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The Public/Private Dynamic in Chicago Art
ÒPublic art is important for our communities and for artistic expression, but it will fail if we cannot come to terms with its complexities and potentials. It is essential that art remain free to
renew itself through the assessment of a world whose issues it reflects and analyzes. Art in the public domain loses its preciousness, but it gains in strength by becoming a social phenomenon, sharing itself with others willingly and effectively. The artists' vocabulary is limited only by the depth and clarity of their vision and their ability to create true syntheses well expressed. This art sees reality but never gives up the dream.Ò1 The question, ÒWhat is public art?Ò is a complex one. As the quote by artist Agnes Denes suggests, public art is both an expanded means of expression, as well as a social phenomenon. The seemingly separate realms of the artistic and the social at first appear antithetical. The former is founded on the principle of individual liberty, the latter on a democratic spirit of collective participation. However, public art seeks to blur the boundaries between these two spheres, one private, the other public, creating a space where artistic freedom and civic freedom conjoin. This definition, although useful, is perhaps a bit utopian. Neither society nor culture are stable entities. The Artwork in Public Spaces project organized by the Soros Center for Contemporary Art was initiated in response to recent shifts in Czech cultural life and serves as a catalyst for considering new relationships between art and its public. Likewise, public art in the United States has taken a varied and, sometimes, controversial course - each turn, each form, influenced by particular cultural, economic, and political forces. Thus the public / private dynamic to which I refer represents a strain of thought regarding the changing role of art in our lives, and illustrates how artists and cultural institutions, working alongside various publics, create strategies for reconciling the function of the aesthetic with the sociopolitical. These strategies give rise to the following series of questions, among others: Are the sociopolitical tenets embodied by public art models at odds with traditional studio art practice? Are these domains separate or intimately connected? Is the public / private relationship oppositional? Or is this dichotomy simply fictitious? How do artists define themselves within these varied contexts? What is the role of the viewer or public? What follows is a conceptual frame for thinking about the above questions, presented via a brief history of public art as it has developed in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States of America. While the artists and projects to be discussed all emanate from this sprawling Midwestern metropolis, they do not represent a regional approach or school per se, but rather are used as key examples of a much larger practice - a practice that emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and continues today in several incarnations. The Mural Movement: Paint Brushes and Communities Public art's roots are grounded in the mural movement, whose profound influences can be traced to the 1930s, in particular to the activities of the Mexican muralists and of the Works Projects Administration's Federal Arts Project, a government-funded program developed during the Depression that employed artists to create murals for public buildings. The movement's revival coincided with the rise of social activism that erupted in the United States during the broadly politicized era of the 1960s, which witnessed protests against the Vietnam War and the birth of the Civil Rights and Women's movements. The slogan ÒThe personal is politicalÒ was the decade's dictum, as issues of identity dominated art and public life. Growing discontent with mainstream institutions of culture and an increasingly commercial, profit-driven art system, inspired artists to create alternative venues and forums, among them artist-run, community-based cooperatives whose activities emanated from the experiences of its members. These alternatives challenged the modernist notion of an isolated avant-garde: creating works collectively in non-art contexts put artists in relation to society rather than outside or in opposition. The modern mural movement is said to have originated in Chicago in 1967 with the Wall of Respect, painted under the leadership of William Walker by members of the Organization of Black American Culture, a collaborative of African-American artists and poets. The mural now destroyed, depicted images of black leaders and black achievement in hopes of instilling a sense of racial pride in a community challenged by growing urban problems. The Wall of Respect, completed without state support and realized solely with the time and resources of its creators, started a kind of chain reaction. Soon mural projects sprang up in other communities, both in Chicago and in other cities. Peace (also titled Metafisica), created in 1968 under the direction of Mario Castillo in Chicago's Mexican-American neighborhood of Pilsen, is considered to be the first Latino public-art mural in the United States.2 Walker later formed The Chicago Mural Group with Eugene Eda and John Pitman Weber, which continues today as The Chicago Public Art Group. Olivia Gude, a senior member of The Chicago Public Art Group, is a mural artist who successfully infuses the medium with innovation and topicality. Her mural Where We Come From ... Where We're Going (1992) is installed at an underpass on the corner of 56th Street and Lake Park Avenue, in an area of the city known as Hyde Park. Here the University of Chicago predominates, and wealth and poverty, black and white coexist, but not always so harmoniously. For this work, the artist stood at the intersection where these various worlds collide and asked casual passers-by the question: ÒWhere are you coming from ... Where are you going?Ò The artist recorded their responses, which range from the prophetic to the profane, then painted them along with the authors' portraits at the site. The work, which is permanent, depicts the diversity of this multiracial community while providing a forum for the discussion of such issues as race, religion, and the day-to-day. ÒFor me the boundaries between public and private are shifting and permeable,Ò says Gude. ÒIn the modernist tradition, authenticity is typically associated with the internal or essential, but as we become increasingly conscious of the identity of the individual as socially constructed through discourse, it is difficult to demarcate public and private concerns.Ò3 This is particularly true of The Chicago Public Art Group's most recent collaboration, a series of mosaic benches created in 1996 for Gateway Park on Chicago's Navy Pier. The work, the largest public art project ever to be realized in Illinois, commemorates the Illinois and Michigan canal and depicts various themes in the canal's history. The Chicago Public Art Group worked with 350 local artists and Illinois residents, along with many municipal and private entities, including the Canal Corridor Association and the Metropolitan Exposition and Pier Authority. Projects dependent on such a large network of support (its budget totaled $400,000) appear incongruous with the movement's humble beginnings, yet the necessities of such relationships are real. Regardless of scale, The Chicago Public Art Group maintains its community focus, uniting artists with diverse publics who together enliven a tradition, the tenets of which remain at the core of today's discourse on public art. Art in Public Places: Monuments as Modern Art Public art is an art of place -- place being a multifarious concept. Public space transcends the limits of private space and is defined not only in terms of physical borders but also in relation to who has ownership and access. Public space may include a city plaza, a municipal building, the public transportation system, a neighborhood, or a park. In 1967, William E. Hartmann of the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, privately commissioned Pablo Picasso to create a permanent outdoor sculpture for the Richard J. Daley Civic Center Plaza in downtown Chicago. The untitled work bears Picasso's distinctive Cubist style and is said to be a hybrid image of his wife Jacqueline and pet Afghan. The Chicago Picasso, as it is commonly known, was unprecedented. Previous monumental works of this magnitude and scale were still cut from the classical mold i.e., equestrian statues, portrait busts, obelisks. Coinciding with the commission of this work and with the neighborhood movements that inspired the renaissance in mural art, was a series of new federal programs that redefined this art of place. These programs had several goals. Akin to the mural movement, they sought to create alternatives to the traditional gallery / museum system, creating partnerships between artists, architects, urban planners, government agencies, the private sector and, of course, the public. More specifically, they supported initiatives in city planning and design in which art played a central role in urban beautification and renewal, while educating Americans about contemporary art as they traversed the urban landscape. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy's administration established the General Service Administration's Art in Architecture Program and in 1967, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, adopted an Art in Public Places program. Similar programs were adopted on the local level. In 1978, Chicago enacted an ordinance stipulating that 1.33 percent of the cost of constructing or renovating municipal buildings be set aside for the commission or purchase of artworks. Known as the Percent for Art Program, it served as a model for other states and cities and today there are over 200 such programs in the United States. In Chicago, the Percent for Art Program is administered by the Public Art Program, a city agency. In 1991, the program undertook one of the largest public art project's in the city's history: a public collection of art objects and site-specific works by over fifty emerging and nationally known artists permanently installed at the Harold Washington Library Center. This project was used as a blueprint for several newly-constructed branch libraries that also house public collections. More recently, the Public Art Program organized public works by eighteen national and international artists, as part of the restoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, a historic boulevard on the city's near south side. Chicago's downtown is often referred to as an outdoor gallery or a living museum where art intersects with daily life. Today, through a variety of public and private sources, works by among others, Vito Acconci, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miro, Louise Nevelson, and Claes Oldenburg grace the city's streets. A pivotal event in this era of public art's history is the destruction of the work Titled Arc by Richard Serra. In 1979, the General Services Administration selected Serra to construct a public sculpture in front of the Federal Complex in downtown Manhattan. The work met with public opposition upon its completion in 1981, when a petition signed by employees of the Federal Complex demanded that the work be removed. In 1989, after eight years of legal and public debate over the work's artistic merits and social value, it was destroyed by the General Services Administration when a decision could not be reached regarding its relocation.4 Titled Arc has come to symbolize the pitfalls of public art. The public's ideas can be quite different from those of the artists and sponsoring institutions. It has also provided some useful lessons, raising anew important questions: What are the artist's constitutional rights to freedom of expression? What are the rights of the public? Who has ÒownershipÒ of public artworks? What social and cultural mechanisms are in place to nurture the dialogue? With the debacle of Titled Arc, public art began searching for a new identity and a means by which to polish its tarnished reputation. This search coincided with the fall of the 1980s art market and the rise of censorship brought on by the conservative right. These economic and political challenges caused radical restructurings to occur both within the art world and within culture itself. In response, artists, along with social and cultural institutions, created new public art strategies in which the autonomous art object gave way to expressions centered on community involvement and education, and on new models of public engagement. At the forefront of these changes was Sculpture Chicago, who since its inception in 1983 has dedicated its programming to new explorations between artists and the public. During its first five years, Sculpture Chicago organized biennial juried exhibitions in the city's South Loop featuring largescale public works by emerging artists, and subsequently curated projects by more established figures in the field whose works were installed in permanent outdoor sites. In summer 1993, Sculpture Chicago staged Culture in Action, a series of temporary community-based projects curated by Mary Jane Jacob, whose aim was to redefine the relationship of art to its audience using Òthe experience of its audience as its subject.Ò5 Emphasizing process over material object, Jacob selected eight artists/artists teams whose projects directly involved members of diverse communities and addressed, through mutual exploration, such issues as AIDS, labor relations, gang violence, racism, and the environment. Two of the more successful projects were conceived by locally-based artists. For Tele-Vecindario: A Street Level Video Project, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle worked with Latino youth in Chicago's West Town community, an area of the city often plagued by gang violence, facilitating a multi-media portrait of their life on the streets. The project took several forms: an outdoor video installation housed in the neighborhood's Emerson House Community Center, a weekly broadcast on the city's public access channel, and an installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Each tier of the project served as a mechanism by which these youths could construct their own concept of self, while simultaneously challenging codified images of Latino identity perpetuated in the mainstream media. Street Level Video continues its production activities beyond the temporal parameters of Culture in Action and receives funding from various sources. Flood, conceived by the collaborative group Haha, which includes artists Richard House, Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, and John Ploof, was a hydroponic garden that utilized water instead of soil to produce vegetables and medicinal herbs for people with HIV/AIDS. (The chemicals found in soil are often just as threatening as the disease itself to those with compromised immune systems). The project, located in a storefront on the city's north side, also served as a community center for discussion groups and a drop-in service for individuals seeking help and inform-ation. Flood's activities are supported today with the assistance of several local churches and hospitals. Michael Kimmelman, in his review of Culture in Action in the New York Times, reveals the complexities in assessing new forms of public art and the failure of traditional forms of art criticism. ÒHow do you compare a leafy vegetable with a park designed by Vito Acconci, much less with a Titian? How do you compare the social service provided by these projects with work done by real social service organizations?Ò6 While Kimmelman, and others, point to the difficulties in understanding these new forms of public art, few offer concrete answers to the questions they raise. Most simply provide a context within the tradition of high art esthetics, connecting these activities to historical examples of political art, rather than providing a cultural context that is more wedded to the political workings of a community. My own criticisms of Culture in Action were not related to how one defines these new models as either social work or art, but to how successful the project was in meeting the terms of its intended and publicly stated social contract. Here are some of the critical questions I raised: Who participated in identifying a community? Can artists whose activities are not invested in that community successfully and knowledgeably speak to its constituency and needs? How does one position oneself within the rhetoric of identity politics without pigeonholing various groups into ethnic, racial, and sexual stereotypes? Without the real participation of educators, policy makers, and members of the body politic other than curators, artists, and art administrators, where is the ability of public art to challenge and empower, and how do we eliminate the boundaries between private art and public life? Some of these questions came to haunt Sculpture Chicago's most recent program Re-inventing the Garden City. Developed in summer 1996 with cooperation from the Chicago Park District, the project joined four artists with four local park communities to develop temporary, collaborative site-specific works in area parks. Issues of negotiation and cooperation were brought to the fore when the project conceived by New York-based artist Dennis Adams met with resistance by members of the project committee. The proposed piece, titled Resale (Border Spill), was to include symbols of gentrification -- signs from local businesses photographically reproduced, then reconfigured into park benches and tables -- that have affected this predominantly African-American community of Garfield Park. Committee members felt the work cast a negative image of their community, and that the project itself did not allow for their direct input. Adams, on the other hand, Òbelieve[d] that a committee should [not] dictate the content of a work of art.Ò7 Neither side nor Sculpture Chicago was able to find a compromise acceptable to all so the project was canceled. Other collaborations included projects led by Pepon Osorio, Miroslaw Rogala, and Ellen Rothenberg. Rogala's Electronic Garden/NatuRealization was successful in its use of technology and serves as an innovative model for these new participatory forms. This interactive audio installation constructed as an outdoor gazebo was located in Washington Square Park, also known as ÒBughouse Square,Ò a site which has traditionally served as a locus of free speech and open debate. Working with local residents and historical material from the nearby Newberry Library, Rogala culled then edited segments from important political speeches, as well as recorded contemporary voices speaking out on topics as diverse as gay-lesbian rights and city politics. These audio segments were activated by infrared sensors triggered by viewers' movements through the park, creating a living dialogue between past and present. An interactive World Wide Web site also accompanied the installation. Technology adds another layer to public art's existing terrain, further disrupting the divide between private and public, while creating new possibilities for the relationship between object and viewer. ÒThe electronic age redefines public as a composite of privates,Ò states artist Vito Acconci. ÒElectronics, by making information accessible and exchangeable, and by making the products of information repeatable and cheap, forces the breakup of national boundaries.Ò8 The File Room, an interactive, World Wide Web archive created by Antonio Muntadas, raises key questions about art and freedom of expression in the public domain of the information superhighway. Sponsored by Chicago's Randolph Street Gallery, temporarily installed at the Chicago Cultural Center in 1994, and currently maintained on the Internet by the University of Illinois-Chicago, The File Room provides an historical sampling of over 400 instances of artistic censorship. Cases, in the form of audio, video, and textual data, are accessed through four main categories -- date, medium, geographic location, and grounds for censorship -- via World Wide Web browser software. Control of information lies in the hands of its users, who can access The File Room from their own computers and are allowed to create their own definitions of censorship, add new cases, or comment on preexisting sources. The Internet played an important role in the realization of Freedom Wall, a public art project by Adam Brooks. The artist began Freedom Wall as a response to the 1992 United States presidential election. ÒI was listening to all the politicians babble about freedom and began thinking about the different meanings of freedom and how the word is often misused,Ò he states.9 Wanting to create an interactive work, Brooks conducted a survey by sending letters of submission to 600 selected participants and randomly by electronic mail on the Internet, asking each respondent to select three individuals who represented the concept of freedom. He also posted a call for submissions on the Electronic Schoolhouse, a nationwide affiliation of middle grade and secondary schools, resulting in two dozen schools that used Freedom Wall as class projects. The poll produced 700 names; the top seventy most frequently given responses were included. The 1,100 square-foot ÒwallÒ made of black vinyl bearing the seventy names of the individuals emblazoned in white enamel, is located in the heart of Chicago's River North gallery district and is visible by the street and by the city's elevated train system. Although visually spare, a complex and engaging narrative unravels, with characters as disparate as Socrates, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela, Frank Zappa, Mother Theresa, and V‡clav Havel. Public Art: An Expanding Field ÒWhen asked my profession, I always respond 'sculptor,'Ò says artist Carmella Saraceno, Òbecause for me the job of the sculptor is to define space, whether personal, private, public or community. The material may be limited to one medium, such as wood, clay or steel, or expanded to include geography, architecture, communities, philosophies, hope, fear or vision. The most successful projects are when different, often contrasting, elements are brought together to create something more important, meaningful, beautiful than any one element individually.Ò10 For the last five years, Saraceno has devoted herself to A+CCT (Artists + Children Create Together), a not-for-profit organization bringing art to disadvantaged youth in the Chicago community of Humboldt Park. The artist has secured five vacant lots and a six-flat commercial building to create a community garden and a recreation/art center. She works with volunteers, community residents, church parishes, business owners, politicians, police, and real estate developers to bring art into these youths lives, as a form of creative expression that provides a constructive alternative to the hardships they encounter in their daily lives. An artist who has created more traditional sculptural works both in the gallery context and for public sites, Saraceno is just one example of a growing number of artists who are merging their private and public works. Just as art has had to negotiate new terrains of understanding, so have the institutions and forums that connect art to our lives, including the gallery, the museum, and art criticism. How does one present and evaluate these new forms? What approaches and methodologies are used? In order to not only build, but also understand these new initiatives, it is necessary to engage cross-disciplinary models of interpretation, such as law, public policy, ecology, environmental studies, sociology, to name a few. These models situate art within a broader social context and help create symbiotic relationships between artists, institutions, and communities. The work presented in this essay is extraordinarily varied and offers a wide range of media, interpretations, and content. As the paradigm for public art changes and shifts, artists will continue to negotiate new terrains of interactivity and to explore that juncture where the studio and society meet and sometimes embrace.
A Case History by © Susan A. Snodgrass Notes:
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