katealaurel

Most mornings, I skim the online edition of the New York Times while drinking a mug of tea. I’m usually not yet caffeinated enough– and thus not optimistic enough– to handle serious news, unless it hits very close to home, so I wind up doing the link-following equivalent of flipping through the editorials, the tech section, and the arts section.

Which is how I came across this extraordinarily dismissive and condescending article on abstract public art: “Well-Behaved Street-Corner Sculpture.” The author’s point– which is more than a little incoherent, but we’ll get to that later– seems to be that abstract public art is inferior to “traditional” figurative and monumental public art, status courtesy of its lack of “values.”

Right. For some reason, I thought we’d all moved on already from that particular chestnut. Maybe back in the ’80s.

Granted, I feel like I should preface my reaction by saying I’ve got a weird relationship with abstract art. My father is an artist of the most decidedly not abstract sort (can you tell where the mural ends and the diorama starts in that last?), and that fact has colored all my experiences with visual art. My background is deeply rooted in an obsession with realism, and affection for abstract art took somewhat longer to arrive.

Those biases aside, though, I think I can objectively say this: This article is unbelievably condescending. Even by New York Times standards.¹

Outdoor art isn’t what it used to be. Once it honored heroic individuals and upheld values that whole populations could embrace. Today, excepting memorials like the Vietnam veterans wall, outdoor art serves rather to divert, amuse and comfort.

When you start off your review– editorial– whatever the hell function this article was supposed to fill– with an ostensibly objective statement (it’s not what it used to be!) slathered in that thick a layer of disdain, well, it sets a certain tone. The kind of tone that makes sentences like

Judging by the reactions of passers-by and their clambering children, this infectiously cheerful work [Franz West's "The Ego and the Id"] is a popular attraction.

sound like scathing dismissals of infectious cheerfulness and popular happiness.

This disdain is set against the backdrop of what the author, Ken Johnson, holds up as an ideal example of public art: the statue of William Tecumseh Sherman across the street from Franz West’s work. To be honest, I rather like the sculpture, as much as possible when you’ve only seen a picture; I’m a sucker for turn-of-the-century figure stuff. But Johnson’s paean to the piece and to the sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, makes my skin crawl a little. Apparently Saint-Gaudens “displays a kind of traditional skill and idealism that practically no one possesses anymore.”

Apparently it’s that traditionalism that’s really the problem, because he goes on to say:

The big problem for outdoor art is the absence of any consensus of values in our pluralistic, multicultural society. It’s hard to imagine a public sculpture of a hero today that would not be regarded by one faction or another as partisan. As an unscientific sampling of art in the public realm this summer confirms, contemporary outdoor art tends to offer unobjectionable, mildly decorative or entertaining and relatively empty experiences.

Let’s pause here for a second.

First, this guy’s holding up a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman as an example of a public sculpture blessed by a consensus of values, a piece regarded universally as non-partisan and worthy of honor. Sherman was certainly an excellent general, and very much admired. But he helped pioneer the involvement of civilians in modern warfare, championing the “scorched earth” idea. And after the war, when in charge of military affairs west of the Mississippi, Sherman pursued vicious anti-Indian policies, including mass buffalo killings to make the Plains lifestyle insupportable and calling for “vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”

Maybe it’s just because I live in a, y’know, multicultural society, but I don’t find Sherman a wholly positive figure, whether or not the sculpture has artistic merit. The call for this to be an example of inspiring public art upholding American values is a little distressing.²

Second, I’m not convinced by the whole lack-of-public-heroes-in-modern-partisan-society line. Unless we’re looking for the easily acclaimed heroes who perform monumental services in everyday contexts (firefighters,³ teachers⁴), our public figures are no more controversial now than theirs were then. (I can think of about half of America that may have felt some controversy over that Sherman statue, after all.) Blaming differences of opinion on “pluralism” and “multiculturalism” is both argumentatively lazy and beside the point, and sets up an anti-multi-cultural (god, what a conglomeration) tone that’s fairly uncomfortable.

Ok, so we’ve established the bad taste in our mouths apparent by about halfway through the article. The rest of the piece is a lazy tour of scorn past several public art works in New York this summer, without much effort put into observation or criticism of any of them. Tara Donovan seems to escape relatively unscathed, which is good, given that she’s a wonderful artist (and a MacArthur genius award recipient). Her rolling, distorted landscapes of styrofoam cups, toothpicks, straws, pins, and plastic sheeting are fantastical and thoughtful; they actually achieve the “reminiscent of cells, organisms, natural world” -type praise that gets showered on so much abstract art these days. The article describes an installation of 2.5 tons of folded plastic sheeting, which Johnson concedes is “magical” (but also “more hallucinogenic than” the work of another artist dismissed in the piece as “psychedelic”).

“wall and door and roof,” part of a subgenre called “intervention” that I wasn’t previously familiar with and that Johnson brushes off as “one kind of public sculpture practiced by people who want to change the world … [that] subtly alters some existing structure to subvert perceived complacency,” doesn’t get off so lightly. The work apparently involves replacing actual aesthetic elements of City Hall with imitations (fake brick patterns, photocopied doors). Johnson calls it “feeble;” claiming that if the artist had gone further “it would have been something to see.” Wait, didn’t we just finish a big ideological statement about the “unobjectionable” nature of public art? I would have thought an attempt to “subvert perceived complacency” might go over well.

His parting shot, against a public social shelter and architectual/sculptural installation at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, claims that the piece “nicely exemplifies the inoffensive spirit of public art today” and calls it a “techno-primitive folly.”⁵ He seems to have been unable to find anything in particular to criticize about the piece, so he damned it with the faint praise (or anti-praise) of being “a treat for young, old, hip and square.”

All of which leaves the article (which ends on that limp note) feeling rather incoherent. In the opening paragraph, Johnson praises outdoor art in the old style, that “honored heroic individuals and upheld values that whole populations could embrace.” Yet he goes on to criticize contemporary public art for being “unobjectionable” and having an “inoffensive spirit.” Art that upholds values embraced by whole populations is, well, pretty inoffensive by definition– it’s praising exactly what everyone else is praising. If Johnson wants art of heroes and public values, he needs to stop complaining about “unobjectionable” so loudly.

Besides, if contemporary art were so unobjectionable, would Johnson be whining about it at length in the New York Times art section? I mean, he whines about Damien Hirst’s “Virgin Mother” in a parenthesis. His claim that “art lovers will be relieved” to hear the “hideous” statue has been removed leaves me wondering what flavor, exactly of “not inoffensive” he actually wants. Maybe most public art isn’t overtly challenging everyone’s sensibilities, but it’s bothering someone enough to engage with it publicly in the newspaper. In my book, that qualifies as getting over the “inoffensive” bar. Between the inconsistencies, the snide reactions, and the uncomfortable praise of “traditional” art, it’s completely unclear to me what Ken Johnson actually does want from his public art. Except, maybe, something less “those kids,” “these days,” and “on my lawn.”

1: Sorry, NYTimes, I love you, but it’s true.
2: And on top of that, there’s the uncomfortable dog-whistle-like feeling of this note:

On a recent sunny day there were lots of people on the plaza in front of the [sculpture of Sherman], but most were watching a group of athletic young men performing gymnastic dance feats to loud hip-hop music. It seemed a safe bet that no one there knew or cared who the man on the horse was or who made the sculpture that honors him.

Really? Really?
3: When they’re not involved in discrimination lawsuits.
4: When they’re not battling teachers’ unions.
5: And again with the awkward, uncomfortable stereotypes: “The whole thing resembles the roofing of a South Pacific king’s palatial hut.”