Advancing the Public Domain
Ihor Holubizky
The current and widely-held definition of public art may be equivalent to the role of sculpture at the turn of the century -- a civic virtue and reminder of ethical conduct for the common good. This is not a new thought for a topic fraught with inexhaustible positions and perspectives. Janet Kardon wrote:
"Public art is not a style or a movement, but a compound social service based on the premise that public well-being is enhanced by good art, and that good art means work by advanced artists thrust into the public domain."[1]
Kardon dates the beginning of public art as a "codified genre" in the United States with the installation of the enlarged Picasso sculpture for the Chicago Civic Centre in 1967. But the public domain "thrust" can be moved back to 1964 when work by nine "young" American artists was emblazoned on the exterior of the World's Fair New York State Exhibit building and new art was commissioned and purchased for New York's Lincoln Center.[2] The convergence of new art and public space in Toronto can be fixed with the dedication of Viljo Revell's New City Hall and Plaza in September 1965.[3] The Council Chambers spaceship had landed and its future shock holds to this day (even if it is the only such landmark) because it also sits in a fixed and stark contrast to the Old City Hall -- architect E. J. Lennox's solid Victorian edifice which was barely 66 at the time of its retirement. A year later, Henry Moore's Three Way Piece No.2 (The Archer) made its debut on Nathan Phillips Square, although Revell had selected it as early as 1961.[4] City Council did not approve purchase funds for the work from the public coffers and the money was raised by private donation. The controversy may have contributed to the defeat of its supporter Mayor Phil Givens in the November 1966 election; the winner of the mayoralty race, William Dennison, made it clear that he was exploiting distaste for the Moore.[5] Nonetheless, ten thousand people turned out for the unveiling on the evening of Thursday, October 27, 1966 -- an event of alien proportions, not unlike the robot Klaatu emerging from a flying saucer in the sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). If not the earth, Toronto certainly stood still that day, and by the weekend it was estimated that 100,000 had visited. Public comments were hardly a surprise: "like a pair of ears"; "it's horrid"; "like something doctors study"; and "a terrible insult to Canadian artists and culture." A Toronto Daily Star reporter described it as "Canada's most controversial work of art." Robert Fulford wrote, "Just possibly, Henry Moore can persuade us that sculpture ... can have a place in the public lives of all of us ..."[6] Newlyweds Louisa and Victor Sciarra stopped by to admire it on the way to their reception.
On the same site eight months later, New would joust with Old in Dorothy Cameron's Sculpture '67 exhibition.[7] The new Canadian sculpture -- works by Les Levine, Michael Snow, N.E. Thing Co. (Ingrid and Iain Baxter), Intersystems (the multi-discipline collaboration of Michael Hayden, Dik Zander, Blake Parker and John Mills-Cockell) and Zbigniew Blazeje -- was vastly outnumbered, but in turning its back on modelling and carving there was no going back. In comparison to the embrace of industry and materials and the invitation for the viewer to participate in a critical playfulness, Moore's sculpture began to represent all that was wrong with sculpture in public space: the morphed bauble did not respond to or address the environs.[8] Such criticism is unfair but commonplace in the revolving door of Modernist revisionism -- which also demands a distance from the past. Inherited forms must be renounced as a symptom of malaise. Whether The Archer represented the old or the new (as is the case of the Chicago Picasso, a monumental appearance from the near past), until that moment Toronto had not been blessed by an abundance of public art nor by any distinctive public art-as-monument.[9] Murals and statues identified colonial-Empire connections and the entrepreneurs of the new nation. Contemporary sculpture made public inroads starting in the late 1950s, but was placed off in the wings of suburban development or within protected spaces. Graham Coughtry designed cast relief panels for the exterior of B'Nai Israel Beth David Synagogue in Downsview (1958); Walter Yarwood and Gerald Gladstone received commissions for University of Toronto sites in the early 1960s; and Kazuo Nakamura for the Toronto International Airport (now Pearson International) in 1964. York University initiated an art in architecture programme in the early 1960s: Zbigniew Blazeje -- then 23 years old -- received a commission for the library in 1965, and in 1971 Michael Hayden (post-Intersystems), completed a landmark electro-kinetic artwork which was integrated into an escalator. The first major public art undertaking for Canadian art in Toronto was at the Macdonald Block at Queen's Park (completed in 1968); exterior sites included a fountain by Gladstone and a large Yarwood bronze.[10] Yet, for decades one of the best-known city sculptures was an artifact from the past -- that of Timothy Eaton the benevolent shop-keeper as father figure. Eaton's employees started a Toronto "tradition" of touching the left foot of the seated gent for good luck (and after, both feet). Not only did it keep a perpetual polish on his bronze shoes, but indicates our connection to public statues, even those mounted on the protective cultural space defined by pedestals.[11] An instructive comparison can be made with Henry Moore's Large Two Forms installed at the corner of Dundas and McCaul in 1974. It has "wandered" away from the Art Gallery of Ontario paddock and developed its own public domain, where the museum caveat of Do Not Touch does not apply and cannot be effectively monitored. Hugging the ground and rising above the pedestrians' heads, it is the most touched piece of public art in Toronto -- a seat, shelter and frame for endless snapshots. Touching is akin to the laying on of hands, a confirmation and affirmation (of what doesn't matter, it happens).
"I LIKE IT. I want to bang my head against it."
- Arna Selznick commenting on William Epp's work in the Sculpture '67 exhibition. (Toronto Daily Star, 27 May 1967)
While permanence may be argued as the critical factor -- the Sculpture '67 exhibition being temporary, and Timothy Eaton and the Moores forever -- being fit or fixed to a site is no guarantee of public awareness. Lawrence Alloway proposed that "all art" in the 20th century is "produced privately (initiated solely by the artist himself) and becomes public information later ... but the term public sculpture means something more specific. It refers to art that is intentionally public from the outset, designed to occupy an unregulated site."[12] If the terms for new public art demands responsiveness to the site and cultural and physical conditions, there is also an assumption that the urban environment is static.[13] Everything can change as populations move elsewhere and as the economy of redevelopment keeps the built environment in a state of flux. Within a short generation or living memory, the subject of a memorial may be forgotten and a work of art once relevant or site responsive, can become isolated or irrelevant.[14] How then can a vital enterprise emerge out of terms of reference (the fuzzy terms of endearment), which pre-empts the private? Another private-to-public approach is "maybe ... doing nothing at all," as proposed by American artist Robert Irwin.[15]
If Alloway's proposition holds true (and "nothing" becomes something), the first site appears in the artist's vision and the opportunities presented by the unexpected. A brief moment of temporary public art activity took place at Harbourfront from 1977 to 1981 -- the Art Gallery at Harbourfront's programming initiative -- on the unregulated site of the decaying and ignored industrial waterfront.[16] The artworks ran the gamut of private interests on a public site to engaging the public in temporary performance events and often played to the extremes -- the old and the suburban, the pastoral and the chaotic, the resolute and the irreverent. As redevelopment closed off waterfront opportunities in the early 1980s, the Toronto Sculpture Garden appeared. However, the historical relationship and reverence for gardens and sculpture cannot be readily transposed, let alone assumed to take root. The ‘Old World’ garden re-created nature in a pre-determined space and the activity of cultivation is implicit. Sculpture in such a setting could be seen as part of a unification -- the presence of the monument in harmony with nature against the background of cultural history.[17] Likewise, the historical European piazza or Ancient World square cannot be recreated at will or by some enthrallment with the picturesque. It is part of a vital traffic flow (or historical flow), the station between here and there and at the same time a destination. The New World plaza is a different creature -- an open space which is neither contemplative nor ceremonial. It sits in front of a set back building, or as the suburban house was set back from the (underused) expanse of lawn. The separation of landscape from the urban-scape may be a consequence of modernist secularism, but by the 1990s Toronto urban spaces such as the Bay/Adelaide Park on Temperance Street, where the Aikenhead's hardware store once stood, were re-inflected with the notion of garden. Designed by Baird/Sampson Architects, the park is a topographical and cultural fabulation of vegetation and water elements, and where the past and present is memorialized through art in an unconventional manner. Margaret Priest's construction technique frame modules, The Monument to Construction Workers, dominates the east side of the park with the city and opened urban scar as the backdrop.[18]
The activity at the Toronto Sculpture Garden is without question a consequence of artists responding to the site conditions -- a protected space and a programmed activity centre (piazzas are never exhibition centres), situated between two mid-19th century "City Buildings" built in the Georgian style. The site had been cleared in 1938 for use as a parking lot and redesigned as a city park in 1981. In place of a historical continuum and permanent artworks, another cultural activity (and identity?) began to form. This was an opportunity for artists to engage in a dialogue as oral history, as their private concerns were made public. In this sense, the TSG is a room as well as a garden, the window into the artist's private space. The east side shows the urban scar, an interior wall revealed to the exterior and a backdrop to the inner court. On the west, a restaurant patio spills into the space and reinforcing a frontal view. The garden is anything but neutral, but in the absence of a governing programme, artists control the readings and act in an unencumbered manner. What better place for the artist-as-monologist to "work the room" (in stand-up comedy parlance): the situationist as humourist and satirist, the fly in the ointment of Toronto the Good. The TSG is across from the historic St. James' Cathedral, a quick walk to the venerable King Edward Hotel, and shouting distance to the axis (mundi) of the Toronto financial universe at Bay and King.
The TSG has had its share of alien sightings, almost unavoidable in the heavy traffic of contemporary expressions -- Pierre Bougault's bisected and glowing metal craft, John Noestheden's elegiac signals, Opus Fifteen, and Reinhard Reitzenstein's anthropomorphic electronic-schematic totems, A Pair of Satyrs -- but other narrative threads appear in the rewinding of 15 years. An innocent phrase jumps out of Andreas Gehr's brochure, for his 1985 site work The Found Foundation: "The sculpture's shape... is enhanced by placing the sculpture on an uneven footing ..." Artists have paid attention to footing at the TSG: a practical consideration in dealing with the sloped grade away from the axial pathway and finding ways to throw the viewer off balance. The inaugural TSG exhibition included John McEwen's many feet of 16 flame-cut horses. The horse was already out of the burning barn and the formalized arrangement of sculpture in the garden was never to be. The corollary is between the stand-up routine in an intimate setting and how acts are "polished" for network television (the large public forum always requires a broader stroke when the real audience is not at hand; stick with what works).
The object as plinth -- the foot play and being footloose -- appeared in Mark Gomes' stacked tables, Margaret's Tables ... Remembering Margaret Laurence; Wenda Habenicht's towers akimbo of Dream Retreat; Claude Mongrain's potter's stools stacked in a vernacular homage to Constantin Brancusi's "endless" columns of 1918 to 1937; and Stacey Spiegel's precariously balanced and rotating Lexan cone steeple-as-container, Sculpture Heaven. In Jerry Pethick's Remembered Room, steel pipes were stacked in defiance of gravity, but for practical reasons were welded in place. Yet the vestige of pedestal -- the foot of "old" sculpture -- did not completely disappear. Stephen Cruise used the TSG brick gate portals as a found plinth for his reconstituted agrarian monuments. Brian Groombridge installed a support column on which a measuring device as object was hung. The plinth and column became the object in works by Spring Hurlbut and Robin Collyer.
Other moments of disregard for decorum were inevitable; sculpture-as-Quasimodo hanging from the parapets and suffering the crowd's jeers around Notre Dame. Yvonne Singer mounted plaster body fragments (a fragment and drapery borrowed from antiquity) on the east wall, their backs turned to the crowd. Tim Jocelyn's irreverent Ooga Booga Suite banners were mounted on the same wall, figures engaged in uninhibited ritual dance. Susan Beniston installed body fragments there and suspended them from tethered cables and in the trees. Artists plunged into the TSG waterfall-fountain element on the east wall as if daring the audience to partake in the baptism, as in Robert Wiens' City of Glass and Susan Schelle's Literalists of the Imagination. Pethick used the water element as a backdrop and visual reference: the construction of optical lens structure mounted with (natural) waterfall photographs. James Carl's self-proclaimed fountain was an arc of vending machines depicting a sectional panorama of Niagara Falls upstaged the TSG waterfall while dispensing a version of pure bottled nature. The reverence for The Falls invoked daredevil acts as this artist walked his own tightrope of reverence and tongue-in-cheek wit.
Carl's work also reflects a recurring "theme" of urban chaos and nature tamed, cultivated and culture-ated -- the premise for sculptor Bernie Miller's selection of works by Hurlbut, Wiens and Collyer for the Paradise Then & Now installation, and in his own Cornucopia installation. Miller transformed the billboard fragment into the omnivorous beast with the all-too-familiar glamourized produce image caught in its grip. He surrounded it with the spilled cornucopia contents -- brightly coloured plastic containers (some designed for storing toxic wastes), as if plastic fruit jeering at the image of abundance. The ominous side of this cautionary tale was Doug Buis' Chaotic Encounters, a greenhouse or eco-pod turned into an archaeological industrial reliquary. Renee Van Halm's Display (Temptation to Follow) proposed another contemporary reliquary scenario. Her cleaved house brought the domestic interior into public view and outside again through a picture window view. This cultural landscape reached out to the Canadian creation myth of painterly backwoods modernity. As proof that the lure was more than local flavour, Russian artist Dmitri Kaminker created an Eastern version of the radical regionalist myth with hewn and assembled wooden monuments, while Pierre Granche looked to Old and Ancient World monuments in his sheet metal miniatures.
Taste is held up as gaudy spectacle - the evergreen in-law joke. Artists delved into the urban-pastoral mythology -- the sly game of the backwoods philosopher, Stephen Leacock and Will Rodgers commenting on the absurdity of modern behaviour. The “word from the woods” was delivered by a variety of structures rooted in the proto-cabana; the Seed Room in Lee Paquette's childhood memory playground and Herb Parker's Transient Earth Structures, the sod structure-as-temple giving spiritual shelter. Andreas Gehr's The Found Foundation -- the first full-scale occupation of the garden -- was a blind alley shed, as if a Calvinist retort to the Neo-Gothic steeple of St. James' Cathedral. An Whitlock's apparition was that of the single room house as shadow in sunlight while the transparent mausoleums of Carlos Cesta and FASTWÜRMS were marked by Lisa Neighbour's illuminated mystic-Christian sign. The vernacular structure was also transformed into the extraordinary. Panya Clark's scaled-down lighthouse contained a hidden view of a stream which once flowed through the TSG site c.1815. Kim Adams' Crab-Legs (Studio) -- a vertical accumulation of garden sheds -- evolved from his vision of the "ideal" needs for an artist's living and working space, but also suggested a northern mining town phantasmagoria which was equally plausible as the outpost on a distant planet (artist-as-alien). The play on garden figures of speech appeared in Cynthia Short's Eden planting, Warren Quigley's "meandering" trees and path, the arboreal-fantastic of a silver glow in Louis Stokes' sacred woods, and Charles Courville’s forest twigs assembled into a shape-shifting trickster. Hugh LeRoy elevated a symbol-carved wooden path over the garden, while Gilbert Boyer's granite tablets formed an irregular garden footpath inscribed with personal and intimate notations, the letters dropped on-route.
It is generally agreed that our culture feeds on contradictions but as the American artist Barbara Kruger noted, "sometimes you could just choke on all the irony around."[19] She also observed that people have short attention spans, "so I shoot for the window of opportunity."[20] Brian Scott's Stray Plow landed directly in such a "window." The agrarian work ethic -- the dignity of labour and tilling the soil -- is mixed with the hunter-adventurer myth, as the plow is transformed into a speeding boat. The boat on this site was a fish out of water but convincing in its illusion -- real and perplexing as it churned up the recreational "spirit" of the urban populace. The installation of Liz Magor's Messenger on the TSG's 15th anniversary was fitting. Her vintage cabin was the true and authentic object transported from another place and time, sending a message to the here and now, even as its authenticity was adulterated by the vestiges of contemporary life. Home-spun truths and myths (the disembodied soul room of Tom Thomson's painting shack) were given a satirical edge and debunked on a neutral ground.
Many other cross-references can be uncovered, but it is too soon or presumptuous to describe this as a movement -- the collective sigh of relief as a sign. It is clear however that idiosyncratic and unruly ideas have been played out -- a tonic for commissioned public art which flattens ideas into paving patterns -- and allowing for a quirky eccentricity would lose its flavour in the solemn white box of the gallery and museum environment. Toronto has received permanent and monumental figures of speech even as the TSG works are relegated to memory.[21] FASTWÜRMS’ giant woodpeckers sit atop a 100-foot steel column accompanied by a black patina bronze snowman -- a vision that is forever summer and forever winter. It is installed at the expanded Metro Convention Centre, just north of the Harbourfront site and within sight of Toronto's signature monument the CN Tower. Further west is Micah Lexier's Hall of Names -- 1,000 laser cut names dangling from the concourse of the new National Trade Centre at the CNE, taking its architectural cues from the period Automotive Building across the street. Lexier's work plays off the ubiquitous trade show name tag and invites those who pass underneath to identify themselves. Less than 10 years old, the grandfather of the public art barb is Michael Snow's The Audience, attached to the spectacle of the SkyDome, a plinth with the world's largest retractable roof. The Medieval grotesquery of Snow's vulgar and frozen gestures is not necessarily the reversal of Quasimodo's predicament, but beckons the crowds to do the same, to join in.
The Toronto Sculpture Garden programme is not necessarily art history-in-the-making but one act following another. The legacy, if it can ever be memorialized, is that of the work room.
Endnotes
[1] Janet Kardon Street Wise/Street Foolish Urban Encounters (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1980) p.8
[2] (Architect) Phillip Johnson, Young Artists at the Fair and at Lincoln Centre (Art in America, Vol.52, No. Four, August 1964) pp.112-127. Keeping "young" in perspective, the ages ranged fromJames Rosenquist at 29, to Alexander Liberman at 52. Johnson wrote of the Lincoln Centre project, "Artists are interested in their own expression, not in helping out mine. I in turn am more interested in space modulation than in wall decoration." Paul Arthur examined a similar relationship with the Expo '67 Ontario Pavilion sculpture competition. ("Art and architecture -- a confused situation?" Canadian Art, July 1966, pp.12-14)
[3] In 1961 City Council overwhelmingly voted in favour of naming the plaza after Nathan Phillips for his decades of service to municipal politics. Ironically, as Mayor of Toronto, Phillips requested the removal of three nude study works from the Graham Coughtry and Michael Snow exhibition at Hart House, University of Toronto in January 1955, which he felt were "offensive." He later qualified his position by stating he was not acting as a censor but at the request from a private citizen.
[4] Toronto Civic Sculpture (Planning and Development Department, 1985, p.35). Robert Fulford writes that Revell chose the sculpture in 1964. (Robert Fulford, Accidental City, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1995, p.9) Months before its arrival a photograph of Moore and The Archer appeared on the front page of the Toronto Daily Star: Expo '67 organizers had requested to borrow it, even though it was still in Holland at the time.
[5] It is impossible to prove or disprove as a critical factor in Givens' defeat, but is a rare example of a work of art being connected to the fortunes and downfall of a politician. (see Fulford, op.cit., pp.9-11)
[6] Quotes from the Toronto Daily Star, 28 October 1966
[7] Dorothy Cameron had been a pioneering dealer, specializing in Canadian sculpture during the early 1960s, but closed her Yonge Street gallery after being charged with exhibiting obscenity in her Eros '65 exhibition. She organized Sculpture '67 on behalf of the National Gallery of Canada, which included work by 68 Canadian and American artists. Some works were also installed in High Park. Barrie Hale's Toronto Telegram column of 6 June 1967 starts, "the carnage in Nathan Philips Square continues as our fellow citizens ... stomp, trample, kick, smash, scuff and fumble the works ..."
[8] Jennifer Oille examined the background to the establishment of the Selection Committee for Public Art in 1980, and issues of community appropriateness with respect to three controversial works sited in the early 1980s; the statue of Sun Yat-Sen in Riverdale Park, The Airmen's Memorial on University Avenue, and the Monument to Multiculturalism at Union Station. (Horizontal Mosaic, Public Art: Toronto, Vanguard, October 1985, pp.8-10)
[9] See Fulford, op.cit. pp.174-177
[10] See Jeanne Parkin, Art in Architecture (a publication of Visual Arts Ontario, 1982) pp.14-22 & pp.28-35. Sculptor Ted Bieler developed an insterest in art and architecture integration in the early 1960s. A notable project was his collaborative work for the Medical Sciences Building at the University of Toronto in 1967. (See Provincial Essays, Vol.6, 1988, pp.51-58)
[11] The sculptor was Ivor Lewis, a member of Eaton's managerial staff. In 1919, Eaton's Golden Jubilee year, employees paid for the casting of two bronzes (the other is located in the downtown Winnipeg store).
[12] Lawrence Alloway, The Public Sculpture Problem, Topics in American Art Since 1945 (W.W. Norton & Co. New York, 1975) p.245
[13] See Jennifer Oille (op. cit.) for an examination of public art and the community and Provincial Essays (op.cit., pp.28-30).
[14] Robert Fulford also wrote of architecture "looking irrelevant when the culture around it changes" (Fulford, op.cit., p.137), and likewise for works of art. Hayden DaviesÕ Space Composition (Rhymney) at the foot of York Street was a temporary siting in 1979, an Art Gallery at Harbourfront initiative, but was simply never removed. The original signage is long gone (never replaced); buildings to the north and west have been demolished and a parking garage built on the west side. The current site conditions may be seen to have adapted to the sculpture's presence by encroachment -- a bicycle rental booth, tree plantings and a pergola structure. In contrast, the statue of Timothy Eaton survived the transition from the original Eaton's store on Queen Street to the new Eaton's Centre, a development which ironically obliterated a section of the old Yonge Street downtown in the mid 1970s.
[15] Robert Irwin, Being and Circumstances, Notes Toward a Conditional Art (The Lapis Press, California, 1985), p.27
[16] The Harbourfront sculpture programme appeared in a critical moment for public art in Toronto in the mid-1970s. The integration of artworks was part of architects Dubois and Associates' vision for the 1976 Joseph Sheppard Building (Government of Canada) in North York - a "humanizing role of art and architecture" and a "direct relationship to the people using the building." (Parkin, op. cit., p.47) Ed Zelenak's plaza-integrated work has since been removed. A programme of art in architecture was part of the Spadina Subway which opened in January 1978. The 10th International Sculpture Symposium was held in Toronto from 31 May - 4 June 1978, and related exhibitions held at the Art Gallery of Ontario, York University, and Harbourfront.
[17] Marc Trieb, Sculpture and Garden, A Historical Overview (Design Quarterly 141, Walker Art Center/MIT Press) pp.44-58
[18] Fulford, op.cit. pp.199-212.
[19] Thyrza Nichols Goodeve interview with Barbara Kruger, The Art of Public Address (Art in America, November 1997) p.95
[20] Ibid., p.98
[21] A number of TSG installations and works have found permanent homes. The works by Spring Hurlbut and Brian Groombridge and half of Dmitri Kaminker's elements are in private collections. Works now in public gallery collections include: Brian Scott and Kim Adams, the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre's sculpture park in Guelph; Stacey Spiegel, the London Regional Art and Historical Museums; Pierre Granche, the MusŽe d'art contemporain in Montreal; RenŽe Van Halm, the University of Lethbridge; and Joseph De Angelis, the University of Windsor. Even the ephemeral found a circulation route. James Carl noted that he came across the bottled water from his fountain vending machines in people's refrigerators -- sanctified and made culturally holy.