Philadelphia's Magic Gardens as a private example of public art

Mostly, I leave Nathan to his drawings and constructions. I have learned that he works from sources unique to him more than most people. He embraces ideas and materials I bring to class, taking them in directions I can never predict. If I intervene too much, I throw Nathan off course. Imagination is part of his source, but it is also the dialogue he maintains with the visual and tactile marks upon the surface. It is a dialogue pulling Nathan out into the world, preventing him from falling into the solipsism and visual redundancy that often happens when the artist feels imagination and self-oriented intention reign. Marks and materials have voices of their own and listening to them leads Nathan to new territories in this corner of the prison.

I think of Nathan when I visit Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens (PMG) on South Street, the mosaic labyrinth of space created by the artist Isaiah Zagar. I am searching for public art that addresses a question: What art emerges when it is free to exist out from beneath the boots of power?

One of Zagar’s many mosaics throughout the city, PMG consists of both interior and exterior space. Over 14 years, Zagar created the mosaics in vacant lots adjacent to his home on South Street because established venues were unavailable. When the owner of the property contemplated selling it, the neighborhood, concerned the art would be destroyed, provided support in establishing the property as a nonprofit museum to preserve the art.

Evidence of a do-or-die activity

Most public art is created through conventional routes of commission or grant for a specific, officially approved site. Without such conventional extrinsic structures, an artist is dependent upon personal conviction and commitment. It is this commitment that prompts my interest in the mosaics — the art manifests an understanding that creativity demands a do-or-die activity ignoring convention and appearing to some as an obsession. Of course, anything less than obsession is a compromise to art.

Another characteristic of much public art is its prescription of public good. In a world of such learning, public art has the potential of becoming, at best, one more laborious detail and, at worst, propaganda. Working without external expectations, Zagar’s work is not burdened by elements insisting that I learn certain facts or lessons.

Public art demands proposal, planning, specific execution, and a committee’s intervention. If these demands are removed, the artist is free to follow a phenomenological exploration leaving the safety of the blueprint. It is this nonconforming dialogue between space and marks on the surface that reminds me of Nathan.

Pure experience

While great art has been created under the confines of public limitation, the PMG mosaics reveal what can be created without such restraints. It is art needing no justification, no explanation, no critique — it is just pure experience of its existence.

Unlike the insistence of learning facts, the mosaics insist upon viewer experience. The first thing I experience is the insistence of pattern, color, texture, and movement in fragmented tiles and objects embedded into concrete. In their insistence, I experience the continuous flow of space and feel the arbitrary demarcation of interior from exterior. As I move through the labyrinth, I move through space in the continuum of a Mobius strip.

The second thing I experience is the visual movement from small to large and the play between fragments and wholes: The magic created makes neither precedent. The whole is not greater than the sum, and, at the same time, the whole is not not greater than the sum of parts. When boundaries are abandoned, binaries become inconsequential.

Looking at this art without boundaries, I feel a contradiction in its institutionalization as a museum. Museums are the bulwarks of cultural convention, no matter how radical they appear. Does confinement within a museum tame this art’s boundlessness? Furthermore, what actually happens to my experience of the art within these boundaries?

The natural history of art

The defense of the museum is in its goal of preservation, making me wonder how art lives — is it immortal, or does art have a natural life, living and dying like the rest of us? Artists creating biodegradable art have raised these questions without really challenging the issue because that art was never intended for anything beyond making a show of its death. What happens when the artist and public want the art’s survival?

If, however, the mission of museums is education, I wonder if there is a better way to pass the torch.

I can’t answer these questions, but I find a clue in the garden that suggests why art does not exists a natural life, but must be placed in a preservation solution. The clue comes in the form of a little sign in the garden asking that I not put paper — personal messages? prayers? — into the mosaics’ bottles.

Art without selfies

Art is not free to experience a natural life; it is murdered. Integrity of art is destroyed through the viewer’s need for a personal imprint upon the art, as demonstrated by the constant selfies taken in any museum. Why must art be coerced into an empire of the self in order for it to be experienced?

Without specific lessons or personal tagging, art remains ambiguous. In a world striving toward clarity, ambiguity is made suspect and conquered through rendering it familiar.

But clarity is eventually revealed as false clarity in the crucial moments of my life. At those times, I am forced to hit the ground running, knowing there are no answers in that mysterious place. Taking art as my ambiguous guide, I can only hope to find courage enabling me to blow through the pop stands of the border patrols.

Above right: Nathan Riggs, Untitled, charcoal on paper. (Courtesy of the artist)

Above left: Chairs in the Magic Gardens. (Photo by author)

For other essays by Treacy Ziegler on public art, click here and here.

For Pamela J. Forsythe's WNWN look at the Magic Gardens, click here.