Reconfigurations

I just happened to be at Mt. Tabor fairly regularly last summer because of a weekly-ish electronic music thing there, and around last July I noticed there was suddenly a new walkway connecting the SW corner of the park to Division St., basically a car-free extension of SE 64th Ave., between the big Portland Parks nursery and maintenance yard and a large retirement community to the west. On taking a closer look I realized the new walkway included some new public art, so I took a few photos and poked around on the interwebs for a bit, and a new art post was born.

This is called Reconfigurations, and it's credited to a number of local artists. Here's the description from that Public Art Archive page -- which is apparently where info on RACC art goes now, instead of the RACC maintaining their own database. (This move may be a good thing in general, assuming Public Art Archive has stable funding and won't randomly go belly-up and disappear right when I need some info from their site, and the Wayback Machine is archiving their pages. Unfortunately this humble blog contains a lot of now-broken links to the old RACC website that probably need to be updated at some point. Anyway, here's their description of what's going on here:

Three sculptures inhabit a new path leading into Mount Tabor Park. Each sculpture consists of one very granite boulder sawn cleanly in half. At each sculpture the two boulder halves will be arranged in different ways, both in relation to each other and to the newly planted tree.Six Oregon writers collaborated to create a poem that is engraved on the sawn stones faces of each sculpture, to be experienced as one traverses the path. The resulting compositions of trees, stones and words will bring people's attention to the slow but steady ongoing natural process of trees growing happening all around us, and help local residents stay engaged with the natural processes and park landscape they visit over and over again. The pieces will also act as touchstones accompanying residents and the community over their lifetime. How the sculptures evolve will be for us to imagine, and future generations to experience. Those future Portlanders will in turn try to picture how these artifacts started out long ago.

The RACC announcement for the walkway's July 2024 grand opening describes the concept a bit more clearly: ...three pairs of stones engraved with written text each with a tree in the middle which will eventually move (reconfigure) the placement of the stones over time.

This might be the first time I've heard of a project designed to be slowly pushed around by tree roots over time. As in most cities, tree roots can be a real public nuisance here, for lifting and cracking sidewalks, infiltrating all sorts of underground pipes. But Portland also has a bureau-level city agency dedicated to protecting trees at all costs. Which has led to some weird "only in Portland" incidents over the years, those things that are easily demagogued by the sort of people who already bear ill will toward the city.

The other big thing that happened around the same time on Division was the grand opening of the city's first BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) service, though the rapid part is a bit... debatable. Which leads to my one ad only complaint about the project, which is that the shiny new FX2 bus rolls right past the artsy new park entrance without stopping, and the closest stops are about four blocks away in either direction. Because apparently the Parks Bureau and TriMet couldn't be bothered to coordinate their efforts even the tiniest little bit. I may be misremembering, but I could swear that public agencies used to be better at this.

Anyway, for more info about all of this, here are some links to websites of the artists, and specifically to pages on their involvement in the project, where available:

• Adam Kuby
• Stephanie Adams-Santos
• Samiya Bashir
• Trevino Brings Plenty
• Anis Mojgani
• Sam Roxas-Chua
• Dao Strom

mt. tabor, november 2007

Back in November 2007 I did a little experiment in which I hauled a variety of cameras over to Mt. Tabor and took photos until their puny batteries died, their puny memories were full, or their film ran out. Which didn't take very long, this being 2007 and all. I posted the Holga, JamCam, and Sears TLS (a vintage film SLR) photos here shortly thereafter, but never got around to posting the photos from my little Canon PowerShot A520, which was my main camera at the time. I ran across them while poking around in an old iPhoto library, so here they are, for comparison or whatever.

There are a lot of photos of the reservoir jets here, you'll notice, which is because they'd only recently been restored to operation after being out of commission for about a decade. I thought that was pretty great, plus this humble blog was still pretty new, and I was just getting into the whole photo thing, and there was all sorts of enthusiasm going around. I admit I kind of miss that. Granted there was other, less fun stuff going on right around the time I did the bag-o-cameras expedition, and I certainly don't miss that part. But still, overall it was kind of an interesting time. Sigh...

in bloom, mt. tabor

From the archives, wayyy back in February 2008. I never got around to posting these because I didn't -- and still don't -- have any idea what sort of tree this is. If you can identify what we're looking at here, feel free to leave a comment to enlighten me and your fellow Gentle Reader(s).

Thx. Mgmt.

Updated: That didn't take long; these are witch-hazel blossoms! Merci beaucoup to Gentle Reader slugonabike, who passed this along over on the humblr Tumblr. You did know I have a Tumblr site too, right?

Mt. Tabor, Infrared

Harvey Scott, Mt. Tabor

View Larger Map

So here are few photos of the Harvey W. Scott statue, which lurks in a lightly-used, forested area near the top of Mt. Tabor. Don't feel bad if you're unfamiliar with Mr. Scott. Despite the statue's semi-prominent location and grandiose pose, he's more or less a historical footnote. Or maybe "historical speedbump" is more like it. Scott, you see, was an ultraconservative, curmudgeonly editor of the Oregonian back in the Victorian era. When he's remembered at all these days, he's remembered for being on the wrong side of history on a wide range of issues -- public high schools, women's suffrage, that sort of thing. Scott's sister, Abigail Scott Duniway, was a prominent suffragette and the two had a long and bitter public feud. After a long struggle, Duniway became the first woman registered to vote in Multnomah County. It's a shame (if you ask me) that Scott didn't live to see that day and gag on his caviar or something.

If you're intrigued by Scott for some reason, you might be interested in his New York Times obit [registration required]. In that you'd be more fascinated than I am -- I'm passing the link along, but I didn't bother to log in and actually read the thing.

Also, here are two two photos of Scott from the Oregon Historical Society, with little biographical blurbs. The second photo shows Scott posed remarkably like the statue, except wearing a top hat. Apparently it's not the sculptor's fault the statue's so bombastic and pompous. Scott, it seems, really was like that. Except the real Scott was substantially fatter, or so I've heard.

The pose does kind of fascinate me -- from some angles Scott looks vaguely Lenin-esque, boldly leading us into the glorious future (which just so happens to look exactly like the even gloriouser distant past). From other angles -- most angles -- he merely looks like an angry rich guy dismissing his entire kitchen staff after the chef botched his Oysters Rockefeller for the very last time.

Which brings us to the statue. It's the work of Gutzon Borglum, who's better known for, well, Mt. Rushmore. So it's fair to say this is one of Borglum's more minor works, relatively speaking.

The statue has fallen into disrepair over the years, and a post at Portland Public Art laments its state of disrepair. The post suggests maybe the Oregonian ought to step in, seeing as Scott used to be their editor and all. Which would be fitting and appropriate, if only newspapers had any money at all to spare these days. More to the point, other than the Oregonian, I can't think of anyone offhand who might be interested in taking up the cause. Maybe the state or county Republican Party would be interested, assuming they still exist, and have any money lying around, and are able to discuss the matter with the city without it devolving into an ugly partisan brawl. Not holding my breath, in other words, and I'm actually fine with the current disrepair. Not for ideological reasons, either, or at least not strictly for ideological reasons; the bird-related corrosion gives it an interesting texture and makes for better photos.

Other photos at Portland Ground and Mike's Portland Word on the Street, if you don't like mine.

In a few previous posts I went on about the importance of not naming things after living people, or putting up statues to them, or generally honoring them in any way while they're still around to enjoy it. That's not quite what happened here -- Scott had been pushing up daisies (or thistles, more likely) for a couple of decades by the time they put up a statue, and gave it prime real estate in the heart of the city. And despite the passage of time, we still ended up with a major monument to a man little remembered and less revered. Oh, well. Maybe a more realistic approach would be to do the opposite of what I've been suggesting: Build monuments and name things based on the immediate impulses and manias of the day, and not try to guess what future generations will make of your efforts. The bits they care about, they'll maintain. The rest will slowly corrode away and go back into the soil. And maybe that's as it should be. I dunno. It's my latest theory, at any rate.

mt. hood from mt. tabor

Mt. Tabor in glorious lo-fi digital

More photos from my multi-camera-totin' "expedition" over to Mt. Tabor. I won't rehash the rationale for said excursion as I've already covered it here. Let's just say it helped with current events. In any case, this batch was taken with that cheesy old Jamcam 2.0 I picked up a while back for a whopping six dollars. As with all Jamcam photos, they needed substantial GIMP processing. I don't care what this camera says, the world contains more than just shades of blue, green, and gray. I'm quite sure of it. I also used a bit of unsharp mask on the pics, not that it's obvious. You can only do so much with a 640x480 image, after all.

B+W: Mt. Tabor

More photos from Mt. Tabor, this time in glorious black-n-white. I was up there a couple of weeks ago with a whole bag full of cameras. Partly as a compare and contrast thing, and partly to avoid dwelling on the latest death among friends and family, something I've seen a lot of lately. Well, anything other than zero seems like a lot to me, and now there's been more than one in the last few months, so it's a lot. Instead of freaking out over something I couldn't change, I wandered around taking photos for a while, spending a couple of hours thinking of nothing but light and angles and framing and such. It was nice.

Once all the film cameras were out of film, and the digital ones had their batteries drained, I hoofed it off to the nearby Horse Brass Pub for another kind of forgetting. I may not be a psychologist, but I know what works. At least for me. At least in the short term.











Note the squirrel in the photo above. Next, here's a closer look. A bit too close, in fact, which is why the shot's blurry. I like a nice sharp photo and all that, but I also like not being bitten by rodents, even cute-n-cuddly ones.