Random Access

On the day last November when the media got a preview of Pier F of Terminal 1 at Pearson International Airport, the most striking thing about the place wasn’t the people mover flat-escalator system, or the dramatic architecture of the glass-wrapped hammerhead. It was the huge, slightly foreboding presence of Tilted Spheres.
That’s the name of the public sculpture by San Franscisco-born, Yale-trained artist Richard Serra that is the centrepiece of the hammerhead.
The four gigantic pieces of solid steel curves, open at the top, are somewhat reminiscent of Darth Vader’s mask, split open and lying on its back. Interestingly enough, you could make neat Vader-like rumblings with your voice inside the sculpture, with attendant weird echoes bouncing all around.
On the media tour, Massachussetts-based architect Moshe Safdie talked about how light had been invited into the terminal building, how it has been designed to bring calm to travelling, one of the most stressful of all human activities, and how public art had been intentionally placed at the centre of Pier F as a symbol of how aesthetics and the utilitarian world of the airport can co-mingle( like domestic and international passengers).
Asked about Serra’s work, Safdie gushed, saying it connoted motion and, because of its unorthodox shape, geometry. “It creates a sense of tension and stability,” he said.
Well, a sense of tension has developed all right, mostly because some members of the public apparently believe that public art is a blackboard suitable for private messages.
The piece has been vandalized by numerous travellers who have scrawled their initials, happy faces and personal messages all over the coating that was applied to the steel to prevent it from rusting.
Tilted Spheres has turned into Curved Shambles.
What absolutely unconscionable, uncivil behaviour.
You wonder not only about the lunkheads who perpetrated such destruction but about their parents, friends and the numerous passers-by who must have witnessed it and done.... nothing.
No, it’s not the end of the world that some philistines want to paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa but this incident is another disturbing sign that the culture of entitlement is becoming dominant.
The GTAA is going to try to find a way to remove the graffiti and change the steel coating to eliminate further defacement. They will not cordon off the piece but they may well have a security guard on duty, or put up security cameras.
That may minimize the problem but it won’t address the root question: How do we change the pervasive attitude that people have the right to destroy public property so long as no one else is looking?