Capital Wags

The last elephant is unpainted, awaiting a judge’s decision on whether People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has a constitutional right to use the beast for a message about mistreatment of circus animals.

But the rest of the so-called party animals are on the streets of the nation’s capital. Decorated as everything from Elvis Presley to a tourist donning an FBI baseball cap and sporting a video camera, the animals are providing a touch of whimsy to a city shadowed by terrorism. Painted by local artists and pop artists these 800-pound sculptures of polyurethane resin depicting Republicans (elephants) and Democrats (donkeys) are bringing smiles--and a few rolled eyes--to residents and visitors alike.

“As both whimsy and as art, this is the biggest event in D.C. since I’ve been here,” said Sam Gilliam, a painter of abstract art whose Seurat-style elephant stands in front of the National Gallery of Art. “Art is another way people have of talking.” So popular have the animals become that their placement has occasioned some high-toned lobbying (imagine that, in this city). City officials recently installed “Florida Hybrid,” an elephant decorated with butterfly ballots, in front of the Turkish Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Embassy officials were delighted, but insisted they needed a donkey too. “The British Embassy has both,” Turkish diplomat Cihad Erginay explained.

At every stop, from the watermelon elephant in front of Whole Foods to the woolly mammoth in front of the National Geographic Society, the animals interrupt the cityscape with a sense of the unexpected.

“Hey, it’s like summer reading,” said Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art. “You can read Heisenberg’s theories of quantum mechanics all you want, but in the summer, we all want a great mystery novel.” Sharon Roy Finch, an artist whose elephant depicting Washington’s monuments guards the Delta Shuttle at Reagan National Airport, thinks the animals are beloved because they’re so big. “There’s something engaging about being eye-to-eye with an animal,” she said. “It makes you feel like a toddler again, looking a golden retriever in the eye.”

But Blake Gopnik, chief art critic for the Washington Post, thinks they are far too small. “Give me a real, life-sized Indian elephant on every corner, I would have gone for that,” he said. “These look like oversized key chains.” Gopnik thinks so little of the animals that he has no plans to write about them. “Either they’re not art or they are, in which case they’re incredibly bad.”

Trend Started in Zurich

Although Chicago is credited with starting the animals-as-public-art craze, installing 300 cows on parade in 1999 as a tribute to the town’s gritty history as a meat-packing capital, the trend actually got its start in Switzerland a year earlier, when cows appeared on the streets of Zurich. Ever since, cities have been experimenting with animals that wink: In New Orleans, it was giant fish; Cincinnati did pigs. New York did cows; Toronto, moose; Santa Fe, horses; and Cincinnati, hogs. Miami Beach, perhaps the most self-amused, did 8-foot fiberglass pink flamingos. Los Angeles, naturally, did angels.

In most cities, the installations went off without a hitch, but this is Washington, where anything worth doing is worth having political squabbles over.

First, the Green Party protested that the nation has more than two parties. The Greens pointed out that in the last presidential election, Ralph Nader, a Green, took 6% of the vote in heavily Democratic Washington, D.C., while George W. Bush, a Republican, got 9%. Party officials wanted the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities to decorate the streets with 100 sunflowers--their party emblem. A judge ruled that the animals were not political speech but art. Case dismissed.

(In fact, the commission considered other animals before settling on the party animals. There was some discussion of pandas--the National Zoo’s top draw--and someone suggested squirrels, although as the Daily Oklahoman commented, “That was wisely rejected. When you think of squirrels, you think of nuts, and then you think of Congress.”)

PETA sued the commission for rejecting its designs: a shackled circus elephant with a tear running down its face and a bull hook in its side. Hiring New Yorker magazine artist Harry Bliss, PETA designed an elephant to represent the “miserable, deprived, and broken animals used in circuses ... forced to perform uncomfortable, confusing, and often painful acts over and over again under the threat of thrashings with a bull hook.” The commission rejected the design because it had a political message, even though other animals--like the “Time for Heroes” elephant clearly had something to say.

“This is discrimination based on message,” said Arthur Spitzer, the ACLU lawyer handling the case for PETA. Public art, he said, “is not a forum for just happy speech.”

Acts of Vandalism

Life for the party animals has not been all happy either. Vandals stole the tutu off Prima Donkey, festooned in pearls and pointed shoes, painted magenta and poised in front of Neiman-Marcus. She’s now in the “Animal Shelter,” a small shopping center at 2000 Pennsylvania Ave. where artists can repair their animals.

Graffiti is a constant worry. A Dupont Circle donkey was smeared with ketchup. And the briefcase of “L.E.Phant,” an elephant dressed as a lawyer and posted outside the Chamber of Commerce, was ripped off.

About 1,200 artists sent in designs. The commission selected 200. Each artist--many from Washington but others from California, New York, Switzerland and Tokyo--was paid $1,000 and given an elephant or donkey, plus $200 for supplies. Earlier this year, they toiled in an emptied department store downtown, letting the animals mingle.

Now, the elephants and donkeys have all been assigned to their public spaces. New York artist Philip Pearlstein’s elephant, one of the last to arrive, is to be installed in front of the Corcoran Museum any day now. There’s an itinerary of the animals at www.partyanimalsdc.org.

The Smithsonian’s Broun thinks one reason this kind of project works is because it is temporary. “If art is permanent, it provokes a lot of debate. Is this the right person to commemorate?” said Broun, whose museum advises cities about the care of some 50,000 monuments on public streets. “These are shared spaces, and people are more forgiving when they are temporary. There’s a spirit of fun, a license to be frivolous.”

In Washington, where fun is usually confined to outmaneuvering one’s political opponents, the animals will be on display until October, one month before the midterm elections, when they will be auctioned to fund future arts projects. In the meantime, despite their obvious political affiliation, the animals seem to appeal across party lines. “There’s an instant joy, when a child sees one of the animals,” said Lou Stovall, an artist and vice chairman of the D.C. Arts Commission, who has installed many of the animals. “There’s a sense of humor, and a sense of country.”