For Art’s Sake - Going public

Public art initiatives run the gamut from ridiculous to sublime

You have to have a sense of humor to live in Atlanta. The city’s inferiority complex in matters of culture can be so backward, you have to laugh to keep from crying.

What city, other than Las Vegas, could come up with a notion as goofy as Millennium Gate, an $18 million, 73-foot spin on the Arc de Triomphe plopped in the middle of Atlantic Station’s prefab city?

While one camp gets all juiced up about the future, others pine wistfully for the past. Rodney M. Cook Jr. (the local designer who erected the World Athletes Monument at Pershing Point), is in the latter camp. A man with a mission to bring classical architecture to the city, he conceived and financed the gate through private donations. It’s scheduled for completion in 2006.

Rooted in the tradition of Greek and Roman design and notions of incontestable aesthetic ideals, the Millennium Gate tends toward the ornate, featuring figures of angels and other sculptures embellishing the arch and two flanking monuments tricked out like a neoclassical wedding cake. The monument suggests that Atlanta can manufacture civic solidarity and local pride by simply importing established high art values, instead of finding something that might suit the unique circumstance of the city.

The arch was collaboratively designed by a team of 10 artists selected from around the world in an international competition presided over by a panel of judges drawn from outside Atlanta. London-based firm Robert Adam Architects will oversee construction.

The design feels paradoxical — trying to make Atlantic Station’s manufactured city into a real city while also asserting that legitimacy can only be found in the past. It was a generous gesture on Atlantic Station developer Jim Jacoby’s part to donate a piece of hot property for the project. But in a more perfect world, the arch might have used local architects working with regional artists and allowed an organic, unique design to emerge instead of imposing a classical one ill-suited to its surroundings. Such a monument could have promoted the importance of the city in tangible ways and given Atlantans a sense of ownership of the site, instead of implying, yet again, that the city must look outside its borders for talent.

Cook may have respectable goals for Atlanta in mind, but more likely, Cook’s stab at civic immortality will become yet another tourist trap embraced by visitors but not the city itself, and an indication of the oddball historical mishmash Atlanta loves in its postmodern office buildings and its neo-Victorian McMansions.

Luckily, there are some other changes afoot on the public art front to offer some hope that Atlanta won’t be remembered in history as the Capitol of Faux-Antiquity.

On Oct. 18, after much angry discussion and insistent pressure from Atlanta’s arts community, Mayor Shirley Franklin has made good on her promise to put public art on her agenda by establishing a Public Art Advisory Committee, which includes two Atlanta artists with a long history on the arts scene, Gregor Turk and Lisa Tuttle. The committee will hopefully push against the mighty fortress of bureaucracy to force implementation of the Public Art Master Plan, which requires that 1.5 percent of all municipal construction budgets be spent on public art.

Though still in the early stages, another group of art activists are hoping to bring a more grassroots form of public art to Atlanta’s largest public space, Freedom Park. Spearheaded by local artist and activist Evan Levy, the group has been working with the Freedom Park Conservancy to create Art in Freedom Park this spring, an installation of various low-impact, temporary works by local artists.

Public art was also one of the best, lo-fi features in this year’s Atlanta Celebrates Photography event. Peter Bahouth is a self-taught artist and, ironically, a consultant on Atlantic Station’s environmental initiatives. For years he has collected stereoscopic photographs, amassing a collection of 2,600 vintage and personal images.

For his witty Post No Bills project, on exhibit through Nov. 20, Bahouth installed viewing devices outfitted with stereoscopic cards at locations around the city, from the Decatur courthouse to Georgia Tech’s Technology Square.

Bahouth’s pastoral, whimsy-driven images of primitive rope bridges or a red car puttering through a mountain drive offer a momentary escape from the city’s corporate environs and take full advantage of pedestrian-friendly spaces.

Somehow, Bahouth says, the project was able to capture the imagination of both the property owners and city officials who approved it, and the regular folk who took to Post No Bills like an orphaned doll baby. Workers occasionally chased away anyone who vandalized the viewers, and one maintenance worker at Tech Square chastised someone for tampering with the piece.

“Don’t you know a local artist made that?” he asked.

It’s that kind of personal and citywide embrace of art that public projects should be aiming for.

Felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com