Beauty Versus Houston
I watched a fun little video this morning from Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, whom I have praised before for their wonderful cosmology videos. This one is about beauty and why we like it. Take a look.
One of the things it asserts is that living in a beautiful place has tangible benefits for the humans who live there. As I type this, I am on the 13th floor of a brutalist apartment block in a city that seems to go out of its way to be ugly. There are occasional neighborhoods and streets that have visual delights, and I love driving down them or walking along those sidewalks. Walking is better. What is beautiful is often in the detail, which can’t be properly seen and appreciated at 30+ miles per hour.
I am interested in little visual details. The video suggest this is universal, but not in my experience. Sometimes when I walk with my brother, I’ll point out visually interesting things that he doesn’t see. He often remarks on it. I think we Houstonians have been trained not to notice beautiful things, lest we go mad from their pervasive ugliness of our city. And our city seems to recognize that this is a problem, but their solutions fail abjectly to increase beauty. One of the worst beautification projects is to paint electrical boxes on the street (that control traffic lights, I think). These paintings do add visual detail to the streets, but not well. The people responsible for them in Houston are called UP Art Studio. Often the individual artists are talented, but they can’t make electrical boxes beautiful by painting flowers on them.
No matter how skilled the artist, or how beautiful the image, there is no way to turn that signal box in that environment into something beautiful.
The weird thing about them is that it doesn’t matter what is painted on them. The boxes are inherently ugly, but more important, they are in unbeautiful settings. The whole project of decorating signal boxes is an exercise in shining shit.
This on is at Bunker Hill and Gaylord, a few blocks from where I went to high school.
This one is at Antoine and Long Creek. It seems ironic that they painted trees in a tree-filled subdivision.
Bingle at Tidwell.
Canal at Adams. It has a jaunty tilt.
This one at 34th and Mangum is one of the most inept paintings in this project. But next to a creosote-covered telephone pole and a parking lot, it is an improvement.
This one is in my neighborhood, at the corner of Fannin and McGowan. I like it because it limits the palette to black and white and is basically a decarative pattern—it doesn’t try to use this random box as a place to depict three-dimensional things. But it can’t escape that it is next to a parking lot, one of the least beautiful objects ever created by human beings. There is literally no way it can make this corner beautiful as long as it sits in front of a parking lot.
This one at South Post Oak and Fuqua Gardens also benefits by being abstract, but I think the reason this one appeals to me is that the way it is photographed from the low angle makes it look like a looming, technicolor monolith. I suspect if you are driving by at 40 mph, you probably wouldn’t notice.
I’m not the first person to complain about these eyesores. Glasstire founder Rainey Knudson published an editorial entitled “Please Stop Painting The Electrical Boxes (A Public Art Proposal)”, which got a flurry of outraged responses. I don’t pretend to be as witty as Knudson was in her brutal takedown, but I hate painted electrical boxes as much as she did.
You can’t de-uglify Houston without changing the basic idea of Houston. You can’t make a place with 10-lane freeways surrounded by parking lots and tiltwall shopping centers beautiful. The very design of Houston mitigates against beauty. I like that there are socialist make-work projects for Houston artists, but painting electrical boxes was a terrible idea. We’ve painted hundreds of these things all over Houston, without improving the life of our residents one whit. That’s what I call a failed experiment.
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