Controversy in Public Art (print version)

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(Published: December 2007, print version)

Controversy in Public Art

By Vera van der Meij

In this article I will be dealing with controversy in public art, focusing especially on art that has been moved or dismantled from its site, and question the role of censorship. I will use two examples of contemporary public artworks in the Netherlands to illustrate my point. Firstly I will address the response of the public towards the art and demonstrate the problems that arise when the governments use public funds to commission artworks that have a strong visual language that could be seen as offensive.

“Public art” is a lable that creates problems in terms of its definition. The meaning of the work and how it relates to a specific site make the public arts ideals too broad to clarify. Difficulty arises when addressing who represents the actual audience; to it the ‘public’ in public art? Is it the people who pass by the piece occasionally, or citizens of the town where the work is situated, or a specific group of people it’s trying to address? I deliberately avoid using the word community here, which deals with the same problematic issue. What, and who defines that community? And what legitimises such a definition? Does the notion of a community actually exist even? Basically, in the broadest sense, public art is art that is sited outdoors or in a location deemed to be public primarily because of its unrestricted physical access. For artist exhibiting their work in the public sphere reality is that their audience is undefined, and the community they might want to address doesn’t actually exist.

Site specificity first emerged in the late 1960s as a growing significant part of public art as a way to resist complicity with market forces that would reduce objects to mobile commodities floating through the idealist white cube of the gallery space. From that moment “public art” needed a better definition. Contemporary public art is known for its relationship to site in contrast to early modernist’s practices which would chose a random abstract sculpture, creating at best ‘a pleasant visual contrast to the rationalized regularity of its surrounding, providing a nice decorative effect’. So the notion of site specificity must be taken into account here, not least because the most obvious and famous example is Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. Tilted Arc, a massive, wall-like steel sculpture that responded to the commercialization of art by grounding the sculptural object irrevocably in the center geography of a rich, diverse and busy area of lower New York city, was removed after years of trial and public debate. It was due to be moved, but as Serra claimed to have made it specifically for that site, relating to the architecture and the size and other aspects of the Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan New York, on which it was placed in 1981, ‘to move it was destroying it’.

Contemporary public art is known for its site specificity. It relates to the site, the architecture, and often also addresses the ‘community’ that lives there. These artistic ideals have played no role in the debate for Tilted Arc at the Federal Plaza in New York, which, as Miwon Kwon believed, should have been the key issues in this dispute. Richard Serra himself argued against removal to plea for his freedom of speech. Unfortunately he lost the trial and Tilted Arc was removed in 1989.

With its platform public art clearly differs from any other art, dealing with its own issues and rights. As Harriet Senie writes in her book Contemporary Public Sculpture: “The larger public for public art must be given access to the art context within which contemporary sculpture can be understood and appreciated.” She continues: “Art in museums is admired and respected, while art in the streets is vandalized and despised.” The public spheres and understanding of pulic arts is created by large amounts of people who are unaware of this specific type of art, its means and its process. Barbara Hoffman writes in Law for Art's Sake: “[…][R]ecent public art has tended to arouse reactions by means of specific political references and direct affronts to traditional standards of decency and taste. These controversies have clear ideological implications involving national and racial pride, and homophobia.”

The question arises whether art, that is publicly sponsored and displayed has the right to offend community values and contravene local standards of decency. This question can’t be answered easily and desires nuanced approach. Artists have to balance between the unlimited boundaries of their artistic practice by weighing the responses of the public to what they create. Thus the artist has to take into account that he/she wants to achieve a certain response, rather than misunderstanding (the fate of most public art). In order to be understood by its audience the artwork has to correspond to the public in a comprehensible language. Ironically, the most disputed public artworks are the most successful because of their impact in drawing the attention, to surprise of the public to its presence. This creates an interaction between the piece and the viewer and questions their role in relation to the artwork, and their presence on the site itself. Public artworks that disrupt the publics daily routine are usually the most disputed artworks.

A link with Tilted Arc, the sculpture which was named earlier is obvious: the public felt it was too disruptive, the case was brought to trial because the government wanted to dismantle it and after years of debating it was removed in 1989, ten years after the work was commissioned.

In Wageningen, the Netherlands “arose” quite literally a monument of war remembrance, called Vrijheidsvuur (freedom fire) in 2005, designed by the Dutch artist Hanshan Roebers, which was a vertically orientated column of copper erecting from the earth influenced by the amount of sunlight, and spurting out a fire on the top. Visually, there is an obvious connection with a penis, but it has also visual connotations to a grenade shell, and the freedom monument of Sukarno in Jakarta (an artwork that is nicknamed “Sukarnos last erection”). The citizens of Wageningen thus felt it was inappropriate for the remembrance of WOII and protested heavily against its installation. An action committee was brought into life to collect 1300 autographs on a petition to prevent the artwork from being installed. The sculpture was due to be placed on the site for which the artist had actually designed it, but that seemed to be the only place for which the municipal government and the citizens of Wageningen didn’t feel it was appropriate. Therefore the municipal government recently decided to move Vrijheidsvuur to somewhere else in Wageningen.

In that same year, a work by the contemporary artist Paul McCarthy called Santa Claus, was due to be placed in a neighbourhood in Rotterdam, also in the Netherlands. It immediately became the subject of vehement discussions, as it looked like a gnome holding a butt plug in his hand, hence the nickname the sculpture received “kabouter butt plug” (gnome butt plug). The Rotterdam municipal government relocated the art piece several times before finding it a less problematic home, which was the inner plaza of the Boymans van Beuningen museum. McCarthy’s piece, which dealt with Western consumerism, was rejected by the residents of every area the government proposed, because of the offensive character of the sex-loaded sculpture. McCarthy is not known for his modesty, and the Netherlands is known as a liberal country, but nonetheless it was decided after more than a year of debating, to place the sculpture somewhere less prominent.

Globalization has also created feelings of loss in our individual and cultural identities. Contemporary public art has tried to give voice to these feelings, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Either way, public art requires a discussion about its function and visual and artistic qualities, and often also about its site specificity. Public art is often funded by the taxpayer because the government commissions artists to make art for the public realm. The public therefore feels it has legitimate reasons to argue against an installation of an artwork that they don’t like, or which fails to address their needs. Since the rise of the internet as a medium, the public sphere has expanded from physical to virtual space, which gives artists working in the public realm another platform to use for their work.

This leads to another issue. Artists use their freedom of speech to make works that they feel give a voice to the issues they are dealing with for a specific site. However, the language they choose may shock the public so much that they cannot see what the artwork actually wants to say. The work of the (white) artist John Ahearn serves as a perfect example here. He was chosen to make a public artwork on the site of the 44th Precinct police station, in the borough of the Bronx, New York, which after installation incited an immediate negative reaction. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood felt offended by the three statues of Raymond and Tobey, Daleesha and Corey, four youngsters from the neighbourhood themselves that he intended to embody as he stated the “South Bronx attitude.” Ahearn wanted to make ‘a community-based realism that countered the example of Serra’s Tilted Arc, which itself was a counter position to the art-as-public-spaces model of public art.’ However, the opponents from the neighbourhood said that Ahearn, as a white man, didn’t understand the experience of the African American “community”, and charged the sculptures as being racist. The responses made him feel forced to remove the pieces five days after they were placed.

As far as censorship is concerned, if a public artwork is commissioned by the government, should the content be restricted because the government seeks a goal independent of communications? Or should art not be submissive to any sort of censorship because it demolishes democracy in a way that art should always be free to question and criticize taboos and morals in society? There is a nuance between those two. Art should be able to state issues about society, even though the visual language chosen by the artist is loathed and sometimes even revolting/repulsive, and the government needs to provide a platform in order to allow artists to do so. But in order to reach their audience artists have to take in account that, if they are in the public sphere and an audience with a lack of artistic appreciation is confronted with their work, they may have to adapt to more moderate visual ideals. But ultimately, art in the public realm is always due to be despised, misunderstood and discussed. That is the challenge of the artists who make public art. Art is not a commodity and the controversy of art in the public realm is also part of its understanding, or can even become part of it. ‘Controversy is both an inevitable and acceptable part of public art, which may require time for its acceptance.’

Conclusion

In this article I have tried to deal with public art that has been moved, or dismantled from its site, and question the role of censorship. I have used two examples of contemporary public artworks in the Netherlands to illustrate the response of the public, and more general show problems that arise when the government uses public funds to commission an artwork with a strong visual language, which could possibly be seen as offensive.

In the Netherlands two public art pieces were installed in 2005 which both were immediately despised by the public for being inappropriate for the site it was due to be placed, and they were both moved for that reason.

Public art also raises the question of censorship. As an art form, public art needs to have the freedom in order to give expression to questioning certain issues in society, and trying to making people aware of themselves and their relation to that society. It is governments duty to provide a platform in order to allow artists to show these artworks. But in order to reach their audience, artists have to take in account that different rules supply for public art as the audience is not used to looking at art, and the visual language they choose in their work might not achieve its goal to create awareness of what’s at stake.

But obviously, art in the public sphere is always due to be despised, misunderstood and discussed. Artists making public art need to challenge the monotone routine of people passing by, in order to make them think outside the box, but this is not an easy task. Art is not a commodity and the controversy of art in the public realm is also part of its understanding, or can even become part of it. Public art and controversy will always come hand in hand, and it requires time to be accepted in the public sphere by its viewers.

Vera van der Meij

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