The Superfluous People Test : MOCA exhibit raises an extremely uncomfortable question

Gaudily upholstered sofas on a public plaza. What do they mean? “Modern art,” smiles a portly visitor to the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. “Comfortable, though,” he adds, settling in. “I mean, considering.”

Considering what? Considering, perhaps, the increasingly defensive character of public accommodation in the United States. In New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, the benches in the lower-level waiting area have been replaced by cunning appliances designed to discourage sitting and altogether prevent reclining. Homeless New Yorkers have taken the point and gone elsewhere. Nationwide, the homeless have long since been barred from the larger, more obvious public spaces. Increasingly they are also denied the use of hitherto unnoticed corners of public land like freeway islands and under bridges.

The haggard wanderers who seem to appear in any unprotected public space are frightening less because they are threatening (they rarely are) than because they are a warning. “Where are we going to put these people?” is the visible, tangible form of a much broader, grimmer question: What, in the emerging world economy, are we going to do not just with “these people,” the desperate homeless, but with all the people whom a high-productivity, high-efficiency economy no longer needs?

With or without Bill Clinton, the end of welfare as we know it may be in view. But so may be the end of the job as we know it. Midway in an open-throttle economic recovery, the United States eliminated 108,946 jobs in January, an all-time one-month record. In 1993, 615,000 jobs were eliminated, also a record, and that number is expected to go up again this year.

Franz West, the Austrian artist who set up the sofas outside MOCA’s front door, calls his assemblage “Test.” Just what test does he have in mind? Perhaps one we might call the superfluous people test. Will the nation that won the Cold War pass the superfluous people test? A sofa on a public plaza makes a comfortable place to face an extremely uncomfortable question.