Public Art Review issue 08 - 1993 (spring/summer)

Garden Expansion Features Abakanowicz Sculptures Magdalena Abakanowicz Left, Sagacious Heads 6 and 7 1989-90, righI, Bronze Crowd 1990-91 (partial view)

Large-scale bronze sculptures by internationally known Polish artist . .

Magdalena Abakanowicz are currently on view in the granite-paved plaza of · ~"'--~ . -I the recently completed Minneapolis Sculpture Garden expansion. In addition to the works by Abakanowicz. the new expansion is home to the sculptures Molecule (1977-83) by Mark di Suvero and Seat-Leg Table (1986-87) by the late Scott Burton.

The Garden expansion was designed by landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. With its addition . this renowned Twin Cities park is now the largest of its kind in the country. housing over 40 sculptural works in its 11 acres. The Garden is open year-round. from 6 am to midnight daily. Admission is free . For more information about the Garden. call the Walker at 375-7622.

The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is a project of Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board

Walker Art Center

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What's the FORECAST? PUBLIC ART affects everyone. It can ex ist any place where the public has access . Public art is a hybrid of the arti st's vision and the community's values. Public Art Review is the onl y journal devoted excl usively to providing important information and cri tical discussion of issues that clearly and_directly, assess the ole and..directio.n...of.public art today .

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"You don ' t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

-Robert Zimmerman

Coming in Issue 9: SummerlFall 1993 Percent for Art: A Reexamination

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n this iss ue of Public A rt Review, we ask the questions "what is public art today and where is it going?" The answers, and a lot more questions, posited by a wide variety of professionals, are diverse and sometimes co ntradi ctory. The private act of creating art is rare ly synonymous with the public act of experiencing art. Public art is not easily defi ned; as' soon as it's summed up, something changes and it must be redefi ned. Perhaps the field is in a constant state of flu x and may never be pinned down. What is important is the development of a language that everyone can use, since public art affects nearly everyone. To develop such a language, we need the help of artists, critics, educators, and scholars. And we need the help of Jane and John Q. Public. They matter a great deal because they are what make public art public.

As President Clinton jammed on his sax during the inaugural party, I sensed a cultural shift occurring. If we look back to the WP A of the 30s and the CET A program in the 70s, when much of what we call public and community art began, we can identify public (art) works programs that have pote nti al signifi cance today.

Conceivably, by the year 2000, any number of revamped WPA art programs co uld push the boundaries of public art as we know it, and more fully integrate the artist's vision with a community's values. But with the artist as public serva nt helping to address social and environmental issues, is quality necessarily co mpromised? How do we define quality when art is the result of a shared communal experience? What happens to the avant garde when the public is in vo lved in design, and artists' identities are no longer evident in the final product?

Perhaps, the cycle will return to favor the isolated eccentric, but for now, we should celebrate the democrati zation of art and hope that before the pendulum swi ngs back, the broader public will become more aware, understanding and supportive of public art in all its manifestations. Toward this end, and with a new administrati on freshly in office, it' s only natural that we should make our demands known.

The public art of tomorrow will need critics ,who can speak clearly to multiple audiences-throu gh the mainstream media and alternative press-evaluate public art on its own terms, in its own context. Artists will be needed with practical ideas that go beyond window dressing and token gestures; beyond altruistic social work and political grandstanding. There will be a need for progressive and open-minded pri vate and public agencies with increased budgets, and visionary program ad ministrators testing new ideas with long- term potenti al. Ed ucati onal institutions must prepare artists fo r this field, and establish effective curricula. Public-pri vate partnerships need to emph asize artists' participation at the earliest stages of planning and design. We need communities to address the real transfer of power that must take place, with ethical , actio n-oriented agend as supporting diverse cultures and independent voices. Our cu ltural institutions need to evaluate their effecti veness and appropriateness in a changing society, one in which art-as-commodity is irre levant and cul ture is often perceived as "something other people have." And we need leaders who are not afraid to lead-with conviction and determinati on-to bring America into the next millennium and build a stronger cultural heritage.

On a subj ect closer to home, as PAR project manager, I'd like to welcome incoming managing editor Bruce Wright, who joins us with many years of design and publicati on experie nce under his belt. Bruce replaces Jeffrey Kastner, editor of the past three issues, who now lives, and writes, in London. Thank you Jeffrey, for your hard work. Remember, your chair may be fill ed, but the door is always open if you should ever decide to move back.

- Jack Becker, Projec t Manager

I

P.S. Letters to the editor are welcome fro m Jane and John Q. Public.

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HAUIGAlIHG HElU TEBBITOBIES Definitions and DiTections in Public RTt The Hew Public RTt Rs Opposed to What? from Philadelphia to Chicaqo

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Sonnd Bytes I Cathey BiUian inteTuiews: HaTY Kilroy, Hob fisheT, LeonaTd Dobbs, Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz, RpTil Kinqsley, Dale Lanzone ~:....-____ 6

Sou'nd Bytes n The futuTe of public aTt: James (lark, Jackie ferraTa, HeanoT HeaTtney, tucy H. LippaTd, Donald HcHeil, Hancy Princenthal _ _ _ _ _ _ 8

ShaTinq Space nTecent'histoTY and possible futuTe of collaboTations 'by Donna GTaues -...,....----i-_ _ _ _ _~_ _ _ _ 10

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RTts fOT Community Chanqe

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Public RddTess: KTzysztof Wodiczko hhibition Teuiew

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Editorial Advisory Board: Amanda Degener, Regina Flanagan, Patrice Clark Koelsch, Cathey Billian, Barbara Grygutis, Kinji Akagawa, Cheryl Miller, Lance Nekar, Fuller Cowles, Christine Podas-Larson, Lori Lane, Mariann Johnson, Gordon Thomas, Rebecca Sterner, Jerry Machalek.

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FORECAST Board of Directors: Cheryl Kartes, Lori J, Lane, Scott M. Nelson, Ellen Valde, Victoria Moore, Garth Rockcastl e, Kit Wilson Printer: Printed Media Services Š 1993 Public Art Review (lSSN: 1040-2 1x) is published semi-annuall y by FORECAST Public Artworks, 2324 Uni vers ity Avenue West, Suite 102, Saint Paul , Minnesota USA 55114 Tel. (6 12) 641-1128. An nual subscription dues are U.S. $ 12 for USA, $ 16 for Canada, and $22 for foreign. Public Art Review is not res ponsible fo r unsolicited material. Please send SASE with material requiring return. Opinions ex pressed and va lidity of information herein are the responsibility of the author, not FORECAST, and FORECAST disclaims any liab ility for any claims made by advertisers and fo r images reproduced by' advertisers.

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ContempoTaTY Public SculptuTe Book Teuiew

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Washington Memorial, (completed 1884), The Mall, Washington D.C. (photo:

Art on File) PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993 3

Contemplation prompted by the 14th International Sculpture Conference in Philadelphia, June 1gg2 b

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PART I onservation and pollution, racial and ~oc ~ a l di visions, ethn i~ pre~ udi ces, hou s ~n g, crime, health, unemployment ... the lIst IS Incomplete, but It indicates the van ety [ of issues addressed by public art. It is a li st of publicconcerns--common, ordinary, and close. In a presentation by Mary Jane Jacob at the International Sculpture Conference in Phil adelphia las t spring, thi s list summed up a rather unusual emphasis in public-art programming.

Culture in Action, a new program curated by Jacob for an independent public-art agency in Chicago (Sculpture Chicago), involves eight arti sts and collaborators who have been commi ssioned to work over several months with local gro ups and institutions. Rather than emphasizing solely the creation of art objects or installations, as an artist-in-residence program might, the progra m' s main goal is social interac tion.

Working with high school juniors, residential council s, commun ity activists, fac tory workers, and ci ty officials, the arti sts will engage in informal di alogs with the groups.

Already, a series of lectures, panel discuss ions, and symposia have been organi zed.

This summer (1993), after two years of planning and public exchange, the projects are expected to culminate in such unorthodox art productions as a public education brochure, a hydroponic garden, a new line of candy, an alternative city tour, an ecological fi eld station, and collaborati ve install ati ons in volving temporary markers and monuments to subjects outside offi cial hi story.

If Culture in Action poses a radical move beyond establi shed approac hes in public art, there is more at stake in its departure than an Oedipal reaction to earlier movements.

It must be remembered that the wish to provide more intimate relati onships between art and its publics has been the driving fo rce behind public art from the beginning. As a means to ac hieve that goal (by prov iding public amenity, fo r instance), the art object has served a differen t purpose in public art than it has in more museum-oriented art fo rms. Rather than seeing Culture in Action as mere experimentali sm, it is better understood as an attempt to reevaluate and overcome the terms, or lim its, that public art has had to contend with and has too often accepted and internalized.

The ground for thi s revaluation became particul arly clear at the confere nce in a panel called "Can Sculpture Survive the Public Art Process?" If the paneli sts-Athena Tacha, Jody Pinto, and Albert Paley, all well-known pioneers of the public-art movementdutifull y recounted the burden of bureaucracy on the creati ve process in numerous, humorous, and not-so-funny anecdotes, the fra ming of the questi on seemed to di stort what their struggle as public artists is about.

In a passionate plea for the creation of " meaningful " public spaces that would unify their communities on the model of the public plazas and fo rums of historic Europe, panelist Athena Tac ha's concern was not with the resilience of solitary creation at all.

Significantl y, her concern was whether a true "gathering place" can be created in a society where there are no common beliefs and where parking lots and streets seem to have priority in city planning.

If Tac ha's concern put the social goal of public art into perspecti ve, it also offered a vantage point on its social limits. Based on an over-simple conception of "community" as well as of the artist' s role in society, the model of the medieval pl aza-with its ideal of "harmonious communi ty" centered on common function--call s for the recreating of the "common life" so conspicuously missing from modern cities by simply updating the spatial symbols of civic unity. It is a model, as panelist l ody Pinto insisted, that at best is irrelevant to the di versity of American society and has proven unresponsive to changes in lifestyle and population in European cities as well .

It is in response to this revalori zation of older models that the Culture in Action program takes its departure. It is not a revalori zation of the artistic achievements of public art but of the assumptions of urban development that public art has customaril y worked within-assumptions about "community" and " neighborhood"; "parti cipation," "representation," and "cultural identity"; "public design," "art" and "architecture." Thi s can be seen by looking at a few of the project descriptions.

- To consider and counter the prevailing perception of a now predominantl y MexicanAmerican neighborhood, Daniel Martinez intends to " interconnect ... an overlay of issues relati ng to housing, labor, and mi gration that have impacted" the development of the neighborhood, a former Jewish ghetto and a major pl ace of settlement fpr many European immigrant groups.

- Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler intend to " reveal . . . the utopi an beginnings, architectural history, and conceptions/mi sconceptions we hold about [federally-funded city housing projects] and their residents."

- Suzanne Lacy "will explore issues of women, immigrants, and the working cl ass ."

Drawing inspiration fro m the struggle fo r fa ir labor practices, education, health, and other social and polit.ical reform by the social acti vist circle formed around l ane Addam' s Hull -House at the tumofthe centu ry, the project will foc us mostl y on presentday service acti vities of immigrant women.

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pose

-S imon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio "will explore the relation of employees to employer and individual to corporation through the real-lifecollaboration among artists and management and workers of a candy company."

-Inigo Manglano-Ovelle' s project wi ll foc us on processes of bridging social, generational, and cultural isolatio n of individuals and groups within localized commun ities. Through evening gatherin gs, a set of interrelated issues affecting the neighborhood (family, immigration, employment, class, city service priorities, etc.) will be explored and an attempt made to "reach an understanding of the complexity and the views of the community."

If these short excerpts suggest a social-scientific research program, that impression may be partially true. Several of the artists will work with sociologists, urban planners, and other specialists to research and analyze social issues. However, the program is a response to social conditions rather than to a scientific goal, and the approach is a public exchange rather than a scientific method. The research is better seen, then, as acknowledgment of the fact that the complexity of public issues cannot be avoided-not only are there no si mple solutions available to public art: there are no simple problems. If loss of community characterizes city life, it is not clear what is to be unified or what will count as community in a pluralist soc iety . And if a sense of irrelevance to public concern has become the predicament of public design , hence of public art, the proble m is not simply that the power of design has been overestimated but that its social significance has not been fu ll y acknow ledged .

It is in the face of thi s recognition that "the new public art" has to proclaim its public-ness . It has, as Mary Jane Jacob stated most convincingly in her presentation at the Sculpture conference, "To test out new methods of invol ving and coll aborating with community members that go beyond the traditional mural-painting model , to engage others in the conception, execution, and ownership of public art. To do so, new strategies for art must be developed that involve the arti st with community over time and may even create a sense of community where there was none; new modes of exchange between artist and audience need to be identified where public art can also be a vehic le for popular education; and new sites-where art in the form of objects, dialogs, and events can take place-need to be created to bridge the gap between art and everyday life."

Jack Becker, Nilda Pauley, and Jennifer Dowley, during a focus session. (photo: Marc PoKempner, courtesy Cultu;e in Action, A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago)

PART II Contemplation on "The Artist In The Community" Forum, Providence-St. Mel School and Erie Neighborhood House, Chicago, December 5, 1992 If the question of the artist's role in the community has been rai sed on occasion over the past 20 years of public art, it is now being asked in a more urgent, certainly more self-conscious manner. There was nothing arbitrary or casual, for instance, about the way it was asked during a public forum on the Culture in

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Action program held in Chicago la t December. Rather than community in volvement being relegated to admini strative workshops on "outreach," as it has been so often in the past, it was the focus of the forum. Thi s is not surpri sing, of course, because cultural identity, diversity, representation , and audience have become increasingly central to art criticism and cu ltural studies. However, it was striking how directly relevant to the art itself-as opposed to some external cond iti ons of its siti ng-the question appeared to be. The very posing of the question seems to have become integral to the way public art addresses itselfto its own cultural conditions-which is to say that "public" art has fina ll y come to openl y acknowledge how problematic its own claim to public relevance is.

This self-criticism, far from being self-absorbed, is a necessary element in public artists' attempts to come to terms with the social shortcomings of what can be called the " integrationist" model of public art. As public art has developed over the last two decades, its emphasi s has been on techniques of integration- not just to incorporate art physically into buildings and parks but also to foster social assimilation. While "site-specificity" -privileged in public-art circles as the public form of art-has provided a means to introduce art into neighborhoods without the glaring irrelevance of what has been called "plop art," it has rarely gone beyond the idea of responding to establi shed ideas or "facts" about communities to partici pating in a public sphere where such facts can be examined and contested. The more an arti st seeks to adapt hi s or her art to preestabli shed notions about a community, the less the art may speak to commun ity members' understanding of their rel ation to their community and other levels of modern society.

It is in response to this dilemma that "the !l~w public art" has emphasized " participation" over " integration." The diffe rence between the two emphases is not simply a matter of degree of community involvement, for community members (usuall y children) are often included in some aspects of integrationist art to facilitate its acceptance. The difference is rather a matter of conflicting notions about the role of art in public life.

This, I wou ld like to suggest, is a matter of confl icting views of what constitute the problems of modernity.

While the integrationist model presupposes that modern societies are, in the words of the social theori st Sheyla Benhabib, "communities integrated around a single conception of the human good"-i.e., a conception that can be responded to in an unproblematic fas hion and revitalized through simple design, such as a public plaza- the participatory model is based on the notion that " [modern] societies are marked by a ' plurality ' of visions of the good, and of the good of association itself.'"

Without such a plurali st conception, it wou ld be hard to appreciate the complexities of at least some of the projects commi ssioned for the Culture in Action program. Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio's project, "The Workers Make the Candies of Their Dreams," may seem like just another ex pansion of public art into new contexts-a candy fac tory this time- but itfits no established categories of public art.

It' s neither a patronizing act of putting good art in the factory for the benefit of the workers' cultural education (plop-art), nor an integrationist attempt to respond to the workers ' "proletarian culture" ("site-specific art"), nor for that matter an attempt of mi spl aced constructivism involving artists in capitali st production ("design co ll aboration"). What di stingui shes Grennan and Sperandio' s project from such approaches is the awareness they have incorporated into their work of how problematic their claim to pub lic relevance is. Thus, if they do make attempts to engage the workers in "participation," it is not to promote the established order at the plant but to examine the uses and abuses of participatory rhetoric. That at least was the impression given at the forum by one of the participants in the project, the president of the Bakers, Confectioners, and Tobacco Workers Union , Local 522. The employer claims to already have a workers/ management participation program in pl ace at the

Anthony Law, manager of the Ogden Court Apartments, addressing a roundtable discussion. (photo: Marc Po Kempner, courtesy Culture in Action, A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago) plant, developed at the plant's ex pense for the workers' benefit, but the workers see it as a structure of empty words and view Grennan and Sperandio 's project as providing a way to examine or test its foundation .

Nor can Kate Eric on and Mel Zieg ler's " Housing Project" be reduced to an integrati onist response to "facts" or values indigeno us to tenants of public housing.

As part of their project, they will develop a paint-chart of official co lors used for public housing, not in an attempt to make their art specific to its site, but to chart the powers at play in everyday life through parti cipatory examination of how facts and values are constituted in people's li ves and of how they are related to other value systems.

What these two examples show is not on ly the complexity of the plurali st vision but also a development away from the integration of art into presumably undi fferenti ated value sche mes to in vo lve me nt in the complex reali ty of power relations. Wh ile the integrationi st vision sees the problems of modernity in "the loss of a sen e of belonging, oneness, and solidarity," as Benhabib has put it, the participationi st sees the probl ems " more in the sense of a loss of political agenc y and efficacy."2 The participatory vision of publi c art grew, as Suzanne Lacy stressed at the forum, out of the grass-root efforts of the I 970s, influenced signi ficantly by the great co mmunity activist Saul Alinsky. Public artists have been partof the so-called "new soc ial mo vements,"3 fi ghting along with environmental, peace, and feminist activists for qualitati ve social and cultural change. In urban politic, they have ali gned themselves with tenants and squatters, consumer advocates, and welfare-rights militants, and again st the face less bureaucracy of fifties- and sixtiesstyle social programs and urban planning. [t has been a fight not just against un wa nted hi ghway plans and gentrification but for acti ve involvement of ordin ary people in the decisions affecting their own li ves.

As with these new social movements, "the new public art" has often concentrated on the positi ve side of the equation. The Ericson/Ziegler project is a good example of thi s; Suzanne Lacy's large-scale art project with ag ing wo men is the classic prototype of an attempt to e mpower through participatory examination of values, prejudices, and alternati ve visions. The success of such projects does not depend on whether the communities engaged will come to accept them-for without their acti ve in vo lvement from the beginning, the projects will not even get off the ground . Rather, the test is whether the art pl ays a real role in the participant's li ves and leaves the m with a fuller sense of their political and cultural power.

Hafthor Yngvason is a writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has written on public art for national and regional publications.

Notes: I . Sheyla Benhabib, SiIL/ating the Self Gender. Commulliry alld Postmodernislll ill COlllelllporary Ethics (New York: Routhledge, 1992), p. 79.

2 . Ibid. , p. 77.

3 . For a more thorough exami nation and description of these movements, see Carl Boggs, Social Mo vements and Political Powers: Emerging Forms of Radicalism in the West (Ph iladelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993 5

olin PART I: Ouerheard at the International Sculpture Conference: Philadelphia, June, 1992 b y

Cathey

Billian

laser light animation): "Maybe I don ' t have to do this sculpture, maybe it's done in the proposal stage and can stand on its own; but part of me wants to see it really done." It took a year ... and I would do another tomorrow.

You have to have enormous faith in your work. You have to be driven; it has to be an obsession to do the damn thing. You need a thick skin to deal with the serious blows and rejections you must go through. If there are any doubts in an artist's mind about wanting to get the thing done, then they shouldn't even begin. eB: Do you think projects like these up the ante on what can be done in the future?

RF: Art is one of the very few areas where risk should be everything, yet there's so much conservativism and predictability in what I see out there; it' s appalling. Artists should be the risk takers of our society, because there's nothing to stop them.

f you know Philadelphi a, you wou ld have fe lt welcomed by last year's International Sculpture Conference hosted by the "City of Brotherly Love." The Mayor was persuaded to deli ver the welcoming address, thanks to the all-out enthu siasm of co-chairs Mary Kilroy and Fred Osborne, who left no civic or cu ltural stones unturned. As an artist-presenter at the conference (sharing two recent projects that provoked a bit of energized debate), r had ample opportunity to capture slices of conversation on trends and future paths in public art.

The fo llowing i a sampling of those conversations:

I

Mary Kilroy is Director of the Fine Arts Program and Advisory Board of Design for Philadelphia 's Redevelopment Authority, the first contemporary municipal public-art progra m to emerge in the country. She's a 20-year veteran of the finer points of administering public projects.

eB: What I'm hearing, Mary, is that from your pointofview, the whole notion of extending the formats, venues, and actual redefinition of public art can effectively be created in the programmjng.

MK: That's where you create it. It's all in the programming. There are some cities out there that are just light years ahead, and it's [because of their] administrative programming. In the pa t, as buildings went up, architects had footings poured [under a pl aza] to hold a piece of art. . . , eB: Making the assumption ...

MK: That's ri ght, that there's going to be a monumental piece of bronze or steel thrown on it. I'm talking the 1970s now, and public art was not very sophi sticated [then]. There were big budgets from the government and "sculptors" and chee e box buildings. eB: Much has changed.

MK: r was asked by an interviewer recently, "What's the single most important thing you need to be a public art ad mini trator now" and r said "Tact." As a med iator filtering through design-review committees and city department, between what the artist, architect, landscape architect, and the client feels they want, you need a lot of Mylanta to get the process rolling. Now, it's a team, but you know there ha to be a leader in the team ... though sometimes it is a true joint effort ... eB: ... and characterized as such by the arti tde igner from the beginning?

MK: Yes. You can see it when it' developed that way.

Sometimes, when a lot of the project is poured on site, the construction people erve a craftspeople, and they [can be] so proud and 0 extraordinary. You must give them credit; they are ju t a much a part of that team, upporting and nourishing it. Generally, we tart with the arti t and their concept proposal. What you eventually get ha very little to do with the original proposal because major, major change need to occur in the de ign development. What' important is to put compatible people together to support the artist's vision and not work contrary to that vision. eB: When the project is finished and sitting there with it plaque, I hunger for how it all came into being-that "behind-the- cenes" story of team-effort- 0 I cap-

6 PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993

Leonard Dobbs is an art collector and former developer and is active on several arts organization boards and the "Art and Arch itecture Committee" of the American Institute of Architects. ture it on video. How important do you feel the captured process is to the ultimate comprehension and appreciation of the workT MK: We will be doing this at the Public Art Institute, through the various schools where we're having the workshops. At the University of the Arts, we produced a video that's now traveling to all the schools. I see this as [my] time to move on, to exit from what I've been doing for over 20 years, and to contribute nationally to the public-art world by traveling around the country, working to raise consciousness through one- to twoday symposiums, hoping to affect how public art is taught in school s throughout the country. I hope we' ll be able to do that in the future. It' ll take a lot of money. eB: The price of invention is high.

MK: The recently created Public Art Institute, here in Philadelphia, is working to start building this into the curriculum of art school s, to start educating artists early, while they ' re developing.

Rob Fisher was co-chair and coordinator of the Computer Forum at ISC '92 and is a sculptor, writer, and lecturer.

eB: Rob, r want to talk to you abo ut artist-initiated projects, those inve ntive, risky, often visionary works that are potential groundbreakers into new venues for meaningful work in the public sector. Often, one starts to create a new idea for public work with a cast of character who appl aud and join forces with you , but by the time the R&D takes place, the "cast" is not necessarily the same-and the implications for bringing the piece to fruition are vast.

RF: There's a hi story of that kind of problem. Christo i a great inspiration for me, in persistence, determination, and invention. I am very much research-and development-oriented. I got immense satisfaction from working through "The Dance of the Cybernauts" (a project using sc ientific and artificial-intelli gence computer programs with architectural si mulations and

eB: Leonard, you've mentioned that developers are resistant to including art in the early stages of a project.

Could you comment on this and on your previous statement about the lack of human response and spontaneity in architecture that leads you to search for artists to fill the gap?

LD: An artist's response is concerned with emotionthat is, bringing forth feelings . Whereas an architect wil l only be concerned with shape and form; ageometric response-something they can put down on paper and specify. es: Where is the room, then, for an artist's spontaneity in these projects?

LD: What happens today is severely limiting to an artist. The artist should be involved in the design process, not put into the space that' s designated by the architect as "for art." What the architect designs has no emotion and feeling. It' s appealing and good design , but it' s not art.

Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz is an art dealer, consultant, and lecturer who special izes in public projects. The following are choice snips of Joyce. Read the list like a Jenny Holzer:

• r am an elitist, and

I have never met a person who wasn't when it comes to good public art.

• Bad art ends up being hated.

• Political correctness can be a smoke screen.

• A ll people want the best.

• Artists aren't entitled to get everything; they have to work like the rest of us.

• Some public artists arecon-artists-artist-salespeople selling the aura.

• The architect's most-used answer to "where is the art?": "I couldn't get the committee together. " (Joyce's favorite answer: "It's always been this way.")

Christo addressing the assembly at the International Sculpture Conference, Philadelphia, June, 1992. (photo: Zoe Kosmidou) April Kingsley is an author, critic, independent curator, and ISC '92 panelist who lives in New York City.

CB: As a critic, does public art interest you as a provocative art form of our time?

AK: The potential and the artists are there, but whether the situations are being fulfilled is another matter. The artist gets chewed up in the process and becomes a " minor parts decorator," and collaboration overrides the individual contributions; no one is immune. If you let an artist go, they will usually come up with a perfect situation . I really do believe that. If you want a great work of art, go to the artist, not to the collaborative process. The worst thing is to interfere [with the artist].

Of course, you have to understand their vision, and you can only understand it if you get to see it!

CB: What would you hope for in requests for proposals that would allow the artists ' vision to survive?

AK: The first stage is to throw money at artists-not a lot of money, but a small amount of money-very hard and very fast. Enough to get a model done so they can present their idea, and early on, not at the end of the building process. Artists should not have to pay outof-pocket to send in their first proposals. [The agency] has to pay them for their time to come up with interesting, viable, specific ideas. Otherwi se, artists are at a disadvantage and their vision doesn' t get across. Often, the needs of the project overwhelm artists. Architects don ' t really believe in art; they believe in their own ideas, so unless you hit them with it real fast, they just go on with their own ideas and try to figure out how to work this artist-person in,because they're fo rced to. What I want to see in the future are the needs of the artist overwhelming the project.

CB: Given your dedication to the topic of your book, The Turning Point: the Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art, what are your feelings about the evidence of the human hand in public art: is it getting lost in the manufacturing aspects of the works?

AK: In a public situation, gesture is lost, but the human feeling is not. By moving one through an experiencewhich is an extension of gesture-the best public art

presents evidence of the human touch. This has to do with choosing the best artist, not the artist who will adapt best to the architect's concept. The architects are going to think about movement of people rather than who's in the space. Artists ask: "How can I connect with the people?"

CB: And what's the role of the critic?

AK: To shut up.

Dale Lanzone is Director of Arts and Hi storic Preservation for the General Services Administration in Washington, D.C. CB: How is life looking in D.C. these days?

DL: Feeling pretty good. It' s about change vs. stasis. .. and art's about change. Public art is becoming truly more public and unpredictable in its outcome. Neither artist nor administrator can predict the outcome, because it' s broaderthan themselves. Communities want to be participants, to make a connection to the meaning of their lives. How does the art activity make sense to a community? It' s the doing of it that's great fu n.

CB: How can we maintain a certain level of quality in public art?

DL: By thinking about the [model of a] presidential election: [You] take samplings from focus groups, sound out broad interests of the community, then use that information, not your ass umptions. Ask about the love and the fears of the community: what inspires it?

Find what the real content ofthe community is: how do 1, as the artist, want to treat and reflect this?

CB: To inform the piece?

DL: It gets charged up by participation in community, the makers of it. Artists that are open to participation are going to do innovative, surprising things.

CB: I've had this experience you descri be first hand.

Before designing an airport terminal project, I spent a weekend just hanging out there, falling in love with taxiway lights, talking to fo lks in the restaurant fo r hours. These people were in love with av iatio n, li ved every spare moment in their hangar working on pl anes.

Middle-class folks with a passion for fl ying. That weekend totally informed the final project, yet there was no allocation in the budget to allow this to happen before creating the final design. As an admi ni strator, how do you di fferentiate between artists with good slides who are not inclined to work with the community and those whose agenda does embrace community input? What's the best balance for achieving highquality projects?

DL: [When] we put the selection process together, we start talking about the content of the piece and try to raise these issues with the panel. Depending on the direction we go, they pick an artist who reflects social, cultural, or physical context. Other artists whose work is nonobjective do not depend on context for meaning.

But the paneli sts generall y want to go in the other direction . Some do want ornamentation, and some want a buxom lady ridi ng a horse. U suall y courthouses start with an eagle over the door, then they go from there.

CB: Yet having been with bald eagles in Acadia this summer, I could imagine getting excited about them as a springboard for dynamic work.

DL: In a good artist's hands, it turns into something.

Van Gogh looks at a field, focuses on it, and then paints it. If the field is Des Moines, then [the artist needs to]

PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993 7

look at it multi -dimensiona ll y-the physical character, its ambitio ns (past and present)-and then paints the picture. This adventure and discovery process connects with the arti st and he lps create meaning.

Author's postscript: Ping Chong's recent La Mama production, Deshima, commemorates the Van Gogh centenni al. We see Van Gogh on stage hawking postcards of hi s sunflowers: "Two for a dollar ... I' ll sig n the back for you ... Here, take a look: See what a starving arti st looks like."

Perhaps it's postcards and video that are precisely the educational tools to effectively invite the community into the public artworks of the future. I believe in a generous and genuine effort to convey our intent to our audience. The Program fo r Art On Film is reaching to bridge the gap between film as art and film about art.

Likewise, we need more med ia voices that speak e loq uentl y about the spirit of our public projects (such as Christo). Recent years have seen rising participation by hi ghl y accompli shed artists, both live and on tape, in programs that address children's li ves. These programs in c lud e Art ists in the School s, th e Guggenheim Museum 's Ch ildren's Program "Learning Through Art," and New York City'S "Public Art for Public Schools." And on educational television, the jazz giants of our time are taking their consummate gen ius ri ght into the programming of kids' shows. The public art arena is the antithes is of e liti st art, and , if it's to be embraced and supported by the public in the yea rs ahead, it mu st communi cate our ideas and share our visions in access ibl e ways.

Sometimes, viewers need to be jarred into chang ing their tempo and foc us. Anita Contini 's powerful programm ing of the World Financ ial Center's "Public Spaces" (NYC) is a case in point. In multi -med ia productions li ke Meredith Monk 's "Three Pivotal Works," the who le c ityscape espl anade was transformed into a theater that, upon revisit, is fo rever changed in the minds of those who saw the event.

Progressive programs of temporary public artwork ex ist across the country and provide artists with opportunities to be daring and risky in ways unmatc hed by the cumbersome process that accompanies permanent works . It will be a constant challe nge for publi c artists in the fut ure to "keep their chops up," i.e., capture the vita lity of their work and s ite, and the spi rit of the people who move through it. Because we work in a rea lm that spans both art and society, we must sometimes stretch to embrace the vigor of a broad range of aesthetic experiences well beyond the art world . We wi ll not fi nd the ecstasy of Ci rque du Soleil's h.ybrid of Montreal -style circus and daring and luminous theater in the art ga lleries or the playbi ll s. Arti sts will mi ss the exc itement, sca le, and s patial exubera nce of deconstructioni st bui ldings- ome of today 's most expressive and agg ress ive architecture-if ex hibitio ns must fir t be labeled "sculpture." From like-minded colleagues in landscape archi tecture, we can learn a rigorous line of inquiry for approac hing a site. These disciplines offer important vocabul aries that we should take adva ntage of, lest (as Ping Chong warns) "we usher in banality in a big-budget sort of way."

I find myself li stening to these seq uences of events in time, space, sound , text, light, atmosphere, and articu lated human movement in order to info rm and adva nce a powerful , forma l approac h to my wo rkthis, while staying centered o n project ites that address the power of place in a hi ghl y personal age nda (for me, the natura l enviro nment). Each artist strives on a daily ba is to tay tuned to the center of the journey, and, as April Kings ley so firmly expressed, by protecting that vi ion intact and a llow ing it to happen in public spaces, a fut ure of the best public art can emerge.

Thank you, Jes e Helms, for " the hysteri a that created the right moment"* that fue led our co llective appetites fo r change, in Washington and our .c oun try.

Cathey Billian is a New York-based environmenta l sculptor whose architectural works treat public art as both environmental interpretation and theater.

Recent projects include a luminous airport terminal for Phoenix (see page 28) and a Regional Visitor Center for the United States Forest Service.

* De nni s Sarrie, keynote address to the Co llege Art As ociatio n, 199 1.

8 PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993

PART 2: Definitions and Directions Editors' note: Publ ic Art Review asked several prominent artists, critics, and arts administrators involved reguLarly with pubLic art to help us define some of the more urgent issues facing pubLic art today, and to indentify new directions. We asked th em to estimate what th e new Clinton administration's effect may be on public art fu nding or work, what they felt would be the significan.t n.ew directions pubLic art might take over the next 10-20 years, and to imagine what a public art project might be or Look Like in the mid-21 st century. BUI fi rst, we asked what public art meant to them. As expected, the answers were as diverse as the individuals who responded. ancy Princenthal writes about art and lives in New York. Her answer to the definition of public art is strai ghtforward: "Public art is work made for sites other than those commonly used in the presentation and marketing of painting and sculpture."

Donald McNeil, curator of the General Mills Corporate Art Collection, Minneapolis, is equally terse: "AIl art should be defined the same." Art critic and activist Lucy R. Lippard makes a fine distinction when she states, "Public art is accessible art of any kind that cares about/challenges/involves and consults the audience for or with whom it is made, respecting community and environment; the other stuff is still private art, no matter how big or exposed or intrusive or hyped it may be." Eleanor Heartney, who writes regularly for Art in America, A rtnews, ScuLpture, and The New Art Examiner, fee ls that "Public art, as opposed to art in a public space, is designed in theme, format, and fo rm language to take advantage of the particular limitations and possibilities of a context that involves interactions with the nonart public." James Clark, executive director of The Public Art Fund, New York, and formerly with the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, similarly pl aces the emphasis on context.

"Public art is artwork that depends on its context; it is an amalgamation of events-the physical appearance of the site, its hi story, the socio-economic dimensions of the community, and the artist's intervention." New York arti st Jackie Ferrara's respo nse was poetry:

H

Public art is: an attitude th e invention of the inventor th e in vention of the client tangible intangible an intervention an enhancement site-sensitive site-indifferent a criticism a mistake confrontational func tional subversive a bench a dance a radio broadcast a bridge a statue sky-writing a fence afield a whisper a pool a billboard a path a mural a tent all explosion To our question on the effect the new adm ini stration in Washington may have on public art, many agreed that much will depend o n how Clinton's ap po intees see the issues and how high a priority they place on art.

Princenthal: Since so much will depend on who is appointed to head the NEA, I can onl y say that Clinton's commitment tocultural diversity seems genuine, which will urely be reflected in federal policy on the arts. It seems equa lly possible that this will result in increased attention to regional arts initiatives, as in enhanced

support for progressive art originating in urban centers. In any event, Clinton 's promises to both establi sh fi scal responsibility and strengthen critically important social programs make it unlike ly that the NEA will see windfall growth.

Far more certain than the impac t of the new administration is the departure of the old. Twelve years of fairly active cultural repression have not only denied crucial support to many kinds of art but have also instilled equall y damaging habits of alienati on and accommodation . There will surely be pain in coming to terms with the inhibitory effects--especially the notorious, self-imposed ones-of an administration so friend ly to the religious right. But to shake those off, to see what it mi ght feel like to be at least partly in sympathy with the executive branch and all it control s, will sure ly be very fruitful.

Regardless of who 's in charge in Washington or locally, public projects will continue to provoke controversy, and multitudes will continue to de mand that their voices be understood to represent whatever "community" is served. It has a lways been that way, and that 's fine, as long as the dialog isn' t mistaken for the art.

McNeil : I think the most that can be hoped for from any governmental body is to not have any negative effect. As has been too frequently demonstrated, thi s is hard to avoid . The arts -that is, the art-making act do not need he lp. They do, however, need the freedom to be created and presented. Govern ment can he lp in this most by simpl y allowing it to happen. If government be lieves, or is convinced to believe, that the arts are meaningful and beneficial to society, it can he lp expand the arts reach by increasing the opportunities through various programs for art to be created and presented.

I hope the new admini stration has no effect on any of the arts but simply allows them to happen and encourages the ir expansion.

Lippard : Probabl y very little. Maybe a let-up on overt censorship.

Heartney: Of course, we all hope that the new adm inistratio n will be more sympathetic to art genera ll y than were its predecessors and that the siege mentality of recent years will abate. Practically, however, it is clear that art is still not a hi gh priority, and if the economy continues to do poorly, it seems unlike ly that large amounts of public funding will be re leased for art fundin g.

Clark: I hope the new ad ministration has little effect on public art per se. It's not the ro le of federal governme nt to e ither e ncourage or discourage types of art. I wi ll consider us fo rtun ate if we have a federa l governme nt that promotes the arts as a necessity of li fe rather than an economic stimu lato r or as remed ial social intervention . But most of all , I hope that President Clinton can res ist what his democratic predecessors have do ne-reduce government support for the arts.

When asked what significant new directions public art will take over the next 10-20 years, o ur respondents differed greatly in the ir opini on.

Princenthal: There are so man y acti vely competing claims on the table right now concerning what public art is or should be that I have to ass ume it will take some time to work them out. Perhaps the most immediate result will be formal recogniti on of a de facto fragmentation of the fie ld that accords eq ual respect to arti st-designed amenities, artist-assisted community cultural activity, artist-led political and soc ial ac ti vism, and art that insists on its independence from all such functions. A more enlightened administration of public-art mandates wou ld ensure that fewe r arti sts are commi ssioned to do one type of work when what is reall y wanted is another. It is my hope that the vis ua l experience of public art is not progressively viti ated in the process.

McNeil: The arts need to be recognized as meaningful expressions of ideas and artists as innovati ve probl em solvers. This is not happening. Most people still view the arts as decorative and/or expensive frills. Involvement in process is not the answer. Certain ly, increased understanding helps, but at some point arti sts have to be a llowed to do what they do--exceed our expectations, excite us, inform us, and move us forward.

Jackie Ferrara, Stone Court, General Mills Headquarters, Minneapolis, 1988. (photo: General Mills) Lippard: No crystal ball ; it will entirel y depend on the artists and the educations they get, the models they are exposed to. At the moment there are only a few fragme ntary courses nationwide that offer any studio experience in public art. If that doesn' t change, not much else will. The wheel keeps being reinvented because there is no real knowledge of the wide variety of truly public art that has been made in the last 30 years in the visual and performance fields.

Heartney: One significant direction fo r public art seems to be the incorporation of a greater degree of community participation in the planning of public-art projects. Possibly running counter to thi s is the rise in critical public art-projects that are designed to provoke and challenge viewers and to raise uncomfortable public issues. These two tendencies, though often supported by the same people, have the potential to conflict with each other. (John Ahearn's South Bronx 44th Preci nct traffic triangle project is a case in point.)

Working out thi s tension may be one of the important public-art issues of the coming years.

Clark: Electronic media and technology-inspired art will gain in use and acceptance over the next few years, especiall y as television cable systems with over 500 channels develop. As a result of technological shifts, our understanding of "community" and "the public" will also shift. While new developments in advanced communications systems are exciting, there may be a significant downside. Increasingly, the general populatio n has grown insul ar, becoming more pri vate and less public minded. If public life is not considered of value, how then can public art be valued?

When asked to forecast the role of art in the 21st century, fewer were willing to project possibilities.

Clark: Considering the infinite variety of art-making practices, aesthetic and social concerns, as well as commissioning processes, I am loath to guess what a public art project of the future might look like. Perhaps creative genius, technology, and utility will all blur into one harmonious environmental condition; after all, I have never seen public art on the USS Enterprise.

McNeil: I imagine a world in which artists' ideas and methods are incorporated into the entirety of human endeavor, used to address not only the design of how we li ve but also the overwhelming social issues we face.

Heartney: By mid-21 st century, both cities and art may ha ve assumed almost unrecognizable forms. The conventional public-art sites of our day- plazas, city squares, parks, and the like-are still based on a

Perhaps creative genius, technology, and utility will all blur into one harmonious environmental condition James L. Clark pedestrian model of the city. Already , the rise of suburban li ving has begun to invalidate thi s model. In the 2 1st century , people will probably gather in very different ways-perhaps through electronic media, computer networks, and the like. If this is the case, public art will have to reflect this very different mode of interaction.

Lippard: The problem with all art today in this society is that we have yet to envi sion a valid context for art.

Artists are drawn into and then trapped in a commercial system because there is no other context. Ideally, under a far more socially compassionate, egalitarian, unbigoted, responsible, heterogeneous, peaceful, somewhat sociali st government, it might have these components: a) A non-confrontational working relationship with national and local cultural policies that support and comprehend the diversity of artists and audiences.

And cultural policy would be made in collaboration by those who make the art and those who are the receivers/responders to it. b) "Public art" as we know it may no longer exist, as it wi ll be drastically affected by its new context. But its successor will be an available, popular, and challenging alternative to commercial and institutional ven ues.

Culture will be recognized as a crucial social ingred ient and will be funded as generously as science and economics. Artists will participate in both private and public sectors but the young and the li vely of all ages will choose the public sphere, which will be as economically viable as the pri vate. c) The art can be any form or style but may very well bypass objects, since the world will be pretty fu ll by

then. Process would be emphasized within temporary or constantly changing imagery and frameworks, markers of space and time, people-oriented actions and events, spiritual centers and other meeting places. .. Above all it will be responsive to what happe ns around it-good and bad-and to the people who make it. These people wi ll have a broad range of tastes and backgrounds and all will be respected. The public "artists" will be faci li tators, maybe anonymous, rather than egocentric creators driven by an art market and perceived as peripheral to "real life"; they will be trained in thi s kind of work within an interdi sciplinary curriculum and they wil l spend much time stud ying their location and successful models. Works may take place in a few hours or develop with a place and its inhabitants over many years. d) Public art will playa role in everyday life, either locally meani ngful or politicall y cata lytic or just plain fun and pleasurable; it can reinforce or broaden a sense of community, raise consciousness, recall hi story, he lp make nonsuperficial aspects of its site visible, and sometimes decorate and inspire. Or perhaps art wi ll have been folded back into life to the point where it is everywhere and nowhere. There will be room for ri sk and contro versy and outrage, but those who li ve with the art will decide if they want it in their environments; provisions will be made in the pri vate context for art rejected by the public sector. The avant-garde wi ll continue to have its own communi ty and ven ues, but they will be peripheral to a participatory public art. e) Bureaucracy wi ll be cut to a minimum and all concerned wi ll be trained in collective process. Writers and other support workers will be invol ved in public art projects from beginning to end so that words as well as images/phys ical experience wi ll be part of the collective communication. The phrases quality and lowest common denominator will be obsolete.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993 9

•

aTln

ace

Some Obseruations on the Recent History and Possible future of Public Art Collaborations b y

Don n a

Grav e s

public-arts administrator fro m Dall as wants to show the wo rld that in volving artists in the des ign of urban, suburban, and rural e nviro nments will improve our surroundings. A major New York deve loper insists that onl y by wo rki ng with arti sts can the wo rld-renow ned archi tect he's hired recreate the power of 16th-century Itali an pi azzas in hi s Manhattan project. The Nati onal Endowment fo r the Arts hopes that combining the ski lls of des ign profess ionals and visual artists will signif icantl y improve public spaces in the Uni ted States .

Over the las t fifteen years, scores of artist/designer collaboratio ns have been applied to publi c projects across the country, fro m small -scaled wo rks to larger landscapes, from des ig ns fo r public seating to schemes for public tra nsit stations and ci ty masterpl ans. Embraced by dozens offunders and public agencies at the loca l, state, and national levels, such collaborati ons have become increasingly insti tutionali zed as an importa nt mea ns of address ing the design of public-art and public space. Envisioned as a means of capturing a more prominent role fo r artists in designing the ci tysca pe and of ensuring local support for public art programs, coll abo ratio ns have become a signif icant goa l fo r many public-art ad mini strators. As more organi zations respond to the promi se of co llaboration, the need grows for cri tical analysis of such projects' evo lution since the late 1970s and a serious reexamination of their potential for enhancing built urban enviro nments.

After studying thi s topic over the last year in the course of prepari ng a book, my current percepti on is that naive rhetoric and a ki nd of myopia have stunted the potentia l of co llaborati ons. Infla ted rhetoric about redeem ing the process of public space desig n is rarely matched by achiev ing pari ty for arti sts in shaping the urban envi ronment. The method fo r arti st/architect coll aborations has evolved without a full understanding, or even acknowledgeme nt, of the larger arena in which they operate, including the poli tical economy of land use and the soc iocultural as pects of public-space des ign.

I

Early Experiments Co ll aborations began to emerge as an intriguing to pic in public art du ring the late 1970s when the Seattle Arts Comm ission and MIT initiated projects that tea med artists and arc hi tects. Seattle's View landl Hoffman project added a trio of artists to its trad itional engi neer/architect team and asked the group to des ign an electrical substation fo r a res identi al neighborhood, which was completed in 1979 . At roughl y the same time, on the East coast, three arti t began wo rk with an arc hi tect on the Wies ner Building, a'new visual arts center for the MIT campus. W ithin a few years these projects entered the canon of contempora ry public art as bi rthplace for arti t/arc hitect collaboratio ns and were widely hai led as a significa nt new approach to public art. I T he View land/Hoffman substation and the Wies ner building presented contra ting models for public-space coll aborations in terms of program, budget, and scale.

Yet both offered a new, expanded ro le for artists in the des ign of public places. By strengthening the relationshi p between artist, artwork, and site, such coll abora-

10 PU BLIC ART REVIEW

ti ons raised hopes that public art could be redeemed fro m critics ' charges that much of it amounted to "plop art. " Coll aborati ons also pro mised solutions to two of public art's nagging problems: the tendency to be treated as an afterthought to design and the concomitant disparity between the authority of arti st and archi tect. 2 In the debate over how best to resolve these proble ms, the Seattle and MIT projects highlighted a pair of issues that have since dominated the discussion about public art coll aborations: the method of artist selection and the point at whi ch artists enter a project.

"Shotgun man'iages," the method used to fo rm both the Seattle and MIT teams, received increasing criticism; by the mid- 1980s they were actively discouraged by many arts admin istrators and some fund ers, including the NEA. Cri tics argued that the need for compatible personalities and working styles in a collaboration had less chance of being realized by thi s method, if onl y because building programs with the time and funds to support a period in which unacquainted team members can establi sh a working relati onshi p are rare. In respo nse to criticism of shotgun marriages, a variety of methods began to be used to fo rm interdi sciplinary teams. The growing number of competitions for collaborative projects allowed teams to fo rm on their own before submi tting qualifi cations or proposals. Archi tectu ral competitions fo r nati onal and internati onal projects generated a great deal of interes t in the design field and beyond and were increasingly popular fo r awarding major comm issions. By the mid-1 980s, several competitions for artist/architect collaborations had been held, including a plaza in Davenport, Iowa, and a winery and residence in the Napa Valley, Californi a.

T he timing of artists ' involvement in building projects has been another foc us fo r discussion. Traditionally, architects had selected the artwork's site, determined its media, and helped to choose an artist whose work conformed to these limitations. For artists and public-art admini strators, one of the mai n purposes of the coll aborative method was to remedy this situation. The artists at MIT were selected after the architect had begun designing the building, a condi-

tion that most artists and arts administrators view as an impediment to artists' infl uence on the overall design.

In response, most public-art programs sponsoring collaborati ve projects encourage or require inclusion of the arti st on the project team at the earliest possible moment.

Wiesner project director Kathy Halbreich had begun with the hope that "arti sts and architect would simply sit down as equals in front of a blank sheet of paper, and together they wo uld generate the concept of the total buildin g." A ltho ugh the uni ve rs ity's fundraising need for well-developed presentatio n materi als in the earliest stages of the project th warted thi s goal, the image she drew of a nonhierarchical creati ve union between artists and des igners has exerted a powerful hold over the imaginations of many arti sts and art admini strators since then.

Developing the Rhetoric The Seattle and Cambridge projects elici ted strong interest in the art and des ign fie lds, and the notion of collaboration between arti sts and architects was soon popularized by increased medi a attentio n, publications, and competiti ons. Collaboration: Artists and Architects, a 198 1 traveli ng exhibition and book organi zed by The Architectural League in New York, was an earl y effort to examine and pro mote artist/architect collaborations. Eleven prominent architects selected artists with whom they worked on imaginary projects that could demonstrate coll aboratio n's possibiliti es. A few years later, Manhattan's Battery Park City showed that this approach could be applied to the real wo rld of a multi-billion doll ar redevelopment project. The Architectural Leag ue and Battery Park City'S developer claimed the Italian Renaissance, or its late 19th-century American revival, as a precedent fo r contemporary coll aborations, a stylistic choice that has been echoed by other participants. Yet the hierarchy evident in any close examination of earlier periods, all of which placed arti sts in a ro le subservient to architects, was exactl y the target for subversio n by the new collaborations of the 1980s.

A range of justificatio ns emerged fo r in vesting significant amounts of money and professional effort into thi s new urban strategy. Public-art administrators and other champions of coll aboration have presented their approach as not onl y a more effecti ve way to use burgeoning public-art funds but also as an important way of redeeming the process of public-space design.

In part, inviting arti sts to take a more acti ve part in shaping the urban built environment was a response to the assertion of some urban critics that the built environment of American cities has dimini shed during the decades after WWII. Seattle's influenti al 1984 study, Artwork/Netwo rk by artist Jim Hirschfield and designer Larry Rouch, was based on the "assumptio n that artists have a fundamental pl ace in city pl anning."3 In arguing that artists should have an expanded role in civic design, public-art administrators began to describe them as "visionaries," "problem solvers," and "bri dges to the communi ty," phrases that have been repeated again and again in public art confe rences and city art pl ans since the mid- 1980s. If artists were the cri tical ele ment needed to ensure excellence in public space design, as these advocates cl aimed, the n ensuring parity for them in the design process was crucial. By the late 1980s, as

cultural pl anners and arts administrators became more experienced in directing interdisciplinary projects a number of issues were identified as particularly important in planning for collaborations. Equality between artist and designer was paramount. Distinctions between various types of collaboration were identified and ranked, with simple cooperation at one end of the scale and "true coll aboration" at the other.

The most vocal advocates of collaboration have been artists, who stand to gain more control over a greater portion of projects, and public-art administrators, who have seen an expansion of their sphere of influence since the advent of coll aboration. However, I would arg ue that such advocacy was not solely a matter of self-interest fo r either group. Dissatisfaction with the context and audience for art had prompted many arti sts and curators in the 1960s and 1970s to expl ore new media and ve nues in an attempt ro reach a broader public and to create works dealing more di rectl y with social, rather than personal or aesthetic, issues. Artists, many acting in coll aborati ve teams, worked in storefronts, sidewalks, billboards, beaches, and shopping malls as they took part in a dialog about the importance of their contributions to the public realm. Unfo rtunately, most of the funders and commiss ioning bodies for large-scale permanent public artworks settled upon a vision of collaboration that severed its links with social activi sm.

One of the most successful efforts to promote artist/ architect collaborations was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts between 1986-1988.

Under the direction of Richard Andrews and Adele Chatfield Taylor, chairs of the Visual Arts and Design Programs, the NEA awarded a series of special grants totaling over half a million dollars fo r the planning and design phases of collaborati ve projects to "stimulate innovati ve ideas and .. .establish new models for meaningful civic design."4 A range of projects- from a site-specific installation on the Wellesley College campus in Massachusetts, to the redesign of a centuryold Californi a plaza- were funded to apply the joint efforts of artists and architects to a variety of design problems, including open space, public buildings, and urban infrastructure. The NEA's Design ArtsNisual Arts (DAN A) grant program both responded to and boosted the growing interes t among artists and publicart planners in artist-des igner collaboration. At the time, Endowment staff stated that they did not want to codify an emerging acti vity, but Andrews recentl y commented that an important goal was to address the fac t that " no clear methodology" had emerged for constructing teams and implementing projects. 5

Some Questionable Assumptions and Omissions The oft-repeated goals and rationales supporting artist/architect collaborations deserve serious scrutin y, for there is a significant gap between much ofthe rhetoric used by commiss ioning agencies to advance and justify their programs and the processes and constraints that must be faced. Even among the several important issues that have received extensive attention within the field, most have yet to be resolved. For example, despite much debate, few programs have successfull y determined how arti sts can have parity in a process that generally ass ures them of onl y one percent of the resources. Nor have they been able to regularly bring artists into projects at the conceptual stage, because most building programs are initiated by private developers or public agencies whose primary agenda is to move with max imum speed and cost efficiency. Many issues of still more importance have yet to be full y addressed and debated by public-art practitioners.

Although some voices have been raised agai nst coll aboration, they have focused on their effect on artists. They have given almost no serious attention to the relati onship between coll aborati ve projects and public space development in contemporary U.S. cities. Many of the underl ying assumptions governing the design team method have not been explored and debated. Instead, discussion within the field has generally been limited to enl arging the arti st's arena of responsibility in shaping the built environment and outlining ways of creating equal working relationships between arti sts and designers. Many of the public-art project directors I have spoken to over the las t year described themselves as advocates for the artist's vision and protectors of the artist's rights,

implying a David and Goliath relationship between artists and architects.

Actually, as others have argued, the collaborative project presents a more problematic and complicated position for artists than the power differential vis-a-vis architects. Many of the most cherished stereotypes about artists are subtly or overtly refuted by the arguments for collaboration.

The second assumption that has shaped collaborations is that the most fruitful relationship in creating public spaces occurs between artists and design professionals. The NEA grant guidelines called specifically for design professionals and visual artists; virtually all of the projects funded were carried out by artists and architects. The primacy of the artist/architect team was asserted even when other possi bilities were presented, perhaps because the DAN A grant panels were composed of artists and designers with relatively little knowledge of other fields.

This narrow definition of appropriate collaborators is attributable in part to the di stinct disciplinary basis of the NEA's programs, yet its underlying assumption has a broader source and impact- it replicates and reinforces a tendency within both professions to treat public-space design as a primarily aesthetic and technical activity. The Artwork/Network study framed its 30 pages of site recommendations primarily in terms of phys ical considerations; very few were based on the needs of a particular community or user group, and none sprang from other place-related characteristics, such as the hi storical or political importance of a site.

Critic Herbert Muschamp ascribes this tendency within arti st/architect collaborations to "the hegemony of visual culture over other forms of content."6 In seeking to expand the role of artists, collaboration advocates run the ri sk of assigning them the herculean task ofcompensating for all of the social, political, and spiritual inadequacies of our current process for creating public spaces. Urban-design critics lament our loss of methods (and of convincingjustifications) for bui Iding new public spaces. Yet artists ha ve been charged with so lving this riddle alongside architects-the very professionals blamed for the problem. Artists are asked to both "humani ze" the design of public spaces and play multiple disciplinary roles, to function as both "everyman" and "Renaissance man." Thi requirement has often placed artists in situations where they lack the knowledge, access to resources, and support that might allow them to begin addressing the complex issues rai sed by the design of public spaces.

Enthusiasm for collaborative projects has grown without sign ificant dialog about exactly what is wrong with the present state of public places and why. One coro llary of the cherished vision of artist and architect sitting down to a blank sheet of paper as creative equals is the notion that a building project is a clean slate on which artist and designer can realize their geniu s by working in paired (rather than solitary) splendor- unmediated by political, social, or economic influences. This denial of the larger context for public art and public-space design has seriously limited both theory and practice within the public-art field.

The debate within the public-art field over collaboration rarely touches deeply upon the political economy of a specific site. The nature and impact of urban development in the post-WWII period and its relationship to the si multaneous rebirth of public art have gone largely unexamined . Among the most pointed questions this rel ationship raised during the collaborationinfatuated 1980s is how a development climate focused on maximum income for the few could provide a framework for public art and public spaces oflasting and profound meaning for the many . Urban theorist Rosa lyn Deutsche attempted to draw attention to thi s matter in relation to Battery Park City, considered by much of the art world to be one of collaboration's greatest successe . Deutsche criticized the project as an emblem of the 1980 ' view of public space as a commercial good tied to real-estate i'nvestment instead of a communal good held in the civic trust. 7 Arguing that Battery Park's public-art program "i ntervened at a critical moment," Deutsche found the collaborative projects complicit in enabling the worst social consequences of redevelopment. By drawing attention away from the long-standing debate over the inclusion oflow-cost housing at Battery Park City and the use of scarce public land resources and public powers, collaborations by prominent artists and designers helped to legitimize the creation of an elite enclave.

Some New Directions In order to sketch the trajectory of the rhetoric and practice of artist/architect collaborations during the 1980s, I've relied on a fair amount of generalization.

However, not all collaborations conform to the characterization I have just drawn. As the field has been forced to rethink its methods in the face of budgetary and other urban crises, many projects suggest alternative ways to think about public art and collaboration.

The following are just a few examples that I believe offer important new directions of more broadly composed interdisciplinary teams as well as of projects in which audiences helped to shape efforts in creative ways.

A recent project that exemplifies the latter approach is found in a quite unlikely place. When artist Ned Kahn toured a county jail on the peninsula just south of the city, the site fora public-art commission awarded by the San Francisco Art Commission in 1989, he was dismayed by the " inhuman" nature of the institution and its architecture and despaired of the possibility of any meaningful proposal for using the art-enrichment funds generated by construction of a 300-bed annex.

Fortunately, he met Catherine Sneed Marcum and was introduced to the nationally-acclaimed horticulture project she had run at the jail since 1984. In an effort to give pri soners a chance to experience their own creative, nurturing capacities and their ability to grow and change, Marcum (a former prison counselor), led

Enthusiasm for collaborative projects has grown without significant dialog about exactly what is wrong with the present state of public places and why... inmates in growing herbs and vegetables and raising goats, rabbits, and geese for local charities on a 12acre plot. The project, which involved over 150 men and women daily, has led Marcum to start a postrelease garden project to help prisoners in the oftendifficult transition back to their communities.

In deciding with Marcum to replace the horticulture project' s dilapidated facility, Kahn translated his longstanding interest in light and water into the design for a new greenhouse. The structure, which is used for classes in organic gardening and for seedlings on their way to the garden, uses dichroic glass and mist to translate exterior atmospheric conditions into a constantly changing environment of color and light, giving time a more positive meaning for inmates than merely the length of their sentences. Over 75 inmates volunteered to work on the greenhouse; their enthusiasm for laying the greenhouse floor, composed of brick salvaged from the 1989 earthquake, inspired them to also design and construct a patio and network of paths after they completed work on the structure.

The ideal collaboration held up by most artists and public-art administrators is one that weighs the coauthorship ofform most heavily, giving primacy to the aesthetic deci sion-making process. Yet by that definition the greenhouse project would not qualify. I would argue that the collaboration between Kahn, Marcum, and the inmates over the content (or what is called in architecture the program of the project) is at least as important as fOlmal decisions. The vision of collaborations as being between only artists and designers has become something of a straightjacket; it stems in part, I believe, from defining collaboration as primarily an aesthetic function. Factoring in the contributions to the program of other professionals and community members gives us a new way to think about structuring and evaluating collaborations and links them to the traditions of community-based art practice.

12 PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993

De s pite the current backlash against "multiculturalism," attention to inclusivity must extend beyond disciplinary boundaries to incorporate ethnic, racial, and gender diversity. Ironically, art and architecture, the two professions that are called upon to create new meanings for the public realm, are among those that have historically been least welcoming to women and people of color in terms of granting professional access and status. Because public-art projects often involve large building programs and budgets, commissioning agencies are usually hesitant to award collaborative projects to those without previous background in working at those scales. Since few minority and women artists and designers can claim such experience, commissions are awarded to allAnglo male teams.

Increasi ng numbers of public-art programs are trying to address this problem in their selection of artists.

A few collaborative ventures, such as Seattle's Metro transit project and the Los Angeles County light rail system, have actively recruited artists of color and have tried to achieve gender balance in their design teams . The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, which gives cultural diversity a high priority in its artist selection process, also encourages private developers to include second artists on projects in "apprentice" roles. Including less experienced artists gives them a chance to gain the knowledge and training necessary to compete for larger commissions.

However, an unintended consequence of these efforts is that the "burden" of representing cultural diversity usually falls to the artists on the team. Although many cities apply affirmative-action requirements to large public works projects, governmental bidding processes usually select design professionals on the basis of their past experience in a particular type ofbui Iding project and their competitiveness in bidding their cost estimates. The result increases the imbalance of power within collaborative teams ; the artist, often the oddperson-out to begin with, is further marginalized as a woman and/or person of color.

An alternative to considering as team members artists who must stand in for "the public" is to view a wider array of people as artists. Artist/activist Bonnie Shirk recently cautioned against an overly-exclusive definition of the artist: "I've met artists who were engineers, artists who were business people, and artists who were parents."8 Although expanding the makeup of public-art project teams is obviously problematic for too-tight project budgets, several programs have been successful in finding ways to expand the disciplinary makeup of "design teams." For their series of temporary public-art projects, "In Public," installed throughout the city during 1991 , the Seattle Arts Commission made the services of a social historian/urban planner available to both out-of-town and local artists.

Gail Dubrow 's work with several of the artists stretched their limited budgets and provided access to rich sources of imagery in local libraries, archives, and special collections. Although the Art Commission assumed that Dubrow 's services would be sought out mostly by the out-of-town artists to compensate for their lack offamiliarity with and attachment to the city, it was primarily local artists who used her critical judgment and research abilities. Norie Sato asked Gail for documentation of her family'S arrival in Seattle from Japan in 1954; Dubrow located the logs of a passenger ship listing the Sato family's possessions as two wooden boxes and three suitcases. The artist used this information, as well as material Dubrow found on the character of the 1950s harborfront, to create images of layered screening along with text that serve as a personal meditation on the transience of memory .

Artists Gloria Bomstein and Donald Fels approached the opportunity to work with an historian as more of a partnership, engaging in discussions on the implications of research in the fields of social history and political economics as they addressed a broader history of the city's waterfront. The team selected sites adjacent to existing historical markers and signs describing rules and regulations for the area's use, then' designed and installed their own signage. The harborfront's history and its use today are linked through a series of questions exploring the nature of real-estate development and interrogating the so-called "public" stewardship of public lands. In evaluating her experience with the "In Public" artists, Dubrow wrote that "artists sometimes raise questions that historians

might not ordinarily think to ask, or have the chutzpah to tackJe."9 The experience was of mutual benefit, causing her to rethink her reliance on empirical evidence and the role of imagination in creating a place for the past within the present.

Conclusion By writing this essay I do not mean to give the impression that I believe collaborations in public art have been a failure. Rather, I think that the project of designing such a method is still incomplete. One reason for this is that the dialog about collaboration has taken place within a small and homogeneous group. Although some architectural journals and critics have reported on collaborative projects, most of the di scuss ion about the nature and purpose of this activity has taken pl ace within the art field and has tended to reflect the interests of artists and public-art administrators. In spotlighting the task of developing more equitable working relationships between artists and designers, the field has ignored the larger arena in which it operates. While it is true that architects hold the lion 's share of power in nearly all building projects, is this the most important battle to be waged in the interests of improving the urban environment?

Public spaces are the meeting places for any number of issues-environmental, social, political, culturaland cannot be reduced to anyone. Those places in which the vantage points of several disciplines are sensitively applied may reach a broader audience than spaces designed solely -by artists or artist/architect tearns. Incorporating the talents of historians, environmental psychologists, cultural geographers? composers and choreographers (to name just a few) can provide an array of points of access for users beyond the aesthetic characteristics, which are often of primary concern to artists and designers. Art historian Harriet Senie recently commented that "the continuing pursuit of this utopian ideal [of collaboration] may represent an ongoing yearning for societal cohesiveness in a time of increasing fragmentation." 10 If this is an accurate reflection of our motivations, shouldn't our collaborations reflect a widerrange of our society's members?

Our discussion about the purposes and methods for public art must take place within what Rosalyn Deutsche has called a "critical urban discourse," a dialog that acknowledges the social , economic, cultural, and political dimensions of our work. In our focus on developing the perfect process, we have lost sight of the end product we claim to seek: a public environment that reflects and sustains its citizens. The problems facing American cities, including declining tax base and infrastructure and ethnic and racial ten-

... This denial of the larger context for public art and public-space design has seriously limited both theory and practice within the public art field. sion , are obviously beyond the power of public-art programs alone. In the face of such overwhelming problems, it is understandable that many public-art practitioners have concentrated on attempting to create an equal role for artists in shapi ng the urban environment. Yet if we are to be taken at our word, our deeds and choice of allies must reflect this lofty rhetoric of civic transformation.

Donna Graves is a writer and cultural planner living in Berkeley. The former executive director of The Power of Place, Los Angeles, she is writing a book on interdisciplinary public art and public space design.

Notes: 1. Artists and Architects Collaborate: Designing Ihe Wiesner Building (Cambridge: MIT Committee on the Visual Arts, 1985), p. 12.

2. Even the Tilled Arc controversy ( 1985-89) inspired support for coll aboration; following the public hearings on the sculpture's removal , the GSA ca lled for increased artist/architect coll abo ratio n as a hedge against controversy.

3. Artwork/Network, A Planning Studyfor Seclllle: An in the Civic Context (Seattle: Seattle Arts Commission, 1984), p. 6.

4. Memorandum from Richard Andrews and Ade le Chatfield-Taylor to Frank Hodsoll , Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, 3 September 1985.

5 . Interview with Richard Andrews, 13 August 199 1.

The Endowment's success in promoting artist/designer collaboration became ev ident to me during a series of interviews I conducted last year. Artists, designers, and arts admin istrators from around the coun try told me that their projects were formed as artist/architect coll aborations in large part becau se of the avail able funding .

6. Herbert Mu schamp, Lecture at the Walker Art Center, Minneapoli s, 24 April 1992.

7. Deutsche, "Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City ," October 47 (Winter 1988), p. 34.

8. Shirk's statement was made at a " Public Art Speak Out" organized by Suzanne Lacy in San Francisco, 14 November 1991.

9. Gail Lee Dubrow, "Behind the Scenes: Public Art and the Art of Research ," In Public: Seattle 1991 (Seattle: Seattle Art Commission, 1992.)

10 Harriet Senie, Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation and Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 92.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW

WINTER/SPRING 1993 13

Mappinq The Terrain: The Hew Public Art b

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major points of unity .

Though not included often in the discourses of public art, "public" was their operative concept and quest. Patricia Phillips posed the dilemma: "First I want to share this quotation from John Dewey in 1927. 'Whatever the future may have in store, one thing is certain: unless local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately solve its most urgent problem- to find and identify itself.' In spite of the many signs of retreat and withdrawal," Phillips continued, " most people remain in need and even d~sirou s of an invigorated, acti ve idea of public. But what the contemporary polis will be is inconclusive."2 Thi s indeterminacy triggers one of the major issues within the new public art: audience-in traditional public art taken to be just about everyone-must now be rigorously investigated in prac tice as well as theory . Is "public" a qualifying description of pl ace, ownership, or access? Is "public" subject, a characteri zation of the audience? Does it explain the intentions ofthe arti st (Arlene Raven called it "Art in the Public Interest" in her book of the same name 3)? Or does "public" refe rto a quality of the work process, as suggested

by Jo Hanson: "Much of what has been called publi c art might better be defin ed as private indul gence. Inherentl y public art is social intervention." This is not simpl y about naming but about findin g di rection. The inclusion of the public connects the theory of art to the broader populace: what exi sts in the space between the two words, public and art, is the space of potential, an unknown relati onship between artist and audience.

Whether or not this work is "art" may be the central question to some. Modernist mythology about the artist's role dies hard . Appropriation, mixed medi a, conceptuali sm, transience, pedagogy, performance, and even interaction in art are all acceptabl e when there is no real intention of social change. In a sense, the reduction of function to craft underlies an aversion to art that makes claims to do something.

That we do have at hand not only art but art that challenges our very definiti ons of the term is the point of thi s article. If there are sufficient similarities in the prac tices of these artists for them to be described as a genre-and I believe thi s to be the case, then it will be a genre based on shared concerns within the notion of the public, rather than shared media or tradi tions.

Editor's Note: This text is part one ofa two-part introduction to aforthcoming book of the same name, edited by Suzanne Lacy. Part two will be published in the next issue of PAR (summerlfall, 1993). t seven o' cl ock the audience-white-haired congregationali sts, art students in to rn Lev is, business-suited city pl anners, arts profess ionals, and others not so easily identified- fil ed uneas il y into the cavernous Unitarian church hall .

The odor of fri ed chicken hung thi ckly in the air. The fi rst and las t rows of seating were not chairs at all. Tn front, uncomfortable narrow green cots were lined up endto-end . Then came rows of folding chairs, and fin ally several tables with scattered glasses and dessert plates. The dinner guests lingered around the tables.

During the ni ght this hall do ubled as a shelter for 75 men who li ved on Oak land 's streets; the cots were their beds. At 7:30 each morn ing it was reconverted, in their wake, to a social hall. For the pas t three mornings, those men who participated in a wo rkshop led bya rti tJ ohn Malpede could postpone their ex it until almost noon.

Thi s evening it was not yet time to check in fo r the ni ght. The free dinner that fed 150 street people an hour earlier marked it as a spec ial occasion. Never mind that they had to stand in line for over an hour whil e the inex peri enced cooks dea lt with one near di saster after another. The table in the back we re cleared just minutes before the audience of almost 100 people began to arri ve. About 50 homeless men and wo men remained, shifting between the tables, the bac k of the room, and the door. Some wa ndered to the front rows to sit on the cots and the fl oor with students. Others carried on pri vate dramas just outside the door under the stone arches of the old church building. They didn ' t top moving th ro ughout the lecture.

At 8:00 pm John Malpede stepped to the microphone to talk about his work with homeles people in downtown Los Angeles and the fo rmation of the perfo rmance gro up. The Los Angeles Poverty Department- LAPD fo r short. He wove political insight, streetwise experience, and perfo rmance strategies together and called it art. This evening he shared the stage with an Oakland-based homeless ac ti vist organi zati on and several street people who had prepared fo r the evening during the previous three-day workshop. From the back of the room several homeless people expressed their agreement. Two hours later the lecture ended, an event in chaos and coex istence, the third in a series of I 0 for California College of Arts and Crafts' "City Sites: Arti sts and Urban Strateg ies." 1[see PAR Alternative Cartographies: Exploring Traditions Vo1.2, No.2] For the pas t two or more decades, visual artists from a variety of bac kgrounds and per pecti ves have been working in a manner that parallels poli tical and social "I'm a graphic designer, and the majority of my work is in architectural signage, acti vity but is distingui hed by its integration with aes thetics. Working with some the traditional objectives of which are to identify and direct. By identify I mean to of the most profound i sues of our time-toxic was tes, race relations, hopelessness, indicate the name of a person, place or a function ; by direct I mean to indicate a way aging, gang warfare, cultu ral identity-a group of American arti sts has developed for people to get from one place to another. In addition to its function al meaning, unique models fo r an art whose public strategies of engagement are an important I' ve come to feel the sign should carry another meaning. My concern now is what part of their aes thetic language. The structu re of these works comes from neither should this other meaning be? How does one determine appropriate meaning?" exc lusively visual nor political info rmation but an internal necessity perceived by - Michael Manwaring the arti t working in coll aborati on with hi s or her constituency. The 10 artists of the "City Site" lecture series were recogni zed in the Although cartography is associated in the field and had been working fo r well over a decade. popul ar imagination with discovery, it is actually Interestingly, the critica l dialog sUITounding their an attempt to represent what already ex ists. Maps 1. Suzanne Lacy, Leonard Hunter, Jennifer Dowley wo rk did not link them to each other; they had been further our ability to imaginati vely comprehend (Mapping the Terrain retreat organizers) and Allan cri tiqued within their artistic di cipline-perforthe whole that our direct senses cannot gras p. The Kaprow. ma nce, vi deo, in tallation, photography, concepnatu re of that "whole"-its shape, its boundari es, tual art, and murals-or een a isolated and idioeve n its hi s to ry- is re vea led throu g h th e 2. Leonard Hunter, Lydia Matthews, Zante River, and syncratic examples . If they were contextuali zed at mapmaker's interpretations. Depending upon how all , it was as socially con ciou arti ts, more or less one begins the record, public art has a history as John Malpede. in vogue, depending upon the present currency of ancient as cave paintings or as recent as the foundtheir subj ect matter. The structural models fo r and ing of the National Endowment for the Arts' " Art 3. Estella Conwill Majozo, Houston Conwill, ass umpti ons underl ying their wo rks were specific in Public Places Program ."4 While there is perhaps Suzanne Lacy, and Helen Mayer Harrison. to their to pics and personal styles, yet there were no agreed-upon overview yet, there is a quasi-

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4. (around circle from right) Susan Steinman, David Mendoza, Judy Baca, Helen Mayer Harrison, Estella Conwill Majozo, Richard Misrach, Suzi Gablik, and Lynn Hershman. (all photos: Rolando dal Pezzo)

official history of recent public art in America that can be traced through commissions, distribution of percent-for-art monies, articles, conferences, and panel discussions. But with hi story as well as maps, it depends on who is doing the marking. "Certainl y as the public changes there isn' tthe possibility of holding any longer a notion of the universal," according to Judy Baca. " Some of u think of the totems, some of us of the sand pai nti ngs of the Nati ve Americans, some of us will think of Los Tres Grandes as our examples of the most important public artwork. But clearly all of us in America came out of a legacy. That legacy is what I call the 'cannon in the park,' brought forth by some of our great forefathers. One has to visit Gettysburg to get the sense of it."

One version of hi story, then, begins when the cannon in the park was e ncroached upon by the world of "hi gh art" in the sixties. The outdoors, particul arly in urban areas, came to be seen as a po sible new ex hibition space for art previously found in galleries, museum ,and private collections. In the most cynical view, the impetus was to expand the market for sculpture, including patronage from corporations. Siting thi s art often in vo lved a change of scale before the work was relocated to pl azas, parks, corporate headquarters, and the like. The ability of art to enhance public spaces was quickly capitalized upon for the revitalization of inner cities, which were beginning to collapse under the burden of increasing social problems. Art in pl:lblic pl aces was seen as a way to recla im and humanize the urban environment. Artists took the opportunity to explore a range of issues involving their relationship to the physical environment.

In the seventies a new breed of arts administrator emerged to smooth the way between artists, who were trained in modernist strategies of individualism and innovation , and the various representatives of the public sector. Teams of artists, architects, designers, and arts administrators were formed to act upon the built environment. Except in unusual circumstances, the creative and cooperative potential of such teams rarely materialized.

It was partly from frustration with thi s situation and partly from a growing appreciation of unrealized possi bilities that a small group of artists and administrators dec ided to make a distinction between "art in public places" and "public art."5 The semantic shift signified a prioriti zation of a type of art over its eventual location. Public art was seen as the opportunity to command the entire canvas, as it were-to allow the artist to operate with a s ing ular and uncompromi sed vision. Site-specific art, as it began to be ca lled, wa commi ss ioned and designed for a particular pace. It took into account a wide range of a site's physical and visual qualities.

Eventually, artists began to respond to the historical and socio log ica l aspects of sites, though these were usually metaphoric and did not include opportunities for audience engagement markedly different than those of the museum . In time, and partly due to the pressure to ex plain the work to an increasingly demanding public, such aspects became more prominent. " Sitegenerated" art, as Leonard Hunter has called it, differs from site-specific art by taking into account the site's soc ial and natural history, thereby adding to the artists' repertoire technique of re earch, collabo ration with other professionals, and consultative interaction with

civic bodies and communities. However the work is still primarily about a visual and sculptural presence.

Throughout the seventies, administrators and arts activists lobbied forpercent-for-art programs and these, combined with National Endowment grants and private sector money, fueled the public art movement.

For some artists, the size of these commissions made public art a viable alternative to the gallery system.

Public art became a recognizable field. Conferences and a small body of literature dealing mostly with bureaucratic and administrative issues addressed the complexities of relations between visual artists and the public.6 The eighties brought an economic downturn, deepe ning urban troubles, and a new distrust of art that led to attacks on funding sources and public work itself.

Various troublesome situations marked this decade, most notably the controversy surrounding Richard Serra's Tilted Arc. Such events spurred a demand for greater public accountability; artistic expression came into conflict with public opinion. Presentation of artists' plans to commuruty groups became de rigueur.

Thi s in turn compelled a greater reliance on the intermediary skill s of the public-arts administrator, since social interaction was neither the forte nor the interest of many establi shed public artists.

Increasing comrrussions and scrutiny brought increasing bureaucratization . According to Patricia Fuller, "In the public art establishment-it has become an establishment, I think-there' s an increasing tendency toward complication and rigidification of processes; the codification of a genre called public art, ideas of profess ionali sm which admit artists and administrators to the fraternity ... This all seems to have created an apparatus which can only be justified by the creation of permanent objects. There's a lag between contemporary art practice and what is acceptable in the public art realm. This has been exacerbated by the bureaucracy, which makes it much more difficult for artists' ideas to percolate up through the system.

Artists' ideas are where change comes from in public art."

From the beginning this form of public art has been nurtured by its association with various institutions and, by extension, the art market. Though progressive, the move to exhibit art in public places followed a museum track, and the majority of the art accommodated itself to the exigencies of that system. "What too many artists did was to parachute into a place and displace it with art," commented Jeff Kelly . "Site specificity was really more like the imposi tion of a kind of di sembodied museum zone ... onto what already had been very meaningful and present before that, which was the place." Given the biases toward object-oriented art and audiences trained in art hi story, work that focused on process and broad interaction and was not saleable did not become part of the di scourse surrounding public art. You might say there was no language for it. "If, in fact, communities had shed some of the glowing, ebullient, patriotic iconography of earlier public art-the equestrian statue, monuments, and so on-there was sti ll a strong consensus," suggested Patrici a Phillips, "about where public art should occur, the scale it should operate on, its general and ecumenical availability, its objectless, its apparent physicality. It was the spatial model of centrality-conforrruty, in sp ite of some of the styli stic excursions."

At first it appeared that out of thi s particular hi story "another geography of public art emerged that is decentralized and aspecial-that is performance based, that embraces an idea of public ... as a subject ... as a topic of inquiry," Phillips conti nued. In fact, theapparent advent in the late eighties of a new public art was illusory . Many of the artists noted as examples had been working for years, outside the purview of the public-art narrative, dominated as it was by sculptural concerns. They were operating under different assumption and aesthetic visions . Not easily classified, their wo rk was generall y considered under other rubrics and hence the apparent impact of their practice on art criticism was scattered and intermittent. Many of their ideas, however, had been incorporated into art education and art practice. "The new public art is not so much a movement of the 90s, a new way of workjng, as a way of workjng that has found its time, perhaps due to desperate social conditions," refl ected Mary Jane Jacob.

The designation of "new" is slightly ironic, as

16 PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993

practitioners of this art are often antagon istic to what Lucy Lippard calls "the fetish for the new which fuels competition and capitali sm and encourages critical and social amnesia." Cultural amnesia operates politically, disconnecting a practice from its radical traditions and embracing apparent novelty for its own sake.

Thus rendered powerless, such art ceases to operate in a broader social context. Coming from the margins, however, the work in question is aggressively vanguardist in the finest sense of the tradition : it challenges closely held beliefs about the function and relevance of art. What is new fin all y is not the work per se, but the revisioni st cartography that may reshape the direction of our path.

To chart an alternative public-art hi story, we rrught begin in the late 1950s. Artists challenged the conventions of galleries and museums through happenings and other experiments with what was to become known as popular culture. Allen Kaprow recently recounted hi s version of that hi story. The arti sts "appropriated the real e nvironment and not the studio ; garbage and not fine paints and marble. They incorporated technologies that hadn ' t bee n found or used in art. They incorporated behavior, the weather, ecology and political issues. In short, the dialog moved from knowing more and more about what art was to wondering about what life was ... the meaning of life."

As the notion of popular culture, which included the media and its mass audience, grew over the next two decades, it became even more attractive to artists . In the seventies a few artists interrupted television broadcast programming with performances (S hu Lea Cheang later called them " medi a break-ins"). During the '80s, media-related art was more analytic than activist with some notable exceptions. The relative availabi lity of media venues encouraged artists to think more critically, and in larger scale, about their potential audiences. The relationship between mass culture, media, engagement and politics was expressed by Lynn Hershman: "The images and values of the culture that produces these programs invade the subconscious cultural identity of its viewers. It' s essential to revise the way electronic and moving images can be seen, distributed and interpreted, so as not to either prejudice the content or limit the comprehension. Equally important is that the dialogue becomes two way and interactive, one that respects and invites multiple points of view."

The connection between an activist view of popular culture and temporal/conceptual art was forged during the Vietnam war protests by East Coast artists who were themselves influenced by cultural and political activists'? At the same time, also drawing from the radical nature ofthe times, a group of women artists on the West Coast developed femini st political agendas in art-education programs. s Activist art grew outofthe general militancy of the era as did identity politics.

Women and ethnic artists began to consider their identities, key to the new political analysis, as central to their aesthetic in some yet-undefined manner. Both began with a consciousness of their com munity of origin as their primary audience.

Ethnic arti sts worked in ghettos and barrios with carefully identified constituencies. They struggled to bring together their often highly trained art school aesthetic with the aesthetics of their own cultures.

Their work reflected this bridging position between white and ethnic worlds, and they became particularly adept at translating. "The difficulty of the role," stated Seneca activist Peter Jemison, "is to have the autonomy of your identity, to hang onto that, so people don 't accuse you-from my side, the Seneca tribe side-of being an apple: white on the inside and red on the outside." They understood their role as artistcommunicators. Thi s almost invariably led to activism.

In developing new strategies, these artists drew upon their own heritage for an art language that would speak to their people about the needs they themselves had experienced . They did not accept wholesale the prevailing notions about art's role in society . According to Yolanda Lopez, "In an era when the state has disi ntegrated to the degree where it can no longer attend to the needs of the people ... artists who work in the com munity need to consciously develop organi zing and critical skj ll s among the people they work with. Theend product, the work of art, is a means." For this they were often called "community artists" and critics refused to take their work seriously.

"The personal is political" was the koan of the feminist art movement; personal revelation, through art, could be a political tool. The decade of the seventies brought a high degree of visibility to women's issues in general, and feminist art that was based in activism was closely linked to feminist theory. On the West Coast the move into the public sectorthrough use of public space, including the media, was an inevitable extension of art that sought to inform and change.

The space of art was seen as a neutral meeting ground for people of differences, and seventies feminists attempted artistic crossovers between different races and classes. As a result, collaboration was highly valued as a work practice of infinitely varying possibilities that highlighted the relational aspects of art.

Because of their activist base, feminist artists were concerned with questions of effectiveness. This led to a fairly sophisticated conception of the nature of an expanded audience, including how to reach it, support it through sometimes difficult material, and assess its transformation in consciousness. By the end of that decade, rather precise suggestions for strategies and aesthetic criteria were formulated for feminist-activist art.

Though not based in identity politics, Marxist artists in the seventies used photography and text to portray and analyze the situation of American laborers. They interacted with audiences through interviews with workers, construction of narratives, and display of information back to the laboring community. Their analysis of capitalism extended to a critique of the art market as well and was exhibited in museums and art magazines. For the most part, the theoretical aspects of this work outstripped its activist modes until the mideighties.

Throughout the past two decades there was considerable but often unacknowledged exchange between ethnic, feminist and Marxist artists, making it difficult to attribute ideas specifically to one or the other group.

Overlapping identifications between group members also accounted for mutual influences. It is perhaps safest to say that working during the same decade and within earshot of each other, these artists reached similar conclusions from different vantage points.

The Crossroads: American Culture in the Eighties The above brief construction of an alternative history is not built on a topology of materials, spaces or artistic media, but rather on concepts having to do with audience, relationship, communication, and political intention. The real heritage of public art today has come from the discourses of largely marginalized artists. However visible the above cited "movements" were, they were not linked either to a centralized artworld discourse or public art itself until the late '80s. Four factors conspired to narrow the distance between our two historical narratives and bring about an interest in a more public art.

First, new highs in racism and violence were part of the ' 80s backlash, but, as immigration had swelled the ethnic minority population, they were often no longer the minority. The development of political power and articulate spokespeople for these groups brought ethnicity to the attention, if not the agenda, of the American public. With the introduction of diversity to the public discourse, it was no mere discussion of parity but a question about culture itself. Visual artists-part of international artistic and literary exchanges-were prepared to express the shifts in cultural expectations of people of color throughout the world. "What if," mused Guillermo Gomez-Peiia, "our internationalism was no longer defined by New York, Paris, Berlin or even Mexico City but was defined by an axis of thought and cultural exchange between Enu people in Canada and the Paramudas in Mexico, for example, or between San Antonio and Bangkok-a different kind of internationalism that is more pertinent to our contemporary cartography?"

"The geographic is political" became the new koan.

Second, the political conservatism of the decade was reflected in attempts to circumscribe women 's rights. Anti-abortion forces gathered momentum as an increasingly conservative Supreme Court promised constitutional attacks on abortion. Several publicized media events, including Anita Hill 's testimony on sexual harrassment at the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings re-ignited the national dialog on gender. An ever-increasing rate of actual vio-

Ience against women was reflected in popular entertainment. Artists once again worked with issues of gender violence, echoing the feminist art movement of the '70s, but this time included both men and women.

Not surprisingly given the political climate, the end of the '80s saw public censorship on a scale not known in several decades. This third factor is closely linked to the first two. Visual art became the instigating irritant for the documented ploy of a group of politicians in league with right-wing fundamentalists. Censorship efforts targeted women, minorities and homosexuals.

The attacks made abundantly clear the connection between the rights of these groups and those of all artists, evoking an almost unified response from the artworld. Censorship attacked the margins, and the margins were centralized in the threat to all. The implications of this attack on public artworks (most were temporal or photographic) has, in the words of Patricia Fuller, "created a chilling influence. The . . .famous controversies in recent years ... have given much greater credence to attacking less openly provocative work and created an increasingly pervasive nervousness about any public art which may cause a controversy."

The final factor that has brought an interest in new forms of public art is the deepening health and ecological crises. Suddenly with AIDS, pollution , and environmental destruction, urgency resonated throughout the culture and artists responded by looking for strategies to effectively intervene in the course of current events. AIDS artists brought the disease into the gallery-literally and figuratively-and art into the streets through staged media actions inspired by performance art of the '70s. Environmental settings, such as abandoned military sites, were the subject matter of artworks in diverse media, including photo-texts, paintings, and performances. Having predicted the current situation in their work, several artists from this alternative public art hi story outlined above had roadmaps.

Concerned with the issues of race, gender, sexuality, ecology and urbanization for 20 years, these artists developed both their theoretical perspectives and their activist strategies. They were quickly held up as models for the new public art.

N ext: Part II, Th e Territory in Question and Mapping the Terrain.

Suzanne Lacy is a performance and conceptual artist, writer and video producer. She is Dean of Fine Arts at California College, of Arts and Crafts.

Notes: I. "CitySites: Artists and Urban Strategies" (March- May 1989) included artists Marie Johnson-Call oway, Newton and Helen Harrison, Adrian Piper, John Malpede, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Judith Baca, Allan Kaprow, Lynn Hershman, and Su zanne Lacy.

Sponsored by the California College of Arts and Crafts in collaboration with the Oakland Arts Council , it was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the California Arts Council.

2. "Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Publi c Art" (November 1991 ) was a subsequent symposium at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, followed by a three day private retreat for 28 arti sts, writers, and curators. It was sponsored by the Ca lifornia College of Arts and Crafts and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gerbode Foundation, the NEA , the Napa Contemporary Arts Foundation, and the Education Department of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. " Mapping the Terrain" was also the title of a panel at the College Art Association Conference in February 1992. Cochaired by Leonard Hunter and Suzanne Lacy, the conference included panelists Suzi Gablik, Rick Bolton, Guillermo GomezPen a, Daryl Chin, Mary Jane Jacob, and Patricia Phillips. All quotes in thi s article are from the "CitySites" symposium , the "Mapping the Terrain" retreat, or panel.

3. Arlene Raven , ed. ArT in Th e Public InTereST(A nn Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989).

4. The NEA founded "Works of Art in Publi c Places" in 1967.

The first grants that year-Calder's " La Grande Vitesse" and Noguchi' s 'The Black Sun" -were authorized by the National Council. The title of the program was c hanged twi ce, refl ecting shifts in the field. Changed from "Art in Publi c Places" to the current "Vi sual Artists' Public Projects," each change suggested a growing awareness of the roles and results of art in a pub lic setting. " What has changed recentl y," asserts Burt Kubli , program office of the NEA , " is the necessity to have a conversati on with the audience in the public space and a renewed focus on the artist."

5. Observati ons from a conversation with Patri cia Fuller during the "Mapping the Terrain" retreat.

6. One such seri es of confere nces sponsored by the NEA resulted in a book, Going Public: A Field Guide to Developmellfs ill ArT and Public Places, published by the Arts Extension Serv ice in cooperation with the Visual Arts Program of the NEA. It was written by Jeffrey L. Cruickshank and Pam Korza.

7. See Lucy Lippard, A DifferenT War: VieTnam in ArT(Seattle: Rea l Comet Press, 1990).

8. Judy Chicago pioneered femini st art education at Cali forn ia State Uni versity in Fresno, Ca liforni a in 1969. Between 197072 she brought her program to California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles wi th painter Miriam Schapiro and in 1973 expanded it at the Feminist Studi o Workshop wi th designer Shei la de Bretteville and art hi storian Arlene Raven. Femini st art education, as she and he r co lleagues conceived it, was dramatically different from most art ed ucati on at the time. It 's goal was to help students identify personal subj ect matter and produce "content-ori ented artworks" that reached a broad audi ence.

Th eaurhor wishes to thank the Lila W1l1ace - Reader 's Digest International Artists Program , a program developed and managed by A rIS InternationallJ/E with th e support ofth e Lila W1l/ace-Reader'sDigest Fund , and the Irish Museum of Modern Art fo r their support.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993 17

A[enter for Arts Criticism forum, in St. PauL Houember 12, 1992

18 PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993

b y

Margot

Fortunato

G a I t

~'Bfore dawn one summer day, we passed out a green Adirondack chai r to each house on the two blocks, with a note saying thi s was made by a neighborhood kid. First, people were stunned: had aliens landed ?

Then they called friends to ask, Do you have a green chair too?

Finally the whole community was outside, talking and laughing in a festive mood . This was a crack neighborhood, remember, where people were afraid to be outside."

Artist and neighborhood activist Joel Si sson is describing his "green chair" project to the 100 or so assembled for the forum "Arts for Community Change," sponsored by the St. Paul-based Center for Arts Criticism on November 12, 1992. As he speaks, an image of a south Minneapoli s street materializes in the air above the sloping seats of the St. Paul Technical College auditorium. Like thrones waiting for ladies and gents of a past era, green Adirondack chairs occupy significant spots behind chain-link fences or by wooden porch steps.

Inviting, promising, confident, the chairs suggest leisurely evenings when friends stop to chat.

Not fearsome or threatening, not modern really , they fit the midwestern Victorian sty le of the houses behind them. Almost instantly, they call forth confident soc iability from people who have been hunkering behind locked doors. What is the secret of the chairs?

Addressed to community arts projects, thi s question recognizes that art can diverge from the conventional notion that it is separate from life.

Instead of enticing hi s neighbors into a museum to contemplate an assemblage of chairs, astro turf, fake elms, and facades , Joel Sisson made chairs that could be viewed and enjoyed in a neighborhood setting, gathering 14 neighborhood young people and their tag-along friends in his backyard to assemble and paint the Adirondack chairs. Though he applied for numerous grants, money was slow in coming: "Sometimes you've got to do an arts project on faith, and hope that the funding will follow," he said. The young workers were so enthusiastic about their accomplishment that they were ready to make something else. Sadly, Sisson had no more supplies.

There's the real divergence: art within a common daily round.

The first panel of the forum considers thi s difference closely and makes some interesting points about why art that interacts with, and alters daily life can be troubling to powers-that-be.

"Art can be radical; it can hold society up for criticism," says St. Paul Council member Paula Maccabee at the opening of the forum. This is especially true of art that refuses to remain in its place. Julia Dinsmore, a community activist and a mother on welfare, plays "porch music" for her neighborhood families to sing and dance to; her willingness to donate time to entertain friends goes hand-in-hand with her organizing of mothers to develop stable, affordable housing. "People think you have to write a grant to go down and play baseball with the kids," she scoffs; she'd rather that her art rise out of her way of life. She follows where daily life leads, even when it steps over boundaries erected to keep certain ideas or issues from being touched by certain people.

AIDS and elementary school children, for instance. Several years ago she volunteered with other parents in her son's first-grade classroom. Those who sewed helped the children make a quilt about AIDS; Julia provided music and with the students' help developed a song for the quilt's dedication . "The teacher who inspired and directed the project was persecuted," she related; "this beautiful man received death threats ." Then three years later, a child in the school publicly announced that she was HIV -positive. "The school was patting itself on the back for that one," Dinsmore said, "but didn't recognize how the teacher of the AIDS quilt had fostered a tolerant atmosphere. Sometimes you get run out of town when you're doing work that needs to be done."

Romi Siowiak, director of the St. Paul East Side Arts Council, has also sponsored many programs to show her neighborhood that the arts belong to them . She's found that "The arts can respond to ethnic and economic change." With a 250 percent increase in people of color on the East Side over the past decade, recreation centers are crowded with newcomers, especially Southeast Asians. Money from the City ofSt. Paul's pull-tab revenue, and from private foundations has helped the East Side Arts Council run numerous rec-center programs for teenagers. Siowiak hopes these help compensate for the economic and familial stress the children experience elsewhere.

The Arts Council has also sponsored programs for older residents from earlier immigrations: a reminiscence night and oral history project, for example, that culminated in a readers' theater program. The actors, chosen from the same predominantly Swedish community, brought their oral histories to life with appropriate accents and immigrant songs.

As critic, editor, and moderator Jan Zita Grover said introducing the panel , describing the Ojibwe idea of art, "A nything with purpose and deliberation that is fine and beautiful , is artful. Art is the process of making someth ing by people inside the community, living in a sacred manner."

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WINTER/SPRING 1993 19

Not all communities are equal in power, status, and funding: inequality can create problems in community-arts projects. Considering the source, effects, and antidotes to such racism was the main concern of the forum 's second panel , " Race, Art, and Community."

Writer and Asian-American activist David Mura bega n by pointing to a double standard in the arts. Most of us work with a white, middle-class definition of art as precious objects set apart from everyday life, he said . But if we want to shift from emphasizing the artist and the product to emphasizing audience and process, he urged us to challenge the standard of "quality."

Often works made by communities of color or works that promote social change have been judged less wellcrafted than those from the Western tradition that hang in museums. This kind of racism has unfortunately built walls of ignorance and stereotypic misunderstanding between white communities and communities of color.

Art from different cultures is valuable for all of us, stated John Mentzos, cross-disciplinary artist and diversity consu ltant. "Art is a window to the soul ; it gives us an inside view of another person or community and can thus help us relate to each other." Artists themselves, added Mura, are often in the va nguard in building multi -cultural bridges. Mentioning a program ca lled "Black Korea" that brought together AsianAmerican and Black-American artists, Mura suggested that the communities would have had more trouble working together than did their representative artists and that artists therefore have a responsibility to advocate social change to larger groups. "I'm troubled when white people approach us arti sts of color to bring art on ly to our own communities," stated J. Oti s Powell! , poet, producer, and performer. "Ghettos are the result of pain from above. We should be taking the word to white communities as well."

Because racism has defined artists and communities of color as deficient or devi ant from white cultural norms, arti sts of color often ha ve had to invent cultural identities for themselves. " I grew up in a white culture whose lang uage did not reflect who I am ," said David Mura. "To write abo ut myself as I did in Turning Japanese I had to invent myself. When that was published, many identified me with other Asian Americans. But do we have anything else in common except

an artist's first job is to help define the community most relevant to reach and create bonds within it.

J. Otis Powell! traces his line of artistic descent from hi s family's mini sters to his own performance poetry.

"It's a privilege to carry my history around with me," he said; "most people don't know who they are."

John Mentzos pointed to the danger of being pegged as an artist. "If artists have to be people off in a corner, it's easy to oppress them," he argued. Arti ts have to be acti ve and self-directed. In working with a community, for instance, the artist often has to go "where they're at, on their terms and turf," he said. For example, a Minneapoli s park next to a low-income project was empty of kids. To engage them, the park brought in a rapper- " Rap 10 I ," quipped Mentzos.

"The kids got into it, made a connection to the man, and created a product that was real to them. After a while," reflected Mentzos, "the rapper could have taught them anything." Requested to give a perspective on how the arts can help teenage Asian boys feel more connected to positive elements in American life, Mura suggested that young Hmong lack role models.

"A rti sts could serve as role models," he noted, "they cou ld help younger Hmong discover that their anger and exclusion are rea l."

A student at the Minnesota Center for Arts Education high school asked how someone growing up in the suburbs could come to understand the inner city.

"How do you reach out to people who' ve been running away from you?" 1. Otis Powell! asked in return.

"Take the initiative yourself," he urged. "Don 't let yourself be locked out of urban life."

Panel moderator Rafala Green, artist and community activist, also argued for a shift in resources to include previou sly excluded communities. Mura ag reed : "We need more diverse staff in foundations.

Artists of color have to sit higher up" on the pyramid of power. John Mentzos advised young people to let the older ones in charge know that they want Black hi story and other programs about communities of color. "Don ' t go alone," added Powell , "get someone else who is also ignored and disrespected to go with you."

This message about the importance of building strong, multi-cultural, artistic communities was fol-

lowed by John Killacky's description of an Eastern European arts community in disarray. Killacky, performing arts curator for the Walker Arts Center, stripped to a new pair of boxer shorts, contrasting the artist's outraged (outrageous) but marginal political role in the U.S. to the very different role of artists in Bulgaria before the dissolution of the Communist regime. Under the Communist system, Killacky di scovered, all arts wcrc equally subsidized and controled by the Communist state. Though traditional theater was the norm, subversi ve meaning was often encoded in works; the theater and other arts were crucial transformers of meaning, attended by intellectua ls and everyone else.

Since the dissolution of the Communist State, lifetime employment in the arts can no longer be guaranteed . Intellectuals have left the arts for politics, and the young, newly enthralled by MTV , don ' t find theater (or most other arts) relevant. Are the arts in Bulgaria becoming as marginalized as they seem to be in the U.S .? Using this question as a backdrop, Killacky described his political education thi s past summer. He nominated himself for his district DFL caucus on a platform of arts and culture, rooted in community and parks. Finding that few were drawn to hi s plank, he visited other sub-caucuses to lobby for an arts platform. At the state convention, he questioned candidates and advocates of other issues about their support for the arts and found that no one could see any connection between their concerns and hi s. Hi s conclusion: "Guess what? We are irrelevant. We have never been in the political dialog."

Killacky 's epiphany was brought home in another way when he discovered that the Minneapolis vice squad mi ght police Karen Finley 's performance art: "My mistake was thinking that there is an exemption from community standards for cultural affairs," he said. Now more aware of the artists and audiences he serves, Killacky urged that the arts become a platform for discussing community issues.

In the forum 's final panel , "Arti sts on Art-Making to Save the Environment," the need to redefine our understanding of "artist" was given another twi st by Seitu Jones, visual artist and panel moderator. "Maurice Charlton never bothered to question what is art and the role of the artist," said Jones . His union work organiz-

Joel Sisson (left), with youth workers (on break) during the construction of the Green Chairs Project, (in Sisson's back yard), Minneapolis, 1991. (photo montage: Chris Hand)

20 PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993

ing sleeping-car porters paralleled his work in the African-American community. "In classes for youth, he taught us not just to recycle dumpsters, trash cans, doll s, TV sets and tennis rackets," Jones remembered, "but how to create beauty from them, like the SelbyDale Shrine to Mothers. We took him for granted."

Environmental sculptor Betsy Damon emphasized artists are not "chosen or special" by birth but become vital through their work. In alerting communities to degraded water quality, Damon downplays her own role and highlights the environment. "Artists are not the solution ," she emphasized ; instead, "we are here to introduce new paradigms that invite new thinking." In installations, actions, and more recently the project " Keepers of the Waters," in which she and Anoka high school students worked on cleaning the Mississippi and educating themselves and the community about the river, Damon insists on "di ssolving separations" between artist and community, community and environment.

Just as Asian-American writer David Mura emphasized the need to create the communities that racism has denied, so Damon emphasized the need to bring late 20th-century Americans into connection with the natural world. The powers-that-be often have a commercial stake in maintaining an environmental status quo. Because artists are often less attached to behavior or attitudes that harm communities they are more likely to initiate change. Both Jones and Damon emphasized that the impact of raci sm on environmental issues also needs attention. "The white middle class is fooled into thinking that the environment is their domain," said Seitu Jones, "but in reality people of color are most directl y affected by environmental degredation. Look where the garbage burner is built in Minneapolis, or where the electric company wants to dump nuclear waste-in one minority ghetto or another."

Stan Shetka, recycling artist, has made human and environmental connections evident in humorous, surprising sculptures. One of hi s earliest was a waterplant machine where within three weeks of planting, Goliath Runner Beans turned the pistons. Recently, he has taken paper recycling to new heights, using paper

of all kinds to create building blocks ten times as stong as cement.

Before the forum divided into smaller caucuses, Minneapolis Deputy Mayor Rip Rapson presented the audience with a challenge: to goad cities into making art and cultural policies a higher priority . "The arts community is light years ahead of the political community ," he said, in recognizing what the arts can contribute to a city' s self-image, economi c vitality, race relations and human development.

Ad hoc caucuses formed around several issues: Beth Blic, dismayed that concerns of the handicapped community had not been represented at the forum , stood up for a caucus on the handicapped . Another coalesced around public art in municipalities and neighborhoods. Betsy Damon and others formed a caucus on arts and the environment. Bob Tracy led one on the United Arts' Arts Action Agenda-a ninemonth-long di alog aimed at making the arts less elitist and more action-oriented. Other caucuses included arts and AIDS, arts policies, and art to fi ght racis m.

Caucus resolutions reflected some of the forums' main points and introduced some surpri ses. Common to many resolutions was a community-based defi nition of art and artists. The resolution from the arts and environment caucus stated thi s well: "We would like to use the arts to bridge the chasm between arts and science, between artists and 'other people': i.e., scientists, engineers, architects, plumbers, corporate employees, business people, store owners, homemakers, lawyers, etc., to make connections that will produce changes in attitudes and policy." The arts' power to educate also appealed to the caucus wanting to use art to fight racism: it wanted to train policy makers to "experience and celebrate diverse cultures" and to "use theater and participatory role-playing to directly look at racism."

The resolutions made repeated reference to creating communities of artists, artists and others, and especially the young. The United Arts' Arts Action Agenda promi sed to "direct our limited volunteer resources to reaching young people by volunteering in the schools."

The caucus on racism wanted "to get art programs and

the history of diver e cultures in the public chool ."

The public art caucus urged that public art projects be evaluated by their involvement with, and benefit to a community. One re olution called for establish ing a "dynamic network for collecting and sharing resources," another fo r a Twin Cities resource center to gather and di per e information about neighborhood public arts projects and to connect ani ts with raw materials for public arts projects.

The AIDS caucus offered the most surprisi ng proposals: target people over 40, who make mo t political and cultural decisions, with "sophi sticated publicservice announcements" during prime-time and sports events on TV. Give high-school students the chance to lobby politically about HIV I AIDS, since the yo ung "will inherit the HIV IAIDS policy mistake and omi ssions of those currently in power."

Despite the fo rums' elan and confidence, a specter of decaying, troubled cities hung over the numerous projects described . Dispelling this threat and maintaining the Twin Cities' cores as vital, functioning communities was a central goal of the forums. Though the arts belong to every hamlet and suburb, the Twin Cities provide the greate t cultural diversity and house the largest share of cultural institutions, as well as the greatest number of arti sts . These resou rces gathered around their own community table today to discuss ways of spreading their bounty to people as close to home as their own fro nt ya rds.

Margo Fortunato Galt, St. Paul poet, educator, and art critic, is the author of The Story in History: Writing Your Way Into the American Experiellce (Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1992). She worked as writer and oral historian on the East Side Readers ' Theater project.

Editor's note: The Center for Arts Criticism is producing an audiotape presentation developed from issues presented at the forum. For further information and advance orders, contact the Center at 2402 University Avenue W., St. Paul, MN 55114. (612) 644-5501.

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Public Address: Krzysztof Wodiczko: installation view, Walker Art Center. (photo: Walker Art Center)

~~Public Address:

Krzyszfof lllodiczko . .

Walker Art [enter~ Oct.ll~ 1992 -Jan. 3~ 1993 Reviewed

by

Nancy

Roth

t one level, Krzysztof Wodiczko 's work seems the most sober, concrete, and unmysterious art imaginable. It falls into two main categoriesprojections (events in which slides are used to superimpose photographic images onto architectural surfaces for several hours at a time) and vehicles (working prototypes of small machines designed for individual transportation, protection, communication, etc.). Neither has much to do with "art" in the traditional sense: the projections aren ' t even "objects"; none of it is particularly su ited to an art gallery or museum ; there is no revealing of unique artistic self and no bid for "timelessness." On the contrary, each work is precisely tailored to a specific site at a particular moment, pointedly and unsentimentally engagi ng social and political issues raised by and at that site. By projecting an appropriately-scaled picture of a hand, foot, eye or ear on the side of a bui lding, for example, Wodiczko guides a viewer to seeing that building as a per on. And by add ing suggestive images-e.g. , money, food, fue l, armaments-Wodiczko endows the allegorical figure he has created with specific interests, logica l allies, and natural enemie .

An exhibition of such work is in one very real sense logistica lly impossib le. Walker's recently concluded Public Address: KrzysztoJWodiczko, necessarily consisted for the most part of historical documents rather than art. As viewer, we were asked to use these documents to imaginatively recreate the experience of an in situ projection or a vehicle in u e. The exhibition provided every sort of incentive to do exactly that: drawing , photograph , handsome backlit transparencies of the projection events, a well a date, times, places, political events of the moment in question, and historical inforn1ation about the architecture Wodiczko u ed a screens. It worked. All the facts and figurespretty dry in themselves-suddenly began to add up to something profoundly strange. One of the catalog essayists used the German adjective unheimlich, a term of Freud's that's usuall y translated as "uncanny."

Wodiczko's work is "public" both in the usual sense-it inhabits public space-and in a more particular sense: the identity of public space is its real subject matter. For Wodiczko, "public" always means,

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among other things, "contested." He has worked in and on many different public spaces, mainly in central urban areas around the world, in each case assisting the site to reveal its unique form of social and political conflict. In New York City, for example, probably the terrai n most familiar to Walker's viewers, he has returned repeatedly to a relationship between urban real estate and homelessrtess.

This same relationship has been explored by critic and historian Rosalyn Deutsche as the context for a discussion of public art in her article "Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City," October 47 (Wi nter 1988), pp. 3-52. Deutsche argued persuasively that urban redevelopment causes homeless ness and that most public art tacitly collaborates in this endeavor simply by failing to recognize the connection. She concluded with a description ofWodiczko's Homeless Vehicle as a counter-example. Much like an ordinary shopping cart in size, shape, and material s, this vehicle opens out into a protected sleeping space and provides for storage of saleable waste objects (cans and newspapers), a washbasin, a compartment for valuables, etc. It is at once ingenious and appalling, embody ing as it does an intolerable proposal to "accept" homeless ness as a permanent feature of our industrial economy. Deutsche praised the vehicle as a work of public art exceptional not only in its acknowledgment of homeless people, who are nearly ubiquitous in public urban space today, but also in its capacity to penetrate through most viewers' practiced defenses, to make the problem visible.

In this instance, Deutsche and Wodiczko are both getting at the same thing, establishing capitalist realestate practice and homeless ness as linked features of public space. Deutsche's rational argument identifies her work as criticism; Wodiczko's allegorical method establishes his as art. More specifically, the "uncanny," otherworldly flavor ofWodiczko's work proceeds from his use of a very old device, a way of linking two or more different symbolic systems in ways that suggest-without explicitly spelling outa causal connection. It appeals to a deep-seated, not entirely conscious human tendency to read formal resemblances as functional links; to suppose, for example, that two things that look alike are related in more profound ways. Wodiczko uses his projections

22 PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993

to establish a physical correspondence between , say, a building and a body, a hero (e.g., George Washington) and a handicapped person, a classical column and a missile. With his vehicle, a homeless person suddenly resembles an "owner and operator" of something tangible, i.e., a participant in the economy. In superimposing one image on another, Wodiczko prods viewers into linking two systems of meaning that would, under ordinary circumstances, never coincide.

He does not resort to rational argument to convince us; these correspondences simply are, he seems to say.

The precise nature of the connection remains literally occult, i.e., hidden. Behind simple meanings, he suggests, lies another, more potent and more comprehensive set of correspondences, an order inaccessible to ordinary consciousness, a source of wonder, horror, or hope. Wodiczko employs, in a word, the means of sympathetic magic .

And somewhere between the lines, Wodiczko delivers an unsettling judgment on the nature of the contemporary public with which public art must contend. In this subtext, not only is public space by definition the site of tension and constant change but of tensions not amenable to rational forms of address.

In such a climate, the durable " public monument," embodying the shared ideals and common memory of a harmonious community, can no longer be effective and should not be created; such monuments that remain from the past need constant revi sion, "resiting" them in collective memory. Public space now calls for agile and ephemeral interventions, addressing brief, specific configurations of power, requires a form of address that gets behind the viewer's practiced, reasoned conscious defenses and activates response at another level-fear, joy. Wodiczko's art, in short, constructs us, a contemporary public, as a body of fragmented, isolated parts, unconscious of a deeper hope to be together.

Nancy Roth is writing a Ph.D. dissertation on John Heartfield, whose work is remarkably like Wodiczko's.

Editors Note: KrysztoJ Wodiczko: Public Address.

May 22-August 22, 1993. Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX.

John Karl Daniels, Buffalo, Minneapolis, 1948. (photo: Moira Harris, courtesy Pogo Press)

~~Monl1mental Minnesota~~ R e vi e w e d

by

Kent

N e rburn

ack in my childhood, one of the great ringing events in li fe was a trip from our home in the western suburbs of Minneapolis to the Oz-like brilliance of downtown. For the fir t part of the drive I wo uld sit in a stupor, picking at lint on the ear and coun ting telephone poles. But as we madeoun a off Douglas Drive onto Hennepin, I would rise up, alert as a terrier. "There it is! " I would houl. 'There' the buffa lo! " The object that so tra nsfixed me was the mas ive granite sculpture that stood on a promontory in fronLOf the No rth American Life Insurance Company near Loring Park, on the outskirts of downtown. It marked the di viding line between boredom and excitement., the dross of waiti ng and the magic of arrival. It was the gatekeeper of the city.

To thi s day, Siah Armaj ani 's Irene Hixon Whitney bridge acro s Highway 94 (w ithin visual proximity of the insura nce company) is an afterthought in my mind, as are the embarrass ing pile of d iving bell s at the Wa lker Art Center and the Mi nneapo lis Sculpture Garden. To me, the centra l work of art that announces the magica l coming of the city is the great granite buffalo that has stood silently on that promontory for almost half a century.

Yet, what was I ever to know of that bu ffa lo? What was I ever to know of the bizarre Paul Bunyan that bell owed out my name from hi s throne in a Brai nerd amu ement park? Or of the wondrous bronze Indian that I chanced upon in a tin y glen near Huot, Minneota? Until the publication of Moira Harris's book, Monumental Minnesota: A Guide to Outdoor Sculptu re in Minnesota, the answer wa de tined to be " Nothing." Since thi s book' s arrival, the answer is "A great deal, but still not enough."

Harri ' s book covers almost every piece of outdoor art you' re likely to discover on your peregrinations arou nd the state. Smokey the Bear at International Falls? He's there. Hiawatha and Minnehaha fo rding the creek above the fall s? They ' re there. Stuart Luckman's gigantic stai nle teel "Rokker V" on the Uni ver ity of Minnesota campus? It' s there, too.

In fac t, almost all outdoor works of significa nce, or insignificance, on the Minnesota landscape are addressed in the text or depicted in one of the 6 1 blac kand-white photographs that grace thi s high-quality

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Terry Labelle, Jeanne Labelle, and Tom Pnewski, snow sculpture for the 1991 St. Paul Winter Carnival. (photo: Moira Harris, courtesy Pogo Press) paperback from Pogo Press. And there are two indexes in which the works can be referenced, one by location, the other by subject, title, and arti st. The actual text of Monumental Minnesota reads li ke what it is: the text of a thorough guidebook. At its best, it takes fa int wing, as in the observation that Russell Erickson's monumental steel-rod sculptures were conceived on a large scale because "the designs were intended to be seen and ' read' quickl y by drivers on the freeway." At its wor t, it becomes a litany of names and locations or leade n ana lyti ca l compress ion s s uch as " Paul Granlund ' s 'Man-Nam ' . . . focuses in shape and pal indromic name on the positi ve and negative aspects of that confl ict."

But it's the information, not the insight or the prosody, that bri ngs the reader back for more. After all , do yo u need great literature to be held spellbound at the

24 PUBLIC ART REV IEW WINTER/SPRING 1993

thought of a version of Rodin ' s "The Thinker" sculpted from Spam at an Austin, Minnesota, jamboree? This is where Monumental Minnesota is at its best: telling you such delightful fac ts as how the Abraham Lincoln statue on Victory Memorial Dri ve in Minneapolisun veiled in 1930 as a memorial to the veterans of the Civil War-was cobbled together fro m several statues because the surviving veterans feared they would all be dead before an original work could get fin anced and dedicated.

Yet fo r all its fascinating detail , Monumental Minnesota is frustrating because of its lack of overview. It give us categories and anecdotes but never places the works in any broader intellectual context. Do they reveal any thematic patterns? Is there anything that unifies them and makes them distinctl y Minnesotan?

Or, better still , what drove the artists to express themselves in the ways they did?

To be fa ir, Monumental Minnesota doesn' t set out to address these questions. But it does make you think about them . Why, fo r example, are Native Americans chosen so frequentl y for monumental depiction ? Or why did John Karl Daniels-whose career was spent making realistic, honorific statues- suddenl y produce that stylized boulder of a buffalo that so influenced my childhood trips to the city? Inqui ring minds want to know, but Monumental Minnesota wo n' t tell them.

Monumental Minnesota is about facts, not ideas. It is to art what roadside historical markers are to history- a fascinating, di sconnected Baedeker of monuments, always ready to answer the question of "What is that?" but never really addressing the question of "Why the hell is that there?"

Still, Monumental Minnesota is a treasure of a book for anyone who has ever enjoyed traveling through the Minnesota landscape. It' s a laptop compani on, a trusty travel guide, a delightful friend for a bac kroads journey. Put another way: a well-equipped bookshelf can get by without Monumental Minnesota; a weHequipped glove compartment cannot. How many books can make that claim?

Kent Nerburn is a writer and sculptor who lives near Bemidji, Minnesota. His latest book, Letters to My Son, has recently been published by New World Library.

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. . Contemporary Public Sculpture . .

Reviewed by Karen Sontag Bacig arriet Senie writes that her new book, Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation and Controversy (Oxford University Press, 1992), is intended for "the general public who live with public art and have a real stake in its success."

That's wishful thinking, 1'm afraid. Her real audience is her other list of probable readers: artists, art historians, critics, art educators, architects, landscape architects, city planners, public-arts administrators and policy makers, government and corporate commissioners, and their art advisors.

Considering the recent controversy surrounding public art, it's vital that we find a common aesthetic language with which to discuss important questions.

There are a number of pressing ones: What is public art? Who should choose art for public spaces? Who should pay for it? Of what value is it for society? How can we rationalize spending money for art when there are so many social ills needing attention?

Ms. Senie has provided us with a comprehensive overview of public art from its revival in the 1960s to the present. But, she has also gone behind the scenes to deliver fascinating scenarios of the politics surrounding well-known pieces. Her research is detailed and meticulous. I especially appreciated the quoted artist's intentions, noting that they seldom matched the finished work.

In her first chapter, "Memorials and Monuments Reconsidered," she quotes Tina Turner-"We don't need another hero" -underscoring social changes in attitude toward monuments. She traces the idea of memorial from the Renaissance to the present, with an in-depth account of the struggle to make the Vietnam Memorial a reality. This story alone was worth the

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price of the book.

The impetus for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial came from private citizen Jan Scruggs, a Vietnam veteran, after he became interested in Jung' s idea of the importance of sy mbol in the collecti ve psychology of a culture and in the issue of survivor's guilt. After seeing Michael Cimino's film , "The Deer Hunter," he decided to act: he hired an attorney, formed a memorial fund , and held a press conference. The twists and turns of this saga reflect the complex issues of the Vietnam War itself.

After a year of campaigning, Scruggs and his cohorts obtained approval for the site and set up an open design competition to select a memorial. They received 1,421 entries-the largest competition in American history . The jury deliberated four days and chose as winner Maya Ying Lin, a 21-year old architecture student at Yale.

Almost every aspect of her design became a subject of controversy. For example, some thought the black granite was a color of shame and dishonor compared to the white marble monuments nearby. A black officer, General George Price, put that issue to rest when he said: "I remind you of Martin Luther King, who fought for justice for all Americans. Black is not a color of shame. I am tired of hearing it called such by you. Color meant nothing on the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam. Color should mean nothing now. " There are numerous anecdotes detailing various objections to the design, but when all was said and done, what remains is the work itself-one of the most powerful ever built. What gives it its power? At least part of the answer is its success in offering us a rite of passage in a ritual-poor age. The public response to the memorial , writes Senie, is "an indication of the need to participate."

Senie believes that "public sculpture has the potential to function as a powerful connector, a meaningful and integral part of contemporary life, defi ning and expanding our common ground." 1 agree with her but marvel at how seldom that really happen .

The rest of the book-chapters on sculpture and architecture, use of nature in public culpture, di scussion of the trend toward more functional culpture, such as street furniture (a la Scott Burton), gates, and bridges---describes many interesting pieces but none have caught the imagination of the public as Maya Lin 's memorial has.

Why is it so difficult to provide potent symbol s for the public to identify with? To quote Harriet Senie: "There has been a serious lack of communication.

Contemporary art is not immediately comprehensible to the general public, and artists and critic largely fail to explain their work in understandable language.

Since art is not part of public school education, mutual education is critical throughout the publi c process.

Public needs must be articulated, and contemporary art sti ll has to be explained."

As a creator of public art and an occasional administrator of public-art projects, 1 ee a real need for a healthy dialog with the public. I recommend this book to all who deal with the intersection of arti t's intentions, public needs, and prevailing politica l influences.I have only one complaint: performance art was not included in the book's di scussion of current trends in public art.

Karen Sontag Bacig is a sculptor living in Minneapolis. She has a permanent stone sculpture along the Mississippi River near downtown Minneapolis, and is currently working in the field of environmental art.

Maya Ying Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial (detail, east wall), The Mall, Washington D.C., 1981. (photo: Art on File)

PUBLIC ART REVIEW

WINTER/SPRING 1993 25

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A column devoted to exploring what public art practitioners, administrators, critics, historians, curators, and advocates are reading and thinking about. Correspondence is welcome.

b y

Regina

Flanagan

n 1979, as artist Robert Morri s was preparing to create a land-reclamation sculpture for a gravel pit in Washington State 's King County, he reflected in a talk at the Seattle Art Museum that "a certain amount of earthwork and sitework has been done .. .that brings new structural assumptions to artmaking." I Morri s recognized that the forma l elements-space, scale, and time-were not simply expanded in these outdoor works. Instead, they were joined by the existential properties of the site, including changes of topography , light, temperature, and the seasons. In addition, Morris noted that many siteworks chose to respond to hi storical , economic, social , or political features of a place, reaching beyond even these formal and exi stential properties to shape a work.

Making a work more locally relevant, in Morris's opinion , did not make it more parochial but rather more inextricably a part of its time and place. Using form al elements as well as locally relevant conditions of place to inform an artwork added significant new structural elements to artmaking. According to Morris, "such usages derive from the context of plac~ , and form the art with what can once again be called a theme."2 Writing nine years later, art historian and critic Rosalyn Deutsche recognized that "site-specificity, a technique in which context was incorporated into the work itself, originally developed to counteract the construction of ideological art objects, purportedly defined by independent essences ... Context was extended to encompass the individual site' s symbolic, social , and political meanings as well as the discursive and historical circumstances within which the artwork, spectator, and site are situated."3 Deutsche went on to state, "the new public art, by contrast, moves 'beyond decoration ' into the field of spatial design in order to create, rather than question, the site, to conceal its constitutive social relations.

Such work moves from a notion of art that is 'in' but independent of its space to one that views art as integrated with its spaces and users, but in which all three elements are independent of urban politics."4 She cautioned that aesthetic practices that claim to respond to urban environments must also have a commitment to comprehending them; artists and urban designers must develop the capacity to appreciate the city as a social form , rather than as a merely technical form .

The views of Morris and Deutsche, at opposite ends of a decade of intense public-art activity, demonstrate how the concept of "site-specificity" had expanded to include not only the physical , historical, economic, social , and political context of a place but also a comprehension and response to the larger social form of the city.

The diversity of public-art activity of the past decade has required a nearly constant process of selfreflection, analysis, theorizing, and redefinition among practitioner and admini trators. Public art is still at an exploratory stage and is not a production of fixed strategies and principles. However, these invigorating conversations and debates, which form the basis of our practice, have been all but ignored by the traditional art world and press.

In the meantime, the primary means for communicating public-art practice has been small catalogs and monographs pre enting case studies of specific projects, mostly published by the institutions or agencies commissioning the work and often by the arti sts themse lves. Analytical writing that critically examine these projects has often been beyond the scope of a case tudy, if not in direct conflict with it, given the publisher and the usual role of a case study.

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Therefore, the publication of Critical Issues in Public Art- Content, Context, Controversy, edited by Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster (Harper Collins, 1992), is welcome. The book gathers together a series of essays that vary widely in sty le and content, from art-historical treatises and critique to anecdotal essays by artists. (The viewpoints quoted above by Morris and Deutsche are from their respective essays

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in thi s book.)

The anthology is divided into four parts: Defining National Values: American Monuments, Mural s, and Memorials; Politics, Patronage, and Public Art; Public Art and Public Response; New Directions in Public Art. The essays are contemporary, written between 1979-1992, and many of them are published here for the first time.

The most enlightening essays in the book examine issues surrounding the commission of a number of monuments, including the George Washington National Memorial of the mid-nineteenth century, the early twentieth-century memorial to Ulysses S. Grant, as well as Holocaust memorials in America, the Viet Nam Veteran' s Memorial , and the 1986 monument to Joe Louis in Detroit. Writings about the earlier works, in particular, are heavily footnoted with commentary from a rich variety of sources, making the essays read like historical dramas.

In his essay "Holocaust Memorials in America: Public Art as Process," professor of English and Judaic studies James E. Young comments, "the 'art of public memory ' includes the activity (or event) that brought the memorial into being, the constant giveand-take between memorials and viewers, and finally the responses of viewers to their own world in light of a memorialized past."5 His essay strives to reinvest these memorials with the memory of their own origins and to highlight the process of public art over its often-

Public art is still at an exploratory stage and is not a production of fixed strategies and principles. static result, the ever-changing life of the monument over its seemingly frozen face in the landscape.

The essays about memorials remind us that the perception of a work of public art is almost never independent of the process by which it comes into being. Choosing an image to symbolize an event or person, whether allegorically or literally, and selecting a location and appropriate form for a memorial are more than aesthetic problems.

The story of the completion of the Washington Memorial is a troubling example. Although it was designed covertly, against enormous opposition, the final form of the Memorial neatly reconciles many competing ideals-ancient tradition and modem technology, republican values and national progress, communal harmony and individual enterprise.6 However, the design of the Monument to Joe Louis, w hich also proceeded in relative secrecy, became a source of grievance for the community, not only because of the image that was chosen to symbolize Louis but also because ofthe process by which it appeared before the public. One hundred years separate the completion of these two memorials; ironically, current expectations that the public should participate in the process of memorialization is an approach that George Washington might have endorsed.

The ultimate value of Critical Issues in Public Art is that it is the first anthology whose essays investigate the complex and contradictory progress of public art in America from social as well as aesthetic viewpoints.

Though not encyclopedic in scope, the book provides a landmark record and contemporary interpretation of both historical and current public-art practice.

Pressure on the Public, the second publication of the Hirsch Farm Project, Hills boro, Wisconsin, has been released. The slim volume documents a weeklong dialog among 10 invited representatives, all with diverse interests and viewpoints, from the disciplines of public health, public arts criticism, French theater, philosophy, and aesthetics. The participants met to examine and discuss the role, definition, and myths of the term public.

26 PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993

Patrice Clark Koelsch, Director of Saint Paul ' s Center for Art Criticism, responded to Pressure. on the Public (in a recent conversation.) While Koelsch found the book' s comm~ntary provocative, though elliptical , she suspected that this document will be much more relevant to the participants and advocates than to the "public" it purports to analyze. Koelsch commented that the overall design of the book is also an obstacle to the transmission of information. An entire section is devoted to an odd collage by artist Jorge Pardo offound photographs that bear no.¡apparent connection to the text or subject. Even in the thoughtful and analytic essays reprinted with the weeklong dialog, there is a lack of context.

While the book has an interesting premise, Koelsch was finally left with the question, "Who is this document intended to serve?" It's ironic that while this book is about the public, there is probably not a public to whom this particular tome will appeal.

SUGGESTED FROM OUR READERS: This list comes from Jean McLaughlin, Director of the North Carolina Arts Council ' s percent-for-art program. Ms. McLaughlin has been reading recently to understand "otherness" as a way of grasping community education-one of the public aspects of public art-from a fresh perspective. Ms. McLaughlin comments that the following books have been essential in opening her mind to new possibilities about what public art can be and mean to those who might experience it in a public place. o Isabel Allende, The Stories of Eva Luna (1991), and The House of Spirits (1985) . Allende' s fiction is filled with emotion, intrigue, mystery, the importance of family , and human interconnections. It seems important to continue reading fiction in the midst of reading nonfiction and the sort of bureaucratic reports that we absorb. This material keeps me grounded in the passion of what art brings to experience and reminds me that we must not be timid when it comes to placing works that will bring an emotional response in public places. This fiction also reminds me that it is our responsibility to bring art into public life that evokes human passion. o John Stoltenberg, Refusing To Be a Man (1990).

These essays on issues of gender and justice give us new ways to look at human interconnectedness. They are gentle, but forceful, feminist understandings from a male perspective. Stoltenberg talks about developing attitudes of shared purpose that can be translated to our shared public spaces. o bell hooks, Feminist Theory From Margin to Center (1984). This is an older work that I have just read but found most effective in conveying the concerns of African-American women to the feminist movement.

Its relevance to public art for me is its discussions of being positioned as object or subject, in the center or margin, and of inclusiveness. (We need to ask ourselves whether we could be viewed as colonizers when we bring art to public places.) There are philosophical as well as practical connections between feminist concerns for improved human relations and the social purpose of public art. o Jean Grimshaw, Philosophy and Feminist Thinking (1986). This is another good book on the history of philosophy and feminist concerns. It talks about societal responsibilities.

Regina Flanagan is a photographer and program associate for the Minnesota Percent for Art in Public Places program.

Notes: I. Robert Morris, "Earthworks: Land Reclamation as Sculpture," Critical Issues in Public Art, (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 254.

2. Ibid., p. 255.

3. Rosalyn Deutsche, " Public Art and Its Uses," Critical Issues in Public Art, p. 159.

4. Ibid., p. 166.

5. James Young, "Holocaust Memorials in America: Public Art as Process," Critical Issues ill Public Art, p. 58.

6. Kirk Savage, "The Self-made Monument: George Washington and the Fight to Erect a National Memorial ," Critical Issues in Public Art, p. 26.

Editor's note: Seitu Jones' "Public Art That Inspires: Public Art That Informs," reprinted in Critical Issues in Public Art (page 280-286), first appeared in Public Art Review, Volume 2, Number 2 (pages 8-9).

Robert Morris, Untitled (land reclamation sculpture), 1979, 3.7 acres. King County, Washington State. (photo: Art on File)

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Updates, Recent Projects, Conferences, Publications, fuents, ~ Opportunities

May Sun and Minneapo li s arti sts Kinji Akagawa and Viet Ngo in a pane l di scussion on public art, community, and audie nce as viewed fro m the perspective of As ian-A meri can arti sts. We iming Lu , executi ve d irecto r of Lowertown Redevelopment Corporati on, St. Paul , will moderate. Walker Gall ery 8 Restaurant, 7:30 pm . Free. Ad va nce registrati on recommended: (6 12) 375-7622.

Updates

Hecent Books ~ Publications

Wra pped R eichstag C hristo, the intern ationall y-renowned public artist ("Runnin g Fence," and "The Umbrell as: Jo int Projec t fo r Japan and U.S.A.") has won the support of the pres ide nt of Germany's parli ame nt fo r one of hi s most ambi tious proj ects: w rapping the hi stori c Re ichstag buildin g in a milli on-sq uare feet of sil ver-colo red fab ri c. Acco rd ing to Stephen Kin zer of The New York Times, the support of president Rita Suessmuth is vital because parliament (now known as the Bundestag) admini sters the Re ichstag bu ilding. Pas t oppositi on to C hri sto's project was based on fea rs that the project wo uld be viewed as a provocation to East Germany and the Soviet Union. Now that both coun tries have ceased to ex ist, prospects for the projec t- 20 yea rs in the plannin g- appear to have improved. C hri sto described the Re ichstag as "almost li kea sleeping beauty" and sa id that wrapping it " is about freedom." He ad mits, however, that the project could be interpreted ma ny ways. " I create gentle d isturbances for a short time," he said . " I cannot claim that I full y know what the project means."

Street Gallery: Guide to /000 Los Angeles Mu rals, by Robin Dunitz, is the first comprehensive guidebook to the interior and ex teri or painted, tile, and mosaic wa ll art of Los Angeles County. Publi shed by RJD Enterpri ses, PO Box 64668 N, Los Ange les, CA 90064. (470 pages, 175 color pl ates, 22 detailed maps) .

New Public A rt Policy in L.A. Seeki ng to invo lve regiona l artists and community participation in publi c-art programs th ro ugho ut the c ity of Los A ngeles, the Communi ty Redevelopme nt Agency (CRA) recentl y adopted an ex panded public art poli cy to inc lude all redevelo pment proj ects underway in 20 local comm unities. Approved by the Los A ngeles C ity Coun c il on January 15th , the poli cy requ ires deve lopers of redevelopme nt proj ects that in vo lve the C RA to estab li sh a proj ect art plan and art budge t that is at least one percent of development costs, excl usive of land and off-s ite improvements.

Exceptio ns to the po licy inc lude deve lopme nts with values below $250,000, and ve ry low- and moderateinco me housing deve lopme nts. The proposed pl an will he lp deve lopers wo rking in redevelopment proj ect areas meet the new publicart requirements. The po li cy encourages deve lopers to consider reg io na l arti stsinc lud ing wo men and persons from d iverse c ultura l and eth nic backgrounds- in co ll aborative des ig n efforts durin g proj ect deve lopment, and to include o nsite arti st parti c ipati on, make contribu tio ns to cultura l trust funds, or deve lop a project-re lated c ultura l fac il ity. Foradditional infonnat ion and copi es of the po licy ca ll : C RA Publ ic Art Program, (2 13) 977- 177 1.

Conferences, Symposia ~ Heetinqs Parked Art: Third Annual Parking Lot Conference.

Marc h 19, 1993 . Sponsored by the Min nesota Landscape Arboretum and the M innesota C hapter of the American Soc iety of Landscape Archi tects. " An innovative way of view ing parking lots ... beyond aspha lt and pl ants, the parkin g lot as art. " Fee $40 ($ 15 for students.) Register by Marc h 15 . S ite : Minnesota La ndscape A rb o retum , 3675 A rboretum Dri ve, C han has en, MN 553 17. For in formation call : Caro l Spandl , (6 12) 443-2460, ext. 772.

1993 Mura l Tours of Los Angeles. Marc h 6: Murals by and abo ut wo men; April 17: East Los Angeles; May 15- 16: San Diego; June 19: Ho ll ywood ; Jul y 10- 11 : South-Centra l, Watts and Compton; A ugust 20: Long Beach; Septe mber 10: East Los Angeles; October 1517: San Franc isco; Novembe r 13: Venice and Santa Moni ca; Decembe r II : Murals of the I 920s, 30s and 40s. Di scounts offered for three or more to urs. Sponsored by the M ura l Conservancy of Los Angeles. For info rmati on, ca ll 3 10-470-8864.

Public A rr Panel. May 25 , 1993. Co- po nsored by the Asian-A meri can Renais ance and Walker A rt Center.

New York artist Mel C hin joins Los A ngeles arti t

tograph s and illustrati ons, 4 maps).

A rt in Public: What, Why and How, edited by Susan Jones, ex plores what's at stake in publi c art today, where it came from , and w here it' s go ing. Offers an overview of contemporary projects (mostl y Briti sh) a nd prac ti cal informatio n for e merg ing arti sts. Art in Public looks at the relatio nships between art and peo ple, and contains a guide to the commi ssioning process, funding age nc ies, site characte ri sti cs, and proposa l development. Publi shed by AN Publi cations, Freepost, P.O . Box 23, Sunderl and, Great Brita in , SR46DG . ( 176 pages, illustrated). To be rev iewed in the nex t PAR.

EHhibitions ~ Euents In the Garden: Recent Sculpture by i ene Highstein.

J anuary 10- May 9, 1993. Katonah Mu seum of Art, Katonah, New York . Since the earl y 70s,Jene Hi ghstein has produced site-s pec ifi c works in wood and stone , as we ll as works on paper. Hi s shapes are abstract with varying de nsity, tex ture, and form , and a lways in proportio n to surro undin g e lements. Ho urs: TuesdayFriday, Sunday 1-5 pm ., Saturday, 10- 5 pm . C losed Mondays . Free. Handi capped accessible. For in fo rmatio n call : (9 14) 232-95 55.

Ghost Nets, by Aviva Rahmani . January 8, 199 1January 7, 2000. As part of an o ngoing nine-yea r perfo rm ance proj ect, A viva Rahmani has begun part two of Phase One of Ghost Nets, an e nvironmenta ll yoriented e ndeavor about the " trap and eventua l escape from the famili ar." Part two in volves restorati o nincluding land and water reclamati on- of the wildli fe habi tat on a secti on of the Maine island whe re the artist li ves. Phase One will be completed in January, 1994 with the install atio n of the " Medi c ine W hee l Garden" incorporating 28 ro und sto nes in a c ircul ar configuratio n. The med ic ine w hee l is a Nati ve Ameri can ceremo ny of teaching and bless in gs used to hea l the earth and tho. e who partic ipate in the ceremony.

Cathey Billian, bi Planar Arrival, 1992, Deer Valley Municipal Airport, Phoenix, AZ. (photo: AI Payne)

Culture and Democracy.: Social and Ethical Issues in Public Support for the Arts and Humanities, edi ted by Andrew Buchwalter, ex plores the phil oso phical questio ns concernin g the ro le of publicl y subsidi zed c ulture in a democratic society. A variety of nati onall y pro minent scho lars, artists, and arts admini strators provide personal perspectives on contemporary issues in national cultural po licy. Triggered by recent controversies surro undin g projects funded by the Natio nal Endowment for the Arts, Culture and Democracy is of time ly interest to artists and public-policy makers, as well as stu dents of law, econom ics, soc io logy, poli tical science, hi story, pho losophy, American studies, and literature. O f spec ial interest to those foll owing the e merging fie ld of public-arts poli cy and fo r phi losophers in vesti gating new do mains in "applied ethics." Pu bli shed by Westview Press, Boulder, CO 8030 I. (280 pages).

Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer, by Yves Abri oux, is a stunning ly produced and comprehensive overview ofFinl ay ' s d iverse body of work. As an arti st of intern ational stature, Finl ay promoted the "concrete" poetry movement through hi s Wild Haw thorn Press and demonstrated hi s ingenuity at landscape architecture through hi s well -knownStonypath . Finlay li fts poetry fro m its typeset world and brings it into nature. In hi s art, poems fl oat among lil y pads on painted wood or blaze in blue neon script aro und a poli shed granite column . Publi shed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 02 142. (3 18 pages, I 10 color pl ates, 24 1 b&w pl ates).

Public Art in Philadelphia, by Penn y Balkin Bac h, demonstrates the di verse and ri ch public-art hi story of our nati on' s first capi ta l. Bach, executi ve director of the Fairmount Park Art Assoc iati on, offers us a unique tour of hundreds o f fa mili ar and overl ooked treas ures in Philadelphi a. Publi shed by Te mple Uni vers ity Press, Phil adelphi a, PA 19 122. (288 pages , 450 pho-

28 P UBLIC A RT R E VI E W WINTER/SPRING / 993

Krysztof Wodiczko: Public Address. May 22- A ugust 22, 1993. Conte mporary Art Mu seum , Houston, TX .

The ex hibition presents a 20-year survey of more than 85 works created by thi s Po li sh-born art ist. Wodi czko is intern ati o nall y renowned fort he haunting images he projects onto the surfaces of publ ic build ings. To date he has created over 50 such wo rks in the Uni ted States, Canada, Euro pe and Austra li a. The ex hibiti o n inc ludes sculpture , draw ings, proj ecti ons, and metaphori cal vehicles. For mo re informat ion call: (7 13) 526-6749. Organi zed by the Walker Art Center (see rev iew page 22 ).

Liz Phillips: Graphite Ground. June 12- A ugust I, 1993 . Conte mporary Art Museum , Ho uston, TX . Li z Phillips, one of A meri ca's lead ing aud io insta ll ati o n artists, ex pl ores the re latio nship of space, move ment and sound with Graphite Ground. Set within the context of a recreated Japanese rock ga rde n, the in stallati on contain s a winding path way of wood and fl agstone; sensors reactin g to visitors' presence transform the gallery into an ac ti ve soundscape. The insta ll atio n was first reali zed in 1987 fo r Capp Street Proj ect, San Francisco, through the ir arti st-in -res ide nce program.

For inform ation call : (71 3) 526-6749.

Hecently Completed Projects, Commissions ~ Requisitions The Majic Wand, by Roc kn e Krebs. Long Beach, C A. December, 1992. Sponsored by The Janss Corporati on of Santa Mo ni ca th ro ugh the Public Art Fund o f the Public Corporati on for the Arts (a di vision of The Long Beach Regional Arts Co un c il ). Budgeted at $2 I 6,638, The Majic Wand proj ects a lase r beam of light from the Pine Square mov ie theater marquee to mirrors mounted on adjacent buildings then o ut beyond the downtown area. The eme ra ld-colored beams reach out for miles into the ni ght sky above Long Beach and surroundin g areas o n an exact north-south ax is. A pio neer in the field of laser art techno logy, Krebs produced the first three-dimensio nal laser beam

installation in 1968. Over the past 25 years, he has created urban-scale laser installations in major cities throughout the United States.

Hydrotifer, by Evan Lewis. Phoenix, AZ. February, 1992. Sponsored by percent-for-art funds from Phoenix's Wastewater Department capital improvement program and administered by the Phoenix Arts Commission. The 30-foot-high kinetic sculpture functions as a fountain and a wind vane. The work is composed of discarded parts from the plant's operations and hand-formed stainless steel shapes representing the microbes that are active in the water treatment process. Hydrotifer refers to the rotifer microbe shape that inspired the design of the wind vane atop the sculpture. (see photo) Greenpoint, by Richard Serra. University of Nebraska, Lincoln. December, 1992. Acquired by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Greenpoint is composed of two monumental cor-ten steel walls, each measuring 19' 4" x 16'3" and weighing 40,000 pounds. Greenpoint joins Old Glory by Mark di Suvero and Prismatic Flake Geometric by Michael Heizer on the Nebraska campus. According to Serra, "I analyze the site and determine to redefine it in terms of sculpture, not in terms of the existing physiognomy." (see photo) hiPlanar Arrival, by Cathey Billian. Deer Valley Municipal Airport, Phoenix. September, 1992. Sponsored by the City of Phoenix , AZ. hiPlanar Arrival presented a series of overhead "visual events" in a manner described as "architectural theater" using custom time-based navigation lights, aircraft rigging, raw copper, and stainless steel. Dimensions: 36' x 22' x 22'. (see photo) Peninsula Tel/-Tail and Overlook, by Anita Margrill.

Emeryville Mud Flats, San Francisco. 1991-1992.

Commissioned by the Emeryville Redevelopment Agency. The sculpture includes metal seating, a 40foot pole, and a "funky" blue hand that moves with the wind. According to the artist, its the largest weather vane in California. Lit at night by solar-powered lights, Peninsula Tell-Tail and Overlook is one of several planned wind sculptures along the East and West coasts that will "celebrate the promise of al ternative energy sources."

1993 ART LINK projects selected. January, 1993. Four artists have been selected to develop large-scale temporary works of art to mark the al ignment of the Metro Link light rail system under construction in St. Louis.

During the three-year construction phase of Metro Link, Arts in Transit has commissioned artists to install art works on buildings, bridges, and retaining walls to inform the public of where Metro Link is and what it will look like. Once the 18-mile, 20-station system begins operation Summer 1993, Arts in Transit will utilize stations, passenger platforms, and right-ofway spaces for an on-going program of temporary public-art works that will make riding the system an enjoyable experience. Artists selected for the 1993 ART LINK projects (to be installed in May) include: Ed Andrews and Alexis Wreden, North Attleboro, MA ; Dan Taylor, Chicago, IL; and Tim Watkins, Brooklyn, NY. Arts in Transit is supported by grants from the Missouri Arts Council , the Regional Arts Commission, and the Illinois Arts Council. ART LINK is open to all artists. To be included in the AIT Artists Registry, submita resume and up to 10 slides to: AITlMetro Link, 707 North First Street, St. Louis, MO 63101.

Richard Serra, Greenpoint, 1988. (installed 1992) (photo: Sheldon Acquisition Trust, U. of Nebraska, Lincoln)

Evan Lewis, Hydrotifer, 1992, Phoenix Wastewater Department. (photo: Phoenix Arts Commission)

Grand Hope Park. March, 1993 . Los Angeles. The 2.5-acre Grand Hope Park, in the downtown community of South Park, shares a city block with the new Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and the nearly completed Del Prado apartments. The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (LACRA) is providing $3 million for the construction of the park, the long-awaited centerpiece of the planned 24-hour urban and residential community of South Park. Designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, Grand Hope Park includes the work of musicians, sculptors, and poets who' ve interpreted the area' s natural and cultural heritage. Visitors will hear original composition s by John Carter, Michael McNabb, and Ushio Torikai on the winding pathways.

The compositions, arranged by New Music innovator Carl Stone, emanate hourly from a colorful clock tower that dominates the entrance to the park. The musical clock tower is the work of Halprin , who al so designed Los Angeles's Bunker Hill Steps and San Francisco 's Ghirardelli Square. Sculptures by Lita Albuquerque atop a cascading fountain capture the sun. Three life-size coyotes, a hawk, and a snake cast in bronze by artist Gwynn Murrin keep vigil on grassy knolls. The work of Raul Guerrero transform s a lizard

into a bench, ants into tiles, a snake into a fountain , a pergola into a tableau for celebrated poets Kate Braverman and Wanda Coleman. The park will be dedicated June 12 to coincide with DownArt, a monthlong exhibition of works by downtown Los Angeles artists, and the completion of the first segment of the Hope Street Promenade, a pedestrian-oriented walkway. Scheduled from June 1- 29, DownArt will transform the retail space of the new Metropolitan Apartments, overlooking Grand Hope Park. For more information call: LACRA , (213 ) 977-1951.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993 29

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Artists Opportunltles and Competitions Public Art Commission : Fine and Performing Arts Center, Shawnee State University , Portsmouth, OH . The deadline for submission is March 12, 1993. The Ohio Arts Council and Shaw nee State University invite artists to create a work of art for the lobby of the arts center's theater. The committee is seeki ng either a wall-supported or suspended piece for the c lerestory of the three-story lobby. The lobby has been des igned not only as entrance to the theater and art ga llery, but as a gathering place for various campus and community fun ctions. The commission (approximately $62,000) is open to artists of all states. For prospectu s and more information contact: The Ohio Arts Council, Percent for Art Program , 727 East Main Street, Columbus, OH 43205 , (6 14) 466-2613.

Public Art Competition : Mesa Street Car Park, San Pedro, CA. Sponsored by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency. Open to a ll artists, with preference given to loca l artists (no travel budget is ava ilable). A half-block car park on Mesa Street between Si xth and Fifth, is being built to accommodate 55 cars. Because the car'park will occupy a prime site in the historic distric t of San Pedro near the Port of Los Angeles, the community seeks an ex traordinary so lution-the creation of a landmark. The deadline is March 15, 1993. For a prospectus/RFQ, call or write: LNCRA , 354 South Spring Street, 7th floor, Los Angeles, CA 900 13, (2 13) 977-1771 or 977-1782.

Outdoor Sculpture Show: Contemporary Sculpture at Chesterwood. Sculptors are invited to submit slides and/or renderings of works in progress or proposed works for prelimi nary rev iew by co-guest curators David R. Collens, director, and Maureen Megeri an, assoc iate curator, Storm Kin g Art Center.

ContemporalY Sculpture at Chestenvood, scheduled from July 4-0ctober 10, is the fourteenth in a series of outdoor sculpture ex hibitio ns to be shown at the hi storic Berkshire summer estate of Dani e l Chester French ( 1850- 193 1) sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial and Minllte Mal/ statues. The deadline is March 22.

For furth er information about the exhibition and an appli cation Form, ca ll or write: Paul Ivory, Director, Chesterwood, P.O. Box 827, Stockbridge, MA 01262. (4 13) 298-3579. $15 applicati on fee required.

Public Art Funding: Pllblic Art Affairs. FORECAST Public Artworks announces the Fifth year of fundin g for artists exp loring the public realm. Fundin g and technical ass istance is avai lab le in two categories: R&D Stipends (up to $800) for research and development of proj ect ideas; and Public Projects (up to $4,000) for production o f projec ts in any di sc ipline. Restricted to Minnesota arti sts. Deadline: April 1. For further information and application form contact: Jack Becker, project manager, FORECAST, 2324 University Avenue West, St. Paul , MN 55 11 4; (6 12) 64 1- 11 28 .

Residency: II/stitllte o/Col/temporary Art/P.S. I Mllse/lIll. Residency includes one-year use of studio in New York City.

Deadline: April l.Send SASE of call for application : P.S. I Museum, 46-0 I 2 1st Street, Long Island City, NY 1110 I, (718) 784-2084.

Intermed ia Arts Regional Grants: Diverse Visions. For artists who are challenging traditi onal approaches in their work. Indi -

vidua l or collaborative projects may be funded which attempt to explore new definitions of, or the boundaries between cultures, art disciplines and/or traditions. Up to $5,000 may be requested for projects beginning after August I, 1993. Deadline: April 7.

Restricted to artists residing in lA , KS, MN, ND, SD, or WI. For information contact: AI Kosters, Artist Programs Manager, Intermedia Arts, (612) 627-4444.

Exhibition Opportunity: The Forum Gallery is organizing Artists COllsider the Environment, an exhibit ion including work in all media that addresses current env ironmenta l issues. To be considered, please send no more than 10 slides, a resume, and related support materials with SASE to: The FORUM Gallery at Jamestown Community College, P.O. Box 20 , Jamestown , NY 14702. Deadline: April 15 (exhibi tion to be held NovemberDecember, 1993). For information call : Michelle Henry , (716) 665-9 107.

Travel Grants: The Travel Grallls Pilot is designed to enable artists to engage in mutually beneficial co ll aborative activities with colleagues in Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Grants support arti sts wishing to pursue arti stic collaborations, to create new work, to deepen their relationships with artists and arts organ izations, to explore significant artistic developments in their Fields, or to increase their understanding of a contemporary or traditional art form through interaction with an expert in that country. Deadline: May 14, 1993, for projects commencing after July 14. For applications, ca ll or write: Travel Grants Pilot, Arts Internati onallIlE, 809 Un ited Nations Pl aza, New York, NY 10017 (2 12) 984-5370.

International Outdoor Sculpture Competition: Sculpture Exchange Program. The Duluth Public Arts Commiss ion , in a spec ial arrangement with its sister city Ohara, Japan, is seeking proposals for an outdoor work in stone or stainless steel to be located in a park next to Ohara town hall. The park is located 18.7 meters above sea level on a hill with a panoramic view ofthecity.

The Duluth Public Arts Commission will pay a commi ssion of $ 10,000, and cover material costs (not to exceed $30,000) and round-trip airfare to Ohara. Ohara wi ll provide studio space, a host home, and meals. The City of Ohara will construct the base for the sculpture, if needed . Open to art ists from MN, WI , ND, SD, lA , IL, and MI. The deadline for proposals is May 15, 1993.

Construction shou ld take place between July and October, 1993.

For more in format ion contact: Carl Seehus, Duluth Public Arts Commission, 303 City Hall, Duluth, MN 55802, (2 18) 723-3707.

Visual Arts Fellowships: Midwest Reg iol/al Visual Artists Fund.

Up to ten artists in each of three categories (photography, crafts and sculpture) wi ll receive $5,000 fellowships and be included in High Vi sibility, an annual publicaton di stributed to critics, curators, ga lleries, mu seums and a lternative spaces nati onwide.

Open to arti sts from IL, IN , lA , MI , MN , ND, OH, SD, and WI. The deadline for application is May 21, 1993. For application form , contact Arts Midwest, 528 Hennepin Avenue, Suite 3 10, Minneapolis, MN 55403 (6 12) 34 1-0755 .

Internationa l: COli/pLIler Sculpture Exhibition. Selected artists wi ll be invited to produce sculptures on computer-controlled machines whose functions include millin g, lo viform age,

If this is the way you look at art ...

stereolithography,joining, and laser or water-jet cutting. Potential artists should subm it a project proposal for consideration.

Write for further information: Alexandre Vitkine , 66 rue d ' Auguesseau , 92100 Boulogne, France.

Temporary, Site-Specific Works: Prison SellIences: Prison as Site/Prison as Subject. Pl anned for the spring of 1994 and 1995, thi s project wi ll address issues of incarceration, architectural interpretation and intervention, and strateg ies for si te-integrated artwork. The project will provide arti sts from all over the world a rare opportunity to work on a large scale and with relative freedom within a significant architectural/hi storica l setting. The site, Eastern State Penitentiary, was designed in 1821 as the world 's first large-sca le panopticon pri son. /t 's a landmark of survei llance techniques, concepts of criminality, and penitenti ary reform . The I I-acre prison has a church, chapel, work spaces, laundry , exterior spaces and 14cell blocks radiating from a central rotunda. Vaulted cell s and passages are lit by sky li ghts, and the entire si te is surrounded by a 30-foot stone wall with med ieval-style turrets and guards' towers at each corner. Eastern State has been abandoned since 1970, is in partial decay, and is presently under study for adaptive reu se. If interested , send work samples with SASE and letter of interest to: Julie Courtney/Todd Gilens, Pri son Sentences, 2227 Bainbridge St., Philadelphia, PA 19146.

National Slide File: The Nat ional Museum of American Art announces its newest database, Th e In velltDlY 0/ American Sculpture, is now open to the public. This database contains information about the artist, title, medium, dimensions, execution date, found ry , provenance, subject, and owner of more than 50,000 American sculptures in public and private collections across the country. Both indoor and outdoor works are included.

For the first time, visitors to the Washington office wi ll be able to consult the database directly. Researchers may a lso access the Inventory of American Paintings Executed before 1914 (with over 250,000 paintings) or the inventories at the regional offices of the Archives of American Art in New York, Boston , Detroit, and San Marino. By late 1993, the Inventories will be avai lable through national and international computer networks such as the Canadian Heritage In formation Network , Research Libraries Information Network, and Internet. Researc hers may call, write, fax, or visit the Inventories in Washington , D.C. to request printouts of scu lptures sorted by artist or subj ect. For more in formation , or to request printouts, please contact the In ventories of American Painting and Sculpture, Research and Scholars Center, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution , Washington , DC 20560, (202) 357-2941 for painting, and (202) 786-2384 for sculpture, or (202) 633-9341 for fax requests.

Although Public Art Review makes every effort to verify the information contained in these li stings, artists are advised to check deadlines and eligibility requirements before investing significant time or money .

Organizations or individuals who wish to li st items in this section should send information to the editor, Public Art Review, 2324 University Ave. W., SI. Paul, MN 55114. Information shou ld arrive by August I and February I respectively for issues publi shed in September and March .

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30 PUBLIC ART REVIEW WINTER/SPRING 1993

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Keynote speakers are Dianne Bos (Harbourfront Centre, Toronto) and Jon Bryan Burley (U of Michigan).

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"THE MINNESOTA PERCENT FOR ~I' ART IN PUBLJC PLACES PROGRAM WOULD LI KE TO CONGRATULATE THE ARTISTS RECENTLY: AWARDED COMMISSIONS FOR STATE BUILDINGS Virginia Bradley Centennial Building Minneapolis, MN St. Paul, MN Armando Gutierrez _St_ . P_au.. .!,I,_M_N_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Ben Effinger Intemofiooal Wo~ Center Duluth, MN E~, MN

June 15,1993 is the nextdeodline for the program's Slide Registry, and several additional sites. Forapp/icatian information, write to the: MinnesalrJ SlrJte Ivts Boord, - - ' - - - - - - - - ' - ' - - - - - - - - 432 Summit Avenue, Michaela Mahady Dept. ofTransportation Saint Paul, MIl, 55102 Minneapolis, MN District Headquarters or call (612) 297-2603 or Thomal lollar Duluth, MN toll-free at 1-800-BMN ARTS New York, NY

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., To order your 1992 catalog of bound full-color cards send $5 to: MN ARTISTS: Deadline for 1993 proposals-Aprill call for application form (612) 641-1128

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2324 University Ave. W, St Paul, MN 55114

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Published by Temple University Press Publication made possible by a grant from the William Penn Foundation Proceeds benefit the Fairmount Park Art Association Design by Katz Design Group 8" x 10" 288 pp,. 450 illustrations December 1992. ISBN 0-87722-822-1 Clothbound. $29,95; $3,00 postage Please make checks payable to Temple University Press To order. or for more information. contact: Fairmount Park Art Association 1530 locust Street. Suite 3A Philadelphia. Pennsylvania 19102 Telephone: 215,546.7550 Fascimile: 215,546,2363