Today’s thoughts revolve around the fact that we so often pass by some art or marker without really noticing it. It’s not that they are in some transitional state – instead, we are, running from point A to point B in our daily lives, our attention captured by more spectacular things, or given over to everyday time pressures.

Here are three examples of what I mean, all taken from travel experiences, where time was not an issue, but attention magnets in the surroundings, instead.

Massa Marítima is a 13th century town in the metalliferous hills of western Tuscany. Tourism thrives there because of the traditional beauty of the old town, a glorious cathedral and a single astonishing fresco that was discovered some years back when a building was torn down: a phallus tree. (Reflection in the photograph because the fresco is kept safe behind plexiglass during renovation.) The small marker that commemorates the hard lives and deaths of the miners that brought the town its riches through iron, mercury and copper mining, goes unnoticed.

Bamberg is a southern German town, a UNESCO world heritage site, with marvels of architecture, located in beautiful Franconia. The small marker commemorating Jews and resistance fighters tortured and killed by the Nazis is located in a corner of an otherwise eye-catchingly decorated town hall. How many people walk by it, blindly, every day, not even wondering about the strange swastika-like emblem overriding the human forms? 

The Spui is a graceful little square in the center of Amsterdam. People walk and bike across, hang out in outdoor cafes or wait for the bus. The fact that there are three sculptures by one of the founding giants of Postminimalism’s conceptual art, Lawrence Weiner, goes unnoticed. In fact people are walking on top of and across the small open books that are inscribed in three different languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Weiner

 

I guess we can all think of public art we walk by here in PDX, not giving it a second thought….