On October 29, 2009 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, five public art professionals gathered together at the University of the Arts for a conversation about some fundamental and enduring questions surrounding the public art field. The conversation was moderated by Aaron Levy and took place during the 50th anniversary celebration for Philadephia's percent-for-art program.
Aaron Levy is the founding executive director of the Slought Foundation. Artist Dennis Oppenheim has exhibited his works internationally in galleries and museums since the 1960s. Since the mid-1990’s his work has become larger in scale and permanent, fusing sculpture and architecture. Andrea Blum, a full professor at Hunter College, has been making social sculpture for permanent and temporary projects in Europe and the United States since 1983. Damon Rich is a designer and artist, and currently serves as the urban designer and waterfront planner for the City of Newark, New Jersey. Adelina Vlas is the assistant curator for modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Aaron Levy: We can begin 50 years ago, in March 1959, when the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Philadelphia established the “percent-for-art” program under Chairman Michael von Moschzisker. The first program in the United States of its kind, it required redevelopers of public land to devote 1 percent of construction costs to the fine arts. In December 1959, the Philadelphia City Council under Mayor Richardson Dilworth gave it legal authority when it passed an ordinance calling for 1 percent of all City building costs to be dedicated solely for the purpose of “Fine Arts,” including sculptures, monuments, murals, mosaics, bas relief, stained glass, and fountains. In his testimony to the National Conference of Editorial Writers, Mr. Von Moschzisker later argued that “Experts now find that beauty increases productivity. It necessarily follows that true functionalism in man-made edifices must include artistic expression. Sterility and her handmaiden, monotony, must be banished.” Percent for art programs emerged, according to Von Moschzisker, to humanize the austerity and deficiencies of the urban landscape through aesthetic maneuvers. But it is also the case that they were also part of an economic agenda designed to increase “productivity.”
Public art, then, has always been implicated by social circumstances, political and economic considerations, and public needs. And yet, when we talk today about the quantifiable benefit of the arts, it nevertheless raises the specter of art’s instrumentalization—the reduction of creativity to mere economic calculus. Today we can no longer continue to justify our cultural programs on account of financial considerations or measured benefits, as if they were a quantifiable element or service to be simply assessed. We also hear much talk today about the need for public artworks to respond not just to the particular site in which they are located, but also to the changing urban conditions and socioeconomic challenges that surround them. In the face of such expectations, it is perhaps no wonder that public aspirations surrounding the importance of public art are increasingly tempered, and the idealism with which these programs were once associated is questioned. If we think about public art in the years ahead, beyond its normative definitions, beyond the traditional sculptural forms that we are so familiar with, and even beyond its administrative components—well, what should be its form, function, and role? Do we need more works of public art or do we need new forms of “art” and new forms of “public engagement”?
Regardless of how we engage this problematic, questions nevertheless persist and conflicts erupt. How, for instance, can the public be invited into the work, but also encouraged to respect the importance of risk and experimentation in generating inventive forms of public art? Our culture is always in conflict, but somehow our public art is not allowed to be. It is important to recall that when we look back on the past 50 years of public art, some of the most interesting works were in their time inherently provocative, while others were disappointments. Success was not written on every work at its moment of inception. How can we accept, then, the complex task of assessing success and the importance of mistakes?
Tonight's event seeks to explore these and related questions through the perspectives each speaker brings to the table. The purpose of this event is to think not about our past work but to consider instead the direction the field is taking, and the directions that we would like it to pursue. In so doing, we seek to affirm the past 50 years by exploring the next 50 years.
My first question to the panel will be: How do you define your “public”? Is the work that you do engaging an existing public, namely, a temporally and spatially associated group of strangers, or is it addressed to one that you would like your work to generate, to make possible? Is it something that changes with time, just as our relationship to particular works of public art seem to change over time?
Andrea Blum: I’m not sure I know. It’s about the process of how I approach work, in which every context has different players and a different content. If you’re designing a library, it’s people who are going to read. If it’s a bedroom, its people who are going to sleep. If it’s at 40th Street in Philadelphia (where I was commissioned by the percent-for-art program to generate a work), well, frankly I think you could put anything in that spot and people will sit on it. In this respect it has nothing to do with me, it’s just mutable.
In this sense, I don’t think that there is a public. I know that when I go to a site, I see how people are moving about it. I’m an outsider, a voyeur. I’m checking things out. And I respond to it as just one voice. I have no idea what the public is, except for those individual moments when I’m there looking at it, and from those moments you deduce a sense about an environment which can be right or wrong. A public is for me never specific.
One thing I particularly like about the 40th Street location is that people come and go—you know, they’re heading towards public transportation, they’re going to the university, they’re approaching the stores across the street. It’s a real mix-place, and knowing that, in that project for 40th Street I tried to design a project that would somehow reflect that. I hoped that it would give access to what someone might need at a certain moment in time.
Dennis Oppenheim: That one’s a problem question to me because what we perceive as the public’s lack of experience with art becomes one of the defining problems of public art. We are all under the belief that the public is not the public that goes to museums, that they are not enlightened art enthusiasts, and that they are in fact individuals for whom art does not enter into their life at all. From the beginning, these assumptions have orchestrated the way we would traverse the course to an artwork. Things have, I hope, changed considerably now.
The last part of your question, that asks whether one would change the operating definition of art somewhat, so as to deal with the ramifications of a public, sounds a little bit like what you would do for a museum. I mean, it shows that you would manipulate your art in certain ways. There are those who believe that public art should change the behavior of the circulation around it. That’s an interesting statement for me to hear, that public art can change the public's behavior, because that influence becomes a kind of instrument which you don’t always relegate towards fine art. You don’t always say when you walk into a museum that a person’s behavior is going to be changed, because public art is operating on more of a physical plane, and behavior is something that one would determine by physically reacting to a phenomenon.
Damon Rich: Back in the early 2000s, I was a building super in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. About every day for four weeks or so, somebody would slip these pink cards underneath the door. It was about as much text as you could fit on a little 4x6 pink card, and the gist of it was that a building inspector, or a fire inspector, was going to come to your building, and you shouldn’t ignore this person. The reason that you shouldn’t ignore this person, the card explained, is because all of the laws that these people are being sent to uphold are to benefit the public.
For me, at least, it made me think a lot about who these people are, and what kind of institutional structure brings this public into being. I tried to figure out what places I could go to in order to learn about the public, to know who they were. I thought maybe going to public hearings would be a good idea. Some of the public hearings I went to didn't have many people in attendance, if any at all—even though it’s a public hearing, that doesn’t mean you can really find a lot of public there.
So a lot of the things that I’ve been really interested in doing are about understanding that process by which a public is constituted—a specific public. There’s a great essay by the artist Martha Rossler, written in the early 1970s, in which she talks a lot about her own art education and her feeling that when you were trained as an artist you were taught not to think about your audience. And she speaks out pretty strongly against this, as being exactly an effort to depoliticize the process of making things in that context. Long before I ever read that, I became interested in how a person becomes a member of the public through education, through acting in some kind of public way. Somehow the idea is that one becomes a member of the public when you just kind of decide you want to say “I’m the public.” I’ve been really interested in trying to make situations where people feel the security to make that claim, to make that jump into being the public.
Adelina Vlas: When I heard the question and the term public art, it made me think of how, lately, that term is avoided by artists; we hear more of socially engaged practices, or community-based practices, where we are trying to broaden the definition of public art in order to address the very issues that are inherent in its name.
Levy: Public art has to withstand the many demands that are brought to bear on it. How can we think about public art in a way that acknowledges the complexity of the process that gives rise to it but also the public sphere—its messiness, but also the public's impossible expectations?
Oppenheim: Art is supposed to be in advance of many things. We're taught that it's a mechanism, in this respect a little like science and philosophy, but different in that it can be paradoxical and perverse, more than science permits. It's a mechanism to interrogate, and certainly it can interrogate its surroundings and justify how it places itself within them. Most of this comes from fine art.
I’m always thinking of fine art as a way of discussing public art, but it’s different in certain ways, and I also wonder if those differences have to be so strong. I think my way of answering this question is to stress this aspect of art’s general ability to penetrate. Public art is often seen as something lighter, and as more democratic than what is supposed to be the elitist posture of fine art. These aptitudes, its lightness and lack of criticality, make it a lesser art form.
If one wants to explore a displacement here, one would think of the time in which bstract expressionism was overthrown by pop art. The abstract expressionists didn’t feel, themselves, as if they were overturned. They still felt that they were doing legitimate work that had a life, and perhaps it did. But a lot of the younger people felt that pop art was disproving the legitimacy of abstract expressionism.
Fine art can be overthrown—just as public art can be overthrown—if people begin to see that public art is operating, as pop art did, on a different plane, on a more developed, a more mature, a more enlightened plane. At that point, public art, instead of being relegated to the back of the room, is all of a sudden in front of fine art with its functionality, its design element, and with its gentle attitude of posture and nuance. And at that point things will change drastically. All of a sudden, these questions about circulation, proximity to one’s public, and the importance of doing things for a public—the questions we are discussing concerning the social order and even politics—all of this stuff would cohere into a higher plane.
Getting people involved always seemed to be a big labor for the ethereal landscape of pure art, where one practices like a scientist in your studio. Finally getting out of that by starting to test aspects of functionality and design, and move fine art in a new direction by displacing it into the public sector—well, this kind of mechanism has brought us all into the domain of the architect. And all of a sudden we have begun to respect this art form, one which it’s always been alleged is a “higher” art form than sculpture.
Rich: Maybe one of the things we're talking about is clients. I'm trained less as an artist and more as a designer and an architect. Yet I have learned some things from artists. One is the difference in attitude towards a client. By this point in time we have a long history of contemporary art that celebrates not necessarily what one might call complicity, but rather embeddedness—an art that celebrates not being plop art, which is a term of degradation I often hear toward what people often call bad public art.
There is arguably a longer history in architecture, however, about finding ways to make peace with the fact that there is a client, and the fact that there are other exigencies driving what you're making, rather than the notion of a pure, unmediated spirit that flows through you as an artist. I've always felt free to celebrate that complicity. I feel like I've had good teachers who taught me that the most progressive thing in that situation is to acknowledge one's complicity, rather than, say, having corporate funding behind your project and worrying about it. This acknowledgment maybe even goes beyond what became known as institutional critique in the early 1970s where—while I think it was really necessary at the time—a really vehement, sardonic approach developed towards the use of culture by corporate agendas such as those you were referring to, Aaron.
Today there is a revised notion about cultural production. Instead of questioning who is producing it, we acknowledge that no one agent is producing this sense of public. We're in a situation today where there are multiple power centers. However we're fitting in to this picture, whether as people who are producing public art, or ones that simply interact in these larger social systems in whatever way, there's always what I think of as that critical moment, where one has an analysis and an understanding of that complicated terrain, and develops a real notion of audience objectives. And I feel like that understanding certainly goes against some very old-fashioned, art for arts’sake discussions, or attempts at keeping the arts at arm’s length, away from politics and political practices.
Blum: I'm curious to know why you all started to work like this. In my case, I was making stuff that was too big to be just for myself. I figured that someone else has to participate in this work that I was making on some level. At the same time, at a certain point it stops being fun—with so much of this bureaucracy around public art, it stops being enjoyable. And I don't want to not have fun in my life.
I think what's happened recently, in the case of Damon's work and others, is that this attitude of fun-ness is starting to come back. By this I mean that there's a return towards combining a smart disposition with a seriousness, an energy, and a desire to have pleasure. I look at Damon's work and people like him, and I think, well, that's totally brilliant. I don't know if you feel this way, Dennis, but I sometimes feel bogged down. My experience working with Susan Davis and the University of Pennsylvania here in Philadelphia was sheer pleasure, but it's not always fun, and in fact it’s often very depressing. And when it's depressing, I think it's time to check out, regardless of the politics around it, on your own personal account. Dennis, how did your relationship to public art start?
Oppenheim: I was going to make a comment about the level of pain that could be attributed to doing public art. I don't know if it's any more than working with galleries and museums, I really don't. I've worked obviously with both, and I think it's a toss-up.
But it's a different kind of pain, it's a different order of discomfort, but nevertheless it permeates both working situations strenuously. You develop a new kind of perspective on architects. Thirty years ago we used to really downplay architects because we, being "fine artists," would say that they're labored by the fact that their work has to be postured, it has to take into consideration people.
But people never entered into most conceptual art. I mean, they didn't really enter into it in a big way. They certainly didn't enter into it before that, during abstract expressionism or anything like that. Getting people involved always seemed to be a big labor for the ethereal landscape of pure art, where one practices like a scientist in your studio. Finally getting out of that by starting to test aspects of functionality and design, and move fine art in a new direction by displacing it into the public sector, well, this kind of mechanism has brought us all into the domain of the architect. And all of a sudden we have begun to respect this art form, one which it's always been alleged is a "higher" art form than sculpture. What I'm obviously involved with now is public art, which is to say an alignment to the architect and this world of difficulties, codes, and restraints—these things that simply are not taught in art school when you're studying fine art.
Vlas: It's true that bureaucracy and process tend to become counterproductive and take the fun out of things, no matter what end of the line you are. Speaking as someone who is just now starting to tackle the public realm in my work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, maybe in many years I'll have a different opinion. But I think that in the challenges that come your way, as a facilitator of the projects that are going to happen in the sculpture garden, I feel like those challenges become opportunities. You start to think how you can jump the hurdles and think creatively and try to make opportunities out of the challenges.
As you probably know, the museum is going through an expansion process that is happening in phases. We opened a new building two years ago, and the next phase of that project is working on a parking garage camouflaged by our sculpture garden. The sculpture garden is in fact a rooftop garden, and it was opened to the public in September of this year. Our first challenge was to present in that new space, because we have not collected works that are suited for the outdoors. So that was the first challenge presented to us. And thinking in terms of this new space as a sort of outdoor gallery, we decided to program them accordingly. The first installment is a group of five sculptures on loan from the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City. It's occupying one level, the upper terrace of the sculpture garden, while the lower level of the sculpture garden remains empty for now. We have added a few works from our collection, and we're slowly trying to populate that space, but because we don't have a lot of public works in our collection we're trying to start thinking creatively.
So we're thinking about commissioning artists, and working in collaboration with other institutions, and in so doing to generate an engaging space. But we also want to activate that space in a way that is different from our galleries, one that at the same time allows us to address a new audience.
Levy: What are the ways that you each define a successful project and evaluate a work of public art? Is it in terms of how it activates the space, or mitigates the deficiencies of the urban landscape, whether the community is proud of it, and so on? Are you ever at a point where you can say a project worked or not? Is success something that you arrive at over time, through constant modification of an initial creative act?
Oppenheim: Well, first of all, one can define success and failure in terms of the percentage of public commissions that one applies for and loses. As an individual, you really dwell on that and begin to wonder if something is out of sync. I remember once being at a discussion of architects, where I mentioned that some people think that the best works are rejected. Of course you don’t want to hear that if you're working for SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Agency) a lot, but some of the architects felt that this had a certain probability. There's a lot of suspicion regarding the process in which one engages when in pursuit of these public pieces. One is that the artist is surreptitiously inspired to pull punches, to slacken the risk factor. I was going to pull up my work Jump and Twist, for instance. I suppose it's probably similar to the way that you would look back late in your career and point out a few things that you feel are successful. Jump and Twist was put in front of the microtechnology building at the University of Freiburg, in Germany. I use this as an example of something that worked, because it was an attempt to align the sculpture with what one could analyze as being the most important feature of the building's use as a site of highly advanced microtechnology and theoretical considerations.
I am quite sure you can't get a more cerebral architectural environment. I chose to address that by showing a piece in three parts that metamorphoses. Outside the building, as you see it here, it's heavy. It looks like it's some kind of combination of a habitat and insect. The second stage literally penetrates the membrane of the building, which I considered like the cranium—the inside and outside of the mind. And then as it gets inside, it metamorphoses even more, and in the third stage it's completely deconstructed, it's hanging and spinning. I'm trying to align public art with some perceived sense of what the place is like. Now, our discussion of the audience and whether they're going to get this piece or not—frankly, this method is more familiar to the way I function as a fine artist. It's somewhat aligned with concepts, with conceptually based work, and how you travel into a work. But this is something different, it’s a public work, and it is functioning in the building, and it does seem to me, more than many of my other works, to have this sort of relative congruency with the features of the architecture.
Levy: Should the community be engaged in the process of creating public art, or should the community be engaged by the finished work? the end of the day, how do we get the public to buy into the work? How, as artists, curators, and professionals, can we navigate this impossible tension? Damon, you’re the urban designer for the city of Newark, so you have to assess daily how public art can serve quantifiable, measurable outcomes. In your work at the Center for Urban Pedagogy, on the other hand, you seem to be somewhat skeptical of that planning perspective and aspire to respond to its deficiencies. How do you straddle these divergent positions?
Rich: Right now in Newark there is an attempt being made to set up a public art system, similar to the one functioning here in Philadelphia. I’m really a novice at this kind of work, but I think of it as building a machine. You have a machine, and you want to build it, but you don’t want it to be dependent on a singular artist, or a singular way of doing public art, so it has to be a capacious machine that can take up many different kinds of intentions. But as someone who’s been on the artist side, the idea of a public art commission whose job is to ensure the delivery of good art—well, that's always been mind-boggling and difficult for me. Not that it doesn't seem possible, but imagining how one builds a machine to produce successful public art is really challenging.This is where institutions become critically important, and this is where some of the messiness that you’re talking about gets swept under the rug. We act as arts administrators, our heads need to be working differently than when we are artists. The question is how to be productive and critical at the same time.
One recent example from my own practice is the exhibition Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center at the Queens Museum of Art. It’s a pretty amazing institution in New York City, not least of all because it is the only museum I’ve ever worked with that has someone on staff in a position called “community organizer”—which is in the context of a museum, a really new concept, and one that seems really exciting.
The installation I made was a sort of playground for adults. I tried to take some of the abstractions that we hear about in the news concerning the economic crash, and how it relates to actual houses, and I tried to make that physical. That was really my focus in the project. But the most amazing thing happened when the museum came and said, “You know, we do some educational programs, and we do some other public programs around exhibitions. What do you think we should do? ” And I said, “Let’s do some things in the museum and in the neighborhoods.” We had a housing advocate “thank-you party” with free drinks for housing advocates and a public discussion with urban historian, Kenneth Jackson and housing activists Sarah Ludwig and Michelle O’Brien.
We also organized off-site programs, insofar as not everyone, and especially not every neighborhood, has good access to this museum. The museum picked two neighborhoods in Queens that are particularly grappling with the housing crash and predatory subprime lending. Alexandra Garcia, the community organizer at the Queens Museum, built working relationships with a dozen organizations in each of those neighborhoods. These organizations, the museum, and I collaborated on a events in two neighborhoods where we had a public discussion followed by tabling where people could get individual advice and services. And it was the fortitude and diligence of these partners that allowed that work to happen.
Blum: I think you also bring up something that’s really exciting, which is that public art doesn’t have to manifest itself today in the form of what I’ve done in the past, or what you’ve done, or what other people have done. It can sort of seep in between the cracks. And these things don’t have to be so expensive.
A long time ago, I was in a show in Paris and the curator had one artist do the message on the phone machine, another artist do the filing cabinet, another do something around the outside of the gallery, and another person the hangers. It was work that was totally invisible—there were 33 artists in a space about the size of this table. But it was exhilarating because we didn’t have to be so macho about it. I think that sort of subliminal sense of art, where it creates a liaison between people who are more experienced with art, but also an actual public, in a manner that is not so mystified or hierarchical, is crucial. We have to develop public art in this direction, through programs that do not have such a strong regime of “This is a site, now do something on the site.” We have to create creative institutions, not just a project of locating aesthetic things in public space according to the maxim “This must be art, this must be art, this must be art.”
Levy: How can we value and encourage temporary gestures and forms of engagement in public art, inclusive of participation and education?
Blum: Public art has to be educational. But this is where it gets messy because we’re asked to do something drastic, and it’s like we’re Obama, who is expected to fix everything in the world in six months. It ain’t gonna happen, because it takes a while. As public artists, we’re asked to come in and make everything okay. But we can’t do it, that’s not our job. What is our job? To work with the people who invite us to think with them about their community and with their community, with people who ask us to participate so that they have the possibility of expanding their offerings. But all this requires an educational system, which means giving actual money to a public school system. And it’s not our job to make things right—we just can’t do it.
Rich: Although that is where it gets interesting. Being pretty ignorant about the history of Philadelphia’s percent-for-art program, but being somewhat conversant in the ways that art gets used in public policy conversations, it is very interesting that the cultural affairs department of the city has been renamed, partly at least, as the Creative Economy. It’s clearly a sign of the times. I wonder sometimes if this notion of dispersion, that somehow the artistic practice in the public sphere should be put into a lot of different forms—not on a podium, or necessarily even in outdoor public spaces—if that actually ends up undercutting more widely supported notions of why in the world our tax money should go to art in the first place. The desire to go beyond the traditional notion of pristine art and explore these new and exciting other forms of engagement must be patient to keep pace with the dreams and desires of the communities it wishes to engage.
That being said, it’s important to note that collaboration is often a mythology, one in which everyone supposedly gets in the bathtub together and everything develops logically from there. But in these cases it’s often just a big mush, and not a situation where there's a recognition of the individuals involved and what they are each bringing to the table.
Blum: It's not an either-or situation where there's a particular way to proceed, because it has to be all. I don't think separating people who make large-scale outdoor work from those that engage more community-driven definitions of public art is the answer, or that we need to call into question the validity of either of these approaches. The whole process has to be more creative, and the way it gets more creative is when you think about it in ways that involve education.
Rich: I have a sense that what you're getting at is education in a pretty open sense of that word. Education as a metaphor for the “non-coercive rearrangement of desires." It's a way of interacting with people. I assume yours is not a disciplinary model of education, where you get it right or you get whacked on the knuckles.
This is exciting, and it is a notion that resonates with the epiphanies I had in my youth about how a public is constituted, and how one can have a proactive approach towards the public one is trying to reach. One cannot just say, "It's for the public, now enjoy it." One actually has to think—and to imagine, actually. One has to imagine the public that one is trying to constitute, or to alter, or to infiltrate, in the way that one is working.
Oppenheim: You know, when exhibitions are designed the way we're talking now, they're disappointing because they're led so much by intellect, and they're led so much by a supposition of the way things are shaped that the product that follows in their wake is unsuccessful. But art doesn't necessarily work in the way that we're talking. It's circuitous and it's perverse, as it should be.
I don't know if an advanced state of public art is going to culminate in that kind of social order. Although it is extremely interesting: You think you're going to have advanced art schools in time, and so you're going to preach this rearrangement to get to that point, you're going to advocate for this other way of thinking. And then all of a sudden you're going to have visual students operating on this almost managerial, somewhat sociological level, with a hybrid ability to operate on different frequencies. It's nice to imagine that this could happen. But all of a sudden, public art has abandoned the options. No more public art, in fact—it's all infiltrated into the community mechanism, and it's being done surreptitiously and secretively within that mechanism.
Blum: Dennis, its not either-or.
Oppenheim: I'm just not sure where these people will come from who will make this work, and who the people will be who will respond to that sort of altered course.
Perhaps it's a case where you want to pull your mind and body into a belief, but it's difficult. I'd like to believe collaboration, for instance, is pertinent, perhaps more than my own working method. But I don't seem to be able to pull myself into that belief. I read something by Liam Gillick saying that artworks should be made by a group of three. This is really something you want to believe in, and I'd love to believe that. But I can't seem to practice it. Maybe I'm collaborating and I don't really know it. But I don't know that collaborating would bear on this problem of longevity and how we're going to intelligently deal with the stability of artworks as time passes, let alone their protection.
On a related note, let’s consider Michael Asher out in L.A., for instance, who has always done work that hides—the art hides behind the real thing. But it's very hard when you walk into one of his shows. Maybe he's moved a desk a little bit, and that's the show. It’s a real cerebral sort of excitement when you think about it. But I just don't know that advancement in public art is going to come from either the collaborative approach I mentioned earlier, or that type of cerebral acuity espoused by Asher.
Blum: I don't know if it's about the advancement of art. I think that there is a way of thinking about art that is not as straightforward as "It looks like this." I'm suggesting that it has to reflect the people who are making it. There's room for variation, because it's a scenario of "in addition to," not "instead of."
Oppenheim: It's interesting that at this time, in 2009, a lot of people believe that architecture is in a renaissance, rather than sculpture, and definitely not fine art. Architecture, which is the most difficult and most painful to execute, and which is the most inundated with codes and restrictions and political conniving, is in a renaissance and nothing else is. One has to wonder once again why this is the case. It's highly visual, flamboyant, self-aggrandizing. It’s a highly egocentric approach to making work, one that often looms 80 stories in the sky. And yet this approach is a recipient of most of the advances, and most of the bona-fide visual and conceptual advances today. How has that happened?
Vlas: Well, they learned from the artists.
Oppenheim: Yeah, they say that. But actually I think it's the other way around. You could say that architects like Frank Gehry looked at biomorphic sculpture. You could say that they looked at some of that stuff, but architecture is in fact operating on an extremely advanced level now. It's not taking its cues from that kind of art. It's operating with a combination of virtual and theoretical nuance. To think that these architects are inspired by fine artists, by sculptors, is implausible. They're operating in their own kind of cerebral matrix.
I feel beaten by their achievements, and that's such a difficult feeling. A fine artist in school today envisions a career where there's no competition. They never have to compete for anything. You go into your studio, and you do what you want. Public artists, much like architects, have to compete. Not only do they have to be enlightened and in possession of original methods, they can be overthrown as well. It's a rude awakening that I don't think the field of art has acknowledged just yet.
Rich: Dennis, I'd like to return to an earlier point in this discussion when you were talking earlier about the transition from abstract expressionism to pop. I was thinking we could perhaps talk about how this succession has been considered by architects. For me that was an exciting transition, because it was about a repositioning vis-à-vis a mass audience. You also mentioned Michael Asher, who I often reference as well, not because I'm interested in being cerebral, but because there was a really interesting project he did that was about a social system, and the project simply was working in the gallery. There was exhibition space in front, and then a wall, and then the office where the business was done. The project was just taking out the wall. The gallery was empty, you walked in, and you just saw all of these people doing the business of art. Finding ways that art can be economical like that is a promising way forward, although it's very much not pop art.
Before this event began, we were talking about the work of Richard Serra, and the controversy his work has in the past elicited. Some of the classic public art showdowns have between the self-anointed defenders of “Culture” with a capital C, and the self-positioned populist folks. I grew up reading the people who defended that kind of work, and I have to say it seems really embarrassing now. How could one ever take this position where one really saw oneself as the defender of a culture that was under threat by a degraded populace?
Levy: Today, what is the role of public art in an age of mutability and virtualization? Public art is built with capital dollars, it is site-specific, fixed, and rather permanent. Today, when the world seems to be in perpetual flux, how can public art stay relevant? Even the technologies we can incorporate in public art today quickly become obsolete. Is the notion that public art needs to keep changing and somehow keep up with things itself a problem? How do you respond to these challenges in your own work? If you could, would you like to go back and modify past works, insofar as public works and our relation to them often unfolds over time?
Blum: I always want to just change the scale a little bit in retrospect. Or maybe I was off about something, and to just have the opportunity in response to the particular situation the work finds itself in would be for the betterment of the work, which is to say its use. I think that one's attitude towards one's own work changes as well. What you were interested in five years ago may not be what you're interested in right now in the same way. But it has to fluctuate—that is, of course, the fun of it. Some work should hang around for a bit, some work doesn't need to. It's all about a range.
Thus far, I've had three or four projects destroyed for varying reasons. It's initially depressing, but then I think that, you know, don't tell me, I don't need to know. They've lasted for 15 years and I don't need them to last forever. I don't know about regulating the life of the work, but I do know that a work often does have a finite life span, and there's nothing you need to do about changing that reality.
Oppenheim: I don't know that anyone feels good about their work being destroyed. You would have to really be of the mind that it's somehow right, that it's somehow okay.
Rich: But it's all about setting up a different mechanism, one that maybe is outside of the individual whims of the developer or even the artist. This goes to some of the more ephemeral, or programmatic, or institutional aspects that we're talking about. We need to think about these sorts of events as the result of an active decision.
Oppenheim: Another way of talking about this issue is with regards to the Public Art Fund in New York, which believes that its success in a given program is due to the work being temporary. If the work were permanent, it would be of a different kind. That's partly true, because the more temporary the work, the more like installation art it can be.
But temporary work as it occurs in all these exhibitions around the world, particularly in the summer, invites this hybrid methodology between installation art and the new architecture. The new architecture, unlike installation art, has a very strong social skeleton. Installation art is operating, oddly enough, in a kind of backward arena, insofar as it is building upon issues that erupted during the 1970s. I think, however, that the really curious and interesting methodologies emerge from more permanent works. To advocate for temporary work and to advance installation art is like going back to surrealism. Having said this, I may sound like I didn't like the idea of change. In fact I really do like when the work actually alternates, year after year.
Levy: Should the community be engaged in the process of creating public art, or should the community be engaged by the finished work? At the end of the day, how do we get the public to buy into the work? How, as artists, curators, and professionals, can we navigate this impossible tension?
Oppenheim: When they invited the families of loved ones lost in the World Trade Center attack into the decision-making process of what memorial would be built, it fell into chaos. It's happened numerous times when that kind of mechanism is brought forth, and much has been written about this. And yet, there's no way else to proceed, except of course for the more elitist method of curators, museum directors, architects, and art people being brought into the mix to make the final decisions.
Blum: I think there are some artists who have a social practice where it involves community; but I agree, there's no specific methodology or way that we could point to as successful. It's really about the individual artist. In my own work, I think about what I do, and how it makes sense in this situation, and the people I work with in order to make it happen. In this sense it becomes a conversation, but there is no way that Joe or Mary or whoever is going to be pleased all at once with my work. My approach is a very selfish process in this regard.
Rich: Notwithstanding participation problems like the ones Dennis is describing, the much more prevalent issue that I would point to as a problem is the use of participation as yet another form of public legitimation, without it really having any real goal or purpose.
A few years ago in Berlin, there was a show about New York City. A variety of New York artists were invited, and we traveled to Berlin. When I got there I was informed that there were actually two parts of the exhibition space. There was a white gallery that was very traditional and that had individual artworks in it, such as those by Hans Haacke, for more contemporary folks. Then there was an outside gallery where there were a couple of groups representing not the artists of New York but rather the "community" of New York. And this was where, I quickly found out, my work would go.
So representing the community of New York was my work, to be displayed alongside a vitrine by this fantastic bookshop called Printed Matter, which is based in Chelsea. Then the press conference happened. There were some curators walking around, to each of the New York artworks on display, and he came over and put his arm around me, and said, "Listen, it used to be that people really looked down on community art, that was really a term of derision, but we're really past that now. Because this is the quality of community art today, we wanted to put it in a communal space," which was in fact the hallway. It was one of these delicious moments that recalls what a lot of organizers say: "When I hear the word community, I reach for my gun." Maybe, hopefully, artists will start saying it more and more.
BIOGRAPHIES
Andrea Blum has been making social sculpture for permanent and temporary projects in Europe and the United States since 1983. The work ranges in site and scale and includes public space, library, home, furniture, and exhibition design. In 2008 she designed the office for Galerie Insitu (Paris), had solo exhibitions at Maison Rouge (Paris) and stART (Venice), and was commissioned for the Italian Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Biennale. She is currently in an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, and is designing a tree house and guest house Italy and a museum garden in Monaco. In 2005 she was named Chevalier, Order of Arts and Letters, by the French Minister of Culture. She is a full professor at Hunter College.
Dennis Oppenheim has exhibited his works internationally in galleries and museums including the Tate Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to name just a few. He has been commissioned by many venues including Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and Olympic Park in Seoul, South Korea. Oppenheim was recently recognized for lifetime achievement at the 2007 Vancouver Sculpture Biennale. In the late 1960s and 1970s he created projects which embrace earth and body art, video and performance art. By the mid-1980s his sculpture was based on the transformation of everyday objects. Since the mid-1990s his work has become larger in scale and permanent, fusing sculpture and architecture.
Aaron Levy is the founding executive director of the Slought Foundation. As a senior curator at the Foundation, he is respected for a collaborative approach and for discursive projects that topically intervene in contemporary debates around art, architecture, and critical theory. He has curated exhibitions internationally, including Into the Open, the official U.S. representation at La Biennale di Venezia (2008), which recently traveled to the National Constitution Center and explored the original ways artists and architects today are working collaboratively to invigorate community activism and redefine social space. He has edited 15 publications, including Braco Dimitrijevic: Tractatus Post Historicus (2009), Blood Orgies: Hermann Nitsch in America (2008), and Helene Cixous' Ex-Cities (2007), and edits a DVD publication series featuring work by Werner Herzog, Dennis Oppenheim, Vito Acconci, Alain Badiou, and Peter Weibel. Levy teaches on the Department of English faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently working on the Perpetual Peace Project, a series of programs that explore twenty-first-century prospects for reducing geopolitical conflict, for the European Union National Institutes of Culture, in partnership with the United Nations University.
Damon Rich is a designer and artist, and currently serves as the urban designer and waterfront planner for the City of Newark, New Jersey. His design work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Storefront for Art and Architecture and SculptureCenter (both in New York City), the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (Rotterdam). In 1997, he founded the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people understand and change the places they live, where he served as creative director for 10 years. In 2007, Damon was selected as a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an artist-in-residence at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where he developed an exhibition on architecture, real estate, and finance.
Adelina Vlas, the assistant curator for modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, has co-curated the exhibition Public Smog and Various Small Fires at the Royal College of Art in London. Previously, Adelina has worked at the National Gallery of Canada, where she concentrated on permanent collection displays and special exhibitions. Since joining the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007, she has organized the contemporary art exhibitions in the Notations and Live Cinema series, including recent projects with younger-generation artists including Tim Hyde and Carlos Amorales. She has also been involved in the programming of the Sculpture Garden that opened to the public in September 2009.
