Lawrence Argent’s Red Rabbit: a virtual view of the construction site

When Sacramento’s new International Airport terminal opens in late 2011, visitors will be greeted by a new urban mascot: a 56-foot red rabbit that appears to be diving from the ceiling into a suitcase. It’s the creation of sculptor Lawrence Argent, best known most recently for a giant blue bear that, on hind legs, peers into the windows of the Denver Convention Center. Argent’s is one of 13 new pieces of public art that will soon grace an expanded Sacramento International airport and transform how many visitors see the city for the first time. 

Sacramento International Airport Terminal B exterior view.  Architect:Corgan Assoc., Dallas

Donald Lipski, virtual installation view of “Acorn Steam”

Sacramento already has a museum-quality collection of public art scattered within a stone’s throw of the State Capitol. It includes pieces by Alice Aycock, Stephen Kaltenbach, Jennifer Bartlett, William Wiley, Jenny Holzer, Deborah Oropallo, Deborah Butterfield, William Allan, Robert Brady, Nathan Oliveira, Lita Albuquerque and Mark di Suvero to name but a few. In all, there are more than 650 pieces of public art in its domain. Problem is, unless you work for the state or have reason to do business with the government in-person, it’s unlikely that you will ever see many of these works – although you could have seen quite a few of them had you taken one of the tours offered last year by SMAC.

Joan Moment, “A Fragment of the Universe", 2009, 24 x 36 inches, acrylic on paper; virtual view of the piece as a 12 x 18-foot glass teserae floor

 

The remake of Terminal B addresses the visibility issue by masterfully integrating art and architecture. It was not an easy feat. With its curved roof, floor-to-ceiling windows and sweeping, light-suffused vistas, the building doesn’t exactly offer a surfeit of hospitable places for displaying painting, sculpture, installation or video. Nevertheless, by working creatively with SMAC and with the architect, the artists, at least on paper, figured out how to install engaging works that complement the airport’s essential functions: parking, transportation, security, ticketing, baggage handling. 

 

A preview of what it will all look like is on view at the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento through May 16.  The show (In Public: Designing Art for the Sacramento International Airport) consists of architectural drawings, models, video presentations and original paintings. The paintings, by Suzanne Adan and Joan Moment, will be translated to glass teserae mosaics by Franz Mayer of Munich, widely regarded as the world’s leading fabricator of glass for contemporary art installations.  Overall, the exhibition achieves its goal of demonstrating the process by which works of public art come into being; that is, the revisions that an artist must make to satisfy structural, safety, security, aesthetic and budgetary requirements. 

 

What a show like this can’t possibly communicate is the complexity of the overall process.  To get an idea of what’s involved, I spoke to Shelly Willis, program manager of SMAC’s Art in Public Places Program. What follows is a condensed version of our conversation.

 

Sculptor Lawrence Argent and Shelly Willis, program director, Sacramento’s Art in Public Places program  Photo: Lawrence Campling

David M. Roth: Bringing the outside world into the interior of the airport seems to be the connecting thread for most of the pieces in this project. Why was that important?

 

Shelly Willis: "Bringing the outside in" is one of the underlying building design concepts. As the artists began developing their designs, I suggested they consider this as a foundation for their work. Thus far, all but one of the artists uses this idea in their work.  

 

Sacramento actually has quite a bit of great public art, a lot of it by well-known artists, both local and national. What does the art in this project bring to Sacramento that’s new and exciting?

 

All of the work in the project looks like art. I know this may sound strange, but sometimes when artists are required to create functional works of art (benches, tree grates, fences), it can disappear into the building. This work will not. The "outside-in" idea prevents that from happening. It serves as a theme that holds the work together as if it was curated by one person.

 

Most people have no idea how complicated it is to integrate art into a construction project this size.  Give us a brief idea of what it takes to bring a project like this from conception to completion. 

 

The process began two years ago with a plan that had three phases.  The first was a limited competition for works that are part of the building’s structure. These have to be planned early on because the art is literally part of the structure. The artist and the architect have to work cooperatively.

 

 Terminal B, Interior View. Architect: Corgan Assoc., Dallas

The remaining 10 artworks were selected in a second phase that began with a nationwide call for qualified artists. 503 artists responded.   I convened seven panels of community members. Depending on the project, the panels met three to six times to select the artists and to approve designs. Each panel, after reviewing the nominees, narrows its selection down to a group of finalists. From there, a winner is selected who then submits a proposal. The proposal is generally revised quite a few times before it is accepted by the panel. After that, it must be approved by the Arts Commission and by the Board of Supervisors. There’s a third phase that will involve three additional artworks, two in the international terminal and one on the South Lawn. The artists have yet to be selected.

 

How much of what you described is your direct responsibility?

 

I direct the program which means I manage the process from start to finish.

 

What distinct challenges did this project present for artists?

 

Overall, I think time is the biggest issue. Meaning, I wish we had more of it! However, each project has its own set of challenges.

Christian Moeller: long view of untitled baggage claim worker portrait, “bit-map” images in wood

 

Public art commissions are seen as big paydays for the artists, and because of that the competition is always intense, and the results are often hotly debated both by artists and the public. What steps did you take to ensure a fair and transparent process?

 

Christian Moeller: (detail) of untitled portrait of baggage claim workers using wood shelving to create wall-sized “bit-map” images

I don’t know about "big paydays". In this project artists are restricted to receiving a maximum of 15% of the budget for design and project management.   The remaining 85% of the budget is used for fabrication and installation. But, yes the competition is fierce – and that is as it should be.   There is a lot of pressure on everyone involved. The artist wants to make a great work of art without compromise. Staff wants to run a flawless process. The panel wants to jury the work at the highest level possible, and of course the Commission and Board want to provide the highest level of project oversight. Nobody wants to make a mistake and everyone wants success. From the very start, every part of the process is held in open public meetings.

 

Was the composition of each selection panel the same, i.e. equally divided between county officials and art professionals? 

 

It was about 50/50. Every panel included the architect, three County officials, a commissioner, and at least 3 arts professionals. 

 

How were the nominees for each of the projects selected?

 

The majority of these artists were selected in an open competition. Seven of the ten opportunities seen in this exhibition were restricted to artists residing in Northern California. Limited or direct selection processes are not the rule. However in addition to trying to reach as many artists as possible through an RFQ (request for

qualifications), I always do research and invite artists to apply to particular projects based on the purpose of the art at the site or what the public wants the artists to "do". This is an important distinction. My research is rarely, if ever, based on what the public wants the artwork to "be". Artists, especially those who have not made public art before, may not be plugged into the public art network; so like any contemporary art curator or historian, I am always researching, reading, looking at art and encouraging artists to apply to particular projects.

 

Mildred Howard, untitled glass house

How many artists were presented to panelists during the first round of the selection process?

 

It was different for each panel. It varied from about 30 to 250 artists.

 

In public art projects there is always a battle over what portion of the total project cost will be used to calculate the art budget. How did this all play out with the Terminal B project?

 

The Sacramento County code applies to all public projects, not just the Sacramento County Airport System. Unless a different amount is directed by the Board of Supervisors, two percent of the total construction costs of the eligible projects is allocated to art. For this project the Board of Supervisors approved an amount less than the normal 2% called for by the County’s Ordinance for the airport art budget. 

 

What, then, is the total budget for art in this project?

 

$8 million dollars was allocated to the art program. $5 million dollars for art. $1 million for administration of the program (any amount not used for administration will be used for art), and $2 million dollars to be set aside for an endowment. 

 

There was quite a flap last year about that, about money that was allocated to maintenance rather than to funding new works of art in the airport. What are your feelings about that?  

 

Establishing an endowment was a brilliant and visionary decision by the Board. The interest from the endowment will be used to maintain the artwork and to fund temporary public artworks at the airport.  

 

Suzanne Adan, “Flying Colors”, 2009, 16 x 22 inches, oil on paper; virtual view of the piece as a 12 x 18-foot glass teserae floor

Tell us about your background in public art.

 

My love of public art began in 1986 when I read a description of the public art program at the California Arts Council. It was fate, I guess. Although I’ve curated a number of exhibitions in traditional exhibition spaces over the past 20 plus years, my work inevitably moves out of traditional exhibition spaces and into the community.   I came to Sacramento after six years of managing the University of Minnesota public art program where I directed the development and installation of temporary and permanent public artworks on campus throughout the University of Minnesota system. I developed a public art minor program at the University, the first program of its kind in the United States, which has yet to be launched, and taught courses in public art in the Department of Urban Studies and the Department of Landscape Architecture. Among other writings, my essay on the state of public art education in the United States was published by Americans for the Arts in the book titled Public Art by the Book, edited by Barbara Goldstein.  I am also co-editor of the book, Public Art Practice, published by Routledge New York in the spring of 2008. I think I am proudest though, of some of the work I did while working for the City of Fairfield and in Sonoma where I produced works of temporary public art. 

 

Besides the airport project, what other public art projects are you currently managing?

 

Lynn Criswell, model for one segment of a 18 x 30-foot terrazzo floor mosaic, “As the Crow Flies”

The Art in Public Places Program has a small staff that includes myself, a project manager, and program assistant, a part time education coordinator, and a person who works with us part time on maintenance issues. Together we maintain a collection of more than 650 works of art. We produce 12 exhibitions annually in public spaces. We’ve got seven new public art projects in the pipeline and approximately another 15 in the works — not including the airport. 

 

Among local art professionals, it’s a fairly well-known fact that you work a crazy-busy schedule. Give us a glimpse if you will.

 

My average work week is 60 hours. In any given day I can be figuring out how to deal with the tile that is falling off a major work of art, talking to an artist about how to best present their ideas in a public process, developing the budget for a new project, giving a talk about the history of public art to a panel, writing a press release, and researching the artists for a new project.   It’s impossible to be bored and not feel vital in this job. 

 

What other things would you like people to know about this project that I haven’t asked you?

 

I care deeply about this work because I’ve seen it create real and substantial change in communities across the country. 

 – DAVID M. ROTH

 

In Public: Designing Art for the Sacramento International Airport @ Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento through May 16, 2010.  

 

"Good Enough to Eat (2)", 1971, watercolor, gouache, and graphite on board, 20.75 x 25 inches

Art that engages with the politics of gendered subjectivity frequently references the body.  As Margaret Harrison understands fully, there are reasons for the prevalence of this thematic emphasis.  First, the body, we are conditioned to believe, is the place where sexual and gendered subjectivity reside.  In the late 1960s, the representation of female bodies in a range of media and genres achieved prominence in art produced by feminist activists.  Women launching careers in the arts at this time adopted a range of positions vis-à-vis the representation of gendered subjectivity.  Harmony Hammond, Howardena Pindell, Lynda Benglis, and Louise Fishman, among others, embraced abstraction in part because of its resistance to body-centered essentialism.  At the same time, performance artists such as Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Eleanor Antin, and VALIE EXPORT variously dramatized the status of the female body as a site of subjugation.  Judy Chicago, with her collectively produced monument The Dinner Party (1974-79), and Tee A. Corinne, with The Cunt Coloring Book (1975), also deployed essentialism strategically, mobilizing  in-your-face vaginal forms to both provoke and counteract phobic patterns of response to the female body and its parts.  Path-breaking feminist artists from Barbara Kruger to Nicole Eisenman focused on the ways that visual culture mediates gendered power relations.  Harrison’s early work played similarly with the gender codes of popular culture and the sexual politics of consumerism.

"Heroes (1): What’s That Long Red Limp Wrinkly Thing You’re Putting On", 2009, water color, colored pencil, and graphite on board, 24 x 19 inches

In 1970 she participated in the formation of the London Women’s Liberation Art Group. The next year, the London police shut down Harrison’s first solo show the day after it opened at Motif Editions Gallery due to the controversial character of works with titles such as Ejaculor.  This swift act of suppression turned Harrison’s gallery debut into an inadvertent performance piece, demonstrating the brutality of the value system critiqued by these censored works: pin-ups pushed to the extremes of their objectifying logic and gender-bending perversions of comic-book heroism.  The works were stored away and not exhibited again for decades. Key works–Captain America, for one–were lost.

Harrison subsequently switched her representational tactics. Still thinking through how the gender system polices its interests and imposes its constraints visually, she began to explore subtler ways to engage viewers–by using mixed-media collage and the representation of emblematic objects, for instance.  Her 2004 show at Intersection for the Arts, Beautiful Ugly Violence, featured a series of exemplary still life paintings focused on small household objects and appliances: a pair of scissors, an electric tea pot, a telephone, a set of kitchen knives. These fixtures of domestic life, pictured from awkward angles at uncomfortably close removes, take on disturbing qualities generally cloaked in typical portrayals of domestic bliss.  The outsized scale of the paintings contributes to an effect of disorientation.  The only still life that appears overtly violent, a handgun resting on the folds of a satin bed sheet, is rendered oddly banal within the context of this series, just as the violence of innocuous household objects is proportionately heightened by the presence of this weapon.

"Captain America (2)", 1997, watercolor and graphite on paper, 26 x 18.25 inches

Never abandoning her feminist commitments, Harrison has, since the 1970s, continuously explored the politics of domesticity, addressing issues that range from domestic labor to sex trafficking to genital mutilation and domestic abuse. Her work tracks the relationship of gender oppression in the domestic arena to global economic and political systems. Bodies Are Back, at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, features some of the paintings and drawings for which Harrison achieved notoriety in 1971. These include a re-creation of her lost piece Captain America.  This portrays the American comic book icon in dominatrix drag, with projectile breasts, black stockings, and stiletto heels. The show juxtaposes vintage pieces (and reproductions of vintage pieces) along with new works created expressly for this occasion. As the title of the show discloses, the artist again adopts the human figure as the site of sexual subjection and consumption.  Many of these works are rendered in watercolor, a medium long associated with women and amateurs.  The new works, in dialog with the originals, open additional registers of visual culture to feminist critique, using high-art icons.  Harrison confronts pop heroes from Dolly Parton to Batman with canonical works of art—Diego Velázquez’s Infanta, Edouard Manet’s Olympia, Willem de Kooning’s Woman, and Allen Jones’ Table—in which the objectified/commodified female body plays a starring role.

Has Harrison’s early work retained its power to disturb?  Pieces from the 1970s such as Good Enough to Eat, and Mrs. Softie, where bustier-clad seductresses serve as sandwich meat or ice-cream toppings, seem almost quaint in today’s media-jaded and putatively “post-feminist” era.

"Mrs. Softie No. 2", 1970, watercolor and graphite on paper, 30 x 22.5 inches

Incursions into the high-art arena by artists from the Guerilla Girls, with their billboard critiques of Met acquisition policies, to Yasumasa Morimura, with his queer re-performances of masterworks, such as Velázquez Infanta and Manet’s Olympia (both also cited by Harrison), locate Harrison’s most recent works within a long history of critical interventions into visual art canons.

While the show might leave some habitués of feminist art with a sense of déjà-trop-vu, the work has important lessons to impart to a new generation of viewers. Intersection for the Arts should be applauded not only for supporting a historically important feminist artist, but also for seizing this opportunity to create an innovative forum of intergenerational dialog.  In anticipation of Harrison’s show, Intersection partnered with LYRIC (Lavender Youth Recreation & Information Center) to host a series of workshops focused on gender-based oppression and modes of print-culture activism.  Framed in this way, The Bodies Are Back, in addition to its visual pleasures and piquant wit, transmits historical wisdom about gender oppression and its mechanisms while demonstrating the stamina of the feminist art resistance.

–TIRZA TRUE LATIMER

Margaret Harrison: The Bodies are Back @ Intersection for the Arts, through March 27, 2010.

Tirza True Latimer is Chair of Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

“Cover” image: Allen Jones & The P.T.A. (Dolly Parton/Allen Jones “Table” sculpture), 2010, watercolor, and graphite on paper, 11 x 15 inches.

“The Secretary of State”, 2005, oil on canvas, 18” x 24 ¼ inches

Belgian painter Luc Tuymans has breathed new energy into painting by pretending to drain the life out of it.  His paintings, which are short on information, long on implication, parade their emptiness.  But they also pack a punch.  Like a postmodern Marlow, Tuymans plies the river of civilization’s discontents.  He’s armed with a paintbrush, but not much hope for humanity.

Tuymans, whose retrospective opened last week at SF MOMA, is a history painter.  His paintings of the Holocaust, Flemish nationalism, Belgian colonialism and post-9/11 America are based on photography, television, cinema, and to a lesser extent, on art history.  But unlike the artist to which he is most often compared – Gerhard Richter — Tuymans filters his synthesis of art history through his experience making movies.  In the 1980s he quit painting for five years and made experimental films that allowed him to find a meaningful way back into his chosen medium.  He did this by looking closely at his films’ components parts, reveling in individual frames and barely recognizable artifacts.

“Gas Chamber”, 1986, oil on canvas, 24 x 32 inches

That investigation deeply influenced all of his subsequent work, particularly his series about perception, At Random.  He has also worked with a Polaroid camera to document his surroundings, relying on the gel of the developing image to inspire paintings that read like murky pools inhabited by ghosts.  Equally influential are the photographs he takes of magazines and television images, which he often re-photographs to give himself a working model of how media images remain in memory.

If you feel an icy remove while looking at Tuymans’ paintings, it’s because the subjects themselves are often wrenched out of context.  Tuymans’ specialty is the incoherent fragment — a closely cropped image rendered in pale and sometimes putrid color, made indecipherable through a diminished or total absence of almost all of the elements that define a picture.

“Himmler”, 1998, oil on canvas, 53 x 40 1/8 inches

“This device,” writes co-curator Helen Molesworth, “lends a sick, chemically saturated quality to the palette.”  His omission of gloss from his oils further flattens his spatially starved paintings.  The result is a confusing, yet oddly compelling mix of painterly clumsiness and pictorial elegance.

Thus, we enter Tuymans’ works through their titles and wall texts, and because those documents often reference horrific events, it is impossible not to look.  Once you do you’re caught in a visual-linguistic crossfire — between titles that jolt and paintings that speak in a whisper, and sometimes not even that.  (“My paintings are silent,” the artist told a museum lecture audience.) Crudely affixed to their supports and painted quickly and casually, his pictures appear — even when richly hued — to be monochromatic, as if dipped in fog.  They are ostensibly representational; yet most of the “facts” — people, buildings, furnishings, and landscapes – are abstract and out-of-focus, like “a videotape paused on a primitive VCR,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in a New Yorker review of the show after its U.S. tour began last fall at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus.  The banal results of this willful obfuscation might lead you to conclude that Tuymans’ paintings are inconsequential.  But they are not.  Like malicious computer worms, his pictures, once lodged, have a way of invading your brain.

“Peter”, 1994, oil on canvas, 21 ½ x 29 ½ inches

His most controversial and easily most difficult painting, Gas Chamber, is unrecognizable as such.  It’s a room with a drain in the center, its fake showerheads represented by inchoate marks.  The horror of it doesn’t lie in what actually happened; it’s that such horrors can be depicted so plainly.  The Architect, a picture of Albert Speer on skis, is even more anonymous; the face is obliterated, blinded to the havoc wreaked by its owner and, by extension, the Nazi war machine.  Similarly, in Reparations, two montages – one of eyes, one of limbs – it’s a wall text that informs us that they are derived from photographs of medical experiments.  To look is to assume, in a detached sense, the position of Josef Mengele: that atrocities qualify as medical research.

“Mwana Kitodo”, 2000, oil on canvas, 81 ¾ x 35 3/8 inches

Our New Quarters is a crude painting of an actual Nazi-era postcard that had those words superimposed on a picture of the Theresienstadt death camp.  It was given to prisoners to send home.  This re-presented document, likening a concentration camp to a family vacation, sums up as well as anything the sadistic pathology of genocide.  

Some observers, including Schjeldahl, have alleged that his choice of subject matter is a ploy to get people to look at his paintings.  That may be true in some measure; but it’s no shtick.  His family divided over the war: his father’s brothers, one of whom Tuymans is named after, fought with the Nazis and were disowned by the artist’s paternal grandmother after they fled the German army.   His wife’s family fought in the resistance and hid Jews. When things got tense around the Tuymans household, the past reared its ugly head. 

In person, Tuymans, 51, is a passionate, animated, voluble and physically imposing man.  When he speaks about the abuse of power, whether perpetrated by nations, religious authorities, individuals or corporations, he does so with a visceral antipathy. These emotions translate to canvas in several ways.  Faces of the vilest men are obscured by heavy shadows (Himmler); blotted out entirely (The Architect); or partially erased, as with Mwana Kitodo, a riveting portrait of the Belgian king of Congo whose nickname means “beautiful white boy.”  Elsewhere, Condoleezza Rice (The Secretary of State) and Klansman Joseph Milteer (The Heritage VI) are depicted chillingly, in a painterly, near-photorealistic manner; while the kitchen of a serial killer (Peter), from a forensic photograph, mimes the gestures, spatial sense and lighting of Cezanne.  

“Our New Quarters”, 1986, 31 ½ x 47 ¼ inches

“In the enigmatic reworking of this banal domestic scene,” writes historian Lanka Tattersall of Peter, “Tuymans ominously undercuts the distinction between generic everyday life and the disquiet of a crime scene.”

That disconnect, between appearance and reality, is, I believe, the true center of Tuymans’ oeuvre.  Whether sneering at bourgeoisie social conventions or savaging institutional powers that feed on human suffering, Tuymans is all about exposing horrors that carefully crafted appearances are designed to bury. 

Tuymans may be a difficult painter to like.  But he is even more difficult to ignore. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

 Luc Tuymans @ SFMOMA through May 2, 2010.