Olympic art at 25Story by Lee Manchester

Original photos by Birgit SchulteLake Placid News, November 12, 2004

LAKE PLACID — With the firstsnowfall last week, Lake Placid hasofficially entered the 1980 OlympicWinter Games’ silver jubilee season.

Most of the 25th Anniversaryactivities will take place in February,commemorating the Games them-selves.

But another anniversary is passingeven as you read this story: theanniversary of the installation of sev-eral pieces of public art around theOlympic Village in conjunction withthe impending Winter Games.

Art programs had long been a partof the modern Olympic Games, takingtheir cue from Olympic founder Baronde Coubertin.

“The Olympic movement,” wrotede Coubertin, “is intended to bringtogether into a radiant union all thequalities of mankind that guide him toperfection.”

“Conceiving art and sport, creativeand physical striving as complementa-ry activities, he saw their union as anecessary precondition for achievinghis ideal of the ‘total man’,” read theintroduction to the 1980 art program’sguidebook, “Art at the Olympics.”

Much of the art commissioned forthe 1980 Winter Games was nonrepre-sentational. Its concept may have hada clear connection to the Olympicideal and to winter sport, but it wasdifficult for many Placidians to con-nect with the abstract, physical formof much of that art .

“Lake Placid’s Reaction to ModernArt: Frigid,” read the headline on theNew York Times story of Nov. 30,1979, about the reception locals weregiving to the Olympic art program.

According to the Times article, artprogram director Carolyn Hopkins

James Buchman, "Vans for Ruth," on the Olympic Center side lawn

had concluded that most members ofthe Lake Placid Olympic OrganizingCommittee couldn’t have cared lessabout cutting-edge, modern art.

“When we were discussing theperforming arts portion of the pro-gram,” Hopkins was quoted as saying,“one committee member said, ‘If youput on a tutu and run across the stage,that should take care of it.’ “

According to Hopkins, the Placidtaste in art would have been satisfiedwith “a nice representational statue ofJack Shea.”

What the village got, however, wasseveral pieces of some of the mostmodern sculpture then available, cre-ated especially to complement the1980 Olympic Winter Games.

Some of those sculptures weredeliberately temporary — LloydHamrol’s sculpture in snow at theHoliday Inn, for instance, or the vari-ous arrangements of fences framingpieces of landscape all around LakePlacid.

Five pieces of sculpture, however,were left standing after the Games aspermanent artistic memories of the1980 Olympics.

We’ve done a little digging into thehistory files and, with the help ofBirgit Schulte’s excellent photogra-phy, we’ve created this tour of thosesculptures so that, in this OlympicSilver Anniversary season, you can re-experience those works of art foryourself.

1) ‘Vans for Ruth’To start the tour, park your car near

the Olympic Center on Main Streetand walk up to the box office. In thepark area across the driveway, adja-cent to Main Street, stands James

Buchman’s steel and granite sculpture,cryptically titled “Vans for Ruth.”

“Buchman’s enigmatic totemseems to record a tension between thepower of its upward thrust and the ero-sion of its forms,” interprets the 1980art guidebook. “The granite section inparticular, scored in a manner thatrecalls brickwork, evokes the qualitiesof a ruin. This effect is underscored bythe spikey, splayed piece of iron thatattaches itself to the granite.

“Buchman appears to address acertain history of building, or more

Carl Nesjar, "Sonja Henie Ice Fountain,"on the Olympic Center front lawn

Joel Perlman, "High Peaks," in PeacockPark on the west shore of Mirror Lake

generally a reference to history, thetension between man’s will and theinevitable destruction of time.”

According to a description of sim-ilar works by Buchman “planted” inthe sculpture garden of the Arvada,Colo., Center for the Arts andHumanities, “James Buchman firstdiscovered granite in 1972 when hewas living and working in Vermont,where it was plentiful. The power ofhis ‘homemade’ sculpture is evident.”

A Tennessee native educated atDartmouth College, Buchman nowmaintains a studio in suburban UlsterCounty, in the hamlet of Cottekill.

2) Sonja Henie Ice FountainThe Sonja Henie Ice Fountain,

designed by Norwegian artist CarlNesjar, was an Olympic gift from thepeople of Norway to the people ofNorth Elba township for the 1980Winter Games. It stands on the frontlawn of the Olympic Center.

The aluminum sculpture consistsof five globes — three are 5 feetacross, two are 4 feet in diameter —representing the linked circles of the

Olympic symbol. Each globe original-ly had a water nozzle attached at thetop, “so that a continuous spray of finedrops of water creates different effectsaccording to the weather,” the 1980guide says.

“In temperatures above freezing,the droplets roll slowly downward,creating the impression that thespheres are rotating about their ownaxes. In temperatures below freezing,ice accumulates.”

Because we were not able to deter-mine before press time the conditionof the nozzles on the Sonia Henie IceFountain, we are not certain if thesculpture still functions as a fountain.

3) ‘High Peaks’The next stop on our 1980

Olympic art tour is in Peacock Park,on the western (village) shore ofMirror Lake. To get there from theOlympic Center, cross Main Street; goup to the Post Office; turn right downParkside Drive. Peacock Park is onyour left.

Joel Perlman’s black metal sculp-ture, “High Peaks,” is easy to find. Itstands between the toboggan chuteand the village beach house. A treethat had grown up next to it in theyears after the 1980 Olympics, com-promising the sculpture’s space, hasrecently been removed.

According to the Olympic artguidebook, “Perlman’s ‘High Peaks’deals with the idea of ‘the monument’by activating its surroundings throughindirect reference and contrast. Ofwelded steel ... its verticality reflectsthe trees around it; small welded-onsections curve outward as if in imita-tion of the character of branches.

“The vertical elements ofPerlman’s sculpture converge and aretied together at base and midsectionby more straightforwardly geometricelements. Here the work assumes astronger architectonic quality. It refersobliquely to ‘dwelling,’ as well as tothe horizontal planes of the groundand the lake.

“This work thus explores the reso-nances and tensions,” the guidebook

says, “between the natural and themanmade, between man’s empathywith the natural environment and hisestrangement from it.”

Perlman, 61, a Cornell alum(1965), today is an instructor in finearts at the School of Visual Arts inManhattan. He continues to makewelded-steel sculptures, something hestarted doing in the early 1970s. Hisgeometric works are part of the per-manent collections of the HirshhornGallery in Washington, D.C., and theWhitney Museum in Manhattan.

4) ‘Maya’The next stop on our tour will

require a little driving. Head up MainStreet from the Olympic Center, fol-lowing the curve left onto SaranacAvenue. Across from the Howard

1980 Olympic Art postcard

1980 Olympic Art postcard

Johnson’s, turn left toward the LakePlacid Center for the Arts. You willsee Linda Howard’s “Maya,” a sculp-ture framed with parallel metal bars, inthe middle of the remote parking loton your right.

“Linda Howard’s ‘Maya’,” theguidebook explains, “attempts to usephysical structure as a means of prob-ing levels of consciousness and medi-tative states. The state defined by thiswork might be called orderly distor-tion, for it hovers between simplicityand complexity.

“An incremental serial functiondetermines the rate of its rotation andexpansion. The basic frame is fairlysimple, yet the resultant shape, with itsreverse warp and topological tensionsof convexity and concavity, resists anysimple perceptual grasp.”

Linda Howard, 70, now lives inFlorida.

Before you leave the Lake PlacidCenter for the Arts for the next stop onour 1980 Olympic art tour, drop in onthe LPCA’s two galleries. The FineArts Gallery, located in the main floorof the LPCA itself, is open throughoutthe winter from 1 to 5 p.m. onTuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdaysand Saturdays, and on from 1 to 9 p.m.on Fridays.

The North Gallery, located in theadjacent Adirondack Crafts Centerbuilding, is open 7 days a week from10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

5) ‘30 Below’Our final stop is on the corner of

New John Brown Road and OldMilitary Road. To get there from theLPCA, go back out to Saranac Avenueand turn left. Go past the PriceChopper plaza on your left to CarolynAvenue, and turn left. When Carolyn“T”s into Old Military Road, turn leftagain. Go about 2.6 miles. New JohnBrown Road is the first road on theright after Bear Cub Road.

Nancy Holt’s “30 Below” is a 30-foot-high, circular brick tower stand-ing in the vacant lot directly acrossOld Military Road from the cemetery.The lot is owned by CornellUniversity. Earthen ramps have beenbuilt on either side of the open towerso that visitors can look into it fromthe outside. Arches lead into the toweritself from ground level.

According to the 1980 Olympic artguide, the idea of Holt’s tower “is tofocus the entire universe on this par-ticular spot in Lake Placid — or, con-versely, to identify this particular loca-tion in terms of its cosmological coor-dinates. Sited according to the points

of the compass, its arches aligned withthe North Star, it appears as a purelyconceptual, axiomatic marker ofplace.

“The viewer is ... encouraged toenter the tower. As we pass from anopen, limitless condition to one ofcontainment, enclosure, the scaleshifts radically, from cosmic andexpansive to subjective and intimate.Inside, we observe nature is if throughthe wrong end of a telescope: the skyabove appears detached; clouds passas if on film.

“When occupied,” the guidebooksays, “the tower is converted into anobservatory from which natural phe-nomena are contemplated as images,their own representations.”

Nancy Holt, 66, born in Worcester,Mass., now works and lives in tinyGalisteo, New Mexico, in the moun-tains outside Santa Fe. Widow of site-specific environmental sculptorRobert Smithson, Holt has becomeprobably the best-known of the 1980Olympic artists. She has created workas diverse as her “Sun Tunnels” in theUtah desert (mid-1970s) and “SkyMound,” a combination park and art-work built to reclaim a 57-acre landfillin New Jersey, which is still underconstruction.