Simplistic Knowledge of Public Art Strikes Again

Peter Schoppert write
(Schoppert's Public Art Blog in Singapore, www.nusantara.com)

Thanks all for the dialogue. Most appreciated.

It's a history of public sculpture in 10 slides, so we shouldn't get too uptight about the elisions and omissions. (The essay assumes that only Euro-American narrative matters, etc.)

Just yesterday someone asked me at an opening "so what *is* the history of public art...?", so I'm sympathetic to Mr Petrovich's need to make choices.

But what it is about public sculpture that compels us to talk or ask about it within the frame of a grand historical narrative? No one looks at a painting and says, "so what is the history of painting, after all?"

No one thinks "I want to challenge the American cultural elite to be more demanding of their sculptors, so I'm going to write an essay/slideshow that begins with Phideas".

OK, I say I don't want to get too uptight about Mr Petrovich's elisions... yet here is one that seems important. The article traces a journey towards abstraction/idealism in public art, from the portrait sculpture of a philosopher-king to allegorical maidens with torches and scales to Serra's formalism.

Actually it seems to me that in the great formative years of modern public art in the later 19th C, the years of "statuemania", the highly individualized (whether realistic or expressionist) portrait statue was more prominent than than the neoclassical ideal type. Bartholdi is remembered far less than Rodin. I've just be reading Janson's 19th Century Sculpture and it seems really useful historical perspective to anyone grappling with public art today.

James Hall makes the connections in his The World as Sculpture. He constructs a stimulating grand narrative of object over image, one that sees the public sculpture of 19th c Europe as a high point of modernism, predicated as it was on the movement of the spectator.

Mr. Weiss,

I think one isn't supposed to respond to blogs, but I don't care much for that wisdom.

I appreciate your reading my essay, and I'm sorry about whatever it was that led you to believe I was a "mover shaker."

I'm basically just a painter who speaks his mind.

Best,
Dushko

From Dushko Petrovich

Jerome,

Thank you for your even-handed defence. I was wondering where all the bile was coming from, myself.

For the record, my goal with this piece was to pose a question about public sculpture. Pretty simple, really. It isn't a dissertation and doesn't pretend to be one.

And, also for the record, I don't really like Wallinger's piece, I just thought it was an interesting effort to engage a public question with public sculpture. In fact, I tried to leave my own opinions of the individual works out of this essay. My strong feelings about each piece occured outside the bounds of the essay.

The issue of permanence and impermanance is an important one, as is the question of funding. Not all of these things fit into 175 words per slide. I went from 161 AD to 2007 in twelve slides, so I just did my best.

As for misrepresenting Michael Singer, I think I did ok, considering the limitations. I picked an attractive slide to attract attention to his work. I also think the link to his website will attract and inform those that want to know more about what he's doing.

Best,
Dushko Petrovich

Weiss Responds
Thank you for writing. Most people don't. A strong statement of character. And I like the word "Bile".

ArtsJournal Book/Daddy writes:
Why do I like this stuff?

Hmm. Because I'm easily fooled by the new, the clever and the techno-savvy (oooh, shiny! a slideshow!).

Obviously, that's why I'm a book critic.

More seriously, I hardly agree with everything Mr. Petrovich says; I simply thought the slideshow/essay was thought-provoking and therefore worth bringing to the attention of the veritable dozens of readers of book/daddy who might not have already seen it on Slate. As an answer to what he sees as America's corporate blandness, modernist asceticism and playful immateriality, Mr. Petrovich's evident approval of Mark Wallinger's street-protest-turned-installation is disheartening. This is his proposed "civic vision" for public sculpture? A collection of crude protest signs given a smidgen of legal-political-ironic pointedness by its location along the 1 km banning border. In its own way, it seems as much a lefty-heavyhanded deadend as all those grand old gents on horseback were formulaic assertions of establishment power and self-ennoblement.

On the other hand, your response to Mr. Petrovich's essay/slideshow seems irritatedly offended, as if he had intruded on your preserve. Your blog calls for more critics on public art and public space to foster more dialogue. But when another critic pops up, you immediately dismiss him as "some new mover and shaker with connections," a description that reveals more bitterness than anything about his arguments. You both acknowledge the limitations of his journalistic medium (a wide topic, a general audience, a tight length), and then blast him for those limitations anyway ("dumbing down"). And some of your grievance seems prompted by his Anglophilic cheering at the end ("the recent efforts in England do highlight American sculpture's complacency in the face of pressing issues") -- a cheering that still doesn't prevent him from citing the American, Michael Singer, although Mr. Petrovich's ideal, publicly engaged art, in my estimation, still sounds drearily (and in its own way, ephemerally) didactic despite his protestation that no one wants "propaganda."

I hadn't considered your very good point about the wide (and changing) differences between government-funded artworks and those by individuals or private institutions, and what this says about the intended purpose of such works. Apparently, neither had Mr. Petrovich, or perhaps he thought that in such an essay, he wasn't writing a complete history but was trying to make his own, selective points about self-expression, ideology, public function, civic engagement. For all his supposed "simplistic" take on public art, Mr. Petrovich can turn a phrase -- in this regard, I note your edited version has downgraded his "connectivity" to other arts from dazzling to merely sparkling. Yet he can suggest some of the ironic complexity in a Jeff Koons, for example ("Jeff Koons has managed to fuse Marcel Duchamp and the Rose Bowl Parade into one very well-trained dog"), both acknowledging Koons' "air of high-art pranksterism" while citing his more nakedly commercial-cynical interests.

And I don't even like Koons.

Finally, you criticize Mr. Petrovich for including one of Mr. Singers "most pretty [sic] new works instead of Singer's complex works that are integrated with the environment and don't really look like art at all." Perhaps my reading is wrong, but it seems to me he does if not precisely that then very much close to that: "In a series of projects ranging from the garden at the American Embassy in Athens (right) to a sewage treatment plant in New Haven, Conn., Singer's Vermont studio has been bringing together aspects of art, architecture, and public planning in ways that blur and reinvigorate all three categories. So, while not all of his work is entirely successful as art, taken together, his work does engage the thorny problem of public sculpture in a provocative way."

Jerome Weeks

Weiss Responds:
Thanks for the long response. I sincerely appreciate your precise reading.

You are absolutely correct in disciplining me for not praising Slate.com for publishing and Mr. Petrovich for writing. The better the language around public art, the better the thinkers. Attracting better thinkers is my goal as I believe that public art contains some hidden attributes that are superior in shaping our cities relative to traditional architecture and landscape design.

Margaret Koscielny wrote:
"He uses Serra's Tilted Arc has an example of empty messages rather than the vast number of politically charged temporary artworks in New York City at the same time."

I did not read that from his comments, at all. I think the article was well done, although not as thorough as one might be in an art magazine, but it raised many interesting points, with examples.

From Julia
To me, the most exciting developments in permanent public sculpture are happening in memorial art in Europe. Political speech seems to be welcomed, and the denser the layers of imagery and concept, the better. They are necessarily not pretty--the monuments are not to heroes, but to victims, and are testaments to the darkest moments of human experience. And they are permanent, political, propagandistic, revolutionary AND civic. I challenge Mr. Petrovich to fit them into his reductionist schema.

I read this article a couple of days ago, and thought it was just silly.
It turns out, of course, the guy is a painter with an ax to grind, who writes well.
He seems to know little about sculpture, much less public art, and his writing could really use an editor.

Most of his grand statements just dont hold up to scrutiny.

For instance, there is no question in my mind that the Cloud Gate piece in Chicago exists for similar political propaganda reasons that his historical examples do. It may not be as overt, but it was commissoned and funded to prove political points about livability, new urbanism, urban renewal, and other things by the city of Chicago, not just as art for arts sake.
Most public art today has just as much political baggage- maybe not in the actual work, but in the reasons its there at all.

Historically, public sculpture was certainly "liberated" some time before World War 2- conceptually, it broke free of adulating popes and kings at the latest some time in the mid 1800's. Probably earlier.

And his whole concept of "ambivalence"- whats up with that?
Lets say you were a peasant in Egypt in 3000 BC, or in Java in 600 Ad, or Rome in 1700- do you really have any kind of a say in what the powers that be erect as public art? How would your opinion, as a rice farmer in Cambodia say, about Angor Wat, be any different from a NYC cab drivers about Tilted Arc?
Makes no sense to me.

The big money guys, whoever they may be at any time in history, pay for monuments to be erected. The peons learn to walk around them.
Serra or Sphinx, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

And what possible evidence does he offer that public sculpture is no longer "political, propagandistic, revolutionary, or even civic"?
I know of current pieces that are variations on all those themes, and mixes of them.

This guy just hasn't done his homework.