John Ahearn's figures wound up at Socrates Sculpture Park
Whenever I teach art appreciation, I teach the controversies behind Tilted Arc and John Ahearn's figurative sculptures briefly placed before the 44th police precinct in the South Bronx in 1991.
The list of reasons is long. Ahearn's sculptures resonate with kids in commuter colleges in and around New York City. Ahearn is white and making sculptures about black and brown people who are not, like Ahearn, choosing to be poor, and discussions of race and class are interesting. Tilted Arc is the best way to introduce non-artists to the idea that contemporary sculpture is all about the space it displaces and describes. The court case and Serra's behavior surrounding Tilted Arc is titillating.
But the big idea is to disprove a notion that most kids walk into art appreciation classes with: that artists do some stupid shit, and then everybody loves it just because they call it art. Love Tilted Arc or hate it, it's a grand gesture. Ahearn's three figures are comforting and careful and in no way stupid. And in both instances, the public hated them and made them go away. That is a powerful position to place viewers in. Many of my students hated art because they thought they had to like it, and that smelled like bullshit to them.
I know what they mean. I feel like I have to like a lot of really mediocre art, and I think it smells like bullshit too.
Moving away from the gallery context (in which a bag of Doritos carefully perched atop a pedestal manages to look like a knowing nod to Jeff Koons, Tim Hawkinson and Duchamp) and into this world of the powerful viewer is, I think, good for artists.
Sure, it creates struggles like the ones highlighted above. Both Ahearn's figures and Tilted Arc are great, great works of art that simply didn't fit the entirety of their context. Or better: you could more successfully argue that they each fit their contexts too well--that the discomfort they each produced was a function of their respective greatness as projects. That hardly seems fair.
But who wants to be trapped in a world where everything you do looks good because it's the only thing in a room that has no other purpose but to showcase what you have done? Where is the sport in that pursuit?
Coming up: more interesting stories about people destroying art they don't like.
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