Buster Simpson specializes in a poetics of the practical. His sculptures can be used as benches, handrails, windmills, weather vanes, shovels, nests, lures, cups, plates, moving forests, toilets, limestone tablets (''River Rolaids") and target practice leading to recycling bins - whatever a situation demands.

Buster Simpson, "River Rolaids"

Back in the late 1960s, only a handful of artists (such as New York's Alan Sonfist) were in the game from the urban angle, and nobody brought to it Simpson's interest in using art for community organizing. Art for him is a means of encouraging people to know their neighbors, share tools and clean up their backyards, oceanfronts, city streets and parks.

Two decades before the Bridge Motel, he took over the Pine Tavern just before urban renewal took it down. On the tavern's roof Simpson placed lines of fish made of sawtooth blades, tar-black crows stuck on poles and sheet metal men serving as surveyors.

Winos in the alley could throw bottles at the fish and crows, landing the bottles in recycling bins. When the wind blew, the metal men turned, causing the poles to twist and activate additional metal figures bellying up to the tavern bar. They swept beer bottles off the counter, the first step of recycling the glass. Dark crows hunched into deeper darks and sawtooth fish shone like lights in a fog.

Simpson performances include himself hurling one of his huge limestone tablets into the Hudson River headwaters, to sweeten and neutralize acidic water. "The bigger the problem, the bigger the pill," he says.

He monitors the problems of rivers and oceans with his own art tools: cast concrete "dinner plates" shaped as disposable TV dinner trays. These he placed in sewer outfalls around the country, as an acknowledgment of the country's digestive system. The plates steep in the outfalls' effluent, collecting contaminants that form a glaze during kiln firing. The more colorful the glazes, the more toxic the effluents.

Simpson has photographed a series of these crazy-glaze, pollution plates, laminated them and turned them into placemats, along with images from slot machines. They are, like the plates, symbols of chance.

Buster Simpson, Street Furniture

Simpson has left similar shovels in homeless encampments around the country, tools made into artworks and back to tools again. On the blade are painted images taken from the Boy Scout manual describing how to dig a latrine.

Simpson doesn't just straddle the divide between the functional and the poetic; he makes it disappear. In so doing, he has given the Northwest a revitalized myth of itself.

PI review here, and PI report on his gardens in suitcases here.