Art's Energetic Punctuation
of a Psychological Map
Part 2 of the series 'Profundity in Public Art'
In the first part of this project about sculpture that appears in or influences our views of Cincinnati's public spaces, I set an inquiry rolling about the role of public sculpture for the art viewer, the artist, and the community. In looking at George Rickey's work as it appears in downtown Cincinnati and in a natural environment through Paul Kreft's documentary, I discussed a work's relationship to its surroundings. The visual collaboration of object and place creates meaning and invites a broad range of responses from the viewer.
The relocation of the aesthetic object into the public realm (rather than more conventional sites like museums, galleries, or private collections) overlays the geographic mapping of place with a process that maps the psychological qualities of spaces. What follows are sincere speculations that have spun out from my personal experiences with this set of public artworks. These particular works are ones that lend themselves to investigations into the kinds of energy—metaphysical and psychological—that culminate around the peculiar circumstances of their presentation.
An abstract entrance point
Although constructed as a commission for Federated Department Stores in 1980, it wasn't until 1993 that Louise Nevelson's Sky Landscape II was moved to its present location outside the Walnut Street entrance to the south building of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County's Main Branch. The outdoor work's grand scale and permanence set several precedents for many of the artworks that have appeared in the public sphere since her time. The Cubist piecework of the steel sculpture's overall form is highly dramatized in direct sunlight. The black patina of the surface is the lightest part of the work as deep shadows intensify the three dimensional composition of curved, curled, and scrabbled-together elements. The Nevelson is an abstraction to which the title adds some points of content. The irregular range of pinnacles across the top edge of the work is less abstract when compared to the silhouette of a city's skyline (maybe ours with the addition of Daniel Liebeskind's Ascent in Covington).
But here one of contemporary art's sensitivities that usually call for a neutral exhibition environment is brought into play. Sky Landscape II is susceptible to its context in front of a public library. That the sculptural sentinel outside the library's Vine Street entrance is Michael Frasca's 1990 fountain that literally depicts stacks of oversized tomes with ridged leather bindings, the Nevelson may be even further charged with the specific imagery of its location. The interplay of vertical and horizontal bars in the piece may be thought of as an untidy, oft used shelf of books. But I for one am almost always put off by the unclever interpretation of abstract forms as literal images slightly askew. So rather than insist on forcing the artwork's elements into a scene that they are obviously not intended to be (because (a) the piece was conceived for another location, and (b) I will continue to hold that if an artist wanted to make a sculpture of a pile of books, they would, like Frasca did, actually sculpt a stack of books), the Nevelson can be celebrated as an irregular structure of ideas, laced with qualities like mystery, discovery, and openness. These are physical truths about the sculpture itself that are also concepts that drive the institution beside which it stands.
The Frasca work, officially named The Amelia Valerio Weinberg Memorial Fountain, 1990, is said to represent the free flow of information from the books, as water cascades through and over top the disheveled piles. Perhaps from its literal depiction of the historical contents of a library, this work is indisputably a more energized gathering place outside the library entrances. It is integrated into the space, with a welcoming ledge for sitting and the oasis-like draw of a fountain in the thick of an urban setting.
While, certainly, which entrance library patrons use is no doubt largely influenced by the direction of their approach, I wish to inscribe meaning to the two alternatives. In comparing the two entrances, the one accompanied by a literal stack of books, the other by a seminal artist's abstract solution, it seems plausible that these works make up a meaningful dichotomy of expectations with which library visitors may choose to enter. Frasca's piece is a foregone conclusion, purposeful and predictable, with just a little whimsy borrowed from Pop Art's propensity for enlargement. On the other side, Nevelson's work is ambiguous, but nonetheless seems familiar in how its forms relate to the urban landscape and combines geometric and organic structures to create an altar to the transcendental. I do believe there is some consequence to which of these entrances visitors to the library's south building choose to use, insofar as the subconscious is constantly recording information and memories that are implicated in the interpretation of our conscious experiences. (If you are interested in knowing about my personal experience, if I am entering that building of the library, I always enter past the Nevelson). There is meaning formed from the addition of experiences, events, and sights. Each person's is specific, invaluable and humanizing. These enormous, publicly displayed objects are added into what may otherwise be banal drives through the city for the unobservant. Art's punctuation of the succession of one's memorable impressions is an access point to shared cultural information. The highly personalized expression from each of these two artists now exist in and influence a public space's comings and goings.
Partition and collaboration
Jumping ahead nearly two decades, 2008 saw the implementation of two public artworks by local artists that if considered (and one risk of integrating art into the public environment is that it could go unconsidered or altogether unnoticed), contribute discourse concerning social behavior, navigation, and the spirit of a place.
For nearly a year leading up to its dedication midsummer last year, the sculptor Rebecca Seeman collaborated with Claire Darley, a fellow professor at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, to conceive of an artwork that would also function as a division between a play area and sitting area for the Otto Armleder Memorial Regional Aquatic Center at the Dunham Recreation Complex. (Many of the discoveries that Seeman made during this project contributed to the work she exhibited earlier this year, which I reviewed in our March issue). Collaboration is often at odds with the conventional model for the artistic practice, which is typified by solitude and autonomous vision. While Darley and Seeman both maintain sophisticated, individual working processes, on more than one occasion they have found projects that they can create together as a means of stretching outside their regular, basic interests.
The location of Water's Edge is very different from the downtown sidewalks that the Rickey and the Nevelson watch over. As part of a public park and recreation center, it is heavily trafficked, especially in warm months, by families and children playing with the water park equipment available. Darley and Seeman's piece stands just outside the water park area, demarking a rest area of shaded tables.
In their case, the nature of the site drove the ideation of the work, along with a neat incorporation of both artists' independent aesthetic concerns. Their artwork invokes a sleek oasis appended to one end of the outdoor space. More on the side of readable imagery than, say, Robert Motherwell's organic black forms, or the aforementioned Nevelson, the low partition is comprised of a series of panels, each a sheet of black enamel coated steel cut into compositions of botanical forms with the negative space removed completely. The result is a succession of silhouetted images of water plants that casts a complex shadow of the cut out forms across the white concrete onto which it is installed. This play of light is another inventive response to the artwork's context; the totally exposed concrete patio is further integrated into the sculpture by way of its shadow stretching as a double of the piece across the ground.
The artwork is a subtlety in some ways. With the help of its shadow play, it is even further integrated into the surrounding place. The brilliance of their project's integration of form and function is probably more subliminal than it is readily recognized by visitors to the park. The directional flow of the space and the difference in the kinds of social energy within and outside the seating area it nearly encloses is remarkable. Water's Edge illustrates one of the truly impressive, powerful abilities of sculpture: the addition of the work to the topographical site influences the mental and physical activity that surrounds it.
Energizing the connective tissue between communities
Perhaps one of the most interesting additions to the urban landscape in Over-the-Rhine is a project local artist Debbie Brod developed last year with the help of students from Hughes High School and University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, as part of Findlay Market's 'Art in the Market' program. Brod's work as a visual artist is often directly related to her passion for education and community enrichment. (In this issue of AEQAI, A.C. Frabetti reviews a couple of miniature works Brod exhibited at the Art Academy of Cincinnati). Flavia Bastos, the director of Art in the Market, worked closely with the project as it commemorated the program's tenth year. Initially it may be seen to share much in common with not only the works discussed in this piece, but also many public art projects in our time. Two tall relief panels that are built atop planters are spaced down what is little more than an alleyway just across Race Street from the north parking lot at Findlay Market. Its location and use of recycled materials contribute to an intriguing, elusive atmosphere that surrounds the work. The pieced-together irregular shapes that comprise the work owe much to Louise Nevelson's artwork in general, and to Constructivist investigations by the likes of Kurt Schwitters before her. The surface of the piece is dense with the kind of impassioned, colorful painting typical of youth-driven artworks. The planters, as well as a number of birdhouses that are built into the various constructions of the twin objects, denote the convergence between the natural and urbanized spheres, augmented by art tinged with shades of populist theory. Hailed as not "...just art. It's a bridge between communities" by UC Magazine's Amanda Hughes, this piece's manufacture-funded by grants and donations from UC's Center for Community Engagement, the Ohio Arts Council, and other outside partners-bespeaks of the ambiguous relationship between neighborhood revitalization projects and public art projects. Needless to say, there are plenty of facets to consider when looking at this work, but none so interesting as the ways it inhabits space(s).
The additional insight into this artwork that is not immediately apparent during the experience of it in Over-the-Rhine is that these structures only make up half of the project that Brod and the students executed. There is a second site-specific installation that hangs high on a wall above the café in the DAAP building on UC's campus. I immediately think of sculptural pieces by the artist Roni Horn. Oftentimes, one sculpture, such as When the How and the What are the Same, is comprised of two elements that are never exhibited in the same rooms of a gallery or museum. In this way, the entire work can never be experienced in a single take; instead, one must rely upon memory and the even more elusive metaphysics that tether the objects into a "whole" art piece. The connections that drive the artworks Brod created that are now displayed in distinctly different neighborhoods and situations are those social efforts that were involved in their making. The wood materials that form the pieces are recovered, with their shapes and physical presence actually remainders from previous lives. Like the proper ingredients for a spell, these leftovers carry history and experience into the final artwork. A remarkable range of communities—collegiate, art non-profit, and the intense diversity of the residents of Over-the-Rhine and visitors to the Market-possess degrees of awareness that are brought to the production and ongoing appreciation of these objects. At its best, UC and Art in the Market expect that the school's 4,000 students and 250,000 annual visitors to the Market will appreciate this endeavor.
The works beside Findlay Market are displayed in an alleyway that is meant to act as a connector between the Market and a nearby park where locals congregate. That on my many visits to said alley during the research and writing of this piece I have never seen another soul looking at the artworks at any time of day, anytime during the week is not at all disheartening. In fact, I find the discretion of the work's location of special interest. It raises questions about whether visual art need be consciously observed in order to be effective. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's specific brand of phenomenology and poetics would certainly allow for indirect or inarticulated qualities to be sensed or transmitted in one's experience of space and form. Perhaps even more, Feng Shui ideology would allow the potential that the placement of Brod's sculptures would have an effect on the qi, or energy, that is in regular flow through the neighborhood. Treated as a hall or passageway, the addition of Brod and her team's sculptures with planters check off nearly every point of what changes can be made to improve qi. Without these objects, Feng Shui principles would say that the narrow alley allows qi to rage and rush forward, which can be harmful. I wonder what ways the qi of both parts of this project cross-inform one another. I hope, even if I touch on these theories only lightly, that I can induce in the reader some speculation about the energetic potential of the creative act apart from a direct experience of its visual presence.
Public art is a scarecrow
Especially in the realm of public artworks and their discourse, there is more going on than just what is seen. The artwork carries a social weight that can be read psychologically or spiritually, politically or as some intersectional symbol for these and other concerns. Often, in the presence of these described public works and many others, my interest is as invested in considering the context of the work as the aesthetic decisions in the works themselves. Through these pieces, artist/individuals contribute personal insight back into a shared societal dialogue.
I'll theorize that the art object often functions as the alter ego of the artist. I often find artists locating themselves inside their work, re-accessing and identifying with a personal investment that went into its making. In some of these cases, the artwork itself is so connected to the identity of the artist that it can't stand up for itself without reinforcement from biographical back stories about its maker. But perhaps the strong, detached alter ego artwork is one in which the artist has explored a premise, a set of possibilities that are very separate from the concerns that make up their inner psychological inquiries. As I have spent time with these works, I haven't been able to shake my recollections of Carl Jung's model of archetypes that populate the Conscious and the [collective] Unconscious.
For the artist who produces and lives with their work as public, permanent, outdoor works, there are special considerations for how their personal expressions are given back over to a shared experience of idea. As wild a hypothesis as it may be, public sculpture seems particularly well suited to address a potentially problematic archetype: the Persona. The Persona is the part of the self that is publicly displayed. Often attached to metaphors like masks or scarecrows, the Persona is furthest away from the depths of a Collective Subconscious. It is a personalized construction, one with the ability to distract or even mislead. It is used to make an impression.
How many of these descriptions are apt in approaching public artwork as well? Perhaps in the case of artists, the nature and activity of the Persona is further extended off of the matter of self's conscious/unconscious by attaching one's 'public face' to artwork that is then separated from the artist, and exists out in the world as an independent alter ego. What strikes me is this: under normal circumstances, the Persona is a mental space removed from a collective consciousness. But if it is even possible to invest this scarecrow self into a large sculpture and go on to give that artwork over to a shared, public experience, perhaps the personal inventions of the individual are re-joined to public or collective experience.
The energetic traffic considered throughout this work is not only the soulful stuff of qi. Walk in and around Findlay Market for example and I hazard that you will sense and participate in an exchange of thought and idea. The spirits of cities are at their most intense in these places: libraries, parks and markets are among the most important gathering places that are cross-community, reflecting in larger systems many of the ideals purported in Brod's collaborative, multi-location installation project. One of the important reasons to invite public artworks into these kinds of spheres is to recognize the value of individual perspectives as they contribute to an inter-dependent society (read: the collective consciousness). If my thinking through this field of art has profited something so far, it is the reassurance of art's place in a society full up with industries, concerns and conflicts. It would be naïve to think a public artwork as simply an oversized decoration. On the contrary, I keep finding that the placement of that object closes a conceptual circuit, and not one relegated to the niche concerns of high art discourse. They locate the individual within the community, and likewise, benevolently add the individual's insight into the community's space, augmenting (and in the best cases improving) the flow of such spaces.
