Public Art Review issue 02 - 1989 (summer/fall)

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2955 Bloomington

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Volume I, Number 2

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Non-Profit Org U S Postage PAID Minneapolis, MN Permit # 2 3 8 2

Summer/Autumn 1989

PUBLIC ART IN TRANSIT

" A new Minneapolis garden is one of the finest outdoor spots for displaying sculpture."

The New York Times

Minneapolis Sculpture Garden A project of Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board Open daily, year-round.

Walker Art Center, Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403 612.375.7600.

Martin Puryear Ampersand

1987-1988 granite. Gift of Margaret and Angus Wurtele

M i n n e s o t a Percent for Art in Public P l a c e s Program would like to congratulate the artists recently awarded commissions for State Building Projects

Paul Benson Minneapolis, MN — Brainerd Regional Sen/ices Center Brainerd, MN Richard Fleischner Providence, Rhode Island — Minnesota Judicial Center Saint Paul, MN

Janet Lofquist Minneapolis, MN — Bemidji State University Bemidji, MN

Stanton Sears Saint Paul, MN Northland Community College Thief River Falls, MN

Mark Marino Duluth, MN and Wayne Potratz Minneapolis, MN — Itasca Community College Grand Rapids, MN

Thomas Paquette Lynn Geesaman Jantje Visscher Minneapolis, MN and James Kielkopf Saint Paul, MN Centennial Building Saint Paul, MN

The Program maintains a slide registry and welcomes entries at two deadlines each year: February 1, and June 15. Contact the Minnesota State Arts Board, 432 Summit Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55102, (612) 297-2603 or toll-free in Minnesota (800) 652-9747.

PIONEERING IDEAS IN ARCHITECTURE BPBIB?

H S is S• lll^l lit H II 1 1 1 1 1 1 II IHI •1 Si S T A I N E D

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A custom studio specializing in stained glass since 1918.

2744 Lyndale Avenue So. Minneapolis, M N 55408 612-872-4550

Conference The National Association of Artists' Organizations and Intermedia Arts Minnesota are happy to invite you to Minneapolis and Saint Paul for the 6th National Association of Artists' Organizations Conference. Come to Minnesota and join your colleagues for five days designed to serve you - the primary presenters and supporters of new art in the United States.

We will examine our critical and aesthetic assumptions while participating in panels, workshops, presentations and caucus meetings. We will view some of the best work hailing from the Midwest region and from around the world by important performance, video, film, music, literary and visual artists. No one theme could say it all so we've planned something for everyone!

For more information contact NAAO, 1007 D Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20002 or call (202) 544-0660.

October 11-15 Hosted by Intermedia Am Minnesota

M I N N E S O T A

D I R E C T O R Y The St. Paul Art Collective, publisher of New North Artscope and producer of Public Art Review announces the 1990 Minnesota Regional Arts Directory, a comprehensive guide to the arts in the Upper Midwest. Published in January of 1990 the directory will have a multi-disciplinary listing of artists, musicians, performers, authors, and will include: • Arts Organizations • Public Art Projects • C o m m u n i t y Art Festivals • Professional Services • Grant Opportunities & Deadlines • Conferences & Seminars • Galleries • Classes Individuals and organizations from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota may register for the directory Call for registration information, (612) 338-4974, or complete the order form below and send to New North Artscope, Suite 990, Ford Centre, 420 North 5th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55401. (Deadline for entries is November 1st, 1989.)

SITE Foreword by James Wines. Interview by Herbert Muschamp. This profusely i l l u s t r a t e d b o o k p r o f i l e s t h e a r c h i t e c t u r a l g r o u p SITE, a n a c r o n y m f o r Sculpture In T h e E n v i r o n m e n t . F o u n d e d in 1970, SITE has been identified i n t e r n a t i o n a l l y as a p i o n e e r i n g c o n t r i b u t o r to the N a r r a t i v e Architecture movement, exploring new directions for architecture as fine art. T h e volume reproduces a n d discusses interiors, e n v i r o n m e n t a l w o r k s for Best Products a n d project drawings by James W i n e s , w h i c h reveal the process of development f r o m the first sketch to the final rendering. 2 4 0 pages. 8Vz" x 11".

235 illus., 4 7 in color. H a r d c o v e r : $50. Paperback: $35

A t all f i n e b o o k s t o r e s * J L ) w r y or direct f r o m

I\lL/sJLl V j >

w 300 Park Avenue South New York 10010 (212)982-2300

Send me registration information.

Send me a copy of the 1990 directory (enclose $5).

Send me advertising rates & information.

Name Organization Street City State/Zip Phone Comments (Type of organization, artists list discipline, other categories)

INTRODUCTION Public Art in Transition Infrastructure in the Public Domain

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by William Rees Morrish

gly roads are often taken to be one price of civilization, like sewers or police.

The boring, chaotic, disoriented roadscape seems to be the natural habitat of that useful but awkward monster, the American automobile.... The authors take a different position: road watching is a delight, and the highway is-or at least might be-a work of art."

--Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John R. Meyer (The View from the Road, 1964) As a nation we invest about $45 billion dollars annually in planning, construct ing and o p e r a t i n g our public infrastructure. These networks of roads, mass transit, water, power and waste removal provide us with the basic framework for maintaining our accustomed high level of efficiency, health, safety and comfort.

The National Council on Public Works has recommended a national commitment to vastly improve America's infrastructure along with a recommended "increase of up to 100% in the amount of capital the nation invests each year in new and existing public works." As the number and size of these gargantuan public infrastructure systems overlap and increase, they will begin to dominate our everyday view and experience of the landscape.

What affect will this investment of up to $90 billion annually have on the aesthetic enhancement of our cities? What role will those concerned with visual quality and urban design play in the creation of these urban frameworks? As currently envisioned, the answer is not promising.

Infrastructure projects are seen by public policy planners and public works engineers as neutral utilities rendered invisible by a gray palette of color and chain link fencing.

Unfortunately, such thinking creates and reinforces a chaotic urban landscape riddled by "neutralized" forms and patterns of utilities and transit systems.

Our transportation network is the dominant visual facet of our public infrastructure. In residential areas automobiles consume approximately 35% of the land, and in office and commercial areas that amount is near 50%. For the last 40 years we have worked to build a comprehensive and efficient system of roads, mass transit lines and airports. Like other public works they have been designed as if they were neutral entities composed from standard sections and with generalized traffic flow geometry. They are viewed as requiring little enhancement or integration into the public urban landscape through which they pass.

We spend a fortune of time and money in and on these systems, geared towards a single goal: to move people and goods in the most efficient manner available. But, the potential richness of these engineering marvels has been overlooked.

They are not embraced by users with a sense of public pride as a positive symbol of our culture, rather they have become bewildering, disorienting and frustrating places.

Changing attitudes towards infrastructure have recently thrust public art into this potentially rich and frustrating context. Artists have been asked to "humanize" projects after the fact, to camouflage blunders or to soothe political adversaries with their artworks. Most typically, public art has been added on to the project after the engineering of the system has been completed. In these cases public works engineers and policy

CONTENTS

planners often have an adversarial view of artists, considering their artworks as a threat to the engineering efficiency of the system and a cause for delays in construction and cost overruns.

When art and the artist are added on at the end of a project, public art is used as an embellishment, and this is a misperception. Public art is seen as a luxury, of little practical value, necessary only for select places or districts. In this country, entire transportation systems have yet to be seen as larger "works of art," in which the art of engineering, design, and public art work together from the beginning of the planning process.

Perhaps as a result of community objections, the examples of European systems, or a renewed awareness by engineers and administrators, there are new projects that expand the role of public art as an integral part of the total transportation system plan and environment, from the earliest points of establishing principles for movement, structure, perception and orientation. These projects have been initiated in Seattle, Washington; Phoenix, Arizona; and St. Louis, Missouri, to name just a few cities.

For the Phoenix Public Arts Plan, with which I am most familiar, the idea of collaboration began with an artist, urban designer and landscape architect to establish a comprehensive program through the development the city services. Public art and public works have been united to create a public domain system that will recognize the various neighborhoods of the community and connect them to each other, as well as to the environmental qualities of the low desert. This approach has altered many of the existing conventions for funding and producing public art.

In Phoenix the public arts planning process began with a complete urban design framework identifying a common vocabulary and linking public works with possible sites for public art. For each site the artist acts in an expanded role as a collaborative designer in conceptualizing the total project in the early stages, generating alternatives, understanding the various perspectives of the collaborative disciplines, and developing artworks in an open forum.

We are at a critical juncture in the development of our urban landscape. Our urban public infrastructure needs radical overhaul. Hopefully, these emerging projects signify a transition where public art moves from the "back of the bus" intoacollaborative driver's seat, transforming systems from divisive and tolerated obstacles into true urban contributions that enrich the public domain. It is a national question whose answer will effect the image and form of our urban landscape for years to come.

The call for public artists to work with our public infrastructure can serve as a symbol for a change in public attitudes.

We should seek and demand more thoughtful and comprehensive solutions by all members of design teams in order to produce an integrated and supportive urban landscape where cultural aspirations collaborate with our utilitarian needs. This would form a coherent and pleasing urban landscape, filled with memory and instruction, symbol and pragmatism, comfort and dreams. •

Briefs Raging Bull Durham METRO Bus Tunnel Design Team Notes Public Art and Transportation Riding the Red Line The Changing Face of Soho People Mover Murals Art Takes the Bus A Luminescent Happening Armajani's Bridges The Stockholm Metro Subterranean Space

from Coast to Coast

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by Richard Posner

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by Ron Glowen

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from Seattle

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by John Chandler

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by David Skarjune

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by Tim Yohn

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by Bruce N. Wright

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by Melissa Stang

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by Jim Billings

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by Jim Billings

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by Bette Hammel

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by Hafthor Yngvason

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ON THE COVER

Dancer Alan Boeding performed Circlewalker on his sculpture of the same name at Grand Central Terminal in New York on June 13, 1989, during "Dancing off the Floor" which also featured dancers Lisa Jiobbi and Joseph Mills on skis, and Tim Latta on stilts.

The program was part of Sounds Grand, an ongoing series of performing arts events sponsored by Metro-North Commuter Railroad, Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Arts for Transit, and the Dreyfus Corporation. Alan Boeding is often a performer with the Momix Dance Theatre.

Photograph by Les Stone; courtesy of Metropolitan Transit Authority, New York.

"The Changing Face of Soho" by Tim Yohn on page 13 reviews a subway installation by the collaborative group Artmakers, another New York project sponsored by MTA's Arts for Transit program.

ERRATUM

The problems with the old foundations of Carlos Dorrien's Human Construction in Lowell, Massachusetts, (reported in last issue's article "Boston: 80s Boom 90s Loom") weren't problems. The original plan was to level the existing concrete piers that sat in the Pawtucket Canal, according to Rosemary Noon of the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission. Although there was a six-month delay in having the foundation work done, the work has been installed, just as planned.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We thank ART on FILE for the use of several photographs supplied for this issue.

Founded by Rob Wilkinson and Colleen Chartier in 1983, ART on FILE maintains the largest library of images documenting current public art in the United States. Slides are available to arts professionals and educators. For a free catalog that describes the projects included in the library, write: ART on FILE, 1837 East Shelby, Seattle, WA 98112.

T J L J

lEKW

Minneapolis. MN (612) 370-0700 Denver. CO (303) 773-9700 Phoenix. AZ (602)234-1591 Tucson. AZ (602)622-0341 SI Petersburg. FL (813)895-1692

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING URBAN DESIGN ENGINEERING ARCHITECTURE

Public Art Review 2955 Bloomington Minneapolis, MN 55407 612-721-4394

William Rees Morrish, A.I.A., is Associate Professor and Director of the Design Center for American Urban Landscape, College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Minnesota. He is co-author of Building for the Arts and collaborated with landscape architect Catherine Brown and artist Grover Mouton in developing the Phoenix Art Commission's Public Arts Plan, 1988.

Project Director: Jack Becker Forecast Executive Director: John Walley Editor: David Skarjune Associate Editor: Jennette Lee Production Manager: Jim Schiller Art Director: Brendan Finnegan Art Assistant: Stephanie M. Rau Editorial Assistant: Sara J. McDonnell Advisors: Mildred Friedman, Lane Relyea, Peter Boswell, Linda Mack, Thomas Rose, Lenny Dee, Loren Niemi, Stuart Nielson, Regina Flanagan, Scott Wende.

Public Art Review 3

BRW, Inc. and BRW Architects, Inc., multidisciplinary consulting firms, support artists involvement in projects such as the Nicollet Mall, Light Rail Transit, and Centennial Lakes.

Š1989 Forecast Public Artworks ISSN: 1040-21IX S t a t e m e n t s e x p r e s s e d in Public Art Review are those of the authors and not necessarily the views or opinions of Forecast, its members, or staff. Unsolicited materials cannot be returned with out an SASE. Public Art Review is made possible with support from the McKnight Arts Partnership Grant Program of the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, the St. Paul Riverfront Commission Grant Program, and the Center for Arts Criticism; and it is produced in partnership with the St. Paul Art Collective, publisher of New North A rtscape.

Public Art Review is published semiannually. Subscriptions are $6 annually (2 issues); $5 for Forecast members. Send a check with your name, (organization), and address to: Public Art Review, 2955 Bloomington Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55407.

BRIEFS Tucson Arts & Transportation

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like many cities across the United States, Tucson is exploring ways to broaden the impact of public art on the built environment. The Tucson/Pima Arts Council held a one-day workshop, "Tucson Arts & Transportation Conference," on April 21 to begin an educational process to stimulate planners, architects and engineers in the Tucson/Pima County area with the possibilities of public art, beyond a limited percent for art program that has excluded transportation projects.

Presentations on projects in Phoenix, San Jose, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and St. Louis showed the range of approaches being used for art in transportation projects. And, updates on projects already in progress in Tucson demonstrated the willingness of city officials and staff to move forward with public art initiatives.

"Lewis Mumford, one of our foremost writers on cities has commented that our national flower in the U.S. is the concrete clover," noted Tucson Council Member Janet Marcus. "I think we're at a beginning stage and ready to learn, to try to make our roadways, gateways and parkways more attractive."

David Hoyt Johnson, assistant director of the Arts Council and coordinator of its public art program, billed the conference with the goal of promoting design teams as "A Partnership for the Future."

"Burgeoning populations force cities to construct new and more efficient modes of transportation," states Johnson. By including artists in the design process, he feels that "these collaborations provide a humanizing element to transportation projects that the community often views as impersonal intrusions."

Discussion panels on freeways, parkways and gateways; light rail; transit centers and parking garages; and airports, explored not only the types of projects and processes that have been implemented across the country, but also the importance of rationale and planning in achieving success.

Under the guidance of administrator Joyce Chambers Selber in 1984, who is now t h e e x e c u t i v e d i r e c t o r of t h e Pasadena Arts Commission, the City Gates program of San Diego used a master plan to identify four city "Gateways" relating to the four points of the compass, The concept centered on "artist-created reference points," used professional juries and committees, community input and design teams, and obtained the backing of city officials.

"This assured accountability and credibility, which is very important in seeking artists to participate," explained Selber. "They want to know that we have the commitment as well as the ability to follow through." The City Gates project is still in progress, and it has survived the turnover of various administrators and is currently complemented with a percent for arts ordinance.

The same concern for a effective planning phase was echoed by Carol Valenta, a r t program coordinator at Seattle METRO for the Downtown Seattle Transit Project Art Program. The nearly $500-million bus tunnel that runs through the heart of the city was not under the strong percent for art mandates of the city of Seattle or King County, so METRO was challenged to initiate a new program for art on this gigantic public works project.

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An airport is not a museum V so what does art have to do with an airport?

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THE TOCSON AIRPORT IS A GATE GATES ARE PASSAGES PASSAGES ARE INDICATORS OF CHANGE ART CAN FACILITATE CHANGE BY OFFERING A CLARIFICATION OF VISION (as the gate) A CLARIFICATION OF PLACE (in the gate) A CLARIFICATION OF WHO WE ARE (through tb ART IS A GATE AND THE AIRPORT IS A GATE AND CAN BE ART

Jack Mackie's blueprint from his "Study Guide" series deftly presents the basic concept for his public art proposal for parking and roadway improvements at Tucson International Airport in Arizona, a collaboration with landscape architect Larry Zukowski.

parks. An architect at the University of Arizona will be using a design team approach for a pedestrian overpass, and calls for artists to work on design teams are being formed by other city and county departments with our assistance."

"The Arts Council has now been directed by the city of Tucson to proceed towards a master plan for public art that will address the community at large," he adds. " That is the challenge before us: to look at the entire community, to look at neighborhoods, to look at our downtown, to look at features of our environment like the Rillito and Santa Cruz Rivers. We have a wonderful future ahead, if we create art projects in all facets of our public lives."

"The emphasis of our program was not to create more art in public places, but the art of creating public places," said Valenta. "When the METRO Council made the decision to set up the arts program, they also had the wisdom to take themselves out of the process of selecting artists and artwork. First, they established a committee of experts and then began an aggressive public involvement process. Before the first artists were selected, they met with the community to hear what the community wanted the arts program to achieve. They appointed community advisors to the selection panel for the artists, the selection process was open to the public, all arts committee meetings were open to the public, and when proposals were ready to be reviewed public meetings were convened . . . before they were approved for final implementation."

Ann Ruwitch, project director for the Arts in Transit program at the Bi-State Development Agency in St. Louis, faced a task similar to METRO'S in putting artists on design teams for Metro Link, an 18mile, 20-stop light rail system that is in the planning stage. But, there was no percent for art program in St. Louis to serve as a local model, as there was in Seattle.

"From a design point of view we have an absolutely enormous challenge, . . . an existing railroad right of way . . . with abandoned, desolate backyards of small corporations and businesses," explained Ruwitch. To prepare the public works agency and the public at large for making art an integral part of all aspects the transit system, Ruwitch has brought both the public and the artists (Alice Adams, Gary Burnley, Michael Jantzen, Jody Pinto and Anna Valentina Murch, along with lead artist Leila Daw of St. Louis) into the process since its inception.

"Most of what has been done in the first few years related to community education about transit, about Arts in Transit, and about collaboration and the role of artists on design teams," said Ruwitch.

"Gaining consensus among community groups and all the people involved is really what makes this kind of a project successful, I believe." " It really has made a difference," says Johnson, just two months after the conference. "It was really a successful mechanism for educating professionals that you have to reach. The Pima County Department of Transportation and Flood Control had the Arts Council stage a workshop for consultants who are planning nine river

—David Skarjune David Skarjune is a freelance writer and editor in Minnesota, and is the editor of Public Art Review, Volume I.

Forecast Public Art Affairs f^e lorecast Public Artworks has just begun its new Public Art Affairs program.

Public Art Affairs will provide an annual round of funds for Minnesota artists of all disciplines to research, develop and install public artworks.

The first round of Public Art Affairs funds went to six individual artists and one group of six artists. The artists received $800 in research and development stipends to develop ideas for public art and "Public Projects" awards of up to $4,000 for production-related expenses of temporary outdoor work within Minnesota.

The recipients are David Hall, Seitu Jones, Sandra Menefee Taylor, Philip Rickey, the six-member artist/architect group AnArch, Camille Gage and Zoran Majsilov.

Major funding for Public Art Affairs was provided by the Jerome and DaytonHudson Foundations.

A complete schedule of Public Art Affairs events an installation sites is now available, and a year-end catalogue will feature and essay with photographs, docu-

Public Art Review 4

mentation and statements by the participating artists.

For further information about the project or the related publications, contact Elizabeth Greenbaum, (612) 721-4394.

—Sara McDonnell

New Works Published

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Iew Works: A Public Art Project Planning Guide by Patricia Fuller has been published by the Durham Arts Council. This up-to-date resource covers such topics as setting goals, exploring approaches to public art, structuring the process, the artist's role and selection, and implementation of a project.

Jean McLaughlin, visual arts director of the North Carolina Arts Council, comments on the notebook's usefulness, "Questions commonly asked by local arts agencies, city officials and nonprofit sponsors of commissioned new works are addressed here in the context of broader artistic and community concerns." The book offers guidelines and options rather than rules, stressing the individuality of each project. Positive and interdisciplinary approaches are outlined. Only 34 pages in length, New Works is an extremely useful primer about public art processes for planning offices, local arts agencies, nonprofit organizations, libraries, boards of directors, city councils, county commissions, architects, landscape architects, designers, preservationists, corporations and artists.

Patricia Fuller, the author, is a public art consultant from Greenville, N.C. Since 1981 she has consulted and lectured nationally on public art. Her clients have included the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the City of Davenport, Iowa.

The cost of New Works: A Public Art Project Planning Guide is $11.95 plus postage. It is available from the Durham Arts Council, 120 Morris St., Durham, NC 27701, (919) 560-2787.

—Sara McDonnell

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Art, Architecture & Engineering

It is a failure of political will that creates ugliness," said St. Paul Mayor George Latimer at the Art, Architecture and Engineering Conference: A Collaboration in Urban Place Making, held April 13 and 14 at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. To counteract such failings in urban planning, this conference brought together artists, architects, landscape architects and engineers with politicians, planners, public works officials, and community activists in order to explore collaboration as a strategic principle in placemaking.

The issues presented through multidisciplinary panels touched on both the blinders and parallel concerns of the various professions represented. Case studies ranged from public projects where artists were only marginally involved to those in which cooperation between the disciplines was a comprehensive aspect from the beginning conceptual phase.

The introductory session on "Why Can't We See?: Six Blind Men Design the Elephant" presented six fragmentary approaches to a hypothetical redesign of the main thoroughfare of the University of Minnesota campus. The jarring clash of perspectives that resulted served to reveal the gaps that need to be bridged.

"I think the act of creativity at the beginning is critical to the design process," said William Rees Morrish, an urban planner, and associate professor and director of the Design Center for American Urban Landscape at the University of Minnesota.

"Classic planning has become passe," said Michael A. Powills Jr., a transportation consultant and senior vice president of Barton Ashman Associates, Evanston, Illinois, who could not accept placing aesthetic impact before functional concerns.

"Art is an individual activity," claimed e n v i r o n m e n t a l a r t i s t Elyn Zimmerman. "It's not about a collective decision of what should be done."

"The creative approach, democracy in progress, is a lot of work," noted Karen Avaloz, a neighborhood activist in St. Paul, Minn., who has been awarded a Leadership Initiative by the St. Paul Companies.

The examples that followed over the two-day gathering demonstrated how the design team approach can work and is emerging throughout the country. Programs and sites covered included the Phoenix Public Arts Urban Design Master Plan, the Irene Hixon Whitney Pedestrian Bridge at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the Hennepin Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, the High Bridge and 1-35 Parkway in St. Paul, the Highline Receiving Substation in Seattle, the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia, and proposals for the Mueller Airport in Austin and Artpark in Lewiston, N.Y. Artists, architects, engineers and planners are brought together in various ways, and the characterizations of these a p p r o a c h e s ran f r o m "a shotgun marriage" to "a match made in heaven."

This kind of matchmaking is sometimes seen as a creative act in itself. There is even a movement toward viewing the design team itself as an artist of sorts, with the artwork being the end result of the process, the placemaking that encompasses the entire project.

The final sessions on "Public Issues in Collaborative Design" and "A Blueprint for Change" emphasized the need for vision in public art. A common vision gives

focus to multidisciplinary collaborations and to their function and experience within communities.

"Public art and design is not part of the mainstream of the infrastructure issue, although it should be," commented Nancy Rutledge, executive director of the National Council on Public Works Improvement. "My sense is that infrastructure is truly a metaphor for a much bigger set of issues, or a much deeper reckoning about the future. Structures are important, but ultimately the structures provide a service that has values to it it is the artists as well that need to be part of this debate . . . not just the one percent-I like that-but I think that is only the first step in a much bigger strategy."

Throughout the conference, many of the most enthusiastic presenters were newly converted members of the engineering profession who had recently participated in successful collaborations with artists. Unfortunately, the conference was mostly an occasion of preaching to the already converted. Deborah Whitehurst, executive director of the Phoenix Arts Commission, pointed to the need of having those public works and engineering professionals take the message of multidisciplinary collaboration to the meetings and conventions in their fields. This kind of direct advocacy could do more to convince the unconverted than hoping that the uninitiated will attend conferences on public art.

-John Walley John Walley is the Executive Director of Forecast Public Artworks, publisher of Public Art Review.

CALTRAIN Runs With Art I he California Arts Council commissioned two new works of art to be added during the fiscal year 1988-89 to two station sites on the CALTRAIN rail system running between San Francisco and San Jose. The commissions were awarded to artists Gary Dwyer and Anna Valentina Murch. Their works will be installed (respectively) at the midpoint Burlingame station and the Santa Clara station at the southern end of the system.

These two commissions are the latest in an ongoing art program for CALTRAIN initiated by the California Arts Council in

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Art Policy for LA Metro

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I he Los The Transportation

This bus bench design by Bruce N. Wright and Mark Nichols will honor Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Barbara Flanagan, an advocate of urban beautification.

1986. During the first year of the program, four artists (Gary Dwyer, Lili Lakich, Frank Romero and Beth Thielen) worked with Claudia Chapline, Art in Public Buildings program manager for the California Arts Council, an Office of the State architect and CALTRAIN staff to develop an art plan establishing a system-wide art policy, design themes and site recommendations for the Peninsula Commute Service.

CALTRAIN has 28 stations in three counties and 15 cities, and it serves over 20,000 daily passengers commuting between San Francisco and San Jose. In fiscal year 1986-87, commissions were awarded to artists J.B. Blunk, Roslyn Mazzilli and James Phillips. Their works have been installed at the Menlo Park, Belmont and 22nd Street stations. 1987-88 commissions in progress include Danae Anderson (San Francisco Terminal), Alan Shepp(San Carlos) and Jeri Yasukawa(for a system-wide art poster/map). Finished works include a neon wall sculpture, parking lot poetry (with pavement dots arranged to be braille poetry) and a redwood root bench sculpture. Proposed ideas for other areas are weathervanes, clocks, neon sculptures for tunnels, ceramic pavement designs, wall sculptures, earthwork walkways and other bench sculptures.

The sites for art are selected by the Art in Public Buildings Advisory Panel according to construction schedules, public access and aesthetic opportunity. Artists compete in an annual open competition for the commissions.

For further information contact: Claudia Chapline, Manager, A r t in Public Buildings Program, 1901 Broadway, Suite A, Sacramento, CA 95818,(916)4451530.

—Sara McDonnell Salsa del Sol (1987) by Roslyn Mazzilli at the Belmont Caltrain Station.

Public Art Review K

Angeles County Commission (LACTC) adopted a new public art policy that will enhance the 150-mile Los Angeles Metro rail transit system with public artworks.

Stations along the 22-mile Blue Line (Long Beach to Los Angeles) and the 20mile Green Line (Norwalk to El Segundo), as well as future lines, will feature installations and designs by artists.

LACTC's policy allocates one half of one percent of the rail projects' construction costs for public art. The artworks will be sinvlar in scope to ones commissioned for other cities' rail lines and will include murals and sculpture as well as architectural components designed by artists, such as tiles, fences and light fixtures.

"The commission believes the art will give stations specific identities and will add to the passengers' pleasure," said LACTC chairwoman Christine Reed.

"This art program will help build neighborhood interest in the rail lines and a sense of pride. The more people who enjoy the system, use it and respect it, the bigger success it will be," Reed said.

The LACTC will commission one or more original works of art by California artists for each station, as well as sponsor temporary art events such as exhibitions or concerts at various locations along the lines. Artists will be selected through a committee review process and by means of both open and limited competitions.

Residents of the neighborhoods surrounding the various stations will participate in the process of choosing the artworks.

LACTC's public art program is being developed by Jessica Cusick, who will implement the first steps of the program this summer with a series of public meetings for artists and community residents.

When the Blue Line opens in the mid-90s, at least three stations are expected to have their artworks installed.

For further information on the project contact: LACTC, 403 W. 8th St., Suite 500, Los Angeles, CA 90014, (213) 626-0370.

—Sara McDonnell

On View Symposium

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•erha erhaps public art should be ephemeral, not permanent, more akin to performance art than to the metal and monolithic monuments of the past. Certainly more aesthetic risks should be taken. So said some of the participants in the symposium at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in May sponsored by On View Institute to discuss the topic, "How can we judge 'artistic quality' in public art and design?"

"We should not worry about whether this work will be significant in ten or twenty years," opined Mags Harries, one of Boston's most innovative public artists.

"I don't think art should last 75 years!

Temporary work is a way of getting ideas out there. The artist can take more risks, the public will accept more, because it goes away."

A rich outpouring of ideas swamped firm answers; indeed, most participants

voiced suspicion of rigid standards. A suspicion that jurying systems don't work terribly well was widespread.

"We should not think of quality controls, but think of art as a species that grows and changes," added Harries. Massachusetts developer Richard Friedman remarked, "We have a lot of P words here: problem, participation, panel, process, public. What we need are less participation, less democracy, and more leadership."

Trust the artist, Friedman recommends. The local committee, if any, should select the architect, the designer and the artist, and "then drop away. If you make the artist come back with his design and ask the committee, 'Whaddya think?', that's a formula for oatmeal."

Community panels have gone too far in involving people without a background in art, thinks Patricia C. Phillips, a critic for Artforum.

"Don't call it community art," she advised. "These panels ought to have fewer representatives from the community and more from the public at large."

Jackie Ferrara, whose specialty is converting "urban ruins" into usable public spaces, suggested, "Put the local troublemakers on the panel and get them on your side right away."

"The emerging role of the public artist," said Minnesota writer and editor David Skarjune, "is to muster the communal imagination." Skarjune urged continual expansion of our definition of art, recognizing that public art operates at the junction of the utilitarian, the contextual, and the aesthetic.

"In designing the city, there'satemptation to overdesign," noted Minnesota urban planner WeimingLu. "It's stifling."

Urban designers ideally would set the general design framework of the site, including such essential parameters as building mass, signage and lighting intensity, and then invite the artists to contribute the "specifics later," Lu says.

"The qualities for public art are no different from those for any other art," stated well-known public art consultant Patricia Fuller. "It must achieve some resonance with its public." The difference is that it has a non-art audience; art in galleries is seen by those who have chosen to go there. Fuller believes that the public can be sold on good art by good artists. "Find the strongest artists and support their best efforts," she advised.

Jennifer Dowley, director of the Headlands Art Center in Sausalito, California, noted that "a place has a history, a future, and a constituency." Good questions to ask about public >vork include,

media (such as banners, small-scale sculpture, pavement pieces and other streetscape features). The actual placement of the artworks on Market Street, along with the scheduling of performances, will begin this year.

Market Street has long been recognized as the major transit and pedestrian thoroughfare in San Francisco. It is a street where more than 300,000 daily transit trips begin or end, and where thousands more people work, shop and relax. The inclusion of art work on Market Street will fulfill the original intention of the Market Street Beautification Plan that provided the basis for the city's Art Enrichment/Art in Public Places Program that is mandated by a city ordinance.

Funding for the Market Street Public Art Program will be provided by the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and private contributions. An initial $350,000 has been allocated for the project. Maintenance of the new commissioned work, as well as the existing historic monuments, will be funded with revenues generated by a transit shelter advertising program on Market Street.

The Market Street Public Art Program will be coordinated by Jill Manton, curator of Art in Public Places for the San Francisco Arts Commission.

For further information on the competitions for individual art projects, or for requests for site profiles or the master plan contact: Jill Manton, The San Francisco Arts Commission, 45 Hyde Street, Suite 319, San Francisco, CA 94102, or call (415) 559-3463.

"What did the artist intend? Does that intention make sense in this time and place?

Is it identified as art at all? Is the role of artists that of outsiders or as citizens?"

"Absolute consensus is not a happy state," said Phillips, who is also on the faculty at Parsons School of Design. "The idea of a common coalescence of community (results in) a dialogue that is too cautious, too generalized. We can expect the blandest and most comforting art." At the crossroads of aesthetics, public life and social and political issues, public art ought to be "a little unruly," she concluded.

Agreeing with Phillips, Massachusetts public art consultant Pallas Lombardi said, "We need hard criticism, somebody taking a stand. Publicity is not criticism; it's only half the story." The public feels it has the right to participation, yet it is not knowledgeable. "Ourjobisto promote (arts) education."

"Art develops in ways we cannot foresee," mused Carlos Dorrien, stone sculptor and a faculty member at Wellesley College. "Are we pampering the community, instead of asking it to accept the element of risk involved in art itself? The question is, does the site call the artist in a magical way?"

—Marty Cariock Marty Carlock is an art/architecture writer who contributes to the Boston Globe, Art New England, and is the author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston: from Newburyport to Plymouth.

—Sara McDonnell

Market St. Sites in San Francisco Landscape Slide Library

The I he San Francisco Arts Commission announces the exciting new extension of its Art in Public Places program into the arena of public transit with the development of the Market Street Public Art Program. The Market Street Public Art Program will feature temporary and permanent art works and performing arts programs along the Market Street corridor, from the Embarcadero to Castro Street.

During this year, an artist and an urban designer will be commissioned c.o develop a master plan for the project in order to identify specific sites for artworks and to recommend specific concepts and

i hI ehe Landscape Architecture Slide Collection, documenting a decade of award-winning projects of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), is now available to the public through The Environmental Images Slide Library.

This catalogue presents the slide collections of the projects that have won ASLA's Professional Awards from 1979 to 1987.

There is also an updated supplement listing the 1988 winners.

The catalogue is well organized and •rftsy to use. It provides a comprehensive listing <•! all projects by ASLA award eater i e s , numbered slides with brief descriptions and quality indicators for each, pricing information and order forms. The publisher also offers a short 15-day turnaround time on slides ordered. The Landscape Architecture Slide Collection documents some of the best environmental design projects. They are recognized for their sensitivity to the environment, respect for the human presence in nature, originality, and design excellence.

The catalogue of the Landscape Architecture Slide Collection sells for $8.00 i~uS $2.00 postage. It is published by Environmental Images, Inc. Copies of the catalogue with the 1988 update may be obtained from Environmental Images Inc., Suite 101, 300 Eye St. NE, Washington, D.C., 20002, (202) 675-9108.

Environmental Images Inc. hopes to assemble catalogues of other slide collections that will document both the best and the worst environmental projects in an effort to illustrate those that present a threat to our natural and cultural heritage, i s well as projects that show creative approaches to protecting our environment.

Sculptures by Ron Gasowski were recently installed at Marivue Park as part of the ambitious Percent for Art Program of the Phoenix Arts Commission.

—Sara McDonnell

Public Art Review 6

Phoenix Public Art Takes Off T hIhe e Phoenix Arts Commission has announced approval of a $4.7 million budget during fiscal 1989-90 for the two-year-old Phoenix Percent for Art program. Nearly $1 million was allocated this past year for commissioned art in Terminal 4, under construction at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, and an additional amount of $1.2 million will now be added. The increased budget will also allow the commission to hire three new fulltime consultants for the period.

A master plan for the Phoenix Percent for Art program was formulated in 1987 by urban planner William Morrish, landscape architect Catherine Brown and New Orleans artist Grover E. Mouton to develop a conceptual framework for the placement of, possible themes for, and methodology of creating public art. The plan identifies general and specific sites for public art as "working zones," and suggests the types of projects that might be pursued. Artists are already involved in a variety of efforts to rebuild and expand the city's public works infrastructure.

"I think that the collaboration [of the planning team] really set the standard for the collaborations that are taking place now and will take place in the future," stated Gretchen Freeman, public art coordinator fo»- the Phoenix Arts Commission. Freeman feels that together, the master plan and broad approach of the projects will help to "combat the homogenization of the built environment" through the placemaking aspect of public art "I think that meaning did exist at one time, and now the artists are helping to bring back that meaning to our places."

When artist Marilyn Zwack first joined the design team for the Squaw Peak Parkway in Phoenix, where three bridges with expansive underpasses and embankments are under construction, the architects and engineers thought: "She'll do an adobe wall, and it won't get in the way," said Jerry Cannon of Cannon & Associates, the engineering firm for the project. But Cannon was soon impressed with the new dimensions of the bridge project. He cites "team consensus" as an important part of the process and says that the results will be "more humanistic."

Zwack's massive panels and columns for the Squaw Peak Parkway project are based on pottery designs of the Hohokam people who inhabited Arizona from about 300 to 1500 A.D. Preliminary excavation uncovered a Hohokam burial ground, and Zwack, who works primarily with adobe, was sensitive to the historical significance of the site.

"I do usually research the history of the area I'm working in," saysZwack, "and a memorial to the Hohokam seemed appropriate. " She feels that the combination of abstract and representational elements in the designs will allow a broad public to appreciate the work.

The most stunning aspect of the design is a series of gigantic reptilian columns that are major supports for the bridge. "To me they represent a cross between man and animals reaching to the heavens, though attached to the earth," says Zwack, who sees this as a symbol of reverence for the earth as "Our Shared Environment," the stated theme for the project.

—David Skarjune

ONTHEROAD DURHAM

Raging Bull Durham Public Art DialogueSoutheast

by Richard Posner I wenty years ago this month, I made a pilgrimage to visit master wood carver Edgar Tolson in Breathitt County, Kentucky. As we sucked on a pair of Buds on Edgar's house trailer steps, he turned and said, "Brother, let me Richard Posner's HERENOTHERE Belt proposal tor a vehicular gateway to the Robert Mueller Airport in Austin, Texas, if built, would be tell you what an expert is. Webster says X stands for the 120-feet-wide by 8-feet-high. The belt is an acknowledgment of, rather than an apology for, the fifty-year public/political debate on unknown in algebra. Daniel also defines spurt as a limitwhether to move, expand or relocate the current airport. less amount of water. Well, to my mind an e-x-p-e-r-t is In their panel presentation, Ericson and Ziegler sugDoris Betts. "Southerners tell stories to find out who did somebody who's got endless answers for things they ain't gested the ephemeral nature of temporary artwork is wellwhat to whom," Betts noted. "Northern storytellers seem no questions for." suited to address social issues. Asa way to circumvent the to always want to test hypothesis, and solve social probThis sentiment is shared by author Flannery O'Conrestrictive focus inherent in many permanent projects, lems. They take forever to get down to the nitty-gritty." ner, whose novel, Wise Blood, begins with the disclaimer: Ziegler presented slides of actual Percent for Art Program A Faulkneresque series of Southern demographic "this book is written by someone congenitally innocent of projects, where the following pathology were identified: chart studies was sociologist John Shelton Reed's contributheory, but with certain preoccupations."

The Site A Zone Syndrome, The Site One Zone Syndrome, tion. In chronological order, he presented A Directory of Nearly four hundred "experts" and people "congeniThe Shaded Area Syndrome, The Area Available SynKudzu Growth Map, A States Which Celebrate Lincoln's tally innocent of theory" attended Public Art Diadrome and The Mall Syndrome.

Birthday and Confederate Memorial Day (Or Both) Map, A logue = Southeast, a four-day symposium on regional and The audience greeted Ziegler's analysis with laughter Lynchings From 1900-1930 Map, An Outhouse Map [Pernational public art aesthetics, culture, history, philosophy and applause. The mirth, however, quickly disappeared cent of Residents Lacking Complete Plumbing in Housing and geography. The presenters and participants comonce the houselights came back on. Was this due to the Units), A Life Expectancy Map, A Baptist Map, A Birthprised artists, public officials, architects, landscape archisubliminal fear that "Commissions Do Not Come To The place of Country Music Singers Map, A Death Penalty tects, administrators, writers, scholars, developers, One Who Pulls The Leg Of The Hand That Feeds?" Who States Map, An ERA Ratification Map, A Textile Workpreservationists and educators from around the country. sets public art framing devices, and who determines how a ers/Domestic Servant Map, A States in Which Homosexual "All the usual suspects," as one panelist dryly remarked, space should be occupied, Ziegler's parting questions, were Relations Are Illegal Map, A Dry State (Non Wine and Beer "were rounded up." discussed among participants and presenters throughout Consumption) Map, and A Top Ten Soft Drink ConsumpDuring a plane-change in Pittsburgh, I reviewed the the conference. tion Map. North Carolina leads the nation in the latter, Public Art Dialogue = Southeast panel abstracts. The iniwith 55.4 gallons per every man, woman and child.

"Public space is primarily used by ethnic people," tial presentation by Oberlin College philosopher Norman stated Judy Baca, Director of Social Public Art Resource Art critic John Howett's observation that "there is no Care, "Public Art and Moral Responsibility," set the tone: Center (SPARC). In response to the economic disparity high culture without low culture" was the premise for poet (1) To notice, but not lament, the current lack of and social unrest predicted in the LA 2000 Task Force Michael McFee's slide meditation on visual landmarks of clear definition for "public art," (2) to consider study for Los Angeles, Baca presented her muralist vision Southern culture: The Giant Peach Water Tower (off 1-87 whether, in the circumstances, and perhaps against for the City of The Angels: "Muralism celebrates the divernear Gaffney, N.C), The Big Chair (a 20-foot sculpture in perceived opinion regarding art, the idea of public art sity of the city, promotes neighborhood pride and interThomasville, S.C.), and the numerous Confederate may be given a moral interpretation, and (3) to exracial harmony, and is a positive and creative means to Memorials depicting idealized rebel soldiers ready for The plore what that moral interpretation should be, and address youth-related problems".

Last Roll Call. Jean McLaughlin, visual arts director for how it might be followed. the North Carolina Arts Council chaired "The Changing Baca's survey of American muralism began with Los The dawn-to-dusk conference events, scheduled with Roles of Artists and Cooperative Efforts of Communities Tres Grandes (The Three Great Ones: Mexican muralists, simultaneous and overlapping activities, were punctuated in Three North Carolina Projects" panel that featured arRivera, Sequerios, and Orozco), continued with Works Proby a night at the opera with Gaetano Donazetti's Elixir of tists Vernon Pratt, Robert Kopf and Tom Spleth. "The ject Administration (WPA) and Comprehensive Training Love set in an local tobacco warehouse, and a "Rally Towel lesser truths are also true," poet Gary Snyder's rubric, was Act (CETA) mural projects, and concluded with a Night" baseball game with the Durham Bulls against the a fitting coda to their presentation. breathtaking panorama of her Great Mural of the City of Peninsula Pilots. Listening to the Bull Durham movie Los Angeles Project, a half-mile-long mural depicting sound track on the flight into "Art is not half as interesting California ethnic history.

Raleigh, I recalled Crash Davis's as the business of daily living," ob"Why do Native American artists get overlooked in musings about art and life: served artist David Ireland in "An American art surveys?" asked artist Edgar Heap-of-Birds.

Eleven Points of Light Artist's Perspective on Public Art." I believe there ought to be He then demonstrated the relationship between art and the Ireland's Prison Reformatory Fura Constitutional Amendment 1 It Happens.. .The wrong artist landscape in Native American work with examples that niture was designed around a comoutlawing AstroTurf and the is selected for the project. ranged from elegantly beaded Cheyenne Cradleboards, to mon tattoo, skull and crossbones, designated hitter. I believe in Medicine Wheels and burial mounds. "Remember," Heapand electric chair motif. Ireland the sweet spot, soft core porno2 It Happens... The client doesn't of-Birds told the audience, "American public art existed shared the Durham Arts Council graphy, opening your presents like the artist or proposal. before Columbus."

Gallery with Second Growth, artist Christmas morning rather than 3 It Happens... The administrator Jennifer Dowley, director of the Headlands Center for Patrick Dougherty's room-sized spiChristmas Eve, and I believe in the Arts, stated, "Headlands artists have participated in ral cyclone of maple saplings. Both long slow deep wet kisses that or client retires from the project. the planning of symposia on environmental issues, renoworks evoked Ad Reinhardt's obserlast three d a y s . . . .

4 It Happens... The artist, client vated buildings, developed curricula for the local school, vation that "aesthetics is to artists Crash Davis would unor fabricator goes broke. run a summer camp for children, collaborated with naturalwhat ornithology is to the birds." doubtedly concur that the practice ists, as well as carried out their more private investiga"Public art is inherently politi5 It Happens... The project takes of public art, like the sport of basetions, Dowley noted. "The board, staff and artists see cal," declared artists Kate Ericson ball, is a game of chance. Practithree to five years to complete. themselves as archaeologists-divining, uncovering, articuand Mel Ziegler. "We assume the tioners of both tend to succeed, in 6 It Happens... Collaboration is lating and interpreting what this place has to offer in all its site already exists. We look at what the words of Branch Rickey, when poorly conceived. manifestations." The next launching of Headland artist is already there for power and mean"luck is the residue of design."

Jim Paul's Human Sling Shot is not to be missed. ing." Several weeks prior to the Richard Andrews tossed out 7 It Happens... Disagreement In "Speaking Out of Place: Artists Working Outside conference, Ericson and Ziegler the ceremonial first ball. His conbetween artist, architect and the Mainstream," SandraPercival, Washington State Arts wrote the entire "City of Durham ference keynote presentation, "Inselection panel puts the kibosh Commission program manager, examined the decentralizaRevitalization Plan" on an 8-by-40venting an American Public Art," on project. tion of artmaking and surveyed the inextricable connecfoot stretch of city sidewalk for examined the relationship betions that exist between artist and place, a connection Loaded Text. The pavement was tween memory, landscape and 8 It Happens... The project is put further enumerated upon by artists Susan Stinsmuehlensubsequently jack-hammered into social utility: A 300-year typology on hold or stopped.

Amend, Farley Tobin, and Albert Paley in "The Craft arm-sized shards and displayed on of European and North American 9 It Happens... Artists end up Artist's Involvement in Public Art." The panelists offered three trucks outside the Durham public art history, which began both insight and humor into the relationship between the Arts Council. having to economically subsidize with Rodin's Burghers of Callais intentions and consequences of public work.

Loaded Text is a civic selfand culminated with Maya Lin's the project. portrait, open ended in its multiplicSeattle artist Lewis "Buster" Simpson, was the subVietnam Veterans Memorial.

10 It Happens... Administrators ity of meanings. For the optimist, ject of "Collaborative Efforts Between Artists, Designers, "The South As A State of urge artists to be "more the shards become Durham Rosetta Historians and Archaeologists that Make History Visible in Mind" was the focal point for three considerate" of the project Stones-sacred Rorschach mosaic Several of Cleveland's Historic Districts," by Kathleen subsequent presentations. "It is a tablets borne by the Three Graces Coakley, Director of Cleveland's Committee for Public Art. budget. cultural, not a geographic or Hauling Company trucks outfitted Simpson has inventoried all the call boxes, steam plates, economic reality," observed play11 It Happens... The practice of with Godwill company mud flaps and fire hydrants, street lighting, public seating and other wright Jo Carson. With Cherokee public art requires artists to be fender skirts. For the pessimist, amenities in Cleveland's Warehouse District. His generstoryteller, Molly Blankenship, she Ericson and Ziegler's endeavor may on the road a lot. ous sense of place and time makes Simpson a historic admonished the audience to "be well be evidence that The Road To "Ghost-Buster," equally at home on both sides of the careful what you get good at 'cause - D a v i d Ireland Hell is paved with broken words Mason/Dixon Line. you'll be doin' it for the rest of your Continued on page 16 symbolic of broken promises. life." A dictum seconded by author

Public Art Review

TRANSITTUNNEL SEATTLE

METRO Bus Tunnel Passenger Experience Paramount

by Ron Glowen

The Ihe Downtown Seattle Transit Project (DSTP), slated for full operation in 1990, will add another distinct element to the city's unusual transportation matrix. Seattle boasts of three floating bridges, a homeport for the world's largest vehicle ferry system, a monorail and catacombs of old streets and storefronts below street level in the historic Pioneer Square district.

Designed to relieve congestion along Third Avenue, the DSTP (or as it is known locally, the Metro Bus Tunnel) will route electric trolleys underground through 1.3 miles of subterranean roadway. The tunnel will be further defined by the integrated artwork and architectural plans of a five-member artist-design team working within a $1.5 million arts budget for the project.

The $150 million project is technically exempt from the percent-for-art ordinances of Seattle and King County, but METRO (the Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle) adopted the percent-for-art policy and followed its guidelines for this project. An advisory arts committee selected five artists to be members of the design team in 1985. Jack Mackie, Vicky Scuri and Sonya Ishii of Seattle; and Alice Adams and Kate Ericson of New York worked daily alongside project architects, engineers and landscape designers until the final overall design was completed in 1987. At this time, several artist-designed elements for the Metro Bus Tunnel are in the process of installation while others await implementation.

The urban scale, the complexity and the impact of the Metro Bus Tunnel project demanded a system-wide approach to the incorporation of art within architecture. The scope of the project includes five station terminals (three underground and two open-air), the tunnel itself, and surface improvements along the construction route.

Because each station is in a different urban district, artists and architects wanted to reflect and integrate the particular characteristics of the surrounding neighborhood so that passengers would be able to recognize each station by means of visual landmarks, as they do on the streets above.

The design team adopted a strategy of lead or co-lead responsibility for one or more of the project components.

These persons assumed a prominent design role and recommended locations and types of art for each site.

Likewise, the design firms of Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade and Douglas, and TRA Architects assigned lead architects to each project site. Mark Spitzer of TRA is the overall project design architect who supervised the design-team artists. In addition to the design-team artists, 16 other artists w e e commissioned to create specific artwork proposals that followed the parameters established by the derV team.

If the art installations go s j planned, no one design theme will dominate throughout the tunnel and station system. Instead, motifs will evolve from station to station, creating a constantly changing visual experience for the passenger.

l

ffiZfgu:

The METRO Bus Tunnel Westlake Station under construction.

Aiice Adams and Jack Mackie are the lead artists for the Convention Center Station, which is near Freeway Park and the Washington State Convention and Trade Center (both mega-architectural landmarks that cap Interstate Highway 5 in the heart of the city). Adams and Mackie see the station as a gateway.

To this end, Adams designed two entrance marquees for the street intersection that leads to passenger platforms below its surface. The open-grille, white-pipe structures with their glass and neon inserts are directly across from a landmark Seattle theater marquee, a placement

that is intended to be complementary. Adams also designed the glass paving blocks at the entrance that will be lit from the station lights below along with an adjacent seating platform on the landing of the station's entrance.

The monolithic concrete retaining wall, marking the station's perimeter where freeway access ramps and an overpass meet, will be the site of Mackie's waterfall garden. A vertical section of the wall is peeled back, its curved shape providing shelter for a "hanging garden" of foliage above the station's passenger platforms. The waterfall originates underneath the sidewalk at street level, and plummets in a stepped sequence of pools and precipices

Station clock designed by Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler.

district (Pioneer Square Station). At Westlake and University Street, a recent spurt of high-rise construction activity has altered the previous urban gf ambience, while that of Pioneer Square has remained relatively intact due to its s t a t u s as a historical landmark.

The City of Seattle created the new urban plaza of Westlake Park and the Westlake Mall and Office Tower to consolidate the neighborhood's five major retail department stores. The Westlake Station will double as an underground access to these businesses.

Jack Mackie is the lead artist for Westlake Station.

-^iHr

â&#x20AC;˘ â&#x20AC;&#x201D;' i-

The Convention Center Station, s h o w n here in an architectural illustration, was designed with the assistance of artists Jack Mackie and Alice Adams.

to the p l a t f o r m level.

Mackie also designed grid

The collaborative goal was to reflect

w^lstoalleviate e theabrupt transition from the freeand integrate the way scale to that of the station itself. He also devised surrounding color coding for the station's utility poles, which neighborhoods. will also function as directional and distance markers. New York artist Meren Hassinger was commissioned to create four concrete and granite planters for the station plaza, which will be landscaped as kind of urban pocket park.

Ishii and Adams are the team for the system's other open-air terminal, the International District Station.

Here, an entirely different set of environmental and situational factors resulted in an overall design that has a more distinguishable cultural motif. The station is located adjacent to one of Seattle's primarily Asian neighborhoods Community activists from the International District lobbied for a public open space at the station site, which resulted in major design changes. The centerpiece of the station plaza is an open space surrounded by high, horizontal trellises, a raised square platform of heavy timbers, and a central brick-paving pattern of stylized images depicting Chinese calender symbols. This open space will serve as a meeting place and arena for festivals and other public events.

The linear geometric trellis patterns will also be used for railings and an arbor passageway leading to the open space. The color scheme of red brick and shades of celadon green denotes achromatic transition between the old buildings on one side, and the newer Oriental neighborhood on the other. In reference to the latter, Ishii created nine 14foot-square painted-steel and stucco panels depicting origo.mi patterns for one wall of the underground platform, and poems by Seattle poet Laureen Mar are etched on stainless steel plates placed on the trellis crossbeams.

The three underground stations are located in the retail district (Westlake Station), the financial district (University Street Station), and the municipal government

Public Art Review 8

He and Vicki Scuri designed wall surfaces for the mammoth walls of the station platform, which can be seen from the mezzanine level. Mackie's wall-and-garden theme, of buff-colored terra-cotta relief tiles lightly glazed with subtle colors, will create an impression of leaves, vines and flowers hanging from the upper wall surface. This "hanging garden" will spill onto the platform wall, which is being lined with Scurf's embossed, low-relief terra-cotta tiles.

Abstract linear designs of clothing and architectural ornamentation represent the neighborhood's retail and architectural heritage.

Three 10-by-35 foot porcelain enamel murals by Fay Jones and Gene Gentry McMahon of Seattle; and Roger Shimomura of Kansas, are set into the wall. Jones' symbol-laden, narrative mural is a theatrical interpretation of Seattle as a waterfront city. McMahon's mural exaggerates the roles fashions and cosmetics played in producing the aura of glamor-her figures are dressed in a kind of debonair 1940s movie-set chic with appropriate gestural mannerisms. Shimomura's collage celebrates pop and

consumer culture with snippets of everything from Disney to Warhol, Hollywood movies to Kabuki, modern conveniences to ancient rites.

Westlake enjoys some surface improvements related to the tunnel construction. Five artists (Maren Hassenger, Garth Edwards, Virginia Paquette and Dyan Rey of Seattle; and Susan Point of British Columbia) designed fivefoot-square, cast-iron grates with decorative or abstract patterns for each of the five species of trees that will line the surface streets above the tunnel route. Seattle artists Heather Ramsay and Bill Whipple designed and fabricated street clocks. Ramsay's is on top of a 14-foot leaning pendulum with a brass mouse scurrying up it, and Whipple's design insets a clock's face into a seven-foot question mark atop a granite pedestal.

Next to Westlake's multicolored, travertine-covered Continued on page 17

DIALOGUE

Design Team Notes Creating Public Places W .rhen

Seattle METRO first decided to take a collaborative approach to incorporating art into the Downtown S e a t t l e Tunnel P r o j e c t (DSTP), I thought collaboration referred only to artists and architects working together. Over time, I learned how important it was for METRO to view itself and to be viewed by others as an equal participant in that collaboration. By taking responsibility for the art program and committing substantial staff resources to it, METRO made sure that the art program was a part of rather than apart from the rest of the project.

Most of the artworks for the DSTP are so integrated into the project that they are included in the project construction documents. This means that they have been reviewed by every conceivable interest group, from METRO'S safety and operations staff to the City Police, Fire and Engineering Departments. The artworks are generally made from the same materials that exist throughout the rest of the system. Therefore, there are very few special maintenance requirements.

There is a lot of "functional" art in our project because the artists learned through working on the design team that operationally there was not room for "plop" art.

Therefore, walls and ceilings are art, gates, tree grates and clocks are art. These are all elements of the system that would have been there anyway as passive fixtures but now contribute to creating a unique environment.

I think it is important to understand that collaboration may not always result in an art "object," but through the integration and incorporation of the artistic influence on materials selection, as a whole, it can result in a greater work of art than it might otherwise have been.

--Carol Valenta

Initially, collaboration requires more time and cooperation from everybody. The roles of individuals throughout the project vary greatly. Going bev y \ tx I s yond simple cooperation to AV/ V\ \ y levels of collaboration requires ^ *"* â&#x20AC;˘ trust. For me, my most collaborative experience has been with Mark Spitzer, on the University Street Station. By the time Mark and I received news that we would be redesigning the station, we had known each other for two years.

By then, our methods of communication had become quite fluid. We reached a level of collaboration that William Burroughs calls "the third mind," when ideas generate between individuals in such an integrated way, with such spontaneity, that a new level of thinking occurs.

Roles and responsibilities were constantly shifting and adjusted, specifically to the players involved. Not everything worked out as planned, but much of the planning was more about process than product. The process we employed was excellent. None of us had ever worked collaboratively on this scale in transit. So, we made up the rules as we went along, relying on process and group consensus for making decisions and adjustments. In terms of aesthetics, all of us received reviews of our work, many times. But many of the specifics of the work were left to the integrity of the artists on the team.

850 FT I think that the public will definitely be given a better project and a better commuting experience as a result of the design team's work. Design teams are an excellent means for humanizing and diversifying public projects. The pluralistic quality of the public has a much better chance of being realized in design statements when diverse groups of people (from different disciplines) are asked to problem solve and create. In this sense, the process and product allows all of us to better realize our diversity and our humanity.

5SHES

--Vicki Scuri

In Seattle what made the design-team artist role different from that of the commissioned artist was that the artist is hired as a consultant by the transit system in the same way as an architect or engineer. The artist works on a daily basis in an office with other consultants and staff, so one is aware of changes as the design of the whole system develops. In the same way, the other professionals are

aware of what the artist is doing and often consult with the artist as their work progresses. Any conflicts show up early and can be brought to the table for discussion and review.

It sometimes seems that hardly anyone knows what you're talking about with the term design team. All of the different DSTP consultants usually worked in close proximity and could call upon one another. It is extraordinary for artists to have this kind of access to various expertise, and this makes working on such a vast project so valuable.

As closely as I can recall, I was in Seattle for 32 weeks during that time and worked in the Dexter-Horton Building office ten hours a day on the average. I did this because I found the work fascinating. The more I began to understand the unique and difficult position we were in, the more I was pulled along by it. I was influenced by the architects, just as I think they were influenced by me.

In the beginning, many of us, artists and Detail of gate designed by Garth Edwards for the Pioneer Square architects alike, had difficulty dealing philosophi- Park station. cally with the idea of the individual artist and the design team. As I found myself taken more seriously as an idea and simply examine the merits of the idea. Not everyartist, I became more confident about wanting to develop one is capable of working this way. One artist resigned those things I thought were important to see through into when he could not control, couldn't prevail with his design. the design of the stations I was working on. I did not want A couple of the architects boycotted the process by ignorto see myself as "doing a piece" or "sculpture" or as "geting it or restricting it. If only they had been as honest to ting a commission." I felt in a way more like a shepherd, the project as the artist who left. Those artists and archiherding a flock of ideas along month after month and tects who wished to pursue their own personal vision, who hoping that most of them would not stray irretrievably felt a need of authorship, to be right or take control found away. In order to do this, I learned a new way of working, the process frustrating and impossible. one that was effective for the design team.

At this writing construction is not complete and criti--Alice Adams cal assessments of success or failure cannot be made. But, we do know that those who abandoned the traditional roles of artist, architect, etc., for the messy process of collaboration found it to be a dynamic method of design. The stations that are the result of uniting people with different training and skills and different perspectives toward problem-solving, are informative places beyond their intended use, structure, geometric volume, signage and people shuffling. These stations are scaled to people and people use. They will serve their intended use. They will also be curious, accessible and peopled-not places to avoid or leave as quickly as possible.

--Jack Mackie Alice Adams at the construction site for the International District Station.

The goal of the METRO Arts Program was to transform a functional transit facility into a place of human interest and creativity. It should add inspiration and delight to a transit rider's experience of comfort and efficiency.

The architects and engineers were open, involved and willing to assist the artists. And, the full participation of the artists on the project has permeated the work of the whole design team.

Based on the success of this and other projects, I'm now proposing a permanent one percent for art program for all METRO projects.

-Jim Street

Public art is about a different kind of artist, architect, sculptor, planner and citizen. It is about a citizen who pursues the revisioning of public space as an oasis conducive for listening, conversation and civic discourse. It is about artists who recognize the city as a cultural facility and who understand that art can have the ability to facilitate a culture's understanding of itself, its spirit.

This, spirit, this publicness of art, is created by a broad range of people all agreeing that what this art does is it involves the public. It serves a need and deals with a total situation-a situation of a shared psychology.

To build the DSTP a group of people were assembled who, for the most part, agreed that the job at hand was to construct a viable underground transit system. To some this meant that the task was to build stations that were worthy of being peopled. Some of the artists on the design team assumed this as a job, not a commission or the chance to do "a piece of art." To do these jobs, "collaboration" was attempted. At first this meant the artists would work with the architects. This has also come to include engineers, politicians, transit operators, art and design committees, citizens, attorneys, artists, business association members, administrators and now, contractors with change orders.

The question of collaboration seems to be hashed out on a day by day, dollar by dollar, profession by profession, and idea by idea basis. The viability of this process is centered in the participant's ability to relinquish ownership of an

Public Art Review 9

Roles and responsibilities were defined as we went along, both in the day-to-day working relationships and in the more formal aspects such as the terms of the artists' contracts and the final determination of budget allocations. In hindsight, an understanding of the terms and responsibilities would have cleared the air, but I would also argue against locking everything in place before beginning. Much of the creativity and opportunity came from the ability to write the rules as we went along.

The public will enjoy most of the work because the design team considered the public to be the client and the spirit of transit to be essential. Much of the work is rooted in its context and could not be moved without loss of meaning.

The notion that public works are dehumanizing comes from, I believe, our experience with modernism done badly and the disappearance of the human gesture in public projects over the last fifty years. To the degree that design teams can work together to deal with the human body and spirit, they are a good means for humanizing public projects, in general. They are not a panacea, however, and they are capable of creating poor work as well. But at this moment in time, they offer a way of coming together, which reflects something that our society as a whole is also struggling with.

One very interesting question raised by this work is who should judge or criticize the work of the design team?

--Mark Spitzer

Alice Adams is a New York artist who is well-known for her sculpture and public art.

Jack Mackie is a Seattle artist who specializes in public art.

Vicki Scuri is a Seattle artist and the lead artist on the DSTP design team.

Carol Valenta is the Art Program Coordinator for the METRO DSTP project.

Mark Spitzer, of the architectural and planning firm TRA, is the Project Design Architect for the DSTP. Jim Street is a Seattle Council Member, who is currently running for the office of mayor, and the chairman of the Arts Committee for the DSTP. Signage for the DSTP system and terra cotta tile squares for the

westlake Station were designed by Vicki Scuri.

ART IN TRANSIT ESSAY

Project." Many were outraged by the abstract designs and the lack of Nebraska artists. Nebraskans told me that many were incensed about one of the works in particular, a cor-ten steel piece by Massachusetts artist John Raimondi, which had the unfortunate title, "Erma's Desire," and seemed to include three rather lethal looking obelisks in states of spent (or anticipated) erection. A debate ensued in the state legislature whether to accept the ten sculptures, as they would be on public lands and require public maintenance. Hearings were held in five communities throughout the state, "turning out vocal spokespersons for both sides with an overwhelming majority expressing a favorable response." The testimony produced in these hearings resulted in a favorable decision by the Nebraska Legislature, and most of the works were dedicated on July 4, 1976-fireworks enough for any such celebration.

The Nebraska experience was good for the state and got people talking about art and writing letters about it to the editors of Nebraska papers. A year or two later the

Public Art and Transportation Highways to Society

l

by John Chandler

Iransportation was the theme of many a class mural painted on long sheets of butcher's paper back in grade school. We had to include every means of transportation from ox-pulled wagons to trucks, "streamlined" trains, airplanes and dirigibles. These were no space shuttles at the time except in the comics, but that didn't keep us from including them, as our aim was to present the history of transportation, past, present and future. We had the WPA transportation murals to inspire us, some of which still exist in places like the Pan Am shuttle terminal in New York.

Art and transportation have been historically linked

Public art presents us with an opportunity to redefine art in our time. in America, Our earliest s c u l p t o r s carved t h e figureheads on the sailing ships, and limners decorated our stage coaches.

Now we adorn the stations Long Division (1988) by Valerie J o h n s o n serves as a 60-foot security gate at the Lexington and terminals, and except Avenue line 23rd Street Station in New York and was commissioned by the Arts for Transit for an occasional project to Percent for Art program. replace the advertising cards on buses and subways with prints and poetry, we Nebraska Legislature passed a bill requiring one percent leave the vehicles unadorned. Where once we created luxof state construction costs be allocated for public art. The urious Victorian railroad cars, we now travel in the utmost artist-in-residence idea also took root in Omaha, where the blandness. Can anyone tell me why someone will pay extra Bemis Foundation has operated an artists-in-residence promoney to fly "first class" on an airplane? gram, drawing such artists as Italo Scanga, Michael Todd When we talk about art and transportation today, we and Manual Nari, that could be a national model. Some of are talking about rest stops, bus stops and waiting rooms; the artists attracted to the Bemis artist-in-residency prothe subway stations and airport terminals. Let's start with gram have stayed on and bought studios in Omaha, and a the rest stops. Two states were pioneers in installing art fledgling but apparently thriving art community is taking at the rest stop on interstate highways: Vermont and Neroot. braska. In Vermont during the '70s, the art resulted from At the Federal Department of Highways a spokespertwo international sculpture symposia, the brainstorm of son I once talked to said, "We don't have enough money to the sculptor Paul Auchenbach, who coordinated the entire fill the potholes." But, Stan Hamilton, of the office of pubproject. Stone carvers from throughout the world came to lic affairs at the department, said that as far as he knew, Vermont to live for several weeks and to carve artworks although there had never been any discussion of allocating from marble donated by the quarries. At the end of each a percent of highway funds for works of art, there was symposium, the works produced were installed at the rest money for highway beautification, for planting and landstops on Interstates 91 and 89. This was probably the least scaping. expensive major public art project done in this country.

What is needed is to persuade the state highway deSculpture symposia, common in Europe, are rare here. partments that artists should be added to the design teams, Perhaps not too many American sculptors are interested to work with the engineers and landscape designers on the in working on a piece for six weeks and leaving it behind design of these parklike rest stops, most of which are in when they complete it. The process does seem a bit exploicarefully selected sites with outstanding panoramic views. tive, but then it is not very different from what happens at Many an environmental artist would like to have such an Art Park or Sculpture Chicago. A lot more public art projopportunity. The inclusion of artists in such a project does ects could be done as Auchenbach's Vermont project was, not have to result in steel sculptures. In Boston artists will at relatively little cost. The artists have to be housed and get an opportunity to shape open, urban park spaces fed, and should receive a stipend and travel expenses. created when the Central Artery, presently elevated, is depressed and bridged over. Rebecca Barnes, manager of In Nebraska they have what is billed as a "500-Mile Urban Design and Facilities Planning for the MassaSculpture Garden." In 1973 Norman Geske, director of the chusetts Department of Public Works, plans to include artSheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, and Thomas ists on the design teams for shaping these public spaces Yates, then with Bankers Life, proposed a sculpture proover Interstate 93. ject to the Bicentennial Commission, which endorsed the project and gave a $100,000 grant. Money was received Jim Gutensohn, former commissioner of the Departfrom the Nebraska Arts Council, the National Endowment ment of Environmental Management in Massachusetts, for the Arts and the Nebraska Art Association. A call to made it a policy to always include artists on the design artists was answered by 121 sculptors; 47 of them were teams for new state parks. He said that artists treat each asked to submit specific designs, and then ten artists were place "as though it were the center of the universe," and selected to create major works at ten rest stops along 1-80, as a result, "the places they create are very special places, from Omaha in the east, to Sidney and Kimbal in the west. which says to the visitors who use them that they too are An interesting aspect of the project was that they formed very special people." Once an artist has created a very committees in each of the ten communities where the art special bus stop, rest stop or park, it should not be dupliwould be situated and brought into each community one of cated or mass produced, but allowed to remain its own the artists "in residence." The communities agreed to prospecial place. Get another artist to do the next one. Our vide the artist with room and board, transportation and cities look too much alike as it is, thanks to our international work space, and they coordinated the residency program. style designers.

The intention was to encourage the community to meet the Apart from the work of Dennis Adams, few artists artist, and watch the work in progress, thereby gaining a have taken the bus stop challenge, but maybe they haven't greater appreciation of contemporary sculpture. been asked. The reason artists have had so little influence The project resulted in considerable controversy on the look of the American city is because they simply throughout the state. A brochure on the project states: haven't been asked. They are seen as "flakey," impracti"recent history records no bigger controversy than the cal idealists, whereas the truth is that most artists are very great debate in 1975 of the Bicentennial Sculpture imaginative and creative problem solvers, and are in fact,

Public Art Review 10

very resourceful, accustomed to doing a lot with little. An artist-designed bus shelter needn't cost any more than one selected from a catalog. And it will be a lot more personal, will say a lot more about the neighborhood it sits in, and animate the space far better. It will also keep people who are waiting for the bus out of the rain.

Waiting rooms at most bus, train and airplane terminals are often dreary places. Art can help people wait, to pass the time. Possibilities exist for video art installations in such places. Instead of those rows of chairs with television sets attached, video rooms could offer the time-killing traveler a choice of art options to watch. Some of them could be interactive, some contemplative. The technology exists, the need exists. At the United Airlines terminal at Logan Airport there are two of George Rhoads' ball-game Avdiokinetic Sculptures. They are Charles Adams-like plexiglass boxes in which balls are elevated by screw gears and conveyor belts and released to roll through a maze of intricate devices, ringing bells and playing xylophones, filling the space with stochastic music, entertaining and entrancing spectators for 15 or 20 minutes at a time. How many public art works are looked at that long?

United Airlines also has an extensive art collection in its many Red Carpet Rooms throughout the world. These private clubs are the airlines' answer to plush railroad cars of the last century. They try to make the art in each airport reflect the various countries in which it is located, according to spokeswoman Jean Patterson. Susan Moss, also of United, added that "whenever designing a new terminal or renovating an old one, art is always included." She said most decisions for the public spaces at the terminals are made jointly by United, the city or another government agency that owns the airports, and the architects. There seems to be little uniformity in the process of commissioning artists. Some airport authorities have hired art consultants to advise them on the selection of artists; some do it themselves. Usually it's the architect who decides, with the approval of the client authority. However, some airports have used state percent for art programs.

Although the Atlanta airport was one of the first to have a major public art project in this country and did some bold contemporary works amid considerable public controversy, my own favorite airport for art is San Francisco.

The San Francisco airport falls under the city's percent for art ordinance and they have commissioned a number of outstanding pieces, including a wonderful William Wiley painting. But the best part of San Francisco to my mind has been the extensive exhibition policy there. Whenever I go there I am confronted with an exhibition that I am forced to walk through to reach my baggage. We all have had to make these interminable treks through airports, but at San Francisco the journey is a pleasant stroll through amuseum

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Alexis Smith designed this proposal for a bar in Concourse B at the Miami Inte

of contemporary art. One of the best exhibits I have seen in San Francisco was an exhibit of artists' chairs at the airport. Art in public places does noi, have to be permanent.

The airport everyone is looking to is, of course, Miami, where the Art in Public Places program, presently under the direction of Cesar Trasobares, asked artist Robert Irwin to get the dialogue going again between the airport authority and the puolic art program. A number of artworks had been installed in the airport over the years, but a controversy arose over a Rosenquist painting years ago, which halted any further art installations there. After Irwin got the two sides talking again, he was asked to produce a master plan that considered all aspects of the airport: parking, roadways, landscaping, terminals and all.

Finally they said, well, what would this look like? So he pre-

sented them with different strategies they could use for different ends, and brought in artists to make presentations representing these various strategies. The whole process has taken over three years, and Irwin is reluctant to give a quick summary of the plan. However, he intends to go over his copious notes, plans and presentations to produce a document that will make sense to others.

Irwin and I agree that public art presents us with an opportunity to redefine art in ou: time; we also agree that the way people are going about do.'ng public art has been, for the most part, although well-inte.itioned, misguided. A lot of unfortunate mistakes are being made, and repeated, as public art programs, run by inexperienced people, proliferate. The result is often mediocre art that we may all regret in a few years. We had better get our act together and do it right at least a few times before we lose the opportunity.

Perhaps one of the answers to the problems of public art is to involve artists in the conceptual stages of projects, as Irwin has served as a consultant for the Miami airport.

The administrators, Irwin suggests, often have too powerful a roie. They act as curators. They know what they want and find an artist who will do that. In Miami, the administrator stood aside to give the artist a better view and grasp of the complexities of the site and situation. The artist, with this increased understanding, can better shape a public place. I said to Irwin, "It sounds like they let you, as an artist, shape public policy." He replied, "No, but at least I may shape public places and the public places may help to shape the public policy."

Urban rapid transit systems have produced the most opportunities for public art in transportation during the past decade. Of course, art in the subways was not invented by Americans; we were actually latecomers to the field, following by some distance Europe, the Soviet Union and Canada. Stockholm was the first to decide to systematically install art in all of its almost 100 transit stations, and talks began in the 1940s to have artists and architects collaborate to make the stations' "beautiful rooms."

Among their stated goals for the art were "to relate the underground to the surface, to animate and humanize the subway system, and (in some cases) to relate the city's present with the city's past."

In Toronto, the rapid transit stations were all identical. They used a different colored ceramic tile in adjacent stations, but even here the differences were minimal. You had to read the station signs to know where you were. This was not unusual for metropolitan subway systems, which often had but one designer for the entire system and repeated the same plan over and over again. There was no uniqueness. Nothing underground related to anything above where there was distinct neighborhood and architec-

Airport in Florida.

tural variety. The inclusion of art made each station unique, gave it an identity, made the traveler through the system more conscious that he or she was taking a trip through an incredibly complex cityscape. Before, the ride was like a horizontal elevator with nothing to distinguish one floor from another except its number.

When the model Arts On The Line project got underway in Boston/Cambridge in 1979 with money from the Urban Mass Transit Administration (UMTA), Joan Mondale was Secretary of Transportation, and she was a great advocate for art in public places, encouraging all government departments to include provisions for art in government-supported public works projects. The UMTA program is permissive, not mandatory, but if a city is applying for funds for planning, constructing or rehabilitat-

Situations (1987), a granite subway bench at the Downtown Crossing in Boston, was designed by Lewis "Buster" Simpson

ing mass transit systems, it can include a plan for artists' participation as part of its proposal.

Most subway art projects have concentrated on the stations, access structures and surrounding plazas, but an UMTA circular written by Theodore Lutz, Administrator of UMTA under Mondale, makes it clear that additional possibilities are eligible for funding as well. The design of rail cars and "paratransit vehicles," buses and bus shelters, and also "pedestrian-oriented improvements," such as underground walkways, elevated walkways, bridges and sidewalks, are all options. Also, legitimate expenses include "additional amenities such as street furniture, sculpture, fountains, and special lighting These improvements can contribute to a renewal of the entire city environment."

UMTA required that art professionals be responsible for selecting the artists through open, non-discriminatory practices, that the costs be reasonable (1/2 to 2 percent of construction costs are seen as reasonable), that the community be involved at least to some extent in the process, and that some effort be made to raise some of the costs locally. They also require that the art be durable, vandal resistant, and "of the highest quality."

The Department of Transportation, through its UMTA division, does support funding projects for bus transit. " Since buses are the most prevalent form of mass transit, visual improvements concerning bus transportation could have a significant nationwide impact Shelters can be designed to complement their particular urban settings and also incorporate graphics or artwork." Bus shelters could be designed by sculptors in collaboration with engineers. Such functional sculptures could do much to improve the urban streetscape. We have too much uniformity in the country. Designers like continuity and repetition of form; they want "to use a consistent vocabulary," as they say. But the value of adding artists to the urban design equation is that they produce originality and uniqueness. A place shaped by an artist is like no other place. It is a special place.

UMTA's purpose for adding art to the transit environment is to enhance the visual quality, and to make "mass transit a more pleasant mode of travel" and of course, to increase the number of riders. Unspoken in the official documents is the fact that the inner cities are being choked to death by automobile commuters producing grid lock and unbreathable air. Since we seem unwilling to ban autos in the city, we must encourage greater use of mass transit.

But often the subways have a bad reputation. Sometimes called "people movers," they are often seen (but not by New Yorkers, who known better than to drive) as only for t l j poor who can't afford to drive. This image has been around enough to be a wish-fulfilling prophecy in the older cities with run-down transit systems.

The inclusion of art and good design in the subways could make these underground environments more upscale, could "gentrify" their image. To reduce auto traffic and increase use of transit systems, it is necessary to attract the middle class to take the trains. Huge parking garages and parking lots at the ends of the lines tempt travelers to park and ride. Beautiful, clean, art-filled stations make the trip more endurable. In some cities, like Boston, it may be working. The garages are filling up. In some other places, such as Buffalo, the new subways are largely unused. This may simply be because people who are accustomed to driving their cars to the corner store are not suddenly going to discover the pleasures of walking the few blocks to the station. Or, it may be because some of the new systems are too limited, don't serve enough area to make them viable. New systems, however, like the Metro in Washington, D.C. and BART in the San Francisco Bay area already seem to get passengers and fill real needs through their functional efficiency, so gentrification is not the issue there.

Public Art Review 11

On the whole, the Is contemporary art art that has graced our public transit stations has incompatible with not all been "of the highest quality." This is public art? no fault of UMTA. The public art in transit programs has certainly tried to guarantee quality by entrusting the decisions to panels of art "experts," and the experts have often selected very good artists. Wherein then is the shortcoming? Is it, as Boston artist Mags Harries says, because the artist is asked to make the work last for decades in a alien environment? Is it because, as she says, seven years can pass between the selection of an artist and the installation of the work? Most artists have asked to be involved early on in the process, fronn the beginning if possible. A subway system can take seven years to design and build. There is no instant gratification in most public art projects. Harries argues that maybe we should do more temporary art in public places and worry less about permanent, durable art. There is much to say for that.

Is contemporary art incompatible with public art?

Robert Irwin says he doesn't think he can ever go back to doing studio art again, now that he has committed himself to shaping public places. And yet sometimes it does work.

Sometimes a work of art, even plopped down like the Calder in front of the post office in Chicago, can make you feel elated. And sometimes a collaboration between an artist and a designer really clicks and energizes an entire design office. Landscape architects and other designers are creative people too, but perhaps they have had to make too many compromises over the years. Their creativity gets beaten down as they keep repeating the easily accessible, the acceptable and the predictable. The presence of an artist on a design team is an opportunity to let oneself go, a license to think the unthinkable, to experience the joy of a good brainstorming session where all ideas are encouraged till the right ones emerge, almost effortlessly, from the group.

In 1918, the American thinker Mary Parker Follet, who laid many foundations for both mediation and dynamic management, wrote in The New Siate, "we must learn cooperative thinking, intellectual teamwork. There is a secret here tha t is gaivg to revolutiov he the world." There are three ways to settle disputes, she said, "submission, compromise, and integration." The first two are states of war. "War is the easy way; we make war because we have not enough vitality for the far more difficult job of agreeing. By "agreeing," she means "creative group thinking," which always results, she was convinced, in a higher, more creative, more participatory and democratic solution.

These ideas probably sound antithetical to the creative process as many artists know it. Most artists, at least since the Renaissance, have had a heroic, almost sacred, image of the artist as the creator. Self expression, is regarded as an inalienable right for most artists. But the public realm has little place for that kind of individual ego. The successful public artist must be a "giver," to use Lewis Hyde's term. The artist must feel a certain indebtedness for the gifts and talents one has, and a need to pass these gifts on to tne society at large.

Herbert Read once wrote that there are two kinds of artists: the hermits and the missionaries. The hermit is solitary, self-absorbed, unwilling or unable to share his secrets witn others. The missionary is dedicated to giving what he has to others, and of meeting them on their own ground and communicating with them, so that they both may arrive at a higher level. â&#x20AC;˘ John Chandler is a freelance critic and public art consultant residing in Boston.

SUBWAY BOSTON/CAMBRIDGE

Riding the Red Line Arts on the Line

A

by David Skarjune

commuter, standing on the station platform at Davis Square, the subway stop nearest Tufts University in Somerville, Mass., wishes she had something to read. Her wish is granted: looking down, she sees that the bricks under her feet are carved with the lines of a poem: "Perched in hackmatack and cedar, thrushes singand flit..." The sentence engraved in the platform has a title, "Gilman Pond Mountain," and is signed by author Richard C. Shaner.

If :he commuter's train is very late, she might have time to discover fragments of poetry by ten other poets, unobtrusive treasures that brighten the both real and psychological gloom underground. The poetry platform is one of twenty works of art that were installed when the Boston subway system extended its Red Line over three miles to the northwest.

Boston was the first American city to follow the lead of European cities in putting art in its subway stations. Although the "T," as Boston's Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) is called, was the first organization to place works in the Boston subways, the Cambridge Arts Council's Arts on the Line has become a base line of sorts for similar projects elsewhere.

Arts on the Line began as a design initiative of the Federal Department of Transportation (DOT). Joan Mondale, wife of the then Vice President Fritz Mondale, helped

The Glove Cycle (1984, detail), by M a g s Harries at Porter Station helps elevate commuters.

to spearhead this major policy shift at a national Boston was the first level. Of three DOT initiatives in 1978, one was ear- U.S. city to put art in marked for airport art in subway stations.

Atlanta, one for architectural restoration of Baltimore's railroad station, and one for Cambridge, which landed a pilot project for a comprehensive program of siting subway art. The majority of installations for Arts on the Line were completed by 1985 with the opening of the Alewife Station at the end of the line.

Years earlier the "T" planned its station modernization program in the mid-1960s for some of the system's oldest stops, which date back to the turn of the cen.jry.

Arlington Street Station was assigned to Cambridge Seven; an innovative architectural firm that had a novel idea: install some graphics, some photomurals of the neighborhood, on the rehabilitated station wall. These photomurals would show underground riders where they were as well as brighten the underground environment. The Arlington photomurals, along with those installed in other stations from 1966-70, are still in place.

For Park Street Station, the heart and crossroads of the system and the oldest subway station in the country (built in 1897), a different approach was used. The architects for that job, Arrow Street, and the MBTA selected artists to create art for the site. The choice was a ceramic and found-object mural, Celebmtion of the Underground,

by Lilli Ann Killen-Rosenberg. The mural incorporates old trolley parts and rusty tools, nails, fossils and horseshoeÂŽ unearthed on the site into scenes of Boston's transportation history.

Mallets swing against chimes hanging between the tracks as part of The Kendall Band M9R8, detail) by Paul Matisse at Kendall Station

The "T" also commissioned Locomotive by George Greenamyer, who welds wheeled vehicles of a whimsical character, for Essex Station (now Chinatown Station). A private party bought and donated an aluminum and copper piece, Wheels inMotion, by Silvana Cenci for a corridor wall under South Station. The main flaw in the "T" program, as far as the arts community was concerned, was the failure to work out a selection process for choosing artists.

For Arts on the Line, the Cambridge Arts Council has developed an open and competitive selection process. But in the earliest phases, before the process was developed, there were problems. For example, the architectural firm of Skidmore Owens & Merrill asked Gyorgy Kepes, founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to design something for the new Harvard Station, and there had to be negotiations to get the architectural firm to accept other artists.

Kepes' design, Blue Sky on the Red Line, is nonetheless one of the transit system's glories, a 110-foot-long stained-glass wall, blue except for a glowing red line (a pun) running through it. But the work did not turn out as it was originally planned. A pioneer in melding art and technology, Kepes wanted to use fiber optics to bring daylight from above ground "into the netherworld." But the cost of such an undertaking was prohibitive. A traditional stainedglass window with artificial backlighting was substituted in its place.

To select permanent works, the Cambridge Arts Council has worked hard to develop procedures that would satisfy all constituencies: users, neighbors, artists, historians, local businesses and bureaucrats. They insisted on fair and democratic procedures. The competitions have been widely advertised, and neighborhood committees are involved along with qualified art consultants. Each station had an advisory committee comprising all of the above groups, which fed input to a voting jury of three professionals. Of the jury, at least one member had to be an outsider and one a working artist.

Harvard Station received one other interior work, a ceramic mural based on New England Decorative Arts, by Joyce Kozloff. The rest of the money for the Harvard stop was spent above ground for a pair of towering sculptures, Omphalos by Dimitri Hadzi and Go.teway to Knowledge by Ann Norton.

One stop up the line from Harvard, Porter Station has perhaps the most significant works of any "T" station. The architectural firm here was Cambridge Seven. They encouraged artists to wander around the neighborhood and fantasize. The architectural firm even used some of its own

design money to support artists' brainstorming. The effort paid off. Mags Harries' famous Glove Cycle, formed with lost gloves cast in bronze that appear as scattered items alongside an escalator. William Wainwright's Lights at the End of the Tunnel, a mobile that refracts daylight underground, won a Governor's Design Award. And, that's only the half of it. A red Susumu Shingu windmill sculpture, Gift of the Wind, marks the spot from afar. David Phillips' granite boulders sliced by bronze sections grace the pleasant outdoor plaza, along with works in granite by Carlos Dorrien and William Reimann.

At Davis Square, long a blue-collar neighborhood with a variable ethnic history, local people made it clear they would prefer figurative art. Ten life-sized cement figures

by James Tyler stand in the street-level plaza, and a frieze of ceramic tiles made by local school children under the aegis of ceramicists Jack Gregory and Joan Wye bedecks the corridor leading underground. One abstract piece by a notable artist was chosen, though, the colorful and largescale wall piece by Sam Gilliam titled Sculpture with a D. Alewife Station, located in a junction of highways, business parks and commercial strips, is an immense station complex lacking an immediate neighborhood influence.

For those reasons Alewife's art seem low-profile, even though there are maps in the station identifying the placement of works. Joel Janowitz's tromp l'oeil painting Alewife Cows fares best with its prominent placement at the end of a bus station platform.

To date, the work enjoying the biggest crowd appeal has been Paul Matisse's The Kendall Band, at Kendall/MIT Station. A set of large-scale musical instruments designed and tuned by Paul Matisse hangs between the tracks, safe from the tampering hands of vandals. By a system of cranks, pulleys and hammers located on the platforms, a set of aluminum chimes, a gong, and a slab of thunderous sheet steel can be played by commuters waiting for their rides.

The lesson is clear: artists must be involved from the beginning, and they must be allowed to work directly with designers, architects, contractors and the community.

Before Arts on the Line, artists considered themselves lucky if architects plopped down one of their public works as an afterthought. Now these same artists can ask for full participation as designers, and increasingly, get what they ask for.D David Skarjune is a freelance writer and editor in Minnesota, and is the editor of Public Art Review, Vol. I.

The "Artstops" series of art installations and events gave Red Line riders temporary escapes from the gloorn o< subway construction Staged several times monthly from April 1986 to March 1989, the program was sponsored by the Arts on the Line program of the Cambridge Arts Council and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. From Left to Right: Commuters interact with ReachPark Street Station by s o u n d artist Christopher Janney; A rider carries a totem during Knows No Bounds by Mags Harries and Richard Lerman; Commuters disrobe to become tap dancers in Holiday Tap.

Public Art Review 12

NEW YORK

The Changing Face of Soho Artmakers & Arts for Transit

o

by Tim Yohn

n the surface, public art can come a piker in Manhattan, where open space is at a premium. The power and privilege of the private sector, in the form of architecture and advertising, predominate to a degree perhaps unequalled elsewhere. But below the surface, it's a different story: a huge public area of the city remains curiously unadorned-the New York subway system. In 1985, following the example of the Boston transit system, the giant New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) established a bureau called Arts for Transit to help upgrade the 463 stations of the world's largest subway system as well as the 255 stations of three commuter surface railroads serving New York City.

Arts for Transit's most visible program, Percent for Art, has used allocations from MTA's capital renovation budget to commission some 30 projects, including works by such big names in the public art world as Nancy Holt, Maya Linn, and Romare Beardon. But since 1986 through amore modest effort called Creative Stations, Arts for Transit has been offering space in stations, along with up to $5,000 in a matching grants, to local community arts initiatives. In the second year of the Creative Stations program, an MTAorganized jury selected 14 proposals from more than 70 submissions systemwide. One of these awards went to Artmakers Inc. for the Broadway/Lafayette subway station, which is just north of Manhattan's Soho artist district and near the Artmakers office. The work of 19 artists, Artmakers' The Changing Face ofSoho installation exhibits an almost defiant departure from the mainstream of contemporary public art.

Artmakers Inc. is a loosely-knL association of artists whose membership varies on an ad hoc basis, depending on the scale and venue of active projects. Formed in 1983 by veteran mural painters and arts activists Eva Cockcroft and Joe Stephenson, Artmakers is dedicated to "the creation of high quality public art relevant to the lives and work of the people in the communities it serves." Artmakers has left its mark by way of outdoor murals in various neighborhoods, most of them poor, around New York City. From their inception, Artmakers' projects involve people from the local community at every phase: as sponsors, as jurists selecting individual designs, or as artists carrying out the work. The most ambitious of these projects was the 1985 La Lucha Continua, a "political art park" of 26 murals by

Individual panel by Ed Herman ( o r T h e Changing Face of Soho (1988)

40 artists on the walls of back yards and vacant lots snaking through a partially abandoned block in the mostly Hispanic Lower East Side of Manhattan. Although the murals addressed such issues as U.S. intervention in Central America, apartheid, gentrification and police brutality, they broke with the tradition of political murals, which "too often obscure the best of individuals' styles" and instead "integrated and enriched very different personal styles."

(Lucy Lippard, "Hot Art in the Summertime," In These Times, Oct. 2-8,1985) This desire to maintain the identity of individual works while integrating them into a community context is evident in Artmakers' approach to the Broadway/Lafayette station project.

Cockcroft and Kristin Reed, another core Artmakers member who coordinated the project, are fierce in their determination to keep public art from being a private vision formed through an elitist process and imposed on the public. Rather, the two artists believe in an art that serves a community by responding to the people in a certain location, and not simply to the physical character of a site. In the case of Soho, Artmakers was dealing with a "community" made up of artists.

Like the light industry sector they displaced in the area that came to be called Soho in the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists in the 1980s now Icons (1989) by Jen Siegel and Rodney Sappington is one of six find that they are the ones being squeezed out of multimedia panels at the Huntington Train Station in Long Island Soho. The soaring market for Manhattan real commissioned by the Creative Stations program of Arts for estate has brought in a new population, affluent Transit. professionals as residents and in their wake, upscale galleries, shops and restaurants.

So it was organization working for the homeless. The final selections that Artmakers adopted as its theme, The Changing Face (works by artists Amir Bey, Elizabeth Grajales, Ed HerofSoho, for its subway installation, a subject that would unman, Suellen Johnson, Nina Kuo, Ginger Legato, Rachael derline the plight of a community of artists as well as Romero, Pamela Shoemaker and Mimi Smith) covered the memorialize the history of socio-ethnic convergence! that gamut of media-painting, pastel, sculpture, collage, cegive the area its special character. ramic, photography and computer printout drawing-and a variety of representational styles.

The two blocks of the crosstown artery of Houston Street between Broadway and Lafayette Street present a Artmakers invited the artists whose proposals were banal low-rise cityscape. A jumble of filling stations, auto not chosen to join in on the design and creation of the two repair shops and a Cars a-Poppin' carwash belie the area's collaborative pieces, and five of the artists did so. The strategic location as the meeting place of Greenwich Villarger of the collaborative pieces, an 8-by-32-foot painted lage on the north, Soho to the southwest, Little Italy and mural, was designed and executed by Janet Braun-Reinetz, Chinatown to the south, and the East Village and Hispanic Eva Cockcroft, Catharina Cosin, Camille Perrotet, and Lower East Side to the east. The only architecture of note Francesco Santinelli. Using bright colors, strong lines and is the imposing red-brick Puck Building on the southeast overlapping and disjointed perspectives, it jazzily depicts corner of Lafayette and East Houston streets, a former the human, occupational and architectural diversity of the printing trade center in the early part of the century that neighborhoods abutting the Broadway/Lafayette subway has been refurbished in recent years as office space. The station. More offbeat and magical in effect, and employing ground floor ballroom is frequently rented out for galas and muted earth colors and flat pictorial space, is the second movie locations-the street in front is often clogged with collaborative mural, composed of glazed low-relief ceramic movie-equipment vans or limousines disgorging passegments, by Karin Batten, Therese Bimka, Dina Burszsengers in evening dress-in stark contrast (though a contyn, Myra Melamed, Camille Perottet and Nina Talbot. trast commonplace in Manhattan) to the poverty of the Stylized images and words organize the whole into a simulhomeless men who form agauntlet of beggars at the Broadtaneous narrative, telling the story of an artist losing her way/Lafayette subway entrance. living and working quarters to commercial development, which is symbolized by a chomping dragon that converts Down a flight of stairs is a typically grim New York the artist's favorite coffeeshop into a trendy bar and her City subway station, a dingy subterranean sprawl on three local grocery store into a "food boutique." levels where three separate subway lines cross one another. The three lines were originally built by private enArtmakers' proposal had been made in March 1987, terprise as competing services, a fact that explains in part and its proposal was approved in June of that same year. the unique character of the New York subway system.

But in the fall of 1987, when Artmakers was ready to inHundreds of homeless people sleep in the lower levels of stall the finished work, the MTA wasn't. The system's the station because it remains surprisingly warm in winter.

Track and Structures Department, responsible for keeping Even so, its location at the center of lower Manhattan the trains running, had studied the blueprint furnished by makes it the venue of choice for thousands of riders with Artmakers and informed Arts for Transit that the instaldestinations in the area or commutes between the Upper lation would take them two weeks to put into piace, which East Side and Brooklyn, as it provides a free transfer bewould be too long of a hindrance. Along with ti'at news, tween the Lexington Avenue line, the only service to ManArtmakers received a request to scale back the project. hattan's Upper East Side, and the two Independent (END) Having commissioned work from 19 artists whose projects lines serving midtown, Manhattan's West Side as well as had already been finished or were near completion, Artdowntown and Brooklyn. makers refused to scale back but offered a compromise-it Cockcroft and Reed decided on a low-ceilinged but would install the project itself over one weekend. Arts for relatively spacious chamber with square columns Transit agreed, and after several false starts the installasupporting girders eight feet above the floor (vaguely sugtion was accomplished in the spring of 1988. Artmakers gesting a Romanesque cloister) for the area just off the scrubbed the space and put up The Changing Face of Soho, downtown Lexington platform and on the transfer route to under the eagle eye of MTA personnel, who provided electhe IND. A wall roughly 40 feet long contained nine shaltricity and temporary extra lighting at the site, as well as lowly curved, ceiling-high niches between pilasters and tools ai d aa ace. seemingly ideal for a series of roughly 4-by-8-foot panels.

There w.Te feors that the office of Mayor Ed Koch An adjacent and a facing wall offered suitable spaces for might tay.f umbrage at propaganda against gentrification two large collaborative murals. The effect as envisioned by affixed to a publicly-owned wall, but no threat of censorArtmakers was to make an art gallery out of space whose ship ever materialize H. In the year and a half since its creadarker recesses were accustomed to serving as urinals for tion, The Changihj Fac ufSoho remains in place, without the homeless. being defaced, trav^ed by and looked at by as many people Lumber and plywood provide backing for the installain a day a? any Old Master at the Met. It has made a differtion; local suppliers donated heavy-gauge acrylic sheets to ence to its commuiJ'v Dy making the subway less menaccover and protect the panels once they were in place. Forty ing, and thus a little safer. As public art it is exemplary; artists citywide responded with proposals for pieces for the both of the community and for the community, The Changnine niches. The jury that made the final selection coning Face of Soho represents the artists' own community. â&#x20AC;˘ sisted of two Artmakers members; two local artists, Nancy Spero and Josely Carvalho; representatives of four commuTim Yohn is a New York photographer and writer, and nity arts-political action groups; and a representative of an senior editor of Art & Artists.

Public Art Review 13

LIGHT RAIL DETROIT

People Mover Murals Downtown on the Move

D

by Bruce N. Wright

etroit was once a shining example of what modern industry could produce. Its erstwhile optimism and wealth were reflected in its richly decorated stone and terra cotta public libraries, police stations, court houses, government buildings, office towers, and commemorative squares and fountains. It was a city enriched by its ability to crank out a product that virtually everyone could use, and it was a city that saw the future as a steady, unending climb toward greater and greater prosperity.

W? all know the sad truth about that story. It's a story abcut a downtown plagued with empty office buildings, run-down storefronts, and the near total abandonment of a once beautiful and vital metropolis. Detroit seemed indicative of a larger urban malaise that most U.S. industrial cities, unable to keep pace with changing technology, suffered through. A late 1970s attempt to reverse that trend by the Big Four auto companies and a private developer produced the bejeweled Renaissance Center. It only seemed to hasten the exodus from the older class-B office buildings, and painfully pointed out the discrepancy between the dream and the reality.

Now, through herculean efforts on the part of the city of Detroit and civic and private groups, the downtown is again bustling with activity (if only in a small concentrated area), and the focus is on the waterfront and major public or business-related institutions such as the Renaissance Center, Millender Center, Cobo Hall and Joe Louis Arena, and the historic Bricktown and Greektown quarters.

A significant part of that bustle of activity is generated by a new public transit system called the People Mover. It is a closed-loop, fixed-rail system that connects major buildings in downtown Detroit at their second level by means of a raised track and a series of short, two-car automated trains. The inclusion of $2 million worth of privately and publicly funded art in the thirteen transit stations of the People Mover has proved to be a boon for the transit system and the city as well. A strong mix of color, texture, and dynamism, the art in the 2.9-mile system enlivens the otherwise bland gray boxes on stilts that are the station stops, and is made all the more lively by the ebb and flow of commuters.

The art in question ranges from bright, geometric tile patterns, to complex mosaics of mythological motifs, to humerous cast-bronze running figures, to more representational art, and exhibits a wide range of aesthetic appeal.

Charles M c G e e at work in his studio on The Blue Nile (1988), an enamel mural installed at the Broadway Station.

Many of the murals were produced by Pewabic Pottery in Detroit, "one of only two active turn-of-the-century pottery studios in the country," as its promotional literature states. For example, New York artist Farley Tobin's untitled mural of bright, colorful tiles places a repeating red X-form over a constantly changing color pattern of basic forms. The frenetic quality set up by this juxtaposition bespeaks the activity and rush of commuters through the station. Joyce Kozloff's giant illuminated manuscript, titled D for Detroit melds a historical medieval style of witty references to the stock market (illustrated bulls and bears) and the financial district it occupies, with intricate Byzantine and Aztec designs influenced by the Fisher Building across the street.

The most unusual piece is by well-known New York neon artist Stephen Antonakos entitled Neon for the Greektown Sto,tion. The artist has wrapped red, yellow, amber, violet and green neon tubes and their electrical raceways around the outside of the station and across and under the second level skywalk bridge connecting the People Mover with a nearby retail and entertainment complex. It is a fitting gesture that pays subtle homage to Greektown's (and the artist's) ancestry with bold geometric lines, semicircles and other forms-after all, it was the Greeks who invented geometry.

Undoubtedly the most controversial of the station pieces is the freestanding sculpture called Catching Up, by Princeton, New Jersey, artist J. Seward Johnson Jr. for the Grand Circus Park Station. It is, what else?, a life-size painted bronze commuter reading a newspaper while waiting for the next train. Though many in the local arts community d e r i d e J o h n s o n ' s work, the public has wholeheartedly embraced the piece, unofficially declaring

On the Move (1988, detail) by Kirk Newman at the Michigan Avenue Station is a series of fourteen cast bronze figures.

Public Art Review 14

it the favorite. Could it be Art in the Stations that the average person finds the straightforwardhelped to reverse ness of the art more digestible than the more, shall we say, esoteric work public opinion of the found in most modern art People Mover with museums or being put f o r t h by many public its troubled history. artists?

Other artists in the program are include ceramic artist Tom Phardel (of Pewabic Pottery), Detroit painter Allie McGee, Kalamazoo artist Kirk Newman, Larry Ebel and Linda Cianciolo Scarlett, Ann Arbor based Gerome Kamrowski (known for his surrealist work of the 1930s and '40s), Detroit-born New Yorker Alvin Loving Jr., Colorado artist George Woodman, Detroit artist Glen Michaels, Pewabic Pottery artist Diana Kulisek, Detroit painter Charles McGee, and sculptor Jun Kaneko (formerly with the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan).

Artists were selected by a thorough screening process that was conducted by a council of 14 people drawn from civic organizations, the community, public officials and local arts advocacy groups. More than 200 artists were solicited from across the nation, from which the final fifteen were selected, nine of them Michigan artists. Priority was given to artists who worked in or had a working knowledge of durable materials such as bronze or glazed tile. In addition, artists had to guarantee their work vandal-proof and capable of lasting fifty years.

The process of securing funding is also worth noting.

Major effort was put forth by many dedi§ cated enthusiasts, most especially Irene < Walt, chairwoman of the Detroit People ° Mover Art Commission. According to many involved with the project, Walt's indefatigable efforts were instrumental 2 in making the art possible. Also key to the process was the use of three-dimensional scale models of each of the transit stations. These helped potential funders to visualize and appreciate the impact of that the art would have in embellishing the nondescript stations.

The architects of the transit system, though initially convinced of the inherent art of their station designs, were soon persuaded of the importance the commissioned art could take in building support for the People Mover.

The Art in the Stations program was exactly what the People Mover needed to reverse public opinion of its worth. When the city took over from the original developer of the People Mover, SEMTA (South East Metropolitan Transit Authority), it was stepping into a project troubled by a history of cost overruns, structural problems, serious on-site accidents, hints of contractor corruption and mayoral complicity.

Today the People Mover is viewed as being especially representative of the new Detroit-acity proud of its heritage, sophisticated in cultural matters and reformed in its social attitude. • Bruce N. Wright is an architect and freelance design critic, and he is the editor of INFORM Design Journal.

COMMUTER MINNEAPOLIS/SAN FRANCISCO

Art Takes the Bus Streetfare Journal & Bockley Gallery

L

by Melissa Stang

I ike people in a crowded elevator who stare rigidly upward to avoid eye contact, passengers on buses tend to gaze out the window or scan the vehicle's interior. Advertisers take advantage of this behavior and place their messages around the buses' upper parameters, hoping to catch the wandering attention of distracted riders. Two recent projects have interspaced cultural messages among the usual array of advertisements, giving riders something interesting to contemplate during an otherwise routine trip.

Streetfare Journal is a poetry-on-the-bus project going into its fifth consecutive year, with three series being distributed in 1989. It was originally intended as a temporary local project by founder and series editor San Francisco poet George Evans, but overwhelmingly favorable response allowed for expansion to 12,500 buses in 14 major cities. Each series of attractively designed posters merges poetry with visuals and has recently included reproductions of abstract paintings by well-known American artists.

The Minneapolis Bockley Gallery's Art on the Bus project made original artworks accessible to large numbers of Twin Cities commuters. It included the work of many individuals usually unable to exhibit in commercial galleries.

After their tour on the buses, all works were exhibited at Bockley Gallery.

Public art is commonly conceived of as visual art, but

Bus placard b y Jeff Springer (1989) for Bockley Gallery's Art on t h e Bus project.

tract more members of the Native American community.

Evans is a good editor. He not only selects interestThis gave him an idea: Why not take advantage of the acing artists, but he also knows how to best present their cessibility of bus advertising to organize a mobile exhibition work in this public context. With almost haiku-like simpliccapable of reaching large segments of the population? ity, each poster features a succinct stanza or two often exBockley basically saw it as "an opportunity to broaden what cerpted from a longer poem. Given the circumstances, this we do in a nonjudgemental, noncritical manner." Art on the is a perfect length-little literary jewels amid a sea of sloBus could dispense with elitist separations and acknowgans and catch "media bites." ledge the integrity of all artistic expression by persons of An energetic, expressionistic Joan Mitchell painting diverse ages, backgrounds and levels of experience. captures the frustration felt by a young girl in Paulette The grassroots, nonhierarchical flavor of the exhibiJile's poem "Paper Matches." The girl wonders why she tion was evident in every aspect of its organization. First and her aunts are stuck inside washing dishes, while her of all, it wasn't juried. Everyone who applied was acuncles play on the lawn: "I have all the rages that small ancepted. Secondly, size became an equalizer, as the standimals have, / being small, being animal / . . . " Three shapes ard ll-by-28-inch format prevented anyone from getting positioned between stripes in a Robert Motherwell paintmore attention by making bigger artwork. In addition, all ing seem to diagram the interactions described in James works were set at a consistent price of $50, thus implying Laughlin's poem "A Failure of Communication in the Anithat all work was of equal value-none better, none worse. mal Kingdom": "A fox was crossing the / meadow and the In order to attract individuals who might not normally resheep //went running but the / fox has no inter est // in them spond to a group show call-for-entries, Minneapolis artist he is looking / for a field mouse or a // chipmunk we people John Snyder designed a folksy and inviting poster. Despite - rtmpgrnam al- // so have such problems." somewhat limited promotion, response was overwhelming.

Even though the paintings A FAILURE OF COMMUNICATION The Bockleys received about 20 out-of-state inquiries, inmay reverberate the poems' IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM cluding some from Rhode Island, Boston, Detroit, Los Animagery, they are not regeles and even Canada. duced to simple illustrations.

A fox was crossing the Instead, there's a relationmeadow and the sheep As a result of these populist tactics, a wide array of in them he is looking ship of autonomous equals individuals were able to participate. An entire English went running but the for a fieldmouse or a joined to reflect new meanclass submitted entries (including several very beautiful fox has no interest chipmunk we people alings. drawings by ten Asian students), while an older woman conso have such problems.

Another intriguing tributed an inspired autobiographical piece, Accordion aspect of Streetfare Journal Woman, a juxtaposition of test and imagery with surprisJAMES I.AUGHLIN is how it addresses a margiing parallels to contemporary feminist work. A number of nalized, minority audienceyoung children and adolescents participated as well. Style S T R E E T F A R E J O U R N L /xrt e v i d e n t in t h e Spanish and technique were greatly varied, ranging from realistic Streetfare Journal placard w i t h p o e m by James Laughlin a n d painting by Robert Motherwell s u b t i t l i n g of a poem by renderings to colorful abstract compositions, surreal sci-fi (Vol. V, No. 2, Fall 1988).

Roberto Juarroz, with a serimagery and naive childlike landscapes, wildlife art, colStreetfare Journal cenies of Native American poets, or by a powerful piece by lage, and still lifes. Interestingly enough, the Bockleys ters on an unusual art Gwendolyn Brooks using black street slang to discuss the estimate that fewer than ten percent of all participants Riders can make form in the public realm: short-term future of high school dropouts. Buses seem a would probably consider themselves "professional" artists. poetry. After all, readparticularly effective context for reaching urban minority The Bockleys plan to continue A rt on the Bus on an anemotional correlaing is usually a private audiences, who may rely more on public transportation due nual basis and are considering some twists for the mobile activity saved for quiet, to economic necessity. exhibition. For example, the standard ll-by-28-inch fortions between text introspective moments mat for signs means these works could travel on any bus in I was first exposed to Streetfare Journal while living in over-scheduled lives. the country. The Bockleys would like to sponsor exchange and imagery. in a neighborhood with a high population of Native AmeriEven the most public shows with other communities both nationally and intercans. The Streetfare series I encountered featured Native manifestations of book nationally.

American poets who I have really come to appreciate inappreciation are designed to foster interest in reading as a If a goal of public art is to contact an "uninitiated" arts cluding Joy Harjo, Mary TallMountain, and N. Scott Morewarding private activity. We will continue to seek out a maday. Placing these poets poet's published work after attending a reading, we read in the public realm struck aloud to children so they will eventually want to read for me as a very reaffirming themselves, and people who watch a movie or televised sergesture. The numerous Inies based on a novel may later seek out the book. dians taking the bus found a voice that validated their Streetfare Journal has similar educational aspira51 1 don't k n o w h o w to m a k e a m i s unique cultural perspective, tions. Series editor George Evans originally conceived of > Maybe jny hands m a k e o n e w h i l e I'm as'eep CO important for any minority the journal as a "literacy project" of sorts, hoping that and w h e n it's finished i § group struggling to retain riders surprised by poetry in an unusual location would be they w a k e m e up completely o individuality in a society intrigued and encouraged to pursue further reading. It a n d show it to me. striving for assimilation. works. Through exposure to the journal I've become a ROBERTO JUARRI After all, traditional artistic devoted fan of a number of the poets and actively sought expressions are the first out their work. The posters always indicate where the S T R E E T F A R E J O U R N A L //m things a dominant culture Streetfare Journal p i a r a r d with p o e m excerpt by Roberto Juarroz a n d print by O.O. J o h n s poem can be read in its entirety and where more of the tries to eradicate, erasing (Vol. V. No. 2, Fall 1988). author's work can be located. Bookstore employees have cultural history and distestified to the noticeable influence of Streetfare Journal couraging indigenous languages. Streetfare Journal has audience by placing work in a well-traveled public context, on poetry sales-especially evident when Harper's Anhelped counteract cultural homogenization by bringing then both Streetfare Journal and A rt on the Bus are highly thology of 20th Century Native America.n Poets was the diverse voices into an accessible public forum. successful endeavors. Utilizinga public transportation syssource for a popular Streetfare series. It's likely that After talking to series editor George Evans, I was surtem used by thousands of commuters daily is a great way Streetfare Journal can attract readers who might not prised to discover that specifically targeting a minority to expose multitudes of people to these projects. Streetotherwise purchase poetry. audience was not a conscious effort. Instead of organizing fare Journal demonstrates that art forms other than visual The Streetfare series also has helped to demystify yet Streetfare Journal like an affirmative action project, Evans art readily adapt to a public forum. And, Art on the Bus another art form: abstract painting. Abstract art often simply scanned the country for significant, innovative does not treat original art works as precious objects that poses a problem for many individuals. Yet by juxtaposing voices. As a result, a high percentage of minority poets need to be contained behind glass in carefully monitored poetry and paintings on bus posters, viewers are enwere included-not because they fulfilled certain quotasenvironments. Instead, both projects place works directly couraged to make emotional correlations between text and but just because they were good. in the path of the commuting public. â&#x20AC;˘ imagery. In this way, Streetfare Journal becomes a visual Specifically addressing a minority audience did occur literacy project as well. In a subtle and non-intimidating to A rt on the Bus organizers Mark and Todd Bockley. Mark Melissa Stang is an artist and writer residing in Minmanner, viewers are given lessons in reading artwork.

Bockley looked into the possibility of bus advertising to proneapolis.

They discover that abstract art is something that can be mote an upcoming show by Frank Bigbear, hoping to atexperienced without specialized knowledge.

Public Art Review 15

TERMINAL CHICAGO

A Luminescent Happening Hayden Sculpture at OHare

M

by Jim Billings

temperature and a constant belt speed. To this a taped voice drums softly in tribal rhythm: "The-MOV-ing-WALKway is-now- ending. Please Look Down! The-MOV-..."

Hermetically sealed, Terminal for Tomorrow is but a component in a worldwide system of airports. Within this system airports are full of constant motion-ticketing, walking, eating, grooming, greeting, waving goodbye.

Even foreign currency stations are mobile. Among travelers mobility is a status symbol. The pace is fast. Most walk rather than stand on moving walkways and escalators.

Standing creates an obstacle. "Fast Lane", a cluster of shops in Concourse C, symbolizes this pace. Its shops include Bun on the Run, Deli in a Hurry, Lightening Lounge, Hasty Pastry and Ice Cream Express.

Airports are an environment that have only recently become familiar. Humans are separated from a sense of place, a sense of temporal time, a connection with nature, and a sense of familiar beings. One craves fresh air, plants, animals, birds, negative ions. If one loses ID cards, what happens to personal identity? There is an anonymity in airports, a loneliness. One forgets oneself.

Built on the airport's reduction of natural qualities, the Hayden installation mimics a discotheque. Disco evolved in 1974 in the wake of minimalism. Minimalism removes human properties from visual art. Human space is supplanted by a technological confrontation. Disco continues minimalism's reduction. Natural light is removed, the span of attention is reduced to the present moment.

Color is reduced to rigid neons. Audio space is removed.

While disco's content originally hinged on an edge with mainstream society, Hayden lightens the fantasy.

The tunnel environ- He o f f e r s modulating translucent pastels, ambient music-without harment manipulates mony, and with f r e e rhythm. Passage now betravelers, picking come experience, for its own sake. up the weary and Like Christmas shopping, the tunnel environpacifying the ment manipulates travelers. Hoards are harried.

iichael Hayden's light sculpture Sky's the Limit is kin to a 1960s Happening. Built upon discotheque themes, the artwork generates a special sense of time. Like Happenings, Hayden has turned the priorities around.

Passage becomes its own purpose, and travelers themselves ultimately become the objects of art.

Becoming foremost in an ever-concentrated industry, United Aii lines recently built a $500 million concourse for its world headquarters, its capitol. Not surprisingly, United's site is Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.

Chicago has long been a transportation hub due to its location on Lake Michigan and its link to the Mississippi River, as well as being a railroad center. When airlines boomed following World War II, Chicago's Midway Airport (named after the battle of Midway) became the world's busiest air terminal. Upon opening in 1962, O'Hare (named after fighter pilot hero "Butch" O'Hare) became the busiest.

Named the Terminal for Tomorrow, United's venture seeks a futuristic identity. (Ironically, its name may connote airplane delays or untoward landings.) Terminal for Tomorrow was the airline's rebound from Delta Airlines' O'Hare expansion, and in turn, this has prompted American Airlines to build yet another new terminal at O'Hare.

90,000 travelers move each day through United's two concourses, but the terminal transforms their trip through architecture and art.

Designed by Bauhaus-trained Helmut Jahn, the Terminal for Tomorrow has two parallel concourses separated by 900 feet of runway. The concourses are tall, long, and naturally lit through 15 acres of glass. Although Jahn's plan included Royal Palm trees, the presently treeless greenhouses cause one to crave flora. Reminiscent of 19th-century European train stations, these vaulted shapes are supported by erector-set-like ribs. One concourse resembles a Romanesque Cathedral's nave and the other resembles a cloister.

The concourses use high-tech components from baggage systems to a subway link. Even the bathrooms are high-tech.

Sinks operate and toilets flush via sensor; mazes replace doors (whose touching would be less sanitary). Consequently, the concourses appear antiseptic. Visually, too, they are antiseptic with a pallet of hospital gray-whites and aluminum, two million Detail of Michael Hayden's Sky's the Limit (1987) at the United Airlines Terminal for Tommorrow, O'Hare Airport, Chicago. pounds of aluminum. pulled through floors by escalators, tinkling monophonic These concourses are connected only by a tunnel, 900 bells, flashing Christmas lights. Through the concourses, feet of underground congestion. United's competitive zeal they had already become accustomed to automatic revolvled to the commissioning of art for the tunnel, to avoid buring doors, sinks and toilets. Now they are pulled by escadening already harassed travelers and to turn a boring paslators and moving sidewalks through cloistered sage into something experienced for its own sake. panels-translucent and in modulating ice cream colors. ArCalifornia artist Michael Hayden was selected to design a tificial light warps a sense of time. Color frequencies inlighting sculpture synchronized with music and orcrease, then decrease; first lifting, then soothing. chestrated with architecture.

Within Terminal for Tomorrow's tunnel, rather than Hayden's solution, Sky's the Limit, uses 466 neon being reflected, light is within the sculpture and architectubes and extends 744 feet. It converts mere passage into ture. This removes our sense of time, which is based upon an experience with its own parameters. As travelers lower light reflection. Consequently we lose a natural sense of into the tunnel, they escape airport bustle-no flight tables, time. The drum beat of the walkway warning tranquilizes. no natural light, no need to walk or to think. Pulled through It stills the conscious as one strains to hear the soft mesthis environment on moving sidewalks, they encounter sage. Its drumbeat pace is faster than the heart at rest, monophonic tones and flashing white light reflecting on the slower than the heart when running or panicking. Thus it floor. Then, abstract shapes in color crash forward at picks up the weary and pacifies the harried. As one must speeds matching the music's tempo. A section starts with strain to hear the message, thoughts are slowed. Curves indigo and moves through the spectrum into yellow, and a sooth, angles prickle; the music variably soothes and middle section in the reds-orange, red and plum. prickles. Viewers become passive.

Pure neon colors are contained within Helmut Jahn's Sky's the Limit is a gentrified version of the 1960s waving, translucent pastel sides and ceiling borders. This Happening. The Happening works with juxtapositions of undulation "decelerates travelers" according to Hayden. materials, a chimera of theater, visual art, architecture and The white neons are abstractly shaped, the blue-yellow music. Characteristic of Happenings, the viewer sees only neons are shaped by the curve. The red neons with Va sliver. The time devoted to the experience is 3-5 minutes shapes reflect on the ceiling as diamonds. The floor's carof an hou: -Iong sequence. Further, instead of looking at tographic semicircles reflect on the ceiling. A sine-curve, art as a separate object, the viewer becomes the object. light-absorbing band of black between the translucent ceilRather tl-ar rel.ccting light, the visual art and the archiing and side provides a backdrop for all colors of the light tecture pri^u.'e b-mt. The viewer now reflects the light. sculpture.

As one looks u*. one sees down. We become the sky. We Music by Gary Fry runs continuously. "Geo-ambecome the limit. â&#x20AC;˘ bience" has two 30-minute sequences: "Angles" and "Curves" are dissonant and consonant. Orchestrated by Jim Billings : s an art critic, appraiser and dealer residcomputers with lighting sequences, it counterpoints the ing in Mii nesot a id he researches and teaches in economfree-flowing play of music and neon lights against unchanging artificial light in precise frequencies, unchanging ics and popular culture.

Public Art Review

DURHAM Continued from page 7

Visual artist and writer Richard Turner, expressed his belief that artists have a responsibility to understand their source material. After chiding those who take postmodern shopping trips through history, Turner spoke about the need for "an eclectism tempered with economy and caution." A caucasian educated in Michigan and Vietnam, Turner was questioned about his "credentials" to use Third World history as subject matter. Turner's response is indicative of his ability to bear witness to multicultural experience: History is a living narrative, a tale being told and retold again and again. Though we simplistically describe the story of life on earth as having a past, present, and future, these distinctions are but attempts to straighten out the spiral of history's vortex. . . .

History is equally event and interpretation, action and reflection.

Turner's words characterized his own art: "The magnetism of a place to speak without interpretation, like a dry stream bed, reminds us of the river that once ran there."

Memory's Vault in Port Townsend, Washington, combines natural beauty with historic reference and reverence.

MacArthur Park Monument Proposal calls for the transformation of the garbage-strewn reflecting pond that surrounds a bronze statue of General Douglas MacArthur into a raked Zen garden. Once completed, MacArthur's focus will shift from that of The Warrior to The Old Soldier As Peacemaker. "Public art is an arena of controversy, innovation, diversity and debate," observed Turner. On his palette, irony and paradox are primary colors.

For artist Doug Hollis, the practice of public art is more about "asking a better question than solving a problem." "Proposing, not imposing," as naturalist Barry Lopez wrote in Arctic Dreams. Collaboration for Hollis comes down to an artist's ability to trust his intuition, feed his instinct, and adapt to ever-changing circumstances. He explained: You discover your own process and proceed.

Collaboration for me is a chemical thing. Do we like one another? Do we enjoy the act of talking? Are we capable of investigating how to describe things to one another? Do we have a curiosity about one another's investigations? Is there a mutual respect? Are we capable of coming out from behind our professional shields? What are the components that make a working relationship? How does one go about creating a reciprocally nourishing experience?

Talking about one another's concerns, preconceptions and interests is a good start. Informality is important. Collaboration is more about 'what are we going to do,' than 'what am I going to do.' It is about a gathering and a synthesis. After all, the site tells us what to do. Our job is to listen.

Rather than working in a piecemeal fashion, I like to work in a beehive situation. We build a big sandbox and play with it. If we all work at the same time, we don't get too slick, or too stuck with precious drawings. The first rule, as Siah Armajani remarked, is 'Never Say No.' The second rule is 'If all of the team can't agree on an idea, than it won't work.'

In closing, Hollis stated his preference for 'selfselected versus shotgun design-team marriages," a comment on free will that recalled Annie Savoy's thoughts on the subject from Bull Durham: Nobody on this planet really chooses each other.

It's all a question of quantum physics, molecular abstraction and timing. There are laws we don't understand that bring us together and tear us apart.

It's like pheromones. You get three ants together and they can't do dick. You get three hundred million of them, and they can build a cathedral.

The final presentation, "Public Art, Folk Art, and the Social Consequence of Aesthetics" by Miami University of Ohio Professor, Eugene Metcalf, was the first time I recall hearing author Ayn Rand's social theory of objectivism applied to the "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" school of backyard art, Professor Metcalf's comments brought to mind the words of the late Tessa "Grandma" Prisbrey, creator of The Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California. In response to the question why she built thirteen glass houses in her back yard, Grandma replied, "My second husband drunk himself away, and I had to figure out something to do with all them empty bottles.

I may look real tired," she winked, "but I'm not retired."â&#x20AC;˘ Richard Posner is an artist and the author of Intervention and Alchemy: A Public Art Primer, to be published this year by the First Banks Visual Arts Program.

Posner's current public art projects include the Robert Mueller Airport, Austin TX, and the Water Sewage Treatment Plant for Devil's Lake, ND, a collaboration with engineer Viet Ngo of the Lemma Corp., and Garth Rockcastle and Troy Kampa of MS&R Architects.

PEDESTRIAN MINNEAPOLIS

Armajani's Bridges Poetic Paths

D

|

by Jim Billings

o not step out of the traditional path prescribed by society, Herman Melville warns us in Moby Dick. Otherwise, you may never return to that path. Fair warning for Siah Armajani's new paths over Minneapolis freeway lanes and streets, over the machine age that Melville abhorred.

Armajani bridges tall and wide over Marquette Avenue. His Norwest Center skybridge, designed in collaboration with Cesar Pelli, links the financial district and downtown retail centers with the new Norwest building, fifty-six stories of Calvin Coolidge-era architectural revival known as postmodern style.

For the most part skyways are hallways in bridge drag. Prophylactically, akin to the Metrodome, they remove weather, traffic and street noise, street people, fresh air. But this skybridge seeks to be otherwise. Proudly arched, the skybridge's understructure defines its principal beauty. Its exterior is colored in Reaganesque deep red and gray. Four huge diagonal braces join the ends on pivots

Stylistically, the Whitney bridge is midwestern Structurist, deriving from both Prairie School and the French-Russian Constructivists. Not just another footbridge of chain-link tube, this path invites play. Its trussed sides gently sweep concavely; at midpoint another curve takes over, parallel for a while, but moving convexly. Suggesting half a suspension bridge, half a railroad bridge, the combined effect is serpentine, undulating like a wave, a sine curve. Roller-coastering and swinging with a midair trapeze catch, the Whitney bridge atones for freeway homeliness. It frames the Basilica with a garland of pastel yellow, blue and rich teal, and it brings balance to the background mass of the Minneapolis skyline.

In spanning streets named after Father Marquette and Father Hennepin, who were Minnesota's earliest links to afar, Armajani hints at a dialectical irony. The repeated links to afar create barriers nearby. 1-94 connects the Twin Cities, but it vivisects neighborhoods such as East St. Paul, Summit-University, Prospect Park, Whittier, Phillips and Bryn Mawr-social cleavage in its wake.

But bridges span these barriers, ever eager. In their zeal they even span other bridges near the Whitney. Consequently, Armajani offers a healing role, bridging rich and poor, Loringand Kenwood, old and new, east and west, art and architecture. The Whitney bridge "provides the missing link in Homer Cleveland's early plan for Minneapolis," says Armajani. It serves as Wheelock Whitney's tribute to his wife, Irene Hixon Whitney, who herself bridged so many: the Laotian Hmongs in Minnesota and the

Two pedestrian bridges in Minneapolis designed by artist Siah Armajani. Left: Norwest Center skybridge (1988) as seen from outside.

Right: Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (1988) from inside.

mimicking drawbridge arms. Centermost, the skybridge has an "implied room," complete with a postmodern pyramidal ceiling, light-filtering stained glass, noise-reducing mats, and a small insert of glass blocks below. From the sides and above, citrus-yellow opaque glass refracts the world into ajaundiced hue, bordered by blues, greens, reds, purples and slag-glass oranges.

In conceiving a bridge as a means to elsewhere, a room centermost is a surprise. But precedent exists among the shops on Old London Bridge and Florence's bridges and Japanese teahouses over water. Collectively these stopovers preach let's-be-here-now.

The skybridge room also serves as an antechamber to the Temple of Sound Money, Norwest Center, which one enters through huge doors flanked by anthemia. The skybridge's parent and context, Norwest Center uses an old style and older motifs to pull from the past. Rich, lasting materials of bronze, marble, and Kasota stone push into the future. Together they secure the present. Consequently, money is safe and hard at work. Unlike "near money"~such as stocks, when five hundred billion dollars of liquidity evaporated in October, 1987, during a computer-automated selling panic-electronic deposits are secure. The Armajani-Pelli drawbridge stands guard.

As one exits from Norwest Center, the skyroom becomes a decompression chamber. It prepares one for lingering, dining, shopping and for eventually descending into the streets and real weather. From downtown, a nearby path leads through the Greenway gardens to Loring Park, rich in political, cultural and socii history. With a concrete stage as gateway, a ramp rises to the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, over fourteen fast lanes of Hennepin and Lyndale avenues and Interstate 94. High above the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, another ramp on stilts meanders to a concrete apse, then descends toward Walker Art Center.

chemically dependent.

Bridge builders Bridge builders have long played a rehave long played ligious role, bridging to the gods. The word pona religious role, t i f f , meaning pope, descends from Pontifex bridging to the gods.

Maximus, the g r e a t bridge builder. The pontifexes were early Roman builders in the Po valley, and as protectors of villages they were considered sacred. Accordingly, Armajani's poetic path also seeks a spiritual reunification.

Armajani is most effective when free of constraints.

The Whitney bridge is beautiful art, spanning fourteen fast lanes. The Norwest skybridge is constrained by context.

An architect pulls toward America-standing-tall Reaganism, toward buildings growing tall from injections of tax-increment financing. Meanwhile, the artist pulls toward playful contemplation. But such compromises are part of public art. Context becomes the taxpaying public; content becomes the public's participation. Perhaps foremost, however, is public art's subtle shift in values from individual competition, toward symbiotic cooperation, toward savoring the present. To this end, Armajani sometimes inscribes prominently in his works a quotation of a favorite passage from Moby Dick. "The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun-slow dived from noon-goes down." â&#x20AC;˘ Jim Billings is an art critic, appraiser and dealer residing in Minnesota, and he researches and teaches in economics and popular culture.

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the October-November 1988 issue of New North Artscape.

Public Art Review 17

SEATTLE Continued from page 8

gallerias and its glitzy aura, the University Street Station will seem more subdued, yet more high-tech. As the lead artist, Scuri has devised a black, white and red granite block surface for the station's wall and platform. The either rough, honed, polished or sandblasted blocks will create a random textured pattern. The wall and floor patterns will be continuous-the wall's pattern suggesting a mountain range, and the floor's pattern keyed to pedestrian movement through the station.

Scuri's black-and-white marble pattern for the end walls of the mezzanine will provide the backdrop for kinetic light works. One wall will be embedded with Boston artist Bill Bell's 16- and 32-inch red "lightsticks," which will flash on and off in a rapid sequence, creating an afterimage of patterned movement. Seattle artist Robert Teeple will install a series of electronic light boxes with light-emitting diodes coded to create various moving line images of over 100 symbols, facial configurations and illustrations.

As it now appears, the Pioneer Square Station will have less integrated collaborative design and more "addon" artwork. Kate Ericson is the lead artist for this station, but conflicts with the station architect turned her away from the integral design and toward an advisory role in selecting such work as Garth Edwards and Jim Garrett's steel gates for the station entrances, and Laura Sindell's colored-tile montage of figures and patterns for a stairwell wall. One aspect of the station's works that does involve architectural synthesis is Brian Goldbloom's sculptural design for a stairway in which the "twisting," overhead granite struts will appear to rest on rough granite blocks tilted outward from the contiguous wall surface.

For the station's end walls, Ericson and longtime collaborator Mel Zeigler designed large clock faces made of masonry fragments from local demolition sites and castaluminum numerals in the shapes of old-fashioned tools.

The two artists' more important contribution to the project is system-wide: at each surface entrance, an eight-foot, diamond-shaped marker is embedded in the sidewalk. A border of colored granite will function as a directional marker.

Another system-wide design concept involves the most prosaic part of the project-the tunnel itself. The tunnel was overlooked in the original plan to incorporate art within the underground transit system, but Scuri proposed and will execute a system of markings and directional signs along the tunnel walls. Safety information will be displayed in alternating color strips at headlight level using reflective materials. Traverse arcs of blue reflectors will indicate emergency phones, and traverse concrete ribs will indicate the approach to the tunnel exit into each station.

Admittedly, it is premature to attempt to critically assess the aesthetics, functions or perceptual experiences of the unfinished Metro Bus Tunnel and artworks. As is usually the case for artist-architect design team concepts, the major architectural infrastructure is only nominally affected by the proposed artworks, if it is at all. The infrastructure is the artist's given framework for conceptual exploration, and although an artist occasionally . : step outside of it, his or her task is to work within it.

The Metro Bus Tunnel design team agreed from the start that the paramount issue is the passenger's experience of transit, which includes all of the following: utility, comfort, ease of access, mobility, visual enticements, safety and security, signage, and many other means of human interaction within the system. While it must have entrances, the infrastructure seldom humanizes the process of using these entrances. Recognizing that the experience of art in a public arena takes place, as critic Lawrence Alloway puts it, "in the midst of other activity," the design team strove to make the art-inspired perceptions a part of that activity. Significantly, that is the reverse of the conventional art experience in which the viewer only perceives, and does not participate in, a work of someone else's inspirations.

Much of the design-team artwork is ornamental in nature. It is in keeping with the form and structure of the object that it adorns, is subordinate to it, and does not stifle it. Ornament can be enriching, or it can be without meaning. Only when the projects reach final completion will we be able to see how well, or poorly, these artwork proposals succeed as ornament. Yet any architectural construct that includes all of the variety of artistic form that the Downtown Seattle Transit Project has perceived as "ornament," supercedes the conventional notion of what ornament represents. That should make for an interesting bus ride.D Ron Glowen is an art critic based in Seattle. He is contributing editor to A rtweek, and teaches at the Cornish College of the Arts.

}

UNDERGROUND SWEDEN

The Stockholm Metro Cave Stations of Art I

k i

by Bette Hammel

W W hen the late Swedish artist Siri Derkert was 73, she descended into a cold subterranean rock tunnel beneath Stockholm and began sandblasting impressionistic drawings of the women's movement into the hard concrete. She had just won an open competition in 1961 for creating the new Ostermalmstorg Station for the Swedish underground railway-but that wasn't the sole motivation for her work.

She drew her greatest inspiration from the women's movement; she was determined to leave a lasting imprint of women's key roles in maintaining peace. Derkert's early work in the Stockholm metro lives on today (Ostermalmstorg is still considered one of the best stations for art) and exemplifies one path taken by Swedish artists in their creations for Stockholm's subway and surface stations.

Today the Stockholm metro system has 99 stations and covers 108 kilometers. More than half of the stations are embellished with artwork ranging from sculptures and paintings to mosaics, engravings and wall reliefs. The most outstanding work dates from the early 1970s when the concept of integrated environments or underground rooms was first developed. It can now be said that this provocative public art plays a more significant part in the lives of ordinary citizens than does the art hanging in galleries or museums.

The first underground railway was built in Stockholm in 1941 when the city was just 600,000 in population (small by world standards). At that time, only 20 other cities had subways. In 1955 the Stockholm City Council, with the Stockholm Transport Art Advisory as overseers, initiated the idea of using art in the subway stations as a way of democratizing art; the program's purpose was to be for the common good. The artist, workingin collaboration with engineers, architects, planners and government representatives, was considered to be a worker like anyone else.

At first the stations of the '50s and '60s were basically rock tunnels formed by blasting through Stockholm's granite bedrock and later reinforced with concrete. The visual effect was that of a concrete house inside a cavern. In the '60s, improved technology introduced sprayed concrete, which preserved the rough stone character of the excavated space. Thus began Stockholm's cave stations-a new kind of natural environment that allowed for the creation

of i n t e g r a t e d spaces or underground "rooms" for each station. It was an exciting challenge that inspired Sweden's finest artists. In 1971, thanks to the cooperative efforts of the Stockholm City Council and the city's Transport Art Advisory Council, a new era of design began for the Stockholm metro.

Art for the people was the goal.

What the artists created reflected life in Sweden in the past, present and future and showed a great diversity. Some designers used architectural images, others historical artifacts, graphic signage and even futuristic modes. Many employed symbols of nature and the natural environment, such as blue skies, sunshine, rainbows, ponds of water lilies, flowers and trees.

One of the most outstanding integrated artistic environments is Kungstradgarden Station in the cultural center of Stockholm.

Planning started in 1974 and was completed in 1977 by artist Ulrik Samuelson. Here the walls of natural rock were left exposed, and the ceiling of sprayed concrete was painted a moss green. Concrete floors are patterned terrazzo. A stone garden and stone waterfall recall the Kungstradgarden and its beautiful fountains aboveground. Sculptures and masks, casts of 17th century originals from the Makalos Palace, which once graced the land above, greet the passengers who scurry by.

Another standout on the system is the Jarva line platform area, which opened in the mid-70s at T-Centralen Station. New excavation techniques allowed the architects to shape a single arch using the walls and roof. The artist then painted the sprayed concrete surface in blue and white and in a leafy crisscross pattern of branches, reminiscent of the old murals from provincial churches. At the highest point of the arch, a painted silhouette portrays the workers who helped build the station. "I tried to create a total environment, to decorate everything," said artist Per Olof Ultvedt.

In a tribute to the people who use the Tensta Station, artist Helga Henschen used as her theme, "A Rose for Our Immigrants, Solidarity and Sisterhood." In her 1975 work she covered the walls with a white background, a green forest of fir trees and hand-lettered quotations, such as "The world has come to Sweden; we have a unique opportunity of enriching our culture through contact with immigrants."

A collection of sculpted ceramic birds pose in long rows on shelves of exposed rock and scrutinize the passersby.

"Each station is entirely different," says Patty Lindell, who was Minneapolis co-chairwoman of New Sweden

'88 Minnesota festival, who recently traveled on the Stockholm metro while attending the 350th anniversary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. "Some stations are contemporary, some a r e a t e e n a g e r ' s delight, filled with pop art.

I never saw any one that resembled another in any way," remarked Lindell about the originality of this underground public art.

When selecting artists for the underground, the Swedish council has always been unanimously insistent on artistic quality. At the same time, the council has striven to feature local themes and to encourage designs that will be meaningful for the majority. Often, artists take part in competitions or undergo a stiff selection process to get their art in the tunnels.

For a newer station at Sundbybergs Centrum (1985), the council chose the theme-nameiy, the history of the old town. Artists were commissioned long before the contracts were let. In fact, the collaborative process of designing this station took seven years, so long, that some thought the artists would lose interest-but none did. Lead artist Lars Kleen created six facades of past and present houses in the town plus a vision of houses for the future. The works have been called masterpieces of Swedish craftsmanship and have made the station a cultural landmark.

Today Stockholm is a city of a million and a half people (including its suburbs) with throngs using its metro system daily. Graffiti is a continuing problem as in any major city, according to Thomas Minnhagen, a Stockholm native now working for a Minnesota publisher.

"It's a big problem, and makes it costly to keep subways clean. But I think to some extent the art is done in such a way that it prevents graffiti. (e.g., the use of metal panels on the walls.)

Some of the stations use a theme that's connected to a place. Like Tekniska Hogskolan's art is connected to the technical university, or the Stadion Station uses sports themes because it's close to the stadium," says Minnhagen, who is of the opinion that artists are given quite a free hand.

Though the Stockholm metro art program continues at a more modest pace today, it is so far ahead of its time that it is the envy of many other world capitals and especially of world transport authorities. Each of the artistically designed stations gives passengers a definite sense of place, a distinctive identity. No wonder awestruck tourists from America remark, as did Patty Lindell, "Riding the Stockholm subway is like entering a new world. It's exciting. 'ÂŁ)

This provocative public art is more significant for ordinary citizens than galleries or museums.

Bette Hammel is a freelance writer on the arts, architecture and local history. Residing in Minnesota, she is also a community activist.

Top: Leafy decorations by Per Olof Ultvedt (1975) at the T-Centralen Station of the Stockholm Metro. Bottom: Casting of the historic Separator Chimney by Sigvard Olsson (1975) at the Radhuset Station of the Stockholm Metro.

Public Art Review 18

COMMENT

Subterranean Space Public Art Underground 1 A f

by Hafthor Yngvason

W When the French national collection of nineteenthcentury art was moved a few years ago into a converted train station, there was a proposal to place a locomotive in the nave of the building. The intent was to create a social context for art cut off from its original surroundings. Paradoxically, the Musee d'Orsay has no trains, but the Paris Metro has art. In fact, there is art in subway systems in Brussels, Stockholm, London, Mexico City, New York, Boston/Cambridge, and Seattle, to mention a few world cities. And one of the reasons for the art is to create a context for passengers cut off from life aboveground, although that context is not necessarily meant to be the same as it might be aboveground.

Characterizations of the Brussels Metro as the "most visited museum in Belgium" and the Stockholm Metro as "the longest art gallery in the world" are not approved of by those responsible for the success of these art programs.

Although museum curators may envy the quality of commissioned art in a subways, the differing philosophical approaches that public art administrators and museum personnel bring to their respective collections reveal a very basic difference between the two types of artwork.

The siting of art in the underground is not a goal in itself, as it tends to be in a museum setting. To be successful, subway system art has to achieve an objective that goes beyond aesthetic purposes. Whatever the museum policies should be on contextualization-and this is not a place to go into that hotly debated issue-the fact remains that people go to museums, not to the metro, to discover masterpieces.

People don't travel on the subway for pleasure or for edification. Systematic studies of the reactions of London and Paris passengers to their environment show that stress, anxiety and disorientation are common problems for those cut off from life aboveground in an overwhelmingly crowded environment. Thus the objective most generally agreed upon for subway art is to "humanize" the subterranean space: to bring the scale down to a human level, to give the stations a sense of place, and to orient the passengers. F. V. Rodriguez of the Mexico City mass transportation system asserts that art in the metro "demonstrates that collective transportation is more than just a physical plant."

Male Profile (1975) by Sivert Lindblom at the Vastra Skogen Station of the Stockholm Metro.

brance of the natural world, no vegetation, and especially no sky." In order to give an impression of freshness, he decided to base his work on "multiple movements and colors, splashed in a field of white."

For Seattle's new METRO bus tunnel, Jack Mackie is creating an "underground park." The multicolored terracotta tiles with raised patterns depicting leaves, vines, and flowers, give the suggestion of voluptuous vegetation hanging over the platform.

Another way to "humanize" the featureless underground environment is to give stations individual characteristics that override their technical similarities. The idea is to provide references that substitute for the stimulus of the constantly changing environment, and to alleviate the problem of disorientation.

Therefore, it has been the task of the architects and the artists working on the stations to diversify the visual environment. One leitmotif in this endeavor has been to create a place, or a context that gives passengers a hint of some of the characteristic sights and activities that occur aboveground.

The trend was set 20 years ago by the Louvre Station in Paris, where indications of the Louvre's great collection

The siting of art in the underground is not a goal in itself.

w e r e placed u n d e r g r o u n d .

Plaster casts of famous objects in the museum remind the subway passengers of their location. A popular device in less eminent stations is to place photopanels and tiled murals of the neighborhood area and its history at platform level.

The placemaking role of public art has not been restricted to the subway. Art theories prominent since the 1960s have emphasized site-specificity as a meaningful quality of art. Thus is it held that public art should relate both formally and thematically to its environment, interact with and comment on that environment's physical and cultural Silhouettes of workers constructing the T-Centralen Station by Per Olof Ultveldt (1975). disposition, and engage the public in a dialogue with that same environment.

M. Liebaers, the chairman of the Metro Arts Commission in Brussels, insists on a very deliberate use of art in To that end, the local inhabitants must be involved in the service of the subway rider. "The main function of art developing each station's identity. The community speciin the underground," he said, "is to replace missing dayfies what it sees as the characteristics of its neighborhood, light." He requires that artists working for the Brussels defining how the subway relates to living and working Metro keep the passengers' interests in mind and compenspaces and to the area's history, geography, demography sate for the depressing atmosphere of the closed environand socio-economic import. The station's architects and ment by creating "luminous" works. engineers add to this definition to create site profiles.

A sense of community is sometimes stronger in one Parisian artist Claude Marechal agrees with this aeslocale than in another. Often residents want the public art thetic objective. Before he started on a 1988 artwork for to express the characteristics of their neighborhood, and the Paris Metro, he "analyzed the public, stricken by the artists can respond to their wishes without compromising stress." He concludes that the reason for the stress was their art. But when site identifications become too specific, that "in the underground universe there is no remem-

Public Art Review 19

they stop being a help and inspiration to the artist

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sM°er'ation"influence "a f ° ™ S ^Ut OeW k i n d s subway a r t program? rif e n a p p o Artists fear becoming "ilui o p a u c D . lustrators or technicians" who have to abide by strict guidelines. If art must follow the function of "comforting the passengers" then it may be very restricted in its message.

After one of the slide presentations on European subways at the International Symposium on Art in Transportation in Cambridge, one viewer was moved to comment: "This is all very entertaining, but is it art?"

Art administrators working on the subway programs are responding to these concerns. Most are working toward integrating the art program more with the overall planning process, so that art does not become an afterthought limited to illustrating preconceived ideas or decorating spaces already mostly completed. The goal is for artists to start working with the client, planners and designers as early in the process as possible and for them to be involved in every stage that affects the visual treatment of the spaces.

Development on these lines has been furthest along in Stockholm. In the 1970s Swedish planners and architects started to move away from the concept of the subway station as a concrete house placed inside a cavern. Instead of built-up, flat walls, there was a movement to acknowledge, in a radical way, the stations' own natural construction components by exposing and preserving the rough stone of the excavated space. This was the beginning of the socalled "cave stations." Here was a completely new kind of environment to work with, and it required a new design approach. No longer would conventional artworks be transplanted into the stations to cover the isolated bits of wall spaces usually left over for the artists. The artists became, along with the architects, creators of the whole space, in charge of shaping of the visual and spatial qualities.

The art program for the Stockholm Metro has managed to sidestep the threat of overly specific requirements, which has led to visually and spatially exciting results and has resulted in significant innovations. For the first time in subway art, the traditional forms, developed in response to space aboveground, have been left behind for the opportunity to create, not only new forms, but new kinds of spaces. Seattle and other cities are now emulating the Stockholm methodologies, making artists part of the planning and design team for new transit systems. Whether that will ensure good results only time can tell. But to develop good public art programs, planners must compare notes and examine program procedures and attitudes to ascertain how success was attained. • Hathor Yngvason is a freelance writer and art historian residing in the Boston area.

Editor's Note: In May 1988 representatives of transit art programs in the world's major cities came together in Cambridge, Massachusetts for a conference organized by the Cambridge Arts Council, the International Symposium on Art in Transportation. The author's comments (along with quotations of others) are based on presentations and discussions from the conference.

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Model lor Zoran Mojsilov's Crying Oak for the 1989 Public Art Affairs program.

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