That’s Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
by Collier White
A rotten tomato for public art’s ugly face.
Mary, you're lovely. It's this likeness that gives us the creeps.
Imagine this: for most people, the pinnacle of sculpture and public art in the Twin Cities is the “cherry spoon.”
Does that depress you?
You know, that flagship piece of the Walker Art Center’s own sculpture garden? Actually titled “Spoonbridge and Cherry,” the playfully phallic atrocity by Claes Oldenberg and Coose van Bruggen is that kind of mystifying public art that asks, “Was that really necessary?”
And then, as if trying to outdo itself for pure whatthefuckery the Walker[i] recently built an addition whose icy steel mesh exterior that has provoked even more head-scratching than ire. Depending on your elevation, the monstrosity variously confronts all three of the beautiful, century-old churches to which it is proximate, soiling the landscape with an aesthetic that haphazardly quotes Gehry without the poetry. The thing seems to have been created with the intention of flipping the bird to the public while pocketing the money and creating a visual pun on the word “obtuse.”
For the purpose of this particular survey, I am not particularly concerned with where each individual work came from, but with the aggregate assault on my visual field. It’s as though each cliché has been cast in bronze and mobilized virally throughout the environment. These ideological zeroes strike a weary public as nothing more than eyesores, wastes of space, and a tremendously poor return on public investment.
The Vandal-Proof Zero
A recent such investment is the installation piece “Personal Journeys” along the Midtown Greenway bike trail. The series of bronzed shoes affixed to yellow benches between 27th Ave and the Mississippi in Minneapolis represents the ultimate expression of this kind of art-as-civic-duty utopianism. The shoes are nearly vandal-proof. Above the benches are whimsical little evocations – open ended questions. “Where are you going?” “Would you like to dance?” My mind was blown only in the sense that such an inert work could be shat out of the committee process. I have another question for them: “Why can’t we have nice things?”
By contrast, the mural on the back of the HVAC building that faces the greenway – a multi-artist work that features some signature Broken Crow pieces and a peppering of Goldy Gopher mascots – seems downright synergistic. What exactly was the Greenway shoes project supposed to do? Get me to walk a contemplative mile in the shoes of another immigrant population? It’s bullshit, and those who want to defund the arts instinctively know it. It’s about time we noticed it, too. Publicly funded art’s public face is a tremendous liability.
Pluralism as Brechtian Unpleasure
I can’t pretend to know definitively why this last half-century of public art sucks so much, but there seems to be a contributing idea that I would like to unpack in the manner of a bundle of firewood: that is for the purpose of setting it on fire. This idea is that we are teetering on the edge of fascism, and if the art world, that witness to our ugliness and detritus, gives way to beauty and celebration, the way that Germany and Italy, (among other European countries), did in the interwar period, the next assembly will be at the fringe of a concentration camp. Any idiot can see that this correlation is not causal, yet that does not stop the idea from holding a great deal of sway in academic and curatorial circles.
Take for instance a recent Guggenheim exhibition Chaos and Classicism: Art in France Italy and Germany 1918-1936. The exhibition presents a broadly bifurcated history of early twentieth-century art, separating it into that commissioned by or that critical of the emerging regimes. Neatly, the pieces fell into the supportive Gesamtkunstwerk – with figures cutting neoclassical and romantic poses, and the resistance: the abstract, the ugly, and the just plain weird. It seems to be a legacy that we are stuck with.
Provocation vs. Bad Taste
But if neoclassical art, with its Greco-Roman stylizations, promotes dictators, who exactly is served by a man-sized beaver with a towering vagina on its belly? Such question is begged by one of the installments in a recent sculpture walk in Bemidji. The piece is called Gaea, and it represents the apotheosis of feminist coffee shop art. Recently, it was transported to Northfield, Minnesota’s riverwalk, where it may escape the vandalisms of angry Bemidjians and where it will certainly find allies at Carleton College (but perhaps not at the more sensible St. Olaf).
caption: “It’s not a question of understanding it, stupid. If you feel it, you feel it.”
But a public that can’t be trusted to have nice things – lest our pride metastasize into nationalism, or worse – is a willingly infantilized public, and we can trust our world will be cluttered instead with the bric-a-brac of capitalism and civic minded cliché. We don’t celebrate civic leaders, we celebrate television characters and sports heroes. Statues of Joe Mauer and other baseballers have recently joined Mary Tyler Moore and the Peanuts gang, littering downtown Minneapolis.
Let me draw another correlation for you: How about the steady fall in journalistic standards – and even in staff numbers – at the Star Tribune since Charlie Brown and Lucy squared off across the street from the newspaper’s Portland Avenue office? What years of corporate control could not accomplish, a little Charles Schultz has neatly achieved: the paper is now little more than a yawping, excitable piece of fishwrap.
Now, if you painted a vagina on one of them – hell, put one on each of them – then you might get my respect. As it is, the public intervention regarding “taste” has gone the other way. Swaths of black censorship were recently painted upon the offending Bemidji beaver, while the sculptures of the Peanuts gang have starred in more photographs than the collected work of Rodin, at one point relegating the Cathedral of St. Paul to a background for more immediate whimsy.
Say what you will about the recent heroic baseball scuptures that have populated the city, in their formal attention to the body, you can cross your eyes and see greatness or at least celebration. The eight-foot Rod Carew at the foremost corner of Target Field is positively classical in contrast to the detritus that fills the rest of the city. Call it “Rodin Carew.”
Rodin, now there was a sensuous dude. Not to get nostalgic, but have you seen those bodies? Twisted and tortured and nevertheless just dripping with sexuality. Rodin proves that to be resistant to the status quo does not mean being anti-sex, neutralized, or otherwise unpleasant to look at. [iii]
Seriously, the clinical state of Minneapolis public art is enough to make you really love that couple of fat dancers that stands over the open sewer at the corner of 5th and South Washington. They might be a little overweight when compared to the customers of the adjacent Yoga studio, and they might be shrouded in a cloud of sewage farted from the bowels of Minneapolis, but in their glassy-eyed way, they seem to be enjoying themselves. [iv]
Which is not to say that they are enjoying relational aesthetics. You know, that fad in public art that elevates an attitude of civic-mindedness above all other aesthetic principles? Here, the participatory outweighs the contemplative and the mirror replaces true reflectiveness.
As much as I hate the ersatz, outdated 60s feminism represented by the Mary Tyler Moore totem of capitalism at 7th and Nicollet, the thing passes the relational aesthetics test. Here countless people pose with the brass lass and have their pictures snapped by the helpful yellow-jacketed ambassadors of Nicollet Mall. They instinctively grasp their role in this social order even as they pay tribute to a moment of Virginia Slims Feminism. In the rictus of the statue’s gaping smile, they recognize themselves.
Call it art 2.0.
Call it litter.
Sweep it up, let’s start again.
Homeruns
Spectators of the Rod Carew statue in front of Target Field have got one thing right. They understand, when they gaze upon it, the difference between an aesthetic appreciation of their idol and the spectatorship of the game itself, not to mention the playing of the game. The idolatry of the statue is dense with meaning – the player’s body rendered in bronze becomes a site of looking, admiring, and the sexual power and vulnerability of his crouch are foregrounded. We needn’t apply any kind of beaver to Carew to see that he is sexualized. Yet the sculpture is tasteful enough to evoke something that really resonates with the users of the space – a story of how the game inside the dome gets hardened into history, how the fleeting efforts of players can come to symbolize big ideas like hope, equality, and yes, even individual greatness.
Let’s take a breath and look back and see what formal considerations produce art that is worth keeping and what misguided policies and groupthink leads to the litter of tomorrow, the front page of Glenn Beck’s newsletter, the missed opportunities that defile our wonderful city. We deserve more than boring visual cliche, garish dirty puns, and faddish concerns. Leave that to the graffiti writers and rogue muralists, who do a wonderful job of capturing the ephemeral.[v] Let’s claim public space for art that is lasting, meaningful, evocative and above all well made.
[i] An institution without which we would not have had last month’s essential Ousmane Sembene film festival, for instance. The collection and screening of the works has led to interest from other institutions and the preservation of the Senegalese filmmaker’s legacy in the striking of new 35mm prints. The recent exhibition, Alec Soth’s America, presents evocative photography both inside the museum and in huge reproductions that have beautified the city’s bus stops. For these and countless other reasons, the Walker’s essential positivity for the world of art is not in question.
[ii] The offending homunculi have since been removed from the lawn, allowing more serious contemplation of the Church’s important and problematic role in civic life.
[iii] Rodin’s Gates of Hell was commissioned for a museum that was never built. His Burghers of Calais is a patriotic historical monument commissioned by the city. The work was controversial in its time, in part because Rodin wanted it displayed near ground level, where it would be more interactive.
[iv] The piece is Dancers by Columbian artist Fernando Botero, (2000). It was placed there by the CSM Corporation, a tenant of the adjacent building. Botero has since gained further notoriety for his series of paintings Abu Ghraib.
[v] In sidestepping the committee process, artists like Deuce 7 and John Grider have created works that reflect fashion and aesthetic concerns, effectively encapsulating the moment without requiring civic endorsement and preapproval. Minneapolis rewards them by removing their work and equating it to “tagging”.
Video:
Excerpt from Shadows. Dir. John Cassavettes. 1959.
Images:
1. Claes Oldenberg and Coose van Bruggen. Spo0nbridge and Cherry. 1985-1988.
2. Deborah Davis. Gaea. 2010.
3. Peanuts Sculpture by Tivoli Too. Photographed for Quodlibetica by Kelly Riordan.
4. Bill Mack. Rod Carew. 2010. Photographed for Quodlibetica by Kelly Riordan.
5. Fernando Botero. Dancers. 2000. Photographed for Quodlibetica by Kelly Riordan.
6. Fernando Botero. Dancers. 2000. Photographed for Quodlibetica by Kelly Riordan.
7. Bill Mack. Rod Carew (Detail). 2010. Photographed for Quodlibetica by Kelly Riordan.
8. Auguste Rodin. The Burghers of Calais. 1889. (not in Minneapolis)
Do you mean Rod Carew’s crouch or crotch?