A city looks up Marilyn’s dress
Palm Springs brings back a risqué statue. Its placement will mar an architectural gem.
In 2016, the city of Palm Springs got serious about moving forward on a downtown redevelopment project that, after decades of planning, would put the local art museum and its Midcentury Modern architectural design at the very heart of the ambitious overhaul.
Then, during a City Council Zoom meeting last November, all five councilmembers turned heel and summarily trashed the plan.
Without so much as a mention of the long-established redevelopment goal, which is on the brink of completion, the City Council in
stead unanimously agreed to plant a vulgar, misogynistic statue made by a hack artist smack in the middle of the mix. The decision could not have been worse.
The 26-foot-tall colossus shows 1950s movie star Marilyn Monroe, legs splayed, with her skirt blowing up around her waist to expose her panty clad backside. Designed as a tourist photo op, the statue beckons viewers to saunter in between the late sex symbol’s giant gams, look up her dress and snap a picture for the amusement of the folks back home. Say cheese! Tone-deaf doesn’t begin to describe it. You would think that the national movement against sexual violence, which exploded as the crimes committed against actors by a powerful Hollywood mogul, Harvey Weinstein, were revealed three years ago, had never happened. “Forever Marilyn,” as the awful sculpture is named, would be better called #MeToo Marilyn.
The Palms Springs Art Museum, a low-slung building designed by E. Stewart Williams in 1974, is emblematic of the Midcentury Modern architecture now synonymous internationally with the desert enclave. Rather than a civic celebration of one of the town’s greatest cultural contributions, as the 2016 plan envisioned, the council opted instead for a civic celebration of the misdemeanor crime of up-skirting.
The statue is slated for installation late next month. Incredibly, #MeToo Marilyn, her body posed tilting slightly forward, will even be positioned to moon the museum. How this travesty came to pass is hard to say.
The switch was the brainchild of Palm Springs Resorts , businesspeople in the hotel and restaurant industry who lobby the city on tourism issues. They first brought the statue to town in 2012, where it stood in a vacant downtown lot for two years, lighting up social media.
Last year they petitioned the city to allow them to bring it back and install it in the center of that critically important redevelopment zone. When the council agreed, P.S. Resorts bought the thing — reportedly for a million dollars. They’ll drop another $100,000 on the installation.
Redevelopment in downtown Palm Springs has been through seemingly endless revisions since the end of the last century, when an enormous shopping mall gobbling up a big chunk of Palm Canyon Drive, the town’s primary thoroughfare, went belly up. A decade later, the Great Recession hit the city especially hard, with tourism numbers slumping and real estate values plummeting. Recovery lagged badly.
Community input was sought on earlier downtown plans, and designs were revised. In 2011, voters handily passed a 1% increase in sales tax to pay for redevelopment. By 2016, a smart plan was in place for the vicinity of the now-demolished mall.
Building on a 2009 idea, it called for an open street to create a view corridor leading two short blocks due west, from heavily pedestrian Palm Canyon Drive to the Palm Springs Art Museum, with the magnificent San Jacinto mountains as an imposing backdrop. A two-acre public park, designed by able landscape architect Mark Rios, responsible for the successful renovation of the Music Center Plaza and Grand Park in front of City Hall in Los Angeles, is under construction adjacent to the street. Completion is expected by August.
Williams’ museum building, long hidden behind the hulking mall, was intended to emerge as a civic emblem of the Midcentury Modernism that had come to represent the city. (Modernism Week, an architecture and design festival, has grown from a modest 2006 launch for a few hundred people into an annual 10-day extravaganza with attendance now surpassing 160,000.) Rios’ park design, in plantings and organization, defers to the museum, which is discussed 17 times in the 83page Downtown Specific Plan as its focus.
WASN’T THE PLAN
Williams’ building is described as “iconic,” intended to be seen “standing alone as a landmark.” The plan requires that everything in the redevelopment tract “shall defer to the presence of the adjacent Palm Springs Art Museum.”
How important is the view corridor? Since proposed a dozen years ago, the name of the short new thoroughfare has bounced between Main Street and Museum Way, which is what it’s called now.
Then, the tourism lobbyists struck. Palm Springs Resorts petitioned the city to close Museum Way and stick #MeToo Marilyn in the middle of the blocked street.
There had been earlier discussions of putting the statue in the adjacent park — although project notes pointedly say, “or another sculpture,” suggesting unspecified worries about the offensive hunk of junk. An early Rios park rendering shows #MeToo Marilyn tucked away in the corner farthest from the museum and looking south, her backside facing a parking garage.
Over-scaled for the site — the statue is the height of a two- or three-story building — the figure’s billowing, windswept skirt will block the sightline from Palm Canyon Drive to Williams’ ostensibly iconic, standalone landmark of Midcentury Modern architecture. In the other direction, departing museum visitors will be greeted by her exposed behind as they descend the stairs and head into town. Photoshopped mockups made to scale by opponents of the plan demonstrate the erasure.
Virtually none of this was discussed during the November Zoom meeting. It was also simply assumed that public rather than private land would be an ideal location.
Not a single councilmember expressed unabashed enthusiasm for the statue before unanimously supporting the new location. Neither the council nor a remarkably shoddy background staff report even mentions the guiding 2016 document being upended by the plan.
Lisa Middleton, the councilmember in whose district the behemoth will be erected, said the art was not to her taste, but she was willing to give it a shot.
The aesthetic question of “personal taste” is a common dodge in public art discussions, but here it is entirely irrelevant. The work’s sculptor, J. Seward Johnson, who died last year at 89, was very rich; an heir to the Johnson & Johnson medical fortune, he self-funded production and public display of his absurd work. Everyone enjoys a hobby, but his sculpture is unrepresented in any significant museum collections. Expert consensus regards him as an artist of zero achievement.
No one at the art museum next door was consulted for the City Council staff report, although the sculpture would be its new neighbor. (The current museum director, Louis Grachos, and multiple former directors and curators have publicly registered horror. Last week Grachos resigned, effective this summer, but did not identify the controversy as a cause.) Shockingly, the city’s own public art commission was not asked for an opinion. Am I wrong to speculate that it wasn’t queried because city staff knew full well what the answer would be? An answer that would be hard to wave away in their report?
The city bent over backward to accommodate the awful scheme, even as it ignored established redevelopment goals and winced at the offending sculpture. Why? My simple answer: The tourism lobby wanted it.
Tourism is fundamental to the Palm Springs economy. According to the local convention and visitors bureau, it is the largest single employer in the area.
“I do think we need interactive works of public art that are Instagrammable — are going to drive tourism on social media” is how Mayor Christy Gilbert Holstege explained the council decision.
A CONNECTION?
The scourge of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter looms in the background. The leap from image proliferation on social media to a definable increase in tourism was made — even though not a shred of hard data backs up the claim.
And the city didn’t ask for any.
When I did, all I got from Palm Springs Resorts was an accounting of nearly $800,000 in free advertising calculated from the social media frenzy when the statue first arrived in 2012. (It had been a recent scandal in Chicago, where it was eventually run out of town.) That number was juxtaposed with rising tourism figures in subsequent years.
No mention was made of the big, ever-expanding draw of events like Modernism Week, the Palm Springs International Film Festival or the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. To think that anyone will travel to Palm Springs inspired by a burning desire to get a gander at #MeToo Marilyn’s giant panties is bizarre.
I’m just one person, but I first saw the sculpture on my cellphone screen the first time around, and my immediate reaction was, “Ugh. What is wrong with Palm Springs?” I wrote a column applauding its departure from the city.
The translation of social media clicks into tourism dollars, however, is simply embraced as an article of faith by the civic powers that be. Perhaps they see all publicity as good publicity, but I wouldn’t count on it for #MeToo Marilyn now.
The country has changed meaningfully since the statue was first here nearly a decade ago. After the epic Women’s March on Washington, two presidential impeachments, a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, an attempted election theft built on a racist Big Lie and deadly pandemic exposure of all manner of societal inequities, social justice issues are today squarely on the public radar. As Confederate monuments come down across the country, a blatantly sexist sculpture snickering at women in general — and a tragic Hollywood actor in particular — is unlikely to be widely cheered as it goes up in a tourist town.
Clothing designer Trina Turk and architecture preservationist Chris Menrad are among locals who have banded together to form the Committee to Relocate Marilyn. A GoFundMe page was launched to hire a lawyer to sue the city and stop the project. (Having met its $50,000 goal in less than two weeks, it’s upped the ante to $75,000.) The suit, filed Monday in Riverside Superior Court, claims city violations around street closure where the statue will stand.
Best would be not installing the shameful misogynist lark anywhere at all. But stopping it on Museum Way is essential. The grinding yearlong COVID-19 pandemic seems finally to be pointed in the direction of winding down, but if the statue goes up, I plan to remain socially distant.