Urban Surrealism
The Oregonian, June 03, 2001 - by Randy Gragg
In the 87-decibel roar of the Eastbank Esplanade's loudest stretch stands a gateway shaped, appropriately enough, like a broken ear.
Made of thick sheets of copper, stencil-cut, folded and reinforced with curving ribs, it also evokes a cave's mouth, a conch shell's cleft or a boat hull's yawning interior. But at just the right angle, a more magical image springs into view -- seven cut-out silhouettes of ancient architectural portals emerge like a hallway in a human-size, pop-up greeting card.
Called "Echo Gate," the sculpture is one of four similarly energetic new artworks punctuating the esplanade.
Created by the five-person creative collective Rigga, the sculptures are the most enigmatic and exciting public artworks Portland has seen in years.
For those who have followed Rigga, the project represents an engaging pinnacle of achievement as well as a somber moment of a culmination.
After five years of collaborating on all manner of art and architecture projects, the collective is opting to end its raucous art-and-architectural jam session with a true classic.
Rigga was founded by Ean Eldred, 32; John Kashiwabara, 36; Peter Nylen, 34; and James Harrison, 33. Three years later, they were joined by respected teacher and architect Richard Garfield, 57.
Their backgrounds tell a lot about the depth and breadth of their aspirations.
Before migrating separately to Portland, the original four studied at Cooper Union School of Design with such influential architectural conceptualists as John Hedjuk, Peter Eisenman and recent MacArthur genius fellows, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.
Adding both a complement and contrast, Garfield was a protégé of one of the century's great masters, Louis Kahn, and worked on such seminal Kahn projects as the Kimball Art Museum and Legislative Capital at Dhaka, Bangladesh.
With a typical ear for language hybrids, they took their name from a merger of Norwegian and Italian words for "lashing" and "binding force."
And what resulted was a rare breed of architecture: built from the most rigorous and spontaneous ideas but almost all made more like art -- by their own hands.
"We tried something incredibly absurd, a group of friends making a company without a hierarchy, " Eldred says. "It was like the human genome project, all this work and you discover humans have one-third more genetic material than a fruit fly."
Rigga beginnings
The group's 1997 debut exhibitions at Marylhurst Art Gym and Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art were filled with wildly enigmatic machines based on writings by Jorge Luis Borges and with titles like "Cerebraphone: A device for listening for the sound of man's emergence" and "Catastrophe Tool: A device for creating lost drawings."
A sign for Artists Repertory Theatre at 1516 S.W. Alder St., designed in 1997, festooned the building's corner with a winking, copper eyelash of awning, projecting a shadow-puppet theater of stage props on the wall behind.
A garden pavilion for Portland patrons Jack and Marjorie Butler designed in 1999 took the "primitive hut" envisioned by the 17th-century architectural theorist and Jesuit priest Marc-Antoine Laugier and broke it into an intricate puzzle of folding screens to frame a garden of monster bamboo.
Rigga designed more conventional projects, too, such as the delicate light fixtures for the Saucebox restaurant and the office interiors for a software development firm, Rapidine.
But where the group's creative id ran more wildly than any of Portland's other adventurous architecture firms was in Rigga's party environments for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's annual Dada Ball and in its own ritualistic, agitprop performances.
With Harrison often emceeing in ill-fitting tails or a toga, playing a hybrid of Diogenes and Ed Sullivan, Rigga turned its low-tech theater into a ritual extension of its architecture, as essential to the process as model building is to most architects.
"Ritual for us made places for things," Kashiwabara says. "Its power is in looking at things discreetly. Brush your teeth as a ritual, and it gains a different space."
So seamless was the collaboration that those who worked with Rigga firsthand often described their working methods with analogies to the body, assigning words like "brain," "heart," "will," "soul" and "memory" to the members.
But in a typical, Dylan-esque free association, Harrison prefers: "I was the nose cone, Ean the carburetor, Peter the glue, John the poetry and Richard the smoke."
Through separate interviews, the range of complementary skills more fully emerges:
Nylen, "the mechanic" whose love of the shop "constantly reminded us to get the body involved" and a "social conciliator" who navigated Rigga through the rougher creative tangles; Kashiwabara, "the pro" whose talent with the pen as both writer and designer is equaled only by "the quiet power of his respect"; Eldred, the sublimely talented maker whose passionate advocacy for his ideas was equaled in force only by his ability to turn and similarly support someone else's idea he thought was better; and Harrison, the "underground vaudevillian" whose "fearless embrace of the ugly" made certain "he couldn't make anything beautiful unless it really was."
And the comparatively elder Garfield?
The "classic master" who tethered the young collective's "beautiful lie" that they were pioneering something truly new with recollections on how it had been tried before.
The social sphere
But in many ways, Rigga's sixth and most powerful partner was the city -- torqued by the largest economic boom in a century.
As a new Portland shouldered out an old one, Rigga found inspiration in the leftovers, what Nylen calls "the in-between spaces stripped of their former utility that become objects to be considered, like a sculpture."
Indeed, Rigga's most infamous moment came in the writing of a new chapter in Portland historic preservation: the successful rescue of a series of concrete viaduct supports -- the Lovejoy Columns -- emblazoned with rapidly deteriorating myth-inspired graffiti by a transient railway worker Tom Stefopoulos.
Most of Rigga's work exists only in slides, concepts, videotapes and occasionally in somebody's back yard or terrace garden.
For example, the collective designed a potentially powerful gateway, featuring the remnants of the Lovejoy Columns, that remains short of the $1 million in donations and potential in-kind services needed for completion.
Such pursuits and seemingly ephemeral ends may seem obscure and insignificant in the pragmatic world of Portland architecture.
But if architecture is, at its simplest, the making of space, Rigga built some significant structures -- socially.
Who could have imagined luring the Portland Development Commission, the state's Department of Transportation, developer Homer Williams and Portland City Commissioner Charlie Hales into collaborating to save a series of concrete pillars with 40-year-old graffiti at the careful direction of an internationally respected art conservator before Rigga was formed?
Yet while many local architects rolled their eyes and resented the group's attention in the press, Rigga earned the respect of their peers elsewhere.
Architecture magazine featured the group as one of the country's leading "independents" in a May 1999 spread. Internationally noted curator Aaron Betsky invited Rigga to mount an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
But, in the end, the process of five independent creative minds attempting to steer themselves down the road of even this much success proved too difficult.
When it passed on the San Francisco exhibit, an opportunity that might easily have launched them into a national/international sphere, it was clear the band was playing its final gigs.
"It was a familiar pattern," Garfield observes. "You start something, not as an idea or an organization but as actual work. Then slowly things shift, and more and more power is given to the structure of the organization."
Shed a tear for its short duration, but celebrate the breakup that ended so well.
It would be hard to find a better match for the group's aesthetic than the Eastbank Esplanade, a park built where there is no land, a place, as Nylen observes, "Where instead of the river overflowing the banks, the banks overflowed the river, decaying and growing simultaneously."
Last works
If the challenge wasn't already tough enough, they chose the esplanade's most difficult site, where the walkway runs right alongside and under the Morrison Bridge, where most walkers, runners and bikers speed up to shorten the pounding on their eardrums.
But on a cool and cloudy Memorial Day Monday, the "Echo Gate" seemed to absorb passers-by like a vortex, some orbiting, some pausing to look and touch but with virtually no one resisting the urge to pass through it.
In typical form, Rigga found its inspiration in the far and the near: 18th-century physicist Peter Guthrie Tate, whose "atomic knot theory" upset Aristotle's 2-millennia-old model of chemistry, and a statement/poem Kashiwabara wrote after running the bank one day.
"The concrete spills into the water and forms a reef... City built upon city... A good place to tie my shoe. Heat rises like smoke from my body... I resume my run. A monstrous black fish is moored in the shadows."
They conceived the sculptures as "a string of spatial knots" and "extended gates" linking "past and present places."
In the end, the sculptures declare themselves like ancient horn blasts, celebrating the raucous aural/visual landscape.
A few yards from the "Echo Gate," the "Ghost Ship" rises, a sphinxlike bronze form sporting a shack-shaped head of planks and amber glass that lights up like a beacon.
The "Stack Stalk," a telescoping, rusting steel cylinder, seems bent by the force of a green-glass fishing float puffed bubblelike toward the passing motorists.
Finally, there is the "Alluvial Wall," with its hundred bent, steel beams tangled like tentacles around tiny, bronze fossils of a camera, a morel mushroom, a hook and a spring.
Looking like native species in the east bank's odd mixture of the repellent and the enchanting, the sculptures seem to have germinated from the same industrial, maritime soil as the freeway arches, concrete tailings, rotting pilings and sewer outfalls.
If the esplanade as a whole acts as a surreal echo of one of Portland's most cherished civic achievements -- the transformation of Harbor Drive into Tom McCall Waterfront Park -- its warped originality is at least in part because of Rigga's hand.
Indeed, as though someone surreptitiously slipped a bottle of absinthe into the punch bowl, even the ribbon-cutting ceremony suddenly had a Rigga-esque, hallucinatory air.
The Fool Soldiers and Grand Ronde Royalty danced. Mayor Vera Katz and Hales arrived by water taxi. The new pedestrian walkway beneath the Steel Bridge dropped into place, festooned with a big, red bow. Rep. Earl Blumenauer road across on his bike. And the McMenamins Jesters marching band led a less-than-organized mile-long procession to a ritual blessing of the art by Chief Cliff Snider representing the river's first human inhabitants, the newly recognized Chinook tribe.
Corny? For sure. But as Harrison argues, maybe the down-home-and-funky shouldn't be considered lower aesthetic orbit.
"Artists and architects shouldn't be in the back seat as the culture drives toward art and architecture that's nothing more than capitalist realism," he says. "We should be in the front seat yelling for a different direction.
"I hope Rigga in some small way proved it was possible."