The Portland Museum of Art

Edward Steichen, Moonlight Dance Voulangis

Sometimes looking at bad art can be as much fun as looking at good. OK lemme rephrase. Bad art can be entertaining. A museum full of crap can keep me on a fun rant for days.

To be fair though, The Portland Museum of Art has fabola pieces on display as well as some exquisitely dull drek too. 

It’s really a tremendous museum, a great space but, like any salon, they’re not gonna hit it outta the park with every single show.
Part of the reason Helen and I chose Portland, Maine as our Just Us Weekend destination was because I’d fallen in love with this joint. On my last visit, they had a tremendous show of WPA murals and such, including some work by Diego Rivera—a fav of mine.

The current exhibit:

Biennial: Piece Work
October 3, 2013 - January 5, 2014

The 2013 Portland Museum of Art Biennial: Piece Work is the eighth in an ongoing series of juried exhibitions showcasing new or recent work by living artists.

Sounds like it oughta be mega awesome and interesting. Right?

Eh. Yes and no. The yes first.

I walked into the first main room to see a trio of large chromogenic prints (24”x20” or thereabouts) by Jocelyn Lee. If Diane Arbus and Raymond Carver had made an art baby, Jocelyn Lee would have been her.

Lee's pieces, and there were more than just those first three, were uncomfortable, strange and deeply skeevy. In other words, way cool.

But then there was Kate Beck.

My first reaction? Babe, I realize the idea must have been exciting when you were stoned but, well, some ideas are best stubbed out with the roach.

Fernand Leger, Le Coq

J.T. Bullitt and Aaron Williams.

Their photo mash-ups might have been fun to do but, truly, why is someone’s first gee-look-what-I-can-do-in-Photoshop up in a museum? Honestly.

Gary Green

Dude, contrast can be a very good thing. Grey doesn’t automatically equal deep, inspirational art. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Joe Kievett and Julie Gray’s work looked like great any-holiday wrapping paper.

Lauren Fensterstock

Big and painted black doesn’t always equal stellar and thought provoking. What worked for Chiharu Shiota is just not happening for you.

Moving on to their permanent collection I rediscovered Reginald Marsh’s tremendous Coney Island painting, Playing on the Beach. More than a happy day at the beach it brought Nicolas Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women to mind. That was more or less the plan though.

 They have Joan Miro’s First Spark of Day III, George Bellow’s Manticus, N.C. Wyeth’s Black Spruce Ledge. They have Kandinsky, Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Paul Delvaux, Magritte and more.

And then, then I moved on to their next special exhibit:

Ahmed Alsoudani: Redacted will showcase 20 recent works by the celebrated New York-based Iraqi artist and will include a number of new paintings and drawings that continue to chart the artist’s unique and powerful visual vocabulary of violence, survival, and history. Alsoudani’s artistic process involves layering charcoal drawing and a bright paint palette, creating passages of beauty amid distorted and disturbing imagery.

Sounds wildly intriguing. Right?

It was awful. SUCH a waste of prime gallery space! His canvases are, essentially, collages of his drawings, scribblings and cartooning making no clear statement. The various scraps appear wholly unrelated to one another and not keen on having any sort of a bond either. Each ‘painting’ conveys one thing only—Big Repellant Mess.

Maybe that’s his idea, his plan. Perhaps he’s trying to be all harshly discordant in order to convey the chaos, pain and confusion of war?

Groovy but two big rooms filled with six foot tall visual people repellants seems like a disservice to the artist and viewers both.

Just so’s ya know—I like Pollack, Basquiat, Twombly so I’m not some delicate I-only-like-Monet sort. Nope, Alsoudani’s work just seemed inchoate, unfocused and, finally, uninteresting.

NEXT!