This really is a very gloomy sculpture - black stone with water running down it - to have outside the USC hospital - it looks like a huge memorial plaque, a striated tomb, and its morbidity can't be lost on a good number of the patients or those accompanying them. It's a lapidary memento mori. It's most inappropriate, even if it has its own gloomy beauty.
It would fit, nonetheless, very well into a course that's germinating in my mind on Outdoors Art - the fact that I'm working on Victorian pavement artists for a paper feeds vaguely into this, too, but so does the aptness of Los Angeles for such a course - the streets are a readily available classroom. Sculptures, yes - and murals, and graffiti, and the Watts Towers, and billboards - both advertising ones and ones that on occasion are freestanding works of art - and installations on vacant lots, and signage, and then field trips for various Land Art examples. And other works via reproduction, from Japanese painted manhole covers, to Ben Wilson, that guy in London who paints on little blobs of chewing gum that stick to the sidewalks. The trouble with the academic calendar is that one has to declare what one will be teaching such a long way in advance that by the time one gets there, it may not be what one is actually passionate about right then - but I think that this idea should endure until next year without too much trouble.
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