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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
