Transplant

Next up is another installment in our occasional tour of TriMet MAX art. Art along the westside Blue Line can be sort of hard to figure out sometimes; TriMet's official guide doesn't always mention titles and sometimes doesn't even name the artists, and I don't feel like I can do a proper public art post without knowing those two things. For example, take the group of decorative brick carts (i.e. benches that look like carts) at the Elmonica MAX station at SW 170th. TriMet's description of the station explains that Westside design team artists and Don Merkt echoed the act of transplantation—moving objects, plants and people from their original environment to a new place. Three brick carts symbolize transplanting, transporting, transforming.. At some point I ran across an RACC page that was a bit more specific, saying the group of carts was called Transplant and was created by Merkt. Unfortunately if you follow that link now you'll get an ugly IIS server error; I don't know whether it's a website error or the page has been deleted without redirecting to a nice 404 page, but it's been this way for months now. Anyway, I seem to recall there was a longer description on that missing page, though I feel like I understand the general concept already without a longer description. Still, it's too bad, if only because quoting a extended block of art lingo makes one's blog post look a bit larger and fancier.

In any case, this humble blog has previously visited a few other artworks by Merkt: Driver's Seat on the downtown transit mall near Union Station, Water, Please at the city water pollution lab next to Cathedral Park, and On TV at the cable access studio building on NE MLK. I think there's also something of his along the new MAX Orange Line, but I haven't gotten around to Orange Line art just yet.

On TV / Electro Umbilico

Today's adventure takes us to the corner of NE MLK and Graham St., Atop one of the buildings is a stainless steel frame that sort of resembles a TV screen, with a disembodied head (or maybe an Earth) floating in the picture. A big steel power cord coils its way along the side of the building. This building is home to Portland Community Media, the nonprofit in charge of our local public cable access channels, and the TV-like thingy is today's public art object.

The TV sculpture is titled either On TV or On the Air. Its Smithsonian art database entry gives a date of 1985-86, and claims "This is the first sculpture funded through Portland's Percent For Art Program."

Rooftop sculpture of an oblong box television with a revolving globe placed where the screen should be. The television sits on a fabricated carpet or table cloth whose corner drapes over the building. The set has an antenna, an electrical cord and a fishbowl on top.
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Funded with a National Endowment for the Arts, Art in Public Places grant of $5,000 given in 1987 to Portland Cable Acess TV. Additional funding was provided by Portland's Metropolitan Arts Commission and the Oregon Arts Commission. This is the first sculpture funded through Portland's Percent For Art Program. According to the attached article from the Oregonian, the site address is 2766 N.E. Union Avenue. The sculpture is attached to the building, and the artist used the building's walls for portions of the work.

Don Merkt, the sculptor, also created Driver's Seat, on the transit mall near Union Station, and Water, Please at a city office next to Cathedral Park. Other works not visited by this humble blog include several indoor sculptures at City Hall and the local state office building, a giant urn structure in Culver City, CA, and a baseball-themed sculpture in Dublin Ireland. He also created a cool (but unbuilt, as far as I know) concept for Broadway Bridge lighting. I think we ought to build this, if only because Portland currently has zero laser-armed bridges.

It turns out the electrical cord is a later addition, added during remodeling in 2004. It was created by Portland's Blashfield Studio, and goes by the title Electro Umbilico. The website describes it:

A sweeping exterior redesign of the Portland Community Media building as part of the facility's new identity. An 80 foot aluminum umbilical cord droops languidly across the side of the building, seeming to connect the existing Don Merkt sculpture (an abstract TV set) with a huge abstract plug shape above the newly designed entryway facade.

The TV dates to the era when some people still thought cable TV might change the world for the better somehow. Or at least locally produced cable might have a crack at it. It was the era when MTV still showed music videos, TLC had educational programs, CNN had news, Max Headroom was a pop culture icon, and (in theory) anyone could create their own cheesy cable access show, a la Wayne's World, or I suppose the original MST3K. I mean, I certainly wouldn't trade the modern internet for that imagined TV utopia, but it seemed like an inspiring vision at the time.

I honestly couldn't tell you what the future holds for the public access TV model. There are still no HD public access channels in Portland, and I haven't heard of any proposals to create them. The proposal that would bring Google Fiber to Portland is said not to include any subscriber fees to support cable access channels. Which makes sense in a way, since Google Fiber is promoted as a broadband Internet service, not a competing cable TV provider, though it can certainly act as one. A news account I saw indicated that the Google deal might give Comcast some leverage to weasel out of cable access fees too, which I think would essentially defund the current system.

Water, Please

The Water, Please sculpture sits along the Willamette River at Portland's Water Pollution Control Laboratory, just south of the St. Johns Bridge. Despite the name, it's actually kind of a swanky looking building, and I wouldn't mind having an office there, at least if I was in the water pollution business. The sculpture, naturally, has a water theme. RACC describes it thusly:

This piece frames the essential and eternal relationship between man and water. The sculpture establishes a parity between a drop of water and a human being, both of which emanate ripples of effect and consequences on each other.

This sounds incredibly groovy, but I admit I'm not really seeing it, myself. Maybe you're supposed to bring your preferred mind-altering substance along, in order to really dig the whole parity between people and drops of water thing. In any case, the sculptor also created Drivers Seat, which appeared here way back in 2007.

The half-raindrop part of the sculpture appears to double as a picnic table, with the inner ripples serving as seats. They're just curved pipes though, so it's not exactly the world's most comfy picnic spot. I guess it's an opportunity to suffer for art, if you're into that sort of thing.

driver's seat

Some pics of "The Driver's Seat", a large sculpture on the (once and future) transit mall, at NW 5th & Irving. This is a 1994 piece by Don Merkt, added during the transit mall extension. Apparently it's going to be moved across the street in the near future due to the new MAX line, but that shouldn't disrupt matters too drastically.

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I don't have a definitive reference for this, but I'd imagine Driver's Seat is an allusion to the TriMet bus lot next door, sort of. It would stand to reason, at any rate.

Oddly enough, I didn't actually sit in the driver's seat pictured here. I'm not sure why not. Maybe it's that this is Art with a capital A, and it's intimidating like that. I don't have a degree in art, and I don't have a doctorate in anything, so I'm not sure I'm qualified to sit in the driver's seat.

Also, for some reason this reminds me of a scene in Alien, where the crew comes across a highly deceased creature that got all chest-bursty while operating a huge sci-fi ray gun.

So, you know, no sense in tempting fate.