MARCH 23, 2012

The Pioneer Log ARTS

All Lemon Everything: The Sign in Society

BY DREW LENIHAN
Arts Editor

PHOTO OF THE WEEK

BY HANNAH COOPER
Photographer

TOP 5 NEW ALBUMS

BY HAYLEY TRIVETT
Arts Editor

11

PORTLAND, OREGON

by BLOUSE

BLOUSE

The radical thinker of the week is not Gucci Mane, but another lemon head by the name of Roland Barthes. Barthes is a post-structuralism powerhouse whose writing primarily looks to bring to light the misleading mechanisms of bourgeois culture which surrounded the theorist in 1950s and 60s Paris. He used semiotics, or the study and analysis of signs, to establish a number of dialectics, including the concept of the signified and signifier. This put him in line with a similar Marxist theory of the time, and in his book Mythologies (1957) he sought to discuss and critique the symbols of the bourgeoisie that gave rise to greater oppression in society. This weeks quote is from Barthes essay The World as Object, in which he theorizes the two dimensions of the work of art: that of the work itself, or what Walter Benjamin would call the aura of art, and the dimension of the spectator, or the viewing and consumption of art.

This photo of a red colobus monkey was taken at the Jozani Natural Forest Reserve in Zanzibar, Tanzania last September while I was on the East Africa study abroad program. The monkeys are protected and unafraid of humans so they allowed us to get close to them. In this picture the monkey seems so human. The way he is looking into the distance is almost hopeful.

Sounds Like: Murky, 80s dream-pop by ROBERT GLASPER

HOUSTON, TEXAS

BLACK RADIO

An objects use can only help dissipate its essential form and emphasize instead its attributes. Other arts, other ages may have pursued, under the name of style, the essential core of things; here, nothing of the kind: each object is accompanied by its adjectives, substance is buried under its myriad qualities, man never confronts the object, which remains dutifully subjugated to him by precisely what it is assigned to provide. What need have I of the lemons principal form? What my quite empirical humanity needs is a lemon ready for use, half-peeled, half-sliced, half-lemon, half-juice, caught at the precious moment it exchanges the scandal of its perfect and useless ellipse for the first of its economic qualities, astringency. The object is always open, exposed, accompanied, until it has destroyed itself as closed substance, until it has cashed in all functional virtues man can derive from stubborn matter.
Barthes. The World as Object, 1953.

Disjecta opens Portland Biennial in Tour de Force

Sounds Like: Jazz and everything else

WITHOUT YOU

by BARE MUTANTS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Sounds Like: Dusty psychedelia

THE THORNS

by FAR-OUT FANGTOOTH
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

Professor of Art Grant Hottles painting Facing North is featured at Disjecta.

PHOTO BY DREW LENIHAN

BY DREW LENIHAN
Arts Editor

The largest gallery show for the 2012 Portland Biennial is at Disjecta, a north Portland art venue situated in a converted and restored bowling alley. The show compiles the work of ten Portland artists and represents a broad sampling of work with video installation, painting, interactive art and sculpture. The show offers both high conceptual and formal work, from Mark McFarlands Peripheral Visions Composition that flashes images to evoke a sensory overload for the viewer, to Arnold Kemps minimalist scanned tin foil portraits, Whos Afraid of Something Real? The show continues the tradition of celebrating technically

skilled artists in the Portland community while also pushing the envelope, weaving together several different conceptual narratives. Curated by Prudence F. Roberts, the show presents works that are in tune with each other both theoretically and spatially, with no work detracting from the power or intention of the next. Walking through Disjecta, each piece can be fully appreciated and contemplated with little distraction. Featured in the show is adjunct professor of Art Grant Hottles massive painting Facing North. The painting takes up an enormous chunk of the gallerys north wall space and depicts a surrealist landscape with referential imagery and poetic forms of fabric draping across the scene. Disjecta has other connections

to Lewis & Clark as well. The gallerys manager Katherine Rosenheim and gallery assistant Wyatt Schaffner are LC alumni. Spencer Bryne-Seres (13) is an intern at Disjecta and has worked as a gallery assistant and bartender during openings at the biennial. Im so excited to be around all this art and I am filled with a subtle, genuine warmth that succors me as I sit here for hours on end, in the cold, drafty former bowling alley, he said from his post at Disjecta last weekend. The show will run until Saturday, April 28 and is open Friday through Sunday, 12 to 6 p.m. On Sunday, April 1 at 1:30 p.m., there will be a panel discussion with numerous featured artists in attendance. Disjecta is located at 8371 N Interstate Ave.

Sounds Like: Shadowy, ethereal post-punk

DONT BREAK MY LOVE

BY NICOLAS JAAR

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

Sounds Like: Experimental, minimal pop