Recently a stroll through our new (Jan. ‘07) nine-acre Olympic Sculpture Park inspired a sense of restlessness. With some permanent and some visiting sculptures, around 20 large-scale art works currently comprise the outdoor museum. The pieces, while technically brilliant, seem stodgy. While edgier art works typically appeal to a youthful audience, established pieces ring primarily amongst an elderly group. Founded by and for an aging crowd, the obvious influence of the middle-aged enwraps each sculpture in a musty fog.
Let me paint you a picture: Per the exotic lifestyles of the extremely wealthy, a helicopter crash during a 1996 fly-fishing trip in Mongolia left stranded Mimi Gardner Gates, the director of the Seattle Art Museum, and Martha Wycoff, a trustee of the Trust for Public Land. As these powerful women waited, they discussed the creation of a Seattle public sculpture park. With the help of Weiss/Manfredi Architects, the Charles Anderson Landscape Architects, a $30 million-dollar donation from Jon and Ann Shirley, and the completion of a multi-million dollar seawall and underwater shoreline transformation, Gates’ and Wycoff’s dreams were realized.
In lieu of showcasing a riskier assortment of cutting-edge sculptures created by unknown Seattle-based artists, the SAM opted instead for a well-trod route. Said Seattle Times art critic Sheila Farr of the sculpture park, “In an age when contemporary-art museums are taking a cookie-cutter approach to art—sanctioning an elite group of preapproved artists, often New York-based—Seattle has been more of a follower than a leader.”
For instance, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Typewriter Eraser, Scale X (1998-1999) on loan to the sculpture park from the Paul Allen Family. Born in 1929, Claes enjoyed playing with his father’s typewriter eraser as a child. Later on, his extensive studies of the eraser manifested in a series of drawings, prints, and sculptures. Allen’s art work is the largest of three similar typewriter eraser sculptures crafted by Oldenburg.
A Swedish sculptor known for his large-scale replications of standard objects, Oldenburg’s past subjects include: a cherry on a spoon, a clothespin, a hamburger, a tube of lipstick, and a light switch. Interestingly, from Oldenburg’s wide-ranging body of work, the members of the Olympic Sculpture Park chose to exhibit a piece whose subject matter is obsolete: while typewriters were wildly popular throughout the bulk of the 20th century, the ease of the word-processing units on personal computers swiftly overtook the market by the 1980s. For those who spent significant time working with a typewriter, the piece undoubtedly inspires a sense of whimsy. But for a contemporary group, the gigantic typewriter eraser is an unrecognizable piece of alien machinery. The sculpture, consisting of an esoteric allusion, becomes a monument to the middle aged.
Another similarly cryptic work is Tony Smith’s Stinger. Smith, who studied beneath the esteemed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was known for his Minimalist sculptural designs. Some controversy shrouds Stinger given that Jane Smith, Tony’s widow, had the work fabricated in steel following Tony’s death, based on a plywood sculpture that Tony had constructed during 1967-8. Many felt that the Sculpture Park’s plaque, which did not pay tribute to Jane’s involvement in the piece, was misleading.
However, it’s the piece’s title that inspires feelings of bewilderment amongst its younger audience. Smith’s hoary admirers will recall that a Stinger was once a popular drink in the ‘60s, consisting of brandy and white crème de menthe. Again, per the SAM’s youth-crowd-inhibiting agenda, a dated cultural reference is cast to an exclusive set.
Furthermore, there's Ellsworth Kelly, a New York based artist, who served during WWII and studied at The Pratt Institute. Kelly is known for his minimalist approach characterized by irregular-shaped canvases, hard-edge works, and brilliant color-field paintings. Exhibited at the Olympic Park is the minimalist Curve XXIV, which involves a large-scale fan-shaped object, made of rusted steel.
Writes Sheila Farr of this art movement,
“Minimalism first came into vogue in this country during the Vietnam era, and it’s on the rise again—maybe in response to the violence and uncertainty of today’s world.” While the piece (“It isn’t about something: It is something,” writes Farr) and its “simple geometry of…form and…beautiful contrast of materials” (Farr), may be appealing in itself, it is a mistake to compare most aspects of the Vietnam War with present-day events.
Obviously, the Vietnam-era draft inspired an extreme disquiet. But beyond this, the media’s visible role in depicting war-related imagery then was in stark contrast to today’s ingratiating news industry, as no violent images accompany headlines and newscasts.
Shocking photographs once freely circulated amongst the public, such as Eddie Adams’ photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, taken moments before he preformed an execution or Ronald Haeberle’s My Lai 4 massacre documentation. Most heartbreaking of all is Nick Ut’s snapshot of a young naked girl, dripping with napalm as she flees a burning village.
Taken in this context, it’s understandable that a striking, neutral form like Kelly’s piece would elicit feelings of solace, or ring of a truer beauty, during times when horrific images were continually released upon the public. However, contemporary media strays from the gory visual reality of wartime events. And while a comparatively mild photograph, which depicts soldiers’ American-flag draped coffins, stirs a heavy controversy, Kelly’s audience drifts into the past.
