VISUAL ARTS / LEAH OLLMAN : Muting the Criticism of Public Art

Private money, public art.

The marriage, if not made in heaven, is at least relatively free of the possessive pandering that goes on with the pairing of public money and public art.

The use of public funds calls for a degree of public accountability that art programs nationwide have found difficult to meet. From Richard Serra’s infamous “Tilted Arc” in Manhattan’s Federal Plaza to Vito Acconci’s and Roberto Salas’ doomed proposals for San Diego’s Spanish Landing, dissatisfaction and dismay, anger and antagonism have marred attempts at placing art in the public domain.

When private interests pick up the tab, however, public outrage is muffled, if not silenced. Tolerance steps in as financial responsibility steps out, making it easier for the offended to simply look away, rather than staging a clamorous revolt.

Few serious complaints have been heard, for instance, about the works in the Stuart Collection on the campus of UC San Diego. Crude jokes have been made at the expense of William Tucker’s “Okeanos,” recently installed in front of the Scripps Clinic, but so far no one has called for the sculpture’s removal.

Private funding is the key, for all of these works are both challenging and publicly accessible, usually too volatile a combination to be bought by public funds.

Battery Park City, a development on the southwestern tip of Manhattan that promises to house the largest outdoor public art collection in the country when completed in the 1990s, is a fine model of the private sponsorship/public use approach. Its 92 acres of Hudson River landfill extend New York City’s financial district to the shoreline, where the tight labyrinth of high-rises relaxes before an open vista to the Statue of Liberty and the state of New Jersey.

Developers, architects and artists teamed up to shape each facet of the development, from its dense commercial core (the multitowered World Financial Center) to its esplanade along the waterfront, punctuated by parks and plazas. Battery Park City’s master plan, drawn up in 1979 and now roughly half realized, also calls for 10,000 residential units, a hotel, high school, marina and Holocaust museum.

The principle of “civic responsibility” guided Financial Center architect Cesar Pelli in his collaboration with artists Scott Burton and Siah Armajani on the Center’s large public plaza and seems to have been instrumental throughout the art-related sections of the development. The seven nationally and internationally acclaimed artists commissioned to participate in the design of the public spaces are known for their environmental and site-related installations, works quite remote in concept from the tradition of dropping a monumental signature piece in the public square.

As a result, art creeps into the crevices and along the borders of Battery Park City as an intangible stimulus, a provocation, an enticement to consider new perspectives. It never announces itself with grand, self-conscious gestures, but instead encourages a heightened, personal experience of its site.

Artist Mary Miss collaborated with architect Stanton Eckstut and landscape architect Susan Child on a three-acre park imbued with a sense of its own past, recalled through the use of wood-plank walkways along the water, blue glass nautical lanterns and only slightly refined plots of natural vegetation. An elevated lookout deck of black painted metal slides gracefully into the sleek and streamlined present, while offering visitors a place to reflect on their own position in time and space.

Ned Smyth’s “The Upper Room” also serves as a stirring bridge between the past and the present, a gateway from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on one side to the forest of urbanity on the other. A plateau, framed by columns of pale red aggregate studded with stones, it welcomes pedestrians with an oasis of calm.

Though lacking a roof and solid walls, the room stands apart from its secular surroundings as a temple of repose. Its forms recall ancient Egyptian and Greek sources, while its long table of inlaid chessboards accommodates modern means of meditation as well. Simple, yet somehow spiritual, Smyth’s “Upper Room” interrupts its stark and anonymous setting with a reminder of the magical, the elegant, the hand-crafted.

Other environmental installations by Richard Artschwager, R. M. Fischer and Jennifer Bartlett are in varied states of completion, and the plans for each prove them equally sensitive to the human requisites of public spaces, especially in a neighborhood dominated by the efficient, anonymous and gray. Not one of the works could be considered threatening or disturbing--which in certain circles might diminish their importance--but they are all challenging in their own rewarding ways.

The artists were selected by a Fine Arts Committee that included architect Michael Graves, art historians Linda Nochlin and Robert Rosenblum, Whitney Museum curator Barbara Haskell and Museum of Modern Art curator Linda Shearer as well as others in the field of art and architecture. Revenues from the private developers leasing space in Battery Park City were used to fund the Fine Arts Program, which was conceived as a parallel to the percent-for-art programs now in practice in numerous cities across the country.

By integrating art intelligently into the built environment, the Battery Park City Fine Arts Program helps nudge the public’s sensitivity to its surroundings onto a higher plane. It is a thoughtful approach that deserves a like response from its visitors, one that might be gauged not only by the future popularity of the area but also by the mood in which the next wave of publicly funded art proposals is received.