April 1998
Pacific Northwest
Urban Writing
Northwest aesthetic for art created here still being pondered
Douglas McLennan
orginally appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
I S THERE ANY such thing as Northwest art?
Of course, there is plenty of art made here, but is there anything about Northwest art that marks it as being distinctively from this region? Does our choreography have a Northwest personality? Do we make theater in a particular Northwest flavor? Does Northwest music resonate with a regional pulse? Do we write or paint in a style that is identifiable as Northwest?
A number of important choreographers have worked here, from Robert Joffrey and Merce Cunningham to Mark Morris. But little about these artists' work can be described as Northwest. And none of them is identifiable stylistically by the larger world as being a Northwestern artist.
Pacific Northwest Ballet is one of the country's larger dance companies. But its personality is more Balanchine than anything regionally unique.
Seattle is known as a theater town, and a number of prominent playwrights call the city home. While it's true that the range and diversity of theater found here is unusual compared to most cities, and while the regional theater tradition is strongly established, there isn't a strong notion about how Northwest theater looks different from what is produced elsewhere.
Musically, Gerald Schwartz has established the Seattle Symphony as champion of a specific school of American neo-Romantic music. But the music came from elsewhere, and with the possible exception of Alan Hovhaness, the region doesn't have a prominent composer considered distinctively from the Northwest.
There was a time when Northwest visual art meant Tobey and Graves and Callahan, artists who were identified outside the region as belonging to a Northwest school. But the stylistic rubric failed to sustain itself among younger artists. Mention Northwest art outside the Northwest today and most people conjure up images of traditional Northwest Coast Indian art.
Arts:
There's not a sense of place
to our symphony, dance, visual art.
IN THE NATIONAL LANDSCAPE, contemporary Northwest visual art barely registers. Northwest artists don't define themselves stylistically the way that, say, Southwest or Bay Area artists do. No particular style or idea has seized the imagination of the region's artist to produce a regional personality that extends beyond home.
That is not true when it comes to glass art. Dale Chiluly is probably the world's most famous artist in the medium of glass, and thanks to the Pilchuck School, the Northwest is one of the world's centers of glass art.
Regional identities can be established in either two ways. One way it happens when something (or someone) indigenous to a region assets itself in an art form and develops a unique voice that resonates with other artists in that region.
Distinct regional schools were common in the 19th century. Music could easily be identified as Czech or German or French, as could painting. American art lacked its own stylistic identity, and since its culture was grafted from Europe, most aspiring American artists of any promise headed to France or Germany to study.
American composers struggled for years to come up with a style that was distinctly American, and didn't really succeed until the likes of Aaron Copland and Roy Harris incorporated American folk idioms into their work. A more recent example is Chihuly, who transformed the art of glassmaking while imprinting it with his unique personality.
The second way of asserting regionalism is to bring an existing art form or style to a new level of achievement. That excellence ultimately becomes associated with a place.
Who, for example, would have thought of Cleveland as home to one of the world's greatest orchestras? But once a great orchestra was established there, the tradition continued.
Regional differences in style are fast disappearing. Internationalism has largely erased national schools, and a Czech composer is as likely to reach for a Japanese idiom as a Chinese painter is to incorporate Impressionism or surrealism into his work.
On a more regional level, artists tend to migrate to centers where the action is, just as they always have. Only now it is easier than ever before, and fewer artists are strongly associated with the places in which they live.
Why are artists from the Northwest mostly invisible nationally as Northwest artists? Maybe the region doesn't have enough defining voices to make it unique. Understand, we are not talking so much about quality as the ability to impart a sense of the place to those outside the region. August Wilson, for instance, is one of the country's best playwrights, but you don't see in his work a sense of Northwestness.
No, grunge music and Starbucks more identifiably define our aesthetic to the outside world. The Northwest has no arts organization that sets a national or international standard, no orchestra or ballet or museum that is the best at what it does.
On the other hand, Seattle has a reputation as a good place for the arts generally, a place where good work is made and can be seen. That's a significant accomplishment at a time when many cities are worried about keeping their arts institutions alive.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe it's not important that there's a Northwest school or style.
Then again, maybe now that many of our major arts institutions are coming into middle age, it's time to start talking about whether there is a Northwest aesthetic. And if there is what it might be.
© The Raven Chronicles 1998