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PORTLAND'S CONNECTIONS: To the rest of the world.

Artist, architect, and Maine College of Art professor Iain Kerr was recently enlisted by Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance to draw up some innovative ways of diagramming data it had gathered through its “Discovery Research Project.” This survey of artists and artists’ resources in Portland was designed to tell us precisely who inhabits our city’s Arts District, and to help build the resources to serve them. This was all meant to have been the subject of the “Creative Conversations” event at Space on Monday evening until the great tempest of 2007 intervened. The talk has been postponed to a later date — to be announced — when, it is hoped, folks will show up and participate in this conversation about how best to support the arts in Portland.

In the meantime, the Portland Phoenix caught up with Kerr to find out what he learned from the quality time he spent with all of this data.

How did your involvement with PACA’s project begin?
First off I should say that these musings are mine and should not be seen as the views of the Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance (PACA). The simple answer is that Jessica Tomlinson from PACA saw some of the diagrams that spurse, an art/architecture collective that I am part of, made for a recent exhibition. These diagrams were an investigation of the networked nature of our environment. The question of how to understand the space around us and our contemporary global condition of hyper-urbanism is something I have been interested in for quite some time. Anyway, PACA approached me with data from a large survey that they conducted last year about the condition of art and the artist in Portland and asked me if I could make a series of diagrams of this information. I began working on this project from this point in collaboration with the artist and critic Brian DeRosia. This got me interested in speculating, about Portland and the arts today.

Why do you begin thinking of portland from the perspective of global urbanism?
Well, to think about location, dwelling, and something like the question “in what way is Portland an arts city?” one needs to think on differing scales and place the issue in the context of what is happening now. Simply speaking we are in moment of paradigm-shifting global urbanism. Portland is on the northern edge of the largest urban area in the US — we are the northern edge of the Boston-Washington megalopolis. This is our immediate context, especially in terms of art. I think it is important to say that globalism is our condition. The question of locality needs to be thought in a global context: forces and systems, whether physical, environmental, economic, or what have you, are vectors that traverse the globe. Like the weather. We cannot simply effectually image an opposition between local and global. It takes roughly the same time to get to New York as Lewiston. It is perplexing to go into a local book store, surrounded by books from all over the globe, and see a “buy local” sign. It is perplexing in the sense that the issue seems to be how to produce sustainable, democratic, creative places to dwell, and that this is now packaged in a xenophobic message. What is exciting about Portland as part of the megalopolis in terms of the arts is its relation of both proximity and distance, that we are as close to NYC as Philadelphia. This allows for the condition of living in Portland but working quite easily across the megalopolis.

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