The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 161

Movies Music Video Theater 'Dance Books. 14 I I lU In the Movie Section, Clint Eastwood builds "Bridges of Madison County," Page B23. I In Books, Gail Caldwell reviews RusspM Ranks ArtsEtc. 1 PaaeBSO. 1 i r-.

i 4 THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE MAY 28, 1995 1 1 6- 1. 1 I 1 1 long ourney in 1 After 15 years, Jeffrey Schiff 's 'Destination' reaches South Station, but is it lost in 'commercial chaos? By Christine Temin GLOBE STAFF 1 in 1 i I r-V, 3 ,1 (, i i I '(' 'v. i jf i M.Miiiiiiiiniiiriiri.iii.iu.i imriinni iiiii mi 9 GLOBE STAFF PHOTODAVID RYAN was 1980 when the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority awarded Jeffrey Schiff, a promising 27-year-old Boston artist, a $100,000 commission for a piece of public sculpture for the renovated South Station. 4 Fifteen years later, a Schiff sculpture was supposed to be. End of granite forest even though the escalator never materialized.

It was not the end of Schiff participation in the station, though. Although he says he was ignored and ill-treated for years, paid an amount that worked out to maybe 5 cents per hour he spent on the project, he didn't give up. He kept talking and writing to anyone who might be able to help, and he was willing to adjust "I don't have the Richard Serra attitude of take it or leave it," he explains, referring to the artist at the center of the "Tilted Arc" controversy in New York. "I also didn't want to be defeated by bureaucratic vagaries and complete incomprehension of what art can do," he goes on. The vagaries and incomprehension come not only from the he says, but also from Beacon Management Company, which runs the retail operation in South Station.

By round two of designing for the station, Schiff thought he was safe in creating something for the ceiling. After all, you couldn't put an escalator there. The second commission, which didn't involve additional money, came in 1990. Then, he says, came a three-year delay, while he struggled to have the convince Beacon to remove some large metal structures already hanging from the ceiling, intended to work by Schiff, now a graying Wesleyan University professor who has long since moved his base from Boston to New York, has at last been installed in the station. But the work installed this spring is not the one the artist originally designed.

That work, a forest of rugged granite columns intended for the station concourse, was meant to suggest a quiet chapel amid the bustle. The columns were to be angled so they would first draw travelers into an enclosed space, then send them on their way, out toward the train tracks. The work was a metaphor for a journey. The granite forest almost happened. The station floors were reinforced with steel, ready to accommodate the heavy stone.

The columns were about to be fabricated. Then the powers at the decided that maybe they'd put an escalator where SOUTH STATION Jeffrey Schiff stands below his 'Destination, 'an installation of weights, spools and wires hanging from the ceiling of the station's foyer. Keeping art WW 1 1 i 1 lit to a nn 1 -J i yo- 7Tt i 3- ri-Ji'- r-: GLOBE STAff PHOTOMAAK WtLSON 4 Vandalismyunding, dirt pose problems for transit works GLOBE STAFF PHOTOMARK WILSON PHOTOCYMIE PAYNE PORTER SQUARE Everett Goss now hawks newspapers under a skylight where "The Lights at the End of the Tunnel" (at right) by William Wainwright hung until it was removed in 1993. IS 1 i i 4 By Christine Temin GLOBE STAFF Pigeon droppings, graffiti and carved initials cover William Keyser's undulating wooden benches in the Alewife MBTA station on the Red Line in Cambridge. Gyorgy Kepes' sweeping stained-glass mural in the Ts Harvard Square bus shelter is no longer lit from behind: The once-sparkling colors are now a blank, black blur.

Morgan Bulkeley's mural next to an exit of the Hynes Convention CenterICA stop on lower Newbury Street is a magnet for stickers, posters, help wanted ads and paint in a palette that has nothing to do with the artist's. In the late 1960s, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority began commissioning these and other art works for its stations. The Ts art was considered an international model. People came from as far as Stockholm and Mexico City to see what it had acquired, much of it through a pioneering collaboration with the Arts on the 'Line program of the Cambridge Arts Council Art in transportation programs in Seattle and Phoenix were partly modeled on Arts on the Line It was not only the high quality of the art that impressed, but also the fair--ness and wisdom of the selection process the program established. The Cambridge-based work of Arts on the Line ended in the late 1980s, but the continues to commission important art through private art consultants.

The now owns 58 works of art. Some are in fine ART, Page B22 1 PHOTOCVME PAV i GLOBE STAFF PHOTOUARH WILSON ALEWIFE STATION Pigeon droppings and vandalism mar William Keyser's undulating wooden benches. The benches, which the artist treated with several coats of epoxy and a HYNES CONVENTION CEHTERICA Morgan Bulkeleys mural on lower Newbury Street is frequently defaced. special varnish, have been refinished only once 3.