when is a boulder...

When is a boulder not ok?

YES space, NO space, and the purposes of public art

Anna Gray with Ryan Wilson Paulsen

I was walking at dusk on a cool night in late October, looking for a Jamaican restaurant that didn’t exist. I was young and with a boy I liked who was from the East coast, and who wore a hand-sewn satchel under his sweaters to hold stacks of ephemera that he’d anonymously distribute everywhere he went. His ‘free write me books’ were a form of public art that consisted of short stories (somewhat true) about people and places that he knew and loved. They were simple: just one folded page, with 3 pictures, 3 paragraphs, and a PO box encouraging readers to write back. One time I did; that was part of how we met and ended up together that night searching for a meal that would remind him of home. After about an hour of following hunches, we ended up hungry in front of a Whole Foods.

We gave up the search and settled for a picnic of havarti, apples, and bread under the closest grove of trees. We sat on a small triangle of hard-packed dirt tucked above the cut of the four-lane freeway as it curved through the NW part of the city. The cedars there held the hum of the road and caught cones of car light in their branches.We weren’t disappointed; we had pocket knives and a few napkins and there was a thrill just to finding each other and a little free space in the city to improvise an open-air dinner. I don’t remember a no trespassing sign, but maybe there was one. I don’t remember what we talked about. I do remember, despite protests, slipping a fold of dollar bills for our shared dinner into the pocket of his tape-patched down jacket. It was the first of many meals that we’d share together over the next 20 years.

Since that night, our lives and neighborhoods have changed. We navigate the city differently now, but we still pass by that dinner spot and feel fondly for how easy it was then to find an in-between space—a diagonal pocket in the cement grid of buildings and traffic. We’ve seen other people (and animals too) using the same spot: resting, eating, and congregating, squatting to pee, storing food, or pitching a tent and sleeping.

Sometime in the 2010s, a chain-link fence went up around the perimeter, enclosing most of it and hindering human access. More recently, a carpet of boulders was added and the cedars now stand choked amidst dozens of irregular stones tetris’d tightly together and secured to the ground with a thick layer of pasty gray cement. These boulders take up all the available space. It's so thorough and so thoroughly lacking in tenderness.

This triangle is now a site of one of Portland's many boulder fields—a form of defensive design used to keep folks from occupying certain spaces. Boulder fields have been appearing in Portland since 2013 when the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) chose this strategy as a way of dealing with the problems of camping along the roads that they manage. Between 2013 and 2019, ODOT spent over $1 million to place boulders on plots of land all throughout the city.1 And in the last five years, more and more have appeared. ODOT cites safety concerns for the people using these areas as a large part of their motivation for these public projects. The one-time cost of installing a rock field is an investment in not having to repeatedly clear the remnants of the lives of people who have been underserved by a system that prioritizes and protects private property. The boulders are successful in what they set out to do, but they, of course, do nothing to actually address safety or the needs of people who have nowhere else to go. ODOT and the City of Portland “don’t directly track the outcomes for people removed from camps;”3 so how can they responsibly or thoroughly assess the impact of these interventions on people or the living environments in which they are placed?

Sometimes when walking, I think about the Situationist slogan under the pavement, the beach. Or in Portland, under the pavement, the forest. I love the spots in the city where the forest pops through, where despite human management and control, that wild sponginess of the rainforest persists. But these absorbent places in the city are more rare. I wonder about the repercussions of creating more impermeability in our urban zones. There is less soft ground for birds, squirrels, and wandering seeds. There is more run-off and more of the city’s residue coursing through rainwater and draining into creeks and rivers. I think about the weight and the soundless permanence of a 4-foot stone pasted to the ground in relation to my soft and wrinkling skin.

In a 1964 speech, Malcolm X criticized the myths that had grown up around the settling of the US. He spoke about the experience of Black Americans, those who survived the Transatlantic slave trade and their descendents, saying: “We didn’t land on Plymouth rock, it was landed on us.” Coming to a rock in need is different than having one landed on you. You might crave a boulder at your back when the wind is blowing too hard. You might clamber atop one on the playground, to temporarily escape the disadvantages of being small or to avoid a rising tide at the beach. In Malcolm X’s speech the rock signifies something different. So too in our city: rocks have become silent weapons, landed in groups on sites where people used to sleep and eat.

The boulder fields are just one example of urban hostile architecture, but these kinds of antagonistic additions have been present in lots of places in our city. Smaller strategically placed rocks, concrete planters, and other obstructions litter parking strips, line sidewalks and underpasses. High-pitched noises or weaponized music is broadcast street-side, piercing LEDs are installed to create a sense of hypervisibility and prevent rest. These features not only make our civic space less accessible (especially for the most vulnerable), but they limit opportunities for social interaction. You can’t argue with a rock. You can’t ask to rest on a bench that doesn’t exist.*

In a discussion of their book Unpleasant Design Gordan Savičić and Selena Savić point out how these kinds of designs “unlike interactions with security guards or police officers … are non-negotiable. Their permanence is definitive and uncompromising, baked into the built environment in a way that is hard to argue against or reverse.” While interactions with cops or guard labor can be rife with problems and especially dangerous for black and brown people, those experiencing houselessness, or those dealing with mental health issues, there is still a chance for discussion, for being known, and possibly for understanding—for people in positions of relative power to overcome their roles, begin to build class solidarity (in the case of low-paying security workers), and respond with more empathy than a rock is capable of. But the rocks keep multiplying and they are at once blatantly hostile and somehow cloaked in a mystifying acceptability. This is what I want to understand: what makes these boulders ok?

I love rocks and carry them in my pockets. Boulders make a playground a more desirable destination for our kids. I relish a stone’s steadiness in a time where precarity, both economic and existential, dominates our lives. And, I am easily seduced by the texture and awe of naturally occurring boulder fields, which are thought to be formed over thousands of years as a result of warming and receding glaciers and processes of frost-heave, weathering, and erosion. These un-authored geological acts happen on a scale beyond the human, outside the swift order of market time. They evoke a sense of wonder and mystery when we stand before them.

It seems like replicating this effect is part of how Portland’s stone fields appear tolerable. The visual power of all that stone obscures what took place in the boardrooms where these installations were authored and approved. It obscures the human and machine labor that it took to design, unearth, break, lift, and transport all that weight. We aren’t visually transported to Tamarack quarry, the site on Mt. Hood where ODOT extracts igneous rock for its projects. Instead, we just see the massive scale and irregular geometry of the rough gray stones repeating in monochrome. Their silence, materiality and scale, their unattributed authorship and somber naturalism allow them to appear as a minimalist masquerade of landscape design, or even monuments or site-specific land art.

The fact that art history comes to mind when I see them is part of what I find especially intriguing and repulsive. The aesthetic association and the fact that maybe in the far future, these arrangements of rocks could be interpreted in different ways, could hold the mystery of a site like Stonehenge, is part of how they work to disguise a form of state-sanctioned violence and enclosure. This feels akin to the way that art has historically been used as an optical purifier by corporations or individuals who want to improve their reputations. (A common historical example is how the Rockefellers used their heavy philanthropy in the arts to obscure their relation to the weapons industry during the War in Vietnam.)

When I look at the boulder fields I see aspects of the creative interventions made in the landscape of the American Southwest by (mostly white male) artists in the 1960s and 70s. The fields echo the harshness of Michael Heizer’s work, the terraforming of Robert Smithson; and (though it’s not technically land art) the intimidating presence of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. A more direct material and contextual comparison might be with stone field sculpture, a work of public art designed by Carl Andre, which was commissioned by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving and the National Endowment for the Arts. Installed in Hartford, Connecticut in 1977, the piece consists of thirty-six boulders arranged in rows in a grassy lot right across from the Wadsworth Atheneum, the oldest public art museum in the country.

According to Andre, the rocks were supposed to reflect the gravestones in the neighboring cemetery, and the geological roots of what lay on the land prior to the settling of the city in 1635. Carl Andre and his sculpture have long been controversial. It is important to mention his relationship with Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-American artist who was a maker of brave and fascinating performative, sculptural, and land-based projects in the 1970 and early 80s. Despite a considerable amount of evidence pointing to the fact that Andre killed Mendieta, his then wife, in 1985, he has enjoyed a long and ever-respected career in the arts . When police officers questioned him in his home upon the discovery of Mendieta’s death, Andre supposedly used images and publicity from stone field sculpture to defend his moral credibility and demonstrate his social importance.

Despite his success in the market and his following in the art world where he is recognized for his contributions to the legacy of Minimalism, many in Hartford were then and remain now, underwhelmed by his public project. Some thought that it wasn’t enough or that it wasn’t finished, that Andre must be returning to sculpt or add to the boulders, as if they were only pedestals for forthcoming works, but, there was nothing to add. Andre’s rocks were just rocks. The public’s main generalized criticism of his work was that it was too expensive. It was also challenging in that it didn’t have the symbolic content that many viewers expect from something called Art.

Unlike Andre’s public sculpture, Portland’s stone fields do work symbolically as well as stand as literal barriers to the people who might use the space to improvise a meal or a houseless life. They collapse the real and the represented into one city-sanctioned NO. Regardless of their success or failure as art, given their spacious arrangement and location, Andre’s boulders actually offer a little bit of YES space. (Space for conviviality, for sitting, for ambling or gathering.)

stone field sculpture was made parallel to the tombstones of an adjacent graveyard; Portland’s boulder fields feel like they parallel the strategies of contemporary art and design to transform the city’s liminal spaces into inaccessible tombs themselves, like some warped commemoration of the slow death of public space.

As ODOT has been creating their own stone field sculptures around Portland, the City has also been engaged in a dialogue about its public art and monuments. After protestors toppled several public statues in the waves of demonstration that followed the murder of George Floyd and in relation to the Indigenous People’s Day of Rage, the Portland Monuments Project was established to foster dialogue about our city’s public art and to imagine new approaches to thinking about what a monument could and should be. Citizens and institutions have been questioning the worth of public statues that affirm white supremacy and uphold narrow readings of our collective history. In 2021, the Regional Arts and Culture Council’s Public Art Committee proposed a new policy in accordance with the City’s value of anti-racism: “[public artworks can be removed if the] subject or impact of an artwork is significantly at odds with values of antiracism, equity, and inclusion.” The protracted and political deliberations about the future of these statues has been ongoing and while two of the statues will be permanently removed, others are now slated to be reinstalled with updated interpretative signage. But over the last five years, their empty plinths have been staging grounds for other creative and social interventions—for art, for commentary, and for mutual aid.

This opening, created by the public interventions of a crowd, forces a re-evaluation of our public space that is vital and heartening. Though ODOT’s bouldered sites aren’t yet widely considered to be monumental artworks, they clearly borrow from that visual history. So what if we borrowed back and applied the aesthetic and social values of antiracism, equity, and inclusion to our assessment of these hostile & exclusive arrangements? Could we call for their removal?

We look to public art to make a city more hospitable, to engage people’s minds and spirits, to represent the values of diverse communities, and, in the case of a monument or memorial, to hold and elicit memories of what has come before. If we imagined these boulder fields as unfinished monuments (as if we were the unimpressed viewers of Carl Andre’s sculpture, calling for something better), what kinds of generative or functional interventions might we make there? What kinds of affective, aesthetic, or essential services could these stones provide? If not shelter, then what?

*It reminds me of a book I read as a child by William Steig about a donkey named Sylvester who finds a magic pebble that grants him wishes. In an effort to hide from an approaching lion, he wishes to be a rock. Only when he transforms into a boulder does he realize that he can’t very well hold his pebble and wish himself back to his prior form. As the pebble rolls to the ground, he is severed from his mobility, his voice, his family, and his home. A boulder is being used as a defense tactic in this story too, and it has disastrous, silent consequences. It saves Sylvester from the danger of the lion, but separates him from all that he loves. Lonely, he sits through the changing seasons while his parents look for him without success. They even enlist the help of the police, whose piggish rendering and inability to solve the case of Sylvester’s disappearance got the book banned in 1977 for being anti-police. It’s only by the magic of coincidence (or some other unspoken mysterious magnetism like love) that he is reunited with his parents as they are out for a picnic and find the magic pebble in the same clearing where he has been sitting as a rock for so long.

Sources:

Diana Kruzman. “Homeless Campers Face a New Obstacle Along Portland Roadways…” Oregon Live, July 4th, 2019. See more at:

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2019/07/homeless-campers-face-a-new-obstacle-along-portland-roadways-giant-piles-of-boulders.html

For more on the destructive effect of sweeps see the reporting of Alex Zielinski, specifically: “Uprooted and Unhoused” Portland Mercury, July 7th, 2022. https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/2022/07/15/44219943/uprooted-and-unhoused

Malcolm X, Audubon Address. Washington Heights, NY. March 29,1964.

Roman Mars, 99% Invisible, Episode 219: “Unpleasant Design and Hostile Urban Architecture.” July 5th, 2016. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hostile-urban-architecture/transcript/

On Ana Mendieta's death and legacy: www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/death-of-an-artist and https://hyperallergic.com/127500/artists-protest-carl-andre-retrospective-with-blood-outside-of-diachelsea/ for more.

On Portland 's monuments & memorials: www.racc.org/2021/09/28/next-steps-for-toppled-and-removed-monuments-faq/