Stainless steel, structural carbon steel, fiber-reinforced plastic, cast epoxy, polyvinyl chloride foam; painted with polyester gelcoat 64 ft. x 143 ft. 9 in. x 17 ft. 3/8 in.
Commissioned by D&DF Foundation, San Francisco Installed November 2002
Statement by the Artists:
Inspired by San Francisco’s reputation as the home port of Eros, we began our project for a small park on the Embarcadero along San Francisco Bay by trying out the subject of Cupid’s stereotypical bow and arrow. The first sketches were made of the subject with the bowstring drawn back, poised on the feathers of the arrow, which pointed up to the sky.
When Coosje van Bruggen found this position too stiff and literal, she suggested turning the image upside down: the arrow and the central part of the bow could be buried in the ground, and the tail feathers, usually downplayed, would be the focus of attention. That way the image became metamorphic, looking like both a ship and a tightened version of a suspension bridge, which seemed to us the perfect accompaniment to the site. In addition, the object functioned as a frame for the highly scenic situation, enclosing — depending on where one stood — either the massed buildings of the city’s downtown or the wide vista over the water and the Bay Bridge toward the distant mountains.
As a counterpoint to romantic nostalgia, we evoked the mythological account of Eros shooting his arrow into the earth to make it fertile. The sculpture was placed on a hill, where one could imagine the arrow being sunk under the surface of plants and prairie grasses. By slanting the bow’s position, Coosje added a sense of acceleration to the Cupid’s Span. Seen from its “stern,” the bow-as-boat seems to be tacking on its course toward the white tower of the city’s Ferry Building.”
“This thing is awful. I do not understand putting up a piece of ‘art’ that looks like it should be at Disneyland’s California Adventure, smack-dab in the middle of an already amazing view. Everytime I go by it it pisses me off. Leave the Bay view alone to it’s own devices.”
“This Disneyland crap makes me want to barf. If only Chicken John had been elected mayor, he would have run his pickup truck into this eyesore and San Francisco would have looked like a real city again”
“Ugh. Really? It’s hideous and tacky. It belongs in Cleveland, not San Francisco.”
I think Don Fisher of The Gap paid for this operation what cost millions.
The Presidio people were supposed to have reopened the moribund Main Post Theatre by now but the Infamous NIMBYs of the Marina District and the Greedy Owners of Nearby Movie Theatres put a stop to that.
Here’s how it will be until the end of this week – you’ll be out and about on the Streets of San Francisco near Union Square, the Ferry Building or Fishermans Wharf and then you’ll encounter Gap‘s Cheer Squad and Drumlineand/or their giant buffalo-plaid bus.
So, be on the look out. What more can we ask from our corporate overlords than free swag?
They’ll be hitting Santa Clara County today, San Francisco tomorrow, Marin County Saturday, and San Mateo County Sunday.
The deets:
The Gap Cheer Squad and Drumline are bringing the cheer home to San Francisco this Thursday through Sunday. They’ll be spreading cheer around the Bay Area with performances and giveaways. Show your holiday spirit and you could win cozy Gap accessories or a pair of 1969 jeans.
Thursday, December 17th Valley Fair Mall
Friday, December 18th
Union Square
The Ferry Building
Market & Powell (The Flood Building)
Chestnut Street
Fisherman’s Wharf
Saturday, December 19th
Corte Madera
Sunday, December 20th Stanford Shopping Center
Cheer Squad & Drumline Dates and Cities:
New York City: Friday, November 27 – Monday, November 30
Chicago: Thursday, December 3 – Sunday, December 6
Los Angeles: Friday, December 11 – Tuesday, December 15
San Francisco Bay Area: Thursday, December 17 – Sunday, December 20
See it? 700 spaces, free of charge. It’s historic, you know. When the U.S. Army wasn’t out there killing a million or so Filipinos it managed to create the GNPLoSF. Therefore, these parking spaces are sacrosanct:
Now that that pesky modern art has been gotten rid of, a question remains over what to do with the upper end of the Main Post. You know the Burger King corporation had an outlet that served as an Army Mess on the Presidio for so many years, it would be only fitting to give it the right of first refusal to get a chance to replace the famous itty bitty bowling alley that’s up there now.
An artist’s conception, avec just one installation of evil modern art thrown in to see if the NIMBYs can tolerate it.
Just get to the Building 104 Mouse House and then go downhill a skosh. There’s probably not going to be a program or anything – just drop by and yickety yack a bit…
“Please join us for informal “open house” sessions at which Presidio Trust staff members will be available to respond to questions about proposed projects for the Main Post as well as questions about historic resources, transportation and parking, visitor use , and environmental sustainability. The public comment period for Main Post planning ends on June 1, 2009. Comments may be emailed to mainpost@presidiotrust.gov.”
As promised, the Presidio TrustMain Post Planning Transportation Workshop went off on April 22, 2009. Look here later on to see when and if two more similar meetings will occur in the very merry month of May. (The first should deal with historic resources and the other is slated to be a kind of catch-all open-mike night.)
122 souls sat through a presentation of answers to a dozen key questions that people have been asking about concerning transportation – signalization, fees for parking, traffic loads, etc. I vowed to leave as soon as the public speakers veered off-topic – that took about ten seconds, so oh well. Regardless, this appeared to be a more-productive-than-average public yammer session. Assemblymember Tom Ammiano sent a representative (the well-informed Noriko Shinzato) as did Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier, so it appears that interest in the plans for the Main Post remains strong.
Click to expand
Fully eleven Mercedes-Benzeses were out front, or in the lot up the hill, or in the overflow lot even further up the hill near the chapel. BMW was also well-repped, and there were a least three Porsches, including two expensive Porsche Cayenne minivans and one hepped-up Neunelfer.A richer group of parking-hungry NIMBYs would be hard to find. One bicycle.
All this Powerpoint stuff should be online in the near future, or maybe it already is.
Presidi-Go is already up to 300,000 trips per year.
Should the NIMBY’s, the people of means, be given more votes on this matter than tourists from Tempe? Only Time Will Tell.
“Please be advised that the Presidio Trust is cancelling the Main Post Public Meeting that was to be held on Thursday, April 16, at 6 pm at the Golden Gate Club. There will be no meeting on that date. Future meeting dates will be announced at www.presidio.gov as soon as the information becomes available.”
Here’s what you’ll miss:
Word from Tia Lombardi, Director of Public Affairs at the Presidio Trust, is that this meeting will be rescheduled to a date yet to be determined.
After Presidio Trust Director Craig Middleton gave the crowd an update, everyone got to see more-detailed plans on the controversial CAMP museum proposal via a Powerpoint slideshow. The architect from San Francisco-based WRNS Studio received sustained applause when he finished his presentation. That was a surprise, certainly.
In fact, the audience seemed just about evenly split, with half supporting the Main Post plans and the other “flamethrowing” half opposing. That was a surprise as well.
Click to expand:
What’s this? Pro-museum protesters or supporters, or whatever you want to call them? Never before have I seen this:
For those of you who like to see issues simplified into dramaturgical dyads, a portion of the happy CAMPers are on the left and a portion of the opposing NIMBY and preservationist groups are on the right, the site of the anti-CAMPers’ putative news conference.
The mise-en-scene. Were more people here than at the last board meeting on December 9th? Yes. The Palace of Fine Arts Theatre (made famous by the appearance last Fall of ukulele-playing Jake Shimabukuro - 3 million astounded YouTube viewers can’t be wrong) was half-full or half-empty, depending on your point of view. So that’s about 500 souls motivated enough to show up:
This chart actually makes sense to me now. It shows how far we’re progressing to the end of the process and the beginning of the inevitable lawsuit designed to chuck all these plans out the window.
And here we are, the proposed Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio 2.0. (Learn about CAMP 1.0 here, via the New York Times.) The Gallery Building dominates but don’t forget about the quasi-subteranean Art Handling Building on the left and Building 101 in the upper right hand corner. There’s your ”B”-as-in-boy, billion-dollar CAMP museum:
Here’s a 3D view:
The Pavillion level is up top…
…and the Courtyard Level is down below:
Sections, just like my grandmother’s MRI!
The Future is Now:
All of the Gallery Building is below the altitude of the eaves of the Presdio Theatre, seen in foreground:
The Gallery is three buildings, three buildings in one. Historic Building 100 and the defunct Presidio Theatre rise above:
Oh no! It’s the kids from UC Berkeley Law School. They practically hijacked the meeting. And that was the final surprise of the evening, before I had to get home to some Java curry. Now it’s one thing to be a millionaire homeowner NIMBY living in the Marina or Cow Hollow, but there’s literally millions of millionaires out there. On the other hand there are only so many folks able to get into Berkeley Law. The nine or ten speakers from the law school contingent displayed far more intellectual candlepower than typical speakers at these kinds of public meetings.
This didn’t make for good theater, because the college kids were basically speed-reading their ideas into the record, but diverse and novel viewpoints were expressed, and that’s a Good Thing, right? It will be interesting to see the transcript when it comes out, certainly.
Here’s how I left it:
Oh, and about that crowd size estimate. The Examiner is saying just 250 people? So if four times as many people showed up, almost everybody would have had a seat in the venue (one that can handle 1000 if you include the small number of people who prefer to stand on the sidelines)? No way, Jose. The proper count is about 500.
