Further thoughts on public art in Philadelphia

Looking up, I see the whiteness of City Hall and imagine the sculpture otherwise. I feel a momentary experience of the outnumbered, perhaps the everyday experience for these men.

City Hall sculpture does represent ethnic groups other than white; there are Native Americans in monumental poses on the north corners of the building and half-clothed Africans holding up pillars.

Philadelphia artist Diane Pieri recently asked me, “Doesn’t public art exist as a sociological recording of our history?” Yes, and because history is a slippery fishtail of interpretation, recording it through art becomes even more slippery.

Before being approached by the men, I hadn’t really thought of Billy beyond what I was taught in school: benevolent founder of Pennsylvania, friend to Native Americans. My grade school instruction did not mention Billy as a slave owner (3 to 12 slaves, depending upon the source, and freed in his will). How is this understood? As a matter of degrees: Billy was not really a slave owner because he owned only a few? Or as a matter of the culture’s values: It was the practice of the times? Regardless, Billy’s ownership of ancestral blacks could make the group of young black men less tolerant of his sculpture presiding high over the city.

History demands interpretation from a particular point of view, although several interpretations may be available — and no one has the freedom to choose his or her history. The interpretation of history becomes problematic for public art, so it’s not surprising that much of the art installed in public spaces in the past five years has been either abstract or has portrayed animals or nature.

For instance, a sculpture by Roxy Paine, Symbiosis, has been installed for a year in Iroquois Park across from the Art Museum. It is conceptually based art directed at the universal, in this case, what happens between the organic and man-made. We all live at this intersection, thus ensuring that the future will not reveal a bias within the art.

“Anything you want it to be”

Can art provide potential freedom to our historically controlled lives? I often hear my prison students state, “Art is anything you want it to be.” When I recently mingled in the crowd surrounding the Rocky statue at the front of the Art Museum, this statement was echoed by a young film worker keeping watch over the public while the latest Rocky movie was being shot. When I asked her if she thought Rocky is a work of art or a movie prop, she told me, “Art is anything you want it to be.”

What does this cliché mean? Art does have the capacity to expand concepts in a way that everyday language cannot: I may insist that my pen is a good backscratcher, but to insist that the pen is my mother decompensates any conversation into insanity. Language allows me to change a thing’s function but not its identity.

Art may offer space in which common rules of communication can be broken. Examples of this are Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures created of common everyday objects; Clothespin in Center Square, Split Button on Penn’s campus, Paint Torch at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Giant Three-Way Plug outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Each work asks the viewer to experience common objects differently through magnification of size and obliteration of function; we are forced to construct another identity for that object.

The art of the urinal

Duchamp’s urinal inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art is another public reconfiguration of an object. Arthur Danto suggests an “is” theory of art legitimizing a common object into art — the difference between a Brillo pad and a work of art that contains a Brillo pad is the theory of art that deems the second as art.

However, there is a caveat. Art (and theory) requires an adequate overlying power structure concurring that it is art; there must be a power source larger than artist or nonartist, existing without fame, political power, or money. The group of black men saw this inherent power structure manifested in City Hall’s sculptures.

It may be I cannot even determine art in my own space, as is the case of an upstate New York man. When this landowner placed several toilets on his yard designating them as art, he was issued town warrants to remove them. A battle ensued questioning the toilets’ status as art or garbage. Without consensus from a higher authority designating it as art, Duchamp would be just another chump with a urinal.

Getting through the labyrinth

Most art viewed by the public has been selected through a finely tuned labyrinth of management — galleries, museums, or committees. Only a fraction of art surfaces to the public’s view. As a result, the public is at a disadvantage in making any determination. A recent article in The Art Newspaper finds that almost one-third of solo exhibitions in U.S. museums go to artists represented by only five galleries.

The irony of the Rocky statue is that art management has little power in deciding its fate. Rocky’s powers are higher, answering to tourism and city revenue. The Rocky question may be sealed, but the Museum might better serve art if it were to initiate a public discussion as to why Rocky has never had, and will never have, the strength to reach the top of its steps. Unless the Mueum's management, too, benefits from Rocky’s revenues (sacrificing integrity for cash) and/or thinks it’s strong art.

Art emerging from top art management is no less biased than a traditional statue presiding over the city, making me wonder what could be created if art were freed to exist out from beneath the boots of power.

For an earlier essay by the author considering public art in Philadelphia, click here.

Above right: Symbiosis by Roxy Paine. (photo courtesy of Roxy Paine)

Above left: Split Button by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (1981), University of Pennsylvania campus. (photo by Marc Smith via Creative Commons/Flickr)