"Art:21" defended - Letters

To the Editors:

I am grateful for the extensive coverage of our PBS series, "Art:21, Art in the Twenty-first Century" in your February 2002 issue, but write to contest some of reviewer Eleanor Heartney's comments. Referring to Robert Hughes's PBS series "The Shock of the New," which aired in 1980, Heartney writes: "In `Art:21,' Hughes's `shock' is replaced by the message that artists are people just like the rest of us, and that their endeavors are pursued in the spirit of sincerity and truth." Heartney worries that the "relatively uninitiated viewer" will be unable to understand the artists and the works of art put in front of them in our series without the framework of controversy which, she asserts, has surrounded much of their work in the past.

For example, Heartney takes the "Art:21" segment on Richard Serra to task for not including his Tilted Arc and the bitter debates it aroused. Our segment, which concentrates on his recent, highly respected series of ellipses, as well as the installation of a new sculpture in San Francisco, features the artist himself discussing the inspiration for his work and the fashion in which he both conceives and realizes these gigantic and awe-inspiring sculptures. For that "uninitiated viewer," Serra's clear description of how he creates his work, and how he believes other people experience it, offers the most direct way to introduce an important artist's project. His lucid account of the attention he pays to the responses his sculptures evoke, his visible collaboration with many people and the show's filmed presentation of sculptures that television viewers across the country could not see firsthand without travel to New York, Bilbao or San Francisco seem to me much more informative for new viewers of Serra's work than an extended discourse on the past politics of Tilted Arc.

Heartney makes a similar case against the segment featuring the San Francisco artists Barry McGee and the late Margaret Kilgallen. She writes that their "participation in an essentially illegal subculture is neither questioned nor contextualized." This is essentially untrue, since both artists discuss at length their discomfort with the art world and the reasons why they continue to make "illegal" work on the street. When Heartney alleges that "only their gallery work is shown," this is also untrue. McGee is filmed tagging his name "Twist" on a number of walls in the San Francisco area, and both artists are shown in a nearby train yard tagging boxcars. Perhaps Heartney's problem lies with the fact that it is the artists themselves, rather than a grave voice-over authority, who question and contextualize their "illegal subculture."

The idea that one must convince those outside the art world that something is truly shocking and controversial in order to spur their interest, or get them to understand the value and beauty in new works, insults the viewer as much as it insults the art work and the artist who makes it. While the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum engendered a lot of discussion, little of what was said in the resulting fracas was about the art work itself and the experiences it provided to those who encountered it. Maya Lin is an "Art:21" artist (shown in a segment Heartney does not find fault with) whose career was launched amid noisy disputes prompted by her winning proposal for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; yet today she is revered by the general public, not for that controversy but for the memorial itself. The love her work in Washington now meets with suggests the lesson that contemporary art presented to a broad public for perhaps the first time (as in our series) does not need to be reduced to polemics.

Whatever happened to the belief in direct experience of works of art? Surely the wonder explicit on the faces of people who went to see Serra's exhibition of ellipses at the Gagosian Gallery in New York last year, or of those filmed by "Art: 21" in Bilbao, was the result of their rapport that day with the sculptures them-selves. I cannot believe that the controversy over Tilted Arc prompted their awe or instigated their pleasure. The work, and the artist, can speak directly to all of us, and judging from the e-mails and letters we at Art:21 have received from informed and "uninitiated" viewers alike since the series aired, there is much to be learned and enjoyed through the closest thing we can provide to meeting each artist head-on.

I would also like to point out that extensive background information and contexualization for each artist in the series is provided on our Web site, www.pbs.org/art21, as well as in the companion book recently published by Abrams and in the educator's guide supplied to teachers on request.

Susan Sollins
Executive Producer and Curator
Art:21, Inc.

Eleanor Heartney replies:

I raised the issue of the series's general avoidance of controversy because it is a symptom of a larger problem-s-namely, the desire to avoid aspects of contemporary art which may not be easily palatable to a nonart audience. I think it is important to acknowledge controversy, not because such conflict is sensational but because it reveals major fault lines in the intersections between art and the outside world. The Tilted Arc dispute, for instance, had enormous effects on the subsequent evolution of public art and public-art funding in the U.S.