Icarus at Kittyhawk

Next up we've got a fresh entry in a couple of long-running projects here. Some years ago this humble blog was largely about public art, in Portland or wherever else I happened to bump into it. When a new MAX line opened, there would always be a whole new batch of art of -- let's be honest here -- uneven, mostly fair-to-middling quality to write about, with the posts tagged blueline, greenline, yellowline, and so forth to make it easy to check them all out in one go and compare and contrast and so forth. That was a fairly well-defined, limited-scope project, but I still occasionally run across stuff I'd missed earlier, or things I couldn't post about because I didn't know the title or the artist.

Another sort of subproject was tracking down additional art by people whose other work I liked, or at least thought was distinctive in some way, and the resulting posts are tagged so if you just want to binge on Manuel Izquierdo art (for example), it's easy to do that. One of the resulting tags is for the late Lee Kelly, the prolific local artist behind Leland One (aka "Rusting Chunks No. 5") and countless other welded steel whatzits that have cropped up across the Northwest since the mid-1960s or so. I've never been a big fan of his stuff, though I'll admit some of his older work truly radiates groovy 1970s-ness, for good or ill. It's more that his stuff is fairly unavoidable if you try to do a public art project in this corner of the world.

That long-winded intro brings us to Icarus at Kittyhawk, at the Beaverton Central MAX station. TriMet's revised Westside Blue Line public art guide describes it thusly:

Icarus at Kittyhawk, 2005, by Lee Kelly was inspired by the myth of Icarus with its timeless message about the danger of human arrogance.

The 10’ tall stainless steel sculpture with seat was purchased with funds left over from the Westside MAX project and held by METRO.

The title is kind of funny given the location: The Beaverton Central project was a late-90s attempt to transplant Pearl District-style urbanism to the 'burbs: Retail and restaurant space on the ground floor, topped with several floors of upscale condos. That, evidently, was the Beaverton version of flying too close to the sun. The initial project ran out of money during construction, and the main condo building sat empty and exposed to the elements for a number of years before finally being completed in the mid-2000s. The condos eventually sold, and they finished an office building or two to flesh out the complex a bit, and a variety of short-lived restaurants and retailers have sort of cycled through the area ever since. But except for a couple of buildings on the old Westgate theater site, the expected forest of ever-taller imitators spreading across downtown Beaverton never happened. Or at least it hasn't happened yet.

Icarus doesn't seem to have arrived with any great fanfare, as the only mention of it I found was in the June 2005 meeting notes from the "Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation", a now-defunct regional government body:

On April 27th, the pedestrian environment at the Round in Beaverton received an injection of culture with the installation of "Icarus at Kittyhawk," a sculpture in stainless steel by Oregon City artist Lee Kelly. TOD Program staff secured funding for the project and worked in partnership with TriMet, the City of Beaverton and regional arts commission on artist solicitation and selection.

As a former westside resident on and off since the mid-1970s, I'm more than happy to snark about Beaverton all day as a private citizen, but the snide remark about Beaverton getting "an injection of culture" in official meeting minutes is... a bit much.

Come to think of it, going by the timing Icarus would have arrived while I was still commuting into downtown from darkest Aloha, since I didn't move downtown and start this weird little blog until November of that year. I don't recall noticing it at the time, but then again I had no idea I would end up doing weird projects like this, so I wasn't keeping detailed notes at the time.

Anyway, Icarus was also a stop on an exhaustive "Walk • Bike • Drive" map of Kelly art across the greater metro area, along with two others just within Beaverton city limits, the others being Arch with Oaks along Sunset, and another at PCC Rock Creek that I've never seen. In fact the map includes a lamentable number of others that I wasn't aware of and have never visited. Somehow I feel like I have to add them to the ol' TODO list now, although for the life of me I'm not sure why.

Memory 99

So, the good news is that Portland's getting a new North Park Block, namely the block that currently holds the parking lot for the old Federal Building. The feds have moved out of that building, and it will soon be home to the Pacific Northwest College of Art. They apparently aren't going to need a parking lot, so it's going to be a park instead. And since it's a park next to an art school in Portland, it's inevitably going to sport some public art. The art, in fact, has already arrived, even though the park itself is still just a gleam in city planners' eyes.

So far so good. It turns out, though, that this means we're getting yet another Lee Kelly piece. Kelly, you may recall, is the guy behind Friendship Circle in Waterfront Park, the Kelly Fountain on the transit mall, Howard's Way on West Burnside near the stadium, Nash in the Central Eastside district, and of course Leland One, aka Rusting Chunks No. 5. Longtime readers might recall that I'm not always a huge fan of his work, and I'm not sure the city truly needed quite as many of his pieces as we've ended up with. I'm actually not feeling all that snarky today, though, so I'm going to just set that aside and take the latest piece on its own merits.

Memory 99 arrived at our future park block last October after PNCA purchased it with a grant from the Ford Family Foundation. The same piece was previously seen in 2010 at the Portland Art Museum's show about Kelly's work:

He's a superior sculptor, of course. But there are many around -- Mel Katz comes to mind locally. But when I think of Kelly, I think of that lyrical behemoth greeting visitors, "Memory '99," which Kelly made after public art funding had begun to decline. Kelly paid for the work himself, using computer programs to help design the four structures that resemble twisting, exaggerated musical notes.

That's a telling detail. At the time, Kelly was making vital work, much of which is in this show. But with "Memory '99," he wanted to sum up everything he knew about scale, volume, form and materials, and he wanted to express it in a way that artists stopped doing, either because they didn't have the opportunity or were afraid to.

In other words, Kelly created this chance to prove something to himself. In the 11 years since it was made, "Memory'99" has rested on Kelly's Oregon City estate, surrounded by unkempt grass and shrubs. No one bought it.

Now, the rest of Oregon has a chance to embrace "Memory '99" and other fine, lasting things that Lee Kelly has made.

A 2010 Oregonian profile of Kelly (to go along with the show opening) includes a photo of Memory 99 at Kelly's property in Oregon City. Kelly's website has a larger, similar photo. An article about the show at Art Ltd. discusses Memory 99, describing it as "the monumental Memory 99 (1999), which manages to suggest both gargantuan calligraphy and archeological ruin in its grouping of forms in Cor-Ten steel." The same article also includes a photo of Arlie, another piece of his, which is now on permanent display at the Portland Art Museum. Yes, another one. Sheesh.

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.

Couch Park expedition

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A couple of photos of Couch Park in NW Portland. The park is basically the neighborhood playground and dog park, and as a non-dog-owner without kids normally I don't bother covering places like this here. But I dimly remembered that I'd taken some photos of the place several years ago, and it occurred to me that a post about the park would fill a moderately sized geotag-less hole in the humble blog's official map (which I sorely need to update again, btw), and if you think those sound like idiotic reasons to do a blog post you're probably correct. But as far as I know that's never stopped anyone from putting something on the interwebs, so here we are.

So I went back and looked through my old photo archives and realized I in fact had precisely two photos of the park. This probably seemed like a reasonable number to me at the time, given the limitations of circa-2006 memory cards and puny digicams that take AA batteries. I went ahead and uploaded those two, and figured I'd go back and take more and better photos before publishing this post. I made it there a couple of weeks ago, and walked around a bit, and I ended up not taking any photos at all. So I'm going to go with the two I have and call it good.

The pictures capture the two things I though had some degree of interest. A Lang Syne Society historical marker (I occasionally consider doing a project to track down more of those), and the abstract sculpture in the top photo. It's a 1976 piece simply called "Untitled", by David Cotter. And I admit even it isn't all that exciting from a photo standpoint. I tend to take lots of close up photos to show any interesting textures or details a piece has, and I didn't notice anything like that with this piece. The RACC page I linked to seems to indicate this is Cotter's only work in town, but the Smithsonian art inventory indicates he was also an assistant on Leland I, aka the infamous Rusting Chunks No. 5. The Smithsonian also refers to the Couch Park piece as "(Abstract Circle)", though I don't know whether that's an actual name or just a description. Cotter is also credited with a sculpture on the Catlin Gabel campus, and is listed as co-sculptor of something at Mount Hood Community College, and as an assistant on the Frank Beach fountain at the Rose Garden. So now you know.

awning

Today's installment in the ongoing public art series takes us to the pedestrian-only intersection of SW 3rd & Mill St., home to Douglas Senft's "Awning", which graces the west edge of the 200 Market Building grounds. It's an obscure location, and even if it wasn't this is not the sort of artwork that leaps out and grabs you by the lapel, if you have a lapel. You might not even realize it's supposed to be art. I didn't for a long time, until I noticed it on one of the city's official public art maps.

Back in April of this year, Willamette Week named "Awning" its Eyesore of the Week, for pretty much the reason I just expressed: You see it and can't immediately tell what it is. Maybe it's capital-A Art, or maybe it's a "garish and whimsical air vent", as they describe it. It's not obvious, and there's no sign nearby to make it any more clear.

In any case, I have to disagree with the mainstream media here. I don't see how they can call this thing an eyesore when Leland One (aka Rusting Chunks #5) is just a few blocks to the south, which they would have known if they'd done even a little research. It's not just ugly, it's WMD-grade ugly. An unmemorable object like "Awning" isn't even in the same ballpark.

rusting chunks, 8mm

A few test shots of our old friends the Rusting Chunks, taken with a shiny new Sigma 8-16mm ultrawide-angle lens. The lens was a splurge for an upcoming vacation, and I figure I ought to learn to use it a little before getting on the plane.

The main use for the lens is actually not for wacky perspective games, but for really really wide, but normal-looking landscapes, interiors, and so forth. But tradition holds that I always go take photos of the Rusting Chunks first thing when a new gadget arrives, so here they are.

untitled (5th & oak)

Our occasional tour of Transit Mall art stops in on 5th Avenue near Oak St., the new home of this small and brightly colored gizmo named Untitled, not to be confused with a similar work a block to the north also titled Untitled. TriMet's Green Line Public Art Guide [pdf] has a small photo and a very brief description that reads simply:

Ivan Morrison, Untitled, 1977, Painted aluminum
SW 5th and Oak.

There's very little contemporary info on the net about this one. The artist's website includes a mention of it in his resume, but doesn't include any photos. The October 2008 RACC newsletter mentions its reinstallation on the transit mall, and includes a small photo of its earlier removal via forklift. Untitled also gets a mention in a ginormous XML file from the University of Oregon listing a lot of things that "One Percent For Art" money has been spent on over the years.



To find out more, we have to dive into the Multnomah County Library's Oregonian historical archives again. A January 5, 1977 article lists the winning entries in TriMet's Transit Mall art competition. The top selection was the Kelly Fountain, for which $75,000 was awarded. The second largest award was $35,500, for an erstwhile fountain on 6th between Yamhill and Taylor. The metal centerpiece of the fountain survives, fountainless, in front of the Standard Insurance building on SW 5th. Third largest (and I'm not sure why the paper listed them by grant size) was $25,000 for Interlocking Forms, which the artist stated he expected people to climb on. If you were to try actually doing that in 2011 you'd very likely get pepper sprayed, then tasered, then given a large fine for "disorderly conduct", whatever that is. Anyway, the article goes on to briefly mention 8 other works, including the other Untitled I mentioned earlier, along with Kvinneakt, Cat in Repose, and a few others I haven't covered here yet. And then there's the piece shown here, which is described simply as "an assemblage of painted steel shapes". So it wasn't the main attraction back then either.



A followup article, on March 19, 1978, interviewed a number of the Transit Mall artists, asking them to explain what their works were about. The relevant blurb from that article:

Ivan Morrison said he used primary colors -- bright yellows, blues, and reds -- in his 7-foot-high, painted and assembled aluminum arch (Southwest Sixth between Alder and Washington streets) to accent the space around it.

"More subtle colors would get lost in its environment," said Morrison. "I like the idea of colors Alexander Calder has used in public spaces. I have been influenced by that."

There's also a photo, which isn't reproduced well in the scanned version of the article. The creator of the other Untitled also mentions the city's need for a little color in the winter. Whether you like 70's abstract art or not, you have to admit they had a legitimate point there.



For what it's worth, Mr. Morrison also gets a passing compliment in a January 26, 1974 profile of Lee Kelly, who was about to exhibit a portion of the partially completed Leland I, aka "Rusting Chunks #5". Which is described as:

Trucked in from the farm (young Jason helps operate the truck crane) will be two parts of the three part gate-tower complex in three-quarter scale which Kelly and his wife are doing in weathered steel and red enamel for a small park in the South Auditorium Renewal Project.

At the south terminus of the mall system, with steps leading up to it, the sculpture will be a serene place, 20 feet high, to walk around and through. It was commissioned by the Portland Development Commission

sketchy

Found a tutorial on how to do a "sketch effect" in GIMP, making photos kinda-sorta resemble line drawings, assuming the person doing the line drawings was someone with talent, i.e. not me. I mean, maybe I shouldn't run myself down like that; I can do stick figures, and stick figures seem to be working out ok for xkcd.

Anyway, here are a few preliminary results from last night.

nash

So I recently ran across yet another Lee Kelly sculpture here in Portland. Kelly, you may recall, is the guy behind "Rusting Chunks #5", as well as the Kelly Fountain on the transit mall, and the art around "Howard's Way" next to PGE Park, and probably a bunch of others that don't spring to mind immediately.

It's gotten so I can recognize his work immediately, despite generally not being a huge fan of it. This one's called "Nash", and sits in front of the National Builders Hardware store on SE 10th between Yamhill & Taylor, in the Central Eastside industrial area. It's a surprising place to find a big piece of art sitting there, but when I saw it there was just no mistaking what it was. A Portland Tribune article about the store mentions "Nash" briefly: "Portland artist Lee Kelly’s massive steel sculpture of a latch and bolt sits in the front parking lot".

If there's a story behind the sculpture and why it's here, I haven't encountered it yet. But it seems the CEO's late wife was a local patron of the arts, and once served on the board of the Bonnie Bronson Foundation, honoring Kelly's late wife (and co-sculptor of the aforementioned Rusting Chunks). I don't know if that's related, or just illustrates that the Portland art scene is basically a very small town within the city and everyone knows each other. Or at least that was true before hipsters started moving here fresh out of art school. I'm not sure hipsters really count, though, at least not until they've had at least one proper gallery show (i.e. excluding coffee shops, even indie ones).

retread infrared

It's another cold, cloudy March day, and there's just no way to take infrared photos on a day like this. So instead I tweaked a bunch of old IR photos in Picnik, mostly having it auto-adjust colors & exposure so the photos aren't just solid magenta like the originals. Enjoy?

rusting chunks, infrared

multimorphic chunks

Ok, so here's a silly experiment I've wanted to try for a while. Over the years I've picked up a variety of thrift store photo doodads of widely varying usefulness, including a few now deeply unfashionable doodads from the groovy 70's. Among the uber-grooviest are a couple of multiple image filters I sorta-overpaid for about a year ago. I posted some photos of "Rusting Chunks #5" with one of them around that time, and warned that I might be posting "more multiple image pics here than strictly necessary". Turns out I haven't actually posted any more since then. Although as of this post I've done it twice, and that may still count as more than strictly necessary.

That time I used the Mirage 5F, this time it's the Mirage 3FP, so it's three images in a row instead of five arrayed in a circle. The effect isn't quite as dramatic as with the 5F, so for most of these pics I broke out a second widget, the Optivision anamorphic lens previously seen in this batch of cat photos.

And what better (or more convenient) subject for 70's-style photos than our old friend the Rusting Chunks? I couldn't think of a better subject, and as it turns out there aren't very many things that easily lend themselves to the multiple-image and/or the anamorphic gimmicks. And it's not for lack of looking. It's worth noting that the multiple image fad died out around the photo world started moving to zoom lenses, in place of the ~50mm prime lenses that had been the standard up until then (in the 35mm film world, I mean). A multiple image filter doesn't zoom with the lens, and pretty much only works as designed at focal lengths around 50mm, or the crop-sensor equivalent (and then not quite as well). Go longer, and you quickly lose the side images, so the filter becomes sort of pointless. Go wider, and the filter vignettes badly due to the thick rim of the filter.



It's easy to imagine someone taking photos just like these circa 1978. I can see it now. He was probably some sweaty chauvinist-pig type named Stan or Marv or something, who always wore a shiny brown leisure suit, a gold medallion, and cologne by the gallon. He'd heard that chicks really dug photographers, and besides photo gear was the latest trendy form of conspicuous consumption. He picked up a couple of multiple image filters thinking they'd help him take hip, with-it, happening pictures. When a woman fell for his cheesy pickup lines down at the singles bar, he'd invite her back to his place to check out his slides and perhaps have a glass of Riunite on ice and possibly fire up some romantic disco tunes on the ol' 8 Track. Having served their purpose, the multiple image filters went back in a drawer and sat unused for 30 years. And now they're mine, mwhahahah....



Speaking of Riunite on ice, we were messing around on YouTube a while back and ran into a bunch of vintage Riunite commercials, with that damn jingle you can't get out of your head. I think I like the skiing one the best of the bunch, although it's a tough call. Anyway, that naturally led to "whatever happened to", and the surprising discovery that it still exists. In fact, you can even be Riunite's friend on Twitter. Which led to, I wonder if it's available here in Portland. Not long after that, I found it and bought some. The Zupan's on Macadam has it, on the bottom shelf in the sparkling wine section, in case you're so inclined. A great thing about Riunite commercials is that, along with the music and happy 70's people, you also get food pairings. Ok, pairings with 70's food. The skiing commercial suggests fondue, so we thought we'd try that. And... it was actually nice. We liked it. Ok, it's kind of sweet, and lightly fizzy, and that's something that Modern Wine Experts regard with the very deepest disdain. But it would be nice on a hot day, as an alternative to beer or soda, assuming the weather ever improves. And if the weather doesn't improve, it also pairs nicely with chicken fried steak (which we verified with bottle #2).

Lest you take me for a complete barbarian, the quest for Riunite led me to take a good look at the sparkling wine aisle, something I don't typically do. So I thought, this year I'll do something different and get some proper from-Champagne champagne for New Years. So the Taittinger was kind of fabulous, and right now I have a bottle of something else in the fridge, and I'm looking for a flimsy excuse to pop the cork.

And all of this started with messing around aimlessly on YouTube. O, how I love thee, interwebs...