Seminar Welcome and Opening Remarks
Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell and Tom Finkelpearl

Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell: Welcome to the NYU Graduate Seminar, organized by Cheryl Younger and the Tisch School's Department of Photography. I can think of few topics which are as important as the discussions you will have in the coming week on public art. While thinking about this session, I reread a little book called Whose Art Is It? by Jane Kramer. The introduction was written by Kate Stimpson, who is Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at NYU. She began with the following Emersonion maxim: "One man's justice is another man's injustice; one man's beauty, another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly, as one beholds the same objects from a higher point." So it was for the subject of Jane Kramer's book, the Ahern sculptures that were commissioned for a site in the South Bronx in front of a police precinct, by the Department of Cultural Affairs for their Percent for Art Program. This was at the tail end of my tenure there. Someone took Polaroids of the completed sculptures and called my office to say that the sculptures were racist. I reported that to Linda Blumberg, the Assistant Commissioner, and Tom Finkelpearl, who at the time was the director of the Percent for Art Program. Right after that call, I left to come to the Tisch School. After I left, when the sculptures were finally mounted, a Latina woman from the neighborhood stood in the street stopping traffic to protest the sculptures. In response, Ahearn, also a resident of the South Bronx, removed them.

I recount this story because it remains one of the most cogent examples of how complicated the idea of a public, let alone a public art, can become, and how deeply our differences can cut. We experience differences within the public, among the many public agencies that deal with the art, between the artist and the patron, between the artist and his various publics. As an episode in public art, this invites us to investigate not only our strategies, but our assumptions about art, about the artist, the public, and probably about democracy itself.

At the end of your weeklong inquiries, there will no doubt be few answers, but, to take another maxim from Emerson, "Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred, none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past on my back." So, I invite you to enjoy this week of endless seeking and endless experimentation, and welcome you to the Tisch School.

Tom Finkelpearl: Welcome to New York. I teach a course in NYU's arts administration program called, "Urban Development and the Visual Arts," which traces urban development since the Second World War, and how public art fits in. I'd like to present you with a fifteen minute version of that semester-long course.

I teach about public art with an emphasis on the word "public" rather than on "art." Too often, people talk about it in terms of artistic development, divorced from the developments in the American city that paved the way for the reintroduction of art on our streets and plazas. To give a very brief overview, at the end of the Second World War, veterans returned to the a country which was in the process of suburbanization. The new American Dream meant a home of one's own. Population in the major cities began to drain out on highways that were built without any regard to how they divided communities. The suburbs were glamorized in the popular media. But not everyone was able to partake in this new dream. When one bought a home in Levittown, for example, you had to sign a covenant that you would not let anyone other than Caucasians live in your house. And this was more the rule than the exception; the suburbs were white. Meanwhile, since the Depression and continuing after the War, there was a northward migration of African Americans who were escaping the Jim Crow laws and economic hardship that restricted their opportunities in the south. Cities became increasingly black and poor, as manufacturing jobs moved to suburbs as well.

Simultaneously, since modernism, art had withdrawn from the public arena. If you take the long view, the history of art is primarily public art: cathedrals, civic monuments, the Pyramids, religious art, and so on. High Modernism decreed that art is just art, and it exists in an isolated aesthetic realm. In the 20th century, art retreated to the museum. After the war, with the triumph of Abstract Expressionism and the expanding commercial gallery market, there was little interest in public art in the artistic or critical establishment.

By the 1960's leaders in cities were becoming increasingly desperate to find ways to get people to come back to the city. One strategy that began in the late fifties and continued through the seventies was the reintroduction of art into the urban environment. There was a new recognition of the attractive nature of art, and the fact that it is consumed mostly by the middle and upper middle classes. Starting in Philadelphia in 1958, city after city across the United States passed percent for art ordinances that requires city buildings to include permanent public art. The first projects in the new era of public art were big, abstract pieces plunked down in the barren modernist courtyards of large public or corporate buildings, like the Chicago Picasso, or Alexander Calder's La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

While Picasso and Calder's works were well received, there were a many of instances in which the new public art was either superficially appreciated or rejected entirely. A number of traumatic events in public art ensued, notably the controversy over Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in New York City. The attitude at the time was that since Serra is one of the great twentieth-century sculptors, it was a gift to the people to have his work in their midst. Well, it was a gift that the people who used the site did not appreciate, and Tilted Arc was eventually removed by the federal agency that commissioned it. This became a watershed event that prompted us to think there might be better ways to create a bridge between people and art.

Around the same time Tilted Arc was being vilified in the press in the mid-1980's, people began to take notice of the great success of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. It was a public art work that was embraced by the general public and the art world elite alike. And one of the important aspects of the work that people noticed was how the visitors participated–how the work embraced them physically, how they took rubbings and left gifts, and how the polished black stone reflected their image. Public art bureaucrats and artists across America took note of the work, and I feel that it helped pave the way for a more participatory approach to public art. Where Tilted Arc had pushed people away, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was welcoming and open. During your week here you will be meeting with a number of artists who have made collaboration and audience participation central to the way that they work. For example, Mierle Ukeles and Krzysztof Wodiczko have been in the forefront of investigated the idea of creating work in collaboration with their audiences.

I am in the process of finishing a book about public art. It grew out of the frustrations I encountered as a public art official. But I wanted the book to reflect the sort of public art that I am committed to. First of all, this meant interviewing many artists, to give them a voice. Secondly, though, it meant that I could experiment a bit with the structure of my criticism, and here is one of the ways that I tried to do this: I am the Director of Skowhegan School in Maine, which draws a lot of the talented graduate students like yourselves from all over the country. In 1968, Ad Reinhardt gave a lecture there, in which he said there are no religious works of art in a fine arts museum. When you take a work of religious art and put it into a museum, he argued, it becomes art, just art, not religion. "If you do not believe me," said Reinhardt, "Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and kneel down to pray. They will kick you out." So I decided to take him up on this challenge thirty years later. I went to the Metropolitan Museum with Byron Kim, an artist, and prayed in front of medieval altar pieces depicting the Madonna and Child. Byron performed a particular prayer in front of a Buddha, where he bowed and kneeled and touched his head to the floor, stood, bowed, kneeled... 108 times in succession, which took about half an hour. The prayer/meditation is meant to recognize the 108 aspects of the Buddha. I was three or four galleries away with a telephoto lens and 3200 film shooting the whole thing. Well, we didn't get kicked out. Afterwards, I went to the guard and asked if he had seen what had just transpired. He said, "Oh yes, I see stuff like that all the time. People also leave candy and money in front of religious objects through the museum." That made me feel that art's segregation from life is easier to break than you might think. I was encouraged. There are ways to break down the separation between your art and various audiences, in the ways you present your work, the ways that you market it, and the kinds of audiences you seek. Public art does not need to be a public monument. It could be an unauthorized action in a museum, or anything that you can imagine that makes your work relevant to new audiences.

When I was Director of Percent for Art for New York City, we commissioned a number of photography projects. They ranged from straightforward, big, beautiful prints, to community-based projects that interacted with the community, to appropriated-images work. Dennis Adams, another one of the speakers at this seminar did a project with us in which he took pictures from public television's "Eyes on the Prize" series about the civil rights movement, and created a series of light boxes at water fountains in high school in Queens. I think photography is a viable public art medium. The general public is full of amateur photographers, so people have a sense of photography and a relationship to photography that is unique and positive. I am glad to see you all here considering the potential of photography and public art.

I am in an unusual position, as I have very little to do with this conference. I would like to say that I have been involved in public art for the last ten years, and have been to every major convention about public art. This is the best collection of public art speakers and artists that I have ever seen. Congratulations to the organizers.