In San Diego, Public Art Is Still Hard to Define : Expert Admits It Has Polarized City

The arts continue to baffle, boggle and bewilder.

Last week during a hearing on its new allocation process for transient occupancy tax dollars, the city’s Commission for Arts and Culture was stumped by Councilwoman Judy McCarty.

Miffed because the commission had the temerity to suggest that maybe the Hall of Champions sports museum did not come under the general rubric of culture, McCarty, a Hall of Champions partisan, said, OK, define culture.

The silence of the commission was deafening.

Meanwhile, art in public places or public art, continues to be one of the city’s least prominent and most divisive elements. Enter Richard Andrews, who Thursday night gave a witty and eye-opening history of public art at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s Sherwood Auditorium.

No wonder we are bewildered. Public art ain’t what it used to be. Using slides for illustration, Andrews traced the course of public art for the 200 people who attended the talk. He showed an evolutionary progression from public monument (the Lincoln Memorial), to landmark (the Eiffel Tower), to smaller art objects (Rodin’s “The Thinker”), and finally to an object of the artist’s expression. Today all of the above apply, as well as art that is designed for a specific site.

Andrews is one of the foremost authorities on public art in America. He is director of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle and was chief of the visual-arts program for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1985 to 1987. Before that, he ran Seattle’s model public art program.

The Seattle program is now 26 years old and boasts more than 1,400 works of public art including 40 to 50 major artworks, Andrews estimated. But placing public art in Seattle, or any city, is almost never easy, he said.

Andrews acknowledged that the issue of public art has polarized San Diego, but over the course of his talk, offered ideas that could help make a program here successful.

The emphasis has to be on hiring artists, not on “buying things,” Andrews said. It’s a waste of time to try to predict in advance what an artist will do. The best a government program can do is to sign up the best artists.

The process of selecting artists must be acceptable to the public. Artists have always played a role in building cities. In the past, they were chosen by the church, the local prince or the government to memorialize individuals. In a democracy, the people must be involved at some stage. Andrews suggested that a good place for public involvement is to have an acceptable selection process.

Choose “the strongest artist, the strongest possible mind,” he advised. The best work comes from the best artist. By the same token, avoid the strategy of choosing easy, “happy-face” art as the initial piece. It can become addictive, Andrews warned.

Similarly, he suggested not picking the most beautiful spot in the city for an artwork that would only draw attention to itself. A better location might be found in the urban core, in blighted, or redeveloping areas that need improving. The creative minds of artists, he said, could be engaged in improving neighborhoods, along with those of planners, architects and landscape architects.

In Seattle, artists were signed up for the design stages of a series of power substations. They brought whimsy and color in the form of decorative whirligigs and yellow, green and pink pastel transformers.

Andrews said art is one of the important tools that can be applied to urban renewal. However, when public art is the only tool, the best it can be is a Band-Aid.

Politicians should not not be discouraged by the naysayers. Those yelling no will always be more vocal than those in favor of anything, whether it is a park, a freeway or public art, he contends.

Public art, Andrews said, has evolved from a means of evoking commonly held memories, history and emotions to a personal expression of the artist. It is ironic however, that in a nation that reveres the creative entrepreneur, originality and personal expression in public art are anathema, he said.

Andrews held out hope that public art will grow in San Diego, especially as long as the city has an art-in-public-places program tied to the city’s capital building budget.

That will take time, years even. For now San Diego’s arts concerns are more basic. Like defining culture.