Art and Public Space

Art in public space is not the same as public art; the latter implies a large, general audience suggesting an ideal genre for a democracy. Yet, since the formation of the United States, issues surrounding the appropriate form and placement of art in public space, as well as its funding, have made the concept of public art all but an oxymoron, an object of controversy more often than consensus or celebration. Nevertheless, the implicit intension of all art placed in public space is that it is, in some often undefined way, for a public (as opposed to private) audience.

Today public art may take any form: abstract sculpture or figurative mural, city park, street furniture or lighting, and even community-based events with a sociopolitical focus organized by artists. However, the most familiar form of art in urban space remains memorial sculpture, and for centuries it was the only kind. Historically, commemorative monuments celebrated heroic men, deeds (usually of war), or virtues. Although George Washington was an undisputed national figure worthy of commemoration, finding a suitable memorial for him proved problematic in the extreme. Horatio Greenough, commissioned by Congress to create a portrait of our first president for the Capitol Rotunda, produced a 12-foothigh seated figure in classical Greek robe that became an instant object of controversy and graffiti. As a result, his George Washington (1832–1841) was removed to a more neutral and less visible outdoor location on the Capitol grounds and subsequently to even safer turf, the entrance hall of the Smithsonian Museum of History and Technology. The Washington Monument, a 555-foot obelisk on the Mall in the nation's capital, remains the structure most associated with the first president, yet it does not bear his image. The product of a lengthy and fraught process, it was designed by Robert Mills and completed in 1885, over a century after Congress voted to honor the first president with a monument.

Commemorating war was no less problematic. Building memorials raises issues regarding a particular war specifically and war in general. Traditional forms of war memorials such as victory arches or columns didn't reflect these problems. Debates began after World War I and became widespread after World War II as to whether it might not be better to build useful memorials, such as libraries or swimming pools, rather [Page 43]than structures whose only purpose was commemorative. The hope was that this might shift the focus from a controversial subject or structure to a general public benefit. From a public space perspective, this pitted social amenity against memorial object.

During the postwar period, at a time when the art world increasingly championed modern styles of art favoring abstraction, there was a concern that something could not be both modern and a monument; if it was not exclusively about art issues, it could not be art. There were only a few artists whose figurative memorials were accepted as art, notably George Segal with In Memory of May 4, 1970, Kent State: Abraham and Isaac (1978, now on the Princeton University campus), Gay Liberation (1980, in Sheridan Square Park, New York City), The Steelmakers (1980, in Youngstown, Ohio), and The Holocaust (1982, in San Francisco). The situation of artists of memorials not receiving art world approbation did not change until Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1981) was installed on the Washington Mall between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. The wall takes the form of minimal sculpture, two 250-footlong walls tapering to ground level at each end and rising in the middle to a height of 10 feet at the center where they meet. Made of black granite with a highly polished surface, listing the names of all the war dead or missing according to the day they died or disappeared, with its back embedded in the earth, it suggests a large national tombstone or house of death. Its audience moves along the memorial in a specific choreographed way, first into the space of death and then out again. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, once the object of a huge controversy that resulted in the addition of a compromise figurative sculpture, Three Fighting Men (1984) by Frederick Hart, opposite its reflective wall, is today the most visited memorial in the nation's capital. Lin's use of the visual vocabulary of minimal sculpture (influenced by Richard Serra, who was teaching at Yale where she was an architecture student) and her listing of the names became a model for subsequent memorial sculpture. By providing both a mobile and tactile experience for the viewer, Lin's sculpture and many of its offshoots in effect created their own distinct and dedicated urban space.

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