Farewell to Orpheus

A couple of photos of "Farewell to Orpheus", a smallish sculpture + fountain in the South Park Blocks, within the PSU campus. These are all the photos I've got, and I felt oddly furtive while taking them. I mean, white guy with a big lens taking photos of a nude statue based on a Greek myth, and sculpted by another white guy. C'mon, I took critical theory back in college, I know this whole scene is, as they say, problematical. I suppose being on the PSU campus I figured someone else would draw a similar conclusion and... I dunno what would happen after that.



I do know that I walked past it nearly every day for several years back in college and never wondered about it or gave it a second look. Kind of nondescript from a distance, and it doesn't help that they rarely, or possibly never, run the fountain surrounding it. (It seems the various fountains around PSU are quite expensive to maintain.) So it turns out that it dates to the late 60's, was created by the same guy who did the Pioneer Woman sculpture up on Council Crest, and represents the saddest of all Greek myths. So now you know.

I have to say I'm not really sold on the style, either here or on Council Crest. It's kind of... lumpy... if you ask me. The 60's weren't really glory days for scuptures that were supposed to actually look like stuff. Perhaps they'd just lost the knack of it or something.