Christopher Columbus
Waterfront Park
Brian Miller
Details
Related Content
More About
Located between Piers 57 and 59, just south of the Seattle Aquarium, Waterfront Park is a disaster, the second worst park in the city (after Freeway Park) despite the Elliott Bay views. A cove blocked from the Alaskan Way sidewalk by a concrete wall, the park was designed by Bumgardner Architects and opened in 1974, soon becoming a favorite boozing and sleeping haunt. Four years later came Douglas Bennett's tall bronze figure, staring out at the waters he never actually sailed. (George Vancouver, we could understand.) The memorial was rededicated in 1998 to City Light worker and activist John R. DiJulio. Lately, it's been doused with red paint on Columbus Day. Because colonialism equals genocide? Because it's bad art? Either could be the cause, though Columbus himself—rendered partly in outline, giving him an almost skeletal, scary countenance—would be better able to defend himself in a different setting. After we tear down the viaduct and redo the waterfront, let's move him into Safeco Field, buy him a beer, and let him watch the ballgame.
Source/Untitled
Fourth & Blanchard Building, Fourth & Battery Building
Derided when it opened in 1979 as the "Darth Vader Building," the trapezoidal, dark-glass Fourth & Blanchard Building doesn't look so awful three decades later, especially compared to the stucco-clad Belltown condos that have sprung up all around it. But what's that on the neatly landscaped northeast corner, where people wait for the bus? Canadian-Romanian sculptor Sorel Etrog's 1965 Source, a vaguely phallic, blobby, twisted, pistol-y black pointer thingie that looks like something the Beatles might've encountered in Yellow Submarine. It's a little menacing, a little off-balance, not particularly friendly or accessible. Perhaps that's why it's in private hands—the city would never risk something so odd. A few blocks north, at the northeast corner of Selig's Fourth & Battery Building, stand intersecting, perforated, rain-oxidized green slabs, unidentified by any plaque. Selig tells us the untitled piece, which he recently bought at Sotheby's, is by the late English sculptor Barbara Hepworth. It and Source will be moving later this year to a courtyard sculpture garden at an office project he's developing at the site of the old Darigold plant on Elliott Avenue, which he expects to open before the end of the year.
Black Sun
Volunteer Park
Likely the most touched, caressed, and fondled piece of public art in Seattle, Black Sun was installed at the old SAM (now SAAM) in Volunteer Park back in 1969. Hard to remember now, but American-born sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was once considered a rather daring modernist, an avant-garde cohort of Calder, Giacometti, and Rivera. Placing the big black oval directly in front of the 1933 Deco-influenced museum design (by the UW's Carl F. Gould)—in an Olmsted park, no less!—seemed a bit of a slap at convention. Such temerity! How did it fit with the collection, with the prevailing conservative orthodoxy of the city's tastemakers and benefactors? But Noguchi, with his American mother and Japanese father, was all about contradictions—or resolving them. He trained in New York and Japan. His abstract pieces drew inspiration from natural forms, but he was also an urbanite who designed opera sets. Though Black Sun, expanded on commission to nine feet in diameter from a similar, earlier piece, is sited in the city, it's an emphatic reminder of the water and other natural shaping agents that surround us. The granite, quarried in Brazil and hewn in Japan, offers a famous donut-hole view of the Space Needle, which was still new when the sculpture was lowered (off-center) onto its plinth. Tourists love to frame photographs through that peephole, looking West (across the ocean to Japan, where Noguchi often worked and traveled). But reverse that perspective and you're looking East, back at Gould's museum, whose design and collection were then mostly European. Black Sun is an aperture, a transitional portal between traditions of seeing and collecting art. Certainly it marked a change in Seattle's appreciation for public sculptures that didn't depict white men on horseback. And whether Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" is named for the disc—that you'll have to ask Chris Cornell. (Don't mention the Weekly when you call.)
Department of Forensic Morphology Annex
UW campus near 15th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 42nd Street
You have to kick aside the fallen leaves to find a small marker identifying this five-year-old installation just south of the UW Law School, a stainless-steel blob which looks like something Buckminster Fuller might've designed for Woody Allen's Sleeper. In fact, credit goes to local artist Cris Bruch, with an assist from the Washington State Arts Commission (est. 1961). With a skin of metal plates held together by steel stitches, DFMA suggests both snail shell and igloo, armadillo and Dr. Seuss. The underlying lattice peeks through in places—a system of rods and bars, like a cage or exoskeleton whose innards have long since rotted away. It's like an unrusted remnant from a forgotten era when right angles didn't exist. Dimpled, bulbous, undulating—the architecture could be from a distant galaxy or the sketchbook of M.C. Escher. Bruch, recently featured in a 20-year retrospective at the Lawrimore Project, draws on natural forms—petals, tendrils, acorns, gourds—and executes his sculptures in modern materials like fiberglass and metal. But DFMA also visually echoes the UW's nearby 1895 Theodor Jacobsen Observatory and its famous cupola. You could almost imagine astronomers staring into one end of the telescope and, light-years away, the alien inhabitants of DFMA peering back.
