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Idolatry and Imagery
Well, the hours have already passed, and now it's officially after Schnitz's (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alphaschnitz) birthday, so I'm a little late. I hope it was good, and he'll have moved into his new place soon.
I want to write something, I guess. I guess I'm posting in search of a topic, which is a bad place to be.
Well, there's a couple of nonsense trivia bits I can talk about. For one, i saw a map of all of the art on the university of Houston campus. While there's no real comparison between the UH campus, which looks as unplanned as most of the rest of Houston and Rice that took the actual effort to keep most of the buildings alike. You would never see a 60 year old tin shed on the rice campus.
Still, UH does go for some modern art on campus. One of the newer pieces, in front of the new school of music is some sort of bronze melting that's supposed to resemble a winged Nike but looks more like a chocolate easter bunny that has partially melted in the hot Texas sun. It's placed up high on a pedestal, but that just seems to make people want to dress it up even more. It's had band uniforms and dresses and other costumes from the near by theater.
There's also a statue in the Student Center that's a sort of crazed representation of a cougar (the UH mascot) attacking a pained Longhorn, and just about every other mascot of the old Southwest conference, including Horned Toads, Razorbacks, Owls, Ponies, Bears, and a little guy who I guess is an Aggie, or maybe a Red Raider. I'm not sure if I've ever seen anything more rah-rah on our normally apathetic campus.
Now, one of the newest installations on campus is a three story stainless steel blender. I guess it could be an hourglass of some sort, but really, it looks more like a blender, and probably is there to inspire smoothy purchases in the Rec. Center that it stands in front of.
One of the older ones is named Sandy in a Defined Space (or as we called it, Betty in a Box), and it's a raised box structure with a nude female figure sitting in to, with a leg stretched out of it. She's stuck at a normal person's reach, and she gets felt up often. You can tell because the patina has been worn down in certain areas. Sometimes she gets painted. Well parts of her.
Each new building on campus has to set aside one percent of it's budget to purchasing art. Sometimes it's good, often, it's just plain weird. The architecture building has two granite slabs that are carved into the shapes of couches. They aren't comfortable. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be art or a torture device.
Still, my favorite art pice at UH is an abstract metal set of boxes that sort of mess up your perspective. It's a forced perspective where it's not as deep as you would perceive looking at it. It was tough to draw in a art class I took one time. It's called Troika, but i have no idea why, since a Troika to me is a chariot that's propelled by three horses.
Occasionally I'll see a pice of art elsewhere. there's a couple of small pieces on the lawn outside the building I work at, but they are out dazzled by the light up deer that appear on the lawn each Christmas, but Houston isn't, as a whole, a big city for public art. It's a developer built city that doesn't think about devoting money for things like that.
Houston isn't a bad arts city, better than Dallas in ballet, theater, symphony, but there's never been a strong push for statues. In fact, I can't think of another statue besides the one in Herman park of a soldier (Sam Houston in this case), in the entire city. There's very little acknowledgments of wars in town, where others in the South would have Civil War heroes everywhere.
It's just not that kind of town. Trees, freeway overpasses, and buildings, little else.
alphaschnitz) birthday, so I'm a little late. I hope it was good, and he'll have moved into his new place soon.I want to write something, I guess. I guess I'm posting in search of a topic, which is a bad place to be.
Well, there's a couple of nonsense trivia bits I can talk about. For one, i saw a map of all of the art on the university of Houston campus. While there's no real comparison between the UH campus, which looks as unplanned as most of the rest of Houston and Rice that took the actual effort to keep most of the buildings alike. You would never see a 60 year old tin shed on the rice campus.
Still, UH does go for some modern art on campus. One of the newer pieces, in front of the new school of music is some sort of bronze melting that's supposed to resemble a winged Nike but looks more like a chocolate easter bunny that has partially melted in the hot Texas sun. It's placed up high on a pedestal, but that just seems to make people want to dress it up even more. It's had band uniforms and dresses and other costumes from the near by theater.
There's also a statue in the Student Center that's a sort of crazed representation of a cougar (the UH mascot) attacking a pained Longhorn, and just about every other mascot of the old Southwest conference, including Horned Toads, Razorbacks, Owls, Ponies, Bears, and a little guy who I guess is an Aggie, or maybe a Red Raider. I'm not sure if I've ever seen anything more rah-rah on our normally apathetic campus.
Now, one of the newest installations on campus is a three story stainless steel blender. I guess it could be an hourglass of some sort, but really, it looks more like a blender, and probably is there to inspire smoothy purchases in the Rec. Center that it stands in front of.
One of the older ones is named Sandy in a Defined Space (or as we called it, Betty in a Box), and it's a raised box structure with a nude female figure sitting in to, with a leg stretched out of it. She's stuck at a normal person's reach, and she gets felt up often. You can tell because the patina has been worn down in certain areas. Sometimes she gets painted. Well parts of her.
Each new building on campus has to set aside one percent of it's budget to purchasing art. Sometimes it's good, often, it's just plain weird. The architecture building has two granite slabs that are carved into the shapes of couches. They aren't comfortable. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be art or a torture device.
Still, my favorite art pice at UH is an abstract metal set of boxes that sort of mess up your perspective. It's a forced perspective where it's not as deep as you would perceive looking at it. It was tough to draw in a art class I took one time. It's called Troika, but i have no idea why, since a Troika to me is a chariot that's propelled by three horses.
Occasionally I'll see a pice of art elsewhere. there's a couple of small pieces on the lawn outside the building I work at, but they are out dazzled by the light up deer that appear on the lawn each Christmas, but Houston isn't, as a whole, a big city for public art. It's a developer built city that doesn't think about devoting money for things like that.
Houston isn't a bad arts city, better than Dallas in ballet, theater, symphony, but there's never been a strong push for statues. In fact, I can't think of another statue besides the one in Herman park of a soldier (Sam Houston in this case), in the entire city. There's very little acknowledgments of wars in town, where others in the South would have Civil War heroes everywhere.
It's just not that kind of town. Trees, freeway overpasses, and buildings, little else.