Public art and the government : a progress report

Public Art

and the Government

A Progress Report

BY BRIAN O'DOHERTY

An idea whose time seems to have come,
the Works of Art in Public Places program
of the National Endowment for the Arts

Reprinted from
Art in America,
May-June 1974

Public Art and the Government:
A Progress Report

An idea whose time seems to have come, the Works of Art in Public Places
program of the National Endowment plays marriage broker in the
pairing of large-scale abstract sculptures with communities which seek their
presences. This is the first published account, by the program's director.

BY BRIAN O'DOHERTY

When the National Endowment for the Arts was created in 1965,
its first chairman, Roger Stevens, appointed panels to study
needs in each art, and to make recommendations for programs.
When the visual arts advisory panel met on March 28, 1966, at
the Museum of Modern Art, Rene d'Harhoncourt proposed that
a National Award of Excellence be created. At that time, there
existed only one government award for which artists were eligi-
ble— the Medal of Freedom. In 1963, this medal was given to
Willem de Kooning; the next year, to Andrew Wyeth. Since these
poles of taste were defined, artists have received no further Medals.

D'Harnoncourt's proposal was that an Award for Excellence take
the form of a major public commission; the work would then be
given to a city for permanent public display, with the cost shared
by Federal, State and urban agencies, and by private donors.
Eventually this idea evolved into the Works of Art in Public Places
program, under which artists are commissioned to make works
for specific sites, with the impetus coming from local communi-
ties— a crucial change in perspective which removed the idea of
the Federal Government imposing art works on communities that
had no option but to accept or reject them.

In 1966, at the first meeting of the National Council of the
Arts — 26 men and women appointed by the President to advise
the chairman of the National Endowment — a recommendation was
made for "an allocation up to $140,000 to provide matching funds
enabling the commissioning of sculpture specifically designed for
outdoor public places in three sections of the country." In April
1967, Henry Geldzahler, the first director of Visual Arts Programs
for the Arts Endowment, visited Grand Rapids, Michigan, to give
a lecture at the local art museum, and suggested to his hostess
that an application be made for a grant to erect a major sculpture
on the new plaza which was the focus of a downtown renewal
program. A $45,000 matching grant was approved at the May 1967
Council meeting. Subsequently, a panel composed of local repre-
sentatives and national experts appointed by the Chairman met at
Grand Rapids, viewed the site, and selected Alexander Calder to
execute the commission. La Grande Vitesse was dedicated in June
1968.

This extended process — request from the community, grant,
panel meeting, visit from the artist, evolution of the design,
placement and dedication of the work — is still an intrinsic part
of Works of Art in Public Places, which has since that time
diversified into a cluster of programs. Common to all of them is
the aim of encouraging local communities to think in terms of
public art, to debate its merits, and to prepare themselves for the

Author: Brian O'Doherty. critic, erstwhile editor,
and artist, is director of the Visual Arts
programs of the National Endowment for the Arts.

reception of a work which they themselves have commissioned.
This is not too dissimilar to the architect's dialogue with a com-
munity on the planning of a new building. In the case of art,
which asserts itself without the cloak of a utilitarian rationale, the
debate takes on an energy that would surprise those accustomed
to the old-fashioned, avant-garde way of thinking: that, on the
one hand, the public's perceptions are not worthy of much attention
and that, on the other, the placement of the work and its absorption
into the community signifies its esthetic gelding.

Those of us who have accepted the premise that artists should
have a public arena for their art, if they so desire it, have become
aware of a new theme — that the insertion of advanced art into
the social matrix alters both in ways we have hardly begun to
understand. A reading of this theme tends to be clouded by the
views that the artistic community and the public traditionally have
of each other. The myths about the avant-garde, so devotedly
sustained by large segments of the public, are (it is often forgotten)
reciprocated by the myths that members of the avant-garde sustain
about the public. In bringing the two parties together in the public
arena, it has been this observer's experience that these myths tend
to be dissipated rather than confirmed, and that the greatest single
obstacle between artist and public may not be his work, but the
accumulated myths of the modernist apparatus itself, which of
course gravely misinterpret the aims of modernism. (For example,
modernism holds considerable social potential, which has remained
largely untapped.) Also, the convergence of artist and public, or,
if you will, art and society, bring to bear on the work of public
art esthetic and social energies that are, for those of us who see
this area in positive terms, the material which must be used. It
focuses attention on two areas: one specific — the immediate prob-
lems of carrying through a project, the other general — the context
of the work, which, in the largest sense, is the society within
which such art gets made.

Public art provides an acute perspective on these large questions
about the social order which modernism has persistently asked,
though this has been concealed in most history books, which
confine themselves to internal histories of form. These large issues
cannot be explicated here, but in reporting on the progress of a
government program to assist local communities in supporting
public art, they are a constant backdrop. In practice, perhaps, they
translate themselves into a more decorous concept, that of "appro-
priateness"— a phrase that allows these large matters a civilized
entry into the debate which inevitably accompanies public art.

La Grande Vitesse is a model of the successful assimilation of
a work of advanced art by a community which eagerly prepared
itself for its reception. Matching funds were raised locally on a
wide base, and the community's pride in the result is one of those
civic virtues in short supply in cities that have become arenas for

random violence. The success of the Calder is due to the fact
that different groups within the city found that it fulfilled their
necessities: the art community was, of course, enthusiastic; the
city's cultural leaders saw the Calder as a focus for various other
kinds of cultural events — open-air concerts, etc.; and the puhlic
was proud of the national attention the city received. Others saw
the art work as a socially useful device for improving "the quality
of life." This raises the question of intention. The art community
tends to place too high a value on purity of motivation on the
part of patrons (a criterion that would cast a shadow on Cosimo
de Medici himself). The fact that some citizens concerned with
urban renewal welcomed the Calder primarily as a major impetus
toward renovating a downtown area hardly affects the work's
quality. It is also possible to see the Calder as a model of the
way in which a successful work of art can exercise those elusive
moral energies we like to think attach themselves to the idea of
quality, and so prepare the way, through practical education, for
community participation in more advanced art. Grand Rapids has
since brought sculptors to the city to fabricate their work with
the assistance of local industry [see Art in America, Jan. /Feb. '74],
and has climaxed this pioneering liaison between advanced art and
the public by commissioning Robert Morris' first earthwork in the
U.S., to be situated on the slopes of the nearby reservoir in an
area that will become a public park. This stands, in my view,
as the most exceptional gesture ever made in this country by a
community to an advanced artist.

This six-year arc from Calder to Morris can, one is encouraged
to think, be described again. In retrospect, it was a fortunate
occurrence that the Calder in Grand Rapids was the maiden voyage
of a program whose occasional failures are bluntly instructive and
whose successes are always hard- won. The criterion for success
in this program, however, is not just the production of a successful
work of art. It also includes the degree to which the work enters
the social context, and contributes to the clarification of those larger
matters referred to earlier.

This point may be illustrated by the Isamu Noguchi Black Sun,
for which $45,000 was appropriated in 1968, and which was
dedicated in September 1969. Perfectly sited on a ledge near the
Seattle Art Museum, the Sun and the viewer both look down on
Seattle's orientalist mists. The matching funds were, in a grand
gesture, donated in toto by an anonymous local patron. Here, by
most standards, is an eminently successful occasion: a splendid

work of art, perfectly sited, and fully supported locally. Yet the
generosity of the donor involuntarily precluded the community from
declaring, through its contributions, its involvement, and from
reaping a resulting sense of pride. Without this sense of identifica-
tion, a case could be made that the work remains sealed in an
invisible museum, withdrawn from that dialogue through which
the community clarifies its needs, educates itself and defines the
work's appropriateness. It remains the product of distant forces.
This I think is the situation that critics have in mind when they
object to the idea of public art — the mysterious alighting of a work
on a public site where, no matter how magnificent, it resides in
alienated majesty, like a spacecraft after a forced landing.

The Seattle project instructed other cities — and the Arts Endow-
ment— on the irreplaceable value of harnessing community energies
to public art projects. This lesson has been learned relatively
recently by architects, whose International Style predecessors
seemed at times to consider people to be as impersonal a component
of their buildings as glass and steel. "Community involvement,"
like most slogans, has become a somewhat dreary phrase, but cities
are full of tough-minded young administrators who renovate it with
practical elan and a well-controlled idealism. Though community
involvement can be a disguise for many philistinisms — some of
them sophisticated — the concept depends on the patient exercise
of a kind of trust intrinsic to the democratic process, which
presumes that a body of people — a community — are fundamentally
good-willed, and that that good will can see beyond short-term
goals and immediate self-interests.

For those whose concern it is to negotiate matters of quality,
the path is precarious; it is not easy to develop this trust. But
the public's vernacular wisdom is a warning against ignoring it:
this vernacular is often devastating where public art is concerned,
and has left us with our share of epigrams. (A smooth mound
of black marble outside a San Francisco bank was quickly chris-
tened "the banker's heart.") This shrewd common sense is, after
all, the unconsulted public's only remaining weapon when con-
fronted with "elitist" monuments. The collision of high art coming
from the tradition of the privileged space (gallery and museum)
and vernacular wisdom, often lends an air of comedy to public
art projects wrapped in nothing more than their good intentions.
The tinker-toy minnow in the shadow of the International-Style
leviathan is an image that, for good reason, comes to even sophis-
ticated minds when the words "public art" are spoken. And this

Isamu Noguchi: Black Sun, 1969, black marble,
9 feet high. Seattle, Washington

Louise Nevelson: Environment XIII. 1972, Cor-Ten
steel, 14 feet high. Scottsdale, Arizona.

image is as much the public art cliche of our age as the 19th
century's general on a horse.

It has been the Endowment's concern to avoid not only such
cliches, but the imposition of taste that subverts the dialogue
between artists and community through which the role of public
art in our society can be clarified. Perhaps the greatest single key
to community acceptance of art works is the avoidance of the
argument based on privileged understanding, i.e., "I know more
than you and therefore you should accept this."

When Nancy Hanks became chairman of the Arts Endowment in
1969, she gave government support of public art, so ably defined
by her predecessor, a vivid impetus. It was clear that art and public,
or more truly, one variety of art and the public, were converging
in a situation that the Endowment was in a unique position to
assist and discreetly monitor. There was a changed public attitude,
a viable public art, an art community with (after the protests of
the '60s) an awakened social conscience, a wide concern for the
restoration and recovery of downtown areas, and a general concern
for environmental probity.

During the next few years the program was reviewed both by
advisory groups and by the National Council on the Arts. While
maintaining the major commissions initiated by Stevens and Geld-
zahler, and the general mode of administration, the program was
expanded to encourage a broader variety of approaches and needs.
At its 16th meeting, in October 1969, the National Council recom-
mended that the worthy desire to celebrate figures of mature
reputation not preclude opportunities for younger artists, whose
work had redefined the nature of sculpture in the '60s. Subse-
quently, both the concepts of public art and public spaces were
reconsidered to encourage local communities to think of public

Works of Art in Public Places

Following is a selection of projects funded by the En-
dowment. Matching funds were raised by local commu-
nities. To date, some 80 projects have been funded in
27 states. Many of these are still in progress. (The year
given is the fiscal year in which the grant was approved,
not the year the project was completed.)

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Alexander Calder

$45,000 (1967)

Seattle, Wash.

Isamu Noguchi

45,000 (1968)

Wichita, Kan

James Rosati

45,000 (1970)

Red Wing, Minn.

Charles Biederman

10,000 (1970)

Minneapolis. Minn.

Nine artists,
including Barry Le Va,
William Wegman

10,000 (1970)

Scottsdale, Ariz.

Louise Nevelson

20,000 (1970)

Highland Park, III.

Peter Voulkos

20,000 (1971)

Joplin. Mo.

Thomas Hart Benton

10,000 (1972)

Lansing, Mich.

Jose de Rivera

45,000 (1972)

Berkeley, Calif.

Romare Bearden

8,000 (1972)

Fort Worth, Texas

George Rickey

35,000 (1972)

New York, N.Y. (City
Walls)

Seven artists,
including Allan
D'Arcangelo, Mel
Pekarsky, Nassos
Daphnis

10,000 (1972)

Las Vegas, Nev.

Mark di Suvero

45,000 (1973)

Minneapolis, Minn.

Ronald Bladen

45,000 (1974)

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Robert Morris

30,000 (1974)

art in many different contexts and mediums. Virtually any place
where there is public congress — airports, subways, lobbies, city
and county public buildings, parks, playgrounds, inner-city walls,
even highways — offers opportunities for artist and community; it
was pointed out that public art could include murals, photo-murals,
large prints, tapestries, etc. As yet most of these opportunities
remain unexploited by communities and. consequently, artists.

The Endowment, as a responsive body, cannot artifically create
needs, any more than it can dictate matters of taste. It is the
declared needs of each field of the arts that properly define and
limit the Endowment's role. While some may find this frustrating,
it ensures that excessive powers on the part of the Endowment
will not reverse the flow of energies coming from the art commu-
nities the Endowment serves. This attitude has turned out to be
the Endowment's major strength; panels and consultants administer
the needs in their own fields by advising the Endowment on its
role. Those who have assisted the Endowment in carrying through
its Works of Art in Public Places program are familiar names within
the art community; among them have been: Richard Hunt, Adolph
Gottlieb. William Seitz, Barbara Haskell, Henry Hopkins, Peter
Voulkos, Walter Hopps, Howard Lipman, Jan van der Marck.

Projects supported by the Endowment fall into four fairly clear
divisions: projects involving artists of national reputation (Noguchi,
Calder, Nevelson, de Rivera, Rosati, Bladen, di Suvero); projects
involving artists of regional reputation (James Clover, Jackson,
Miss.; James Fitzgerald, Kirkland, Wash.); temporary experi-
mental exhibitions testing the viability of public art in various
situations ("Nine Artists/Nine Spaces" in Minneapolis; the Ver-
mont Sculpture Symposium); and a category based on a single
genre: outdoor murals. In 1970, the Endowment initiated an Inner
City Mural program, in response to the spontaneous evolution of
wall-painters, particularly in Chicago and Boston, serving their
communities' needs in ways that brought a very different social
complexion to the program.

Indeed the social context within which art gets made is in-
dispensable to any discussion of public art. The artist, whatever
his social echelon or ideas, exists within a support-system of
museums, dealers and collectors — an upper middle-class milieu
which makes his work possible. This milieu, exclusive in terms
of wealth and privilege, surrounds what is exclusive only in terms
of quality (art), thus producing an unfortunate identification be-
tween the two. The traditions of avant-gardism and social exclu-
sivity coincide to militate against art's wider acceptance.

The usual thinking about this situation is that the ready-made
bourgeois world surrounding the artist's work translates the work's
energies into the mercantile values of the larger society of which
this bourgeois world is a part. The artwork, according to this
scenario, becomes the ornament of a society that the work's values
implicitly question. I'm not sure the answer is that clear or simple.
It ignores the understanding some members of the museum and
gallery community have of their own role, which is more than
playing straight man to the artist. Suffice it to say here that there
is art that resides easily enough within this bourgeois milieu and
art that does not — rich art and poor art, if you like. And then
there is public art, not a category or a style or a movement, but
a social situation. Most of us can't begin to cope with it, and
we confront, or stumble across, public art with mixed emotions.
For those of us who took in the avant-garde tradition with our
mothers' milk, the unshielded work, naked to the vagaries of public
discourse, reinforces a sense of incongruity — finding a work of
advanced art outdoors is like running into a Vassar girl working
the street. Its exclusive social credentials, we tend to think, still
attach to it, no matter how it adjusts to its situation.

I suspect this view greatly underestimates the artist, though to
be sure, we haven't heard from him (the literature on public art
is scanty; it hasn't even identified the issues, let alone debated
them). But an artist engaged in public commissions cannot avoid
being involved in the values — all the values — which maintain the
body social. And anyone who has been part of the process through

The dedication of Alexander Calder's La Grande Vitesse, June 1968, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

James Rpsati: Wichita Tripodal, 1972, stainless steel, 17 by 37 by 50 feet. Wichita. Kansas.

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Thomas Hart Benton: Joplin at the Turn of the Century, 1973, 51/2 by 14 feet. Joplin, Missouri.

which the Endowment's program works has a front-seat view of
the dialogue within communities and between communities and
artists — a dialogue that, as I've said before, is inevitably socio-po-
litical in nature, however disguised in the specifics of the occasion.
These specifics are always ready to cause difficulties and abruptly
enlarge them in a way that would, if matters were not so serious,
be gorgeously comic. Yet the encouragement of this dialogue has
been, in my view, one of the Arts Endowment's most valuable
contributions to our culture. Equally important has been the recog-
nition of the inner city mural phenomenon, which was carried
through in an irrefutable sweep of feeling not by a single artist,
but by groups of artists, and not just by artists, but by an entire
class, one that is usually far removed from privilege.

No serious study of the inner city mural movement, primarily
generated by minorities from the mid-'60s to the early '70s, exists.
Yet its search not for an audience, but for an arena to display
the values of its audience, reverses the usual currents in public
art. The mural artists declare — and this is above all a declarative
art — feelings of brotherhood, celebrate heroes, memorialize, attack
injustice, notate historical events in a context of ideas eminently
socialist and in a variety of styles derived from the Mexican
muralists and socially conscious American art of the '30s. So that

urban walls became community newspapers, on which were written
symbolic essays and reports on its feelings, concerns, and issues —
many of them quickly wiped out by the wrecker's ball. While
general opinion on the value of all this "as art" (i.e. its relation
to the area of privileged taste) has not been enthusiastic, the
phenomenon introduced valuable coefficients into the dialogue
about the nature of public art, and the relationship between artist
and community.

Many of the artists who began on walls proved that the "art
world" could expand its borders to allow another mode of entry
to artists who had no access to its benefits. This has been one
of its lasting values. Although moods are less radical now, and
the energies of the wall movement diminished — the Endowment's
Inner City Mural program was absorbed back into the parent Works
of Art in Public Places program in 1973 — the movement served
its role by introducing the idea of the community as the conscience
of a work of public art. The opposite situation — artists from the
art community venturing into the city to decorate city walls — has
resulted in some lively occasions, but the merits of this are, to
many observers, far less certain, and the rationale subject to sharper
debate than any other kind of public art. A major asset, it seems
to me, is that this activity was generated not by institutions but

William Wegman: What Goes Up Must Come Down, 1970, acrylic on wood, 10 by 35 feet, "9 Artists/9 Spaces," Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Peter Voulkos: Untitled, 1973, bronze, 10 by 60 feet Highland Park, Illinois

by artists seeking practical means to realize their own ends in the
public arena.

The sanest and most constructive summary that I have seen on
the issue of public art, and the government's role in it, is in a
report made in early 1973 by Irving Sandler to Nancy Hanks, the
chairman of the Arts Endowment. After pointing out that the visual
arts had aroused increasing mass media attention, Sandler noted
that "in response to the public's openness, artists since 1960, in
marked contrast to the Abstract-Expressionist vanguard of the
1940s and 1950s, have tended to feel less alienated and to visualize
themselves as integrated into society." "Public art," he went on,
"is not yet considered a category or a tendency in contemporary
art. ... However a considerable number of artists are thinking
consciously about the potential of a public art ... a significant
part of contemporary art lends itself to exhibition in public spaces
and . . . artists are aware of this."

Sandler did not neglect to report that "many artists find the
idea of art-as-monument incredible, if not disreputable, believing
that the notion of heroic art is outdated. Others reject even the
idea of art-as-object ... I do not think these objections are valid
with regard to public art or other current modes of object-art. The
polemics of Conceptual artists, performance artists, earth artists,
etc. (supported in other Endowment programs) are valid with
respect to their art. However the time is past when any 'ism' can
credibly claim to be the one fruitful tendency in art. This point
deserves to be stressed. In recent years, one artistic style after
another has monopolized the attention of the art-conscious public.
The belief prevails that each successive style is avant-garde and
that it renders all other styles obsolete. Value in art is thus made
to depend on novelty. This point of view is outdated, and increas-
ingly the uniqueness of an artist's vision and the artistry with which
it is embodied in a work will count for more than the alleged
'up-to-date' character of a style.

"When the imagination opens up in the direction of public art,"
he goes on, "there will be many disparate ideas, most of which
will not survive, but a tradition will be started that will generate
its own criteria of suitability, quality, etc. . . . The process must
be trial and error and will entail numerous failures, for the alterna-
tive to a slow improvisational evolution is an art based on precon-

ceived plans — and fiats of any kind lack the credibility to move
artists today — or for that matter, most city planners, who are more
interested in the ad hoc renewal of cities than in dreaming up
Utopian ones. . . ." And he concluded that "now is the most
propitious time since the 1930s" for the government to encourage
public art.

There are three Works of Art in Public Places programs, each administered
ditferently, responding to different needs, and of a different financial scale Grant
amounts run from $5,000 to $50,000 and are administered by local communities

A fundamental aim is to inspire community support of public art projects, and
to support the artist by an administrative structure through which matching funds
can be raised for a project agreed upon by artist and community

Further details on these programs can be had from the Visual Arts Department.
National Endowment for the Arts, Washington. D C 20506 Envelopes should be
marked Public Art: attn. Richard Koshalek Mr Koshalek is the Endowment's
Assistant Director of Visual Arts Programs.

Jose de Rivera: Construction No 150. 1972. stainless
steel, 45 inches high Lansing, Michigan

For general information about
programs and activities of the
National Endowment for the Arts
write to:

Program Information
National Endowment for the Arts
Washington, D.C. 20506
(202) 382-6085

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