A Human Comedy

This was almost a very embarrassing blog post. Recently I've been doing a lot of posts about obscure public art & monuments around downtown Portland. It's a convenient topic in that I can just consult the map and then wander out of my cubicle on lunch and go find a few more. I'm not sure it always makes for really exciting blog fare, but then I've never been entirely convinced that anyone besides me actually reads this humble blog. In any case, I had it in mind to do a post about A Human Comedy, one of a few public artworks that went in along with the Pioneer Place mall. I often walk the block of SW Yamhill between 3rd & 4th and figured I was pretty familiar with this one, so one rainy day I wandered by and snapped some quick phone photos of the cryptic inscriptions spaced along the wall. I had a post in the drafts folder waiting to go and everything. Then I started in on the research part of writing the post. This is almost without exception the hardest part of the blogging racket: Collecting interesting (and hopefully accurate) facts about an obscure subject, trying to beat them into a semi-coherent and semi-readable whole, and secretly wondering if I'm just being tiresome and pedantic once again. So I started with the usual suspects. The Travel Portland art map says: Smart Park, SW Yamhill btw 3rd & 4th • façade Lee Hunt The Human Comedy 1990 terra cotta

And the Smithsonian art inventory describes it as "Ten medallions with faces in various expressions, in relief on the facade of a building".

Terra cotta? Faces? This didn't sound much like the Human Comedy I was familiar with. Then I noticed the CultureNOW page for it included a few photos. Which showed a bunch of terra cotta faces, and didn't picture any of the inscriptions I'd taken photos of. I went back to look, and it dawned on me: The faces are roughly on the second floor of the building, and all this time I'd neglected to look up. So I just saw the inscriptions and figured they were the whole piece, when they were actually just the labels for the medallions above them. D'oh. If I hadn't noticed that, and published the post, one of two things would have happened. Someone more pedantic than I would angrily point out my mistake, and they'd be right, and it would be very embarrassing. Or nobody would notice, which would be another data point on just how obscure and little-read this humble blog actually is, which would also be very embarrassing. As much as I make self-deprecating remarks about that now and then, I'm fairly certain I don't want any more actual data points about it.

Later came across an Art On File page for the piece, with a better photo and a short description:

The artist created ten glazed terra-cotta reliefs which sympathetically portray individuals, separate in outlook, but unified in their sense of the structure of their community. The reliefs are located on a public parking garage.

The RACC page about it says:

Lee Hunt’s “Human Comedy” shows human faces embodying various states of emotion. They include the Laughing Woman, the Perplexed Man, the Competition of the East and West Winds, the Idealized Woman, the Wry Woman, Marat Alive, The Idealized Man, Children Watching from the Window, the Skeptical Woman, and the Architectus Mundi.

In any case, I realized I needed face photos and didn't have any, and I was too busy to take any just then due to deadlines and so forth. This was around the time I was trying to get to an empty blog drafts folder, so I went ahead and deleted the old draft. Eventually I went back and took more photos, and here we are. There are a couple of details I should point out here. First, several of the faces were covered when I took these, thanks to construction for a shiny new Microsoft Store. I could have waited for that to finish, but I ended up with a couple of photos of a face suspiciously eyeing the Microsoft Store, which is too funny not to use. Secondly, between two of the faces stands the Atlas figure of the local Tiffany & Co. jewelry store. Which is an opportunity for platitudes about the awkward collision of Art and Commerce, which is a second angle I sort of have to run with. One or the other of those ideas might have gotten top billing in this post if I didn't also have a self-deprecating story to share.

In case you were wondering, I did do a bit of actual research on this one. I didn't come up with a lot of stuff to pass along, but I note that the artist also created the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden in Grant Park, A statue at the new high school football stadium in Camas, Washington, and a sculpture in the lobby of the Oregon State Archives building in Salem, with an inscription from Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. The Cleary sculptures get by far the most mentions on the interwebs, mostly in connection with fandom around the books. I have to admit I've never read the books, despite being constantly encouraged to in grade school. I did come across an interesting blog post about public art that touches on the Cleary statues briefly; the author mentions a family from Kansas driving all the way to Portland just to be photographed with the statues, as one (rather extreme) example of the general public engaging with public artworks.

lilacs, duniway park

Patterns May be an Action, or the Trace Left by an Action

Today's adventure in obscure stuff takes us to the Portland State campus again, to Patterns May be an Action, or the Trace Left by an Action, on SW Broadway. It's a set of granite panels with nature-inspired patterns on them, a companion piece to the nearby diatom sculptures titled Urban Hydrology.

Unlike its companion piece, there's almost nothing about this on the interwebs. Which is a shame, because I'm curious about the various patterns here: Are they simply nature-inspired, or are they images of something in particular, or...? None of the usual sources (RACC, Smithsonian, various online public art guides, etc.) have an entry for Patterns as far as I can tell. It does get a brief mention in PSU's Historic Resource List (even though it's not actually old), and a brief mention in the new Walking Portland, 2nd Edition, and all the other results I see are for my Flickr photos you see here. The artist's website isn't a lot of help here either, although it talks about a number of other interesting projects of hers.

waterfront flagpole (infrared)

soft focus flowers (iii)

soft focus flowers (ii)

soft focus flowers (i)

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.