Mocking Public Art

[elfs]

Scrotum

Perhaps I shouldn't mock public art, but I paid for it and if this is the best entertainment value I can get for my tax dollar, then I should do what I can to enhance the experience.

Seattle recently built a complete light rail system from the airport to downtown. It's a lovely system, and I have some photos of it to show you later, but first I want to discuss the Tukwila Station, a huge thing of concrete, steel and glass that looms over the freeway like the home of some well-meaning but clueless Jedi overlord. It has three pieces of public art, and this one to the left amuses me first. You can see it through the glass when you drive past the station and I swear, it looks like nothing less than an uncomfortable scrotum.

Lute Statue

This isn't so bad, as public art goes. But you know that post I made awhile back about how certain wavelengths of light give me headaches? See that blue crack running up the length of the lute? Yeah, that's a neon bulb, and it's exactly at that spot. I avoid the station at night if I can.

Molecule Statue

And finally, there's this thing: a ten-foot high, six-foot in diameter dangling tinkertoy or molecule, each node of which is cut off at some facing to reveal a polished steel flat panel with something "profound" written on it.

The thing is, the quotes are all about the city of Tukwila. Tukwila was probably a nice farming community fifty years ago, but since 1947 the city of Tukwila has been little more than support infrastructure for Seattle International Airport. There's also The Southcenter Shopping District, and aside from those two hubs there's just nothing "there" to Tukwila. It's a wholly artificial city that has become a municipal service arm for the sprawling service corridor around the airport and the low-rent flight-path apartment complexes that have sprung up nearby. It's hard to imagine a more dreary borough. Art about how wonderful it is now is ridiculous.

I remember when I arrived in Tukwila, too. I passed through it to get to where I wanted to go.

Comments

[gromm.livejournal.com]

I don't see a scrotum. I see a drop of water following the first one that splashed into the pool of concrete already.

But maybe that's because I'm too much of a literalist. :)

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

To me it looks like a drop of blue paint about to follow one that's just splashed down.

[bldrnrpdx.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought too. Not that it should stop any mocking of anything, of course.

[urox.livejournal.com]

Tukwilla always meant Toys 'R' Us visit to me as a child.

[wendor.livejournal.com]

When I read "I remember when I arrived in Tukwila" my mind immediately rushed back 20 years to the the "visiting Tukwila" euphemism.

Of course that was quickly followed by the sad realization that it's really been TWENTY years.

(archives don't seem to go back 20 years, all I could dig up was a followup from 1996)
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19960802&slug=2342267