Recently I spent three great days in Portland, Oregon meeting with some artists for upcoming Angels Gate shows, most specifically Bean and Dan Gilsdorf, who are coming down to do the next Gallery A show, about which I am extremely excited, and I will no doubt write about more it the future. But on to the sucking.

I’ve become addicted to big museums lately - if only for the historical artifacts and decorative arts wings. Both Bean and Dan warned me and my traveling companion, Michele, that the Portland Art Museum is all cocked up at totally skippable. They told me about the contemporary expansion that is 80% rental hall and fundraising space and 10% multi-story, crammed art hallway. We probably weren’t going to go after their warning, but on the last day we were in town, neither Michele and I could resist - we had to know.

The Building(s)

I don’t think you can even begin to discuss the collection of this museum without first explaining the buildings in which they are housed. Some museums, like the excellently designed Asian Art Museum of San Francisco are defined by their collection and some museums end up having their collection defined by the limits of the buildings that house them. The Portland art museum is definitely of the latter species. The museum consists of two buildings, occupying the better part of a block, with an underground level that spans the footprint of both buildings and the connecting plaza between them. The main building, the Belluschi Building, was purpose built as an art museum, and the contemporary arts wing/building, the Mark Building, was converted over recently from a Masonic hall that the museum acquired in 1991 and converted in 2004.

The Belluschi building is a reasonably laid out art museum, with hallway spaces connecting to interconnected, themed rooms. There is a large special exhibition space in the center of the building with the bulk of the museum’s permanent collections wrapping around it like a U. The space has a maze-like quality, more so than other museums, but not so much as to be ridiculous. If this building has any great flaw is that it’s almost impossible to locate a restroom. There isn’t one in the entrance area of the museum, I ended up finding one in the basement after getting lost twice.

The Mark Building, also known as the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, is a disaster. It can only be entered by going into the basement area of the Belluschi and then traversing the underside of the plaza. This is despite the fact that the Belluschi building has a secondary entrance/exit that directly faces the Mark building. In fact it faces what appears to be an entrance to the Mark, doors and all. But those doors appear to be permanently roped off. That was how we first attempted to penetrate the Mark building. We walked around to the side, where two “regular guys who didn’t look like museum employees” were guarding the street entrance to the Mark. They wouldn’t let us in (which is fine as the bulk of the building isn’t open to the public) and pointed us back the way we came in a vague and uninformative matter. That was when we hit on the idea to go back into the Belluschi, take the elevator back down to the basement, and attempt to tunnel our way across the plaza into the Mark Building.

It should be mentioned that we were still confused as to the location of the Mark Building in general, as the map that the museum provides at the front desk in no way clearly indicates the relationship between the buildings, and the map (.pdf download)of the Mark Buliding/Jubitz Center only shows the part of the building that houses the modern and contemporary collections, and as the building is actually shaped very differently than the map indicates, it’s more than a little confusing. We were only really able to ascertain that the building across the plaza was the Jubitz Center by comparing the architectural facade of the building to the one shown on the map.

The only real indication on the map that the Belluschi Building is connected to the Jubitz Center is an arrow on the underground level of the map pointing to the mysterious “CMCA”. What the fuck is the CMCA? I’m looking for the Jubitz Center, not your employee used, internal acronym for the “Center for Modern and Contemporary Art”. Give it one name guys - is it the Mark Building, the Jubitz Center, the Center for Modern and Contemporary Art or the CMCA? If your going to lay out your buildings in a idiosyncratic and viewer-unfriendly way, you could at least decide on a stable descriptive moniker for your building.

Anyways, we got into the Jubitz Center, which I will now critisise further. The floorplan of the Mark Building itself is basically a box. The floorplan for the Jubitz Center is like a narrow strip of that box, on the side facing the Belluschi Building. A large percentage of the building, let’s say 80%, is offices and rental hall space, leaving what is basically a 30 foot wide hallway for the display of the modern and contemporary collections. A hallway which is further reduced by the presence of a massive staircase and sizeable elevator that pinches down the center third of the hallway to about 10 useable feet and the areas around the building hardware. The collections in the Belluschi museum were a bit on the cluttered side, but this arrangement actually creates a situation in the Jubitz Center where there is art obscuring art. As in there was literally a huge sculpture sitting about 3 feet in front of a painting. More on that in the collection section, though.

One of the other interesting artifacts of the building’s design is that there’s apparently an emergency exit/connecting double door between the ground floor of the Grand Ballroom and the fourth floor of the Jubitz Center. Sound from the event taking place in the ballroom carries right into the gallery - on the Wednesday morning we visited the soundtrack to that floor of the gallery was an evangelical Christian prayer meeting, which is just what I want to be listening to while I’m trying to focus on a really amazing piece of art in an environment that is already distracting. To add some irony to the situation, the door, if opened would open into a narrow space housing several works involving photorealistic male nudity, and the awesome homo-eroticism of a really nice Tom of Finland drawing.

The Collection

Note - PAM is one of those facilities that has a no photography rule, as they don’t want you snapping something on loan. Therefore there will be no photos, which further sucketh. I’ve never understood the purpose of these rules, and although I can see why museums will make their “special exhibitions” off limits to photography, I can’t see any reason why you can’t hold lenders to some kind of boilerplate “if you’re going to show in our museum, people may take pictures” language in the loan agreement. They’re only photos - the worst thing that’s going to happen is that more of the public might get to experience and fall in love with works they might otherwise never see.

Part the 1st - Modern and Contemporary/Jubitz Center - the brief rememberances of a viewer in a chaotic and confounding place

Despite the failings of the building, the Portland Art Museum has managed to collect a pretty solid blue-chip collection of modern and contemporary works. The biggest issue of the space is that they’ve got everything on display at once - it’s a disaster, that makes me think that they either built the Center too small, forgot to build proper storage space for the collection or that there’s a sad streak of “small city me-tooism” going on. I’m not one to drag my tongue over the modern era but one of the standout pieces of the whole collection is Eugene Berman’s Time and the Monuments, a late 1930’s surrealist work that prophesies the coming ruin of much of the history of Europe during World War II. Unfortunately, this rather large painting is displayed in a cluttered hallway.

The defining feature of the Jubitz becomes not the works it contains, but how it contains those works. The whole of the collection gives off an air of “name collecting”, which makes it a mix of great works and works which really have no function other than to check off yet another artist from some unseen “museum legitimacy” checklist. They have what must be the smallest and least interesting Clyfford Still that is out there, but they’ve got it crammed into a corner where it has no presence and serves no real purpose. It was so hard to look at the collection that I can only remember fleeting details.

I remember a beautiful sterling silver boar on a platter, tens of thousands of individual strands of silver giving it an elegant, bristly coat of boar hair - as beautiful as anything ever crafted in silver.

I remember almost tripping over this stainless steel cart that looked like a miniature work cart with four bondage restraints attached and a 18″ long steel pole with a handle that basically resembled a dildo. At first I thought some installer had left some weird jig (maybe to stabilise some sculpture while it was being mounted - I got no idea) out for me to trip over, as it was sitting on the floor in front of a painting in the most narrow part of the gallery. Then I realised it had a label, and therefore was really someone’s brilliant art, not the out-of-place sex toy that it appeared to be.

I also remember a sculpture in the form of a large wooden spindle, about 6 feet high and 10 feet long, sitting directly in front of a painting, to which it had no discernable relationship, but which it managed to completely block the view of.

I remember the great big Gilbert and George piece that’s both under-lit and seemingly misplaced in a stairwell.

I remember seeing my first Kenny Scharf sculpture/video piece in a long time - I still don’t see the purpose of him making physical objects - it only takes away from his work.

I remember feeling glad that the museum had a Tom of Finland out - more museums should be featuring his work.

I remember the comically large “out of order” label on a deflated Oldenberg piece. I have a feeling that I got more out of its situation as I saw it than I would have had it been working properly.

I remember the photography gallery which was also blue chip - what’s the deal with photos of William Burroughs? I’ve seen portraits of him in several museums now, is his face one of the definitive faces of the 20th century? Damn I miss him, he should have lived forever.

The best thing I saw in the Jubitz was a video exhibition by Pierre Huyghe called This is Not a Time for Dreaming, which is essentially a puppet show of the story of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. It’s awesome and becomes sort of a meta puppet show at times, ending with an introduction by the narrator that’s exceptionally well written. The character design for the puppet Mr. Harvard, Dean of Deans has an Alien Queen/Darth Vader quality that’s suitably menacing and helps take the story just the right distance into allegory. There’s a great article about the piece by Christian A. Stayner for the Harvard Crimson, here.

Part the 2nd - Everything Else

There’s nothing wrong whatsoever with the collection in the Belluschi Building. It’s certainly a little more cluttered than I’d like it to be, but the space is well designed and orderly, and there’s some really strong features to the collection. It’s more of a collection of collections than anything else, which is good, as each room or series of rooms can focus on what it does best. There’s little relationship between the collections, but I didn’t mind.

One of the big surprises about the collection was the presence of an exceptionally good Japanese print collection, which originally began as an immense gift from the Ladd family, but has grown beyond that gift since. On display when I was there was a series of prints made in the early 20th century, after what is thought of as the “golden age” of Japanese printmaking. It was great stuff, all prints of dramatic scenes, in styles clearly descended from Ukiyo-e, but clearly influenced by European styles at the time.

There are several other galleries dedicated to Japanese objects, including a really impressive selection of folding screens, most notably a large screen depicting the arrival of either Spanish or Portuguese traders. The screen depicts in laser sharp detail the various activities of both the traders and the Japanese, trading, watching, a Japanese monk talking to a European monk. The other super eye catching thing in this part of the collection was an ivory carving of a man feeding little eels to ducks. At about 20″ high, it was a pretty big piece of sculpture and was carved with lifelike detail that must be seen to be believed. Never seen anything like it before and I’m pretty familiar with Japanese ivory carving.

Upstairs from the Asian collection, there’s a great collection of American and European art - the American section has a lot of Pacific Northwest landscape paintings, which is interesting, and there’s a great room filled with English silver, which has a really interesting collection of coffee and chocolate pots and gravy warmers. There’s an immense tankard in there that’s like a 18th century 40oz booze hammer - too bad it’s not interactive.

There’s a room with a whole wall of Madonna and child paintings, which is a great resource if you want to look at a very specific and narrow area of European painting, but I couldn’t really get into them when I was there. Maybe my Heb was in effect that day. Michele really liked them, though. There’s also a strangely placed room filled with Greek and Roman artifacts, including some tiny amphorae for holding oil that would be given to winners in gymnasium wrestling matches. Yesterday’s t-ball trophy is today’s priceless historical artifact.

The other side of the building is home to two collections, the Native American Art Collection, which is artifact heavy, and I got into more than I usually would, and the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Northwest Art.

I’m not a big fan of most Native American art, as I just can’t seem to care much about the aesthetics involved. But I have a special soft spot for the art of the Pacific Northwest, Alaskan and Arctic tribes. Something about the culture of the Pacific Northwest tribes says “we were on the right track, if only those pesky Europeans showed up we would have figured this whole civilisation thing out on our own, livestock or no livestock.”

I really liked the hats, masks and other ritual costumes from the Northwest part of the Native American Art Collection. My favourite was a “shark hat”. Basically a lifeguard style had carved from wood with a big ass shark going through it back to front. These guys invented the logo team hat! I like the line work, the attention to detail and the carving in all of the Northwest stuff, really. It’s definitely worth seeing. They even have a pair of Inuit snow goggles - one of my favourite practical inventions, ever, and right up there with welding goggles in terms of steampunk goggle fetish objects.

The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Northwest Art is pretty cool. Basically a collection of art focused on the Northwest, as the title indicates, it’s a pretty solid collection, although there wasn’t anything that sucked me right in. They had some of those crazy giant glass fruit that I saw at the De Young - I wonder what it’s like to wake up in the morning and be the “giant glass fruit guy”?
Finally, in the basement of the building is the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Art, which is devoted to printmaking. On display while we were there was a show of works from a Portland based Master Printer. One of the series on display really struck a chord with me - a series of 20″ x 30″ prints of circles based on notebook paper hole protector stickers, each one representing a prime number with the stickers arranged in a semi-ordered pattern. I love prime numbers. I love them more than it’s really healthy for a man to love numbers and I loved the prints. Lots of white space.

The main hall of the Belluchi was closed when we were there, they were installing an Egyptian exhibition. We did get to watch them lower a sarcophagus onto its pedestal, which was an impressive piece of gallery work, though.

Epilogue

So yeah, the layout of the whole museum is jacked up, but there’s some really impressive art there, but you’ve got to really work to experience it. If you’re in Portland I wouldn’t miss it, but go with a patient and sympathetic disposition. It’s the kind of place where an irritation can grow into a pearl of anger and frustration, and since they won’t let casual visitors perform the curatorial intervention that the modern and contemporary collections so badly need, there’s no real outlet for your frustrations.