Sculpture As Argument

Deborah Fisher, Solid State Change, 2007, discarded tires, electrical insulation and stainless steel screws over cement, installed permanently at Middlebury College, Middlebury VT.

A work of art in a public place is, in more ways than one, an argument, and the argumentative nature of public art reaches its pus-filled, angry, inflamed zenith in sculpture.

This is not hyperbole. A sculpture is more argumentative than other kinds of art. It sits there in your space with you, refusing to politely cling to a wall, threatening your own thoughts of your own clumsiness. Last year, the students of Middlebury college were spitting mad about Solid State Change, and so I went and gave a lecture, which turned into a fantastic discussion about the very nature of environmentalism, and the very nature of sculpture. Those Middlebury kids are not dummies. They were able to see how rude the sculpture was. The way it jutted out in space. They hated it, in part, because they had to walk around it; because they didn't want to have to think about tripping on it; because they were told that they couldn't sit on it or climb on it, even though that's what it seemed to be for.

I got in trouble with the museum because I started laughing when they said that they felt like they couldn't touch it. I said that I personally had climbed all over it, and that I had made it for climbing, and that one of the best things about the sculpture is the way the tires collect warmth on a cool, sunny day, making a nice little microclimate in spring and fall. I said that I personally had napped on it countless times. I asked them to please go outside and climb on it after the lecture, so that they could really get it.

These details seem utterly banal, but they changed the tenor of the rest of the entire conversation, and I know why. The sculpture seemed ugly to them because it was literally in their way. And on top of that basic physical intrusion, on that campus it was read as a physical intrusion of the museum's rules of conduct out onto the campus.

A sculpture is this essentially rude thing, whose sole purpose in life is to take up space. It should therefore be unsurprising that public sculpture is, more often than not, the site of outrageous conflict, and that the overwhelming response to that inescapable fact is generally to settle on the most numbingly bland public work possible.

This is a missed opportunity! There is too much learned in the conflict itself--the conflict is too valuable to give it up, and in a fractured mediascape that preaches incessantly to the choir, a sculpture injects itself into the only shared thought-space left: physical reality.

The problems between the city of Peekskill and Strong Like Water are resolving themselves, and I'll be able to write more about that conflict (which is not that interesting) when it's all over. But I have to say that every single time I go to that site, I overhear an argument about whether the sculpture is ugly and worthless or interesting and evocative. And not every time, but a couple of times, I have heard those conversations turn on the industrial past of the waterfront, how polluted the Hudson used to be, how many tires there must be in the world.

At Middlebury, the students hated Solid State Change not just because they couldn't climb on it, but because it challenged their idea of what environmentalism is. They hated it "because it wasn't made of local materials." Of course the correct response is to count the tires in the parking lot, or how many tires are thrown over the average tarp at your average Vermont farm. And to ask what "local materials" means. And to ask whether it's helpful to collapse a complex idea like environmentalism into a simple fetishizing of beautiful, natural-looking things.

A sculpture stands outside ourselves and challenges our internal notion of reality. This is totally rude, and produces conflict. If we lived in a truly shared society, in which our internal reality was challenged much more often, then perhaps public sculpture would be unnecessary. But we don't.

Comments

[Elizabeth]

Does sculpture have to be rude? 3D work can guide, divide, surprise. It's certainly a much stronger presence than 2D work, no matter the reaction.

And re. tires, what do you think of earthships, made of recycled tires, cans, bottles, etc? http://www.earthship.net/

[Anil]

I agree with your view about art in public spaces.

Maybe it is the respect they assign to art in general that prevents them climbing all over it even when installed in a public space.