Toothless, Old And Sharking Up Beach Road

Pattaya Focus On…..

Art on the City side of PBR

Fighting off the Indian tailors, hawkers, beggars, barging Russians and hordes of shoppers streaming from the malls on the town side of Pattaya Beach Road is usually such an irritating experience that I usually walk along the beach side. However, ignoring these distractions recently, I focused on finding interesting items of art and objects of interest displayed as art.

Not good ones, mind. Only interesting - which is just as well as it's hardly the bleeding Metropolitan Museum of Art over there, that's for sure.

Whilst there isn't much of note to coo over, there was certainly enough to keep an uneducated, un-artistic Philistine like me going.

The old stuffed shark (photo above) serves as a sobering reminder of the passing of time for Pattaya's legion of working women, usually seen in the familiar Pattaya cycle of younger girl in go go bar, who becomes an older girl in Soi 6 who becomes an old bag on Beach Road. This toothless old shark seems to say “you too will end up on Beach Road, in the same condition as me”.

I like the above plastic heads which have been placed outside one restaurant, where they sit, sentinel-like, bearing silent witness to the shenanigans and crime on the other side of the road.

They act as a useful symbol for the city, where the powers that be are equally powerless to prevent the many scams being carried on under their very noses on PBR.

And of course they are also a very appropriate symbol for other aspects of life in Pattaya, a city which specialises in all kinds of head, from the giving of it (everywhere) to head shots (guns).

More pacifically, outside Central, on a sunny day with a blue sky background, these metallic sails reflecting the sunlight are a pleasant sight.

I see this as aspirational art, whishing this is what the city looked like - the clean blue sea flecked with tall sails atop expensive sailing boats owned by posh residents, moored in the no doubt soon-to-be-built marina, after which they all troop into Central to eat and shop, and spend gazillions of quid.

'Aint gonna happen though. Or not in most of our lifetimes.

I quite like this water, fish and metal installation which is also outside Central, although its impact is lessened during the day. By night it is nicely illuminated with different colour lights and the orgasmic explosion of water is more dramatic than by day.

I saved my favourite piece until last. This statue of a boy with a swan is again an entirely appropriate image to grace Pattaya.

When I find myself Googling: “swan symbolism in classical art” for a column in Pattaya's most vibrant rag, I know I have bitten off more than I can chew, and I am about as helpless as this poor swan in the clammy clutches of a (hopefully not priapic) youth.

Located in the pleasant grounds of Caffe Toscana, this fountain lends itself to a number of thoughts.

First of all, is he playing with this unfortunate creature? is he trying to kill it? Or worse, to mount it?

Is the boy choking a chicken, grappling a goose or strangling a swan? I think the latter, but look how close he is to it. Disturbingly close.

Perhaps the boy really is THAT into birds, and if so, where better to put this statue than in Pattaya, where it can function as a piece of symbolic art representing the city, to which ornithologists all over the world flock to get to grips with birds themselves.

Although, as also represented in this statue, the bill for that kind of grappling can be quite large.

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-- Pattaya One 2011-02-08