Public Art E-Book

Cher Krause Knight

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 335

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This book takes a bold look at public art and its populist appeal, offering a more inclusive guide to America's creative tastes and shared culture. It examines the history of American public art – from FDR's New Deal to Christo's The Gates – and challenges preconceived notions of public art, expanding its definition to include a broader scope of works and concepts.

• Expands the definition of public art to include sites such as Boston's Big Dig, Las Vegas' Treasure Island, and Disney World
• Offers a refreshing alternative to the traditional rhetoric and criticism surrounding public art
• Includes insightful analysis of the museum and its role in relation to public art

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Introduction: A Short History of the United States’ “Official” Public Art

Roosevelt’s New Deal

General Services Administration’s Art-in-Architecture Program

National Endowment for the Arts’ Art-in-Public-Places Program

Chapter 2 Conventional Wisdom: Populist Intentions within Established Paradigms

Art as Monument, Art as Memorial

Art as Amenity

Art in the Park, Art as the Park

Art as the Agora

Art as Pilgrimage

Chapter 3 Culture to Go: From Art World to The World

What Museums Do for Us

My Museum

Education, Outreach, Programming

The Alternative Museum/ Alternatives to Museums

Chapter 4 Not Quite “Art,” Not Quite “Public”:

The Art of Entertainment

This is Special, I am Special

Open Pocketbook, Open Agenda?

Embracing Spectacle

Chapter 5 Super Viewer: Increasing Individual

Power to the People

Claiming Space and Place

Dig In

Chapter 6 Conclusion:Art for All?

The Trouble with (Re)Development

Nonprofits and the Ephemeral Idyll

Back to School

Grieving Loss, Remembering Life

Two Tales in One City

Bibliography

Index

For Beatrix Marcel –

I love you the whole world.

© 2008 Cher Krause Knight

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Preface

The role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale. (Duchamp 1957: 819)

I cannot think of a single book on public art that commences with Marcel Duchamp. Maybe this is not surprising. Duchamp, the irreverent artist-provocateur, is best known as a Dadaist. Confounded by the massive violence of World War I, the Dada artists responded to senseless cruelty and destruction with artworks that trafficked in absurdity, mocking conventional art world pretensions. Dadaism was a social movement as much as an artistic one; the aforementioned “esthetic scale” actually encompassed much more than aesthetics. Audiences were asked to interrogate the foundations of society, moving beyond collective and individual comfort zones. Dadaism represented an unwillingness to accept things as they are, resisting complicit endorsement of the status quo. “Spectators” bore a great responsibility – if not to change their behaviors, at least to question the social norms that formed them. Duchamp instinctively apprehended the viewer’s primary role in the art experience. In “The Creative Act” (1957), he scrutinizes the authority of the artist, and affirms the power of the spectator. He describes the “art coefficient” as a gap between an artist’s intention and the artwork’s realization, where viewers actively engage with and interpret the art. Duchamp proposes that an artist cannot fully express his own intent, so the viewer must complete the Creative Act; without someone to react to and interact with the art, the artistic process is forever unfinished, a still-born idea never seizing its absolute potential. No longer a passive act, “viewing” gives way to a multitude of readings, limited only by the number of people in a work’s audience. Duchamp offered a potent analogy, describing art in its “raw state” as molasses, which is then “refined” into pure sugar by its spectators (1957: 818–19). The artist provides the source material, but it is the viewer – with her own viewpoint, taste, education, and experience – who discerns its meaning and relevance. Once art is shared with a larger public, the artist surrenders control to the unpredictable will and whims of “the people.”

In the glossary of New-Land-Marks public art is defined as “art placed in public places and spaces,” and those spaces as “open to everyone to use and enjoy” (Bach 2001: 153). If only it were that easy! The contours of art’s publicness are continually assessed on its physical location. But as Hilde Hein asserts, “The sheer presence of art out-of-doors or in a bus terminal or a hotel reception area does not automatically make that art public – no more than placing a tiger in a barnyard would make it a domestic animal” (1996: 4). I suggest we can best understand art’s public functions when we consider the interrelationship between content and audience; what art has to say, to whom it speaks, and the multiple messages it may convey. This approach prompts several questions: Is public art’s responsibility “to communicate with the public”? To do so, must it transcend an artist’s private or aesthetic concerns, and “generate human reaction” from a larger audience (Doezema 1977: 9, 14)? If so, how big must that audience be? As early as 1903 Charles Mulford Robinson’s Modern Civic Art called for art that was comprehensible and socially relevant to its audiences, addressing “the conditions before their very eyes” (1903: 34). But the notion of a shared artistic vocabulary has long since dissipated; as Arlene Raven contends, “public art isn’t a hero on a horse any more” (1989: 1). Through his experiences as a public art administrator Jerry Allen observed that the civic symbolism of the past was a language in which the public was no longer “fluent.” He queries: “Can substantially fewer than everybody be the audience for public art without destroying the public character of the art?” Allen concludes that since public art is “broad and heterogeneous,” speaking to wide though not necessarily large and generalized audiences, it would be best to define a “new public” for each work (1985: 246–7, 250–1). For Patricia Phillips art only becomes fully public when it takes “the idea of public as the genesis and subject for analysis”: “it is public because of the kinds of questions it chooses to ask or address, and not because of its accessibility or volume of viewers” (1992: 298). To this I would add that art’s publicness rests in the quality and impact of its exchanges with audiences. These do not hinge on wide acceptance, but on the art’s ability to extend reasonable and fair opportunities for members of the public to understand and negotiate their own relationships with it. I propose to conceive public art primarily through this populist agenda.

A few words must be said about the frictions – perceived and actual – between art elitists and populists, although caution must be exercised when dealing in such binaries. Generally, elitists emphasize the need for professionalism and formal education in the arts, art-specific institutions, and standards of quality according to established canons of taste. For them the boundaries of culture are fixed though fragile; they are perceived as centurions standing guard over and imposing their culture on others. Conversely, populists usually argue for the widest possible availability of art experiences, welcome cultural diversity, and promote public (often “amateur”) participation in and experiential relationships to art. Their pluralistic construction of artistic merit, open-ended definitions of taste, and insistence on art’s subjectivity and m utability prompt elitists to charge them with eroding culture’s quality and substance. These conflicting agendas result in what Margaret Wyszomirski identified as “the tension between the quest for excellence and the quest of equality.” She concludes that these “quests” might coalesce in a framework of cultural democracy, if we temper the notion of “elite” art audiences with “open-door exclusivity” (1982: 13–14, 17; Levine 1988: 255). I interpret this as an egalitarian impulse; to provide all interested parties with an entrée into the arts that nurtures confidence in their own critical faculties, but allows final decisions about engagement to rest with each individual. Yet such agency can be hampered by what Miwon Kwon identifies as art’s great myth: the presumption that it is “good” and “everybody wants it” (Arning, Chin, Jacob, and Kwon 2006).

Edward Arian outlined the premises of cultural democracy: art experiences develop good citizenship and enhance the quality of life; all citizens have the right to art experiences, the provision of which “is a public responsibility not unlike health and education”; and people of all backgrounds and classes are desirous of art experiences when presented with options to engage in such. These principles manifest themselves in a specifically populist approach as codified in American arts legislation: emphasis on broad-based exposure to and consumption of the arts; conviction that art contributes to individual humanistic growth; a belief that government should foster each citizen’s development on behalf of its own welfare; the need to showcase and support the talent of artists; and an effort to make the arts part of people’s everyday lives. But Arian asserts that cultural democracy exists only when people are able to assess “their cultural needs and determine the programs that will best meet those needs and express their individual identities” (1989: 3-5, 24–9; Kardon 1980: 8). Though disparate, the sites and works of decidedly populist public art share at least one if not all of the following three qualities. First, they create immersive, experiential environments: instead of building independent objects around which audiences must negotiate, designers usually produce enveloping settings to traverse through. Next, each engenders highly proactive relationships with visitors, predicated on participatory interaction, not passive viewership. And finally, they are frequently private ventures or public-private partnerships; without portending to a false sense of egalitarianism, these are often more inviting and potentially civic-spirited than their typical public art counterparts.

In 1981 John Beardsley argued that most discussions of public art were limited to issues of physical rather than emotional or intellectual accessibility (1981b: 43). Since that time there have been many efforts to broaden public art’s accessibility, with mixed results. I contend that art becomes most fully public when it has palpable populist sentiments – the extension of emotional andintellectual, as well as physical, accessibility to the audience – not a pretension toward such. Unfettered physical access is an empty gesture if the public does not feel other forms of accessibility are within its grasp too. Accordingly the placement, funding, and content of public art will be scrutinized here as related to audience engagement. Assessments of audience response made throughout the text are based upon years of research, including my personal observations of and conversations with members of the public. The book begins with an overview of American public art’s “official” history since the early twentieth century, when governmental programs nurtured notions of cultural democracy. The second chapter considers artworks that fit within conventional paradigms of public art, but evidence heightened populist intent. Chapter 3 examines interrelationships between art museums and public art, and queries how museums can further enhance their well-intentioned attempts at civic engagement. In the fourth chapter we encounter private patrons and industry that have succeeded in capturing the public’s imagination, and ask what public artists and administrators can learn from them. Chapter 5 argues for viewers’ increased agency to determine the levels of engagement with art and merits of their own art experiences, whether these be intentional or not. The concluding chapter addresses some persistent woes that often accompany public art and works that manage to avoid these, highlighting venues and situations in which populist public art thrives, and could do so in the future.

Although focused on the United States, the wider critical scope of the questions raised here is relevant to public art elsewhere. The US is a vast and greatly differentiated country, with nearly limitless local artistic dialects and regional cultures. In an increasingly pluralistic society, Beardsley reminds us, there are no coherent belief systems or definitive interpretations; “public values are not universal, but a function of their epoch and locale. … An art that expresses the values of all the people is impossible to achieve” (1981b: 43–4). In The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey made much the same observation, noting that the “public” always changes with time and place, and suggesting that such a public is “too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition” to be treated as a holistic entity (1927: 33, 137). An attempt to discern a unitary national aesthetic or any such consensus is futile. But while a single vox populi cannot exist, this book strives to identify and contextualize dominant or recurrent traits shared among the spectrum of American sensibilities, and provide a fuller understanding of our shared culture and more accurate barometers of our tastes. To do so will lead to some sources that critics might regard as unsophisticated or unworthy as “art.” In his sensitive study of Holocaust memorials, James Young observes that traditional modes of art historical inquiry cannot fully accommodate the “social life” of public art, which fuses art, popular culture, historical memory, and political consequences. He proclaims: “Rather than patronizing mass tastes, we must recognize that public taste carries weight” (1993: 11–13). But while definitions of “high” and “low” culture continually shift, “popular culture” remains maligned by those seeking to “maintain their ideological authority by defining ‘good’ and ‘bad’ culture.” We need to recognize popular culture as “a potentially powerful and progressive political force,” which liberates its makers and users from “the top-down strictures of high culture” to subvert the “dominant notions of taste” (Jenkins, McPherson, and Shattuc 2002: 26–8).

In No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Andrew Ross warns against taking a “conspiratorial view” of mass culture as a monolithic, “profitable opiate” imposed on a passive public of consumers that uncritically accepts such culture. He posits that critics who take such dim views of popular culture engage in an undemocratic sort of intellectual hysteria, or sample that culture only to reinforce their status as they are “slumming” it. Conversely, other critics unquestioningly embrace popular culture’s “gee-whizzery” (1989: 4–5, 7, 45, 50–2). I wish to do none of the above. My populist perspective seeks balance between the hypercritical and uncritical nodes; to reorient our appreciation for artworks already absorbed into the canon, highlight the viewer’s role, and suggest an expanded terrain for public art. The intent is not to measure “successes” and “failures,” but rather to assess art’s publicness and engage in a jargon-free discussion of its pertinent issues. By proposing a more widely constituted domain for the study and practice of public art, disparate artworks, organizations, and individuals might be able to coexist, if not agree. The complications brought by public art’s complexity are also its opportunities. Though “public art” cannot be pinned down with a single, reductive definition, hopefully a more panoramic view of the field shall emerge here. Like Duchamp, I recognize there is always a gap between intention and realization; this text strives to be informative and provocative, while leaving readers enough intellectual elbow room to reach different and contradictory conclusions. The book is in a perpetually “raw state,” and readers are invited to visit their own “refinements” upon it.

Acknowledgments

Supposedly writing is a solitary journey, but without the help and support of others I could not have written this book. First I want to thank my editor, Jayne Fargnoli. She believed in this project from our first tentative conversation about it, and brought a keen intellect, kindness, and expert stewardship to every step of the process. Ken Provencher, Margot Morse, and Annette Abel were also invaluable resources, as have been the many other helpful people at Blackwell Publishing.

My colleagues at Emerson College, especially those in the Department of Visual and Media Arts (VMA), have been wonderfully encouraging and enthusiastic about the book. I would also like to thank the administration of Emerson College, particularly Jacqueline Liebergott, Linda Moore, Grafton Nunes, and Michael Selig. The College provided both financial and intellectual resources, most notably two Faculty Advancement Fund Grants that gave me precious time to work on the text, and the Mann Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award, which funded essential research travel. I must also acknowledge our excellent staff in the VMA department, including several terrific graduate assistants.

My students at Emerson have been a continued source of delight and enlightenment. In particular, those students in my public art seminar courses in the Fall 2005 and Fall 2006 semesters contributed greatly to my thoughts on this subject. Without all of you, this would have been a far different, and much less interesting, book.

I had many illuminating discussions along the way with colleagues, friends, and family that had direct bearing on the text, too many to mention though my thanks are sincere. Harriet Senie’s intelligence, candor, and compassion made for an excellent sounding board on many occasions. She continues to remind me of the excitement to be found in public art. Mags Harries, Lajos Héder, and Robert Sabal all generously shared their time, art, and good conversation. Sam Binkley and Eric Gordon, who were writing their own books at the same time, offered empathic camaraderie. Therese Dolan, Gerald Silk, and Laura Watts Sommer manage to humanize academia when I need it most. And Brooke A. Knight, always my first and last reader, was a constant companion throughout the process. Not only did he offer moral support and constructive criticism, but he took several of the wonderful photographs included here.

I would also like to thank my parents, Harold and Elaine Krause, who accompanied me to see The Gates and reconfirmed my suspicion that public art had a different story to tell. And my daughter, Beatrix Marcel, who looks with her heart as much as her eyes.

Chapter 1

Introduction: A Short History of the United States’ “Official” Public Art

Just six months before his tragic assassination in November 1963, John F. Kennedy responded to a report on the status of arts in the federal government he requested the year before. Writing to the report’s author, August Heckscher, the President noted:

Government can never take over the role of patronage and support filled by private individuals and groups in our society. But government surely has a significant part to play in helping establish the conditions under which art can flourish – in encouraging the arts as it encourages science and learning. (JFK qtd. in Netzer 1978: 58)

Here Kennedy staked an ideological claim for public support of the arts, building a foundation for the United States’ official art patronage. Yet there remains no definitive interpretation of “exactly what public art is, or ought to be” (Allen 1985: 246). If we define “public art” by its most basic precepts, then its roots reach far back in history. Its works are conceived for larger audiences, and placed to garner their attention; meant to provide an edifying, commemorative, or entertaining experience; and convey messages through generally comprehensible content. Meeting the public on its daily travels, these artworks reinforced the agendas of those under whose aegis they were constructed: ranging from countless portraits of ancient rulers, designed to bolster confidence and inspire loyalty; to massive pieces of street furniture, like triumphal arches proclaiming the military prowess of particular regimes. But the notion of art in the service of the people, rather than ruling factions, is a more modern concept. One thinks, for example, of citizens emboldened by the French Revolution demanding that the Louvre, a private palace housing royal treasures, be opened to the people of the Republic (which did happen on August 10, 1793). As Carol Duncan suggests, public art institutions and initiatives became “evidence of political virtue, indicative of a government that provided the right things for its people,” while being “a preserver of past achievements and a provider for the common good” (1991: 88–9, 93, 101–2).

While many European nations have well-established, widely supported traditions of state patronage, it is only in the last century that the US made sustained efforts in this endeavor. Although the evolution of our government’s arts patronage was not necessarily “orderly” (Prokopoff 1981: 78), it is illuminating. Americans remain admiring of European culture and even state support of it, though historically our attitudes toward the arts are “ambiguous and contradictory.” In the absence of a “clear public philosophy regarding the value and place of art in society” (Wyszomirski 1982: 11), some citizens took it upon themselves to commission or make art. In 1872 Philadelphia neighbors Henry Fox and Charles Howell spearheaded the Fairmount Park Art Association, the US’s first private nonprofit organization focused on integrating public art and urban planning. Still thriving today, the Association cooperates with civic agencies to commission artworks responsive to the city’s layout and spirit (Bach 1988: 262–3). With the turn of the twentieth century came the short-lived but influential City Beautiful Movement, whose proponents, envious of European urbanism, contended that social responsibility and order would follow in the wake of meticulous planning. Charles Mulford Robinson epitomizes this mindset: he conceived of a “civic art” with utilitarian, moral, and educational functions, which “exists not for its own sake, but mainly for the good of the community” (1903: 26–9, 35). The Depression next advanced our government’s arts patronage, but it was not until the 1960s that this role was formalized on more permanent terms. Garry Apgar posits that American pragmatism tends to resist state patronage for the arts, though he recognizes that “fundamentally democratic approaches to government support” have taken root here (1992: 24, 26). In this chapter we shall encounter three federal programs critical to the foundation and development of an “official” American public art: the New Deal art initiatives, which represented our first concerted effort to support artists while producing art underscoring state ideology; the General Services Administration’s Art-in-Architecture program, in which a percentage of federal construction costs is allocated for the arts; and the no longer extant Art-in-Public-Places program of the National Endowment for the Arts, which offered matching grants to local communities. As we shall see, there are significant distinctions between cultural democracy “as a social idea” and political democracy “as a system of government” (Dewey 1927: 143).

Roosevelt’s New Deal

The profound despair of life for many Americans in the 1930s (marked by the economic woes of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl agricultural crisis) was offset by a series of socially progressive programs. Combined under the umbrella of “The New Deal,” these were conceived and managed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. As Richard McKinzie asserts, the New Deal’s intentions were altruistic: to attend to people’s cerebral needs as much as their material ones (1973). In addition to addressing unemployment, business failures, and a lack of adequate food and shelter, the New Deal also positioned the federal government as a primary agent of social change and enlightenment, entrusted to ensure the welfare of all citizens. Despite its shortcomings, the New Deal got many Americans “back to work,” including artists employed in “the largest art program ever undertaken by the federal government” (Park and Markowitz 1992: 131). From 1933 to 1943 thousands of artists produced over a hundred thousand artworks under the patronage of the American government, though as Dick Netzer reminds us, this was a temporary measure. The impetus was less “a special concern for artistic activity … (or) a commitment to a permanent federal role in support of the arts,” and more a matter of alleviating the dire economic climate (1978: 54). First came the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in 1933, directed by Edward Bruce, which paid professional artists daily wages to make works for public buildings. But after seven short months it became clear that the PWAP’s stopgap approach could not meet enduring needs. By 1935 the Federal Art Project (FAP), run under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), was established. The FAP remained intact until the New Deal’s end in 1943, when the US’s involvement in World War II intensified, and critics complained that any state-supported art smacked of fascism (Harris 1995: 153). The FAP, which was the largest and best-known of the art programs, served artists already on relief and disseminated their artworks to state and municipal facilities. Under the leadership of Holger Cahill, who was not inclined to judge the art’s “quality,” the FAP engendered progressive experimentation and offered public art demonstrations, classes, and lectures (McKinzie 1973: xi; Park and Markowitz 1984: 178).

Two other important New Deal art programs were administered by the Treasury Department. From 1935 to 1939 the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) employed artists, mostly those on relief, to decorate federal buildings whose construction was then managed by the Treasury. The second program was the Section of Fine Arts (initially named the Section of Painting and Sculpture), spurred by Edward Bruce’s suggestion in 1934 that for each new federal building constructed, one percent of the total cost be set aside for its “embellishment.” Under the leadership of Bruce (himself a painter and pragmatic administrator), Edward Rowan (another painter), and art critic Forbes Watson, the Section flourished until its closure in 1943. It commissioned individual artists for particular jobs, and offered anonymous competitions that “discovered” new talent (Prokopoff 1981: 78). The Section’s decisions were not based on financial need, and rather than foster the collectivism of the FAP, its artists often continued in their private studio lives. Bruce insisted on aesthetic and technical standards in keeping with “good” art, convinced that exposure to such would enrich the quality of American life (McKinzie 1973: xi; Park and Markowitz 1984: 178). Thus the Section promoted more conventional styles that would not be off-putting to uninitiated eyes. As Marlene Park and Gerald Markowitz observe, the Section’s “goal was to create a contemporary American art, neither academic nor avant-garde, but based on experience and accessible to the general public” (1992: 136). Through projects such as post office murals, the Section not only underscored the federal government’s presence in communities large and small, but brought art into the realm of the everyday with recognizable subjects depicted through familiar means.

Perhaps the New Deal programs demonstrated not so much public support for the arts, as public endorsement of economic relief (Mankin 1982: 118, 136). Though Netzer is correct that in retrospect the New Deal is too often idealized as a “happy marriage of big government and the arts” (1978: 54), it did have lasting effects. The New Deal affirmed art’s importance in a democratic society, built a significant national collection of public artworks, nurtured creative energies that might have otherwise perished, and laid the groundwork for federal arts funding. As characterized by Jonathan Harris, the New Deal programs also politicized culture within specifically populist terms, projecting an image of “social utopia” to be achieved through capitalist means. Stereotypes of the modern artist as an aloof loner or self-interested recluse were replaced with notions of the “productive worker” and “good citizen,” loyal to the nation (1995: 4, 8–10). New Deal artworks were also intended to cultivate national pride in a shared culture, while buttressing belief in a faltered economy. Park and Markowitz write:

The New Deal sought to change the relationship between the artist and society by democratizing art and culture. Art project officials wrote that the mass of people were “underprivileged in art,” and they endeavored to make art available to all … projects were a uniquely American blend, combining an elitist belief in the value of high culture with the democratic ideal that everyone in society could and should be the beneficiary of such efforts. (1992: 131–2)

Thus there was a pronounced strain of cultural democracy in the New Deal: for the first time all citizens, regardless of their educational background, socio-economic class, or geographical region, were entitled to have art in their daily lives (Park and Markowitz 1984: xvii, 5, 181). Embedded in the New Deal were a multitude of evocative tensions that directly influenced the future of American public art. Among these was the massive entity of a federal government, attending to state, municipal, and individual needs; and the desire to make “high”-minded ideals accessible to the “average” person, while forging a cohesive cultural identity. The experimental nature of the programs was tempered by more conservative, “middle-of-the-road” aesthetics; frictions occurred between nationalist rhetoric and regionalist tastes, and the aim to provide for citizens’ material necessities while also enriching their cultural lives. Ironically, these goals were manifested through socialist strategies called upon to shore up American capitalism. These supposed contradictions are instructive for a populist treatment of public art, as they attest to the need for nuance and negotiation. Rather than dealing in absolutes, public art strives to reconcile popular will and collective aspirations with governmental oversight, private business, or the individual artist’s vision. But one might ask if such compromise necessarily leads to conventional ends as suggested by the Section’s agenda, or if it can offer challenges and provocation as had the FAP. Although the FAP remains the best-known New Deal art initiative, it was actually the Treasury Department’s programs that provided direct lineage for the next phase of federally sponsored art patronage in the US, the Art-in-Architecture program of the General Services Administration.

General Services Administration’s Art-in-Architecture Program

The groundwork for the Art-in-Architecture (A-i-A) program was laid in 1934, when Edward Bruce recommended that one percent of new federal building costs be earmarked for the commission of art. Eventually this proposal was implemented through the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency that oversees federal construction projects, and was made manifest with A-i-A’s inception in 1963. Often referred to as “percent-for-art,” A-i-A specified that up to one half of one percent of total construction costs for new federal buildings (later to include their repairs and alterations as well) be utilized to purchase contemporary works by American artists. The program was suspended in 1966 in response to inflated construction costs, and flack over Robert Motherwell’s NewEngland Elegy (JFK Building, Boston), a large Abstract Expressionist painting some people interpreted literally as a death scene. A-i-A was revived in 1972 under the Nixon administration, and since has provided consistent government arts patronage. In 1973 A-i-A began soliciting input from “expert” review panels convened by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to avoid questions about the rigor of its selection process, which favored the wishes of project architects (Balfe and Wyszomirski 1987: 23–4). Yet the GSA retains final authority over artist selection and commission, rendering it a major taste-maker for American public art. Though the GSA has widely disseminated some excellent artworks, A-i-A projects range in quality and efficacy. Perhaps the most enduring effects of these efforts are not found in the physical works themselves, but in the public’s greater awareness of public art, and the GSA’s heightened sensitivity to the intricacies of placing it.

A-i-A helped solidify several philosophical precepts about the nature and function of public art in the US. The first is a simple assertion that truly “public” art should be literally owned by the citizens. Although commissioned by a federal agency, A-i-A artworks are understood to be property of the people, even when these might not accurately reflect prevailing tastes or engage the full comprehension of intended audiences. At times such art falls shy of the public’s appreciation, especially when it shirks emotional and intellectual accessibility. Nonetheless, the general public’s physical access to and ownership of art was cultivated, and a federally sponsored collection was amassed. Another philosophical current embedded in the A-i-A program is the (albeit gradual) recognition that public spaces and artworks are not interchangeable. The notion of a sitesensitive art, in which the particular location is taken into consideration, gained great currency as A-i-A became more conscious of placing artworks in hospitable spaces. This eventually led to sitespecific approaches, in which the interaction between site and art is a prime determinant in the work’s conception, design, and execution, with the art sometimes altering the site. The individual character of respective artworks and sites was increasingly acknowledged, and artists were more frequently commissioned to respond to particular places. Instead of glorified decorators sprucing things up at a project’s end, artists consulted more often in the early planning stages.

A-i-A’s percent-for-art formula subsequently became the model for many state and municipal art programs that also draw funds from construction budgets, and place art in sites such as schools and parks. In 1959 Philadelphia passed the first municipal percentfor-art ordinance in the US, followed next by Baltimore (1964), San Francisco (1967), and Seattle (1973). Hawaii became the first state to follow suit and adopted its percent-for-art policy in 1967. Yet, it would be misleading to say that the GSA consistently brought an enlightened approach to public art processes. Many A-i-A artists had little effect upon their sites’ overall design, often commissioned to “formulate solutions compatible with an extant architectural conception” (Prokopoff 1981: 79). Some A-i-A works remain vigorously scrutinized by critics bemoaning the unfortunate proliferation of “plop art,” guided by an “unstated assumption that a successful museum or gallery artist would be a successful public artist” (Senie 1992b: 230). Dubbed “turds in the plaza” by architect James Wines, such art is typified by the lone, epic, abstract sculpture, resting awkwardly in but unrelated to its vast surroundings. Its life being granted through percent-for-art dicta rather than an understanding of shared public culture, “plop art” cannot be saved by its egalitarian ambitions.

Although the GSA has aspired to greater outreach and consensusbuilding in the last few decades, emphasizing regional representation on selection panels and organizing meetings for artists and community members to discuss potential sites and local history, its heritage is still marked by some autocratic decision-making. The most enduring example of such was its 1979 commission of TiltedArc, a 73-ton, 12-foot-high, 120-foot-long curved expanse of Cor-Ten steel, which self-oxidizes to yield a rusty patina. Artist Richard Serra conceived the work for its specific site, Federal Plaza (Jacob K. Javits Building, New York City), using pedestrian traffic patterns to determine both its form and placement. In 1989, eight years after its installation, Tilted Arc was dismantled under the cover of night. (Although this was authorized by the GSA’s Acting Administrator, Dwight Ink, it was Regional Administrator William Diamond who pushed for the Arc’s removal.) It remains in storage indefinitely. Complaints about the work’s aesthetic impoverishment (a brooding, corroded “wall”), impediment of the space’s “social use” (open space in Manhattan being a precious commodity), and spoiling effect on the surrounding environment (supposedly it lured graffiti, litter, rats, and criminals into the plaza) were touted as the impetus for its “departure.” In actuality, an even wider matrix of factors came into play. Countless articles and numerous books have debated the Arc’s relative merits and weaknesses and the legal battles over its removal, so a protracted account is unnecessary here. But that the Arc persists to remind us of a federal agency overstepping its boundaries (at least from the art world’s perspective) is essential.

According to Serra, Tilted Arc was designed to forge social function from sculptural space, and visually link various governmental buildings. The artist hoped to reorient visitors’ perceptual relationships, to “dislocate or alter the decorative function of the plaza and actively bring people into the sculpture’s context” (Serra qtd. in Doss 1995: 32). But critics argued that Serra subjugated the plaza in servitude to his sculpture, being more concerned with physical rather than social context (McConathy 1987: 11–12). Steven Dubin suggests no “overt message” accounted for Tilted Arc’s problems, but rather it was Serra’s aesthetic choices, “whose artful qualities eluded” the public (1992: 25). Described as a “sullen blade,” “eyesore,” and “iron curtain” (Senie 1984: 52; Danto 1987: 90), to some viewers the Arc was overbearing and even menacing. Harriet Senie writes: “There was no way to avoid it; one became, willingly or not, a participant (not a spectator) in a city where staying uninvolved was … the preferred way to negotiate a public space” (2002: xiv). Thomas Hine concludes that Tilted Arc was “a great work of art,” but the “qualities that gave it its power were precisely those that made it difficult to live with every day” (2001: 41).

Serra’s emphasis on site-specificity transformed the act of removal into one of destruction for those critical of the GSA’s practices. This claim gains credence in light of several facts. Serra’s previous work was well known, and the GSA sought him out for a permanent piece (Serra received verbal assurances confirming this; Buskirk 1991: 43). After exhaustive project evaluation and approving detailed plans specifying scale, placement, and material, which included revisions made per the GSA’s request, Serra was awarded the contract. The GSA knew what it was getting from Serra; as Robert Hughes snapped: “It did not expect a cute bronze of Peter Pan” (1985: 78). Finally, the GSA had troubled commissions in its recent past, most notably George Sugarman’s Baltimore Federal (1975–7), which a US District judge described as a “security threat” despite its bright colors, whimsical abstract forms, and provision of seating. Though the A-i-A program was temporarily halted and an internal review conducted (Balfe and Wyszomirski 1987: 24), Sugarman’s work remained in place, thanks to a mobilized art community, and the local press and people (Lewis 1977: 40; Thalacker 1980: 8–13; Senie 1992b: 176–7). As proven by the Baltimore case, “understanding is not instant” (Allen 1985: 248), yet the GSA did little to enhance public receptivity toward Tilted Arc before its installation. A small scale model of the work that “gave little real notion of the size and impact of the full piece” was placed in the GSA building’s lobby, while a pole-and-string stakeout on the plaza offered no “accurate impression of the mass and solidity of the artwork itself” (Balfe and Wyszomirski 1987: 25). The GSA also did little to address resentment toward the work after its installation (Storr 1989: 276), which may have been intensified by poor working conditions at the site (McConathy 1987: 4). Though it can take years for an intended audience to acclimate to an artwork, and for a commissioning agency to evaluate the public’s reactions (Grant 1989: 82), the GSA was anxious to cut bait.

The tribulations of Tilted Arc made their way to the general press, with publications like People Weekly portraying the work as a conspiracy between the federal government and art elite against the “people” (Carlson 1985: 138). But Serra’s supporters perceived no such alliance between government and the art world. Instead they saw something insidious in the GSA’s actions, believing that Tilted Arc’s removal was not actually motivated by the will of a deeply offended public, but by political aspirations, especially those of zealous GSA Regional Administrator William Diamond, who entered the scene three years after the work was installed. Since the GSA covers all design, execution, and installation costs, the agency maintains propriety rights over the works it commissions, and retains final authority over artwork removal or relocation. Prompted in particular by the complaints of Chief Justice Edward D. Re, Diamond circulated petitions and convened a Tilted Arc hearing, claiming to carry out the public’s wishes. Diamond presided over the hearing and personally selected a five-member panel to hear testimony, none of whom were experts on public art. The hearing was to determine whether or not Tilted Arc should remain in situ that is, in its original, intended location – or be relocated, though as Robert Storr observes, the hearing seemed little more than “parliamentary niceties” providing “camouflage for a fixed agenda” (1989: 273). While some members of the public decried the piece upon its installation, it remains unclear if they were still as upset by the time of the March 1985 hearing. Only 58 people bothered to testify against Tilted Arc