I managed to drag myself out to the farmer's market and museum again today, which is a small victory. Not particularly early, but still, I'll take it. There were 3 whole floors I missed at the museum's main building, so I took some time to wander through, before finishing on the gorgeous cat picture again. Portland Art Museum has a truly great collection of native american art, both contemporary and historical.
Of particular note this visit was the "Next Level Fucked Up" exhibit on the 4th floor by Vanessa Renwick. I'm not always too into A/V installations, but this one I liked. In it, there's a short video of an artist on one monitor talking about the gorgeous mural he painted in Portland decades ago, which is in danger of being destroyed by the building's new owners. He has been assured that the new owners are reasonable people. But he kind of wrestles with that, and how that didn't entirely reassure him, and he struggles to articulate why, because reasonable and art aren't necessarily good friends. "Do you know what I mean?" he keeps saying. Which is the part that sticks with me. Because what's great about art is not it's reasonableness. What's great about art is the way it tries to puncture holes in the reasonable and comfortable world you've built for yourself.
The joy of the artistic experience is probably not best summed up by, "well, this seems perfectly reasonable."
"Wow, this is kind of fucked up!" is where it starts to get good, right? Whether it's too real or too surreal, it should move you a little. Jostle your good sense uncomfortably. Good art is a broadside across the bow of your sensibilities, a reminder to your conscious mind that "reasonable" is the mask your animal wears, and there are uncomfortably unreasonable layers always squirming around just underneath.
The museum is not where you go to be reasonable. It's where you go to bludgeon your reason within an inch of its life.
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