Public Art in Age of Government Austerity

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 18.10.11

 
Although the policy objectives of public art have been reformulated frequently over the practice’s relatively short history in the United States, the installation of public art within the urban fabric has always been—and I would argue is inherently—a political exercise. The promotion of public art, however, has a tendency to create false consensus and mask underlying political objectives by appearing to advance the seemingly neutral and uncontroversial policy of urban beautification, so it is important to subject these objectives to critical scrutiny. In my talk today, I will bring public art outside the bounds of aesthetic discourse and criticism and resituate it within urban discourse in order to understand its relationship to economic and political conditions. Today, the role of government in American society is being debated and questioned—in healthcare, in the regulation of the financial system, in cities, and, indeed, in the arts, so I wonder…in what ways does public art reflect this?

To answer this question, I will backtrack a bit in time to talk about public art during the Great Depression, an important historical precedent of “art-as-stimulus.” I will discuss the emergence of public art as a tool of economic development following New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s. And finally, I will use Olafur Eliasson’s New York City-based piece The Waterfalls as a case study to understand the impact of the current economic crisis on the practice and evaluation of public art.

The Great Depression has frequently been referenced in the popular and business media as a relevant counterpoint to the most recent recession from which the global economy is still reeling. Though the more responsible economic forecasters never predicted anything of its magnitude, casual references abound, from the “Great Recession” to the “Lesser Depression” to talk of the “worst crisis since the Great Depression.” While less has been made of the comparison of public art during the Great Depression compared to public art during the present economic crisis—perhaps because the idea of art as stimulus is a distant one—a closer examination of this era may reveal intricacies in the relationship of public art to its political and economic context that are pertinent today.

The New Deal’s socially progressive programs greatly advanced government patronage of the arts. From 1933 to 1943, artists produced more than a hundred thousand artworks with government support, administered by alphabet agencies like the PWAP, the WPA, and the TRAP, with the goal of facilitating economic recovery and job creation. For the largest program, the Works Progress (later, Works Projects) Administration’s Federal Art Project, artists were given work on the basis of financial need rather than the merit of past work or a proposal for future work.

This art established the federal government’s role as benefactor to neighborhoods and communities and symbolized it’s changed and changing relationship to the people: during the Great Depression, the federal government built housing, regulated the stock market, provided relief, and became a patron of the arts for the first time. For the first time, too, the federal government established a visual presence in remote towns and rural areas in the form of post office murals and sculpture, which reflected a shift in power away from state and local governments to the federal government, a shift that was justified by the belief that the federal government was better equipped to deal with the pervasive structural and economic problems that were plaguing the country. This shift did not occur without resistance, however, and the tension between regional and national identity played out in many commissioned pieces.

Another tension that emerged was that between the ideals of fine art and democracy, a polarity that continues to dominate the debate on public art today. Most New Deal public art employed a visual language of American art accessible to a broad public, rather than an academic or avant-garde elite. Abstract painters, for example were excluded from most commissions, which is the main reason art produced during this period and its legacy has been largely neglected by modernist-formalist art historians and critics that treat American art as beginning with Abstract Expressionism. Despite laudable democratic ambitions, commissioning agencies reserved final approval of any mural or sculpture and at times sought to influence the entire creative process. This is a big part of the New Deal era public art’s complicated legacy.

We see further complications in New York in the 1970s, when the city faced an unprecedented fiscal crisis. The city barely avoided declaring bankruptcy, which resulted in a massive paradigm shift in urban governance. During this time, economic development replaced redistributive policy and service provision as the primary function of local governments as cities sought to generate income without driving away the middle class with increased taxes. Tourism emerged as a favored development strategy because it allowed cities to import spending and export tax burden. Large public investment in cultural and entertainment facilities became commonplace, fueled by the competition between cities for tourism revenue. First, I will describe the conditions that presaged [PREH’-SIJED] the rise of economic development as a central component of urban policy and then I will talk about how public art came to be subsumed as a tool of economic development.

New York City became a major tourist destination in the late 1970s even though it was not exactly a viable place to live and work for its citizens: people continued to flee to the suburbs, crime soared, and social disorder reigned. The 1970s are widely considered to be the city’s nadir. This contradiction was overcome through an extensive image-control campaign, whereby the city co-opted the corporate strategy of branding and harnessed its position as a major media and communications center to project an image of itself to potential visitors as a safe, fun, and hospitable place. While urban boosterism is hardly a new phenomenon, starting in the 1970s, marketing professionals and economic development practitioners began operating with large budgets and had much greater influence than the amateur, de-centralized efforts of earlier eras.

In addition to comparatively inexpensive tourism marketing campaigns, political elites began partnering with their private-sector counterparts to construct “tourism infrastructure,” which serves the dual purposes of attracting tourists and providing ample opportunities for them to spend money, which is presumed to have an exponential, or multiplier, effect on the local economy. While scholars have analyzed the role of convention centers, retail malls, and major-league sports franchises as components of an urban entertainment infrastructure that serves to promote tourism, public art has not received such attention from urban political economists, even though its emerging role in urban growth politics begs explanation. Urban economic development, after all, is not just about bricks and mortar, but is realized through more intangible tactics such as city image. Furthermore, public art is not simply the object of urban development schemes; operating in an increasingly competitive environment where marketing and entrepreneurialism are the favored strategies, public art itself has been transformed.

Though they constitute an intervention into the urban built environment, temporary public art installations occupy an intermediate realm between physical tourism infrastructure and symbolic urban imagery. Due to the unpopularity of urban renewal tactics, culture war controversies on arts funding, and federal devolution in general, New York City has not built a major cultural center since the 1960s. Public art, by contrast, represents a decentralized cultural offering and a strategy of incremental change to the urban built environment. [oh-LA-fur ELLIE-a-son] Olafur Eliasson’s piece The Waterfalls, which I will discuss later on, is unique in that it is not part of a cultural center or comprehensive development project, such as New York’s Lincoln Center or Millennium Park in Chicago, and thus serves a different role. Public art lacks the immediate legibility of function that other types of urban development have—like sports stadiums, housing, and office developments—so it requires greater scrutiny.

Public art fulfills the symbolic function of bolstering confidence in urban centers once suffering from disinvestment and decline through the historical association of the arts with affluence and prestige. Public art serves as a patina of cultural sophistication in a thriving post-industrial economy by creating visible distance from the non-aestheticized spaces of the old manufacturing economy. Similar strategies have been employed more recently in an attempt to illustrate regenerative ability of cities against persistent economic downturns. [oh-LA-fur ELLIE-a-son] Olafur Eliasson’s The Waterfalls is a key example.

The Waterfalls was installed in 2008, in the middle of the recession. At a total cost of $15.5 million (which includes building materials, construction, operation, disassembly, and promotional and educational materials), The Waterfalls represents the largest public art undertaking in New York City since The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 2005. The piece consists of four- 90 to 120 foot structures located near the Brooklyn Bridge, the Brooklyn Piers, Pier 35 in Manhattan, and the north shore of Governor’s Island, which denote the widest prospect of the harbor. The Waterfalls pump water from the East River that cascades down scaffolding constructed out of simple industrial materials. The project received a $2 million grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, a joint state-city corporation that was formed in 2002 to plan the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan after the September 11 attacks. The Public Art Fund, a New York City-based non-profit, raised the remaining $13.5 million in funds from private donors. The project was justified by the fact that it was expected to generate $55 million in economic activity during its almost four month run, an estimate based on attendance at Millennium Park in Chicago in 2004, [ELLIE-a-son] Eliasson’s Weather Project at the Tate Modern in 2003, and The Gates in 2005, which are the only examples of adequate scale to justify the comparison.

While that may seem like a lot of numbers to describe this proto-Earth Art piece, a focus on quantification pervades the discussion of The Waterfalls. The height of the structures, the amount of materials used, and the rate that water was pumped from the East River are essentially product specs that serve to convince taxpayers and other project funders that they are getting a good deal for the price. It is a kind of “conspicuous consumption” on the part of a city that is not afraid to flaunt the project’s extravagant price tag despite the dismal economic climate.

In general, this kind of cost-benefit mindset pervades cash-strapped city governments, trapped in the zero-sum game of resource allocation where the burden is on them to prove that each tax dollar was spent with maximum efficiency. Thus, even before The Waterfalls was installed, the New York City Economic Development Corporation commissioned a market research consulting firm to conduct an “impact analysis” to determine the amount of tourism revenue that The Waterfalls would generate. According to their estimates, which were based on surveys and visitor counts at seven vantage points in Manhattan and Brooklyn, nearly 1.4 million people visited The Waterfalls. 79,322 of these supposedly would not have visited or would not have extended their visit to New York if not for The Waterfalls. The Economic Development Corporation reported that these visitors generated $42 million in direct spending and a total impact of $69 million, exceeding the original estimate.

As a researcher in the Program Evaluation division of a city agency that conducts plenty of “impact analyses” of subsidized housing programs in New York City, I have frequently faced the political imperative of using research to justify government policy and expenditure. During my tenure, I have worked to reframe the agency’s mindset from that of the “impact analysis,” with its attendant emphasis on generating development, cost-saving measures, and return on investments, to that of the “needs assessment.” I think this is an approach that may benefit the field of public art as well. Rather than “What kind of public art will have the greatest economic impact?” the question then becomes, “What kind of public art do communities, neighborhoods, and individuals need?” Or, “How to create work that is monumental and draws the attention of global audiences while still being responsive and accessible to New Yorkers?”

I am also troubled by this focus on quantitative data because I believe it is evidence that public art is being held responsible for the obligations of government. In general, it seems that programs that promote the arts and “creative cities” have taken precedence over and even replaced programs that are more closely tailored to address pressing social and economic problems. After all, it is probably easier to fix government investment in the arts than it is to fix the country’s macroeconomic system. I would even argue that The Waterfalls did more harm than good; through it’s spectacular elements, it may have masked underlying inequality, polarization, and conflict that is exacerbated in times of economic crisis.

As with The Waterfalls, public art is usually framed in terms of functionality and social, political, or economic instrumentality. But I think this is not conducive to a public art that reflects and comments upon the complexities of contemporary society. Function, after all, rarely enters the picture when it comes to the evaluation and criticism other types of art. If we do choose to reject the framework of functionality, what forms of evaluation are appropriate? How can we engage in an aesthetic discourse that is not depoliticizing and instead challenges the motives of urban regimes? These are the questions I would like to leave you with today. Thank you.

© Emily Baierl

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