Public Art Conference Archive—2003
Responsible Criticism
by Harriet F. Senie
The idea of responsible criticism is, of course, predicated on the existence of public art criticism, period, a body of writing that has yet to reach critical mass. There are various factors responsible for the present near vacuum. Public art operates outside the gallery system; it cannot be exhibited in museums except by proxy (drawings, models, photographs). And, most significantly, it functions differently economically; it doesn’t generate revenue within the art business. If it is commissioned directly from the artist, there may be no fee for the gallery. There are few ads and therefore fewer reviews.
One strategy for bridging these gaps is to link public art installations directly to museum exhibitions. The Public Art Fund in New York has been very successful at that: already in 1975 with the Mark di Suvero retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art had a public art component extending to the five boroughs, and more recently the Tony Smith exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998 was accompanied by five installation sites in Manhattan. Although this increases the odds of art reviews, it is obviously is a limited, temporary strategy.
Public art readily attracts critical attention when it is the subject of controversy. Or as part of a general article appearing each spring, noting where outdoor art is now that the weather is nice enough to stop and look at it. But public art is rarely reviewed together with museum or gallery art—on the same page or even in the same section—at least not in New York. It’s unlikely that public art will be recognized as "art" by critics, art institutions, and the general public until it is consciously reframed as "art." This article is intended, in part, to suggest ways of accomplishing that. Certain factors pertain to all types of public art: the nature of the patron and the terms of the commission; the site; and public response. All, I believe, should figure prominently in responsible criticism.
The patron: Who is the patron and what are the parameters of the commission? What precisely was the artist asked to do? What was the role of the commissioning agency? Was there a selection panel? If so, who served? i.e. who was the curator? The curatorial role played by many public art administrators is rarely acknowledged, yet many play formative and even collaborative roles. This begins with the selection of slides to show the panel and extends to on-going conversations with and suggestions to the artist. While it is gradually becoming museum practice to note curatorial authorship in exhibition wall labels and some critical reviews, public art administrators (perhaps from now on better called curators) generally remain anonymous to all but those in the field. There is an important story here that remains to be written but in the meantime should at least be acknowledged.
The site: It is arguable that in public art the site IS the content. Most famously, the commissioners of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial chose the site on the Washington Mall in view of both the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument before they determined the parameters of the competition. All sites have local, if not national, content established well before they are transformed by public art. Every public space has an evolving history of multiple uses—visual, social, political, and so on. These directly or indirectly influence, if not determine, both artistic and audience response.
All too often public art gathers, even becomes a repository for, all manner of neighborhood discontents, something I have come to think of as the "velcro factor." Sometimes it is even held responsible for the general condition of the site. And here, in addition to the velcro factor, a peculiar form of the "blame the victim" phenomenon occurs; if someone urinates on a work of art or defaces it in any way, it’s the fault of the art. Federal Plaza, once the site of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc and arguably one of the worst examples of an urban public space (barren, without any amenities, punctuated only by an empty consistently non-working fountain) was so dismal that it was singled out by several architecture critics as well as members of the general public as being at the root of the objections to Tilted Arc.2 What, if anything, would have worked at this site? Before we critique public art we have to consider and articulate the pre-defining features of the site.
It would also be useful to ban, at least for a time, the term “site specific.” It has, by now, too many different meanings and is loaded with too much theoretical baggage.3 And in any case it is impossible for public art to be "site specific" for long. Since a public site invariably undergoes seasonal and/or developmental change, any work specific to it would logically have to be frequently or periodically redesigned to remain specific. Site responsive is, I think, an improvement for now.4
Public response: Here too I’d like to suggest a different terminology. Audience rather than public or community implicates only those for whom something was created, “an assembly of hearers or spectators...the persons reached by a book, radio broadcast, etc...” (according to a popular dictionary definition). Audience does not imply or suggest a larger political entity or philosophical concept. Arguably, there is no public or community in general, or for public art specifically, but there certainly is an immediate audience—those who pass it sporadically or on a daily basis. And there is an indirect audience - those who read about it or see it on television, should it become famous or infamous, or just part of the backdrop for an ad.
Since part of the raison d’etre of public art is an expanded audience, it is essential that responsible criticism considers reception issues. The general press already does, but not in a responsible way. Most reporters are happy to cite negative remarks or intentionally provocative comparisons, for example, relating two works in Seattle composed of natural stone—Noguchi’s Landscape of Time (1975) and Michael Heizer’s Adjacent, Against, Upon (1977)—to the then current "pet rock" craze; or likening Joel Shapiro’s proposed piece for Charlotte, N.C. to a headless Gumby.
Obtaining audience response, however, remains problematic. As an experiment, I have for quite some time used student field work to gather such information. Every time I teach a class pertaining to public art (which is usually once a year), I assign a "public art watch." For the duration of a semester, on different days of the week, at different times, students observe, eavesdrop and engage the audience for a specific work of public art. Based on a questionnaire developed in class and then modified for individual circumstances, they inquire about personal reactions to this work and to public art in general.5 Although far from "scientific," the information is based on direct observation over time. And that is precisely what is in short supply for writers of reviews who are working on a deadline.
Arguably, the best time to write about public art is not when it is first installed but rather after it has time to "settle in." It’s important both to observe audience interaction (or lack thereof) and to talk to some individuals. My students found that people were easily engaged (unless they were running for a train) and often had interesting observations once they got over an initial timidity to express themselves about art. Most interestingly, although people reacted more favorably once they were told something about the art or artist, often they had not bothered reading plaques, even those placed in close proximity to the work.
Public art agencies have a responsibility to the audience and the art to find a better way of getting information out there. All manner of information is available to museum visitors—from wall labels to brochures to guided tours. Indeed, museum educators might provide useful models. Perhaps interns could be used, like docents, to prompt public interaction and provide information.
And, following the museum model of visitor’s comments books, there may be a feasible ways to ask for responses initially, after a few weeks, and after a few months or years. In 2001 for a temporary exhibition, Points of Departure: Art on the Line, independent curator Julie Courtney provided questionnaires at each station along the Septa regional rail line in and around Philadelphia.6 Surprisingly, a significant number of people did take the time fo fill them out. So it is possible; and probably necessary. It’s essential for all involved, including critics, to be able to lose the "art gaze," to view things as a non-art-informed person might without the benefit of the artist’s explanation, or even a general context for understanding. (Left to their own devices, it is not surprising that many may follow a “looks like” approach to interpreting what they see.)
Before we can determine how information about audience response might best be used, we first have to know what is really going on—if people ignore, discuss, or `use’ a work in some way—or if they even see it. At the very least, being informed is being more generally aware of how art functions in our public spaces.
Although public art is intended for a general audience, there is also a general distrust of that very audience among critics and even some artists and public art curators. Accordingly, a popular work is somehow presumed to not be good (public) art. For example, in spite of the overwhelmingly positive audience response to the Towers of Light (possibly the most visible—certainly in reproduction—temporary work of public art in our time), I don’t think there was any serious discussion or critique of the work as public art.
Responsible criticism for any public art project should include a discussion of the requirements of the commission and the curatorial role of the public art administrator/ curator, an analysis of the site, and a consideration of audience response. Beyond that, critical parameters are determined by the type or model of public art. In all models, however, as with museum or gallery art, the artist’s intention is a critical issue.
Public Art as Art
Long derided as "plop art" or worse, single object sculpture was the initial form of the public art revival of the late 1960s that began with the Chicago Picasso. Contemporary discourse notwithstanding, this is still a, if not the, dominant form of all commissioned public art. In any event, I am not prepared to write it off. What serves to attract ever growing numbers to museums, can also find an appreciative audience in the larger public as well. Works should be judged both independently and in terms of placement (or installation), much as if they were in a gallery (i.e. "That’s a great piece but it looks terrible here.") Public art as "art" presumes the possibility of an art viewing experience. To be seen as art, it requires a site where this experience is possible, where people can literally see it and possibly stop for a brief or extended encounter.
Away from the protective "art" frame of a sculpture garden or gallery space, public art is vulnerable to certain kinds of public use that changes or distorts its meaning entirely. Consider the well known Calder in Grand Rapids, MI whose silhouette is emblazoned on civic stationary as well as garbage trucks; and George Rickey’s Triple L Excentric Gyratory Gyratory II in front of Coca Cola headquarters in Atlanta, renamed Leadership by the corporation. Public art as explicit or implicit civic or corporate logo (unless specifically commissioned as such) precludes its being seen as art.
In addition to imposed use from above, there is a kind of daily use that often goes unremarked. Object sculpture frequently serves its older audience as a photo op;
(People often line up behind George Segal’s Breadline, at the FDR memorial in Washington); and its younger or more agile audience as a jungle gym. (Mark di Suvero’s sculpture at Pierwalk, Chicago is one of many examples). But more generally, if a sculpture has a viable base people will sit on it, as they do on Louise Nevelson’s Madison Plaza Sculpture in Chicago. While it’s not clear if this makes the art more or less visible (I suspect the latter), it clearly signals a lack of seating in the urban environment.
For public art as art to work it must be visible, must be perceived by its immediate audience. Its apparent widespread, if not pervasive, invisibility is comparable to familiar works in museum’s permanent collection which are unnoticed unless they are rearranged or moved to an unfamiliar space. Obviously this is not an option for public art. But a sculpture that moves often serves to attract audience attention. George Rhoads’ 42nd Street Ballroom (1983) in New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal is usually surrounded by a variety of viewers when it is operative but ignored when nothing moves. Since not all public sculpture is or should be kinetic, we are back to the central issue: what will make public art more visible to its immediate audience?
There is some public work that seems to do better on its own—is more accessible, or user friendly, without “dumbing down” or depending on signage. Tom Otterness takes an installation approach in his scattering of pieces throughout the New York City subway station at 14th Street on the A,E, and C lines, much as he did in The Real World in Hudson River Park in downtown New York. Imbued with narrative content, his small figures transform their space in subtle ways, their atypical placement providing ongoing elements of surprise. Its hard to overestimate the effectiveness of surprise in public art, especially since it often goes hand in hand with delight.
Public Art as Urban Design
Public art today may consist of an array of functional works ranging from (intended) seating, fences, bridges, outdoor lighting, clocks—any and all imaginable street furniture, and even entire sites. This model is based on a pragmatic as well as aesthetic response to site; its intention is to provide for a perceived lack of urban amenities. The works at Battery Park City in New York address this paradigm in various ways. At North Cove, Scott Burton and Siah Armajani, working with architect Cesar Pelli, designed an urban waterfront plaza with a sculptural element evocative of a light house, ample seating, and a fence inscribed with lines of poetry: Walt Whitman’s “City of tall facades, of marble and iron - proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad extravagant city!” and Frank O’Hara’s “One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes.” Indeed, at North Cove there is an adjacent park designed by landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg.
Further south, Ron Fischer designed Rector Gate (1985-89), a playful assemblage that provides seating at its base. And still further south, Richard Artschwager designed Sitting/Stance (1989), furniture/sculpture that questions traditional forms of seating, while also providing a good place to sunbathe, judging from frequently observed use.
With this model the question "Is it good (urban) design?" is paramount. Does the work fulfill its intended function? Does it provide viable seating, lighting, enclosure, etc. in an unusual, visually provocative way? And do people actually use it?
Public Art as Landscape
The garden paradigm is less common than its urban counterpart and it raises distinct issues. One is maintenance. Although this is a major factor in the success or failure of all public art (ideally a maintenance budget should be part of every commission), it is particularly critical to a project that consists primarily of planted materials. Occasionally public art with landscape elements is called upon to address environmental issues such as erosion or pollution, raising other questions. Is this a good use of public art, or is it a whitewash? As Robert Morris remarked in 1979 at the opening of Land Reclamation as Sculpture at the Seattle Art Museum:
The most significant implication of art as reclamation is that art can and should be used to wipe away technological guilt...Will it be a little easier in the future to rip up the landscape for one last shovelful of non-renewable energy source if an artist can be found (cheap, mind you) to transform the devastation into an inspiring and modern work of art? Or anyway, into a fun place to be? Well, at the very least, into a tidy, mugger-free park?
It would seem that artists participating in art as land reclamation will be forced to make moral as well as aesthetic choices. There may be more choices available than either a cooperative or critical stance... But it would perhaps be a misguided assumption to suppose that artists hired to work in industrially blasted landscapes would necessarily and invariably choose to convert such sites into idyllic reassuring places, thereby redeeming those who waste the landscape in the first place.7
Morris’s caveat has other implications for the various uses/abuses of public art, but for this model, if public art is commissioned to perform a specific environmental function, then in part it must be judged on its ability to do so. However, we would be better served if the art in question ALSO calls attention to the questionable practices that caused the problem. It should provide more than ground cover. This is not always easy as Morris found out.
In fact Morris's critical stance (or gesture) became part of a controversy. He cut down trees and blackened their stumps to mark the topmost boundary of the site as a reminder of its former debased state. This not only provoked objections from environmentalists but was not necessarily understood unless you knew the artist’s intentions. It was easy to mistake it for the result of a fire.8
Public Art as Social Intervention
Often called community-based public art, this model immediately raises the question of what is being judged: “process or product?” It makes sense, however, to begin with concept. Is this a good or viable idea? Then, did the process achieve the project goals? And, finally, what was the intended role of the “product” and what implicit criteria does it suggest?
When students in a graduate seminar in public art taught at the CUNY Graduate Center in spring 2003 considered the projects included in Mary Jane Jacob’s public art exhibition, Culture in Action, that took place in Chicago 1993.9 their responses were amazingly consistent. The vote for best work was split between two projects. Inigo Manglano-Ovalle and Street-Level Video worked with neighborhood teens to produce Tele-Vecindario, 75 video installations installed in the streets, intended to reveal the concerns of neighborhood youth; in one lot an 11-monitor-installation, Rest in Peace, was dedicated to those who had died recently in gang violence. Displayed at ground level, it suggested a cemetery with video screen grave markers.
Haha (a collaborative group consisting of Richard House, Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, John Ploor formed in 1988, the year David Nelson’s portrait of Mayor Washington in drag was arrested in Chicago) and Flood (a voluntary network for active participation in healthcare) transformed a vacant lot into a vegetable garden and created a hydroponic garden in an adjacent storefront. Envisioning bacteria free produce as particularly important for those with HIV, the artists included a space for discussion and dissemination of information about local services available to AIDS sufferers. Haha saw this as a model capable of being reproduced in other areas.
In both cases students applauded the concept, the process, and the product, and especially the existence of built-in mechanisms for continuation. This is an essential element of public art as social intervention. It has to have the potential for an on-going, evolving relationship with its immediate neighborhood, to be more than a one-day (or night) stand.
The Dematerialization of Public Art
Eleanor Heartney in a critique of Culture in Action, remarked on the general dematerialization of public art.10 Mary Jane Jacob’s next large scale venture, created in conjunction with the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, was for a project that consisted primarily of public dialogues. The catalogue was called Conversations at the Castle.11 Public art as social intervention continues to be the critically favored model. In the call for papers for the 2004 meeting of the College Art Association (CAA) in Seattle, there were seven panels devoted to issues that pertain to public art. Three directly addressed the public art as social intervention model: Temporary Transformations: Public Art as Social Action; Activating Critical Discourse: Models of Civic Engagement and Public-Arts Practice; and The Activist Artist: Community-Based Art Practice. Two addressed publically created forms of public art (i.e. created without professional artist intervention): Signs of Devotion: Bathtub Madonnas, Highway Crosses, and Personal Manifestations of Spirituality and Memorialization and Graffiti: Re(sur)facing an Old Wall. Two more focused on the place and form of public art in our changing urban environment: Designing for Security: Our New Urban Environment and Space, Spectatorship, and the Dialogue between Art and Architecture Practice, 1950-1980.
And one panel was devoted to the history of perhaps the most contentious form of pubic art: The Rise and Fall of Memorial Sculpture. Few of these pertain to the majority of public art currently being commissioned. I see this is as a critical split, comparable to the rift between theory-based art history and object-based museum practice. These CAA topics presume that the best or only interesting kind of public art is based on a critical stance and is created by an artist together with neighborhood residents or entirely made by a non-professional artist. And, by definition, is temporary. The vast majority of public art commissioned today therefore falls outside its purvue.
Unreasonable expectations
Public art is not a substitute for urban renewal or social work although projects may address or include such functions. Public art ideally creates better places and provides enjoyment, insight and maybe even hope to its participants, viewers, and users. But it cannot correct deeper problems stemming from widespread unemployment and poverty, the neglect of public education and healthcare, and all the other social ills that are being so glaringly ignored at the moment. But these unreasonable expectations are often implicit or imbedded in the commission of public art.
Conclusion
Although different models prompt distinct criteria, I think there are three basic questions that should be asked, and probably in this order. Applying art world standards:
- Is it good work, according to its type: art, urban design, community project?
- Does it improve or energize its site in some way—by providing an aesthetic experience or seating (or both) or prompting conversation and perhaps social awareness?
- Is there evidence of relevant or appropriate public engagement or use?
For me successful public art has to score on all three or it isn’t. These, I think, are high but reasonable expectations.
Notes
1. A version of this article was given as a keynote address for the 2003 annual meeting of the Public Art Network (PAN) in Portland, OR. The ideas, developed over many years, took form in a seminar taught at the CUNY Graduate Center in Spring 2003.
2. For a detailed analysis of the relevant issues see Harriet F. Senie, The Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
3. For a good analysis of its various evolving meanings see Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
4. My thanks to Anne Pasternak, director of Creative Time, for this term and many other insights about public art.
5. For more details on the results of these surveys see Harrief F. Senie, “Reframing Public Art: Audience Use, Interpretation, and Appreciation,” in Art and its Publics edited by Andrew McClellan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
6. Julie Courtney. Points of Departure: Art on the Line (Philadelphia: Main Line Art Center, 2001).
7. Robert Morris. “Earthworks: Land Reclamation as Sculpture,” reproduced in Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster, eds. Critical Issues in Public Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Insitution Press, 1998), pp. 250-60.
8. For a discussion of the controversy see Kenneth S. Friedman, “Notes on the Environment: Robert Morris,” in Peter Frank, ed., Re-Dact (New York: Willis, Locker & Owens Publishing, 1984), pp. 70-72.
9. Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Brenson, and Eva M.Olson. Culture in Action (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995). All descriptions of the projects are taken from this catalogue.
10. Eleanor Heartney, “The Dematerialization of Public Art,” Sculpture, March-April, 1993, 44-49.
11. Mary Jane Jacob with Michael Brenson, eds., Converations at the Casatle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
