 There have been plenty of times I’ve been fooled in my hunt for public sculpture. Noticing a great shape or pleasing line, I’ve taken my camera only to find that it was a bicycle rack or a traffic barrier I was seeing.
And that got me thinking about wallpaper.
The stuff we see around us in cities day after day is really wall paper to most of us. The design elements are obscured by familiarity. But when you really look at a lot of the work, it’s as exciting as public sculpture.
Take lampposts, for example. When I lived in Boston, the street was lined with tall stone aggregate lamp poles. Until I looked at them with the public art angle, I just saw industrial boredom. But- at closer glance- they were hexagonal. Good clean vertical lines that converged at the top. Gorgeous. And near them, a traffic barrier with its concave line rivaled anything the arts commission had approved for the past ten years!
It’s all in the angle. The undulating bike racks that line streets near schools take on a new meaning artistically when you squat near one end and look up at them. Or when you go high angle and look straight down into their sensuous curves. Of course, you don’t want to be doing this during school hours since the vigilant school watch folks will probably get you for some perversion or another…
(Photo from clavius.org website)
8:51:06 AM 
|
|
