Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago. - book reviews

Art in America, June, 1995 by Eleanor Heartney

With essays by Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Brenson and Eva M. Olson, Seattle, Bay Press, 1995; 144 pages, paperback $20.

In the summer of 1993, Sculpture Chicago, a not-for-profit organization which had hitherto been associated with fairly conventional public art programming, unveiled the results of "Culture in Action." This ambitious series of public projects (the word sculpture was no longer applicable) aimed at a radical redefinition of the relationship between public artists and their audience. Each project entailed the immersion of artists in some urban community (defined loosely enough to include the members of a local union, the resident group of a public housing project, a group of high school students and a group of AIDS volunteers); the visible results ranged from a candy bar and a storefront hydroponic vegetable garden to a parade, a block party and a dinner party,

"Culture in Action" is evidence of a major shift that has taken place in the dialogue surrounding public art since the debacle of Tilted Arc. While efforts to merge art and life through community service have been in evidence since the '60s, only recently have they emerged as an institutionally supported alternative to what is being characterized as the unresponsive, irrelevant and overly artist-centered tradition of public art.

The history and philosophy of this "new genre public art" and the beginnings of a framework for criticism of it are set out in the two books under review here, both published by Bay Press in Seattle. Culture in Action is a report on Sculpture Chicago's project and contains essays by project curator Mary Jane Jacob as well as by Eva Olson, the project's director, and Michael Brenson. The second book, Mapping the Terrain. New Genre Public Art, grew out of a conference on public art which was held at, the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1989. Edited by artist Suzanne Lacy, one of the participants in "Culture in Action," it includes essays by a variety of artists, writers and curators along with a very useful compendium of artists and art works from the last four decades which exemplify the ideas outlined in the text. Both books make the case for a new definition of public art that stresses community involvement, the elevation of process over product and a vision of art as an instrument for the encouragement of participatory democracy. Together they contain a great deal of provocative discussion about the social function of art as well as some inspiring examples of what can happen when artists seriously work for social change. However, both also reveal some very problematic assumptions beneath the rhetoric surrounding this kind of work.

In her introduction to Mapping the Terrain, Lacy notes that she intends to provide an alternative to the usual history of public art. Instead of focusing on Percent for Art projects and the NFA's Art in Public Places Program, she links the emergence of new genre public art to the thread that runs through Happenings, to '70s-style media interventions and activism, to feminist art and to the type of current work that focuses on identity politics and other political issues. She argues that a key factor in the new visibility of this more ephemeral, community-based work is the transition from a model of public art that stresses individual authorship to one that emphasizes collectivity and interaction with the audience. This theme is also taken up by other writers in the volume. Mary Jane Jacob asks, "But what if the audience for art ... were considered as the goal at the center of art production . . . as opposed to the modernist Western aim of self expression?" Suzi Gablik argues that new genre public art replaces modernism's depreciation of the Other with the cultivation of empathy and that it creates a place for the voices of members of groups previously excluded from the conventional art world.

Such attitudes indicate a troublesome aspect of Mapping the Terrain. While several essayists (most notably Patricia C. Phillips, Jeff Kelley, Lucy R. Lippard and Arlene Raven) maintain a critical point of view and thus seem able to measure the strengths and the weaknesses of "new genre public art," too many of the texts in this book are marked by a more or less uncritical demonization of modernism. The authors seem to subscribe to a cosmology in which modernism, associated with the ideas of autonomy, elitism, individualism, self-expression, reliance on institutional support and the consumption model of art, is seen as unequivocally bad; on the other hand, an approach identified with empathy, feeling, a feminine perspective, a devotion to the healing properties of art and the suppression of the artist's ego in the service of community empowerment is considered to be unequivocally good. Gablik is the worst offender, adhering as she does to a caricature version of modernism, which she blames for everything from the rape of the eco-system to the manipulation of the individual and the spiritual impoverishment of contemporary life.