From Stalin to TipiGate: Public Art and its Discontents
By Tom Pazderka
Throughout history, public art has had a tenuous relationship with the public. When times are good, they’re really good for public art; when times are bad, they’re really bad for public art.
Shortly after the death of Josef Stalin, the largest statue depicting the Soviet leader was dynamited in Prague in the former Czechoslovakia. The artist committed suicide, his reputation ruined forever. Sadly, he never wanted to have the monument built in the first place and only did so because of the pressure the politburo placed on him. The spot where Stalin used to stand was empty until just after the 1989 revolution against the Communist dictatorship, when a giant inflatable ‘statue’ of Michael Jackson appeared in its place in 1996 promoting his tour across the newly ‘liberated’ Eastern Europe that kicked off in Prague.
In 1991, also in Prague, the artist David Cerny and a few of his friends, used pink paint to cover the Monument to Soviet Tank Crews, which consisted of a real Soviet T-4 tank on top of a pedestal, apparently in protest of the Communist regime’s past occupation. This action, his arrest, and the notoriety and heated debate it sparked, made Cerny famous overnight. He was released shortly from prison, but the tank kept getting repainted back to official green, then back to pink again in an ideological tug of war on the edge of revolution, when it still wasn’t quite clear which way the political tide was headed. Eventually, the tank was removed and now sits quietly in a military museum 20 miles south of Prague.
In a similar instance in 2011, a monument to the Soviet army in Bulgaria was painted over to resemble Marvel superheroes, creating a debate over what the sculpture meant and stood for in those times. Opponents pointed out the sculpture’s allegiance to a heinous past and its symbolic occupational overtones, while proponents countered with the Soviets’ role in defeating Nazism and the cynical attempt to erase the memory of the countless faceless people that perished in that war.
That same monument continues to be the target of ‘vandalism’ to this day, as people and artists of various political leanings use it to communicate to one another their version of history like a giant message board. Toppling statues has a long and strained history in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, or anywhere with a colonial past. Public art plays a strange role once unleashed from the artist’s studio and into the world. Do we still remember the backlash that the Martin Luther King Jr. statue received when it was revealed that a Chinese artist and his studio were commissioned to produce it?
In some sense, public art functioned, and to some extent still does, the way that Twitter or Facebook do today, often sparking debates that go viral and then die down as people sift through the debris in the aftermath. Public art and especially statuary, signify and symbolize power and domination, regardless of the intention of the artist or the committee/benefactor that commissioned it. Once it is released upon the world, public art is endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted, making its original intention a moot point. The debate over iconography in Islamic art, for example, set off one of the most intense chapters in recent art history with the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015.
Even the most innocuous of public sculptures could be easily interpreted as machinations of government power structures, religious zealotry and attempts at neocolonization of an already subjugated indigenous peoples.
In one instance, a class of art students at a local Santa Barbara community college were used to erect a tipi for the Lucidity on the college property. What followed was a local uproar over the intentions behind the project and suspected cultural appropriation of indigenous Chumash culture that in local lore became known as TipiGate. Up through just recently, reverberations of that event still resonate. But it would be wrong-headed to think that the artists themselves or the people behind public art are not aware that these issues exist. In fact, it seems to be standard practice for public art committees to shut down projects that specifically address political issues of race, nationalism and religion—including issues pertaining to indigenous cultures—precisely because the fear of backlash and condemnation for cultural appropriation is very real.
This leads to very interesting scenarios when artworks go up that are meant and thought to be completely neutral and devoid of any political content, find themselves reinterpreted in those very terms. In a sense, it is impossible to be neutral these days. Art has a special tendency to hit people in a time and place, making it both ahistorical and an object of historicization at the same time. No public sculpture can be neutral even aesthetically. Consider that in Santa Barbara alone, each instance of a temporary public sculpture caused some form of controversy. People file complaints that the street pianos that go up once a year for two weeks distract office workers in a nearby building, that the quarter inch high steel plates that attach a sculpture to the sidewalk are a potential tripping hazard for the blind, that the abstract temporary sculptures placed beside a natural lake are ugly, distracting, an eye sore. Each complaint is in its own way valid.
Art has the specific quality of appealing or not appealing to individuals based on many different aspects and attributes. Just like with music, we have music we love and music we can’t stand the sound of. The difference is that not too often does music veer off into vast and drawn out contentious political debates. And this brings up the point that many artists tend to argue over, does art have the power to change the world?
In some sense it does, but in another, it assuredly does not. Art seems to be able to only amplify, in a similar way that Twitter does, the biases and predispositions of those audiences that consume it. Whatever political and social issues art is attempting to take part in or solve, were already there in another form. Art so often simply commemorates and engages with social issues in ways that mimic the social order and society at large.
This is precisely why so often public art is enmeshed in these types of political struggles, though to be sure, the removal of statues of known slave owners and genocidal priests should always be on the table, no matter the state of political climate. The major issues facing protests over statue removal are over real, tangible political gains and I’m afraid that without real political engagement and platforms, the statues themselves will remain what they were when they were standing, merely symbolic notions of power relations, though I do have some words from trusted sources that real politics are in the works.
Then there is the issue of the artists themselves. In a sense, artists are not equipped, by nature and/or by education, to deal with the very real social and political issues that concern the public. That is why they are artists and not politicians or lawyers. But artists do have opinions and views, especially concerning their own work and the work of other artists. But the world of art history and art theory is a place staffed mostly by non-artist professionals, historians, curators, directors and journalists, who bring with them their own specific interpretations. Artists themselves are often left out of the conversations that concern such great events of historical significance.
But do the artists have their own takes on them? You bet. The problem is that rather than talk or write about the issues surrounding art, an artist is more likely to make another artwork, which is then inevitably reinterpreted by the non-artist experts. And so, the world turns, or should we say, so the art world turns?
