Aeolian Columns

Here's a photo of Aeolian Columns, a Lee Kelly sculpture in front of the Portland Veterans Hospital at OHSU, in a landscaped median between two buildings. Kelly's website describes it:

Aeolian Columns (1989), stainless steel and porcelain enamel columns fitted with organ pipes, c. 198 inches high; Collection Veterans Administration Medical Center, Portland OR. With composer Michael Stirling.

This is about the same vintage as Kelly's better-known (and similarly musical) Friendship Circle (1990) in Waterfront Park, and the family resemblance is uncanny. Sadly, I have a long track record of bad luck with local musical art, and I have never heard either of these sculptures in action. Or any other musical sculptures in town for that matter, except for the Weather Machine in Pioneer Courthouse Square. I'd claim to have some sort of anti-musical superpower, but in reality it's a combination of the art often being broken, and me being too impatient to wait around for it to do something. Anyway, a 1988 Oregonian article has a bit more about Aeolian Columns:

Oregon City artists Lee Kelly and Michael Stirling have been selected from among 64 contestants to create the $40,000 art-in-architecture project for the new Veterans Administration Medical Center, according to Barry Bell, center director.

The artists have created Aeolian columns, a collaborative sculpture and sound artwork created by sculptor Kelly and composer Stirling. The sculpture consists of three stainless steel columns between 15 and 16 feet in length, with bands of porcelain enamel providing splashes of color and highly reflective material.

The interior of the columns will be fitted with two tuned pipes that will produce the continuous series of tones scored by Stirling. The three pieces will be placed in the parklike setting at the entrance to the center, to create a man-made physical and musical grove.

I actually first heard of this sculpture in a Portland Public Art post about OHSU art that mentioned it briefly; the mysterious 'C' behind the blog was even less of a Kelly fan than I am, and said: "There’s an old rusty Lee Kelly in front of the nursing school, and another shiny one in front of the VA. Both hideous." I wouldn't go quite that far; "eyeroll-inducing" is more like it, and in general I do like Kelly's stainless steel stuff better than his rusty work. More importantly, I just hope the organ pipes play something pleasant and soothing, for the sake of the VA staff and patients.

Bell Circles II

A couple of earlier posts here talked about the pair of bells in front of the Oregon Convention Center, donated by Portland's sister cities of Sapporo, Japan, and Ulsan, South Korea. I mentioned there was also an acoustic art installation connected to the bells: Bell Circles II is an automated system that rings the bells every so often. Signs simply say the bells ring without warning, but they allegedly operate on a set schedule. Supposedly the Sapporo bell rings hourly, while the Ulsan bell rings on a schedule that evolves over time and resets on each solstice and equinox.. I say "allegedly" and "supposedly" because I was at the Convention Center recently and I had the idea of filming the Sapporo bell ringing. I'd checked YouTube and couldn't find any video of either of the bells ringing, so it seemed like this would fill an important cultural gap or something. So I started filming just before the top of the hour, and kept filming for four minutes, and came away with a boring video of the bell just sitting there, doing nothing. Later it occurred to me that "hourly" doesn't necessarily mean "at the top of the hour". Still, I feel like I've made a good faith effort to record the bell doing its thing, and I don't really feel like going back and hanging around for an hour or more to see if it ever actually rings. So I'm just going to go with the video clip I already have, and imagine that the bell's playing a famous John Cage piece. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Ulsan Bell of Sisterhood

A few months ago I wrote a post about the Sapporo Friendship Bell in front of the Oregon Convention Center, a gift from Portland's sister city of Sapporo, Japan. I mentioned briefly that there was a second bell nearby, and suggested there would be a post about it sooner or later, when I got around to it. Today we're visiting the second bell, the Ulsan Bell of Sisterhood which was a gift from Ulsan, South Korea, another of Portland's sister cities.

A note on the Portland-Ulsan Sister City Association's Facebook page calls it "a copy of the famous Shilla Dynasty bell". The famous bell in question is probably the Bell of King Seongdeok, cast in 771 AD during the Silla Dynasty period. Portland's copy is obviously a scaled-down version of the original bell. A larger copy, the "Korean Bell of Friendship", is located in a park in Los Angeles.

In addition to the bells themselves, the bell-ringing system is a public artwork in its own right. Bell Circles II is a sound installation created by composer Robert Coburn. The system rings the two bells according to a programmable and varying schedule. I'm not clear on exactly how this schedule works; signs near the bells merely warn visitors that they ring without notice and are quite loud. I'm thinking the sound installation stuff deserves a blog post of its own, but for that I'll need a video or audio clip of at least one of the bells ringing. And to do that I'll need to figure out the ringing schedule, since I'm not going to hang around in front of the convention center all day filming bells just in case. That's just not going to happen. The news items below give some clues, but it could easily have been reprogrammed any time between 1990 and today.

Anyway, the Oregonian covered the Ulsan bell when it was donated in January 1989. The article explains that the original concept would have included a third bell, donated by Beaverton's sister city Hsinchu, Taiwan, along with some aluminum wind pipes, and continues:

According to Coburn, the $30,000 bell is modeled after a 7th-century Buddhist temple bell. It's decorated with images of Korean angels and topped by a dragon. An inscription commemorates the sister-city relationship.

When installed, the three bells will give off deeply resonant tones that will serve as aural landmarks at the convention center, orienting visitors to the building's entrances, Coburn said. One bell will be in the main courtyard and the other two will be at entrances. Each bell has a specific pitch. A computer will activate automatic striking devices that will sound a slow melodic pattern.

Coburn will arrange the cyclic patterns so they change over long periods of time, coinciding with the changes in seasons. On each equinox and solstice, the cycle will restart, Coburn said.

In addition to the temple bells, clusters of two or three aluminum wind pipes will hang in trees around the center. The pipes will be oriented to the wind and will sound pitches that relate to the bronze bells.

Much of Coburn's music is concerned with sound and the environment. The bell project is an attempt to neutralize urban noise, welcome visitors, orient them to the building, and provide sanctuary, he said.

The convention center opened in 1990, and the paper's architecture critic went on at length about all the art. After a bit about the big Foucault pendulum in an atrium, he spent a few paragraphs on the bells:

As the pendulum marks time inside with its metronomic swing, two bronze Oriental bells outside will mark time in sound. In a project conceptualized by composer Robert Coburn, Portland's sister cities Sapporo, Japan, and Ulsan, South Korea, each donated bells. They will be struck with a computer automated device according to a composition created by Coburn.

At this writing, Coburn had not completed his score, but he explained his two main goals are to orient people to the convention center's outdoor spaces with what he describes as ``soundmarks'' as opposed to landmarks. And, he wants to call attention to two scales of time.

``The intention is not a musical composition,'' Coburn said, ``but to make references to how we measure time versus how nature does.'' He explained that the Sapporo bell will be struck hourly while the Ulsan bell will be struck on a daily and seasonal cycle. ``On the equinox and solstice, they will be struck together at noon,'' Coburn added.

Three other wind bells, donated by the Republic of China, will resonate when a breeze blows. ``Usually architects use waterfalls to mask the traffic noise,'' Coburn said. ``I wanted to create a situation where the traffic would become a background to my composition.''

In addition to the pure aesthetics of sound and the marvel of seasonal rhythms, Coburn's bell project also represents a cultural handshake, an anticipation of the growing economic friendship between Portland and its potential Pacific Rim trading partners.

Weather Machine

If you've ever been in Portland's Weather Machine in Pioneer Courthouse Square at precisely noon, you may have noticed the square's Weather Machine. It's the tall column next to Starbucks, and at noon it wakes up, plays a fanfare, spins around a bit, and pops up a sculpture based on the next day's predicted weather. Its Smithsonian inventory page explains:

A tall pole topped with a sphere containing three weather symbols that represent typical weather conditions in the Portland area. Each day at noon there is a two-minute sequence of music and the weather symbols appear --Helia (A stylized sun, for clear sunny days); Blue Heron (For the days of drizzle, mist and transitional weather); Dragon (For stormy days of heavy rain and winds.

Apparently the weather forecast part involves someone in the square office calling the national weather service and asking. Or at least historically that's been the case; you'd think this could be automated. It's fun to imagine the phone conversations though. I imagine the same two people having a routine phone call every morning since 1986 or so. Maybe there's small talk, maybe they've become lifelong friends through the weather machine. Or maybe it's a brief cryptic conversation every day, a voice you've heard every day for 25 years and know nothing about. Or maybe they've grown to resent each other and this daily chore over the years, and it's an "Oh, it's you again" sort of conversation.

Will Martin, the square's overall designer, thought the place needed a whimsical "weather machine", but he died in a tragic plane crash before he could explain what he had in mind. The city got as far as designing the pillar here, and then held a design competition to decide what sort of weather contraption. to put on top of it. Here's a timeline, via the library's Oregonian newspaper archives:

• Competition announced August 1985
• The paper's art critic's take on it, with a mention of a copyright stipulation on the thing, to prevent the winning artist from creating an identical weather machine elsewhere.
• 33 designs submitted, including "Will's Wacky Weather World" which was same basic idea as the final product, but with more elaborate gadgetry, and photovoltaic power
• A letter from Terrence O'Donnell pointing out it was originally his idea, not Will Martin's, despite the Oregonian presenting Martin as the sole genius behind the square
• The competition was narrowed to 2 finalists by February 1986
• The winning design was selected in April 1986
• The first public model was unveiled April 11th
• The finished product was finally unveiled in August 1988
• A follow up article on September 1st noted that the machine is technically able to play at other times besides noon, but doing so would violate the city's noise ordinance, whereas playing at the strike of noon does not.

Sapporo Friendship Bell

Here are a few photos of the Sapporo Friendship Bell in front of the Oregon Convention Center. The bell marks the longstanding sister city relationship between Portland and Sapporo (the big city on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, host city for the 1972 Winter Olympics, and namesake of a beer you may have heard of). There's a second bell that marks the sister city relationship between Portland and Ulsan, South Korea. I didn't realize the two bells had different origins at the time, so right now I only have photos of the Sapporo bell and I guess I'll need to go back for the other one at some point. Although I may hold off on that until my Drafts folder is a bit smaller.

The two bells were the focus of a brief controversy in 1990, when a local evangelical Christian group objected on First Amendment grounds, claiming the bells were a Buddhist religious symbol and should either be removed, or joined by a nativity scene. Convention center management didn't buy the argument; the bells stayed, and there's still no nativity scene. The ACLU was reported to be "looking at the case" but they don't seem to have ever filed suit over it. I can only imagine how Bill O'Reilly would have demagogued this if Fox News had existed back in 1990.

Drawing on the River

In Cathedral Park, next to one of the St. Johns bridge supports, a mysterious steel wall stands in the middle of a grassy lawn. This is Drawing on the River, a relatively recent (2008) addition to the park. Its RACC page has this to say:

This sculpture was conceived as a tribute to industrial ingenuity in the St. Johns area. Like the Saint Johns bridge above, it is a suspension structure anchored at each end. The hull-like end pieces allude to the shipbuilding that went on nearby and were constructed using standard steel shipbuilding techniques by Peninsula Iron Works, a third generation firm adjacent to the park. “Drawing on the River” reflects back on a century of industry in St. Johns and is an homage to both the mills and the workers who ran them. The piece also invokes the river itself, which powered the mills and is the reason the workers settled here.

What the description doesn't tell you, and what I didn't realize while I was visiting, is that the wall has a variety of interactive features too. (If you can get close to it; it seems like the lawn sprinklers around it are always going full blast whenever I visit Cathedral Park.) The artist's website explains:

Also within the sculpture’s end forms are a looking and a music box listening device, designed with longtime [Donald] Fels collaborators Rob Millis and Ed Mannery. To listen, a button is pushed winding a spring that turns a music box. One of the music boxes plays Hoagy Carmichael’s “Up a Lazy River”, which topped the hit-parade in 1931, the year the bridge was dedicated.

The other music box plays “Amazing Grace”, a tune played by fiddlers who accompanied Lewis and Clark, who camped there in 1805. The explorers used music to communicate with the natives they encountered on their journey. The viewers in the sculpture feature historic photos, one of a hot air balloon that was featured in the Lewis and Clark Expo in 1905, the other of the world’s first plywood mill, also once on the site.

One of the music box collaborators has a few close up photos on his website. The music boxes were mentioned in a November 2013 OPB article about RACC art maintenance & conservation, as they were experiencing a bit of rust. There could be other reasons behind the rust, but I'm inclined to blame the sprinklers. The wall's also needed pressure washing for graffiti at least once so far. The pressure washing company's Facebook page is actually kind of interesting. More than I would have expected anyway.

Another fun detail is how Drawing on the River was funded. Since the 1970s, the city's "1% For Art" program has mandated that publicly funded construction projects should devote one percent of the total cost toward public art. The wall here is no exception, but looking around you won't see any circa-2008 public buildings nearby. In fact, it was created with surplus 1% For Art funds from the still-unopened Wapato Jail, in the far corner of industrial North Portland. It turns out that the rules only say how much project money goes for art, and they don't specify exactly where the art has to be. The jail cost $58 million, and 1% of that is still a big chunk of money, and the then-sheriff felt it was a waste to spend it all at the jail where law abiding citizens would never see it. So some of the money went here, and (as a snarky Portland Public Art post points out), some also went to nature-themed stuff around Smith & Bybee Lakes, and a sort of river piling-themed piece at the jail itself. Naturally the whole thing got the talk radio crowd all riled up about the gol-durned commie gummint spending money on highfalutin' art. Even though the rest of the money went to an enormous jail, which you'd think they'd be pretty stoked about. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

Friendship Circle

Some photos of Friendship Circle, the sculpture at the far north end of Portland's Waterfront Park. It's yet another local piece by Lee Kelly, the guy behind Leland One (aka Rusting Chunks No. 5), this time in collaboration with a composer. The sculpture commemorates Portland's longstanding sister city relationship with Sapporo, Japan, and it (supposedly) plays a 35 minute musical piece we're told was inspired by Asian temple music. As far as I can recall I've never actually heard this music, and I've been around the thing more than a few times. So all I can really say is that multiple sources insist it does this from time to time.

If you're looking at it and thinking, jeebus, this is one phallic-looking piece of art, you'll be pleased to know you aren't alone. The blog Culture Shock compiled a list of sorta-suggestive public artworks back in 2009, and this is #2 on the list. Also listed are Pod, aka "Satan's Testicle", Tikitotmoniki from the Pearl District, and Stack Stalk reppin' for the eastside. We've probably acquired a few more of these bad boys since that post went up, given that public art commissions still mostly go to male artists.