Public Art, Off the Plinth
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“Public Art” is either a tautology or an oxymoron. If you accept philosopher Benedetto Croce’s definition of art as communication, then without a public (which can consist of a single person other than the maker), it wouldn’t be art. It would be the tree falling down in the forest without anyone knowing about it. If, on the other hand, you prefer the “institutional” theory, which says art becomes art once you put it in a place or before an audience that accepts and recognizes it as art, then simply leaving subtly meaningful objects “in the public’s way,” catching them off guard and foisting an aesthetic experience on them, won’t necessarily make it art to them.
Mind you, how philosophical do you need to be about public art? Cities wouldn’t be cities without statues of forgotten generals catching pigeon-droppings in deserted squares. The Disneyfied current equivalent are the casts of cows or other such prefabricated tchotchkes (it’s apples in the Big Apple this year!) painted in garish colors by school kids, street artists, and “celebrities,” which each year seem to descend on our nation’s cities like the plague. As soon as art is completely absorbed into an urban fabric, taken for granted as outdoor decor or wished away as litter, it loses the right to be termed art. It no longer compels or requires aesthetic attention.
Yet the notion of art as an elevated experience to be savored in a rarefied time or space is itself relatively recent (post-Enlightenment, to be precise). Before museums art was as often as not public: Monuments and memorials, decorations in houses of worship, fetes and processions took spectacle directly to “the people,” whether to cow them into submission or inspire them as free citizens. Since the advent of the museum, however, art has gone “interior” – even when it is sited outdoors and is very big. Museum-style art demands complex consideration on its own terms, beyond civic or religious functions.
It is difficult not to conclude, for instance, that the Public Art Fund, a great New York institution, is a glorious contradiction in terms. A non-profit organization funded by state and city agencies, foundations, and individuals, it has commissioned countless temporary sculpture installations, performances, and offbeat projects, at art-friendly plazas like the Rockefeller Center, the Lincoln Center, and Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the southeast corner of Central Park, which was named for the PAF’s founder. It has also done so at less likely locations, or indeed non-locations like Barbara Kruger’s wrap-around slogans on a city bus. (What could be more public than an omnibus?)
Mrs. Freedman, New York’s first commissioner of cultural affairs (under the Lindsay Administration), President of the Municipal Art Society, and an advocate of Percent for Art legislation founded the PAF in 1977. The current president is her daughter, Susan K. Freedman. A finely designed and intelligently written new book, “Plop: Recent Projects from the Public Art Fund” (Merrell, 256 pages, $49.95) charts 45 projects from the last few years by an international roster of artists.
Some of these pieces were especially commissioned. Others – like Jeff Koons’s monumental floral “Puppy” (1992) and Louise Bourgeois’s humungous “Spiders” (1996) installed at Rockefeller Center in 2000 and 2001, respectively – were imaginatively facilitated by the Fund. But all these objects and events are emphatically art world-style art: They don’t belong to the citizenry and aren’t permanently there either by popular consent or at the will of determined leaders. The PAF is, effectively, a museum without walls.
“Plop” is a knowingly ironic title, a derisory term from the 1960s meant to refer to modern sculpture dropped in as an after-thought by city planners to mediate between a brutalist scale and its alienated users. Architect James Wines talked of “turds in the plaza,” taking a swipe at Henry Moore or his imitators. Moore himself objected to sculpture pinned to buildings, which he thought made it look like costume jewelry. PAF can afford the self-deprecatory humor, as its projects are temporary, site-specific, often self-consciously subversive, and invariably anti-monumental.
Ilya Kabokov set the pace in this last regard with his “Monument to the Lost Glove” (1997), which poked irreverent fun at the kind of bombastic memorializing familiar from his childhood in the Soviet Union. A cast resin glove was placed in front of the Flatiron Building, surrounded by lecterns sporting poetic texts on themes of loss and nostalgia. In 1998 British artist Rachel Whiteread placed one of her trademark casts in positive form of the inside of a classic New York water tower on a SoHo roof – one of the PAF’s best-received projects.
A few artists have created works that directly assault conventional statuary. Do-Ho Suh had an army of little figures, supporting a faux marble pedestal many times the height of their out stretched arms, at PAF’s favored Brooklyn site, the MetroTech Center. Keith Edmier placed a pair of half-size academic bronzes of unprepossessing World War II GIs, named Emil Dobbelstein and Henry J. Drope, in Freedman Plaza. The carved dates suggest the former was killed in action, but the text explains that, in fact, he was a suicide; the two men were the artist’s grandparents. In other words, the artist is completely debunking public art by displaying work with solely private significance.
If Mr. Edmier’s work seems an extreme example of meaning hermetically sealed within formally boring art, conceptualism is nonetheless the norm among the 45 works featured in “Plop.” There are some classic heavy hitters from the movement, including Vito Acconci and Dan Graham; in each case, their forbiddingly minimal forms are playfully interactive. Play was taken to a new level by Roxy Paine, whose stainless steel tree, “Bluff” (2002), was placed in Central Park.
Rather than such inherently suggestive sculptural work as this, PAF largesse more typically extends to performative artists engaged in tongue-in-cheek antics: Anissa Mack, who baked pies in a prefab cottage in front of the civic buildings along Prospect Park, leaving them on a ledge to be stolen, Tom Sawyer-style; Mark Dion, who set up a spoof nature observation kiosk in Madison Square Park; or Francis Alys, who orchestrated a procession of relics from the Museum of Modern Art to the temporary MoMA QNS site, with replicas of canonical works such as the “Desmoiselles d’Avignon” and Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, and artist Kiki Smith held aloft as a “living icon.”
Obviously, a good time was had by all. But once you penetrate a surface diversity among these projects, a distinctive house style emerges. Almost all the works belong within a countercultural tradition. With the generous funding of the PAF and the political muscle they bring to their projects, the artists essentially form an institutionalized avant-garde.
With deconstruction the norm in public art, thanks to the adventurous and tireless efforts of the PAF, it almost smacks of subversion when a more traditional agency like the Madison Square Park Conservancy presents a group of sculptures by Mark di Suvero (still on view through October 31). Three of the veteran modernist’s graciously gargantuan geometric variations in constructed steel “sit pretty,” awaiting old-fashioned, private, engaged aesthetic contemplation. They are radical on their own terms and beautiful, on mine at least.