A VOLATILE PROPOSITION

1. 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

2. 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.

3. Should public art (a) “promote pride in Las Vegas”; (d) “help build and reinforce the identity of the city of Las Vegas”; (g) “support tourism”; (l) “explore and provide information about facets of Las Vegas history”; (m) “draw attention to the natural environment and environmental issues facing Las Vegas”; (n) “open conversations about issues facing the community”; (p) “bring a sense of whimsy and delight to everyday spaces”?

Those are some of the 16 suggested responses in a survey conducted this year on behalf of the City of Las Vegas as it goes about revising its Public Art Master Plan. You can deduce from their demeanor at least one of the process’s guiding assumptions: that in order to be publicly funded, art—one of humankind’s slippier pursuits—must go through a cost-benefit analysis just like any other public infrastructure, and that “benefit” will be construed to mean “useful in an explainable way.” Thus, a vocabulary of uplift, education, and community enhancement is simply as close as a process meant to evaluate roadwork and sewage projects can get to justifying something as ineffable as art. A city can’t just hand a bunch of cash to an artist and accept whatever comes. I get that.

And, my Acconci-like qualms about group-think aside, civic vetting doesn’t always weaken an artist’s vision. It can still give us a real banger like Stephen Hendee’s Monument to the Simulacrum, in the courtyard of the Historic Fifth Street School. It’s a forceful treatise on the city’s interplay between the artificial and the real, even if you haven’t read Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, to which it refers. Or Wayne Littlejohn’s tangle of desert and fission symbolism, Atomic Tumbleweed, on Third Street, with its reflected light and enigmatic shadows. Or Jesse Smigel’s Snowball in Vegas, downtown’s whimsically-oversize cat head—big fan here.

Still, pieces like those, and a few others—Rita Deanin Abbey’s Spirit Tower at the Summerlin Library comes to mind—stand out in a valley inventory of public art, public and corporate, that seems more likely to advertise the good intentions of its sponsors than risk trying to rejuvenate your—okay, my—relationship to this place we live. “I think (public art) should be challenging,” Littlejohn tells me. “I don’t think it should be too generic or over-the-top palatable.”

Art on the public dime will always be a volatile proposition; see ARTnews in 1982 (“Does the Public Want Public Sculpture?”) or the art blog Hyperallergic a few months ago (“Are We Asking Too Much of Public Art?”). About the time Acconci was concocting his Vegas pitch, he was also embroiled in a controversial project in San Diego. You can see why, in that cultural flux, a public body might prefer a fine-screened filtration process. Even at its most anodyne, art can be difficult for a public servant to explain to an angry taxpayer. (It probably helps to have a master plan.) And yet: the paintbrushes. Maybe you’ve seen them: two large metal paintbrushes on Charleston Boulevard, designed by the late, prolific public artist Dennis Oppenheim. Intended to be a dazzling gateway to the Arts District, when lit they would call to one another in a melding of artistic vibrancy and Vegas showmanship. Instead, after what was, by most accounts, a convoluted selection process you can easily imagine being haunted by the ghost of William Maxwell’s Ground Zero, the result is mostly insipid. The two poles have almost no interplay, and fade into the street’s visual clutter—they’re the taxidermied remains of the process that created them: inert, with nothing to say or do.

I could go on in this vein, but I’ll spare you.

4. All of which, finally, is why I came to stand in this fricasseeing heat, regarding Dream Machine. Here’s the thing: I’ve been knocking around this valley for most of my life, five decades and counting, and the heavy press of those years has flattened my sense of place in a way that can’t be resolved by the hoopla of a new casino or the arrival of a sports team playing in a publicly funded stadium. (Those things work for some; not me.) Many days I experience this place as merely a blur of suburban strip-mall monotony. There are many remedies for this, of course, but, for me, art jabs the deepest.

So here I am, seeing what Dream Machine has to say.

Funded by Clark County, Dream Machine is, to my gimlet eye, one of those rare works to emerge from the thunderdome of group consensus-building with its magic largely intact. If it checks any boxes on a master-plan questionnaire, it’s not unctuous about it. I find the piece compelling on several fronts. Its organic lines simultaneously recall a mushroom, a dust devil, and the demonic technology behind an atomic cloud. There’s an unresolved tension between its long, slender stem and its top-heavy cap. Not to mention its directionality: is it rising from its mound, in a whorl of release? Or corkscrewing into the earth, gouging it?

Poised between the red desert dirt at its base and the huge Nevada sky above, Dream Machine is as much a product of this place as I am, and, crucially, it does its thing out in the real world, where I live, rather than in the Tupperware seal of a gallery. Somehow the public context of that private exchange matters.

As I collate these impressions, I find that Dream Machine’s layered effects offer an incipient sense of connection. Hard to pin down, as the best art is, but there’s definitely a pulse of something. So if the question is, can a work of public art somehow re-enchant my flagging sense of place, this is one of the few points in the valley where the answer starts to bend toward yes—for me.

Then again, as the master plan might reply, feeling a little defensive at this point, Is that even a reasonable thing to ask public art to do? “It’s a really fascinating question,” says Loe, a land art expert who recently co-curated the exhibition Modern Desert Markings in UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. “Are people going to have epiphanies through public art? I would think that that could happen.” And I imagine that when it does, it’s mostly inadvertent and different for everyone—it’s hard to imagine “cathartic restoration of your bond with the valley” appearing on a list of goals.

Still, before I get too full of myself, it’s worth noting that someone told Littlejohn that Dream Machine looks like “an upside-down bedpan,” so, really, what do I know? “If you’re coming up with an idea like that,” Littlejohn says with a laugh, “at least you’re looking at it.”

5. If you walk around Dream Machine you’ll eventually see it against its other natural backdrop, the Strip, including the hallucinatory bulge of the Sphere. During my talk with Loe, she floated a spur-of-the-moment trial balloon: “Is the Sphere not only a work of architecture—is it a work of public art?” Whoa! Even though the idea cuts hard against everything I’ve just burbled about the primacy of individual artistic expression, I immediately felt a shiver of rising possibility.

Let’s tease this out for a minute. I’m thinking of the structure’s huge blinking eye, 366 feet high and 516 feet around—freakish, authoritarian, and disquieting, but absolutely compelling. At once it literalizes the idea of surveillance, proposes a monstrously one-sided intimacy, alludes to the human soul, and weirds you out. “Batshit surrealism,” the poet Gregory Crosby called it on social media. “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all,” French poet and head surrealist André Breton declared, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find him quoted in the Sphere’s operating manual. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of this thing, beginning with its unholy power use. And I’m sure it won’t be long before we see Jake from State Farm splashed across its many pixels. Capitalism’s gonna capitalism, after all.

But as a feature of Las Vegas’ physical and mental landscape, with its eruptive visual capacity yoked to cutting-edge technology, scaled up to the size of our modern anxieties, and synced to 21st-century attention spans, it feels to me utterly alive to its time in a way I wonder if Acconci—who was deeply influenced by Robert Venturi, co-author of Learning from Las Vegas—might endorse.

“Maybe that’s the best model of public art, something you can continually change,” Loe speculates. “The permutations are endless. They can do anything with it.”

We’ll see. For now, I like to imagine the Sphere winking across the short distance to Dream Machine, game recognizing game, each representing a radically different path to a shared destination, where the antic ghost of Vito Acconci’s discarded cross is waiting.

Scott Dickensheets

Scott Dickensheets has been a journalist in Southern Nevada for 38 years, focusing on art and culture. He writes the daily Hey Las Vegas newsletter for City Cast Las Vegas. Before that he was features editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, deputy editor of Desert Companion, and editor-in-chief of Las Vegas CityLife and the Las Vegas Weekly. Dickensheets edited, co-edited, or contributed to eight volumes of the Las Vegas Writes book series; has contributed to publications as disparate as Playboy and The Nevada Historical Society Quarterly ; and, in 2015, curated the Transient Landscapes exhibit for Nevada Humanities. He lives in Henderson.