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WHILE IN PORTO, PORTUGAL WE WENT TO The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, the foremost museum for contemporary art in Portugal. The museum is located on the grounds of the Serralves Estate, which also comprises a Park and a Villa. In large part, the museum’s mission is to encourage reflection on the relationship between art and the environment.
After spending the better part of 2 hours in the museum, we took an hour walk around the park grounds which includes trails through large wooded groves, a gorge with a large pond, an elevated bridge-like walkway through the treetops, past an incredible villa and its gardens, and to top it off, a visit to the on-site farm. Overall, a very impressive place, however…
…I must confess that I could not quite connect to/with the art on view in the museum. That’s cuz what came to my mind, first and foremost, was some lyrics from Bob Dylan’s song, What Was It You Wanted…
What was it you wanted
Tell me again so I'll know
What's happening in there
What's going on in your show
What was it you wanted
Could you say it again
I'll be back in a minute
You can get it together by then
…sorta like the same feeling I get when viewing contemporary Academic Lunatic Fringe photography. That is to write, a feeling of “Huh? Say what?”
For purposes of self-preservation, under such circumstances-defined by the deflating feeling that I am just too dense to figure it out-I generally fall back on my Susan Sontag rationalization that interpretation is the revenge of the intellect on art (photography or otherwise).
Now I am not implying, upon viewing the blackened tree with nearby (dead?) golden leaves that I did not have any thoughts. Like, say, wow, big and threatening and if we do not deal with climate change there is going to be a lot of dead-as-a-skeletal-doorknob trees and a concurrent lack of golden-leaf beauty. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a Marvel Comic nightmare movie character come to turn us all into mulch. In which case, the thought / question that comes to my mind is, “Where’s the popcorn?”