Here’s the Coleman Avenue bridge, by the big shopping center at Taylor, where the recent floods have provided for the latest sculpture to hit San José, this time in the middle of the river. Like many sculptures in the city, it’s a meaningless technical exercise, an immense MS Paint job executed by not even an amateur but a disinterested user. The title of the piece is “Interpolating Concepts,” grabbed mid-paragraph from the piece’s indecipherable pseudo-philosophical justification, which is attached to the river bed and visible only to divers.
“Interpolating Concepts”
The medium is pile of sticks and tree trunks on a plinth of rocks with support from a live tree.
When in fifty years, when the vacuous tech-boom society of Google employees collectively decides, based on a single meme, that this is the most important art of their era, and the artist is asked about his motivation, he’ll have nothing to say but that his boss commissioned it in order to show some long-vanished investors the company’s edgy design ideas, much like the inverted 3D-printed cone on the steps of the Convention Center.
The piece unfortunately took very little logistics to produce, practically zero quarterbacking of dealmaking with Chinese suppliers, and therefore practically zero child laborers were exploited in order to produce it, unlike the iPhone. Americans get off on the idea that everything they consume, including art materials, are produced under the most egregiously, unnecessarily harmful and exploitative means, because it amplifies their sensation that “we’re lucky to live here,” even though they themselves cause the rest of wherever else to not be so lucky a location.
The sculpture, nonetheless, unfortunately doesn’t really hit the latter points in any way.