AVOLATILE PROPOSITION
ISSUE 003
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SCOTT DICKENSHEETS
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It’s an afternoon in torrid July, officially 109.4 degrees— I checked—though it’s a thousand degrees hotter on the unshaded rockscape where I stand, training the most thoughtful gaze I can muster on this thing I’ve come to see. A sculpture. Specifically, Wayne Littlejohn’s Dream Machine. A 27-foot-high twist of painted aluminum that, according to its placard, “arises from the Earth like some mysterious love child of dust devils and drones.” It’s in Siegfried & Roy Park, close to the airport, and I’m risking this brain-melt as part of a four-decade conversation with myself about living here, in Southern Nevada— I want to know whether public art has anything useful to say about that. So while I’m looking at Littlejohn’s piece, I guess I’m looking for something else. Let’s see what you’ve got, Dream Machine.
Before it became a notorious fiasco, William Maxwell’s Ground Zero was a fine idea. This was back in 1989, and the City of Las Vegas’ recently formed Arts Commission had just finalized its first big project, selecting a piece of public art to adorn the blank, curving, 10-story face of the old city hall (now the Zappos building). Maxwell’s proposal: to etch into its marble surface a complex bas-relief of Indigenous, natural history, and anti-nuclear imagery; shadows thrown by the moving sun would keep it dynamic. It was the sort of piece, in other words, that you can envision a high-minded committee, seeking a comfortable overlap between acceptable artistic virtue and defensible public spending, totally going for. But, as it does, reality intervened. The city’s maintenance people vetoed the etching, saying the wall’s marble surface was too thin—a concern you’d think someone would’ve voiced earlier. A compromise was reached: elements of the design would be replicated using brightly colored plastic strips, and right there you can see its demise foretold: that cheesy execution distorted and trivialized the piece. After a decade in which it was mocked when it wasn’t ignored, the city took it down in 2001, and, a spokesman tells me, probably destroyed the components. It’s a cautionary tale we’ll come back to, but my real interest lies with a different finalist, one decidedly less calculated to appease a selection committee. Proposed by the late Vito Acconci, a trickster figure in modern art, it’s easy to picture but impossible to imagine happening: a 10-story mirrored cross, its arms pulling away from the curving white wall, leaving architectural “wounds” that would “bleed” water. In contrast to Maxwell’s broadly acceptable anti-nuke message, the politics of Acconci’s uneasy mix of religiosity and city hall were more pointed: he wanted to trouble what he believed to be America’s toocozy relationship between church and government with a work that might make people question the building’s true purpose. But then he confessed another, funkier inspiration: the 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker, a lurid vampire yarn set in Las Vegas. He was captivated by it, associated it with this city.
That’s an idiosyncratic mix of inspirations, to say the least. Indeed, I have a photo of the meeting in which the finalists unveiled their maquettes; Acconci, dressed like Brooklyn’s hippest undertaker, stands next to his model, and it’s clear his piece simply contained too much weird gristle to survive the good intentions of a municipal selection committee. Still, I’ve thought a lot about his proposal over the years. At the time I knew nothing about Acconci himself, a poet and performance artist who graduated to public projects. But I clearly responded to elements that marked much of his work: a spirit of provocation and sinister humor, for sure, but also its sense of critique, and a tension between a desire to draw people together and his suspicion of group conformity. He described another piece as his attempt to create “a kind of discussion place, argument place, start-a-revolution place,” and that’s most certainly the wavelength I picked up on over the years as I indulged in a bit of counterfactual speculation: what if the damn thing somehow had won and gone up on City Hall? I imagined it pranking the streamlined capitalism of the Fremont Street Experience, and exchanging energies with the crackpot aesthetics of the Stratosphere Tower. I’m no doubt in the minority in thinking that would’ve been terrific. “I like Acconci as an artist,” says UNLV art historian Hikmet Sidney Loe when I describe his proposal to her, “but it just sounds horrific.” Absolutely, but that’s not a deal-breaker for me. I’m okay having a pugilistic relationship with a piece of art—if it promises to pierce my brittle crust of daily complacence. I mean, love it or hate it, when we were downtown we’d surely have had to contend with it, right? How might that have charged our relationship to this place? That’s another way of asking, What do we want from public art? And because I’m not an art critic, social theorist, or urban planner, just a guy mired in ordinary life, I suppose what I’m really asking is, What do *I* want from public art? Over time, Acconci’s mad vision crystallized in my head as a kind of benchmark for seeking an answer.
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