Context
From Picasso to the Cows: The Disappearance of Public Art in Chicago
John Beer
In 1965, Mayor Richard J. Daley dismissed
those Chicagoans who disliked Pablo Picasso’s plan for a sculpture in
the new Chicago Civic Center Plaza, saying: "Picasso is the best artist
in the world, and that is what we care about." Thirty-four years later,
his son, Mayor Richard M. Daley, continued the family tradition of
amateur art-criticism, summing up the message of the city’s Cows on
Parade™ installation: "Cows on Parade™ proves that art doesn’t have to
be serious. Art can be fun." Both pronouncements illustrate in their
own ways the persistent denial of aesthetic and political seriousness
to public art in Chicago that has ironically allowed the city to escape
the fracases that have engulfed public art projects elsewhere. At the
same time, in the distance between the first Mayor Daley’s invocation
of Picasso’s greatness and the second Mayor Daley’s giddy celebration
of art as play, we can measure a significant transition in the status
of the city’s public art. The monumental sculptures commissioned under
the earlier Daley administration, for all the compromises involved in
their creation, manifest an imaginative power with a significance both
aesthetic and political; they remain exemplary works of public art at a
time that the very category of public art remains under severe
pressure. The cows, on the other hand, represent the collapse of the
idea of public art. Expressive of no social aspiration beyond the
maximization of the tourist trade and aesthetically worthy of comment
only insofar as they demonstrate the erasure of the line between art
and entertainment, they count as neither public discourse nor art. The
claim that public art has not been given serious aesthetic or political
attention in Chicago may draw demurrals. After all, the city’s
political and journalistic institutions have consistently voiced their
faith in art’s edifying potential. Public art, we are told again and
again, is good for us and good for business. Even the philistine
reflexes of the Chicago Tribune have softened. That newspaper’s
coverage of the Picasso unveiling balanced the high-minded reflections
of the first Mayor Daley, reminding us that "what seems strange today
will be familiar tomorrow," and President Johnson’s bold telegraph that
"there may be a difference of opinion as to the symbolism and its
meaning, but there is agreement that it is the product of genius," with
the outcry of seven-year-old Bob Wendell ("Oh mommy, it’s terrible,
it’s terrible!"). Today’s Tribune, on the other hand,
genuflects thoughtfully at the remarkable sums cultural productions
entice to the coffers of the city’s tourism industry. When the Tribune’s story on the arrival of Cows on Parade™ introduces young Aaron for the
obligatory child’s perspective, he doesn’t turn in dismay to his
mother; rather, with unabashed technophilia, he greets a solar-paneled
cow with, "They glow? Cool!" One might diagnose the relatively
untroubled acceptance with which Chicago has met its public art as a
symptom of the Second City’s ever-present cultural anxiety: the city is
relentlessly determined to demonstrate to its coastal rivals that it,
too, can be a world-class connoisseur. But I think this complacent
reception is more fruitfully read as evidence of an urge to domesticate
the troubling potential of art in the public sphere. Thirty years ago,
journalists and politicians characterized the remarkable collection of
sculptures lining Dearborn Avenue—Picasso’s Untitled, Miro’s Chicago, Chagall’s Four Seasons, Calder’s Flamingo—solely
in terms of the creators- unassailable greatness, as fit emblems of a
national and global trading center. Today, the Department of Cultural
Affairs presents statistical proof of the economic impact of each
summer’s outdoor installation, even if the new product line invariably
falls short of the Cows on Parade™ gold standard. In both cases, the
desired effect is achieved: the value of public art is delineated in
terms no civic leader could find disagreeable. Public art is rendered
safe for consumption by evading or trivializing discussion of the work
in terms of aesthetic merit or sociopolitical implications. Looking
at Chicago’s public art with an eye toward recapturing the dimensions
of aesthetic and social meaning that go missing when its meaning is
reduced to economic impact or the authority of genius, one can trace in
the movement from Picasso to the cows a sobering narrative, one in
which the effacement of the very idea of the public sphere is
intimately entwined with a debased conception of imagination. Such an
account, of course, risks nostalgia. We should not enshrine the high
modernism emblematized in Picasso’s Untitled or Calder’s Flamingo as, in David Lehman’s fulsome phrase, the mark of "the last
avant-garde," as though any future art were doomed either to repetition
or to irrelevance. Nor should we overlook the conformity and repression
without which, after all, the first Mayor Daley could hardly have
engineered the installation of these massive sculptures. The Picasso is
in part a monument to the rule of the political boss. But, I
want to insist, only in part. The very monumentality that inscribes the
weight of civic power on Daley Plaza simultaneously marks that plaza as
a site for civic engagement. Only a year after its dedication, the
Picasso watched over the Yippies’ nomination of Pigasus the pig for
president during the Democratic National Convention. This parodic act
of public theater, ending in the arrest of seven people and the pig,
performed one of the exemplary functions of public art: it rendered the
state of the community visible to its citizens. The energizing shock of
the event depended crucially upon the prior identification of Daley
Plaza as a locus of civic aspiration, Chicago’s aspiration to represent
the vital heart of a supposedly democratic polity. The Picasso
sculpture, representing simultaneously that democratic aspiration and
the antidemocratic confluence of local political and business power,
made such an act of protest possible even as its impassivity mocked the
agonizingly temporal concerns of the participants. The
sculpture itself hovers between abstraction and figuration. Viewed head
on, a narrow pediment supports an elongated and distorted face framed
by two massive, curving planes. Harriet Senie, noting that the
resulting image is derived from a conflation of Picasso’s wife
Jacqueline and his Afghan dog, objects to the sculpture for its
inappropriate introduction of obscure personal and domestic themes into
a public context. But in this objection, Senie ignores the effect that
a public context has on the viewer’s experience of the statue. Outside
the museum, in the public square, the sculpture is primarily responsive
not to the contemporaneous works by Picasso that might clue the viewer
in to its origins, but to the structures and the urban life that
surrounds it. As a figure, it appears less a representation of
Picasso’s idiosyncratic concerns and more a sign of its own opacity,
its challenge to the passing viewer to consider its unrecoverable
significance. The sculpture thus constitutes something of a
totemic rebuke to the rationalizing authority of the government
agencies clustered around it. Formally, this challenge is mirrored in
the peculiar lightness and instability of the monumental object. The
large gap, both keyhole and vagina, formed by the intersection of the
posterior planes, the delicacy with which these planes balance upon the
sculpture’s base, the steel lacework that connects the sculpture’s
front and back: all work in opposition to the potentially oppressive
scale of the Picasso, opening up in this arena of serious work the
possibility of play. If the sculpture’s Pharaonic majesty seems
dangerously appropriate to a city in which few public spaces go
unemblazoned with the Daley name, the sculpture itself resists so
single-minded an interpretation: denying its own weightiness, it brings
to vision that space for imaginative transformation that is,
ultimately, the content most appropriate for modern public art. Alexander Calder’s Flamingo,
soaring against the backdrop of Dearborn Avenue’s Federal Plaza,
provides an even more potent example of this imaginative transformation
of its civic context. Enormous and graceful, the Calder, with its
undulating curves and bright vermilion surface, evokes a sensuality in
sharp contrast to the van der Rohe boxes that surround it. Flamingo,
subject at its unveiling to the familiar bemused condescension
("what-cha-ma-Calder") tempered with admiration for its creator’s fame,
energizes its vicinity with a promise that modern urban social space
might remain human space, responsive to the physical, emotional, and
spiritual desires of the plaza’s varied occupants, whether occasional
protestors gathered in the square’s northeast corner or patrons of the
post office. The scale and materials of both these sculptures
are integral to their meaning, registering the expectation of civic
continuity, their permanence the sign that the public space they help
to define would also endure. This continuity has its worrisome aspects,
signalling in part the desire to maintain in the face of dissent the
power relations that enabled the public expenditures. But essential to
the conception of such continuity, and most visible in the ideal of
communal imagination inherent in the Calder and Picasso, is the
complementary aspiration that public space by virtue of being public space will facilitate the continuing recreation of communal values always at
risk of being overshadowed by the seductive demands of present
circumstances: stock market booms, stock market busts, shadow wars
against omnipresent enemies. It is no secret that the last two decades
have seen a relentless assault on the very idea of a public sphere with
values and obligations distinct from and frequently in conflict with
private motives. This assault is manifested, for instance, in the crude
rhetoric of the militia movement and in the subtle displacement of
categories like "student," "patient," or "citizen" by the all-embracing
"customer." One might very well expect that such a dramatic shift in
the animating ideology of virtually all major institutions,
governmental and educational as well as commercial, would have a
discernible effect upon public art. What sort of public art is
appropriate for a moment at which the public sphere itself threatens to
disappear? The answer, it appears, is Cows on Parade™. An idea
originating in Zurich and imported by a local businessman, the
installation of three hundred and twenty individually decorated cows
throughout Chicago during the summer of 1999 reportedly injected two
hundred million tourist dollars into the local economy, a success that
soon left other communities scrambling for their own plaster mascots.
Besides providing ample opportunities for bringing out the inner
punsters in local copy rooms, the cows proved their humanitarian bona
fides in the form of a final charity auction. Only a killjoy would deny
that many designers of individual cows produced slyly clever work, the
golden calf perched at the entrance to Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent
Mile luxury shopping district being perhaps the most notable example.
But taken as a whole, Cows on Parade™ displayed three qualities that
sharply distinguish it from the public artworks of a previous
generation: while the sculptures were fixed, the cows were spatially
dispersed; while the sculptures were permanent, the cows were
ephemeral; and while the sculptures were seriously imaginative, the
cows were by and large merely whimsical. Although the 1990s
saw a reversal in the depopulation of American cities in favor of
suburbs, this reurbanization effectively represented, at least to a
degree, a suburbanization of the city. Rather than the locus of a
robust and unruly civic life, the kind of social intermingling that
might eventuate in such disruptions as Haymarket or the 1968
convention, the suburbanized city is the strip mall perfected. It
offers a dazzlingly differentiated array of leisure activities to
offset the often ferociously taxing and always anxiously uncertain
rigors of the contemporary workplace. Transient and decentralized, the
cows were perfect emblems of suburbia, their very charm an icon of
victory in the suburban war on nature. They also reflected the flexible
labor conditions increasingly familiar through decades of downsizing to
their middle-class viewers. The cows, like the temporary employees and
independent contractors who paused to admire them, would be kept at
their locations throughout the city, a ubiquity that defined no
specific place, only long enough to ensure maximum return on civic
investment. The Tribune paid a backhanded compliment to the
Picasso by describing it as a tribute to the steelworker’s art; Cows on
Parade™, in contrast, as the recurring attention in press accounts to
the details of its finances suggests, is a fitting tribute to the art
of the deal. Entertainment is the compensatory gesture of the
suburbanized city, and Cows on Parade™ epitomizes the contemporary
disregard for any distinction between art and entertainment. Like the
somber quality films of Spielberg or Mendes, the self-importantly empty
sheen of corporate rock from Peter Gabriel to Matchbox 20, or the
quietly populist poetry of current laureate Billy Collins, the cows
serve up to their audience a predigested experience, a tasty and easily
assimilated diversion that poses no threat to settled understandings of
the self or the world. Liberated from its attachment to antiquated
concepts like beauty, truth, community, or critique, art in the guise
of the cows is free to be nothing but fun. That is to say, Cows on
Parade™ is public art as pop art. Like a Mao silkscreen, the spectacle
of a fiberglass cow dressed as a construction worker or converted into
a solar-powered beacon confronts the viewer primarily with the question
to what degree it is to be taken seriously. Within its
art-historical context, to be sure, pop art did provide welcome relief
from the occasionally heavy-handed piety of high modernism. But,
particularly within a society saturated with ironic distancing
gestures, a public art that offers idiosyncratic fancies valued
primarily for their novelty in place of the sustained attempt to
envision the imaginative possibilities of social space is nothing less
than an abdication, a moment in which a democratic society in effect
tells its citizenry, "Don’t worry, we’re just kidding around." The
monumental sculptures commissioned by Daley Sr. stand in part as
emblems to the old reign of the city boss; the PR-savvy simulations of
democracy practiced by his more sophisticated son find their reflection
in Cows on Parade™: social domination with a friendly, bovine face.
