You’re not supposed to touch the Richard Serra in the Olympic Sculpture Park, but it’s marked with perfect white pairs of hand prints anyways. There are a few shoe prints too, which I find somewhat disrespectful, but I can appreciated the desire to press your hands on the monumental rusty steel waves. I wonder if Richard Serra cares about the hand prints or if he’d think they add to his work.
I love this piece, I love walking through it and feeling the gravel crunch under my feet, I love walking right to the sharp edge and looking up at the sky, I love the streaky lines the rain has left on the surfaces and the way it’s placed in a low spot below a big round glass sided building. The Serra — oh, it’s called Wake — is so appealing, it’s just made for walking around. And I will never forget the woman who, standing at the north end of the sculpture, said with such joy, “This is what it feels like to be a fish!” Exactly. If you can imagine swimming through great sheets of reddish kelp, you might have a sense of what it feels like to walk around in Wake.
The Olympic Sculpture Park has a few other things that I like just fine, the giant typewriter eraser by Claes Oldenburg cracks me up every time, and I’m fond of the Alexander Calder because it’s huge and red and looks totally cool standing below the Space Needle. The rest of the work I’m fairly indifferent to; I don’t love it, I don’t hate it, it doesn’t really affect me. Not like the Serra piece, that’s for sure.
The park is a fine place to spend an hour or two, it’s beautifully landscaped, there are red wire chairs that look amazing on the green grass, and there are lovely views of Puget Sound. The pavilion is a big lofty space with a cafe counter, you can get coffee and watch the sky change over the water, which is exactly what I did on Sunday morning. It’s a lovely place to wander around for a few hours, even if, like me, you don’t love the art. Except for the Serra. I love that thing.
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