Perspectives on Perspectives: Roger Berry’s statue at the Cupertino Cali Mill Plaza
“meet me @ the giant diamond. u will see it fersure.”
Kennedy Middle School eighth grader Lily Park sends the text, the dripping frozen yogurt in its mashed, damp white cup caking her fingers. It’s too cold for frozen yogurt. It’s too cold to be out, mid-January, an orange evening glow just starting to finger its way into sky, waiting for her two new freshman friends from Homestead High School to meet her at the intersection of Steven’s Creek and DeAnza Blvd.
But somehow, she doesn’t mind the wait. After all, this is where she usually meets with her friends, for no other obvious reason than the fact that towering above her is a 20-foot-diameter silver-toned steel statue, almost flickering when she tilts her head to the left and right to watch the street.
The statue, for all its width and height and silver sheen, has never been something she’s looked at directly. Whether tucked into the back of her mom’s stationwagon or crossing Steven’s Creek or running with her little brother through the two set of sprinkler-fountains flanking the statue’s square base, the statue’s presence has been defined by the people she’s with, the things she’s doing — or, in this case, eating.
A drop of melted yogurt hits the base. She swipes it away with her sneakered foot.
“Whoops,” Park said. “I don’t think that’s what the artist had in mind.”
Now, she thinks of the statue as a shadow. When she first saw it, after moving to Cupertino in 2008, she associated it with the concept of temporariness. Just as the shape of the statue was impermanent, dependent on angle and location, Park thought that Cupertino was going to be her home for only a few months. She always assumed that she would eventually move back to Mountain View.
Now, though, that she considers Cupertino her home, it’s become more solid, less ethereal. Because its short base was so unnoticeable, she’d always used to wonder if the entire thing would roll off the plaza and into the street. Not anymore.
“I’ve seen it so many times, like almost my whole life, that I think of it more in … relation to me, too. The statue seems different, over time, when I look at it,” Park said.
Across Steven’s Creek is Noah’s Bagels and LeBoulanger and T.J. Maxx and Hilltop Gifts, where she walks with her grandfather every week. It seems that all these coordinates of her life have been rotating around this sculpture.
A sight so familiar it’s become sensation.
Each new homecoming, whether from school or from vacation or from Target, can be marked by the slow, seemingly skyward twisting of the statue as it is passed, a sight so familiar it’s become sensation.
“I see it a lot, from crossing the street or driving by, and each time, I think I know at what exact moment it’s [going] to look like this, or that, but then I’m always wrong, it looks different,” Park said. “Here, it’s a squarish diamond, but over there it could be an eight, there like an ‘and’ sign.” She points in various directions, the fountains finally beginning to spout.
“And of course, it’s kind of like a landmark, because if it’s close to your house, you use it mentally to tell yourself you’ll be home soon,” Park said. She continues to wait for her friends, who will see the statue not exactly as art, not exactly as a means to an end, but rather as a kind of cursor, something that promises more. Park wonders if having something like this around only makes your surroundings dull in comparison. She hopes it’s the opposite.
Finally, a faintly audible ping as Park receives a new message:
“u mean the 8 thing”
Park laughs, rolling her eyes. She forgets that the statue’s fluid appearance isn’t just something happening in her own mind: everyone in their SUVs and Priuses realize, at some point, that something is happening — even when they aren’t always conscious of it.
This is exactly the intent of artist Roger Berry, a Northern Calif.-based sculptor who has been experimenting with shifting perspectives since the 1960s.
“It’s an odd balance. The way you see these things is out of your peripheral vision,” Berry said. “You’re not generally staring at these things, but you get a sense of its movement.”
Just as Park senses her approaching friends’ movements relative to the statue. She’s beginning to feel impatient.
“If it looks like an 8 to her, she might be on Steven’s Creek right now, and she needs to park … ” Park said. “Wow, actually this is a pretty great navigation device.”
She’s now standing by the base of the statue, where the smooth curve of steel tempts her to use it as a bench. The frozen yogurt from Yogurtland, now forgotten, continues to wilt and fuse to the gray pavement, now a miniature sculpture all to itself.
“looks like an ampersand lol” is the next text.
“Right, they’re called ampersands,” Park said, smiling. “I should’ve said something more general — just ‘pretty awesome silver thing.’ They would get it.”
Before she can scrape her frozen yogurt off the ground and run to a garbage can, her friends arrive. Scott Wong and Jackie Tang, both freshmen at HHS, sprint up the the statue and nearly tackle Park, who ducks and scurries away. The yogurt now officially forgotten, they sit cross-legged exactly where they are, near the center of the base, and tilt their heads up.
“This is ginormous,” Wong said. “And kind of confusing.”
“I like it,” Tang said. “Let’s bring it home to Sunnyvale.” They all laugh. Wong leans in, taps his finger along the metal ridge to create a faint echo.
“I’ve seen lots of statues, but you can’t touch them,” he said.
“Well, touch it all you want. But not too much. Because you don’t know what other people have touched it,” Park said.
“Yeah, look at all the dangerous people around here,” Tang said. About fifteen feet away is a mother and her two toddlers in matching outfits. She’s carrying a paper bag from LeBoulanger.
“We’re all seeing different things.”
The topic of the statue soon fades from their attention: too much gossip to repeat. But they now look up at the piece with affection, as if it were a favorite swing set in a playground. Much later, when they depart, they walk around it once, the sky now washing from a dark orange to a navy blue. Their parents are waiting in opposite parking lots, seeing two very different silver outlines against the dark.
“See?” Park said, completing her loop, satisfied. Wong is facing inwards, towards the lit-up hotel. Tang is facing outwards toward the emptying street. “We’re all seeing different things.”
Art history: the beginning of a new perspective
In 2004, when California-based sculptor Roger Berry won grant money from the Cupertino City Council to develop a sculpture for the then-empty, weed-plastered Mill Plaza, he didn’t know that the final result would be so drastically altered from his original plan.
In days when Mill Plaza was the Four Seasons Plaza, Berry had designed an interactive piece that would determine the time.
“[It] was going to have five sundial elements, so that the shadow of the sun would tell the time of the season. There would be a compass rose where if you stood in the middle of it, your shadow told time.”
But the project was delayed for several years, while developers changed the purpose of the plaza, and the initial design was never realized; when Berry could finally resume his work, he created 14 different proposals, one of which he built into a 4-inch model that he brought to one of the city council committees. The miniature model was bolted at the bottom and could be spun with his fingers, and when one of the committee members first saw it, he said “Perspectives! That’s what it’s called, ‘Perspectives.’”
“Perspectives! That’s what it’s called, ‘Perspectives.’”
“I don’t know if that’s what I would have named it, but I never got a chance,” Berry said, laughing.
But the name was apt: the sculpture would be constructed from four arcs of brushed stainless steel curved into sphere-like pieces, which would be arranged so that at any given angle, the sculpture would manifest itself differently.
And that’s exactly artist Roger Berry’s intent.
“There’s thousands of people who drive by there every single morning. When they’re coming one direction, it looks one way, and it you’re coming the opposite direction, it looks another way,” Berry said. He considered the pivotal location to be an opportunity to explore the kind of fluid geometry he has been fascinated with since the 1960s to the present.
Public vs. Private
The pros and cons of public art in comparison to studio work also proves to be a matter of perspective, and to Berry, they are both essential. Both feed and bounce off each other.
“They resonate from one to the other. The work I do in my studio informs the sculpture I’m building for a public space,” Berry said. Discovering something in a sculpture that is 24 inches tall might lead to a 40-foot project. Anything could be the beginning of something big.
Anything could be the beginning of something big.
“A public art project is necessarily collaborative. You have to work with the landscape architects and the architects and the city council, sometime 20 people, and it’s a lot of people you have to work well with and satisfy their concerns,” Berry said. Meanwhile, working in the studio, his work has only one criteria: the ability to stand up.
With a large public piece like Perspectives, Berry had a crew: they welded the bottom and top pieces of the sculpture together while dangling from a crane, twenty feet in the air. They hung in buckets.
“We welded, and the steel is lumpy, so we had to grind it,” Berry said. “It was an elaborate thing.”
Not just standing on the fringes
A boy with a blue skateboard leans back so that the curve of silver cradles his back. He looks up from his phone and tucks it in his pocket, then flips up his skateboard. Off the edge of the concrete base, he lifts his heels and the board follows. Then the two-beat landing: board then feet.
He runs back to the base of the statue and starts again, this time launching himself towards the shallow edge with more speed, jumping higher, landing harder. Nearly one whole second between the clatter of the board on pavement and the thud of his rubber soles on board.
“The edge of the base is so small I can just be a total beginner,” the boy said, now pointing to his sports sweatshirt, which listed his name as Bacon Adjemian. His real name is Blake Adjemian, but his “blasphemous” hatred for bacon had somehow become central to his identity. He’s been in Cupertino for three days.
“I stay at the hotel,” Adjemian said. “I like it so far. I like Cupertino so far. The hotel has flavored water, so I like it too.”
It’s still winter break for him, so he’s accompanying his father, currently “gone, doing terrifically dull business things,” before he returns to high school in Connecticut. He’s usually allowed to go where he likes, but since he lost his phone somewhere in the hotel, he’s been confined to the general area of the plaza and surrounding blocks.
“I’ve been waiting for the sculpture to light up. Or have lights on it. I’ve heard that that happens,” Adjemian said. “Though it’s pretty bright by itself.”
The sight of it is still unfamiliar to him. When he peers out his window, he can’t help but linger over it for a few seconds, watch the multicolored cars pass through its framing loop. He’s never been much interested in art, but he thinks it’s a lot better than anything he’s ever seen in books and on vacations. It’s part of the living space.
“It’s part of the living space.”
According to the artist, that’s something to celebrate.
“There’s this wonderful thing that when a piece is successful, and not always is it successful,” Berry said. “It belongs to the people and the place. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does I feel really rewarded … and it’s like giving someone a gift and them opening it and really liking it.”
“I guess we like it because it’s here, for a lifetime, basically, and [it doesn’t] feel distant, like a lot of abstract things can be,” he said. “I have more of an outside perspective, but I get it. The thing is part of Cupertino. Like, not just standing on the fringes.”
Adjemian doesn’t know what the sculpture is called, where it comes from, how it got there. To the average passerby or resident or visitor, a name seems unnecessary for this element of the landscape. The Petsmart across the street went out of business. Adjemian will leave Cupertino in less than a week. Park’s frozen yogurt stain is long gone.
“Not just standing on the fringes.”
But the “big twist,” as it is known affectionately, is immovable, the sum of a relationship between the deceptively stationary and the constantly changing.
