CITY DAILY PHOTO APRIL THEME DAY - APRIL FOOL

PLASTIC FOOD

I could have saved this one for tomorrow's City Daily Photo April Fool theme day. It is in an old building downtown whose street-level retail space is unused (like so many others). Someone went to the trouble of setting up an elaborate display of fake produce. It's all plastic as far as I can tell. Heaven knows why - it's not a high pedestrian traffic area. Maybe it's for Frank Zappa's plastic people.               

ROOSTER

 

 

This might be better left as an enigma than explained. What might lie behind such a door in the city center?           

NOTHING LASTS FOREVER

But some things go on for an amazingly long time. I can't think of another business that has been in operation downtown so long except the natural gas utility mentioned recently. Famous old restaurants have closed or moved to the suburbs. The department stores are gone. No hotel has been in operation nearly that long. Even the baseball team only moved downtown in 1966. I bet this place had some hard times but is now doing better with so many old buildings being turned into apartments. It seemed to be going strong when I walked by.                  

OPTIMIST

Well, sort of, but not alone and with a lot of luck. But why not a woman? Found on a vacant building on Locust Street in downtown St. Louis.               

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE LIGHT

I am so out of materials and ideas. We have had some pretty spring weather but the same old daisies and magnolias aren't doing much for me. After a couple of hours in my office yesterday I picked up a camera and walked around the secondary streets of downtown trolling for images. Anything.

We have some handsome old architecture, some of it preserved, some not. Many years ago this was the headquarters of the natural gas utility (methane mixed with some other stuff), from the days when it was used to light homes and businesses. In time it became mostly used for heat and industrial applications. Then the business became just the Laclede Gas Company and moved to one of our first steel frame, curtain wall high rises, built in 1966. Several years ago, like some other corporations, it changed its name from something meaningful to something meaningless and is now Spire. The current location is in an odd Philip Johnson-designed building, once occupied by an insurance company that went under in the Great Recession.

So like many others, the old building is now apartments. As you can see, the ground floor retail space is vacant. Still, the structure retains its charm and dignity.

          

FALLING MAN

I suppose our town's best known 20th Century visual artist was Ernest Trova, https://etrova.org/home.html. He was, in a sense, a one-trick pony with endless, if creative, variations on a single theme, Falling Man. They are smooth, armless male figures, truncated cleanly at the shoulder like a mannequin. They often pitch forward but sometimes, like here, stand like Egyptian funerary figures. You can look at the web link if you want a precis on the subject. 

The art on display at Laumeier reminds me of the words of the poet Archibald MacLeish that a poem should not mean, but be. The essence here can be a challenge to the viewer.              

SIX TONS OF BALLOON SCULPTURE

As I write this series of posts I wonder more about how much help even receptive viewers need with contemporary sculpture. This piece at Laumeier is called Sugabus, a 2004 work by Robert Chambers. It refers to the arrangement of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a molecule of sucrose. Well, and also Cerberus, the terrifying three-headed dog guarding the gates of Hades. Are there three heads? Is there a diet version?             

STATE SURVEILLANCE

Likely the most popular work at Laumeier Sculpture park is Tony Tasset's Eye, https://www.laumeiersculpturepark.org/tony-tasset-2007. The descriptions and interpretations provided by art venues, as in this link, are mostly written by curators. They may speak to the creators' ideas or to scholarship but I wonder how much they resonate with the average viewer. They don't always resonate much with me. Eye creeps me out. Big Brother might be watching you if it could move around.           

SAINT LOUIS DAILY PHOTO TURNS 14

OMG, I almost forgot! Yesterday was Saint Louis Daily Photo's fourteenth anniversary. 5,025 posts to date, mostly from around here but sometimes from around the world during our travels. The days I've missed were generally when we were somewhere so far out in the boonies that there was no Internet or cellular service.  I could not have done it without the support, sharp observations and meticulous proofreading of Mrs. C. I'd be lost without her. Forty seven years together is worth a lot.

This may qualify as clinical obsessive-compulsive disorder. I'm not looking for any medication.      

THE WAY

One of the two best known works at Laumeier Sculpture park is The Way, completed by Alexander Liberman in 1980. It was constructed from 18 salvaged steel oil tanks, is 65 feet / 20 meters tall, 102 feet / 31 meters wide and 100 feet  30.5 meters deep and weighs 55 US tons (50 metric). The work dominates the central lawn. It is hard to get a sense of scale but for the tiny person at the center left edge.          

LAUMEIER

These pages have had many pictures from Citygarden, our two square block downtown art oasis.  They have rarely featured Laumeier Sculpture Park, a 105 acre / 42.5 hectare haven in the suburbs. https://www.laumeiersculpturepark.org/ . There are 70-something major outdoor works and a couple of buildings with rotating shows. Yesterday was such a perfect spring day that Mrs. C and I went over for a walk.

This is Donald Lipsky's Ball? Ball! Wall? Wall!, a 300 foot / 91.5 meter chain of marine buoys that snakes along a path in the woods, finding its way somewhere between minimalism and surrealism.            

AU PRINTEMPS

Mrs. C and  I went to the botanical garden yesterday to see if anything was popping as winter officially rolled into spring. Just a little bit. There will be more every day.               

THE SHOW COMES LATER

One of the reasons to visit the City Museum is its little circus troupe, Circus Harmony, https://circusharmony.org/. It is not a circus in terms of clowns and animals. The organization recruits young people from every part of society and teaches them juggling, gymnastics and aerialist skills. They have a performance space in the center of the building, simple step seats on one side (background) and glass walls on the other for passers-by to watch. A group of young women was practicing when we were there. She looks determined even behind the mask.       

YELLOWFISH

Once you clear the entry area of the City Museum and the obligatory gift shop, you enter an area with strange sea creatures and pools. It's full of tunnels and balconies, some too small for me to fit through. It is fanciful. What is the point besides pure whimsy? The Lou is a long way from the ocean.               

YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE

Another perspective on the maze that is Monstro City, the outdoor part of the City Museum. You would have to be on an adjoining rooftop with a wide angle lens to get the whole thing.

This is an an area of old light industrial buildings and warehouses just west of downtown. The museum's structure was a shoe factory or warehouse of both, I forget which. Decades ago, this town was the center of shoe manufacturing in the United States. And we used to make more beer than anyplace before Anheuser-Busch was the last player standing. Back in the day when we were important enough to have two Major League baseball teams, it was said that St. Louis was "first in shoes, first in booze and last in the American League."                       

COMING IN FOR A LANDING

Yesterday's photo was inside the City Museum. This (obviously) is outdoors and again only a small part of the structure. It's called Monstro City for no obvious reason. There are all sorts of catwalks and tubes and tunnels in no order at all, other that it doesn't fall down. That's the scrapped Learjet I mentioned. You can mess around inside. The tube at the upper left is steel mesh and you can crawl through it. I'll have to shoot this again on a brighter day. 

No St. Patrick's Day celebrations in town and there are usually lots. My father's family is Irish (County Clare) but I'll have to drink my Guinness at home.    

CREATIVE CHAOS

 

This picture gives an idea of the wackiness and genius of the City Museum but the scene is a tiny part of the whole. It goes on and on. The vertical cylinders on the staircase all move. They must have been rollers for some industrial process, now wildly painted. That's Ellie in the pink sweatshirt inside the bars at the center left edge.               

MADELEINE MONDAY

City Museum is full of things to slide down, indoors and out, metal and wood, curved and straight. Ellie is careening down one on the outside, I presume made from aluminum. Some are long, steep and scary. Audrey, my five year old granddaughter in Michigan, is already a snowboarder. She could handle any of them.                   

RECYCLED FOR FUN

On Saturday we took Ellie to The City Museum, STL's funhouse of post-industrial junk. There is nothing like it in the world. It has some actual exhibits but most of it is a mad assortment of old building parts, architectural remnants, machinery and scrap metal. There is even a gutted Lear Jet suspended high over the street. Children love, with its almost limitless variety of things to climb, crawl through and slide down.

Ellie may or may not have been in there somewhere. Some how this part of it reminds me of Duchamp's Large Glass.                

EFFLUENT PIPE

Okay, not really, but that's the visual association I got from the scene. You see metal plaques around street drains here that say "Caution. Sewer drains to river," with a picture of a fish. This looked to me like some giant, rough pipe that thrust out of the levee next to the Mississippi.

But of course it isn't. It's in Citygarden, one side of the large sculpture Eros Bendato that's been seen here before (e.g., https://saintlouismodailyphoto.blogspot.com/2013/08/all-you-need-is-love.html). You can crawl right in there, and lots of children do. I just don't want to see that worker washed away by slime.              

A WELL PLACED BARRIER

I often mention Citygarden, downtown STL's two square block sculpture park. For some reason, when it was built the designers left the street open between the blocks but then immediately barricaded it. During the summer they roll in an ice cream truck and it's been a venue for small performances pre-COVID. Maybe that was the intention.                                

WE ARE THE . . .

I've mentioned Ballpark Village, the real estate development next to the baseball stadium. A couple of years ago they installed a giant replica of the championship trophy in front of the main entrance. Our team has won it quite a number of times. When it was unveiled, many commentators said it looks really tacky, and they are right. In fact, I think it's a bit of an eyesore.

The base is cylindrical. The funny thing is, a bit out of the frame to the left, there is a big dent in it. I'm not showing it today but the shape and distance off the ground makes it obvious that an SUV or pickup truck ran into the thing. There's some poetry in that.                         

Hanging Out

Masked or unmasked, downtown at 7th and Market. You would never get me on one of those things. Well, with my spine, my knees and my lousy sense of balance it would be plain foolish.

The streets were nearly empty on a weekday afternoon.             

WHERE WERE THEY WHEN WE NEEDED THEM?

Actually, the caption is totally unfair. I wrote it just to get your attention. There's no blame on the city health department. It's on our incompetent state administration and governor and all of those fine "it's my free choice whether to wear a mask" folks. 

The state's vaccine distribution system is a disaster. I was lucky to get my first shot through the big doctor-hospital network I use. However, we read in the news about vaccine sent to rural areas going to waste and St. Louisans in the currently eligible group driving long distances to get a shot. I got an email yesterday from the state registry offering vaccination appointments in Kansas City, four hours drive away. Remember, this is the state that gave us Josh Hawley. See https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/us/politics/josh-hawley.html .