How Public Art Exists More in Our Minds than in Some Place

In the wake of the Dr. King Memorial kerfuffle, I’ve been thinking more and more of how public art is a state of mind as much as a physical thing in a physical place. In an article in the inaugural issue of Public Art Dialogue, Joshua Fisher argues that Gutzon Borglum’s Mount Rushmore National Memorial and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty exemplify this dual nature of public art, specifically in their relationship to the idea of American “Manifest Destiny.” By examining what Borglum said in his sculpture versus what his “antithesis” Smithson said in his earth art, Fisher sheds new light on each work and provides a template for analyzing the MLK monument and those that will follow. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Public Art Exists More in Our Minds than in Some Place."

With Friends Like These: How Isamu Noguchi Became an Artist

If the The Noguchi Museum’s 25^th anniversary exhibition were an episode of Friends, it would be titled “The One Where Isamu Became an Artist.” On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and his Contemporaries, 1922-1960, which runs through April 24, 2011, demonstrates just how Isamu Noguchi navigated through the worlds of sculpture, painting, dance, theater, and even architecture and design with a little help from his friends. Borrowing bits from different means of expression, Noguchi added them together into the greater sum of his sculpture. With friends like Arshile Gorky, Constantin Brancusi, Frida Kahlo, Martha Graham, and Louis Kahn, Noguchi became an artistic force transcending traditional boundaries. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "With Friends Like These."

[Image: Isamu Noguchi, Arshile Gorky, De Hirsh Margulies. Hitler Invades Poland, September 1, 1939. Crayon and sealing ink on paper, 17 1/2 x 22 7/8 in. © 2010 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © 2010 The Arshile Gorky Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Courtesy Gallery Gertrude Stein, New York.]

[Many thanks to the The Noguchi Museum for providing me with the image above and a review copy of the catalogue to the exhibition On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and his Contemporaries, 1922-1960, which runs through April 24, 2011.]

Go Tell It on the Mountain

"The reason for building any work of art can only be for the purpose of fixing in some durable form a great emotion, or a great idea, of the individual, or the people," wrote Gutzon Borglum, the man whose name is now synonymous with his greatest creation, Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. (Borglum appears above with a model for Mount Rushmore around 1930.) Born March 25, 1867, Borglum thought big and literally needed a mountain to convey his personal convictions about what America as a nation and an idea truly meant. In 1909, Borglum first gained attention with a monumental head of Abraham Lincoln that Theodore Roosevelt himself admired. Years later, Borglum depicted those two presidents along with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on Mount Rushmore. (Women’s civil-rights pioneer Susan B. Anthony almost appeared alongside those gentlemen, but conservative politics thwarted that effort in the late 1930s.) Mount Rushmore represents America in many ways, good and bad, as its finest and yet most overwrought monument to itself.

Mount Rushmore wasn’t the first mountain Borglum sought to conquer with his sculpture. In 1915, he accepted a commission to sculpt a monument to the Southern soldier of the American Civil War on Stone Mountain, Georgia. Borglum had actually begun work on the memorial that remains there today, grossly unfinished, before walking away because of a dispute with the managers of the site and beginning work on Mount Rushmore. The Ku Klux Klan reportedly contributed heavily to the funds for the commission, hoping to use the monument for their own purposes. (A nighttime laser-light show at the site helps liven up Borglum’s fragmentary work today, showing that the South will rise again and again and again.) It’s unclear whether Borglum, who was born in Idaho, sympathized with the Southern “cause,” but he later did a smaller monument (above, from 1929) now at the Gettysburg battle site for the North Carolina soldiers killed in the infamous Pickett's Charge. The flurry of activity between these different soldiers in the heat of battle recalls the work of Rodin, whom Borglum knew and studied with while in Paris.

Another Rodin-esque work by Borglum is his The Aviator (above), placed on the campus of the University of Virginia for James R. McConnell, an American pilot who flew with the Lafayette Escadrille for France before the United States entered World War I . McConnell’s heroism in the name of the democratic ideal and with the idea of “repaying” Lafayette’s aid to America during the American Revolution, undoubtedly appealed to the romantic idealist in Borglum. When Borglum died in 1941, his son Lincoln Borglum supervised the Mount Rushmore project to completion, leaving it pretty much as his father had left it—unfinished. Borglum originally dreamed of carving the presidents from the waist up, but his death and insufficient funding left us with his magnificent monument to America. On one hand, Borglum’s foursome represents all that is good about the American experiement—Washington’s bravery and leadership under fire, Jefferson’s visionary expansionism, Lincoln’s bold holding of the union together, and Roosevelt’s populist battles for the little guy. On the other hand, Mount Rushmore also celebrates two slaveholders and a war-instigating colonialist, excludes women and people of color, and remains incomplete thanks to the shortsightedness of politicians and the public. Like the America it represents, Mount Rushmore is a work in progress that may never be completed.

Drawn and Quartered

Remember when the U.S. Mint started their State Quarters project in 1999? Is anyone other than me still collecting and still interested in what images are picked for each state? The gladiatorial games of politics and aesthetics fought over these coins have yielded some weird and wacky results. Seeing the new Montana quarter (above) for the first time made me think of just one person: Georgia O’Keeffe.

Above is O’Keeffe’s Red, White, and Blue, just one of her many paintings of sun-bleached animal skulls painted while she lived in New Mexico. I realize that horned animal skulls all look alike, at least to a city-slicker tenderfoot like myself, but to re-iconize an image that is already an icon in a different context, especially a different geographic context as widely dissimilar as Montana is from New Mexico, seems wrong. New Mexico doesn’t release their design until 2008, but I’d understand New Mexico’s anger with Montana if they were going to go with an O’Keeffe. They can still go with an O’Keeffe, just as North Carolina and Ohio both decided to lay claim to the Wright Brothers on their coins, but they’d then only create a 4-way tie for second most boring quarter design.

Who’s the winner of the most boring state quarter art? Why, it’s my home state of Pennsylvania (shown above), a state so unimaginative that their state quarter depicts the actual state, itself boring in an amazingly nearly rectangular way. New Jersey and South Dakota remain the only states to portray actual art on their coins. New Jersey sports Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, while South Dakota takes pride in Gutzon Borglum’s mammoth sculpture of the Presidents on Mount Rushmore. Would it have killed Pennsylvania to use Eakins’ Max Schmitt in a Single Scull?