city reflections

Our occasional tour of art on the Portland Transit Mall continues with "City Reflections", one of the new crop of sculptures that went in along with the recent MAX construction.

So, ok, it's shiny and whimsical and harlequinesque, and it includes a cute dog, and that's all great and everything. But it also looks strangely dated, like something you'd have seen in a trendy housewares store in 1996, on the shelf next to the gargoyles and the chile pepper margarita glasses.

On the the bright side, if you buy it when it already looks dated, it slides over into "retro" that much quicker, and then everyone's bound to love it and see it as a local icon. So there's that. I give it another 6-8 years, 10 tops.



Additional info from across the interwebs:

• The artist's website
• A profile
by the Seattle P-I.
• Smithsonian oral history
• An interview with the UW alumni magazine.
• Craft in America story

The Dream

So this is the long-promised post about the very worst statue in Portland. Which, it pains me to say, is "The Dream", the MLK-n-Friends grouping in front of the Oregon Convention Center. It pains be because it's a great example of noble intentions -- or at least noble platitudes -- gone terribly awry.

There's a plaque on the base explaining these intentions in excruciating length, which is never a good sign in itself. The idea is that everyone shares the same dream of justice, equality, peace, etc., and we're all striding together as one towards the glorious future, or something along those lines. Sure would be kinda neat if the world worked that way in real life, huh?

As an aside, The Dream bears more than a passing resemblance to old Soviet propaganda statues, which often depicted assorted proletarian types (usually a worker, a peasant, a soldier, an apparatchik from the Party, sometimes some token ethnic minorities, occasionally a scientist/engineer) striding together as one toward the glorious Communist future. I'm not trying to draw a moral equivalency here; I'm merely pointing out that the form is strikingly similar.

So anyway, there's MLK for starters, stiffly and clumsily strolling into the future, and looking more like Sherman Hemsley's character on The Jeffersons than MLK.

Surrounding him is a diverse grouping of figures. On his right stands what the plaque describes as "a young man of the working class", at the precise moment he achieves class consciousness (although I don't think the plaque uses that term), rolls up his sleeves, and joins the aforementioned universal struggle. In the US his sort of thing is exceedingly rare, and you're far more likely to spot our blue-collared chum here shrieking incoherently at a corporate-sponsored Palin rally than lifting a finger to advance what you'd think would be his personal economic interests. This has caused decades of hand-wringing and head-scratching in academia, and endless indie documentaries and such, and we're not going to figure it out today.

Behind MLK and facing away is a vaguely Hispanic-looking woman who symbolizes immigrants. She's looking around nervously, as if watching out for the Border Patrol, and water laps at her feet. I'm not too sure about this tableau here. It certainly looks like we're watching her sneak across the Rio Grande. Now, I was under the impression that was kind of a negative stereotype. And in any case, if you're trying for a sympathetic depiction of immigration -- beyond preaching to the choir, I mean -- this probably isn't the image you really want to emphasize. Just sayin'.

There's one detail here that I suppose is to point out that this is merely the allegorical Rio Grande: If you look closely, you'll note a couple of salmon. You didn't really think it'd be bad art in Portland without any salmon, did you?

And finally there's a kid pestering MLK. The plaque goes on for a bit about the allegorical meaning of the kid, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Something about letting go of other attachments and going off to join the aforementioned glorious struggle, but I still don't get what the sculptor is trying to say here. It's as if the kid is here as an obstacle, rather than as a co-striver. It's all very incoherent, even for someone like me who generally views kids as antagonists. And besides, all statues of kids are creepy -- even the most technically skilled statue ever made of a kid still looks like Chucky. And all painted statues I've ever seen are automatically Bad Art.

But wait, there's more! The fun doesn't stop with the statues. Look closely at the base of the thing: There's the plaque with the explanatory essay on it, and two more honoring people who apparently didn't make the cut for the main statue, or were added later to bump the diversity up another notch. That's always the big risk if your goal is universal representation: You will always have left someone out, maybe entirely by accident, or for space or budget reasons, who knows, and the internet will always assume malice on your part. So here we have one panel honoring Gandhi, and the other honoring Chief Joseph.

At least I think the Gandhi one is supposed to be in his honor. It's the weirdest part of the whole sculpture, and I'm giving it the unofficial title of "Legalize It". So you've got Gandhi arguing with a lion, and there's a big scary mushroom cloud, and what looks like Indian and Pakistani guys arguing, and even a set of hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys.

Chief Joseph is a bit more sedate, mostly just scenery. More salmon though.

Despite the two panels here, you can tell this dates from the early days of trying to include absolutely everyone. If you made something like this thing today -- not that I'm suggesting it -- you'd need more panels. You'd need a Harvey Milk panel, at minimum, and someone in a wheelchair looking saintly; and other panels to represent the entire galaxy of genders and identities and nationalities and body types and shapes and sizes, without leaving anyone out; then find some kind of way to depict neurodiversity in panel form, and I have no idea how one might go about that; plus maybe a wolf and a dolphin hanging out with Bigfoot, to represent all non-human sentient beings, and there's probably someone or something of precisely equal importance that I've acccidentally left out but who also deserves a panel exactly as much. And you know what would really pull the whole thing together? Imagine if they were all animatronic and sang "It's a Small World" together, if Disney will let you use it, otherwise maybe "I'd Like to Teach The World To Sing" if Coca-Cola will let you use it.

Obviously all of this representation stuff will deeply offend conservatives, and you may need to placate them to avoid being shipped off to a dungeon in El Salvador, so in order to look "fair and balanced" you may end up having to add a panel honoring Sheriff Bull Connor, or famous Oregon Klansmen of the 1920s, or a giant gold Trump statue with his back turned to the whole group, and hidden speakers bellowing his most deranged campaign speeches around the clock at 120 decibels.

That's not the only way you could extend the thing, though. Our heroes are basically already arrayed in a defensive circle; why not have them fighting off an army of horribly mutated, inbred, redneck zombies? Ok, so the whole peace-n-love angle wouldn't work anymore, but you'd be adding the sort of awesomeness this thing desperately needs, and sort of emphasizes the idea that survival depends on working together. And just think -- right now nobody makes a trip just to see the statue, and conventioneers likely barely notice the thing. But add some zombies and give MLK a chainsaw, and that all changes. Hipsters would show up by the busload from far and wide, their Holgas and Polaroids at the ready, many of them earnestly making indie documentaries about each other, or writing ironic hipster songs about the whole occasion. And I'd start a bar next door and overcharge them for PBR. So, yeah, the zombies would be in rather poor taste, but it might do wonders for the local economy.

Items about "The Dream" from across the interwebs:

• The artist's website has a page about it. His bio elsewhere on the site shows him wearing tie-dye. This would probably be a bad time to fall back on stereotypes about dreamy hippies and such, so I'm just going to say it's a telling detail.
• The Convention Center's Art Map has a blurb about it, and the other artworks scattered around the complex.
• Portland Public Art covers another work by the same artist, an obscure Lewis & Clark scene hidden behind some shrubs at the University of Portland.
• Washington Post story about DC's new MLK statue, which is much larger and (to some critics) rather "confrontational", a term Dan Savage decodes as meaning "uppity".
• Another article about MLK and the DC statue.

Strength of America

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At the corner of 35th & Belmont, in inner SE Portland, is an old historic fire station that now serves as a firefighting museum. On the streetcorner in front of the museum is this monumentally craptacular statue called "Strength of America", which is supposed to be a 9/11 memorial. You didn't realize we already had one of those, did you?

Portland Public Art describes it with an extra helping of snark:

As a nation we’ll look back on our response to 9/11 in a decade with chagrin, I expect. So many decisions made from fear instead of facts; and some of these were aesthetic as well.

This Doc Savage mock up has his hands full, holding an enormous snake with one hand, and a kerosene lamp in the other. Adjoining him is a US flag and an eagle, wings out swept. For some reason he is shirtless, dressed in jeans and tiny work boots. Surrounding the base are roughed Plexi blocks with names of people killed on 9/11, and the lord’s prayer written in childish script and signed by Caswell.

It’s a blink and a silent WTF? Damn, you’ll say, that’s incongruous for Sunnyside. Then you’ll shift it into the context of 9/11 and list it within that long list of other bad decisions our nation made afterward, we as individuals made.

One quick quibble with that: The words in childish script are actually not the Lord's Prayer, they're lyrics to "God Bless America". You know, the song Kate Smith used to sing before every Flyers riot, er, game.

Nitpicking aside, it really is a very weird statue. Note how it entertains fanciful notions about male anatomy. Look at that moobage, with man-nipples an inch or so too low. And the abs, which stretch all the way up to the moobage, with no intervening rib cage or anything. And the hands, oddly long and skinny fingers all about the same length.

The snake's cool though. I think the snake's supposed to symbolize the Evildoers, slithering about and deviously doing evil with their Weapons of Mass Constriction. Or something. Whatever it represents, the man-n-snake combo invites comparison with other person-n-snake-themed artworks down through the ages -- "Laocoön and His Sons", for example, and who can forget the famous Nastassja Kinski photo with the python?.

The eagle's not terrible either, although it's kind of smiling, which is weird. And it's stealing our hero's flag, which eagles aren't known to do in the wild. Maybe if you took the flag, dunked it in fish innards, and wrapped it around a live salmon, then eagles might take a professional interest. Although then you've defiled the flag and you're supposed to burn it, because them's the rules, fish innards and all, and that would really smell. So let's just agree that the bit with the eagle isn't modeled on real life.

Call me a minimalist if you like, but all in all I think the memorial would've been more effective with just the rubble and the fire helmet, and maybe the tablets with the names.

One thing that surprised me is the size of the thing. The photos I saw made it look bigger than it actually is. In reality it's only maybe 2/3 or 3/4 life size, if that, and like all the other photos I've seen of it, my photos fail to convey this small scale. I'm actually kind of disappointed by the whole thing. With subject matter like this, you naturally expect something a bit more imposing. If the scale matched the sheer melodrama of the thing, our hero here ought to be Paul Bunyan's big brother, and the flag-thieving eagle should be about pterodactyl-sized, and the whole thing would constantly play patriotic country-western songs at 120 decibels. Except on Sundays, obviously.

Based on my limited and biased experience in this area, I'm working on a set of guidelines to help you, the Gentle Reader, determine whether something constitutes Bad Art. Here are the rules so far, as they apply to statues. Abstract art will likely need its own set of guidelines.

• If a statue is painted, it's Bad Art. It's a sign the sculptor wasn't talented enough to get the point across with mere sculpture, and had to layer on a little paint-by-numbers to make the thing work.
• If it's a grouping with more than one person, it's often a sign of badness. In particular, if there are more people than strictly necessary, two or six when one would've done just fine, it indicates the artist doesn't know when to stop piling it on. Also, if people are depicted talking or looking at each other, that's surprisingly hard to get right. They tend to come out looking like brainless idiots, badly sculpted. Whereas if your people are working together (say, raising the flag over Iwo Jima) or just standing in a group (say, riding an elevator), often that can be fine.
• A similar situation applies when there's at least one person, plus one or more animals. Equestrian statues are an exception; they're a traditional form, and they can turn out ok. I suppose because the rider isn't typically interacting with the horse.
• It's also generally bad if one or more children is present, regardless of whatever else is there. Sculptures of children tend to turn out looking kind of weird and creepy, especially if they're smiling. Almost as creepy as 19th century painted portraits of kids, come to think of it.
• If any books are present, and their titles are visible, typically it's bad art. If you're meant to see the books (Bible, Das Kapital, Kerouac, etc.), a heavy-handed message is usually intended, and the artist wasn't able to make the art speak for itself.
• Similarly, if the art comes with a long explanatory plaque or artist's statement, it's usually bad. The art should either speak for itself, or STFU.
• If the artist bungles basic human anatomy, it's automatically bad, even if none of the other guidelines are met.
• If the art dates from before, oh.... say 1800 or so, it gets a free pass, as the product of another culture and another age.

The 1800 cutoff is needed because as it turns out, the aforementioned "Laocoön" clearly breaks the multiple-person and person-and-animal rules, and it's long been speculated that the ancient Greeks painted their statues, which would break another rule. And the two sons, well, they look maybe old enough to escape the no-kids rule. At least nobody's carrying any books. So, in short, make of these guidelines what you will.

Some people might go, wait a minute, the last time you really bashed something for being Bad Art was "The Promised Land" (the crappy pioneer sculpture in the Plaza Blocks), and like "Strength of America" it's conservative Bad Art. Isn't this Good vs. Bad yardstick just your ideological biases showing? Actually no, that's not it. Or that's not completely it anyway. I do have another Bad Art post in the works, this time about a local example of liberal bad art that just might be the most supremely craptastic statue of them all. Here in town, I mean. Any guesses?

Kvinneakt

Yep, the famous "Expose Yourself To Art" statue has finally returned to city streets, after an extended absence due to MAX construction. I posted about it when she was first removed, way back in November 2006, and at the time I speculated she might not be coming back, and might end up in the Pearl District or someone's private collection or something. It occurred to me later that she might not be asked back due to the whole nekkidness thing, so as not to alarm children and suburbanites. But here she is, and this time they've moved her to the corner of 6th and Morrison, right next to Pioneer Courthouse Square, I suppose so the tourists can find her more easily. I do wonder what would've happened if she wasn't famous, though.





The new prominent location is probably also so we can flaunt just how openminded we like to think we are. I have to say, though, that when I was taking these photos more than one person looked at me funny, like I was freakin' Larry Flynt or something. I mean, I'm used to attracting a little attention when taking photos of art downtown. The usual reaction is to look at me, puzzled, and then look at the art with a startled expression as though they'd never noticed it before, and then keep on walking. Generally I like to believe I'm performing a valuable public service by doing this, drawing people's attention to things they've walked past a zillion times without ever really looking at. Drawing people's attention to their tax dollars at work, that sort of thing. And generally I like to believe I'm entitled to massive government grants and subsidies for performing this valuable public service, although not once has anyone from city hall ever called to offer me money, the freakin' ingrates.



But in this particular case I'm not so sure. It occurred to me later that I could've played with the situation a little, talking to the statue like it was a model shoot -- you know, the usual "work it baby, yeah, that's it, a little to the right". If I was more of a ham and actually wanted the attention, that might've been entertaining, I guess.



Another idle concern is whether nekkid art affects how web-filtering services rate this humble blog. I really don't know how that works, since I don't think they explain their methods in any detail. I think it tends to involve a room full of people paid to look at photos all day and categorize them on an "I know it when I see it" basis. So it's a real crapshoot, I guess. I mean, I'm not going to refuse to cover something out of fear that people in Utah (for example) can't get to it at work. But I do think it would be kind of a shame if that happened. And think of the irony -- it would be safe for city streets, apparently, but not safe on the internet. Weird.

Anyway, it occurred to me (and I was mildly annoyed at this point) that if passers-by are going to look at me like a perv for taking these photos, I might as well get a shot of the feet, so here they are:



I haven't taken the time to gather an extensive "stuff from the interwebs" section this time, and there does seem to be less out there about it than you'd expect. Here are the few items I've cobbled together:

• The recent remake of the classic poster, this time starring the Vera Katz statue on the Eastbank Esplanade.
  
  
• three Flickr photos
  
  
• two articles mentioning her in passing.