Sculpture in Public Places

Sculpture has been used in public places since the socialization of man. Tribes practiced cave painting, carved totems in wood & stone. Egyptians had obelisks, Greeks constructed temples with statues, Romans constructed arches and colossi; kings built monuments to their battles and themselves. In the democratic age, unexpected icons like the Eiffel Tower, The Statue of Liberty, and The Space Needle appeared, celebrating industry and nationhood and science. Once given a voice in what we build, use, and keep, we base some of our decisions on aesthetic appeal. We prefer a pleasing living environment, often imitating nature, expressing our history, culture and community in choosing our surroundings.

Large European cities like London, Paris, Rome or Berlin, contain buildings, monuments & sculptures from every era. People appreciate the mixture of old and new. To look around Rome and see the stone bones of an empire, flanked by Fascist parade avenues, catholic rich houses, and human scale squares which celebrate an apex of classical marble sculpture, with an overlay of trattorie, souvenirs, chic boutiques, neon, noise, motorbikes and all the racket which goes on in the making and spending of daily bread, is to realize that a lively city like Rome is not just the sum of its past.

Anyone who has ever lived in the country knows the shock of a trip to the city and the feeling of being pressed in by and towered over by buildings. Humans need a bit of open space. For Europeans this meant saving or reclaiming a bit of land for squares and public parks. Often these spaces were donated by city benefactors, or in the case of many European public parks, were ex-royal ground. North American cities developed as organically as European models, first one structure, then many on a central street. There was plenty of good land in North America – why construct a city on a hill – there were no threats to outward expansion. As cities grew large enough that it wasn’t practical for a cities inhabitants to travel far, governments created public parks. Parks need trees and open space. These parks are patterned on European parks, which are meticulously designed - even the trees are chosen. Capability Brown re-designed the English vision of the landscape. Many of us live in cities, larger or smaller, and all alike are bombarded with sensory input – that’s the stress and the joy of living in a city. If we accept that we live and work in crowded public spaces, we should try to have some input on what those spaces will be like. There are many places to locate sculpture in both a park setting and a street setting. A public park is an easy place to choose sculpture for – it is already a beautiful spot – even a ragamuffin of a sculpture would look handsome there. It may become a favourite or go unnoticed, or become universally disliked. Sculptures are removable, as all dictators must know.
Street settings for sculpture are more problematic and have more interesting solutions. West Berlin and East Berlin were both restructured after the Second War, so could qualify as a model about how to incorporate sculpture into a modern city. Wide country streets in the West became main thoroughfares with large football field intersections. Squares are created in the middle of this traffic flow. A Roman fountain would be lost and in the space. West Berlin also has a drainage problem, calling itself the Venice of the North, and supports a network of above ground waterpipes, which have been counterpointed at one intersection by Adolf Behrens “Berlin”, an untwisted knot of fluted stainless tubes. Startling contrast to the sad truncated tower of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church.
East Berlin created its peripheral version of Soviet chic, with interminable rectangular blocks of buildings with windswept spaces between them, which for some hold a severe beauty. Yet the East German vision of the retro space in its TV Tower remains a landmark. From almost anywhere in the city you can find your direction by it – like navigating by the moon. It also fits because in it’s situated on a launching pad sized Alexanderplatz. It serves as a point of reference and as a meeting point. Appropriate sculpture can add scale, history, mystery, and importance to a place. A sculpture however, must be chosen to have particularity and universality. It should represents its era and also have longevity, not only in structure, but also in the imagination.
Equipping our public space to be more livable has a price. Someone has to buy, install, and maintain the thing. Again, scale is the key. Architects and planners now create space in front of large buildings by using corner cutoffs and building setbacks. This creates enough space for a small square. Depending on the size of the found space, benches & shrubs are possible. Sculpture needs less space and is less expense.
Sculpture in public places democraticizes art by bringing it outdoors. Living with art is no longer a preserve of the privileged. Yet in a rather American way, we tend to segregate our duties and pleasures. For open space go to a park, for shopping go to a mall, for work go to a building, for sport go to a complex, for art go to a gallery. This segregated approach makes every facet of every activity suffer by dislocating it from everything else relevant in life. A sane healthy life is an integrated life, both privately and publicly.

Public parks work, people need them. Sculpture parks however, are a step backward as they reinforce this eliteness and segregation. We should surround ourselves with some of the best examples of what artists, sculptors, architects and town planners can produce. We should see beauty in the street, the bank, the shopping mall, and work place with out having to make a trip to a museum.

Old can mix with new, different interests create diversity. Juxtaposition creates a powerful effect. Look at I.M. Pei’s glass & steel pyramid in front of the Louvre, Botero’s chubby bronze characters along a Florentine courtyard, downtown Chicago’s cow as character craze with noble creatures stuck in windswept concrete, Joe Farfards’s “Mind’s Garden” circular filigreed iron corral in a flat Regina field, the HSBC atrium in Vancouver which barely contains Alan Storey’s precise monumental motion “Pendulum” This behind glass solution solves the problem of vandalism and protection from weather. Can and should sculpture be protected from being climbed on and touched? The original of Michelangelo’s David kept indoors. The Copenhagen harbour mermaid has been damaged at least eight times but has always been put right. Like painting over graffiti, repairing damage and supporting creative alternatives to youthful self-expression is good policy in maintaining any structure.

Much effort and expense is often been channeled toward winning garden awards, yet in the north, flowers bloom only half the year. The same applies to fountains – water freezes. Sculpture thrives in all weather. Government and business often overlook the practical and beautiful role well chosen installations have in making a place attractive and memorable. Sculpture is an ideal candidate for lifting any location from banal to sublime.

A wealth of locations exist, but local governments, when deciding how allocated money should be spent, often overlook the practical and beautiful role in sculpture has in making a place important. Businesses could be accommodating. Even citizens groups, which have a tendency to celebrate themselves by erecting boosterist welcome signs, somewhat reminiscent of frontier town timber gateways, could spend the same time, money and effort installing something that transcends politics and commerce.