Wind Gate

Next up, we're still on the Reed campus after looking at Trigger 4 and Seljuk, the college's two Lee Kelly rust sculptures. We're done with Kellys for now, but we've got one more midcentury abstract thing to look at while we're here, this time a sorta-organic shape that sits on the college's very large front lawn. The 2006 Portland Public Art blog post describes it:

This big hunk of bronze has been here quite a while. No idea who the artist is. I can remember seeing Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsburg sitting a few yards from here, surrounded by a few thousand frolickers + adherents in 1967. Summer of Love, baby.

Apparently this is a bit of a campus landmark, and a basic search of the interwebs quickly returned the title and artist info I was looking for. So this is Wind Gate, by Portland sculptor Hilda Morris, who also did Ring of Time outside the Standard Insurance Plaza tower in downtown Portland (which has always been one of my favorites, and which secretly doubles as an interdimensional portal across space and time, if you know the trick), and Winter Column at the Portland Art Museum.

According to Confidential Sources that I am not just making up on the fly, Wind Gate is a sort of miniature portal that just moves air around. It was thought that a full-scale people-moving portal was overkill since nobody was all that interested in leaving campus no matter how easy it was, but a device that brought in balmy tropical breezes while the outside world endured ice storms, and bracing arctic air during heat waves, now that sounded fantastic, in theory. In practice it was immediately repurposed for venting weed smoke off to somewhere else, initially to avoid detection by The Man (for the first week or two, until it became clear The Man didn't care) and after that it was to save the world. Which I realize sounds crazy at first, but let me try to explain, to the degree that I understand the situation:

I'm unable to confirm this part, but as the story goes, shortly after Wind Gate was activated, a Classics professor learned to control the device and configured it to always vent into some cave or deep chasm at Delphi, in ancient Greece, on his personal theory that the Oracle's enigmatic prophesies were caused by great clouds of weed smoke from the future. Which honestly is just a variant on the more common ethylene gas theory, if you really think about it. Furthermore, Reed was the only known institution that a.) was capable of generating that much smoke, and b.) had a portal for sending it across the Atlantic and back in time, where it was needed. Therefore students would now have to shoulder the burden of keeping the Oracle baked on a long-term basis. There was no way for people on the present-day side of the portal to tell what time of day it was on the other side, or whether the Oracle was going to be prophesying soon or about what, or whether she was even in the cave at any given time, and letting her go ahead and try to tell the future while sober risked altering our timeline in untold but probably catastrophic ways. And that's why, ever since that realization over 50 years ago now, there has always been at least one brave student volunteer (and often a whole crowd) near the portal 24/7/365, in all weather conditions, smoking as much weed as possible and trying to keep the Oracle properly hotboxed at all times, just in case a visitor shows up asking what to do about the Persians.

Winter Column

Today's object from outside the art museum is Winter Column, by Hilda Morris, who also created Ring of Time, the "Guardian of Forever"-like ring outside one of the Standard Insurance buildings.

I realize it's abstract midcentury art, and speculating about what it's supposed to "look like" is the mark of an uncultured barbarian. But it does look a lot like an inverted tree root, torn out of the ground, like something you'd see in a clear cut, or floating down the Willamette after a winter storm. Ring of Time has the same rough organic look to it; it's easy to forget these are metal objects. Morris wasn't the only midcentury Portland artist to do this, and I've said once or twice that Frederic Littman's look just isn't my cup of tea. Somehow Morris's rough organic look works, where Littman's doesn't, at least to my barbarian eyes.

Ring of Time

A few photos of one of my favorite public art pieces in town, "Ring of Time", by Hilda Morris. It's not strictly public, mind you; it sits in front of the Standard Insurance Plaza building (not to be confused with the nearby Standard Insurance Center, which has The Quest out front), and it dates back to an era when companies liked to appear cultured, highbrow even, and wanted to be seen as public-minded members of the community. As part of that effort, they often spent far more than strictly necessary on office buildings and art to decorate them. You don't often see that anymore, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. It may be that an ostentatious building no longer convinces the public that the business inside is solvent and soberly run, so you can't justify all the glitz as a business necessity anymore. If the savings from not buying highbrow art resulted in lower insurance rates for consumers, I suppose that might be a reasonable tradeoff. But something tells me the money goes to CEO bonuses instead. I don't have proof in hand, but it just stands to reason.

I realize some of the photos look a tad crooked. I'd like to blame it all on the building sitting on a slope, and insist the photos really are framed straight up and down. Not totally sure that's the entirety of the problem, but hey. The earth isn't here to argue, so that's the explanation I'm going with.

From the interwebs:

• A post about it at Portland Public Art. Note the comment by a 5-years-younger yours truly, agreeing that it strongly resembles the "Guardian of Forever" in a certain classic Star Trek episode. I can see how a mysterious time portal could be useful to an insurance company. They could send "adjusters" back in time whenever someone was about to do something stupid and expensive, and slap them silly until they promised not to do whatever they had in mind. And I suppose if you don't have access to a genuine time portal, parking a nonfunctional replica out front is the next best thing. I suppose. Given what little I know about the insurance business, I mean.
  
• The Smithsonian Art Inventory page for the sculpture.
  
• A retrospective on works by Hilda Morris.
  
• And a list of her major shows, commissions, etc..
  
• Portland Oregon Daily Photo has two posts about it. The first one refers to it as an "onion ring", which is a fairly apt and delicious description. The second discusses it a little more, and goes on to explain the weather beacon atop the Standard Insurance building. I really think the weather beacon is overkill, btw; they could just leave it flashing green all the time, for "precipitation, no change", and it would be accurate at least 75% of the time.
  
• two photos on Flickr.
  

The conservative scold guy who loved The Promised Land (the cheesy pioneer art in Chapman Square) hates Ring of Time. I realize modern abstract art is an acquired taste, but as a rule you can't go too far wrong by liking the opposite of whatever he likes. If I ever met the guy for some reason, not that I'm eager to, I'm likely to demand "Why do you hate onion rings?" the way neocons used to say "Why do you hate freedom?".

Mmmm.... onion rings....