The ugly truth about public art projects
A meeting place of public funds, municipal codes
It’s almost a cliché by this point: A city unveils a sixfigure public art installation, and a horrified public is left to gape at a pile of twisted, rusty postmodern shapes.
And lately, Calgary seems to be getting the worst of it. First, there was Bloom, a much-maligned $500,000 sculpture of various street lights fused together. Then there was Travelling Light, a giant blue $500,000 ring that even the city’s public art-loving mayor couldn’t help but disparage.
“I don’t like it, I think it’s awful,” Mayor Naheed Nenshi said at the time of its 2013 unveiling.
And now Calgary has Bowfort Towers, a $500,000 installation of rocks and rusted metal next to the Trans-Canada Highway. By this point, hated public art in Calgary seems to be an almost supernatural force.
One of the reasons public art isn’t like regular art: it’s a complex piece of infrastructure that needs to be graffitiproof, weatherproof and meet a whole host of municipal codes and regulations.
Here, for instance, is the request for proposals issued by the City of Saskatoon when it was searching for a $47,500 piece of public streetscaping.
The 12-page document demands art that is “vandal-resistant,” free of “sharp edges,” adheres to all Saskatchewan building codes and does “not restrict movement or obstruct views on the pathways along the sidewalk.”
Naturally, these kinds of dense rules tend to favour a certain kind of style and material, which partly explains the municipal obsession with postmodernist assemblages of rusted steel.
The other problem seems to be economic disconnect. Often, public art is funded by closed committees tasked with spending automatically replenished treasuries.
“The selection panel is made up of members of the community (who) decided this was the most interesting approach they could see,” was how Calgary’s manager of arts and culture, Sarah Iley, described the genesis of Bowfort Towers.
Calgary funds its public art using a mathematical formula common to many cities: Every time the city funds a capital project under $50 million, one per cent of the construction budget needs to be spent on art.
In Ottawa, a similar principle ensured that when the city was setting aside money for the 13 LRT stations of the Confederation Line, $7 million was automatically earmarked for public art.
The result is that art gets earmarked regardless of whether it’s wanted. In Calgary, the most perverse consequence of the one per cent policy was when a $200,000 sphere was installed in a city maintenance facility closed to the public. It also explains why so much art is getting put on highway medians.
“The people in charge have to spend the money and as long as they deliver something they can call art on time and for the budget, their job is done,” said Scott Hennig, spokesman for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, writing in an email.
In certain cases, artists have even been explicit about their intention not to make art that the public enjoys.
“You know art is not there to please people,” the creator of Calgary’s Bloom told CBC. “Art is there to bring people somewhere they don’t know yet.”
In Toronto in 2015, a large glass installation at Union Station immediately attracted scorn that it was “depressing.”
“Public art, if it’s any good, has to be art first and public second,” artist Stuart Reid said in a defence written in the online art publication MOMUS.
One of the famously reviled public artworks in Canadian history stood in Quebec City. A gift from then French president Jacques Chirac, it was a pillar of white marble notorious for clashing with nearby heritage buildings of the city’s Old Port.
To great fanfare, it was torn down in 2015 for what the city deemed to be “safety reasons.” And yet, even after three decades of scorn, its creator Jean-Pierre Raynaud remained unrepentant.
“People and works of art are everywhere in constant danger and victims of aggression,” he told La Presse at the time.
New York City once faced the same problem as Calgary. A program named Percent for Art was setting aside millions for new sculptures, and a horrified public was aghast at the shlock that kept resulting.
Finally, things came to a head with Sunbather, a giant, US$500,000 humanoid form seemingly constructed of spent bubble gum. Spurred by public hate of the sculpture, city council soon passed a law mandating that all future art be vetted in a public hearing.
Scott Hennig noted that one of the most beloved and photographed attractions in Calgary — a giant mesh head known as Wonderland — was built without a cent of public money. It was funded by Encana Corporation and Cenovus Energy, the builders of the city’s Bow skyscraper — although public art was a component of the developers’ deal with the city.
Hennig’s job is to advocate for smaller government, of course, but he said when art is handed off to private or non-profit actors, the rate of controversy plummets.
“That way if the art is ugly (and some will be) at least taxpayers won’t have to foot the bill,” he said.
The textbook example of bad public art was a 1971 statue of Metis revolutionary Louis Riel unveiled for the Manitoba centennial year.
Most provinces spent their centennial year unveiling heroic statues of figures in period dress, but the Riel design by sculptor Marcien Lemay depicted the Metis leader nude, twisted and appearing to wince in pain.
“I felt I wanted to put everything into the work that I felt about the man himself. It therefore lends a little confusion to the structure,” was how Lemay described it.
If the immediately horrified reaction of locals was any indication, the statue would never have been cast if Manitobans could have known what was coming.
“One can only imagine that, when they whipped the shroud off the statue on the day of the unveiling, if there were any Indians or Métis present, immediate plans for a new Riel rebellion must have precipitated on the spot,” said one critic at the time.
The Canadian public is generally good at stopping bad public art projects in their tracks.
Early designs for Ottawa’s Memorial to Victims of Communism showed a massive field of concrete — an ironic monument to the evils of regimes whose own love of bare concrete was well documented. Public opposition soon got a less brutalist sculpture of brass rods approved in its place.
A similar smackdown was delivered to Mother Canada, a planned 24-metre Cape Breton statue of a woman reaching across the Atlantic to Canada’s war dead in Europe.
The project had been approved by the then-Conservative government, until widespread criticism resulted in the site approval being pulled by Parks Canada.
Calgary councillor Sean Chu has been one of the most vocal opponents of his city’s public art.
Speaking to the National Post, he said it’s a problem that can be fixed with more democracy. Had any public meeting or focus group been able to see Travelling Light or Bowfort Towers when they were still mere sketches, the city would have been able to head off the storm of controversy that followed.
“Once you have public involvement, I don’t think you’d see any trouble,” he said.