Untitled, Macleay Park

NW Portland's Macleay Park is one of my favorite places in town, and I've never really done it justice here. An early blog post only covered one obscure corner of the park. I've also posted a boring video of a creek in the park, and a photo of a local slug. I've also done a post about the Thurman St. Bridge, which stretches over the park's lower entrance in dramatic fashion. Unfortunately this isn't a proper post about the place either; you might have noticed I've been doing a sort of public art thing lately, and Macleay Park is home to today's stop on this ongoing tour. The lower entrance to the park includes a meadow and group picnic area stretching out beneath the Thurman St. Bridge, and the popular hiking trail along Balch Creek begins at the far end of the meadow. In the middle of the meadow is an incongruous trio of bright red abstract sculptures, collectively known as Untitled. Their RACC page gives the rest of the story:

Three geometric abstract steel sculptures are placed in a raised landscaped area in and located directly south of the Thurman Street Bridge. In siting the work, the artist wanted the sculptures to respond both to the surrounding greenspace (thus, the bright red color) and to the broad horizontal expanse of the Thurman Street bridge (thus, the vertical nature of the sculptures). At the time the pieces were installed, Vern Luce lived near Lower MacLeay Park and selected the site both for its visual beauty and its proximity to his home.

The date on it says 1983, but the design was originally selected in 1979, and funded with a chunk of federal CETA money, along with Silver Dawn in Wallace Park, and the untitled ring whatzit in Couch Park. I've actually added a blog tag for CETA-funded art; other than Silver Dawn most of it isn't that great or memorable, and it's by people you've never heard of, and it's all in the same groovy chunky 70s style. It's not trying to communicate an environmental message, or define a neighborhood identity, or serve as a local landmark, or harmonize with its surroundings or anything like that. It just sort of exists, period, plunked down wherever the movers thought was easiest and left to confuse future generations. Or, more likely, be ignored by future generations, and marked as territory by their dogs.

Silver Dawn

I may have mentioned once or twice that I'm rather fond of The Dreamer, the shiny bronze whatzit in Pettygrove Park. I recently found out it has a silvery sibling in NW Portland's Wallace Park, so obviously I had to go check it out. Silver Dawn is at the NE corner of the park, near the fenced off-leash dog area. The blurb from its RACC page is more artist bio than description:

“Silver Dawn” is an excellent example of the large biomorphic abstract sculptures that Manuel Izquierdo was known for. Izquierdo, a central figure in the mid-century Portland art scene, was born in Spain and came to Portland as a refugee who fled after the Spanish Civil War. He studied at the Museum Art School (now PNCA) and taught there for 46 years after graduating.

Silver Dawn makes a cameo in a blog post about the author's ongoing project to track down Izquierdo sculptures around the city. It mentions that Silver Dawn had once been in the middle of the off-leash area, and had also received dents and dings over the years, possibly thanks to balls from the nearby baseball/softball field.

The June 28th, 1980 Oregonian had a photo of Silver Dawn being installed, and the July 22nd paper mentioned it had just been dedicated as part of a repair and improvement effort at Wallace Park: "A sea-form sculpture by Manuel Izquierdo, selected in a national competition coordinated by the Northwest District Association, was dedicated during a neighborhood potluck." Silver Dawn was mentioned in passing in a 1982 article; this being the era before the internet and publicly accessible databases, the then-Metropolitan Arts Commission decided to put together a book cataloging the city's public art, fountains, murals and so forth, and they asked the public for suggestions to try to make the book as complete as possible. Which suggests they themselves didn't already have a master list to work from. Now, thirty-odd years later, they do at least have a public database of things they administer; works belonging to other government agencies or private owners are generally not listed, though. The Smithsonian art database is a bit more comprehensive, but isn't updated on an ongoing basis, so anything new in the last few years won't be listed. Still, the combination of these various sources is enough to keep this humble blog humming along, so I can't complain too much.

Incidentally, to go off on a mostly-unrelated tangent, I know exactly where I was on July 22nd, 1980. It was a hot day, and we were at our suburban neighborhood swimming pool. All of a sudden, people looked up and noticed a big grey mushroom cloud in the sky: Mt. St. Helens was erupting again. The famous destructive eruption had occurred back on May 18th, but the July eruption came on a clear sunny day and I think it may have been the only eruption I actually witnessed (at least until the volcano woke up again in 2004.) I even got out the family Kodamatic instant camera and took at least one photo of it, which I think I still have around somewhere. (If I ever find it again, I'll probably scan it and post it here.) The eruption was naturally the big lead story in the next day's paper.

118 Modules

The latest obscure artwork in our ongoing tour of obscure things is 118 Modules, on the SW corner of the parking garage at SW 10th & Yamhill. It's yet another find from the big Travel Portland public art map. The map's description:

Smart Park, SW 10th & Yamhill
John Rogers 118 Modules
1979 slip-cast white stoneware

The RACC page about it has a bit more to say:

This is John Rogers’ first public art commission. He has since created numerous large-scale public art projects from Alaska to Florida. A Portland native, Rogers studied ceramics at Portland State University, and currently works with diverse materials such as metals, glass, ceramics, stone, cement, plastics, and light.

“I like to mix qualities found in the organic world with the technical world… My art relies on a firm understanding of the interplay between art, architecture and engineering. From these disciplines I develop sculptural forms that create a dialogue and tension with the architecturally defined space, as well as the surroundings.”

There are also Smithsonian art inventory & CultureNOW pages that don't add a lot. It also shows up in a big .CSV file cataloguing local public art, hosted on Github of all places. An interesting idea, anyway.

This is at least the third artwork I've posted about that was funded under the late, lamented, Comprehensive Education & Training Act (CETA), which I gather was a great big 1970's style unsupervised crockpot of federal money. The other two pieces (that I'm aware of) are Uroboros and Disk #4; I think 118 Modules is probably my favorite of the three, although Uroboros had an interesting, photogenic texture when you got up close to it.

So the question you're probably wondering now is whether there really are 118 modules or not. I did actually try counting & came up with fewer than that, but then I realized some of the modules are divided into halves, quarters, or even smaller fractions, and those pieces all probably count toward the total number of modules. At that point laziness kicked in and I shrugged & stopped counting. In my defense, I'm pretty sure that not knowing whether there really are 118 modules or not adds a sophisticated new layer of complexity to the piece. Also, counting the modules is sort of like tugging on Superman's cape: What if, hypothetically speaking, it turned out there were really only 115 modules? What then? An angry taxpayer lawsuit? A quiet renaming? The piece gets de-accessioned and goes up on eBay? Honestly, I have no idea how these things usually work, but it's bound to be ugly, so maybe we just shouldn't go there.

Couch Park expedition

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A couple of photos of Couch Park in NW Portland. The park is basically the neighborhood playground and dog park, and as a non-dog-owner without kids normally I don't bother covering places like this here. But I dimly remembered that I'd taken some photos of the place several years ago, and it occurred to me that a post about the park would fill a moderately sized geotag-less hole in the humble blog's official map (which I sorely need to update again, btw), and if you think those sound like idiotic reasons to do a blog post you're probably correct. But as far as I know that's never stopped anyone from putting something on the interwebs, so here we are.

So I went back and looked through my old photo archives and realized I in fact had precisely two photos of the park. This probably seemed like a reasonable number to me at the time, given the limitations of circa-2006 memory cards and puny digicams that take AA batteries. I went ahead and uploaded those two, and figured I'd go back and take more and better photos before publishing this post. I made it there a couple of weeks ago, and walked around a bit, and I ended up not taking any photos at all. So I'm going to go with the two I have and call it good.

The pictures capture the two things I though had some degree of interest. A Lang Syne Society historical marker (I occasionally consider doing a project to track down more of those), and the abstract sculpture in the top photo. It's a 1976 piece simply called "Untitled", by David Cotter. And I admit even it isn't all that exciting from a photo standpoint. I tend to take lots of close up photos to show any interesting textures or details a piece has, and I didn't notice anything like that with this piece. The RACC page I linked to seems to indicate this is Cotter's only work in town, but the Smithsonian art inventory indicates he was also an assistant on Leland I, aka the infamous Rusting Chunks No. 5. The Smithsonian also refers to the Couch Park piece as "(Abstract Circle)", though I don't know whether that's an actual name or just a description. Cotter is also credited with a sculpture on the Catlin Gabel campus, and is listed as co-sculptor of something at Mount Hood Community College, and as an assistant on the Frank Beach fountain at the Rose Garden. So now you know.

Uroboros

A few photos of "Uroboros", a small modern sculpture in Westmoreland Park. It's hidden away toward the south end of the park near Crystal Springs Creek, and it's not all that big, and it's sort of earth-toned, so you won't necessarily notice it. I never noticed it until I read about it on the interwebs and went there specifically to track it down, and even then it a while to find it.

Its Smithsonian Art Inventory page gives a date of "possibly 1978", and gives a little extra detail about it:

Medium: Sculpture: concrete; Base: concrete.
Dimensions: Sculpture: approx. 45 x 45 x 16 in.; Base: approx. 21 x 20 x 16 in.
Inscription: (At lower right:) Kibby 78(?) signed
...
Remarks: Commissioned under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and donated to the park.
Condition: Surveyed 1993 November. Treatment urgent.
References: Save Outdoor Sculpture, Oregon survey, 1993.

Looking at this sculpture today, I seriously doubt 1993's urgently required treatment ever happened.



Not much on the interwebs about this one; Portland Public Art mentions it in passing, comparing it to the rather similar Disk #4 up in Peninsula Park:

It is a fair replica of Chuck Kibby’s Uroboros, in stone, located at Westmoreland Park. There may be more in storage somewhere. Both typify a 1970s combination of anxiety about marketing and incomprehension about interesting artwork.

I note that both pieces were funded under CETA, a 70's-era federal jobs program that's fondly remembered for its lax rules and generosity. My understanding is that you could get a grant for just about anything under the sun. You'd just claim that someone, somewhere, would probably have a job for a while, and the feds would write you a big check. It sounds almost European, and I mean that in a good way.



If I'm reading things right, and guessing correctly, it appears the guy who created "Uroboros" now has a well-known historic preservation firm in Los Angeles. A 2008 LA Times article profiles the company and talks about its rapid growth & growing pains. (Although note the real estate bubble was still inflating at that point.)



Like the similar Disk #4, I don't really have a strong opinion about this one. I do generally prefer abstract art. I realize that's still a minority opinion even after a century or so of it, but there you go. And this one's perfectly fine, although as an astronomy & photo geek I can't help thinking it looks an a lot like a coded aperture mask (See this one from the European INTEGRAL gamma ray satellite).



In any case, it has an interesting texture that's kind of fun to play with in photos (and hopefully you can see this). I'm not sure it's the original, intended texture, but hey. If the city or RACC ever scrapes up some cash for restoration work, I can think of one obvious candidate for the job.

Disk #4

Here are a few photos of Disk #4, a small and unassuming sculpture tucked away in a corner of NE Portland's Peninsula Park, just north of the rose garden. I can't find anything on the net about this beastie, so the plaque is all I know about it:

I don't have any strong feelings about the sculpture itself, although it has a number of attributes I admire in public art: It's relatively small, inoffensive, not in anyone's way, and the Feds paid for it instead of local taxpayers, courtesy of the Comprehensive Employment & Training Act, or CETA. From what I've heard, CETA was a large and basically unsupervised pot of money with no strings attached, and you could get funded for just about anything if you had a good grant writer. I kind of miss those 70's-era warm-n-fuzzy, overly generous government programs; now it's just bluenosed control-freak Calvinism all across the political spectrum, and your only choice these days is whether you want a red nanny state or a blue one. Feh.

During the Reagan years, CETA was replaced by something called the Job Training Partnership Act, authored by the one and only Senator J. Danforth Quayle. Which is really all you need to know about that.

In any case, I didn't stop and dally at Disk #4 because of its overall aesthetic merits, or lack thereof. Overall, I don't really have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. But like most bronze sculptures, it has an interesting surface texture. The day I took these was one of the summer's many bright overcast days, with that ugly blue-grey light you generally can't do anything with, photo-wise. That light made for some interesting reflections off the warm bronze of the sculpture, though. I think this is the first time that light's been useful for anything. And even then, it's only just useful, I wouldn't call it great or anything. I'd meant to do a post about the park as a whole, but these are the only photos I got that didn't totally suck. Seriously. Not even the roses came out ok. Bloody weather.

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