Whose Art Is It? - book reviews

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Eleanor Heartney

When New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs decided in 1986 to commission John Ahearn to create a set of bronze sculptures for a Percent for Art site in front of a police station in the South Bronx, it seemed a perfect match of artist and neighborhood. Ahearn had been living and working a few blocks from the proposed site for 12 years and was well known in the Bronx for his sensitive plaster and fiberglass casts of the local population. His proposal--to make bronze casts of three neighborhood characters who embodied his notion of "South Bronx attitude" and to place them on pedestals in a small traffic circle in front of the 44th Precinct station house--offered a way to deconstruct the mythology of the public monument while celebrating the lives of ordinary residents of the beleaguered South Bronx. The unraveling of Ahearn's commission is the subject of Jane Kramer's eloquent book, which is adapted from an extended journalistic essay originally written for the New Yorker. Kramer's dissection of a public art project gone awry points to a gathering sickness in the body politic and reveals ironies and contradictions inherent in current "progressive" thinking.

The facts are simple. After passing through the rigorous approval process, which included meeting with local officials, art experts and community members, Ahearn's three bronzes were less than a week away from installation when trouble began. Two black city bureaucrats, who had not actually seen the sculptures but had been shown a few drawings for the project and some Polaroids of the pieces, announced their objection to what they claimed was a racist vision of the South Bronx by a white artist. Their reaction might not have been enough to sink the project, but on installation day a woman named Alcian Salgado began to proselytize for removal of the sculptures. A self-styled "neighborhood stalker," she lived across the street from the police station and considered the sculptures to be a slap in the community's face. Presented with such opposition from a neighborhood that he loved and considered his home (and despite the continued support of the Department of Cultural Affairs), Ahearn agreed to remove the statues.

But if the facts of this case are simple, the implications for public art and public life are not. As Kramer points out, this incident calls into question a whole raft of assumptions about the definition of community, the function of art in a fragmented, multicultural society and the meaning of democracy.

The surface problem was the sculptures' unidealized representation of life in the South Bronx. Two of the three models for the sculptures, Raymond Garcia and Corey Mann, were friends of the artist. Raymond, a troubled young man who had been in and out of jail, was depicted in a hooded sweatshirt, kneeling beside his beloved pit bull. Corey, a gregarious but intermittently employed local character, was depicted shirtless, his ample belly hanging over his running shorts. He cradled a basketball in his arm and rested one foot on a boom box. The third figure, a teenager named Daleesha, was depicted on roller skates; she flew in and out of the artist's life as the model for his image of youth and energy, South Bronx style. Most of the complaints focused on Raymond and Corey; the former was seen as an image of a drug dealer and the latter as a shiftless layabout. Why, opponents asked, couldn't Ahearn have created more "positive" role models--college graduates, perhaps, or working men in suits.

The controversy over the "negativism" of the sculptures masked deeper issues which have begun to surface as a result of growing ethnic and racial polarization throughout the United States. The question "Who speaks for whom?" has seeped out of the academy, where it has played an important role for deconstructionsts and multiculturalists, and onto the city streets, where a newly excitable public is quick to challenge artistic representations that appear to be imposed from the outside.

For many of those aligned against the sculptures, it was clear that, despite Ahearn's long residence in the South Bronx, he could never speak for its residents because he was white. Kramer quotes Arthur Symes, an assistant commissioner with the Department of General Services, who was one of the first to criticize the commission. "[Ahearn is] not of the community because he's not black--simply that." Symes, as Kramer notes, is a black architect who lives in the upscale hood of Battery Park City in Manhattan.

As Kramer points out, this kind of logic leads to a greater and greater splintering of the notion of community, until one is finally left with a community of one. She also asks a very important question: What's wrong with reality? When Ahearn's critics (especially those from outside the neighborhood) demand that public sculpture present a more idealized version of the South Bronx, are they empowering the community or simply imposing on it another kind of control?

There is another aspect of the "positivist" position that Kramer doesn't mention--namely that Ahearn's commission came at the end of a long battle to make public art more responsive and relevant to the community in which it is placed. In the wake of the Tilted Arc debacle, public art administrators have become increasingly sensitive to the history, ethnic makeup and political concerns of the neighborhood surrounding a potential site, and the Ahearn commission was made with those very issues in mind. Ironically, however, this impulse to tailor a commission to the specific concerns of a community--which in the South Bronx apparently means being responsive to the community's demand for "positive role models"--can have retrograde consequences. It threatens to return us to the days when public monuments simply celebrated war heroes and historical paragons.