On my first evening in Portland I go to a rehearsal of a play, Pelléas & Mélisande: A Vaudeville Symbolist Duodrama, in Chicken Coop Contemporary, a project space in a working chicken coop in the garden of painter Srijon Chowdhury, who has organised Utopian Visions. During the second act a gorgeous monochrome rooster flaps proudly into view. “I did not know what beauty was,” says actor Justin Streichman, “then it touched me. Once we touched, it would never stop touching me.”

The story concerns two men rehearsing a performance of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande (1893) and was written by and stars Tim Reid, who explains onstage that he’s never really understood what the original’s about, that none of its characters seem to know who they are, how they’re always crying, how they’re caught inside a fairytale where nobody believes in magic anymore. I’ve come here in search of some new ideas from American artists that don’t live in New York, and as Reid he stands by the window and tells stories of lost sheep at the crossroads, of dogs that are afraid of a swan, of homeless men living in the woods outside singing Bill Withers songs, as he hurls straw down from the hayloft crying “Look, look I am kissing thy hair” and the roosters cuck and whistle loudly in agitation, I do feel a long way from home.

Pelléas & Mélisande, A Vaudeville Symbolist Duodrama, at Chicken Coop Contemporary

The next morning I go to a waterfall in Columbia River Gorge and there’s a crystal stream where young salmon are frolicking, and the air is sweet and smells of cinnamon rolls, and as soon as I round the riverbend strangers with colourful displays try and lure me into joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Falun Dafa. People try and fill you with meaning in the most unusual places these days. On my way back along the highway to the opening of Utopian Visions I spot a lonely cloud glowing iridescent apple and violet above the highway; a good sign I believe.

Despite its name, Utopian Visions Art Fair is not so much a fair as a group of shows by different collectives, galleries, not-for-profits, curators, artists and so on; 31 projects in all, spread between a compact warehouse, a rundown yard and the cellar of a nearby house. There are sculptures made of bread, hanging sausages of lard, flower wreaths on doors, portable vitrines made of packing tape, a panopticonical information desk, a rooftop sign declaring “Mr. PLYWOOD IS VEGAN”, and a leftover fluorescent unicorn, The Cosmic Messenger, on which one can write one’s desires in chalk and send them out to the universe, which I do. The projects I’m most drawn to have to do with writing: artist Jesse Stecklow, here assuming the role of curator, plants text clippings found by writer and researcher Lucy Chinen as signs on the lawn. For instance: “Guests at Los Angeles hotel where missing woman’s decomposing corpse was discovered in rooftop say water tasted ‘funny’.” Nearby, a show curated by writer and artist Keith J Varadi includes the self-made publication A Naomi Fry Reader: Selections from the New Yorker, which collects the best of Fry’s comic studies of the lives of American celebrities and politicians in 2018, suggesting how fungible those roles have become while also producing an insightful, and often rather hopeful, portrait of the present moment. More directly, but again hopefully, Portland local manuel arturo abreu presents a sign-up sheet for Americans willing to marry an undocumented person in order to help get their papers in order, and some visitors really do sign up for this. There are many empty gestures in the resistance culture of the day, more than all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world, but going through with an action like this would be hardcore, I think, and radical.

Layet Johnson, curated by gallery Good Weather, North Little Rock, Arkansas

The fair is, more generally, Chowdhury says, a place for conversations between different groups. So the Institute for New Connotative Action presents a series of protest posters. The Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations, which hopes to one day build an experimental sanctuary in which animals and people can live harmoniously together, like a New Earth, shows information boards promoting a variety of related projects. The Institute of Queer Ecology invites Posadas (Ignacio Hernández Murillo and Pablo Herza) to open a Mecha Body Mall selling various prosthetic bones and flimsy BDSM underwear. Their handout features the slogan “human as emotions gatherer” and this reminds me of Vladimir Putin’s mysterious and grandiose pronouncement, “I am the wealthiest man, not just in Europe, but in the whole world. I collect emotions.” Not that I think Putin is involved with the Institute of Queer Ecology, but one never quite knows what the Russians are up to these days.

Something I’ll realise in Portland is that really I prefer the company of dour Atlantic narcissists and charming, highly refined sociopaths to the kind and openhearted; which I’ve realised before, but it’s nice to have one’s prejudices reinforced from time to time. Pelléas and Mélisandeare caught inside a fairytale where nobody believes in magic anymore, which is how I generally feel about artists or curators harbouring utopian aspirations. But I came here looking for an alternative and an alternative is what I’ve found. I’m here in the Pacific Northwest and the apples are crisp and the trees are tall and maybe it’s okay to just be idealistic for a change, to let the warmth flow through me and to gather some emotions of my own. At least within reason. Inside there’s a performance from M. Page Greene in which they tie everybody in the audience together with string and guide them through some breathing exercises; I run away as soon as the string comes out. However I am willing to engage with the sculptures placed among the flowers and marijuana plants by Garden, a project space from Los Angeles, including Genevieve Belleveau and Themba Alleyne’s (Sacred Sadism’s) hand-carved ecofetishist butt plugs made from salvaged wood, which sound like a parody but aren’t, and do get me thinking: which part of the art world has the most pleasurably debauched sex lives, the cash money Art Basel darlings or the S/M sustainability flower children? Also why are artists from Los Angeles always so obsessed with anal beads and pegging?

Documentation of The Cosmic Messenger

Over drinks that evening, Varadi, who not so long ago was working as a private investigator, tells me how he was once accused by another critic of being a mercenary. He was accused of being a mercenary for two reasons he says: because he says and writes things that people don’t always want to hear or read, and also because he was working as a private investigator. This world might make mercenaries of us all, but I don’t want to be a mercenary today. Not here. It’s nice to be surrounded by something different for a change. And isn’t that what everybody wants in art right now: something, anything that’s different?

Keith J Varadi with the Naomi Fry Reader

Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations

Genevieve Belleveau and Themba Alleynes, hand carved salvaged butt plugs. Photo: Dean Kissick

Performance by Midori Hirose

Martha Rosler, Joshua Hughes, Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas. Curated by the Institute of New Connotative Action, Seattle