Context N°13
by 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.
