The Fussy Eye: Please Give

SAM demands your used water-bottle caps!

A A A Comments By Brian Miller Wednesday, Sep 8 2010

Brian Miller

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Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., 654-3100, seattleartmuseum.org. 10 a.m.–4 p.m. (Closed Mon. and often for private events.)

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We Seattleites are accustomed to recycling every damn carton and container we use, but bottle caps present a problem. The city's recycling program doesn't want them, because they gum up the conveyor belts and grinders that turn today's 16 oz. of Poland Spring into tomorrow's $250 Patagonia sweater. But Texas artist Trenton Doyle Hancock presents us with a solution—or rather, nine of them—in his new installation A Better Promise at the PACCAR Pavilion. Overhead hangs a giant horror hand, composed of several separate panels, with colorful perforations and fingernails. Facing west to catch the evening light, it's a pleasing but not particularly meaningful Pop Art sculpture, an immobile mobile. Beneath are nine Plexiglas bins where we're to deposit our plastic bottle caps. "Help me turn trash to art," reads Hancock's rustic wooden signpost. What kind of future art? He hasn't declared his intentions yet. May we suggest a giant fleece mitten for the hand? The hanging palm and fingers—facing upward, as if in supplication—are made of aluminum, but not recycled from old Diet Coke cans. After being open a week, his nine receptacles have a few inches of caps in each of them, plus some miscellaneous garbage. (Whoever tossed in the Häagen-Dazs lid, shame on you!) Whatever Hancock intends to make of the collected caps, it'll mainly be rendered in primary colors—red and yellow are doing quite well. Purple, not so much.