Bridge Between Cultures
Fourth Avenue South and Weller Street
Brian Miller
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With coal cars and commuter trains rumbling beneath, the Weller Street Overpass—which connects the ID to King Street Station—isn't a place where pedestrians tend to linger. Racing across Fourth Avenue South from offices at Amazon.com to catch the last Sound Transit train home, their haste is understandable. The view axis north and south down the tracks is protected, perforated even, by Bridge Between Cultures, a metal-mesh series of stencils integrated into the fencing. Installed in 1999 with the bridge, the group of steel panels began as paper cutouts based on commercial advertising and other retro iconography. Artists Fernanda D'Agostino and Valerie Otani have adapted what look to be old album covers, cigarette ads, and baseball cards to suggest Seattle's past—back when trains and trolleys ruled, private automobiles were expensive and rare, and the city was a somewhat simpler place. Now, of course, rail is resurgent and gas is expensive. Commuters hoof past, furiously thumbing their BlackBerrys instead of pausing to frame the skyline through the stencils. And instead of relaxing to play cards and talk with fellow passengers on the way home, they'll probably do more work on their laptops.
Untitled (Johnson Pit #30)
37th Place South and 40th Avenue South, Kent
Installed in an old gravel pit in 1979, Untitled (Johnson Pit #30) is a fine example of bulldozer art (also called "earth art" during that decade). Robert Morris graded a series of concentric terraces in the hillside concavity, which resembles an old crater overlooking the Green River. There are some railroad-tie stairs, a bench or two, plus the "ghost forest" of old stumps that Morris preserved in creosote, yet the clean old earthworks has long since grown over with grass and brush. (Goats are used to tend it.) The sharp edges and contours have eroded, by design. Locals now use the four-acre site as a dog run. "It would be a misguided assumption to suppose that artists hired to work in industrially blasted landscapes would necessarily and inevitably choose to convert such sites into idyllic and reassuring places, thereby socially redeeming those who wasted the landscape in the first place." So wrote Morris of his work, funded by a King County Arts Commission grant. Indeed, the Johnson Pit is hardly reassuring—more like an eerie Stonehenge remnant of a mysterious extinct culture. Only now it's surrounded by the dissonant geometry of new condo and apartment complexes. The suburban grid and rooflines contradict Morris' divot; and one wonders, compared to the old gravel pit, which one he would now consider blight. If his pit was once a rebuke, an open wound in the terra firma, it now seems a successful repair job.
Broken Obelisk
UW campus
So familiar, so central to the UW's Red Square, it's almost become background art. For that reason, students and faculty were shocked when Barnett Newman's 1971 sculpture suddenly disappeared for several months last spring—to be repaired courtesy of its donor, Virginia Wright. She had originally purchased the piece, based on a 1963 design, for the new SeaFirst Building, which opted for Henry Moore's Vertebrae—see above—instead! So both the bank and U-Dub were well served by the non-deal. Today returned to its pedestal, Broken Obelisk is one of the few sculptural works by the late modernist painter (1905–1970), a delicate perching of geometric forms that's almost as popular with photographers—particularly when the shadows are long at sunset—as the cherry trees on the quad. Along with Phillip Levine's nearby Dancer With Flat Hat, I suspect the obelisk is the most-viewed piece of public art in Seattle—a good argument for siting future works at well-trafficked locations around the city.
bmiller@seattleweekly.com
