Goodbye to all that is beige. In Porto, if I were a chameleon slithering down the streets, I’d be green. Even the sidewalks are green.
Easter holiday here and old guys like me sit on benches and watch the couples court and the kids run loose. Not enough benches in Albuquerque for elderly eyeballing.
The Contemporary Art Museum in Porto is set in a park dominated by towering gum trees.
The exhibits in the museum (check Ella’s post for greater detail…oh, now she tells me she didn’t say much about it either) were not as fascinating to me as the teachers herding scores of grade schoolers through rooms of minimalist conceptual art. Awestruck they were not. Neither was I. The one interactive setup that left me blank, featured wearing a headset and threading an undulating clothesline stretch of phone cord so that you could listen to various recordings of quietness the world over, answering the profound question, “Is the silence in Bangkok as arresting as the silence in Darfur?” Since silence implies the absence of sound, the artist, who I hope was pulling our legs, could have recorded the global sampling in her bedroom. (Ella says there was sound and i must be deaf. i replied that yes, there might be noise, but it’s not sound. She rolled her eyes).
Then there was the Miro exhibit in the Deco Villa overlooking a Baroque vanishing point of hedges defining a descending stone walkway of rectangular pools.
I’ve never been taken by the exploding ink scrawls that are scattered across Joan Miro’s canvases, and this collection was not transformative.
How about the House of Cinema down the path from the Deco Villa? With a darkness that encouraged low murmuring, there was an exhibit honoring Manuel de Oliveira. Manuel had a career making Portuguese movies from the Silent Era to 2015. Judging from the clips that were on display, Manuel’s filmmaking style relied a lot on closeup reaction shots with an emotional voice-over. Very reluctant to show any impactful action, just the looks on the actor’s faces as they register what is taking place. The voice-overs preached a return to some mystical paradise. Watching his work was like viewing a Portuguese novena.
After the visit to the House of Cinema, we went down a path and ended up, way up, in the trees.
Not recommended if one is prone to vertigo. Reminded me of a similar treetop walk we took in Canada near Vancouver (there for Brendan and Brie’s wedding so many years ago…although it should be noted that the wedding was in nearby Abbotsford, not in the tree tops) only there the trees were shorter. It also reminded me of an Italian Calvino book I read a few months ago, “The Baron of the Trees,” about an 18th Century aristocrat who left his parents to live the rest of his life in the treetops.