For Art’s Sake - Worlds collide
Art activist hits High; public art installed at Lindbergh
An artist with a bold desire to make a political statement took it upon him or herself to hang a piece of artwork on the walls of the High Museum’s Permanent Collection Gallery on June 2. An Atlanta police report described the artwork, accompanied by text that read: “bang Bush,” as “unauthorized graffiti.” According to Marion Lee, a spokeswoman for the police department’s Public Affairs Unit, the piece featured a caricature of President Bush in place of George Washington’s head on a dollar bill.
In light of the nationwide crackdown on freedom of expression in the wake of 9/11 and the recent physical attack on a San Francisco art dealer who displayed a painting inspired by the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, the artist may have chosen an inopportune moment to make a political statement. Atlanta Police and members of Homeland Security were called to the scene, where they dusted for fingerprints and viewed tapes from the museum’s security cameras. Lee says they may be close to an arrest in the case.
Art folk know how desperately the city’s artists need the financial and moral support of Atlanta’s corporate leaders. If the arts stay some esoteric hobby of the few, it is to the disadvantage of the arts and the community as a whole.
The ideal scenario in Atlanta’s cash-strapped, benefactor-eager art world is when corporate America takes notice.
And just such a scenario unfolded recently with the dedication of new public sculptures commissioned by Carter & Associates, master developer for Lindbergh City Center on Piedmont Road. The collision of corporate money and art world figures lent a certain Old South-meets-New element to the proceedings that could have been lifted straight out of Tom Wolfe’s carnivalesque A Man in Full. Artists Zachary Coffin, Anthony Liggins and Phil Proctor were all present (save fourth sculptor Wayne Trapp) to watch their large-scale sculptures ushered into permanency with some modest fanfare. Also on hand were representatives of MARTA singing the praises of their multiuse transportation hub for cutting down on traffic, pollution and commute times, as well as the tall, tanned reps from the development and corporate sides with their plummy Southern accents and cotillion manners.
The presence of these four artists’ works certainly makes the area feel less like a soulless concrete holding pen for godforsaken commuters and more like a manufactured main street evoked in street names like Camellia and Magnolia lanes.
The faux-village’s money shot is Coffin’s impressive, kinetic “Hydrogen,” a 40-foot-tall model of a hydrogen atom that rises from the development’s most visible point. In yet another remarkable instance of worlds colliding, Coffin’s sculptures now appear simultaneously in locations that speak to the odd but beneficial culture clashes happening on the city’s landscape — in this Buckhead neo-thoroughfare, and the grittier, old industry artist hub of the West End’s City View Sculpture Park.
Some have suggested that privately funded public art means fewer risks taken, an argument that could be supported by the admittedly inoffensive, abstract works at Lindbergh. But if tentative efforts at supporting public art and creativity on any stage, public or private, are supported, then maybe one day, true, grand risk taking will follow.
Despite its undeniable insights into Henry Darger’s life, Jessica Yu’s documentary In the Realms of the Unreal, screening June 17 and June 19 at the Atlanta Film Festival (www.imagefv.org), for me, brought up troubling issues surrounding the perception of outsider artists, who are never given the same sense of agency as “legitimate” ones. When Darger died in 1973, his landlords discovered a massive 15,000-page fantasy novel complete with gory, impossibly strange illustrations of sweet little girls fighting grown men in a Christian holy war. Those exquisite, bizarre artworks have since made Darger an art world legend. But there were few witnesses to this reclusive Chicago janitor’s eccentricities to give insight into his work. So instead, Yu animates the drawings themselves to tell Darger’s story.
It’s hard to imagine a filmmaker taking the liberty of “animating” a Cy Twombly canvas or making one of Warhol’s Marilyns talk, but there is often a presumption made with outsider, “eccentric” art that issues of artistic integrity are less relevant. A disturbing aftertaste lingers over the fact that Darger’s solitude and lack of resources continue in his posthumous treatment, with no friends or family to protect his work.
Look more
- Hinting at the religious ecstasies and altered consciousness encouraged in ecclesiastical architecture, David Stephenson’s color Dome Photographs take a lowly human vantage looking straight up into the god’s eye of these soaring, fantastical structures. Stephenson’s stunning, kaleidoscopic surveys of myriad domes, from Hungarian synagogues to Spanish cathedrals, will be on view at Jackson Fine Art through June 26 (www.jacksonfineart.com).