Mistral No. 2

Here's another object from the Portland Art Museum's free outdoor section, Frederic Littman's Mistral No. 2 (1961). Littman was a prolific local artist of the mid-20th Century, so his work shows up all over town. I've covered three other creations of his: Joy (Pioneer Woman) on Council Crest; Farewell to Orpheus in the South Park Blocks at PSU; and The Flogger at ESCO in industrial NW Portland. As I've said before, his style is generally not my cup of tea (though it works in The Flogger). Still, it was kind of fun to look around the museum's sculpture garden, see Mistral No. 2 and immediately know who had created it, even before I looked at the sign. I'm starting to feel as if I've actually learned something in this little project. It's not exactly a marketable job skill, but hey.

Meanwhile Mistral No. 3 is somewhere at Keller Auditorium, apparently. The interwebs don't seem to know where Mistral No. 1 is, or how many Mistrals there were in the series.

The Flogger

Today's adventure takes us up to industrial Northwest Portland, to a parking lot at NW 25th & Vaughn, near the big ESCO steel mill. The statue shown here is The Flogger, by Frederic Littman (who also created "Joy (Pioneer Woman)" and "Farewell to Orpheus", among other works). In the past I've generally said that his style is not really my cup of tea. I think I've used the word "lumpy" before. But this one actually works. Here the style seems to convey power and motion and determination. So it's possible that it's not the style that I don't care for, it's that the style and subject matter often don't mesh like they do here.

The company's website has a photo of the statue on their 'about' page. An Oregonian article profiles the company, and interviews one executive who started out at the company as a flogger. At this point you're probably wondering what a flogger is. In the steel industry, I mean. It seems that when you mold molten steel into a form, you often end up with extra steel stuck to your new metal part. A flogger uses a sledgehammer to break the extra metal off of the molded part. whereas a grinder does basically the same thing, except with a grinding machine. I'm going to go ahead and guess that "grinder" is the next step up on the career ladder if you start as a flogger. It's fortunate that a career ladder exists, at least; outside of the steel industry, the word "flogger" on a resume could prove to be a hindrance. I mean, unless you're interviewing for a professional S&M gig or a job with the CIA, not that there's much of a difference between the two anymore.

This post is a bit of an experiment in that these are camera phone photos. I'm not sure I've used phone photos here before except as a novelty, DSLR snob that I am. But these seemed to turn out OK, and uploading to Flickr instead of Twitpic seems to result in better image quality. The 40D is still obviously the high quality option, but it would be nice not to have to lug a big camera around quite so much. I say this as someone who turned mumble-mumble years old in December and whose lower back tried to seize up this morning as he jogged across the street to avoid traffic, while lugging -- you guessed it -- a big hefty camera bag.

Farewell to Orpheus

A couple of photos of "Farewell to Orpheus", a smallish sculpture + fountain in the South Park Blocks, within the PSU campus. These are all the photos I've got, and I felt oddly furtive while taking them. I mean, white guy with a big lens taking photos of a nude statue based on a Greek myth, and sculpted by another white guy. C'mon, I took critical theory back in college, I know this whole scene is, as they say, problematical. I suppose being on the PSU campus I figured someone else would draw a similar conclusion and... I dunno what would happen after that.



I do know that I walked past it nearly every day for several years back in college and never wondered about it or gave it a second look. Kind of nondescript from a distance, and it doesn't help that they rarely, or possibly never, run the fountain surrounding it. (It seems the various fountains around PSU are quite expensive to maintain.) So it turns out that it dates to the late 60's, was created by the same guy who did the Pioneer Woman sculpture up on Council Crest, and represents the saddest of all Greek myths. So now you know.

I have to say I'm not really sold on the style, either here or on Council Crest. It's kind of... lumpy... if you ask me. The 60's weren't really glory days for scuptures that were supposed to actually look like stuff. Perhaps they'd just lost the knack of it or something.

joy (pioneer woman) (for now)

Here are a few pics of Joy (Pioneer Woman), a Frederick Littman sculpture located up at Council Crest... at least for now. A sister piece was recently stolen and sold for scrap by a couple of creepy metal-thieving tweakers, and some years ago "Joy" herself was temporarily abducted as well, and was only recovered about a decade later. So it's probably only a matter of time before someone else notices it and sees dollar signs. The same likely goes for any other metal object that can be grabbed and carted off, or cut into pieces and carted off.

In the first draft of this post I went off on an extended rant about metal thieves, meth, and Mad Max, which then segued into a bit of pop sociology about meth and the unending stress of poverty. The ranting didn't fit the tone I'm aiming for with this post, and the soc. theory was unpersuasive on second reading. Most sociological theory strikes me that way, actually, which may be why I never went on to grad school.

So instead I'll just get to the point. The statue's nice enough, it's here in town, in a scenic location, and it's probably doomed if scrap metal prices stay at current levels. Or if people notice the word "Pioneer" in the name and decide it needs toppling. So go see it while you still can.