I will be in Vancouver, B.C., this weekend, where my college friend Zanja, a professor of the philosophy of physics (when did we get so old?), will be conferencing with other brainiacs by day and catching up with me and mine by night.

But if there were no Zanja on this wide earth, I’d most certainly be in Portland, where there’s some great stuff happening this weekend. The greatest has to be the opening of the Hadley + Maxwell show I Want to Show You Somewhere at Reed College’s Cooley Gallery on Saturday (with a not-to-be-missed back room symposium including the poet Lisa Robertson that night).

Curator Stephanie Snyder’s description of H+M’s work is so clear, I’ll just give it to you instead of trying to sum it up:

Hadley + Maxwell consider subjectivity and political experience through moving image, song, drawing, and printed matter, working, in part, from photographs of the Kent State riots on May 4, 1970, as chronicled in news magazines of the time. During the summer of 2006, Hadley + Maxwell improvised these photographs on the Reed College campus, alternating roles as victim and bystander, corpse and “person,” re-imagining and re-opening consideration of the images as historical records, but more critically, as spaces for the incomplete and idiosyncratic articulation of gesture, time, and attachment.

While the video is projected onto small, cut-out representations of the artists and reflected around the room, the artists ground our experience on the textured surfaces of a series of delicate graphite drawings based on the Kent State photographs. The drawings carefully record a process of identification between the artists and their subject, taking on the quality of a body of evidence that exists somewhere between public and private experience. Permeating the space is a recording of Hadley singing a somber and matter-of-fact rendition of “Gloomy Sunday,” a song written by Rezsô Seress in 1933 that was banned from the airwaves in the 1940s for being too damn sad. Throughout the installation, the bodies of the artists are cropped and rescaled, deleted and reinserted. This dislocation makes space for, and summons, the viewer into the work — an invitation to “be-together” that resists over-definition; an invitation to “be” together, in consideration of something meaningful, an invitation to “be-together-in-meaning.” What Hadley + Maxwell invite the viewer to engage in, they first and foremost do themselves, together. The installation is neither a practice run for something else, nor a partial action.

Also up in Portland, at PAM, is Pierre Huyghe’s 24-minute puppet video This Is Not a Time for Dreaming, dramatizing the creation of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Arts at Harvard. In one gorgeous shot, a heap of rods on the floor is lifted slowly to form a three-dimensional puppet of the complex and beautiful skeleton of the building—quickly dropped back down again. The idea is born, it collapses, is fragile.

Huyghe is the man under the tree; later he struggles with Corbusier. The villain of it all is the gliding, matronly love child of Darth Vader and Duchamp’s praying mantis machine Bride, here seen (small and blurry, I admit—it was all I could find), on the right.