PUBLIC SCULPTURE: THE PURSUIT OF THE PLEASURABLE AND PROFITABLE PARADISE
A SERIES OF IMAGES HOVERS over the recent emergence of public sculpture in America. In one, we witness an epiphany: above a plaza swept by sunny skies, the heavens open and a helicopter descends. The sculpture is deposited amidst the massed crowds who respond with adoring cheers. In a second, the scene changes. The machines are gone. Quiet reigns. Children clamor over their new-found toy and rest on its ledges. And to such paradisiacal visions of the public “interacting with the art” is aligned one more, a ceremonial view, in which the Mayor dedicates the artwork, signifying official acceptance.
But such images could as easily be replaced by others—by scenes of hostile crowds, or graffiti scrawled over Corten; by images of rabid newspaper editorials and carefully pointed cartoons. And by statistics: when Philadelphia dedicated its statue of Major General George Meade in 1887, the railroads advertised special rates; nearly 30,000 proceeded towards Fairmont Park in well orchestrated parade. When Richard Serra’s St. John’s Rotary Arc was unveiled last year, just how many people converged on Lower Manhattan?1
In fact, public sculpture’s problem lies in its very public, in its address, and in the functions thereby implied. It inherits the difficulties implicit in its funding label, “Art in Public Places,” with its two terms inflecting each other, playing essence against situation, and raising the disturbing yet necessary question of whether “art” and “public art” are not very different things. If public sculpture is subject to the definition implicit in its name—if it is work both destined and designed to be seen “outside the special viewing that the exhibition system provides”2—then it enters a sphere that is unfocused, unspecialized and unmediated by traditional esthetic norms. It enters into relations with an audience that is broad and heterogeneous. And it enters an environment that removes art from its slowly-developed, privileged status to an ancillary one, involving new roles within a wider realm of entertainment, politics and economics. All are consequences of sculpture’s desire to be useful to, or usable by a newly extended audience. A new vision, then, inhabits the public sphere—that of a ubiquitous art, placed not only in schools, shopping malls, or subways, but in front of the tenement-to-be-tenement-no-longer.
Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant have their statues in European cities; my own childhood transpired between the Rue Descartes and the Rue Auguste Comte, between a statue dedicated to Pascal and a statue of Diderot. . . . Why are American streets so silent to the remembrance of thought?
—George Steiner, “The Archives of Eden”
Criteria for Evaluation:
—creative artistic imagination . . .
—pedestrian and vehicular access . . .
—equal access and circulation for the handicapped
—sitegrading and drainage . . .
Excerpt from sculpture proposal for Duncan Plaza, New Orleans, 1980.
History affords both examples and heritage. Civic sculpture, after all, is hardly new—remember the Egyptian obelisks and the temple gods, the Greco-Roman busts and haughty Venuses, the portal figures from cathedrals. And all those equestrian figures of heroes or fallen warriors that populate our parks and plazas . . . In the United States emulation started early on, a dedicated plying of the memorial function of monumental art (monere, to remind).3 The construction of monuments followed on the Revolution’s heels, springing from the need for a visible past. Civic values, solemn virtues and shared imagery characterize these emblems of sculpture’s commemorative role; Baltimore quickly acquired the name “The Monumental City,” sporting images to Columbus and Washington.
While federal commissions date from shortly after the country’s founding, when Jefferson imported Italian artists for the sculpture and detail of the Capitol’s South Wing, the first native sculptor was employed under the administration of John Quincy Adams.4 This predilection for national support joined in these early works, with certain other tendencies that have persisted throughout the public field. The first—a civic or communicative function—is obvious; the second—a relationship to architecture—has an implicit role, developed by Neoclassical and Greek Revivalist directions into a deep-seated, enduring difficulty. The monuments of the early 19th century were mainly portrait busts, designed for inclusion in building interiors—monuments subordinate to, and implementing, the larger architectural scheme. The small rapidly grew to large, as the forms became full statues or architectural structures—columns, obelisks, pyramids. Both developed an architectural dependency, or architectural competitiveness, to which the sculptural profession has responded.
With the Civil War another political function was admitted. At this time, the Freedom Statue was commissioned; soon after, civic sculpture reached its zenith as thousands of veterans with rifles, and generals on horseback, were erected. Familiar images—the laugh of public art—they had considerable value as correctives to the industrialism that developed with increasing impetus and corresponding concern. Symbols of the past, of permanence and hence of national stability, they furnished reassurance amidst the population change, economic turnover and periodic depressions that followed in industrialism’s wake.
If such works functioned as vehicles of national conscience, conveying constant and communal values, public sculpture also developed a more local, particular slant at this time. Just as temperance and slavery spawned their own emblems, so, with the rise of private funding alongside national support, a tradition of ethnic commissions began. French memorials, Italian marbles and monuments to religious groups were erected; sculpture’s use within the sphere of social activity was accompanied by ethical aims. If, today, certain sectors demand specific educative ends, ranging from moral uplift to “civilizing” the urban locale, their reflex can be seen as extending a specific 19th-century mission. The urge for lofty meaning, transparently embedded within a physical message, arose in emulation of the German practice of placing allegorical monuments in public places as reminders of desirable ideals. Through regional inflection context and content became bonded indissolubly in an amalgam problematic to later art; sculpture’s role as a constellating image, reflecting community virtues and local desires, was established as a sensitive concern.
Whole communities responded to these regional sentiments, using local artists to local ends in a particularly contemporary way. Characteristic was Gaetano Federici, the Italian-born protagonist in Paterson’s “age of bronze” or, more properly, its resident public sculptor.5 By his death in 1964, Federici had speckled the New Jersey city with over 40 public monuments, most immortalizing civic or cultural leaders and all rendered in the most realistic styles. His role of artist-as-historian, recording and eulogizing local events, confirms the survival of classic “public” proclivities; that he conceived himself within the lineage of architectural sculptors indicates another slow-dying directive.
The specificity of their aims differentiate such projects from the first, most frequently cited example of subsidized art, the programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA programs were aimed exclusively at providing employment; they were neither related to the communities, which in no way had demanded them, nor to the specific spaces they graced. Neither permanence nor local values nor social and architectural integration rose above the wartime need to employ artists. Sheer quantity made America the greatest patron in the West, providing a historical bridge between artist and society. Although the mural and painting programs are better known, almost 18,000 sculptures were produced. Created for the “embellishment of public property,” they were decorative in intention, if not always in result, encompassing papier maché figures, portrait busts, welded abstractions and monumental groups. The urge for a “vital national expression”—for the articulation in “living monuments”6 of American ideals—led to a general focus on representational style and American-scene subjects. Suitability militated against experimentation; numerous innovative but “intelligent” artists voluntarily palliated their expression, setting precedents for later conservative public work.
All of which brings us to the postwar years, dominated by private support filling the gap left by governmental programs. The ’60s, a time of rapid economic growth and commensurate growth in art’s status value, spawned a rash of corporate subsidies and corporate commissions. Sculpture that was public in scope but placed on private land mushroomed near office buildings, plazas, shopping malls, banks. How the business community recognized its benefits we shall leave for later; what is important is that the period provided the other image which cohabits, within the communal consciousness, with General Sherman on his horse. The monolithic sculpture, made of Corten, reflective or colored steel, became the emblem of urban “modern” art. Kinetic and Corten frequently interchanged; in each case, the corporate bauble, indifferently planned but assertively placed, became the signifier of business ideology. Perhaps only private money and esthetic banality, geared to the monotonous rhythm of the day-by-day, could make the public live so complacently with abstractions. Whatever the reason, its legacy rings clear: the Turd in the Plaza7 became ours.
The period we now inhabit is one of massive government spending following on, implicated with, and apprised by, the activities of corporate support. The political import of these programs, whether federal, state or local, whether directly legislated or generated indirectly through construction costs, is indicated by the exponential growth in the size of appropriations; these programs can be socially justified, economically sanctioned, politically implemented, according to the value of Art for Everyone. Myths sustain this process, notably the one that a society is remembered by its contributions to the human spirit. To this sentiment, bolstered by examples from the past, is added that other adage, that artists merit their society’s support. But recently, two other statements have appeared on the esthetic horizon—one, that the arts are a growth industry; the other, that America’s cultural attendance now outstrips that of sports.
This equivocal relation made available to artists coincides with a generational urge, developed as a result of ’60s activities, for both a social place and a socially useful art. “Use” might be interpreted in terms of public context, directly functional work (i.e. “street furniture,” stairways, or the many landscaped parks now being commissioned) or works that, as in current land reclamation projects, participate in the economo-esthetics of an area. The intended audience, once restricted to the art world’s narrow confines and attuned to the hermetic channels of its discourse, was extended to include the wide, undifferentiated masses with all their multiple interests and myriad proclivities. Use and entertainment, by this approach, provide reputable ways in; the artist’s adversary stance, set apart and combative to his culture, no longer applies. This is as evident from the words of Ned Smyth, who speaks of making sculptures “which the public does not contest,” as from those of Athena Tacha, who talks of a useful, admissible art, or Scott Burton, with his allusions to a “more civic . . . outer-directed” art, with content beyond “the private history of its maker.”8
One could easily and complacently align these urges with “Post-Modernism,” were it not that early Modernism already contained many Utopian dreams of social action. Constructivism and the Bauhaus alone abound with reveries of designed cities, of social-artistic corps, and of useful esthetic objects. Mayakovsky’s brushes were to sweep the streets of Moscow. Artists congregated, in concern, at the Abbé de Creteuil. And who could have made better street furniture than Rietveld? But if the earlier versions contained parallel visions—visions neglected or negated through later reform—the response required or solicited by the art has been appreciably revised. Moreover, specific esthetic directives helped to point the way—one, the loosening of artistic categories, the other, certain experiences particular to sculpture.
Artists who in the late ’60s and ’70s had been working in remote, often desolate environments—either on private land with limited access (as with site-specific sculpture) or unpeopled terrain (Earthworks)—brought back to the public sphere a notion of site not only easily transmissible, but also highly appropriate. To create works as a function of urban scale offered a means of dealing with a total space that had been largely ignored by earlier endeavors. The ’60s-spawned plaza, as developed through corporate patronage, provided a background, and an example to react against. Similarly, the desire for permanent works, along with the availability of funds (which, though hardly ample, were greater than those available from the private sphere) were significant contributory factors.
And so the public sculptor, armed with funds, bolstered by good intentions, pointed towards the populace becomes (to use the words of arts administrators) “part of the team.” As an artist working towards the social good, he produces works that are used by the populace, that inhabit its plazas, that are part of its plans for urban design and economic redevelopment—works that rapidly leave the environment of art to enter the realm of artifacts. And, in the process, significant readjustments are required regarding their function, phrasing and coordination.
. . . we live in an era in which the tendency is to design architecture in what could be described as the “skimmed milk style,” without any cream whatsoever.
—William Gehron, FAIA, 1944.
As a house is the home of a family, so is a city the home of its inhabitants and should be furnished with works of art, just as you would furnish your own home.
—Sir Henry Moore
. . . the ideas of progression and of the indefinite perfectibility of the human race belongs to democratic ages. Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be . . .
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1839.
The shift to economic function is itself a significant change. Public art begins in democratic urges—the desire to bring art to a broad, unspecialized public; to this ethical vision of art’s transforming social power—its capacity to alter the communal mind—has been added a corresponding vision of its transforming economic function. If the purpose of urban art is to “unlock the latent potential within a prescribed context,”9 then this purpose can be applied similarly to the economic potential within any particular space. “Site” can thus be interpreted in innumerable ways, from spatial to social to financial.
Implicit in this change is a widespread, far-reaching shift from functionalism to esthetics, from machine to garden. To the Utopian vision of urban design, based on workable, serviceable machines, has been added a focus on “livability” or “quality of life,” stressing the environment’s social scope. The change is reactive: encouraging the “sensitive development of the built environment” contrasts with decades of urban blight and bad planning, of sterile International Style buildings and corporate industrial rape. Into this maladious, rather than melodious, environment, art enters in a therapeutic way, humanizing the inhumanity of steel and glass, binding the city’s wounds. But this reawakening to the forgotten element of art runs against that older, more entrenched American sentiment, reflected in governmental funding, that the arts are insignificant elements in technological growth—luxuries, not necessities; “add-ons” rather than basics. Why, then, this large-scale, un-American activity? Economics alone could supply the requisite suasion, transforming “soft” issues into serious ones, mandates into legislation.
What makes some cities more pleasant than others? The buildings themselves, their decoration, and their surrounding spaces give some clue. The most appealing cities combine space and architecture to create a harmonious setting for man and his activities.
—Art & Man (teacher’s edition of the magazine)
Businessmen are responding to Moussorgsky’s admonition that “art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.”
—Buildings magazine
If the first stage in “The Livable City” covers the therapeutic ideal, the next stage emphasizes art’s other, complementary reality as a growth investment and catalyst. The amenities strategies currently used in innumerable American cities spring from the realization, recent and widespread, that life’s quality can be strategically improved through culture, to the benefit of economic return. The result of this awareness, arising over the last decade, is that ” . . . politicians have come to see funding for the arts as another requisite social service, most closely analogous to funding a department of economic development.”10
This policy is hardly unprecedented. The act of employing, not just placing works, underscored the art projects of the Renaissance—those most-often cited civic sculpture examples. Perhaps the greatest instances of public urban renewal were the Renaissance and Baroque plazas, and particularly the Florentine Piazza della Signoria, which was cleared in the slum demolition of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, claimed for public gatherings and transfigured through sculptors’ works.
Among current American examples, the experiences of two cities are repeatedly invoked. One is Seattle, Washington, a city noted both for its general cultural support and for its innovative sculptural commissions. When Boeing collapsed, destroying its largest industry and ending a central source of jobs, the city reinvested heavily in the arts as a major tourist attraction. The other city is Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which, after 20 years of failure in its attempts to use shopping centers, malls and other commercial means, implemented a successful redevelopment policy concentrated on the arts. A central element of the policy was a federally-seeded, privately-supplemented “culture block,” designed—much in the manner of Lincoln Center—to be a model redevelopment example.11
In these and other projects, sculpture was, and is, used as a focus, and certain commissions have particular importance. Notable among them is Grand Rapids’ Calder, La Grande Vitesse, (1969), funded in 1967 as the kick off for the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) Art in Public Places program. Its role within the sphere of urban policy and public response elicited the comment, now well-known and undoubtedly influential, from then-representative Gerald Ford: “At the time, I did not know what a Calder was, but . . . a Calder in the center of the city, in an urban redevelopment area, has really helped to regenerate a city.” Related aims placed sculptures by di Suvero, Snelson, Sugarman and Henry Moore, among others, along the waterfront in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor Renewal program. Claes Oldenburg’s Batcolumn, erected in Chicago in 1977 with General Services Administration (GSA) funds, formed part of a project designed as “the initial step in the transformation of a once slum area to a significant business-office sector”; similarly, his Crusoe Umbrella (1979), constructed beside the Des Moines Civic Center—a site “catalytic” to the Capitol Center Development Area Urban Renewal Project—was conceived as an attractive “focus” for tourists, shoppers, workers.12 In the near future, the 42nd Street Development Corporation (a private company financed through various federal sources) plans to construct sculptures by Mary Miss and Stephen Antonakos in New York’s Times Square, “utilizing the visual arts as a focus for economic development.” The sites are scheduled for “urban parks” within this “derelict and abandoned, hence blighted”13 city region; theaters, “intermission gardens” and restaurants will face their locations.
In these inner-city projects, sculpture claims a preeminent position as a public sign. What Bataille said of architecture, which he singled out among disciplines as an authoritarian vehicle, might similarly be applied here: mass, weight, visibility and clear evidence of expended capital make it an apt and appropriate emblem of established values. But if sculpture in its public role inherited a long tradition of civic function, it was also informed by a short yet highly cogent history as a corporate sign. In a manner repeated many times over within the sphere of federally-financed projects, the private sector pointed the way towards public use. Sculpture’s roles as symbol, lure, advertisement and emblem of urban prosperity, as they have been exploited in such redevelopment programs, come out of the construction boom of the ’60s and early ’70s.
Although the private urban plaza is beyond the scope of this article, its effect as a public example deserves mention. The interjection of real estate into the culture market yielded the role, novel to America, but centuries-old in Europe, of the builder as patron of art.14 This role was later ceded to the government—witness the GSA, America’s largest collector; central to its emergence was the influence of architects, often art-involved if seldom art-informed. Gordon Bunshaft, for example, first suggested to Harry Helmsley that he ask Isamu Noguchi to design the object in front of New York’s 140 Broadway. The result was Noguchi’s red cube, positioned on its edge, and the prototype for numerous commissions. A more distant precedent was Rockefeller Center, with its art-full plazas and lobbies that had been worked out in the ’30s largely by Wallace K. Harrison. I.M. Pei and scores of others followed suit, and the culture-crammed city was born.
The identifying trademarks provided by such art were easily translated into the public realm; Chicago’s Calder, now emblazoned on the city’s stationery, garbage trucks, et al., fills a related community role. But more insidious, though doubtless effective, rationales were offered by corporate involvement. One key document of private marketing psychology is an article entitled “Super sculpture banishes the building blahs,” published in Buildings magazine.15 Beyond a corporate version of the therapeutic ideal (“In the last few years, private enterprise has commissioned artists and sculptors to help make the city a viable place to live and work . . . .”), beyond advocacy of emblems of corporate cultural support, much is made of art’s seductive abilities to lure industry, commerce and tourism to downtown areas. The power of “people-oriented focal point[s]” to “reach out, touch and bring people in” (italics mine), attracting “business that might otherwise not have come in,” is accorded cogent appeal.
Such indications of art’s lures could hardly go unheeded in public ventures, given their heavy reliance on private capital investment. Moreover, the appeal to dollar values has been a persuasive force in the actual commissioning of sculpture. The demand that public art prove itself viable through capital accretion, thus justifying the expenditure of taxpayers’ funds, has resulted in the frequent recitation of two facts—one, the meteoric increase in the value of the two main “national collections” (GSA and NEA); the other, their original bargain-basement costs. Most persuasive, however, has been the emergence of the hardest of dollar-bound facts: that if, as David Rockefeller has stated, “Diminished cultural activity can bring economic chaos to a city,”16 then the obverse can bring all sorts of benefits extending from property values to jobs.
In recent years a number of studies have been released showing that the arts are indeed a good public investment, stimulating activity throughout the entire economy. Both particular and general effects have been stressed, and all have been centrally connected to sculpture. Congressional reports from the early ’60s, for example, showed that the arts return more than they take in, and cited the now oft-used statistic that one dollar in federal money could create an additional eight dollars to be spent on the arts. By the multiplier effect of Keynesian economics, the money “would tumble down into all sectors of the marketplace,”17 benefiting everyone from artists to building tradesmen and material suppliers.
Moreover, the snowballing of such culturally-generated dollars results in long-range, wide-scale effects. “Beautiful architecture and public art,” this and other studies indicate, attract visitors, thus bolstering tourism and industry, and contribute to income in service fields like printing, advertising and construction. Ancillary or “spill-over” benefits also accrued, notably enticing to the city the upwardly mobile middle class who use restaurants, take taxis, need parking lots and hire babysitters. To them, culture connotes a higher stage of development, a quality way of life increasing residential attractiveness. And their relocation similarly affects real estate values, which, again, augment tax revenues to lure increased business and increased labor.
A 1977 survey by the Rand Corporation18 provided the main rationale for current amenities funding, confirming cultural “attractions” as economic necessities. The amenities, it reported, are now more conducive to job growth and executive relocation than are tax reductions or exemptions from environmental codes. Since jobs follow people; since jobs within the current economy are largely in mobile, “footloose” industries; since strategies are needed to insure both labor retention and labor development, with their own consequently emerging industries, Rand recommended that “quality of life factors” be encouraged in all government economic plans.
This closed circle of benefits accruing from the urban integration of art, architecture and people has resulted in a number of changes in governmental policies. All confirm the shift from function to esthetics, and each can be applied towards the funding of sculpture. Underlying them is the ideology that the arts be accorded full, rather than add-on, status in urban redevelopment plans.
One change is that the federal Economic Development Administration now requires old cities, along with young towns, to implement amenities strategies in overall planning.19 Another is the initiation of new legislation, or reinterpretation of already existing laws, to promote art programs that contribute to regional development. These range from the many “Percent for Art” ordinances, which engender art allocations from construction budgets, to the recent Department of Transportation mandate (centered on subways, highways and airports) to include art to beautify the environment and encourage patronage. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) now awards community development block grants for programs in low- or moderate-income environments. And many communities have devised art plans, site banks or long-range art implementation schemes to “rationalize” cultural development. A sphere in which art can conveniently, harmoniously, profitably be deposited as sites become available, and economies beckon, is projected as our modern Utopia.
Yet the lures of culture, as they are skillfully plied by economic development planners, have resulted in a new situation for artists, who must exploit these strategies on their own behalf. Those many projects blocked by mayors, condemned by city councils, sandwiched between administrations or otherwise frustrated by political procedures have required the artists’ intervention to salvage their own work. Persuasive arguments by sculptors on their own behalf include, (1) art’s progressive image as a symbol of city values, (2) the fact that money spent on art recirculates, through construction costs, into the common domain and (3) art’s substantive, already analyzed role in tourism and urban development. And, through such arguments, the artist’s own ethics rapidly leave the hallowed Realm of Art to enter the Arena of Artifacts.
Such justifications, informed by a logic traditionally alien to the artist—that of the business and corporate class—underline the schismatic operations manipulating the desire for a wider audience. Increasingly, public art must be held accountable both to political and economic forces and to mass society’s concerns. And private and public demands coexist uneasily within the sphere of civic art. One problem with the desire for a wide, democratically-extended culture, different from the “personally-based art” distributed by galleries or museums, is that the urge was created within that sphere itself, the domain of investments dependent on minority values. Public art, in its value preparation, has become politically expected precisely because of these private activities. And to these “private” values has been joined a new accountability, or responsibility, both to public response and to the political processes that reflect it. Hence the paradox of a public wanting the allures of art but not the gnostic secrets it spawns.
Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
. . . this particular federal program . . . proves over and over again, with each new addition to our government buildings, that the people—not just the intellectuals, but all of us—can appreciate the very best in contemporary art.
—Joan Mondale, GSA address
The question of accountability, or of a viable public rhetoric, is recent. Traditionally, there was no problem: before the advent of specialization, and before society’s fissuring through progressive advance, society knew well what it desired in art. The conventions of a common culture provided a legible style, immediate in access and coordinated in expanse. But public art’s current situation is that of urges impeded by the unavailability of forms. If the 19th century closed the tradition of public art, plummeting the 20th into the private world of abstraction, it left behind no inklings, intimations or harbingers with which to commence a successive version. The lack of a coordinated style,20 equivalent to the court or “period” manner, left no context to inform artistic expectations or insure their acceptance. Similarly, with the demise of the commemorative and communicative aims that had characterized 19th-century production, no valid function inhabited the field of civic art. Sixties’ corporate patronage, while providing examples of economic use and symbolic form, failed to offer a rhetoric transmissable on a communal scale. Hence the situation of copious funds and abundant urges awaiting the means to effect them.
In a parallel manner the populace, though predisposed to art through the media’s popularization and the need to humanize the heretfore inhumane environment, failed to develop a knowledge of, or sensitivity to art commensurate with its’ desires. While the domain of art has been appreciably extended, there is little evidence to indicate a corresponding increase in comprehension. The media, in contrast, provide a steady stream of personalities, images, forms. The routine rape of public credibility—a consequence of the avant-garde, with its successive shatters and shocks—has less dulled the public sense of change than nurtured aggressive postures. Thus the hostility and outrage, the cries of charlatanism (My five-year-old child. . . .) and the abuse of funds that accompany most public works.
The pathway to the revolution is paved with contradictions: we move from Lenin’s dictum, “Art belongs to the people,” to Trotsky’s statement, despite his social allegiance, that poetry and painting have interests exclusively their own. To art’s specialized discourse, with its formal variations and intricate structural codes, is opposed the popular, vernacular mode, generally centered on figurative references and on meaning, as invested in human values.
Indeed, meaning, the casualty of Modernism, provides the central coding for the perception of public work. Like the art lover who wants pictures not paintings, so the public wants statues; the formula of pedestal + horse + hero + pigeon is deep seated and inhering. The metaphor for meaning is provided by the base, that other Modernist casualty, as it has informed the primary history of public work. For public sculpture, in its communal role, is indissociable from sculpture’s traditional definition as an object in space, placed upon a pedestal that removed it from the mundane ground. This placement also separated it from the world-at-large, depositing it within the etiolated realm of symbols, ideas and values, of which it was the appointed bearer. Such sculpture, as opposed to the Modernist thing-in-itself, was assumed to be everything other than itself, and accordingly achieved its efficacy, eloquence and social force.
Popular art says relax; private art says stretch.
—M. Fishwick, Parameters of Popular Culture
The Coliseum is . . . not a prestigious museum catering to the cognoscenti.
—Editorial, Hartford Courant
Remember the Rocks.
—Hartford poll. 1980
Carl Andre’s Stone Field Sculpture, 1977, the infamous “Hartford Rocks,” the meaning of which was its own brute matter and the significance invested in it by esthetic dialects, illustrates the problematics of language at the core of public art. The dilemma, now, is to construct a valid public language, ideologically “sited”21 within the undifferentiated, unspecialized public space. To this end a number of solutions have been proposed, all distanced from the chilly discourse of Modernism, and most centered on the introduction of iconography. Legibility, shared images, and communal values comprise a litany oft-repeated within public art; to the alienation of “form” is opposed the seduction of “content,” as expressed in extra-esthetic terms. Proposals range from SITE’s visual metaphors to Oldenburg’s urban icons, particular to their specific city sites, to sculpture rooted in that most basic of human responses, humor. Historical data garnered from a given locale is offered as a means to achieve community focus. “Nonesthetic content” provides the sales pitch for otherwise unpalatable packages; examples include ecological concerns, water’s “universal appeal,”22 the particularity of person.
This focus within public discourse on a lexicon of preexistent, conventional terms underscores a significant change in the general expectations of art. The Utopian urge of a widespread cultural movement, launched upon the ark of sensibility and dedicated to perceptual change, has been ceded to a focus on familiar, recognizable factors. Moreover, this tendency is supported by the various surveys that record the popular response. A chatty, conversational urge informs this end of the public dialogue; preferences tend towards “people art” or figurative works; “warmth” and “whimsy”; “light,” amusing or regional themes; and color, color, color. Demands emphasize art “that people can relate to”—slices of life—as well as “something that pleases the eye.”23 Humanism is viewed as the obverse of abstraction. A recent Louisiana study recorded desires for such traditional works as “grandiose fountains,” memorial statues, bas reliefs and “big objects.”24
In politically responsive art, a low degree of negative reaction becomes the criterion for success. Among the most successful sculptures commissioned by the GSA program25 is Ned Smyth’s Reverent Grove, built in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, in 1978. Chromatic fantasy and traditional techniques characterize the mosaic trees and fountain; their decorative allure, along with the symbolism of columns, is easily appreciated and readily grasped. Similarly, the sole GSA commission to occasion not a single negative letter is Charles Ross’ Origin of Colors (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1976), where lambent light, fractured in myriad hues, cascades down the courthouse stairs. Figurative references in many cases have obvious regional appeal. Notable among the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) design-award-winning airports is Gallatin Field (Billings, Montana), with its sculptured mobile of Canadian geese. And few complaints have been voiced concerning Leonard Baskin’s Three Presidents From Tennessee (GSA, Nashville, Tennessee, 1975), which combines figuration, historical subject and commemorative approach to that most traditional sculptural material, bronze.
Public sculpture’s moment is inextricably bound to esthetic turns: with its relativistic values and plural styles, “Post-Modernism” affords a ready fund of modes and manners to meet the most varied demands. But if access and multiplicity go hand in hand, mirroring the terms of the social contract, one wonders if similar pairings are not being made between accessibility and accommodation, suitability and conformism. One wonders if the audience has been appreciably extended, or if the vision has been accommodated to public desires. The “taming of the individual vision,”26 art’s depreciation in its procession through cultural conventions;27 its accordance with the lowest common denominator of a public whose demands still remain largely hypothetical, are parallel hazards on the horizon of public work.
In aristocracies a few great pictures are produced; in democratic countries, a vast number of insignificant ones.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Would the Statue of Liberty, reactionary in its time, be considered, today, to be progressive public art? Political accountability furnishes the major problem in this catering to public norms. The hostility, name-calling and derision that has greeted public sculpture since Rodin’s Balzac has been compounded by governmental responsibility for dispensing common funds. Taxpayers’ dollars, frivolous expenditures, “arrogant” esthetics, all limn the litany of fiscally based complaints; to the dilemma of popular versus elitist values is joined that of local against national control. Claims of “unwanted federal intrusion” into local affairs have often shifted commissions toward regional selection; complaints to Congressional officials, always avid for reelection, have similarly threatened the allocation of funds.
Moreover, although subsidy has extended the options available to artists, it has done little to improve the actual level of art. One danger of subservience to public approval lies in the institutionalization through subsidy of the Public Artist.28 The sculptor who lives on the esthetic welfare of grants, or constructs a whole career on the bedrock of public commissions, is not unknown in our American past. Like Gaetano Federici, like the architectural sculptors, like those New Deal artists who tempered their work to accord with authorized taste, such sculptors make art conforming to conservative norms as they are ratified by public approval. The search for “appropriate” art, inoffensive to its audience and scaled to its locale, has resulted in whole enclaves of provincial, preselected art, seemingly market-researched for production. Does public art, then, aspire to the condition of Muzak?
If sculptors have failed, in most cases, to find creative solutions to the public rhetoric, the problem lies less in the public, less in the funding, than in the political fragility of the programs themselves. Their tenuousness in the face of Congressional opposition, geared to election schedules and constituents’ demands, encourages the short-term solution. Yet public art’s novelty, along with popular ignorance and alienation and the corrosive effects of media popularization, all militate against the quick and easy, demanding long-term exposure. The classic justification—that advanced art always meets with hostility, only to cede gradually to the test of time (“Seldom does any artistic effort evoke immediate universal acceptance”)29—has confirmed the role of exposure, familiarization and the communities’ cumulative experience. Each new venture tends to legitimize its precursors: the Calder once despised in Grand Rapids is now the urban emblem; the Heizer disclaimed in Seattle became a model for city art.30 Such an initially alien and recondite work as Robert Morris’ X, a pathway spanning Grand Rapids’ community park, can merge seamlessly into the social fabric due to a slowly-developed, continuous tradition of commissions.
Indeed, the Morris project implies another solution to the problem of a viable form. To the absence of a shared iconography, it suggests the shareable presence of space.31 In this, it is one among many current works that not only take cues from context or symbolically interpret site but actually involve their “viewers” as participants in perception. Just as use insures relevance, so the appeal to space as a social experience, communal in scope, individual in response, may insure a larger measure of support. The desire evinced in these projects to make the works available in terms of time and movement corresponds to esthetically developed concerns; it is distinct from the object-oriented, space-dominating urges of the ’60s. Paralleling the shift from commemorative values and iconography, then, is a corresponding turn from “structure” to place or site.
This notion of site, as it was developed by artists, also fronts upon an urban history of incongruous objects, poorly designed spaces and thoughtless urban design. The haphazard growth of American cities is currently under scrutiny. The urban plaza (like the suburban industrial park) is a metaphor: around us discordant relations, congested quarters, ill-aligned buildings meet the eye.
There are no avant-garde piazzas.
—SITE, Inc.
In the work of my office, I have had the good fortune of working with a number of sculptors, . . . . I have invariably been amazed by their ability to adapt their work to the architectural requirements, . . .
—William Gehron, FAIA
It was not always so. The therapeutic ideal linking art projects to urban redevelopment, or embedding them within futuristic social reveries, depends, like many dreams, on allusions to the past. The paradise lost, yet hopefully regainable, is, in this case, the Renaissance city with its harmonious integration of elements and its art organically realized to involve the total site. The sense of a geometrical system of relations, fusing buildings, spaces and sculptures into a continuum, underlies this urban dream. Bernini is often cited. The Piazza Navonna makes frequent appearances. We see palazzos, broad strade, gardens and statues by moonlight. . . .
The demise of these integral bindings can be located in the effects of specialization which developed from post-Renaissance individualism, and increased with rapid tempo under Modernism. Specialization split disciplines, pitting artist against architect, and led to the emergence, in concentration, of wholly artistic focus. If we locate the pedestal’s demise in Rodin, and watch its steady violation throughout Modernism’s course, we can observe the end of those precise factors linking objects to surrounding space. Sitelessness, “urban furniture,” decorative objects, Turds in the Plaza or “awkward little warts” upon the urban landscape (to quote, again, James Wines)32 are the result of a situation in which carefully developed relations no longer pertain, in which the connections among disciplines no longer adhere. The base that had served to site the work ideologically also functioned to mark its place in space, to which the architectural system was harmoniously allied. The loss of site, the stress on scale, the focus on materials and on internal relations, divorced from surrounding space—all descend like dominoes from its death.
The problem of the primacy of architecture, traditional “mother” (and master) of the arts, is implicit in the title of the book that chronicles the GSA program, The Place of Art in the World of Architecture. In this sphere ordered by, and structured around, building, art assumes a subsidiary role; it is to be incorporated wherever “appropriate” into architectural designs so as to “enhance” their overall character.33 “Enliven,” “enrich” and “ornament” are common words within architectural diction, reinforcing a predilection for art that accentuates, but in no way competes with, a building’s force.
The sentiment echoes a long-standing bias that is reflected in selection practices. Traditionally, the architect commissioned the artist or chose the art. Ranks of architectural sculptors implemented his schemes, later ceding their role to corporate artists. The juries for commissions or competitions always included architects who, though often in the minority, as often controlled the decisions. In Europe, the long history of “Percent-for-Art” programs in which architects retained the power to choose the art has largely resulted in offensive, somewhat derisible objects. In America, where such programs have only recently been mandated with the aim of making art “as normal as building,”34 the architect’s powers have been more recently curtailed. Scanning the early GSA commissions, in which architects retained authority over art selections, confirms the bent of architectural taste.
The role of “architectural” sensibility is significant, emphasizing objects distinct and different in impact from buildings. Philip Johnson’s statement, “You have to have a contrast,”35 articulates the now-classic relationship, echoing Mies’ placement of a fulsome Maillol next to his right-angled structure, and inflecting those many wispy kinetic sculptures juxtaposed to steel and glass. Other functions conventionally accorded to art within architecture’s world include “interest linkages”36 between buildings and streets and accents unifying schemes.
Compounding the situation (and reinforcing the priorities) is the fact that, until recently, commissions usually followed construction. The places reserved for sculpture tended towards exterior “pedestal positions” and interior spaces in courtyards and atriums. Frequently, too, antagonism resulted in blockage of a work as resentment of artistic intrusion was backed by architectural authority. Notable among these cases is that of Richard Serra, who states that the many rejections of his projects have been caused largely by architects. During discussions of his proposal (since annulled) for Washington Mall (a project organized by the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Committee and designed by Robert Venturi), he was told by the head of the Committee that (in his words):
. . . if it came to a decision between an architect and an artist, they would always defer to the architect. All the architects told me, “Either play ball with the architect or your work won’t get built.” The PADC threatened me with the statement. “If you don’t comply with Venturi’s scheme, you’ll never get another commission.”
Similarly, a project designed for a leftover, “useless,” and hence sculpturally suitable space outside of Paris’ Centre Pompidou was rejected under pressure from the museum architects, Rogers & Piano. Wishing a small-scale, traditional work to enhance the still-vacant alley, they objected to a sculpture which would alter the architectural conception of the space.37
The ideology of public sculpture, then, can be seen to involve a large-scale, studied integration of art into two sectors traditionally hostile to it—the community and the architectural profession. Both antagonisms are the results of Renaissance individualism. Both, depending from an original communion, or state of grace, can supposedly be revoked.
On the latter side, the revered remedy is now being attempted through collaborative projects and through plans that redraw the boundaries between sculpture, architecture and landscape, grafting wider responsibilities onto the artist. Central to each, whether individual or collective, is a more harmonious, organic, properly “public” space than has existed in the recent past.
The collaborations range from limited involvements to full-scale partnerships. Among the former, the major advance has been an attempt, in art-inclusion projects, to involve the artist at an earlier stage in construction. Benefits range from more harmonious relations, to a wider use of art, to simple budgetary gains. (As a negative example, witness the case of Loren Madsen, 60 percent of whose current GSA budget was spent on redesigning an already completed ceiling.) The partnerships make use of numerous past examples to applaud the values of teamwork (e.g., Iktinos, Kallikrates and the sculptor Pheidias, the “combined creators of the Parthenon”; the architects and sculptors of the Gothic cathedrals; Stanford White and St. Gaudens). One current example is the Seattle Design Team Program, in which artists, engineers, architects and neighborhood residents work as equals in designing urban services. The first project, the Viewland/Hoffman power substation, was completed in 1978; eleven other projects have been completed to date. In another individual plan exemplary of this kind of teamwork the artist Larry Bell and the architect George Landeman are collaborating on a solar fountain (Denver, projected 1981). And in a third, ambitious scheme, six artists have been hired as consultants for the new I.M. Pei-designed Arts Center at MIT, (Cambridge, Massachusetts). A variety of elements ranging from furniture to landscaping, from sculpture to lighting to wall decor, will be designed and executed by the participants.
Among works mingling functions and fields, the Seattle Land Reclamation projects have been too well publicized to require recitation. Yet many others, smaller in scale though hardly smaller in conception, employ grading, landscaping, underground construction and building techniques towards the esthetic redefinition of urban sites. Several focus on the park, that traditional civic oasis; notable among these is Nancy Holt’s project for Arlington, Virginia, in which gentle mounds, streams, paths and plantings will be punctuated by fountains, along with more typical sculptural elements, in a carefully orchestrated scheme. In her hands, then, the urban wasteland will be born anew in the form of Redevelopment Eden. Many, too, cull money as well as methods from other fields. In a project for a Cambridge subway station (Arts on the Line, projected 1983), Richard Fleischner will use landscape-budgeted as well as art-budgeted funds38 to redrain, regrade and in general artistically reorient a 200-foot long external space into a large site-specific environment.
Other works center on that traditional space, the plaza, which has both symbolized collective consciousness and hosted its urban ills. If the civic space has, historically, exerted a constellating and consolidating community force, many sculptors now react against the explicit focusing emblems that informed the more recent past. The piece in the plaza, again, provides the reactive example; arranging several elements so as to use the total space, or to reinvolve the spectator in spatial perception, has emerged as the major thrust.
One of the most ambitious ventures entailing both collaboration and expanded roles for artists aims to create a viable “20th-century plaza,” a civic space designed as a totality without arbitrary and inharmonious divisions. Duncan Plaza, presently slated for construction in New Orleans, Louisiana, with NEA and community funding, is conceived as “material for a single work of sculptural art”; its premises oppose “placing an object in a space.”39 A collaborative team of a sculptor and a landscape architect will be chosen to design and construct an earthwork/landscape environment/park/piece of art on the wreckage of a Modernist civic square. Surrounding it lie Jackson Square and Lafayette Square, stately homages to 18th-and 19th-century urbanism. Overlooking it sits City Hall. Within the play of traditions, temporality and politics lies its future.
Kate Linker is a freelance critic living in New York and a past editor of TRACKS, a journal of artists’ writings. This is the first of several articles on public sculpture. The next will concentrate on funding programs and the resulting projects.
—————————
NOTES
1. My appeal to the example of Serra’s recently-installed work marks a slight but purposeful departure from the topic of this series of articles. Public sculpture, for these purposes, is defined as sculpture produced with partial or total public funding, the definition excludes those many projects which are privately-financed but placed in publicly-accessible areas This particular article deals only with permanent commissions. although the ideas and problems involved are also applicable to temporary ones Temporary projects will be discussed along with permanent installations in the next article on funding opportunities St John’s Rotary Arc is one of two privately-supported Serra sculptures placed on public land through the help of public facilitating agencies (notably the Public Art Fund). Though its status is, at present, temporary, it is scheduled to become permanent should community approval allow it; it is thus in an ideologically pivotal position to this essay.
2. Lawrence Alloway, “Problems of Iconography and Style,” Urban Encounters: Art Architecture Audience, Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, March 19–April 30, 1980, p. 15. I am indebted to many of Alloway’s insights on contemporary public sculpture, as published both in this essay and in “The Public Sculpture Problem,” Topics in American Art Since 1945, New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Most important to this article is his notion of the environment of artifacts, derived from Tomas Maldonado, and involving art’s entry into “the man-made landscape as it is shaped by architects and designers, by city ordinances and regional planning” (p. 15).
3. This and most other information here on the history of American civic sculpture is taken from “Monumental Art Questionnaire,” an address given by Blanche M. G. Linden at the conference “Monumental Art in Our Society,” held at and sponsored by the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center in conjunction wih the Ohio Program in the Humanities, July 18, 1980.
4. Karel Yasko, ed., “The 1% Solution,” Chicago Percent for Art Program, p. 2.
5. See Passaic County Historical Society, Gaetano Federici: The Artist as Historian, September 24, 1980–Feb 1. 1981.
6. Letter from artist George Biddle to the President published in Francis V. O’Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The New Deal and Now, Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1969, p. 18. The comments on federally-subsidized programs are largely drawn from O’Connor’s book, and treat the several programs, including the WPA s progenitor, the Public Works of Art Project, as a whole Hence, though restrictions on subject were more pronounced in the early program they are taken as exemplary for the period as a whole—a stance reinforced by the final years of the WPA when the problem of “abstract art” rose to new heights.
7. This term, introduced by James Wines of SITE Inc., has become a part of the language of sculpture through its ability to convey skillfully the pitfalls of public plaza art.
8. Conversations with Ned Smyth, Nov. 7. 1980, and Athena Tacha, Dec. 8, 1980; Scott Burton in “Situation Esthetics, Impermanent Art and the Seventies Audience,” Artforum, January 1980, p. 23.
9. SITE Inc., “A Combined Statement by the Artists,” in Emma L. Fundabenk and Thomas G. Davenport, eds., Art in Public Places in the United States, Bowling Green, Ky.: Popular Press, 1975, p. 42.
10. Annette Kuhn, “Culture is Our Fail-Safe,” The Village Voice, Nov 21, 1977, p. 25.
11. See: Winston-Salem Cultural Block Concept Plan, Ampersand, Inc., April 1979.
12. See project concepts in Coosje van Bruggen, R. H. Fuchs, Claes Oldenburg: Claes Oldenburg Large-Scale Projects, 1977–80, New York: Rizzoli, 1980.
13. Brochure and background leaflets, 42nd Street Development Corporation, New York, 1980.
14. Rita Reif, The New York Times, March 23, 1975.
15. Sumitra Srinivasan, ed., “Super sculpture banishes the building blahs,” Buildings, April 1977, pp. 54–56.
16. Quoted in Dennis Green, Percent for Art, Western States Arts Foundation, Inc., p. 23.
17. Ibid, p. 23.
18. The Urban Impacts of Federal Policies, Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, June 1977. See also Livability newsletter, Spring 1980, pp. 1–2 for discussion of Rand study and general amenities planning.
19. Jerry Hagstrom, “Bringing People Back Downtown With a Little Help from the Arts,” National Journal, Dec 15, 1979, p. 2104–2105.
20. Alloway, “Problems of Iconography and Style,” p. 15.
21. Nancy Foote, “Sightings on Siting,” Urban Encounters, p. 25.
22. Foote, p. 33.
23. Hartford. Conn., Civic Center Coliseum Artist Selection Poll, December, 1979.
24. Duncan Plaza, RUDAT team findings, Jan. 17–21, 1980, New Orleans, AIA, 19.
25. For this and other information on GSA projects see Donald W. Thalacker, The Place of Art in the World of Architecture, New York: Chelsea House, 1980.
26. Douglas Davis, “Public Art: The Taming of the Vision,” Art in America, May–June 1974, pp. 84–85.
27. Patrick Ireland in “Situation Esthetics,” p. 27.
28. For a discussion of this problem as applied to the Northwest region, see Deloris Tarzan, “Art, the public and public art,” Seattle Times, Sept. 21, 1980, p. F6.
29. Letter to Las Cruces Lions Club signed by Arthur Sampson, Director of GSA, June 5, 1975
30. Discussion with Pat Fuller, NEA, Nov 24, 1980.
31. See Alloway and Foote, Urban Encounters, for discussion of various projects based on this notion.
32. James Wines, “De-Architecture: The Architecture of Risk,” Sculpture Today, 10th International Sculpture Conference, Toronto, May 31–June 4, 1978, p 8.
33. Quotations taken from a variety of architects opinions and comments. For further examples, see Thalacker as well as Fundabenk, ed., passim.
34. Nina Gibans, “Public Art and Policies,” address at Cincinnati conference.
35. As quoted by Richard Lippold in “Integrating Responsibilities of Sculptors/ Architects,” Sculpture Today, p. 27.
36. Architect Warren H. Smith, quoted in description of Geoffrey Naylor fountain sculpture (1978) for Orlando, Florida, in Thalacker, p. 112.
37. As quoted in interview with Douglas Crimp, “Richard Serra’s Urban Sculpture,” Arts Magazine, November 1980, pp. 120–21.
38. William Gehron, “Teamwork in Architecture and Sculpture,” address before the Architectural League of New York, April 1944. Reprinted in Fundabenk, ed., p. 26.
39. Proposal information for Duncan Plaza, New Orleans, 1980.
