Michael Kimmelman - New York: The other morning, as on most weekday mornings, the front steps of the public library in Flushing, Queens, were jammed with people coming and going. Past the checkout desk and tables of new books, the sunny children’s library at the back was mobbed.
The front steps and the big white etched glass window that occupies a wall of the children’s library are both public art projects, part of the city’s Percent for Art programme, completed along with the building in 1998. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville carved the titles of epic adventures and travel stories in the risers of the stairs. Yong Soon Min delicately overlaid maps and flowers – roses, orchids, jasmine, lilies, lotuses and tulips – representing the home nations of Flushing’s immigrant population into the design of the window.
The phrase “successful public art project” may sound like an oxymoron. The world is full of forlorn statues that go unnoticed. A gallant faith in the alchemical power of art to interact with “the public” has inspired generation after generation of American artists and public officials to pursue well-meaning endeavours that too often have turned out to be visually disappointing or alien (“plop art” is one term to describe what has resulted) or have become public-relations debacles.
New York’s Percent for Art programme has had its share of duds and crises. But it has had some triumphs, too, almost all of them below the radar of the commercial art world, which usually pays minimal attention to government-supported public art.
The programme, signed into law in 1982, is celebrating a 20th anniversary: The first project, a sculpture by Jorge Luis Rodriguez for a park in East Harlem, was completed in 1985. The Centre for Architecture, at 536 LaGuardia Place, in Greenwich Village, is holding an exhibition through September 24 to coincide with the publication of a new book, City Art, edited by Marvin Heiferman, with essays by Adam Gopnik and Eleanor Heartney, looking back on what Percent for Art has accomplished so far.
It has become the largest public art programme in the city since the Great Depression, with more than 200 projects completed in schools, parks, police precincts and branch libraries. Incrementally, usually without much fuss, they have enlarged the city’s visual topography.
There are projects in public squares, hospitals, juvenile detention centres and courthouses. One, consisting of sculptured manhole covers, is along Seguine Avenue in Staten Island; another occupies a wall outside Engine Company 75 in the Bronx; yet another is on top of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant in Manhattan. They are just about everywhere the city has done construction in the last 20 years.
There is even a project afloat: Its kinks are still being worked out, but aboard the newest of the Staten Island ferries Werner Klotz and John Roloff have devised a sound installation, consisting of recorded readings from historic texts about the sea, and also a sonar display, of the passing harbour floor.
With the exhibition and new book as unnecessary excuses, I set out recently to see a small per cent of what Percent has done. I invited Tom Finkelpearl to come along. Now director of the Queens Museum, he ran the program for six years, until 1996, when Charlotte Cohen, the present head, took over.
We started out at the Audubon Ballroom on Broadway, meeting up there with Cohen. Then it was on to the Schomburg Centre in East Harlem; the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the 107th Police Precinct in Flushing and the Townsend Harris High School in Kew Gardens in Queens; the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn; Stuyvesant High School, P.S. 234 and Foley Square in Lower Manhattan; and a few other places. We had just enough time left to catch the new Guy Molinari ferry to Staten Island and check out the Klotz and Roloff project.
Along the way, Finkelpearl filled in some details. The idea behind Percent for Art is simple: 1 per cent of the budget of certain municipal construction projects (in reality the figure sometimes turns out to be much less) is set aside for art. The architect on the project may suggest where the art might go and might suggest an artist. Names of other artists are picked from the programme’s slide registry and offered by experts on the selection panel, which consists of community representatives, art professionals and Percent staff members.
When New York passed the Percent legislation in 1982, the city was recovering from near bankruptcy. Public officials, led by art advocates like Doris Freedman, a former director of Cultural Affairs for New York and founder of the Public Art Fund, embraced the concept that art would enliven and humanise the often gloomy, boxy buildings that had come to dominate public architecture.
This was also around the time that the brouhaha over ‘Tilted Arc’ began to reshape discussion about public art. Richard Serra’s sculpture, an 84-foot-long curtain of steel interrupting a windswept plaza in front of the Federal Building downtown, pitted the artist and his supporters against many workers from the area and others who did not care whether Serra was regarded as the world’s greatest living sculptor; they saw his work as an intrusion and imposition.
The acrimonious debate, which exposed a vast cultural gulf between the art world and a wider public, encapsulated a basic problem for public artists: How can art that is not meant to be popular be truly public? What does “the public” mean anyway? Whose public?
Partly from a desire to sidestep another ‘Tilted Arc’ ordeal, Percent for Art from the start stressed community collaboration. Heartney writes in City Art that public art came increasingly to be understood not simply as an object but as “a process or a kind of society-wide experiment that uses the public sphere as its laboratory.”
That much anodyne and mediocre work was produced; that artists sometimes complained they were just cleaning up after bad architecture; and that some still clashed with communities – all this was inevitable. But a notion emerged: that public art might be good but not successful, or vice-versa.
“Success,” as Heartney writes, no longer would only “be measured using traditional criteria of conceptual clarity or aesthetic coherence.” It would also depend on how the public responded to, and used, the art.
So, for example, in 1991, when John Ahearn, a well-known sculptor, installed three bronze portraits of local residents – a boy and his pit bull, a young man with a basketball and a boom box, and a young woman on roller skates – on pedestals outside the 44th Police Precinct House in a Bronx neighbourhood where he lived, he provoked a firestorm.
While he was respected in the art world for embracing real-life subjects, in the community the art was seen as stereotypical and degrading. It was removed.
That public art has its own criteria, apart from those of the conventional art world, is clear from one of the projects Finkelpearl and I visited, Donna Dennis’ work for P.S. 234 in TriBeCa. We plunged into the cauldron heat to see her courtyard fence, finished in 1998: 14 arched panels with silhouettes of the ships that used to cruise New York harbour when the site was Washington Market and the waterfront came up to where the school is now. A signpost for the neighbourhood, screening off the playground, the fence is seamless with its surroundings, cheerful, beloved by the community and also practical.
We drove a few blocks to Stuyvesant High School and saw the 1992 project by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, ‘Mnemonics’: more than 400 hollow glass blocks embedded here and there, like Joseph Cornell boxes, containing exotica and artifacts – fragments from the Great Wall of China, water from the Ganges, sand from the Sahara. More blocks have memorabilia from graduating classes. Some are empty, awaiting the remnants of future classes.
Mysterious and enlightening, linking the high school’s past to its future and the world at large, the project blends into the daily traffic and proud mindset of the school, popularising a sort of conceptual art that might in other circumstances seem arcane.
In place of the statue of the general on horseback, Percent projects strive to be insinuating. Klotz and Roloff, with their ferry installation, exemplify this: Midway across the harbour a computer program randomly picks from a roster of prerecorded poems and historic snippets about the sea to broadcast one selection aboard one of the ferry decks. It is user-friendly, nondidactic and contextually relevant. Weary rush-hour passengers near the speakers seemed to perk up at the broadcast, which briefly interrupted their routine on this day with a letter from Alonzo del Campo y Espinosa, a Spanish vice admiral, to Capt. Henry Morgan, a British privateer.     – New York Times
Last update on: 22-8-2005