Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park

I shouldn't have been surprised, but the Bears won yesterday. Now we get some coffee and a bunch of fish from the mayor of Seattle, thanks to a bet with our mayor. (I think we would have owed Seattle a pizza if the Seahawks had won.) The Bears' victory also means one more week of Rex-bashing before we move on to complaining about how the Cubs overpaid for Alfonso Soriano.

Meanwhile, Seattle has a new waterfront sculpture park to distract itself from the Seahawks' loss. Sheila Farr at the Seattle Times calls the park an "image-changing landmark." Like Chicago's Millennium Park, Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park was paid for by private donors. Millennium Park has been criticized--unfairly, to my mind--for being a hodgepodge of vanity projects, but the Olympic Park seems to have avoided that problem by sticking to a budget of $85 million (about what Chicago paid in kickbacks and miscellaneous graft alone) and hiring a single planner, the New York architectural firm Weiss/Manfredi. The Olympic Park is thematically unified as well, with works from an all-star cast of contemporary artists: Richard Serra, Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg, Mark di Suvero, Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Teresita Fernández, Mark Dion, and others.

All this modern art on Seattle's lovely waterfront raises interesting questions about the art-nature relationship, especially in regard to modern art. The monumentality of Serra's rusty sculptures, for instance, seem at home in nature, but rather than holding a mirror up to nature, his sculptures contemplate nature with a blank gaze. Similarly, di Suvero's I-beam jumbles wear well in damp climates like Seattle's, but his sculptures are industrial at their core. Seattle's approach to the waterfront sculpture garden says much about how the city conceives of its relationship to nature. The sculptures have been placed at the fulcrum of urban space and the sea shore; the park includes an 850-foot section of restored beach. By contrast, each focal point of Chicago's Millennium Park rests in a space named for a wealthy patron or corporate sponsor. For instance, Anish Kapoor's beloved Bean (more formally known as Cloud Gate) sits on a space known as the AT&T Plaza. Seattle places its art at the intersection of culture and nature, while Chicago places its art in small parcels of corporate branding, like so many market shares. The entire park was built on space originally reclaimed from Lake Michigan for railroad tracks. This is fitting, I suppose, for a city situated for the maximum exploitation of nature.