Basement Office

Public art

While my talents are few and lie far outside the bounds of the visual arts, I like to try my hand at new things. So when I heard that submissions for public art to adorn our fair city’s new roundabout were now being accepted, I immediately threw my hat in the ring.

This first piece, which I call “White Bread,” is intended as a non-offensive commentary on the stated desire of the city to solicit art that is free of controversy and/or political messaging.

My second proposal, which I imagine will enjoy a critical and popular reception in the Daily Journal comment section, where I debuted the piece, is a Pop Art homage, a la Warhol, to the workaday magnificence of Black Sign advertising.

Surely if there is a place where the common Black Sign is elevated to revered status, it is Fergus Falls.

And, because the joke is worth repeating, the piece is customizable so that one need never wonder when the next OLV fish fry is again.

Shaking things up

I’ve just returned from a public forum on the siting of two pieces of sculpture on the CMU campus. The time spent was well worth it, and I come away more surprised than ever at the diversity and ferocity of opinion held by the various factions.

The big draw at the meeting was the discussion of Jonathan Borofsky’s piece “Walking to the Sky,” (shown here during installation in Rockefeller Center) a 100-foot sculpture that depicts people in various stages of ascent up the near-vertical, 20-inch wide stainless steel surface. The campus received the piece as a gift from a donor, and is now undertaking the messy process of determining an appropriate site.

Initial reports led people to believe that the art would be placed somewhere near the campus mall, a long-preserved green space framed by (mostly) original campus buildings. Workers went so far as to pour a concrete slab near one particularly sensitive location, giving rise to this poorly-Photoshopped abomination, which was passed around electronically and through printed flyers. This turned a lot of people off from the start.

But at today’s meeting, in an announcement that was news to me (and most everyone else there, I assume), the Public Art Committee said that it is favoring a different location, one that is far removed from the mall locations. The new site fronts Forbes Avenue, which is a main thoroughfare past campus. The sculpture would be placed right in the center of this map, in a small triangle of grass between several sidewalks. This patch of grass lies at the top of two sets of stairs and is located right at the cusp of the major entrance to campus.

My thoughts on the placement of the piece are generally favorable. The original locations were not to my liking. While there may be a piece of art that can gracefully intrude on the classic lines of the mall, this piece is definitely not it. This new siting, however, is better. I think it would do a fine job of carrying on the upward line of motion that the stairs and the surrounding topography lend to the area. Little line-of-sight into campus is lost due to its off-center placement. There are few other places on where this sort of impact could be achieved without major sacrifices to the dual integrity of the work and the campus.

As a visual statement, it’s a lukewarm success. An off-kilter 100 foot steel pole is to be noticed, for sure. But will it be a powerful impact, or a limp cartoon? I just can’t say. (And these Photoshop mockups don’t help the piece’s cause.)

Symbolically, I find the basic idea of the sculpture to be as inspiring as a Successories poster. As far as themes go, this one is about as white bread as you can get.

And maybe that’s a good thing, and the piece’s saving grace. While it’s not genius brought to the everyday or a bold affront to a campus pedestrian’s routine, it’s enough to raise the hackles of many here. Anything more controversial would be rejected immediately. Being at the margins of acceptance is where the real value of the piece lies.

Art is not about pleasing everyone. It never has been. Cave painters did it for themselves; Renaissance artisans for monied clients. Yes, when looked at through the narrow lens of “conventional” museum-art, it’s easy to play ostrich and ignore whatever one does not like, picking-and-choosing a Van Gogh here and a Rembrandt there. But public art is public. There’s no avoiding it. It’s a spectacle that must be lived with, and this spectacle includes the daily encounters, the editorials, the public forums, and the water-cooler conversations. At least we’re alive enough to care.

So put it up, I say. Let’s live with it for a while and see what it does to us. Needless to say, things have been interesting thus far.

Looking over shoulders

I came across this interesting social experiment while looking for more information on hashing algorithms. It’s called TinyURL Roulette.

TinyURL, in its most common application, is primarily a device for communication. It allows one to create a shortened version of a URL of otherwise unmanageable length. It facilitates information sharing in email messages, message board postings, IM, and the like.

The TinyURL Roulette game simply generates random URLs, such as http://tinyurl.com/boab. Since this URL maps to an entry in TinyURL’s database, one can randomly jump through the stored web addresses, which is like uncovering past traces of human interest.

It’s an interesting game. Playing it is a very voyeuristic experience. Maps, news stories, pictures, merchandise, message board posts, and the inexplicable all lie side by side. It’s like an endless issue of FOUND.

In one series of clicks, I came across the following items:

• A Las Vegas map centered on a Comfort Inn on the outskirts of town;
• A CD of trucker music called “Rig Rock Deluxe” (which, now that I viewed it, has alerted Amazon to the fact that I now might be interested in the whole Trucker Music genre);
• A self help book entitled “Addicted to Unhappiness”;
• Mercedes-Benz discussion board in German; and
• An empty Yellow Pages directory page with the words “You do not have a route now.”

This random collection of things work together in interesting ways; André Breton spoke of such interactions while playing Surrealist games such as automatic writing and the exquisite corpse. What one gets back seems like nonsense, but it works subconsciously, and brings to mind associations that may never have been uncovered without the triggering events

From Le Manifeste du Surréalisme:

In fact it is very difficult to appreciate the full value of the various elements when confronted by them. It can even be said to be impossible to appreciate them at the first reading. These elements are outwardly as strange to you … as to anyone else, and you are naturally distrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are especially endowed with a very high degree of immediate absurdity. The peculiarity of this absurdity, on closer examination, comes from their capitulation to everything — both inadmissible and legitimate — in the world, to produce a revelation of a certain number of premises and facts generally no less objective than any others.

This is a picture

So we got a digital camera for Christmas. It’s my goal to make regular use of it, in hopes of getting back into photography more.

This picture was taken at the Andy Warhol Museum. We went there with some friends who were visiting Pittsburgh.

The exhibit shown here, Silver Clouds, was one of our favorites. While Warhol’s paintings are generally participatory in the fact that their sheer size requires some head movement to take in the whole work, this is viewer participation taken to the next level. By being able to enter the gallery and interact with the work (in this case, silver Mylar balloons), one is put into a surreal, tranquil frame of mind. It was fun to stand and contemplate the movements of the balloons, which were neither predetermined nor totally random.