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the wurst gallery
posted by Sanjeev Narang at 11:53 AM
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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/football/79034_stadiumart19.shtml
Public art commitment adds passion to stadium
Pioneer Square neighbors beneficiaries of $1.75M project
Friday, July 19, 2002
By REGINA HACKETT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER ART CRITIC
Fans scoff at the idea of art in Seahawks Stadium, with good reason. Football is about force, not beauty. Requiring artists to forge a link would have been a disaster. So, can art exist in the football framework?
Yes, quite well, as Seahawk Stadium proves. With guidance from public art veteran Pablo Schugurensky, art manger for First & Goal, the art committee began by acknowledging reality. None of the 12 artists selected to enliven the site was asked to relate their work to football, and none did.
The artwork links to the building, not its use. It clicks into place as if the stadium were created for it, not vice-versa. Working with the widest possible range of materials and methods, the artists succeeded by addressing the site and -- metaphorically at least -- putting their own spin on the ball.
Because of its art, which cost First & Goal $1.75 million, Seahawks Stadium can claim to be a good neighbor. Pioneer Square is loaded with galleries but light on significant public art. The stadium contributes at least four pieces that push the Pioneer Square area to the top of the city's public art venues, and all four (by Claudia Fitch, Susan Point, Beliz Brother and Peter Shelton) can be seen without setting foot inside the stadium.
Other terrific pieces are inside, and one more outside (by Bob Haozous) is terrific chiefly because of the context.
The stadium faces Pioneer Square like a giant rocket at lift-off, with a huge vertical panel (the backside of the scoreboard) and horizontal braces (seats). The architects undoubtedly hoped to create the illusion of a large bird, head up and wings flared (seahawk), but there's nothing organic about the shape or placement.
Haozous claimed the vertical panel for art, transforming it from a brutal shaft to docile background for his four painted steel discs, each 24 feet in diameter. Titled "Earth Dialogue," the piece has a hard clarity that aligns it to the architecture, plus a spare beauty that subtly changes its meaning and imposes a welcoming grace.
Moving closer to the stadium, visitors need to look down to see Point's 16 cast bronze bas-relief sidewalk inlays. They align on a slight curve that marks the place the Kingdome once stood, saluting Seattle sports history with a series of stylized faces that come from a far deeper history, Point's Coast Salish culture.
Because Brother works with light, her piece is visible only at night, when it turns the north plaza into a electronic forest or a sea of streaming blue lights. Walking through them with light pouring out underfoot is like walking into wonderland.
Hanging on the west colonnade wall outside the stadium are Fitch's six giant heads, painted fiberglass over polystyrene foam. Distant ancestors include statuary of Roman civic arenas, as well as art deco figurative design, cubist fractures, carnival heads and penny arcades: Pomp and Pop married for a thoroughly 21st century version of a monumental human head. Totally successful, they're sleek, funny, fierce and engaging: from any point of view, public art classics.
In the west plaza sits a 5-ton granite boulder that sculptor Shelton found in the Cascade range. It's a dazzling stone, an object with the power to embody its home and bring wilderness undiluted into the city.
Shelton honors it by providing it with a shadow. It's a black bronze replica, the mass without the weight, with a lovely stitching in horizontal waves that responds to the surface nuance of the rock and answers its chaos with order. Titled "rockshadow," the piece plays with the nature of inside and out, form and shadow, the real and fake, the found and created.
Robert Yoder's "Montgomery Line" is a painted concrete design on the sidewalk near the Seahawks Exhibition Center. Yoder is a wonderful collage artist who works with fragments of signs and weathered siding. Possibly the size of this project overwhelmed him. His abstract curves and angles add up to nothing special.
What can be said about David Russo's 8-minute video loop, "Populi"? It's a bewildering, fast-forward look at a sculptor bearing a single head across the state. People waiting in line for a hot dog might glance at the nearest video screen expecting to see the game and see instead a mad carver whirling in space.
Because video is a prominent part of contemporary art, the committee wanted at least one piece. This one probably sounded good. It will come and go on the video screens, in snatches and fragments. Broken up, it might make a better impression.
That leaves the more conventional art that hangs on walls inside: paintings by Juan Alonso, Romson Bustillo and James Lavadour; banners by Cheryl dos Remedios and photographs by Glenn Rudolph.
All work well. They function as focal points and keep the muscle-bound architecture that houses them in check.
Alonso's four acrylic paintings in the club lounge are three-dimensional flower paintings with a weedy, sour sense overgrowth. His plants may look parched, but they are relentless colonizers. Bustillo's three acrylic collages in the passageway between the stadium and exhibition center explore aspects of Filipino culture. Each painting is a kind of boat, a settlement or island in a choppy sea.
Lavadour's oil-on-board landscape at the entrance to the club lounge shows fire in the mountains, which are massive combinations of blur and exactitude.
Also at the entrance to the club lounge are Rudolph's 10 large gelatin silver prints featuring Northwest watersheds. There are no contraries in Rudolph's work, no us against them, no nature against city, good against evil. Everything exists in messy interaction, hauntingly recorded.
Cheryl dos Remedios created eight riotous banners to hang amid the signs and advertisements in the Occidental Avenue concourse. She has a great color sense and fluid understanding of form. Loaded with sea creatures and beguiling beauties, her work triumphs in the clutter of its context.
Public art is always a gamble. The distance between a proposal and a piece can be enormous, and once the art's in place, its trial begins. Will it rub the public raw, fade to insignificance or become a source of pride and wonder?
Seahawks Stadium may be brutal, but the art inside and around it raises the city's art profile, making it richer and more intriguing.
P-I art critic Regina Hackett can be reached at 206-448-8332 or reginahackett@seattlepi.com
� 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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