A Sunday morning flea market drew my honey and me to Treasure Island to see what we could see. An unexpectedly beautiful sculpture balanced at the edge of a park overlooking the city of San Francisco from this man made island in the bay, of a female dancer—one foot raised and cocked behind her knee, the rest of her body in a well considered counterpose demurring to the bay bridge in the background. Her innards, a delicate lace of metal work structured quite a bit like both our bay bridges, were a nod to the setting as well as a reminder of the internal structure of a human body. The heroic scale of her invited a multiplicity of viewing opportunities, a few of which made the kid visitors giggle, never having before stood underneath the leg of a naked woman looking straight up the line of her buttock—a little like an ant’s eye view I imagine (do ants giggle too?)

    The work, “Bliss Dance” by artist Marco Cochran comes by way of the Nevada desert’s  now annual Burning Man Festival as part of a an initiative led by the Treasure Island Development Authority to reclaim the art at the heart of the island’s auspicious beginnings as the site of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Once I understood that, I could be a bit more forgiving of the absolute mess of her immediate surroundings—the light posts, the trash cans, the road between her and the audaciously gorgeous skyline in the background, the unnecessarily close adjacent parking lot that made her feel as if she’d been thrown out of a car looking to lighten its load on the way to somewhere else, for in a sense, she was and did her best to rise to her feet as strike a pose with equal parts energy and grace. And although she’s no Lady Liberty asking for lofty considerations such as “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breath free”, she does do a very nice job at asking us to follow our inner bliss which is as tried and true a San Francisco ideal as their ever was or will be.