Taking his art to the streets

Tuesday, April 24, 2007 | 7:12 a.m.

Throw Buster Simpson onto any street corner, urban pathway or office park and within seconds he has surveyed the site, calculated options and absorbed the demographics, social and economic history. Then he can sputter an articulate idea - all while pushing back his baseball cap and throwing in a joke or two.

He's green, resourceful and sharp, working holistically in an environment.

The Seattle artist is known for hometown projects such as "Beckoning Cistern," which collects roof runoff water from a building and sends it to nearby plant beds, and "Portable Landscapes," which feature plastic suitcases as plant beds. He's also created "Incidence," an installation of glass sheets at the Museum of Glass/International Museum of Contemporary Art in Tacoma, Wash .

Simpson is working on a light rail transit bridge project in Tempe, Ariz., and has created an assortment of international environmental projects using recycled materials.

Often, you can detect humor in his work, as when he did the "Hudson River Purge" in 1991. The installation-performance project had the artist throwing limestone discs - giant antacid tablets - into the Hudson River.

In Clark County, Simpson is working with artists Barbara Grygutis and Kevin Berry on projects that incorporate art and environmental design with trail development at the Flamingo Arroyo Trail.

This weekend Simpson will give a workshop at the Winchester Cultural Center for local artists, part of a plan to develop home grown public artists who can work on large infrastructure projects with design teams, planners and architects. It's an opportune time given the maturing of the city's Percent for Arts program and growing projects in the county. He'll be discussing green public art projects in June when the Americans for the Arts convention comes to town.

Simpson talked with the Las Vegas Sun last week before dashing off to a lecture in Seattle.

Q Did you really create public art at Woodstock?

It was my first job out of school. The experience of that, of what we did and learned was kind of interesting. It was agrarian art. We incorporated elements of the farm, had bales of hay. We had animals there, until we decided we'd better rescue them and return them to the farmer because (pause) they could have been eaten.

So you've taken this integrative approach right out of the gate?

You're kind of hard-wired for it.

What do you say to studio artists moving into public art projects?

It has to come from the heart, that's the only way they're going to persist in this business.

It has to be something they want to do for no other reason than to do it. You can't look at it as a job because there's not a high value on good design.

What is the biggest misconception of public art?

What is the definition of public art? Is it a man on a horse? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. It depends on what town you're in. Some people are going through that. Some people are still plopping art. It's not right or wrong. I think we have to be open to a lot of different possibilities, social issues and economic issues.

What's been the biggest change in public art in the years you've been working?

The big change has been that artists have been brought to the design table sooner ... One of the important skills is to be agile, to pick up on these opportunities, have a meeting. That's part of it. A lot of meetings. A lot of studio artists don't like that.

Some artists have too large of an ego to work on team projects.

The ego is probably still there, but it's more in knowing what you have accomplished. I'm not above making objects. I do those, too. I'm all over the place. I'm schizophrenic (laughs).

Many people remember Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc," the controversial 120-foot curving steel wall placed in New York City's Federal Plaza that was removed. What are some public art disasters?

We all have those. It's generally miscommunication is what it all boils down to. There wasn't any outreach to the office workers and the community. The taxpayers are the patrons. They have a right to say something about it. I thought it was a good piece. It was confrontational in a good way. What else is provoking thought?

To what do you attribute the success of your projects?

I generally can create a rationale for what I'm doing. That's the way I work. I have to convince myself first. You should have a really tight rationale for it.

What interested you in the Flamingo Arroyo Trail project?

It's a utility and trying to put some poetry in that utility was most intriguing.

There is an urbanist in town studying our erasure of the Mojave Desert.

I think we're trying to bring some of that back, but we kind of have had an uphill battle with that mind-set.