VISUAL ARTS
BY ESTER BARKAI
ART TALKS
Having Cultural Conversations at OSU
H
ave you ever tried to repeat a phrase until it loses
its meaning? Take “appreciating diversity,” for in-
stance. It’s one of those phrases repeated so often,
especially on college campuses, that people be-
come indifferent. It’s discussed as a requirement
rather than what it is.
So what does it actually mean to appreciate diversity?
Oregon State University is attempting to give students
and the public an opportunity to find out for themselves
by installing the work of five contemporary artists with
different backgrounds and interests in five different cultural
centers on campus.
The idea that we can have a conversation using art
— that art can speak to us — is the framing concept for
Cultural Conversations, a sprawling exhibit of prints
from Portland philanthropist Jordan Schnitzer’s collection
running through May 3 at OSU. The artists are Mildred
Howard, at Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center; John
Baldessari, at Fairbanks Gallery; Hung Liu, at Asian and
Pacific Cultural Center; Joe Feddersen, at the Native
American Longhouse; and Eena Haws and Enrique
Chagoya at Centro Cultural César Chávaez.
The art is displayed at places where students spend time,
where they socialize and where they study. At the crowded
opening reception for Cultural Conversations, OSU
President Ed Ray said that in order to be a good university,
an institution has to celebrate the arts and integrate them
with other subjects. He suggested that though we may go to
school to learn math and literature, art allows us to express
how we feel and think about what we learn.
Ray said he had not been exposed to art before going
to college. Taking an art appreciation course when he was
in college, he said, pulled a curtain back on a new world.
Schnitzer, who also spoke at the reception, had a
different experience growing up. The son of Portland
philanthropist and gallery owner Arlene Schnitzer and the
late real estate magnate Harold Schnitzer, Jordan Schnitzer
at 14 started collecting art with a piece he bought at his
mother’s Fountain Gallery.
Since then Schnitzer has amassed roughly 10,000
artworks. I asked OSU art history professor Kirsi
Peltomäki, who curated the pieces for this exhibit, whether
there was a theme to the diverse display of art. “Yes,” she
said. All of it includes “a dialogue between the past and
the present.”
Baldessari’s work, for example, has a conversation
with Marcel Duchamp. Throwing three balls in the air to
get a straight line, the famous California conceptual artist
addresses the culture of science, particularly the way we
arrive at standard measurements.
Duchamp was associated with Dada, a movement of
modern art that criticized traditional approaches. He is now
often referred to as the father of conceptual art (we don’t
know who the mother is, but she might be Duchamp’s
alter-ego Rrose Selavy).
Baldesarri’s Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get
a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) speaks to
Duchamp’s work called Standard Stoppages from 1913-14. To
get his three standard stoppages (standards of measurement)
Duchamp threw pieces of string on the floor, then used the
shapes in which they landed to create templates.
Duchamp was having a playful conversation with
science, pointing out that standards arrived at arbitrarily
are nevertheless useful tools. Although Baldessari works
with the now-traditional medium of photography, his work
is conceptual and playful as well, very much a continuation
of the conversation begun by Duchamp in 1913.
A favorite moment of mine at the opening reception,
which spread itself around the OSU campus, was at Centro
Cultural César Chávez while viewing a print by Chagoya
and listening to people looking at another of his works
beside me. These prints are colorful and surreal landscapes
in which people from different cultures, real and imagined,
are portrayed.
I was looking at The Thingly Thingness of Things,
which is a multiple portrait. The group of people gathered
around the artwork beside me was viewing The Pastoral
or Arcadian State: Illegal Alien’s Guide to Greater
America. In these works, Chagoya obliterates, partially
hides or blends his subject matter into the background.
We all wound up standing in front of these artworks for
a considerable length of time, looking for and spotting
particulars, and pointing them out to each other.
Sometimes a phrase or even a word such as “diversity” is
said so often it loses its meaning. That’s why it’s important
to, as a teacher might say, put it in your own words.
This is what Cultural Conversations does, though not
with words (or hardly any). Each of the artists approaches,
examines, satirizes and illuminates, presenting culture
from their own perspective and continuing the conversation
anew.
The map for locations of Cultural Conversations exhibit
on campus at OSU can be found at liberalarts.oregonstate.edu.
eugeneweekly.com • A pril 20, 2017
39