Enduring Another One Of Those Self-Congratulatory Public Art Roundtables: Peekskill Edition

Deborah Fisher, Strong Like Water, installation view, Peekskill Project, Peekskill NY

I participated in a roundtable last weekend for the Peekskill Project, and in it all the usual questions were asked:

Public art is good for the larger community, right?

How do we shove public art down the throats of a community that doesn't understand how good it is for them?

Are we arrogant or virtuous for posing these questions?

I kid. Mostly. Everyone involved in the Project is much more thoughtful and well-meaning than I am making it sound. But this isn't mere snark-theater, either--I have a point. The actual questions were fairer than the questions asked in italics above, but at the same time it's true that the actual questions did devolve, PDQ, into exactly the quizzical, cautious back-patting eluded to above.

I think this is unfortunate, and I want to cut through it. Talking about public art in a palavering, self-congratulatory way that highlights art's supposed socio-medicinal qualities obscures the actual, concrete good that public art really does deliver to artists and public alike.

Public art is good on a practical level because it's such a hard sell--such a stupid thing to do, and so difficult to do well. You, public artist or public curator, are asking to put this subjective cultural artifact, this object of contemplation, into a relatively lawless space in which people are rightly and actively oriented toward doing other things. Your average downtown public plaza

(See: Tilted Arc)

is decidedly not the right place for deconstructive contemplation of the spatial qualities of this public plaza, and this is true because people are busy using the plaza. My favorite quip from this weekend's roundtable was about Tilted Arc, and it went kind of like this:

"How dare you (Serra) make my coffee run take five more minutes every single day!"

This is a beautiful assesment because it gets right at the social contract underlying art in public places--a social contract that was explained to me as a graduate student being critiqued by one Steve Fagin, who spat and spittled and waved his hands up and down in exasperation as he exclaimed:

"People have better things to do than deal with people like you on the street!"

This social contract, henceforth called the "People Like You On The Street Problem," or PLYOTSP, is the fulcrum on which every public art scenario balances. A good piece of public art, then, isn't just a piece of good art. It's a piece of art that uses the PLYOTSP as a lever to increase instead of decrease both participation and meaning.

Even a brief examination of the PLYOTSP exposes the outrageous arrogance of assuming that art is good for people, and that therefore "inclusion" is the answer to solving the conflict inherent in public art, because the real problem is that the "public" is actually full of Philistines that need themselves some edjumacation. There is obviously much more to it than that. I mean, I am certainly cultured, and beyond that I happen to have an enormous boner for Richard Serra. And I wouldn't want to walk around his bum-shit-collecting, crime-sheltering downer of a public sculpture just to get a cup of coffee every day either. The man's a genius. But it was still a crappy piece of public art.

The italicized questions we began with are so fucking lame because they, like Serra and his Arc-defenders, utterly fail to take responsibility for the artist and institution's half of the social contract.

No, it's worse--they replace the social contract that PLYOTSP describes

(this is shared space, no one person's use is more important than anyone else's, nobody has the right to impose one way to correctly use or understand that space)

with paternalism, and thereby designate the PLYOTSP a function of mere ignorance. The questions at the top of this post assume that a plaza or a park is just like a gallery, but with different colors and more shapes. And that of course any enlightened person would immediately drop whatever they were doing and engage with art at the drop of a hat.

Armed with an understanding that there is such a thing as the PLYOTSP, the questions surrounding public art change a lot. It becomes reasonable to ask whether it's a good idea to even bother. And it also becomes important to question whether the well-worn avant garde agenda of shocking and denying and negating and destroying is the best possible strategy in a public context.

I do happen to think that it's a good idea to bother. The PLYOTSP is a magnificent bullshit-detector for the artist who is earnest, patient and socially sensitive enough to engage it. There's a simple difference between making a piece of art for a gallery, an art destination that has been consciously stripped of context and distraction, and making art for a place that is about fishing, running, watching a magnificent landscape, catching a train, or walking the dog. In order to be taken seriously, any work of public art has to be executed with a heaping dose of brio and total follow-through. Easy formalism that descends from the Sibony Jank-Dynasty doesn't look intentional or evocative in a public setting. It just looks unfinished and cynical.

But there's more to engaging the PLYOTSP than finally being rewarded for "bullshit" like craft, thoughtfulness and total formal and structural followthrough. The PLYOTSP opens a door to artmaking strategies that have nothing to do with the compulsively negating avant garde you grew up with. The power of this opportunity to shift discourse should not be discounted. I grew up going to art school and learning how to be edgy, and this has created in me a lifelong lean toward violences and poky things and the word fuck and a real predisposition toward offending people. I know I am not the only one. We all learned in art school to cling to our shocktalk and unfinishedness and bad behavior the way rednecks cling to guns and religion. It's dogma, and I am just as awash in it as you are. But a work of art in a public space is fundamentally a guest. And guests who aim only to shock and destroy and be poky and bad and uncivil and problematic are not interesting. They are merely bad guests. The PLYOTSP demands public art that can do more than shock and titillate

(but that need not be unalloyed nicety)

while galleries do not, and at this point probably cannot. This is a function of having to look at and understand all the stakeholders, and understand the practical ramifications of what you are doing to people and things, and work with those practical ramifications to create an experience that actively invites instead of repels.

This is a radical shift in gesture that is both necessary

(I cannot take another contemporary art show about porn, I cannot take another contemporary art show about rich girls in panties or celebrity-filth or oh-my-god-there's-nothing-here-but-a-punchline!)

and timely. We just elected a president who is definitely not a Liberal Messiah, but he does have this gift for inviting people to help him achieve great things uncynically. It would certainly be helpful, and it would certainly be of-a-time, if visual art figured out a less cynical, more inviting way of being.

Comments

[Michael Konrad]

Hey Deborah...I went up to Peekskill last weekend to visit my brother, so I got to see your sculpture in person. I have to say, there was a lot of "crap" (driftwood, garbage, etc.) strewn about the surround landscape, which I actually thought was an appropriate environment for your recycled tires & timber, as well as Cal Lane's dumpster.

Have you gotten any feedback from the local community or had any opportunities to observe people reacting to the artwork? I always find it interesting to hang out on the sidelines of a public artwork and try and get a sense of what people think about it.

[Zoe Strauss]

Agreed!

[deborahfisher]

Hey Michael, Hey Zoe,

I like the driftwood situation too--makes it look like it belched up onto the shore. That's a function of it being moved to accommodate the city's urge to build a 9/11 memorial.

People either really like it or really hate it, which I think is great. The last thing you want to be is mediocre, right?

[Pretty Lady]

What on EARTH is the problem with art that attempts to provoke wonder, awe, amazement, and joy? Is this such a Philistinic goal? It's certainly a difficult one--I haven't begun to figure out how to start, and I've been working on the problem for about 15 years. But this shock thing is just so adolescent.

[david kramer]

I am hopeful that people we will grow up a little when it comes to things like appreciating public art in this country. The old knee-jerk reaction is no longer acceptable.
DK

[MBT Online]

It's so nice to have you do all of the research for us. It makes our decision making so much easier!! Thanks.