Great art smacks you in the head. That’s what happened when composer John Cage came upon artist Marcel Duchamp. Then Cage’s 4:33 of silence opened John Ashbery to idea that anything could be in a poem. Picasso and Matisse were staggered by Cézanne’s retrospective in 1906. Chuck Berry stunned Keith Richards and awed The Beatles. Woody Guthrie shocked Bobby Zimmerman into becoming Bob Dylan.
Art is an act of desperation. “We have art in order not to die of the truth,” Nietzsche wrote.
Great art is more real than we are.
That’s more or less the view that artist Terese Agnew carried into a meeting last summer with the Public Art Subcommittee of Milwaukee County. She had gathered letters from local curators and artists who wanted to stop the county program. I can’t remember a time when artists advocated for less art. It was an unprecedented moment in the history of culture in Milwaukee.
Artists don’t usually become anxious by the proliferation of art, if for no other reason than we all stand to potentially benefit. But like anyone else selling to consumers, artists worry about their “brand.” They’re afraid of bad art just like the butcher fears bad hamburger. Hence the protest – public art was degrading the brand for every artist in town.
The committee seemed blissfully ignorant of who these people were and the extraordinary nature of their dissent. The artists’ concerns were politely dismissed as a matter of taste, like whether mustard or ketchup is better on a hot dog. Once something is certified as “art,” and by a committee no less, who’s to say whether one work is better or worse than another?
But art is not a matter of taste for artists. Nor is mustard for master mustard makers. Meaning there was a big disconnect that afternoon between these working artists and the volunteer bureaucrats who administer public art programs.
Had the committee listened carefully to the artists, what might have been learned? Artists know how hard it is to make art. Their research and development program is a haphazard, almost whimsical process of frequent failure. Artists try to give form to what we don’t know. “Truth and reality in art begin only at the point where an artist ceases to understand what he is doing and what he is capable of doing,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it.
Like mutation in nature, art making is an exceptionally wasteful process. The odds for success are long. Museums tidy up the mess and present a false narrative of one masterpiece succeeding another. But at the ground level, good art is not a progression of greatness. It’s typically a happy accident. A masterpiece is usually a marvel, even for great artists.
Bad art isn’t scary in the studio. It’s a means to an end. And less-than-great art isn’t bothersome in a museum or a gallery because it changes every month or so, and we only view it for a few minutes at a time. In any case, it’s easy for people to ignore.
But art permanently installed in the public square can be a nightmare. It’s like being trapped in a mediocre TV movie. You can’t ever turn it off. There’s no escape from public art.
So the stakes are much higher, which makes public art a more daunting proposition. And many complicating factors add pressure: a unique site, a community of interested parties, guidelines, committees, a patchwork of funders and so on.
Then you only get one shot. Artists have to forgo their meandering ways and draw a straight line between the idea and the product. They must operate more like architects, who are trained not to make as many mistakes as artists and perhaps not learn as much in the process. Public art is a difficult marriage between the ideals of art and the efficacies of commercial design.
Which brings us to a new sculpture by Chicago artist Jin Soo Kim called “Stratiformis.” It stands in a small triangular park at the south end of Broadway in the Third Ward. There are few sites like this in Milwaukee. It’s a visual fulcrum. The whole intersection spins around this point. It’s exactly where we would have put a statue of some general on his horse.
Unlike the overseers of other public art projects in town, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design found a real artist and gave her reasonable resources to accomplish the work. In fact, MIAD consciously improved upon the standard operating procedure that brought us the visual trifles that the artists complained about to the committee. Unlike the county art program, MIAD had a credible panel and cast its net much wider than the subculture of simulated artists who specialize in public art. There was lots of public give and take. Kim worked well with the community and students at MIAD. Everything went according to plan.
And Stratiformis, despite its wretched name, is not bad art, though it’s not Kim’s best by any means. It’s a substantial work of art from which we can learn.
Yet it utterly fails as a work of public art. When you look down Broadway, Stratiformis is no more than a brown smudge. From the other side, where all of the cars go by, it is an awkward rusty hulk that teeters on the edge of the pocket park. So it’s innocuous from one side and bulbous from the other. That could be a neat trick if the sculpture didn’t seem so tacked-on to the space, as though grasping to its site rather than redefining it.
When you get closer, Stratiformis is gunked up by the history of the Third Ward, which is literally represented by old tools from a local knitting factory. This gesture is designed to make the art more likable to its immediate constituency. Incorporating history has become a kind of cheap insurance policy for public art. It gives added meaning of the most mundane kind, so that when the art fails, it still seems to have value.
When I talked with people on the MIAD committee and other supporters of the work, we had a lively conversation about questions raised by the art. Several people involved with the project told me its virtue is “it makes people think.” Well, that can be a good thing, of course, but it’s kind of like telling someone in high school that a girl has a “good personality.” It takes so much work to like this brown smudge that you can’t help wonder what the site would be like without it.
Supporters wondered if it’s in the right place, if it’s the right color, if the forms are resolved, if it will fall apart or if it’s too literal. Unfortunately, these are questions artists have before their work is finished. You don’t leave a Beethoven concert wondering if he should have flatted that fifth or not. I don’t think anyone stands in front of the di Suvero wondering if it should be orange.
Stratiformis has its dense and rewarding passages and textures. It would be fine in an exhibition. But on our public streets, it is a dispiriting thing that will annoy us forever. It’s not a matter of taste. In public, Stratiformis is clearly a failure.
Public art bureaucrats often sound like Marxists when they apologized for Stalinist Russia. The problem isn’t the idea – it’s just that the idea was poorly implemented. But MIAD did everything right. Stratiformis is not a process error.
Commissioning unique works of art through an elaborate and transparent public process has simply not worked in Milwaukee. So the solution is not to write better guidelines, as the county is doing.
There are no easy answers here. Public art is vexing. Good art can upset citizens and bad art upsets artists. Well-intentioned people in power with bad taste will often want to leave their mark on the city. When public art succeeds, it is more of a fluke than its advocates would like to believe.
Yet some public art in Milwaukee has worked pretty well. The di Suvero at the end of Wisconsin Avenue, commissioned by an anonymous donor; the Beverly Pepper at Burns Commons, purchased by Barry Mandel; the Magdalena Abakanowicz on Kilbourn Avenue, commissioned by the Women’s Club of Wisconsin; the Kiley Gardens in front of the Milwaukee Art Museum, purchased by Michael Cudahy; and the Wind Leaves in front of Discovery World, given by an anonymous donor – these all have a presence and create a place to pause for existential contemplation. They also function as markers for our mental map of the city. We can argue the finer points – whether these are works of great art – but they are not embarrassing disasters. They add pleasure to the urban landscape.
All of these came to Milwaukee in more or less the same way – with private money and very little public input. There were no official panels of experts or calls for proposals. A person or group of people simply went shopping for something nice. They minimized their risk by either buying an existing object off the shelf or contracting with very experienced artists whose prior public works offered the likelihood of getting a good deal.
By contrast, public art programs in Milwaukee pursue a very high-risk strategy by only buying future works by less experienced artists whose art has no market value.
It’s better to shop for art just like you shop for a car. Your choice will be informed by all kinds of information – a test drive, talks with friends, professional evaluations on the Internet and a host of other media. Anything of value naturally generates information that distinguishes one product from another. Then there is the matter of price, which is determined by the market. This is the way art curators buy art for museums – by being good shoppers.
Shopping also involves a little healthy skepticism and is naturally conservative. By contrast, public art programs often spend money on wildly speculative ventures.
So it’s no mystery why most publicly funded art in Milwaukee looks like a mistake. In the case of Jin Soo Kim, we paid for research and development, and that is what we got – her learning, her mistakes. We are building monuments to the failure of art.
So here is a modest proposal to stop the bleeding. With the public monies that are currently spent degrading both the idea of art and our precious urban landscapes, we could hire a professional public art curator who could guide privately funded art projects and perhaps raise money for such projects as well. This curator would consult with individuals and groups who are interested in public art and guide them to the resources that will make their shopping more fun, efficient and rewarding. The curator could also become the liaison between donors and the public infrastructure.
Just who this public curator might report to would take some discussion. But we’ll never even begin to consider such a change until we first admit we’ve made mistakes and that the current process of selecting public art doesn’t work and probably never will.
In the short run, this admission might result in less public art being purchased, but that would be a blessing. In the long run, a new approach that seeks to shop for the very best in public art would give us more value for our dollar and more beauty in our urban spaces.
