Button Sunday

Wouldn’t that be something? That button is from the early 1970s, after the big break-up. I told Tim I felt like I’d gone back in time when I received this recent issue of Rolling Stone.

Back in February 2008, Lisa and Mark were in Houston. They, along with Lindsey and Tom, went downtown to shoot some photos, which I often go back and look at in their LJs and Flickr sets. Included are photos of David Adickes’ “The Virtuoso.” Here are a couple of shots I took of that sculpture when I went out night shooting with Lynne:

I’ll admit that sometimes I can be a little bit of an art snob, but my preferences are rarely based on what art critics tell me I should or shouldn’t like. I react to art viscerally. If I like something, no one can make me dislike it by telling me I’ve got awful taste. However, sometimes when I don’t like something, I can come to appreciate it, at the least, when I get the insights of someone who views it with a perspective different from and more approving than mine.

In general, I like David Adickes’ work. I think it has a whimsical quality and his sculptures are public-friendly. There are lots of people who love him and just as many who dismiss him. Probably the first art of his I saw, without knowing it was his, was “Big Alex,” a giant telephone once visible from I-45 which has since been moved.

My second introduction to his work, again, without knowing the artist, was “Cornet” in Galveston. In the mid 1990s, Tom and I went to a friend’s wedding reception when the building behind the sculpture was a restaurant called “Trumpets” (long gone). Because of that restaurant and a jazz club using the “Trumpets” name, many people mistakenly call the sculpture “The Trumpet.” It was originally created to display at the World’s Fair in New Orleans in 1984.

I like both sculptures, but I’m not as fond of “Big Sam,” a sixty-foot statue of Sam Houston between Houston and Huntsville, Texas. Sam overwhelms me a little.

I’ve visited Adickes’ studio–a HUGE warehouse by necessity, considering the scale of his work–and will probably eventually publish my photos of the gigantic presidents’ heads that replicate ones placed in parks in Virginia and South Dakota. But there are four sculptures that I FREAKING LOVE, and they go with this post.

They get high with a little help from their friends. Thirty feet high.

From a different angle, with the Houston skyline a couple of miles behind them.

You can read a good Houston Chronicle article on David Adickes, his perspective on his work, and reactions to it, at this link.