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  • From: Andrew Ross <andrewwross AT earthlink.net>
  • To: chpac-staff AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Chpac-staff] Fwd: Public Art
  • Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2004 18:31:27 -0500

Hey everyone. Here is another article that Anita found on Public Art. Just as a reminder, we have a new listserv that anyone on the commission can use to reach the ENTIRE commission. Just send your email to chpac-staff AT lists.ibiblio.org (add it to your address book to make it even easier).

Andrew

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Anita Wolfenden" <awolfenden AT mindspring.com>
Date: 10 January 2004 3:31:09 pm EST
To: "Andrew Ross" <andrewwross AT earthlink.net>, "Janet Kagan" <jkagan AT nc.rr.com>
Subject: Public Art

Andrew or Janet, would it be possible for you to send this out to the whole commission with one fell swoop?
I would appreciate it, thanks so much.
Anita
 
 
 
 
 

Public Art – that we love and hate.

 Article from Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, transl. by Anita Wolfenden.

 

(Sweden has had a percent for art program for at least 20 years – maybe much more - and it is not one percent but several percent – going into all public buildings. As a result Swedenhas wonderful public art textiles, sculpture, stone set squares with fountains, benches etc. Most of it is done very tastefully and most of it does not interfere with natural areas – it is usually art in cities and towns inside public buildings or on open public spaces like squares, plazas in front of buildings etc.)

 

During the last several years public art has increasingly been the subject of attacks – as if the art works represented the voice of authority. At the same time we begin to see a different kind of public art – which in itself is a sort of attack - on our customary way of looking at art.

 

One morning a small red cottage has been built right near the motor way as you enter the city. The news media are soon there to check out the mysterious new building project. Is it a protest against the building politics of the city authorities? Is it perhaps a call to a simpler natural life style?   A woman working at the museum of medical history says that she has seen the house being built. First she wondered how they even can build something up there on the mountain – and why? And who? When the local TV catches a couple of garments being hung on a clothes line in the minimal garden the builder is revealed: the graffiti artist Akay.

 

A couple of days later a hiker finds a row of shoes filled with butter on a mountain top in Jämtland (beautiful mountainous region within driving distance form Stockholm).  What does this mean – some drunks have been having fun? Students pulling a practical joke? The news about the butter filled shoes  spread across the world.  The local paper eventually poses the question if perhaps it is art?  Perhaps it is, was the answer from the curator of the modern museum. You can definitely say that it is, but whether it becomes accepted as art depends on those who look at it. Anybody can claim to make art but unless those who write about art decide that it is, it won’t become art, he says to the local paper.

 

A few days later an embarrassed artist confesses to the media that he was the person who put out the butter filled shoes.  It was a sketch, he said, I am so sorry I forgot to clean up after myself.

 

It looks like an acceptance of contemporary art. Suddenly there is a social acceptance of unexpected interference in both the urban and the natural environment. This interference can’t be characterized in any other way than as public art.

 

 It is a revolutionary change (inSweden).  You can ask the artists Gunilla Bandolin and Monika Gora who saw their sculpture in the square in Falkenberg being burnt, Bengt Lindström whose monumental Y outside the airport in Sandoval was threatened with bombs, or Lenny Carnal, whose T shaped sculpture in a traffic roundabout near Uppsalawas turned over and destroyed.  It follows a pattern: The irritated public takes action against what they see as an invasion of their spaces. The artists are seen as speaking with the voice of authority, unwanted intruders who use taxpayers’ money with careless nonchalance and a disregard for the general public.

 

Usually the official State Art Office takes the blow.  Every inauguration of a new public art project is accompanied by protests and vandalism from the public which is supposed to appreciate it.

 

There have been many recent public protests: Astrid Lindgren who died a year or two ago had said she didn’t want to be a statue and anyway a statue was done and placed in her home town.  A group not associated with the State Art Office put up a different memorial forAL , a simple fountain with a bronze head of a child.  Official protests by well known writers and cultural personalities have also been launched – a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg inStockholmcaused one writer to complain that he found the “stone snails” nauseating. He recommended that if one is to do a memorial to a known person to do one that is a real concrete portrait – in the Case or RW to show him the way he looked in Budapest in trench coat and hat, carrying his fat briefcase full of Swedish passports (to be used by the Jews he helped smuggle out). What he (the protesting writer) was asking for is a realistic portrait like one made last year by a famous woman artist (Marie-Louis Ekman)  of a beloved stage actress (Margareta Krook)– it is a sculpture that looks just like her and it is warm – heated with coils inside –  you can go up and feel her arm or her cheek and she feels alive.

 

The little red cottage at the entrance toStockholmchanges the notion of what people really want and expect of public art.  In contrast to modern sculpture featuring graffiti, found objects, abstract violent scenes and political protests, the minimalist cottage has a good chance of staying in the collective memory.

To some degree this has to do with the anonymous maker. Neither the cottage nor the butter filled shoes was a project approved by the bureaucrats inStockholm, but appears to emerge right from the collective soul of the population.  It has not cost the taxpayers any money at all and can be seen as a surprising, rather amusing aspect of the grey every day trudge.  They are here today and tomorrow the butter will have melted, moss grown over the shoes, while the cottage will have fallen apart into a pile of warped boards.  It is quite in line with the tendency of today’s art to move away from permanence and seriousness – fewer sculpture bases, fewer horse and riders,  more video installations and non permanent art in the urban environment. The official art office is getting the message and is more open towards experimental and short lived solutions than the permanent monuments of the old times in bronze and marble.

 

Perhaps there exists a possible road towards a reduction of the growing distrust between the general public and art.  Just like Lars Vilks, who with his project of drift wood on the southern coast eventually managed to get people excited about what he was doing (Vilks constructed huge piles, free form constructions/sculptures perched on the rocky outcroppings near the city ofMalmö. This was terribly controversial as the coast guard at first listed this as dangerous and an obstruction and then the police arrested Vilks saying that it was illegal, no building permit had been issued, and people generally thought it looked awful – at first. In the end a museum bought the entire project, dismantled it and took it to its own park). Even among the bureaucrats there now seems to be a dawning acceptance of spontaneous creative expressions in public spaces. 

 

It is a golden opportunity for public art in general, for the artists and for the public. But it demands that society shows some good will – that the little red cottage doesn’t get torn down, that the shoes on the mountain are allowed to remain until the snow falls, and that the official art we all pay for with our tax money won’t get defaced by graffiti or destroyed by vandals.

 

In the end it gets down to the fundamental idea of respect for creative activity and of the right of everyone to his/her own space in the shared public spaces – whether it is in the town square, on a mountain top or a cottage by the motor way.

 

 

 

 

Attachment: Butter filled shoes.doc
Description: MS-Word document

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Andrew Ross Photography & Video
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mobile: 919.260.7537
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  • [Chpac-staff] Fwd: Public Art, Andrew Ross, 01/10/2004

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