Public Art Review issue 12 - 1995 (spring/summer) by forecastpublicart

Issua

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Vol.

No.2

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Spring/Summar

1995

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81 . 50

. . .Vlew L ES USTED FELIZ?

a project of

First Person: Writers, Taggers, & Heap of Birds, Kuspit, Alavi, Witz, Gude, Lindstrom, V, Geer, Rowe, Harris, Huebner, Novakov, and many more!

1='

Billboards and Posters Three Rivers Arts Festival

1995 Public Art Project

Ron Desmett Lonnie Graham Mark Perrott Belinda Raczka Robert Raczka

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Curated by Vicky Clark June 2-18

SPIRIT POLIES AND FLYING PIGS

Public Art and Cultura.1 Democracy in American Communities

Erika Doss Examining why public art projects often enrage rather than enliven the public, Erika Doss argues that some sculptures, murals, and landscape works have tended to privilege unrestrained artistic expression over the complexities of the local community. Doss reviews several public art projects from the last decade, including Barbara Kruger's mural for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's Free Stamp sculpture in Cleveland. She engages questions of aesthetics, artists' assumptions about audiences, problems of placelessness, and concerns about civic identity. Public art, she argues, has the capacity to stimulate democratic conversation, but only if artists speak FruSrnmp. a sculpture by Claes O ldenbu rg and Coosje van Bruggen, 199 1. with rather than for the public. 79 b&w photographs 288 pp. Cloth: 1-56098-464-3H $45.00 Paper: 1-56098-534-8P $17.95

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION P.o. Box 960 â&#x20AC;˘ H erndon, VA 22070-0960Âˇ 800/782-4612

PRESS

CONTENTS FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

A WAY WITH WORDS New York City Sending a Message Through Hummingbirds and Hoodies by Dan Witz ... 6 Northern California Using Language to Create an Art of Insight by Seyed Alavi .......... ..................... 7 Colorado The Sign as Lifeline: Bishop Castle" a Case in Point by Carolyn Erler ..... .......... ... . 8 Milwaukee Heneing/Djiriyai (Learn a War Cry) by Susan Snodgrass ........... ........... ....... ........ . 10 St. Paul Overlapping Frames: The St. Paul Cultural Garden by Keli Rylance ................ 11 New York Writing About Writing in Art: An Interview With Donald Kuspit by Nicholas Drake .......... ........ ................... .. . 12 San Francisco Language as a Cultural Transition An Interview with Su-Chen Hung, by Anna Novakov .......... ..... ................... ........ 14 U.S. Artists Writing In Public .. . from Suzanne Lacy 's Mapping The T.errain, featuring Gloria Bomstein, John Fekner, Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, Barbara Ftruger, Daniel 1. Martinez, Martha RosIer, Robert Sanchez & Richard A. Lou , Kate Ericson & Mel Ziegler, compiled by Susan Leibovitz Steinmall ........ 15 ... And Other Words of Wisdom featuring Beliz Brother & Mark Calderon, Adam Brooks, David Schafer, Larry & Kelly Sultan, Karen Atkinson, Indira Johnson, RobertMarkey, and Kathryn Nobbe, compiled by Jack Becker .... ... .. .... .......... :...... 18 New York City Public Penetration: Text, Gender, and Urban Space by Anna Novakov ........... 20

PUBLIC ARTICLES Saving Our Murals, California Style by Robert Schultz .. ........ ........ ... ..... ......... ....... .46 Moral Rights of a Public Artist by Laura Danielson ..... ................ ... .... ...... .. ... 47

GRAFFITI CULTURE & MURAL MAKING Northern California Graffiti Language: An Interview wiith Jim Prigoff by Tim Drescher .................. ..... 23 Los Angeles Thoughts on Graffiti as Public Art by Suvan Geer and Sandra Rowe ...... .... ...... .. 24 "Notes From The Other Side" A Dialogue in the SPARC Gallery by Krissy Kuramitsu ........... ........................ .. 27 Youth in the Crossfire. Graffiti, Hysteria, Urban Realities and SPAlRC by Lindsey Haley .. .. ........... ................... .... .... . 29 Minneapolis/S!. Paul Tagging the Twins: Two Cities' Reactions to Graffiti by Moira F. Harris ..........: ........... 30 Fluid Intelligence: A Graffiti Colle<:tive by Moira F. Harris ............ .. ........ ... .. .... .. ....... 32 As the sun sets, we rise. The life and times of a graffiti artist by Chaka Jenkins r •• ••• •••••• 33 New York City The Name and the City: Writing as an Illegal Art by Joe Austin .... .. 36 Downtown '94: A Review of New York Graffiti by Robin VanArsdol ...... ... .... ...... .... 37 Chicago Up from the Underground: Graff Arts in Chicago by Jeff Huebner. ..... . 38 Beyond Monological Monuments: The possibility of heteroglossia in public space by Olivia Gude ............ ,.... ....... 40 Minneapolis The Language of Hope: Minneapolis' Neighborhood Safe Art Program by Bruce N. Wright ....... 43 San Francisco Big Women by Miranda Bergman ............... 44

JUMP SPACE

REVIEWS Andrea Blum: "Domestic Arrangements" by Particia C. Phillips ...................... 48 P.A.R.T.I. Public Art: Realities, Theories & Issues by Michael Several ... .................................... 48 "Planning to Stay" . by Bruce N. Wright ..... ..... ............................. 49 "R.I.P. Memorial Wall Art" by A.P. Porter ................... ...... .............. ... ...... 50 "Bomb the Suburbs" by A.P. Porter ........ ... 50 "Whose Art is It?" by Patrice Clark Koelsch ..... .... .. ........ ........... 50 "But Is It Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism" by Patrice Clark Koelsch ..... ....... 51 "Outside The Frame" by 1. Otis Powell! .. ............ ... ....... ....... ...... ...... 51 "Urban Pradise: Gardens in the City" by Deborah Karasov .................... ... ........ ... ... 52 "Public Interventions" [The Video] by Laura Weber ........................ 52 ''Dimensions of the Americas" by Sal Salerno ................... ...................... ....... 53 WORTHY OF NOTICE That Beauty Problem-Why? by Regina Flanagan & Deborah Karasov ........ 54

Graffiti vs. Zero Tolerance by Moira F. Harris ................... ...... ....... .. .. .... 56 Further Reading compiled by Jack Becker & Moira F. Harris ..... ... ..... ... 57 LISTINGS Recently Completed Projects .. .................. . 58 Exhibitions & Events ...... .... ........ ........ .... .... 59 Conferences & Meetings....... ............ ...... .... 60 Books & Publications .... ............ .................. 60 Of Special Interest ................. .... ....... ...... .... 62 Artists' Opportunities .. Inside Mailing Sleeve Note: If you are not a subscriber, and would like to obtain a free copy of the Artists' Opportunities listings printed on the inside of the mailing sleeve, send a SASE to Public Art Review-Listings, 2324 Unjversity Ave. W., Suite 102, St. Paul, MN 55114 Suscriber Bonus: The outside wrapper for this issue of PAR comes with its very own limited edition Jenny Holzer stamp, featuring one of her characteristically b1unt truisms. The stamps are courtesy of Art Matters, the independent nonprofit group that raises money to provide direct grants to artists whose work is often controversial. For more information, contact Art Matters, Inc. , 131 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011. For our cover, we used artwork that is featured throughout the magazine. The artwork on page five jncludes a work by Dan Witz, and on page 22, the graffiti is by Andre Charles.

NEXT ISSUE: NE'W TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY

FOREWORD

LETTERS Denver Airport Baggage

ORDS. Some people have a way with them. What people do with words, and where they put them are the subjects of this issue of Public Art Review. As signs of spring surround us, it's time to get outside and look at other indicators of our changing environment. With PAR #12, we invite you to explore and examine the growing trend of visual artists expressing themselves through words and text. Many enjoy successful careers without drawing a si ngle image. But why do artists choose to write, and what makes writing public art? Who is the writing for, and what does it all mean? Like everyone else, we're listening, watching and wondering why text is the medium of choice for so many artists dealing with the "big issues." Through their collective voices we hope some signs of truth are revealed. One thing is for sure: there's a battle raging outside, with no remedy in sight. It's called graffiti. Perhaps it's all about power: who's in charge and who has control over the public domain. We tend to accept signs as statements of facts; government signs and corporate advertising eminate power. Perhaps it is this power that text-based artists and graffiti writers hope to attain. Their words-from the discreet and suggestive to the bold and assertive-give them power. There is no doubt that graffiti has altered our collective consciousness, even though it' s writing that many of us cannot read. It has influenced~if not altered-fashion, music, art and literature. Yet what do we really know about this widespread phenomenon? Most of what we receive as information is filtered through the media, associated with illegal tagging on private property. We rarely get to hear from artists and writers themselves. It's time to change all that. With millions of dollars spent annually removing unwanted graffiti-more than is spent on making all the rest of public art-it's time we started listening to taggers, street artists, muralists, and other public writers. If you think public writing is simply a costly nuisance involving poor minorities in the inner city, read on. One common thread is the innate desire in all of us to express ourselves, to make our mark, and take a stand. ÂˇWhen we're gone from this earth, all that may be left of us are the words we leave behind, and they alone will tell our tale. Hopefully they will be words to live by.

- Jack Becker and Moira Harris

Public Art He Managing Editor: Jack Becker Associate Editor: Moira F. Harris Copy Editor: Judy Arginteanu Art Director, Design and Production: Shannon Brady Advertising Representative: Jack Becker Editorial Advisory Board: Cathey Billian, Peter Boswell, Fuller Cowles, Amanda Degener, Regina Flanagan, Barbara Glygutis, Mariann Johnson, Patrice Clark Koelsch, Julie Marckel, Clhristine Podas-Larson, and Herbert Scherer.

Thanks for running Jennifer Murphy 's article in the FallIWinter issue ["Nice Idea Doesn ' t Make for Pretty Picture"]. Maybe this will let others go ahead and admit that there are problems surrounding and controlling public art program s that the programs can not change. We'll see. For future di scussions regarding collaboration one thing that needs to happen is your spell checker has to learn a new word. The word is "coIlQboration." The word has been coined to speak to a reality. It is not a misspelling. Ms. Murphy used it spec ifically and intentionally. By changing that word in M s. Murphy 's article a substantial reality was removed fro m her report. Any artist who has been in a colloborative situation understands this word immediately and in its entirety.

Ja ck Mackie, Seattle, WA Thanks for publishing the photograph of my piece in [the last] Public Art Review. It's a very strong issue-lots of interesti ng stuff-and some insightful articles about the continuing evolution of the public art process. Keep up the good work! Jennifer Murphy' s article about the Denver Airport Art Program gives a valuable insider's perspective, but it is not very evenhanded, probably because she needed to focus on a few projects due to space limitations. I realize that it doesn' t make for interesting copy to acknowledge the positive contributions of the many people involved. But it should be noted that, given the climate and history of the larger public works project, many of these people felt that public art was being forced on them. This caused all of us great duress, and many of us made an effort to alleviate fears and build consensus. Some of those city employees ended up bending over backwards to accommodate the surprise that was the Airport Art Program. Their new-found willingness and generosity should be honored as a successful result of the intervention of public art. In the end, all of us learned a lot. It was incredible to be involved in the largest public works project in the country, and humbling to learn about the scope of considerations in building a $3 billion facility , issues we as public artists rarely have to confront in our studios. David Griggs, Denver, CO

Beauty Problem Thanks for "Worthy of Notice," which has been consistently thoughtprovoking. Regina Flanagan's most recent column, in which four artists discussed "beauty" in public art, ended up reinforcing my belief that the "beauty problem" isn ' t a problem at all. Like the tired " what is art?" warhorse, the beauty issue is usually brought up in order to beg a question, not illuminate di scussion. The begged question is often the rarely articulated " why is this visual art not visually engaging?," an inquiry especially germane to the realm of public art. (Artists who bring up the pretty vs. beautiful argument are rehashing a long-resolved fossil from the years of early Modernism. ) Robert Irwin' s art was cited by Doris Vila, and like her! admire his work. Irwin succeeds precisely because he isn' t afraid to employ an ambitious and sophisticated notion of beauty.

Ralph Helmick, Newton, MA [Editor 's note: The "Beauty Problem" is revisited in this issue 's "Worthy" column, p. 54] continued on page 57

ÂŠ 1995 PublicArt RevielV (lSSN: 1040-211x)is publishedsemi-annuaUy by FORECAST Public Artworks, 2324 University Avenue West, Suite 102, Saint Paul, Minnesota USA 55114 Tel. (612) 641-1128. Annual subscription dues are US $15 for USA, $19 for Canada, and $24 for foreign. Public Art Review is not responsible for unsolicited material. Please send SASE with material requiring return. Opinions expressed and validity of information herein are the responsibility of the author, not FORECAST, and FORECAST disclaims any liability for any claims made by advertisers and for images reproduced by advertisers.

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Published by FORECAST Public Artworks Managing Director: Paula Justich HECUA Intern: lena Trustem FORECAST Board of Directors: Ta-Coumba Aiken, Jane Cunningham, Jan Dreelan, Cheryl Kartes, Laura Migliorino, Garth Rockcastle, Susan Scofield, and Tobi Tanzer.

NOSCtUATTERS TRESPA'5'SING

DUHPING GAf<8/-r:ÂŁ

AND TRASH ON . ,.... THIS PROPER TY ;

OFFENDERS WILL BE PENAL! ZE C.

r-..(.;6D LOVE YOUB

t's been estimated there are over 60,000 artists living in New York City. That's almost twice as many people as the town where I grew up. Add the legions of art professionals, art students, and various dilettantes, and you've truly got a self-contained art universe without historical precedent. One might reasonably presume that such an enlightened environ- . ment would provide a nurturing habitat for artists with a public agenda. Not so. Fundamentalism reigns here, special interests rule. Careerism and self-interest have ghettoized the goings-on, kept the creative flow tightly within this art world's walls. Yet as much as it seems that forces have conspired to keep all this creativity bottled up, some of it inevitably breaks out onto the street and into the pede trian flow of life. That' s where cynical but optimistic fringe characters like me come in. Every year, typically in the warmer months, I perpetrate some kind of mild misdemeanor street art project. Usually 1'm satisfied if my pieces make passersby stop just for a moment, stalling the busy forward momentum of their lives. My small goal is to give pause, to say art is around, that it is a possibility. I want ordinary people to know that places like this street aren't always what they seem. All sorts of goodies wait below the surface of everyday life if you ' re willing to look. Some projects have sub-issues to addFess. A few years.ago I painted more than 40 life-sized, realistic hummingbirds hovering on exterior locations in just about every place in lower Manhattan ][ could reach, except Soho. Besides giving simple aesthetic "pause,'" I wanted to address my pet peeve, the art world' s ghetto wall syndrome, by letting my birds fly beyond its boundaries. Last summer I posteJred the Lower East Side where I live with a series of faceless sweatshirt-hooded figures. Lately heroin trafficking down here has reached epidemic proportions. Several of my close friends and colleagues have died from overdoses or caught HIV infections from dirty needles. It' s gotten scary. Late at night, in an operation resembling a guerrilla raid, I installed the hoody posters on the perimeters of the drug copping zones. Besides the ominous "pause" passersby made when they saw the grim reaper drug dealer figures , I intended each of these hoodies as a warning sign, to promote awareness about a deepening problem in my own neighborhood. I make my living, such as it is, within the art world's ghetto walls. It' when I break out, when I participate in the unpredictable flow of

Sendin a Messa eTrough Hummingbirds and Hoodies

6 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

real life on the street, that I approach something revealing. I suppose my ultimate goal is to merge these two worlds, to force a small window through the ghetto walls; or, if that' s as naIve and futile as it seems, to at least continue challenging my own possibilities as an artist.

Dan Witz bas been committing random acts of unattributed street art since he moved to downtown Manhattan in 1978. His work is also in major corporate and private collections. He has received an NEA fellowship as well as one from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Currently he resides above a Chinese funeral home on the Lower East Side.

Using Language

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~ ~~ hat is the relationship of language to thinking? Is under-

standing dependent on language? Is thinking even possible without words? Haiku, Koan, parables, and poetry strive to go beyond the surface of words, to recreate the essence of ex.perience; however, poets and mystics alike have confessed that language ultimately falls short in this respect. Lao Tsu said, "Those who speak do not know, and those who know do not speak," highlighting the paradoxical nature of language in relation to understanding. I was born and raised in Iran, where the relationship between language and experience is intensified. Since Islam forbids iconography and introduced the Qur' an as the direct word of God, text has a widespread presence in the arts and culture, from walls and buildings to fabric , pottery, and jewelry. Words hearken back to a sacred and mystical foundation. In Iran, language is percei ved as the primary connection between humanity and ultimate meaning. Yet despite the value of language the fundamental question remains: How does language engender cognition and how does one arrive at experience through words? It is clear that a description of an experience cannot recreate it, just as describing water cannot quench the thirst. However, something analogous to the experience can be arrived at through lan-

guage. This arrival is insight. For me, insight is the experience of knowledge, it is "feeling" knowledge. It is a kind of birth. Words have the power to generate this moment of insight. In my artwork, I seek to present visual poems. I hope to inspire the viewer through language to go beyond language, into the heart of his own thinking. In the project Words by Roads (1992), I collaborated with a group of high school students. Together, we presented four text murals (Inform[nlation, eRacism, Invisible Colors, and D fference) on underpass walls under Highway 1-580 in Oakland. We composed words to reflect our concerns as well as to inspire the viewer to discover meaning through his or her own unique interpretations. In another installation, titled Here , I explored the intricacy of a single word, "here," by using it in a variety of visual contexts. I sought to explore both its physical and metaphysical dimensions, as well as to create the experience of "hereness." Through language I seek to create an instant of non-language experience, a moment of insight in which the viewer re-evaluates his prejudices. A single word has the power to reveal the shortest path to meaning. My challenge is to discover the language and expose the significance of words.

Seyed Alavi is an Oakland, CA.-based conceptual artist. He works in the fields of installation and public art.

ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 7

Bishop Castle, a Case in Point

Above: View of Bishop Castle Right: Artist's signs at Bishop Castle Next page: Highway Department Sign, with castle model in background (photos: Jim Bishop)

8 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

BISHOP

CASTLE b

Carolyn

. . or the public artist whose work is large-scale and long-term, a . . well-placed sign can be a lifeline to viewership, appreciation, " and support. Sometimes a sign can become a source of acute tension between artist, public, and government offices with the power to determine what constitutes a "landmark" or area worthy of public attention. In the case of Bishop Castle, a towering structure built by one man on a private lot surrounded by federal lands, a 20-year stlfUggle has ensued over how and if the tourists visiting the San Isabel National Forest in southern Colorado should be directed to the site. But only after the Castle received exposure from National Public Radio and ABC's "Day One" in 1994 did the Colorado State Highway Department comply with builder Jim Bishop's request to have signs erected. The mountainous Colorado State Highway 165 runs so close to the Castle that visibility to passing motorists might be the Castle's best publicity if not for Bishop's refusal to remove the trees bordering his land. Bishop outlined the development of this struggle in his selfpublished booklet "Castle Building: From My Point ofVie:w," and in personal correspondence with the author. After over three decades, Bishop Castle is now a non-profit corporation. Admission is free, but twenty-five percent of all public donations support its Foundation for Newborn Heart Surgery. The Castle functions as a site for wedding ceremonies, concerts, local fairs , and treasure hunts. Bishop made the down payment on the 2.5 acre site in 1959 when he was 15 years of age. He and his parents made the next 16 payments on the property together. Bishop, a self-described "zealot for freedom" and "non-conformist," left high school to work in his father's ornamental iron shop. He continues to run the shop today as a means of support and as a place to construct the iron parts of the Castle. From 1959 to 1969 Jim Bishop and his father hand-cut trees and dug a road into the property. At the time their intention was to build a simple mountain retreat from granite gathered from the site. As Bishop tells the story: "As I started the rock walls of the stone cottage, people: happened in, such as friends, relatives, fishermen and locals ... they commented on how it looked like a castle ... and they asked for some signs out front on the highway so that when they sent their relatives and friends to see it, they could find it. "I put up a simple sign-Bishop Castle-out on the right of way and soon was told by the Highway Department to take it down and apply for a sign that they would put up and maintain. After applying, we received a letter saying 'NO!' because of the Ladybilrd Johnson Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which prohibits the placement of new highway signs. A couple of weeks later the Highway Department put up four new signs up the road from us ... 'Ski Area 112 mi.' I was enraged!" State highway officials told Bishop that the ski industry was exempt from the Ladybird Johnson Highway Beautification Act because of the revenues it brought to the state. Bishop resolved to take alternative action. "I went to the Postal Authority about a mailbox, and put up the castle-shaped box (within postal rules and regulations) on the road in front of Bishop Castle." Within days, Bishop received a certified letter from the State Highway Department threatening a $1,OOO-per-day fine if the "advertising device" on the mailbox (the word "Castle" and an arrow painted next to it) was not removed . It was this turn of events that transformed Bishop into a public art crusader. Bracing himself with visions of Old Testament :figures and their struggles, he compared himself to Moses in his battle against Ramses II of Egypt, an identification which remains at source of

strength for him today. Bishop's Moses is fueled by a fervor for justice. And for the visitors who happened by to view the hand-built structure, "the people are the true government," proclaimed Bishop, "they are the Temple of God!" Bishop removed the scale model mailbox to avoid the fine, but "I parked a 1116 scale sheet metal model of the castle out there and I painted a grievance sign on the castle itself telling about the government's 'Thumbs Down Legally Criminal Attitude Toward the People,' with the phone numbers of the state Highway Department and the governor." In 1994, due in part to national media exposure, the Colorado Highway Department issued two federally funded and maintained signs announcing Bishop Castle's "arrival." Neat brown government signs now stand on each side of Bishop Castle along State Highway165. Though small, the signs indicate a measure of dignity and historic presence. The look of the government signs departs significantly, however, from the signs made by Bishop during his years of struggle for the attention of passing motorists. Among the smooth, sprayed-on letters there is no place for mention of Moses , Ramses II, orofJim and Phoebe Bishop's only son, Roy, killed in an accident on the construction site several years ago. Bishop's large, heavy , wooden placards crammed with hand-painted grievances, warnings, boasts, and narratives guide the visitor away from the roadside along a path leading up to the breathtakingly huge stone structure. The border between a federal public space and an artist's vision of public space is inscribed upon the landscape, in large part by and through these signs. Jim Bishop insists that the 20-year battle was won "through the power of the public" and he has parked the once-unlawful mailbox by the road once more. There it remains as a symbol of endurance and, more specifically, an indication of his stubborn commitment to working alone, without a crew, heavy equipment, or corporate support. Bishop's project has also managed to do without blueprints, buiJding permits, inspectors, lawyers, loans, grants, and public utilities. Bishop has a plan in place, should cutbacks or changes in administrative policy again threaten his lifeline to public viewership. He will "force the recognition by performing stunts-like a huge nylon banner across the highway, forest to forest, an anti-world government slogan the size of an auto." He promises hi s state representatives that this could be accomplished in a matter of months and be ready for display across Highway 165 by, say, this year's Memorial Day weekend. Unlike Christo's wrappings at Rifle, Colorado in the early '70s, Bishop adds, "this will not blow away." Carolyn Erler is an artist and writer living in Minneapolis. Her essays have appeared in Artpaper, Fiberarts, and Iris: A Journal

About Women. PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 9

HeneingiDjiriyai (Learn AWar Cry)

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he multifaceted art of Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds poignantly fuses political conviction and personal reflection. As a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation of Oklahoma, Heap of Birds has experienced a legacy of exploitation and domination . As a Native American artist engaged in the world of postmodern art, he constantly balances the politics of representation and authentic expression. Working in the juncture of what is real and what is imposed, Heap of Birds seeks to challenge the sociopolitical codes that define the Native American identity, while exploring the self as the site, and means, for cultural renewal. For Heap of Birds, the conflict between mainstream and indigenous culture is encoded in the rhetoric and semantics of social discourse. Thus the artist's true medium is language (whether linguistic or pictorial), which he scripts, edits, and dissects to reveal the transparency of words and images that speak to oppress. Likewise, he makes visible the power of language as a potent political tool: "The survival of our people is based upon our use of expressive forms of modem communication ... As a native artist, these insurgent messages delivered through art must present the fact that Native Americans are decidedly different from dominant white culture."l Heap of Birds works within four seemingly disparate modes of artistic production-public art, abstract painting, photographic word prints, and text-based drawi ngs or "wall lyrics," which together form the whole of his identity. Through public works, such as the series Native Hosts (1988) or Building Minnesota (1990) the artist reclaims the history and territories of Native peoples by placing public signage on important sites of tribal communities, memorializing those who have fought and died. These works often appropriate the technology of mass communication (traffic signs and computerized billboards), subverting the authority inherent in their commercial forms . Working publicly and interculturally has taken Heap of Birds to a number of rich and varied sites, including British Columbia, Ireland, Mexico, Peru , and Switzerland. His travels to Australia, where he recently had a one-person exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, have resulted in a collaborative project with Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley. Although Foley currently lives and works in Sydney, she is a member of the Badtjala tribe of Fraser I land, Australia. Foley 's people, like Heap of Birds', have experienced a hi story of subjugation as a result of imperialist interests conquering indigenous peoples and their territories . These artists ' interest in their shared experience has led to Heneing/ Djiriyai (Learn a War Cry), a billboard project created for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, Wisc. The Milwaukee billboard measures 11 feet by 38 feet and is installed on the bookstore's exterior, where it is

10 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

hoped it will remain until the end of the year. Shunning pictorial representation, using only text, this bold declaration is situated on one of the city's busiest strips (an estimated 36,000 cars travel it each day), which serves as a main thoroughfare between the north-south expressway that bisects the city and the University of WisconsinMilwaukee. Heneing/Djiriyai (Learn a War Cly) speaks about colonialism, cultural annihilation, empowerment, and political action from the position of two artists who come from two di stinct communities and geographic locations. The billboard is read as a series of dialogues between the authors, and between the authors and the work's viewers . Heap of Birds: BRITS/SHIPS/STEALIHURTILEARN/SHARE/ COMMONIWEALTH. Foley: MILK-HONEY/OR, YOU HURT ME/SET ON FIRE/ ITCHY/A WAR CRYIBLOODIBRA VE/BLACK. Echoing the cadence of modem communication, their messages are scripted in the sans serif typeface Avant-Garde Bold. Each artist's original language and its English equivalent are painted in colors symbolic oftheir respective homelands: red ochre for Heap of Birds' Tsistsistas text, yellow ochre for Foley ' s words in Eora. Despite their use of localized idioms, these artists speak universal truths in a terse poetics that successfully traverse both the private and public realms. Heap of Birds ' works "display, through words, the ongoing conflict of native life" 2 while reminding us that creative expression can fuel true change. For Heap of Birds, the role of the contemporary artist is to build new paradigms for the signification and representation of culture, where the personal--constructed through images and words and regardless of origin or gender-becomes the means for social acceptance and transformation.

Susan Snodgrass is corresponding editor for Art in America and Dialogue and writes regularly on public art issues. Notes: 1. Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, "Sharp Rocks," from Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists, ed. Brian Wallis (NY: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987), p. 171. 2. Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Land Spirit Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa : National Gallery of Canada, 1992), p. 149. Portions of this article were previously published in an essay written by the authorforTell YourSelf, The Art Gallery ofNew South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Nov. 5-28, 1994.

The St. Paul Cultural Garden

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he disparate, often conflicting factions that comprise the American metropolis suggest opportunities for public sculpture's growing interest in establishing a relationship to community and place. The St. Paul Cultural Garden, dedicated in November 1993, provides a strong example. Literary voice and visual form overlap, producing socio-historical frames of reference, frames that establish the cultural complexity of an urban site largely defined by waves of immigration. Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the naming of the city, the garden serves as a social and historical repository. St. Paul artist Cliff Garten worked closely with a group of artists and writers to design "a public place about Americans struggling to locate and presÂˇerve their cultural heritages as members of an American democracy." By locating the garden on Kellogg Boulevard next to a bridge crossing the Mississippi River, the source of St. Paul's historic settlement, Garten provided the collaborative team with a unifying focus. Poets Roberta Hill-Whiteman, Soyini Guyton, Xeng Sue Yang, Sandra Benitez, David Mura, and John Minczeski were asked to write about their respective struggles for identity, which became metaphorically linked to the nearby river. On completion of the poetry, Garten collaborated with the poets to design six different spaces, each one related visually to the poet's cultural heritage. The idiosyncratic voices of the six poets are consequentlly framed within separate "rooms," as well as by their own syntax. Both voice and room establish a point of reference, a glimpse into a cultural context, by which the viewer may attempt to share meaning. Interlocking granite forms link the disparate voices, and their respective rooms, as does the theme of the river. What emerged is a complex visual and literary dialogue, something Garten calls a "visual rebus." Roberta Hill-Whiteman 's wordls "Where young and oldlDanced in harmonylBefore trade became more valuable than lives" are etched into a granite spiral pointing towards the east and the Native American burial mounds . Soyini Guyton 's room contains a granite circle etched with words suggesting the underlying tragedy of the black experience in America. The circle begillls, "Once I was a mighty river," but concludes with, "and sorrows too deep for even the Mississippi to fathom." Reading Guyton's text, arranged in a circular format, engages the viewer, linking text, image, and reader. The circle is overlapped by granite bearing Sandra Benitez's wotds "The true border is not the river." Garten combined her text with patterned waves, which direct the viewer towards the Mississippi. Thus the voices function dialogically , as each poet's frame focuses on the river.

The social dialogue is enhanced along this southern side, facing the waters. The words of Roberta Hill-Whiteman and Sandra Benitez are directed towards a metal railing and a scenic overlook ofthe river. For the railing, each poet submitted three lines of text, fragments joined together to form a single poem. The voices of the six poets are cut into the metal and are augmented with motifs derived from their respective cultures. As negative spaces, the words are framed by the patterns in the railing, which also frame the river in the words. Each voice and motif remains distincti ve; I inked, they converse wi th one another, and are rendered meaningful because the fragments share a physical and thematic context. The collaborative efforts of the St. Paul Cultural Garden result in a rich imbrication of textual and visual imagery, by forming frames and links to the site's cultural heritage. Just as the rooms provide an individual viewing context for each poet's assessment of American history , the individual voices of the poets provide frames by which the viewer may consider the legacy of another culture.

Keli Rylance is an instructor in art history at Hamline University in St. Paul. Editor's Note: The book The St. Paul Cultural Garden will be published in the summer of 1995, with essays by Mary Jane Jacob, Lance Neckar and David Mura (32 pages, with full color photographs). For information write: P.O. Box41, Hamline University, St. Paul, MN 55104. PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 11

~iIInf About ~iIInf in Art An Interview With Donald Kuspit b

hoI

D r a k e

Editor's note: Donald Kuspit, author, art critic, and educator, is chairman of the art department at SUNY-Stony Brook. Nicholas Drake interviewed him on the subject of text in contemporary art. Nicholas Drake: Let's start out by getting your overall views on public art, before we approach the issues specific to textÂˇoriented art. Donald Kuspit: I've been thinking about the whole public art issue and it'sframedforme by two works, both inNew York. One no longer exists; the other is still here. Thefirst is the George Segal piece in the Port Authority building on 42nd Street. It' s a wonderful piece. It 's set up right where you buy tickets. And it shows three figures going through a door, typical of one you might go through to catch a bus. They're melancholy white figures. The Segal piece is pelfectly sited. It 's one of the most pelfect public works I know. It 's got a lot of subtlety, a lot of reference to the situation. It's psychologically significant -catching the mood of people, in the curious isolation one is in within a crowdgoingfora bus. It ties up with all kinds of "High Art " ideas about representation of the figure and the avant-garde in modern art. The othe r piece is the Ti I ted Arc by Richard Serra. The Serra is a wondelful work, but totally inappropriate to its site. It 's hostile, basically-maybe even indifferent to human beings who happen to use the square that it was in. It was a mistake to put it there. I think that most people relate to public art on the move. They don't stop and contemplate it as they would in a museum situation. In a public space, people are in passage and this art catches their attention and can have a very important unconscious effect. It can reach them. The Serra intrudes itself. It 's obtrusive, irrelevant, and indifferent to the people using the square. All ofthefuss about it could have been avoided if the people who commissioned it in thefirst place realized that it made absolutely no sense to the human environment. Drake: In terms of our discussion about text in public art, maybe you could begin with the idea of the growth of written text within art and the public art medium. I think an interesting way to approach that is through the feeling of disenfranchi sement of the general public and their scraw ling on walls and graffiti . Kuspit: There is not only a disenfranchisement of the general public. In a curious way there is disenfranchisement of the artist, as well. The lack of any commonly held system of beliefs means that everybody starts giving his or her message. One of the most interesting phenomena of modernity is the fac t that all kinds of artists-all kinds of groups of artists and movements-make these statements to justify themselves. Then you have a kind ofpublic itself making itselfmanifestfrom its side through graffiti, by all kinds of collective text, which are put within the public space. In a sense, the art enters into this double situation of text-that is, the artist's self-justifying text and the public 's ideafor wanting to mark public space with a kind of" Kilroy was here" [message}, but making that "hereness" very significant. [It's} breaking out of the anonymity and yet it becomes part of the anonymity, while reaching for some kind of permanence, some kind of endurance. It 's velY poignant. I remember seeing graffitifrom the 19th century. We have graffiti 12 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

going back to antiquity, as well. The graffiti of the 19th century was much like it is today: names and dates. It was rather neat actually, in contrast to some of the scrawl youfind today. Part of that was about the longing for eternity, but I think that today with the so-called graffiti artists-spray-can people-it's also something to go against the barren functional space that has generally come to dominate the public space-you know, those big blank walls that are dead ends. I don 't Âˇknow if they're really dead ends, since no roads actually lead to them. They'rejust there in a dumb way. And these peoplefill it up. They in some way personalize it. Drake: Robert Indiana was an earl y user of text in his work, wasn't he? Kuspit: Yes, he was riding in a car-I think-through the West somewhere and he saw a sign on some diner that said EAT. He said that this was a very existential term for him. The important point is that we do live in a world ofsigns all over the place. A lot ofthese signs are verbal signs. We tend to take them casually. But they are startling and Indiana was aware of that. Drake: This, then, seems to have carried over into billboard art, hasn' t it? Kuspit: Yes, there's a group of eight artists in Regina, Saskatchewan [Canada}, called the Regina Billboard Artists, and that's all they work on, if I understand correctly. The point is, why not use this public space, ifyou can afford to use it? It 's directly accessible and it breaks down the barriers. Above all, it gets out of the gallery. Another example of this is the New York Public Library's plans to install in the streets around 40th Street some 150 tablets of text from all kinds of people,from Shakespeare to Beckett and so on. It' s an interesting idea and it's an effort to break that kind of barrenness, and change the character of public space in the world we inhabit. Drake: There is irony in this-that as our society becomes more image-oriented, because of influences like television, at the same time there seems to be this drive to express in public and private spaces the use of the text as an art image. Kuspit: That's correct, butalsoasakindofmessage, I would saynot just as news or entertainment, or "infotainment, " but something else in a kind ofmental space. It 's a very important phenomenon, and what 's interesting about it is that it 's not so institutionalized. Drake: Do you see this process-bursting out into the public with words and images to get a message across-as more of an avant-garde process or neo-avant-garde (the desire to be famous or spectacular) process? Kuspit: One of my interpretations of this is the attempt to solve an old, old problem, that is, rapprochement between the artist and the general public, which has been very, very hard to do in the situation where there is just nothing holding anybody together. There 's no sense of belonging, or, as I like to say, a sense of community-some sense that it's not utterly strange out there, it's not completely threatening, making the world a little hospitable. It' s an interesting psycho-social statement as I see it. I'd like to see more artists really trying it, actually trying to work for particular spaces, not just throwing out any old message. Drake: Are there any specific text artists you want to discuss? Kuspit: I was at one time interested in the usual suspects, [Barbara} Kruger and [Jenny} Holzer. I now feel that Holzer's messages have become banal, and the more banal they become the more she

piles them on. I think that they are unempathic and there is a dimension of insult to them. I have vivid recollections ofthese benches that she did in Muenster, Germany, a few years ago, when the whole town had a lot of sculptural sites in it. She did this around the war memorial for the German dead of the First World War, and it was a nasty attack on soldiers. It was totally inappropriate; it's too polemical, a lot of this stuff It's not subtle enough. Itjust hammers people. So I've come to be a little jaundiced about it. Also it has become part of the general shriek that surrounds us all, a kind of verbalfiller that comes through the television, the airwaves, the billboards-our whole society isfull of verbal crap in some way. None of it is sorted out. It just joins the saturation, rather than trying to create a separate zone of reflection. Drake: Now that you brought up the media, or, more specifically, cyberspace, how do you perceive this new public space? Kuspit: Well, it's the space that the majority of people think they can comfortably inhabit, which is their fantasy, I think. The problem with cyberspace is that reality is going to catch up. There is a reality out there. It chooses you, you don't necessarily choose it. It's all the difference between piloting a plane in a simulated cockpit and actually flying a plane. You make a mistake in cyberspace ... well, it doesn't matter so much. You have these very violent video games in cyberspace. In real life, it's not a game. You're killing human beings. The mentality for one will carry over. I've read interviews with gang members when they kill somebody and they say, "Well, it'sjust like television, man. Bang, bang and they're dead." There is no sense that a human life is being taken, no conscience. It would be extremely interesting to see really "serious" artists make worksfor the Internet, really enter cyberspace and create a little cognitive and sensuous dissonance, with their visual, verbal text. I'd like to see that. Drake: As a wordsmith yourself, in your role as a critic, how do you consider text as a visual art form? What are your views about writing about writing? Kuspit: I'll tell you something: Wordsforme are not just concepts. They're sensuous. They're like fingertips. They have touch. They haye visual quality. They have a cabalistic dimension to them-the very shape ofa word and ofthe letters. Forme there 's a kind oftension always between making as conspicuous public sense as I possibly can, without losing any kind of intellectual ideation, or cognitive subtlety. Words are not completely verbal to me. They're visual.

They're physical. They're visceral. I mean this literally. It's a very curious sense I have ofthis. There is always the pressure to turn words into conceptual entities. I fly to resist that as much as possible without losing conceptual sense, because one does want to communicate and try to reach that imaginary audience out there.

Nicholas Drake is a critic and artist working in Charleston, SC. He can be reached on-line at 73742.566@compuserve.com

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 13

LAN

Ann

Novak

Editor's note: Su-Chen Hung is a conceptual artist who movedfrom Taiwan to San Francisco. Anna Novakov talked with her about her work and its relationship to language and culture. Anna Novakov: Often language is not just a practical means of communication, but infact aframeworkfor human identity and a way ofunderstanding the world. In your most recent public project, which will be installed at the International Terminal of the San Francisco Airport, you address some of the intersections between language, culture, and the division between public and private space. Su-Chen Hung: I am focusing on the concept of transition, of the airport serving as a gateway between East and West. In addition, I address the concept of evolutionary change, in which transition is "phrased" in a very slow, gradual manner, to avoid shock to travelers and create a subtle sense of arrival. [The goal is] avoidance of high impact, great speed, and the MTV sensibility. In 1976, when I first landed in San Francisco, I was very frightened. I came as an immigrant and had to find a way for myself in this new space. I had already learned some English in school. When I saw that at the terminal they had written "welcome" in Chinese, I immediately felt warm; my mother tongue was in this new place. That's why I want to include in my new project as many languages as I can. I want the travelers to feel that they are really welcome. As an immigrant from Taiwan, I feel that my work is directly related to my personal '. experience. I hope that extends from my personal experience to a more universal immigrant experience. Novakov: I find the intersection between different cultures and the intersection between public and private space a very compelling issue in your work. Hung: As a student, I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, while at the same time I was living in a very traditional family. [was always on the borderline, trying to balance myself. These two extremes became a daily conflict for me. Novakov: Your work utilizes a number of recurring metaphors, the most notable being the use of glass, and in particular the glass of storefronts or kiosks, traditionally arenas of commercial activity. Hung: In 1985, I was invited by Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco to do a project on the outside of a storefront. Every night, between 7 p.m. and 2 a.m., I projected hair and water on the building across the street while I hid inside the storefront. It was fascinating to me that the passersby were not expecting to see art and yet in most

This Page: Two of the 25 kiosk installations of immigrants, here Sudanese and Mexican, from Silent Voice: I Have Something to Say, by Su-Chen Hung and Gigi Janchang (photos: Su-Chen Hung)

cases accepted the projections in a very spontaneous and natural way. Novakov: You also used the glass/storefront metaphorina video and peiformance installation [called] Sweet Red #2 at the New Museum in New York. Hung: I started off as a photographer. I found the reflections of the water and the glass of the lens itself very interesting. Then I started using the glass directly, through the video medium and the glass on the television monitors. In Sweet Red #2 I pressed my lips against the glass. The piece started with a performance on opening night. I was standing behind the glass, and I covered the window with wet rice paper. Between the paper and the glass I placed a piece of red string. I was there pressing my mouth against the glass while sitting inside the storefront eating the string. People viewed the performance from the sidewalk outside. When the Sweet Red #2 tape was played back, you really got the presence of the glass. So at the New Museum windows, you have the storefront with the glass, and then the glass on the monitors, linking everything together. Novakov: Glass also plays a prominent role in the Market Street project, Silent Voice: I Have Something to Say. In order to give some background information to the reader, let me say that Silent Voice was a collaborative project between you and Gigi Janchang. It involved 25 kiosks along Market Street in San Francisco. This 1993 installation consisted of life-size photographs of immigrants, pressed up against a sheet of glass, set against a street background. They all wear black Tshirts with the words "I have something to say" written in their native language. In the lower right-hand corner they speak about their dual cultural identity. Below that are their names, ages, birth nations, and other immigration information. It seems particularly important that this project was set on Market Street. If you look at the geography of San Francisco, Market Street is really a central thoroughfare, an artery that bisects as well as connects the city.

.An Interview With Su-Chen Hung

Anna Novakov writes about art in public places for national and international publications. She is an assistant professor of art history, theory, and art criticism at the San Francisco Art Institute.

I . ~_

Artists Writing in Public ... n 1993 Public Art Review previewed segments of Suzanne Lacy's Mapping the Terrain, New Genre Public Art. With its recent publication by Bay Press, PAR is pleased to excerpt portions of the book's extensive compendium of artists' works, compiled by Susan Leibovitz Steinman. For this issue, we have selected artists whose work relies heavily on language or text. GLORIA BORNSTEIN Born in New York City, Gloria Bornstein spent the '70s in San Diego, first studying art (she was impressed by the work at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles), later switching to psychology. In 1980 she settled in Seattle, where she turned down a mental health job and instead explored community-driven art as a healing medium. She began by working with homeless seniors of Seattle's Cascade community who had been displaced by arson , eviction, and gentrification. The resulting performance, Soupkitchenwork ' (1980), Brought homelessness to the Seattle public ' s attention. Bornstein is working with members of the Native American tribes of the Northwest and Alaska on Neototems , an ecological work to be completed in 1995.

Porno-Graphos (1984) This was the third installation in a trilogy that voiced outrage at the "violence of silence" behind the Green River serial murders in Washington-the stilI-unsolved deaths of 40 young female victims , mostly teenage runaways from abusi ve homes, stereotyped as prostitutes by the press and largely ignored by the police. Bornstein developed a relationship with representatives from COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) , the national organization to protect the rights of sex workers . Through a dialogue about these rights, pornography, and violence, she created a voluminous text that filled streetfront window installations at New York City ' s Printed Matter and Seattle' s 911 Media Arts Center. "Pornographos" is Greek for "the writing and advertising of prostitutes" ; in the center of her text, Bornstein installed a neon sign reading, "PORNO-GRAPHOS IS THE WRITING OF HARLOTS ." COYOTE's National Task Force on Prostitution presented this text of rights to the Meese Commission Hearings on Pornography in 1986. [photo: Nancy Linn]

JOHNFEKNER Called "caption writer to the urban environment, adman for the opposition" by Lucy Lippard, street artist John Fekner has been involved in direct art interventions within New York City"s decaying urban environment since the mid- ' 70s. His best-known guerrilla artworks are large, stenciled, politically critical, acerbiic captions applied directly to tenement walls, abandoned automobiles, and blighted urban infrastructures. Although his basic intent is to address the local community, he first realized the stencils could have a wider impact when the word " Decay ," painted on the crumbling Williamsburg and Queensborough bridges, drew mass media and city government attention. Newspapers widened the response with articles commenting on the sad condition of New York's infrastructure. Fekner's use of words on walls comes out of his love of poetry.

He is interested in identifying situations that could be transformed or that already embody a form of local historical memory about a particular site.

Charlotte Street Stencils (1980) Fekner spray-stenciled words onto the walls of gutted, ruined buildings in five different locations on Charlotte Street in the South Bronx. The stencils read "Broken Treaties," "Lost Hope," "Save our Schools ," "Decay," "Falsas Promesas," and "False Promises." People from the community were involved informally on an impromptu basis as they offered their opinions and street-side art direction. Some also helped Fekner spray-paint the graffiti late at night. The work took place during the People's Convention in the summer of 1980, a national gathering of people from different backgrounds (including the local Latino and African-American communities) planned to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. Fekner's work drew media attention and led to a South Bronx visit by then presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan, who was looking for a photo opportunity. Claiming he would fix the buildings, Reagan was photographed standing in front of Fekner's "Falsas Promesas" sign. The now-famous image appeared on television, and in The New York Times. [photo: the artist]

JENNY HOLZER Born and educated in Ohio, Jenny Holzer found her public art voice in the laconic Standard American English of the "heartland"-the vernacular of radio and television broadcasts. For her earliest text art (1977), printed on flyers that were stuck to walls, phone booths, and bus stops, she used a dialect that was genderless, impersonal, seemingly honest, deceptively simple, humorous, often cruel , painfully confrontational, and "ultimately popUlist." Since her 1986 Survival series, her language has become more personal, complex, and situational. In 1980 she joined Colab (Collaborative Projects), an alternative artists ' group dedicated to placing art (often anonymously) in non-traditional public settings. Invited by the Public Art Fund to display her Truisms on the Spectacolor board of Times Square as a part of their Messages to the Public program, she discovered her signature medium , the electronic message board. Since then, Holzer's texts have flashed from LED signs in San Franci sco's Candlestick Park, Las Vegas ' s gambling strip, and taxi stands in Italy. Although her work is exhibited in museums, Holzer maintains a strong allegiance to public art, as she creates concurrent texts on public LED boards, billboards, buses, television commercials, T-shirts, posters, and hats. PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 15

Truisms (1977-79) In 1976, Holzer, then a student in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, synthesized and restructured weighty philosophies from a monumental reading list into a sequence: of one-line aphorisms. Thi s first public artwork consisted of anonymous text, a provocative list of35 one-line adages printed as commercial flyers and posted on building walls and fences around Manhattan. The Truisms were, in fact, contradictory. They included: "ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE ... ACTION CAUSES MORE TROUBLE THAN THOUGHT ... AN ELITE IS lNEVITABLE ... ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL .. .EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL. . .ENJOY YOURSELF BECAUSE YOU CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING ANYWAY ... FATHERS OFTEN USE TOO MUCH FORCE ... OFTEN YOU SHOULD ACT LIKE YOU ARE SEXLESS ... MONEYCREATESTASTE ... PRIVATEPROPERTY CREA TED CRIME ... " The public often responded by scratching out lines they disagreed with or positively emphasizing favorites, and writing their own opinions alongside Holzer' s. A subsequent installation of Truisms was removed, after initial approval , from the Marine Midland Bank in New York City when an employee noticed the line "IT'S NOT GOOD TO LIVE ON CREDIT." The Truisms have taken on a life of their own as they continue to be published and sold commercially on inexpensive posters, T-shirts, and baseball caps. [photo, 1982: Stefan T. Edlis]

ALFREDO JAAR Born in Santiago, Chile, photo-installation artist Alfredo Jaar left a stifling political situation to move to New York City in 1982. His artwork has continuously dealt with "the issue of the widening gap between the so-called Third World and the industrialized world." An inveterate traveler, he journeys around the world, taking his photographs in non-Western countries, "to have personal contact with the people and issues that I am dealing with. I go myself to take the photographs of children with chemical burns, vomiting blood because we have contaminated their environment." In his installations he employs photographs, light boxes, and mirrors to create uncomfortable, complex situations in which the viewers ' awareness of their own complicity is an important component. His intent is to properly contextualize his photographs, so that they become a call to action. In Rushes (1986), Jaar filled the entire advertising space of New York City' s Spring Street subway station with eighty enormous photographs of Brazilian Indians mining for gold under dehumanizing conditions, and alongside posted the going prices for gold on the world market. ;,Es Usted Feliz? (Are You Happy?), 1980 For this work, Jaar leased three billboards, one in central Santiago, one on the road to the international airport, and one next to a freeway interchange, and printed the question "l,Es Usted Feliz? (Are You Happy?)" He also posted the question on newspaper stands, under public clocks, and at other pedestrian locai 1 , tions. Enlarging on a question that is casually asked in daily salutations, Jaar provoked a public dialogue about Chileans ' most private thoughts . The project included a I,OOO-hourevent (eight hours a day for 125 days) at the Museo de Bellas Artes, in which Jaar taped people ' s answers to the question . Some answers were illy; others were political, social, or personal. Some people held a hand or newspaper over the camera lens while they talked so no one could identify them. [photo: the artist] '

16 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

BARBARA KRUGER Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger alters commercial advertising imagery, censoring portions of the original with broad strips of sloganistic text that is aggressive, sardonic, questioning, and disquieting, then places the new work in overtly commercial sitesbillboards, T-shirts, posters, matchbooks, museums, and art galleries. In the' 70s Kruger worked as an art director for Conde N ast women's magazines. "I learned that you designed a page for someone to look at. .. in a relatively short time; it was important to get people's attention. If you didn ' t you were fired." Kruger employs, alters, and critiques this methodology in her own work. She uses "I" and " You" in her text to imply the two sides of a struggle for survival : the "I" is abused, exploited, and angry, while the " You" holds the power, the money, the tools of abuse. Untitled (Questions), 1989-90 In 1989 the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art commissioned Kruger to create an outdoor wall mural. The installation of her original design was delayed 18 months, while Kruger conferred with the Little Tokyo community. Sited on a windowless wall nearly three stories high and more than two-thirds the length of a football field, the original proposal included the Pledge of Allegiance and other texts, framing the image of the American flag. It was the flag that caused painful memories: The wall faces the embarkation point from which thousands of J apaneseAmericans were sent to relocation camps during World War II; their loyalty in question, they had to recite the pledge daily. Approximating the American flag, the upper left corner of the image is a blue rectangle with white letters that read: "MOCA at the Temporary Contemporary." The rest is a red field with four long "stripes" of white-lettered text asking nine questions: "WHO IS BEYOND THE LA W? WHO IS BOUGHT AND SOLD? WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO DOES TIME? WHO FOLLOWS ORDERS ? WHO SALUTES THE LONGEST? WHO PRAYS THE LOUDEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST?" A second "flag" painted in 1991 on the Manhattan street-front door of the Mary Boone Gallery was so popular with passersby that the gallery maintained it long after Kruger's show closed. [photo: Gene Ogami , MOCA]

DANIEL J. MARTINEZ Born and based in Los Angeles, conceptual artist Daniel J. Martinez uses photography, video, computer technology , telecommunications, and text in his large-scale site-specific installations, performances, and public art projects. From his beginnings as a photographer, sculptor, and installation artist, Martinez has developed a crossmedia vocabulary in public works and large-scale performances. His stated aim is to "strategically challenge city structures and mediums that mediate our everyday perception of the world ... through aesthetic-critical interruptions, infiltrations, and appropriations that question the symbolic, psychopolitical, and economic operations of the city." His confrontational work, often using the street as his forum, ~ has drawn intense public debate. :::J In 1991 he installed Nine Ways to ~ Improve the Quality of Your Life, :I a series of street banners hung in the well-to-do shopping area of downtown Seattle. In developing . the work, Martinez interviewed Seattle' s " haves" and "havenots." One side of each banner

asked a "have" question, such as "DO YOU HAVE A BEACH HOUSE OR A MOUNTAIN I lOUSE?" while the reverse, white with black text (with a generic imageofa house and tree), asked "DO YOU HA VE A PLACE TO LIVE?" The benign-looking yet inflammatory work instigated a Seattle Times front-page story, editorial columns, and an unprecedented barrage ofletters to the editor debating both the art and its messages. [photo: courtesy Seattle Arts Commission]

and often felt excluded because of his mixed Mexican-American and Chinese-Mexican cultural background. The two began working together in the mid-'80s as members of the Border Art Workshop/ Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BA WIT AF), which produced dynamic, community-interactive installations and performances. In 1990 both left BAWIT AF to concentrate on independent work while continuing to collaborate with each other...

MARTHA ROSLER

Entrance Is Not Acceptance, 1991, 1992, 1993 A collaborative multimedia installation by Sanchez and Lou, Entrance Is Not Acceptance originated in 1991 at the third biennial exhibition of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, near Los Angeles, and traveled to the 1992 biennial exhibition in Istanbul , Turkey, and in 1993 to the Civic Cornerhouse Gallery in Manchester, England. A recurring strategy in their collaborative work is to construct disorienting spaces in which the audience gains empathy for the physical and mental displacement experienced by immigrants. In this piece-a metaphor for the exclusion and confusion of border politics-a phalanx of battered, closed doors revealed, when opened by participating visitors, a maze of written text, slide projections of newspaper articles, and videotaped interviews. Some doors led to blind alleys, others to claustrophobic cells lined with the text of interviews with undocumented workers. Several doors opened onto a black wall with a viewing slit that revealed three sets of videotaped interviews. Sanchez and Lou taped these interviews themselves at U.S.-Mexican border settings. In one, undocumented migrants tell personal experiences. In another, the artists interview participants of Light Up the Border, a 1989-91 series of anti-immigrant vigilante-like events in which people aimed their car headlights toward Mexico to thwart border crossings. In the third video, officials, educators, and theorists discuss "marginality, institutional racism, internalized racism, cultural diplomacy and the future for the 'Multi-Cultural Reality.'" [photo: SanchezILou]

The prol ific career of New York-based acti vist -feminist artist Martha Rosier spans more than 20 years of critical writing, photography, performances, and installations. Based in Southern California during the '70s, Rosier worked within the multiple contexts of the Woman's Building in Los Angeles with its feminist activist theory, Marxist art theorists, and practitioners, and performance explorers of the boundary between art and life. Her work continues to reveal the complicated influences of this rich heritage, ranging from lifelike performances to photography to theoretical writings. As such, her work addresses various audiences , from the critically sophisticated art world (through writing and gallery installations) to people in the street (through performances, postcards, and public installations). Her critical writings argue for a reassessment of the voyeuristic, elitist nature of documentary photography and video. Her art consistently addresses economics and consumerism within and outside the art world and analyzes how women and minorities figure into the political environment of capitalism. [Housing is a Human Right, 1989, photo: Oren Slor]

Tijuana Maid Postcards, 1975 [not pictured] Tijuana Maid is the third in a series of serial postcard "novels" RosIer produced. She mailed one installment of these first-person narratives each week for 12 to 15 weeks, depending on the length of the particular "novel." Each told the story of a woman and her relationship to food production and consumption. The works went to a varied list of community members, art world figures, and friends. Tijuana Maid, in Spanish and English, was based on discussions with undocumented women from Mexico working as maids in the San Diego area. Tijuana Maid's composite character describes the economic and personal difficulties these women experience. The text, prepared with Mexican friends living in the United States, includes phrases drawn from the manual Home Maid Spanish, sold in local supermarkets. Tijuana Maid and the two preceding postcard novels, A Budding Gourmet and McTowers Maid, portraying the personal effects of capitalism on workers in the food and home care industries, have been collected in a small book, Service: A Trilogy on Colonization.

ROBERT SANCHEZ AND RICHARD A. LOU Well-respected for their individually produced, socially critical art, Chicano conceptual artists Robert Sanchez and Richard A. Lou also work collaboratively as a conscious political strategy to democratize the art process and underscore the importance of community. Based in San Diego, they share common territory, the U.S.-Mexican border zone, with its politics of fear and exclusion, and corrosive effect on family and community life. Employing the conceptual language of a third culture, a "border people," their work strives to deconstruct inflammatory media-derived misinformation about immigrants and to produce empathy and respect for the cultures of "others" within our own borders. Both say that their work also stems from childhood estrangement from a community mainstream. Born in Texas and educated in the East, Sanchez, whose father was in the Navy, moved frequently as a child. Lou was born and raised in San Diego-Tijuana neighborhoods

KATE ERICSON AND MEL ZIEGLER Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler have been working together since they met in art school. Their public-directed projects actively engage people outside the art world, sometimes reaching them in their own homes. Ericson and Ziegler draw lines down streets, paint houses, and move stones to mark physical arenas of inclusion and exclusion. They have deconstructed the ideas underlying house construction by writing relevant quotes on wood that was then sold to build an average home. In Durham, NC, in Loaded Text (1989), they provided full public disclosure of the city's revitalization plan by writing the complete text on a ISO-foot length of damaged downtown sidewalk. They then had the sidewalk broken up, repaired, and the concrete recycled as riprap in a nearby eroding streambed. For Chicago's Harold Washington Library Center, they created an elaborate word game, Wall of Words (1990), that is installed in the building's upper windows and changes with the active participation of librarians and community residents. [photo: Wendy Walsh]

[Editor's Note: Thanks to Bay Press for granting permission to reprint the above edited excerpts. Photos have been substituted by PARfor the Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler, Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, and Daniel 1. Martinez entries.} PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 17

... And Other Words ofWisdolTI Compiled

lack

Becker

The list of artists using words and text in public continues to grow. Here is a sampling of other artists making their voices heard.

PUBLl C EIII WORKS

Larry and Kelly Sultan they appear was determined by their frequency of norrunation (the name mentioned most often appears at the top). The site for the 72-foot mural was made available by the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation, and was painted by BillBoards Inc. of Hammond, IN. (photo: Michael Tropea)

David Schafer

Beliz Brother and Mark Calderon Garfield Community Center (Seattle, 1994) Commissioned by the Seattle Arts Commission 's Public Art Program, Brother and Calderon, both of Seattle, met with the Garfield community at half a dozen evening meetings to hear concerns and ideas and show proposals for community response. The end result features a cast aluminum grillemade from recycled cans donated by the community-based on Kuba (Zairian) textiles ; the wooden form used to cast the grille was carved by artisans in Bali, Indonesia. Quotations and proverbs made of cast alurrunum letters (also from recycled cans) are embedded in the stair risers. Among the phrases, collected from neighbors of the community center, are "TECHNOLOGY DOES NOT TEACH REVERENCE" and "IT TAKES A VILLAGETORAISEACHll.-D." (photo: Mark Calderon)

Pastoral Mirage (Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY, 1993) Schafer's multi-site installation featured 14 temporary signs dotted throughout Prospect Parlk, sponsored by Prospect Park Alliance's Visual Arts Program. Sign number 12, "(LANDMARK)," was elevated 17 feet high and made of painted alurrunum with vinyllette:rs. The text reads: "As to the appreÂˇhension, sometimes expressed, that the park is to be everywhere disturbed, as foreign parks are, with artificial objects, such as monuments, statues, temples, kiosks, pagodas, obelisks, fountains , vases, terraces, stiff avenues, and trim parterres, there is nothing of the kind to be found upon all this ground, and except the indication of a site for a simple block of stone, three or four feet high, as an historical landmark and this in a position where it could not be observed from any of the drives of leading walks. There is not a single construction or artificial object upon all this ground which is designed to attract the eye or arrest attention." (photo: the artist, courtesy George Melrod)

Have You Seen Me ? (San Rafael , CA, 1994) This series of paper shopping bags was sponsored by Public Art Works and featured youths telling their own stories. 12-year old Charisma, a fifth-grader at Bahia Vista Elementary School, for example, tells of her mother overcorrung drug addiction, violence in her neighborhood, and living in a bi-lingual family. Charisma writes: "I can remember my mom had this pipe thing that she would put into the fire . She ' d tell me ' don ' t look,' but I was looking. I knew everything." The Sultans' clever use of grocery bags to reach audiences where they live met with controversy, outrage, and, of course, media attention. (artwork: courtesy Public Art Works)

Adam Brooks Freedom Wall (Chicago, 1994) Brooks ' collaborative project consists of names of people who represent the idea of freedom in all its potential interpretations. An initial list of names was collected via national mailings (to teachers, writers, artists, commentators, politicians, civic and reli gious leaders, and others), through e-mail networki ng, and by setti ng up opinion-gathering stations for on-the-spot subrrussions. The 70 names that occurred most often were selected for inclusion; the order in which

18 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

Karen Atkinson For the Time Being (1994-95) Over 20 parking meters in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, and Pasadena were altered so that when someone feeds a meter, a recorded tape plays, shutting off when the meter expires. Artists and writers with HIV / AIDS and their friends and farrulies were comrrussioned to write the

texts for the tapes, with a number of the messages being spoken in Spanish and English. ÂˇFollowing the initial three months of the project, new venues are being sought with the tapes rotated from site to site. Under the title on the sign attached to each pole reads: "Let no voices be silenced. Please feed the meter." For more information, contact the artist at: 1629 18th St., #3 , Santa Monica, CA 90404-3807; (310) 828-0620. (photo: the artist)

Indira Johnson ness to Violence event. This collaborative Our Own Vision (Bombay, India, 1993) public performance series invites individuals Chicago artistJ ohnson transformed a com- to help tally the number of women being muter train in Bombay into a dramatic ve- beaten and sign their names as "witnesses" to hicle for the dissemination of information this violence. Markey's project, in which about leprosy, the disease and its curability. men update the number every 15 seconds and Working with leprosy rehabilitation organi- women survivors of violence (or affected zations, Johnson selected a group of lower- family members) sign their names, gives a caste children whose families have been face to the women who have survived battertouched by leprosy. Assisted by Western ing and demands a dedication of both men Railway as part of "Anti-Leprosy Week," the and women to end the violence. Markey, of project reached over 20,000 people daily. A Ashfield, MA, will tour with the project to documentary booklet has been published, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA (April recording the impact of the project. For more 26), Hampden County Correctional Center, information contact: Esther Saks Fine Art Ludlow, MA (April 27); WMCAC, SpringLtd., PO Box 14169, Chicago, IL 60614; field , MA (April 28); Greenfield, MA (flrst week of May); Minneapolis, MN (Aug. 26); (312) 751-0911. (photo: Neela Kapadia) City Hall Courtyard, Philadelphia (Sept. 20); and the University of Texas, Austin (Oct. 8), Robert Markey Witness to Violence , various locations, 1995 among other sites. For more information, On February 14th, Massachusetts Lt. Gov- contact: the Artists Foundation (617) 859ernor A. Paul Celluci joined the hundreds of 3810. (Above: Lt. GovernorCellucci changes men and women demanding an end to do- numbers while artist Markey looks on; photo: mestic violence by participating in the Wit- Toru Nakanishi)

Kathryn Nobbe Pillsbury House Mural (Minneapolis, 1994) Created with neighborhood groups and individuals, St. Paul artist Kathryn Nobbe's mural utilizes a new 3M system called Scotchprint which the artist used to scan, digitize, and manipulate her original art. The piece was then enlarged to a 62-foot fourcolor electrostatic print. Most of the imagery came from local historic archives, family snapshots, written stories, newspaper photos and children's artwork. Inspired in part by her mother's girlhood stories of growing up in the neighborhood, Nobbe sought to "represent this hub of life." Among the many supporters were Vomela System Graphics, 3M Co., the Minneapolis Community Development Agency, Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association, Social Settlement Foundation, Pillsbury Neighborhood Services, Pillsbury House, and FORECAST's Public Art Affairs program. (bottom photo: Vomela System Graphics; detail of original art, courtesy the artist)

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setting for the Messages to the Public series, comprising works produced on the Spectacolor lightboard, which presented computer-generated messages 24 hours a day. All the messages, except for the Messages to the Public series, were paid advertisements. The series was sponsored by the not-for-profitPublic Art Fund, Inc., through a National Endowment for the ArtslInter-Arts Program grant. Broadcast time and production costs for the series, involving 30-second messages, airing 50 times a day, were supplied by Spectacolor, Inc. These non-commercial messages were used as filler, sandwiched between standard commercial advertising spots. The various artists' projects, presented from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. , addressed a broad range of social and political issues, including the AIDS crisis, the destruction of the ozone layer, and homelessness. The Messages to the Public projects embraced the use of text and visual imagery in public spaces as a way to present the electronically generated symbolic image as visual art. This presentation involved recontextualizing visual information embedded in the domain of advertising to visual information

AlÂŁiM'E1j7lAn~l~W Text, Gender, and Urban Space

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not. in an art world context. The s~lection of texts by the partIcIpatIng artJsts was gUIded by access to an Instrument of mass media in the form of the electronic, computer-generated lightboard. This medium, traditionally employed in advertising, provoked many artists to use these visual texts as vehicles with which to enter the political arena in the form of a kind of national conscience or moral reminder intended for the Times Square audience. They often attempted, through this cathartic process, to uncover a space for themselves within the privileged arena of open discourse, acknowledging that inherent in the socially and politically motivated act is the collaboration between the speaker and listener-or in this case, between the artists, their work, and the viewer. Many of the participating artists not only became social commentators, but also agents provocateurs, whose work is a call to action . One of the more controversial projects in the Messages to the Public series was Jerri Allyn's Lesbian Bride. In a recent interview with the writer, she commented that the lightboard itself was "really a public medium. I have always done performance projects and installations and have been interested in almost everything except galleries. I think the notion of collaborating with the public is more of an advertising medium."1 There are several advertising terms that seem particularly applicable to the recent use of text in public spaces. "Embedding," "scanning," and "nesting" all refer to an advertisement's ability to "penetrate" the marketplace, and in this case to penetrate (both physically and metaphorically) the urban, public space. Projects such as Dennis Adams ' bus shelters, subway posters by Les Levine (We Are Not Afraid), Barbara Kruger (Untitled, bus shelter of construction worker), and sign posts by Hachi vi Edgar Heap ofB irds (Native Hosts) function as markers within the public landscape. They operate, as does advertising, to "turn one's attention" to particular, often personal, ideas and points of view. These visual texts, of course, also bear wi tness to the work of earlier conceptual collective groups such as the Situationists and the ArtLanguage group. In the 1960s, Joseph Kosuth, for example, created photostats of dictionary definitions of the word "water," as a way of creating a link between a work of art and an ordinary language text which, when joined, became a quintessential visual text. In 1980, over a 12-month period, Group Material rented a storefront at 244 E. 13th St., where they presented public installations that challenged passersby on various issues of social and political import. In recent years, the cityscape has become a densely populated and cluttered visual jungle that requires that the viewer be responsive while traveling through its space. Many, if not all , of these visual text displays are intended for the viewer or reader in motion, on foot, on public transportation, or in a car. Many artists, such as Jenny Holzer (Laments), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Untitled: In Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion), and General Idea (AIDS transit posters) utilize advertising guidelines such as "emotional appeals make the most memorable executions" and being "intrusive . .. you must break through the barrier of disinterest." The objective of advertising is to convert "scanners into readers."2 Definitions that shift between the public space of art and the public space of advertising are peculiar and of particular interest. The term "penetration," for example, with its obvious sexual connotations, is a central concept in both fields and a kind of metaphor for the intrusion of ideas , most often male ideas, into the urban arena. Ineffectual ads are referred to as "limited-penetration weapons." The lack of penetration achieved by an ad is often blamed on a misinterpretation of the "reading" ability of women. For example, according to ad man Vance Packard, "a woman's eye is most quickly attracted to items wrapped in red; a man ' s eye to items wrapped in blue. Students in this field have speculated on woman's high vu lnerability to red. One package designer. .. has developed an interesting theory. He has concluded that a majority of women shoppers leave their glasses at home or will never wear glasses in public if they can avoid it, so that a package to be successful must stand out from the blurred confusion."3 Advertisers Karen Claus and R. James Claus also suggest that "red is an exciting, active color. It is used to suggest boldness, quickness, and efficiency. Its warmth is appetite-inspiring. Fast-food chains use red

20 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/ SUMMER 1995

politic~l . are?a,

to connote warmth, fresh food (meat), and action ... Black [on the other hand] can be used effectively in signage to create an impression of low-keyed crispness and sedateness."4 It is not by chance, of course, that Barbara Kruger, whose background is in advertising and graphic design, uses black and red as the basic colors in her work. The gendered, phallocentric terminology and theoretical methodology of advertising she cites through the graphic references in her work recall Marshall McLuhan' s references to "the dominant pattern composed of sex and technology. "5 Kruger's projects perform particularly well when paired directly with "straight" advertising. In Queens, her billboard inquiry into oral fixation, We Don 't NeedAnother Hero was placed next to a Burger King fast-food billboard. In Columbus, OH, her billboard, Your Boody is Your Battleground, mirrored the neighboring billboard for an anti-abortion, pro-life group, reminding us that the "fear of female sexuality is a staple in the national pathology," as David Deitcher wrote in his essay "Taking Control: Art and Activism."6 This mass-media advertising armature becomes the backdrop not only for Kruger' s much-publicized work, but for other contemporary public art made by women. To infiltrate the advertising system, artists such as the Guerrilla Girls, Louise Lawler, and Jenny Holzer have assumed the semblance of the "encoder," sending messages to the urban world in hopes that a receptive "decoder" will receive them. The insertion of the female voice into the male arena signals a shift in the general "nesting" or "cluttering" of signs that miirror understood patterns within the society at large. The break in the dominant message provides a momentary pause that, according to Kruger, [acts to] "bring a female spectator into a male audience ... I always try to be aware of all of the possible signifiers that my works/texts have. From the beginning of my career, as a graphic designer, I was always very

conscious of the spectator. .. art on the Spectacolor lightboard is like television, a loop without narrativity."7 Visual texts presented in the urban setti ng mimic the games found in the surrounding streets and alleys, making art, and in particular public art, into a Duchampian game in which all of the players are elusive and shifting. The viewer or art player comes to realize that "thinking about the artistic object means to recognize that the immediate objectivity of its forms no more exhausts its meaning than the tendentious subjectivity which attributes values to it exhausts its experiential impact."8

Anna Novakov is an assistant professor of art history, theory and criticism at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a regular contributor to Artpress, New Moment, Public Art Review, Sculpture, and other national and international publications. She has written extensively about issues of gender, public art, and contemporary installation art. Notes: 1. Jerri Allyn, interview with the writer, Janua ry 1992. 2. Don Schultz. Essentials of Advertising Strategy. Chicago: Crain Books, 1981, p. 108. 3. Vance Packard. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: David McKay Company, 1957, p. 109. 4. Karen and James Claus. The Sign User's Guide. Cincinnati: ST Publications, 1988, p. 55. 5. Marshall McLuhan. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1951, p. 101. 6. David Deitcher. "Taking Control: Art and Activism"from The Decade Show: Framework for Identity in the 1980s. New York: New

Museum, 1990, p. 181. 7. Barbara Kruger, interview with the writer, JanuG/y 1992. 8. Donald Kuspit. "A Phenomenological Approach to Artistic Intention" in The Critic is Artist: The Intentionality of Art. Ann Arbor: UMl Research Press, 1984, p. 4.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 21

Graffiti Language An Interview With Jim P'rigoff B

Drescher

Editor's note: All quotations are from an interview with Jim Prigoffin December, 1994. Prigojf, a retired business executive, is co-author of Spraycan Art (1987) and one of the foremost documenters of murals and graffiti in its variedforms. 11 spray-can practitioners are known as "writers," regardless of whether they are putting up words or images or some combination of the two. This terminology obviously refers to the origins of the form, but it does not suggest recent extension far beyond mere words. Let's look at the categories and then at some of the issues spray-can /graffiti writing/art raises. Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper note the several types of graffiti in their important book, Subway Art (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984). The most common (and hated) examples are tags, which are initials or names or nomsd'aerosol quickly written on any surface. They are ubiquitous throughout the inner cities of the United States and have spread throughout the world as well. They are written with any implement: magic markers, pencils, pens, paints, scratched into glass, plastic or wood surfaces. The motivation here is to "get up" as often as you can so that you gain prestige by having your mark (placa in Spanish) seen by as many people as possible. Tags are what most people have in mind when they refer to graffiti, but there are other types. When letters are blown up and put up in outline form and then filled in with a different color; they are known as "throwups." These, too, are executed very quickly, but they have some suggestion of style to them. With other types of graffiti, a debate begins. Jim Prigoff, co-author of Spraycan Art with Henry Chalfant (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), argues that all graffitj except for tags and throwups should be understood as spray-can art "to separate it from the street tags and graffiti." Old school, flDf example, originated in New York and refers to the block lettering and earlier types of writing done roughly before the 1980s. New waive refers to more current forms . Wild style denotes letters that are stylized to the point of being indecipherable-except by those in the know (and sometimes only to the writer). The issue is whether at this or any stage graffiti transforms into art, about which more in a moment. The pinnacle of graffiti is the piece, short for masterpiece, which is a representational painting, a graffiti mural if you will, which often incorporates text along with the images. Prigoffs categories are widely inclusive. Wild style, he says, "is a camouflage in essence, but it is simply a style of writing letters. When one writes with colors and better calligraphy, I include that in the whole category of pieces. Pieces can be just letters, they can be abstract, they can be letters with characters, they can be realist [sic] paintings of people done with spray cans." Definition is a central issue here, Prigoff continues, because although graffiti has been around for a long time, "this is a new art form. " He sees the word "graffiti" being used "to denigrate the art work of youth." To escape this prevalent association, Chalfant and

Prigoff selected "Spraycan Art" as the title of their book. Prigoff continues, noting that "society has generally equated graffiti with gangs, violence and a youth culture gone mad . Plus, there was an almost total unwillingness to see the art work that had emerged from the scrawls. In some ways I saw myself giving dignity to their art work through the medium of the slides I was taking and through the exposure of these images in slide shows and lectures that I did." While some attack these works, others study them with motives far beyond casual curiosity. Spraycan Art has sold more than 100,000 copies and continues to sell, Prigoff notes. "Advertising people, graphic designers, anthropologists, sociologists, to name just a few groups, have all been interested in this new form of communication." Of course, how one defines the work has a lot to do with whether one views it as a "new form of communication" or as property defacement. It is, of course, both. Calling it either "graffiti" or "spraycan art" does not alter the fact of its presence virtually everywhere in our cities. Is this a political act? What are the politics of graffiti? Prigoff sees the politics embodied in the act more than in the contents. "Graffiti images are political because they use public space without permission, not always because there is a specific content to them. Spray painting is political just by the very nature of what it is. However, 90-odd percent of the youth who do it would deny that they have any concept of politics or social statement." At the same time, he acknowledges that the form includes many macho and sexist images. Although there are a few especially powerful writers with a social/political conscience, the politics of the content derives primarily from the immediate experiences of the youths, from popular images (and attitudes) and from hip-hop culture. For the most part, spray-can work is highly individual, a fact often suggested by the competitive nature of writing, in "crossing out" (writing your piece over someone else's) and in the pervasive tags. Even if you try to place the act in a (bogus) historical context by noting that "European fine artists traditionally signed their canvases, and now the signature has become the art form itself," the individualistic, even egotistical, nature of the practice is inescapable. But this, too, is political, when seen as a response to a society increasingly "privatized," from which most youth are excluded. Prigoff notes "they are left out and therefore in many ways they are resentful of not having a share of the pie, and so pri vate property for them represents, sometimes, the enemy. And, in a way, by utilizing the walls and the buildings and everything else, they are in some ways recapturing the property, or let' s say they are aesthetically altering it, changing it, and making it more public." Tim Drescher is an author, educator, and muralist. He has served as editor of Community Murals magazine, documented the murals of the Bay Area in his book, San Francisco Murals: Community Creates Its Muse, 1914-1994 (1994), and is a professor at San Francisco State University. PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 23

Suvan

Geer

and

Sandra

Rowe

ACKGROUND: This is a rumination. We are not authorities, we are artists. We live in and near cities dotted with graffiti, some ofit quite stunning to look at for the short time it exists between abatement crews. We began this exploration of graffiti as public art out of curiosity and a sense of confusion. On one hand we could see the refinement and obvious craft of some of the works, but on the other hand were the unsophisticated, ubiquitous scrawls which smacked of threat, gangs, and a sense of violation. Finally, there was the always mystifying, nearly illegible text itself. What we discovered about graffiti wasfascinating-that it is a pa rt ofa worldwide subculture ofhip-hop graffiti, rap music, rave party competition, overnight bombing runs, tags, throwups, and pieces. While we learned much from speaking with the advocates and the opponents ofgraffiti, these comments are still admittedly ignorant of many nuances within the graffiti movement. They are also in many ways specific to hip-hop graffiti, Los Angeles, and California. HipHop Graffiti should not be confused with the tags of gangs, or with other kinds of graffiti such as "latrinalia, " or bathroom graffiti. "HHG is distinct in both form and fun ction. "I Suvan Geer: Ifwe are going to talk about graffiti, we have to begin in a very obvious place: the public space. That' s the realm graffiti operates in and it is the context that makes it a political and confrontational gesture. I think that to get to what graffiti means, both to the producers and the people who see it, we have to remind ourselves that public space is a community 's social space. As cultural critic Amalia Mesa-Bains pointed out at the P.A.R.T.I. conference, "Social space produces social relations," and "social production is an act of property [see review, p. 48]. It is about economic value and even historical meddling." Public space is the always occupied mental and economic territory of the public. How it is structured, what decorates it, or what it memorializes is a representation to and of a community and a culture. Most clearly , it exemplifies and illustrates who's in charge. Sandra Rowe: Who is in charge? One tagger told the L. A. County Sheriffs Department, "I want people to remember me, no matter what the cost. " He said his specialty was freeway overhead signs, which he ref erred to as "the heavens, " because they offered more vjsibility for a longer period of time. 2 These kids believe they are in charge. Geer: In the parlance of a consumer-based society, what we own

24 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

defines our power and our very worth to that society. What we own, we writeournames on. For all the world to see we are then represented by those things . That is the power of the sign or signifier. What' s interesting, of course, in the contemporary world is the fascinating way in which the signature, the brand, the logo, or the tag becomes confused with, accepted as, or even sought, as if it has become the thing it represents. Not surprisingly, in this atmosphere the sign's power to represent the individual-to declare a presence and establish a social territory-finds a perfect corollary in the scrawls of young graffiti makers . Rowe: Graffiti as a revolutionalY shift ofmeaning ? That's reminiscent offeminist theorist Gayatri Spivak's remark that "Afunctional change in a sign-system is a violent event. " Geer: Graffiti can be considered, in a social dialogue acted out in social space, as the activity of the disenfranchised youth of every country and socio-economic group . As critic Hal Foster commented in his article, "Between Modernism and the Media," graffiti is "a response of people denied response. In the midst of a cultural code alien to you, what to do but transgress the code? In the midst of a city of signs that exclude you, what to do but inscribe signs of your own?" Rowe: Is this really the activity of the disenfranchised ? Police Detective Wright from Riverside, CA, talks about taggers driving BMWs. Some of the taggers are college students. In middle-class neighborhoods, the youth are copying what they see on the freeway signs and writing on the fire hydrants and sidewalks of upscale shopping centers. They are copying the "look " of tagging just like they copy the trendy, thrift shop/post-industrial look of the clothing of the hip-hop rappers, "gang-ers" and taggers. What are they looking for ? Geer: Without moving this discussion of social space further into a sociological dimension, I'd speculate that the answer to that probably lies in the feelings of powerlessness by all youth. But I agree that graffiti does raise other issues besides just proclaiming territory and implanting identity. Kids do it because it's fun and an almost

instant access to visibility and celebrity. Rowe: I believe tagging marks come from the need ofour youth to see a "self" identity in marks recognized by their peers. The youth culture swims in an environment where the value of celebrity status can be seen in the trappings of what fame and power can bring. Geer: Graffiti brings all this baggage into the arena of public art. While some graffiti and street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat (Sarno), Keith Haring, and Chaz Bojorquez have attained econorllic status within the art world, the majority of graffiti piecers and taggers have not. They remain identified in the media with gangs, vandalism, and all the crirllinality possible to associate with an act of rebellion aimed at one of the capitalist world's most cherished tenets. Butcan graffiti imagery and its principles of construction be considered apart from its illegitimate use of walls and space? Rowe: Well, all graffiti gets lumped together. I think we need to be clear that there is a difference betweentaggersandpiecers. While they all refer to themselves as writers, taggers will mark anything, in any place. Unlike gangs, theyaren 't marking territOlY, they are just trying for maximum visibility and numericforce without the confines of geog raphic boundaries. The idea is to "get up " all over.3 Piecers are the elite in the street culture of graffiti. Piecer comes from the word "masterpiece. " Perhaps more than quantity, piecers venerate and concentrate on the evolution of "style. " "Style, " in its various practices such as wild style, computer, slice and shift, or abstract, has different looks. But each form seems to share an apprecia-

tion for the dynamic and graphic image where size, clean lines, layering, and a feeling of spontaneity all come together. Geer: It' s not all the animated calli graphic tags like those we see around Los Angeles. In different parts of the word writers also use scenes, characters, and slogans. Rowe: I remember in New York and San Francisco seeing bright, hot-colored words intertwined with other images that you had to stop and spend time deciphering. In Paris there was a funny image repeated at different sites along the Seine River, making a political statement that became a tourist attraction as people actually tried to find it. Geer: In the no-rules, anything-for-fame, hip-hop graffi ti culture, one of the primary concerns of the piecers is the mesmerizing beauty of the images. Tiger from the NASA crew, who does interconnected, animated letters, told me, "I mean them to be beautiful , so people can get lost in them, kind of like a puzzle. They' re not simple, because everything I do in my life is a challenge and pushes me. You can never get enough style." Part of that style is the mastery of the various wall surfaces, and appreciation of things like "can control," as well as motion and color knowledge-a specialized kind of color manipulation based more on manufacturers ' color charts and retail availability than on acaderllic theory . This is part of the complicated knowledge and technical prowess that piecers look for and value. 4 Rowe: Both taggers and piecers belong to crews, who watch each others' backs and help in the proliferation of the crew tag and the taggers' noms de plume. The crew is adolescent community on a night raid for daylight celebrity, which equates with power. Power, along withfame, artistic expression, and rebellion are thefourfundamental values of the hip-hop graffiti subculture. 5 Geer: It is the piecers whom I find easiest to identify with as an artist. They are dedicated to their craft. Sumet, a local piecer I spoke with, told me he learned to draw by sketching and studying books like Getting Up. He spoke of being mentored by an older artist who made sure he understood about style and the history of the images. He also learned about respecting other murals. A lot of piecers complain that the taggers today don't know anything about style or graffiti hi story and that's why they tag allover the great pieces. 6 Piecers evidently begin as taggers, but over years of work on walls and sketchbooks they develop their own kinds of characters and lettering. It's a very traditional-sounding kind of apprenticeship and grass roots schooling. Piecers even exchange photographic images as they rllight trade baseball cards and they travel, as finances allow, to other cities and countries to view, work, and discuss the construction and deve lopment of pieces. All this is part of the responsibility required of those respected in the genre. And peer respect is, of course, basic to thi s kind of highly visible self-representation . Rowe: Remember though that this visibility is an illegal act. It 's almost frightening the kind of response that tagging provokes in many people. Maybe because g raffiti is a visual sign of a crime committed, cities and the police can simulate fighting crime by fighting the "sign" of the tagger. Abatement sure costs enough, over $50,000,000 in 1989 in Los Angeles alone. 7 It also gets politicians working overtime making laws. Recent legislation in California titled SB 1779 would allow warrantless arrest of a graffiti writer simply for the possession of spray cans or graffiti implements and wouldmakegraffitiafelony. Writ-anonymous tagger

people to re-

member me, no matter

what the cost."

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 25

ers could be arrested even if they were not observed marking.8 This makes people like the ACLU nervous because it leaves so much leeway for false accusation and abuse. Geer: There have been, and still are, attempts in some communities to designate certain walls for graffiti work-including allicinds from stencil work and brush work to spraycan pieces. At the Huntington Beach Center, one mile of the sea wall facing the ocean was divided into areas where murals could be painted. According to Naida Osline, who opened the mural program to spraycan artists, it already had a 20-year history of throw ups (an outlined tag name quickly done in one layer of paint). She said the response from the writers was amazing. A thousand kids from allover Southern California came to get permits and use that wall before public pressure on the city closed it a year later. Tiger worked there and said that he prefers to work on legal walls because he can do the work during the day, talk to people, and not get hassled . Several piecers said that illegal piecing isn't worth arrest and that, when they get the urge to piece they go to places where they have permission or to other legal yards around Los Angeles. They maintain those walls , buff out tagging, and try to see that the best works get preserved. Rowe: Some people feel that piecers' works should be protected and conserved as an art form. This proposal has met with negative comments from some of the graffiti artists as well as from their opposition, according to Susan Hoffman, director of the California Confederation of the Arts. She felt that graffiti artists didn't want to be co-opted by any form ofcontrol or intervention, and that they want to do it "their way." Geer: I find it interesting that legal areas for pieces get such mixed reviews from the public and the participants. Graffiti, even wonderful eye-catching images , clearly makes people nervous. The gang associations are still there along with a general mistrust of lcids:, of ethnic "outsiders" in a community, and of all the unwanted tagging that that lcind of public mark-malcing brings to surrounding walls. But youth still needs to find a space for itself-to image itself in ways different from what advertising and TV tells us. Several piecers proposed that legal walls be operated by community centers to give writers a place to learn, practice, and get peer and public exposure. They felt that, over time, that lcind of access to public attention would limit the amount of illegal work being seen because it gets the same results without the arrests and the fines. 9 As part of a program for youth that channels their interest into more socially acceptable lines , while malcing sure to keep the pressure on illegal work, it seems a positive alternative to filling the jails with lcids who transgress society's codes wi th an acti vi ty which mimics that code of possession and feeds it back to society, emptied of economic meaning. As two wri ters, Eric Montengro and Joseph Montal vo from Earth Crew in Los Angeles, recently told the P.A.R.T.I. art conference, "Graffiti is not destruction of property . A bomb is destructive. Graffiti is aesthetic alteration." Sandra Rowe is a visual artist and associate professor at California State University Polytechnic, Pomona. Suvan Geer is an artist, art writer, and artist-in-residence at California State University Polytechnic, Pomona.

Notes: 1. Devon D. Brewer, "Hip Hop Graffiti Writers' Evaluations of Strategies to Control Illegal Graffiti, " Human Organization, 51:2 (1992), p. 188-196. 2. David Ogui, The Press Enterprise (Riverside, CAY, November 7, 1993. 3. Devon D. Brewer and Marc L. Miller, "Bombing and Burning: The Social Organization and Values of Hip Hop Graffiti Writers and Implicationsfor Policy," Deviant Behavior, 11 (1990), p. 345-369. 4. Interview with piecers Luan Nguyen and Akiel Daniel conducted by Suvan Geer, December 18,1994. 5. Brewer and Miller, op cit., p. 357-361. 6. Letters, The Word (zineforHuntington Beach 's The Walls project), #3 (January 1993). 7.. Brewer, op cit., p. 188. 8. Susan Hoffman, Executive Director of the California Confederationfor the Arts, Legislative Notes. 9. Brewer and Miller, op. cit., p. 363. [This essay was supported in part by the Center for Arts Criticism in St. Paul, MN with a grantfrom the National Endowmentfor the Arts.]

Chaka got a lot of media coverage, so it kind of made the whole tagging thing take over the art aspects of it. * I pretty much slowed down my elf. For myself, it's just about taking that aspect of graffiti into my art work. We're really pushing graffiti as far as we can. Question: There's a legislator that has come up with a propo al that graffiti artists that are caught be caned, a la Singapore. I heard an artist say the graffiti doesn ' t have to be legal, that we take the wall, we take whatever we want and that' s it. For community activists who don't want to see this sort of random, spontaneous stuff, what do you do? Duke: Graffiti, as it is, is getting a lot of bad press. The art aspect of it is really getting shoved to the side. As far as walls, it just gets harder and harder to find a legal place to do something. That whole feeling of just taking a wall and doing it, that's a whole performance in itself. And it leaves something there for other people to see. Nuke: It's hard to say. You know-we need to be responsible as elders coming up. There are other venues to redirect some of the artistic impulses, but graffiti's always going to be graffiti. Question: Do you ever worry about losing your credibility, getting your message out to them? They might say, look, man, you ' re doing stuff on canvases in a closed room . Why should I believe you? Nuke: A lot of us have paid our dues, you know, have made our mark in the culture. It's not like we can completely stop being true writers. Everybody will put you in check, like, "Hey, I haven't seen you getting up" or "When was the last piece you ever did?" And within that realm, we all help each other out, you know, that's how we keep active, not only here but out there, in the yards. As long as we don ' t take it further and actually disassociate with the writers themselves we' ll be respected. Question: Do you think that graffiti is the way that youth is fighting the revolution in the urban core? How do you see yourself as a graffiti artist in the context of art history? Nuke: I think most of us know what we're a part of. I think it' s our responsibility to make sure that the right history goes out. We' ve got to take the time and the initiative to write our own books and write our own Âˇinformation down. There would be better understanding from the young ones if it were to come from us. A lot of us are getting serious about this, ' cause we know it's going to make an impact in the future ... I think it's part of a bigger revolution, a big youth revolution that's going on all over the world . The only means of communicating nowadays that's accessible to the youth is that spray-can or marker; they don't have access to newspapers anymore, or TV stations. Everything's so far away from the youth that by the time they get [to the media] to be able to speak about it, their way of thinking has already changed so they can ' t speak actually from the heart about it. I've seen [graffiti] used all over the world as a way of saying it' s time to listen to us. Question: When you look at Chicano art today, what do you see? Do you identify with it?

NOTES FROM A DIALOGUE IN THE SPARe THE OTHER SIDE GALLERY, LOS ANGELjES Transcribed and edited by Krissy Kuramitsu

he following are excerpts from a discussion held at SPARC last year in conjunction with an exhibit curated by artists Nuke, Duke, and Tempt called "Notes From the Other Side." The participating artists displayed work in the gallery and painted an exterior mural on the SPARC building. Among the artists present at the dialogue were Nuke, Duke, Tempt, Angst, and Skept. Duke: It's been a while since any of us have gotten together to talk to each other about this. Since then, everyone has taken off on their journeys, some went to school, others pursued their art form personally . Now, we're at a time when a lot of misinformation is going out to the public about graffiti and its origins. It's only right that some of the people that made an influence on Los Angeles should be recognized. Our graffiti background affects [our] art work now. [We can] see how each of us has taken that into our medium. Skept: As far as I can remember, if I had a chance, if I had a spray can, I'd write up on the wall.. .growing up you look up to the nicer writing on the wall, and you have respect for that. You don't just want to copy it. After the mid-'80s, the whole hip-hop culture came about and influenced a lot of people. That's how graffiti started with a lot of us; by the late ' 80s, we were hitting all aspects of graffiti-tagging, piecing, and doing artwork. It was really great, but after a while, this whole tag-banging thing came along, more people got into tagging,

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 27

Duke: I recognize and identify that as a part of hi story , and, in many ways, it was inspirational to me, grow ing up in ESlrada Courls. Nuke: In a way I see a lot of similarities [with graffiti] in how [Chicano art] began. Chicano art has not really gotten all the attention that it should have. It was kept away from mainstream society. But in the city, growing up, you see great murals by Chicano artists, [and you wish] yo u could do a mural someday. Duke: When I was growing up, I wanted to take art and art classes, but they never taught us about who's out there. It would have made such a big difference. They'd seen how powerful the art was and they didn't want that to get into the schools so younger children could actually be inspired by that. I really feel sad when I think about how badly those classes failed me when I wanted to do art. Only now, over the past three or four years, I have been learning about older Chicano and Chicana artists who made such an impact on those times. I wish I had known more abo ut it when I was younger. I think now is the time to take the initiative to go the library to look over these different books and learn about them. That way you learn to respect it and know that there 's a continuous flow that's still going on, and [ask] , "How I can add to that flow with this new kind of art?" Question: What's different from you and the younger people? Duke: Back when we started and we were starting to see pieces go up, there were many more places, yards where we could! go and we could see the more elaborate, creative stuff as opposed to all the "tagging," scribbles, on the street. I would say in '88 there were six, seven places to go; now, there're maybe two places. There' re less places for the bigger, more elaborate stuff, and there's more tagging. Ifthere're more places for the creative stuff, that's how the balance would work. That's one of the differences; we definitely did more of the creative stuff than they do now. Question: They see more of the tagging, so that more of the tagging gets produced. Skept: Yeah, it's a point that I've made before. There was that tagbanging in a made-for-TV special a couple of years bade. I can say before that special came out, yes, there were taggers, but after that, everywhere there were tag-bangers, tag-bangers that didn ' t exist before that program came out. They created this whole scare. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. Now, that's all you see. Duke: It's what gets viewers and ratings. So the media talks about the problems, they talk about the controversial aspects of it. They go to the Belmont Tunnel where there's usually good pieces, and, as opposed to taking a picture next to a good piece, they ' ll walk over to the side where all the tags are and say, "This is what we wal!1tto erase." They just totally ignore the creative aspects of it. Nuke: And [the media] just hypes it up like there's no reason for it. But that's what people want to see out there. Then, they want to see [graffiti abatement proponents] putting something together, wiping it out, when in actuality the abatement people don't want it to stop because it' s making them lots of money. Question: I'd like you to comment on the exhibit you just had with ADOBE LA at MOCA [the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles]. How do you feel about the graffiti in that exhibit? Art and architecture have gone hand-in-hand from Roman times up until today, and that relationship has been defining different eras that we have had culturally. For the first time in history, art is attacking architecture. Tempt: I'm an art student. It's funny, even in your question, you used the example Roman , and that in itself explains what my answer is going to be. I know a lot of us in here have had art educations and know what that teaches you, Roman , Greek .. .! ai n't Roman and I ain't Greek, none of us are Roman or Greek. MOCA speaks to a different kind of culture, and that's cool, but ourtype of art form is like an urban traditional folk art. It's a craft that's been interpreted and passed down to yo unger generations. It's never been about a single artist in this room devi sing ideologies and theories about the state of mankind in the world. It's more of a communal thing where friends get together, and we paint and we help each other out. And that's alien when I go to MOCA. I see "i ndividuali sts." I see ... a person with a vi ion that nobody else has that has been "given to him from God." Ourtype of art form, graffiti, in that kind of setting-it's ki.nd of alien. But we went in there because we had to educate people about the art form that we do and how we feel about what MOCA is.

28 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

But we had a big debate whether we should be in the show because, well, the security guards followed us around in the museUlll. I know they don't do that to other artists. We weren't even acknowledged in the catalogue. We were more or less treated as window dressing by the architects. And with respect to all the other architects in that show, we should be given our just due. That' s a bunch of unrelated stuff, but there's a little bit of racism in that, whether they intended it or were aware of it or not. We're individuals and they saw us as graffiti artists; the things that they associated with graffiti are crime, drugs, and gangs, so that's how we were treated. But we put up with that 'cause we feel that our art form deserves better than how it's been treated. There are some really good people in the graffiti art community with some beautiful artwork who have gone unrecognized. One funny thing was this one plan I saw at the architecture show, this old unused river bed, and they were saying that they could make it a walkway at night, and a friend of mine had looked at it in a different way, one that I hadn ' t realized; that if they tried to put that in L.A. , with all the bushes there'd be so many places for people to hide and jack someone, and it's true. Because in a sense the person who is drawing up the plans is from a different reality, and although they are trying to do it with good intentions, if they don ' t know or understand the community that they ' re making these plans for, it's justa bunch of hot air. So in a way that's like a perfect example of what I was talking about. They ' re coming from a different reality than we are. I went over one comer of an architect's work, and he freaked out. But it was OK for another architect to completely go over another friend of mine's graffiti piece. And it was like, whose art is allowed to be shown? That was the perfect testing ground right there. Question: Who won? Tempt: The architects. Question: Do you guys come across racism? Duke: It exists. Not in the graffiti community. Tempt: Yeah, that kind of thing has always been there. It's like something you can't fight, or do anything against. You have this limit. .. so you just go around it. . .It' s notthatthere's a wall there and that I stop and I go around it, when I get to the wall and say "this is racism" and I'm going to do this and going to do that and to fight you and have a confrontation. It's like you go around the wall, and I think that the major aspect of this is economics, once you get the money in your pocket, then from behind the wall you can tap on the shoulders and fix it that way. I think something like that is going to be not for my generation but for the next generation, three, four generations down the line. I didn ' t mean to say that the wall is going to be there from here on out. .. I'd like to add to that also about the graffiti movement and the hiphop culture, it's a trip the way we're talking about it now, we're starting to move towards racism and Chicano muralism, and those directly affect the graffiti culture. In our subculture, the graffiti subculture and the hip-hop style, we judge people's work on their work, and oftentimes you don 't know who the person is when you see the work, so I think that graffiti is really pure in that sense, that we don 't judge the person from seeing the art. Crews have been made up of rich white kids and kids from South Central and kids from the Eastside, all based on skills and that's beautiful. And I thinkjustliving our lifestyle the way we're living it now, we're helping to break down those fears and those stereotypes, because what you were saying earlier about how we're going to fight this racism, we' re fighting it by living our lives; by the fact of doing our work it's very front line, putting ourselves at risk of getting busted everyday or getting called this and that stereotype. When we go on and do what we do, in the process we've met a lot of beautiful people and learned a lot of things. The canvas has empowered a lot of us, just like the fact that we ' re right here, allowed to talk about what we do . So in that sense we are fighting racism. Nuke: I am not political when I do this, but it works politically. The fact that we're out there doing this, on an individual basis, is selfempowering, it's like you can get me this way, I can get you that way, you can use taxpayers' money, blah blah blah. But the bottom line, how I feel , [is that] I can go to the 10 Freeway tonight and tell you to fuck off, and you cannot do anything to me, and I know the piece is there and that I did it, and that empowers me.

Duke: I think for specifically this show here, the premise was, having been influenced by graffiti ... [it shows] where are you now, at thi s point in your life. I don ' t want to speak for anyone else, but I can go and bring a piece out there into here, but since this is a gallery , it's no longer a piece. Nuke: I'd like to get back to the point of documentation. We do document our work, in our own way. All writers keep photo logs of their pieces, but the thing is, in terms of teaching, graffiti art is not taught in the same way you teach other traditional forms of art. It's not a school in the sense that you pay $200 to take a class. Like in a lot of non-white cultures, it's a traditional thing that's passed down, and if you want to learn the art form, it's your prerogative to go to the teacher and learn. It's not for the teacher to come to you . If I have skills, it' s because I went to the dude or woman and learned from them, I took the time to hang out with them and find out where I could get the good brands of spray-paint colors and which colors were discontinued, and which markers with which kinds of ink produce a beautiful color .. .it's all about that. And that's the thing that keeps graffiti art strong, , cause it weeds out the people who are half-stepping, it [shows] the people that are in it for the long haul. Tempt: That's why we didn ' t attempt to do graffiti in here. There' ve been countless galleries where they' ve painted the inside with straight graffiti, and we wanted to do a little different twist. Also, as graffiti artists, we are artists. Part of the phrase "graffiti artists" is artists, and artists explore different mediums and different means, and that's what we' re doing here. Krissy Kuramitsu is the Manager of SPARC's Mural Resource Center.

*Editor's Note: When Chaka(DanieIRamos) was sentenced to a year injail and 1,500 hours of graffiti cleanup, prosecutors said he had written his tag in 10,000 places, according to a New York Times report on May 3, 1991.

'Youth in the Crossfire Graffiti Hysteria, Urban Realities, and SPARe b

Hal

Our organization ' s philosophy is expressed in our name: The Social and Public Art Resource Center. Located at 685 Venice Blvd. in Venice, we have been a vital force jin Los Angeles public art since our first program, "The Great Wall of Los Angeles." lOver the years, we have struggled to provide venues for community expression in neighborhoods throughout our city. Almost 20 years ago, our artistic director Judith F. Baca made a public plea to the Los Angeles City Council not to sacrifice artistic and recreational opportunities for young people to city-wide tax cuts. She foresaw that denying young people these sanctioned outlets would push these same young people to develop their own ' 'illegal'' venues for expression. The youth culture hip-hop movement that arose transcends ethnic and socioeconomic boundaries.The vocal opposition to graffiti, which is the movement's visual manifestation, has bred its criminalization. In the state of California, it is now a felony to write on someone else's property; the "three strikes" policy applies to graffiti. When legal yards became more scarce, "tagging" was the "quick fix" for these young people. Tagging fulfills both the need for creative expression and the need for competitive sportsmanship. The goal of tagging is to make your tag as prolific and visible as possible, particularly in hard-to-reach and dangerous spaces, such as freeway overpasses and moving buses. Taggers will verify the rush of adrenaline, and a sense of accomplishment and pride that comes with each tag. Recently in Los Angeles, one such tagger, 18-year-old Cesar Rene Arce, met his untimely death at the hands of William Masters III. Masters, a part-time actor, was on his nightly walk through Sun Valley in the San Fernando area of Los Angeles, when he saw Arce and a friend, David Hillo, 20, spray-painting on pylons under a freeway. Masters wrote down the license plate number of the car the two were dri ving and an argument ensued. Masters claims that the young men tried to rob him; he shot them, killing Arce and wounding Hillo, who was carrying a screwdriver. The city attorney ' s office may prosecute Masters on a misdemeanor charge of carrying a gun without a permit, but dismissed other potential charges, ruling that Masters did indeed act in self-defense. The incident prompted a fluny of media attention to the issue of tagging and graffiti. Many hailed Masters as a "hero." On several radio shows, callers not only supported his actions, but called for open season on taggers. The markings oftaggers , argue some, are not only disrespectful and demoralizing, but they also lower property values. But was not Masters' vigilante murder also a disrespectful, demoralizing act that took away something far more valuable-the life of a human being? This sad incident illustrates how we find ourselves telling young people what not to do, while giving them few orno alternatives. SP ARC's mission is to offerjust such alternatives. For over 20 years our programs have uniformly addressed this issue of public disenfranchisement of our city's youth, even as the options for today' s young people radically decrease. People are often surprised that, even in areas with a lot of graffiti , our murals remain untouched. It is because these projects respect the youth in the neighborhoods and the youth respect the artworks in return. Late last year, SPARC hosted the exhibition of graffiti art called "Notes From the Other Side." Not only did the graffiti artists create spectacular murals on our parking lot walls, but our gallery provided visitors with two canvases on which to write their own tags and pieces. There were layers and layers of such markings, but all of them were written on the canvases. As SPARC respected the taggers, so taggers respected the exhibit. Lindsey Haley is the Manager of SPARC's "Great Walls Unlimited: Neighborhood Pride" mural production program, which has created over 70 murals over the last eight years.

Earth Crew, UndiscoveredAmerica, 1992, sponsored by SPARC, Great Walls Unlimited Neighborhood Pride Program. (photo: SPARC)

TAGGINGTHE TWO . CITIES' REACTIONS TO GRAFFITI

Moira

Harris

Graffiti is a kid's thing, it s beautiful, ugly, risky, and angry art. Graffiti is pure vandalism. Graffiti should be ignored, erased, restricted, or encouraged. Graffiti means gang turf marks, hate slogans, bathroom conversations, and kids' aliases. Graffiti is part of a worldwide youth culture and its pieces are significant forms of public art.

30 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMM ER 1995

Everywhere in America, graffiti provokes mixed reactions and opinions like those above. Whelher it should be erased, dl~stroyed , or gingerly encouraged have become questions for Minnesotans. And in the state's two largest cities, there have been different responses. Graffiti was not really a major problem in Minneapolis or St. Paul until the late 1980s. There were the usual nanl ... ~ and high school "Class of' 89" marks on water towers, underpasses, and on the nowdestroyed "Graffiti Bridge" in Eden Prairie, a Minneapolis suburb, an underpass made famous by rock musician Prince. But New York wild-style tags or wall-sized pieces were not yet on view. Graffiti writing began in north Minneapolis about 1986, inspiredl, some say, by the arrival of writers from other cities who came with sketchbooks of designs and knowledge of new techniques. By 1992 the residents ofSt. Paul neighborhoods such as Highland and Macalester-Groveland began to notice tags. The St. Paul police department arrested the first "graffiti vandal" in October 1992 and the anti-graffiti campaign began. Both cities elected new mayors in November 1992: Sharon Sayles Belton in Minneapolis and Norm Coleman in St. Paull. Both had campaigned on the usual platform- making their cities safe and clean places to live. Voters asked both to do something about graffiti; both established task forces to look into the problem. In Minneapolis, the Police Department (charged with arresting graffiti writers) and the Public WorKs Department (charged with cleaning up the graffiti from city-owned buildings) were the first agencies to get involved. Residents could call 911 to report graffiti and authorities posted "Don't Deface My Space" signs, offering rewards for reports of graffiti vandalism. The city purchased gallons of a product called "Graffiti Terminator Remover," which was offered free in one-quart bottles to homeowners who wanted to do their own erasing. In both cities, penalties for graffiti vandalism could include jail time, an obligation to clean up the tags that could be traced to the apprehended writer, and monetary restitution to victims, depending on the writer's age and the severity of the damage. Yet even as city workers were removing graffiti, other groups were working with spray-can artists to create murals . In Minneapolis, on the retaining walls leading to the garage behind the Boys and Girls Club, on the Waite Neighborhood House, and on the Northside Residents Redevelopment Council building, spray-can work can be seen. Graffiti writers created their intricate designs on the walls ofthe Intermedia Arts building on Lyndale A venue and a new graffiti mural is slated for the warehouse district near downtown Minneapolis, with help from the city ' s Youth Coordinating Board. In writers ' terms, these are "permission pieces." The work is done in daylight, the sponsor provides the paint, and the writers even get paid. The best-known Minneapolis spray-can work was not, however, a permission piece. Called the "Wall of Fame," after other well-known walls in New York and San Francisco, it was located on the back walls of two one-story buildings on 17th A venue South facing a railroad yard . From about 1990 until the late fall of 1994, writers covered the two walls with names, messages, cartoon figures, and even rules : "No toys." "No painting on bricks." "Don't go over unless it's better." "Throwaway your cans." Painting over is a widely accepted form of criticism in the graffiti world. If one writer' s work is considered amateurish or "wack," or is the work of a beginner ("toy"), another writer is free to cover it up with his or her ostensibly better written name. Writers coveredl, criticized, and competed on the Wall of Fame until Hennepin County workmen painted both buildings in gleaming white. The current favored spots for free expression, graffiti-style, are underneath the bridges that cross the "Midtown Greenway" one block north of Lake Street. There, one former tagger said, tags may only last a week or so before another writer's work comes along to cover them. In St. Paul, the mayor' s task force included representatives from the office of families and children, the city attorney's office, the departments of public health and public works, the information and complaint office, the parks and recreation department, the office of planning and economic development, and the St. Paul Pollice Department. Ordinances already in force prohibited the sale of spray paint to minors. Other measures related to graffiti and its cleanup were quickly suggested. The task force explained its various initiatives in

Detail from the Wall ofFame, 1994, Minneapolis. (photo: courtesy Pogo Press)

neighborhood meetings, through news articles, and in a short video called "Out of Sight: How to Remove Graffiti in Saint Paul," which could be borrowed from any video store or library in the city. Task force members studied not only the graffiti but the graffiti writers, and developed a profile of typical perpetrators. A graffiti writer is usually male, between 14 and 22 years old. Taggers favor "hip-hop" clothing, especially the baggy pants with big pockets and backpacks, which are useful for carrying art supplies. Typical tagger hangouts are coffee shops, often near college campuses. Taggers often come from middle- and upper-class families. Beginners, or "toys," start out working alone, but later find others with a similar interest. Working in crews, they paint the initials of the crew near their own tags. "MAS," for example, stands for the Minneapolis Art Society, a crew that worked on the Dunn Brothers Coffee Shop piece and on the Wall of Fame. In St. Paul, the tagging crews were usually separate from gangs, since, as one official remarked, "gangs sell drugs-they don't have time for tagging." As Norman Mailer noted in his essay accompanying a book of photographs assembled by Jon Naar and Mervyn Kurlansky, "the name is the faith of graffiti." Getting one's name, or "tag," in hardto-reach spots is the aim of taggers and crews. The Twin Cities have no subway, so the taggers use underpasses, bridges, benches, and the rooftops of downtown buildings as canvases. Tagging as many surfaces as possible, or "bombing," is one strategy taggers favor to "get up," or gain fame. University Avenue, which links the two cities, was bombed in the fall of 1994 with tags on buildings, mailboxes, doors, and even billboards along both sides of the street. As the cost forremoving graffiti and the number of kids arrested for tagging mounted, members of mayor' s task force in St. Paul felt that another anti-graffiti approach should be explored. Police commander Larry McDonald, Officer Pat Finnigan, and Meredith Vogland, a community organizer, felt that many of the kids were intelligent, artistically talented, and could perhaps be "redirected." Thus Graffiti Inc. was born in February 1993. The effort, supported by community organizations, businesses, and the city administration, offered taggers a contract. If they agreed not to do any more illegal tagging, Graffiti Inc. , now known as Graff Art, would find walls for them to paint and supply the materials. Taggers ' parents were also asked to get involved with the program. The police soon discovered that some parents were unaware of their children ' s tagging acti vities, while others permi tted them to tag at home, hoping that would keep them from tagging elsewhere. ("One kid even covered the Tupperware in the kitchen,"

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 31

a surprised po lice officer commented.) What they painted had to be approved by Graffiti Inc . and the wall's owners, but it was spray-can art. As Vogland says, "Graffiti on a legal wall is art; on an illegal wall it's vandalism." Businesses and foundat ions helped pay for paint and supplies. Graff Art's outdoor murals include those on the Urban Lights Music Store at 1449 University Avenue, a courtyard on Concord Street in West St. Paul, and the Dunn Brothers Coffee Shop on Grand Avenue (a project coordinated by Maura Matula Williams, a FORECAST Public Art Affairs recipient). Other Graff Art murals on a. Salvation Army building, a former boxing club, and the Intermedia Arts building in Minneapolis have been painted over by rival tagging crews or by building owners who didn ' t like graffiti art. In October 1994 the St. Paul Police Department presented a day long symposium for law enforcement officers offering information on its anti-graffiti activities and Graff Art's redirection program. Most professional artists hope the general public will react to their art. With graffiti, reaction is automatic, yet the local writers don't seem to know how to handle it. On the one hand, they create: their tags, throwups and pieces to be recognized; but identification of the artist and his tag on a non-permission space can lead to arrest. They relish fame in their own peer groups, yet resent requests for interviews, saying, "This is a kids ' thing. It should stay private." Yet by using what they consider ugly blank walls (which belong to others) for their tags and pieces, they have created a most public form of art. Some graffiti writers have opposed the idea that their art.should go public and "aboveground," since that suggests to them exploitation and rip-offs. It seems probable that the excitement of doing illegal writing will always be more attractive to some writers than doing permission pieces in programs sponsored by either Graff Art in St. Paul or Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. In the Twin Cities the amount of illegal graffiti seems down, and anti-graffiti measures are clearly up. But it's far too early to predict the future course of spray-can art here.

Associate Editor Moir a F. Harris is the author of Museum of the Streets: Minnesota's Contemporary Outdoor Murals (1987), as well as other books and articles on art and popular cUllture.

Fluid Intelligence: A Graffiti Collective Fluid Intelligence cou ld be the name of a rock band , a computer program , or an automobile transmission , but it's none of the above. Instead it identifies a graffiti artists' collective , part of a new program run by Intermedia Arts, a Minneapolisbased arts organization. Over the last few months FI 's aerosol crew (EROS , EWOK, SPEL and others) has been covering the walls of an old automotive repair garage, what will be a theater space in Intermedia Arts' new home in south Minneapolis. Flu id is their name and fluid is their style as throwups and pieces come and go. Intermedia Arts has been promoting new art forms for over 20 years by offering financial support to artists, as well as exhibition space. Its Fluid Intelligence program gives aerosol artists a chance to try other avenues for their art. As program director James Bradley says, it is a chance for them to come aboveground, to try their luck, on their own terms, in such commercial ventures as Tshirts for a rock concert and a graffiti newsletter. Through the newsletter the FI collective hopes to promote public awareness of graffiti art, give it a positive image, and communicate with other graffiti artists across the country. Upcoming is an exhibit by FI members of art done on canvas and paper, as well as documentation of their work on walls. A slide lecture by University of Minnesota instructor Joe Austin and a panel discussion of graffiti pros and cons are also scheduled by group members . (see Listings , page 59)

EROS, of Fluid Intelligence, untitled spray-can piece, 1995, at Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis (photo: Kathleen Maloney, courtesy Intermedia Arts)

As the sun sets, we rise The life and times of a graffiti artist Written and Illustrated by Chaka Jenkins Editor's Note: This essay originally appeared in COLORS Magazine, November-December, 1994. It has been edited for length.

Âˇ O

INTRO n a gray-skied Wednesday afternoon within the confines of my first-floor lab, I recline my head on a soft blue cushion, relax.ing, pondering life's poisons over a glass of mango Snapple. An excessive dose of underground hip-hop seeps thickly out of my makeshift boombox. As the beat hits the audio canals and liquid trickles slowly down my esophagus, I allow my eyes to wander over 200 hundred cans of Krylon, American Accent, Plasticote, and the old-time favorite, Rustoleum. It's an indescribable pleasure to observe large quantities of paint, especially when the stash of paint is within my possession. Immaculate colors and labels stand in single-file rows-plums, real greens,

mauves, silvers, reds and blues . Sacks upon sacks of adjustable spray nozzles lay scattered on the floor. From an aerial position the white nozzles form a subconscious pattern on the dark-brown carpet. For me every day is the same. Work among the zombies who have already submitted to government corporate flux, then backtrack my way to the residence, avoiding unnecessary confrontation with divine evil, occasionally waving to comrades of both genderl). When I finally reach my destination I enjoy many methods of relaxation. After my meditation, I focus my mind on subjects that negate any remnants of my work. I enter my euphoric graffiti, or (as some refer to it) aerosolic art, which in some ways destroys the negative connotations of the word graffiti. Whether it be called aerosolic or graffiti, the action of rebelliously painting is my soul and energy, my breath oflife, my walk and talk, my 360 degrees ofbona fide culture. I am far from alone. Our members run deep and thorough, yet I'm aware that the numbers of people who can't see or feel it in its proper context rank massive next to ours. We are a clandestine group, writing

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 33

graffiti by night after the sun has set on others ' daytime fortunes. My very good friend Jeanne Lee at COLORS thought it would be interesting fo r me to write an article regarding the life and ethics of a graffi ti artist. Due to my lack of trust I was hesitant. New men with cameras have greedily requested access to hidden meccas of pieces, asked for names and crews, history, and so on. Many uninformed people were influenced by that irresponsible ad campaign by candidate (now Mayor) Sharon Sayles Belton during last year's Minneapolis election. When I first saw her ad on television, set against a backdrop of graffiti that others were painting over as she pledged to rid the city of it, I was shocked. It was funny and detrimental all at once. It was just living fact about how foul all politicians must be in order to function in the political arena. The Sayles Belton campaign told the public that graffiti artists are illiterate and gang members. People actually believed it. That newsman was stupid to think I would reveal precious locations for commercial fame. If you stumble upon it, that's one thing, but to lead yo u to it - I don't think so. It is very ironic that numerous articles have been written about us but not by us. Once again, outside entities define our culture, telling us what we dress, look, and smell like. Pure arrogance in the highest form. Before I get in depth with this article I would like to first give love and powerful positive shouts to all brethren and sistren representing graffiti all around and especially in Minneapolis, where I used to lay my head . I hope I represent us properly, as is rarely done olUtside our intimate circles. I really hope toys out there learn something valuable and the means to shed their neophyte curse.

SOME HISTORY Graffi ti started in the streets. It is rugged and rough and has adopted codes of existence which in the last resort may result in violence. Graffiti at its core is not violent, but has evolved to something totally removed from its original form. Graffiti is the attitude that subdues average linear letters and twists, bends, and shapes them. Letters are primary; characters (images, pictures, portraits) are secondary. Graffiti is visual slang. Most of the graffiti styles in Minneapolis and St. Paul originated elsewhere. In 1985 or 1986 a brother from Brooklyn named Jek put brothers on the North Side down with styles. I knew most of the old school brothas but not enough history to splurge upon. I do know that graffiti in Minnesota started in North Minneapolis. I knew brothers who caught rek were Jek, Viper, EB Too Much, Payton, Stage, Oops, Smak, and Rey. Graffiti, of course, was here before Jek, clue to the movies "Wildstyle," "Style Wars," and "Beat S'treet." From what I heard, Jek formulated styles out of his black book like no other, to produce olid students. But that graffiti died out in 1987 or 1988 due to people getting busted and the introduction of crack. Tag-banging is based on neighborhoods taggin ', scrapping, and shooting. The only thing that separates taggers from street organizations is the nicknames of the members, the crew name and the jazzy style of writing. When I first was fully in tune with the graffiti scene in Los Angeles in 1987 and 1988, groups were assembled along with gang-banging. As time progressed, the rules changed. People crossed out each other more blatantly, causin' rougher measures to enforce respect for your crew. As confrontations arose, people literally got beat down . Some kids who caught the beatings had older siblings who were involved in the gangs . Regardless of who did the beating, they had to handle the situation in gang formation. Blood is the strongest connection. Everybody in L.A. had some siblings who bang. Some graffiti crews were in the same radius as the gangsters, sometimes sharing membership. So problems escalated. Some people do not see the separation between the two, just a lifestyle. The similarity lies in the high level of respect you must command. In the world of the streets, whatever you bring upon yourself you must handle adequately. I wa involved in some of the early tag-banging in the summer of 1988. Downtown Huntington Park in L.A. was the spot for the Tuesday $2 mati nee. The theater was packed more than 300-deep with taggers. I remember standing in line forever to enter, talking to the homies, checking out the female writers trooping in packs. After you paid your $2, you entered the clutches of tern-faced security guards who would

34 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

Chaka Jenkins and his daughter Sahkeena (photo: courtesy COLORS]

thoroughly check for any object used for marking or carving. But being so youthful and sneaky, we always managed to get our supplies in . After I was clear, I would enter a sloping red-velour carpet trail down the aisle to find my crew. I would look for the hats with the crew initials embroidered on the side, then slide in, give a few handshakes and proceed to observe the chaos in motion. Side doors would blast open like explosives to reveal sunlight and 20 kids rushing into the dark black forest of angry adolescents to quickly fit in as if they had been in the movie for hours. Kids would tag on the screen as the projector showed the film. Rarely would I be able to focus my attention on the movie. I mostly came for the ambiance. When people label graffiti writers as gangs it gives a wide range of misconceptions. The first misconception is the word "gang." Who do you fit to it? The president's committee, the pope, judges, police, FBI, CIA or USDA? Nope. Dark-skinned people with the lowest form of a gang which is visible, thanks to our good friend media.

BOMBIN', PIECIN' AND STAYIN' SAFE A tag is a signature used with a Pilot, mean streak or thin or fat cap connected to some Krylon. A fat cap is best so your tag is most seen. Entering a throw-up along with taggin ' in my view is bombing. A throw-up can consist of initials of your name or your whole name or crew. Usually throw-ups are bubbly. Sometimes they are sprayed fat in a mist with a fat cap just to lightly cover them. When you're finished, a thick outline is applied to pull everything together. Throwups are very visible. Throw-ups are done in a light and dark color or done in the darkest color with no fill-in. Good combinations include true blue and white; red and white; silver and black; red and silver; gold and red; and blue and silver. The next step is two cans of clean, stylized letters that don ' t connect. Then comes piecing. Piecing is a learning experience. You learn from what you didn ' t do before. Then you try to include all input for the next piecing. Letter formation is more critical than the colors or concepts. You should be able to manifest your wild style in two colors. Cleanliness is appreciated from everyone. When I piece, I look for clean, smooth walls that can best serve my letter size. Visible or invisible, I mostly look for potential yards to start up new locations. I'll piece anywhere, high or low ; the same with bombing. Developing styles is cool , but if you can't outdo what you wish togo over, don ' t do it. Take it somewhere else. If you go over someone's work with bullshit, you will be handled roughly. Plain and simple. To prepare the wall for piecin ', you can roll primer over it, go over someone else's piece who you can outdo, go over your own stuff, or paint right on the wall, depending on how good the wall is. There is no set method. Everyone does it differently . I like to fill in my dimensions first, then handle the fill of the piece. When doing this, I try to feel and become one with my environment, allowing myself to be aware of intruders. I look out a lot. I also have a watch out. It feels good to do it illegal. To all toys: Watch and feel. Don't ever overexaggerate. You will cause attention to yourself. If you get caught, shut up and be quiet. Tell them nothing. If this is what you want to do, why snitch out a

buddy who loves to do what you love also? If you are in school , stop taggin' on your backpack. Become silent wilh your skills, like you're some superhero by night, student by day.

Some toys really wa nt, feel it, live it, and love it but get bunched in with the others who outnumber u all. They follow the un een rules and show development through time. Time converts toys or condemns them to the abyss.

TOYS A toy is what every graffiti writer is when starting off. Writers who say they were never toys are lying. I was a toy when I first started writing in the summer of '85 in Los Angeles. After watching "Wildstyle" and reading the book, I named myself Toy because of my beginning status . As I evolved, I realized naming myself Toy was a dis to myself. People who remembered me from junior high would shout, "Hey, Toy," and I would be ready to fight. The '94 toys of Minnesota refuse to listen to their elders. They are the ultimate hardheads . They lack feelings, dedication, soul , spirit, and fo undation . Honestly, they're not even doing graffiti. Without these elements they move further and further away from what they say they 're so interested in . Metaphorically speaking, a beginning jazz musician can ' t start doing solos or delving into the depths of fusion or improvisation unless the fundamental aspects of simplicity are fo llowed, memorized , and become as easy to do as breathing. After that process is completed, one can move on. I think the chain of evolution goes like this: toy to tagger to bomber and fina lly to full-fledged writer who tags, bombs, and pieces. Toys are the biggest enemy to a small scene like the Twin Cities where they misrepresent us and outnumber us six times over. Toys are the low end of our culture, and in this town they wi ll be our demise. I personally have nothing against some toys. They must learn somewhere. Yet I won't take a toy under my wing to school him or her, because I fee l it would be in vain. In 1994 everyone's authenticity is challenged due to heavy exploitation. I question toys up and down about why they wish to be a part of the rich and talented culture. Is it a fad? Can you fee l it? Most toys I interrogate don ' t pass. T hey know nothing. It hurts tremendously. I ask myself what is to come of what people have risked their lives for?

OUTRO The Wall of Fame used to be legal. The owners of the building said it was okay as long as good taste was kept, di scriminating against no one. This year the Wall of Fame is still legal, according to the owners of the building. But you piece at yo ur own risk from a consistent swarm of cops who apprehend on site. To be free from harass ment you must get permission from the city. Most artists don ' t know that, and most artists wo n' tgo through the motionsj ustto painton the wall . So in turn the wall creates more illegal graffiti , and more negati ve things for politicians, cops, and other organizations to talk about. It's just another form to kill whatthey can't have their hand in controlling. In the eyes of the government, it's only legal when the government controls it. But then it wouldn ' t be graffiti anymore. Graffiti is a sign of discord and of the corruption within our communiti es. We get upset and take it to the streets. Graffiti will forever stay illegal. The best a city can do is to donate abandoned walls for practice without trying to make money, or trying to control and destroy it. Make graffiti legal without government strings. It's a radical thought that everyone's too scared to try .

Chaka Jenkins is now studying art in Atlanta, GA. Editor's Note: The Wall of Fame has been whitewashed since this article was first published (see article, p. 32). Special thanks to COLORS for their generous assistance. [Reprinting Chaka Jenkins' essay was supported in part by the Center for Arts Criticism in St. Paul, MN, with a grant from the National Endowmentfor the Arts.]

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 35

or most of the 20th century, the dominant names written in and on urban public space have been those of the state, business, and advertising. That changed in the late 1960s. The "authorized" commercial/state names and the "blank" walls of urban space have since had to contend and compete with spectacularly calligraphed names, (illegally) written in ink marker and spray paint by urban youth. The new writing has become an art form, and is now supported by an elaborate art world that connects the youth cultures of most major cities in the United States, and many of the major cities of Europe and Australia. Writing originated in Philadelphia about 1967, but found its distinctive aesthetic form within the mixture of African-American, Puerto Rican, and immigrant youth cultures of New York City. Writing names on the walls of alleyways and local hang-out spots had long been a common practice among urban youth. As ink markers became widely available in the 1960s, young people began writing their names as they strayed beyond the confines of their neighborhoods. As a rule, urban youth develop an incredible knowledge of the cityscape. Writing became part of that knowledge, "a way to be known andÂˇÂˇa way to know others," as one writer has put it. A Greek-American teenager began writing his name, TAKI 183, all over New York City in 1969, and quickly realized that, byÂˇwriting on the ice-cream trucks that circulated through Harlem streets, his name was carried far and wide. Within two years, tens of thousands of young people from all over the city became writers, and subway trains became the preferred means for circulating names. Once the trains became the primary writing surface, writing attracted young people, almost exclusi vely young men, from all races, ethnic groups, and social classes. The train storage yards were the central sites of the writing culture, serving simultaneously as classroom, studio, and gallery. For novices, the yards offered a space to meet experienced and well-known writers , observe their techniques, and participate in the simpler tasks of producing the larger train works, called "pieces" (abbreviated from masterpiece). Established writers and "crews" (organized groups) regulated access to train space in the yards, collectively deciding when a novice or newly formed crew had sufficient talent to merit inclusion on a particular subway line. The culture's code of ethics forbade painting over another writer's work, unless the new work was of better quality or some pre-arranged agreement had been made. In

this way, the established writers were able to maintain the prestige of their subway line relative to other lines, while allowing new writers to enter the culture. By 1974, the three accepted aesthetic forms of writing were firmly established within the New York culture, and these are the predominant forms still practiced today. The most elementary form, the "tag," is signature-like and relatively small, and is the form that a novice must master first. Most novices then move to "throwups," which are larger, two-color works usually consisting of a three-letter abbreviation of their name. Tags and throwups are used to "bomb" public space-to saturate a locale with a name and thereby establish a reputation as a committed writer. Writers literally make their name. They design it, practice it, and promote it, gaining fame among other writers. Very few writers use their birth names in their art, since that could lead to identification and arrest by the authorities. Instead, names are selected for their aural and visual qualities, in much the same way that a company creates a brand name or logo. The resulting design may not be recognizable as a name to outside observers, and the letters themselves may be unreadably abstracted. Whether the name is readable or abstracted is a point of aesthetic debate among writers and often ref1ects their stance toward the non-writing public. But like a signature, the design of each name is unique and immediately recognizable to other writers , since it is the prestige and fame among writers that is ultimately of value. Those who show a talent for design and the skills necessary to control spray paint often move to the "piece" form. A piece usually consists of the writer's full name, painted in an elaborate, abstracted letter style characteristic of that particular writer. The background of the piece might incorporate urban landscapes or characters from movies, comic books, or original creations. Writers usually place the initials of their crew and sometimes short messages around the central name. During the subway era, which lasted until the mid-1980s, it was common for a piece to cover the entire side of a 1O-foot-by-60-foot subway car. New York City authorities-or those in any other U.S. city-didn ' t welcome writing as a new urban art form , and writing has been uniformly construed as vandalism and a sign of social decay. During the 1970s, New York City authorities tried to prevent writing on the trains in a series of spectacular and expensive cat-and-mouse games between the police and the writers. Writers, already defying the laws governing private property, incorporated this game of chase into their art by brazenly painting in the most open areas, sometimes taunting their pursuers by tagging their police cars. During the mid-1980s, the city built high-security fences around the storage yards and took painted trains out of service until they could be cleaned. This tactic was successful, and by 1989, all writing on the subway system had been removed. Since the mid-1980s, the writing culture has expanded from New York City to become an international art movement. New York writers, like most others across the world, paint on the walls of buildings, bridges, and retaining structures. For the most part, their art remains illegal. The newest move has been to tum to freig ht trains as a medium . Freights offer the same large surfaces as the subways, but they circulate across the entire nation. Several writers' magazines, in print and in video, began publishing in the late 1980s, and these serve the same circulation function on a global scale [see Further Reading, p. 57]. The art shows no signs of fading, and New York: City now competes with Los Angeles and Berlin for the title of writing capital. See your local walls and freights for further detai ls.

Joe Austin is a graduate student in American studies at the University of Minnesota, where he's working on a history of the New York writers' culture.

Downtown '94 A Review of New York Graffiti by

Rob i n

VanArsdol

{ R V

During the '80s , graffiti was all over New York City and rarely done as a collective. Unless you went to the "Graffiti Hall of Fame" or the West Side Dri ve, artists and their crews seemed to be independent, especially downtown. Currently, the prime spaces downtown, the parking lots on the comer of Broadway and Grand, and Grand and Wooster Streets are packed solid with graffiti. Even the parking lots on Crosby, which atone time I alone dominated, are now wall-to-wall with graffiti and images. There seem to be fewer tags and more complete signed and even telephone-numbered works in the downtown area. The Andre Charles, T.C.T. , and Zone crews are more active since the death of Keith Haring and have several excellent murals on Broadway and one on Crosby. My favorite is the one in homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat on Lafayette Street. It was also exciting to see the work of Lady Pink, Claw , and many other writers who never used to paint mural s in the downtown area until recent! y. Chico and the Lower East Side crew are still very active and Chico has a tremendous mural just off Delancey Street. In the old days of graffiti, studio-oriented works dominated the downtown area. Liz and Val, Linus, Avante, Larrnie, and other artists lived in the area, so its accessibility made the street an easy showcase for them. Currently, there is less activity by studio artists as opposed to writers, and it shows. I've seen nothing new from any of the old-timers, with the exception of the T.V. man and Frost, while the person doing the tile work on the street posts seems to be new . A duo named REVS and COST seem to be the dominant street artists of the '90s. In the downtown area their posters, Xerox copies, stickers, and spray works transmit an anti-social, anti-establishment attitude, especially with statements like "cost ofli ving" and the "F. U. finger." Their Mount Crushmore mural on Lafayette Street was by far my favorite of the current works I viewed. While most graffiti seems to be getting slick, REVS and COST' s rawness is definitely a return to the old attitude when getting work up was more important than looking pretty.

One-time sculpture coordinator/instructor at New York University, RV has exhibited and lectured internationally. In the '80s RV is credited with over 5,000 murals on the streets of New York City. RV maintains studios in New York City and Orlando, FL.

Chicago graffiti. (photo: courtesy Chicago Transit Authority)

Up From the Underground Grajj Art in Chicago b

Huebner

n Chicago, the street art underground is gradually going legit. In recent years, like a subway surfacing from a tunnel, graffiti writing has become a sanctioned form of social expressionalmost. While public perceptions persist that spray-can art (and the aerosol paint media) is synonymous with teen-age terror, it's now gaining credibi lity in the emerging cu ltural fringe. Graff-evolved art is finding increas ing acceptance on commissioned walls and on the walls of some vanguard art galleries. Chicago still has a vital "graffiti art" culture, at least in the guerri ll a, hip-hop-derived sense of the term. Last year, veteran piecer William "Upski" Wimsatt even published a book-length collection of essays, Bomb the Suburbs, about race, hip-hop, and graffiti [see review, page 50]. Fly-by-night bombing and elaborate tags continue to blitz some of Chicago ' s subway stations. Along elevated train lines, a cacophony of non-permission "wild-style" pieces-blastin', emi-abstract constructions of calligraphic lettering-and comixli ke spray-can murals speed by on the brick walls and backsides of lofts, businesses, and factories. But the present state of spray-can art in the city may reside where the Chicago Transit Authority's O'Hare line rapid-transit train busts out of the subway tunnel and starts running on open elevated tracks, about two miles northwest of the Loop, in the gritty, arts-gentrifyi ng Wicker Park neighborhood. Unlike New York, where graffiti writing evo lved on subway cars almost two decades ago, Chicago s "writers" have refined their subterranean craft of urban self-expression ism mostly on the rooftops : It' s imperative that pieces be visible from the city's numerous "EI" lines. About five years ago, DZine (Carlos Rolon), 24, and members of his old Aero Soul crew pioneered , at least in the urban Midwest, the idea of covering factory and warehouse walls with block-long "permission" pieces, paid for mostly out-of-pocket, as a means of preventing unsightly gang insignia and indiscriminate tagging ; for the most part, vandals won ' t "dis" the art. The practice has spread to other crews and communities: Many neighborhoods now have wild style on business facades. On the back wall of the Walgreens on Milwaukee Avenue, surfacing riders catch sight of a striking collaborative "burner," part of a "3peace globa l mural" by DZine, a self-taught Chicago street artist, New York's Posse II, and members of La Force Alphabetick, Paris ' s premier graffiti art crew. The mural , infused with neo-PoJP sensibilitie and pictographic border , depicts cartoony characters on either ide of the Eiffel and Sears Towers.

38 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

Across the alley , rising on the Chicago Transit Authority rail embankment, another spray-can art revolution has taken place. One weekend last May, a number of crews painted both sides of the viaduct as part of a CTA-sponsored graffiti art contest. The most prominent piece, facing the Walgreens parking lot, was executed by Mario Gonzalez and his crew, ICE-Pack. Combining wild style and political messages, the large-scale mural shows characters attempting to escape towering public housi ng high-ri ses. Gonzalez, also 24, began piecing trains and rooftops in the mid1980s, one ofthe first writers to bring the "Old School" graffiti/hiphop movement to Chicago. He began teaching graffiti art at youth centers six years ago, and currently leads workshops at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Division of Continuing Studies and Special Programs. "My mission, my goal in life," he says, "is to promote graffiti and teach kids. We're a bunch of artists making life out of art, and putting our heart and soul into our work. We're just trying to keep the Movement alive."

A DIFFERENT KIND OF ART The CTA's graffiti art contest, which awards area art scholarships to winning crew members, is the only one in the country, according to Constance Mortell, external affairs officer for the CT A. She and CTA President Robert Belcaster initiated the program in 1993 to prevent vandalism 'on the public transportation system, while also providing a number of venues for youths to go wild with style and social commentary. "The graffiti artists that I know are like Jack Kerouac," says Mortell. "The frontier is closed now, and they're 'on the road' in a different way , blazing new trails. Their art is as legitimate as Kerouac ' s writing." Mortell first met with about 80 writers in late 1992. "We told them, 'We're willing to give yo u walls in exchange for you to stop bombing our stations and rail cars,' " she says. "Most crews agreed, since they just wanted legitimate places to do art. They've been true to their word. We saw a decline [in bombing] the first couple months." Only one "renegade" crew, she adds, has been kicked out of the contest. Fourteen crews participated in the first year's competition, with one member of first-place crew UFG winning a scholarship to the Chicago Academy for the Arts. Last year's graffiti art contest drew 28 crews, or 150 kids, at 14 CTA sites throughout the city-rail embankments, subway stops, bus terminals. UFG, which embellished the habitually bombed North and Clybourn subway station, took first prize again; fo ur of its members won scholarships to Columbia College. One member of second-place crew DCS was awarded a merit scholarship to the School of the Art Institute.

In recent years, the CTA had spent about $ 14 million a year in graffiti removal. Last year, they saved $5 million in maintenance costs, according to Mortell. With an operating budget of $773 million, the CTA' s $12,000 investment in the 1994 contest barely merits a plunk in the bucket. While Mortell will stage the contest again this year, she's worried about running out of walls; she'd rather not paint over murals. Educating the public is another important component of the program. "Some community groups still don ' t understand what these youths are doing," says Mortell. "They don ' t know that piecing is a different kind of art than tagging or vandalism. It' s an entirely different cultural expression. The media has painted a distorted picture of these young people as gangbangers, that they're all out there with guns and drugs. That's not true. They have real, raw talent and deserve more venues-they're doing great, highly sophisticated art, with a lot of abstraction, using crude tools . These young people come from all kinds of ethnic, cultural, and urban neighborhoods, and they work co-operatively to produce meaningful art with positive results. We should celebrate. That's what [Martin Luther] King was all about-we shall overcome."

AEROSOL ACTIVISM The Chicago Public Art Group, a non-profit multicultural arts coalition, has united community groups and professional artists to produce murals, mosaics, and sculptures for 25 years. Now the group has added a new medium to its culturally activist agenda: the aerosol spray-can. Since 1992, the CPAG has employed writers and incorporated graffiti techniques in 12 community-sponsored murals throughout the city, mostly in poor South and West Side neighborhoods. The first one, in majority Puerto Rican Humboldt Park, includes the portraits of three Puerto Rican Independence Movement heroes now in U.S. prisons on seditious conspiracy charges, and the word "Freedom" in wild-style. The combined traditional/spray-can mural concept-also unique in the country-grew out of discussions between CPAG Executive Director Jon Pounds and Jim Prigoff, co-author of Spraycan Art, the seminal 1987 book that inspired a new generation of writers to transcend traditional subway-type graffiti and take it to public walls. "We thought blending two urban street styles would be an interesting and positive thing to try," says Pounds. "We saw it as a kind of collaboration which would benefit both the mural community and the spraycan community." The program was originally funded through the Chicago Initiative-a joint project of government agencies, social service and community organizations, and private foundations and businesseswhich had been created in the wake of L.A .'s upheavals over the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial. The first year, a core group of seven youths worked on all five murals, with six collaborating from

each of the sponsori ng sites. Each ite had a lead murali t; DZine served as the project's spray-can director.

BREAKING THROUGH TO THE MAINSTREAM "People don ' t consider us legitimate artists. You alway have to school people to let them know that this is a serious media," says DZine, who, since being busted by the CTA cops for illegal painting in 1991 , has become something of an art-commodity in Wicker Park galleries with his "rapid enamel" canvas works. "But just the fact that I'm now a CPAG member is proof they 're taking the spray-ca n seriously . The whole thing is to be breakin ' away from the stereotypes and breakin ' through to the mai nstream." Veteran CPAG artist Oli via Gude and DZine collaborated on three murals in 1993, supported by local community sponsors and a National Endowment forthe Arts Art in Public Places grant. Works combined DZine's di stinctive spray- paint letterin g and Gude' s brush-pai nting ski ll s and emphasis on text in murals. For exa mple, the vi brant, vertically conceived cornerpiece Still Deferred; Still Dreaming , co-sponsored by the Dr. Martin Luther King Boys and Girls Club in the Garfield Park neighborhood, incorporates wild-style, portraits of King and Gandhi, figures of civil rights marchers designed by club members, and quotes from African-Americans discussing their dreams and their Lives. Pounds says that the collaborations have benefited both traditional muralists and aerosol artists. "For the mural community, it was an excellent opportunity to learn about new techniques and how to work quickly, on the fly, in an often surreptitious activity-though it' s done with full permission now . [Muralists] were informed by a sense of speed and how to execute a beautiful piece by pushing time. For the spray [can] community, it provided the opportunity to learn about the collaborative process. They were informed by some sense of content and the connection to a larger community-addressing the needs and issues of the people who live there. " Interestingly, the mainstrearning of graffiti art in Chicago has come without a co-option of content or style, and has n' t seemed to spawn a radical cultural backlash-at least not yet. In some wild West Side neighborhoods now in the throes of arti stic (and real estate) coloni zation, the graffiti aesthetic has even adopted a kind of cool, hardedged "ghetto chic." But there's always a new crop of outlaw writers and street artists coming up, seeking to re-invent the alphabet and to conquer their own personal Mount Rushmore; it remains to be seen if or how the formal-and territorial-boundaries of public spraycan art will be challenged in the future.

Jeff Huebner is a Chicago free-lance writer with a special interest in public arts and community arts.

Echoes 01 the Heal1{detail) 1993, acrylic paint on canvas banners, by Olivia Gude with community members from Chicago's southwest side, coÂˇ sponsored by the Southwest Catholic Cluster Project and Chicago Public Art Group. (photo: the artist)

I REMEHBER D~ . XING AS A HERO, BUT ALSO AS A THREAT . I REMEMBER THE TERRIBLE SAONBSS WHBM HE DIED, BUT I ALSO REMEHBER THE BLACK PANTHERS THREATENING TO BEAT /Iii UP .

d b

The pDssibility of heteroglossia

"Men and women are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.. .no one can say a true word alone, " - Paulo Freire

O in public space

40 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

~_'cal

n a cool spring afternoon, I watched the young couple carefully read the IOO-plus names on the credit box of the 1988 Roseland Pullman mural, and I reflected on how common an occurrence this was. As a community muralist, I know that public crediting of the community contributors to a mural is an important part of the art's meaning. It is acknowledgement that the mural is the product of a social discourse; it is a recognition that the contemporary urban mural is a popular cultural form that has succeeded in communicating to the public that community art calls into question the tradition of the avant-garde artist as necessarily alienated from and adversarial to his or her audience. As a young artist, I was fortunate to encounter the Chicago Mural Group (now Chicago Public Art Group) , whose artists, linking us to the "Wall of Respect" and other early monuments of communitybased art, were a vital part of the creation of the contemporary mural movement. From them, I learned the longstanding tradition of community art: Public art will be accepted and respected by the community if it authentically arises from the experiences of the community. A basic technique of creating this link is for the artist to enter a dialogue with the community at specially arranged gatherings. This kind of interaction builds community; individual and group formulate their hi stories and possible futures in discourse. In the community mural tradition , images for the mural are then synthesized from the collective conversation . As an artist, I have often seen myself as an orchestrator of various, .

sometimes contradictory, community themes. I have worked to develop a design style that allows for a profusion of iimagery, a juxtaposition of various styles of drawing, so as to foreground the works' development through an aesthetic of collaboration, rooted in difference. Several years ago, I noticed that when explaining the making of a mural, the images were notenough to convey the experience. I wou ld often share with the listeners quotes from participants in community design meetings, which seemed to eloquently sum up ;~ theme or advance the discussion with a fresh and tentative insight. Thinking about people's propensity to actually read all the text on murals over time, I became excited about the possibility of creating a new mural form in which such "conversational poetry" would be a vital element. Where We Come From ... Where We're Going was created in 1992 by standing on a street corner in Hyde Park in Chicago and asking passersby, "Where are you coming from? Where are you going?" People chose to answer the question in many manners - some quite practical and literal, others taking the question into political or metaphysical realms . Images of people, accompanied by quotes from their answers now make up a permanent mural at the site. The mural attempts to reflect the various, often contradictory influences in a multi-cultural community, rather than the more expected homogeneous picture of a mythic, united "people" in joy, in work, in struggle. The variety of quotations within the mural suggests that people within a diverse community do not necessarily hear each others' voices. The act of pointing out these overlapping and interlocking stories suggests that a possible role of the artist is to initiate a conversation between layers of a community which often exist within a single geographic space. Echoes ofthe Heart is a series of 10 banners that were made in 1993 with a group of residents from Chicago ' s southwest side. Keenly aware that this area surrounding Marquette Park is nationally infamous as the place where Martin Luther King was attacked, the multiracial discussion group agreed to come together to try to speak frankly about race and the neighborhood. The unexpected use of a familiar form-the decorative church banner-made it possible to create a text piece on race that would be seen and read by many people who might otherwise not participate in

conversation across racial lines. Participants in the ongoing discu sion group shared stories of anger, grief, fear, and embarrassment, and analyzed structures of language and politics, even as they struggled to find a practical basis for fulfilling spiritual commitments to reach out across barriers of racial difference. The gender and race of those quoted are often quite apparent, despite the lack of identifying information. Although collectively the banners are clearly an anti-racist project, the collection of quotations points not to an overriding truth about race and racism , but to how subjectivity arises out of particular experience, even as the act of sharing thoughts creates the possibility of forging other new collective experience. Also apparent within the dialogic structure is the way in which subjectivity changes over time. People present themselves not as standard, historical types, but as human beings whose thoughts and reactions shift according to accumulated experience. It was important that this piece was made in conjunction with the Southwest Catholic Cluster Project, an anti-racism group in the area. This meant that the project not only arose from the community, but that there was a structure in place through which the work could be shown at various community sites and thus become incorporated into an ongoing dialogue. The group decided that when the banners were completed, preference would be given neighborhood institutions as the exhibition sites. Thus the work belongs to and returns to the community from which it arises. I think Echoes of the Heart and Where We Come From ... Where We 're Going represent just the beginnings of the possibilities for creating polyphonic forms in which communities can represent themselves to themselves. If we believe that as creators of culture, we have the potential to be shapers of society, we must develop effective and respectful aesthetic practices in which communities are seen as multi-vocal communities of discourse, rooted in their histories, open in possibilities, and rich in complexity and contradiction.

Olivia Gude is a muralist and mosaicist. She teaches in the Interdisciplinary Arts Graduate Program at Columbia College and at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

crylic paint On concrete, sponsored by Chicago Public Art Group. (photo: the artist)

W r

"No one ever told me that (art) was something that could be put up on a wall, or in a park, or anything, really, that was our idea. I never really thought that I could produce anything like that--it uplifted my spirits, you could say. " -Dawn Young Bear-Tibbetts, teen-ager, muralist. oo often the youth of today seem to find little value in helping old people, cleaning up vacant lots, or doing typical "good deeds" for their community . Yet a group of teen-agers in a Minneapolis inner-city neighborhood has counteracted this impression by participating in a unique public art project involving writing, drawing, historical and cultural research, and mural painting. The brainchild of Minneapolis artist Marilyn Lindstrom, the Neighborhood Safe Art program is giving inner-city youths more positive role models . Lindstrom started Neighborhood Safe Art as a reaction against what she saw as growing teen-age malaise and violence in her community. Lindstrom has painted murals allover Minnesota, the Midwest and as far away as Nicaragua, but it's clear this project is especially dear to her heart. "The Safe Art project offers youths the opportunity to express themselves in positive ways," she says. "These murals give kids the chance to really see their community and their future in it." The murals also encourage cooperation and a sense of responsibility to others because they require teamwork to produce. Each mural begins with a theme-Unity is the Ultimate Power (1993) and We Claim Our Lives (1994)-developed by Lindstrom and the participating artists. Key to the effort is Lindstrom's incorporation of language and writing, a technique she applies through group discllssions and journal writing. It is a process that plays a central role in producing the bold, powerful images that characterize the murals: "The journals helped us understand our background and others' as well," says 17 -year-old artist Adrian Garza. "Everybody had their own journals, and we wrote in them about our heritage." Teens researched their own cultural and ethnic backgrounds, wrote about these discoveries and on the chosen theme, picked symbols from their ethnic heritages, then copied them or adapted them to their own use. These new designs were made into slides and projected onto the Wall, traced in chalk and painted into the larger collaborative work-a direct link between ideas, writing, and final art. Lindstrom does not work alone. As part of the process, she invites local poets and visual artists to become " mentors" to the teenagers and to offer regular workshops in mental exercises or art techniques that affect the collaborative output. Poet Charles "Doc" Davis was one of those mentors. * Davi s held writing workshops with the teenagers to encourage them to express personal thoughts about topics such as truth, community, the future, trust, and visions of self. "A big part of the process of creating this mural and Neighborhood Safe Art 'Spot' was the writing," says Davis. "Whatthis process does is bring youth together to work around real life. We asked the kids: What do you have to offer your community? What does your community have to offer you? How do you view yourself in your communi ty? So most of the questions and answers were about empowerment." Lindstrom 's process has produced positive change in the community and given young people in her neighborhood a chance to affect their own future.

Bruce N. Wright, a free-lance architecture and design critic and editor, is a former editor of Public Art Review. *Besides Lindstrom and Davis, "mentors" for the Neighborhood Safe Art Spots have included Pat Ballanger, Robert DesJarlait, Chris Ellis, Rafala Green, Baron Lewis, Svoen Mao, Marcie Rendon, Sofia Rodriguez, Anna Stanley, Janet Stately, Denise Thomas, and Tou Vang.

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Maestrapeace, 1994, The Womeo's Building, San Francisco. (photo: Ruben Guzman)

n Sept. 25, 1994, there was dancing in the streets of San Francisco to celebrate the completion of Maestrapeace, a monumental mural transforming the San Francisco Women's Building. The mural, which the San Francisco Chronicle called "stunning and provocative," is a fabulously colored, deeply detailed tribute to the often hidden history of women ' s contributions to societies worldwide. It honors both famous and unsung women, highlights political activism, artistic and scientific achievements, and proclaims the healing power of women ' s wisdom for the ills facing today's communities. The figuration spans centuries, through the combination of ancient spiritual icons and modern portraiture of women in all stages of life. Carefully rendered fabric patterns weave across the four-and-a-half story walls, and nearly 500 calligraphed names of women convey a depth of cultural diversity and inclusion . Four large faces in the top corners are over 35 feet tall, and most figures are over 20 feet. These are big women. Among the many women celebrated are Rigoberta Menchu, Georgia 0' Keeffe, Audre Lorde, Coyolxauhqui , Yemeyah, Guanyin"Hanan Ashrawi, Lillian Ngoya, Joycelyn Elders, Lolita Lebron, and Niuta Teitelboim. The one male figure in the mural is Delexes, the 6-year-old son of muralist Edythe Boone. His joyfully singing figure represents the wish for a kinder world for all our children. The Women ' s Building commissioned the mural to celebrate its 15th birthday and the completion of mortgage payments. The Women ' s Building is the nation ' s only women-owned and operated advocacy, service, cultural, and social action center dedicated to the empowerment of women and girls. The Building, located on 18th Street between Valencia and Guerrero, houses 10 women's organizations, has an active information and referral center for social services, and provides space for numerous public events. By bringing together groups that work on many issues, the Building helps build links and coalitions, serving as a dynamic catalyst for social change.

44 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

The mural process was a testament to community involvement and artistic collaboration. In 1992 the Women 's Building administration formed a committee to formulate plans for a mural project. Eight thousand questionnaires on the mural' s theme were distributed to building visitors, neighbors, and community organizations. About a year later, enough money was in place and a call went to artists to apply. The committee sought artists who reflected cultural diversity and artistic excellence. From the numerous applicants, seven women were selected. These artists were given the survey results and piles of resources, approaches, and graphics. From there they had the awesome task of bringing the ideas to life on immense window-filled walls. Luckily, this team was up to the challenge. The murali:sts-Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton, and Irene Perez-have collectiively more than 100 years of mural experience and are an active and integral part of the Bay Area mural movement. Their ethnic and cultural diversity (two African-Americans, two Latinas, one East Indian, and two Caucasians, one Jewish; lesbian, straight, and bi-sexual, 26 years old to 57, including two grandmothers), and a varied range of artistic styles and influences, gave them a rich assortment of viewpoints and skills from which to draw. They f9rged their collective view in marathon discussion and design sessions over several months. They presented the design to the board of the Women 's Building and a large community meeting for discussion and suggestions. After a few alterations, the design was approved. The team worked together for over a year painting both walls. They met regularly at the walls during the painting process, and in evening meetings where other issues were raised and worked through. Besides the seven core artists, 70 other women painters lent their talents to the project by assisting in the painting over the course of the year. Some were experienced muralists, others community members having their first encounter with public art. The unity of action of such a varied group, coordinating a complex and beautiful creation, reflected the potential to overcome division and despair, inspiring hope for the neighborhood and the world. The community response was overwhelming. There was almost always an audience, sitting on the sidewalk or standing in groups, watching the artists climb up and down 11 levels of scaffolding, spreading the brilliant colors, as Maestrapeace emerged from the blank walls. People cooked for the painters, serenaded them, and brought flowers. All day long, people shouted thanks and encouragement. It was not uncommon for bystanders to be moved to tears. Deciding on a title for this elaborate work was hard . The muralists decided that they needed to unanimously approve a title . Less than two weeks before completion , after having considered over 30 suggestions , the work was still unnamed.

Meanwhile, they had initiated a correspondence with the Mexican office of Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, inviting her to be the keynote speaker at the dedication . She was featured prominentl y in the mural, and the Mission District, which is home to the Women 's Building, has a very large Central American popul ati on. First she replied that she would be honored, and thought she could make it. A second letter said she regretfully couldn ' t come because of an important commitment, but would send a video to the September dedication , and come later to perform a special Mayan blessing ceremony at the mural. "After all," she wrote, "why shouldn ' t a maestrapiece such as this have two inaugurations?" The artists looked at each other, and said, "That's it! " That was the perfect title. The artists further deconstructed the word "masterpiece" by changing the spelling to "Maestrapeace." This bilingual semantic turnover feminized " m aster" into "maestra" or woman teacher, removing the word completely from a hierarchical paradi gm. It became "woman teacher of peace." The play on " masterpiece" also commented on the bourgeois elitism that denies community mural s the status of fine art; it laid claim to our right to choose our own masterpieces (maestrapeaces) in our own communities. To the artists, their title defines a feminist method of creatingcollectively, in alliance, shari ng strengths, carrying and transforming weaknesses, creating a vision together, beyond individual egos Maestrapeace (photo: Tim Oescher) . bUl'ld mg ' partnerand h'lstones, ship and rejecting supremacy-challenging the very construct of domination by creating visionary art to help build a worldwide movement of women . One of the artists summed it up with this poem about what the mural meant to her, which was read at the dedi cation ceremonies:

Maestrapeace A standing ovationfor women 's liberation A non-negotiable demand fo r respect A dance of detail A web of resistance A healing waterfall ofwomen's love A justice-colored vision empowering the poor A prayer for every single child in the world A sister-song of praise for our Mother Earth And a sweet subversive dream of Peace Maestrapeace

Miranda Bergman has been a public artist for over 20 years. Her murals are found in many locations in the U.S., Central America, and the Middle East. She teaches muralism and specializes in international mural projects, combining political activism and art.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 45

PUBLIC ARTICLES

Mural Conservation Saving Our Murals, California Style fiti. Funding also comes from the Cultural Affairs Department, and a grant from the Andy Warhol Murals are one form of expresFoundation. sion that a majority of Americans Further north, Susan Cervantes can quickly connect with the term is the volunteer director of the non"public art." Murals generally profit Precita Eyes Mural Arts Cencontain recognizable content, ofter in San Francisco's Mission Disten commemorate significant trict. The center employs a minipeople and events, and share close mum-wage paid staff, but it's mainly ties to the communities in which a volunteer organization. Their they exist. When planning public funding comes from workshops, art projects, the citizenry often membership fees , and a few grants. exhibits a certain comfort level When it comes to caring for 100 with this medium that may not of the city's murals, Cervantes and exist when the discussion turns to her organization strive to create an enhancing infrastructure, perforatmosphere of community self-sufmance pieces, environmental art, ficiency. A recent project advideo, or abstract sculpture. dressed the deterioration of a 1979 Murals and other forms of pubmural by artist Bob Gayton. lic art do share one common feaCervantes visited the site, and ture: Very few local arts commisnoted that the work was painted on sions orcivic agencies can or will portable wooden panels. She arcommit adequate resources for ranged for storage space donated their conservation. Fortunately, from the San Francisco Arts Comthe state of California is the mission, worked to stabilize and anomaly, boasting three agencies restore the mural, then oversaw its that could (and should) serve as re-installation within a new neighnational models for the promoborhood mini-park. tion and care of public murals. "The Center represents the largThe Mural Conservancy of Los est mural archives in the city," Angeles' mission is to "maintain, says Cervantes, with documentaprotect, document, and heighten tion both of "what is there and public awareness of murals in what is no longer there." She's greater Los Angeles," according disappointed that the city has no to Bill Lasarow, board president mural maintenance policy and, she of the volunteer group. Central to Willie Herron restoring his 1976 mural The Advancements ofMan (in 1995), located at says, "they don ' t acknowledge that its mission is the Mural Rescue the corner of Cesar Chavl~z Avenue and Soto in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. (photo: the murals are even there." Still, Program, which focuses on se- Krissy Kuramitsu. courtesy SPARC) Mural ÂŠ Willie Herron. she remains upbeat, especially as lected murals which are then she tells the story of a recent mural cleaned, restored, and protected. Funding comes from member donations, Web, and the organization is developing a project designed to include a local school's earned income from special mural tours, and data file of digitized mural images. cultural diversity. The kids there could readily grants from the California Arts Council and Staff member Krissy Kuramitsu spoke identify with Julio Cesar Chavez, the profesthe city's Cultural Affairs Department. about one of SP ARC's current restoration sional boxer, but didn't know of Cesar The Conservancy pioneered the use of an projects, a 1976 mural by artist Willie Herr6n, Chavez, the champion of migrant workers' effective coati ng process for murals, devel- The Advancements of Man. It's a project rights . The project ultimately served to raise oped in response to the substantial graffiti supported by the owner of the building on cultural awareness and had a direct effect problem in the Los Angeles area. Older mu- which it's painted, with some labor provided on the school's curriculum: a new social rals near freeways used to need attention by youthful assistants from a nearby high studies class was formed in response. California's conservation programs dethree or four times a week. Now, with the school. The project has been successfully coating, it's only two or three times per year. linked to the school curriculum, with the serve to be emulated by every community The Social and Public Art Resource Center artist helping educate students about murals with murals, and the public art heritage that (SPARC) is a 20-year-old multi-cultural or- and the process of conservation. murals represent. For more information, conganization, based in Venice, that maintains a "Of 600 murals surveyed, 16 are targeted tact The Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles computeri zed database of over 1,000 mural s. for restoration based upon condition, and at (213) 481-1186, SPARC at (310) 822SPARC compiles mural condition reports, community, aesthetic, and historical impor- 9560, or Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center at photo documentation, and conservation his- tance," says Kuramitsu. Many murals feature (415) 285-2287. tories through the Mural Resource Center a stenciled, toll-free phone number and an [see article, p. 29]. In tune with the '90s, identification number that allows concerned Robert Schultz is the visual arts superthey're Internet-accessible via WorldWide citizens to call in reports of damage or graf- visor for the city of Mesa, Arizona.

by Robert Schultz

46 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

Detail of Wall of Fame, Minneapolis, 1994. (photo: courtesy Pogo Press)

Moral Rights of aPublic Artist by

Laura

Danielson

Long overlooked in the U.S. and widely respected in Europe, artists ' moral rights are gradually entering the American consciousness . Also called rights of personality, moral rights essentially move beyond copyright to protect the artist' s individuality. They are best explained by looking at each of three categories of moral rights: the right of integrity, the right of paternity, and the right of divulgation. The first and most essential right involves the artist's right not to have his or her art work mutilated or distorted in any way that would harm its artistic integrity or the artist's reputation. In certain cases this right includes preventing the destruction of a public artwork. The fundamental idea is that society has a moral obligation to preserve and cherish the work of its artists. The right of paternity allows the artist to claim authorship of a work, while the right of divulgation allows an artist to withhold work from the public. A fourth right frequently included in moral rights discussions is the right to resale royalties, meaning the artist may receive a mandatory percentage from each subsequent sale of the same work of art. These moral rights were developed in Europe and are embodied in the international copyright treaty, the Berne Convention. The United States signed this treaty in 1989, and consequently was required to adopt legislation to safeguard artists' moral rights. The public acceptance of these rights, however, does not come easily to an American legal mentality that places a high premium on individual property rights. After all, once an artwork has been purchased , shouldn ' t its owner be free to do with it whatever he or

she pleas:es? Under pressure from the other Berne signatories, in 1990 Congress enacted a somewhat watered-down moral rights statute, the Visual Artists Rights Act or "V ARA" (Public Law No. 101-650, Title VI, 104 Stat. 5089). This law relates only to the rights of integrity and paternity, and includes original or limited-edition paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, or photos taken for exhibition purpose. Artists alone have these rights, and cannot transfer them to others. This legislation gi ves artists the right to prevent any "intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification of artwork which is prejudicial to their honor or reputation. In cases of art that is oflfecognized stature artists may intervene to prevent its destruction. An exception is made for art that is incorporated as part of a building and cannot be removed." To date there are not many cases involving this legislation, as only those works of art created or sold after the enactment of V ARA are protected. One such case involves an artist's attempt to block the removal of sculpture from the entry of the famed Helmsley Palace Hotel. We can expect these cases to increase as artists become more aware of their moral rights. Unfortunately for artists, we can also expect "savvy" public art patrons to require artists to sign contracts waiving their moral rights as a condition ofthe art commission or sale. As waiver of these rights is expressly allowed under the statute, there is nothing an artist without leverage could do except walk away from the deal. Still, absent a waiver, V ARA serves to protect the integrity of artwork in the United States, especially public artwork by a recognized artist. But what about unrecognized artists, and

especially graffiti artists? I was recently intrigued by an article in Colors, by Chaka Jenkins, "As the Sun Sets We Ri se: The Life and Times of a Graffiti Artist." [see excerpt p. 33] It got me thinking about graffiti as a vibrant art form instead of as a rebellious act. What about graffiti art such as that found at the Wall of Fame near the University of Minnesota, which after a time takes on its own life as an artistic contribution to urban culture? Could graffiti artists have blocked its destruction by those authorities who view graffiti as urban blight? Under V ARA, graffiti artists could only assert moral rights if the art is protectable under copyright law, meaning that it must have been legal. Presumably, if graffiti is created with the approval of the property owner, a graffiti artist might assert the right to block plans to paint over it. According to Jenkins, the Wall of Fame's owners gave permission for the graffiti ; if so, it is interesting to imagine the outcome of an action brought by graffiti artists to block the wall 's modification or destruction . [see page 32] In any case, even with its limitations, V ARA is an important first step in American jurisprudence towards recognition of the kind of artists ' rights that have long been respected in other cultures. Who knows, perhaps we ' 11 eventually get used to the idea of moral rights, and even the idea of resale royalties won't seem too radical. Laura Danielson is an attorney with the intellectual property law firm of Patterson & Keough, P.A., in Minneapolis. She practices arts and entertainment law and represents foreign artists in immigration matters. She also teaches arts-related law at area law schools.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 47

REVIEWS

P.A.R.T.I. PUBLIC ART: REALITIES, THEORIES AND ISSUES Reviewed

Andrea Blum: "Domestic Arrangements" Storefront for Art and Architecture 97 Kenmare St., New YorkÂˇ November 19-December 31,1994

Reviewed

by Patricia C. Phillips

Operating from spartan headquarters, the Storefront for Art and Architecture has been an astute cartographer of the shifting boundaries of art, design , architecture, and urbanism . Founded over a dozen years ago in a former store in lower Manhattan , the organization ' s current space is an acute trapezoid whose extreme configuration challenges exhib itors and viewers alike. One year ago, Vito Acconci and Steven Holl reinvented Storefront's sole elevation. Ignoring conventiona l features such as walls, doors, and windows, Acconci and Holl created a manipulable, opaque plane of pivoting components that confronts usual conceptions of public and private space. Since this transformation , every exhibiti on is compelled to implicitly acknow ledge or actively engage the Acconci/Holl project. At home in this provocative context, Andrea Blum ' s exhibition Domestic Arrangements quietly interrogates the relation of public space and private gesture. Many artists have designed or reinvented amenitieseither conforming to or deforming the normal design standards for such artifacts in the city . Blum puts a spin on these notions. Her preoccupations are for furniture that provides seating which is simultaneously accommodating and discomfiting. Her projects seem to be prototypes that fo llow guidelines for specific formal characteri stics, but produce ambiguous p ychological effects. They appear disarmingly " normal" at first take, yet, in fact, they are simply style- less. Banqu.ette, for example, is a long line of individual eats. The sequence of seating modules is articulated by armrests ; whi le they do not shield, the armrests clearly discourage contact and exchange between individuals. Projecting verticall y from each seat is a vanity mirror. The viewer/user can revel in a narcis ism that is inevitably contaminated by the reflection ofthe pace beyond. A balance of de ire and paranoia is regi stered in the e vanitylrear-view mirrors.

Visuality and vulnerability are principal experiences in Blum' s recent work. Many of the projects use mirrors, monitors, and carefully placed peepholes where one might expect a solid shape. Inspiring the identification of the entire exhibition, the project titled Dom.estic Arrangem.ents is an armless maso nite chair with a high back. The chair is draped in a heavy gray fabric that silences and protects while a rectangular aperture cuts through the structure reveals the back of the head and. neck of a seated person. The authoritative proportions of this high-backed chair are subverted by the peephole which leaves the body open to view and to the disturbing experience of being observed "behind one' s back. " Blum's persistent use of masonite, with its ~anal, impermanent associatio ns, raises intriguing questions about models and objects -or models as objects. Are we looking at proposals or projects? Or are we viewing something oddly interstitial like the hybrid conditions emerging between public and privaterealms?Thefunction of Blum's public art is the representation of these indeterminacies. Patricia C. Phillips is an independent art critic: and chair of the art department at the State University of New York-New Paltz.

48 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

Michael

Several

Spin doctors, negative attacks, massaging the press, political advisors, media consultants and mobilizing the core constituencywelcome to public art at the end of the 20th century. This portrait of an increasingly political as well as politicized public art emerged at the Pu.blic Art: Realities, Theories and Issues conference, October 27-30, 1994, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. The conference was organized by the California/International Arts Foundation, the California Arts Council, and Los Angeles ' Community Redevelopment Agency and Cultural Affairs Department. The tone of the conference was jointly set by the campaign then raging over the racially charged Proposition 187 and by the conference keynote speaker, Amalia Mesa-Bains , independent artist, cultural critic and recipient of a MacArthur fellowship. Together, they presented complementary segments of a fractured society turning away from an overarching sense of community. Mesa-Bains called not for a history-an American history-that is comprehensively and thoroughly told, but for ethnic, racial and feminist "histories properly told." She invited the audience to translate her formula, with its claim for acceptability and rightness, into public art that addresses the needs of marginalized groups rather than search for the cords of shared values and experiences that un ite us as a people. This physical and metaphorical loss of our nation ' s common ground was discussed in a number of panels. In "PubliclPrivate Space: a New Cultural Mapping," urban geographer Michael Dear warned the public arts administrators who constituted the majority of the audience that they are operating in a political , social , and economic environment in which "the People" can no longer be defined. On a later panel, artist Daniel Martinez suggested with telling military phraseology like "strategic engagement" and "the aesthetic occupation of enemy territory" that the settings for public art have become battlegrounds. This theme was reinforced by Jim Prigoff, who asserted on a panel on "Graffiti: Art or Plague?" that spray-can artists are aggressively exposi ng the cracks and divisions in society. The panel entitled "Is Confrontation in Public Art Acceptable?" explored the divisive political context in which public art is now created. Artists Elizabeth Sisco and Louis Hock described their Border Rebate project, which handed out money, including some

indirectly granted by the NEA , to undocumented workers as a reminder that the recipients are taxpayers. This message, however, was ignored in the videos Sisco and Hock played of the English-language television coverage, which portrayed the project as a waste of public funds and a government giveaway. (Sisco and Hockdid not have time to show Spanish-language broadcasts which presented the message they wanted .) Appearing on the same panel as Sisco and Hock, Suzanne Lacy presented a video of a favorable CNN segment dealing with her "The Roof is on Fire" project. This performance piece, involving over 100 inner-city youth talking in their space-the inside of automobiles- about political and social issues that affect them, drew more than 1,000 middle- and upper-middle-class spectators. This coverage of public art as part of regular news broadcasts was hailed by panelists throughout the conference as representing public art's increasing relevance. What unfortunately was not explored, considering the sharp differences in the media' s treatment of their projects, was the handling of the press by Lacy on one hand and the Border Rebate team on the other. In addition to discussions of the contentious issues surroundi.ng public art, there were technical panels on commissioning, installing, and maintaining public art and well attended tours of Los Angeles public art projects. Together, all the panels made the conference a benchmark for measuring the maturing of public art issues since the 1980s, when the focus was on artist/architect collaboration, funding , community involvement and integrating public art into urban planning. By the end of the conference, there were probably few who shared the opinion Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight espoused on the panel "A New Paradigm: Critical Writing About Public Art" that "it was a red herring to suggest differences between public and gallery art." Instead, most probably agreed with artist David Avalos, who summarized the two days of panels by declaring in the very last session, "A New Dialogue: Reinventing the Administrative Process," that "Public art is about democracy."

LEqR NI NG

Ad~

4I4~A.ffarrs

SEE

r H E P H VSICAL

FEATURES

O F YO U R N EIG H BORHOOD

PLANNING

TO STAY

Planning to Stay Learning to See the Physical Features of Your Neighborhood by William Morrish and Catherine Brown Minneapolis: Milkweed Press, 1994, 120 pages, $ 16.95 , paper.

Reviewed by Bruce N. Wright In a tone of voice not unlike that of the Los Angeles beating victim Rodney King, who said "Can we all just get along?" William Morrish and Catherine Brown in their new book, Planning to Stay, importune America's neighborhoods: "Can we agree to meet and work together for a common purpose?" But Morrish and Brown-respectively, the director and coordinator for special projects for the Design Center for American Urban Landscape at the University of Minnesotaare fighting a tough fight. If the federal government succeeds in its efforts to promote widespread use of a future "information superhighway," we will see continued erosion of public space and connection with our communities. As the late Christopher Lasch says in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, the increasing mo-

Michael Several is a legal assistant at Baker & Hostetler. During his spare time he writes about public art in downtown Los Angeles.

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bility of the upper-middle and upper-class American popUl ation (a segment he calls "the new elites") i contributing to a decline in civic responsibility: "Advancement in business and the professions these days requires a willingness to fo llow the siren call of opportuni ty wherever it leads. Those who stay at home forfeit the chance of upward mobility." This migratory lifes tyle, he argues, leads to nothing less than a revolt by the new elite against "Middle America," because these professional managers and jet-setting info rmation handlers are fl eeing the very idea of home, with its ground-gripping traditions, nosy neighbors, and fa mily obli gations. Controvertibl y, Planning to Stay believes continuity of population and dedicati on to solving localized problems lead to improved conditions. There is a second message promulgated here-that by learning to see the physical features of our neighborhoods we can make value judgments about existing situations and thereby begin to make use of, even fi ght for the preservation of these fa miliar settings . Furthermore, we begin to reconstitute a neighborhood conscience, that guiding light of morality which distingui shes us, we are often told, fro m animals. Planning to Stay offers no quick remedies to be applied indi scriminately like a soothing poultice on one of the currently egregious social sores, like "increased violent crime," "the drug problem," or "teen pregnancy." Morrish and Brown do not expect people to bring solutions to the "hood" like so many combat medics sent in to make provisional repairs, although many politicians ac ross the country appear content with merely this. Instead, Morrish and Brown expect a community to work hard at discovering itself, its wants, its fu ture needs, and its potenti al. This necessarily must be a laborious, ongoing effort. In this sense Planning to Stay is more a guidebook than cookbook, more processthan product-oriented. For this reason, the language, at times, gets a bit simplistic, even redundant from chapter to chapter. Morrish and Brown overlay a matrix of observation and data collection on a community to obtai n new info rmation. It's a studied, careful coaxing of a neighborhood' s hidden (and sometimes visible but not evident) messages through exhausti ve gathering of images, maps, zoning codes, literature-a daunting, thorough-going inventory of physical and psychological attributes. But the reader is advised to suffe r through it, because the payoff at the end is new insight into how a neighborhood actuall y works. Although Planning to Stay may seem untransferable-aUphotos and examples used in the book are specific to the Twin Citiesthe principles and basic approach can be applied to any vicinity. And public arti sts will find this method useful fo r better understanding urban pl aces: Think of it as a Baedeker's Guide to your neighborhood.

Bruce N. Wright, a free-lance architecture and design critic, is a former editor of Public Art Review.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 49

R.I.P. Memorial Wall Art by Martha Cooper and Joseph Sciorra New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994. 96 pages, $19.95 , paper.

Bomb the Suburbs Graffiti, Freight-Hopping, Race, and the Search for Hip-Hop's Moral Center. by William "Upski" Wimsatt Chicago: The Subway and Elevated Press, P.O. Box 377653, Chicago, IL 60637, 1994. I 12 pages, $7 , paper.

voyeurism. It is also plausible that a number of deaths may not have been complicated by AIDS or drug abuse. I don ' t like the innuendo, andl I don ' t like the violins in the background. It reminds me of the way mainstream media often say of the latest city shooting, "Police say it may have been a drug- or gang- or devil-related death." But Sciorra and Cooper have done a good job with this collaboration. I've learned something aboUtt a genre I didn ' t know existed, and several arltists have made me see into their worlds, although filtered through others' eyes.

Reviewed by A. P. Porter

Bomb the Suburbs is personal and dense.

My brain hurts. In the lastfew weeks, I've read two books about stuff that was new to me-memorial wall art and hip-hop. I reel. I marvel. lieU you about them. R.I.P. Memorial Wall Art presents the wall paintings in New York that are dedicated to those who die, usually young, often violently. Many of these paintings are huge, sometimes with portraits of the deceased, where the guy's head might be eight feet high. Individuals and families commission memorials, although many are done spontaneously by the artist. R.l.P. ' s photography and reproduction are fine, and the colors are vibrant and accurate. The paper is good enough. I wish the binding would let it lie flat. And I wish the cover were stiffer, so the book wouldn't flop around the way it does. I do so like a hardcover. R.I.P. made me wonder again what it's like for a city boy nowadays trying to grow up with TV and no hope, where kids who expect to die young arrange for their own memorial painting. I still don ' t know what that' s like, but R.I.P. reminded me that some things don ' t change, that people die in spite of our love and that being reminded of the dead, even with an airbrush, is not a bad t.hing. Historian Mahmoud EI-Kati tells of an African tradition regarding ancestors, which considers them still here as long as someone remembers them. Memorial wall art keeps loved ones around like that. There over 100 pictures of memorial wall art in R.I. P. and scores of artists represented ; some are stunning, some are awful. Many are corny and sentimental. A couple memorialize the favorite products and cartoon characters of the deceased. For some-especially the big ones-you probably ought to be there. The flashy presentation-full color, lots of full bleeds, high production values-suits a mostly airbrushed genre, but R.I.P. suffers from a vulgar voyeurism, looking at the lifestyles of the poor and talented. Such statements as "It is plausible that a number of deaths attributed to an illness such as asthma may in fact have been complicated by AIDS or drug abuse," contribute to this

U pski-the author' s tag, or by line, as a graffiti writer--has a lot to say. Fortunately he's a good writer, simple and direct: "To be black is to feel used, unappreciated, condescended to, to be told you are ugly, stupid, abnormal, inferior, violent," and "Blacks are stupider than white:s." Like a lot of black people, I don't expect white people-or anybody who's not black, for that matter-to get it, to have any real insights into "TheBlackExperience," or even the black experience. Thomas Kochman, author of Black and White Styles in ConGraffiti. Frei9f1'.Hopplng. Rice, and 'he flict, has some. So Silarch lor Hlp-hop's 1.601,1 CentH does William "Upski" Wimsatt, certified wigger, and Bomb the Suburbs is a hell of a fine book. For the hip-hop challenged, a wigger is a white person who affects the styles-sartorial and behavioral-of lower-class black people. The lower-class part is my refinement, added because I don't think the styles of middle- and upper-class black people are distinctive enough for anybody to emulate. "If channeled in the right way, the Wigger can go a long way toward repairing the sickness of race in America," says Upski. "Our [white people' s] most useful role-besides acting like decent human beings-is not 'fighting racism,' 'uplifting' blacks,' or attacking 'sell-outs.' It is to support blacks' success in our institutions by practicing a personal kind of affirmative action: Friendship that includes race instead of ignoring it...The main reason more whites don't become wiggers-instead of just white rap fans-is that getting down with blacks, like any relationship, requires that precious, egoendangering resource: effort." As a book, Bomb the Suburbs is a mess . The whole thing is poorly designed, from the truly ugly covers to the tiny margins and crude illusltrations. Big deal. Read the words, like "the white liberal is a worthless frustration to black efforts; he has never put any skin on the line and he never wilL" Upski grew up in Chicago and that hip-hop scene is what he knows best and focuses on, but he also gives some attention to hip-hop as a national phenomenon and the latest area of

50 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

black exploitation. Upski's accounts of his adventuresbombing (writing graffiti), hitchhiking, surviving in Chicago-are fascinating, but it' s his philosophizing that makes me want to give Bomb the Suburbs to everybody I know . Upski knows how little he knows, which is curiously refreshing, and he' s willing to learn. Like the rest of us, Upski is a bundle of contradictions, and so is his book. Near the end, he concludes, "It seems to me that being a juggler of competing truths is the only sensible moral center to have."

A. P. Porter- essayist, biographer, XyWriter-is the author of six books for children and several essays for grownups. He volunteers for the Center for Arts Criticism and S.A.S.E., an organization of writers. [A. P. Porter's reviews are supported in part by the Center for Arts Criticism in St. Paul, MN, with a grant from the National Endowmentfor the Arts.]

Whose Art is It? by Jane Kramer, with an introduction by Catharine R. Stimpson Durham, NC, and London: Public Planet Books and Duke University Press, 1994. 132 pages, $9.95, paper.

Reviewed by Patrice Clark Koelsch Jane Kramer has written an informative and sympathetic account of the effort of John Ahearn, a young, white, middle-class sculptor, to produce artthat affirms the gritty grace of his adopted neighborhood in the South Bronx. Ahearn was well-established on Walton Street, decorating outdoor and indoor spaces with murals and painted casts of his neighbors, when he was awarded a percent-for-art publiccomrnission for the new precinct police statiGn. Ahearn made and installed three life-sized cast bronze statues of people from the neighborhood: Dasheela (dressed in a Batman T-shirt, gliding on roller skates), Corey (bare-chested, a basketball under his arm, his foot resting on a monster boombox) and Raymond (a hooded young man genuflecting next to his pit bull, Toby). Although no one on the selection panel or at the Office of Cultural Affairs expressed any reservations about Ahearn's project, two black employees at the Department of General Services took issue with Ahearn's choice to "put those negative elements on a pedestaL" They were joined by like-minded activists from Walton Street. Within if week of their installation, Ahearn voluntarily removed the pieces and put them in storage. The debate about whether art should depict

the real or the ideal has its formal origins in the philosophy of ancient Greece. But Ahearn's saga is as much about identity politics as it is about art. Who is morally authorized to determine how a community should be represented? Which one can legitimately speak for the many? In retrospect, Ahearn characterizes the conflict as "the art world against the community" and his allegiances are entirely with the community: "If I've misread my people it means I've misread myself and my concept." Ironically, Corey (one of the models), sees the furor as "just like the Bronx, no respect for art." Although the story of John Ahearn and his Bronx bronzes (a story which first appeared in The New Yorker) is reason enough to read Whose Art is It?, Catharine Stimpson's dense but lucid introductory essay on multiculturalism and political correctness could be enormously useful-as a refresher and a rallying point-for artists and arts administrators confronting hostile and uninformed interlocutors. Stimpson provides an evenhanded historical and phlosophical overview of the issues and concludes with a helpful discussion of five principles for establishing genuine cultural democracy. It would be wrong to read Whose Art Is It ? simply as a cautionary tale about the personal and political perils of producing public art; the book is as much a specific .and complex portrait of the artist as a young missionary. Although Ahearn may have to keep one foot in the Manhattan gallery system in order to keep the other in the South Bronx, his adamant identification with Walton Street is problematic. (Ahearn's on-again, off-again collaboration with community member Rigoberto "Robert" Torres is skewed by Ahearn's singular access to artistic and financial resources.) Kramer wryly observes that while John Ahearn dresses in the same hooded sweatshirt and sneakers as his model Raymond, "he does not look like a drug dealer. .. [he] looks like a healthy, good-looking' blue-eyed downtown artist-which, of course, he is."

But Is It Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism Edited by Nina Felshin Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. 412 pages, $18.95, paper.

Reviewed by Patrice Clark Koelsch The grabber title, But Is It Art? is deliberately ironic and a bit of a misnomer; the subtitle, The Spirit of Art as Activism, is a more accurate description of this hefty anthology edited and introduced by independent curator Nina Felshin. The dozen essays in this volume examine specific artists, projects, and organizational efforts to reconceptualize and reinvigorate a variety of progressive, sometimes radical art practices. The artists were chosen "on the basis of the

consistency, integrity, and inventiveness with which they employ their formal strategies," says Felshin, "as well as their interesting, complex, and at times unresolved relationships to the art world." Many of the projects analyzed require the participation of experts in science, technology, engineering, health, bringing additional credibility to the effort and enlarging the audience for it. The book pays homage to individual artists who have received considerable acclaim personally and professionally: Eleanor Heartney writes about Helen and Newton Harrison's environmental reclamation efforts; Patricia Phillips examines Mierle Laderman Ukeles' maintenance art and Peggy Diggs' efforts to make the private public; Jeff Kelley mines the metaphor of the body politic with respect to the work of Suzanne Lacy; and Dot Tuer chronicles the labor-intensive careers of Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge. But where are the critical appreciations of the museological interventions of James Luna? The creative collaborations of Guillermo G6mez-Pefia and Coco Fusco? The interrogation of race by Adrian Piper? While race and racism are included as axes of engagement and disengagement in the pieces on such group projects as The American Festival Project, the San Diego art activist group, the Guerrilla Girls, and Women's Action Coalition, in-depth exploration of the careers of specific, mature activist artists of color is missing. While many ofthe pieces raise philosophical issues about criteria for establishing the success of a project, the primary value of this volume is in the wealth of contemporary art historical information it brings together. The last two essays in this collection deserve special notice for their critical insights. Elizabeth Hess ' s study, "Guerrilla Girl Power: Why the Art World Needs a Conscience," traces the meteoric trajectory of the Guerrilla Girls ' art and politics, from postering to performance. Hess notes the limitations and contradictions of the gorilla mask as a signifier, and she wryly observes, "There are, I'm sad to report, more advantages to being a Guerrilla Girl today than being a woman artist." Tracy Ann Essoglou examines the Women's Action Coalition (WAC) from the vantage point of an activist participant. Her discussion of the development and dissolution of the WAC is candid and critical. She examine strategic mistakes that undermined efforts to build coalitions, and confesses that it was easierforthe WAC to appear inclusive in its media productions than to actually be inclusive. ("In refusing as a group to discuss money as an enabler, and in refusing to have an office, we inadvertently maintained divisions in terms of who could afford to do what.") Every activist-artist organization can learn something from studying the parallel parables of these two fruitful but flawed

efforts. All 12 essay provide important basic information- who, what, when, where, how, and why. None of the essays have the shorthand smugness of insiders writing for other insiders. Each author has compiled a formidable bibliography; consequently, this book has a future as a text for the social sciences as well as the arts.

Patrice Clark Koelsch is a writer, critic and cultural worker living in Minneapolis.

OutSide The Frame Performance and the Object: A Survey History of Performance Art in the USA since 1950 Robyn Brentano and Olivia George Cleveland: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994. 200 pages, $19.95, paper. Reviewed by J.

Otis Powell!

They didn ' t go far enough. Outside the Frame. Performance and the Object: A Survey History of Performance Art in the USA since 1950 is the overly ambitious title of a book oflists, photographs, a timeline, and two essays published in conjunction with , or as documentation of, an exhibition with the same title which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. The book is a good example of why I have trouble writing the word "history" without quotations . The authors (Robyn Brentano and Olivia Georgia) take such a narrow view of performance art that many participants are excluded from written documentation of the genre. This would not be so upsetting if the title didn ' t make such a broad claim. I could have lived somewhat easier with the book if it had only tried to document an exhibition, but to add all of the other weight to it bogged it down. Don'tbelieve the hype. The book reads like an annual report to funders. The introduction is full of back-slapping prose before it ventures into just plain lists of names. There are long essays by the two guest curators chronicling the "history" of performance art and tracing it back to 1881 in Paris, despite the title's focus on American performance art in the last 45 years . Both curators seemed more interested in impressing the reader with their knowledge of 20th century art history than with their knowledge of performance art in the USA. The lists of artists and events that do appear in the essays are the same lists that appear in other"histories" of the genre, crediting mostly visual artists who worked on either coast, are from the gallery scene, and who got their MFAs from the right institutions. That' s simply too narrow a prism through which to view performance art; it omits many musicians, dancers, actors, writers, media arti sts, and others who belong in a "history" of the genre, not to mention artists who don ' t live and work on either coast. My favorite definition of performance art

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 51

came from Twin Cities-based performance artist Patrick Scully who said, "It's performance and it' s art." That type of generous perspective allows room for a lot of work to be considered, and it doesn 't presume that performance was not art until painters and sculptors started showing their work in theater settings or taking it to the streets. Another di sturbing characteristic of the perspectives rendered in this book is that, even when the authors manage to talk about American art, they don ' t contextualize it with what was happening politically and socially in thi s country from the 1950s on. There was a climate of civil unrest, social change, and enlightenment that generated enough heat to make space in "the" galleries for that work to come outside the frame and live, but the essays in Outside the Frame give no indication of that at all.

J. Otis Powell! is a poet, philosopher, curator, performer, and cultural commentator who lives in the Twin Cities. He works with The Loft, The Southern Theater, Intermedia Arts, and writes for COLORS. [Po well! 's review was supported in part by the Center for Arts Criticism in St. Paul, MN, with a grantfrom the National Endowmentfor the ARTS.]

Urban Paradise: Gardens in the City Public Art Issues No.3 New York: Public Art Fund, 1994 $12.95, paper.

Reviewed by Deborah Karasov Two garden traditions are predominant in thi s country, the common garden and the ornamental garden. As a para- Urban Paradise' . digm for public art, Garaens '" tne C,ty neither is wholly sat._isfactory. On the one __ hand, the common garden satisfies the aspirations of everyday existence. Culturally diverse but universally significant, the common garden represents "work shared with a few companions, family or neighbors, work that has quali ty and measure, capable at best of humanizing a small fragment of nature."! The common garden is not a public work of art, but rather a place to impart kinship traditions and values. On the other hand, the ornamental or pleasure garden is created by urban tastes and professional values. It is an urban amenity, designed as much for public display as for the passive enjoyment of nature. Originating in the 17th century as a setting for courtly celebrations, the pleasure garden remains a "setting for social interaction, as background for

playing both in the sense of diversion and of acting a part. ,,2 Urban Paradi se, Public Art Fund 's program for artists' gardens in New York, is an effort to reinvent these traditions . Urban Paradise, the publication , documents the artists' conceptual proposals and offers related essays. As such, we can evaluate it as a public art program only conceptually. In this basis one wonders if the artists are as effective as they could be when they use the garden as a forum for personal moralizing. Why does it matter? Inherent in the common tradition is the emphasis on people's collaboration in design and maintenance; implied in the ornamental tradition is the need to reflect on class mores. Inattentive to these traditions----even as a critique-some of these artists are left to create only personal statements, however compelling and varied they are. This approach might be valid in tending one's own garden, but it's hardly relevant in a public realm, and certainly not in an era when we need public discussions on environmental spaces in our cities. The contradictions of Public Art Fund's program are self-evident in the accompanying essays . While including an essay on community gardens in the monograph, Public Art Fund sets itself up in opposition to this tradition. Director James Clark writes in the introduction, "In contrast to community-based programs which privilege process over product and where the artist's creativity is often subsumed under the goal of community participation, Urban Paradise retains a realm in which the particular skills of the artist and the visionary potential for artistic intervention can find a meaningful role within the physi cal and spiritual development of the city." What could be this new role for the artist, one that maintains the individual artist's voice in an environment that seeks the representation of many different views? Urban Paradise gives us only a conventional role of artist as apostle. Certainlly several of the artists do suggest thoughtfull innovations in our garden traditions. Meg Webster' s project links ecological and social change in a "theoretical proposal to create a series of intensely gardened spaces on a number of sites." Designed with the community, these sites would be individual community garden plots, ecological demonstrations, or production spaces. Alison and Betye Saar propose a kindergarten garden for P.S. 152 in Woodside, Queens. They imagine a place far more stimulating than conventional play areas, using plants and structures to demonstrate ethnic identity, issues of ecology, and literature. In his proposal for a Lower East Side square, Gilbert Boyer suggests a simple yet poetic granite form, planted with ivy and engraved with bits of stories collected from the neighborhood. In these instances, the artist is not preaching, but is acting in a new role, linking fields of knowledge and transcending the divisions of professions. Other proposals are not gardens so much as garden paintings with didactic labels . Architects Gary Strang and Michael Roche pro-

52 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

pose a revelatory structure that teaches us about the infrastructure of irrigation , natural gas, and waste disposal. ArtistHaim Steinbach envisions an extended planter surrounding a waste treatment plant, as a symbol of "nature as an object of contemplation." In these and other instances the lessons seem unremarkable. Admittedly, these proposals are only preliminary . James Clark mentions seminars and discussions that could help sharpen the artists' thinking. With one final question, we look forward to the project as it matures in the next few years. Urban Paradise makes no mention of Public Space for Public Life, the 1993 vision for a new public space approach put forward by the New York Parks Council and the Central Park Conservancy. Projects like Urban Paradise may need to work within this or a more theoretical framework so each public art garden becomes an intervention within a larger cultural landscape. Otherwise, we are left with inconsequential, albeit 20th-century, statements of a mythical Garden of Eden. The title notwithstanding, one hopes this is not the intent of Urban Paradise.

The author thanks Peter Boswell, Associate Curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, for his comments.

Deborah Karasov is director ofthe Landscape Studies Center at the University of Minnesota. Notes: 1. 1.B. Jackson, "Nearer Than Eden, " in The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980, p. 35. 2. J. B. Jackson, "Gardens to Decipher and Gardens to Admire," ibid., p. 51.

Public Interventions [The Video] Producer/director: Branka Bogdanov and written by Eleanor Heartney Produced by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, 1994. 47 minutes. To order, contact the ICA.

Reviewed by Laura Weber Public art is like a stew: a little art, a little community building, sometimes a parade, other times a pinch of guerrilla theater. If you've ever wished you could hand a public official, a student, a community activist, or your parents a visual description of the many forms public art has taken in the past 15 years, this video would fit the bill. In fact, this ambitious 47-minute documentary contains so many concepts and images that neophytes may need to view Public Interventions more than once to fully grasp everything. Those with some familiarity with the field will admire how skillfully it surveys its subject. Public interventions was produced in 1994 in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name at The Institute of Contemporary Art

(ICA) in Boston. The April 27-July 1, 1994 exhibition, co-curated by ICA director Milena Kalinovska and Eleanor Heartney, claimed to be the first exhibition to take a comprehensive look at public art created in the last 20 years. The video does not pan the exhibit galleries or even directly refer to the exhibit (except in the credits). Rather, it is a documentary of the "new" public art, defined as projects that interact with the economic, political, or social aspects of public life. Anything can be public art is the video's basic assertion. After shots of the stereotypical battle-related statues and reliefs to illustrate the "old" conception of public art that commemorates the imposed consensus of the power-elite, Heartney, who wrote the narration, appears to discuss her take on the categories of public art: not temporary vs. permanent, but static vs. active. The static approach is a "house beautiful" aesthetic that tries to eliminate visual clutter and values harmony. Things left out, including unwanted human elements, are as important as what is there, Heartney says as she strolls through Battery Park City in New York. Her animated description of the active approach cues the viewer to the kind of projects that will be highlighted. This implicitly favored approach "sees the city as an organism," assumes democracy is participatory, and citizenship an active process. This kind of public art creates art, Heartney says, that acknowledges "cracks in the body politic." The reference to the city is relevant: All projects and programs documented are distinctly urban, with the emphasis on projects in New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and especially Boston, home of the exhibition. Interviews with artists include (but are not limited to) Houston Conwill and Tim Rollins (New York), Gloria Bornstein and Buster Simpson (Seattle), and reclamation artists Mags Harries and Ljos Heder, Heidi Schork, Ted Clausen, Jeff deCastro, Dunya Alway, and Buffalo Gals (Boston). Works of artists not interviewed such as Mierle Laderman Uke1es, Mel Chin, and Hans Haacke are also profiled. Critics and curators are represented by Kalinovska and Heartney, Rosalyn Deutsch, and Pamela Worden of Urban Arts Boston. Co-curator Kalinovska's interview, describing contrasting reactions to Rachel Whiteread's House project in East London by the professional art world and local residents, illustrates one of public art's sensitive areas: The public the art is intended to edify is sometimes actively hostile toward it. She says, "There are certain problems connected with public art and I ask myself, Why? Why such animosity on the part of residents? What is going on?" One flaw in the video is that this key question is never answered or even really explored. No members of "the public" are interviewed in the video and Kalinovska does not offer any explanation. Though the Gingrich era was still to come when the video and exhibit were produced, it's easy for a sympathetic viewer in February 1995 to worry that the frankly community-based , multicultural and activist attitude to public

art portrayed in Public Interventions is extremely vulnerable to the hateful and punitive public climate the Republicans have been regrettably successful at CUltivating. Any follow-up project or study guide to accompany the video ought to explicitly explore just who the public is and what they think of the public art they've experienced. If you are already of the mind that public art that acknowledges "cracks in the body politic" is positive and legitimate, I daresay you would agree that Public Interventions states its case in a persuasive and appealing manner. While persuasion was not explicitly Public Interventions' aim, the current political climate's antipathy to the aims of "new" public art seems clear. Whether this video can change an unsympathetic mind is less clear.

Laura Weber is a Twin Cities-based art critic and co-author of Forecast's recent publication,Public Art in Minnesota (1994). [Note: The exhibit "Public Interventions " was reviewed by Patricia Phillips in PAR #11.]

Dimensions of the Americas Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States by Shifra M. Goldman Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. $80, c10tll; $29, paper.

Reviewed by Sal Salerno I remember the murals along the alleyways behind my grandfather's house in the East Los Angeles barrio where I grew up. Images that mixed the ancient traditions of Mexico with the continuing struggle of barrio life are still vivid in my mind. The Chicano artists and cultural workers who created them sought anonymity within their own community, not only because they had rejected the Anglo definition of art but because they saw their work as part of a larger cuI ture of resistance, the daily resistance, and struggle oflife lived between borders in an occupied land. What was happening in East Los Angeles in the' 50s was also happening in the streets of Latin American cities and other Chicano barrios throughout the United States. Not only did public buildings become canvasses, but the streets served as free stages for artistic events that prefigured what we now call performance art. The solidarity and artistic vision of Latin American and Latino artists and cultural workers altered the aesthetic and political possibilities of public art. Unfortunately, published accounts of this important chapter in the history of art are few and far between, both in Latin America and the United States. The interaction between indigenous and popular art that occurred and continues to occur in Latin America and the United States reveals complex interfaces and resistances to modernity, modernization and

moderni m. History, culture and politics, combined with the creativity of Latin American and Latino artists, their work and its contribution to aesthetic theory, politics, and culture have, for the most part, been outside the Euro-American discourse on art. Shifra Goldman's book, Dimensions of the Americas, builds the foundations for a dialogue. Dimensions assembles Goldman's essays written since the early ' 70s. More than just another scholarly anthology, Goldman's book chronicles her activism and the politics of her commitment and involvement with Latin American and Latino art and artists, as an outsider. The daughter of working-class Jewish immigrants, Goldman spent years researching and building relationships with artists in Latin America and the United States. "It has taken years of research, travel , and self-retraining (since the university offered me no model) to reconfigure my understanding so that I would be able to contribute to the discourse, a process that will never be completed; come face to face with my presumptions in seeking to present the history , iconography and interpretation of Latin American culture from without." Her reflections and interrogations are woven into a critique of the European paradigm of art history as she constructs a basis for a social history of modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art. She reviews historical and theoretical writings by scholars, artists, and activists throughout the Americas, connecting her social history to the political debates about multiculturalism. The essays that follow her discussion of social history and theory draw from the many journals and books to which she has contributed and exhibits she has reviewed. These essays center on the Mexican muralist movement, the political and artistic significance of poster art and print making, the role of women artists, the politics of multinational businesses in the art world of the ' 70s and ' 80s, the reception of Latin American and Latino artists in the United States, nationalism and ethnic identity. Dimensions is about the social, cultural, and political history of the visual arts in modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino culture. Goldman ' s focus is on mural, print, poster, painting and installation art, and, to a lesser extent, on still photography, film , video, performance, and conceptual art. While the latter are integrated into her discussion of social history, they are not the subjects of individual essays. One nevertheless finds an engaging discussion of the concept of "border art" as developed in the work of Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, artist and author of Warrior for Cringostroika, and on cultural critics George Yudice and Mari Carmen Ramirez. The synthesis of Latin American and Latino history, culture, art, and politics that Dimensions offers and the dialogue that Goldman's work opens are important to activists, art organizations, art institutions, and the university community.

Sal Salerno is a Minneapolis writer and photographer.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 53

ORTHY OF NOTICE

That Beauty ProblemWhy?

Karasov: I believe our environments are uncivil, our experiences too alienated, to be satisfied with a public art that celebrates only personal sensory experience, even if The Conversation Continues that experience is innovative. As I understand Hickey's point, beauty can be the instrument that empowers an audience-not by Regina Flanagan and Deborah Karasov simply to respond, but also to expand its way of looking at things. The 1993 publication of Dave Hickey's Hickey's examples are broader than pubThe Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles, CA: Art Issues Press), definition of beauty address? I began think- lic art projects, but might we speculate on has unleashed much speculation about the ing about "beauty" in 1992, after hearing what his ideas mean for public art? I will try, role of "beauty" in contemporary art. The from a university president who called to say knowing that few people venture to outline April 1994 issue of New Art Examiner was how much the work we had commissioned distinct objectives for public art. I might devoted to the subject, including interviews for her college meantto her. When the stresses suggest that beauty in public art could lead with Hickey, and essays by Peter Plagens of her job became too great, or when she one to experience a new social or ethical and Howard Risatti. In August, apanel at the needed to clear her mind, she would find a way; or the art could provide for a kind of International Sculpture Conference in San quiet spot to contemplate the aerial sculpture seeing that is at least somewhat revelatory Francisco tackled the question" Who 's Afraid of glass and steel cable by Edward Carpenter, about cultural issues. For example, in her part of the architecture of the building'S public baywalk called "Endangered Garof Beauty ?" In the last issue of PAR, this columnfea- atrium. For her, the beauty of the work was its den, " artist Patricia Johanson designed the tured four artists-Doris Vila, Ray King, restorative power. She could find no other walkway in the form of the endangered San Francisco garter snake. Joyce Ko zloff, and Richard Paving stones mimic the Fleischner-who responded to colors and patterns of the Hickey's premise that what is snake. In selected places, important about beauty is what the "body " twists and it does, rather than what it is, turns, creating gardens and who spoke about the reldesigned to provide habievance of beauty to their own tat for locally threatened work. While Vila, King, and species. Albeit in an obviKozloff dealt with the topic, ous, didactic manner, she Fleischner found "beauty" an is trying to unite formal uncomfortable abstraction. conceptions ofbeauty-the The following exchange adpoetry of design and the dresses beauty in public artfrom use of metaphoric the perspectives of an artist/ public art administrator shapes-with the cultural issue of endangered habi( Flanagan) anda landscapearchitect/geographer (Karasov). Artist Mierle tat. Regina Flanagan: Our curLaderman Ukeles once said we should be creating rent reference points remain em"symholsofsurvival. "While bedded in the 19th-century philoso phies of Wa lter Horatio Johanson 's example is Richard Fleischner, East Cap/~'o1 Plaza, SI. Paul, MN, 1991 . Although the site may be grasped in Pater and John Ruskin. Pater one view because it is relatively flat, the composition is best understood as one navigates the landscape, the same objective could apply to cultheorized that art could have no space. Sensory experience opens the door to understanding the work. (photo: Regina Flanagan). relation to the social situation ; tural issues centering on he privileged individual perceptions and the secular public place in her community of urban life. pleasure of the beholder over ethical content. 70,000 that had this effect, and wondered Philosopher Marcia Eaton says that in Ruski n's views on beauty and the sublime why our society did not provide more public moral upbringing what one learns is not how were informed by humankind 's response to places with this qUality. to behave within rules of conduct. Rather, Hickey 's assertion that beauty empowers a the aesthetic properties of nature in a time what one learns is how to see situations in a before the industrial revolution. beholder to respond (to a work of art) causes special light. Something like this could also Deborah Karasov: Your historical refer- me to ask whether the agent causing beauty be true of some public art. A visually or ence to a theory of individual perception is resides in the perceptions of the beholder, or tactilely appealing bench need not stop there. important Our practice of isolating indi- in the aesthetic object. Hickey might also Rather, the bench could lead one to consider, vidual perception as the basis of beauty is assert that: beauty occupies the space between say, its contrast with the inhumanity of other distinct from basing it on social or cultural the beholder and the object. But beauty oper- buildings, its meaning as an isolated ininterpretations. As cultural historian ates differentl y when applied to public art stance of natural materials in our city, or Raymond Williams suggests, this is simply because a plaza, street, or other public place even the workers who put the bench together. one more instance of the divided modern provides a different framework and set of In all these examples, the visual is expanded consciousness of art and society. I raise this possibilities than an art museum or gallery. to a kind of cultural or moral seeing. only to remind us that we are discussing deep r have observed that the most meaningful Beauty, of course, is not the only possible and pervasive ways of thinking. Hickey is a public art, providing the exchange Hickey objective for a public artist, even if the artist good example. Hickey innovates on the defi- has defined as "beauty," often has a "phe- defines beauty as more than visual-for exnition of beauty as an instrument rather than nomenal" aspect, and is perceived by using a ample, spiritual beauty. But ifa goal is beauty, as an idea. Yet he still limits the discussion to variety of senses, not just sight. Sensory I would hope that there is roomfor public art experience opens the door to first perceiving, that makes a connection between aesthetic visual delight and to the isolated senses. Your mention of Ruskin raises another then undelrstanding the work. Yi-Fu Tuan has and cultural seeing. Otherwise our public art issue which is larger than our topic ofbeauty remarked that the development of the proxi- experiences remain isolated and personal in public art bur which impresses upon it. mate senses are necessary to the cultivation and never redress the separation of art and Eighteenth-century or early 19th-century of an aesthetic life of "shaped" feeling and society. works of philosophy may have connected sensitive perception. If public art that is both beautiful and beauty in art with beauty in nature, but that era also had a very anthropocentric attitude towards nature. Today, these issues reappear when we are dealing with beauty in landscape art. To what extent should the "beauty" of the work be coextensive with its ecological "good "? I offer this question, knowing that with this column we won't be able to deal with it. Flanagan : What might a late 20-century

54 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995

1.00

Another view of East Capitol Plaza. (photo: Regina Flanagan)

revelatOlY cannot be directly compared, at least the two can be seen as relevant to the same thing: all the values implied in the word public. Seen this way, the real question is not "Is beauty superficial ?" but rather, "Is the artwork supdficial?" Flanagan: Facilitating social or moral seeing is a goal befitting public art. But while we are a predominantly visual culture, we also interpret most visual information as fact. Seeing is believing, until we stop to reflect upon what is presented, and multiple, often conflicting interpretations become apparent. But how often do we stop to reflect upon the meaning of all we see? Generally, we pause when something contradicts our expectations, is challenging or difficult, or transgressive and offensive. I fear that we have become conditioned to using our sense of sight, in a way which may not help us develop the faculties necessary to understand public art. If we "read" visual imagery literally and superficially, expecting it to yield its message (information/fact) immediately, we may miss the meaning of all but the most didactic of artworks. Are our environments too uncivil and egotistical, or are we? People have a physical as well as visual relationship to both their surroundings and each other. However, public spaces are often designed to discourage public gathering, and do not provide a hospitable context for human interaction, much less reflection or introspection. Perhaps other senses, as well as sight, need to become engaged so that we can first feel comfortable in public spaces. How might public space become more civil? Richard Fleischner's East Capitol Plaza,

designed for a major civic space in St. Paul, MN, operates on several levels. The plaza, adjacent to the Minnesota Judicial Center across the street from the State Capitol, is first perceived spatially. Because of both the functional and visual complexity of the plaza, there is no one viewpoint from which the asymmetrical layout coalesces. Rather, the composition is unveiled as one navigates the space, following any of three possible routes across the plaza. The center of the composition is therefore the viewer, not an exact physical location within the plaza. Fleischner has created a space that we compose using our senses and perceptions. Our response is complex because we have no special organ for registering a spatial sensation; the awareness is subconscious and takes place by the automatic registration of successive images. Spatial perception involves memories and experience, and not only visual sensations, but also sound, touch, and smell. Jean-Pierre Vemant, in his studies of historical psychology, traces the evolution of the ancient Greek agora, traditionally a circular gathering place where citizens assembled to deba.te matters of common interest. Fleischner has used this historical form symbolizing free speech and debate in the amphitheater at the north end of the plaza, and the paved forecourt to the south. Although we may no longer know how to use the traditional public space as an effective political instrument, Fleischner has provided that option, as well as more informal uses. Karasov: It is true that works like that of Fleischner are a good example of a sensory aesthetic that is more than visual. Actually,

the early definition of aesthetics never was necessarily limited to visual. In two volumes titled "Aesthetica " (1750-58), Alexander Baumgarten defined beauty as "phenomenal perfection." The significancefor our discussion is that this early definition, like that used today, still placed predominant stress on apprehension through the senses. Public art, I think, has a need to evoke more than an isolated subjective sense. It is not simply a matter of working outside the gallery context. Certainly artists should create what they want to; I am speaking here only of what I perceive as an important direction. Common or conflicting interpretations, meanings, resonances-these are the special insights artists can invoke from us and which con.ventional place design.ers do not. I could quibble with some ofFleischner's design choices. But the real problem is that it works primarily on an isolated subjective level-how do I respond to it, isolated from any other person or community. If interpretation is there, the language is vague to most. One of the first principles of landscape ecology design is that ofspatial and temporal extensiveness. By definition, a project is an intervention, maybe a disjuncture or pause, within a larger process. Couldn 't some public art be thought of in these terms? Couldn 't beauty be a particular tool of intervention that leads us to read our li ves and our environment in a different way? Regina Flanagan is a St. Paul photographer and art administrator. Deborah Karasov is director of the Landscape Studies Center, University of Minnesota.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER 1995 55

JUMP SPACE Left: Palo Alto's Graffiti-Busting Van In December, 1993, the city of Palo Alto, CA, began an 18-month trial of a new graffiti abatement program . The staff included three employees, one answering a graffiti tips hotline and issuing cleanup work orders, a volunteer coordinator, and a removal laborer who drives the cleanup van shown here. The program relies on volunteers to "adopt an area," to report tags , and help staff remove them , using kits with some of the same cleaning supplies carried in the van . The initial program cost $125,000; extending the program will be considered by the city council's finance committee in April. Reports of graffiti have decreased since the program began , but 1,500 work orders for graffiti removal have been issued and 25 taggers arrested so far in this Silicon Valley city of 30,000 people. (Palo Alto Weekly, February 22, 1995.) (photo: Moira Harris) Below: DEATH in action, NYC. (photo: Joe Austin)

Granili VS. Zero Tolerance b y

Moi ra

Ha rr is

When a tagger with a spray-can meets a city with zero tolerance for graffiti, the res ul t is expensive. Very expensive. Taggers have been arrested, convicted, and jailed for making their marks on society's structures. To remove the marks rapidly, as proponents of zero to lerance campaigns arg ue is necessary, costs cities time, money, and a large investment in cleansing agents. City ordi nances are passing restricting sales of spray-can paints or markers to adults or preventing their purchase completely, as Jeff Huebner writes has happened in Chicago [see stOlY, p. 38]. Task fo rces in volving business, government, and civic leaders, have been established in various cities. They have been involved in developing graffiti prevention or deterrence programs such as St. Paul's Graff Art and Philadelphia's Anti-Graffiti Network. In San Diego, the city's Waste Management Department and a group called I Love A Clean San Diego County, Inc., developed an Anti-Graffiti Curriculum Module for teaching graffiti awareness in grades K-8. The costs of prevention, deterrence, and

educatio n are small compared to the price for erasing graffiti. In 1989 the New York Transit Au th.ority declared that its subway cars were clean, 20 years after T AKI 183 started wri ting his tag around town. The transi t authori ty' s zero tolerance campaign included 1,000 wmkers to clean the cars, transit police dressed as cleaners to patrol the cars, and different color pai nts fo r the cars. (Painti ng cars whi te was not a success, as it prov ided an even more vibrant canvas for tagging.) The costs of this effort, called the Clean Car campaign, were part of the transit authori ty' s $52 million budget for maintenance and repair (The New York Times, May 10, 1989.) Obviously, that was not the end of graffiti in New York City as RV and Joe Austin explain [see stOlY, p. 36] . Graffiti lives, on memorial walls, in subway statio ns, and on the Brooklyn Bridge where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani recentl y posed for a photograph in graffiti-erasi ng gear (The New Yo rk Times, Ji!nuary 29, 1995). "U ni versities, small cities in themselves, fmd graffiti enrolled on campus, indoors and out, and thus must budget for its removal. The University of Minnesota, according to the campus newspaper, spends $100,000 to $200,000 each year fo r g raffiti re moval

(Minnesota Daily, January 30, 1995). Graffiti has otherrepercussions, as well, as businesses research removal products and paint manufacturers deal wi th restrictions on the sale of their wares. Hardware stores cope with banned sales by keeping the cans under lock and key. As a fo rm of public art, graffiti has certainl y generated more attention, worldwide, than any mural, sculpture, or environmental piece ever has. A storyline on television's police drama, NYPD Blue, recentl y involved the murder of a Puerto Rican tagger who had been identified at work in New York's Little Italy. Some news programs present pro-graffiti reports, but most stress anti-graffiti measures as did NBC's 20120 broadcast of October 28, 1994. After correspondent Lynn Sher interviewed taggers and a police officer, and reported on anti-graffiti programs in Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, and Spri ngfield, M O, Barbara Walters ended the segment by saying, sorrowfully, "And all this just to be fam ous."

PAR Associate editor Moira F. Harris is the author of books and articles on art and popular culture.