Art for Art's sake

The day I visited the Wadsworth-Longfellow House I found myself arriving just as the 3 o’clock guided tour filled up. “Couldn’t you squeeze one more person in?” I asked. Sorry, the docent said, “I had to squeeze in the last person.” They try to limit the tours to 13 people because of the space available throughout the house. I was the first person to go on the list for the 4 o’clock tour, but it was only 2:30. What to do with myself for an hour and a half on a cool, drizzly day in downtown Portland?

Portland is not the most scintillating place to wander around, except possibly down on Commercial Street, which runs along the bay. This is a small city of low-rises with a working class feel to it. Except for a few jewelry stores most of the retail establishments have, as in so many other cities, wandered off to the mall. In the summer Congress Street is bustling with tourists, but on my particular Saturday afternoon at the end of September there were few people on the street, and a sizable number of them seemed to be, if not quite homeless, close to it. I walked a couple of blocks south, and spotted the Maine College of Art, housed in a renovated former department store. Maine, like the rest of New England, is extremely diligent about preserving old buildings, but there isn’t really anything noteworthy about the Porteous Building. But there were a couple of galleries open and free on the ground floor, so I wandered through.

The most arresting, and amusing, exhibit consisted of an entire wall covered with lists and notes-to-self. Hundreds of grocery lists, to-do lists, chore-assignments-for-the-cooperative lists, written neatly or more often scribbled on post-it stickies, notepad paper with kittens or flowers at the top, torn sheets of notebook paper. I pulled out the pad of paper I’m never without and scribbled a few. The following list conjured up a middle-class mom with an SUV and 2.3 kids:

Water plants
Swim
Newspaper
Haircut
Library
LL Bean – return items
Recycling
Bandaids (Batman)
Coop – gluten-free waffles
Call dr.

On a snippet of lavender paper was scrawled:
Sun.
11 a.m.
Smelly Cat! (A bath was planned?)

The following harried note on a yellow post-it I could certainly identify with:

Do math again in my checkbook!
email Charles

On a torn sheet of notebook paper:
1) Clean your room
2) Read for 30 minutes
3) Practice your piano for 30 minutes
If you don’t do this Becca will call me @work & tell me.
Have a Great Day! Love, Mom

And on and on they went; it was absolutely fascinating and delightful. This to my mind is contemporary art at its most imaginative, taking an ordinary everyday something or other and making it into something else, or something we see as something else. Can’t you just imagine the sequence of thought that led to the idea for this exhibit? Damn, where’s that grocery list? God, I’m forever making lists. Everybody’s forever making lists. Just think of all the lists and notes to themselves people write in their lifetimes...

Hey! Imagine a wall full of nothing but lists, grocery lists, to-do lists...

Something my Survey of Art teacher in college kept saying was that art was about making people see things differently. This exhibit did that.