Public Art Review issue 15 - 1996 (fall/winter)

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CONTENTS FEATURES Foreword James Clark The Anti-Monumental Work of Maya Lin Tom Finkelpearl Creating Intersections of Meaning James Clark Intravenous Consumption-Interview with Francesc Torres Anna Novakov The Greening of Des Moines Eliot Nusbaum Picture This: Art + Landscape in North Carolina Linda Johnson Dougherty Hero Among Confederates Cynthia Abramson Is Placemaking an Art? Deborah Karasov

DEPARTMENTS REVIEWS "Veiled Histories" Conference 26 Sally B. Woodbridge Sculpture: "Crossing Boundaries" Conference 31 Hafthor Yngvason Art for Atlanta Olympic Games 32 Felicia Feaster The Best, the Worst, and Beyond 34 Jack Becker PUBLIC ART SCHOOL Nowhere to Go But Up: Joliet Muralists Jeff Huebner BOOK REVIEWS Sculpting With the Environment Deborah Karasov Sign Language: Street Signs as Folk Art Moira Harris

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Public Art Review Managing Editor: Jack Becker Guest Editor: James Clark Associate Editor: Regina White Copy Editors: Judy Arginteanu and Phyllis Korkki Art Director, Design: Shannon Brady F O R E C A S T Managing Director/Desktop Production: Paula Justich Cover and this page: photo of Maya Lin's Wave Field Printer: A S A P Print Group, Plymouth, M N

by Tim Thayer

4 5 10 14 18 20 23 24

VIDEO REVIEWS Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision Paula Justich Graffiti Verite Bienvenida Mati'as Joyce Kozloff: Public Art Works Joyce Lyons COMMENTARY The Kudzu Effect (or: The Rise of a New Academy) Joyce Kozloff PUBLIC ARTICLES Off to See the Wizards Jack Becker

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LISTINGS Recent Projects, News 43 Exhibits, Conferences, Artists' Opportunities (continued on mailing sleeve)

Public Art Review

is indexed by Art Index.

© 1996 Public Art Review (ISSN: 1040-21 Ix) is published semiannually by F O R E C A S T Public Artworks, 2324 University Ave. W „ Suite 102, St. Paul, MN U S A 55114. Tel. (612) 641-1128: E-Mail: forecast@mtn.org. Annual subscription prices are US $15, $ 2 0 for Canada, and $25 for foreign. Public Art Review is not responsible for unsolicited material. Please send S A S E with material requiring return. Opinions expressed and validity of information herein are the responsibility of the author, not F O R E C A S T , and F O R E C A S T disclaims any claims made by advertisers and for images reproduced by advertisers.

P O S T M A S T E R : Send change of address to Public Art Review, University Ave. W., St. Paul, M N 55114 U S A

2324

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 3

A

s the 20th century winds down, it would seem the importance of place has diminished. Economic, social and political forces, advances in communication technologies, the realignment of political borders, the continued decentralization of North American cities, and a population base that has grown increasingly transient have all loosened the cultural and social bonds that connect us to specific places. Yet as physical and spiritual beings, we still yearn to be connected, to make and maintain public places that for any number of reasons have special significance to us.

There is no formula to placemaking. While some real estate developers and urban planners have realized the importance of providing attractive places, their efforts are generally based on cookie-cutter approaches: colorful banners, standardized signs on storefronts, baskets of flowers suspended from lamp posts, and "artist-designed" street furniture. By and large these are cosmetic attempts to create a place that is perceived to be safe and activeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an environment in which you can shop with peace of mind. Regardless of the claims made, this is not the kind of placemaking that fosters a sense of community or belonging; it is urban decoration in the service of business.

Real placemaking is a complex and messy business, and this is where the artist comes in. Rather than simply solving a visual problem or making a place look nice, ideally the artist reveals a different way of reading the site, which in turn activates or revitalizes the public space. But artists and community leaders who seek to create a sense of place face an uphill battle as outside forces continue to foster a sense of placelessness.

Regardless of the obstacles, it is clear that artists have a vital role to play in the development of new public spaces and the revitalization or reinterpretation of established sites that are considered historic or that function as public symbols. Recently there have been a number of public art projects that focus on history.

Often these projects promote the notion that history should not be viewed as a linear event in which one episode neatly follows the other. Instead, this kind of artwork argues for a more expansive view of the past, one that has many voices and many perspectives. Quite often this type of work seeks to illuminate a present-day concern, like racism, through re-examination of the past. The quality and impact of these projects varies; however, collectively this work marks profound changes in society which affects how we perceive ourselves as private individuals, as members of a community, and in relation to others globally.

In a time when public life seems to be full of conflict and social tensions rather than shared values and the c o m m o n good, it is a daunting task to define what makes a public place meaningful. A site's history plays a significant role, but other factors come into play: architecture, personal experiences, naturally occurring phenomena, and cultural conditioning, to name a few, all influence how we "read" a site. Just as there is no formula for making a place meaningful, there is no set way of pointing to the perhaps infinite number of connections and associations that make it so. In this issue we highlight a number of artists whose public projects have sought to make manifest the connections between a specific site, its past, and the present day; this work attempts to illuminate the special values (sometimes very private ones) we assign to a place. While some may prefer a more nostalgic view of the past, the work of these artists has helped foster a public realm that may be more democratic and a more accurate reflection of the character of public life today. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; J a m e s Clark, Guest Editor

F O R E C A S T BOARD OF DIRECTORS

T a - C o u m b a Aiken, Cheryl Kartes, Laura Migliorino, Garth Rockcastle, Susan Scofield, Colleen Sheehy, Tobi Tanzer, and Laura Weber Public Art Review ADVISORS National Advisors: Jerry Allen, Julie B a r g m a n n , Cathey Billian, Mel Chin, Jessica Cusick, Barbara Goldstein, Barbara Grygutis, M a r y Jane Jacob. Bert Kubli, S u z a n n e Lacy, Donald M c N e i l , Michael Mercil, Patricia Phillips, Phil Pregill, C e s a r Trasobares, Mierle L a d e r m a n Ukeles, Nick Winton, and Frangoise Yohalem Twin Cities Advisors-. Peter Boswell, Fuller C o w l e s , A m a n d a Degener, Regina Flanagan, Patricia Jesperson, Mariann J o h n s o n , Patrice Clark Koelsch. Julie Marckel, Aaron Parker, and Christine P o d a s - L a r s o n

ed valuable assistance throughout. To the National E n d o w m e n t for the Arts, and the M c K n i g h t Foundation, thank you for continuing to stand firm in your support of PAR. Special appreciation to M a y a Lin. w h o s e thoughtful work continues to innovate and inspire. And to our National Advisors, a heartfelt w e l c o m e and thank-you f o r your c o m m i t m e n t to our future. W e ' r e honored to have your guidance and support.

Support for Public Art Review c o m e s f r o m the National E n d o w m e n t for the Arts Visual Arts Program, and the M c K n i g h t Foundation.

Additional f u n d i n g f o r F O R E C A S T is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation f r o m the Minnesota State Legislature; the C o w l e s Media Foundation; General Mills Foundation; J e r o m e Foundation; Honeywell F o u n d a t i o n ; Bush Foundation; and the advertisers, subscribers, and friends of F O R E C A S T .

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T h a n k s to our contributing writers, w h o consistently g o above and beyond the call of duty. Special thanks to guest editor J a m e s Clark for his time, ideas, and energy. T h a n k s to Deborah Karasov, w h o provid-

4 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

If you are not a subscriber and wish to obtain a free copy of "Artist O p p o r t u n i t i e s " on the mailing sleeve, send a S A S E to: PAR-Listings, 2 3 2 4 University Ave. W., St. Paul, M N 5 5 1 1 4

Civil Rights Memorial, Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery. AL, 1989-90, black granite, palladium leaf, water, (photo: courtesy Walker Art Center)

.. U N T I L JUSTICE ROLLS DOWN UK A N D RIGHTEOUSNESS LIKE A MIGHTYSTRtA MAPT1M llTtHf R f-W. |f

in M Maya Lin and and her cat, ranch, 1994. (photo: Jill Krementz)

aya Lin is an architect and sculptor who has designed and created public art, "studio" sculpture and buildings in the United States. Her best-known work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) in Washington, DC. While much discussion has centered on this monument, it is misleading to isolate it from the rest of her work. This interview, conducted at Lin's loft on the Bowery in New York City in March 1996, ranges from a discussion of her landscape-oriented projects to her memorials.

Tom Finkelpearl: How do you think people see your work?

M a y a L i n : I realize that the memorials that I designed will be my best-known works, and that's fine. When you do something like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the age of 20, there is the danger that you will be forever hitting your head against the wall trying to outdo it.

I never tried. I was happy with the closure that the Civil Rights and the Vietnam memorials created for me. They referred to two wars fought by the United States as I was a child growing up: one domestic, one international. By having the two paired. I was able to close a chapter.

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 5

Topo, Charlotte Coliseum. Charlotte, NC, 1991, Willow Oaks on sloped median strip, (photo: Henry Arnold)

Though my working process started there, I have really been much more involved in other issues since that time. I have concentrated on the differences and similarities between the making of art and architecture in this public realm, which I would call public art.

My initial gesture has been toward landscape. In urban projects, I've created works that respond to the hard, urban site, while fighting to get back to the land itself. I admire and love the earth artists of the 1970s, but they went out to the middle of nowhere to escape the gallery system. I have worked in what I would call a suburban context. By the time I was doing the piece at the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH, and then the Wave Field that I just completed at the University of Michigan, I felt a certain voice was emerging: considering landscape and nature based on scientific analysis and 20th century technologies. That's what really interests me.

Finkelpearl: It seems to me that there is a generation of artists currently in their 30s and 40s who are admirers of the artists of the 1970s like Richard Serra and Robert Smithson. As you say, they have learned from the earth artists, but transposed this sort of art back into more accessible sites. In some cases they are infusing the aesthetic with a more recognizable narrative or social content. Someone like Mel Chin is an example. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has formal similarities to a minimalist work, but it has historical and interactive characteristics, as does the Civil Rights Memorial.

Lin: It is important to remember that I don't come from an art background. I didn't know who Smithson or Serra were when I designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I wasn't even aware how much the Vietnam Veterans Memorial had in common with the earth artists when I designed it. I can remember walking into the Whitney Museum and seeing one of Smithson's Non-sites in 1982, and I was speechless. I'm much more tied into that aesthetic than a lot of the artists working today that are trying to push other boundaries.

I think a lot of the interactivity in my work relates to my background as an architect. My reasons for going into architecture were never based on theoretical approaches or learned responses to what architecture is supposed to be. Some say that architecture is a certain language that you need to learn. My approach starts with a psychological understanding. I am only interested in the human response to works. I choose to be much less aware of what either the art or architecture "world" is doing.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial may look minimalist, but it is really very different. The ideology behind Western minimalist art

denies "reference." My piece is coming from a type of simplicity that you can trace back to Shintoism, to Zen. Now, I was never trained in Eastern philosophy or religion, but I always had a real problem with the way that Western European architecture was set up as the end-all. The Western ordering where man is at the center of the universe, where we are able to order our world, is a kind of egotism. I do not find Versailles as engaging as, say, a Shinto temple. Though I grew up in Athens, OH, it happens that my parents come from China, and they are both educators. There was a different sensibility. In our home, everything was handmade, crafted, including a lot of my father's ceramic work.

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6 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

I have a fundamental belief, probably Eastern, that deals with the notion of teaching. There is a proverb that says "Make a well of knowledge, and allow people to drink from that well." This may seem passive from a Western perspective. I am trying to pose facts and let others interpret them, trusting the viewer to think. Obviously I've been focusing on certain information, but at the same time I'm just asking you to look at facts. The Women's Table at Yale is nothing but numbers.

Finkelpearl: Is this approach to information a consistent element in your work?

Lin: Yes. But I've allowed it to be more of an open exploration, looking back to realize the path I've taken. Again, I would argue that there is something Eastern about this: You will have found something at the end of your life, though you never posed the question as to what you were seeking. Again, I was never trained in Zen or Confucianism, so it is not clear to me where these ideas came from.

Finkelpearl. The history of public art is full of overpowering monuments which are so authoritarianâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;vertical, phallic. Do you think that being a woman contributes to the less authoritarian nature of your work?

Lin: Of course there are gender and cultural issues. Though I have a sense, I would rather have someone else decipher that.

In a hundred years, when more women have designed buildings, I'd like a psychiatrist to study the way we build, and see how it has changed. In Washington, where there was already lot of controversy around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, things just exploded after an article in the Washington Post. The headline read "An Asian Memorial for an Asian War." The author followed Buddhist tradition. In writing about my background, he pegged it in a narrow and specific way. When I looked at the title of his article, I thought, "We're in trouble now." Of course the veterans were already hearing that I was going to give them

a "ditch," and now all of a sudden the race issue came right into play. They didn't see the memorial in terms of the inward-looking nature of my works.

I stayed very quiet about my political beliefs through the whole public discussion of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Obviously I built a memorial that asked us to accept death as the primary cost of war. Having studied countless other memorials, I found that this is rarely addressed at a national level, though sometimes it is dealt with at a local level.

I have become much more aware of the mix, of the balance between my Eastern and my Western heritage, and this has come forward particularly through my work. As a child growing up, you want to assimilate into your surroundings. But through my 20s into my 30s I became very aware of another voice that is so much a part of my aesthetic. It is a dual voice. It is wonderful to see a balanced mix of two cultures emerge.

Finkelpeari. You live at the northern edge of Chinatown. For your commission at the Federal Courthouse you were presented with a site at the southern edge of Chinatown. How did you relate to the site?

Lin: I love the idea that this area is my neighborhood, that I can do a work, for once, in my back yard. Aside from being a peculiarly narrow site, I saw it as a boundary. It is an interface point between Chinatown and the [solidly Western] regional headquarters of the federal court system. It really is right on the border. In the morning, before the judges arrive, the Chinese community uses the Federal Courthouse 2J W 2 J Plaza to do Tai Chi. The sculpture I designed for the site Q G l l © consists of four stones, each with a pool of water on the top. Sound is an important element. At first, I wanted wind to whistle through the stones, but I could

never get any acoustician to guarantee it was going to work, so I decided to make them into fountains. I think it comes back to this notion of the well. I've built four cisterns, each one its own independent water fountain. In Chinese culture, certain intricately carved stones have been very sacred. Of course, the ones I have designed are minimalist blocks. I turned the fountain inside out.

The pool of water disappears into itself, but you hear it. These stones are different heights so the pitch and the echoes will vary.

I don't think I would have done a piece like this if I weren't presented with a site on the border of Chinatown. When I was teaching at Berkeley, I talked to a lot of musicologists and anthropologists. I learned that the only people who have used stone as a musical instrument were the Chinese, with their "sounding stones." In public art my site becomes not just the physical site, but the cultural or anthropological site. Knowledge of the specific people who are going to be around a work always comes into play. My hunch is a lot of other public artists do not work this way.

Finkelpeari. It is interesting to consider the different sorts of relationships public artists have to the various groups they work with. At Yale, you could speak as a graduate. At the Federal Courthouse, you can speak as a Chinese-American "community resident." This is quite different from the Civil Rights or Vietnam Memorial.

Was there a big difference in being an insider versus an outsider?

Lin: It really depends upon the group.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Civil Rights j © L»i Memorial presented opposite working environments. At the Southern Poverty Law Center, we were all working as a team with the same goal in mind. The Vietnam experience was the exact opposite. When I started, I

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Wave Field, Aerospace Engineering Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ml, 1995, landscaped earth, (photo: Tim Thayer)

was met with an incredible amount of suspicion. My process was the same: Go in, immerse yourself in study. For the Vietnam, I chose to study memorials, not the Vietnam War. I was recently having dinner with a journalist who had covered the Vietnam War. He was shocked because his whole approach is that of a reporter: What are the specifics? Get in there and do the research.

Find out about the history of the war. 1 did the exact opposite. I deliberately remained uninformed about the specific politics of the war because I did not think this knowledge would help me do the piece. I felt that these politics might get in the way of looking at the sacrifices made by individual veterans. With the civil rights [memorial], I felt that 1 had to know the history. I grew up through the civil rights movement, but it was not taught in schools. I was really shocked at how little I knew about that time period. It scared me that we can choose not to deal with history, and it will be forgotten.

When 1 began working on the commission, I think the people at the Southern Poverty Law Center were assuming I would choose to commemorate one or two martyrs, even though it was a people's movement. This is where the creative process gets fascinating. What are you going to commemorate? What should the piece be about? What is your intention? How can you catch a person's attention in an instant and begin to open a matter up?

Some monuments act as markers. My pieces tend to be much more educational in nature. For the Southern Poverty Law

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Women's Table. Yale University, New Haven CT, 1993, black and green granite, (photo: Norman McGrath)

Center, I chose to create a table inscribed with events and people's deaths, some information about why they died. All of this was intertwined, because there is a causal effect. A riot led to someone's death, which led to legislation. This is how people changed history. By focusing on this, you are subtly saying to the next generation, you can make a difference.

I made the decision to mention a fairly large number of people in the form of a time line, but I told the people I was working with, "I am not a historian. I am not going to be the one to choose which people to commemorate." While I was working on the logistics of building the sculpture for a year and a half, they got together a crew of advisers, experts, historians. The 43 people who are identified on the memorial all died violently. It was horrible. I came back in at the stage of editing the information, and said, "We need to present the facts, but not in a way that sensationalizes these people's deaths." We needed to present facts which spoke for themselves.

Finkelpeari. So it was a tone issue.

L i n : Yes.

8 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

Finkelpeari. Which relates to what you were saying before about how you present information, allowing people to come to their own conclusions as opposed to giving them answers.

Lin: I've made all these pieces that deal with very difficult issues, and yet I have led a sheltered life. I would argue that it is my weird objectivity that has allowed me to do these pieces. I did not really come across racism until my junior year in college when I went to Denmark and people thought I was an Eskimo.

The Danes had the same tension towards the Greenland Eskimos that people in the United States have for the Native Americans.

There is this huge prejudice against Eskimos. The skinheads would get on a bus and be really nasty, and no one would sit next to me. 1 finally had to ask someone. If I get a suntan, I can look like a Native American or an Eskimo. It's very strange, because I can cross over and change race. It happened to me in Mexico.

When I first got there, the Mexican children were all coming around trying to touch me because I was Chinese, but given two weeks in the sun, I blended right in because my skin goes red. I can relate to the book Black Like Me. If you are white you will probably never know the feeling that a non-white person feels in a crowd when you are looked at, standing out as being different in a negative way. To be able to go from being perceived as being one race and then switching over into another race is very strange.

Finkelpeari. Are you saying that this sort of identity-switching led to your "weird objectivity"?

Lin: I think what happens is that you are brought up not quite fitting in. And because you feel, as a child, somewhat isolated, you distance yourself. Once that has happened, it's both a benefit and a detriment. I think you can really stand back and look and see a different story. You know the phrase, "You are far enough away from it to get a good picture." I was raised not fitting in. I probably have treated life somewhat as a distanced observer.

Finkelpeari. Would you call your work anti-heroic?

Lin: I wouldn't say it is anti-heroic. I would say it is anti-monumental, intimate. No matter how public my work gets, it remains intimate, one-on-one with the individual. Even though I use text, I never use text like a billboard, which a hundred people can read collectively. The way you read a book is a very intimate experience and my works are like books in public areas. I think that is what has always made people respond to my work in a very quiet way. Again, I think gender and my AsianAmerican heritage play a role.

Finkelpeari. But this quiet experience at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was almost dislocated with the installation of the heroic bronzes on the site. Were you consulted as to where it would be placed?

Lin: They wanted to place the sculptures at the apex, with the flagpole right on top, and we were lucky to get them out. It would have been horrible. But if I had gone to the press right away, the whole process would have stopped. So I gambled. I felt that we needed to get construction started so I kept quiet for four months, which got us to the groundbreaking. I knew that if I couldn't effectively get those realist sculptures moved from the site that was being proposed, I would have had to walk from the piece, or sue. If I had been a strict idealist I would have said from the start, "I will not threaten the aesthetic integrity of the piece," but we would have gotten the heroic sculpture, and the monument genre would not have changed at all. I remember a committee hearing where only one person got up to support my design, while countless other people got up to say that they felt I was deliberately trying to hurt the veterans.

Finkelpeari. Some people say that when the realist sculptures were installed, they gave your memorial time to be accepted.

Lin: No, false myth. The main person who was behind the compromise was the Secretary of the Interior, James Watt. He had to give final approval in order to start construction. He wasn't going to do that. He held us back from groundbreaking until

Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Washington, DC, black granite, 1981, (photo: courtesy Art on File)

a compromise was meted out. Apparently, what the veterans had been told was that I was giving them a "black ditch," and that the memorial was a negative comment about the war. I kept arguing that we should give it a chance. Let people experience it. Well, the minute the piece was opened to the public, the controversy ceased, and I started getting the most amazing letters from veterans. Even though everyone was responding favorably when the memorial was opened, the sculptures were a done deal. The politicians had already committed. They were put up a year later.

Finkelpearl. It is interesting to me that abstract public art seems to be at both extremesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the easiest and the most difficult sort of art for the public to accept.

Lin: I taught an introduction to public art at Yale. Some of my students researched this, and found that, statistically, figurative works got into far more trouble than abstraction in the long run, because they are specific. If a work is specific, someone is going to have a problem with it these days.

So much of it isn't even the physical presence of the work, but how the work is introduced to the community. The political

process needs to give the community respect. At the very early stages, it's about territory, about psychology. I am uneasy with some of the one-man-one-vote approaches that have been tried, but my attitude is to respect the public. And in the end, you should get some controversy, because if you are pushing any limits, people will be surprised.

Finkelpearl. Topo represents the side of your work that deals more with nature than history. It was a collaboration with a landscape architect?

Lin: Yes, with Henry Arnold, who was the same landscape architect from Vietnam. He and I kept in touch. Arnold was the original landscape architect for Constitution Gardens in Charlotte, NC, the site for Topo. I was very conscious of working in someone else's space. In redesigning the space, I figured I should defer to him, call him in on it. It was the right thing to do.

We applied as a team to a competition for art at a sports stadium.

This is when I was working on the Civil Rights Memorial, and I was becoming acutely aware of getting typecast as someone who only works with the dead. So we decided to do something playful. Also Civil Rights was a suburban site, and I was trying to get back to working directly with the landscape, like the Vietnam piece. I think they expected an object right at the front entrance to their stadium. But I definitely seek out situations that involve the entire environment. We decided that we would do a completely green sculpture. There was this grassy median strip, 60 feet wide and 1.600 feet long, that dropped 75 feet from top to bottom. Henry and I just looked at each other and said. "How can we resist?" Here is a space that nobody pays attention to. So we threw in a game. We designed "balls" that seem to roll down the hill on that central grassy strip. To this day I think they worry that we were making fun of them, but we were just having fun with the commission. In Topo, we tripled the number of willow oaks that had been planned for the site. I do not try to compete with the landscape, but really work with it. This reflects a belief system which I think will color my whole life, wanting to work with the environment. I want to examine the relationship man has to nature, promoting sensitivity.

Finkelpearl: Do you think you will ever do a memorial again?

Lin: Yes, one more.

Finkelpearl: Do you know what it is?

Lin: It will be about extinction, about the environment.

Finkelpearl: So that will put the two parts of your public art together: memorials and landscape.

Lin: I really care about the environment. It has been my love since I was a child. This work will probably take my lifetime to do, and it won't be a monument in a traditional sense. We are the one species that has rapidly caused the extinction of so many other species, and that is unique. We have to stop. We have to begin to understand that we cannot continue to overuse. Again, for me it is about teaching. I don't know how it will manifest itself, but this is my dream.

Tom Finkelpearl is the former director of New York City's percentfor-art program and currently executive director for program at Skowhegan School in Maine.

Civil Flights Memorial, detail, Southern Poverty Law Center.

Montgomery, AL, 1989-90. (photo: courtesy the artist)

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 9

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George Segal, Gay Liberation, Christopher Park, New York City, 1980. installed 1992, white bronze, (photo: James Clark)

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he United States of America is a nation of immigrants and as such we are a people of many histories, stories, and myths woven together. Art created in public spaces can provide links to understanding these various histories, and it can reveal alternative stories that have been lost to time, neglect, indifference, or intolerance. Temporary public art projects (or "interventions," if one leans towards activism as a means of expression), in particular, have the capacity to broaden the symbolic value of a public space by momentarily reframing how it is perceived in terms of its historical and current significance. The most effective public art projects enable the viewer to gain new insights into the historic, social, and spiritual dimensions that surround us.

The temporary projects mentioned in this article transcend the traditional notion of public commemoration to create a sense of place. By "sense of place" I mean something intangible and nebulously constructed first within an individual and then, perhaps, collectively among particular members of the populace. This "something" has to do with feeling connected to the world in which we live and feeling that one's identity or image of oneself as a citizen is supported or defined through the associations made in such a place. For some, these connections are familial or are more broadly assembled through ethnic identification, social groups, economic class, or even physical surroundings. With regard to the latter, public spaces play a significant role in creating associations

1 0 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

eamnn Jeffrey Cole and David Schafer. Liberty Prop, City Hall Park.

New York City. July 30-Dec. 31.1991. (photo: Timothy P. Karr)

between the individual and his/her community and culture. The architecture of buildings, parks, sacred and historic sites, as well as memorials and other forms of public art, all convey meanings.

But in a heterogeneous society these meanings are not universally apprehended, shared, or appreciated, and over time the meanings once ascribed to these public symbols or places may erode or evolve.

In post-World War II America, society has undergone intense changes fueled by the civil rights movement, urbanization, and demographic shifts. In an effort to absorb and comprehend these societal changes, the public decision-making processes concerning public art and the design of public space (as well as education and social services) have been opened up to include greater community participation and involvement. As a result, public symbols as well as the design of public spaces have increasingly reflected a more diverse world view. Concurrently, many artists working in the public realm have mined the margins of society, revealing a complex web of social, political, spiritual, and aesthetic interconnections and associations that reframe the generally accepted view of public symbols and the meanings attached to them. These artists are engaged in a form of poetics that transcends the literal or "traditional" associations that define a public space to reveal new meanings and an expanded American identity.

In the late 1960s, artists such as Jochen Gerz, Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, Richard Long, Allan Kaprow, and Judy Chicago located their artmaking outside the traditional venues and economic constraints of the "art world." Choosing to explore the public realm, these artists laid the foundation for public art as we know it today. Temporary projects were as much a part of this movement as permanent artworks. In many respects, the temporary installations more closely reflected the transient nature of

the urban environment and the growing mistrust of the permanent "civic monument." These ephemeral projects also enabled artists to address alternative histories and to make associations that did not support mainstream society's view of itself. These artists did not simply create works to be placed out of doors, they created work which was dependent on the physical and social context in which it was installed; in short, the work plus the associations made with its context became the work in toto.

In 1989, for a period of six months, a commercial billboard in New York City measuring 18 feet by 40 feet was painted black with two lines of white text flowing across the bottom. This was not your typical advertisement. The text read, "People With AIDS Coalition 1985 Police Harassment 1969 Oscar Wilde 1895 Supreme Court 1986 Harvey Milk 1977 March on Washington 1987 Stonewall Rebellion 1969." Created by Felix GonzalezTorres, the artist stated that the billboard was "a visual reference, an architectural sign of being, a monument for a community that has been historically invisible."

Created as a commemorative artwork to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, the dates, names, and acts listed function both on a personal and public level in that they signify the individual and communal struggle towards recognition, as well as society's reaction to that visibility: In 1895 Oscar Wilde courageously remained in England to face prosecution on charges of sodomy; 1977 is the year that Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; in 1985 the PWA Coalition was established in the face of government inaction; and 1987 marks the Gay and Lesbian March on Washington, one of the largest civil rights demonstrations ever held in Washington, DC. Located in Sheridan Square, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street, the billboard overlooks the site of the 1969 riots that were ignited in response to the New York City Police Department's policy of harassing patrons of gay bars.

Led by drag queens, a closeted community that had remained silent for years fought back, establishing the modern gay rights movement. Gonzalez-Torres' billboard, placed at the historic center of the city's gay community, commemorated a turning point in local gay and lesbian history, but it also connected the rebellion to a continuum of other, more global events and personages that have defined and shaped contemporary gay life.

Today, in stark, silent contrast to the short-lived billboard is George Segal's Gay Liberation sculpture installed in

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 1 1

Christopher Park, directly across Seventh Avenue from marked by division and a society and culture that seem to be in Gonzalez-Torres' work. The two works could not be more dif- constant flux. ferent in style and meaning. The sculpture does little to estabIn the absence of a permanent memorial, temporary projects lish links between the park's users and the history that it pur- should be considered throughout the newly formed historic disports to embody. In fact, there is not even a sign to indicate why trict. Projects of a limited duration can provide a variety of this "place" is the place to memorialize gay liberation. This insights and interpretations ot the importance of the burial moribund sculpture ignited a storm of protest, and not simply ground and the role that New York's early African residents from the so-called "straight" community—many in the gay played in building the city. The challenge is to tell an interconcommunity (including the Gay Activist Alliance, and Lesbians nected history of the European settlers, their enslaved workers, and Gay Men Against the Statue) opposed the sculpture's instal- and the freed slaves who participated in the growth and developlation. The Segal monument reveals the problems that arise ment of the region. These are not separate histories; rather, they when artists attempt to create an image of permanence to repre- represent a continuum of experiences, beliefs, and attitudes that sent all personal, communal, and social meaning in a city as shaped our nation and the city of New York. diverse and heterogeneous as New York.

For many New Yorkers, City Hall Park resonates with the On the other hand, temporary projects at historic sites like histories of the European settlers and the Africans who were City Hall Park in lower Manhattan allow the place to be contin- brought here as slaves. But in 1988, Hachivi Edgar Heap of ually mined for cultural meaning and significance from many Birds' direct and deceptively simple intervention, Native Hosts, perspectives. City Hall Park is one of New York City's oldest and reminded visitors to the park that there was another history that most used public spaces. Originally established as "the pre-dated the colonists and their slaves—that of the Native Commons" in 1785, City Hall Park today continues to play a vital Americans. Six aluminum signs measuring 18 inches by 36 role as a forum for politicians and the electorate—demonstrations, inches were painted white with red text. Each sign bore a greeting from one of six Native American celebrations, and protests occur with nations—Seneca, Tuscarora, Mohawk, great frequency.

Weipoe, Shinnecock, and Manhattan. If As a historic and symbolic site. City visitors approached the park from the Hall Park reflects a past that is as stratinorth, they would have encountered a fied and diverse as present-day New sign stating, "New York, Today Your Host York. Among local historians, archaeolIs Shinnecock." By using the present ogists, and some city officials, it was tense, "Your Host Is" the artist reminded known that an 18th-century burial viewers of the park's Native American ground existed somewhere in the generhistory while also affirming the fact that al vicinity, but it was assumed that the descendants of the six nations continue to building boom of the 19th century had live and work in the New York region. obliterated most, if not all, of the burial site. In 1991, the construction of a new For one of this nation's oldest municifederal building revealed that the 18thpal parks, City Hall Park is relatively free century ground level was well below the of commemorative statuary. On the westmodern street level, in some cases by as ern side, there is a statue to the patriot much as 23 feet. Digging the building's Nathan "I regret that I have but one life to foundation revealed that a significant give to my country" Hale; across the park part of the burial ground remained intact. and to the north, there is one for publisher In 1993, the New York City Landmarks Horace "Go West, young man" Greeley; and a more subtle memorial takes the form Preservation Commission designated of a flag pole, the Liberty Pole. In 1991, a the five-block area as the African Burial temporary installation referenced these Ground and Commons Historic District. memorials and alluded to historical events By the summer of 1994, over 400 human associated with the site. Compared to remains had been exhumed from our Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Native Hosts, City Native Hosts, Liberty Prop, by artist nation's earliest known AfricanHall Park, New York City, May 31-Nov. 30,1988.

David Schafer and architect Jeffrey Cole, American cemetery. (photo: courtesy Public Art Fund) involved a more complex reading of the According to the General Services park. For about a year, pedestrians Administration, the federal agency responsible for the construction of the new building, it will be encountered a curious structure standing on the grounds of the park. some years before a permanent outdoor memorial is created for With its heraldic red, white, and blue panels one might have susthe site. The GSA has, however, already selected three artists to pected that it signified some celebration or political event. Upon create memorials within the building's interior public spaces. closer inspection, its dysfunctional forms emerged: A picket fence This has not been a smooth process for all parties concerned. that did not enclose, a short boardwalk that led nowhere, a bridge [Previous issues of Public Art Review have documented the con- that was impassable. troversy surrounding the discovery of the burial ground and the dispute that erupted between the federal government, the city, and the African-American community; see PAR #10, p. 42.]

Given the tensions that already exist and the large number of agendas that must be satisfied, one wonders if the permanent memorial will reveal the complexities of the history and stimulate a healthy curiosity in this chapter of history, or be a marker honoring present-day egos and the politics of race. While the site remains a grassy plot, fenced off from intruders, it remains pregnant with possibilities and encourages a wide number of people not only to consider how best to memorialize the past of those buried there, but also how best to memorialize in an age

1 2 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

The exterior of the structure was composed of cropped sections of a 90-foot American flag arranged as advertising billboards suspended overhead from a boxy structure that looked like some sort of modernist pavilion. The boardwalk, framed by the picket fence, intersects with the metal bridge at a point beneath the flag pavilion. Underneath the "flag" billboards were oversized flash cards, similar to those used to teach children the alphabet, that together spelled out "OATH." On the flip side of the flash cards were the interior panels that bore a "fill-in-theblank" quiz and accompanying text on the U.S. Constitution. The billboards not only bore obvious elements of a huge, deconstructed Hag, but also the markings of free enterprise: the copy-

right symbol, "pat. pending," and trademark symbols that control a product's usage. These universal codes of ownership were emblazoned on each panel, raising questions about the relationship between patriotism and capitalism.

But Liberty Prop also alluded to historic events. Earlier in the park's colonial history, five successive Liberty Poles created by the Sons of Liberty stood within the Commons. These poles were anathema to the British because they were cut from the white pine, a tree reserved exclusively for the masts of British war ships. Each pole was erected in defiant response to the felling and removal of the previous pole by British soldiers.

Sometimes the poles were simply branched pine, but other times colonists affixed banners or added a soft, conical cap to the crown of the pole. The cap (made famous during the French Revolution) harked back to the caps given to freed slaves in ancient Rome. The battle over the poles eventually led to further hostilities and served as a rallying point for the rebellious sentiments that preceded the American Revolution. As a visual reference to the struggles of the pre-Revolutionary era, a pole rose from one corner of the Liberty Prop pavilion.

In a society where certain public spaces are historically "loaded," public art installations, especially temporary ones, can serve to "download" various interpretations or points of view.

The City Hall Park projects compel viewers to consider anew the physical, concrete, or "rational" world around them. This rational world consists of architecture, landscape, politics, and business, and it is the assembly of and associations among these things that contributes to the space's meaning(s). The rediscovery of the African Burial Ground, Heap of Birds's Native Hosts, and Schafer and Cole's Liberty Prop interrupted the "rational" reading of the public space by interjecting new visual and intellectual information. By invoking little-noted history, citing mythologies, enacting ancient religious or secular acts, or calling on the spirits of our ancestors, the artists open up a realm for the non-physical, non-linear material that for some may be perceived as "irrational." It is in this poetic space that one can develop an alternative reading of the public symbols which, in turn, reframes the space's meaning(s) and its cultural significance.

George Segal. Gay Whether the projects are located at Liberation. Christopher places on the margins of mainstream sociPark. New York City, ety such as Sheridan Square, or are at coninstalled 1992. tested historic sites such as City Hall Park, (photo: James Clark) temporary public art projects can create intersections of meaning—a convergence of the rational and the irrational. At any given time, an unsuspecting citizen might stumble into such an existential intersection, causing an epiphany of sorts that reframes the physical world and, perhaps, the viewer's understanding of it.

For some, such an encounter can create an opening through which the sense of connection to the public space might be engaged for the first time or renewed with a deeper understanding or a different kind of appreciation. All this serves to invest our public symbols with new or alternative meanings, leading to an expanded notion of community and the development of public spaces that reflect the character and diversity of our American cities.

Excerpted from a presentation made at the Veiled Histories Conference, San Francisco Art Institute, July 1996.

James Clark is a public art curator and writer living in New York City. Formerly director of the Public Art Fund, Clark is developing the Urban Arts Forum at New York University's Taub Urban Research Center.

Postscript: Gay Liberation Reconsidered Christopher

Park in the Village, Aug. 26, 1996

It was late in the afternoon when 1 made my way over to Christopher Park to photograph the public sculpture Gay Liberation by George Segal. I had waited to have the right light to photograph the work. The angle of the sun would be just right, coming in low over the Hudson River, sliding in under the branches of the old beech trees. The park's trees create a perfect canopy, making it a haven for many of the area's homeless people. Sure enough, there were about 15 to 20 folks waiting out the heat of the day. I loitered on the edges of the park waiting for one group in particular to move away from the Segal sculpture.

Had these people seemed more coherent I would have asked them if it were OK to photograph the sculpture and to reassure them that I was not really trying to take their picture. But then I thought, "why open a can of worms?" I feared they would want a "fee" or a "contribution." I decided it was best to wait them out. Besides, two of them looked so strung out and anxious I knew they couldn't sit for long. I got off a few shots when a slightly built man of undeterminable age turned to see me take the last photo. "Hey," he said "you takin' my photograph." "Actually," I said. "I was more interested in the sculptures."

"Oh," he exclaimed as his eyes widened, , "people come from all over the world to r.

'A d photograph these things. Don't know why

f

, ''i ' s ' though." He thought about what he had • t ' l , just said, and then added, "but after all, -i I ~ \ , i i this is the Village and these sculptures « j [ rS scream THE VILLAGE." I told him that I .i.'-ij * was writing about the sculptures for a I: g" T". public art journal and that I was not too fond of the work. "I'm not a big fan of ._. the artist's work to start with," I explained. "Well," he sighed, "personally I like them a lot. Not because of how they look, but what they stand for." He told me about Stonewall and how his "sisters" had started the " m o v e m e n t " right here in Sheridan Square. Gay Liberation indicated that this was his place in the city.

"When those Bangee boys come around here lookin" to beat some of us up, I try and get the friendlier ones to come over here...I show them the sculptures and I say.

'You see them two on the bench, they're my brothers, and you see those two standin' up, they's my sisters'...I let them know that this is my place and that there ain't much else place for me to be other than here...I try to get them to see that they got to respect that and just let us be." Gay Liberation, according to this homeless man. creates a safe place in a city that can be hostile to his kind. He was grateful for its existence.

A perfect stranger compelled me to see Gay Liberation in a new light. I can afford to spend $7.50 on this rather esoteric journal you're reading. I have the freedom and the means to construct the world in which I live. My friend in the park cannot. His identity is either supported or challenged by the people, places, and things that inhabit the public realm with him. In this case. George Segal's sculpture enables him to construct an association with a unique part of the city that reinforces who he is and his right to be.

—James Clark

FALL/WINTKR 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 13

INTRAVENOUS CONSUMPTION Public art, mass media, and historical memory Francesc Torres in conversation

with Anna

Novakov

B

orn in Barcelona, Spain, Francesc Torres lives in New York City. His multimedia installations have been included in museum and gallery exhibitions

throughout the world.

Anna Novakov. Much of your recent work has been about Spain, and the political and social issues that are a part of its self-definition as a country.

Francesc Torres: Spain is a country that until relatively recently has had a fascist dictatorship. During that long period everything was politicized. Culture was politicized. The artistic avant-garde was politicized. At that time, being active in the avant-garde already implied an act of ethical resistance against the regime, a staunch defender of the most reactionary values. With the advent of democracy, however, this approach to social issues changed almost overnight. On the one hand, political activism became associated and identified with a divorce from political ideology in the pursuit of other goals. We went from the duty to change the country to the need to decorate it. The cultural and political institutions under the socialist administration encouraged that. If you look at contemporary Spanish art today, you will see very little ideological or political content.

Novakov. What do you think is the place of the artist in contemporary society? Specifically, how do you see yourself functioning within a larger societal context?

Torres: I think that I have something of significance to say to people. Otherwise, why bother? The work that I do is always content oriented and almost always deals with social.

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 1 5

ideological or political issues because these are the kind of things that interest me intellectually. I am not interested in art as a problem; I am interested in art as an activity. This doesn't detract from the fact that I am as deliberate as anyone else at trying to push the envelope of aesthetic language, since what constitutes the merit of a work of art is not what it says but how it says it. I would like to think that my work functions as a point of departure for a process of reflection that eventually will lead to action; not because I know something that nobody else knows, but because I have discovered something which can be of interest to others. If my interests are pedestrian, my discoveries will be too. There is. however, no way to quantify a priori the impact of a work of art on the viewer, but nonetheless the ideology that informs the work is fundamental in order to give it direction, to convey a particular proposition. It all starts with the artist making a statement of ethical resistance, if you will, and after that the work takes on a life of its own.

Novakov. What is the connection between art and politics? Should the artist be a neutral observer or an active commentator on the political scene?

Torres: If one has a genuine interest in politics it becomes completely impossible to approach it in an ideologically neutral way.

Ideological neutrality is an oxymoron. Let me make a relevant distinction: There is a difference between political art and socially oriented art. For something to be truly political it has to have a discernible, unequivocal, political ideology. The murals one can see in the streets of Havana, for example, are true political art. If you cannot read the artwork like an ideologically political open book, however, then you are confronted with something having to do with social, historical, philosophical commentary, but not with political art in the true sense of the word. In the socially oriented art context one can find two options, one being that of the artiste engage, who reacts ethically in relationship to a given set of political circumstances, and whose engagement ends when those conditions cease to exist; the other, with which I feel identified, being that of the artist who happens to be intellectually interested in how society functions. There is more guarantee of continuity, I think, when it comes as a result of an intellectual curiosity rather than out of a noble response to something concrete and contextual. I find democracy, for example, politically more interesting from a critical point of view, than dictatorship. In a dictatorship everything is very simple, like a mediocre novelâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the bad guys are very bad and the good guys are very good. In democracy the gradation of grays is almost infinite, and so are the possibilities of deception. It is a much more sophisticated system. The political discourse in a democracy attempts, paradoxically, to avoid by all means anything of any substance. It is a remarkable skill aimed at the construction of a mirage, of pure appearance. I find the task of unraveling this mirage extremely stimulating.

Novakov. How does installation, as a medium, contribute to your work? What role does the medium itself play in the broader messages that are being conveyed?

Torres: I do primarily multi-media installations because I can use any aesthetic strategy that I choose. I don't want to be married to any particular art practice. I find them all interesting, if not by themselves, then in combination with other techniques. I am interested in the connections between different fields and the DMZs in between them. My work in installation has helped me to see art as a totally open field of formal experimentation. In addition to that, installation work seems to cry out for strong narrative content, and I feel comfortable with that.

Novakov. Do you see popular media, like television, competing with art? Does art have to adjust itself to produce images that are

comparable to those presented and consumed through electronic media?

Torres: Television and the printed media have become highly sophisticated in terms of language and image manipulation, to the point of being unable to accurately read a newspaper or watch a network news program before you know who owns them and what they are up to. The fine arts, on the other hand, have lost the monopoly on the manufacture of imagery. The most emblematic images now in contemporary culture come from media, not high art. One could say that we are competing with these new iconography factories, but perhaps what is actually taking place is a clearer separation of fields between what is visual, intravenous consumption and what is visual food for thought.

Novakov. How would you compare mass media in Spain with that of the United States?

Torres: If you look at weekly magazines in the States, like Time or Newsweek, there is still a modicum of priority distribution of information. You can still tell what is important (or what the editor wants you to think is important) and what is not. Spanish weekly magazines, on the contrary and perhaps more in the heyday of liberalization than now, tend to present everything at the same level or visual pitch, making the banal relevant and the relevant banal. Everything comes indiscriminately from the same package. It is entertainment as spectacle, not unlike the format of American television in which images of the war in Bosnia are followed by a news item about some lady in the suburbs crying over the loss of her lap dog. It generates total emotional confusion to the point of anesthesia. I am generalizing, and I am aware of leaving nuances out of this comparison. But perhaps, after all, there aren't that many differences between countries whose habits are dictated by a market economy and a philosophy of profit at all costs. It's about selling, not informing.

Years ago, I was reading a book on cognition. The writer was saying that one characteristic of consciousness is the capacity of creating an analog mental space, a virtual reality of sorts, in which you can try things. One can infer from this that lying is an example of high consciousness. It would be practically impossible for anyone to function within the civilization and culture we, capitalist Westerners, have created, particularly in the political arena, if truth were something to be respected all the time, by all means, without compromise. Perhaps true democracy is defined by the degree of privacy as the only context where people can be free (not experiencing fear, being themselves, not lying). Then we could say that true democracy is nothing more than the absence of lies.

Novakov. What is the difference in your approach to a project, working in a gallery or museum and working in a public space?

Torres: The museum is perhaps the most natural context for me. In a way, I consider it my studio. It is where the work actually takes place. It makes the whole working process, from the production in the studio, accelerate at a fast pace. The museum, because of the space and the infrastructure, makes a certain type of work possible. The place alters the context. With galleries, I wonder whether this is the right context for my type of work. The gallery is the space to show a different kind of work. Not necessarily minor work, but for work that is for sale and intended for private collections. The gallery is the place for some of my smallscale work or three-dimensional objects. The museum allows for a much more academic and historical approach than the gallery, which is basically a business. The museum is essentially a much more democratic institution, having a substantial number of works available for anyone to see. The public space is something

"The fine arts have lost the monopoly on the manufacture of imagery."

1 6 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

that I am in the process of getting into right now.

Novakov. What is the nature of your new public projects?

Torres: It all started off with my interest in expanding the natural context of installation. The precedent for much installation work, or its historical pedigree, is the garden. My initial interest has been in the garden as an installation. So I have a whole new body of work that has transcended the museum and gallery space. Working in the public space, you realize that you don't call all the shots anymore. You have to adapt yourself to a given situation, a new context. You have to take into account the nature of the site, whether it is being sponsored by City Hall or some sort of a semi-private organization, and what the people who live in those areas really want. The museum is also a controlled environment, but it has much more flexibility within certain set parameters. In the public space those limits are much more complicated and conditioning.

Novakov. It essentially becomes much more of a collaboration between you as the artist, the environment, and the public that is going to live near the work. It is a rather fluid situation.

Torres: This really affects your work. You end up doing something that is quite different from what you would do if you were simply doing an installation where you would take into consideration only your own strict intellectual interests.

Novakov. Are you currently doing a garden project for Bilbao, Spain?

Torres: The project will take place in an area by the river, which has an industrialized history, much like Manchester or Liverpool. It is an ecological nightmare on the one hand and a very interesting area for industrial archeology on the other. Now they are cleaning up and reclaiming this area, recycling the river so that fish can swim again. Everything is going to be made livable again. It is also a shame, though, that with this clean-up job a lot of very interesting industrial architecture and even obsolete machinery will be lost.

What I would like to do is utilize this shell of an old factory in an architecturally industrial area and use the shell as a container for a garden. I will be doing research in the archives of that factory to find out the names of the people that worked there and perhaps include that in the environment. It would be a work that on the one hand would deal with historical memory, would reclaim that area back to nature while preserving its anthropological nature as well. There are two types of nature—natural nature and archeological nature. It is my ideal to mesh the two together: historical memory of the place and the people that worked there—a bedrock site for unionized political activity, resistance against fascism under Franco and many other factors.

Novakov. It seems that within the past few years there has been a growing interest on the part of artists in history as a flexible kind of narrative.

Torres: I have been doing that for the past 24 years. While you find a lot of work with historical narrative content in the States right now, if you go to Spain, a country that was highly politicized for a long period of time, you will find that any type of interest in politics or political parties has vanished, completely swept away.

In Europe in general, you are hard-pressed to find any art dealing with ideological content or history. Politics and history are all tied together; you cannot deal with one without the other. Who knows what can happen in politics if history has disappeared while at the same time you have an increase in social tension—massive unemployment, the rise of xenophobia, cultural retrenchment, and nationalism? It is a danger within the realm of culture.

Novakov. Where does content come from in your work? What is its basic structure?

Torres: This issue has to do with how you perceive the role of art. Is it decoration or something else? Content in art comes from

two sources, one which is an act of ethical resistance, given to a contextual situation—artists who are outraged by a particular situation which will change in the near future, at which point the artist will return to normal life. Then there is the artist who is interested in politics, intellectually as a subject matter, and will continue working with that subject regardless of what the current political climate is. Which is the case with me. There is much more promise of continual work in the second category, which is essentially the need to adopt ideological concerns in your work, which is more than simply a passing phase. I perceive a certain paradox in the social arena.

Novakov. What is your project in Barcelona going to be about?

Torres: It will be a sculptural rather than installation solution to the site. There, I will be working on a very long promenade, a piece that, rather than being a lot of small pieces sprinkled together, will be one long piece which is related to the structure of the site, and the natural breaks that need to be retained in the promenade.

For the piece in Raleigh, NC, it may be possible to do a garden. They have 150 acres of land around the museum and a very active public art program. The first piece has already been built by Barbara Kruger. [See Picture This on page 20.] When they asked me. I thought this is really the perfect place for a traditional garden.

Novakov: Your interest in the gardens must also have something to do with the interaction of the viewer in the space. If you have a garden, one of the things that is assumed, although it is not always the case, is that the viewer can walk through it. There is some sort of physical relationship to the space.

Torres: This also happens with installation.

Another thing that links multi-media installations with traditional gardens, such as the Italian or English, is that they have an extremely strong narrative component—you have to read as you are walking around. The space appears like chapters, or at least sentences—a sort of linear writing or narrative which you have to decipher as you walk and read. The movement of your body as a spectator is almost analogous to the sweeping gaze of the reader's eyes. Gardens also have a very interesting link to myth—the context in which nature and culture fuse instead of fighting each other. Gardens usually make direct references to lost paradise. It is also a reference to Utopia that takes its sources from the Garden of Eden and becomes a paradigm of social freedom or migration. It is so rich, such a warm and interesting field. I am surprised that there aren't more artists interested in it.

Novakov: One of the things that I always found interesting, particularly when I was living in New York, are the fenced-off, enclosed gardens. They are almost like archeological sites—a very contained area which you cannot enter, but look at from the outside. It is, as you are saying, trying to make some sort of connection with a primal past.

Torres: I am trying to put it into a situation of coexistence, diametrically opposed and yet complementary concepts of time. The synchronic, mythic concept of time would be represented by the garden, which in theory never changes, except going through the cycles of the season, which presents a certain concept of time.

And then there is historical time, diachronic time, and the rest of the city. The garden is the vehicle that makes it possible for people to move in and out of these states at will.

"The movement of your body is almost analogous to the sweeping gaze of the reader's eyes."

Anna Novakov teaches art history, theory and criticism at the S a n Francisco Art Institute. She holds a doctorate f r o m N e w York University, and has contributed essays to m u s e u m and gallery exhibition catalogs.

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 1 7

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ary Miss came to Des Moines, IA, to reclaim a lagoon that was choking on algae and silt. Her mission was to save a place from itself and create a new public place, Greenwood Pond: Double Site, in the process. Within memory a hub of recreational activity, Greenwood Pond was dying from within; she was proposing to give it new life.

Miss was one of several internationally known environmental artists who came to Des Moines in the late 1980s, invited by Julia Brown Turrell, then director of the Des Moines Art Center, to consider creating a site-specific sculpture in Greenwood Park, the small city park that surrounds the museum, two miles from downtown.

"I came to look at sites, but the pond was the most interesting to me," said Miss. "Water is so fascinating, so ephemeral. I photographed the area, which at the time was a derelict site, and began to think about how you could do something Mary Miss, Greenwood Pond: Double Site, without being overwhelmed by the crummy site." various views, August 1996.

Her idea, albeit a loose one at that point, was to (photos: PAR this page and right. Far right build on the natural setting and materials already there. photo courtesy Des Moines Art Center)

1 8 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER

1996

Then plans for the park ground to a halt. Des Moines has never been very comfortable with its own outdoors. (In fact, Iowa's capital city has gone to considerable lengths to insulate itself from its sometimes hostile environment with an elaborate system of skywalks that make it possible to walk through most of downtown without ever stepping outside.) The Des Moines Art Center's neighbors were likewise uncomfortable with the idea of an outdoor sculpture park. The idea of environmental sculpture being placed in Greenwood Park so riled the neighbors that they organized themselves as "The Friends of Greenwood Park" and hired a lawyer to find a way to stop the city from forging an agreement with the museum.

On the surface, the group claimed to be debating the city's right to allow the museum to use public land. But you didn't have to scratch too far to uncover a deep distrust of the museum. What the neighbors really were opposed to was "modern" sculpture, site-specific or otherwise (one neighbor predicted "crashed airplanes in the woods"), chosen by the museum director and placed in their neighborhood park. In reality "their" park had long since fallen into disrepair through neglect and very limited use by all but area teenagers.

As it turned out, unbeknownst to the artist or the museum, the sorry state of the park had attracted concern from other community organizations. "We didn't know there was a Mary Miss or that the area was part of the Des Moines Art Center's sculpture garden," said Lynda Chase-Tone, president of a local gardening club. "We just knew something had to be done with the lagoon.

We knew the city was going to dredge it, so we went to the parks and recreation department, asked them if they thought it was possible to turn the lagoon into a wetlands area and if they would draw a design that we could take to the Natural Heritage Foundation and the Science Center to see if this could be made into a reality."

When plans for Miss' project became known, these disparate groups found a focus for their efforts. The result was a unique collaboration between the artist, the Art Center, the Science Center of Iowa (which sits at the opposite end of the park from the Art Center), the Des Moines Founders Garden Club, the Des Moines Parks and Recreation Department, the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, and the Polk County Conservation Board.

Together they forged the idea of Iowa's first inter-urban wetlands. The project would combine built elements like ramps,

bridges, walkways, a tower and a pavilion designed by Miss with materials planted by the Founders Garden Club and maintained by the city, and with educational programs run by the Science Center. The project and its coalition attracted public support and financial support from a variety of non-traditional sources, ranging from the Andy Warhol Foundation to the Garden Club of America.

Once the neighbors' lawsuits were successfully fended off. plans for the park went forward. Ground was broken in 1995, and despite problems with weather and an overzealous city mowing crew, Greenwood Pond: Double Site is set to officially open in October.

And people are already exploring the site, even before its official inauguration. In fact, the lagoon was crawling with explorers—young and old—this summer. Once construction crews showed up, the teenagers disappeared. In their place came families and various other groups who have taken—or, more accurately, retaken—over the park.

As in many of her other public outdoor projects. Miss has used the most basic of materials—treated lumber, metal mesh, steel, stone, and concrete—all easily repaired or replaced. Likewise, her designs are simple but inspired by indigenous architecture. Miss traveled around the state, looking at farm buildings, especially circular barns, buildings on the Mesquakie Indian Settlement in Tama, and the Indian burial mounds in northeast Iowa. The built elements are arranged in a sort of circuit, allowing visitors to walk around and over the lagoon, giving them a chance to experience the site on a variety of levels. To Miss, this is the ultimate goal of the project: "The question becomes how can you reveal this place, the experience of it? How many ways can you see this place?

The circuit offers a variety of ways of seeing, and by the end, people will walk away feeling they have really seen something."

Eliot N u s b a u m is an art critic for the Des Moines Register.

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 1 9

m

Art + Landscape in North Carolina

Picture This, during construction. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

NC, 1996. (photos: Bill Gage, courtesy North Carolina Museum of Art)

By Linda I n

Johnson

Dougherty

the first phase of what will eventually be a 150-acre park surrounding the museum. the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh is currently constructing a gigantic outdoor environmental artwork, PICTURE THIS, that is completely integrated into a multi-disciplinary outdoor performance complex. Located adjacent to the museum, the Museum Park Theater covers 25 acres of land and consists of an amphitheater with 500 seats, an outdoor movie screen, landscaping, and a wide range of informal seating areas. It will be used for music, dance, art, theater performances, films, videos, and lectures. Construction started in the fall of

1995 and the theater officially opened in September 1996.

PICTURE THIS is a completely interactive work of art, designed to be read, touched, climbed on, sat on, and explored on multiple levelsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;visually, intellectually, physically. The work has a great sense of humor, a gigantic playground of whimsical forms underlaid with an adult irony. It changes dramatically depending upon your vantage pointâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;up close it provides intimate spaces and a direct one-on-one relationship required by "reading" the individual pieces.

Within the work itself, you can see partial glimpses of the whole, and if you enter the museum and take the glass elevator that faces the park, you can look out over the entire complex and read through it, albeit upside down and backwards. You can also see the work in its entirety when flying into the Raleigh-Durham Airport because some of the planes fly directly over the site.

The entire complex is the result of a unique collaborative effort by a design team consisting of an artist, Barbara Kruger; architects Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson; and a landscape architect, Nicholas Quennell, with associate architect, Frank Harmon.

Barbara Kruger is well-known in the art world for her striking and often inflammatory works that combine text with pictures, appropriating the styles, techniques, and images of the mass media to comment on issues of gender, power, and representation. In this environmental artwork, Kruger's text is the image.

The design of the Museum Park Theater is

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 21

focused on 11 85-foot-long letters that spell out the phrase "PICT U R E THIS." Constructed of a wide variety of materials, the letters form the various functions of the complex, including a retaining wall that holds up part of a hillside, a roof over the restrooms, and the floor and roof of the stage. Almost all the letters serve as informal seating areas during events, such as outdoor movies (there will be a 30-foot-by-60-foot drive-in movie screen permanently attached to one of the exterior walls of the museum).

The outer edges of the "P" are cast concrete and its interior spaces will he planted with grass and lavender. The straight edge of the letter is formed by a 10-foot-high retaining wall which is filled with text by Kruger, consisting of 21 phrases that all begin with "please": " P L E A S E D TO MEET YOU ... PLEASE D O N ' T PUT W O R D S IN MY MOUTH ... PLEASE BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE," etc.

Many of the letters incorporate text within their sculptural forms, focusing on specific references to the history, culture, and landscape of North Carolina. The "I" is a shallow concrete slab with the shape of the state of North Carolina set into its surface in green concrete. Placed around the edges of the slab are 60 cast aluminum plaques, replicating historical markers throughout North Carolina. " C " is a gigantic sandbox outlined with a colored concrete curb. "T," formed out of blacktop and bisected at an angle by a double white line, looks like it was cut out of the highway with a huge cookie cutter. "U" will be planted with a variety of ground covers and grasses. "R" consists of multiple rows of chainlink fence, which will eventually be covered with vines. The final "E" in "PICTURE" is constructed out of concrete block walls, each approximately 7 feet high. Attached to the walls are 80 etched aluminum plaques; the same size and shape as the concrete blocks, they are randomly placed on both sides of the walls. Each plaque contains a single quote, selected from a series of questions by Kruger, such as " W H O IS FREE TO C H O O S E ? " and " W H O IS AFRAID OF IDEAS?" or from a variety of quotations chosen by Kruger, including "Give your brain as much attention as you do your hair and you'll be a thousand times better o f f ' (Malcolm X) and "People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat" (Rebecca West).

For the word "THIS," "T" is a black surface that starts out on the roof over the restrooms and the museum shop and moves out into the benches that face the stage. " H " is simultaneously down on the ground and up in the sky, forming both the outer edges of the stage floor in yellow pine planks and the translucent fiberglass stage roof. "I" is a low concrete slab inset with North Carolina's

state motto in colored concrete, "TO BE RATHER THAN TO SEEM." The final letter, "S," is formed out of raised dirt covered with boulders. All the dirt between the letters will eventually be filled in with grass to form an expansive lawn. Because the heights of each letter vary radically from one to the next, the work provides constantly changing vistas and viewpoints. Lighting integrated throughout the work illuminates the outlines of the letters, as well as the text within it, for night viewing.

The phrase itself, "PICTURE THIS," evokes multiple images and associations: You envision the "pictures" inside the museum, the "moving pictures" of the outdoor cinema, and you begin to see the natural landscape as a picture framed by the boundaries of the park. The text found within the letters adds more layers of meaning to the work by posing questions or making statements that cause you to question who is speaking and who is being asked.

PICTURE THIS provides an effective and unusual link between art and nature, landscape and architecture. The work as a whole creates a pivotal transition between the built and the organic, the museum and its surrounding natural environment. As Dan Gottlieb, the museum's project/design director for the park, has described it, the theater complex becomes "a hinge between the building and the landscape."

The Museum Park Theater project is only one aspect of the design team's original proposal for the master plan of the museum's entire 150-acre park. The original proposal, titled "Imperfect Utopia: A Park for the New World," looked at the museum and its grounds in terms of flexible zoning. As Barbara Kruger described it during a lecture last spring at the museum, the team's proposal was an "anti-master plan," intending "to pose questions and not offer all the answers." Plans for expansion of the park include walking and bicycling paths, landscaping, reforestation, and a flexible framework for placing site-specific and existing artwork in the landscape.

PICTURE THIS is concrete proof of how successful largescale public art can be when the project is initiated as a collaborative effort between artists and architects from the very beginning, an exemplary work of public art because it truly synthesizes the needs of the place with the aesthetic ideas of the designers. It is a highly innovative and completely functional solution to a complex, multiple-use site, a solution that is aesthetically challenging, provocative, and original in its vision and scope.

Many of the letters incorporate text within their sculptural forms, focusing on specific references to the history, culture, and landscape of North Carolina.

22 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

Linda Johnson Dougherty is an independent curator and critic based in Chapel Hill, NC.

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H ERO AMONG CONFEDERATES intersection. It is barely accessible even by those nimble enough to circumnavif transforming the Arthur Ashe memogate two lanes of fast-moving traffic. rial into a placemaker for the citizens The statue, according to one Richof Richmond, VA, had been a goal of mond reporter, is "neither comfortably this controversial public art project from viewed nor comfortably situated. Ashethe outset, perhaps many of the obstacles watchers who opt for the relative safety it encountered could have been avoided. In of the median strip occupy a benchless order for a public artwork to act as a placespace. It is a crowded, congested place maker, it is necessary to build a place for where the statue's inherent peacefulness the community around it, and to introduce and simplicity grates against the very elements that come together to improve or environment it has created." 1 The landcreate a good public space. One must scaping and concrete blocks that surattract activity and incorporate design eleround the base to protect the statue not ments and amenities that make the space only from damage by automobiles and inviting, including traffic circulation and tour buses but from human interaction transportation systems that encourage as well. The encircling traffic island, walking. In addition, a management entity built at a cost of $70,000. is devoid even must maintain the space and ensure that it of a curb large enough to act as a pedesis safe and comfortable for people to use. trian refuge, let alone a place to take If, on the other hand, a public artwork is photographs. To compensate for the sited in a place that has not been designed inconvenience caused to monument visto accommodate people, if it lacks seating itors. a "no left turn" sign has been Paul DiPasquale, Arthur Ashe Monument, and shade, and if access is difficult prominently placed next to the artwork Richmond VA. 1996. (photo: the artist) because of a poor pedestrian environment to ensure their safety. or because it is not connected to other city The question of whether to honor destinations, the work will fail as a placemaker and a communi- Ashe has never been an issue. What has been questioned is the ty enhancement. This, unfortunately, is the case with Richmond's way the artist received his commission and the quality of the finmonument to tennis star Ashe. ished artwork. DiPasquale was hand-picked by Virginia Heroes, Paul DiPasquale's bronze memorial to this humanitarian, edu- the project's sponsor, and unanimously supported by then Mayor cator, and international sports hero—who arguably was to tennis Leonidas Young and members of the city council. However, the what Jackie Robinson was to baseball—features Ashe in a warm- commission was executed without a formal review by the city's up suit, racket poised over his head, with books in hand and ador- public art commission, without following the city's own public ing children at his feet. It stands 12 feet high, sits atop a 44-ton art gift policy and site review procedures, and without seeking stone column base twice its size, and is set in the middle of an input from Richmond art professionals, the community at large

By

Cynthia

Abramson

I

(Continued on page 25)

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 23

By Deborah

Karasov

Prior to the 19th century, culture and art were never separated from place.

Place was not only a source of materials, energy, food, and collective action, but also a repository of meaning, history, livelihood, art, and sacred memory. Since then, however, many of the forces that have shaped the modern world, such as economies of scale, the commodification of land and labor, the conquest of nature, and the quantification of virtually everything, have made our places invisible and virtually inaccessible to us. For our economics and politics, places have become just the intersection of two lines on a map, suitable for speculation and profiteering, another mall, another house. The idea of people becoming responsible for their places is an anachronism.

Yet some believe that the attachment to places may be one of the most important—and neglected—needs of the 20th century.

So public artists who take place seriously are dealing with a profound concept. Yet their work can never be more than a small blink in the face of long-held dogmas about growth, capital mobility, the global economy, the nature of wealth, and the wealth of nature. We should not be overconfident. Even the most brilliant artist will never be able to endow modern spaces with a convincing, enduring sense of place using facile tactics that rely on an appeal to nostalgia, parochialism, or even bitter memories.

Is it naive then to believe that public art can foster a sense of place? Social scientist Sharon Zukin might say yes. As people's lives become more entangled in the modern culture of consumption, she says, they lose interest in values that developed during the industrial age: values like responsibility, which are based on a shared history and place. Nor, she believes, can artists or critics be counted on to oppose the current market-oriented culture.

They are themselves too involved in market production to draw up alternatives.

At the same time Zukin seems to say that a public agenda—presumably even that of an artist—could be useful in calling attention to the crucial forces disengaging ourselves from places. By hinting

24 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

at this larger context, such a public agenda might relay what choices are and are not possible for people living within a specific place. Also, people might come to understand their own role within those larger forces.

Compare, then, two recent public art ventures that engage and comment upon the history and social dynamics of place. One, Culture in Action, sited in Chicago 1 ; the other, Power of Place, sited in Los Angeles 2 .

Culture in Action took place from 1992 through 1993 and was organized by free-lance curator Mary Jane Jacob and Sculpture Chicago, a decade-old organization that specializes in public art "that can be relevant to the lives of Chicago residents." From the point of view of Sculpture Chicago, the program's experimental goal was to test the territory of public participation and the artist as interventionist.

Sculpture Chicago's experimental goals shaped everything about the program. It addressed lower-class non-white audiences unlike the stereotypical audience for museums, it provided that the projects become collaborations with the residents, and that the curator selected artists for their interest in critical social issues and testing the boundaries of public art. A key motivation throughout, one that would distinguish it from the growing realm of collaborative community-based public art, was to create projects in which "the voices shaping the past and present of the site also shape the work."

Many of the "products" that resulted almost define the trends, sometimes ridiculed, in current community-based art: a storefront hydroponic garden and classroom space focusing on AIDS, a parade of 500 people representing a range of cultural expressions weaving its way through three often overlooked non-white neighborhoods, and an ecological field trip to Central America bringing together affluent white and inner-city black teenagers. These and other projects were designed to respond to very particular situations, says art critic Michael Brenson in his essay from the Culture in Action catalogue.

Unless those situations are grasped or experienced to some

degree, it is very hard for any evaluation of a project to be responsible or just.

At the same time, Brenson inadvertently puts forth at least two basic questions related to evaluation. On the level of benefiting the community, must the art have real in addition to symbolic value? And on the level of reaching the general public, if the public comes away with an oversimplified attitude, does this mean that the project is less than successful?

The paradox of the Chicago projects is that while they seem like very worthwhile educational and community-building events, their value is very one-dimensional: They indeed have primarily symbolic value, and the public does come away with an oversimplified understanding. The reason why this is true over and over again has to do with the theoretical basis for the project.

That basis is the conventional art one, and therefore product-oriented (if not object-oriented). Although called investigations, each of these art projects comes to an isolated conclusion. The public has a simplified, very delimited idea of larger historical and social conditions. The artists try to summarize and symbolize the social and historical framework in an artwork, rather than all the projects relating to that framework and having the meaning come from that framework.

In contrast, Power of Place in Los Angeles began with a theoretical framework that is a genuine hypothesis: The dream of a common language as it relates to place must be rooted in the programming of new, related kinds of private and public spaces to explore genuine economic and social conditions in a historical and environmental context. The projects do not stop at the boundaries of a particular ethnic group by merely celebrating group identity; nor do they reinforce separation by simply calling attention to isolated sites with a significance spelled out in terms of one group. Instead, all the sites, while having local significance for a particular group, also relate to each other within the larger economic, political and environmental history of the city. That larger framework has to do with the history of working landscapes as African-American, Latino, and Asian-American families have experienced it.

Hero Among Confederates continued from page 23

or area residents. Furthermore, those who have opposed either the statue's location or the work's artistic quality have been labeled racist. 2 Perhaps the most controversial element of the debate centers on the appropriateness of placing a 20th century figurative statue of a contemporary, African-American sports hero on Monument Avenue, a tree-lined historic district punctuated by 19th century statues dedicated to the memory of such Confederate heroes as Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson. The Ashe monument has been relegated to a site at the end of this inexorable procession of Confederate leaders, creating a jumbled, post-modern, wax museum-like atmosphere, where evidence of curatorial concern for preserving historical context is sorely lacking. Not surprisingly, historic preservationists have been some of the site's most vocal opponents.

However, former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder has claimed that the street is "now an avenue for all people" 3 and former Mayor Young that it will "assure blacks that a permanent statue to an African-American hero someday will be placed on that site."4 The existing Ashe monument is slated to be removed to the site of a national sports museumâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;which may or may not ever be builtâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; if funds to cover the cost of relocation can be raised.

While solutions to the artwork's aesthetic problems have been proposed, and alternatives to the way in which the mayor and

One project celebrates the urban homestead of Biddy Mason, an ex-slave and midwife active between 1856 and 1891. Another reinterprets the Embassy Auditorium, where Rose Pesotta, Luisa Moreno, and Josefina Fierro de Bright organized Latina dressmakers and cannery workers in the 1930s and 1940s. A third tells the story of a historic district where Japanese-American family businesses flourished from the 1890s to the 1940s.

Specific projects are also grounded in broad themes such as the migration experience, the breakdown and reformulation of families, or the search for a new sense of identity in an urban setting. The participating community becomes empowered by understanding its own experiences as similar or different from other social experiences; its own contributions in the context of the larger developing city; and its own limitations and opportunities as shaped by global economic forces.

Certainly, it helps that Power of Place represents a decade of research and practice beginning in 1986 and coordinated by a brilliant historian, Dolores Hayden. And yet, for all of the clearly substantial amounts of money and resources that went into Culture in Action, one wonders if a more substantive framework could not have been developed.

Is placemaking an art? Yes, but if we ignore the massive forces that have destroyed place in this century, if we make places that are unrelated in their meaning to other places, that art will be a trifle.

Deborah Karasov, geographer and landscape planner, was director of the Landscape Studies Center, Minneapolis, and recipient of a leadership grant from the St. Paul C o m p a n i e s .

Notes: 1. Artists were Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Haha. Robert Peters, Mark Dion, Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio, Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, and Daniel J. Martinez.

2. Artists have included: Bettye Saar, Sheila de Bretteville, Rupert Garcia, Celia Munzo, Susan E. King, Sonya Ishii, and Nobuho Nagasawa.

city council approved the artist suggested, there has been little meaningful discussion about the statue's relationship to its site and its role as a placemaker for the neighborhood and the city.

Richmond's communities certainly should have had a voice in deciding on the best site and the artist most qualified to honor Ashe, a hometown and national hero. But because of some questionable political decisions, an opportunity to create a meaningful place for dialogue about Richmond's past and future, and to redefine the city as a gateway to the New South, has been lost.

Hope lies, however, with the city's own public art program and its thoughtful and far less publicized work on projects of a truly difficult natureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;public artworks for a juvenile justice courthouse and detention complex for youth who, unlike those in bronze forever gazing up at Ashe, stand little chance of knowing the man or visiting his monument.

Cynthia A b r a m s o n is the public art project m a n a g e r for Project for Public Spaces in N e w York City.

Notes: 1. Bill McKelway, "Love at First Site?" Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 16, 1996, p. D l .

2. Gordon Hickey, "Council Again Gives OK to Ashe Statue Site."

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Feb. 27, 1996, p. B3.

3. "Ashe Statue Joins Those of Confederates." New York Times, July 11, 1996, p. A17.

4. Gordon Hickey, "Council Again Gives OK to Ashe Statue Site."

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Feb. 27, 1996, p. B3.

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 25

Historic "The issue here is how, through our practice, to interrupt the tendency of repetition of the past's mistakes and injustices and to simultaneously propose some sort of vision for the future...In relation to monuments, the issue is how to present the history of the victims versus the history of the victors. The history of the victors is transmitted through the generations, through the selection of events—preserving some, rejecting others, or determining their interpretation.

The image of the past is composed in this way.. .by silences and omissions."

—Krzysztof Wodickzo

"What I am looking for is a layering of information that is different from any particular construct. I am looking for the shape and meaning of my own experience in this time. Each artwork is an outgrowth of others, and how they might link and reveal something one to the other...Any discussion of the work after the fact becomes a piece of history, a consciously created artifact.. .when I talk about the work, I try to let the stories that lie within the work reveal themselves."

—Suzanne Lacy

I

I

" ®0(I)90(P(D(D Reviewed

by Sally B.

Woodbridge

To make visible the invisible, give voice to the voiceless, and interrupt the linear history we have inherited, ingested, and institutionalized—these were the themes of "Veiled Histories," a public art conference held in San Francisco July 812 under the auspices of the San Francisco Art Institute. The principal speakers, artists Dennis Adams, Suzanne Lacy, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Victoria Vesna, and writer/curator James Clark, presented temporary works committed to giving aesthetic form to socio-political issues.

In organizing the conference around the dual themes of impermanence and activism, Anna Novakov hoped to give this relatively new field in the arts the attention she believes it deserves. This is not because a career of public activism brings artists more security or better pay, but because artists working in the public sphere have a broader range of opportunities for interaction with the general public than does art created for museums and galleries.

Other advantages that temporary works may have over permanent ones include lower materials costs and a shorter time commitment. The works may also be easier to fund since their impermanence makes them more likely to escape lengthy official review and can defuse the opposition that permanent works with a political message tend to provoke. Still, as Lacy observed, the activist artist is perforce a guerrilla conducting a suiprise raid on the

Top Left: Suzanne Lacy, A Woman's Street Life performance, DeYoung Museum, 1977. (photo: the artist) Left: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Martin Luther Kirche.

Kassel, Germany, 1987. (photo: the artist) Top Right: Victoria Vesna, Virtual Concrete, 1995. (photo: the artist) Bottom Right: Dennis Adams in collaboration with Nicholas Goldsmith, A Podium for Dissent.

Battery Park Landfill, New York City, 1985. (photo: the artist)

establishment because the resources for such art are so limited to begin with.

The works described by Adams, Wodiczko, Lacy, and Vesna are strategic maneuvers aimed at the engagement and defeat of the forces that warp public consciousness and memory. Adams, who prefers to create works that spur provocative discussion after he and they have vanished from the scene, has moved to more minimalist pieces from the strong architectural character of his early Manhattan bus shelters, which incorporated photographic images from the McCarthy hearings and the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Through appropriations of urban street furniture such as European pissoirs and workers'

endless repro duction.The loss of identity and personality rooted in the body which is fixed in time and space. How do we differentiate and classify the many layers of the simulated and the real? The differences between uirtuality and reality and their coexistence. Can the Web, thought by many to be the epitome of the hyperreal, be demonstrating the opposite—the linear notion of the past, present and future.. .concretized memories of the real that are no longer valid? Most discussions around virtual reality continue to reproduce dichotomies between the mind and the body, with the virtual occupying the lesser status to the real."

—Victoria Vesna

"The relationship between text and image is something that has been a part of my work from the beginning. Not so much how a text describes an image, or an image illustrates a text, rather the space between these two things. I am also interested in architecture. The creation of some hind of public space in which people could congregate or gather. The information I am working with can then be reconstructed around the architectural configurations of those spaces."

—Dennis Adams

Panel members (from left): James Clark, Suzanne Lacy, Dennis Adams, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Victoria Vesna. (photo: J. Becker) - •.

"The spectrum of public reactions can run the gamut from complete indifference to the point of engagement, when a viewer is caught in a moment of time, in which they pause, reflect, and make connections between their life, the work, and the things that surround that particular intervention.. .Some works arrest people in their tracks, creating a moment that is in the present but acts to peel back the skin of the city's past while simultaneously opening up a window to the future."

—James Clark street signs, he continues to "talk back to authority."

Wodiczko described his earlier projections of photographic images on the surface of historic m o n u m e n t s as "hijackings" intended to contradict their mythologized messages. Using images of armaments and the homeless, among others, Wodiczko has attempted to deconstruct the rhetoric of monuments in Europe and the U.S. that perpetuate the false myths of the victors, who have concocted our linear history. More recently he has concentrated on re-actualizing the memories of strangers. An immigrant himself, Wodiczko has dedicated many of his works to unveiling the condition of immigrants in their perilous transit from a lost land to the promised land. To this end he designed the xenolog, a contemporary version of the wandering prophet's walking stick. The xenolog serves as a porte-parole, a portable artifice that provokes curiosity and promotes discussions among people who would otherwise not communicate.

Capped with a monitor that plays a videotape of the operator's personal history and may under some circumstances record another's story, the metal staff is an intriguing mouthpiece intended to

draw the viewer into conversation and break the silence of the society of strangers to which, in reality, we all belong. By providing individuals who are or have been immigrants with a xenolog to tell their life stories in public, Wodiczko has brought them from the wings into the limelight.

Over the past two decades, Lacy has worked to reveal the subtexts of political events and societal conditions—many of them related to women—that have been masked from view in the mainstream media. Her varied works are settings for political morality tales in which she seeks a high level of spectacle or theater.

They are—to put it mildly—labor-intensive. Only with the collaboration of battalions of volunteers has she been able to stage such extravaganzas as The Crystal Quilt, staged in Minneapolis in 1987 with the help of 430 women. The Roof Is on Fire, a multi-media public conversation and performance held in 1994, had a cast of 200 Oakland teenagers and took place in a downtown parking garage.

Victoria Vesna's presentation of her project-in-progress, Bodies, Inc., prompted a discussion about the nature of appropriate space for public art. Bodies, Inc. occupies the virtual space of a Web site on the Internet. Through an involved and evolving interactive process, players who buy a share in Bodies, Inc. select body parts and skins to create their own virtual bodies. Although this game is akin to many others in cyberspace, Vesna discovered that it could take on a threatening reality for some players. Their paranoia forced her to create a necropolis for those who became haunted by their virtual bodies and wished to kill them.

For Vesna, the challenge of cyberspace is that, in offering a new framework for visual media it can change our perception of reality and cause people to question that which is constructed, for

28 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

example, by the corporate world through advertising and other manipulation of information. There is also the prospect of a vast audience, one that can interact with the artist in a playful way. And by helping to evaluate the work, the audience allows the artist to continue working and to overcome the difficulties inherent in evaluating temporary works in a physical space. Vesna suggested that, by avoiding prescriptions or moral messages, playfulness may gently lead to a more healthy society.

Two panels broadened the conference discussion. Public Art Review managing editor Jack Becker led the first, "Public Art as Message"; Linda Blumberg, director of the Capp Street Project, moderated the second, "The Dilemmas of Public Art." Bay Area-based artists Seyed Alavi, Doug Hollis, Su-Chen Hung, Richard Kamler, Anna Valentina Murch, and Rigo 96 were joined by Haha, a Chicago art collective, architect LaVerne WellsBowie, and Judy Moran, director of the Villa Montalvo artists' residency program. The artists gave brief presentations of their works, most of which bolstered the main theme of spotlighting those on society's margins.

For the conference's closing session at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, Donna Graves, Headlands program director, moderated a panel titled "Where History Lies: The Politics of Collective Memory." Artists Reanne Estrada and Johanna Poethig presented the Bayanihan Transition, a peripatetic work concerned with immigrant issues performed by members of DIWA, a Filipino artists collective in San Francisco. Gregory Sholette, the third panelist, described the 1992 Lower Manhattan Sign Project by REPOhistory, an artists collective based in New York City. In 1992, this group attempted to rewrite early American history by mounting 39 metal plaques on 36 sites in lower Manhattan. The plaques' texts recounted forgotten histories of people and events associated with the sites.

Despite the growing number of temporary projects that address issues of broad public concern such as gender, immigration, and the environment, few conferences are dedicated solely to upstart public art. One hopes that "Veiled Histories" won't be the last.

Sally B. Woodbridge was a former correspondent for Progressive Achitecture and is a contributor to Landscape Architecture, On The Ground, and other publications in the field of professional design. She has also written several guides to architecture and landscape design on the West Coast and other books on various subjects in these fields.

Veiled Extracts 11

Bay Area Work in Progress Edited

by Anna

Novakov

from "Veiled Histories" presentations and original texts by Terri Cohn, Constance Lewallen, and Susan Pontious Rigo 96 is a muralist whose highly graphic word paintings are in the style of traffic signs. The monumental red, white, and blue lnnercity Home, sponsored by the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, on the side of a new Knox SRO building for low-income residents at 241 Sixth St., can be seen from as far away as the busy Central Freeway. Rigo worked with the area's residents and merchants to find words that would

Nayland Blake, Constellation lighting design by Architectural Lighting Design San Francisco Public Library, Collection of the City and County of San Francisco, 1996. (photo: Craig Mole)

express their hope and pride in the future. His One Tree at the freeway entrance at Tenth and Bryant streets is a large arrow pointing to a single tree that has managed to survive in a nature-hostile environment of cars and concrete.

Extinct, painted in bold yellow and black stripes above a Shell station at Fifth and Folsom streets, warns of the depletion of natural resources and, perhaps, all that is lost in the name of progress, but it is

ambiguous enough to invite many interpretations.

Anna Valentina Murch on the PAR Panel said: "I became more and more interested in how cultures change and how places became a point where you looked and it activated memory. The places that I was particularly drawn to were what I categorized as forbidden, abandoned, and condemned. I was interested in the places that had been left behind. They had already gone through some sort of transition. They provoked me to rethink their histories and the people that had been there. Because they were in this state of flux, they had the possibility of changing yet again."

During the San Francisco Art Commission session, Nayland Blake gave a tour of his work Constellation for San Francisco's new public library. The piece is a contemporary response to the beaux arts architectural tradition represented by San Francisco's Old Main library. The design of the Old Main was derived from the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris, designed by Gerard Labrouste. One of the key design elements in this building is the stone plaques on the exterior of the building, inscribed with the names of famous authors. The outside of the building is the index of its contents, echoing in its form the idea of the book.

Blake has taken this idea of the index of authors inscribed in stone and converted it to light. "Looking at the building, those names become like tombstones; the metaphor 1 wanted to work with was a guiding light." says Blake.

The artwork is located on the 53-footby-9-foot wall that rises out of the central atrium and is encircled by a five-story grand staircase. A perforated metal wall system provides openings for fiber-optic tubing, which is used to illuminate 160 glass shades, each inscribed with the name of a 20th-century author whose works are contained within the library.

The list, representing a culturally mixed

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 29

group of heavyweights and popular writers, is both an homage and a critique of the earlier tradition. As Blake says, "libraries are not universities, they are spaces for democracy."

San Francisco artist Su-Chen Hung is working on a large-scale project to be installed at the San Francisco International airport. This project involves a series of custom-built double glass panels that have the words " w e l c o m e " inscribed in many different languages.

The glass panels are adhered to both sides of 12 columns that line the corridors of the customs area. The messages appear and disappear as passengers walk by them. According to Hung, this project is related to her own immigrant experiences coming to the airport. She recalls that "When I first came to San Francisco, I saw a welcome sign in both Chinese and English. This sign gave me such a wonderful feeling, that I wanted to create something that would welcome all of the visitors and immigrants arriving from different parts of the world."

Richard Kamler, on the PAR Panel related: "I am in the process of building a very long table, called the Table of Voices.

It is made of transformative materials, such as lead and gold leaf, which from the ancient notion of alchemy, suggest change. You can hear voices talking through telephone receivers and across a sheet of glass which goes down the length of the table. Surrounding this table are memorabilia such as clothing, photographs, writings, drawings, coat hangers, and other personal things. The problem that has turned up is the question of what side of the table you are on, the felon or the victim?"

Seyed Alavi's project Mind Field is a collaborative piece between the artist and 16 high school students in Dublin, CA.

Seyed Alavi's design for Mind Field, maze garden, Dublin High School, Dublin, CA, 1996. (photo: the artist)

According to Alavi, the project, situated on the school's campus, is "a profile of a face in the landscape." The brain—a walkway—is constructed of chain-link material in the form of a maze. Inside are 16 benches referencing different parts of the brain: the seat of memory, the seat of knowledge, etc. Small plaques, embedded in the ground, are inscribed with nine poems, two of which were written by the students. The poems are related to the maze as a metaphor of life. A historical time capsule, assembled by the students, will be buried under the eye of this largescale profile.

One stop on the library tour was the collaborative work of Ann Hamilton and Ann Chamberlain. This piece is also a historical reference to the libraries of the past, a tribute to the discarded library reference system—the old library catalogue cards. When the public library moved into its new building, it made the transition to an on-line computerized catalogue system. Hamilton and Chamberlain took 50,000 manila cards, and with the help of over 150 "scribes" working in 12 languages, hand-notated each card with quotes from the book itself or references

HUDOLHD

FCHFD

to related books. They are, as Hamilton suggests, instant artifacts, "a memory of a whole way of doing something that is past or is passing." The notated cards are now embedded in translucent layers of artisan plaster on 5,000 square feet of the core diagonal wall that penetrates the new building on three levels. According to Hamilton, through this physical arrangements of the cards, they hope to allow viewers the "happy accident of butting into something," as they browse the walls.

Members of DIWA Arts, the FilipinoAmerican artists collective, spoke at the Headlands Center for the Arts session on the last day of the conference. They discussed Bayanihan Transition, which was installed in collaboration with the Capp St. Project in the window of the Gran Oriente Filipino Hotel at 106 S. Park St., a residential hotel primarily housing elderly Filipino men. Building upon an earlier installation at Filipinas Restaurant in San Francisco, DIWA Arts used various electronic media to present excerpts from interviews they are conducting with the hotel's residents. The excerpts examine the resident's cross-cultural experiences and unique lives.

Johanna Poethig, a member of DIWA Arts who also works independently, collaborates closely with the people and the places where she works in order to create murals on buildings and freeways, painted and stacked tire sculptures, and ceramic tile murals. Her mural To Cause to Remember, created for the South of Market Multi Service Center, a homeless shelter at Fifth and Bryant streets in San Francisco, is a quintessential example of her ability to subtly address and unmask the dualities inherent in publicly positioned work. Here, Poethig has employed the Statue of Liberty as an icon for the site, which she has manipulated in order to particularize her statement about freedom in America. Rendered familiarly erect but laterally recumbent, the statue's torch—the flame of emancipation—floats above her, just out of reach.

Underscoring Poethig's historically contradictory interpretation of this universally understood symbol of freedom is its chained drapery, which keeps it earthbound, and the portion of the statue's text which refers to this country's historic beckoning to the "tired, poor, huddled masses."

Johanna Poethig, To Cause To Remember, San Francisco homeless shelter, 1995. (photo: the artist)

30 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

Sculpture: "Crossing Boundaries'

iff

The 16th International Sculpture Conference, Providence, RI, June 5-11, 1996 al artists " w h o both make persuasive objects and work searchingly in the public realm": Martin Puryear, Luis Jimenez, A good sculpture, it is said, fuses form Richard Serra, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and content. If so, this year's International Joel Shapiro, Tom Otterness, Claes Sculpture Conference passed the test, for Oldenburg, David H a m m o n s , Ronald the conference theme had a perfect match Jones, and Antony Gormley. The examples in the structure of the conference itself. As are impressive, and the list can easily be an organizing principle, the theme— extended: John Ahearn, Alice Aycock, Mel "Crossing Boundaries"—suggested an Chin, Agnes Denes, R.M. Fisher, Jenny adventurous approach. Rather than bringHolzer, Judy Pfaff, Christy Rupp, etc. ing together artistic compatriots to reafSuch enumeration does little, however, firm their agreements, the organizers to elucidate the relation between self-consought to place radically different artists tained sculptural objects and site-specific together on the same panels. As a consepublic art. There certainly are artists whose quence, the specter of foregone concluwork is so deeply embedded in the public sion that haunts so many conferences was realm that it is not at all clear how (mostly) avoided. their process of art-making could As a topic of discourse, the theme Barnaby Evans, Second Fire, Providence, RI. fire braisers. June meaningfully translate f r o m the was also fertile and opened up the 1996. (photo: Erik Gould) street to the studio. Indeed, the whole field of contemporary art for boundary between the two was easdiscussion, as critic Michael Brenson ily taken for granted at the confernoted in his opening remarks. "It is ence, in panel discussions about colclearfrom the program forthisconferlaborations, environmental remedience that 'sculpture' has become the ation, master plans, and the mobiumbrella term for contemporary art," lization of community interaction. he said. " I t c a n r e f e r t o . . . video instalOnly in a panel entitled "The Object lations and many different approaches and Non-Object" was the relation to public art, including excavations of between the two addressed, but it memory, collaborations with archiencouraged little discussion among tects, commemorations of unrecordthe dissimilar panelists. While ed voices, and mobilization of comGareth Jones presented a sweeping munity interaction. Sculptors of theory that placed the non-object objects ignore these installations and securely within the development of approaches at their peri 1. Some of the the object, Robert Irwin responded most original thinking about space flatly that he felt that none of what and time and some of the most imporJones had said applied to him. tant lessons about courage and growth On the face of it, what was preare being formed away from the stusented as public art at the conference dio, and sculptors committed to the J has little to do with what goes on in object may have to pay as much attenthe studio. The third panelist on tion to [installations] as sculptors had "The Object and Non-Object" to pay attention to the achievements of panel, William Tucker, has written painting when the century began."

Reviewed

by Hafthor

Yngvason

Having thus acknowledged the seminal contribution of public art, Brenson went on to turn the theme of the conference upon itself by attacking a boundary that has been imposed in the process of bringing public art beyond the limits of traditional sculpture. "The boundary that is widely assumed to exist between object makers and their studios and artists committed to working outside them is a fiction ...Insisting on a hard and fast boundary between the gallery and the park, the studio and the street, distorts and impoverishes the entire sculpture field."

To reveal the fictitious character of this boundary, Brenson gave examples of sever-

*

®

(Continued

Convergence Beside a wonderful installation by Ursula von Rydingsvard at the Rhode Island School of Design, an annual art festival called Convergence provided the main diversion for panel-fatigued conferees. Organized by artist Boh Rizzo who, along with Jay Coogan of RISD. was instrumental in bringing ISC to Providence, the Convergence Festival has been an annual city event since 1987. The festival brings together sculptures from around the country for a summer-long display, mostly (because of its limited budget) by emerging artists. With the conference coming to town, Rizzo managed to con-

vince the city to augment his budget and dramatically increased the number of installations from 16 last year to over 75.

The Convergence is not limited to sculpture: as the name indicates, it is a festival of converging artforms that provides a series of free music and dance concerts throughout the summer.

Until this year, the festival took place in Roger Williams Park, a large park with rolling hills and meandering paths.

Recently, an ambitious makeover of the riverfront in downtown Providence has opened up new public spaces that allow Rizzo to expand the sculpture program into more varied venues. This year, at least 20 sculptures were sited along the Providence River and one on the river

on page 47)

itself. If Rizzo has any reservations about his increased options, it is that next year, with the impetus of the Sculpture Conference long gone, he will have to consolidate his resources either in the park or downtown, and that poses a dilemma.

While the downtown development provides a more urban setting, hence, perhaps, a more congenial one to recent developments in public art. the rarified park happens to be in the very center of one of Rhode Island's most underserved neighborhoods. The park is heavily used by hundreds of low-income families, who may not venture downtown to partake of public art or other cultural offerings. It is an audience that Rizzo finds hard to leave.

—Hafthor Yngvason

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 31

Apt for Atlanta's Olympic Games Reviewed

by

Felicia

Feaster

In an all-encompassing approach to public art, Atlanta's Cultural Olympiad has blanketed the city with the works of international and regional artists to parallel the athletic talent showcased at the Centennial Olympic Games.

Comprised of permanent and temporary artworks (sculpture, murals, performance art, and the traditional heroic bronzes flanking public buildings), Atlanta's foray into a large-scale, highly visible arts projects yields mixed results.

Featuring some lackluster, one-note celebrations of the Olympics, Atlanta also boasts a number of provocative works paying tribute to the historical and cultural specificity of this emblem of the New South, which counterbalance the self-congratulatory Olympics pomp.

A rich, imaginative critique of the harmonious one-worldism of the Games is contained in the brilliant, prankish temporary installation Atlantic, by the Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi.

Housed in an airconditioned trailer in the shadow of the High Museum is a wall devoted to the 95 flags of every nation touched by the Atlantic Ocean, rendered in colored sand sealed behind plastic. The artist introduced a colony of ants into a portion of the flags, all of which are interconnected via plastic tubing, which the insects are gradually colonizing. A commentary on the invisible but significant operation of non-humans in altering the world's geography, Yanagi's clever, accessible work also critiques the assumed integrity of national boundaries.

Some of the more successful pieces in this diverse public arts venture refute the Olympics altogether, content to enrich Atlanta's often generic, culturally bereft "official" landscape and treat the region's rich folk arts legacy, as in a collaborative installation by R.A. Miller, Tim Lewis, and Burgess Dulaney. Installed on three facing

ZVito Acconci, High Rise of Trees, Georgia State Archives Building, 1996. (photo: J. Becker) Left: Bettye Saar, Pause Here, 1996. (photo: John McWilliams. courtesy ACOG)

concrete islands at an austere downtown intersection, Miller's signature whirligigs tower over painted sheet-metal dinosaurs and devils that "walk" over cartoon-wavy hills in a whimsical, kinetic assemblage.

It's often such small-scale, regionally specific pieces that resonate more than the vanity Olympics projects by well-known international artists like Britain's Tony Cragg. The artist's centrally located, massive cast-aluminum figure of a child holding an enormous globe, composed of hun-

32 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

dreds of articulated puppets, conveys the Olympics' requisite sweep and spectacle—at a reported cost of $500,000—but pays lip service to the same officially mandated theme of global harmony flooding Atlanta's airwaves and billboards courtesy of Reebok, Coca-Cola, Bell South, and other corporate sponsors.

One of the characteristically imaginative examples of art tucked away from Atlanta's commercial epicenter is Ralph Helmick's 7-foot hollow-mask sculpture Through His Eyes, which has a manifold eloquence missing from more spectacular works like Cragg's. Inventively treating Atlanta's pride of place, this bronze with a thatched ebony surface commemorates African-American local hero John Wesley Dobbs. Cleverly reworking the convention of historic and artist information embossed on a plaque, Helmick has engraved Dobbs' biographical data—including poignant references to his six daughters and excerpts from his speeches—on the interior of the mask, as a metaphor for Dobbs' consciousness. The accessible, eye-level

Yukinori Yanagi, Atlantic from series "World Flag Ant Farm," 1996. (photo: John McWilliams) Left: Tony Cragg, World Events, 1996 (photo: J. Becker)

Regina Frank and Edward Stein, Glass Bead Game, installation, 1996. (photo: John McWilliams courtesy Arts Festival of Atlanta)

4 r -.Sti^azM

placement of the work also contests a traditional dwarfing, superheroic brand of public memorial that aggrandizes historical figures.

Highlights of the Corporation for Olympic Development in Atlanta's public art program that manage to wrest some poetry from corporate-internationalism, are Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel's rooftop topiaries.

Placed on numerous downtown buildings surrounding Woodruff Park, the human effigies use public space in a novel way, drawing the eye upward in a gesture of exaltation repeated in the arms-raised-in-victory posture of the figures. Such celebratory, highly visible works are nicely balanced by pieces like Bettye Saar's spirit chairs, tucked into the landscape of a downtown park where a number of homeless spend the night. Miniature metal chairs underlaid with neon tubing and embellished with found objects (jingle bells, picture frames, candle holders, and keys that rustle in the wind), the work is a charming hidden treasure, integrating nicely into the tranquil surroundings.

In contrast to such subtle, harmonious works as Saar's, the large proportion of temporary works placed in locations flanking major roadways give much of the Olympics arts enterprise the feel of seasonal tree-trimming, eye-catching decorations pulled out for visitors, to be shut away once the party's over. Fortunately, many artists represented in this heterogeneous public arts event have chosen to forgo the thematic constraints of the Olympics and the impulse to billboard their credentials, and instead produce thoughtful, arresting works.

Felicia Feaster is a free-lance writer on the arts and film based in New York.

Right: Yukinori Yanagi, <jTierra Nuestra?, installation, 1996. (photo: John McWilliams) Bottom: Michael Brenson, Patty Phillips and Mary Jane Jacob, 1996. (photo: J. Becker)

Conversing with Mary Jane Jacob Independent curator Mary Jane Jacob, formerly of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, has enlivened Atlanta's public art project with an innovative series of performances, installations and interactive exhibitions, titled "Conversations at the Castle." which Jacob has broken into four thematic phases.

The "Conversations at the Castle" project. housed in a medieval-inspired stone building across the street from the High Museum of Art, featured in its first phase—"Conversations as a Medium for Art"—Berlin artist Regina Frank. Frank's Glass Bead Game, an interactive performance piece in which viewers' Internet dispatches guide Frank's creation of a Shifu kimono, appeared alongside performance and installation art by the Slovenian collective IRWIN. Contesting the integrity of national boundaries in the post-Communist context, IRWIN proposes its collective—which makes its own 'state" artwork and issues its own passports—as a theoretical nation, a provocative notion that had particular relevance amidst the jingoism of the Olympics.

Work in the second phase, "Conversations is an International Dialogue," by Yukinori Yanagi, also critiqued the apparent autonomy of nationhood by reworking the United Nations emblem in iTierra Nuestra?. a piece which perhaps too derivatively referenced Alfredo Jaar's Peters Map.

I

Challenging the rigid parameters of the gallery space, Jacob's "Conversations" has embraced not only the Internet as a means of addressing the public, i but has welcomed community-based, socially relevant art projects as well, in

"Conversations as a Social Experience."

Ery Camara, Mauricio Dias and Walter Riegweg, and Maurice O'Connell worked for months with Atlanta's A f r i c a n American community, prison, and youth detention population and the Boys and Girls Clubs in collaborations of artist and public, represented in installations at the Castle.

The show's final phase. "Conversations on Culture," brought together critics, artists and activists over dinners created by the Italian team of Federica Theine and Stefania Mantovani, for discussion of the issues raised over the course of Jacob's project [see Off to See the Wizards, p. 42.].

Surprisingly, Jacob is reluctant to categorize "Conversations" as a purely public art project, noting, "(It) is not quite a public art project, but rather about the manifold layers in which art and the public address and meet each other and how we think about, more holistically. what that experience can mean."

The "Conversations" show raises questions similar to the one Jacob asked in a catalog essay for her "Places with a Past" project in Charleston. SC. where artists from outside the city interpreted its history: "Can an artist speak for people of another place with whom he or she does not share a common history or cultural tradition?"

Asked about possible elitism involved in importing international artists to work with a regional community on issues of race and poverty that might be better addressed by locals. Jacob responds, "I think this 'Conversation' subject, or conversations as a metaphor and a mechanism and a £ 5 2 2 methodology, is one way of resolving that dogmatism that some work does fall into, of coming to a place that isn't your own. and feeling you have to represent it because as the artist you have to be the aesthetic decision maker or the one who defines representation. They're all actually creating a work halfway, and the other half, you make."

Ultimately, says Jacob, curating "Conversations at the Castle" extended beyond the parameters of international and local debates, the tension between the cloistered museum space and accessible, democratic public art, to embrace larger issues. "It's not a conversation about just contemporary art, but a conversation about now. who we are, how do we relate to the rest of the world and how art can work as a mechanism for thinking about other things."

—Felicia Feaster

J

FALL/WINTER 7996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 33

IE1

The Best, the Worst, and Beyond NALAA Public Art Pre-conference '96 Reviewed

by

Jack

Becker

The heights and depths of public art were examined in St. Louis by a group of 75 public art administrators at the May 29-31 preconference to the National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies' spring convention.

The conference as a whole, like the sweep of Eero Saarinen's famous Gateway Arch (among the heights), had its ups and downs.

We gathered at the Adams Mark Hotel—as close as you can get to the Arch—under the theme "public art and urban design." A broad spectrum of examples was presented, from art that's subservient to urban design to artists as urban designers.

One problem with the conference, apart from its small budget, was a lack of exposure to the actual public art outside the front door. We huddled in a dark room looking at slides of the Arch (what's wrong with this picture?). The actual Arch should have been a required group tour.

(Think of the bonding that could have been accomplished in those tiny elevators!) Also worth a group tour would have been Richard Serra's Twain, only five blocks away. The ominous slabs of rusting steel provided an excellent example of the depths of public art. Many St. Louisans despise this work, and from what I could gather, rightly so. We did manage to tour the MetroLink, one of the first light-rail programs in the country to engage artists on a grand scale at the early stages of planning. (The art was minimal).

And we did get bused to a reception at Laumeier Sculpture Park. It felt somewhat uncomfortable. Much of the art needed maintenance, we were a day early for a big 20th-anniversary bash, and we were in the way of workers installing portable toilets.

Folks were quick to praise as well as criticize Jerry Allen for organizing the conference, albeit long-distance from his desk at the San Jose (CA) Arts Commission. Harriet Traurig, formerly involved with St. Louis' MetroLink program, assisted A l l e n — f r o m her new address in San Francisco. Perhaps no one in St. Louis wanted this job.

Author William Gass kicked off the first day with an acerbic assessment of the field. His talk, titled "Your Damn Bronze Dog is Digging in My Yard," cracked me up. With so many involved in the selection of public art, he stated, "a mediocre result is the best that can be hoped for. That's

why the Arch is a miracle and the Serra a suiprise. Groups tend to be timid. They certainly have no minds. And compromise, when you are dealing with quality, is a catastrophe. That's why most public art is pathetic, under any principle of devising." He suggested renaming the Serra St. Louis Abandoned. It was actually developed, Gass discovered, to express decay and entropy. He suggested reworking the presentation of Twain to make it more obviously depressing.

Other noteworthy speakers included conference perennials Buster Simpson and Jack Mackie, artists from Seattle, and Tom

Finkelpearl, former manager of New York City's public art program [see Finkelpearl's interview with Maya Lin on page 5]. Weiming Lu described his innovative Lowertown neighborhood in downtown St. Paul, attracting an influx of artists and arts organizations. Jean Greer discussed the innovative new public art master plan for Broward County, FL. John Norquist, the mayor of Milwaukee, was a hit, with his deadpan humor and bad slides of generic freeway bypasses. Projects in New Haven, CT; Chattanooga, TN; Minneapolis; and San Francisco were described in great detail.

Outstanding was Jennifer Dowley, program director at the National Endowment for the Arts, and former program director at the Headlands artist retreat outside San Francisco. She summed up the past three decades of public art in less than 20 minutes, then presented a rare sampling from the NEA's slide archives, including works

by Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, and Otto Piene's helium sculpture for the Walker Art Center's 1977 exhibit on the Mississippi in Minneapolis.

34 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

Dowley is concerned with the role of artists in our society. She asks, "How do artists engage with issues of our time; what function do they perform in our culture as a whole; and how are artists and their work perceived and received? Those of you managing public art programs have the good fortune to collect data on these questions on a daily basis, and to actually guide and shape the tenacious relationship our artists have with civic systems."

During the past three decades of the NEA's involvement in public art, Dowley observed, there have been three distinct paradigms: the " m u s e u m " paradigm (1967-79), the "urban design" paradigm (the 1980s), and "community engagement" (the 1990s). The 1970s employed a curatorial perspective—with the allimportant unveiling to generate public excitement about the work. In the 1980s, we said "commissioned" instead of "purchased" and there was concern about the relation of the work with the site. The artist today, acting in the public realm, is "moving away from architecture and the urban street palette." These three paradigms exist simultaneously now, Dowley stated, and they have distinct characteristics.

In the 1980s, for example, we thought of "artists as thinkers, as problem solvers, as urban designers. Design teams were being formed behind every lamp post.

Artists' relationship to the building and design trades changed. Artists were hired as equal partners with architects, or even in some cases, the power hierarchy was reversed and architects were hired to work for the artists" (such as St. Louis' MetroLink). "The role of the artist had shifted from being a solo venturer to working in partnerships to shape a great new urban Utopia. We really seemed ready to take on the world. Our roles as public art administrators changed from being managers of an installation process to being facilitators of an ongoing trust between the community and the artists coming in to work in it. We were orchestrators of a dialogue, a kind of call and response between the artists and the community. Community groups became an integral part of communicating the context of a place to the artist, who in turn responded by creating vehicles for enhanced civic life."

The 1980s, Dowley said, saw a great expansion of temporary public art programs. "There were lots of opportunities at that time for artists who had never had the chance to work in the public realm to work with issues of scale, endurance, site, community. They were yeast for the advancement of artists thinking and our own. Then came the 1990s. Sobering for everyone: Politically, economically and artistically."

(Continued

on page

46)

Joliet Muralists hit the Jackpot By

J

e

f f

H u e b n e r

Paralleling the rebirth of this hard-bitten industrial river city, Joliet, IL, artist Kathleen Farrell has spent the last five years building, from the ground up, a promising movement of communitybased artists and muralists. Never mind that the steel and limestone industries may have virtually vanished; the newly bannered City of Steel & Stone, once a beneficiary of the 1840s Illinois & Michigan Canal, is now experiencing a boom unprecedented in its history, as a beneficiary of another waterway resource: riverboat gaming revenue.

Along with a renewed sense of pride and purpose in place, the welcome flood of funding has enabled Joliet's mural team to literally paint the town—to freshen once-crumbling viaducts and walls with images of cultural heritage and civic history. But Farrell's vision of cultivating the next generation of community artists in Joliet, like the city's remarkable rebound from rust, was long overdue and not realized overnight.

In the summer of 1993, when Farrell and Kathleen Scarboro painted the African-American History Mural outside the Warren-Sharpe C o m m u n i t y Center in Joliet's largely black southeast side, the two veteran muralists couldn't ignore a troublesome fact: They were white. Although the design of the mural had been worked out with the local community, Farrell and Scarboro couldn't find anyone with sufficient interest and skills to assist them

Top: Renee Townsend, bas-relief of children from the Warren-Sharpe Center, 1995.

with the visual and technical aspects of the painting.

"The fact that they had to hire two white, west-side women was the genesis for our mentoring program," explains Farrell, who has been painting mostly labor-themed murals in Joliet and Chicago for more than two decades. "They couldn't find trained neighborhood artists.

There wasn't anybody. There were no art programs for this in grade schools and high schools, and very few mentors. Not that there weren't talented AfricanAmerican artists in Joliet. But the economic realities of having to have a fulltime straight job meant that they had to keep artwork a part-time thing; they weren't available to do art in the daytime, on weekdays."

Farrell, a longtime Joliet resident, had been emboldened by a successful mural project she curated in 1991, the benchmark year for the city's mural renaissance. She and Alejandro Romero, a renowned Chicago artist and muralist, had directed a mural painting class at Joliet's Spanish Center. Romero then painted Visions of Joliet, a richly detailed, 41-foot by 7/4-foot work on the city's

Bottom: Kathleen Farrell, Kathleen Scarboro and crew. Bluff Street History Mural, pt. III. detail, West Jefferson Street. 1996. (photos: K. Farrell)

transportation, labor, and cultural heritage, in the Union Train Station.

(Although Joliet is about 40 miles southwest of Chicago by commuter train, it's not a suburb; the city of some 80,000 was actually settled before Chicago.) Of the students who assisted Romero on the summer project, three of them—Javier Chavira, Sergio G o m e z , and Jesus Rodriguez—discovered a passion for public art and have since become among Joliet's most talented young muralists.

A crew of A f r i c a n - A m e r i c a n and Native American students had assisted Farrell and Scarboro on the River Walk Park Mosaic in 1992—the 20-foot by 30foot ceramic tile work, installed a year later in Bicentennial Park across the Des Plaines River f r o m downtown Joliet, depicts an aerial view of the city and its architectural treasures. But none of the youths employed in the low-income family program wanted to continue. "There just wasn't a mentoring system for bring-

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 35

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Kathleen Farrell and Kathleen Scarboro. Bluff Street History Mural, acrylic, 1995. (photo: K. Farrell)

ing up artists in the African-American community," says Farrell.

After painting the Warren-Sharpe mural, Farrell formed a partnership with the Illinois State Museum Lockport Gallery (Lockport, another canal and river town, lies a few miles north of Joliet) and Caterpillar Inc. to establish free, yearround art programs at four community centers in under-served Joliet neighborhoods. Farrell has directed the Lockport Gallery's Cultural Education Extension Program (CEEP) since the spring of 1994.

Simultaneously, she won an allocation of $250,000 from the City of Joliet for the three-year Viaduct Mural Program, part of a multimillion-dollar general bond issue to improve downtown in anticipation of the arrival of Harrah's Casino Joliet and the Empress River Casino. Farrell and Scarboro—a Joliet native who has made her home (and art) in Paris since 1976— co-direct the summer program.

Though nominally separate entities, CEEP and the city's public art program have coalesced to become a fertile laboratory for a diverse team of aspiring muralists (Joliet is about 25 percent black and 10 percent Latino, overwhelmingly Mexican/Chicano). "These programs have achieved the awareness of public art as a dynamic visual tool for communication being spread to a new generation of painter-artists," comments Geoffrey Bates, the Lockport Gallery's acting director.

CEEP initially employed neighborhood artists from the Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) to serve as artist-in-residence mentors; they worked with students to create permanent public artworks— murals, mosaics, and concrete relief sculptures—for each of the four community centers. Chavira and Gomez, art students at nearby Governors State University, for example, assisted CPAG artist Bernard Williams on the African and Mexican Cultural Heritage Mural at the Hartman Recreational Center in the spring of 1994. Carla Carr, also a Governors State art student, worked with African-American children on a mural at the Fairmont Center, and is also now doing her own murals.

Some former CEEP students, such as Rodriguez, have become instructors.

Public painters first work on murals designed by master artists. One of Farrell's primary goals as a mentor in this initial 10-week mural-making process is to get crew members—many of whom are college art students—up to "professional speed," and to teach them paint-mixing skills. "You have to learn how to paint faster if you want to make a living as an artist," says Farrell. "At the end of 10 weeks, you're better and faster at what you were pitiful at in the beginning."

After yearlong apprenticeships, in which muralists learn the finer techniques of translating scale models to finished paintings, they're ready to design and paint their own walls.

Farrell has deep roots in the community mural and labor movements. She earned a printmaking MFA in the early 1970s from a decorative arts school in Paris, where she became immersed in the city's then-flourishing "political poster culture"—and where she became friends with Scarboro; the two barely knew each other growing up in Joliet.

Returning to the U.S. in 1974, Farrell fulfilled part of a cultural anthropology masters degree at Governors State by painting community murals with the now-defunct Public Art Workshop in Chicago under Mark Rogovin, who had studied under David Alfaro Siqueiros in Mexico. Since then, Farrell has been promoting art and labor culture through murals (often with CPAG support) and studio paintings; the United Scenic Artists Union member had an art exhibition earlier this year at the American Labor Museum in Haledon, NJ. Joliet's initial viaduct murals included the 150-foot-long European Immigration Mural, by Lucille Dragovan, in the city's vestigial Slovenian neighborhood (now mostly black and Latino, Joliet's working class east side had been settled by Germans and Eastern Europeans, who began arriving in great numbers in the late 19th century to work as factory laborers); and Farrell and Scarboro's 345-foot Steam Train Mural, on the Union Station viaduct. Like other works, these also include thousands of square feet of decorative faux limestone and vines, usually painted by unskilled youths who must volunteer for two days before possibly being hired at minimum wage.

Chavira and Gomez, who assisted on these works, designed and painted their own murals this past year. Chavira did a piece honoring famed dance impresario and Joliet Central High School alumna Katherine Dunham, now artist in residence in East St. Louis, while Gomez's Hickory Creek Mural depicts local Indian settlement. The 24-year-old Chavira, an award-winning studio painter, says he plans to keep making murals. "At first it was hard to do personal work on a huge wall," he says. "But now I see there are possibilities of using your own style in public work. I'm trying to break the boundary of something traditional and doing something new and exciting."

Carr, also 24, spent part of the past summer assisting on a Farrell-designed mural about the history of the wallpaper industry in the Joliet area. (While there were eight such mills in the area in the early 20th century, only one remains in

Will County.) Carr, who entered a graduate art program at Governors State this fall, also recently completed her own viaduct wall; the piece, about AfricanAmerican history in Joliet and Will County, is across the street from the site of a future low-income housing development. "Painting murals has increased my social skills and artistic vocabulary," she says. "When you're contributing to the spirituality, through public beautification, of how a certain population sees themselves, I think it's a very powerful tool."

The program's most ambitious achievement has been the Bluff Street History Mural, a series of works depicting Joliet life and livelihood in the mid19th century. Spanning the work of two summers (1995-96), the murals run along both sides of a heavily traveled thoroughfare that was once part of the Great Sauk Trail, an arterial Indian migratory route that became Joliet's first street in the 1830s. The 380-foot-long south portion features sections highlighting Joliet's mid-1800s architecture; women and children (including Native Americans) in pioneer days; and early businesses and industries. The 95-foot-long north section deals with the history of the I & M Canal. The panels have a burnished golden hue, evoking times past, and like all the viaduct murals, use high-grade exterior matte acrylic paint.

The Bluff Street murals, designed by Farrell and Scarboro, were painted with the assistance of nearly every crew member. Second-year recruits on the project included Joliet Junior College art students Dante DiBartolo, Eric Standish, and David Wilson, along with Governors State art student Eric Frazier and volunteer Jean Zimmerman (the latter two also worked on the Wallpaper Mural). The students are getting college credit—and being paid as well.

While Joliet's public art program doesn't follow CPAG's intensively collaborative community-design model, the viaduct murals haven't been foisted on their respective neighborhoods: Each mural proposal has been accompanied by a public meeting, where photographs, preliminary sketches, and ideas are brought to the table. "We have as much community involvement in content as we can drag to the meetings," says Farrell. "We actively seek input from historians in the community, and actively seek the opinions of various cultural groups in Joliet. We make sure all voices are heard." After the scale model is presented to the city council and the community, it's voted on by the Public Service Committee before going to the full council again.

The viaduct murals evince little of Farrell's activist visual rhetoric; since the program was funded under the rubric of

"downtown improvement," or city beautification, it has precluded the exploration of progressive or controversial themes. However, the Wallpaper Mural, which depicts paperworker-artisans designing and producing the home accessory in a factory tableau akin to Diego Rivera's Detroit murals, is as fine a contemporary tribute to historic working-class culture as one is likely to see in the industrialized heartland without a didactic adherence to heroic proletarianism. The Bluff Street murals also show scenes of early citizens—blacksmiths, retailers, actors, journalists—working at their trades.

Farrell says the city wanted the viaduct murals "to look like greeting cards, lovely and representational and conservative," but the team has been able to proceed from the purely decorative to the stylistically risky without negative comment. "I think we've gotten Joliet used to full vivid color and a certain level of imaginary imagery, like clouds going through buildings and rivers going through the tops of bluffs," she says. But, despite a "99 percent positive response," Farrell says that some people have objected to murals with a minority representation they felt was out of whack with the city's racial composition—for example, why are there so many blacks in the 19th century Steam Train Mural?

While the Viaduct Mural Program has technically concluded, Farrell says that Joliet city manager John Mezera has pledged continued financial support for public art. Future mural projects will probably be funded via a street improvement/infrastructure budget, in which money is allocated equally to each of the city districts; councilmembers will then decide how to spend the money on art in their districts.

Time will tell if the newly risen casinocoffered City of Steel & Stone can become a City of Murals, but there's no doubt that Joliet has hit the jackpot by having a dedicated team painting walls that both embellish and educate.

"Obviously, I want people to learn about their history," says Farrell. "But my intent is also to make Joliet a visually exciting place to live—to make an art that represents the people here, and expresses the visual culture of the community. We want to develop a vital community of artists to serve the city of Joliet, and be supported by the community. Joliet has a strong tradition of music and musicians, and I'd like to show people that visual art can be just as vital and healthy a part of their town—and a part of their lives."

Top: Javier Chavira working on Katherine Mural,1996.

Dunham

Bottom: Kathleen Farrell, Kathleen Scarboro and crew, Wallpaper Mural, Cass Street, 1996. (photos: K. Farrell)

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

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 37

BOOK REVIEWS

Sculpting With The Environment— A Natural Dialogue

by Baile Oakes New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995.

250 pages.

Reviewed

by Deborah

Karasov

What is the role of small, often very abstract, environmental art works in z resolving our ecot— logical crisis? HuQ. _J manist Yi-Fu Tuan writes that works of <_> t art are a force only CO when "their meanings are simplified beyond recognition and lifted out of context." From a different angle, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead comments that it is in art that "the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression."

According to the 35 primarily American artists in Sculpting With the Environment, environmental art becomes a force by helping us to understand our place in the environment. Each believes that reconnecting art with life and with the natural environment is a matter of absolute priority. Writing in the opening essay, author Suzi Gablik notes that these artists are committed to "despair work"— that is, to lifting the denial and repression about what is happening to our world. She continues, "Our potential as artists for social, environmental, and political action needs to be released from the feelings of inadequacy, cynicism, and despair which are blocking it, and from an aesthetic ideology that has crippled art by restricting the scope of its vision."

Lavishly illustrated, Sculpting with the Environment is one of the more up-todate and comprehensive books on environmental art. While some of the projects began over a decade ago, including Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt (1976), Fair Park Lagoon by Patricia Johanson (1981), and Circles of Lift (1985) by Alan Sonfist, most are recent ones, from 1991-1993.

Certainly it is a useful reference, even if there is no effort to evaluate the art projects. In their own words, the artists describe the intentions and mechanics of their particular projects, offering insights that range from thoughtful ideas on how a work is experienced to overused references to cosmic mysteries.

Most of the artists are familiar names, including Mel Chin, James Turrell, Douglas Hollis, and Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison. If some are less familiar,

E1N V I R O N M E N T » Jw % o

it is because their work is what some might call performance art, such as the "prayers" and "rituals" performed by Dominique Mazeaud, Donna Henes, and the team of Fern Shaffer and Othello Anderson; this is a genre not often included in environmental art books. In the most trite of these performance pieces, it seems that it is the artists themselves that they are calling attention to, rather than the environment. For other "events," some might be prompted to ask the typical questions associated with performance art: Are actions like picking up garbage and planting trees art? Does it matter?

Does it matter also that this book is philosophically naive, beginning with a title that makes no sense for the majority of artists included? Essays on scientific paradigm shifts and primitive belief systems give us little but generalized perspectives on the work. The selection of works seem to weigh heavily toward those that celebrate natural beauty. Are these on par with ones that "solve problems"? Indeed, for all the works in the book one might ask: Does the artistry of the concept matter more than its effectiveness relative to environmental action or awareness? Do we need to evaluate these works at all, or should we simply be happy that they are occurring?

Deborah Karasov, of St. Paul, is a geographer and landscape planner.

Sign Language: Street Signs As Folk Art

by John Baeder New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1996.

144 pages, 200 photographs. $19.95.

Reviewed

by Moira

F.

Harris

Sign Language is John Baeder's third foray into the world of roadside Americana. In Diners (1977, revised edition, 1995) and Gas, Food, and Lodging (1982) he used his talents as a painter and photographer to document architecture. This latest volume is based on his photographic collection of signs.

Baeder has photographed and collected signs since the 1950s. In an autobiographical introduction he describes his development as a collector of streetcar tickets, toy cars, airplane photographs, and finally, signs. Most of his signs were found or photographed in the South (the author lives in Nashville, TN), but there are examples from elsewhere.

38 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

What interests Baeder most in these handpainted signs is the graphics: lettering styles, spacing, and occasional misspellings. Locations and dates when the signs were photographed are not always given in the captions and only one sign painter is identified. Baeder describes the signs musically—a good sign whose lettering seems improvised is a "Charlie Parker"—but does not compare them to any other forms of painting or folk art in the region.

The subtitle, Street Signs as Folk Art, is a concept that the author suggests indicates the anonymous artists' lack of formal training as sign painters, but Baeder does not include a bibliography, so it's difficult to judge whether he is aware of the current scholarship in fields that relate to his signs.

The work of visionary artists and folk art environment builders (who usually paint many didactic signs) has been widely disseminated through books, exhibits, and the recently opened American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

The calligraphy found in paintings by Rev. Howard Finster and Sister Gertrude Morgan is stylistically very similar to that of the church signs Baeder photographed; ministers who founded evangelical churches often painted their own signs and "other roadside messages of salvation."1 Thus it would probably be more accurate to describe at least some of the sign painters as idiosyncratic visionaries rather than folk artists, and it might not prove too difficult to identify them.

Baeder divides his photographs into categories such as "The Ubiquitous 'No Parking' Sign," and "Vehicles as Signs."

In the latter chapter, anyone familiar with lead sleds, low riders, and artists' cars would be surprised to read that "painted cars are so unusual that they get a lot of attention." Having explored the world of chivas in Colombia, tap-taps in Haiti, and buses in Panama, I would suggest that the painted vehicle is a very common and delightful form of popular art throughout the world. Owners frequently paint their own vehicles, but there are professional car artists as well.

Another form of sign which Baeder doesn't understand and thoroughly dislikes is graffiti. In Diners he describes graffiti as "visual violence"; in Sign Language he devotes an eight-page section with 12 photographs to graffiti-written walls and cars. For Baeder, all graffiti is "inherently destructive. No doubt social ills prompt these expressions, but the lawlessness and desecration of public and private property cannot be tolerated." Yet the '60s examples he presents, written in crayon, paint, and soap, are bland pre-spray-can writings with none of the vibrant colors, exaggerated letters, or cartoon figures used today. (continued

on page

40)

VIDEO REVIEWS

Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision Los Angeles: Ocean Releasing, 1994.

American Film Foundation 96 minutes, $295 "TWO THUMBS URI" - J "M®yo Un't itofy li lh« stuff tl

Reviewed

by

Pa ula

Jus tic h

Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision sketches a portrait of the thoughtful architect and sculptor, who received national attention at the tender age of 20 with her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This documentary, which won an Academy Award in 1995, attempts to detail just what Lin's vision is, and how she has used her early fame to expand her artistic perimeters.

The brouhaha that erupted over the design that Lin submitted to the national competition for the memorial, and the compromises that had to be brokered in order to ensure the design's execution, are a fascinating tale. Director Freida Lee Mock uses the first 30 minutes of the film to remind us of the nasty fight that developed, employing historical footage and present-day interviews with Lin and several members of the committee that commissioned her design.

Opponents were not above using racial slurs and political lobbying to denigrate Lin and her simple linear design, which was revolutionary at a time when war memorials usually had representational elements. Her concept of a simple chronological listing of the dead on black marble cutting into the earth struck some as insulting, as if the simplicity downplayed the gravity of what was being commemorated. Others recognized that the simplicity highlighted the importance of the dead to the exclusion of anything else.

There are intriguing glimpses of what the battle inflicted upon Lin. From a rather girlish, smiling figure at the initial press conference announcing her selection, she becomes a grim-faced, determined advocate before a congressional committee.

There are also scenes of vindication for Lin at the end of the film, when she returns to

the memorial for its 10-year rededication.

By then, the memorial has become ingrained in our collective psyche, and the idea of removing it would be unthinkable.

The veterans' emotional response to the memorial and to Lin is overwhelming.

Which points to the strange bifurcation that the documentary as a whole suffers from; it's almost as if we are watching two different films. In the middle portion of the film we follow Lin from project to project, hearing a little about each artistic choice made and witnessing lengthy footage of the dedications. Unfortunately, the film takes on the aspects of a travelogue—"I went here and did this." Almost an hour into the film we receive some information about Lin's background and a glimpse into the forces that shaped her as an artist, but we are mainly limited to Lin's own perspective. Singularly missing is the diversity of opinion that surrounds the segments dealing with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Mock cuts from each project dedication or installation to shots of Lin working at a drafting table, showing the artist at work.

Film has rarely been successful in showing the creative process; interior thinking doesn't translate into the dynamic media of film. Narrative filmmakers have wrestled with this dilemma for years, continuing to see the artist as a natural leading character. From Kirk Douglas gutturally bellowing Van Gogh's artistic frustration accompanied by a stereophonic musical score in Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life, to surreal scenes of anti-Semitism serving as the backdrop for Gustav Mahler's symphonic composing in Ken Russell's Mahler, filmmakers have resorted to giving blatant signals to the audience—look now, the artist is creating.

Which makes the level of emotional engagement Mock achieves in the segments detailing the memorial all the more intriguing. We get a sense of the motivation and process that spawned the design. This makes Lin a compelling subject, although she remains an enigma. With the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as well as later with the Civil Rights Memorial, Lin touched a nerve and evoked an emotional outpouring. Her resulting body of work has been impressive, but it is the drama of the creation of her first work that stays with the viewer of this film, and offers an interesting tale about making art public in America.

An Academy Award usually guarantees an afterlife for a documentary, theatrical or televised showings being otherwise limited. Maya Lin: A Clear Strong Vision will be shown on public television on November 27.

Paula Justich is the m a n a g i n g director of F O R E C A S T Public Artworks. In a previous life she w a s in the film business in Chicago.

Graffiti Verite:

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f O j

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'An Amazing Documentary thai explore* the eclectic world of Hip Hop and the Urban Graffiti Artist."

Reviewed

Read The Writing on the Wall Los Angeles: Bryan World Productions, 1995.

45 minutes, $21

by Bienvenida

Matias

The documentary Graffiti Verite (Read the Writing on the Wall) began by chance when producer/director Bob Bryan, who knew very little about graffiti, stopped his car to observe a group of guys spray painting inside a soon-to-be art gallery in Hollywood, CA. One of the artists, Toonz, invited Bryan into the gallery and into the wonderful world of Los Angeles graffiti art. Many times only the negative aspects of graffiti and the artists who produce it are told. Bryan was lucky to gain the trust of a group of writers who willingly shared their stories, and so are the viewers of this powerful, non-stop look at the aesthetics, politics, and history of graf art as told by 24 practicing artists.

The range of Los Angeles artists and styles included in the video is mind-boggling for the uninitiated viewer who might consider all graffiti alike. The artists make a compelling distinction between tagbangers, who simply spray their names, and the serious writers who work the graffiti on different surfaces, with different collaborators: Tattoos on human bodies, canvases in art galleries, and theatrical backdrops (one for a Peter Sellars opera) are some of the more conventional outlets.

Make no mistake: These guys are professionals with impressive track records. To hear them talk about spray-can control, fill-in styles, cuts, and patterns is to witness the creativity of the art.

One of the video's recurring themes is the tight connection between the artists, crew members, and mentors, who support and inspire each other's exploration of the art form. Artist Cre8 talks about the mentor who introduced him to different yards, different styles, and to the possibility that he could make money with his art. The documentary also highlights graffiti's long history in Los Angeles, from the Mexican community's cholos of the 1930s and 1940s who delineated their gang's territories with

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 39

their paint brushes, to today's Friday-afternoon writers' bench meetings of the West Coast Artists, which attract young people interested in seeing and being seen with their heroes.

Bryan captures the tense energy of the writers by not allowing the viewer space to reflect on and time to absorb all the information he packs into this video. I first viewed the video on my small funky TV set—bad move. The second viewing was on a state-of-the-art video system, and this documentary needs a large screen to bring out the details of the art. It is very much about being out on the street getting bombarded by sounds, shapes, colors. As Toonz comments, if you want to know what is happening in a city, you need to read the writing on the wall.

My view on graffiti has changed over the years. When I was a New Yorker I hated the graffiti which defaced subway cars and the housing project elevators, adding to the confusion of an already chaotic city. Now my office is at the Intermedia Arts building in Minneapolis, which is covered inside and out with graffiti. Intermedia works with the artists by providing them with the wall space to use as their canvases. This involvement is controversial. Some community politicians and residents believe that Intermedia's graffiti adds to the neighborhood's blight and encourages gangs. The art is not appreciated and the issues up on the walls—homelessness and racism, to name two—are not discussed because people can't get past the confrontational, in-yourface production tactics needed get the work in front of the public.

Bryan lets the art and the artists speak for themselves. In an age of jazzy video effects and pulsating hip-hop music, Bryan brings to the viewer a clean, straightforward documentary.

Graffiti Verite is a very strong graf art primer which should be required viewing for young and old.

Bienvenida Matfas is a documentary film and video producer and the executive director of the Center for Arts Criticism in Minneapolis.

Joyce Kozloff: Public Art Works Video produced by Hermine Freed New York: Hermine Freed Video Productions, 1996. 42 minutes.

Reviewed

by

Joyce

Lyon

My response to Hermine Freed's video, Joyce Kozloff: Public Art Works, was an immediate desire to drive to Mankato,

Produced by Hermine Freed

MN, to experience directly Around the World on the 44th Parallel, the tile mural Kozloff created for the library of Mankato State University under the auspices of Minnesota Percent for the Arts.

In the video, Kozloff's discussion of the creative and technical process involved in this work—12 sections, each interpreting with her characteristic play of pattern and color the map of a city located on the 44th parallel—provides an introduction to her public art involvement. The discussion is enriched with views of earlier work, cuts from past interviews and brief supporting comments from critic Elizabeth Hess and fellow pattern artist Robert Kushner. That I was curious to compare an experience in real space and time with the one provided by the video says something about my views on the limitations of video, but it also indicates this video's ability to pique visual and intellectual curiosity.

Joyce Kozloff came to focus on the decorative by a somewhat familiar path. After a formalist education in the 1960s, she became deeply involved in the women's movement. On a trip to Mexico after the birth of her son, she was excited by the rich heritage of pattern she saw and also became aware of the Western taboo against the decorative. She realized that "the decorative arts are the carrier of popular culture," and began to develop a personal aesthetic and the creative process that seems to sustain her still. It is an aesthetic initiated by personal curiosity, followed by visual research, and leading to traditional and innovative work in tile and mosaic.

The first time I saw the video, I thought I heard Kozloff use the word "deconstruction" to describe her translation of 16th century French garden plans into decorations for the Home Savings of America Tower in Los Angeles. The second time I heard—correctly—"reconstruction." Her approach is more an embrace of elements that intrigue her personally than a cultural interrogation.

Spurred by the video, I visited two of

40 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

Joyce Kozloff's works. Galla Placidia in Philadelphia and Topkapi Pullman, at Penn Center in Philadelphia, present a sensuously rich, somewhat tongue-incheek homage to Placidia, the 5th century patroness of the Ravenna mosaics.

In Mankato I found an interesting demonstration of the differences between experience and documentation. From the video I could not clearly understand the physical installation. The murals form three rectangles placed midway up a twostory atrium, which means that they can be viewed from below and above. From below, the distance and required tilt of neck are distracting, but from above the juxtapositions of color, line, and motif are rich and interactive. What the video provides (in far livelier form than the wall didactics) are Kozloff's engaged commentary, and closeups that only a winged creature could enjoy on site.

The low-tech production of the video has pluses and minuses. I always value situations that allow me to observe an artist with as little mediation as possible.

Kozloff talks directly to the camera, thus to us. Excerpts from earlier interviews allow us to see how she and her ideas have matured. The downside is that the editing is sometimes disruptively choppy and her work is visually more luscious than video can convey. Joyce Kozloff: Public Art Works allows the artist to establish her work in a personal and layered context and offers a tantalizing preparation for an encounter with the real thing.

Joyce Lyon is a visual artist and teaches at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Sign Language Continued from page

38

There are better examples of graffiti to be found.

Baeder mentions his admiration for Lee Boltin's Jail Keys Made Here and Other Signs (1959), an earlier exploration of signs in black-and-white photographs.

Boltin's were basically commercially made productions, but his examples, without captions, were full of wit. Baeder's photographs are fine and well reproduced, yet his captions and text leave much to be desired. In essence, Sign Language fails to communicate the significance and messages of these signs.

Moira F. Harris is an art historian in St. Paul w h o served as guest editor for PAR #12.

Notes: I. Passionate Visions of the American South; SelfTaught Artists From 1940 to the Present. Alice Rae Yelen, editor, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

COMMENTARY

The Kudzu Effect (or: The Rise of a New Academy) By

J o y c e

K o z l o f f

T H E T E N M O S T POPULAR PUBLIC A R T P R O J E C T S IN THE ' 9 0 S :

1. It's a Small World A mural depicting a rainbow coalition of larger-than-life smiling faces dominates the space. Below it are texts, in which ordinary people, as well as community leaders, tell their stories in different languages and handwritings; these same stories reverberate throughout the edifice in the sounds of recorded voices. Many of storytellers have overcome adversity (abuse, homelessness, AIDS). Objects of personal meaning to each of them are encased in apertures in the adjacent walls.

2. Junior High School Science Project The site rests over a gravel pit. The artist has researched the origins of gravel.

There is a large mound of it in the space, as well as didactic signage explaining gravel's historic and cultural sigP nificance. The graphics mimic functional signs already located throughout the building.

3. Junior High School Geography Project There is a terrazzo map on the floor, depicting the place where we stand. An arrow points to our exact intersection, because one cannot assume that people know how they got there. There is a clock indicating what time it is, followed by a series of clocks showing what time it is everywhere in the world. Additionally, trompe I'oeil murals represent this street as it once appeared before all the landmark buildings were destroyed.

6. Heal the Earth Project The artist is reclaiming a neglected urban site, recycling sewage, planting an indigenous forest, recreating a lost wetland, protecting endangered species, irrigating local gardens, purifying the air, feeding the community, and saving the whales.

7. The Artist/Writer Collaboration Inspirational poetry is woven into the sidewalk, fences, doorways, telephone poles, lamp posts, and window boxes of a grim municipal building. Its inner sanctums are graced by oversized antique photographs evoking memories that will encourage civic pride and a timeline of the community's history instructs visitors about their past.

8. The New Age Observatory (also known as Son et Lumiere) This is a structure that mirrors and reflects the cosmos. The curved benches built into its wall serve as a mini-

obelisks will appear in government headquarters, the veterans' burial ground, various corporate lobbies, and a shopping mall.

The artist will not determine these pieces' final design specifics until a program of public seminars is conducted on the subject. â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘

How is it that projects like these have emerged, like kudzu, across the country, executed seemingly independently, by an array of different artists? Is it only because certain ideas are in the air at a given moment? Are there a finite number of logical solutions to the problems proposed by public art? Is it impossible to get a quirky or independent thought through a committee? Or perhaps that in a decentralized discipline with few organs of communication, artists newly entering the field are susceptible to suggestions from veteran art administrators, who attend conferences and know what works?

All of us are painfully .C. PROJECTS PLOP PROJECTS aware that visual arts organizations are besieged, nationally and locally, by right-wing fundamentalists looking for an excuse to defund them. In these times, we want to be supportive and positive, but we must also remain self-critical. Who among us has not created, or at least proposed, a variant on one or more these 10 projects? For an older artist, it is at best a dubious distinction to have amphitheater so shamans and goddess become a pioneer of cliches. Certainly we worshippers can gather for the solstice. can all recall and imagine wonderful works Outside is a magical array of topiary tarot espousing any of the sentiments I have card figures perched above a field of tin- been satirizing, but good ideas and inten4. The Artist/Architect Collaboration (also kling and gyrating whirligigs, created by tions are not art, and even the best ideas regional outsider artists. known as The Two fer) seem dumb when presented as literal, The artist has designed light fixtures, 9. Transgressions and lnter\>entions untransformed data. gates, furniture, paving, etc., using all the Large cryptic words or phrases on bus Are we trying so hard not to offend or same industrial materials and color palette shelters, billboards, electronic sign sys- provoke that our only goal has become eduinsisted upon by the architects. Some ele- tems, etc., exhort and mystify their audi- cation? Is this why so many pieces seem to ments are made of clear, transparent plas- ence. Some of these words take the form of be pandering and talking down? Maybe our tics, so as not to intrude on anyone's three-dimensional objects doubling as communities expect more and deserve betdesign sensibilities or run the risk of being uncomfortable seating and can best be read ter, and possibly art doesn't always have to labeled signature-style art. in aerial photographs taken to document feel so good, anyway. If we respect and trust the artwork.

5. Kids "R" Us ourselves as artists, we will be more able to The artist has gone into the local 10. Triumphal Arch to Nowhere and make challenging, complex, mid moving schools and invited hundreds of chil- Domestic Obelisk works: There is a difference between public dren of maximum ethnic diversity to The artist wishes to revive and honor tra- relations and public art. draw a picture of their neighborhood or ditional forms, but without their unnecesfamily. These drawings are then fabri- sary architectural function and unpleasant These thoughts evolved, in part, out of conversations cated on ceramic tile or baked enamel, imperial content. Stage I, Gates, will with the following friends: Mary Miss, Tamara depending on the budget, and installed include a modest brick arch at the threshold Thomas. Nina Yankowitz, Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz, in a subway station with the kids' of a parking lot, a more substantial concrete Erika Rothenberg. Alexis Smith, and Jody Pinto. names prominently displayed nearby. A one over the neighborhood playground, and press conference is called, and all the a giant steel structure across the interstate J o y c e Kozloff is a public a n d private artist livchildren are invited. highway. During Stage II, Markers, ing in N e w York.

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 41

PUBLIC ARTICLES

OFF TO SEE THE WIZABDS: A Quick Conference Tour (or We're Not in Kansas Anymore) By

J a c k

B e c k e r

A whirlwind of con ferences punctuated the country this summer. Among them were ISC in Providence, RI, and NALAA in St. Louis (both the first week of June), then "Veiled Histories" in San Francisco, "Building on Common Ground" in Des Moines, and "Conversations at the Castle" in Atlanta (all in August). As if those weren 't enough, Chicago just hosted "The Arts and Humanities as Agents for Social Change," and Lisbon featured "Junction 96: Art and Public Transport." SOS! (Save Outdoor Sculpture!) is preparing a special town meeting in Washington, DC, entitled "Playing for Keeps: A Game Plan to Save Outdoor Sculpture."

I chased down four of these twisters, like a lunatic meteorologist in this summer's movie blockbuster. As with real tornados, there's an unusual calm at the center of these gatherings, surrounded by a flurry of chaos, confusion, conflicts, and technical difficulties. And like the Emerald City, the chaos is well hidden. This summer, a couple of shadowy public art wizards emerged into the light. Here's my quick take on some of the highlights—and lowlights—of the summer: There was mixed reaction to Anna Novakov's emergence from behind the wizard's curtain at "Veiled Histories" [see Sally Woodbridge's review, p. 261.

The conference offered an impressive line-up of artists, yet one speaker referred to N o v a k o v ' s gathering as "Veiled Agendas," with perhaps 20 hours of group time spread over six days. (She structured the conference so keynote speakers could spend afternoons critiquing students at the San Francisco Art Institute, to which the conference participants were not invited.)

Novakov explained to everyone—on day four—that in fact we were all participants in her "brand of public art."

Filling in for artist Agnes Denes, who canceled at the last minute because of a broken foot, Novakov took the opportunity to explain her reason for planning the conference and her related book project. It turns out the whole thing started with a photograph she came upon in The New York Times over a year ago. After sharing a slide of this otherwise mun-

dane street scene for some time, be made to serve 31 people. Of course no Novakov asked for questions. There was one noticed; they were too busy talking. dead silence. Yet despite this rather dis- The conversation, like the dinner, sufconcerting revelation that we were mere- fered from overpopulation; if we'd dividly unwitting participants in Novakov's ed into smaller, in-depth groups, the con"master plan," the next day I heard one versation might have been more rewardof the best panel discussions of the ing. whole summer: Jim Clark "moderating" It appears that Novakov and Jacob Suzanne Lacy, Dennis Adams, Krzystof weathered their "twisters" with hair in Wodickzo, and Victoria Vesna, all com- place. Both courageously explored relapelling, thoughtful and passionate. tively uncharted waters, and both gave us In Atlanta, the menu and the guest list a chance to confront this increasingly diverse and complex changed nightly, with realm of public art. daytime left comAs rich as the displetely unstructured cussion was, 1 ex[see Felicia Feaster's pect they'll both review, p. 32], The produce intriguing wizard in this case and thought-provokwas curator and critic ing publications.

Mary Jane Jacob "Building on Comwho, with critic/curamon Ground," the tor Michael Brenson, second such statecooked up food for wide gathering of thought, called "ConIowa artists, took versations at the place in late August, Castle." It was an under "Tractor" John unusual blend of Herbert's leadership, caloric ingredients. with support from I ' m pretty sure Rick Lowe addressing artists in Des Bruce Williams and most of us were clueMoines, Aug. 25,1996. the Iowa Arts Counless coming in. (photo: PAR) cil. Other than missReceiving my invitaing Mary Miss, who tion only three weeks couldn't make it, beforehand, I had went smoothly [see Eliot few expectations but, knowing Jacob's things past work (Culture In Action, Places Nusbaum's coverage of Miss, page 18].

Rick Lowe's noteworthy presentation With a Past, etc.), I willingly threw myself headlong—briefly—into her lat- about Project Row House in Houston referenced senior African-American muralist est production.

During my first road-weary evening, John Biggers as an influence—a teacher of two dozen folks settled in an ad hoc meet- Lowe's whose own early paintings depicting room after a delicious meal on the ter- ed row houses similar to the actual ones rescued from destruction. race. We talked about the dust settling Lowe Diversions in Des Moines included a couaround Atlanta after the Olympics. With so much public art injected into the com- ple of impromptu street astronomers offermunity—most of it at the last minute—a ing passersby a glimpse at Jupiter or Saturn number of questions emerged: What will through their home-made telescopes. You the city do with its newfound, mostly can't get this kind of raw urban performediocre collection? Who'll maintain the mance art in the big cities.

Armajani cauldron (apparently it's up for As it turns out, I get to spin the next grabs)? What's next for Atlanta? "There's no follow-through whatsoever," said artist twister, at the urging of my NALAA colKristen Jones, referring to the Olympic leagues. You're all invited to Minneapolis Committee that commissioned her and a next June 5-7 when Public Art Review, Public number of other artists to create tempo- and our parent entity FORECAST rary installations. "There's no office, no Artworks, present yet another occasion to phone, no fax, nothing. They just packed confer with fellow wizards. Our fun-filled exchange among professionals in the field up and moved out."

My second night was the eighth and is in the works. I'm thinking maybe we final dinner/dialogue event for "Conver- should skip the serious stuff altogether, sations," appropriately named CHOW. and focus on fun and games. How about The series was created by Artway of pot luck? I'm sure everyone has a speThinking, a contemporary collaborative cialty they could bring. from Italy, and chef Massimo Frigatti.

According to Artways artist Frederica [See Becker's review of NALAA 96, p. 34.]

Theine, the original plan called for 12 guests, yet somehow things got out of Jack Becker is m a n a g i n g editor of Public Art control. Last-minute adjustments had to Review.

42 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

LISTINGS Rpf p l l t P n n i P r t S r i

Public Art Fund's fall season is hectic, to say the least. New installations by Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Otterness, and Vito Acconci top the list of impressive projects. Lichtenstein's 31 -foot-talI Modern Head, painted cobalt blue, opened in Battery Park City in April, where it will remain for a year.

Otterness' Life Underground, organized with cooperation from New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation, includes more than 30 bronze figures on the Doris C. Freedman Plaza (Fifth Avenue and 60th Street).

Acconci's Addition to MetroTech Gardens is an interactive labyrinth started last June, and by now is mostly covered with vines and ivy. [Otterness photo: Andrew Moore; Lichtenstein photo: courtesy Public Art Fund] Sculpture Chicago has also been busy with its "Re-inventing the Garden City" program, featuring work by Miroslaw Rogala, Ellen Rothenberg, Pepon Osorio, and Dennis Adams. Site-specific projects were developed in tandem with Chicago park communities, concluding in September 1996. Osorio's installation at the Humboldt Park Fieldhouse honored six local heroes from the neighborhood.

El Gran Salon de la Fama—a Latino-style hall of fame—featured an assortment of objects and memorabilia in combination with large-scale photographs. In the foreground is Evaristo "Tito" Rodriguez, a musician and folklorist, who was selected for his commitment to Puerto Rican culture. [photo: James Prinz Photography]

' ' o r s e v e n n e w Public Art Fundcommissioned works on the Commons at MetroTech Center in Brooklyn, including works by Jackie Chang, Ken Landauer, Walter Martin & Paloma Mummi, and John Monti. In mid-November, the young Russian artist Alexander Brodsky will transform the Canal Street Station into a Venetian canal. Brodsky hopes passersby will mistake the sound and light projection using cutout gondolas placed in shallow pools of water as the real thing (scheduled as part of PAF's "In The Public Realm" program). PAF will also soon publish a special Guide to Battery Park City's Permanent Public Art Collection. For information, contact Public Art Fund, 1 E. 53rd St., 11th Floor, NY 10022; (212) 980-4575.

The sculpture is based on the celebratory sardana dance popular in Catalonia and Andorra, which, as Alvarez describes it, "starts with one person and entices everyone in its path to join hands with their neighbors as the dance flows through the streets." [photo: Neil Dent)

Last summer in Atlanta, two renowned topiary artists, Jim and Elaine Mason, of Columbus, OH, cultivated 10 herbaceous Olympians in front of Hotel Nikko Atlanta.

(The Masons first attracted national attention in Columbus, when they installed their version of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the lie de la Grand Jatte —A Landscape of a Painting.) For Atlantans and visitors, Arcadian Odyssey offered thousands of Kodak moments, so it's not surprising Kodak commissioned the work, honoring its 100th anniversary with the Olympics. A 12-foot version of the mythological fleet-footed Atalanta is featured, for obvious reasons, [photo: Bill Cranford]

New York-based artist Ned Smyth has completed over 20 public art commissions nationwide since 1978. His latest work was installed in March, in Long Beach, CA. The Dream of Simultaneous Connections consists of a series of architectural facades, an entry rotunda, colonnades, and landscape features. Finish materials for the pieces include stucco, concrete, marble, glass, and gold leaf mosaics in a variety of shapes and colors. Located at HarborPlace Tower on Ocean Boulevard, the project was managed by the Public Corporation for the Arts (PCA), serving developer KOAR Group, using guidelines adopted by the Long Beach Redevelopment Authority. [photo: William Nettles, courtesy of PCA]

Loo <

In another gesture of Olympic good will, Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, presented a site-specific sculpture as a gift from the Fundacio Universal de la Sardana and the people of Barcelona, Spain, to the people of Fulton County as a cultural legacy from one host of the Olympic Games to another. The Sardana, Dance of Peace, by Barcelona artist Manuel Alvarez, was made of Georgia marble and dedicated at the Fulton County Judicial Center July 14.

Site Omaha is artist Cindi Harper's latest endeavor, pulling together 43 Omaha-based artists portraying places of significance around town. Sponsored by the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Site Omaha offered intimate expressions—an edition of postcard-size color copies—folded inside plastic capsules.

The capsules were distributed through vending machines along side bubble gum machines, at 25 sites in Omaha. The machines run out of art this October-Arts and Humanities M o n t h - h a v ing successfully demonstrated the project's creative partnership with the likes of Variety Vending Com-pany and Godfather's Pizza. At 50 cents a pop, public art takes on a whole new flavor, [photo: Cindi Harper]

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 43

schoolchildren, an athlete, a musician, and a workman. Using porcelain enamel and stucco on concrete, Graupe-Pillard's 16foot-high work was intended as "community voices made visible," conveying positive images of ordinary people. Iphoto: Grace Graupe-Pillard] In May, sculptor Patrick Dougherty completed Running in Circles at Melen, near Bagenkop, Denmark. The 100-foot-long, 22foot-high willow installation will join the collection of Tickon Sculpture Park.

Dougherty was commissioned by Trilogi, a cultural event organized in conjunction with the festival "Copenhagen: City of Culture 1996." His on-site sculptures have been seen in cities around the world during the last few years, including in Mexico City; Misima, Japan; New York City; and Sheboygan, WI. [photo: Marianne S. Christensen]

Dyke Action Machine! is back, with D.A.M. S.C.U. M., a low-tech, incendiary device sure to offend just about everyone.

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Among the latest works commissioned by the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles is the Garden of Conversion, at Hope Street Terminus, by artist Blue McRight and architect Warren Wagner. Funded by LACRA's Downtown Cultural Trust Fund, the artwork transformed an unsightly area beneath a freeway. The solar-powered lantern, evocative of a seedling growing toward the light, casts webbed light patterns on the freeway's underside. The team incorporated recycled materials from the site and used drought-tolerant plants. 'This project," says Lesley Elwood of the Arts Program, "exemplifies the creative solutions artists can develop to fight urban blight." [time-lapsed photo: David Laurence] For the first time since World War II, the City of Orange, NJ, has a new monument.

This one, by artist Grace Graupe-Pillard, is entitled Celebrating Orange. Mayor Robert Brown calls it "a tremendous work of art that will serve as the focal point for this urban community. The importance of this monument cannot be overestimated.

This project will forever change the face of the City of Orange." Depicted are a family,

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listen to the S.C.U.M. Manifesto and female callers, a description of DAMl's self defense products "for the separatiston-the-go." DAM! evolved f r o m the activist organization Queer Nation, founded by Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner.

For six years they've been spoofing mainstream advertising by inserting lesbian images into a recognizably commercial context. DAMl's public art projects have been included in exhibitions all over the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands, and have been most recently seen in "Counterculture: Alternative Information from the Underground Press to the Internet," mounted this spring by Exit Art. [sample card: courtesy DAM!]

The Lincoln High School in Portland, OR, received its first permanent artwork as part of Tri-Met's Westside MAX Public Art Program. The transit agency has almost 100 projects to its credit, and its rail line includes $l million of art. Artist Carolyn King was selected to head a collaborative effort with students to design and fabricate elements of a new fence around the playing field. Imagery shows the 126-year history of Lincoln, the oldest

public high school west of the Mississippi. Pictured is a detail of the cast concrete bas relief work, which received a 1995 "Excellence in Concrete" award from the Oregon Concrete Institute, [photo: courtesy Westside MAX] A new mural appeared recently at San Francisco's South Market Health Center, appropriately titled Health.

Dedicated in July, at the corner of Russ and Minna streets, the lifesize ceramic tile mural was created by the Inner City Public Art Projects for Youth, through weekly workshops sponsored

by ARTSPAN and the South of Market Cultural Center. Pictured is Healthy Humor, one of 11 figures representing aspects of good health, including Sleeping Child, Meditation Being, and Germs Body.

ARTSPAN program manager worked with a team of artists including artist/director Johanna Poethig [see p. 29], painter/ dancer Sofie Siegmann, ceramicist Erika Clark Shaw, and writer Hoa Nguyen, [photo: courtesy ARTSPAN] Paul Housberg's masterful use of light in huge glass murals reappears in his season-themed commission for Pfizer Central Research, Groton, CT, which uses pixilated images to "make a forest clearing of glass." He recently commemorated the death of his bush pilot brother in an 8-foot-by-20-foot mural at Alpenglow Elementary School, Eagle River, AK. Supported by the state's percent program, Dream of the Arctic Flier is dedicated to Daniel Housberg who was lost in a fatal plane crash. Dream changes color as the viewer's eyes travel across the mural, and as the seasons change, [photo: the artist] REPOhistory's contribution to last year's Arts Festival of Atlanta was a huge success. As one of its City Site Works, the collective's multi-site Entering Buttermilk Bottom featured New York City and Atlanta artists looking at the evolution, daily life, and dismantling of a oncevibrant black neighborhood, made all the more visible by the in-town-for-the-

Olympics audience. Drawing on oral histories and other research materials, 20 artists and teams installed temporary signs around the community.

Cynthia Anderson and George Spencer's Penny Candy (pictured) remembers Joe Louis Cookies, sold two-for-a-penny out of glass jars at corner stores. REPO's 199293 debut. The Lower Manhattan Sign Project, included 36 official-looking street signs affixed to existing street poles as "re-written" historical markers.

According to co-founder Greg Sholette, one of REPO's current ventures pairs them with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, commemorating issues of public-interest law in the Big Apple. For more details, write REPOhistory, 339 Lafayette St. #301, New York, NY 10012. [photo: George Spencer] Artist Terry Allen's Shaking Man welcomes visitors to Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco.

This life-size bronze statue of a business executive toting a briefcase conveys a sense of motion as its hand is extended as if for a handshake. Allen has worked since 1966 in a wide variety of media including musical and theatrical performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, and video. Commissioned by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, [photo: J. Becker] Cincinnati artist Jill Rowinski's recent installation aboard a city Metro bus, titled Home Sweet Home, provided seat covers, window treatments, and throw pillows, all sewn out of pink vinyl and trimmed with "miles" of box pleats. Throughout the installation, partially funded by the city, Rowinski rode the bus wearing a matching apron with "Home Sweet Home" stitched on the bib. According to her press release, she often wears her work in public. "This allows people, lots of people, to experience art and it puts art in an unexpected place.

where people live and work every day."

One rider mistook the project for a surprise birthday party for herself, one young man thought it was a baby shower en route.

Rowinski's favorite story is of a little girl who looked around, sat next to the artist and asked: "Will you come decorate my house? And I would like to help you." [photo: Matulionis Photography] Siah Armajani has completed one of the largest public art projects in New York, a 65foot-long bridge with a 65-foot-tall tower topped with a light-house motif, costing about $500,000. The site of the sculpture is on the new North Shore Esplanade extension of Staten Island, the first stage of a planned 6-mile-long esplanade that the city hopes will halt two decades of deterioration. The steel and wood structure is painted in grey, with accents of green and orange-yellow. "The warmth and friendliness of the bridge—I work very hard at that," says the artist.

Artist James Turrell's Celestial Vault, in the dunes at Kijkduin, the Netherlands, was completed under the auspices of stroom, a progressive public arts agency in The Hague. Several related installations occurred last month, including two of Turrell's artificial light installations, and a screening of Passage-ways, a 30-minute documentary by French filmmaker Carine Asscher, about Turrell's magnum opus—and his inspiration for the Kijkduin project— Roden Crater, in Arizona.

In Washington state an innovative inter-governmental It partnership has resulted in i LEAD (Limited Edition Artists' Designs), artworks specifically designed for the public schools at a lower acquisition cost, as an alternative percent-for-art acquisitions. The artworks are fabricated at Department of Corrections facilities by inmates and staff in limited editions of 12.

This past summer Waterworks Gardens was dedicated as part of the expansion of the East Division Reclamation Plant in Renton.

WA. Created by artist Lorna Jordan, working with Jones & Jones Architects and Landscape Architects, this large-scale earthwork/waterwork treats stormwater. " enhances on-site wetlands, provides garden spaces, and represents eight acres of open space for public use. The "Water Walk" winds through 11 terraced stormwater treatment ponds from which one can observe how the water is filtered.

An extraordinary place for learning and

recreation is now on the edge of the 95-acre wastewater reclamation plant.

According to a Sept. 8 New York Times article, Henrik Lehmann and Malene Botoft, a Danish couple, chose to live in a cage at the Copenhagen Zoo as part of an experiment to make visitors think about their ties to nature. Like the zoo's 250 other species, the human couple had a sign outside their cage describing Homo sapiens, their main characteristics, life expectancy, average number of young, and distribution on earth. Their 320-square-foot habitat had a furnished bedroom, kitchen, and living room, the latter equipped with a computer, TV, and stereo.

St. Peter's Riverside Sculpture Project, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, United Kingdom, is entering the final phase of its five-year artist-in-residence program. The aim of the project has been to produce works for the public access areas of Tyne and Wear Development Corporation's multi-million-dollar regeneration of Sunderland's riverside. Additionally, the artists' team of a sculptor, artist-blacksmith, and crime-writer has created opportunities for local groups to become involved and develop a sense of ownership for the site.

For example, schoolchildren helped to make a series of carved wooden fence panels, a group of local women worked with an artist to create banners and a painted and mosaic mural, and young, unemployed men worked with a sculptor on wooden scale models of seating and waste bins.

Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen attended the Sept. 6 dedication of their newest work. Torn Notebook. The 22foot sculpture is located between downtown Lincoln. NE, and the University of Nebraska. A companion exhibit at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery continues through Dec. I. Call (402) 472-2461 for more details.

Artist David Joyce, of Eugene, OR. completed Komachin '96, a photo-mural featuring over 15,000 portraits of school children, and installed at Komachin Middle School in Lacey, WA. The percent-for-art project utilized a digital point-and-shoot camera and three months of mosaic manipulation. merging the images into a 6-by-8foot group shot, easily read as a single image from a distance. The huge 140 Megabyte file was printed digitally by Nash Editions in Los Angeles.

Tape Art expert Michael Townsend [ see PAR #13], with assistance f r o m artist Melissa Brown, completed one of his flyby-night tape murals on two 60-foot-high water towers in Tempe, AZ. in conjunction with the Superbowl.

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 45

For the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh this year, curator Mary Jane Jacob [see p. 33] selected several artists to work in public. Among the impressive list of participants were choreographer Ann Carlson, curator Lonnie Graham, the expandable collaborative Group Material, community-based artist Michelle Illuminato, public art veteran Daniel J. Martinez, and conceptual installation artist Fred Wilson. Wilson's project, entitled An Invisible Life: A View into the World of a 120-year-old Man, focuses on the historical collective memory of marginalized racial, social, and political groups. The results were seen in a restored Victorian mansion on the North Side. He researched the artistically unique and socially turbulent 1930s, resulting in a faux restoration of the mansion, theatrically recreating the life of a 120-year-old photographer—Baldwin Antinious Stein, who supposedly lived there during the Depression. Stein's personal artifacts filled the house, and tours were offered throughout the festival.

curator Tom Finkelpeari to present " U n c o m m o n Sense" March I6-July 6, 1997. Using the Geffen Contemporary and off-site locations, the program includes newly commissioned works that reach out to new audiences within and outside the walls of the museum. For more information, contact MOCA at (213) 626-6222.

The California artist team Martinez Petropoulos White (as in Daniel J., Renee, and Roger F.) recently completed Your Move on the Municipal Services Building Plaza in Philadelphia, commissioned by the Philadelphia Percent for Art Program, Office of Arts and Culture. In addition to fabricating oversized game pieces—dominoes, parchese, chess, and bingo chips— the artists' proposal included a provision that $25,000 be set aside for the development of a series of public performances by local and touring performers and groups.

Inspired by Marcel Duchamp, whose works occupy a prominent spot at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Your Move is among the latest—and perhaps most playful—additions to Philadelphia's collection of some 500 pieces of public art.

Eleanor Roosevelt was honored in her hometown of New York City October 4, when Penelope Jencks' bronze sculpture of the longest-serving first lady was unveiled—the first memorial ever for a first lady. The statue's location, in Riverside Park (Riverside Drive and 72nd Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan) was frequented by Mrs. Roosevelt; she toured the area's Depression-era shantytowns with her son, the late Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOC A), Los Angeles, received some heat for its recent sponsorship of Friendly Fire by a San Diego-based collaborative of artists Deborah Small, Elizabeth Sisco, Scott Kessler, and Louis Hock with Cheryl Lindley. With the project scheduled in August as part of MOCA's "Focus Series," the artists took advantage of San Diego's hosting of the Republican National Convention (Aug. 12-15). They set up a faux sweatshop and retail store offering 14 different styles of bullet-proof vests. Aimed at revealing the spectacle of election-year politics, a special catalogue promoting the line, together with a faux bullet, were mailed to 3,800 delegates. Needless to say, the bullet mailing received a f e w sneers, and a few phone calls. M O C A curator Julie Lazar says equal attention was given to the Democrats but, of course, their convention was later. Lazar is teaming up with guest

Seeking to encourage the growth of flowering spaces along New York City's shoreline, A.R.E.A. (Artists Representing Environmental Arts) initiated their Wild Flower Field this October on Wards Island by the lower Harlem River. Featuring waves of yellow-orange cosmos, circles of yellow poppies, red indian blanket plants, white butterfly bushes, and daylilies, the project hopes to inspire an annual event. In this instance, the field was prepared, planted, watered, and monitored as part Manhattan Psychiatric Center's Patients Therapeutic Training Program. For more information contact Dorothea Silverman, A.R.E.A. director, at (212) 288-7650.

Bay area artist Richard Kamler spent almost three years negotiating with the National Park Service, but finally got permission to install his Search Light Project on Alcatraz, beginning mid-October and continuing until year-end. In addition to search lights circling the island, Kamler's Table ofVoices, in the basement of the cell block, sports a vertical sheet of glass bisecting the table, similar to those used in prison visiting rooms. Visitors can sit down and pick up a phone receiver and listen to interviews with perpetrators or victims (depending on which side you're sitting.)

Edited

by Jack

Becker

Twin Cities Projects Two firsts were witnessed in Minneapolis this summer. Dr. John Biggers, master muralist of Houston, has allowed his original work Celebration of Life to be recreated by 15 Minneapolis artists. These artists were chosen from a field of 50 Twin Cities-area applicants and are led by local artists Seitu Jones and TaCoumba Aiken. This is also the first mural on a state of Minnesota highway sound barrier,

46 PUBLIC ART REVIEW FALL/WINTER 1996

measuring 160 feet by 30 feet. Leading into North Minneapolis, Celebration of Life will serve as a much-needed gateway, empowering people and building a sense of pride in their neighborhood through use of traditional African symbols such as combs, turtles, pots, etc. In addition to involving local minority artists, workshops on the role of public art in the community and a curriculum for public schools was developed. Completion is expected this fall. [Thanks to Meseret Soulom for this report. Look for Soulem's interview with Dr. Biggers next issue.]

Another first, the Shoe House, occurred in Frogtown, a veritable vegetable soup of ethnic cultures in a neighborhood near downtown St. Paul. Detroit artist Tyree Guyton, of the Heidelberg Project, was persuaded by Todd Bockley to look around Frogtown. Bockley was curating "Off Center: Outsider Art in the Midwest" this summer for the Minnesota Museum of American Art and wanted a community-based component. Once Guyton was introduced to Tracy Moos, the spritely matriarch of a house on Charles Street, he knew it was "the right house, the right project." In less than a month, he collected thousands of shoes from all over (including 3,000 from Detroiters), and in 10 days attached them to every square inch of the building's exterior. "Each sole has a soul," says Guyton, and the Shoe House is a place where the souls can come together. In an interview with Burl Gilyard in the Twin Cities Reader, Guyton "speaks with a kind of pragmatic mysticism about the power of public art as a tool for drawing people out and awakening them to the possibilities of their environment: 'Everything I learned in art school is nothing compared to what I've learned out here in the street.' " Of Moos, Gilyard says her "come-what-may spirit and openness mirror that of Guyton; she'll live in the house throughout the project.

T h a t ' s what gets me about art,' she says.

T h e y ' r e always coming up with something new. And it's never over with.' " [photo: Tracy Moos at Shoe House dedication, August, 1996]

Artist Joel Sisson's 1996 version of the Green Chair Project is moving to the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC, Oct. 1618, following ARTNOW, a national arts demonstration (Oct. 6), and the gigantic AIDS Memorial Quilt (Oct. 11-13).

Sisson's teenage crew from Minneapolis will install—with the help of students at DC's Duke Ellington School of the Arts —two 14-foot-high apple-colored Adirondack chairs surrounded by 55 human-scaled chairs (each one representing a state or territory of the United States). They will encourage drop-in conversations with invited guests, the media, and crew members. Sponsored by FORECAST Public Artworks, the installation is planned to spread the word about Sisson's—and others'—alternative recipes for community and youth engagement. An ingenious chair-making kit designed by Chris Hand fits inside a small crate; follow the steps in your easyto-read Green Chair manual, and you're ready to start a chair factory in your own neighborhood!

FORECAST Public Artworks received support from the Minneapolis City Council to temporarily transform a prime downtown parking lot into "Paved Paradise," a multi-media, family-oriented town square, with an abundance of nomadic offerings. FORECAST project manager Jack Becker (PAR managing editor) hopes to have things up and run-

ning by next June for the national public art conference [see p. 42]. "Paved Paradise" hopes to get off the ground with a street-painting festival, encouraging national arts leaders, local artists, and passersby to fill in the 150 parking spaces.

FORECAST'S Public Art Affairs program, offering annual grants to Minnesota artists for projects at sites of their choosing, has seen the completion of several noteworthy projects: Andrea Sisel produced a 60-foot youth mural at the Minneapolis headquarters of Habitat for Humanity, engaging Habitat children unable to help build their new homes.

Landscape designer Marjorie Pitz finished a series of miniature fantasy environs at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, one of which features a water element with tiny stairs leading up a rock wall to a mysterious dwelling. Laurie Phillips' month-long projection installation Big People utilized an abandoned bell tower atop Minneapolis' People's Center, with larger-than-life portraits of building workers and users with quotes pertaining to their views on life. Sculptor Dean Lucker's intimate, interactive Sign Pole Project featured an edition of ornate oval boxes surreptitiously mounted to street poles throughout the Twin Cities in September. Inside, a mechanical figure holds a plant; when the cord is pulled, its leaves drop to reveal the phrase "You can begin again."

(Listings continued on mailing sleeve.)

continued from page 31

Sculpture that "if one word captures the aspiration of modernism..., it is surely 'object.' First in poetry and painting, then in sculpture, music and architecture, the word came to denote an ideal condition of self-contained, self-generating apartness for the work of art, with its own rules, its own order, its own materials, independent of its maker, of its audience and of the world in general." 1 Obviously, "public art" is a perfect antithesis of the modernist disregard for the audience and, as the notion of sitespecificity suggests, it seeks explicitly to align itself with the rest of the built environment. On closer examination, however, the techniques of engagement and spatial design employed in public art do not, in and of themselves, constitute a radical departure from the assumptions underlying modernist art. The experience that unfolds through the spectator's participation may seem closer to that of the built environment than to the sculptural object, but then we do well to remember that architecture, as Tucker observed, can also aspire to the condition of the object.

In recent years, the belief in the unified, centered, and self-generative subject, as it affects the practice of modern architecture, has come under radical interrogation by such architects as Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi. Such interrogation is rare in public art. At ISC, Dennis Adams, who often emphasizes disjunction over synthesis and harmony in his installations, was a notable exception to the rule.

Following modernist conventions in spatial design, the tendency is to emphasize coherent and unified experience.

Likewise, the essential strategy of sitespecific art is to fuse form and meaning, program and context, and thus to synthesize potentially disparate parts into selfsufficient totality. In that sense, at least, the boundary between the self-contained sculptural object and site-specific public art may be an illusion.

Hafthor Yngvason is a writer and director of public art for the C a m b r i d g e [ M A ] Arts Council.

Notes 1. William Tucker, The Language

of

Sculpture,

Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1974, p. 107.

continued

from page

32

The Best...

In these "ponderous and politically charged" 1990s there is a "re-assessing of what we've accomplished and what we can really do, and a simultaneous intensification of our commitment to our communities," Dowley said. Collaboration is a process that still has a life, she claimed, although it is undertaken with a great deal of caution. Yet the chemistry among the players is an essential ingredient that we need to continue applying today.

Dowley touched on the "need to come to terms with longevity and maintenance, and not see it as a ball and chain," and cited efforts to establish successful maintenance programs, such as those being promoted by SOS! (Save Outdoor Sculpture).

Referring to Suzy Gablik's The Reenchantment of Art, Dowley said, "Artists are becoming facilitators of the community's voice. They are catalysts for the expression of a people. Their concerns are more social than architectural, or maybe they are as social as architectural ... Like architects, there are artists who will never cross the line into the realm of public art."

Dowley continued, "There is still regrettably a real lag in the critical language and framework for analyzing public art—except for the informal dialogue we as professionals in the field use to talk with each other. What's missing is good coherent discussion about the juncture between art as art, art as urban design, and art as social function. And it needs to be in the mainstream media. We don't need any more snide remarks by Morley Safer.

We need to be able to advance our own thinking through the grist of intelligent criticism. What is interesting to me right now is the growing confluence that I see philosophically between a lot of new work by artists, who are choosing on their own to work with communities or in the public sector—not through public art programs—where the public and the community is the very subject of their work.

There is also a revised interest in installation work, which is a signal that there are more and new artists capable of working in new vocabularies."

Public art administrators, Dowley observed, need to stay on top of "the details," which makes it difficult to see the trends or step back and look at what's going on in the field. Luckily for us, this pre-conference was one of those rare moments in which we did just that.

Jack Becker, m a n a g i n g editor of Public Art Review, lives in Minneapolis and m a n a g e s projects for F O R E C A S T Public A r t w o r k s in St. Paul, M N .

FALL/WINTER 1996 PUBLIC ART REVIEW 47

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