Photos of UT’s First Site-Specific Installation for Landmarks
As of 4:30 pm on April 19th, the University of Texas amassed its latest piece for Landmarks public art collection—Ben Rubin’s tribute to Walter Cronkite, who attended the University in the 1930s. Titled And That’s The Way It Is projects massively sized text onto the side of a building in the Walter Cronkite Plaza.
Beginning at dusk and running through midnight each night, this particular piece of art is site-specific and plays off the College of Communication A Building. In Jenny Holzer-like fashion, Rubin’s text cascades across and down the building’s grid façade. The words cycle through old CBS newscasts and current daily news stories, revealing threads of incomprehensible phrases. Occasionally, the text patterns move slowly, and fragments of sentences or words are legible before they fade away. Soon, however, like the acceleration of train or automobile, the text begins to move faster, blurring into illegible streams of lights racing down the side of the building.
This is the first site-specific piece for UT’s collection. The mainstays of public art tend to resemble Henry Moore knock-offs, and are tired, which makes Rubin’s piece an exciting addition for the collection, and indeed contemporary.
Photos by Rowan Ogden.