Is Aesthetic Appreciation a Private Affair?

The Case of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc.

How great a voice should the

public itself have in choosing

public art? Consider:

A Device to Root Out Evil

Urban River

I See What You Mean

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b60HPG0tBKg

• Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada• Date: first exhibited in the 1997• Architect (artist): Dennis Oppenheim• More info: It was too hot for New York City; too

hot for Stanford University. But a controversial, imposing sculpture by renowned international artist Dennis Oppenheim finally found a public home in laid-back Vancouver.

• A country church is seen balancing on it’s steeple, as if it had been lifted by a terrific force and brought to the site as a device or method of rooting out evil forces.

• The urban river was created by Henk Hofstra in Drachten, The Netherlands. The blue road installation features about 1000 metres (.5 miles) of road painted blue and the phrase ‘Water is Life’ written in an eight metre (26 feet) high letters across it. This project took 4000 litres (264 gallons) of paint and cost 75,000 Euros ($100,000).

• This piece is called "I See What You Mean." It's a steel sculpture, encased in a fiberglass and cement composite, by artist Lawrence Argent.

“The primary problem with most public art, both contemporary and historical, is invisibility.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=evHYwAFIxmU

While critics cannot offer reasons that prove their

conclusions, some critics can direct other people’s

attention to the valuable (or defective) aspects of any

work.

Is there a place for critical debate for appeals to values that are not strictly aesthetic values?

• Kant said, when we are truly experiencing aesthetically, the nature of this experience compels us to suppose that the object would be experienced by others in a similar way.

• Aesthetic value cannot be the result of applying rules, principles, or generalizations...critical judgment was not a product of the imagination.

• As such, both the process of creating art and the process of evaluating it must differ greatly from the unimaginative procedures stressing repetition and reason that characterize everyday practical thinking.

• So...to resolve cases like the Tiled Arc, two stages of justification may be required: justifying the method of arriving at critical judgments may have to precede justifying the critical judgments themselves.

• Judgment as recommendation?

A Modest Proposal

for relocating an important sculpture so as to prevent it from being a burden to the citizens of NEW YORK, and for making it once again beneficial to the public (this time in PHILADELPHIA)

       

Philadelphia can justly take pride in the richness and variety of its public art. Indeed, Sculpture magazine saw fit to inaugurate its American Sculpture Tour series by visiting Philadelphia, a city, according to author-guides Marsha Moss and Robin Rice, whose "dominant creative energy is in its public art, from traditional to 'over the edge' and from permanent to ephemeral." As Penny Bach demonstrates in her excellent survey of public art in the city, over the years "Philadelphia has acquired great examples of public art created by many of the world's most distinguished artists."

Particularly fine are the city's monumental bronze castings including Alexander Stirling Calder's Swann Memorial Fountain and Rudolph Siemering's Washington Monument in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as more intimately scaled works such as Billy, Albert Laessle's charming goat in Rittenhouse Square. And, of course, although not publicly-sited in the traditional sense, there are the world-famous sculptures of the Rodin Museum located but a particularly gifted stone thrower's distance from the art museum. (Populists please note: Rocky, originally at the top of the Museum of Art steps, has been relocated to the sports complex in South Philadelphia.)

Robert Engman's mighty TRIUNE, survivor of the fire and subsequent demolition of One Meridian Place opposite Philadelphia City Hall

Predictably, installation recently of a new larger-than-life bronze sculpture of controversial ex-city mayor and police commissioner Frank Rizzo on the steps of the Municipal Services Building has set off a round of obligatory reflections on public art. Even the Philadelphia Inquirer got involved, asking readers who they would like to see memorialized in metal.

(Among those proposed: swimmer Joe Verdeur, Iraqi conflict prisoner-of-war Navy Lt. Jeffrey N. Zaun, and Christie Todd Whitman, governor of New Jersey and now EPA administrator.) Controversial and contradictory in real life, the giant figure of Rizzo strangely lacks dynamism, and, according to one writer, appears "incapable of fusing all the memories and images of life with Rizzo and presenting them in a way that invites and exploits public contemplation." Placed with his back to Jacques Lipchitz's monumental

pile, Government of the People, Rizzo sits above the costly commuter tunnel he championed and across the way from the plaza commemorating another mayor, Richardson Dilworth, with whom Rizzo famously did not get along. But already the collective memory is fading and heavy-metal Rizzo risks becoming just another "bulky figure you have to get around to pay your property taxes."  So it's unlikely that this conventional statue is of anything but local interest, or will do much to push publicly-sited art in Philadelphia in new directions. Quite the contrary: it's a celebration of the aesthetic status quo.   

Despite a rich heritage of what might be described as classical nineteenth century public art, Philadelphia lacks truly imposing modern sculpture. Claus Oldenburg's Clothespin is much beloved, but its overwhelming anthropomorphic form coupled with its isolation on a giant pedestal emerging from the depths of a subway stairwell dilutes its aesthetic power. Through sheer carelessness Philadelphia lost Ellsworth Kelly's early large-scale abstract of colored anodized aluminum panels, Sculpture for a New World (1957), which once adorned the city's downtown transportation center.

According to art critic Edward Sozanski, the placement of Alexander Calder’s 39-foot high stabile, Eagle, on the east terrace of the Art Museum overlooking the city is a “magnificent example of modern sculpture married to a site that seems tailor-made for it.” However, this “rare and sublime conjunction” did not last long: Eagle, it turned out, was on loan to the city for only six months.

But Philadelphia can make a name for itself--perhaps even attract some tourists and dollars--by getting really adventurous about public art, something that most cities including Gotham to the north seem amazingly reluctant to do. Most of the time public art amounts to little more than historical or civic lessons in three dimensions--generals on horseback, archbishops delivering sermons, or (as we see in the case of Philadelphia) ex-mayors hailing taxicabs: these are sculptures

guaranteed not to offend. When abstraction does make a public appearance, it is rarely anything more adventurous than a steel cube balanced on a corner point, an island around which pedestrian or vehicular traffic typically circulates in blissful indifference.   

Daniel Martinez, Renee Petropoulis and Roger White, YOUR MOVE, current occupier of Thomas Paine Plaza

Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised. According to the survey of popular aesthetic preferences in Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid's Painting By Numbers, Americans generally hate abstract art; indeed, whereas nearly half the population claims never to have heard of Jackson Pollock (MoMA please note), only 7% say they are unfamiliar with Norman Rockwell.

Once city officials and urban planners get involved in public art, well, we're lucky to get a few stone benches, defunct fountains and dying shrubbery planters decorating our grandest public spaces. Bowing to the way people say they now use public spaces for relaxing, eating, and strolling, public art is more and more reduced to "public furniture filling empty spaces."To reverse this insistent banality and inject a bit of energy into public art, I propose Philadelphia offer the Municipal

Services Building plaza just north of City Hall as a new home for Richard Serra's magnificent poem in steel, Tilted Arc. As you recall, this striking public artwork by one of America's foremost sculptors originally called New York its home but was ignominiously removed from its site at the Federal Plaza after years of bitter debate, rigged popularity contests, and cheap media jokes.  Apparently the installation's utter disregard of the market place (Tilted Arc was bolted to the substructure of the plaza, thus celebrated

the fact that it couldn't be moved or sold) coupled with deliberate rejection of the conventions of public art (completely devoid of narrative elements, it wasn't obviously beautiful, nor did it tell a happy tale of historic triumph or cultural harmony) and its tendency to interfere with pedestrian traffic (you had to walk around it) upset bureaucrats in nearby office buildings. Several officials launched a campaign, eventually successful, to remove this federally commissioned work from the site for which Serra had so carefully designed it. 

At public hearings Tilted Arc was accused, among other things, of being a rusting pile of junk, promoting totalitarianism, and causing public nuisances such as graffiti, litter, and rats in buildings; incredibly, some claimed it promoted crime by impeding police surveillance, even served as a potential blast wall to concentrate effects of terrorist bombings, thus spookily anticipating transformation of the city into today’s frontline of perpetual war. Surely the extraordinary range of these objections

was alone reason enough to give pause and preserve the work for posterity as a great New York curiosity. However, on the night of March 15, 1989, Tilted Arc was removed --"destroyed" claims Serra -- and packed off to a Brooklyn warehouse where it languishes to this day. The chances of  this extraordinary work seeing the light of day again in “zero-tolerance" New York are, well, zero... which is where Philadelphia comes in.

Although Serra created Tilted Arc specifically for the Manhattan site, perhaps he could be persuaded to oversee the sculpture's relocation to Philadelphia. After all, the Municipal Services Building plaza--officially the Thomas Paine Plaza--is a dead ringer for the Federal Plaza complex in Manhattan. Both are concrete wildernesses surrounded by civic buildings executed in a hodgepodge of architectural styles; they are hard sterile places  with which people don't know what to do. Currently the plaza in Philadelphia is home

to Your Move, a collaborative work by Daniel Martinez, Renee Petropoulis and Roger White consisting for the most part of over-sized chess, domino, and other board game pieces (bolted down to prevent over-eager game players casting them into traffic). As regards architecture of the site, we find the brutalism of the Municipal Services Building in (strained) conversation with both the enormous beaux-arts city hall across the street and the more "directly expressed" late

modernist towers of the Penn Center Complex in the distance. (Here I draw on language from the Foundation for Architecture's excellent guide to Philadelphia’s architecture.) Clearly, only a rigorously conceived and executed public sculpture can hope to quiet this cacophony.    

Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture presiding over Love Park, skateboarders' paradiseWhat would Philadelphia get by offering a home for Titled Arc? For starters, a gorgeous 120 foot long, 12 foot high curved sweep of Cor-Ten steel slightly tipped to one side: something abstract, tough, and uncompromising. Something utterly useless, too, which, like a building, you can't see over and you've gotta walk around; something you can't ignore; something you've got to love before it will love you back. In other words, Tilted Arc  

is pure Philadelphia (the city that claims to “love you back” according to a recent promotional campaign).  Not only that, but as incredible as it might sound, this rusting wall (it takes quite a while for Cor-Ten steel to oxidize to a uniform deep brown--in the meantime the surface blotches and peels) offers as well possibilities for the philosophical enlightenment and existential liberation of the citizenry. Since we usually subsist on a diet of retinal art and modestly-scaled pedestal sculpture, it's a little complicated

but the argument is as follows: The concave side of Tilted Arc (the side that leans over) forms an elementary "anti-environment" (Serra's term), a place for contemplation and self-discovery; on the other hand, the convex side (which falls away as you walk or look down it) forces (whoops! better "invites") the intrepid pedestrian to take note of his or her surroundings. In other words, Tilted Arc isn't so much a static, boring thing to be absorbed at a glance, or simply ignored;

rather, since it transcend the fogs, follies and compromises which make up the taken-for-granted grayness of our lives. Despite its size and austere appearance, the sculpture is alive, dynamic! Revolution begins at home... or at least on the way to the office.

Another thing: Tilted Arc's impressive lateral sweep would nicely offset the verticality of nearby Clothespin,  Philadelphia's principal pop art icon. Together with Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture located in its own park at

at the head of the Ben Franklin Parkway and Robert Engman’s Triune, grand survivor of the One Meridian Place skyscraper fire and subsequent demolition, Tilted Arc would thus complete an aesthetic "Bermuda triangle” of contemporary public sculpture powerful enough to draw folks in from miles around. Imagine: one of the most written and talked about public sculptures of this century resurrected in Philadelphia! Indeed, Europeans, who appear to appreciate Serra far more than we do,

might flock here in such numbers that British Airways would have to add an extra flight. More ominously, New Yorkers and Chicagoans would now be compelled to make that long-delayed trip to Philadelphia.

What might convince Serra to take Philadelphia's offer seriously? The city can always promise to designate Tilted Arc an "historic object," a category of public art recently invoked to prevent the removal ("demolition" in legal jargon) of Maxfield

Parrish's Dream Garden--second largest Tiffany mosaic in the world--from the lobby of the Curtis Building adjacent to Independence Hall. (The fate of Dream Garden is only recently settled. For a long time, lawyers for the estate which owns the work independently of the building continued to fight for its demolition and sale. Such a designation would forever prevent the re-removal of Tilted Arc even should privatization mania render civic government, public spaces and the Municipal Services Building obsolete.

Oh, one last thing. As I see it, the only obstacle to this plan to make Philadelphia public art capital of the United States is the presence of Frank Rizzo and his oversized game piece and domestic appliance chums now scattered about this prime piece of public art real estate. They would have to go. After all, they belong in a museum.