Public Art Review issue 01 - 1989 (winter/spring)

~~fic

t Review

Volume I, :Number 1 Winter/SpJring 1989

PUBLIC ART ON THE WATERFRONT Minneapolis Saint Paul Santa Monica Port Chicago Boston New York TownsE~nd

NANCY HOLT: SCULPTING THE ELEMENTS

Education Programs

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Talkback

A dialogue among employees about the First Bank visual arts program and the role of adventurous, contemporary art in the workplace. color videotape, 15 minutes, .available January 1989

Controversy Corridor An exhibition space for art which has been banished, and can be retrieved, by employees. A vehicle which challenges traditional curatorial practices by giving employees greater control of the art in their lives. brochure with comments by employees, artists, art educators, critics and administrators, available January 1989

Employee Art Selection An organizational development project through which employees select art for their own workspaces.

An examination of cultural values, team building, the role of art in the workplace and the democr:atization of the visual arts program. brochure with remarks by employees, artists, sociologists, psychologists and organizational development specialists, available May 1989

Artist's Projects Vince Leo "Mao prints kept over objections"

T'imetable project: First Bank System Investigating the controversy surrounding an installation of Andy Warhol's Mao portfolio in First Bank public galleries, this artist's book uses timelines and photographs to examine the interrelationships between First Bank, China, US foreign policy, the lives of Mao and Andy Warhol, the visual arts program and those customers and employees who found the exhibition objectionable. artist's book, available April 1989

Mary Tortorici Portraits of Women: First Bank Series An examination of the lives of ten women who work at First Bank System through photographs of them at work and in their homes. Organizational development consultant Karen Moran's text is built from interviews with the women in the project. exhibition and catalogue available June 1989

Norman Cohn Internationally recognized video artist Norman Cohn designed an interventionist project which illuminates the social, political and psychological processes of individuals and teams in the workplace.

Cohn collaborated with his subjects to make dozens of video portraits of First Bank employees over an 18 month period. The tapes are being exchanged and viewed through an informal video networ.k. catalogue with tim~lines and remarks by Cohn and employees color videotape (artist's edit), 45 minutes, available May 1989

Sixth Street Minneapolis, MN 55402

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CONTENTS Public Art Affects Everyone.

SANTA MONICA

Altering the landscape we live in.

Changing the way we see our community.

by Pamela Hammond

With the debut issue of Public Art Review we've taken the first step toward a grand goal to develop a region-to-region network for publishing criticism, dialogue and information on the national scope of public art.

"Public Art on the Waterfront" was chosen as the focus of this first issue for its timeliness and wide array of topics, more than we could cover, in fact. "From sea to shining sea" and by the rivers that grace our land, America has used, abused and even ignored our waterfronts.

But over the past two decades as more and more communities have sought to renew these precious assets, so too have public artists turned their attention to the water's edge. And, as with the work of Nancy Holt, artists have opened our eyes and sensibilities to the es-

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NES Park Celebrates Site CHICAGO

sential nature of water itself, along with the elements of the earth and sky.

S

The Front Yard

by Stephen Luecking

Here, a long overdue dialogue begins, in the spirit of public expression and collaboration, with individual creativity and interpretation, and for an art form and audience that knows no bounds.

CHICAGO

Jack Becker & David Skarjune

by Ron Glowen

S

Counterpoint to Bauhaus

by Jim Billings

PORT TOWNSEND

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Tidal Park Revives Old Port BOSTON

On the cover:

Star-Crossed (1979-81) by Nancy ' Holt, Miami University Art· Museum, Oxford, Ohio. The oval pool fits exactly into the field of vision framed through the small tunnel and appears to be circular. Looking up the small tunnel the other way, a .circle of sky is seen. This circle of sky is also reflected into the pool.

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80s Boom, 90s Loom

by Marty Carlock

NEW YORK

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Socrates SculptUlre Park

by Matty Carlock

ESSAY

Nancy Holt: Sculpting the Elements

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by Monroe Denton

PublicArtReview

MINNEAPOLIS

Linking Development with Culture

Volume It Number 1 Winter/Spring 1989

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by Phill Lindsay Project Director: Jack Becker Assistant Director: Vicky Vogels Editor: David Skarjune MarketinglProduction Manager: Jim Schiller Art Director: Brendan Finnegan Associate Editor: Jennette Lee Forecast Project Committee: Jack Becker, Jennifer Casey, Fuller Cowles.

Community Advisors: Siah Armajani, Peter Boswell, Lenny Dee, Regina Flanagan, Mildred Friedman, Linda Mack, Loren Niemi, Lane Relyea, Thomas Rose, Stuart Nielson.

Special thanks to John Worden, Graphicana

Administration/Subscription/Edit9rial: Public Art Review 2955 Bloomington Avenue Minneapolis, MN 55407 612-721-4394

MISSISSIPPI MILE

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A Tale of Two Parks

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Design Team Experiment

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SAINT PAUL

©1989 Forecast: Creative Alliance for Public Art ISSN: l040-211X

Artists to Join City Planning

Public Art Review i. published semiannually.

Statements e"l'ressed in Public Art Review are those of the authors ana not necessarily the views or opinions of Forecast, its members, or staff.

Public Art Review is made possible with support from the McKnight Arts Partnership Grant Program of the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and in partnership with the Saint Paul Art Collective, publisher of NWJ NortJt. Artscape.

ART & ARCHITECTURE

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by Christine Podas-Larson

Collaboration during the WPA Years

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by Bruce N. Wright

GOING PUBLIC

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The NEA Midwest Forum

by Laura Weber

PUBLIC BRIEFS

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compiled by David SkaTjune

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Public Art Review 3

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PUBLIC

ART

REVIEW

WATERFRONT SITES have reclaimed and their riveifrontsJ harbors and areas in recent years. Public ~art rtant element in the process. occupies a space at least 100 feet from the promenade so as not to compete with the traffic, but also to tempt viewers to take off their shoes and walk through the sand to reach the art.

In Santa M mica Singing Chairs artist Doug Hollis chose to work with music, a la John Cage, sx>nducted by wind passing through slots strategically cut into aluminum pipes, in turn attached to a chair.

The oversize instrwnent invites the viewer to sit and hear the music while feeling the wind and vibration of the sound.

Upon this visit, a low, resonant, oboe-like tone warbles through the air from two 16-foot-high chairs, one tropical lime, one Dresden blue. They tower over the sand like some esoteric lifeguard stands or homely thrones, turning slightly toward one another. On their b:!l.Ckside, side by side, five pipes reach skyward like tuning forks to the heavens. Singing Chairs strikes up a musical conversation carried by invisible ribbons of wind up to 500 feet off on a windy day, according to "Hollis, and 100 feet on an average day. Perhaps I've not hit the average, but on other days that I've visited the chairs, they've stood mute with ample sea breezes not able to muster up the music.

A climb up the six-step ladder to a seated position offers an alternative view of the surrounding area. Situated at an oblique angle from the shoreline, the land at one end of the Bay comes into view. Hollis chose this orientation it\stead of a flat-on and, perhaps, more meditative iilignment where the relationship of ocean and sky might have been prominent. This angle invites you to look at many features of the surrounding area: sand, land, pier and people.

The activity around the site contributes to the "music" and

Left: These Singing Beach Chairs (1987) by Doug Hollis respond to the mood of the coastal breeze on the Santa Monica Beach.

Below: Carl Cheng's Art Tool (1988) roles a cityscape into the sand during special events.

SANTA MONICA

NES Park Celebrates Site

by Pamela Hammond Santa Monica Beach spans three miles of the Pacific Coast bordered by Venice on the south and Malibu to the north.

Inside its generous, curving bay, the beach is broad, measured by the seasons and the tides and reconstituted, when necessary, by humans. And, it is used intensively, particularly in the summer, to the tune of30 million people every year. In winter, joggers and strollers find the brusk weather attractive, and street people choose it over inland alleyways. The beach is the last stretch, the last stop on the move West.

In 1983 BruriaFinkel, an artist and city commissioner, proposed a unique art park for this stretch of oceanside.

Coined the Natural Elements Sculpture (NES Park), her idea called for the city to gather together site-specific sculpture for the beach that "complies to" rathedhan "intrudes in" the environment. Its promise is to inspire visitors to consider notions beyond suntans, bodybuilding and bikinis, acting as a mediator between the ravages of development and nature.

"NE S Park is in a very public arena," says Finkel.

"The intent is not to interfere with the joy at the beach, but to enhance it by creating a real opportunity close to an urban environment where people can get in touch with the natural elements: sun, sand, wind and water."

A brisk air sweeps the coastline today. Sky and sand seemingly sandwich the ocean between horizontal bands of bright blue and beige. The breath of the city seems distant. Yet within a few miles and minutes, a congested citylife masks the uninterrupted expanse of the horiwn.

Set back from the shoreline, a bike path and promenade run in front of the old aquamarine-eolored Sea Castle Apartments, some homes and small businesses just north of Pico Boulevard. Gradually, the charm of the old structures is giving way to the bulldozers of new development.

Not far on the sand is the site of the first of ten sculpture projects chosen for NES Park. Each sculpture site

foot-wide band of two-inch-high 'indentations is pressed into the sand and a city is born, the replica of Los Angeles complete with city blocks, cars and buildings. It remains until swept clean by the tide or by beachgoers gleefully walking over the city feeling the Hollywood Bowl crumble under their toes.

Cheng was inspired by aerial views of Southern California urban sprawl and its carpet of grids, streets, pavement and freeways. That image finds a home in the remembrance of the beach as a giant sandbox for numerous sand forts and castles, elaborately built for an afternoon's pleasure. A rt Tool is decidedly a playful work, but one that reflects a more serious side as well: the fragility of those things we think of as being so permanent--buildings, streets and homes--are also part of a natural process where everything returns to a common form only to be molded again in another guise.

Still maquette-sized, Nancy Holt's Solar Web will be the next work to be erected, near the Venice border of Santa Monica Beach. Holt chose the element of natural light and its source, the sun, to be framed within the work, which will measure 72 feet in length and 16 feet in height.

The sculpture will converse with equinoxes and solstices, and at noon on the summer solstice, promises to capture a particularly dramatic effect.

Other works to follow and yet to be fully funded are a tidepool piece with basalt rock and black sand by James Turrell; an undulating wave-like structure of Douglas Fir that echoes the curvature of the Santa Monica Mountains rising behind the beach by Lloyd Hamrol; and a grandiose breakwater work collaboratively created by Larry Bell and Eric Orr. I recall visiting the Santa Monica City Hall in 1984 to view the maquettes of artists' proposals for the then proposed NES Park. Over a period of six months the public was invited to look at and to vote on which proposals they preferred.

"For public art projects in Santa Monica, the public is always consulted," states Finkel. "If you tell the people what it's going to be and allow them to participate, they have a greater investment ... as a result, you're able to do things farther out than you ever imagined. . . and I find they are almost always correct. " "The plan covers a ten-year period. Hopefully, more artists will get involved in the subject matter. It's good to see what happens in time, not to commit to everything in the eighties," she says. "Artists are always at the forefront and we have to leave some space for that.... The whole park is an evolving idea. " The evolution of public art has moved toward an integration with its surrounding environment, unlike more "dictatorial" works of the past, such as Richard Serra's Tilted Arc. All of the art for NES Park adapts to the site

People can get in touch with the natural elements: sun, sand, wind and water.

-Bruria Finkel when nature remains unruffled with turbulence, this other ambient sound becom~s more pointed. Possibly the anticipation of the music encourages me to replace what the sculpture is unable to produce on a particular day.

Whether that was Hollis's intent remains to be seen, but it certainly further validates the concept and title.

Right now, two sculptures have been fabricated for NES Park. Further north near the pier, Carl Cheng's Santa Monica Art Tool is parked. Its 14-ton concrete roller has turned it into more of a static sculptUlre than originally intended. The plan was to roll it out daily with a crew of ten men. Now it needs a powerful tractor and a special day to warrant the event. When it does move, a 12-

Public Art ReView 4

and the needs of people who will live with it. It may assume some variation of the original conception, as with Hollis's chairs and Cheng's massive roller. Problems or unpleasant surprises can develop along the way and must be faced, perhaps with additional expertise and assistance.

NES Park is developing at a critical point in human history as we question how we've used the world that supports our existence. The selected work reaffirms a balanced relationship between people and nature. Weare one. Each work is a cogent reminder, just yards from signs warning of pollution, that any other course of action will erode the very sources of life on earth.

CHICAGO

The Front Yard

by Stephen Luecking All of Chicago faces the Lake. It laps at our front stoop.

The spatial drama that is our city climaxes at the shore of Lake Michigan. From the west the city crowds toward the shore, its larger and more aggressive buildings elbowing their way to the front. To the east .the space suddenly breaks, flattening into a zinc gray sheet of water that abuts the sky at a machine-perfect horizoll. In between the lake and the city a narrow green intermission of parks winds along the shore.

Despite the grand tableau of that clash of spaces, and despite the lakeshore's eminent status as Chicago's front yard, only three significant public sculptures have been sited there during the public sculpture boom of the past two decades. Faring worse are the fifty or so miles of Chicago's other waterfront, the banks of the North and South Branches of the Chicago River, which remain vir. tually undeveloped as public spaces. .

Over forty sculptures currently dot parks bordering Lake Michigan. These are primarily commemorative statuary, largely a legacy of a sculpture boom precipitated by the Columbia Exposition of 1892. Works by Auguste St. Gaudens, Loredo Taft and their proteges are highlights of that legacy. Private philanthropy, especially the Ferguson Monument Fund, carried that boom well into the 1930s.

Due to legal controversies over its disposition, the fund lay relatively fallow until the 1970s when it gave the lakefront a Henry Moore sundial near the Adler Planetarium and an Isamu Noguchi fountain to front the Art Institute's lake face. During the 1980s another philanthropic group, Friends of the Park, placed Ellsworth Kelly's disappointing sculpture, "I Will, " in Lincoln Park. Looking like a letterless motel sign, it is singularly out of place at Fullerton Avenue near Lake Shore Drive.

Neither the earlier statuary nor the sculptures of Moore, Noguchi and Kelly address that interface of land and inland sea that is Chicago's lakefront. The work that now lines up along the shore could just as well be located anywhere¡else. However, there has been no dearth of temporary sitings, visionary proposals and dashed hopes that do address the lake.

Opportunities for temporary sitings arrive each spring when Art Expo brings the art world flocking to Chicago's Navy Pier, opening its outer promenade to sculpture. Chicago sculpture Ray Bemis's 1985 installation, Untitled, which floated a 3,SOO-square-foot grid of hinged plywood sheets painted to match the gray cast of light off the lake, most aptly addressed the interface of city and sea.

Sited 100 feet off the end of the pier arid flexing with the water's movement, her sculpture read simultaneously as water gelling into pavement or as pavement melting into water.

In contrast to Bemis's subtle statement, the visionary proposals have seen the merging of lake and sky as a broad backdrop against which to showcase monuments on the order of the St. Louis Arch or the Eiffel Tower. Chicagoan Virginia Ferrari's Tumbleweed, a sequence of 40-foot broken circles that would trundle the 7S0-foot length of a downtown breakwater, is the most practicable proposal still in the works. The least practicable would be the $500 million glass bridge work, Crescendo, proposed by German

artist Dieter Wagner. Besides the engineering andl navigational nightmares such a structure would enge:n der (it would be built well out into Lake Michigan), it is the arrogance of interfering with the natural glory of the lake and sky that has most doomed this project.

But it is the perception in Chicago of the lakefront as the city's "front yard," and thus its premier public space that has dashed the largest share of hopes for new public artworks along the waterfront. For example, artist Alan Neider, during a residency as a city CETA (Comprehensive Employment Training Act) artist in the latE! 1970s, generated a proposal for Olive Park adjacent to Navy Pier.

Since this modest park site is one of the lakefront's most coveted locations for a public monument, established sculptors and architects worked effectively to ground Neider's fledgling proposal.

A truly widespread sinking of hearts took place when Chicago decided not to host a 1992 World's Fair. Given this city's ranks of ambitious sculptors, a sculpture boom Above: Jerry Peart's comparable to that resulting Riverview (1980) is a from the Columbian Exposicolorful commemoration of tion was in the offing. But the the amusement park that fair would require major reonce occupied this Chicago workings of the lakefront and site. near-lake neighborhoods--a Left: Sinus-Curve by Adolf project that the city was unLuther on Navy Pier during willing to undertake. the Art Expo of 1988.

In my opinion, Chicago's "backyard" waterfront along the banks of the Chicago River holds more hopes for public sculpture than its lal{efront, and reciprocally, this is where public sculpture could achieve the greatest benefits. A downtown river corridor of parks and promenades, often proposed and long overdue, would serve as a tonic to the sterile State Street Mall andllifeless plazas that have sapped the Loop, in the center of 1the city, of human public spaCes. Such a system along the riverfront could accommodate a wide variety of iIl!Ventive public art.

A front yard of parks, beaches, lake and sky may be fine as is, but the backyard where we spend most of our time could stand to be spruced up with new public: art.

Counterpoint to Bauhaus

by Jim Billings In three waterfront-related commissions, resident artist Jerry Peart adds fun, color and spontaneity to somber Chicago settings. Designed for public plazas, these largescale sculptures tap Chicago's history and its love of the waterfront.

Chicago looks toward Lake Michigan for sceneJ:Y and recreation, for public spaces and museums. Hen~ where water joins land, the element of the muses joins the element of business: The waterfront means sunbathing, waterskiing, sailing, yachting, fishing and touring Lake Shore Drive. The city so valued its lakeshore that the Chicago River's flow was reversed through can:als that diverted sewage down the Mississippi (an oversight now corrected). Lake Michigan once played a maJor eeonOlnic role as well, linking Chicago with the world before r:ailroads and assuring prosperity during the Civil War bloc:kade of the Mississippi.

Public Art Review 5

Following the Civil War a macabre turn made Chicago a hub of avant-garde architecture. Vast amounts of Eastern insurance money went to Hunt, Richardson, Sullivan and others to rebuild the 2,000 downtown acres leveled by Chicago's fire of 1871. These architects revitalized Chicago with America's first indigenous architecture, and gave its design a romantic bent. But this direction was quelled by the Palladian architectural revival brought in by the Chicago World's Fair of 1892-93 and the arrival of Mies van der Rohe as Chairman of Architecture at Chicago's Armour Institute in 1939. Any lyrical notions¡were overridden by a utilitarian attitude toward building design.

Increasingly, Chicago's architecture blusters more than it beautifies. The human spirit must rely on largescale sculptural commissions that decorate the Loop. Most playful among these is a recent commission created by Chicago sculptor Jerry Peart. He brings color, motion and lyricism into sculpture--the color of carnivals and cards, of advertising and packaging.

Peart's first public-site challenge was a plaza by the Chicago River. Isolated by a freeway overpass, the cement plaza is bounded by a low, xenophobic, L-shaped building, a combination circuit court and police station. The nearby trees stand in an orderly regiment, contributing to the area's stern atmosphere. Once the site of Riverview Amusement Park, the setting craved the playfulness of its past.

Commissioned as a tribute to the now demolished Riverview Amusement Park, Peart's Riverview (1980), has a complex form of fabricated aluminum. An upright, yellow disk splits, its lower end bending into a blue rolling shape, its upper resting on a perpendicular, carnelian disk.

A French-gray flange, airplane-tail-like, buttresses a yellow disk. Seemingly abstract, Riverview evokes the movement, color and even symbolic shapes of the former amusement park. A Ferris wheel turns, a roller coaster rolls on, a suspended airplane ride spins amongst carnival colors.

Another Peart commission was to enliven a plaza near an attractive but severely rectilinear, modern college center. Overlooking a wetland at Dupage College in suburban Glen Ellyn, Ill., the sculpture recalls Isadora Duncan's dances in Chicago in 1922. Rainbow Dancer (1982), a scarlet disk, vertical and broken, shakes, twists and turns. Trappings of yellow, hot pink and white wave wildly about.

Kicking high, it dances toward the marsh.

In dramatizing her Chicago arrival Duncan said, "To expose one's body is art; concealment is vulgar .... When I dance I use my body as a musician does his instrument, as a painter uses his palette and brush, and as a poet, the images of his mind. " Chicago saw Duncan's dance as burlesque. Its newspapers raged. Billy Sunday condemned. Crowds thronged. But more misunderstood than iconoclastic, Duncan saw dance as art. She was concerned with problems of surface versus form, of entertainment versus art, topics perennial to artists. Peart's abstract yet lyrical piece is in the spirit of her mission.

Peart's most recent challenge was to enliven the plaza in Illinois Center, a commercial office complex on Michigan Boulevard near the Chicago River. On the site of Fort Dearborn, which capitulated to a band of Powattomies in 1812, became a refuge during the Blackhawk War of 1832 and suffered in the great Chicago fire, this site has a history of security concerns. Now near the headquarters of Brobdingnagian insurance companies, this site has now arrived at a state of pure security. Designed by Mies van der Robe's follower Joseph Fujikawa, the Illinois Center features hulks of black-trimmed, glass rectangles standing guard.

Splash (1986) is Peart's antidote to this grimness. A semi-abstract piece of painted, fabricated aluminum forms a lavender arc trailing over white tail-feathers. The arc is anchored by a lake-blue, serrated wave; a twisted, red form flutters within the arc. Soaring 22 feet upward, Splash then dives into the plaza of concrete coated witb pebbles.

Expansive and confident, it flaunts freedom in counterpoint to solemnity.

These recent commissions evidence Peart's growing confidence and artistry in integrating color with form. To his Cupist notion of sculpture Peart appropriates harded~~ solid color from commercial design and from automobile fabrication. Any similarity to Frank Stella's shaped forms is more superficial than real. Unlike Stella's painterly extensions into sculptureland, Peart's work remains uncompromisingly sculptural while reclaiming color to the medium. His unmodulating coloration respects the pieces' objecthood rather than seeks surface illusion. And with fast color, fast shapes, Peart acbleves an active, on-line, participatory viewer response. His commissions enliven utilitarian, life-deprived Bauhaus architecture.

Site-specific public art commissions vary in role.

Some stand independent of their settings; some compensate for dull surroundings as Tabasco sauce does for a bland casserole; a few even integrate themselves into the setting, resulting in a whole that is more than the sum of the parts. These Chicago commissions indicate that Jerry Peart is busy providing spice to architectural shortcomings. When fate allows him to dance with a lyricallyminded architect, the real action will start.

city of Port Townsend begins to recognize the social, aesthetic and historical value of its underutilized watedront.

Tidal Park becomes both the signal and the focal point for the potential reclaiming, in time, of a civic and environmental asset.

Tidal Park is indicative of a tendency in current sitework philosophy that downplays monumentality and domination of the site by the work, in favor of an approach that accentuates or calls to attention many of the site's more neutral aspects. Hollis and FabIen utilized many of the given elements and conditions of the site as tlhe aesthetic and design rationale for the work. In doing so, the neutral conditions of the site are revised into conditions of instrumentality; that is, the work becomes the means by which the neutral site conditions are engaged and understood. Site integration is the foremost aesthetic ~md environmental ¡principle established in the work. The elements of nature and the ruins and residue of a maritime industry meet the physical zone where Tidal Park is located, and they are physical and conceptual components of the final configuration.

Tidal Park consists of three major componeJnts. A low concrete curb demarcates the site from land. It and other low curbs and terraces filled with crushed basalt follow the traffic lane markings of the original site. Inside the loop of the question mark-shaped pattern is thle "Tide Clock, " a circular basin lined with a concrete wall and open to the tidal waters of Puget Sound via an inlet. Inside the

PORT TOWNSEND

Tide Clock and Wave Gazing Gallery

Tidal Park Revives Old Port

by Ron Glowen Port Townsend, Washington (population 6,500), has an ideal maritime location on the Olympic Peninsula at the entrance to Puget Sound. At the turn of the century, the town rivaled Seattle as a major Northwest seaport. But after the transcontinental railroads chose Seattle as the western terminus, forgoing the considerable land distance around Puget Sound, Port Townsend's maritime industry withered. Today the town relies on the charms of its many Victorian homes and buildings and its reputation as an arts colony to bring tourists from the "mainland." Perhaps in seeing any effort to regain maritime glory as futile, the town no longer seems to regard its scenic waterfront as an asset.

In 1982 Ruth Seavey Jackson, a pioneer family descendant, died and left the bulk of her estate (an estimated $200,000) to the city of Port Townsend with instructions "to erect a sculptured object or artistic monument visible from the water" in memory of her family and "for the benefit of the public." In August 1988, the dedication of a waterfront sitework by Douglas Hollis and Charles FabIen completed the saga of the Jackson Bequest Sculpture Project. The public process and debate, which ensued for six years, had all the hallmarks of a class probate battle, with various beneficiaries and claimants wrestling over the aesthetic spirit and intent of the bequest.

An arts advisory committee selected a site--the old ferry landing behind the city's main street commercial district. Following the example of successful public art procedures such as those of Seattle's art commission, a nationwide competition was announced, and from five finalists, the team of Hollis (from Oakland, Calif.) and FabIen (from Philadelphia) was awarded the project. The Hollis-Fablen proposal was also best-received by the town's populace. All the same, much grumbling arose concerning the "out-of-town" jurors (mostly from Seattle) and their modernist biases and the lack of referendum on whether the project should have amore functional or utilitarian purpose, such as the addition of an arts community center.

Assessment of the Hollis-FabIen sitework Tidal Park begins with the site itself. Essentially unused, the waterfront abuts the back side and alleyway of the town's main street buildings. The project site is squeezed between the old ferry dock pilings and another pier and includes part of the paved area formerly used as a vehicular traffic holding zone. Facing the site are several nondescript buildings, some in considerable disrepair. But in identifying this site for the placement of the Jackson Bequest Sculpture, a process may have begun in which the

Japanese architectUre and Northwest Coast Indian longhouses, and as the artists note, also the expansive porches of Port Townsend's Victorian mansions. The sloped ramps between the stepped platforms create a motion visually analogous with the gradual rising and falling of incoming and outgoing waves. Both the "Tide Clock" and "Wave Gazing Gallery" are less objects to be looked at, than objects to look u,-ith. The eternal motions of the waves and tides, the winds and rain are elements of the site that have always been there.

Hollis and FabIen's Tidal Park is closely related to other waterfront siteworks in the Pacific Northwest, notably the five projects (one by Hollis) completed in 1983 for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration regional offices on the shores of Lake Washington in Seattle. Individually, those five proje<;ts dealt with either environmental conditions or views-~ften both--with some element of utility (such as seating or pedestrian access) included. The method of perceived encounter is similar as well. One is not so much attracted to the work as the work distracts one away from the ambient surroundings toward a solitary experience in a public domain.

Perhaps in that respect, the citizenry of Port Townsend did not receive a "signature" work of public art upon which civic pride and identification could be readily attached. But Tidal Park .will make a place for itself among the other attractions and distractions of this small waterfront city.

are less obiects to be looked at, than obiects to look with.

Water from Puget Sound fills the Tide Glock basin in Tidal Park (1988) by Douglas Hollis and Charles Fahlen.

basin are a series of six terraced catchbasins fonning a segmented inner ring. At high tide these basins are submerged. With the falling tides, each emerges at about one-hour intervals; the basins retain a pool of tidal water as the tide recedes. The sequence is repeated in reverse as the tides roll in.

Parallel to the old shoreline buttressed with concrete rip-rap is the "Wave Gazing Gallery," a pavilion constructed upon old pilings. The gallery is a stepped series o~ platforms and pavilions of cedar with ridged, doubleWlDg corrugated copper roofs culminating in a square chamber with a double-winged hipped roof surrowlding a square opening at the center. The center of the platform is likewise open, creating a central columnar "void" extending from sky above to water below. This vertical opening forms a "rain column" during a typical Northwest winte:' s precipitation. A separated copper flange surroundmg the roof opening and extending outward may act as the "aeolian harp" or wind-instrument featured in many of Hollis' siteworks, though its function might be more decorative than operational.

The materials and the architectural form of the "Wave Gazing Gallery" befit regional construction and :artistic traditions. The pavilions suggest the influence of

Public Art Review

6

BOSTON

80s Boom, 90s Loom

by Marty Carlock Most of the Charles River Basin, a dammed expanse of water between Boston and Cambridge, Mass., is ringed by narrow strips of greenery, handsome esplanades well-used by joggers, bikers, walkers, stroller-pushers, sitters and sunbathers. Until a year or two ago, the Cambridge side petered out as it approached the sea, giving way to manufacturing and warehouses. Right before the dam, a narrow industrial waterway, Lechmere Canal, cut inland.

Once serving the now-defunct glass industry, it was littered with abandoned shopping carts and waterlogged timbers.

As Boston boomed in the '80s, blighted East Cambridge became a target for up scaling. The city of Cambridge zeroed in on the abandoned shipping channel as the logical site for a park-like public space. After putting together a development area via a hugely complicated political and legal process, the city hired Carol Johnson As-

Nevergreen Tree (1987) by sociates, a Cambridge landscape design firm, to William Wainwright in Lechmere Canal Park, create the park.

Shortened, the canal Cambridge, changes with the now ends in a pool centered wind and sun. on a vertical waterspout fountain. The designers worked with Cambridge Arts Council to choose $100,000 worth of art, five disparate works, for the park and for a nearby public parking garage. At poolside the designers set an open kiosk with clerestory panels etched with local history, both word and image. Interspersed with the brick pavement are castbronze pavers, the Bubble Chamber Series by David Phillips, a piece that alludes both to the history of the area as a tidal flat and to Caml?ridge's present identity as a locus of space-age research.

A signal luring pedestrians to the spot, William Wainwright's Nevergreen Tree, is a 35-foot wind sculpture whose diffraction-grating coatings flash in the sun like traffic lights. The bridge crossing the canal sports on its sides enamel-painted steel panels, The British A re Coming, the British Are Coming, by David Judelson. And for traditionalists there's James Tyler's bronze totem of portraits, Faces of Cambridge.

The Boston area's more successful waterfront parks are, like Lechmere, attributable to Carol Johnson Associates, which specializes in waterside landscapes. Upriver two miles from Lechmere is John F. Kennedy Memorial Park. (This site had been earmarked for the Kennedy Presidential Library, a project torpedoed by a community fearing ever more traffic and tourists in a area already overflowing with both.) Separated from the river by a traffic artery, the park nevertheless commands a fine, open view. Johnson's design is simplicity itself: cascades flowingdown abroad, stepped fountain, bollards engraved with JFK quotations, and lots of grass and trees.

The same designers had a hand in the Bird Island Flats Walkway, part ofthe Harborwalk at Logan Airport across the harbor from downtown. An ambitious plan to spruce up the edges of the airport's industrial area and provide some amenities for East Boston--a neighborhood that suffers from the airport's presence--Harborwalk has really not succeeded. One of the best site-specific pieces in Boston is here, a dolmen/gate titled, Portaland Stele by stone sculptor Carlos Dorrien, is here wasted on this seldomvisited location. It is placed at one end of the esplanade, intended as a welcoming entrance to the park for the East Boston community, a populace that seldom, if ever, accepts the invitation. Along the water's edge is a series of pavilions, benches, and stones carved with motifs suggested by members of community; the images are so arcane that they function neither as art nor as public relations.

Until very recently, the story from Boston has been an ironic one: despite the region's long maritime history, its artists have failed to exploit port and harbor in aesthetic ways. The exceptions that have cropped up recently, such as Harborwalk, have been fragmented and episodic. The complexity of the waterfront has something to do with its neglect. Seven different municipalities administer the 180 miles of shoreline of the Outer Harbor, and Massachusetts Bay involves ten more cities and towns. Only in the past decade have the thirty islands been placed under one jurisdiction.

Over the past 20 years the city has changed at harborside, sometimes for the better. But lack of an overall aesthetic plan has hurt. Much-visited Waterfront Park, a green sliver developed near major tourist attractions, features a less-than-mediocre statue of Columbus, which was imported from Italy by an influential city councilman and erected in violation of the city's Arts Commission regulation~ _ Always well-populated is the plaza in front of New England Aquarium. This public space, created in 1969, is on the city side, not the harbor side, a telling comment about Boston's relationship with its waterfront. The art located in the plaza reflects the community's aesthetic confusion: a bronze fountain, Dolphins of the Sea (1980), by Katherine Lane Weems that could as well have been sculpted a century ago, and a high-tech Susumu Shingu kinetic sculpture Echo of the Waves (1983), which knowledgeable locals call "The Whale. "

NEW YORK

Socrates Sculpture Park

by Marty Carlock

Improvements glimmer on the horizon. A promising spot is Marine Industrial Park, once an Army base, separated from downtown only by Fort Point Channel. Its 200 acres are under the jurisdiction of the Economic: Development Industrial Corporation, a quasi-public city agency.

EDIC has just completed a survey by three artists, which has resulted in a ten-year, million-dollar plan for parks, landscape design and public art on the site, and it has hired Carol Johnson Associates to do the job.

Another huge construction project looms. Plans are under way to reconstruct and place undergr'ound the Central Artery, an elevated highway that now separates the city from its harbor. The most immediate result will be a rejoining of the city with its waterfront and a chance to exploit reclaimed ground: whether for economic or humanistic purposes remains to be seen. The Boston Society of Architects has leapt upon this planning opportunity, sponsoring this fall an open and free-form competition called "Boston Visions." Visionaries turned the Central Artery into canals, tree-lined traffic canyons and sculpture parks; they projected reflecting pools and skating rinks into downtown; they converted drydocks into museums. All on paper, the BSA' s brainstorminI~ contains seeds for energetic, vital and long-overdue planni.r.g.

North of Boston, the mill towns of Lowell and Lawrence are further along in exploiting their aquatic heritage. Lowell's canals, once providers of textilemachinery power, are now a tourist attraction, thanks to the urban national park created there. A water-theme for art has been sought. A Dorrien stone construction right in the canal has reportedly run into problems w:ith its old foundations, but completed and functioning at canalside is a Michio Ihara kinetic fountain whose anodized parts are moved by falling water.

In Lawrence, linked riverside parks will be centered on the Great Stone Dam in the Merrimack River.

Downstream, Dorrien will collaborate with wood-construction artist Alice Adams in an area named Workers' Place, a tribute to the millhands in Lawrence's history.

Reaching upriver from the dam will be Riverfront Park, an esplanade a mile and a half long that includes a 70-foot hill, a swamp, backwaters and peninsulas. Four environmental artists are designing work to exploit the landscape's features: James Ford envisions a long, linear piece that will include a boardwalk through wetlands and sequential sculpSculpture by Mark eli tures. Malcolm Cochran is Suvero (1986) i:n Socrates designing sculptural gates for Park (the work is Sculpture ends of a road; Mary Ann now located at the Unger has been assigned a University of Michigan). hilltop pavilion and perhaps two or three others. Jackie Ferrara, concerned with making spaces where things happen, plans to convert a ruined swimming pool into a performance space. .

Greater Boston's boom shows signs of cooling, but the area is not likely to revert to the artistic backwat.er it was at mid-century. One-percent-for-art laws and alert urban planners have raised aesthetic consciousness among builders and opened for outdoor-scale artists the best market they have ever seen. There is yet a lack of coherence in the upgrading of public spaces in thi.s region, but it seems safe to say the idea of environment-as-art now has a momentum of its own.

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7

It is almost impossible for a tourist to find Socrates Sculpture Park. It is across the East River in Long Island City, Queens, not far from Manhattan but in another world entirely. Even if one finds the way to the stop at Broadway and 31st Street (in Queens, don't forget) on the Broadway Local (RR to Astoria), there's still a hike of some six blocks back toward the river. Best to find aNew Yorker who will guide you there.

Socrates Park appeared somewhat seedy when I visited it in 1986. The park's four acres were created circa 1970 when the city filled in a marine terminal slip. In a modest neighborhood, Socrates Sculpture Park is surrounded by warehouses and industrial buildings ranging from underused to derelict. The grounds had an ad hoc look, as if the collaborating artists scavenged whatever was available to pave the paths from site to site: here flagstones, there gravel, yonder a few yards of brick.

Some of the bases for sculpture are parts of the concrete slip that conveniently, still protrude.

One might call this a grass roots project were it not for the long shadow cast by the park's primary founder, Mark di Suvero, whose cantilevered and balanced beams have made him one of the country's foremost sculptors. In 1980 di Suvero began converting an old brick-handling facility in Queens into a studio. He soon spotted a rubblefilled site nearby, formed the nonprofit Athena Foundation, persuaded the city to lease the land for five years and raised some $200,000 to clear it and to mount an initial show.

Except for its distance from the Manhattan art scene, the site is first-rate. Across from the northern tip of Roosevelt Island and just south of treacherous Hell-Gate where the Harlem and East Rivers meet, the park commands a handsome view of Manhattan's skyline.

The works that were there two years ago are gone (the di Suvero that my companions scaled is now at the Univer-

sity of Michigan), so the visitor must take potluck. Unlike your run-of-the-mill sculpture park, where the collection is literally set in stone, the concept at Socrates is that of an outdoor museum: the works on view will change and rotate as would works in a gallery--although perhaps less frequently. Many constituencies are served: artists working large-scale, intrepid public-art viewers, and a neighborhood needing a cultural focal point. It's too bad the site is so remote that ordinary tourists won't be among those partaking.

by Monroe.Denton

HOLT: S~

Time Span (1981) Laguna Gloria Museum, Austin,

Texas

third sky, one-third sand, onethird water; then you ha.d the sun, too, so you had all the elements contained in your vision. 2 The pipe was five and one-half feet long and eight inches in diameter. Its installation had unexpected ecological benefits as well as aesthetic ones. Although the replacement of all plant life over the pipe was intlended, the discovery that the creation of this hole in effed gave longer life to the dune, which now had a passage for wind near its extreme point, was serendipitous.

Views Through a Sand

Dune is now destroyed, but With luck, grace and cooperation, the next few years will see the completion and installation of two large-scale projects by Nancy Holt, one in California and the other in New Jersey's Meadowlands. These should serve to solidify her position as a major creator of public spaces, which tend to be termed "sculptures" under traditional art guidelines.

At the 1984 dedication of Dark Star Park in Rosslyn, Virginia., Holt had this to say about the process of working in the public arena: Five years is a long time to sustain an art idea and work toward its realization. But during that time possibilities for other works have been evolving out of the intermediate stages, and my concern with the value of making art that is also functional and necessary in society has been reinforced. l Through the reverse telescope of completion, the fact that the California project was among the "other works" on the artist's mind on that occasion and that the Jersey commission began within three months thereafter assumes the coloration of irony Nancy Holt refers to her creations as being outside the realm of "art exchanges "(critical, economic or in galleries).

The first works were literally concealed. Buried Poems (1969-71) were located in scattered Florida, New Jersey and Utah sites. The artist had been moved to New Jersey at the age of three, but the first and last of these states are more intimately related in the public consciousness to the work of her late husband Robert Smithson. Holt's work has always diverged widely from that of Smithson and his closest successor Richard Serra. She operates at an especially great remove from the latter, whose production should most accurately be called works of art in public spltces, while her enterprise centers on public works ojart.

These two rubrics, adopted from National Endowment for the Arts program divisions, have a pertinence to Holt's enterprise. The former relates to what are essentially formalist-inspired, museum-centered works relocated into community space. Her own works are intended for a unique location to such a degree that movement, even to another location in the immediate area, would render them extraneous. Thus in the early stages, each project frequently includes an educational component that explains the exact natural and formal reasons for the work. These considerations in turn may lead to legal negotiations that negate the right of the community to move or alter the work in any respect after its completion. More than any other artist creating permanent large-scale works today, Nancy Holt's works are tributes to their sources--the life that generated them, the elements they shape . .

The sand dune on a peninsula of Narragansett Beach, Rhode Island, extended for about a half mile. A favorite track for seaside jogging, it blocked the view of the ocean on the land side, and the parallel Narragansett River with landscape ending in forest on the other. The dune's height, greater than the joggers, meant that on the river side, o~e could see the river, but heard the sound of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1972 Holt placed a length of pipe through the dune approximately six feet from its edge.

Suddenly there was this hole in the dune; it drew people. It's fascinating that way, the phenomenon of it-you don't have a sign saying "This is art"-yet people would relate to it as the product of another rational human being. It pretty much divided the view into one-

its basic elements continue throughout Holt's work and should find their climax in the vast new acreage lOf Sky Mound, atop a New Jersey landfill. These elements are a concern for human scale (the five-and-one-half-foot pipe suggested the average height of a female or the average eye level of a male, as well as the suggested hanging level for pictures on exhibition), a desire to locate the observer in a nexus of creative elements, a relationship both causal and casual of the aesthetic to the natural, a consideration of and reflection on the phenomenology of perception, and a concern for both social and natural ecology.

Rational--sentient--humanity is the center of Holt's work. Her effects are plays on human perception. They do not so much test the definition of art as they do the awareness of cognition. The pipe in the Narragansett piece was a direct descendent from the "locators" which had determined much of the artist's earlier work. These were lengths of pipe through which one looked, in reenactment of the child's homemade telescope. Frequently, Holt would then record the field of one instance of vision through the pipe on existing architecture, either in outline form or by painting the entire area black. The resultant irregular ellipses are possessed of a muteness that subverts aesthetic distinctions, but that are very mueh outward manifestations of a physical process, the act of .. seeing.

The sand dune project marked a transfer of these studio observations into the public realm. The artist's memory of a division of the view into thirds--sand, water and sky--is a transformation of the physical reality that, in unobstructed space, we perceive the horizon as a division into two equal parts of the field of vision. The distiinction between the perceptual vertical of elementary visual experience and the conceptual horizontal on which reading occurs is conditioned by an empirical (and thus an historical) experience of gravity, which establishes a cerebral awareness of the body's location on the horizontal plane.3 Hydra's Head (1974) at Artpark, LeWistoDl, New York, placed six concrete pipes, each three feet deep, on a precipice 200 feet above the Niagara River. The six resultan t stagnant pools were aligned to recall the head al!ld part of the neck of the southern constellation Hydra. Thle selection ¡of this particular constellation was determined through a predilection for its form; in order to accommodate the three sizes of pipes the artist wished to use for distinguishing the relative light magnitude of eaCh star she had to venture into the "neck" area of the star cluster. ~ Silt obscured the depth of the pools, which soon seemed to go "clear through to China.," even as it enhanced tlhe mirroring quality of the surface. Contemplating these surfaces, seemingly calm but constantly changing in response to heavenly reflection, the viewer experiences a s,e nsory dislocation, since the torrential roar of the river below establishes another experience of the same element, water.

A visitor's encounter, first of vision then auditory of the same element, relates to the culturally estrangi.ng experience (based on metaphysics rather than materialism) of seeing the sky in the face of the earth.

It took me until about 1980 to figure out that I WllS always bringing the sky down to earth. I didn't ev~!n know I was doing that. It dawned on me when I was doing Star-Crossed. I work a lot on that unconsciious level. On the other hand, I'm verbal; I like to think and

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8

all that. The work .has content. Even my use of circles; when I do lectures, I get these people saying, "I see you're into some kind of abstract geometry, where the circle's very important." Well, that's not it at all, thE. circle is an extension of the eye. If you're going to deal with water, are you going to make it square? Or with the sun?

To Nancy Holt, it is clear, the circle is not a shape. It is the very subject of her works--the circle and cycles.

This empirical approach collapses the temporal experience of acculturation into a sensate human with a visceral force that is akin to mythologizing. The artist resorts to a historical device, the star map, to stabilize an intellectual awareness that could surely lead a viewer to madness: When we look at the heavens, who (other than Carl Sagan) dares contemplate the chaotic infinity we see? Human rationality requires that the horizontal convention of the map establish a space between the universes, both spatial and temporal--life and death--that separates the stars.

Star-Crossed (1979-81), on the campus of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, not only stimulated the artist to rethink her elements but also revealed her persistence.

The school had originally invited the artist and architect Frank Gehry for a special ait-and-architecture residency, and Holt created a work during this time. When the earlier work was destroyed, she decided to create another in its place; the resulting Star-Crossed required two years of consistent labor, raising funds, and recruiting volunteer labor (mostly architecture students who, unaccustomed to the actual act of building, produced numer<>us problems in the shorings of the concrete pipes).

A lot of the commissions that I've had were not very large, and I would just sort of move with them. I'd get people to donate things, and I'd get contractors to do things for nothing, and trucks I'd get donated. It's a way of working that's never dealt with; you never read about it in the art magazines. It really needs to be investigated. It's a way of working in the world, of extending yourself as an artist through other people, through lots of different processes that aren't typical to an artist..â&#x20AC;˘.

A lot of that wheeling and dealing, and being part of the society, with people believing in you, sensing that you really care about what you're doing, that's kind of a social interaction....

In order to get my works done, I'm brought into these areas. I don't go into them, like what I call "sociological artists" such as Christo and even Hans Haacke to a certain extent, or some feminists who make a life out of that. I do it because it's necessary in order to get my art done. I discuss it as part of my process, but it isn't the thing that's critical to me. It's just part of the process .of getting the works done.

During her first residency, Holt had discovered that Oxford, Ohio, is on of the few places on earth where magnetic north and heavenly north (polaris, the North Star) nearly coincide. This coincidence is marked by an extremely elliptical pool (19 by 7 feet) in which the sky is contained when viewed through the upper of two concrete tunnels.

The lower, on the east-west axis, offers a passage, being seven feet in diameter. By walking up the earthen ramp on the side of the mound and looking through the smaller tunnel "locator," one can again experience the disturbing effect of the sky brought to earth. Ted Castle has observed that "The tunnel and locator are built into a large mound reminiscent of the Indian mounds that were built along rivers in prehistory throughout the Midwest."6 However, the crudely steep incline suggests that this reading is an individual one, based on one critic's determination to link perception and history in a meaningful. structure.

Public art, by definition, stabilizes. But, what does it stabilize? Historically, one may cite Michelangelo's placement of an antique Roman equestrian bronze in the Campidoglio as a fixing of the identity of Marcus Aurelius, a notable persecutor of early Christians, within the center of the Christian world, and thus comprehend the revolutionary accommodation of the individual and his government within the Eternal (now read: Heavenly) City (Christian, hydra-headed in its capacity for absorption/modification/transformation, no longer Jerusalem, home of the much more legalistic Judaism).6 Postmodernism has rejected the concept of communal stability in its fascination with commodification, which is based on the violation of community boundaries through circulation; not for the contemporary world the signifying power of a Garibaldi in every village. Holt recognizes that the act of observation in itself stabilizes the observer in a confusing

CULPTING THE EL circulation that is the community. Her works facilitate the transformation of individual consciousness, with its roots in perception, to result in some clarity of the moment. The circular locator is her trope for the organ of vision: I like to think of us as having these two perfect little spheres in our heads.

These" spheres, " the eyes, are of course kept in their shape by the circulation of blood in relative pressure throughout their membranes. In a world without shared, beliefs, the perceived reality of the act of viewing is the best one can hope.

The pupil of the eye which receives through a very small round hole the images of bodies situated beyond this hole always receives them upside down, and the visual faculty always sees them upright as they are.

And this proceeds from the fact that the said images pass through the center of the crystalline sphere situated in the middle of the eye; in this center they unite in a point and then spread themselves out upon the opposite surface of this sphere without deviating from their course; and the images direct themselves upon this surface according to the object that has caused them, and from thence they are taken by the impression and transmitted to the common sense where they are judged.

-Leonardo7

In effect, art in public spaces with its belief in the object itself, functions as the "eye".of the body of the community. By activating the larger field of nature rather than exclusively that of culture, Holt's public works oj art call attention to the space beyond themselves, inducing the experience of constructing for the viewer, making the individual aware of the subjective construction of the subject.

The image of every object is changed in the mirror so that its right side is opposite to the left of the object reflected and similarly the left to the right ...• And this effect in the mirror would be as though someone who was looking at you, someone, that is, who has the left eye' opposite to your right, were as by a miracle transposing left and right as in the case with letters used in stamping and wax which takes the impression of the cornelian.

-Leonardo8

The intellectual/emotional process of cognition spurred by the physiological act of seeing yields the meaning of a specific art experience. Ted Castle thus sees StarCrossed as Indian-related [sic], and it is certainly true that the experience of the oval reflective water surface summons the Native American adage that pools of water are the eyes of the earth to the mind. The specific reading remains o~e's own. The title may equally refer to Shakespeare's most noted lovers, and the lower tunnel has no doubt provided a trysting place for many campus couples. The common experience is that of viewing, accompanied by a sense of displacement induced by the artist's structure.

The reference system indicated by Holt's works recalls the origins of culture in the conscious division of earthly space into a twenty-four-hour clock. It is this awareness of the circular nature of time that distinguishes the rational human. In today's world the perspective that marks that time is increasingly internalized. One doesn't have to look ".that far, " unless one chooses. At times the artist has purposely evoked narrower histories. In Time Span (1981) at the Laguna Gloria Museum, Austin, Texas, the light shining through what would be the center of a wrought iron wheel free to rotate within a stucco wall, whose profile and material echo colonial Spanish missions common to the area, aligns with a black steel core in the ground at 2:00 p.m. every April 5, the date of the work's completion. Since the date and time are also coincidentally the anniversary of the artist's birth, the work celebrates both its own and its maker's existence. In DarkStar Park, shadows mark a more communally significant event.

The shadows cast by the poles and spheres line up with the asphalt shadow patterns on the ground at approximately 9:32 a.m. on August 1 each year, the day in 1860 that William Henry Ross acquired the land that became Rosslyn, merging historical time with the cyclical time of the sun. 9

This subtle elevation of experience is rare today, but it was the basis of such works as the A ra Pacis, now totally decontextualized in its museum shed, or in another way, 10 of Tatlin's Monument proposal of 1919-20.

ENTS

The modern world is one in which the original physical division of time is metaphorized "Time is Mon4ey," the system of circulation that unites the community; :and one perceives space by its rupture. Here Holt's encllaves of cosmic regularity do stabilize. They are provocations to ecstasy, taking that term in its original meaning from the Greek eksto,sis, from ek 'out' and histanai 'to plac:e' or "a being put out of its space," by definition a shift into timelessness. First, natural elements are articulated (named and recognized); next, they are displaced and transferred into a specific visual field. That field offers the viewer an opportunity to constitute a personalized and thus uniquely specific experience through an awareness of the source, metaphysical or historical. It is no wonder that the supine position is characteristic of ecstasy. Freed of the! bounds of gravity, one enters the realm of pure vision, released from the culturally determined ground of reading.

Both the California and New Jersey projects should illustrate the cycles of time--nature, history, life--in Holt's work and create the opportunity to expand the discourse on public sculpture. For the Natural Elements Siculpture (NES Park) in Santa Monica, the artist will constrUictSolar Web, a 16-foot-high open pavilion that is 32 feet in diameter as the central element of an 84-by-52-foot enclavEl. Its 12 points surrounding an open circle bear a distinct resemblance to the Native American ideogram for the sun, although they are actually the products of the artiBt's playing with solstice angles (300 from East and West). Within this precinct a raised black circular concrete platform, topped with thick rubber matting to cushion playing and falls, is to be placed off-center to align with the circle of sunlight that will be projected by the overhead ring once yearly, on the occasion of solar noon on the summer solstice. This platform will no doubt serve as seating and offer space for improvised performances on a site abutting notorious Venice Beach. Three black semicircles in the sand, at a mandated 300 feet inland from the high tide, will mark the location of sunsets on the equinoxes and summer and winter solstices.

Solo,r Web will be open yet enclosing, serious :!l.Dd eternal, yet with sufficient space for play. Painted a black that will set it apart and frame the natural beach colors and shapes, it will also take into·account the phenomenon that most shapes seen against the strong California sun appear black from a distance. A love for the site and a respect for the civic dedication of those involved in the project has allowed Holt to persist in her vision for Solar Web for six years. The final piece should afford combinations of both formality and casualness that are appropriate to public recreation.

Sky Mound represents the first landfill closure and

reclamation project anywhere that would transform an enormous mountain of solid waste into an "artwork."

Sky Mound, however, breaks from art's mainstream, incorporating educational and recreational facilities with functional technology in a unique park setting.. The work will function as a naked-eye observatory, a methane recovery system and an extension of tbe Hackensack Meadowlands Environment Center facillities with controlled group access only. Millions of other people will enjoy Sky Mound from nearby vantl.ge points including area highways, rail lines and j~ir corridors. l1

The landfill that is the raw material of her ~!Culpture was first created in the '60s and reopened in the '80s. The literal foundation of the work is a palimpsest of rolling papers and peace tracts, stock reports and prophylactics.

There is an eerie appropriateness to this in that fche moon will be caught in the "moon loops" (curved pipe over methane well heads) for six months every 18.61 years; the last time it would have achieved alignment was in 1988.

We are thus reminded that history, being a construct, is true to the constructing consciousness, whereas nature is characterized by cycles that are living, hence irregular to our perceptions.

The park is a symphonic arrangement of Holt's elemental themes. Surrounded by water, it will contain spinning cyclone ventilators to mark the passag-e of the wind, an eternal flame burning methane produced by decomposition underneath, and star-viewing mOlmds, one of which is split in half and flanked by gabions to :mark the solstices and equinox. On the equinox observers on top of the mound will be able to view the sun rising from behind the Chrysler Building. Two pairs of posts and two mounds will offer north and south orientation to the visitor. All of

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9

this is arranged into a landscape of almost lunar stillness and isolation.

The slurry moat walls, 30 feet Geep, have been poured around the 57-acre island mound, which is 100 feet high.

A land drainage system, leachate and methane collection systems, and a utility road (all functioning elements of the final design) are in place. A plastic covering will seal off the garbage, and new soil on top will serve as the basis for a nature preserve open on a limited basis. Migratory birds already mark the hillock, visible to 125 million commuters a year from the New Jersey Turnpike, railways for Amtrak and New Jersey Transit, or on the landing approaches for Newark Airport. Many elements of the fi.nal sculpture will be functional. The pond across which the southern orientation is visible is in fact a necessary drainage area. Loops of pipe eight feet tall serve to mark the reclamation of methane. The open flame, which rhymes with the eternal hells of New Jersey's nearby refineries, is evidence of the recovery of methane, to be sold to the New Jersey public utility over 10 to 15 years, recovering an estimated $3 million.

Nancy Holt's work presents public function as public sculpture. It does not represent. It is real rather than ideal, operating by an extension of the individual consciousness rather than evoking lost historical or political achievements. Its simplicity, based on experience rather than formalism or connoisseurship, offers a present with a promise, if only partial and incomplete, of a future. Its regularity is natural, not positivist, and in the irregularities that escape perception, it forces recourse to a sense of mythology, community-sharing. Sited on the edges of urban space, the sculpture elements literally rise above that space. Its forms are literally functional; they do not represent nor do they derive from functionalism. They touch the communal space lightly, claiming th~ horizon for observation and subject.

I Holt's work occurs at the moment of alcritical split in the discourse of sculpture in which gallery works and their issues of commodification occupy center stage. It is no longer possible to bring these conceptual concerns into alignment with those of public service, literally the ethos-the spirit ofthe community. Nancy Holt is creating a body of works of such elemental concerns that they themselves function as the critique, returning to the sources, locating the individual. Alignment--acceptance-·heightens perception. The resultant recognition parallels the pleasure of morality, derived from a momentary alignment of the self with the community, the ethical, the shared language. At the root of this ethic, this language, is the relationship to the (constructed, hence) perceived cosmos.

Experience is the continuous resonating of nature and culture, the awareness of the extension of perception into visible form. To contemplate Holt's work is to accept the possibility of individual centering experiences in communally marginal areas. The visitor functions as a potential matrix for manifold electrochemical changes that transform awareness into an extension of consciousness, sprung from and bounded by convention in a way that repeats the sculptures' transformation of infinity into the reading space of cognition. The rational visitor is transformed into a viewer.

Twice each year, on the equinox, visitors to Sky Mound will be able to view the spectacle of the sun, rise from behind the Art Deco Chrysler Building, appear to balance atop the pinnacle of the Empire State building, then free itself.

Notes: 1. Holt, Nancy, ·Comment.; Dark Star Park dedicatory broehare, Roulyn, Virginia, 19M. .

2. All quotationa by Nancy Holt are from a conv......tion tnnKribed by Monroe Denton on Dec.mber 9, 1988; thOle thJ.t follow are I>Ot attributed In the text.

S. Th. apprehenalou of the vertical and horizontal u expheated In; MonU, Robert, 'Aligned with Nazca,'Ar\{"""" XIV, October, 1975, pp. 26-39.

4. The conatellation Hydra waa choeen purely for _thetic reaaona; Holt aays that abe wall unaware that Robert Smithson, her late huaband, had ehooen the aame con· stellation for the work docum.nted In hi. Un1l4tUm Ma.p 0/tA. .",..t.eUati<m H"tra..

Equally serendipltoua wall the f""t that Hydra I. a water-uaociated goddeN. 5. Cutle, Ted, 'Nancy Holt, Sit.eoeer; Arti"Am4Mea, LXX, Mueh,1982, pp.M·91.

6. In doing 00, the identity of the work..,... fixed aa that of .. specific pe ...... utor of Chrislhns--an outsider. Eulier aseriptiOD5 had been to CoD5t&ntine, the Ari&n Theodoric; Antoni ... PI ... or his adoptive f..ther Hadrian, builder of the Pantheon; even Septemius Severus, conqueror of Byza.ntium, &II previoualy a.maIgamated into the religious tradition.

7. TIws NoUbooks 0/ L""""rdo, tn.nslat.ed by Edward MacCnrdy, New York: Braziller, VoL I, Chapter IX, 'Optiea; p. 219.

8. Ibid., 220.

9. See note 1.

10. For .. disenasion of the An Pacia ....: Settis, Salvatore, 'An Pacia,' F'MR, No. 8, January/Fehruary 1985, pp. 98-116 11. Holt, Naucy, 'Proposal' for Sky Mcw.tlII., 1984.

SSISSIPPI RIVERFRONT

Minneapolis has already redeveloped much ofthe Rivetfront. How does public artfit into the plan?

MINNEAPOLIS

Linking Development with Culture

by Phill Lin&ay Why do we need public art, and why especially along the Mississi'ppi riverfront? Because it's there? To keep up with Seattle, Boston, Stockholm? Because we can't think of other venues for art or llses for the riverfront?

There are a number of good reasons to establish a meaningful, community-building program of public art along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Difficult questions, both functional and cultural, will need to be asked and answered. For whom and at what cost do we proceed?

What opportunities do we miss if we don't proceed, or if we do? Are we assured of a successful effort? Who decides--public officials, residents, elite decision-makers, artists?

The Mississippi was the source of the settlement we now call Minneapolis. Its origin and geologic changes over time proceeded from the flow of glacial meltwater. Magnificent falls on the site of contemporary Saint Paul receded upriver to Saint Anthony Falls, as well as the falls of Minnehaha Creek.

Although Dakota Native Americans, and later the Ojibway, were interested in and made use of the river, their homes were closer to lakes. Cloud Man's Village was at what is now called Lake Calhoun in south Minneapolis.

Important burial sites, such as the one at Indian Mounds Bluff, overlooked the river. European explorers and immigrants made use of the river and falls. For military purposes Fort Snelling was constructed on a high bluff guarding the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. The Mill City was built on logging, flour and cloth production powered by Saint Anthony Falls, later harnessed for electricity.

Only recently has the city begun to focus on the river for more social and commercial purposes. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) controls most of the public land along the Mississippi where it passes through the city. The Minneapolis Community Development Agency, through its Riverfront Development Team, is focusing on redevelopment efforts. Other significant parties along the river include the Army Corps of Engineers, the University of Minnesota, and numerous neighborhood and communityorganizations. From the Camden neighborhood in North Minneapolis, to the Sheridan in Northeast; from the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood in Southeast, to the Seward and Hiawatha communities in South Minneapolis, resi-

dents are concerned about use of and development along the river.

While the political potential for a public art program along the Mississippi is at least as high as ever before, the process of developing such a program will be the key to its implementation. Given local sensibilities and activism, an unthoughtful imposition of public art could sabotage the effort . A prime motivation for a public art initiative should be to reflect a uniquely Minneapolis experience. This could be done for three reasons that also would serve as rationales for the program: 1. An artistic community of high ability exists in. the city. A compelling case could be made that quality art in itseJf is both possible and of intrinsic value.

2. The process of citizen participation in formulating

The Riverfront eeln become the nexus of downtown and neighborhood Above: Forgotten Journey development.

(1985) by Janet Lofquist on an island in the Mississippi.

a public art program could serve as a community development tool. Since no broad constituency exists, involving artists along with residents, workers, the public sector ,and private development interests would not only facilitate the program, but it also could knit together a community only loosely related today.

3. There are topographic and historic opportunities inherent in the Mississippi valley as a site. As a border to neighborhoods, a thoroughfare connecting the city, and a landmark both physical and metaphorical, the river and activity along it could serve as a bridge across space and over time. The program could speak to our diverse heritage :and to our potential. It could become an organizing dynamic for a unique urban manifesto.

A number of specific opportunities exist for programming art along the river. The river can become the nexus of downtown and neighborhood development. The North Loop, Central Community, St. Anthony, Marcy-Holmes and Cedar-Riverside communities are the connective transitions from downtown to the river as well as to other parts of the city. The downtown riverfront, now called the MissiEsippi Mile, could provide'a strong link between the West Bank Theatre District and the Warehouse District with its art galleries.

Public Art Review 10

Public art can serve a placemaking function. Visual and performance art, along with the performing and variety arts can provide direction, orientation, connection and animation. That very animation serves another purpose: t~ngulation, which provides a stimulus for a link between unrelated people. The riverfront itself, in becoming more culturally rich, would provide a powerful focus among the existing and emerging activity centers in downtown Minneapolis: the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, the retail/hospitality corridor, the Warehouse District, Loring Park and the Minneapolis ScUlpture Garden, the new Convention Center, and even the future Timberwolves sports arena. The significant amount of downtown housing should not be overlooked as a potential source of an audience.

It's not a given that we can expect immediate involvement from residents for a public art program. Community activists in North MiJ;)neapolis, for example, express appreciation for arts resource plans for their neighborhoods, but see boarded-up housing, vacant lots and unsafe play areas for children as more critical problems. We need to be as creative in addressing public concerns as in making the art we want to place along the Mississippi. Camille Gage's WARM Gallery show on the homeless, Pat Young's 26th Street Project, Nancy Raddatz' West St. Paul dance classes for blind children and Down' s syndrome children, the In the City Arts workshops, and the Col way Theatre Trust, among other exemplary programs, show that it can be done.

A principal concern for the arts community will be to maintain aesthetic independence and creative vigor in light of subsidized activity. While accomplishing a public purpose, how can dependance on public support be avoided? If taxpayers support the creation of art for a community purpose, then the cultural sector must balance delivery of its end of the bargain with artistic and imaginative credibility.

The community, through whatever surrogate bodies are chosen to support a public art program, must also articulate its objectives. Among public value questions to be resolved are these: Could specific investments be made privately? Are specific projects recognized as public assets? Are costs covered appropriately? Are benefits distributed equitably?

It will be necessary to build public awareness of the value of a riverfront public art program. Sharing identification with such a project will go a long way toward implementing it. Sectional fears and special interest sniping are probably inevitable, but perhaps could be mitigated.

A list of interested parties includes artists, arts community spokespeople, cultural community veterans and historians, funders (public and private), workers, residents, neighborhood organizations, the MPRB, designers, planners, developers, engineers, maintenance workers, public works staff, policymakers, various city staff familiar with the arts and their cultural context, the Army Corps of Engineers, and University of Minnesota officials. It will be important to work with experienced and credible public and private advisory bodies including the Minneapolis Arts Commission, local Project Area Review Committees, and Forecast Public Artspace Productions.

Some agreement on objectives and goals must be reached. Proposals should paint the ideal picture, outline opportunities, be up-front about options and implications, and identify competing interests. These considerations are important to policymakers and anyone allocating money. If such people feel unaware, or are blind sided by criticism, their interest can shut down quickly.

A wide participation should be encouraged to define language, terms, assumptions, expectations, constraints and options in a consensus-building process with proactive information dissemination. Decision-making can be narrow when values are clear and common, especially regarding technical means, but should be broader when issues are more ambiguous.

Public art exists in a larger framework of urban design, and a number of contexts should be considered, including the political, where values are argued, and the technical, where relatively value-free means are mobilized to achieve determined ends. In this context an inventory of the site and city could be made, including inherent demands, dimensions and possibilities. An assessment of the local visual orientation also could be made, including

coloration, special rhythms and horizontallverticai patterns. An overall impression or feeling, though subjective, should be discussed. Long-term results of a public art program as it relates to the city infrastructure, both social and physical, should be considered.

A context of resolution, in which mutually agreeable objectives are put together for all parties concerned, also is needed. Along the riverfront the appropriate transition from neighborhood to downtown, and the level of activity for visitors, residents and workers will need to be resolved.

The definitive nature of a Minneapolis-oriented public art could contribute to this exercise. A balance of public and private activity needs to be reached. Another context is . of "urban guardianship, " in which the old, the new and the possible are integrated; in which the quality of life is enhanced while it is celebrated. It is here where the proposed emphasis of a Minneapolis riverfront art program could be both a means and an end.

Urban design considerations will include: legibility-how images are presented to residents and visitors; quality--a subjective appreciation for the aesthetic integrity of works, including their materials and long-term maintenance; an experiential framework--how participants perceive their activity over time; significance-how the program contributes to the character of the district and the city; continuity-¡the relation of each work to another and to the riverfront district; and visual scope~how elements provide definition and placement. Doubtless there will be other standards for the art as more parties articulate their interest.

One of the values of developing a community participation process, in addition to building an appropriate constituency to press for implementation, would be the creation of a medium that could evaluate the program over time. Careful examination of results would complete the loop of interest and responsibility. The program could be enhanced and motivation furthered; a better, "living" program could evolve.

Public art is not usually art by the people. If public values ,and sensibilities are integrated with a riverfront program it could fit into a unique social framework, stimulating exploration for similar dynamics in other sectors. It may end up being oj the people, as well asjor the people.

MISSISSIPPI MILE

A Tale of Two Parks

by Melissa Stang Twin Cities artists have long had a nostalgic relationship with the mighty Mississippi. It's been largely a case of proximity, as artists have tended to homestead in old industrial neighborhoods near the river in Minneapolis and St. Paul. While fancy renovation projects were still slumbering in the minds of future urban developers, artists were reclaiming historic buildings, wandering the river shoreline, and contemplating the area's interesting past.

When I first took a studio in downtown Minneapolis, I was amazed at the amount of undisturbed woods which lined the Mississippi shoreline and lay virtually in my own backyard. Prior to the fashionable rediscovery of this neighborhood, the Warehouse District abruptly fell off into fields and woods on its north side. Here downtown ended and a "secret wilderness" began, familiar to bums who camped. among the secluded stretches of trees and local residents who explored the fields and rocky shoreline.

It was the best of both worlds: urban living in close proximity to downtown with the "country" just a couple hundred yards away.

Things have changed in recent years. Old commercial buildings formerly rented as inexpensive studios have been transformed into pricey condominiums, rents have been raised and artists muscled out. The woods near the river have been bulldozed, fields leveled into flat expanses of dirt and rubble, and the winding bum trails paved over to provide cobblestone walkways and bike paths. I'm told that the river area has been reclaimed and made "usable" by transforming this wild stretch of shoreline into an attractive city park. Yet, the resulting development sad-

dens me. Its very emphasis Karen Bacig with her River on usability is problematic, GodMss Sculpture (1988) on as it takes into consideration the Missis:sippi. only a certain kind of use--a playground aesthetic which assumes that all we might want to do in a beautiful landscape is to skateboard through or to regard the scene from a moving car. This asphalt thoroughfare, West Hiver Parkway, is built on a misguided premise: to superimpose a recreational system upon a site rather than preserve the inherent appeal of an area.

The specific shortcomings of West River Parkway, known as the "Missis-sippi Mile" become obvious when compared to a more successful example of a similar riverfront park nearby, Father Hennepin Bluffs Park on the east riverbank just downstream from St. Anthony Falls, the central site where the city of Minneapolis was fOWlded.

Call it a "Tale of Two Parks" --one that works harmoniously with the givens of the environment and one that dOE!sn't.

Both are significant amenities for the Mississippi riverscape in Minneapqlis, but each has different responses to key concepts: potential audience, environmental concerns, and the relationship to local history. It's not surprising, then, that the critically different goals of t hese parks have influenced public artworks situated in them-sometimes positively, sometimes adversely.

Indigenous Minnesota Sculpture, a temporary installation sponsored in 1985 by Forecast: Creative Alliance for Public Art , placed a number of interesting artworks along the east riverbank area of Father Hennepin Bluffs lPark, Nicollet Island, and the retail complexes of Riverplace and St. Anthony Main on the old Main Street. The sites proved to be an especially hospitable context for the many pieces that reflected upon Minnesota's social, ecological or industrial history. The site-specific works of artists .Janet Loftquist and Valerie Frank were the most impressive.

Loftquist's resplendent copper-lined boat was suspended in a: dark lead-lined grave dug along the banks of Ni,collet Island. It was strategically pointed towards the river as though on reserve for some future journey. While Loftquist's piece spoke metaphorically about water journeys and indirectly about the area's rich history of river transportation, Frank's piece focused upon the dver's fetid backwaters and about what is hidden, decaying and dying.

Frank intentionally chose a most unappealing site, a stagnant and foul backwater clogged with rotting logs and covered with green slime. This fetid water emanated from beneath a crumbling stone cavern which seemed to vomit forth forgotten industrial wastes. From the dredges of this mess Frank attempted a transformation. Painted logs levitated from their stagnant graveyard and rose skyward into a dancing mass of lurid green bone-like sticks. Hidden within the cool dark foliage of Father Hennepin Bluffs Park, Frank's piece surprised unsuspecting visitors to this secluded location.

Along the West River Parkway, an artist has recently installed a permanent piece with similar site-specific concerns. Karen Bacig's stone and gravel earthwork addresses the powers of the Mississippi by suggesting the passing of geological time and the processes of erosion and sedimentation. Large yellow-ochre sandstone boulders (native to the area and containing invertebrate fossils) have been selectively chipped, shaped, and strategically positioned within a long shallow trench. This curving gravel-filled depression with its fan-like fingered tail suggests a flowing current of water, in which softly rolling waves of pebbles are worn smooth and deposited at the river's mouth.

Although the artist undoubtedly intended some degree of assimilation with the site, this piece seems stran-

Public Art Review 11

gely invisible as anything other than routine landscaping. My impression is that the bland homogeneity of the park itself has swallowed the artwork and erased its presence. It doesn't help that Bacig"s carefully chiseled boulders ambiguously hover between asserting their naturalness and the artist's aesthetic manipulation. Given the circumstances (mcluding the close proximity of manicured shrubbery), these boulders easily read as an extension of the landscape plan rather than as elements of an artwork with something larger to communicate.

It's hard to respond to the subtlety of Karen Bacig's piece given the nature of its location--an overly landscaped, carefully posed environment which throws this artificiality back on the artwork. The Mississippi Mile, or W cst River Parkway, has been intended to civilize, homogenize and unnaturalize a beautifully wild section of the river, turning it into a scenic picture posj;card designed to be viewed from a moving car. In fact, the whole emphasis of the park is strangely geared towards what is to be 1Jeen from predetermined frames of reference rather than independently experienced. This pictorialiZation of the river environment has precipitated the overdevelopment which characterizes the parkway. "When in doubt, pave it over or tear it out" appears to have been the motto, as far too many trees, brush and sections of indigenous plants have been unnecessarily removed. In their place are neat little rows of shrubbery, manicured tress, and sodded picnic areas. In order to assure easy viewing of Nicollet Island, Riverplace and St. Anthony Main, the numerous trees that hugged the river's steep banks have been thinned down to a fraction of their original number.

The plowing over of large fields that have remained unused is a needless devastation of a habitat that formerly housed pheasants, groundhogs and other wildlife. Since the bulldozers first appeared, the noticeable increase in dislocated wildlife has been astounding. The building housing my studio borders on railroads tracks that intersect the park and a remaining wooded area, and animals seem to have used the tracks as a route of escape. The hundred-yard stretch of wooded hillside has recently been filled to capacity, forced to house a diverse population of animals that were formerly dispersed over a wide range of river shoreline. The woodchuck population has tripled, a family of skunks sought refuge in our toolshed, and large raccoons have taken to raiding the dumpster. My cats have brought me bushels of garter snakes, my neighbor saw a fox, and I witnessed a huge owl in broad daylight slowly flapping down the railroad tracks in the direction of downtown. The only animals stubbornly remaining in the park are a pair of pheasants which make sudden furtive dashes from one patch of cover to the next. .

By comparison, Father Hennepin Bluffs Park is a prime example of an urban park that successfully preserves both the history and ecology of the site in a harmonious, unobtrusive way. Like ancient ruins, a number of mysterious old structures testify to the river's former role for early industry. Abandoned stone bridges, decaying wooden chutes, and crumbling hollow caverns linked to the old G1:>ld Medal flour mill (which was powered by the falls) haven't been politely restored, but have been allowed to exist as enigmatic clues. One enters this park along rough wooden staircase$ which descend the steep shale bluffs covered with trickling water, wet moss and the fragrance of damp vegetation. These steps quickly yield to natural terrain and narrow dirt paths, with arched wooden bridges spanning a still pool inhabited by beaver and carp slowly churning the muddy bottom. Animals have not been uprooted, they've been accommodated through the preservation of their habitat. Beavers boldly squat in the middle of paths munching tender young growth or paddle lazily during intermittent foraging sprees. Woodpeckers, ducks and all manner of songbirds are readily visible. A resident mink even kept Valerie Frank company while she was installing her piece for In,. digenous Minnesota Sculpture, zipping about in the slimy green water and darting underneath floating debns.

Continued on next page

NOW WE REMEMBER

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The appeal of Father Hennepin Bluffs Park is that its use has not been predetermined in the manner of the West River Parkway. Paths have been provided as initial starting points from which we're free to break off from, while dense undisturbed vegetation creates isolation and privacy. The greenery is allowed to grow thick and close to these walkways, and visitors have created their own access to river shoreline by trampling down new paths. By comparison, everything in the West River Parkway is open, exposed and loudly public. Our choices concerning use are strongly directed as paved concrete paths lead us in one direction or another, numerous park benches show us where to sit and what scenic vista to contemplate, while standing grills and picnic tables indicate where we should congregate and otherwise enjoy ourselves. There are very few areas that we'd want to explore anyway, since the developers have eradicated any trace of undisturbed naturalness that would invite trailblazing. Recreational accessibility can be a worthwhile goal when balanced by other considerations. I use this park on a regular basis, and have observed the process of development along my morning jogging route. It is possible, however, to design a park that is both recreationally usable, aesthetically attractive, and environmentally sound. Once again, it's necessary to look at Father Hennepin Bluffs Park as an example.

Riverplace and St. Anthony Main, with their shopping and condominiums near Father Hennepin Bluffs Park, have structured their appeal around the ambience of the historic riverfront. Exclusive shops and expensive restaurants draw clientele rarely dressed for a hike along the rocky river shoreline. The developers have taken this into consideration and created public spaces for everyone, the well-dressed visitor in high heels as well as someone like myself who comes specifically to wander among the bluffs and backwaters. This riverfront development is successful because it has accommodated different audiences and different potentials for use. This transition is fluid and sensible, moving from well-maintained paved paths with benches to more rough and natural ones, the farther one gets from heavily trafficked areas. These varying degrees of recreational wning do not require the large-scale demolition of trees and vegetation. They've been thinned out where necessary, but left undisturbed where it wasn't.

This is the antithesis of West River Parkway, which has bulldozed everything over without allocating any space to the visitor interested in more habitat and less concrete.

Trees like to grow thick along the riverbanks, enjoying the abundant supply of water while stemming the process of erosion. Yet, the amount of trees removed along West River Parkway, to provide a convenient view for passing motorists, has left the once wooded banks a vulnerable wasteland dotted with rubble, stumps and windswept garbage. This is not only unattractive, but ecologically shortsighted.

Rivers are something you approach in a special fashion. The experienceofariver has alot to do with walking through cover until you get that first breathtaking glimpse; not casually driving by as though passing a billboard. You know you're close when the incline changes, there's a break in the treeline, and you start to hear the sound of the water.

The Mississippi will continue to be a source of inspiration for many artists--public artists in particular who are drawn to its banks and backwaters to install their works.

Yet, what kind of public art can give a sensitive response to the Mississippi-as-site when it's been transfonned into the Mississippi-as-picture? When the landscape itself has become aesthetized within a carefully choreographed frame, aesthetic objects can lose effect, becoming indistinguishable from the environment they inhabit. No matter how well integrated, public art requires a degree of difference from its location to function for it to begin a dialogue with its site.

For future public art projects along the Mississippi River in Minnesota, artists need to be acutely aware of the compromising ability of an already aesthetically manipulated environment, and perhaps include this as part of their critique. Artists and others need to vocalize responses to the development of river environments, and perhaps become involved in the planning process--especially when those projects have neither our nor the environment's best interest in mind.

Kellogg Mall Park Icon by Cliff Garten with George Mason and Karyn Sproles.

design team was unconvinced, a large committee (made up of city officials, citizens, and community art advocates) agreed that the artist's plan for the paths was both ideologically and aesthetically preferable.

Another type of collaboration occurred between Garten and other artists that he invited to work with him. To mark the site's historical significance, he proposed sculptures for several areas of the park that would be commemorative as well as integral to the overall design.

Rather than explain the significance of the place with a monument or history lesson, Garten's idea was to "pick important symbols that access history and let them be." His strategy was to create symbols accompanied by text that suggests their historical significance. With city approval, Garten invited artist George Mason to work with him on the design of iconographic reliefs that will be set into the walkways of the park, and he asked me to assist him in collecting additional historical information and in writing the text that will surround the reliefs and four granite sculptures to be set in the chapel site.

One of the three situations in which text is used is at the top and bottom of iconographic reliefs that will be set into the "History Walk." There are six images: oak leaves, a campfire, a trap, wheat, a steel bridge, and a dragonfly resting on a computer circuit. The images were chosen to evoke the experience of settling a wilderness. I wanted the text to imply a narrative in which the reader has a role

THE WILDERNESS KELLOGG MALL PARK

Design Team Experiment

by Karyn Sproles When the city of Saint Paul decided to renovate Kellogg Mall Park, a dramatic space on top of a bluff along the Mississippi River, one of the major concerns first addressed by the city was how to use art in the space to stress the historic significance of the site and to emphasize its location as a boundary between the city and the river. Artist Cliff Garten was brought in near the beginning of the project, in late 1987, to work with the city's landscape architects in the Division of Parks and Recreation. This was a crucial hiring decision, not only because it evidenced the city's commitment to the arts, but also because of the timing and extent of the artist's involvement. Instead of placing art in the park, art was to be integrated ilnto the planning of the park renovation from its coneeption through its realization (the projected date for completion of the park is August, 1989). Gatten's role as artist has not been simply to create a piece of art for the park, but also to be a part of the design team.

Garten had worked on the issue of public art before entering the project and was aware of the confliets and compromises such an undertaking would involve. Working with the Parks and Recreation Division was an opportunity for him to test his ideas about spaee and collaboration. The Parks and Recreation Division, on the other hand, had been instructed by the city to incllude an artist in the project. This shotgun marriage Sâ&#x201A;Ź!t up a relationship in which Garten felt he had to struggle to claim space for himself in the design process. He wanted to create a park that was itself sculptural and representative of the historical significance of the site. The division's agenda was simply to build a park.

Garten's first step was to find historical information about the site. He had begun research even before he was selected for the project, while serving on the Kellogg Mall Park Redesign Citizens' Advisory Committee established by the city. His research led him to emphasize several elements in the park design: the significance of the space as the symbolic founding site of Saint Paul (the location of the city's first chapel founded in 1841 by Father Lucien Galtier, who also changed the city's name from Pig's Eye to Saint Paul); the relationship of the site to the rest of the city as the only remaining sightline from the river to the Capitol building, down Cedar Street; and the relatiionship of the space to the river, and therefore as the edge of the city. Garten wanted to address these issues by creating a sculptural space instead of a monument.

In his original design for the project, the shape and grade of the park were emphasized by a trough in which water flowed down the entire length of the park's natural slope, paralleling the river below as a severe yet fluid boundary. The park would serve as a cultivated but open interface between nature and culture. Looking back at that proposal, landscape architect Tim Agness said that it was rejected not because it was impractical, but because the Parks department has a more traditional perspective on what elements can be used to arrange space that people have become comfortable with in the past.

One important modification was implemented in the park's design because of Garten's presence on the design team. In the original proposal winding, Olmsted-style paths curved through the long narrow mall: Garten felt that straight paths would create borders that focused attention on the park as the edge of the city and would duplicate the inherent geometry of the space. Although the

Public Art Review 12

Cliff Garten wanted to create a sculptural space instead of a monument.

and to have the resonance of poetry, while still remaining simple and unromantic. I designed a formula for the phrases in which each is a complete sentence beginning with "We" and including an active verb. The first line reads: "We entered a strange wilderness." Garten, Mason and I worked on the six lines of the poem together. It was a true collaboration; we each had veto power, and we shared common 8.:Ssumptions about the purpose of the text.

The final line, 'We stop to remember the wilderness, " most clearly illustrates the balance the entire project hoped to achieve. This image brings the narrative of settling a new land up to the present moment with a playful self-reflexivity that does not instruct the reader, even though it points out the significance of the place. We wanted this last image to clarify the connection between the settling of Saint Paul and the city as it is today. We hoped that the text would encourage the questioning of our accomplishments in settling the wilderness as well as celebrate them.

While we were working on the "History Walk" text George Mason said, "It stops being collaboration when you find yourself trying to do something the other people will like." Likewise, it stops being collaboration when you disregard what the other people will like. Garten believes that his collaboration with the design team has resulted in a better design for the park, and this is, I think, enough to justify any compromises made by an artist or by landscape architects. The final design is not one that either would have come up with alone, but all members of the design team express satisfaction with the outcome. As Tim Agness said, "We've covered¡a lot of history with just a few images and just a few words. "

I Saint Paul is finishing a master plan for the Riveifront. And, they want artists on their team.

SAINT PAUL

Artists to Join City Planning

by Christirw Podas-Larson The Mississippi Riverfront--once Saint Paul's economic lifeline--has been abandoned, privatized and sorely' neglected over the past 90 years. Riverboats that once crowded the Upper and Lower Levees, making them lively social places, were replaced early in the century by trains. Railroad tracks still hug and work much of the downtown bank. The 1950s and early '60s marked the beginning of the worst of times for the Riverfront. Italian immigrants who had settled on the bank near the Upper Levee and regularly contended with spririg flood waters had finally been soaked enough and vacated their homes.

The land was acquired by various private interests of anottoo-scenic nature: a scrap yard and an expanded power plant. About the same time, our most dangerous stretch of roadway, Shepard Road, was built to bring traffic from the west and south into downtown Saint Paul. For miles this high-speed, no-shoulder, concrete-barricaded, rollercoaster road is glued to the waterfront, disturbing any views and prohibiting new development. And as a final plow, electric powerline towers were erected along the river corridor, adding view-blocking giants to the whole riverscape.

Directly across the river from downtown, private interests developed warehouse, office and manufacturing facilities, many of which have been allowed to deteriorate in recent years. Harriet Island, a 500-acre regional park, evolved into a pleasantly dilapidated marina, replete with boats that appear to have been idle on their rusted cradles for years in a vast, muddy parking lot. The land boasts large open spaces that have been the site of community festivals lately, bringing people back in touch with their Riverfront and its possibilities (if they can figure out how to get' .there). Beyond Harriet Island, the Riverfront wanders off for miles in a sort of dense, bucolic (and often flooded) no-man's land.

Saint Paul began to reawaken to the value and potential of its Riverfront in the late 1970s. Sparked by a Riverfront planning symposium sponsored by the city and The St. Paul Companies, a Riverfront Commission was established in 1986 and Mayor Latimer committed himself to Riverfront redevelopment as a top civic priority.

City Councilman Tom Dimond speaks for the many political leaders devoted to revitalization of the area saying, "Proper design of the Riverfront's public spaces is essential to their success. Not only the design, but how we make it happen are critically important." He points out that the city has come a long way over the past two years toward developing and realizing a vision for the Riverfront. "Necessary changes have been made in the city's Comprehensive Plan and Zoning Code," he says.

The Riverfront has been designated both a redevelopment and a tax increment financing district. Late in 1986 the city sold bonds to provide some $23 million to kick off riverfront efforts, and this year over $14 million was added through refinancing of the city's sewer separation project. " Over the next decade several key sites on the river will be redesigned, opening significant opportunities for artistic involvement. At the same time, PUBLIC ART SAINT PAUL, a private organization devoted to creating and facilitating opportunities for artist involvement in public space projects, has developed policy proposals that would create three distinct roles for artists working in the public realm: An artist-in-residence would be retained by three of the city's operating departments (public Works, Planning & Economic Development and Community Services) to participate in the earliest stages of site analysis and conceptual planning for all public places (including the Riverfront). Artists would be commissioned to design or collaborate in the design of specific sites. And, they would be commissioned to create discrete works for public spaces.

On the Riverfront the impact of such comprehensive artist involvement would be profound. A Riverfront Esplanade will be a public promenade on the south side of the river and will stretch the length of the downtown

Riverfront. The first phase encompasses land from the Robert Street Bridge downriver to the foundry.

According to William Belden, Saint Paul's dire<!tor of Downtown llDd Riverfront Development, this project is still in the early conceptual planning stages. "Part of the plan for that area calls for the flood wall to be raised four feet," he says . . "Engineering parameters have to be set, and once they are, design of the Esplanade can begin in earnest." He sees the possibility that artists could be involved in all three roles envisioned by PUBLIC ART SAINT PAUL. That possibility is strengthened by the recent decision to bring Jack Becker (an artist and a.member and former president of Forecast: Creative AUiance for Public Art) aboard to work under Belden as the! city's Arts Development manager.

Long-term plans for the "Bridge" site, publijc land directly upriver from the Robert Street Bridge, call for residential development. That will, however, take s¡e veral years to negotiate and achieve. Meantime, the city has sought ideas for temporary use of this significant space.

Initially, it will become a soccer field, but discussions have begun to later convert it into a park for temporary public art installations. Forecast has developed several SUlccessful temporary projects for the Riverfront in the past and may be encouraged and funded to use this space as a Saint Paul "Art Park" .

Harriet Island is the focus of most development attention. In 1987 the Saint Paul Division of Parks and Recreation developed a master plan for the site, key elemEmts of

Japanese-American artist Michio Ibara to develop a preliminary proposal for the site. However, the concept may expand to involve all of Saint Paul's Sister City Committee, opening up the commission opportunity to a broader field of artists. Plans are on hold while the conimittee secures funding and continues its negotiations with the city.

Shepard Road will be realigned and new city street connections developed. This has been a highly controversial project, mostly due to profound disagreement between the city and residents of the bluff-top historic neighborhood over the noise, pollution and traffic impact of the proposed connection at Chestnut Street. As Shepard Road is moved back from the river, it will create significant opportunities for residential and entertainment development. This is a comprehensive and multi-faceted project that affords many significant opportunities for artist involvement in all roles envisioned by PUBLIC ART SAINT PAUL. Kellogg Mall Park has been redesigned through a collaborative effort between the city's Parks and Recreation Division design staff and artist Cliff Garten. That project and the challenges it presented are detailed in another article in this publication.

The Riverfront Commission's jurisdiction and the area of current development focus extends through the downtown Riverfront only (from approximately the Lafayette Bridge to the High Bridge). William Belden comments, "Past plans have tried to deal with the whole reach

which include a prominent gateway at Wabasha and Plato, expanded marinas, an improved landing for riverboat excursions, an amphitheater and an adventure playground.

A design advisory committee was recently formed to discuss and define project design parameters. While ill is too late for an artist to be involved in comprehensive conceptual planning for the entire space, the opportunity for artist involvement in the design of any or all of the sites within the park is certainly strong. A promising sign is that Kathleen Stack, Saint Paul's director of Community Services (which includes the Parks and Recreation Division), chaired PUBLIC ART SAINT PAUL's Process Committee, which called for early artist involvement in project designs. John Wirka, the city's director of Park Design, also served on that committee and made significant contributions to developing a structure that would allow artists to be retained and commissioned by the city.

Navy Island, a five-acre piece of land in the middle of the river under the Wabasha Street Bridge, may be the site of a public park and work of art commemorating the City of Saint Paul's sister city relationship with Nagasaki, Japan. The Nagasaki Sister City Committee had asked

The temporary Braided of the Saint Paul Riverfront and that enStreams (1987) on Navy compasses some 30 miles Island by Susan Fiene showed and includes significant the city of Saint Paul how an amounts of park land. artist could work with public Downtown was privately park land. owned, and it was downtown that needed attention. But we don't see this segment of the Twin Cities riverscape in isolation. We see it as one environmental area, with strong connections to Minneapolis upstream and smaller communities downstream. â&#x20AC;˘ According to David McDonell, chairman of PUBLIC ART SAINT PAUL, "Our organization, along with numerous other agencies, is committed to making public art a significant part of Saint Paul's Riverfront plan. It is hoped that 1989 will be a year during which artists will be chosen to participate on design teams and to create works, thereby helping to make the Riverfront a place where people want to live, work and play, as well as making Saint Paul a city where aesthetic consideration is a community priority.

Public Art Review

13

ART & ARCHITECTURE Collaboration during the WPA Years

by Bruce N. Wright The relationship between artist and architect, up to the arrival of the industrial age, has always been a cozy one.

With the advent of the machine came the machine age and a maLhine aesthetic.

In the August 1940 issue of Architectural Record magazine, the noted art critic Elizabeth McCausland has this to say about the use of art in architecture: "Architects work at a tangent from artists, some 'modern' architects and critics going so far as to deny that there is a place, let alone a use, for art in present-day building. The artist is driven back psychologically to a position not very different from that of the nineteenth century when he had to content himself with easel painting and 'free' sculpture because architecture had abandoned art to the studio. " These words came at the beginning of an era that saw the near wholesale embracement of a movement called the International Style, a movement that equated ornament with crime and one that, even today, is cause for heated debate in architectural and academic circles. Yet this period between the two World Wars saw a flourishing of government-supported art programs that produced more murals and more sculpture than the world has seen since the Renaissance period.

In fact, there were so many federal programs started during the Great Depression that all the acronyms and likesounding titles could cause confusion. There was a veritable "alphabet soup" of organizations, running such programs as the Works Progress Administration, at one time called the Work Projects Administration (WPA, 1935-43); the Public Works Administration (PW A, 193343); the Public Works of Art Project (pWAP, 1933-1934); the Federal Art Project (F AP), which ran from 1935 to 1943; the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP, 1935-1939), which received its funding from the WP A; and other shortlived and specifically funded agencies.

The first federal relief project for artists, the PWAP, dates from May of 1933 when the American painter, George Biddle, wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for government assistance to create murals on social issues: "The younger artists of America are conscious as they never have been of the social revolution that our country and civilization are going through, and they would be eager to'express these ideals in a permanent art form, if they were given the Government's cooperation. They would be contributing to and expressingin living monuments the social ideals that you are trying to achieve."

Thousands of artists found patronage during these troubled times, including such now well-known names as Ben Shabn, Jack Levine, William Gropper, Reginald Marsh, Jackson Pollack, David Smith, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Philip Guston. At its peak there were about 175 to 200 sculptors on the New York City WP AfFAP project alone. Sculptor Robert Cronbach recalled that the whole purpose of the New Deal art projects "was to employ artists in the mass, not just the 'good' artists, but all serious working artists. On this basis a whole field of related art activities was set up and artists were used in many ways. d Several divisions of the F AP were created to help channel artists into productive outputs. Organized largely. by medium, the artists were directed to the Murals, Easel Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Art, or Photography divisions, or if they had an educational bent, into the "practical arts," which included such things as designing posters, doing technical research on art materials or indexing indigenous American design. One of the prime thrusts of the F AP was art education. It was believed that there was a need for extensive art education before the fruits of the artists' labors could be appreciated by the m·asses.

Without an audience, how else could the money spent on public art be justified?

Out of this came the establishment of Community Art Centers, many of which still exist. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is one of these. It started as a poorly patronized private gallery, went public with WP A interv,ention in 1940 and then became independent again soon after its public pebut. Minneapolis sculptor, Elizabeth

Raymond, the only woman sculptor in the group, was part of the original WP AfFAP Walker Art Center collective.

She recalls that period vividly: "We taught art classes in the basement of the Walker building and used the stools we'd made for ourselves at the Minneapolis Art Students League, where we began. Every artist wa.s required to teach whether they wanted to or not. Simplicity was the philosophy at that time." Simplicity of form and line--and lifestyle.

Even as the spirit of collaboration reached its apogee during the New Deal, artists found that they were allowed only so much freedom. As symbolized by the seandal between muralist Diego Rivera and John D. Rockefeller over a mural for Rockefeller Center, artists learned they could do whatever they wished, so long as it fit into a socially acceptable construct. Consequently, work betwelen artists and architects consisted primarily of sculpture and murals incorporated into buildings; the art served only as decorative additions to a stark, stripped-down style based roughlyon Art Moderne--a type of ersatz Art Deco.

As architects took up the cause of Modernism with greater and greater ease (after all, architectural Modernism cost much less to build!) artists found themselves being restricted to smaller and smaller areas. Muralists, luckier than their sculptor friends, were at least given a wall and often entire lobbies to paint. By contrast, in most cases, sculptors were allowed solely the area above the entrance of a new building. Given that, it becolmes clear why McCausland commented with such irritation to her architectural audience.

The biggest patron of art for architectura~ settings was the United States Postal Servjce. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of new post offices built by the WP A during this time, which dotted small and large communities across the North, Midwest and California.

Nearly ~ of t?e post offlCes lDcorporated murals of some kind.

These murals depicted bucolic scenes of a stylized American town (usually taken from the community that the post office served) and expressed standard themes of commerce, industry, local history, social and religious community--all couched in a tone of overweening pro:gress.

Second to the Postal Service murals, the plac.e ment of freestanding sculptures in public parks was the most common form of public art. A good example of this type of sculpture is the Th(wu)'s Garrigue Masaryk Memorial (1941), in Chicago's Jackson Park not far from-Lake Shore Drive. The massive 18-foot bronze on an architectdesigned, 20-foot-high granite plinth was created by the Czech-born sculptor Albin Polasek for a committee of Americans of Czechoslovakian descent. Produced to commemorate Czechoslovakia's first president, the sculpture is of Saint Wenceslaus who, according to legend, led a band of knights who slept under Blanik Mountain in the center of Bohemia while waiting for the opportunity to deliver their people from oppression. As with much of the art of the Federal Art Projects, its style is representational, calculated to offend the least number of people. Polasek collaborated with an architect at least one other tim1e, for his piece in Chicago's lakefront Grant Park, the Theodore Thomas Memorial, also known as the Spirit of Music. It

Eyen as th · ·t e spin

of collabonltion reached its apogee during the New Deal, artists found that they 'were allowed only so much freedom.

Public Art Review

14

has a base covered with carved relief figures of a symphony orchestra designed by architect Howard Van Doren Shaw.

One type of federal project more than the others seemed to spur on architects and artists: th~ public recreation ce~ter. These popular community haunts were built all across the country, but none were more impressive than the waterfront collaborations in New York City. In opening the many public swimming pools, New York Park Commissioner Robert Moses produced a volume of work that, even by today's standards, was impressive. During a single summer in 1936 Moses opened a new pool each week for eleven weeks in eleven different neighborhoods. Many of these pools incorporated sculpture and decorative art into their designs. Of particular note was the Astoria Pool in Queens, which was designed in the popular Art Deco style. The pool was 330 feet long and 165 feet wide and became famous for the 1936 Olympic swimming trials held there. Sculptor Emil Siebern's lavish metallic figures looked down on the swimmers from the bathhouse and the extensive recreation complex. "Two of these statues, made by sheet-metal workers, could be claimed by an April 18, 1936, Parks Department press release, as a true, 'collaboration of architects, sculptors, and artisans,'" states Joseph Coplan in an article he wrote on New York City's public swimming pools.2 The pools brought welcome relief to thousands during those hot Depression summers.

In spite of the amount of work undertaken at this time, funding was never lavished on any single project. Road construction of all kinds commanded the highest priority with the federal government because, of all the WP A programs, it could absorb the largest numbers of unskilled and \lIlemployed laborers. Hence, recreational ar~as that received the most national funding tended to be large parks connected by roadways, and not by rivers. In the eyes of the National Resources Board, "rivers did not merit contact or even close contemplation. "3 Yet there were a number of instances during the Depression when art and architecture came together on the waterfront without help, at least not directly, from the government. The Century of Progress Exposition at Chicago in 1933, the Great Lakes Exposition in Cleveland in 1936 and the New York World's Fair of 1939-40 all provided opportunities for a rich mixture of art in public settings. The 1933 Chicago exposition boasted exhibition buildings designed by all the prominent architects of the time including D.H. Burnham (of City Beautiful fame), Holabird & Root, and Ray Cummins. Albert Kahn's Ford Exposition Building was the highlight of the fair, using new materials, dramatic lighting and daring exhibit techniques that included large gridlike sculptures composed of chrome-plated auto parts. Perhaps the most engaging pavilion at the Exposition was the Kohler building, designed by architect Ely Jacques Kahn to include several murals. These murals, painted by a guild-like unit of six painters, depicted scenes of various regions around the world.

The collaborations that developed between artist and architect during the late 1930s and early 1940sadded much to our cultural understanding of society, and of art. Yet, much was forgotten after the second World War. With the postwar economy focusing on rebuilding and recouping losses, public structures became clean, efficient machines with little room for such frivolous things as decoration or art.

The current rediscovery of art in public places, however, promises to enrich our commonwealth and also could serve to enrich our architecture. Unfortunately, despite all the many "counter" movements and stylisticallyderivative forms of architecture that have occurred since 1940, what McCausland said back then could still apply today.

With architecture now having entered into a period of pluralism and becoming more and more sculptural, the space left over for art, of any kind, becom{!s ever more hotly fought over. Perhaps, with the renewed interest in public art we are seeing today, architects and public officials will find a way to renew the historical connection between art and architecture as well.

Notes: 1. Francis V. O·Connor. ed. The Nf1W Deal Art Projects: A .. An.th.olDgy o/Memair•• Washington. D.C .• 1972. p. 134.

2. Joseph Coplan. "Urban Waters". Metropol" magazine. July/August 1987. p. 66.

3. Phoebe Cutler. The P1Cblio La'llllacape ofu... Nf1W Deal. Yale Unive",ity Preos.

1985. p. 53.

Aloo see: McKinzie. Richard D.• The Nf1W Dealfor Artists. Princeton University P ...... 1973.

The NEA Midwest Forum

by Laura Weber The phrase" going public" usually refers to something hidden coming out into the open. In a sense, that is the case with art, a field usually relegated to the indoors, whether in intimate spaces such as studios or in larger, but still private buildings such as museums. The issues raised by public art in a democracy were discussed at the conference "Going Public: Midwest Regional Public Art Forum" November 4 and 5.

"Going Public" was one of a series of regional conferences initiated by the Arts Extension Services at the University of Massachusetts, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The regional cosponsoring organizations were the Percent for Art in Public Places Program of the Minnesota State Arts Board, Public Art St. Paul, the Minneapolis Arts Commission, the St. Paul Department of Planning and Economic Development and Forecast: Creative Alliance for Public Art. In the relatively new field of public art, various methods and philosophies exist. In recent years "plop art, " has been superceded by "site-specific" public art. In coming to see that plopping their works in the plaza doesn't have a holistic impact, sculptors have redefined the sculptural element of public art. Other artists have begun to specialize in public art, working with communities up front, finding out what the history and interests of the residents are, and then coming up with designs that can take any shape or form. A final approach used in current public art practice is the design-team approach of architects, designers and artists collaborating to create a work.

About one-third of the 140 participants in the forum came from outside the host-state of Minnesota, from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Rhode Island, Virginia and Calffornia. The "public" was not the intended audience of the conference: administrators of public art programs, academics, public officials, architects and a sizable group of artists gathered to "talk shop" about this relatively new field and perhaps to make points for their preferred philosophy of public art.

Conference participants received copies of the workbook, Going Public: Afield guide to development ofart in public places.

Patricia Fuller offered the opening conference overview,¡ and she is an example of a seasoned public art specialist. Fuller served as visual arts coordinator for the Seattle Arts Commission between 1976 and 1978, implementing that city's new "percent for art" ordinance.

She also coordinated the Art in Public Places program at theNEA from 1978 to 1981 and followed that position with the executive directorship of the Metro-Dade County Art in Public Places program from 1983 to 1985. She now consults and lectures nationally on public art.

Fuller explained that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) project in Seattle, involving artists Siah Armajani, Scott Burton, Doug Hollis, Martin Puryear and George Trakas, demonstrated the importance of being sensitive to the needs of the community and allowed the community to realize what the contributions of artists could be. A sense of humor is often missing in public art projects, she said, and showed a slide of a successful use of the whimsical touch: in an empty lot on which a bookstore burned down, the artist created an homage to the store with a painted backdrop and racks of books.

Fuller showed examples of public art in internal spaces such as public libraries, and in infrastructures such as transit system walls and airports, as well as temporary projects. In some of these architectural projects the question sometimes becomes "Where is the art?" In reply, she said, the environment is the art. She expressed concern over the current popularity of sculpture gardens: "Are we relegating sculpture to these separate precincts? For public art to remain vital, we need risk-taking, reaching across the spectrum of contemporary art practice. We need to educate artists in compliance with the communities' needs and to educate the community to move forward with the artist. " The panel discussion that followed was a wide-ranging discussion of the public and of public art. Lynne Sowder,

First Bank Systems' corporate curator, is no stranger to integrating a public (in this case, bank employees) into the art viewing and selection process. She spoke eloquently on the dangers of arts administrators making assumptions about who the "public" is.

"We see 'the public' as an amorphous blob that may try to block programs. There is no public, rather there is a multiplicity of publics," she said. One of the arts administrator's key roles is discovering these public:s and ensuring gTass roots support by "turning over con trol of the outcome. " She warned of "bogus proc~ess, " in which there is a nominal role played by the public "excc~pt at the end when they tell you it's trash. " Pam Korza, special projects coordinator for "Going Public" at the University of Massachusetts, said the public is familiar with public planning processes, but that with the public art process all parties must continue to reevaluate the questions being asked, and to say to the artists and archit ects, "the team needs to be flexible, the public needs to be flexible, can you as an individual be flexible?"

Artist Jackie Ferrara, whose public commissions include a 400-foot limestone courtyard set into the side of a hill for the General Mills Sculpture garden in Minnea.polis, pointed out the personal effect of putting art in people's environments. It's natural for people to be protectiive of their home areas. "We're dealing with a lot of standards for public ameni t ies in parks and people's needs for leisure time."

However, she also noted, "I don't think that public art always has to respond to the community. " Artist Cheryl Yasko of Whitewater, Wis., expressed the concern of artists that if they engage in the public art process, with its democrati.c imperatives for consensus, that they might "regress" from their hard-won personal artistic vision. The process iinvolves maintaining respect for the artist herself, the public and the art itself, she noted.

Calvin Zuehlke, a member of the Minnesota State Arts Board and a former small-town industrial arts teacher responded, "Artists, don't be so hard on yourselves. You have it all! Just remember to tell the people the why of it, if you want to move a public project. Don't forget your horse sense!"

Talk turned to the funding of public art programs, including alternatives to the "percent for arts" programs that one audience member characterized as "a relig~on."

The sins [in not funding public programs] are greatest in the private sector, " said Sowder.

After lunch on Friday, the panelled a discussion of artists and art selection. Ferarra immediately pointed out the personal and psychological toll of the public art selection process. "I'm not cut out for the competition route.

To produce 'on spec' and then not be chosen is heartbr eaking. I will, on occasion, submit something as a team. With someone else suffering, it's not as painful. " She also noted

I don't think that public art always has to respond to the community.

-Jackie Ferrara

Public Art Review

15

that of all the ways to make art, public art is the least financially rewarding.

Richard Posner of Seattle, and a visiting artist at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, brought up the . question of local artists vs. big names being selected. He described a "media funding system" and said municipalities have developed a "AAA farm system of artists. " Sowder worried about the fact that there are a limited number of people who sit on panels. "A small group picks the same artists. The issue is the idea of the learning curve, that if you give one person more opportunities, they will get better at it, versus giving opportunities to newer, local people with less experience." She supported taking risks. Fuller said sometimes you need to dissuade a local council from selecting the "blue chip" artist as the only way to make a bona fide cultural statement.

Since "Going Public" was a conference for people involved in the field, sessions were held on the nitty-gritty aspects of public art, such as fees, contracts and the care and preservation of public art. Unless effor ts are made to engage the public in the works of art, the work becomes "invisible" in an odd way. Some of the suggestions made were to make use of museum labeling systems and seminars, to organize events with the artists, and to create systems where the community "talks back" to the artworks.

Once the work is up, what about issues of removal or relocation? This was the major issue behind the controversial Richard Serra piece Tilted A re, it was noted. This is also a germane issue to works that enter corporate collections, which could be liquidated, as well.

The panel ceded the stage to four presenters of public art project case studies in the Midwest. Michael Dunbar, Director of the State of Illinois Art in Architecture program, and artist Steven Luecking of Chicago discussed Luecking's North Campus Sculpture Commission at the University of Illinois-Champaign, an environmental sculpture that features a fountain piece and solstice time pieces.

Luecking said that "communication is ninety percent of the project." He also said he had to get used to the idea that the entire site was not "his," that he was making a public space, not a sculpture. His aim was "to create a sense of monumentality and intimacy together."

Jack Becker, former coordinator of the Art in Public

There is no public, rather there is a multiplicity of publics.

-Lynne Sowder Lynne Sowder and Barbara Hoffman

Places program of the Minneapolis Arts Commission, presented the case of the artist designed bus bench project. "It's not the size of the budget but how well you use it, â&#x20AC;˘ Becker said. He stressed the need for promotion and documentation of the projects so that down the road, bigger programs can be built. (Becker has been named arts development manager for St.Paul's Planning and Economic Development Department.)

On Saturday conference-goers had choices of workshops on the pros and cons of legislation in cultural planning, programming public art activities on the grass roots level, making the transition from the studio to a larger public, and controversy and acceptance of public risk. Richard Posner used language reminiscent of some then-current presiden tial campaign rhetoric when he called "controversy" the "C" work of public art. Others cited the chilling effect when avoidance of controversy becomes the "engine driving the process. " Neither a consensus of opinions nor ov~rall conclusions were reached by t he conferences's end. Instead, "Going Public" was a chance for people who may not have a large group of colleagues at home to get together and engage in some heavy shop talk.

PUBLIC BRIEFS Public Art Dialogue == Southeast

The Durham Arts Council is sponsoring a major conference on "the future of public art in the Southeast for artists, designers, ar.chitects, landscape architects, city planners, public officials, arts administrators and other interested individuals." The roles of design team members will be among the issues addressed, along with the relationships of artwork to site, artistic integrity, public involvement, planning and implementation, and "handling controversy. " Public Art Dialogue = Southeast will take place at the Durham Arts Center and Durham Civic Center from June 8 to 11, 1989. A mix of presentations, case studies, workshops, exhibitions and instal¡ lations will be offered. Presenters will include Richard Andrews, Patrica Fuller, Doug Hollis, Robert Irwin and Richard Turner among others. Along with the Gering Public field guide, copies of New Works: A Public Art Project Planning Guide by Patricia Fuller will be available

at the conference. For, registration materials write to: Public Art Dialogue = Southeast 120 Morris Street Durham Arts Council Durham, NC 27701

Art, Architecture and Engineering: A Collaboration in Urban Place Making This conference intends to "reflect the stages and progress of the collaborative process among members of the disciplines of art, architecture, and engineering." A contrast between the "aesthetic of neutral efficiency" and programs that "enhance the spatial aesthetics of their urban places" will be drawn through case studies and panel discussions.

Case studies include the Master Plan for capital improvement and public art in Phoenix, AZ, and both the Irene Hixon Whitney Pedestrian Bridge and Hennepin Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, MN. The Conference is cosponsored by the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minneapolis Committee on Urban Environment, and the Minnesota Society of the American Institute of Architects.For information contact: Scott Kopfmann Professional Development and Conference Services 220 Nolte Center 315 Pillsbury Drive SE University of Minnesota Minneapolis,MN 55455 (612) 625-5813

Art for the Public

Will Travel The Dayton Art Institute has organized a traveling exhibition that documents seven innovative public art projects from across the country. A rt for the Public: New Gollahoratimts is "a useful tool for stimulating interest and dialogue about public art" through the use of photographs, plans, models, videotapes and hands-on activities for galleryvisitors.

The sites and projects portrayed are A rtists in the Neighborhood with artists Andrea Blum and Andrew Leicester (Dayton, OH), Arts on the Line (Boston, MA), Fingerspan ,by Jody Pinto (philadelphia, P A), On Gommon Ground with artist Carl Floyd (Cleveland, OH), Shoreline Walk at NOAA with artists Siah Armajani, Scott Burton, Douglas Hollis, Martin Puryear and George Trakas (Seattie, WA), South Gave by Mary Miss, Stanton Eckstut and Susan Child (Battery City Park, NY), and The Wilshire BoUlevard Project with Tony Delap (Santa Monica, CA).

A 70-page catalogue with essays by Penny Balkin Back, Gerald Nordland and Pamela Houk accompanies the exhibition.

The show will travel from May, 1989 through September, 1990. For information about the exhibition schedule or to arrange a booking contact: The Education Department Dayton Art Institute P.O. Box 941 Dayton, OH 4501 (513) 223-5277

Noguchi Fountain is "Classic;' Community Bandshell 'futistic" The winners of the 1988 Excellence on the Waterfront Competition included a public art piece and a public architecture piece.

The awards are made by the Waterfront Center, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. that promotes urban waterfront enhancement.

The Top Honor Award for a Classic (over ten years old) went to the Dodge Memorial Fountain in Detroit designed by the late Isamu Noguchi. The NovemberDecember 1988 issue of Waterfront World stated, "The jury termed the Dodge Fountain a 'fabulous sculpture,' noting it was a dramatic, strong image in the heart of an industrial city ... [that] directly engages the public with water, echoing the adjoining Detroit River."

An Honor Award in the Artistic, Cultural, Educational Category was given for the Lake Harriet Bandshell in Minneapolis, MN. Designed by architects Milo H. Thompson and Frederick Bentz in cooperation with the Minneapolis Park &

Recreation Board, the structure provides a picture window vi,ew of the Lake behind performers in concert. The planning phase for the bandshell involved both working with neighborhood residents and a 33-member metropolitan committee.

"We ended up doing much more than designing a bandslhell," comments park planner Gary Criter who coordinated the process. "We came up with a master plan for the whole area taking into consideration all of the park activities from sailing [the site is adjacenlt to a small marina] to biking apd jogging as well as the impact on the surrounding neiighborhood. "

Press, 1988, ISBN 0-916782-94-8, paperback, $8.95, distributed by Kampmann & Company, 9 East 40th St., NY, NY 10016.

This handy oversized pocket book describes some 600 outdoor sculpture sites from Newburyport on the north to Plymouth in the south. From historical to contemporary, freelance Boston Globe critic Carlock packs both information and insight into her capsule descriptions.

Art on the Road: Painted Vehicles of the Americas by Moira F. Harris, with photographs by Leo J. Harris, Pogo Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1988, ISBN 0-96177671-4, paperback, $16.95 ./ Eo< This colorful /' ~ volume traces the , ~ history and styles of elaborately < decorated vehicles 14 from the traditional ox carts of Costa Rica through the buses of panama, the Tap-Taps of Haiti, the chivas of Columbia and the Kustom Cars of the USA. Forecast Chronicle: 1989 Desktop Calendar, Forecast: Creative Alliance for Public Art Projects, 2955 Bloomington, Minneapolis, MN 55407, $8.95.

To celebrate their Ten¡Year Anniversary, Forecast (publisher of Public A rt Review) culled through their archives documenting some 50 exhibitions, both indoor and outdoor but always in an alternative fashion, to create this spiralbound weekly planner.

i

Marin Lagoon Site Patrick Dougherty's Rolla Coaster was one of four installations at the Marin Civic Center during the summer of 1988. His bundled torrent of twigs looped through trees and into the water of a lagoon. Other works were by Herb Parker, Reiko Goto and Jeffrey Brown. The outdoor exhibition was organized by Public Art Works, Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission Street, San Rafael, CA 94901, (415) 4579744/9749.

In Print A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston

by Marty Carloclk, Harvard Common

PUBLIC

ARliN TRANSIT

Queries & Manuscripts by.....

April 1, 1989.

Releases & Photos by.....

June 1, 1989.

Public Art Review

Summer/Fall 1989 ART', ARCHITECTURE AND ENGINEERING: A Collaboration in Urban Place Making Radisson University Hotel Minneapolis, Minnesota April 13-14, 1989 A conference designed to reflect the stages and progress of the collaborative process among members of the disciplines of art, architecture, and engineering,

Deadline June 1, 1989

The Waterfront Center's Third Annual Awards Program Excellence on the Waterfront

FeatUring...

+ CASE STUDIES + PUBUC POUCY ISSUES IN COllABORATIVE DESIGN

+ TOUR-"BRIDGES. LOCKS, AND A GARDEN"

Winners will be selected by an interdisciplinary jury chaired by Charles Davis, FAIA, of Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis, San Francisco, from entries around the world, Projects are considered in two time frames: classic, prior to 1979, and current.

And omple opportunity for discussion, Input, participation, forecostlng, and networking,

For information call or write Susan Kirk at the Center 202/337-0356, or write The Waterfront Center, 1536 44th St, N.W " Washington, D,C. 20007, The Waterfront Center is a non-profit membership corporation whose activities center on urban waterfront planning, development and culture,

Contoct Scott Kopfmann, Professional Development and ConfE~rence Services, 220 Nolte Center, 315 Pillsbury Drive S,E" University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455: (612) 625-5813,

Public Art Review 16

For further Information ...

The University of Minnesota Is an equal opportunity employer and educator.