Public Art Conference Archive—2003
White Water Rafting And The Perils Of Public Art
Presented by Marc Pally, Artist, Los Angeles, CA
Oh that success in public art could be as decisively determined as the winner of a baseball game. Play by play encoded into an exact and stable vocabulary—prominently and instantly displayed in vibrant electronic colors. Dependable rules. Set number of positions to be filled. Uniforms. Major leagues, minor leagues. Stars and has-beens. Sounding more and more like the art world, doesn’t it?
- Image 1: conference announcement showing a piece of sculpture, foreground, in front of a baseball stadium with
We are now convened under the conference title: “Measuring Up—Defining Success in Public Art”. We know that measuring success at a ball game is an easier matter than measuring success in art—be it public art or any sub-category of that generous and amorphous concept, art. What strikes me as worth considering as much as the question—“how do we define success in public art” are the circumstances which prompt such an inquiry. Certainly the concept of measurement plays a role in assessing both art and the systems that support it. For instance, one might count the number of books and monographs written each on Fra Angelico and his peer Andrea del Castagno and conclude that Fra Angelico plays a more central role in our understanding and appreciation of early Italian Renaissance painting than Andrea del Castagno. Or, one might compare the attendance figures of the Morgan Library and the New Museum of Contemporary Art and conclude that the Morgan Library serves more people than the
Interpreting measurements in these ways is almost futile, revealing very little of abiding substance. Further refinements to the questions reveal more meaning. We might want to compare the budgets of two museums and the percentages each spends on visitors. Or, we might compare zip codes of visitors and assess each institution’s impact upon bringing non-residents to the city. Either way, we are measuring some aspect of performance and by implication, success When we count the monographs on artists we are explicitly looking for a consensus on that artist’s importance and influence, his or her success at finding a place at the art history table. Thus, success is measured by an artist’s ability to create work that generates conversation—ideas and opinions are formed, exchanged, contradicted, contested, modified and passed on to others for continued dialogue. To some degree these methodologies can be applied to public art with the understanding that its contemporary non-commercial nature and amorphous audience require other measurement tools. We cannot judge our projects using auction sales nor can we judge our projects from the perspective of deep time and the filter of history—we are indeed saddled with the present.
We expect art to be visionary, to take us to the future and give form to new perspectives and perceptions. It can trigger spirited conversation but won’t necessarily foster consensus. Even if we were able to articulate an objective criticism what would we do with such an instrument? Develop a formula for success? A list of does and don’ts? A mapped terrain of sink holes and pinnacles? The enterprise of measurement is a numbers game—it asks for counting, it converts to graphs, lovely percentages appear—all is certitude. In politics we look to both opinion polls and voting polls, in public health we look to repeated incidents (or not) of disease, in medicine we look to cholesterol levels, blood pressure and so on. What can we measure in public art and more importantly to what ends can such measurements be used?
This question goes to the heart of the purposes of public art. Without understanding the mission and purpose it is futile to discuss measurement and evaluation. Once terms of success are defined it becomes reasonable to discuss the possibility, and limitations, of evaluation. Before I put forward a few ideas regarding the purpose of public art let’s get some common ground on what the field is.
- Image 2: Edouard Manet, Bar at the Folies Bergere
At this point, arriving at the challenge of defining what it is we are up to, the beast of modernity appears. Just as Manet clearly shows us in the Bar at the Folies Bergere, position is everything—perspective frames the view and the realities it prompts. So too must the notions of public art be multiple, contradictory and ever-evolving. Definitions and objectives vary across projects, communities and programs. Artists, administrators, curators, historians, critics and most certainly the public are all moving in many simultaneous and various directions, holding multiple assumptions and values. I’d like to suggest a few ways we might define success within the endlessly complex set of circumstances we must navigate. I do not include a methodology for measuring these strategies. While matters of attitude, discourse and behavior may in some way be reducible to measurement, I humbly leave such an undertaking to others.
Strategy for Success #1.
Understand and respect that public art must, can and should be art.
I’m tempted to say we’ve painted ourselves into a corner by defining public art as a separate field from or within art. Performance art, installation art, media art and so on are all descriptive terms, all fields of practice and study and all are aspects of art. We must continually remind ourselves that art is the essential aspect of what we do—every bit as much as health is the most essential aspect of public health. Achieving this goal will provide much needed guidance and context for looking at what it is we do and produce.
We are engaged in a messy and thrilling business. Not only do we seek to commission great art, we must often do so in an environment in which many members of the audience do not share our ambition or our ideas regarding great art. Voices of dissent are often highly effective in curtailing or limiting projects and programs. Frequently we self-censor our projects, deliberately privileging stability and community support over artistic adventure and excellence. In many situations, community involvement, pride and story telling are the highest value and trump artistic excellence. However, I am advocating right now for faith in the artistic adventure, for the road to who-knows-where, arriving at some future moment to some new destination, connected to our current vectors, sensitive to environmental conditions and determined to reconsider any and all assumptions about how we might best live within them. Tell me how that is going to be measured?
- Images 3 & 4: Komar and Melamid Tijuana’s Most Wanted Painting,
Komar and Melamid pose a similar question when they polled Americans to find out what they most wanted in a painting. The result is America’s Most Wanted, 1994, a droll project and an utterly banal painting. In a similar vein, and in response to an invitation from in-Site, a biannual program of commissioned art projects in the San Diego/Tijuana region, Komar and Melamid conducted surveys in San Diego and Tijuana. They asked such questions as: “Do you like to see colors blend into each other or do you like it when different colors are kept apart?” and “Which of the following outdoor scenes do you most prefer: tress, lakes, rivers and oceans, the countryside and rural scenes, the city, houses and buildings?” The project succeeds as a piece of sly conceptual irony and offers a cautionary tale about the appropriate relationship between artist and patron and artist and audience.
Strategy for Success #2.
Cultivate respect and awe for knowledge, appreciation and commitment to art.
- Image 5: Jean-Baptiste Chardin, The Monkey Antiquarian
And, thanks to Chardin for showing that such absorption can be transformative indeed.
Art is an enormously complex field. In many ways its history parallels and informs the history of civilization. The understanding, appreciation and development of art is an on-going enterprise. It is as important, difficult, challenging and rewarding a journey as that faced by other disciplines such as astrophysics, bioengineering, chemistry, dentistry and so on down the alphabet. Too often we shy away from this fact. We must not confuse taste with knowledge. This becomes critically important when we look to the decision making process for commissioning art as well as to the sources of public opinion. Decisions regarding the commissioning of art need to be made by people who are capable not only of having a personal response, but who are capable of understanding the formal language and the historical context of the art under discussion. When we ask panels to select artists, we should be sure many of those sitting in judgment are in command of a basic understanding of contemporary art and the sources of its historical development. Abdication of this responsibility fosters the misapprehension that art is not a serious field, one committed to growth and change. No one expects to understand other disciplines and to be able to sit in judgment without serious and extended application of effort. Art is no different.
Strategy for Success #3.
Learn from and, do not be intimidated by failure.
- Image 6: LA Times, front page
Let’s stop being squeamish about failure, let’s not be intimidated by loud-mouth bullies and let’s be sure to aggressively defend art under assault. NASA didn’t close up shop after the Challenger catastrophe nor after the
“Ironically, the success of artwork need not always be measured in terms of favorable reception but rather by how and by whom it is attacked or ignored – whether it appears Other when measured against predominant cultural values or, for that matter, the predominant subcultural values of the art world.”
When we reframe art as a process of investigation and experimentation, much like science, we gain a worldview in which false starts, dead ends and failed experiments are accepted as part of the landscape.
Strategy for Success #4.
Support and respect curiosity and tolerance as intrinsic values and cornerstones of all that we do.
Let’s seek art that is risky and even art that we don’t understand. We understand so little about life but we continue to live it in its full complex contradictory glory. Why should art be any different? We do ourselves a terrible disservice by expecting art to be digestible into bits of literal information. Art is bigger and more elusive than that. Physicists openly admit to their bafflement about reality, they consider string theory and now brane theory. They acknowledge when it comes to making sense of the world, all is flux. We need to embrace this attitude and spread the word that curiosity and questioning are the hallmarks of a healthy civilization. We can re-frame our expectations about art and talk about how curious something is or how elusive and varied its meanings are. We need to advocate for people to have confidence in their own responses, including incredulity. Let’s make room for an art of open possibility, aiming to accommodate us to the future, not just reminding us about the past.
- Image 7: William Blake, The Inscription Over the Gate
William Blake believed that poetry had to be difficult to read, that it is in the act of struggling with the meaning of the text that consciousness can be effected. The process of responding fully to the present will inevitably move us forward Our environments are always shifting and so must we. Great artists understand this and their antennae continually alert us to new directions for thinking, feeling and being. Let’s consider our programs as laboratories, in which every so often we rethink our basic assumptions and allow ourselves to envision new ways of doing business. I am thinking about how we organize ourselves, how we think about the structures that make our programs tick as well as the kinds of art our programs might support.
Strategy for Success #5.
Embrace and support constant evolution in structure and content.
- Image 8:
Diving into and getting lost in a Pollock field provides a fitting experience reminiscent of our complicated lives. The deep space without anchor, skeins of mesh providing framing, structure and traps. We need to navigate through our space, through our challenges and we can do so by being willing to look at what we do and asking how to do it otherwise. For instance, we have embraced the notion of site-responsiveness as a basic tenet for commissioning art. While I don’t deem this approach a failure I do think we need a critical look at some of the assumptions we use as outcomes under the banner of community-responsive or community-based art. It is not enough that art simply reflect the values and/or history of a community. Herbert Marcuse, imaged a role for art that emphasized its subversive character but a subversion first and most effectively staged on the perceptual rather than the political stage. In The Aesthetic Dimension he says:
“The political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimensions. Its relation to praxis is inexorably indirect, mediated and frustrating. The more immediately political the work of art, the more it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical, transcendent goals of change. In this sense, there may be more subversive potential in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud than in the didactic plays of Brecht.”
While we may not be able to circulate RFQs with the selection criterion of Perceptual Subversion, we can continue to broaden the notion of art’s capacity to engage its audiences in deep and subtle ways and thereby avoid the failure of predictability.
Another thing we need to look at is the notion of permanence. I suggest we work to emphasize time-based projects and put our efforts to redirecting programs to accommodate such an approach. The ceaseless battles over permanent work are tedious and exhausting – let’s figure out if we can find a way around the syndrome of complaining and carping. I don’t suggest the idea of permanence be entirely banished, at least not permanently. Perhaps there are mechanisms that could be developed to confer permanence upon certain projects. Art that meets with sustained and enthusiastic response over a period of time, say ten years, might become permanent. Others, perhaps the majority, would visit a site or sites, and move along.
- Image 9: stock market predictions
We cannot predict the future but we can explore and move toward it. Nor can we predict how what we do will settle with time, what doors it might open, what new language it will provide. Nor do we necessarily want to predict the future for it is so often that unknowing that propels the very exploration that enables us to thrive. The sure bet will not advance us - penicillin can be discovered only once.
“Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion on the other hand produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.” Jean Cocteau
Strategy for Success #6.
Share information and resources, build bridges to and with others: be generous.
- Image 10: Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam
Let’s be sure we don’t build a field of public art that is separate from the larger realm of art. We need to reach out to museums and non-profit spaces especially, they have the resources to help us contextualize art. Museums and non-profit spaces are too often suffocated by their facilities; we can offer entree to presenting art to the world-at-large, the long-awaited museum-without-walls. Art colleges and educational institutions are also logical sites for conversation. We need to converse with faculty and students, learning what they are doing and letting them know what we are up to. Our experience in commissioning artists, providing opportunities for temporary and permanent artworks, working across disciplines and within a variety of settings, can be of enormous interest to faculty and students alike. More importantly, conversations with other arts professionals, be they in museums or educational settings, can lead to new syntheses and hopefully joint undertakings. One notable trend in public art is the artist-in-residence concept wherein artists immerse themselves in the life and work of an institution, such as a public utility, a senior center, a hospital, a planning department, a laboratory and so forth. These settings and the engagements experienced therein prompt the creation of art based upon concrete experience that might otherwise not be examined under the lens of the artist. This approach opens the door to much needed cross-disciplinary conversation.
At the beginning of this talk I mentioned I was interested in looking at the circumstances which prompt us to consider the question of measuring success. Most of these circumstances, which put us in a defensive mode, are business considerations, they are about funding, and most importantly they require us to defend the value of art. Our field is complex and comprehensive. We are fortunate our paths cross so many disciplines and personalities. In this arena, we are free and indeed called upon, to continually re-examine our values and our strategies. Our goal must be the creation of great art, only working with others can we address the macro crises of arts education, access to arts, respect for art and artists and the acknowledged centrality of art to civilization. Perhaps our role in cultivating an enlightened, demanding and respectful audience is through an unwavering commitment to produce great art and that, in the parlance of the ballgame, is a home run.
