Park Place

Another of the many ongoing projects here involves tracking down public art around Portland (or wherever I happen to be at the time). I take a few photos of it, see what else I can find out about it on the interwebs, and (because this is an important serious-person website for those in the know) sometimes hazard a semi-informed opinion or two about it. I haven't done a lot of this lately, but I recently stumbled across something that's been on one of my todo lists for years now, so I figured I'd go ahead and finish the post about it now so it doesn't languish in drafts for ages like these things tend to do.

With that introduction out of the way, today we're having a look at Park Place, created in 1997 by Lloyd Hamrol. This consists of three groups of small brick stools or benches scattered around SE Portland's Woodstock Park. The linked RACC page describes it:

Hamrol’s “Park Place” presents itself as series of three intimate gathering places with benches scaled at alternating levels to accommodate both children and adults. The columns were designed to mirror the existing brickwork in the park and to make reference to the many strands of trees. Their varying sizes, heights, arrangements and surface patterns were intended to evoke both a sense of rational order along with the eccentricities of nature.

The three groups form a triangle in the unbusy north side of the park, roughly overlapping the off-leash dog area. My first thought, as a former teenager of the 1980s, was that these isolated groupings seem ideally suited to gothic brooding about goth things, clove cigarettes optional but likely. Though the brick seating would be much less appealing during the rainy months; gloom is one thing, hypothermia is quite another. Second thought, as a former child of the 1970s, is that the three groups are obviously solar systems, and the important thing here is to sprint back and forth between them as fast as possible, while holding a Lego spaceship and making spaceship noises. And keeping an eye out on the other two solar systems, just in case someone wanders by and mistakes your secret base in the Xyzax system for a bunch of free random Legos.

A third thought occurred to me while poking around Hamrol's website. A sited works page has an entry for Park Place along with other site-specific art, and it's quickly apparent that this one is kind of an outlier. The others tend to be much larger and often involve stone masonry in curved mathematical forms and that sort of thing (something I'm generally a big fan of). I haven't found any news items or exact numbers to verify this, but it just sort of feels like Park Place had a much lower budget than these other projects. Which could've been the plan from the beginning, of course, but this was also around the worst-ever point of Oregon's perpetual state & local budgetary woes, in the wake of the spotted owl wars and Measure 5's strict property tax limits. On top of all that, RACC (the regional arts agency that usually handles projects like this) would've been preoccupied back then trying to get its piece of the overdue, over-budget Westside MAX project over the finish line. In short there are any number of reasons that could have led up to an awkward conference call, or maybe a series of faxes, something like "Hey, change of plans, looks like we'll only have 15% of the budget we agreed on, are you still on board?", followed by "Ok, so what can we get for that price?" And what I'm really getting at here is that it somehow reminds me of the cute little Stonehenge from Spinal Tap, and it feels like there ought to be a funny-in-retrospect story behind it, but I can't find one so I'm just sort of guessing one into existence for entertainment purposes. Oh, and here's a movie clip for those who don't get the dated pop culture reference.