I opine in haiku form, apparently all the rage (?):
Blue horizon bucks
We laugh, crane necks; the Mazda
wants also to buck.
And the red, weird eyes?
Inquiring, seeing us.
Making us miss turns.
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Taken from an old NYT post,
March 2, 2009
And Behold a Big Blue Horse? Many in Denver Just Say Neigh
DENVER — Airports can be tense and testy places in the best of times. At Denver International Airport, you can add glow-in-the-dark eyes to the list of triggers for a traveler’s angst.
A statue of a giant male horse — electric-eyed, cobalt blue and anatomically correct — was installed in February 2008 on the roadway approach to the terminal, and it is freaking more than a few people out.(My emphasis) Haters of this work say that “Blue Mustang,” as it is formally known, by the artist Luis Jiménez (killed in 2006 when a section of the 9,000-pound fiberglass statue fell on him during construction), is frightening, or cursed by its role in Mr. Jiménez’s death, or both. Supporters say the 32-foot-tall horse is a triumph, if only as a declaration of Denver’s courage to go beyond easy-listening-style airport art that many cities use like visual Dramamine to soothe travelers’ nerves.
Love it or loathe it, though, “Blue Mustang” is doing what art is supposed to do — get attention. There’s even a poetry slam planned in Denver to read horse haikus, of which about 250 have been composed, believe it or not.
“It’s definitely achieved its purpose of being memorable,” said Rachel Hultin, a real-estate broker in Denver who started a page on Facebook last month to vent her horse anxieties, byebyebluemustang.com, and found herself at the center of the debate.
Ms. Hultin, who said she started the campaign partly on a whim, “after a few drinks with friends,” also suggested on her page that people post comments in haiku form. Denver residents and travelers who had formed an opinion about the statue while passing through, leapt at the challenge. To wit:
Anxiously I fly
apocalyptic hell beast
fails to soothe my nerves.
Local artists and city public art administrators say “Blue Mustang” has stirred a deeper debate too, about Denver itself, and what sort of image it wants to communicate. Is “Blue Mustang” an echo of the city’s high-plains bronco-busting past? Or a mocking denunciation of the Old West conventions? Or is it just strange?
“People can’t put their finger on what’s it’s conveying,” said Joni Palmer, who is finishing a doctoral dissertation on politics and public art in Denver. “It’s the strangeness that really unnerves people — this mix of things.” As another of the haiku writers put it:
Big blue horse beckons
Fiery, red eyes glowering
Good bye one horse town.
The airport’s public-art administrator, Matt Chasansky, said airport settings carry fundamentally different psychological baggage than ordinary urban spaces. Like most public art in Denver, he said, the statue was paid for by developers who are required to contribute 1 percent of the cost of major capital projects to public art.
“We don’t want the work to convey things that would make people uncomfortable about flying,” Mr. Chasansky said. No art, for example, would be commissioned with a violent theme. But art that is too soothing, he said, is probably in the end just bad art.
“Quality works of public art are not the works that are completely gentle,” he said. Yet the specific setting of “Blue Mustang” has evolved since it was commissioned in the 1990s, changing how the work is perceived.
The original design called for a pull-off from the airport road, with benches and ample room to contemplate the statue from all angles. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, however, the parking area idea was shelved for security reasons.
That makes “Blue Mustang” literally unapproachable: most viewers zoom by, perhaps retaining only a vague impression. The barriers to approach, artists and art critics say, have compounded the piece’s troubles, making it seem even more forbidding by virtue of isolation.
“There’s no location to be able to get intimate with the work,” said Lawrence Argent, an artist in Denver. “It’s a vista from afar, and to many it’s a frightening vista from afar.”
Mr. Argent knows about distant vistas — and outsize animals too. He is best known in Denver for creating a two-story blue bear that peers into a window of the Colorado Convention Center, called “I See What You Mean.” Last fall he received a commission for an installation at Sacramento International Airport in California for a 56-foot-long red rabbit. When the piece is installed as part of a planned airport expansion, the fiberglass rabbit will appear to be leaping through the terminal into a giant suitcase.
Ms. Hultin, meanwhile, who got the ball rolling with her antihorse Facebook page, has changed her mind. She no longer wants “Blue Mustang” removed, as she once did. (City policy holds that public art pieces are left in place for five years, anyway, and officials have given no sign of budging.)
She now thinks that pamphlets at the airport, and maybe education courses for airport bus drivers, could lead viewers into a deeper understanding of the horse and the artist, she said, notwithstanding that she had been called “every name in the book” by defenders of the statue.
“In the process of being personally attacked through e-mail, and through learning more about the piece, I’ve shifted gears from, ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate,’ to ‘Let’s try and understand it,’ ” she said.
But the controversy has also stirred up people in other ways. Conspiracies have floated around the Internet for years about secret bunkers or caverns beneath the terminals at the Denver airport. Symbols of Freemasonry are also said to abound on airport floors and walls.
“It’s brought out the conspiracy theorists who think there are aliens living under the airport,” said Patricia Calhoun, the editor of Westword, an alternative weekly paper in Denver that is helping organize a “Blue Mustang” poetry slam in April to share horse haiku as part of National Poetry Month.
