Sculpture and Gotham Art and Urban Renewal in New York City

Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal in New York City

Michele H. Bogart

London: Reaktion Books, 2018. 256 pp.; eighty b/w illus. Hardcover: $27.50
(ISBN: 9781780239224)

In the early days of this new decade, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz tweeted a succinct if perhaps polemical argument: "99% of All Public Art is Crap." The provocation, whether meant sincerely or but a consciously incendiary performance enacted for the benefit of social media soapbox, speaks to the maligned condition of public fine art in contemporary guild—fifty-fifty every bit information technology attracts increased attention from scholars, the general public, private and public enterprise, and fifty-fifty critics. Saltz'southward quip, nevertheless, also reflects an all-as well-easy and common dismissal of public art that ofttimes stems from a gross misunderstanding, if not complete ignorance, about what defines this nearly particular of artforms; how it functions or can function in an ever-changing, increasingly global world; and the sheer byzantine mechanics usually required for its realization. In brusque, everything that Michele Bogart deftly addresses in her much-needed book, Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal in New York City.

99% of All Public Art is Crap.

— Jerry Saltz (@jerrysaltz) January two, 2020

In recent years, public and scholarly attention has focused on the function and fraught nature of monuments; yet, serious discourse remains scant around those seemingly more benign forms of artistic expressions that go on to occupy space and place inside the contemporary built environs. The publication of any book dedicated to illuminating the complex historical context and mechanics of how public art comes into beingness is itself notable. Bogart, nevertheless, does more than simply lessen an academic lacuna with this focused and well-inquiry manuscript that further establishes her standing as an expert on public art in New York City.ⁱ

Over six chronologically organized chapters on specific individuals, agencies, and projects, Bogart convincingly demonstrates how the policies and approaches that have come to define public art in New York City today remain deeply connected to those enacted, often radically, over the preceding five decades. In doing so, she likewise makes a compelling case almost how art, especially that made for and experienced in the built environment, can still function as a powerful vehicle for civic activism, collaboration, and engagement. Sculpture in Gotham, equally its title suggests, has a consciously narrow focus: "the politics of public art patronage in New York Metropolis (8)," "during the 'postal service-hero' statue era, beginning effectually 1965" (9). And then while the focus of Sculpture in Gotham is geographically limited, New York was and remains i of the most globally significant cities for the product and consumption of contemporary art. New York now has a proven runway record as a leader in municipal patronage of public art, with the implementation of countless landmark projects; initiatives such as the metropolis'south Per centum for Art constabulary, which was passed in 1982; and pioneering organizations such as the Public Art Fund, the Public Art Council, and Creative Time, which go along to function as innovative bastions in the field and models of patronage for the country and globe. Bogart emphatically writes that "New York's public sculpture is of inherent historical significance," simply also it is clear what such a argument means inside her project:

The analysis centers on the meanings and importance of this urban artwork, but the genesis and aesthetic nuances of specific projects play a secondary role. What is prioritized instead are the people, policies, and processes that facilitated the sponsorship, installation, and brandish of the new art in public places throughout New York City, especially municipally endemic properties (xv).

Drawing from archival materials, interviews, and her ain experiences equally a steadfast advocate for public art in New York, Bogart comprehensively analyzes these figures and projects, offering a specificity that often highlights the touch on of many individuals whose names take been forgotten, erased, or perhaps are not as recognizable to those living outside of New York.² Civil servants are often disregarded in histories of art, public or otherwise, and 1 of the major revelations of Sculpture in Gotham is only how many of the people that proved so crucial to the history of public art in New York during the concluding sixty years are women. Bogart describes this as a reflection of the "feminization of municipal cultural bureaucracies" that occurred during this period (18). Pivotal arts administrators such as Doris Freedman, Suzanne Randolph, and Anita Contini are just some of the individuals Bogart highlights throughout the book. She demonstrates how they worked collaboratively in order to forge new models for the public display of art, launching new initiatives, establishing departments and entire organizations, and serving every bit essential interlocutors between artists, communities, businesses, and authorities officials. Sculpture in Gotham thus likewise serves as an important testament to and highlighting of their tireless efforts and lasting legacies.

"Chapter Two: Toward Transience," one of the strongest of the entire volume, for example, examines Freedman's advancement in the administration of Mayor John Vliet Lindsay (1966–1973) and the function she played in the realization of Sculpture in the Environment (1967) which was the first big-scale temporary exhibition of gimmicky public sculpture "to exist mounted under metropolis auspices in several boroughs" (46). Bogart writes of merely two small examples of Freedman engaged in pioneering piece of work for the metropolis of New York in the 1970s, placing sculpture at new commercial existent manor developments and concurrently at multiples sites across parks citywide, and also that Freedman'south "strategies were new to New York Urban center," but they "would somewhen go commonplace (61)."

Another standout is "Chapter V: The Dominance of Authorities," which examines the Per centum for Art programs enacted by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) beginning in 1981,³ and the slightly earlier art programs of the Port Authority of New York and New Bailiwick of jersey. Once more, Bogart emphasizes the key roles played by women, including Nancy Rosen, Jennifer McGregor, and Wendy Feuer, while too highlighting the extensive bear upon, likewise as bureaucratic difficulties, of placing art in public spaces traversed past millions each year. Bogart concludes the affiliate with an astonishing fact that reminds the reader of the tremendous stakes of such projects and programs:

Past 1990, New York City had no fewer than six major public art programs, none of which had existed before 1974. . . . The new institutional structures of public art revealed both the pragmatic and artful consequences of the mail-Moses bureaucratization of culture that, conjoined with the rise of feminism, enabled women to arise into new roles equally art advocates, middlemen, and occasionally, executives; there, they operated very finer (155).

Bogart's evocation of Robert Moses, the powerful New York commissioner of parks during the immediate postwar period, circles dorsum to the kickoff chapter of Sculpture in Gotham, in which she persuasively demonstrates how much of the electric current approaches to and expectations of public art in New York originated in the "The Moses Era." Bogart remarks, almost in passing, that "In full general . . . in that location is greater familiarity with civic fine art before the 2nd Earth War than with the work between 1950 and 1980" (12). This statement begs the question why, and should serve as a reminder that considerable scholarly attention to this topic and time period is yet needed. While Bogart'south get-go chapter, beginning in the mid-1950s, seems like an attempt to connect these tumultuous three decades, it also has the unfortunate issue of flattening them. The limited examples of public art from about 1945 to 1965 she discusses in chapter one—José de Creeft's Alice in Wonderland (1950) in Fundamental Park, for example—serve equally solid foils to the type of work from after decades discussed in the majority of the book. Yet the chapter as a whole omits what was a tremendously rich menstruation in the production of sculpture for spaces within the public built environment. While the firsthand postwar period is admittedly across the telescopic of her book, Bogart's brief discussion of it overlooks or skirts effectually the crucial role played by corporate or individual patronage, a vital if short-lived flow that sought to again reengage fine art with compages within the context of modernism. One wonders if it might have proved more than effective to begin the book in the subsequently 1960s, when her analysis really gains momentum, to avoid such bug.

While in no way detracting from the overall success of Sculpture in Gotham, at that place is as well a somewhat distracting issue of terminology. In the introduction, Bogart offers a provocative definition of public art. Whether temporary or permanent, loved or reviled as "an aesthetic object," public art, she claims, is a "vestige of political activity past specific individuals or groups" (13). This definition serves equally something of a conceptual bedrock throughout Sculpture in Gotham, underscoring that a thorough understanding of public art has real-life implications and that scholars should experience empowered to serve as advocates for its connected preservation and relevance. The trouble, nevertheless, is that throughout the volume "public fine art" becomes interchangeable with "public sculpture," without any noun acknowledgment or unpacking of the differences between the two. While this maybe may seem nothing more than than a semantic quibble, information technology calls attention to an oversight that unfortunately runs throughout Sculpture in Gotham, namely the crucial role played by materials, materiality, and the formal and sociohistorical qualities of both the artworks and the specific sites they occupy or occupied. Once again, Bogart plainly states that the aesthetics or specifics of whatever one project are not the primary focus in Sculpture in Gotham, only considering that "sculpture" is featured in the championship of the volume, it should be treated as more than but a synonym or placeholder for whatever kind of public "art object" (15).

Where Bogart truly excels in Sculpture in Gotham, however, is in reminding or perhaps informing the reader anew of the particularities that are unavoidably embedded in the practice and product of public art. To return to Saltz's tweet, what his critique exposes is one of quality. Public art, every bit Bogart shows, has always had to exist about more than aesthetics or class; however, those invested in its production and presentation—from artists to municipal arts administrators—inherently take to grapple with questions of function. This fact has no dubiousness proven problematic in an art world that nevertheless prioritizes individual genius and expressive autonomy above all else. Public art has always operated in a very different context from the high art on display in New York in Chelsea galleries or institutions such every bit the (new) Museum of Modern Art. Non to diminish whatever other types of art or its importance, but public art, even bad public fine art, past default of its placement in public places, has a much greater impact, at least in terms of the sheer number of people who encounter information technology. As Bogart acknowledges in the opening paragraph of Sculpture in Gotham, public art in gimmicky cities is a "hot article," intertwined with aesthetics, community, and heritage, to be sure, merely also quite clearly with décor, amusement, tourism, borough policy, and economic interests (7). These complex, oftentimes impure associations, however, do not brand public art bad or lesser than but instead are a class of art that demands different considerations, parameters, and standards. With Sculpture in Gotham, Bogart reminds u.s.a. that the art in our streets, on our buildings, or activating our built environments is the result of a multifaceted negotiation between multiple stakeholders—a vital, albeit imperfect, civic contract that affirms the continued importance of fine art in everyday life.

Cite this commodity: Marin R. Sullivan, review of Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal in New York City, by Michele H. Bogart, Panorama: Periodical of the Association of Historians of American Art half dozen, no. 1 (Spring 2020), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.10016.

PDF: Sullivan, review of Sculpture in Gotham

Notes

About the Author(southward): Marin R. Sullivan is an fine art historian and curator

cawthornhaps1953.blogspot.com

Source: https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/sculpture-in-gotham/

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