works are what carry the show. A pair of
paintings by Damien Hirst set the tone for me.
Hung side by side, the huge, round paintings
are whorls of vibrant color, all aiming for the
vortex, suggesting planets in turmoil, energy
hurtling toward implosion and self-destruction.
Yet they are simultaneously oddly joyous and
seem to symbolize a fall-of-Rome attitude:
W e’re all going to die soon, so let’s at least
have a party on the way out!
Another thought-provoking piece is N ice
Little G irl’s W onderful Dressing-up Room by artist
Minako Nishiyama, a meditation on the ’90s
fad in Japan called kaw aii, which means cute or
pretty. A candy-colored enclosure surrounds
the viewer and invites examination in a series
of distorting fun-house mirrors as well as intro
spection on the subject of body image and per
ception. T he juxtaposition of the sweet, femi
nine painted designs on the walls and the
warped human forms framed thereon makes a
statement about the power of mass culture to
shape thought.
The centerpiece of the show is
Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 pho
tos taken in the late ’70s. Cindy Sher
man, who states she is “not a photog
rapher but an artist who uses photog
raphy,” explores the fictional feminin
ity of postwar America in this collec
tion of self-portraits. Deftly choosing
her settings, props and costumes, she
catalogs the range of female roles in
Hollywood films of the 1940s through
the ’60s. Some of the images suggest
certain actresses, but they are not
intended to mimic particular stars or
movies. Instead, they provide a
sweeping portrait of how women were
viewed during that era, with an
emphasis on objectification and isola
tion from the true self.
Taken as a whole, they are over
whelmingly moody and brooding, a
quality that is enhanced because they
are black-and-white. Individually,
they invite viewer identification,
imagining oneself in each picture or
perhaps finding a frame of one’s life
captured in someone else’s dream.
The only disappointment is that they
are separated into three groups and
cannot be swallowed in a sweeping
panorama.
After all the stimulation of the
noisy exhibit, it’s especially fun to wander the
far reaches of the second-floor galleries and
savor works by 20th century masters, such as
Monet and Munch, to witness the extreme
span of artistic taste in a mere century. — O G
I
o simultaneously revel in and cast a critical
eye upon the always-accelerating mutations
of culture and life in the entertainment-
obsessed contemporary world— this is the goal
of Let’s Entertain.
The exhibit’s sometimes brilliant, some
times portentous modernity and conceptualism
engender a refreshed focus on the modem
T
Two perspectives on the cu rren t show
at the Portland A rt Museum
by
O riana G reen
and
C hristopher M c Q uain
media of film and video. Everything seems to
be plugged in, lit up and flickering. Although
very uneven, this show is a long-overdue, irrev
erent antidote to the Portland Art Museum’s
hackneyed field-trip exhibits and safe, pretty-is-
good aesthetic.
Some of the most interesting pieces in Let’s
Entertain are little more than rescued cultural
debris. O n one television screen, a segment of
TV and Andy W arhol’s Fifteen M inutes, the
early ’80s cable access programs produced by
the celebrity-obsessed artist, are on display in
all their garish, glaring, dawn-of-videotape
glory. W arhol’s presence, along with guest
appearances by John Waters, Divine and Out
magazine columnist-to-be Michelangelo Sig
norile, is the most obviously queer represen
tation, although the exhibit’s broader explo
a 1981 American Bandstand appearance by Pub
lic Image Ltd. mockingly calls attention to the
fact that none of the performances are ever
“live”; lead singer John Lydon does everything
with his microphone but sing into it, while his
prerecorded voice rings out loud and clear. This
contradictory gesture— on one hand the bub
ble-bursting disregard of the unwritten agree
ment to fake it when promoting records on
television, and on the other hand an almost
joyful assertion of the pleasure of pretending,
regardless of some old-hat notion of authentici
ty— encapsulates what the exhibit s about.
In a similar vein, episodes of Andy Warhol's
ration of culture’s impact on identity will be
of interest to visitors of all sexual orienta
tions.
The first floor also features two giant
video installation rooms: Kyupi Kyupi/++ by
Japanese performance group Kyupi Kyupi and
Rineke Djistra’s The Buzz Club/M ystery
W orld. The former is an ecstatic, colorful, all
singing, all-dancing music-video-like enter
tainment whose meaning, or absence thereof,
is as up to the individual as what color lip
gloss to wear. The latter projects simple, iso
lated moments of club kids dancing, kissing
and striking disaffected poses on two large
screens, transforming an everyday youth sub
culture into something larger than life.
Let’s Entertain also features a variety of
less-fully-realized film and video works, such as
Leigh Bowery’s Death in Vegas, a trite re
creation of Elvis Presley’s undignified death,
and Dara Bimbaum’s Technology/Transforma
tion: W onder W oman, a rather obvious re-edit
ing of the W onder W oman television series.
Time has been especially unkind to Bimbaum’s
videos, which are from the early ’80s and, in
retrospect, too trendy and simplistic.
The real revelations are on the exhibit’s
second floor, where more elaborate and imagi
native video installations by Gillian Wearing
and Doug Aitken reside. In Wearing’s The Reg
ulator's Vision, a troupe of British re-creationists
of the American West are shown playing out
their Lone Ranger fantasies in a stark museum
space. It’s an insightful probe of the prescribed,
inaccurate nostalgia permeating our culture.
Aitken’s satirical These Restless Minds depicts
marathon-tongued auctioneers wandering
through— and selling, one presumes— the
wasteland of America’s warehouses and con
vention centers.
Wearing’s excellent piece reveals what
seems to be an unwarranted liberal-guilt inclu
sion of the subpar; Let’s Entertain suffers no
paucity of queer or women artists, but frankly
too few of Wearing’s rank. One wonders why
her peers— more inventive gay (Todd Haynes)
and women (Sadie Benning, Miranda July)
artists grappling with the exhibit’s cultural
theme— couldn’t have been presented instead.
It is, perhaps, a comment on the overall
scattershot quality of the exhibit’s film and
video content that the most unified, exciting
filmic element is entirely static.
By sheer force of conceptual and
technical perfection, 69 selections
from Cindy Sherman’s Untitled
Film Stills dominate the viewer’s
attention from their unassuming
space on the museum’s walls. In
these stunning and oft-discussed
pictures, she shares the poker-
faced blankness and preoccupa
tion with surface that marks the
rest of Let’s Entertain, but it’s a
blankness informed by fecundity,
intelligence and subtlety.
In an exhibit obsessed with
changeability, her photos define
what exactly that means: They’re
the only objects in the show with
the sublimity to guarantee time
less relevance. These photographs
are thoroughly, devastatingly
clever and inspired, with their
paradoxical combinations of
immediate corporeal charisma
and sly, insistent hints at what lies
behind and beyond them cultur
ally, socially and personally. Sher
man’s shots are the suggestive,
assured and permanently elusive
Mona Lisa smile of the late 20th
century and by themselves make
Let’s Entertain worth a visit.
— CM
■ The P ortland A rt M useum , 1219 S.W .
Park A ve., is open from 10 a m . to 5 p.m . Tues
day through Sunday. Admission is $ 7 .5 0 . For
more information, call (503) 226-2811 or visit
wuKu.portIandartmuseum.org.
ORIANA GREEN had an earlier incarnation as a
painter, and one o f her paintings was included m
PAM’s 1974 exhibit Artists o f Oregon; she is also
the Entertainment Editor for Just Out and can be
reached at oriana@ justout.com .
C hristopher M c Q uain is a Portland uniter
and tireless observer o f pop culture.