When the mayor introduced a skunk of a revision to the public art ordinance this spring and the City Council took a deep breath and adopted it, there was the usual five minutes of outrage. The revised ordinance pushed the public out of the public art program with all the subtlety of bulldozers cruising Meigs Field, usurping every bit of citizen decision-making power and, even more alarming, dispensing with the public’s right to observe the process. In the future, decisions about public art in Chicago will be made by bureaucrats flying under the radar of the state’s open-meetings law. What could be more blatantly objectionable?
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If you’re taking away public scrutiny, Anzia says in her report, “Beyond the Battlefield,” it’s important to put members of the public in charge. The city’s insisting that its changes will increase public participation in a program often criticized as insular, but Anzia doesn’t think so. “Proposing increased centralization in response to accusations of overly-centralized decision-making processes is illogical,” she writes. Unless, of course, that wasn’t the true impetus. She argues that although the new ordinance “has the potential to make the program legally invincible, it would definitely not make it a better public art program.”
She says she undertook the extracurricular study (funded with a small stipend) at the center’s suggestion, thinking it would be worth doing because most of the recent attention given the program focused on the lawsuits brought against it without much examination of the program’s structure. Drawing on public records and interviews with major players, including artists too fearful to be named, she concluded that the public art program as it stood was “beyond recovery.”
Anzia does buy into another of the city’s questionable claims, however: the argument that public discussion should be abandoned because it might stifle debate. In a close-knit art community, she says, no one wants to go on record dissing a colleague’s work. She offers as a better model Portland, Oregon, which started with a system similar to Chicago’s and “transitioned” into nonprofit administration. As a nonprofit, she writes, the Portland program does not have to “send out notices, distribute agendas, or post minutes. . . . As a result, deliberation about artists and artwork is kept behind closed doors.” But the Portland selection committee is made up almost entirely of volunteers–artists serving limited terms–not, as the new arrangement in Chicago has it, a permanent roster of city staffers.
Berwyn’s iconic Spindle is public but not a piece of public art. It was commissioned by shopping center magnate David Bermant, who paid California artist Dustin Shuler $75,000 to get it up at Cermak Plaza in 1989. Bermant has gone to the big parking lot in the sky, but he’s still explaining it for you (it was good for business, and that’s his BMW right under the Beetle) at davidbermantfoundation.org. Berwynites hated it on sight–maybe because Bermant had already graced that parking lot with a three-story wall of junk called Big Bil-Bored. That one came down years ago, and the car kabob is about to meet the same fate, making way for another icon, a freestanding Walgreens. Members of Save the Spindle (savethespindle.com) hope it can be resurrected nearby. If so, Shuler, still a struggling artist, says he’ll have to be in the driver’s seat. Contrary to recent reports, two other works by Shuler–Pinto Pelt, a skinned car, and Albatross, a glider perched on top of a pole–are still on view in the parking lot, free for the looking.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Sara Anzia photo by Robert Drea.
