Sunnyside Piazza

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If you happen upon the quiet intersection of SE 33rd and Yamhill, just one block south of Belmont, you'll immediately notice the intersection's painted up as a gigantic sunflower. This is Sunnyside Piazza, one of the first and best-known "intersection repair" efforts from Portland's City Repair Project. I've posted photos of a couple of other examples that I've run across, and I have a couple more of them in the pipeline. I guess I like these things because they're so idealistic. I tend to be a cynical person by nature, and a bit on the antisocial side; these community projects are a little antidote to my usual stomping around and scowling at the world, I guess. It's not the specific designs, exactly (though I'm fond of the spiral sunflower design here), but that they're impermanent and require a big neighborhood block party every year to repaint them. So I imagine that not all of these things will endure after the initial burst of enthusiasm wears off. And it's not like it's practical to do one at every intersection; you'd run out of willing neighborhood volunteers long before that.

It's a shame there's nowhere to put one in my downtown neighborhood. All the streets around here are way too busy, and most of them have MAX or streetcar tracks running through them. It's a shame because I think I'd be pretty good at brainstorming designs. The moon, maybe, or a giant octopus, or a Deep Space Nine wormhole, or Pac-Man, or a crop circle, or maybe a Sarlacc pit, or a surreal Escher design to confuse passing motorists. Some of these might be a bit tough for amateur street painters to pull off in a weekend, though, and others might have trademark issues. Feel free to swipe any of these notions for your local intersection if you like though.

Couple of links about Sunnyside Piazza and places like it:

• Nomination for a Project for Public Spaces award.
• City Repair page about the annual repainting, part of their city-wide "Village Building Convergence". It describes the project:

  One of the most famous and iconic of all the city's intersection projects, the re-painting of the Sunflower is a long standing tradition during the Village Building Convergence and this year is no different.

  This project is one of the few public places in the world to incorporate Fibonacci geometry. With its vibrant colors of yellow, orange, red and green, this street piazza is considered by many to be the heart of the Sunnyside Neighborhood, whose symbol is the Sunflower. With the Sunflower just a block off bustling Belmont street, this intersection is admired daily by neighbors and local business patrons alike.

• A short YouTube time lapse clip of the 2011 repainting.
• Info page from the metal fabrication firm that created some of the metal work that goes along with the street design here.
• A positive 2009 OregonLive article, since the paper hadn't yet evolved into today's hysterical right-wing tabloid. There aren't even any angry all-caps comments below the story.
• A nice Sightline Daily article about the "intersection repair" phenomenon.

SE 15th & Alder

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A couple of photos of the intersection at SE 15th & Alder, which is home to one of the many "street graphics" created by Portland's City Repair Project. A street graphic is just a large design painted on a city street, usually in an intersection, with the painting (and periodic repainting) done by neighborhood volunteers. Each design is different; this one has a sort of vine motif, I suppose because the intersection also hosts a City Repair-designed compost site.

I'm not sure how many of these there are around town, total. The first one was Share-It Square, the intersection of SE 9th & Sherrett (hence the name), down in the Sellwood neighborhood. As this was a strange new thing back in 1997, the neighborhood first had to convince the city that painting a lightly used residential intersection wouldn't be the apocalypse. The apocalypse didn't happen, and street graphics have multiplied since then. Probably the best-known of them is the one at Sunnyside Piazza, the giant sunflower design at SE 33rd & Yamhill. That was the first one I ran across and I immediately thought it was a great idea. I don't automatically think that about everything the City Repair people do; I tend to roll my eyes when they try building structures out of mud and sticks and hay and so forth. But the street graphics are great.

I'm thinking it might be fun to take up these street graphics as a new blog/photo project, actually. It feels like this humble blog needs a fresh new project. I was doing local bridges for a while, but I've done the major ones, and a lot of the interesting minor ones. Same goes for fountains and city parks. I'd love to travel enough to keep this humble blog in business just with travel photos, but I never seem to be able to pull that off. The ongoing public art project is rapidly approaching the point of diminishing returns as well; I'm already having to wander further and further afield (relatively speaking) to locate increasingly obscure (and often mediocre) artworks. I often wonder whether this is interesting to anyone other than me, to be honest. And the thing with the public art project is that it's difficult to talk about publicly-funded art in Portland without talking about art-world cronyism and gentrification. That's kind of unavoidable, but I feel like I've been complaining a lot lately -- often about the same narrow list of topics -- and generally taking a rather negative attitude about the world and whatever part of it I'm writing about. I really don't intend for this to be that sort of blog, if I can help it.

The missing element here, so far, is a list or map of street graphic projects. That's bound to exist somewhere, since a single group seems to be behind organizing all of them, and each one requires a city permit. So far I've run across a list of 2013 projects, and a map of 2012 projects, but not a complete list or map or guide or whatever. If anyone out there in Gentle Readerland has a pointer to something like that, I'd appreciate it.

A secondary motivation here is that these street graphics are fairly huge, and camera phone photos (like the ones in this post, & most other recent posts here) don't really do them justice. Phone photos are easy. I always have the phone with me, it takes reasonably ok photos, and I can upload to Flickr directly from it, without any intervening USB tethering + iPhoto + GIMP + Flickr Uploader steps. But the results are never as good, and a project like this would be an excuse to dust off the ol' DSLR and probably its ultra-wide angle lens. That looks like the best option outside of using a quadcopter camera drone, and that just feels sort of un-neighborly.

The formula for a street graphic blog post is probably going to look something like this: Photos, obviously; probably an embedded Google map, if it shows an overhead view of the thing; an explanation of what the graphic is about, or whatever else I can dig up about it; and (since the previous item probably won't be lengthy) I'll probably check the Oregonian database on the off-chance that something newsworthy happened at the intersection at some point.

As for today's intersection, far as I can tell the corner of SE 15th & Alder has appeared in precisely one news item since 1861: A purse-snatching reported on March 4th, 1928. The victim was relieved of a purse containing $3 in cash, a checkbook, and keys. So yeah, be careful when visiting. There could easily be malevolent purse-snatching ghosts, or vengeance-seeking wronged ghosts whose purses had been snatched, if you believe the nice people on cable TV.

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?