Public Money
What is the role of public money in defining public art? Does it compromise the artist? Whose values are perpetuated? What strategies does an artist who seeks public commissions employ?
Commissioning Art in Public Places
Panelists: Charlotte
Cohen, Anne Pasternak, Tom Eccles
Charlotte Cohen: I am director of the Percent for Art Program of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. You have had the opportunity to hear from a wide range of participants in the field of public art, marvelous artists, critics and art historians. My program represents a different aspect of the field, the facilitation of public art projects that are government funded and of a permanent nature. Our program began in 1982, when the city council and mayor of New York signed the Percent for Art legislation into law. It says that one percent of capital construction budgets of city projects be spent on public art. Since that time about 125 projects have been completed and we have about 50 projects in progress right now. We work with agencies across the five boroughs of the city. I will talk later about some of the projects more specifically.
I just returned from the Americans for the Arts conference in Denver. Americans for the Arts is a national service organization representing municipal and state arts councils and agencies. My colleagues in the field of publicly funded public art spent three days discussing many of the same issues you have been discussing here. We are forming a national service organization for the field, not only for publicly funded programs, but for all participants in the field including artists, people in allied fields, nonprofit organizations, etceteras. The timeliness of this conference offers me the chance to report to you from the field on some of the concerns we discussed which should provide you with a framework to think about and for us to discuss the topics raised by the premise of this panel: public money.
Working in the field of public art offers the opportunity to engage in a debate on the use of civic space and architecture in which issues of artistic style, audience, civic identity, political posturing and the meaning of cultural democracy are discussed intensely. We are constantly challenged and challenging ourselves in negotiating this terrain. In our work, we encounter questions about how the public views itself and about perceptions of an elitist public culture. These challenges create a dialogue in which we learn about the needs and interests of the users of the facility or civic project we work on, and they are involved in our process of artist selection and design.
The new water pollution control plant, a sewage treatment plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn is a great example. At this site, the prospect of Percent for Art project created a conflict in part because the community was so opposed to the plant. The treatment plant is the largest of the fourteen sewage treatment plants in New York. It was built in the late 1960s and, under federal government order, is being renovated and updated over the next twelve to fifteen years. It is a $2 billion project of the Department of Environmental Protection and we have commissioned two artists at the site. As Renee Piechocki, the project manager from Percent for Art, returned again and again to the community, and as they grew to understand our process and feel they had a role in it, their attitude shifted. They have come to embrace the commissioned artists and to be engaged with what the artists are planning. Originally, the community demanded an artist from the neighborhood be commissioned, but there was a turnaround. Although no one likes the plant, they see that it will be a very different place in the future and will significantly change the neighborhood.
I will now outline some of the major trends that we discussed in Denver. The artists are primary in the field and their role has changed. They are more involved in a dialogue with users, communities, architects and engineers than in the past. In terms of types of projects, transportation is hot now. With the passage of the T21 infrastructure bill in Congress, which provides $217 billion over the next 20 years, there will be new funds available for public art across the country. In regard to approaches, integration of art with design and planning is important. This can be on a huge scale, as in the award-winning wastewater treatment plant in San Diego which commissioned a team of artists. In the attempts across the board to get artists into the design process as early as possible in order for them to influence design, a good example is Julie Dermansky's commission in our program to design all the linoleum flooring in a daycare center as well as the fence on the site. That said, while the popularity of design teams is strong in certain circles, there is the recognition that there are many approaches that work well including a wonderful object, community participation or, more typically for us, a combination of approaches. What is important is to resist labeling and accept a fluidity of terms. Maintenance is a huge concern and is being dealt with up front by new programs, rather than as an afterthought. Changes in the use of public space are recognized. The malling of train stations and airports, and the way that malls are our new town greens, raise the question of where the artist fits into all this. Is the artwork best integrated as architectural enhancement or should it make bold I-am-art statements, or some combination. Our partners have also changed. They are not just art partners. We engage the users of the work in our process which creates a dialogue and an education process for us and for them, and helps build relationships for the future. Programs across the country are changing and reinventing themselves, and looking for new mechanisms and approaches. At this conference, the participants consisted entirely of government-funded programs. There were no nonprofits and a few artists but not enough.
Here in New York, some of our current projects underway include the sewage treatment plant and a new firehouse in the Bronx which is the first firehouse built in New York City in ten years. The commissioned artist is Mierle Ukeles. For the Bronx Criminal Court, the largest structure in the portfolio of the city under construction, we have commissioned three artists. We are working on a small project in Chinatown at the Open Door Senior Center. And we have just started a lot of new school projects with the Board of Education including design team projects and stand alone artworks. We are going to be working with the Hall of Science on their expansion in Queens, as well as with the Queens Family Court, and the Whitehall Ferry Terminal in lower Manhattan. We have a number of new library projects coming up and we will be working with the Health and Hospitals Corporation. The Third City Water Tunnel, with the Department of Environmental Protection, will be an exciting project and is, perhaps, the largest infrastructure project in the world. It is a thirty-year project for a tunnel to bring water from upstate into the city. It will be 700 feet underground and miles long. We will be commissioning artists at the shaft sites that access the tunnel.
I want to show slides of a few completed projects. This is at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, completed in 1992, called Mnemonics. When Stuyvesant High School moved from where they had been for 88 years, the artists wanted to carry the memory of the history to the new high school. They created 400 glass blocks, which are integrated into the architecture of the building, in which are mini-installations. Eighty-eight of them represented the former years of the school. They contacted the alumni classes. This is the doorknob from the principal's office in the old school. They left 88 blocks empty so the next 88 classes could create their own blocks. This is from 1969, the first year girls were admitted to the school. For the remainder of the blocks, they contacted cultural councils all over the world and filled the blocks with objects of no monetary value, but cultural value. They wanted a project that students could experience throughout the entire four years. The blocks are in unique and hidden places all over the school.
This is by Mags Harries, "Topiary: A Twenty Year Project," at the Brooklyn Zoo, completed in 1993. It is meant to take twenty years for this project to fully develop. That octopus is big enough to drive a truck under. You can see the foliage growing up. This is a project in which time plays an important role. There is a snake eating a frog.
This is a work by Toshio Sasaki, "First Symphony of the Sea," at the New York Aquarium at Coney Island. It sits on the boardwalk facing the ocean and is a 332-foot concrete wall. This is an example of the artist supplementing the construction budget with the money from their commission to create the form liners that create this wall. He also included terrazzo and ceramic elements. It gets hit with graffiti and the Parks Department has been great about cleaning it. There was a concrete wall designated at this site anyway. This is by Fred Tomaselli, "Ten-kilometer Radius," at the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadow Corona Park in Queens. The artist documented the surrounding area by taking photographs of the neighborhoods in a ten-kilometer radius around the museum and putting them in loops around the banisters with brass plaques identifying the sites. He was not a photographer originally. He also designed the hand rail.
This is by Justin Ladda, at Public School 7 in the Bronx. It was a design team project where the artist chose colors and patterns and infiltrated the design of the entire interior of the school. He also created cast figures that are inset in the school and mosaics at the water fountains. We are trying to have artists on the design teams in our projects with the Board of Education, so we can infiltrate the entire environment.
This is also at Flushing Meadow Corona Park, by Matt Mullican. It is over 400 etched granite panels that celebrate the World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964 with imagery from those fairs.
This is a recently completed project by Anna Murch at Queens Civil Court called "Cycles." It is in a courtyard that is not accessible physically to the public, but can be seen from all levels of the building. She also designed the bronze doors.
This work by Krzysztof Wodiczko was recently completed at a public school, Sunset Park in Brooklyn. There are five light boxes with photographs taken from the hill in Sunset Park of a sunset. It's in a windowless auditorium and creates windows.
This project by Janet Zweig was also recently completed at a school, Walton High School in the Bronx. It is twelve bronze mail boxes which contain words like fears, wishes, dreams, fantasies, suggestions, worries, opinions, secrets. Students put notes in these boxes and at the end of each month create a newsletter of the notes, and at the end of the year will publish a book. It has raised a lot of issues for the school in terms of setting boundaries for what kinds of information can be in those notes.
In closing, I want to share with you our experience of going to Flushing Branch Library in Queens last night for one of many celebrations and dedications of the new library. It serves 1 million people a year and is in one of the fastest growing parts of New York. Flushing is home to an enormous number of immigrant groups. We have three projects at this site, a beautiful building. We commissioned Sheila de Bretteville to create a project called "Search: Literature," in which titles of search stories in different languages are etched into the granite stairs leading to the library. Kathleen Ruiz created eight panels on the side of the building depicting a cell's metamorphosis alluding to Socrates's comment that a library is a place for the exploration of knowledge. Lastly, Yong Soon Min created twenty-four etched glass panels, called "World of Flowers," in the children's reading room. It was a wonderful experience to be there last night and to hear the artists talk about their work. Afterwards, the Director of the Queens Borough Branch Public Libraries said he wanted to publish a brochure about the projects. I think he hadn't realized how significant the projects were until he saw people looking at them.
Tom Eccles: I am director of the Public Art Fund in New York, a not-for-profit organization that was founded about twenty years ago. It came out of a New York City beautification movement. Citizens, including philanthropists and community activists, were taking control of public spaces to try to improve them. The founder, Doris Freedman, was a philanthropist and also the Director of Cultural Affairs and had a close relationship with the artistic community. At that stage, the idea of public art was to create murals. So the Public Art Fund was established to find a legal framework for artists to make work, to provide them with insurance, permitting, and to facilitate the legal baggage that goes with public art. On one level, we are a city institution, as we helped establish the Percent for Art program and administered it for the first few years. On another level, we are an artistic organization that works as an artists' space. Those tensions continue to this day, and I believe are healthy for the organization. In the seventies the Public Art Fund started working with artists who made large-scale sculpture and treated the city as an outdoor sculpture park. That continues to this day.
The next project we are doing is a large-scale project with MoMA, with a retrospective of Tony Smith's work. We will be siting a number of his works around the city. Following that, we have commissioned Andrea Zittel to do a number of rock formations for Central Park.
During the eighties, the Public Art Fund was very involved in activist art and supported work by General Idea, Group Material, Gran Fury that was made primarily in response to the AIDS crisis. For a decade, the Public Art Fund organized a project called "Messages to the Public" on the LED board in Times Square. In the early nineties, when I started at Public Art Fund, we began to reassess activism and public art. Mary Jane Jacob was the forerunner in creating conversations instead of objects. We were looking for a form of community activism that was viable as an artistic project. Land use and distribution is an important topic in New York City, particularly the reclamation of derelict space, so we started a project called "Urban Paradise Gardens in the City" and invited ten artists to propose urban gardens. Two were ultimately built, one by Vito Acconci, and one by Alison Saar and Betye Saar.
As I show some slides from the past couple of years, I will try to raise some of the issues such as public funding, accountability, artistic issues that we engage in. After the gardens project, it was important for the Public Art Fund to investigate what else we were doing in creating public art and the possibilities for sculpture. In a way, the focus had shifted away from the arts themselves and we tried to put the artist back into the public art process. We see ourselves somewhat as advocates for artists, somewhat as curators. This is by a Russian émigré, Ilya Kabakov, whose two primary concerns were garbage and a sense of the failure of monumentality. We created a piece called "Monument to the Lost Glove," at the Flatiron Building. Surrounding the glove are a series of texts that talk about our responses to the city, the aging and contemporary art. It makes neat parallels between garbage, civic responsibility and aggression to contemporary art. People attack the glove and we have had to replace it a number of times.
Last year, during the election, we wanted to work with Barbara Kruger who wanted to create a bus. We knew it would be very difficult to engage the city in supporting Barbara's project. We wanted to create a project that referred to the clamp down on freedom of expression in the city and the loss of government tolerance with a series of quotes about democracy, cultural expression, public spaces and violence. We bought the advertising but the advertising company feared a public outcry about the piece and we had to negotiate every single quote. We find that in many projects the substantive issues are put aside for irrational fears of controversy, so that one is dealing with an aggressive form of public relations, and public art often is pulled into a dialogue as a public relations exercise. Some have been critical of Public Art Fund projects as a form of social theater which is a very American criticism of contemporary art. In response to an integrationist notion of public art, I think we stand fairly strong on maintaining a notion of juxtaposition, that there is something different about what an artist is doing from what an architect is doing.
We commissioned the British artist, Rachel Whiteread, about four years ago, during the period of House in London, and she came to New York a number of times to realize this project. We went to many sites around the city, all of which she rejected. She decided she wanted to cast the interior of a watertower and, for the last six weeks, we have been casting this piece in resin. The piece opens tonight.
About three years ago, the NEA stopped its emerging artists grants in response to huge budget cuts. At the time, we felt it was very important for organizations like our own, which do have a certain amount of flexibility, to reassert the importance of helping emerging artists, in terms of logistics, financing and promoting their work. We established a program called "In the Public Realm" three years ago. The program was also started in response to the fact that all public art organizations tend to become somewhat ossified and routinized. We wanted to commission up to seven artists a year. In thinking about the city as an artists' laboratory, we told them that they could choose the site. We do a statewide call and have gotten about 500 responses each year, and every March we select seven to nine artists and commission proposals through a panel process. Organizations like us get bombarded with proposals all the time, and I thought we should be honest about what we can do and say when we would do it. The first year we applied to the NEA for the program and got rejected. We started the program with $5,000 in support and we have raised about $100,000 overall.
The first project was Chris Doyle, who is a cyclist who uses the Williamsburg Bridge. He wanted to gild, with 22-carat gold, the steps of a place where bicycle messengers go back and forth. We got the gold, we got the volunteers, cleaned the steps. And the piece stayed up until the Deity ripped the staircase out. It is a Christo-like project. It was done two years ago.
This is the Canal Street subway. It was a disused piece of track in a scary, dark space where people transferred. Alexander Brodsky wanted to flood this side of the track and put in a series of gondolas. Most of his works deal with existential issues and he works in a folk art tradition. He created a bleak series of gondolas that bobbed up and down in a big tank along the tracks for a couple of months.
Gregory Green was an artist who dealt with the relationship between an individual's power and the power of the state and how that was being transformed by information technology. He created a series of virtual missiles, missing everything but the plutonium. This piece is called "Gregnik: Proto II," and is an exact replica of the Sputnik. We launched it forty years after the launch of the Sputnik which was the start of the space race. It is an fm radio transmitter that transmitted about 60 artist messages in the area of Williamsburg. While we were doing this project, we got caught up with the FCC which wouldn't allow us to broadcast more than 100 yards. So we set up small transmitters all over Williamsburg.
More and more, because of the issues we deal with and find great resistance from city government officials to temporary public projects, we are driven to private sites. The next project by Kirsten Mosher is called "Ballpark Traffic." We ultimately worked with the Chelsea Garden Center which allowed us to set the baseball diamond into their property for two months this year.
One project by Arnaldo Morales could never have been done on public land. Morales wanted to make a claw coming from a street light that opened when you walked underneath and moved down toward you. He wanted to do it in Times Square, but there was no way, so we have been working with a developer of a corporate center called MetroTech in Brooklyn. This piece is by Cristian Alexa. Surveillance at any corporate environment is very important, and the architecture is very bland, so placing this set of binoculars allows you to see in all the offices at MetroTech. This is a satellite view of Brooklyn by Lincoln Tobier. This piece is called "Witch Catcher," by Brian Tolle. It is a memory of going to New England as a child and hearing about crooked chimneys keeping witches out. This is by Jackie Chang: it mimics the local architecture around this corporate center which are small immigrant businesses. The title, "Lotto Nation," refers to lotto cards, but also works as a metaphor of the U.S. This was called "Nine to Five," with a set of trees in the commons area, tapped for productivity by Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz. This is by Ken Landauer who wanted to create a work that, as you approached it, you broke through a visual field and found yourself at the scale of someone three or four years old. Finally, a piece by John Monti called "Four Bends and a Push Up." If we had done it in a public space, we would have encountered issues of public liability. The private sites offer greater flexibility.
Anne Pasternak: Hello. I am the Executive Director of Creative Time, a multi-disciplinary non-profit arts organization which commissions artists to create adventurous new works in the public realm. Our work is site responsive and temporary. We encourage artists to try something new (and we never ask for a "signature" project). Often it challenges notions of what art is and can be. Our projects take into serious consideration its audiences. And we work in a diversity of sites¾ from city streets, tunnels and bridges to billboards, milk cartons and cyberspace. No matter what project we undertake, we always encourage artists to approach the public realm as a laboratory for experimentation.
Artists come first at Creative Time. We work with artists of all disciplines without prejudice and inhibition. From visual artists, musicians and architects to fashion designers, film makers and digital media artists, we support artists in creating and presenting new works with the belief that experimentation can help expand and strengthen their own artistic expression as it broadens notions about artistic practice.
Process is key to how Creative Time works. We have a flexible and open curatorial process, allowing the organization to stay timely and adventurous. Once committed to an artist's idea, we investigate with the artist the project's potential and develop the most appropriate strategies for success. These nurturing, behind-the-scenes relationships provide artists a most unusual and supportive working environment. In addition, since many projects require an artist to work directly with the public, both the artist and the audience are offered an unusual connection to the art experience.
Before showing a few slides, I am aware that part of the intent of this panel is to discuss arts funding. Creative Time earns support from numerous avenues. The most significant source of income is from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. In addition, we receive a large percentage of funds from private foundations, corporations and individuals.
It has been nearly ten years since the beginning of the "censorship wars" and the demise of public funding for the arts. After all this time, many people¾ including artists¾ still tell me that the NEA should be abolished. Their argument is usually based on the misperception that funds from the federal government have too many "strings" attached. I am here to tell you that, in my experience, the federal government places fewer conditions on its money than virtually any other funder. Increasingly, I have had to turn to individuals and corporations for support to help make up for the lake of public funding, and here there are many odd limitations placed on their giving. But we can discuss this further during the question and answer period of this panel.
Let's look at a few slides of past Creative Time projects. As I already mentioned, Creative Time is known for working in a diverse array of sites¾ from neglected urban spaces to those sites commonly occupied by advertising.
Gran Fury's "Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do" is one early and impactful example of how Creative Time has helped artists turn to advertising venues to effectively communicate their vision. This project appropriated the look of Benneton's controversial advertising strategies. When this billboard project was realized in New York approximately ten years ago, I remember being struck by its message. I honestly say this public art project was the most powerful force in shaping my personal awareness around the deep layers of misinformation and prejudices surrounding the HIV virus.
The 42nd Street Art Project is a terrific example of how Creative Time takes over neglected urban sites and transforms them with art. Not only did this project compliment the Urban Development Corporation's desire to redevelop Times Square, it also provided incredible exposure to dozens of artists.
Likewise, for the past fifteen years, Creative Time has curated arts programs in the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage. This space has been heralded as one of New York's great landmarks and artists love working here due to its magnificent, catacomb-like feeling. Over the years, we have commissioned thousands of visual artists, media makers, choreographers, theater companies, architects, musicians, filmakers and more to realize site-specific, inter-disciplinary projects.
Presented with the challenge to create a project that would honor the Fourth World Conference on Women, include the participation of women from around the world, have the ability to travel and cost no more than $5000, artist Robin Kahn created Time Capsule. Within a two month period, we sent letters to every woman artist we knew from around the world asking them to make a piece for this unedited book. Within a few weeks we gathered more than 700 submissions. Once the book was printed, we gave free copies to all the artists, sent them to bookstores internationally, and distributed them at the Conference in Beijing. My interns and I also hand delivered copies to every United Nations delegate that was attending the conference with a reminder to consider women's creative work when discussing their economic contributions. For Creative Time, this project represents our first publication as "public art monument."
Paco Cao's "Rent-A-Body" is another favorite project of mine. Here the artist rented himself as a commodity on the open market. Together, we published a brochure that offered the artist for basic, premium and deluxe services. For $35 an hour you could receive the body as a "prop", for $75 you got manual labor and a minimal amount of brain power, and for $125 an hour you got total body and mind function. Paco was called for a number of fascinating jobs¾ from modeling pajamas on a daytime talk show and serving as Jesus on the Cross for a conservative Lutheran church in Brooklyn to lecturing on contemporary art to an association of blind individuals and accompanying a grieving father to his son's funeral.
The media loved covering this project and often asked me, "How is this art?" Ultimately, I found myself providing the same basic answer: For me¾ whether an art work is beautiful, inspiring or provoking¾ art should make you think. And this project made people think!
Blurring the boundaries of art, performance and cultural activism, Michael Bramwell's "Building Sweeps" was a year-long art action throughout which the artist cleaned the public areas of one city-owned Harlem tenement building. This project explored a variety of issues: from how simple actions like sweeping, mopping and changing light bulbs could affect the inhabitants of a severely neglected building to broaching class issues associated with maintenance.
This tenement building was in a pathetic state of disrepair, despite the fact that a superintendent lived on the premises. Honestly, many of us thought the residents would appreciate Michael's efforts, even though they did not know who he was, why he was there or even that he was an artist. We learned that, although some of the residents welcomed Michael's efforts, many others were irritated by his presence. For many reasons this project raised serious questions about the role of the artist and his relationship to his targeted community.
I will conclude with one more project, Karen Finley's "1-900-ALL -KAREN," a national public performance piece delivered via telecommunications. Every day, for more than six months, Finley performed a daily message recorded on a dedicated 900 telephone line. Her phone commentary responded to a range of topics from reflections on her NEA law suit and observations on current news headlines (the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was a popular topic!) to personal reflections on motherhood, health and daily life.
Inspired by America's growing fascination with the telephone as a personal yet anonymous outlet for information and companionship, Finley chose telecommunications as a vehicle to connect to a national audience. She also used a 900 exchange (usually associated with the charlatanism of phone sex, horoscopes and psychics) as a venue to explore free expression.
Question: This is a question each of you could answer differently. How much do you influence the politics of the projects that are proposed? When the projects expand the definitions of what is art, are you particularly drawn to liberal minded projects? How much do your projects filter the projects that come to fruition?
Pasternak: That is a good question. Certainly it is a curatorial process. There are a few ways that artists come to Creative Time. Traditionally, it was only through proposals; increasingly, we have found that artists don't like writing proposals. Why should they, if we don't think we would be interested in their work, so we have an open door policy. If anyone wants to come and talk about an idea, we can talk about it to see if it is worth pursuing. But it is subjective and a project has to fit with the vision I have for the organization. I am sure my politics inform that, but I have never been presented with a project that I could not accept politically. I have had times when I thought an artist was not pushing the political nature of their work enough. We do find artists are not as informed as they should be when they come to us about particular issues. The other thing is that we are now asking people, whose work we love, to work with us and that kind of dialogue happens over time, sometimes a year or so, to find the right idea to run with.
Cohen: That makes our three to five year completion process equal to yours, perhaps.
Question: How is the board of directors involved in the process at Creative Time and the Public Art Fund? Who is on your board? What are their roles?
Eccles: On our board, it is important to have people who have political clout and are able to make moves that we cannot. It is important to have people who are involved in fundraising. The Board of Directors doesn't make artistic decisions. Fundraising and politics are the main arms of our board.
Pasternak: We do have a number of artists on our board. Board members are involved if they want to be. Sometimes they recommend artists to us. Also, when we have panel meetings to look at proposals, all board members are invited. Usually a few of the artist board members come.
Cohen: I have a question for Anne and Tom. We talk so much about the limitations of government support, what are the limitations of corporate support? How are you beholden to the corporation and private money?
Eccles: We experience corporate contributions on two levels. One is in sponsorship of a project, with big financial commitments, which requires the use of their name and product. I don't mind that, and we have used it to our advantage. They know how to get systems going and can leverage areas of publicity that you can't. If you are clear about what the deal is when you go in and are clear about what you are doing artistically, you are fine. If you are not clear, and don't have a contract, there will be problems. We don't go to sponsors for projects we know are going to be difficult. Most of our dealings with corporations are on an in-kind basis. They have something we want and will give it to us for free. I don't mind carrying products at openings. I find it easier to deal with corporations sometimes than with government. There is less administration and fewer legal issues. If you get more than $25,000 from the NEA, the auditing of the annual budget is incredible, as much as the grant. The other relationship we have is site partnerships, such as with Seagram Plaza. But it is negotiated in a frank, honest way. If you are going to go for those kinds of partnerships, you have to establish levels of trust and you have to perform in the market place. We have doubled our budget in the last three years and provided three times as much funding for contemporary artists. We are criticized for making compromises, but I am not embarrassed by it. You can work politically in a subtle way, without slapping the corporations in the face, but you have to be up front about what you are going to do.
Cohen: I would ditto Tom's comments about relationships with corporations as being similar to our relationships with government funding. It is a constant negotiation and collaboration, and not a compromise. We don't ask artists to compromise their work; we ask them to come into the reality of the circumstances and the site and the partners we are working with, from the government agencies to the local residents.
Pasternak: I would answer a little differently. I find fewer strings attached to federal money and the government. The Public Art Fund has developed important relationships with the heads of corporations who are well known as art positive people. That is essential. However, today, corporations, in my experience, are interested in supporting the arts just in relationship to how it promotes their image. It is about marketing. For most arts organizations, it is difficult to say a corporation will get as much return from a sponsoring as from an ad in the New York Times. I also find that it is difficult to raise money for visual art from corporations. It is much easier to raise money for music.
Cohen: Also, the kinds of relationships that you have to build with corporate partners, we have to build with the agencies we work with. They are the ones putting forward the money to finance the capital construction projects that the public art commissions are for. We have to work with them and collaborate with them.
Pasternak: It is about the artist and the organization being aware of the community at all stages of what is happening. You can't throw in last-minute surprises when you are working in the public arena.
Question: Charlotte, could you answer the question about personal politics?
Cohen: I don't see myself as a city bureaucrat. We have a long history of working with artists on projects they could not achieve on their own. Our job is to make that path easier. In terms of the politics, there is a process in place that assists those artists and us in making decisions. It is a group process, not my individual decision about what is right. We convene a panel for every project with agency representatives and community representatives and political representatives, as well as arts professionals. One of the first things I tell them is that we are not shopping for a work of art, we are shopping for an approach, the way an artist thinks.
Question: It is a different relationship when an emerging artist comes to you and when you go to ask a contemporary artist to work with you. What are your motivations for that?
Eccles: Fifty percent of our activity is with curated projects, working with artists whom we have approached. Normally that relationship is a long one and they are large-scale projects. With emerging artists, we have a public responsibility to step back a bit. But really we work with them in the same way as with internationally known artists, but with smaller budgets and shorter time frames. Every time is different though. We are trying to think how we work with emerging artists because, if we only do two projects a year, we are not fulfilling our mission. But six or seven projects a year is a significant financial contribution.
Comment: Because it is in public, if you can make a place user friendly, the local community will feel it is for them. When they had the Keith Haring thing in Central Park, kids were climbing all over it. People loved it.
Cohen: You are articulating one of the different strains I referred to in the way that artists can approach a public space. One is to integrate with the architecture and the public use of that space in the way you describe.
Pasternak: But Creative Time responds to artist desires. If there needs to be content that is not being presented in mainstream media, even though agitating and irritating, that is necessary and valuable.
Question: Can you comment on the artist selection process for Percent for Art?
Cohen: We begin the process with the slide registry of about 4,500 artist slides, which is free. Beyond that, we often do outreach into the neighborhoods we are working in or with our panelists.
Question: A brief money question for each of you. Charlotte, you mentioned that the waste treatment plant had a $2 billion budget, which leaves $20 million as one percent.
Cohen: That would be nice. We have a cap, which is $1.5 million annually for projects, $400,000 per project, unless the agency elects to spend more. The two artists commissioned at that site are $200,000 design-only contracts. They are not responsible for fabrication and installation, but will be working there for ten to fifteen years. The other piece is that DEP is going to build the projects and will pay for them.
Question: What percentage of your annual budget comes from public funding?
Eccles: About 7.5 percent.
Pasternak: It changes yearly, but approximately three-fifths .
Question: Last night, on Charlie Rose, there was a program that involved architectural historians and critics grovelling at Victoria Newhouse's feet on the occasion of her new book about museums. They also spoke about how many museums fail, using the example of Renzo Piano's museum in Houston as successful because of Dominique de Menil. In much of the talk about public art there isn't a distinction made between publicly funded art and publicly sited art. Much of the work Tom and Anne do is publicly sited, that is why I wondered about the funding. When the public is the patron, should the artist be the primary concern? If the patron is paramount, the patron is often the public. The controversies that surround the sense of imposition or colonialism show that often the public feels excluded. Tom was the only one to use the word accountability. How do you factor in accountability when it is a publicly funded project?
Eccles: Most of our projects aren't publicly funded. We are accountable in that at every stage of the process we are actively engaged in a dialogue with local people. One thing that is often forgotten is the amount of financing we put into neighborhoods. The Canal Street subway project put $25,000 into local businesses in the area. We also make a lot of effort to explain what we are doing, what a project means, who the artist is, and how long the piece is going to be there. The amount of public funds is very small though. I feel the arts are a good investment of public dollars and we have worked hard to prove that.
Pasternak: Thank you for making the distinction. In terms of accountability, we approach the issue from case to case. Every artist's project raises new issues and circumstances. Just because the artist is paramount does not mean that their concept is not of public interest. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Analysis by Pamela Bentzien
The final presentation of this year's symposium on public art and public space was a panel discussion that dealt with the funding of public art. This is an area that could be seen as one of the more controversial: where does the money come from, how is it distributed and how is the public represented. Three panelists representing three different agencies that raise funds for public art projects described their individual organizations and how they function. Unlike individual art projects, public art works need not only financial backing, but access to space. Legislation that has been enacted to allocate a certain percentage of the budget in a building project to be set aside for art projects must have some sort of process to determine who will be selected. In a not so perfect world, these three individuals discussed their own processes.
In many ways, this panel discussion cannot provide the answers that one might really want from this kind of discussion. These panelists represent the process and they are key players in this process. The syllabus for this discussion asked the questions: "What is the role of public money in defining public art? does it compromise the artist? whose values are perpetuated? what strategies does an artist who seeks public commissions employ? To get to the heart of these questions, we need a panel that represents all sides of the discussion; this panel represents one side.
What is the role of public money in defining public art? Anne Pasternak stated that in public art, the art work and the public are linked, but where the money comes from dictates the art. Does it compromise the artist? All three spoke about maintaining the integrity of the artist, to bring the artist into the process. Whose values are perpetuated? Anne said that her organization is an artist centered association; they respond to the artists' desires. She elaborated further to speak of accountability to the public. Both Anne and Charlotte believed that funding from public sources have far fewer strings than money from private sources, but they do not elaborate on the accountability to the public that provides those funds. Anne gave what I felt was an honest response to a question on how much their individual politics influence their choices. She will not do it if she does not like it, if it does not fit her vision of Creative Time. Tom Eccles sees relationships with corporations as healthy, as long as there are established levels of trust; no surprises. These are relationships that require you to perform, just as any other person in the market place has to perform. He feels this may be a kind of ugly and uneasy relationship for the artist community, but it is reality. If you are dealing with the corporate environment you need to be honest and be up front about what it is you are doing. Charlotte Cohen has the same experiences as Tom, but with her dealings with government agencies. She sees it as a constant collaboration and negotiation, not a compromise. But these are the expected answers from the directors of public art commission agencies. How would the artist answer these questions? Would a member of the community see it in a different light. The only point of view we were presented with was from the directors of the agencies providing the funding.
A doctor one time said that if you do not want your insurance company to question a medical test you feel you need, do not ask them to pay for it. The question of funding is a sensitive subject. The NEA fell under scrutiny because a segment of the society that began to get a voice in politics felt they were not represented. They felt much of the work that was being funded by the NEA slapped them and their values in the face. One cannot expect a corporation to fund a project that may place them in a negative light. How to fund public art projects is a very controversial subject. The members of this panel appear to fall into similar demographics and, as much as they may try to be open minded, their personal biases will enter into their decisions. Will they be able to consider works that do not support their ideas? Will they be able to really understand the needs and issues of the communities that lay outside their own? I appreciated Anne’s statement that where the money comes from will dictate the art. When dealing with the issues of funding, I found myself thinking about Christo and Jeanne-Claude. They have a vision of what they want to do and will not compromise this vision. Too fulfill this vision, they finance the projects themselves and accept no sponsors. The project stays true to their vision.
I appreciated the insight into the process that these agencies undertake to help support public art projects. I also appreciated the enthusiasm that they all have for their jobs and for the arts. Basically, I found all three of them interesting and appreciated their concerns with what they are doing. In regard to any discussion of these issues, they were all tooting their own horn. It was a one sided discussion with the only controversy arising around Tom believing that corporations are easier to deal with than government agencies.
Anne Pasternak responds:
Pamela Bentzien misinterpreted my commentary. Never had I said, nor had I implied, that "where the money comes from dictates the art." Rather, I commented that the art dictates where one can turn to raise financial support. I offered additional clarity by stating that an artist and the commissioning organization must be knowledgeable and sensitive to the preferences and biases of a potential funder¾ whether it be a government entity, a private foundation, or a corporation. In other words, one must be knowledgable about the funder, aware of the funder’s concerns and honest about the work for which one is seeking support.