Arts and Culture (1MA/4 & 1MA3)

Hey, due to an unexpected dean's hours, we'll be doing the same article in both 1MA/4 on Thursday the 16th of May and 1MA/3 on the 20th. See you then

http://burnaway.org/2013/01/living-walls-and-the-perils-of-public-space-part-1/
http://burnaway.org/2013/01/living-walls-and-the-perils-of-public-space-part-2/

Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space, Part I

Written By Cinqué Hicks on January 11, 2013 in OPINION

The recent controversy over a public mural begs the question: If art can’t speak for itself, who gets to speak for it? This is the first installment of a two-part article on the subject.

When the French street artist known as Roti painted his mural An Allegory of the Human City in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Southwest Atlanta, he assumed everyone would understand it as a commentary on the brutality of capitalism. They did not. That at least is apparently what he told the New York Times.
Instead, the mural was decried by a vocal coterie of residents as containing “demonic” imagery reminiscent of the pervasive destruction the neighborhood has suffered. It’s clear that not all of Pittsburgh’s residents shared that interpretation, but it was the one adopted by high-profile residents including a former state representative, Doug Dean, and the Atlanta-based group Concerned Black Clergy.
The mural, which was part of the annual Living Walls street art program, sparked a controversy that included rounds of destruction and remediation of the mural, ending finally in the work’s removal.

As a work of street art, An Allegory of the Human City was a tour-de-force. (This photo by Dustin Chambers gives a sense of the mural’s scale.) Executed as all of Roti’s murals in monochromatic, freehand spray paint, the mural depicted a dense, machine-like cityscape packed with Gothic architecture and elements reminiscent of Industrial Revolution–era smokestacks and waterwheels. Running through this city and emerging from either side was an enormous fishlike creature, which the artist himself calls a snake, but which had fins and other fishlike characteristics. From the creature’s front end emerged the torso of an unclothed man, fracturing first into a crystalline structure at the neck and then into a full-fledged alligator head, which in turn issued forth (or was swallowing) a series of ever smaller and ever more numerous fish of various species swimming into distant space in a swirling school. The mural contained a number of other objects that implied rich, mythic importance: a lantern-like clock with lock and key, a fishing rod held by the alligator-snake-fish-man, a trailing birdcage that had captured the moon.
Roti has executed numerous murals in the United States, none of which appear to have sparked any significant controversy. The city of Ithaca, New York, in particular has several, all painted in a similar style, employing similar imagery of human-animal hybrids, birdcages, fish, and perhaps most consistently, densely packed Gothic cities. For Roti, the city is both the source of human inspiration and the evidence of human dysfunction.

Many of the arguments in support of the mural have depended not on a defense of the mural’s content, but on a cluster of well-worn clichés about art as such: that art is always socially beneficial, that art need never stoop to justify itself, that some art is always better than no art.
But are those claims valid? What if art can do harm as well as good? And who decides when harm has been done? In short, does the art speak for itself, and if it can’t, whose interpretation counts?
Roti’s Allegory can be considered an example of what I call “neosymbolist” art. It’s a coinage that has been obscurely used in other contexts, but whose meaning can be redirected to apply to a large number of artists practicing today.

The original nineteenth-century Symbolists—Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and others—sought to make works that existed purely on their own terms. Focusing on spiritual and imaginative ideas, these artists were suddenly free from imitating the outside world. Instead, the real subject matter was the artist’s idiosyncratic, psychological interpretation of the outside world. They could pursue their inner visions into any dark, fantastic, or sublime corner of the psyche those visions might lead. Thus the work was willfully obscure, esoteric, and even occult. And it’s not unlike a great deal of work that has emerged from artists in recent decades.
Indeed, most of what you probably believe about the role of the artist in society comes straight from the pen of Symbolist poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé and his cohort: Verlaine, Rilke, Rimbaud, Yeats, and others. It goes something like this: the artist is the unique visionary whose insight into the world is so powerful, so inherently salutary, that the artwork needs no justification outside of itself. Its only obligation is to its own internally created reality. And that work of art, when out among people, must necessarily enlighten anyone who would trouble to probe its self-referential obscurities. The myth of the artist as the high priest of the dark, creative demiurge is so airtight in Western culture that any artist who behaves differently risks being accused of not being an artist at all.

Many contemporary artists have taken these ideas to a twenty-first-century extreme. This neosymbolist work can be almost photorealistic, yet it specifically rejects any commonly accessible reality or any established pictorial language. The more recognizable and readable the figures in the work, the more outlandish other elements of the composition must be in order to free it from the tether of common experience. Hence the explosion of pattern, color, and surreal narrative in many such works.
The work of, for example, Marcy Starz, Jason R. Butcher, and Joe Tsambiras exemplify this mode of working. All three local artists, along with others working elsewhere such as Camille Rose Garcia and Os Gêmeos, might be considered neosymbolists whose exquisitely drafted works are replete with private symbols and obscure, self-contained narratives.
According to Roti’s own statement, Allegory does in fact have a very precise and unambiguous meaning for him personally: fishes represent humanity, the key represents the ability to stop time, and the moon represents uncontrollable forces of nature. For the artist, there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between images in the mural and their meanings in the real world. But the glossary needed for that translation exists in the artist’s head, not in any commonly understood, generally available mythos.

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That’s when audiences create their own meanings. In the privacy of a gallery or the controlled context of academic settings, this act is almost always benign. Many artists even cherish the ways in which audiences help them create meaning.
But when the work is placed in a broader public space, those meanings occasionally get out of control. Thus a former state rep and a group of clergymen in the Pittsburgh neighborhood attached a meaning to the snake-like image that the artist couldn’t anticipate.  Those interpreters did what every one of us without privileged access to the artist did when we encountered the mural: we rummaged around our collective store of symbols and came up with the most fitting interpretation we could muster given the clues we were given. When symbolic imagery enters public space with no other explanation, it should be no surprise that it will be recognized by whatever symbolic system is most available.
Broad, common symbolic systems form part of what critic Michael Kimmelman has called the “aesthetic common denominator” required of all public art. If the work doesn’t avail itself of that common denominator, one will be imposed on it, as it were, against its will. Ironically that imposition is likely to leave both the artist and the audience feeling aggrieved.
Allegory shows one possible outcome of neosymbolist expression as it comes out of the galleries and off the web to engage with public space. Most often, audiences respond with appreciation and delight. But not always. Private allegorical language can be laced with minefields and trap doors if an artist stumbles upon a symbol whose accumulated meaning may be thousands of years older than the artist’s 23-year-old imagination.
The controversy over An Allegory of the Human City is a controversy over real things: about the overlay of incompatible mythologies and histories in public space and who bears the responsibility of interpretation. My purpose here isn’t to lay blame on any artist, community, or arts organization.
It is my purpose, however, to dispel the notion that the dispute is somehow the result of silly people on one side or the other. This dispute is not silly. It is not superfluous. It stands right in the heart of how public discourse functions.
If we accept that art has to power to uplift or heal or educate, then the same logic dictates that it also has the power to oppress or injure or mislead. The question for us all is whose job is it to decide which is which?

Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space, Part II

Written By Cinqué Hicks on January 17, 2013 in OPINION

Artists sometimes slip up when it comes to placing art in communities. But that doesn’t let communities off the hook. When do communities go too far? This is the second of a two-part article on the subject. Part I appeared in the pages of BURNAWAY last week, accompanied by some intriguing commentary from our readers.


The recent dustup over Roti’s Allegory of the Human City mural isn’t the only such controversy to ruffle feathers in this country. It’s not even the first for Living Walls. Last fall, a Living Walls mural in Chosewood Park by Argentinean street artist Hyuro that depicted a woman shedding her clothes met with confusion, disdain, and outrage resulting in a formal request for its removal. Beyond Atlanta, street art powerhouses Os Gêmeos created a mural in Boston depicting a figure that was said to look too much like a terrorist. One in St. Paul was decried for its depiction of two bears looking suspiciously amorous. And in 2011 a mural on the outer wall of LA MOCA by renowned Italian street artist Blu was famously painted over, before the first peep of outrage, because director Jeffrey Deitch feared the mural might cause offense to someone somewhere someday.

Back in Atlanta, Allegory was finally painted over after a fierce turf war on December 11 by the Georgia Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over the 240-foot retaining wall. The mural’s destruction took place despite a promised community forum that was to bring together pro and con constituencies sponsored by the neighborhoods’ city council representatives. As of the time of this writing no such forum has occurred.
Allegory‘s naked torso, fish scales, and alligator head caught Roti in the bear trap of the public’s idea of what art means. But the swift and silent way in which the mural was finally destroyed likewise highlights how limiting, perhaps even toxic, the idea of “the community” has become in its modern guise. According to several press accounts, opinions among the residents of Pittsburgh were split at best and, at worst, those opposing the mural may have been a minority, albeit a vocal and powerful one. But all of that complexity, with all of its potential for nuanced interpretation, was wiped away with the monolithic coat of gray paint that “the community” allegedly demanded.

Sociologist Richard Sennett described this sort of conundrum in his influential analysis of the public sphere, The Fall of Public Man. With the social roles of modern life constantly in flux and in turmoil, Sennett wrote, “the community”—whatever and wherever one thinks that is—has become the one place where we insist on being ever our real selves, safe and unchallenged. Even the family doesn’t provide that sanctuary for many people in the modern age. So we’re always on the lookout for signs that someone else may not really belong. Everyone is constantly testing everyone else, and the price of failing those tests is excommunication. “Fraternity,” wrote Sennett “often becomes an exercise in fratricide.”
That’s why those who speak for this or that community are almost always the most strident voices. They are the voices least likely to be confused for an outsider’s. In other words, whoever speaks for the community is whoever’s most “down” with the cause at hand. And the easiest way to be the most down is to take an extreme position—to insist that a mural be erased utterly with no conversation, no public debate, or conversely to insist that the work remain just as its artist intended it no matter who it offends. Both are extreme positions that grow out of the sense of belonging to a community that’s clear on who’s “one of us” and who’s not.

Historically, the race to out-down the next guy has proven especially vexing in matters of public art. In the 1930s controversies over public murals were both more frequent and more acrimonious than anything this country has since experienced. In that decade and through the culture wars of the 1980s, pleasing the community often meant appealing to its loudest and most conservative voices. A single strident no could outweigh a thousand yeses.
Street art is the newest guest at the table of public art, and as such Living Walls now finds itself on the receiving end of that pitiless please-the-public-or-die logic. Joining guerilla-style street art with sanctioned public art makes for a strained marriage. Street art is often illegal and anonymous. It answers only to its own artistic vision. Public art, on the other hand, is often at its best when undertaken with the deep involvement of surrounding neighborhoods.

Roti has been typical of an old-school street artist: throughout his early practice, none of his work in the public spaces of his native France was sanctioned or asked for. He needed answer only to himself and his own aesthetic impulses. That practice of willful self-determination, however, carries a baked-in tension with communities that may otherwise have their own priorities and aesthetics. As the two worlds merge, that tension is likely to become more and more evident.
The tension is unsustainable. In each case something’s got to give. In one scenario, the street artists will begin to think of their work less as their own expression, and more as a collective expression that may include views of the world quite different from their own. The alternative is that we dismantle the idea that a community should be a safe place where one’s most fundamental truths are never challenged. The first option runs against some of the most cherished notions of how an artist should function, and the second runs counter to the way communities have come to function. This impasse isn’t likely to be dislodged anytime soon, and the resulting turf wars of meaning and interpretation are likely to be constant companions.

In an ideal world, a skirmish such as the one over Allegory would produce more than just a clash of ideas; it would serve as an exercise in getting along in a democratic society.
Every modern person in a pluralistic democracy such as ours must constantly question what he or she assumes to be true about the world. Every cosmopolitan, multi-cultural society in modern history has developed some culture of healthy doubt, and the US is no exception. Doubting our received beliefs is what allows different races, different religions, and those of different political viewpoints to avoid all-out war and, occasionally, even live in something approaching harmony.
The opposite of doubt is certainty. And it’s certainty—the belief that no legitimate explanations for the world exist outside one’s own—that marches soldiers onto battlefields and flies planes into buildings.
In a much less dramatic arena, it’s also the impulse to plug our ears and refuse to believe that a piece of public art could have very different meanings within the fabric of daily life depending on the texture and history of each life.

When a few residents in the Pittsburgh neighborhood caught wind of Roti’s admittedly baffling mural, the logic of certainty quickly took hold on all sides. The battle lines were drawn and genuine openness to doubt became impossible. What should have been an opportunity to encounter new ideas and new ways of seeing the world instead became a series of tribal calls-to-arms to defend this or that community.
That’s why the cancelation of the promised neighborhood forum to discuss Allegory is the true tragedy here. Without the public outlet as a first step to hash out opposing ideas, anyone involved in the debacle can instead walk away convinced of their own righteousness, secure that no alternative explanation of the situation was possible. For the life of a democracy, an enforced silence around the mural is far worse than all the noise and fury the mural sparked in the first place.
The art world isn’t the only place where people fracture into self-enclosed juntas. It isn’t hard to see the same dynamic increasingly at work in our electoral politics. When someone disagrees with us politically, the past decade has shown that we’re more likely than ever to misunderstand each other.  When these arguments happen, we don’t simply assume that the other person is under the sway of wrong ideas; we assume that they must be the wrong kind of person. Not just mistaken, but evil. No wonder we have no language of compromise. When you’re certain of your own rightness and equally certain of your opponent’s evilness, compromise always looks like selling out.
Political tribalism didn’t start with public art and won’t be solved by public art. But if we can’t use it to work out a vocabulary of compromise, a language of productive disagreement, then all the controversy will have been a waste. Public art won’t save democracy, but it may at least remind us how easy democracy is to lose.