tulips, sw salmon

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).

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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 the problem when you try to depict universal struggles: There's always someone else to include. 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 at minimum, and someone in a wheelchair looking saintly; and others for the transgendered, little people, a fat activist, and probably others that don't spring immediately to mind. This will offend conservative types, and you may end up having to add a Bull Connor statue facing them all down, in order to be "fair and balanced".



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 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.

Arleta Triangle expedition

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I don't usually get visitor-contributed ideas here at this humble blog. I can barely get people to visit at all, much less help me out with suggestions. And on the flip side, when I do get a suggestion I don't always jump right on it. Today's adventure stems from a comment I got on a post of mine from way back in July 2008, about the weird little triangular park at SW Broadway, Broadway, & Grant.

And thus I ventured out to SE 72nd & Woodstock, home to the Arleta Triangle. It's a little triangle of land in the middle of the intersection, which was recently upgraded with a few plants and a sort of wall structure with a couple of benches, and a canopy on top. And like so many recent community projects in Portland, it's made of "cob", a rustic mixture of mud and straw.

So, I don't want to be a downer here. I think it's great that the neighborhood's come together to look after an otherwise-forlorn chunk of PDOT land. And I also realize that the triangle is a perpetual work in progress and a labor of love for a lot of people. It's just that I've never been sold on the whole mud and straw thing. I realize it's cheap, and building with it is so easy that casual volunteers, kids, and even hippies can do it. And it looks all rustic and hobbitty and unmistakably made by hippies, which I think is also part of the appeal. And, we're told, it also saves the world somehow. And presumably if you replace the straw with hemp, it saves the world even more.

So this is the second cob structure I've taken a good look at (there's one at PSU as well), and unfortunately they've both been falling apart rather rapidly. There may be other structures I haven't seen that are holding up better, so I'll be charitable and say they have a mixed record when it comes to durability. So, and this is probably going to sound really snarky, but for anyone who hasn't kept up on the technological advances of the last 10,000 years or so, there are these things called "bricks" that might do really well here. Basically the same thing as cob, but fired in a kiln so that they don't dissolve when it rains, and you can probably run the kiln on biodiesel if you have carbon footprint concerns. And even if you don't personally think bricks look better, they make your project look like a real structure and people will finally take you seriously.

I say this as someone whose grandma was born in a sod house in Indian Territory (which wouldn't be Oklahoma for a few more years). She was not nostalgic about living in a house made of dirt, to put it mildly.

Now, I can see one counter-argument here - If your primary goal is to build community, maybe it's a good thing if your structure requires fairly constant maintenance, to keep volunteers engaged and coming to work parties and meeting their neighbors and such. Where a brick structure, or one of concrete / stainless steel / carbon fiber / etc. may only need work every few decades, but then it's accomplished by corporate sponsors and grant writers and professional contractors, and where's the community in that? So yeah, I can see a reasonable argument here. I haven't seen anyone actually make this argument, but hey, you can't fault me for not trying to see both sides, I guess.