The first rule of public art is that it will be unpopular. There will always be a certain kind of citizen who will call it a waste of money because art is useless. You know that your wasteful actions could be seen as democratic (making the tastes of the educated and cosmopolitan accessible to all) or profoundly anti-democratic (the actions of a paternalistic government refusing to respect what its populace actually admires). So if you're going to use public money for art, you must be prepared for indignation – and ready to defend the very idea of unpopular art.
The Eiffel Tower – an entirely useless piece of art – was so hated by Parisians that, before it was even built, it provoked a letter of protest signed by dozens of prominent writers and artists calling it monstrous, ridiculous and hateful. The city government rejected their complaints and went ahead with construction. It is now one of the most visited tourist attractions in the world.
Now Calgary is very fortunate with public art. It has a cool angular piece of folded metal by Adad Hannah, a walking maze inscribed with poetry by Sky Spirit Studio and a lovely undulating wall in the river by Brian Tolle. They have all this art because of an enlightened city policy that mandates that 1 per cent of the budget of every capital project of more than $1-million must go to art.
Sometimes, this program seems designed explicitly to enrage Calgarians. They hate the metal ring called Travelling Light. They hate the big metal ball called Bearing. They especially hate the $500,000 sculpture that just went up beside a highway called Bowfort Towers, by New York-based sculptor Del Geist and his partner Patricia Leighton. They hate it so much that Mayor Naheed Nenshi had to make a public announcement saying he hopes to "include more public input" to the buying process for public art. (But shortly afterward he said to reporters, "I'm not interested in public votes on every piece of art." So I don't know what he is really saying.)
Some city councillors are so mad that they are putting forward a motion to immediately suspend requests for proposals for public art, pending the creation of a "new framework" for selection that would "embed feedback from Calgarians." The main proponent, Councillor Shane Keating, made this quite astounding statement to the Calgary Herald: "I think we need to move away from the concept the artist gets to decide what it looks like."
Then, in an op-ed in The Globe and Mail, a spokesperson for an anti-taxation group used the sculpture as an example of excessive airy-fairy government waste, using the case to suggest that government get out of the art-buying business altogether. (He proposed that private enterprise take over the role, presumably of its own free will and out of the goodness of its heart.)
I rather like Bowfort Towers, which comprises four sets of vertical steel beams holding irregular slabs of local rock at an angle – as if they are about to slide off. I like Geist's work, which is all over the world and tends to consist of angular pieces of rock held aloft in high cradles. I also like the idea of bringing in a foreign artist of great repute; this is what makes international cities.
Geist's pieces combine the organic and the architectural; they seem to insist on the decay of all structure – and its inherent arbitrariness. I like enigmatic and functionless structures; they make us think about the aesthetic patterns in the functional and boring structures that surround us. I would love to have this to look at and puzzle over as I wait in traffic on a featureless Alberta highway. I would never think it has anything to do with Indigenous presence or art traditions in the region.
Ah, but it was in pretending it did that all its troubles increased. The city that commissioned this clever contemporary piece began to worry that it was a little too abstract for its literal-minded constituents. So city officials made up some social relevance for it. The planners said Geist had "consulted" with local Blackfoot leaders and was making some reference to their values or aesthetic. This was utterly cynical – the work had no such connection. (Local Indigenous leaders also noted that the sculpture vaguely resembled Blackfoot burial platforms; this was a coincidence.)
This embroidery on the truth was an idiotic mistake. The artist and the art committee had blundered right into the cultural appropriation debate. It hadn't occurred to them that by invoking Indigenous traditions they were saying that those traditions had been stolen and profited from by a white person from New York. Aboriginal leaders were incensed.
So at this point both the right and the left were against this project. It was both a flamboyant waste of tax dollars and a culturally insensitive installation.
The artist and the art committee backpedalled. They admitted that the work had never really intended to address Indigenous issues, nor was it inspired by an Indigenous presence. And the "consultation" with community elders had happened late in the design process. It was basically an admission that the consultation was window dressing, a marketing idea tacked on afterward. Too late: The damage to the very idea of government-funded public art had been done.
Now there will be even more caution in selecting these pieces and more consultation with every possible opponent to every possible investment. The chosen art will embody a perfectly respectful pan-inoffensiveness. It is worth noting that it was, ironically, in trying to be sensitive that Calgary screwed this up so badly.
Here's a suggestion for avoiding this in the future: How about, instead of trying so hard to make public art more popular, we accept the fundamental elitism of such art? We let our government bodies appoint art experts to choose art that is internationally recognized, then we let them do their job. We don't try to justify it with fake respect for local culture. We respond to the inevitable critics proudly and unapologetically, with the conviction of our expertise. Then we wait for history to judge our choices.