GERSON ON PUBLIC ART MISCUES.
All public art is bad public art. In Calgary this is more true than anywhere. The city has erected one bizarre, expensive, controversial piece after another, so raising the ire of the taxpaying public over the years that Mayor Naheed Nenshi said critics of one particular structure were becoming a “lynch mob.” The city’s public arts policy has proved so untenable that city council recently announced it was pausing all future arts projects until it can be reviewed.
Under the current regime, one per cent of an infrastructure project’s budget must be diverted to an art fund, which then situates public art in places that often make no sense, like remote highway interchanges. The committee that commissions the art is dominated by people who have backgrounds in fine art and civic affairs. It could use a few more voices from drawn from the unwashed masses who can’t tell the difference between an avantgarde sculpture and a pile of construction refuse.
What’s more, the city claims to be bound by trade agreements that require it to put all contracts for public art out to tender globally — which means very little of the work ultimately selected is created by the people who live here and have a connection to the places being beautified.
As a result, Calgary is sprinkled with artwork that is abstract, sterile and, at its worst, outright derivative and garish. There have been a few successes, most notably The Plensa Head — a giant wire head that sits in front of the Bow Tower — but even most of what’s not terrible enough to make the front pages of the local newspapers is banal and generic, the sort of stuff that could appear in any street corner in any city in North America.
The growing collection of Calgary’s most spectacular failures, meanwhile, includes some so awful they could become ironic tourist attractions.
There’s Travelling Light, a giant blue hula hoop with two lamppost antennae popping out of the top. That gem — created by a team based in Berlin — sits on the side of a highway near the airport, ensuring visitors’ first impression of the city en route to their hotel is, “Wait — what the hell is that?”
There is, or was, Wishing Well a $559,000 set of interactive mirrored spheres created by a team from Berkeley, Calif., which had to be removed after an admirer’s jacket caught on fire because the sculpture intensified the sun’s rays like a magnifying glass. The city will have to pony over another $180,000 to fix it. What’s most offensive about it, however, is not the fact that it lights people on fire but rather that it’s such an obvious rehash of the Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park.
Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi continued to defend the city’s art program even after one of his constituents needed to be extinguished — until, finally, we found the nadir.
Bowfort Towers.
The $500,000 sculpture, erected earlier this year on the side of the TransCanada Highway, consists of a bunch of rusted steel girders holding rocks and looks indistinguishable from leftover construction scrap. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough to prompt the city to re-evaluate its art policy. The panic only really took hold when the city’s early press releases gave the false impression the piece was inspired by Indigenous art. That’s when local First Nations got involved, decrying the piece for its allusions to traditional burial scaffolding.
Needless to say, the artist — Del Geist, from New York — was completely oblivious.
There is a solution to Calgary’s public quagmire, and one that should appease both art lovers and fiscal conservatives alike. It’s so painfully obvious it took a rookie councillor to point it out.
Jeromy Farkas, who was just elected to represent Ward 11, wants to see a newly proposed piece of art near a pedestrian bridge to be awarded to an artist from the nearby Tsuu T’ina First Nation. “Throughout the campaign, I heard from people who weren’t opposed to beautifying public spaces tastefully, as long as it was appropriately priced and somehow related to telling Calgary’s story,” Farkas said.
The bridge would see art “installed in place where it would get a lot of exposure, at a literal bridge, but that would also figuratively show the destinies (of Calgarians and the Tsuu T’ina) will be intertwined.”
The problem is that First Nations’ public art may not be compatible with the mishmash of free-trade agreements to which the city believes itself beholden — the New West Partnership, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement and the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement with Europe. (The fact that the artists selected so often seem to come from New York is not adequately explained by these legal realities.)
Farkas questions just how beholden the city to these agreements as it pertains to public art — and First Nations public art, in particular. He’s seeking a more detailed opinion from the city solicitor.
Not only is Farkas on the right track, but in the spirit of reconciliation his idea needs to be expanded.
The one really easy way to get the public back on board with public art is to stop hiring foreigners to reproduce the latest faddish New York art-school crap. Instead, let’s spend a few years devoting our public spaces to the art of the First Nations on whose traditional land we are all living.
CALGARY IS SPRINKLED WITH ARTWORK THAT IS ABSTRACT, STERILE.