crappy art
my sister‘s friend, tasha, visited from indiana a while back. one day while hannah was busy at work, brandon and i took tasha under our wing and went downtown with her. we first stopped off in the international district and went to Uwajimaya where tasha found a childhood favorite, Hello Panda. from there we hopped on the water front “street car” (actually just a bus dressed like a street car) and rode it all the way up to the new Olympic Sculpture Park.
overall the park is pretty cool. the landscaping is awesome, it’s right on the water, and it was a beautiful tuesday afternoon. the only thing that sucked about the whole thing were the actual sculptures: they were the crappiest bunch of crap that i’ve ever crapped. seriously. they were so stupid and pointless and “artsy” and i almost puked.
the worst of the worst was a piece entitled “adjacent, against, upon” which feature giant cement blocks and huge chunks of limestone. i’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:
after seeing that crappy art and hardly being able to believe my own eyes, i asked google for help. here’s what this seattle times article had to say about it:
It looks so simple, you’d never imagine the hostile debate it set off. Three rough stones and three smooth geometric forms, paired up one-on-one in an elemental dance. Stretched along 130 feet of shoreline at [Olympic Sculpture] Park, Heizer’s sculpture “Adjacent, Against, Upon” first seems like nothing more than a harmonious arrangement of forms against a shimmering backdrop of sky and water.
But as you enter into the piece and explore the artist’s design, it keeps growing. You feel the force of the relationship between raw stone and sculpted cement and can start to reflect on the way civilization butts against nature, instinct against reason. Heizer’s massive haiku of a sculpture encapsulates the basic conflicts of being human.
a harmonious arrangement of forms? the basic conflicts of being human? are you fucking kidding me? can you believe that crap? i know that it was created back in the 1970s and at the time it may have been pretty cool, but those words are just about as crappy as the art they are trying to describe. i just forced myself to puked a little bit and then swallow it to get the taste of crap out of my mouth.
