Olympic Sculpture Park
Open Daily
It’s become almost routine for new art museums to be criticized for being so powerful architecturally that they threaten to overwhelm their art. The same might be said of the Olympic Sculpture Park, except that here the aesthetic competition isn’t so much the man-made elements (although they are far from subtle), as the way those man-made paths, concrete walls, and shaped hills focus on and intensify the natural setting.
The architects of this minutely-engineered, 9-acre Earthwork, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, state their intentions clearly, right from the outset. Visitors who cross the symbolic moat to the entrance pavilion at Western and Broad are confronted with a perfectly framed, picture-postcard view of mountains, sky, and sound, outlined by the building’s metal porch and treated with a reverence missing from almost every other built environment in the region, most of which make no acknowledgement of their setting at all. (“Higgledy-piggledy, low-rise, low-density sprawl”, to quote local author Jonathan Raban.)
Far from ignoring the setting, nearly every path, bridge, and viewpoint of the sculpture park represents a particular, elaborately thought-out take on the park’s view-worthy surroundings. Turn one way and the architects call our attention to the high-rise urban background, as well as the active railway and highway arterials that rumble through the park itself, directly under our feet. Turn another way, and we see (thanks to the park’s ownership of everything from hilltop to waterfront) nothing but sea and sky. Mt. Rainier is suitably honored, absolutely, precisely on axis with the main walkway, and turning to the west, one sees ships at anchor so perfectly scaled to the foreground that they almost seem part of the plan.
I’ve never been to a sculpture park with so much outside environment to have to balance with its art, and it’s not surprising that the architects have provided a number of installation sites that are purposely screened off from the surrounding spectacle.
Tony Smith’s dated-looking, minimalist black boxes, for example, are clustered in a view-less aspen grove, placeholders, one hopes, for more interesting art to be cycled in later, as future curators tinker with the mix. Likewise, a row of abstract metal works by Louise Nevelson and Beverly Pepper is protected from the infinite view by high walls, a decent location also awaiting a more exciting sculptural population than this dutifully mainstream, modernist group - made available by local collectors, which is the reason it’s here.
It’s interesting that even the swaggering art-god Richard Serra, given his choice, declined an opportunity to do battle with the view, choosing instead to locate his massive sculptural group Wake in the most isolated setting in the park, The Valley. One first sees the 5 enormous curving steel elements that comprise the work from a distance, and the effect – like smokestacks or oil tanks lined up for storage - is not particularly promising. But when the artwork is viewed, as intended, from the narrow pathways between the works, the experience is indeed transformative. Serra’s 14-foot high, smoothly rusting walls suddenly seem oddly sensual and protective – like a womb or an embrace - the environment completely self-contained. We notice how differently we perceive sounds, light and shadow, and the suddenly small patches of visible sky. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a Serra piece so much, but I’d still prefer seeing this prime real estate made available for other works from time to time – which given the nature of the Serra piece, isn’t going to happen.
The single most extraordinary section of the park is directly over Elliot Avenue, where the main pathway does a complete switchback to head down to the new railway bridge, and all the interacting elements – urban, natural, and artistic – are tuned to their highest pitch. It’s also here that the park’s biggest sculptural success and most egregious failure sit nearly side by side.
The success, the brilliant siting of Calder’s Eagle as the park’s most prominent sculptural landmark, is all the more interesting when one considers how much less impressive the same sculpture seemed during the five years it sat on a side lawn of the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Here the sweeping, 40-foot red steel abstraction powerfully anchors the visual and geographical center of the park, looking equally dominant from nearly every angle, its graceful, balletic gesture of energy and affirmation an appropriate punctuation mark to the sensory excitement of the park.
But one’s heart sinks when one turns away from the Calder to look off to the west, where in the very spot where the architects have given viewers the illusion of hovering directly over the sea (actually hundreds of feet away and dozens of feet below), a huge, awkward and ugly log, chain, and steel sculpture by Mark Di Suvero comes off as an eyesore rather than an accompaniment, a moment of sheer visual clutter at a spot where we least appreciate it. It’s only fair to mention that a little ways down the same path, a sculpture by the same artist – made thirty years later – appears first as a tantalizing tease and then at full height against the sea. It works far better here than at either of it’s previous locations, Harbor Steps and Benaroya Hall.
Perhaps the visionaries of the local donor community and the Seattle Art Museum got a bit more than they bargained for with this groundbreaking park. The site design is so good, and the setting so epic, the park would certainly be popular and beloved without any art at all. The challenge going forward will be to find artworks that can succeed as manmade interventions in their charged environment nearly as well as the splendid park that contains them.
Open Daily
It’s become almost routine for new art museums to be criticized for being so powerful architecturally that they threaten to overwhelm their art. The same might be said of the Olympic Sculpture Park, except that here the aesthetic competition isn’t so much the man-made elements (although they are far from subtle), as the way those man-made paths, concrete walls, and shaped hills focus on and intensify the natural setting.
The architects of this minutely-engineered, 9-acre Earthwork, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, state their intentions clearly, right from the outset. Visitors who cross the symbolic moat to the entrance pavilion at Western and Broad are confronted with a perfectly framed, picture-postcard view of mountains, sky, and sound, outlined by the building’s metal porch and treated with a reverence missing from almost every other built environment in the region, most of which make no acknowledgement of their setting at all. (“Higgledy-piggledy, low-rise, low-density sprawl”, to quote local author Jonathan Raban.)
Far from ignoring the setting, nearly every path, bridge, and viewpoint of the sculpture park represents a particular, elaborately thought-out take on the park’s view-worthy surroundings. Turn one way and the architects call our attention to the high-rise urban background, as well as the active railway and highway arterials that rumble through the park itself, directly under our feet. Turn another way, and we see (thanks to the park’s ownership of everything from hilltop to waterfront) nothing but sea and sky. Mt. Rainier is suitably honored, absolutely, precisely on axis with the main walkway, and turning to the west, one sees ships at anchor so perfectly scaled to the foreground that they almost seem part of the plan.
I’ve never been to a sculpture park with so much outside environment to have to balance with its art, and it’s not surprising that the architects have provided a number of installation sites that are purposely screened off from the surrounding spectacle.
Tony Smith’s dated-looking, minimalist black boxes, for example, are clustered in a view-less aspen grove, placeholders, one hopes, for more interesting art to be cycled in later, as future curators tinker with the mix. Likewise, a row of abstract metal works by Louise Nevelson and Beverly Pepper is protected from the infinite view by high walls, a decent location also awaiting a more exciting sculptural population than this dutifully mainstream, modernist group - made available by local collectors, which is the reason it’s here.
It’s interesting that even the swaggering art-god Richard Serra, given his choice, declined an opportunity to do battle with the view, choosing instead to locate his massive sculptural group Wake in the most isolated setting in the park, The Valley. One first sees the 5 enormous curving steel elements that comprise the work from a distance, and the effect – like smokestacks or oil tanks lined up for storage - is not particularly promising. But when the artwork is viewed, as intended, from the narrow pathways between the works, the experience is indeed transformative. Serra’s 14-foot high, smoothly rusting walls suddenly seem oddly sensual and protective – like a womb or an embrace - the environment completely self-contained. We notice how differently we perceive sounds, light and shadow, and the suddenly small patches of visible sky. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a Serra piece so much, but I’d still prefer seeing this prime real estate made available for other works from time to time – which given the nature of the Serra piece, isn’t going to happen.
The single most extraordinary section of the park is directly over Elliot Avenue, where the main pathway does a complete switchback to head down to the new railway bridge, and all the interacting elements – urban, natural, and artistic – are tuned to their highest pitch. It’s also here that the park’s biggest sculptural success and most egregious failure sit nearly side by side.
The success, the brilliant siting of Calder’s Eagle as the park’s most prominent sculptural landmark, is all the more interesting when one considers how much less impressive the same sculpture seemed during the five years it sat on a side lawn of the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Here the sweeping, 40-foot red steel abstraction powerfully anchors the visual and geographical center of the park, looking equally dominant from nearly every angle, its graceful, balletic gesture of energy and affirmation an appropriate punctuation mark to the sensory excitement of the park.
But one’s heart sinks when one turns away from the Calder to look off to the west, where in the very spot where the architects have given viewers the illusion of hovering directly over the sea (actually hundreds of feet away and dozens of feet below), a huge, awkward and ugly log, chain, and steel sculpture by Mark Di Suvero comes off as an eyesore rather than an accompaniment, a moment of sheer visual clutter at a spot where we least appreciate it. It’s only fair to mention that a little ways down the same path, a sculpture by the same artist – made thirty years later – appears first as a tantalizing tease and then at full height against the sea. It works far better here than at either of it’s previous locations, Harbor Steps and Benaroya Hall.
Perhaps the visionaries of the local donor community and the Seattle Art Museum got a bit more than they bargained for with this groundbreaking park. The site design is so good, and the setting so epic, the park would certainly be popular and beloved without any art at all. The challenge going forward will be to find artworks that can succeed as manmade interventions in their charged environment nearly as well as the splendid park that contains them.
John Taylor at Garde Rail, Scott Trimble at Greg Kucera, and Miller/Watanabe at Soil
Through Mid-January
Just in time for the holidays, Pioneer Square is hosting three excellent shows by artists clearly in touch with their inner child, making serious art masquerading as ship models, black and white cartoons, and miniature bridges, stairways, and ramps.
First, there's John Taylor at Garde Rail Gallery. Taylor tinkers in a Southern California garage surrounded by bins of the cast-off detritus of industrial America. There’s a satisfying irony to the fact that eviscerated cell phones, disintegrated computers, and wrecked optical devices that form such an important part of his work end up as models of actual, long-departed ships. Broken circuit boards become deck plates, their components suggesting hatches, bins, and posts; resistors and capacitors become turrets, winches, and fuel tanks; binoculars transform into smokestacks. The silver handle of a camera rewind crank sits atop the bridge of a luxury liner like a metallic crown. The unifying theme of all of Taylor’s work is the corrosive and leveling power of time, and his metallic fleet all looks very much the worse for wear.
The weathered patina of Taylor’s ships, in fact, is one of their most appealing features. No mere rust, the hulls and superstructures and masts of the Taylor fleet bristle with complicated and subtly colored textural effects, taking as a point of departure undersea photos of the great shipwrecks of history, but sporting a much more evolved palette of restrained greens, violets, blue-greys, and pinks. No surface is left smooth, shiny, or simple, and the all-encompassing decay seems almost to be advancing as we watch.
In recent times Taylor has chosen to broaden his subject matter to include the purely imaginary as well as the historic, and the two strongest pieces in the current show fall into this category. Noah’s arc seems monumental, even though it measures less than four feet long, and here Taylor’s skill at aging a surface is a perfect match for his mythic subject. Constructed of layers of plywood, Taylor’s arc is a primitive, coffin-shaped floating city, its gorgeously decayed brown-black hull pierced by hundreds of tiny windows, an inner world large enough to shelter a very satisfying zoology. Similarly expressive is Jonah’s whale, writhing its massive bulk and covered with tiny grey wooden slats, like the siding on a hillbilly’s shanty, and with exposed nail heads like barnacles. The detail of the tiny figure in the whale’s mouth is one of the few moments in the show whereTaylor lapses too far into the literal; contrast with this dimly-seen shapes inside the arc, shapes which on closer inspection are not animals, but more capacitors, resistors, and transistors.
Scott Trimble is also a master craftsman, filling every available surface of the mezzanine level of Greg Kucera Gallery with an array of tiny wooden bridges, stairways, and ramps. Clearly in touch with his inner child, Trimble multiplies simple elements to a level of inspired absurdity, like the wall-mounted construction entitled Hive, in which hypnotic rows of short stairways and closed doors create a stage set ready for a treatment by Franz Kafka, or a nightmare sequence from a film noir. Wheelchair Accessible, is a spiral of diminishing size to nowhere. Maze, consists of a set of wooden corrals for herding humans instead of cattle. The pieces have been specially designed for the space, and several span great chunks of the gallery, following real stairways or ceilings as a sort of accompanying alternative world in miniature. The child in our group saw the whole installation as a magical maze to follow and explore.
Another sort of wizardry is afoot at the neighboring Soil Gallery. Two guest artists, Jesse Paul Miller and Brent Watanabe, have collaborated on a series of animated installations. The animations are composed of attractive, straightforward pencil drawings reminiscent of children’s book illustrations. These drawings, randomly re-combined by computer, are projected in various ways throughout the gallery, as both still and moving images. The most compelling of the various pieces is an enigmatic, multi-layered black & white cartoon, where we pan quickly across a storybook landscape while cryptic objects and foreign alphabets whirl past in space. The effect is both amusing and slightly sinister, sort of Disney gothic. Similarly off-key is a cute animated puppy projected onto an invisible screen nearby and appearing to hover in space, sprouting mutant extra limbs and crying as we watch. All this oddball visual activity is accompanied by an equally off-kilter soundtrack, with some of the equipment and images housed in thrift store furniture from the previous century, a further mix-and-match of low tech and high. The artists subvert our sense of the predictable by using an outside agency - computer technology - to take familiar imagery out for a stroll in the surreal.
What these three shows share in common, besides a high level of inventiveness and craft, is a celebration of the spirit of play. It’s not only a relief from the arid seriousness of much gallery work, but it’s also a reminder that childhood gives rise to many of the passions which fuel the artistic impulse in adults.
Through Mid-January
Just in time for the holidays, Pioneer Square is hosting three excellent shows by artists clearly in touch with their inner child, making serious art masquerading as ship models, black and white cartoons, and miniature bridges, stairways, and ramps.
First, there's John Taylor at Garde Rail Gallery. Taylor tinkers in a Southern California garage surrounded by bins of the cast-off detritus of industrial America. There’s a satisfying irony to the fact that eviscerated cell phones, disintegrated computers, and wrecked optical devices that form such an important part of his work end up as models of actual, long-departed ships. Broken circuit boards become deck plates, their components suggesting hatches, bins, and posts; resistors and capacitors become turrets, winches, and fuel tanks; binoculars transform into smokestacks. The silver handle of a camera rewind crank sits atop the bridge of a luxury liner like a metallic crown. The unifying theme of all of Taylor’s work is the corrosive and leveling power of time, and his metallic fleet all looks very much the worse for wear.
The weathered patina of Taylor’s ships, in fact, is one of their most appealing features. No mere rust, the hulls and superstructures and masts of the Taylor fleet bristle with complicated and subtly colored textural effects, taking as a point of departure undersea photos of the great shipwrecks of history, but sporting a much more evolved palette of restrained greens, violets, blue-greys, and pinks. No surface is left smooth, shiny, or simple, and the all-encompassing decay seems almost to be advancing as we watch.
In recent times Taylor has chosen to broaden his subject matter to include the purely imaginary as well as the historic, and the two strongest pieces in the current show fall into this category. Noah’s arc seems monumental, even though it measures less than four feet long, and here Taylor’s skill at aging a surface is a perfect match for his mythic subject. Constructed of layers of plywood, Taylor’s arc is a primitive, coffin-shaped floating city, its gorgeously decayed brown-black hull pierced by hundreds of tiny windows, an inner world large enough to shelter a very satisfying zoology. Similarly expressive is Jonah’s whale, writhing its massive bulk and covered with tiny grey wooden slats, like the siding on a hillbilly’s shanty, and with exposed nail heads like barnacles. The detail of the tiny figure in the whale’s mouth is one of the few moments in the show whereTaylor lapses too far into the literal; contrast with this dimly-seen shapes inside the arc, shapes which on closer inspection are not animals, but more capacitors, resistors, and transistors.
Scott Trimble is also a master craftsman, filling every available surface of the mezzanine level of Greg Kucera Gallery with an array of tiny wooden bridges, stairways, and ramps. Clearly in touch with his inner child, Trimble multiplies simple elements to a level of inspired absurdity, like the wall-mounted construction entitled Hive, in which hypnotic rows of short stairways and closed doors create a stage set ready for a treatment by Franz Kafka, or a nightmare sequence from a film noir. Wheelchair Accessible, is a spiral of diminishing size to nowhere. Maze, consists of a set of wooden corrals for herding humans instead of cattle. The pieces have been specially designed for the space, and several span great chunks of the gallery, following real stairways or ceilings as a sort of accompanying alternative world in miniature. The child in our group saw the whole installation as a magical maze to follow and explore.
Another sort of wizardry is afoot at the neighboring Soil Gallery. Two guest artists, Jesse Paul Miller and Brent Watanabe, have collaborated on a series of animated installations. The animations are composed of attractive, straightforward pencil drawings reminiscent of children’s book illustrations. These drawings, randomly re-combined by computer, are projected in various ways throughout the gallery, as both still and moving images. The most compelling of the various pieces is an enigmatic, multi-layered black & white cartoon, where we pan quickly across a storybook landscape while cryptic objects and foreign alphabets whirl past in space. The effect is both amusing and slightly sinister, sort of Disney gothic. Similarly off-key is a cute animated puppy projected onto an invisible screen nearby and appearing to hover in space, sprouting mutant extra limbs and crying as we watch. All this oddball visual activity is accompanied by an equally off-kilter soundtrack, with some of the equipment and images housed in thrift store furniture from the previous century, a further mix-and-match of low tech and high. The artists subvert our sense of the predictable by using an outside agency - computer technology - to take familiar imagery out for a stroll in the surreal.
What these three shows share in common, besides a high level of inventiveness and craft, is a celebration of the spirit of play. It’s not only a relief from the arid seriousness of much gallery work, but it’s also a reminder that childhood gives rise to many of the passions which fuel the artistic impulse in adults.
