Wish Trees and Public Relations

All My Works Are A Form Of Wishing
Yoko Ono

Blogger and journalist Mary Louise Schumacher at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote she was "cranky" this week about "Public Relations" stealing the artistic mission of public art. "Visit Milwaukee" will commission a bronze statue of "the Fonz" from the 1970s TV show "Happy Days". Apparently, Milwaukee is copying a TV Land project that donated bronze sculptures of TV character "Mary Richards" to Minneapolis and "Bob Hartley" to Chicago among others. These shows are already dying away. Left by themselves in the public realm, the sculptures will become memorials to the 20th Century middle-class attire without the story-telling detail of Duane Hanson's loners. I hope "Visit Milwaukee" is smart enough to design 1970's video monitors into the site to explain the sculpture. If not, the bronze can be melted and reused in 25 years.

Ms. Schumacher may not have seen the stupidity applied to the streets of Brussels by the AGC Flat Glass Europe company in collaboration with International Polar Foundation. As nothing is stated in the press release or website, I assume the some backroom graphic designer was told to design a hundred trees in the absolutely cheapest way possible. The laser cut shapes are painted nursery school toy colors and stuck in the ground like a stop sign. At an auction in one week, you can buy one of seven signed by the director of the foundation. I guess this guy has quite a cult of personality in Europe.

AGC Trees in Brussels, Sept-Oct, 2007

AGC Online "Dream Trees" for Architects (and others)

If this is not bad enough, the company then asked the architects (AGC customers that specify their glass) to type "hopes for a brighter world" or "your dream". Each dream is printed on a piece of AGC glass with the AGC logo and crudely hung in the crudely cut opening. All the online press info focuses on the CEO of the company and the director of the foundation. The pretty website lets anyone submit a dream, but for unknown purposes.


The CEO of AGC Dream. I hope for all the trees in the world that the translation to English is horrible.

"Visit Milwaukee" can still improve the situation and hire an artist to provide some cultural depth to the effort. If "Visit Milwaukee" is not interested in depth of expression and thinking, they should take a favorite picture of the Fonz and send it directly to a Chinese foundry. Learn from the boys in Brussels and cutout the middleman - better known as the artist.

People like me try to keep an open mind but still get annoyed when corporations and foundations with cash don't bother to seek the best when USING the format and reputation of art as a PR tool. PR is a fine goal, but please strive for the best creative work within the company's means and targeted audience. Don't degrade yourself and the community through artistic laziness. Coca-Cola did a fair job by hiring Peter Blake to promote the company's "Make a Coke Poster" website.

On a conceptual level (if I dare use such a word), the boys of Brussels were piggybacking Yoko Ono's decades long project called "Imagine Peace". I assume that the International Polar Foundation would be very much aware that Yoko Ono intended to take the hundreds of thousands of wishes tied to live trees and preserve them at the Imagine Peace Tower in ICELAND. The tower will be dedicated this October. (See tower image at top of blog incomparison to NYC light. Photo by Wassman)

Yoko Ono "Imagine Peace" Wish Trees in Washington,DC, April, 2007 (Photo Wash. Post)

Yoko Ono has been using a very old idea from Asia of the tying wishes to trees. I have seen other artists and other community activists create the wish trees for local events based on the "open source" idea. This simple act of taking a moment to handwrite a personal wish has a religious feeling. Indian street shrines, Chinese house shrines and Catholic saint candles perform this same short, concentrated connection to something spiritual - and peaceful.

This is Ono's artistic intelligence. She is using the old wish tree as method to have tens of thousands of people participate in the feeling of peace by writing and tying the wish. The boys in Brussels have used the same wish trees but robbed its emotional response. Online and in the street, the dream is de-personalized and presented with the writer's name introducing the ego. Rather than anonymous scraps of paper, the "comment box" results in self-conscious public relations activity by all the writers. ( Of course, I wanted to be clever to try to seek an insult about the project into the project. )

Mail a Postcard or Email a Wish for Peace

Ono's Imagine Peace Tower reuses ideas by others - most recently the "Towers of Light" to remember the feelings of loss after 9/11. (I did not know that the light is still projected every year on September 11. See Flickr.) I am not familiar with Ono's work, but she is not afraid of using existing artistic formats that best connects to her message. Using light with an on-off switch at a faraway corner of the planet, she reinforces the communal mental energy that implies that she believes in its powerful influence. As she will write on the physical element of the sculpture: A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

It continue's her great 1969 work with John Lennon, "War is Over", not "THE War is Over". Strike war from us and substitute peace. I so wish it could come true.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono 1969 Billboard