Barrus on Vernacular and Bufano

Barrus continues

They were one small ray of joy in a toddler's life as the children from the housing projects they were set in used them like jungle gyms.

I am sure there are other examples of this, but this is the only example I am aware of where government included the notion of high art for those who might not know what it was aesthetically versus the aesthetic notion of providing the rich with public art.

Art as social and class statement.

You bet.

Those public housing projects themselves failed the poor and they were demolished a couple of years ago. The Buffano statues were moved to the Randall Museum garden where I assure you no children climb on them.

As a photographer, I could always hang out around the sculptures and get great shots of poor kids dressed literally in rags playing on the sculptures, and in the background of the photos there is always the inevitable growl of the drug dealing and the violence that was, too, a part of the lives of the children who grew up in those housing projects. There was an irony and a contradiction to the reality of softly-rounded sculptures of madonnas (nurturing hordes of small children) right smack dab next to total urban decay and human destruction in no uncertain terms.

I have often wondered if any of that art really touched any of those lives and now I know it touched one. Mine.

My eye and the eye of the kids who regarded those pieces of art as theirs was always drawn to the sculpture. And our eyes, too, were always looking over our shoulders in anticipation of the murderous violence that could spill our way from the public housing parking lot next to the Buffano sculptures.

New public housing has been built. There is no art.

But the contradiction and the reality of the urban dramas and the destruction of human life in those places we have essentially abandoned continues as do our failures as a society. We fail them and we fail us.

Poor children need art perhaps more than they need social workers. Yet there is no art for them in their new and modern play spaces and there is no more art for them in an educational system everyone agrees is overwhelmed and broken.

The power of public art communicates that there are other possibilities.

It is a tragedy that most of it fits into environments built for the people who need it the least but who can afford the idea of their lives and living spaces being molded around art.

Now when I go to the Randall Museum and see those sculptures in the garden, the place feels haunted, silent, and alone. There are no children screaming, crying, laughing, playing guns and cowboys on the Madonna. Where once the sculptures were part and parcel of an ordinary if murderous landscape, what is left of that "redeveloped" landscape is ordinary, dehumanizing, and just as murderous as ever if not more so. How tragic that now the vernacular is the gentrified in a place where the only thing that has really changed is the class and economic status of the people who now get to experience art that was once a playground. Today what we teach the children of those housing projects is that it is hopelessness that truly endures. It is hopelessness that has become the vernacular of their lives.

Tim Barrus