At the Sculpture Park

I've been away too long. I'm going to make an effort to post more often, and work on my webpage. I'm starting to forget what HTML I picked up. I've been unemployed since early February, so you'd think with all the time I have on my hands I'd be updating more often.

Turns out I'm pretty indolent. But my friend Sean wanted me to set up a page for him, so that gives me a good opportunity to get off my cyber ass.

Maybe it's the changing of the seasons, what with the days getting longer and sunnier, I'm feeling more of a need to get out and enjoy things. Monday I went down to Anthony's Seaport down in the Shilshole Marina, sat out on the lounge with a Long Island Iced Tea and a bowl of chowder. Weather was great, the sun setting brilliantly over the water.

Clear, bright skies today, as well, so I went down to the Olympic Sculpture Park to take a look. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I was disappointed. Abstract sculpture just doesn't hold my interest, and there wasn't much here that was too thrilling. I was more taken with the signs they had up through the park.


The layout of the park is kind of strange, as it crosses Elliot Avenue and the train tracks, the walking paths cut back and forth diagonally. The park is mostly manicured grass, while the walking paths are thin gravel. Here's a sign I saw at the head of one path.


While I'm sure this is meant to be taken seriously, I have to wonder if they're serious. I mean, there's grass in all the other parks in the city, and the grass is doing just fine, I can tell you. Perhaps they're trying to come up with something catchier: I notice that several of the signs had been edited down with black tape to "Thank you for staying on the path." Too bad, I think this is the perfect sign for a Seattle park.

Here's another great sign.

I have a section of my webpage photo album set aside for odd signs I see around town. I've got about half a dozen remarks on this one, I'm going to have to settle on one.

Note how the grass looks like it's doing just fine.

This one is right next to a huge painted steel sculpture, which doesn't look like it'd get harmed much by touching.



Well, that's nice and abstract and everything. Just what I wanted from a sculpture in the park, I suppose.

Maybe I'm just callous, maybe I'm uncultured, but I have to be honest: there's nothing in this artwork that really moves me to want to touch it anyway.

No harm done.

Now here's a nice one. When me and Aeryk The Hippie visited New York back in '96, we stopped in at the Guggenheim, which was running an exhibit of an artist I'd never heard of, Claes Oldenburg. The main atrium featured a forty-foot tall badminton birdie. Really weird stuff. I could dig it, you know. Anyway, turns out they've got an Oldenburg original in this park.



So there you are, a big typewriter eraser, to be appreciated by anyone driving south on Elliot Avenue. Occurs to me that there's going to be plenty of the younger generation that grew up with computer printers, that won't know what this is. Actually, that's kind of cool, in and of itself. Art can be edifying. Anyway, there were only a dozen or so sculptures in the whole park, so there wasn't too much to see. But I can say I found one that I liked.