Disappearances and Reappearances:
High Art Hiding in Plain Sight
Part 3 in the series 'Profundity in Public Art'
I've begun to notice that there are different echelons, different employs for art in public spaces throughout Cincinnati and its surrounding regions. Additionally, there are different, albeit overlapping audiences for these projects. Admirers of the immensely popular MuralWorks projects by ArtWorks may find Modernist works like the previously discussed George Rickey and Louise Nevelson sculptures in downtown detached or inaccessible. There are spaces almost entirely devoted to outdoor sculptures, such as the nearby Theodore M. Berry International Friendship Park or Pyramid Hill in Hamilton. I may be too ideal an audience for Friendship Park: the entire space feels designed to curve around and acknowledge the large works by David Nash, the Castle of Air by German architect Peter Haimerl and the tower sculpture by Susan Ewing and Vratislav Novak that designates the culminating endpoint of the park. The artwork and its situation are mutually considered, and a walk through the landscaped park to see the three major works functions as some alternative pilgrimage, with stations or shrines that didactically connect Cincinnati to a global community through text panels, inscriptions, and large, temple-like abstract works. The park is contrived to present clear access points to art; I find it resoundingly successful towards this goal.
Meanwhile, the most fulfilling excursions I make through public spaces are ones that lead me to unexpected, discreetly present art that augments preexisting traffic, views, and the city's texture towards aesthetic subtleties. Like the Debbie Brod sculptures near Findlay Market that were discussed in the July installment, there is art all over this city that you may not be aware you are seeing until you really look. Through this year of writing in galleries, museums, and most especially, these outdoor drifts across the city on the lookout for powerful encounters with public artworks, I have learned how little we actually comprehend about the information our eyes record. I hope, as I/we proceed, I miss fewer opportunities for radical beauty.
Flowers in the food court
If there is a set of artworks most at risk of going unseen within a public space, it may be the series of paintings and fountain sculpture that are integrated into Tower Place Mall on the floor levels of Carew Tower. The Four Seasons by Robert Kushner are neat examples of the Pattern and Decoration movement that emerged after the absolute reign of abstraction in the mid-20th century. In the hands of artists like Kushner, decorative motifs took on subtexts that could, at different turns, read as Feminist or Populist by redefining hierarchies of imagery that have commonly been relegated to home decorating and low art. By the end of the 1980s, Kushner's paintings were focusing on geometric patterns that gave way to every stripe of floral imagery, referring easily to the juicy blossoms of Manet and Monet, the elegant Ikebana flower arrangements of Japan, and dense, hyper-real arrangements found in 15th century Dutch painting. In some of his works that have been shown internationally, including in Cincinnati's own Carl Solway Gallery, Kushner has paired precious metal leaf with shimmering glitter to collapse prior notions of value.
The works included in the Tower Place's commission make use of these trademark elements in Kushner's paintings, with the flower imagery tying them to the fountain installed two floors below. In 1991, when these works were installed, there could be no better choice for an artist of international renown to create works that would hang between retail stores and food courts. Decorative, sly, and decently over-the-top, Kushner's works now memorialize the time in which they came about.
I would warrant that many of the Mall's visitors remain unaware of the artwork that is part of the space, let alone the history and importance of the artist who made themBecause today the Tower Place Mall does not seem like the bustling epicenter it was once described as. On each visit I pay, another store or restaurant seems to be closing or undergoing a conversion into some other identity. The heaviest traffic I see in the Mall is in the food court that encircles Kushner's fountain. Even then, I would warrant that many of the Mall's visitors remain unaware of the artwork that is part of the space, let alone the history and importance of the artist who made them. Perhaps this is a terrible shame, because some of the moments within Kushner's Seasons are surprisingly raw, where the pomp of the floral displays in them end abruptly or are elsewhere cut short by grids of metal leaf. But I am attracted to the idea of high art hiding in plain sight, especially works that could be discussed in other circumstances as outlandish. The aesthetics of these works are so suitably keyed to their environment that they have the potential of blending in to the walls, shops, and eateries that surround them. There are contemporary artists working with issues of invisibility and the unseen directly as subject matter, but in the case of Cincinnati, I prefer to think of Kushner's pieces positioned at the drop-off of an edge in the psychological map of our public places.
A cowardly lion; a disappearing act
About now, I recall Joni Mitchell singing with conviction, "Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone..." The public spaces set aside for art in downtown have recently undergone a fairly major transition. Just half a block away from Rickey's kinetic sculpture, Nam June Paik's Metrobot stood outside what was the former location of the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) for more than twenty years. In 1988 it was presented as a gift from Albert W. Vontz Jr. in honor of the 200th anniversary of Cincinnati and the 50th anniversary of the CAC. Recently, the lease that the CAC had on that strip of sidewalk space ran up, and without a clear direction of where Metrobot should be reinstalled, it has gone into storage for now. Metrobot was a large, brass-colored sculpture installed on the sidewalk that runs along 5th Street. Electronic screen components ran messages about what was currently on display at the CAC and other general welcomes regarding contemporary art. His gesture always struck me as one of greeting, as if waving traffic on by. Much could be said about the artwork itself, and plenty has been discussed and written about this particular icon in Cincinnati and Paik's oeuvre in which he created a visually dense, conceptually rich terrain of crossover between Pop, Dada and new media movements in art. The artwork is an important one; especially as art historians begin the work of really understanding Paik's complete life work since his relatively recent death in 2006. Almost like its maker, the robot sculpture has been removed from our view. Without forming any protest about this change of circumstance, I would rather contemplate how our memories are activated by Metrobot's absence and how the art experience for those who have been familiar with the sculpture does not end in its removal.
Like good food and very accomplished concerts, the effects of the art experience linger. As time goes on, it isn't unusual that the initial encounter becomes averaged with recollections that are partially fueled by the viewer's imagination. The golden robot that stood on 5th street seems to have been taking a stand for contemporary art in that area of the city, daring to bring the kinds of projects on view inside spaces like the CAC and the tribe of contemporary art galleries in Over-the-Rhine out onto the streets to 'meet' the public in a shared space that doesn't carry some of the stigmas that museums may hold in the minds of parts of the public. Metrobot also seems like a Buddha idol (not too farfetched as Buddha was an image employed by Paik in other works); I can see now that I at least projected that kind of meditation onto the work over the past six years of being a bus passenger that makes regular use of the metro system's hub that stretches out in front of the former home of the CAC. And as I have written the previous two installments of this public sculpture series and included metaphorical reference to Tin Mans and Scarecrows, I've known that this work and the set of works in this final piece would easily demonstrate traits of the Lion. The Lion hid. In L. Frank Baum's original novel, the Lion eventually returned to his forest to take charge as a leader. The Lion had to be brave to embrace his identity and his responsibilities. And so it follows with these artworks. In a time that so much contemporary art has all the needs and dependencies of a prima donna, there are steel sculptures and assemblages, permanent installations and collaborative projects that function as sentinels reminding passerbies in public places of the potential of the spaces between us and of profound possibilities in what and how we see. It is a daring move that I applaud: to appreciate museum and gallery spaces for what they can offer artistic discourse, but to never allow one's practice to hide or disconnect from the surrounding culture.
Mother Art
The inception point for these three essays really began and will close off at a bus stop. Brighton, a burgeoning district at the front edge of the West End, meets the main thoroughfare of Central Parkway at a cross street and a monumental outdoor sculpture. Patricia Renick's 30 Module Sphere #1 was the first icon of Brighton for me and stands eleven feet high just beside my morning bus stop. The stainless-steel geodesic sphere is constructed from a repeated form that creates a surface of ridges and pockets of space. The armored sensibility of Renick's project is reminiscent of her dinosaur sculptures that made waves in the community and the international art world in the 1970s. Pieces such as her Stegowagenvolkssaurus from 1974 (that has recently gone on display at Northern Kentucky University's W. Frank Steely Library) were instrumental in forming an aesthetic of projected power, unflinching use of confrontational imagery and creative solution-making for the emerging art movement associated with Feminism. Stegowagenvolkssaurus is a 12-by-20-foot hybrid that attaches the body of an adult stegosaurus dinosaur around a Volkswagen car. In her artist statement, Renick explained that her creation — made from a car widely regarded as fuel-efficient — "is a commentary on the possible fate of the automobile in a society unwilling to give up some individual freedom of movement in order to conserve energy resources. As a consequence, even the fuel-efficient automobiles of the future may become as obsolete as the stegosaurus of the past."
For these and similar large scale sculpture projects, Pat Renick's name became synonymous with the sculpture community in Cincinnati during her lifetime, and since her death in 2007, operates as a reverent, almost sacred invocation surrounding art endeavors and lives lived creatively. When Renick passed away, her ashes were distributed in small packets at a memorial service to be carried all over the world and scattered at the discretion of her friends and loved ones. For my part, the 30 Module Sphere I visit almost daily stands as one of Pat's many resting places, a shrine in my neighborhood at which I may meditate and summon up some of the vision that has crafted our city into such a grand collection of public artworks. This work in particular is one that I have built a daily relationship, a rare opportunity for works contained in museums and private collections. It is a closeness that we can build with artworks that may be displayed in our homes, but even these lack the shared, social reality of a public artwork on display. Truthfully, I am not the only person who knows Pat's Sphere so well. I see others visiting it with intent as well and I see the curious bus passenger approach it. I am grateful to have Pat's sculpture demonstrate to me the continual impact— esthetically, spatially and conceptually— that art has on the physical community that we construct and in which we reside.
Considered together, the public artworks discussed in this piece, as well as many others across the city, start at articulating a tempered aesthetic for Cincinnati. Each public artwork or exhibition mounted is implicated in an ongoing discourse about what Cincinnati in all its echelons chooses to look at. In a field of sculpture that often has a resolutely bad reputation in the minds of jaded viewers who can't make sense (aesthetically, art historically, or economically) of poor solutions in public artwork, those discussed here shine as well-considered additions to the places that house society. As I have focused mostly on abstract sculptures, there is also a politics to these pieces being found in relation to businesses, non-profit organizations, and cultural touchstones of various stripes. These works celebrate and proliferate shared experiences and universals that may adopt different meanings and inflections dependant on their contexts and their audiences. We as Cincinnatians find ourselves living in a puzzle of sculptures, with large pieces, blatant meanings, discreet works and elusive content. It is an amazing experience to start deconstructing the energy channels in Cincinnati's public sphere to find that artwork and visual literacy fill in the mental gaps between many of the more recognized components of our society.
