Pasadena Project a Group Effort

With obvious interest we read Times Art Critic William Wilson’s report on Robert Irwin and the Pasadena Police Station art piece (Calendar, July 22). In it, Wilson promotes and perpetuates a naive, anachronistic view of artmaking as the effort of a “lone wolf, no club” artist.

The Pasadena project is hardly that.

It is, in fact, collaborative public art, created by three individuals who worked as a team: landscape architect Douglas Campbell, architect Regula Campbell and visual artist Robert Irwin, winners of an international invitational competition mounted in 1989 by the Pasadena Arts Commission. Wilson does a disservice to publicly sponsored (and funded) art collaborations in general, and even more destructively, ignores the significance and value of public art.

Wilson quotes Irwin as stating “public art implies the public has a voice in it” and then going on to note that the presumably higher “art in public places” he practices “means that art history itself is being acted out in the public arena. People use terms as if they are interchangeable. The patrons are naive and nice but when it comes down to it, what they often want is a Henry Moore.”

The article omits that the patrons of this piece, the residents of Pasadena, clearly stated in the competition rules that “the winning team will be commissioned to create and implement a total concept for the courtyard and landscape areas of the city’s new police building.”

In our view, this expression of the public voice is fundamental and essential to the understanding of the work. Public art collaborations are meant to bring together the perspectives of different artistic disciplines within a single project and are often intended to be site specific. Pasadena wanted more--a piece expressive of the special values of this community and Police Department and one which would enhance the relationship between the two.

It was these very conditions that encouraged us to accept their invitation to compete. We approached Robert Irwin with this in mind. While we had a general familiarity and enthusiasm for his work, it was our initial conversation and his agreement with the basic image we proposed for the piece--a strong, yet welcoming landscape consisting of a great tree set in a simple, serene courtyard--that led us to work together.

We intended this work to clearly respond to the competition guidelines. Pasadena is one of the few cities in the region that has consciously and consistently sought to preserve its native landscapes. This piece seeks to honor and build upon these efforts by evoking the most characteristic of these indigenous landscapes: the gently sloping oak-wooded alluvial plain and the sycamore-studded canyon of the Arroyo Seco.

Due to the content, configuration and the medium of the piece, it is obvious, even to Wilson, that this is primarily a work of landscape architecture. He credits us unintentionally by ludicrously stating that Irwin was “channeling famous landscape architects.”

In spite of the Old Guard Art Bureaucracy, a new direction in artmaking has emerged over the past decade. It seeks to replace the art object set in a plaza or garden--each the work of separate individuals--with an integrated environmental expression created by a team of landscape architects, architects and visual artists.

Just as the advent of performance art a generation ago provoked much controversy within the art community (i.e., Is it art? Or, more important to some, how do you sell it?), this new approach to public art, not only to the work itself but also the creative process as a collaborative effort, has raised some of the same questions. Concurrently, the dialogue raises questions regarding both the importance of public art as a means of expressing community in addition to individual values and the disciplines of landscape architecture and architecture as mediums of artistic expression. Naturally, this new direction has met with considerable resistance, especially by those with vested and emotional interests in the exclusionary “star-tist” system.

Wilson is correct in noting that “few cognoscenti” would look for a work of Irwin at the Pasadena Police Station, because, in fact, there isn’t one there. Instead, the police station frames a piece of collaborative public art.

We are pleased with the work. It is clearly successful in expressing our intentions. We look forward to its improvement over time, as the plantings mature to further shape its spaces and, more important, as the community embraces it as its own.

In this way, as a collaboration not only among a team of artists but also with a community, it will indeed “mean that art history is being acted out in the public arena,” though not as critic Wilson understands it.