Okay, call me insane, call me an artistic ignoramus, call me a traitor, but I like the Big Red Bird.

The Big Red Bird is “Phoenix Rising,” the sculpture by Frank Boyden that’s been erected in the new traffic roundabout at Galveston and 14th St. in Bend.

For those who haven’t seen it (and it’s well-nigh impossible to miss if you’re anywhere near it) Boyden’s sculpture is a bright-red, stylized rendition of a big bird attached to the top of a shiny metal pole that looks to be about 12 feet high.

The sculpture is supposed to represent the Phoenix, an immortal mythical Egyptian bird that supposedly lived in the desert for 500 years, then consumed itself in fire, and then rose again out of the ashes.

Boyden’s Phoenix is the latest, and most controversial, in a series of artworks that have been appearing in the roundabouts that are sprouting all over Bend. They’re being commissioned and paid for by Art in Public Places, a private, non-profit group.

Over the years, Art in Public Places has placed a lot of art in public places around Bend, some of it controversial and much of it not.

The non-controversial sculptures tend to be realistic – they look more or less literally like what they’re supposed to look like. These include the sculpture of what appears to be two copulating salmon in front of the Bend Public Library, the famous Man and Ducks on Park Bench at the corner of Wall and Franklin streets downtown, and the gaggle of bronze geese in the little park overlooking the Deschutes near Colorado Avenue.

The controversial sculptures tend to be the non-representational ones – those that don’t look like anything in particular, including the Big Shiny Aluminum Boxes at Kenwood School and the Giant Rusty Arches overlooking the Bend Parkway.

The roundabout sculptures follow the same pattern. I haven’t heard any complaints about the realistic grizzly bear near Bend High School or the realistic group of deer in another roundabout.

But the Giant Totem Pole (“Sunrise Spirit Column”) on Mount Washington Drive, the Giant Shiny Letters (“Mount Bachelor Compass”) on Century Drive and – especially – the Big Red Bird have drawn a barrage of flak.

One local letter-to-the-editor writer said the Phoenix sculpture looked like “a chicken with its butt on fire.”

Another described it as a “gargantuan hunting decoy for some extinct variety of giant pink flamingo.”

Angry neighbors of the Big Red Bird besieged the Bend City Council at a recent session, one of them describing the procedure for selecting and placing public art as “Machiavellian.”

The neighbors want to have some sort of say in approving the pieces of art that are placed in their neighborhoods. The city council is mulling over the proposal.

In theory, this looks like a good idea. In practice, it would be a disaster.

It’s been said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. One hesitates to imagine what art designed by a committee would look like.

The only kind of art that would stand a chance of winning broad neighborhood consensus would be the blandest sort of realistic sculpture. Do we really want Bend’s public places filled with nothing but bronze deer, ducks, salmon, bears and beavers?

Besides, neighborhoods aren’t static; their populations change constantly. Who’s to say that 10 or 20 years from now, the new residents won’t think the sculpture picked by the former residents is an intolerable horror?

By and large, the Art in Public Places folks have done a good job of selecting art for the city, and I think they should be allowed to go on doing it without a lot of meddling by fuss-budget neighbors or politicians.

Meanwhile, why are people getting their panties in a wad over this issue? I mean, it’s not as if any of the art being put in the roundabouts is obscene or anything.

I don’t like all of the sculptures that are going into the roundabouts. For instance, I don’t care very much for the giant totem pole or the big metal compass letters. But, what the heck, that’s just my personal taste. I’m not going to storm City Hall over it.

As for the Big Red Bird, as I said at the beginning, I actually like it. And after they get over the initial shock, my hunch is that most of the neighbors will too. It’s kind of like putting a large new piece of furniture in your living room – it always looks strange at first.

I do think somebody ought to paint that shiny pole some dark color, though.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 29th, 2002 at 8:48 am and is filed under Bruce on the Loose. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.