Trigger 4

One of the longest-running themes here on this weird little website involves tracking down public art by the prolific Portland-area sculptor Lee Kelly. Not because I'm a huge fan of his work, but because... well, it's complicated. I tried to explain the situation in a couple of posts last year, about his Sulawesi and Icarus at Kittyhawk, and I don't really have any fresh insights to add as to why this ongoing project exists and why I keep tracking down stuff of his every now and then. It may be because nobody graduates art school in 2024 wanting to make giant abstract whatzits out of rusty Cor-Ten steel, and encountering one of Kelly's thingamajigs in the wild feels like encountering a live brachiosaurus while out for a walk. They're huge, and dumb, and they're relics of a bygone age that's never coming back, but they and their kind once dominated the planet somehow, which makes them oddly fascinating in their own way.

In the last couple of posts in this series, I mentioned a Walking Tour of Lee Kelly art, which was put together for a 2010 Portland Art Museum retrospective. I hadn't looked at that map for a while, but I was reminded of it again a few weeks ago, and remembered that there were two Kellys on the Reed College campus, so I figured I'd go find them. I had not actually been there before; like a lot of private liberal arts colleges, it operates in its own little bubble. Students tend not to stray far from campus, and as far as I know there isn't much on campus to pull in "townies" (do they even use that word? I have no idea.) The college only seems to make the local news when there's a problem with their undergraduate-run nuclear reactor, which doesn't happen very often.

So of the two Kellys, we're starting with Trigger 4 (1979), because the brief walking tour entry said it's in front of the Studio Arts building, which is next to the east parking lot, so you should park there. This being the sort of walking tour where you mostly have to drive between the many stops, because his stuff is freakin' everywhere. Anyway, it was quite easy to pinpoint Trigger 4 on Google Maps with this info, since it's big enough to be visible from space and all.

A 2006 Portland Public Art blog post describes it briefly but vividly:

Big lunk of a Lee Kelly off the East parking lot, a Balder before the art department. I imagine some poor Martian anthropologist trying to puzzle these things out in 1700 years. Why? Why did they venerate the piles of iron?

That about sums it up. Frankly I can't think of anything to add to that.