Seeking a Definition of Public Space
Part I of the series 'Profundity in Public Art'
The summer months are an ideal time not only to keep up with the exhibitions and programming that our active network of art museums, galleries, and organizations continue to offer, but to appreciate artworks that can be seen all over our city in outdoor settings and other public spaces. Amidst the ongoing assault to our senses that large-scale advertising and ill-considered design inflicts, there are sculptures and public works that are visual with intent, aiming to step bravely out of the conceptual safety of an institutional setting and to risk exposure and a much larger public response of misunderstanding, all for the sake of presenting a considered view at our urban core.
For the past several decades, Cincinnati has experienced an increase of nuance in its visual topography. On any walking route through the downtown area alone, it would be hard to avoid encountering some kind of public artwork, be they large-scale outdoor sculptures or the rashes of wall-painting projects executed by ArtWorks, such as the MuralWorks projects of the last few years. What in the 1950s and 1960s began as an embattled discourse to reassert humanism, creativity, and a pre-/post-modern sensibility in the urban experience is now compulsive. If buildings and architecture mediate between mankind and the environment as shelter and a structure within which cultural identities may be shaped and practiced, what can be articulated concretely as the role of large, outdoor public artworks in the city?
One large-scale sculpture in downtown Cincinnati, George Rickey's Two Rectangles Vertical Gyratory II, Variation IV will function as a keystone to my map of the territory around this question; however, this topic has grown to an extent that it now constitutes a series of essays, some of which will be presented in subsequent issues of AEQAI.
Public space, a recent history and evolution
Perhaps we take for granted the metamorphosis public art has needed to undergo to even attempt to project a relevant presence outside of the spaces set aside for aesthetic dialogue. The Bauhaus and similar projects within High Modernism that distilled painting and sculpture to basic components such as color, shape, and visual weight are also responsible for re-imagining architecture into what became known as the International Style—the unembellished glass-and-steel, gridded cubes that 
architects have been riffing on since the 1930s. Before this architectural shift, art's inroad into navigable public spaces was as decoration, such as relief sculptures on churches and museums or the highly ornamental facades on the Italianate architecture one can see locally in old neighborhoods like Over-the-Rhine. By the mid-20th century, government departments, aesthetic theorists, and city planners resumed the pursuit of artistic integration into the urban environment (the General Services Administration's percent-for-art programming is one example of this). But for all intents and purposes, all the components of such a fusion were new and unfamiliar with one another. Since the time of high relief, heavily ornate buildings, art, architecture, and even the basic functions of a city had undergone extreme evolution, responding to expansions in industry and the explosion of politics and philosophy that resulted from war years. Simplified forms, streamlined efficiency, and a widening gap between the general public's understanding of art and the research happening within the field of visual art have all contributed to the awkward relationship between many public art projects and their surrounding environments. Derogatorily dubbed 'plop art,' the worst of outdoor sculpture exudes qualities of displacement and abandonment. And to some extent, this comments more on a flawed system for the implementation. Art is often an afterthought for public spaces, with artists being asked to make do with the preexisting obstacles of the intended exhibition site. Unfortunately, history has shown that alternatives like design teams—efforts beginning in the 1960s to involve art and artists at the outset of city planning projects—weren't adequately prepared to understand the different disciplines' takes on projects. Artists, architects, engineers, and government workers each brought their own way of operating to the table and the rabble of disagreements incurred resulted in an even more intentional disconnect between artworks and their surrounding places. Mediocre or generic implementations of art for art's sake may raise such questions as, "If the public doesn't really appreciate or trust contemporary art, why bother putting it out there?" or "What specific differences are there between artworks intended for installation in public spaces, as opposed to more conventional, controlled research taking place within institutions?"
The contrasting qualities of artworks presented in public outdoor spaces versus traditional gallery environments necessitates some groundwork towards distinguishing 'public' and 'private' as they are used in this discourse. To be left out in public is psychologically suggestive of exposure. The public realm is perhaps the catchall for whatever is excluded from private spaces. Privacy has the potential of shielding participants from observation: the gaze, the senses are averted. Privacy offers a lack of inhibition, a location that is not ordered or as directly influenced by imposed regulations for social behavior. A private space—despite enclosure, which tends to be inherent in our concept of it—is nonetheless a freer place and also a place over which someone may exert more control or personalization. Only when participants in public life behave with extreme eccentricities do the narrow prescriptions for communal activities become more apparent. For artists intent on self-expression, a procedure has evolved that is socially and psychologically protective of their creative efforts. The social ramp from studio to gallery allows objects to be presented to a larger 'public' audience with the merits and malleability of a private interior. The best of contemporary art museums offer near total control of the interior environments to artists so that every sensual element can be considered and manipulated towards the final experience of the presented artwork. As most artists have come to appreciate and eventually depend on the neutrality of the art gallery, a brave few have continued to risk failure (and oftentimes failed) at making art out in the open, in front of and in conjunction with society at large.
Art that moves is moving
Among the most well known artists whose work punctuates downtown office complexes and busy sidewalks is George Rickey. His Two Rectangles Vertical Gyratory II, Variation IV was introduced to the southeast corner of East Fifth Street and Walnut Street in 1979. Its largesse, not to mention the grace with which it exemplifies the 'kinetic art' genre that formed around Rickey's work, make Two Rectangles one of the most readily recognized public artworks to downtown workers. A vertical shaft stands several stories tall and supports two slowly rotating paddles made from the same hand-polished stainless steel. Given various wind and weather conditions, these moving elements spin—fast like a windmill or slow like a waltz—and flash with reflected sunlight.
The Rickey sculpture is placed just in front of the main entrance to the PNC Center, lending itself, in part, to a corporate identity. It is the first piece of information most visitors to the building will take note of, and in that position, its formal qualities mediate strikingly between city architecture and the human experience that overlays that grid. The high rising buildings all around it dwarfs its immensity, so that it modulates the extreme scale shift between the office buildings and the people that occupy it. At a fraction of the scale of the overall city, Two Rectangles is more like people than architecture. The urban core's structure and its inhabitants are provided something off of which to play, and it is doubtful many people fully realize how much Two Rectangles choreographs (or at least contextualizes) the walking spaces directly surrounding it.
One local artist does. Ethan Philbrick, a resident of Over-the-Rhine, has a strong local reputation striated with his accomplishments as a cellist, a dancer, and an activist for social equality and gay rights. In one of his earliest pieces in the online video project Ethan Philbrick Dances in Public Spaces, Philbrick sought out Rickey's Two Rectangles as muse and dance partner. The work titled 5th and Main (January 30, 2009) shows a meditative pas de deux with Philbrick intuitively reacting to the slow, gradual breaststrokes of the towering artwork. The dancer's submission to the sculpture's lead boasts of Rickey's strength as a producer of public art. Rickey's work is engineered to move in response to even the slightest natural conditions. People misunderstand the life of kinetic sculptures like this when they describe them as performing for an audience, which is hardly the case at all. Rather, Rickey's work is liberated from a dependency on the viewer's gaze to activate it. Two Rectangles and similar works will move artfully regardless of accompaniment. Placed into this metropolitan context, a resilient sense of autonomy surrounds the work. Its participation in a conversation between viewer and artwork is, perhaps, mute and disinterested. Its mechanical movement while initially addressing human animation ultimately operates as a poetic extension of the industrial, constructed environment it inhabits.
One of the tropes of public art, especially since the 1960s, has been to punctuate the preexisting building it stands near or occupies. Often, artworks interrupt the ordered city as if mid-sentence by introducing so many new visual elements to the view as to seem out of place. Seen in the context of a business district, one of the sophisticated, obviously considered beauties of Rickey's sculpture is the formal relationship it shares with the surrounding towers. The sculpture's movement coaxes it out from the other metal rectangles that make up its backdrop of office buildings, imbuing these 'building blocks' with a humanistic quality of unpredictability.
The Tin Man
Not all of George Rickey's sculptures are to be found in government squares and on downtown sidewalks. By comparing the experience of Rickey's work in different contexts, it becomes apparent how influential their surroundings are to a viewer's consideration of the outdoor works. This subjective condition is a valid conversation for any artwork, and in particular, art environed by the distinctive problems and charged semiotics of socially employed public spaces. Cincinnati filmmaker Paul Kreft has just released a film that offers an alternative view of George Rickey's life work. George Rickey: Works is a fifty minute documentary filmed in the wooded, natural expanse that surrounds the studio that Rickey used in Upstate New York until his death in 2002.
Other than the occasional excerpt from interviews with Rickey, Kreft's work is an unmediated documentation of the sculptures wrapped up in their own movement despite weather and season shifts. Accompanied by acoustic guitar music matched to the speed of the motion in the sculptures, Kreft takes us through several lyrical scenes that fill out an alternative context for Rickey's work than the urban streets or museums in which we may be used to finding them.
Like Philbrick's dance movements, the film matches the kinetic sculptures' grace with shots that have the camera starting from a few paces away and swooping into intimate takes with the brushed surfaces of the pieces. The cinematography calls attention to the very specific ways that these pieces move. Born out of solutions in geometry and physics, Rickey's pieces sway to and fro in repetition, or otherwise rotate and pivot at joints. The artist speaks throughout about the pieces "coming alive." One thinks of the Tin Man from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, a figure that represents independence, rigidity, autonomy needing help to be freed from rust and atrophy, yet still struggling with an issue of engagement and direct human relation. All of Rickey's works do possess a type of life adjacent to humans, as is made evident in how dancer and filmmaker both can complement their movements.
One work comprised of several stacked triangles is attached to the side of the studio—part weather vane, part Bauhaus experiment with geometry. Prior to the attention paid to this piece, the artist's workplace was kept further in the background. What a surprising moment, when nature, art, and human shelter seem hinged into collaboration. Exclamation, surprise, delight, tranquility: Kreft's nearly wordless film resists explanation on my part. Suffice to say that through his and Philbrick's respective endeavors, we've been offered striking evidence to consider how sculpture interacts with the spaces it inhabits and with a range of possible viewers. In one brief interview excerpt, Rickey may pin down a vital quality to this inquiry into the life and experiences of artworks that exist as basically permanent fixtures in public spaces. "I think it's very important to make art that you have to wait for. I'm very concerned that movement be slow enough so you have to wait and you have to wonder what happens next."
One of the several points to be made in researching and discussing public artworks in this series is to begin to slow our pace as we interact with the world around us. What if Rickey's Two Rectangles had a metronomic effect on the urban environment? What if our attention and state of recognition were applied with more intent towards mapping the visual information around us in the city? As we will discover in upcoming installments, Cincinnati houses a great number of public artworks. Many go unrecognized, or at least without a conversation to contextualize their lives on the streets.
To see more of the performances archived as videos in Ethan Philbrick's project Ethan Philbrick Dances in Public Spaces, please visit: ethandancesinpublic.blogspot.com.
To learn more about Paul Kreft's film George Rickey: Works, please visit: georgerickeyworks.com
