The Knowledge

Ok, time for another episode in obscure stuff near the Portland State campus. The Knowledge is a bit easier to find than most entries in this series; it's the large, brightly colored mural of books that takes up much of the block of 5th Avenue between Hall & College streets. I'm not entirely sure mural is the right word here; it's a photo or photos printed on vinyl, applied to one of PSU's infinite collection of hideous 1960s parking structures.

CultureNOW describes it:

This mural by Harrell Fletcher, with assistance from Avalon Kalin, depicts a series of stacked books from the Portland State University Library, showing the spines with titles. Titles include references to the adjacent educational community and local sustainability efforts, as well as topics of interest to the diverse student body, the campus community in general, and neighboring businesses that support the University District area. Students, faculty, and staff participated in a poll to choose the book titles.

As a PSU alumnus, the only surprising thing about the poll results is that there's only one Raymond Carver book pictured. Maybe there was a quota or something, or maybe his star's fallen a bit in the last mumble-mumble years. Dunno. Anyway, The Knowledge was named one of the nation's best public artworks of 2010, at something called the "Americans for the Arts Public Art Preconference", in June 2011. A Portland State news release about this win says:

Harrell Fletcher’s mural, The Knowledge, at Portland State University’s Ondine Building on the 5th Street side, was partially funded by RACC’s public art mural program, with additional funding from Portland Development Commission, TriMet and Portland State University. The 127’x20’ mural has improved the aesthetics of the surrounding area – which is dotted with residential apartments, , University residence halls, small businesses, cafes and restaurants – by adding vibrant color and graphics that promote learning in a university setting. As a side benefit, the mural also discourages graffiti in the area. More online at http://bit.ly/jgJZgo. Estimated cost of the project is $35,000.

Other items of interest from across the interwebs:

• Interviews with the artist by Shambhala SunSpace, Allan McCollum & Greater Good.
• A blog post at Noticing Southwest Portland.
• A few Flickr photos. A comment at the latter photo suggests "somebody should do VHS version". Which is actually not a terrible idea, considering that PSU's Fifth Avenue Cinema is right around the corner. So it would be sort of appropriate. Although today's college students may have no idea what a VHS tape is.

Reading the Street

Today's stop in the ongoing tour of Portland transit mall art takes us to SW 5th & Oak, right in front of one of Portland's famous food cart pods. Reading the Street is the low railing with the glass panels that you leaned against while waiting for your pad thai last week, without even realizing it was Art. Don't be embarrassed; everyone does this, myself included. TriMet's Green Line public art guide describes it thusly:

Mark R. Smith's Reading the Street consists of a series of glass panels with images of silhouetted figures arranged in horizontal rows. Through body language and gestures, the images are meant to be read and deciphered like text, as the work addresses the complicated nature of human interaction in crowded urban thoroughfares.

This post illustrates one of the things I enjoy about doing this blog: It makes me stop and look at things I've walked past (or leaned against) countless times without ever really noticing. I tend to think these "Hey, wait, what's that?" moments are interesting and worth sharing, which they may or may not be. And if not, I still enjoy taking the photos and doing what passes for research here, so there's that.

It seems the artist behind Reading the Street is an instructor at PCC Sylvania, and had a show last November at Portland's Elizabeth Leach Gallery. I've run across less than a handful of mentions of Reading the Street on the interwebs, but I did come across an interesting article about a 2004 commission of his at Lewis & Clark, so I figured I'd pass that along.

CultureNOW does have a photoset on Reading the Street, but my photos are better, quite honestly. I wish they'd written a bit more about it instead; I'd actually be interested in the design process & requirements around the thing. The food cart pod was there first, years before MAX and the accompanying art arrived. The heavy railings above the panels seem to indicate they were designed assuming that people would lean or sit on them. Which fascinates me, because although this cart pod has been around for over a decade, it's still just a collection of mobile carts on a parking lot, an ephemeral thing that could be gone tomorrow if City Hall or the lot's owner suddenly took a dislike to food carts. So it's entirely possible the railings could outlast the reason they're here. A decade from now, once the parking lot's been replaced by a condo tower for rich Californians, or an anti-zombie fortress, or an Applebee's, or some other dystopian horror, people may glance at the railings and wonder what they were originally for, while fleeing for their lives.

Conduit

Today's adventure in transit mall art takes us to Portland State University's fugly University Services Building, on SW 6th between Mill & Montgomery. Don't worry, we aren't going inside. We're just here to look at Conduit, on the otherwise blank concrete wall of the building's parking garage, facing 6th Avenue. Conduit was created by Emily Ginsburg (a professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art); her website describes it:

This is an outdoor site-specific commission for PSU and TRIMET. It is using the act of traveling as a metaphor for the transmission and exchange of ideas and the perpetual space between thinking and communicating tied to learning, living and working.

For whatever reason, TriMet's transit mall art guide doesn't mention Conduit anywhere, but it does show up on the big Travel Portland public art map, which is where I came across it. I only mention this because I've sort of clued in on that map as a new source of things to take photos of, and the post you're reading now is far from the last item on that map. Thing is, I'm not totally convinced my usual formula for art posts results in interesting or useful content. I post some photos of the piece, tell you where it is, and if I can find descriptions of it on the net somewhere, I quote liberally from those rather than trying to describe or analyze it myself. I have no pretensions around being an actual art critic; if I particularly like or loathe something, I'll usually say so, but I'm not going to offer an extensive theoretical justification for it either way.

On the other hand, I'm pretty good at finding things on the interwebs, and some of my photos turn out ok. I suppose that's a good description of what I usually do here: Seize on some obscure subject, aggregate whatever I can find about it on the net, and add some original photos. Is that valuable? I dunno. I just know I've been doing it for mumble-mumble years now, to a continuous trickle of search engine traffic and the occasional return visitor. Anyway, enough handwringing for one post; you're probably just wading through this waiting for the aggregation part. I only came across a couple of items this time around, but they're both sort of interesting:

• You might also be interested in this interesting profile of Ginsburg at {rainboeliza}.
• PNCA's Flickr stream has several photos of Conduit.

Continuation

Today's stop on the ongoing tour of Portland Transit Mall art is Continuation, a group of pieces on SW 6th between Clay & Columbia, in front of the swanky Hotel Modera. TriMet's public art guide describes it:

With the five sculptures that make up Continuation, Michihiro Kosuge reused red granite from an earlier sculpture and fountain installation on the Portland Mall. To create relationships between the sculptures while allowing each one to stand on its own, the artist sculpted pieces with interconnecting visual elements that include repetition, tension and stability.

Without that description, it's not at all obvious that the sculptures are basically made from construction debris. I'm not entirely sure what the previous piece was, but I think they may have been part of the rim of the late, lamented "Bathtub Fountain", another piece of which reappeared briefly a few blocks north of here before vanishing again. If I recall correctly, TriMet had originally promised to rebuild the fountain in a new location, but you can only claim this happened if you have a very flexible definition of "rebuild".

I don't know whether the nickname "Bathtub Fountain" had anything to do with it being used as a literal bathtub by the homeless, but I witnessed that happen more than once. Call me a cynic if you like, but that sort of thing pretty much guaranteed the city wouldn't rebuild the fountain in its original form, much less provide a more dignified bathing option for the city's homeless. It's possible I've lived here too long. Although it's not like other US cities are famous for their kindness and generosity toward the homeless either.

untitled (6th & washington)

Today's adventure in Portland Transit Mall art takes us to 6th & Washington, home to a piece I repeatedly failed to see and walked right past while taking photos of other sculptures on 5th & 6th. This is Untitled, a chunk of stainless steel wall created by Bruce West (the same guy who created Sculpture Stage, & Land Form), and apparently it's graced the Transit Mall since the 1970s without me ever noticing it. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it; it's a perfectly pleasant decorative object, and failing to notice something this big has to be at least partly my fault. But you have to admit it doesn't draw the eye the way, say, Kvinneakt does, or for that matter the also-untitled (but colorful) 1970s bus mall sculptures at 5th & Oak and 5th & Ankeny. A snarky Portland Public Art post about Mr. West's works around town has this to say about Untitled:

Transit Mall thing politely titled, untitled. Part of the 1976 or 77 splurge on low-maintenance art for the Mall startup.

Can we get exchange this untitled thing for a picnic table?

Knowing this city as I do, the answer to that rhetorical question is that if you put a picnic table on the transit mall, sooner or later a homeless person would sleep under it, on some cold rainy winter's night. Local businessmen would be outraged, and the city would remove the table posthaste. And even if they could keep people from sheltering under the table, we only have three, maybe four months of picnic table weather each year anyway.

In any case, in addition to the West pieces in the Portland Public Art post, Cafe Unknown tracked down yet another piece of his, half-forgotten and cleverly hidden in a subterranean parking garage downtown. As you might imagine, it's been added to my todo list.

Begin Again Corner

The ongoing tour of Portland transit mall art takes us to Begin Again Corner, better known as the corner of SW 5th & Columbia. The piece consists of fern designs by Anne Storrs and a Kim Stafford poem inscribed onto one corner of the Fifth Avenue Building, a former state office building built in 1951. RACC describes the piece thusly:

The artist’s images of a sword fern’s from fiddlehead to skeletal form, are combined with Kim Stafford’s site specific poem about turning a corner. Eleven individual or groups of sword ferns are sandblasted into the building’s granite surface.

Beyond the design itself, which I rather like, the piece adds a bit of a street-level presence to what used to be another windowless, blind corner. I'll probably never understand why they thought that was a great design feature back in 1951.

Cairns

Today's stop on the occasional tour of transit mall art takes us to the far north end of the transit mall, near Union Station, home to the scattered pieces of Cairns. From TriMet's Green Line public art guide:

To create her series of sculptures for the Union Station area, Christine Bourdette was inspired by the man-made stacks of stones that have traditionally served as landmarks for navigation and as memorials. Cairns consists of a series of five stacked-slate forms that mark the path to the light rail stations near Glisan at NW 5th and 6th.

I can't say I have a strong opinion either way about any of the individual cairns or the collection as a whole. Your eyes just tend to sort of gaze right past them. But up close you notice the texture of the stone, which I absolutely love. I see lots of search results for "stacked slate", which seems to mean pieces of slate split perpendicular to their natural grain. It's a neat look but possibly not an infinitely versatile one; a commercially available garden fountain I ran across looks just like Cairns, but smaller and with water spilling out the top.

Whistlestop for an Organ Teacher

The latest installment in our tour of transit mall art takes us to 5th Avenue between Morrison and Alder, next to Macy's (the former Meier and Frank store), home to Whistlestop for an Organ Teacher by Chris Bruch. TriMet's Green Line public art guide says of it:

Chris Bruch designed Whistlestop for an Organ Teacher to be a small island of stillness amidst the urban hubbub and dissonance of the city. Whistlestop refers to an earlier era when politicians campaigned across great distances from trains, while "stop," in organ terminology, means a rank of pipes that all speak with a similar voice.

The sculptor's website describes it differently:

This sculpture references pipe organs, particularly a windchest with three fanciful pipes. Intended to evoke sound and provide a quiet moment in an urban streetscape, it’s softly reflective surface picks up changes in light and color.

He also has a piece on the University of Washington campus titled Department of Forensic Morphology Annex. It looks kind of cool, just going by the two small photos I've seen of it, and I think I like it better than the piece TriMet bought. Although the UW one looks much too big to fit on Portland city sidewalks anyway, so it's sort of a moot point.

On a semi-related note, there are a few more photos of Whistlestop on the website of the Columbia River Theater Organ Society, since it's sort of relevant to their interests, more or less. The rest of the site is kind of interesting too.