• "Annular Eclipse"
• "Cupid's Span"
• "Not Out Of The Woods Yet"
• Abbreviations

(Personal observation).

With "Cupid's Span," the monumental new outdoor sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, San Francisco may have begun to reverse its embarrassing record on choices of art in public places.

The 60-foot-high painted fiberglass and stainless steel sculpture represents a bow and arrow--traditional attributes of the imp of love--shooting straight down into a sliver of pedestrian park that borders the Embarcadero, opposite the end of Folsom Street.

"These urban pieces are treated like something that's hit the city," Oldenburg told the Chronicle in a conference call with van Bruggen from their New York studio. Together they have produced about 40 such projects around the world.

"At first there's the man-in-the-street opinion," Oldenburg said, "but then there's the more nuanced response. We don't copy objects we use, we try to transform them and we hope they go on transforming as you look at them. The idea of endless public dialogue--visual dialogue--is very important to us."

Changing Views

Up close, its taut bowstring and vertical arrow relate to the cables and towers of the Bay Bridge.

From a moderate distance, the bow, arrow and string suggest the hull, mast and rigging of a Spanish galleon--the vessel of the colonizers--a reading countered by the identification of bow and arrow with Native Americans--the colonized. One double reading of "bow," of course, is as the bow, or front end, of a ship.

Viewed from farther off, across the Embarcadero, the curves of Cupid's bow dovetail with the arching fronds of the palms that line the causeway and implicitly also with the swoop of the road itself.

Even the title of the piece changes when pondered. The mind's ear can barely distinguish "Cupid's Span" from "Cupid's Pan": The cherub who imples hearts might turn out to be the lazy, lubricious nature spirit who will impale any warm body within reach (Baker, Keneth, San Francisco Chronicle, 12.23.02: D1).

Notable new works of contemporary sculpture by Richard Deacon and Joel Shapiro have joined the cityscape, thanks to the developers of Foundry Square, a half-completed ensemble of office buildings at First and Howard streets in San Francisco.

Deacon's "Not Out Of The Woods Yet" (2003) nests muscularly in a tight spot behind columns at the entrance to 500 Howard St., on the intersection's northwest corner.

The Bay Area has so far seen Deacon's work in depth only once, in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's 1987 show "A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture Since 1965."

Much of his sculpture turns on matters such as when an enclosure must count as an object or as architecture. He makes viewers sense connections between physical feelings and inner dispositions to use certain words in describing them.

"Not Out Of The Woods Yet," fabricated on commission, strikes the hurried glance as a network of stocky aluminum struts. But try to describe it in detail and it becomes a puzzle frustrating to eye and mind alike.

Six identical elements make up the work, all composed of fat, gleaming hexagonal metal beams. Their surfaces wink with an embossed tread-plate pattern.

The silvery aluminum draws light into the canopied space, which lies in shadow at least half the day.

The sculpture's three bottom elements--one upright, two upended--notch together as if leaning to accommodate one another.

Three more, inverted, sit above, making the upper half a mirror image of the lower.

Where each bottom element rests on the ground, its footprint is an irregular nine-sided polygon, for which we have no ready name.

End-on, one of these structures at ground level resembles a simplified steam locomotive cowcatcher.

The top perimeter of each one plots the same eccentric figure, in the same orientation, enclosing a smaller or larger area. Thick, sloping struts connect top and bottom perimeters.

No strut springs from a corner, apparently upsetting an expectation one did not know one had, making the whole structure strangely hard to comprehend.

These simple facts prove startlingly difficult to sort out, though only their own complexity conceals them.

Deacon's piece passes a crucial test of public sculpture: One leaves it curious to know how hard it will be to hold in memory and how easy to grasp when next seen (Baker, Keneth, San Francisco Chronicle, 06.25.2003: D1, D5).

Abbreviations