Around 1985, two architects in Chicago got access to one of the first giant photocopy machines. The photocopier could make images 36 inches wide and very long. Several architects drew 1 inch by 3 inch drawings that were then enlarged to 3 ft x 9 ft through multiple photocopying. The ensuing exhibition was titled: “The Idea of Big”. 22 years later – so crude, so small.
Emperors, architects and filmmakers have always been drawn to the big – or rather – the enlarged. The objects change scale and fill the eye. Imaginatively and somewhat phenomenology, people assume the role of an ant in the presence of the giant thing. Yet humans made the giant, so share in the feeling of power. Were we not BOTH Godzilla and the Japanese as he smashed Tokyo? King and plebe.
In Denver, the Bigs have gathered in downtown. Works by Lawrence Argent (bear), Coosje van Bruggen & Claus Oldenburg (broom and dust pan), Dan Ostermiller (cow and calf), Donald Lipski (horse on a chair) and Louise Bourgeois (spider). Bruggen/Oldenburg are ahead of Argent on Flickr because of location relative to camera happy cultural tourists and that “Big Sweep” is climbable. (I remark on Flickr as I am curious to discover what makes certain artworks attract photographers).
Lipsky and Bruggen/Oldenburg in Denver
Bourgeois and Ostermiller in Denver
Of the works, only Argent’s “I See What You Mean” is public art. I consider the essence of public art as the ability to spark a relationship with its site – surroundings, the social culture and moment. This is different from originating from a site such as retelling or referring to its history although retelling could be part of the spark.
For the simple test of public art, just imagine its removal and erase its history in the place. Now replace the artwork with another artwork of the same size. If everything is the same, then the work is “art in a public place.” In good situations, the surroundings gently hold the work like a gallery. In the best situations, the work enlivens the space. Like the most excellent architecture, achieving this physical interaction between art and space is no easy task and worth the effort to achieve.
Public art must interact with its space, but that space must appear as its home, its office or its jail. A psychological state is demanded. Argent’s Big Blue Bear comes to work everyday at the Denver Convention Center. Most of Jonathan Borofsky’s sculptures work, too. Hammering Man works literally and Ballerina Clown must come to Venice Beach each day to dance like Argent’s bear must look. (In the 1990’s, a giant ball and chain was attached to Seattle’s Hammering Man. The second artist felt the psychological jail.)
Borofsky’s Hammering Man, Seattle, WA, 1990? and Ballerina Clown, Venice, CA, 1989
The Ballerina and the Bear share another quality: homelessness. The Ballerina’s spirit arises from the homeless men of Venice Beach. Men who invent a world inside their heads and then live it for moments without a concern for the audience on the sidewalk. The Bear has lost his way into Denver like so many animals forced into cities with the destruction of the natural homes. Also just like the homeless. The bear, out of place, stops and looks. Like the Ballerina and the permanently homeless, the bear’s look is so intense that he forgets where he is. For a moment, he is not physically lost, but mentally displaced into his action of looking.
Of course this looking is in the classic pose of tourist photographs, paintings and cartoons of the bear on his hind legs staring into the window of the car or the cabin. An image born in the car camping mountains of the western USA. The bear is curious about the potential food. He is not just looking, but hunting.
The activities of the Convention Center are a mystery to the average resident. Ten of thousands of civic strangers come and go. They are on a kind of corporate vacation, spending the boss’ money and being paid at the same time. Other corporate employees are selling the best of new products and services. Everything is new. Just off the designers’ table. But nothing can be seen without the hanging ID card on the chest.
The bear looks for all the Denver citizens who can’t go in. The bear is trying to see the new sparkly stuff and the handsome wandering people who stop for laugh now and then. The bear repeats the action any outsider and sticks his nose on the glass and blocks the glare with his hands. The closer to the glass, the more can be seen inside. Closer to the glass, the more obvious the outside status to the ones inside.
“I See What You Mean”, 2005, The Bear and Bear
For the convention attendee, the bear is a silhouette and a good laugh first time. But if the attendee is bored on the balcony at the bear’s stomach, she or he might think of Godzilla, King Kong and other fantasies of the giant animal. Like those fictions, the beast could smash the glass and enter the building, but instead he politely respects the social agreement that the glass is impenetrable The attendee knows that he or she is an insider this week, but most weeks, she or he is outside looking in. In this American world, we trade positions by the week, day and hour.
Of course, the most obvious, is that fact that the bear is looking into a place full of surveillance cameras. The kindly bear looks and the camera protect the attendees. The looking is passive at the moment, but that could change.
To achieve recognition as an iconic public work, the work must transform known images and experiences. Even if the Colorado resident or visitor has not been with a bear in the woods, enough media images exist to fill the mind. The visitor hopes and fears to meet the bear. The experienced camper wishes to co-exist without really bothering each other.
The Other Colorado Bears: Yogi and Smokey
The bear is part of the lost west. As an American child, Yogi Bear and Smokey Bear gave me the impression that the bears lived in the mountains. As a man, I know the bear’s are disappearing into mythology. Only by the efforts of the park rangers and scientists do we have any bears in the woods. Man, not nature, secures the bear.
Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox in Kamath, California
As bear turns to myth, the bear becomes blue. The other American mythical figure of the woods is Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. In this myth, Bunyan with his axe and ox, subdued the forests. The extremely cold winter of blue snow into which Babe was born, turned the ox blue. Perhaps like Babe, the bear has the miracle of survival.
Surroundings, the social culture and moment….. The Big Blue Bear links to its place at the Convention Center with its action of looking in. It ties to the images of the West generated in pop culture, documentary photography and real (or imagined) nights in the woods. The bear preserves the moment in time when looking is still real and done in the flesh.
Unlike the Ostermiller’s cows and Bruggen/Oldenburg broom, my mind has many places to wander. The cows are just bigger cows relaxing out-of-place in the city. The broom sweeps the dust from the angled corners of the museum. Both can be moved to any time to any place and succeed. Not the bear, and that is its wonder.
Argent’s Bear at the Site
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Tony Tasset’s Paul at the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Garden ties in neatly to the themes here. Unfortunately, there’s no good link to an image of it (only a thumbnail size one).
Ries’ Comment
Well, Glenn, you have made a pronouncement, one I am not sure I agree with or not- but its a step in the right direction- and that is Definitions.
Currently, there are 4 competing definitions or subdefinitions for public art, used by different people at different times, that makes serious discussion quite difficult, because many times we are actually not talking about the same thing.
The practical, all inclusive, and literal one, which is often wrong-
Public Art is art that is funded by legally required fund set asides, often 1%, either directly by government agencies, or by private developers who are mandated to do so by law.
Then, within that true but squishy category, we have 3 different types of art-
Building Parts- Because architects, for the most part, no longer believe in ornament, but people like it, a lot of artists and craftsmen are paid to create ornamented parts of buildings under the umbrella of public art. Ironwork, woodwork, stained glass, ceramic and terazzo floors, and so on. Some is good, some is bad, some is “art”, some is not.
Second- Freestanding, portable sculptures and paintings, purchased as “public art”, but no different than any other sculpture in a gallery or museum. Some are related, in subject matter or medium, to the location where they are initally placed, but all of them can still look good in a millionaires garden a thousand miles away.
Third- the difficult to describe middle ground- true works of art, not doorknobs or floor tiles, that are conceptually and physcially integrated into their sites. Pieces that add to the meaning of the place, and would be pretty meaningless somewhere else.
This third definition is what I think you are saying the big blue bear is. I would disagree with you about Borofsky’s hammering men, which can travel the world, but not about his clown ballerina, which is to my mind much more site specific.
All three categories are interesting and often needed additions to bland public buildings and spaces. But the third one, the mystical synergetic addition of 2+2 equalling 5, are the ones that really are the hardest to do, and the rarest.
Me, I am a big defender of building parts, as I straddle the line, in both interest and work, between craft and art, but I sure understand the allure of a successful “real” public art piece.
One of my favorites is Vito’s piece at the SF airport- unexpected, in a language all its own, strange translucent plastic tubes enter and leave the corridor- its as if they are transiting between universes, dropping into ours briefly. And yet, they fit perfectly, and make you see everything else differently.
Weiss Response
Your right that I am looking for definitions and evaluation. I am seeking to describe that those things that happen in the human mind and body when an excellent work of public art appears in the landscape. I want to steal the phase “public art” away from the generic sutff that helps make our built environment more humane. Of course, this will not be any more successful than architecture or art. I guess I could go to “Public Art with a capital PA”. Even worse.
Glen, while i love your interpretation of the Blue Bear work, it would be possible to mount a *polar* opposite argument. The Blue Bear could in fact be the ultimate plonk artwork, a displaced exotic object not of any time or place. Moreover, like Smokey and Sidney, though even scarier because he has no name, he symbolises the ultimate bully/victim complex of the modern western psyche. A great stand-over merchant, he doesn’t really scare us but rather works to further infantilise our gaze and disneyfy our environment. Acknowledging the consumers we are, weilding too much power over nature, greedily consuming the planet, the Blue Bear artwork takes up the ultimate projected position of the moralising (m)other making us feel guilty and telling us we’re naughty, while forgiving us in a gesture of removed absolution. We can feel safe – nature has been mourned in ghostly nostalgia.