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Overview
This compelling narrative raises questions about community and public art policies, about stereotypes and multiculturalism. With wit, drama, sympathy, and circumspection, Kramer draws the reader into the multicultural debate, challenging our assumptions about art, image, and their relation to community. Her portrait of the South Bronx takes the argument to its grass roots—provocative, surprising in its contradictions and complexities and not at all easy to resolve.
Accompanied by an introduction by Catharine R. Stimpson exploring the issues of artistic freedom, "political correctness," and multiculturalism, Whose Art Is It? is a lively and accessible introduction to the ongoing debate on representation and private expression in the public sphere.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822379058 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/19/1994 |
| Series: | Public planet books |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Jane Kramer’s books include Europeans, Unsettling Europe, and The Last Cowboy, which won the National Book Award in 1981. She is a writer for The New Yorker, where she contributes the acclaimed "Letter from Europe." Whose Art Is It? first appeared in The New Yorker and was awarded the National Magazine Award.
Catharine R. Stimpson is University Professor at Rutgers University and director of the Fellows Program at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her most recent book is Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces.
Read an Excerpt
Whose Art is It?
By Jane Kramer
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1994 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7905-8
CHAPTER 1
Whose Art Is It?
It could be argued that the South Bronx bronzes fit right into the neighborhood—that whatever a couple of people said about bad role models and negative images and political incorrectness, there was something seemly and humane, and even, in a rueful, complicated way, "correct," about casting Raymond and his pit bull, Daleesha and her roller skates, and Corey and his boom box and basketball in the metal of Ghiberti, Donatello, and Rodin and putting them up on pedestals, like patron saints of Jerome Avenue. John Ahearn, who made the statues, says that he thought of them more as guardians than as saints, because their job was ambiguous, standing, as they did for a couple of days last year, between the drab new station house of the city's 44th Police Precinct and what is arguably one of its poorest, saddest, shabbiest, most drug-infested, AIDS-infected, violent neighborhoods. John himself is ambiguous about "ambiguous." He says that when the city asked him to "decorate" the precinct he thought of the Paseo de la Reforma, in Mexico City, with its bronze heroes—a mile of heroes. He thought that maybe it would be interesting— or at least accurate to life on a calamitous South Bronx street, a street of survivors—to commemorate a few of the people he knew who were having trouble surviving the street, even if they were trouble themselves. He wanted the police to acknowledge them, and he wanted the neighbors, seeing them cast in bronze and up on pedestals, to stop and think about who they were and about what he calls their "South Bronx attitude."
Raymond, Corey, and Daleesha may not have been the best of the neighborhood. Raymond Garcia, at thirty-three, is in and out of jail. Corey Mann, at twenty-four, is in and out of jobs. Daleesha, at fourteen, is a street child, in and out of junior high school. But they are a homegrown part of the neighborhood, and John, who lives in the neighborhood, too, and likes it, likes them—in an edgy, apprehensive way. They exasperate John, and occasionally they alarm him, the way they do the other people on the block, and, indeed, the people in their own families, but they belong to the reality of the shattered social contract we call the inner city, and John wanted them to stand in something of the same relation to the precinct policemen that they do to him and the neighbors. They may be trouble, but they are human, and they are there.
John is neither an innocent nor a fool. He is one of the best artists of his generation. He has a reputation. Right now, there is a show of his work at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and people have seen the painted casts he makes, in the South Bronx, at the Whitney and the Tate and the Art Institute of Chicago and a dozen other important museums. Those casts, at the Brooke Alexander gallery, on Wooster Street, in SoHo, cost anywhere from twelve to forty thousand dollars. Some of John's neighbors call him "saintly," since they do not easily understand what a famous white artist—a "downtown" artist, with a fancy gallery, and museum shows, and critics at his door, and a big retrospective catalogue—is doing living in a stripped-down, sixth-floor, slum apartment on one of the worst streets in New York City, hanging out with people like Raymond and Corey, and they suspect he has some sort of crazy penitential Christian purpose, like Father Hennessy, his priest at the Church of Christ the King, around the corner. John and Patrick Hennessy and a homeless street sweeper named Roberta Nazat, whose own Christian purpose is cleaning the right side of 170th Street between Walton and Jerome (and who sleeps on a couch at John's when the nights get cold), are about the only white people in the neighborhood, but John does not put himself in the same class of "saintly" as Father Hennessy or Bobbie the Sweeper. Sometimes he describes himself as "like an itinerant portrait painter," and sometimes as "like Raul,"who manufactures plaster santeros for the Bronx botanicas, but that is ingenuous. When he is talking about art, the names he invokes are Caravaggio, who took the poor for his models "and blew art history away," and van Gogh, who took the postman and his wife and made them live forever. John has work up all over the neighborhood—there are fiberglass casts of the neighbors on four big building walls and plaster "portraits" in nearly everyone's apartment. Some people in the art world found that work sentimental, and John says that when he started making his bronzes for the 44th Precinct he was determined "to make art, make a statement," something with edge and irony and "complications." He says now that this was his mistake: he should have been thinking about making people happy. Five days after he put the bronzes up, he hired a truck and took them down, and they ended up in the yard at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, the museum where white people from Manhattan often go to look at "statements." The statues themselves look safe, even benign, at P.S. 1, but they do not look like they belong there. They are, in the jargon of public sculpture, "site specific"—though some of the policemen who saw them at the corner of Jerome Avenue and 169th Street last year prefer the word "confrontational" to describe them. No one who saw them could deny they had the "bad" South Bronx attitude. When they were up on their pedestals—at the edge of a little concrete park the city calls a "traffic triangle"—they looked less like monuments than like the Corey, Raymond, and Daleesha whom John thought everybody knew, only metal. They were part of the crowd. They belonged to the cocky, come-on quality of the street, to the rusty train trestle and the trashed cars and the machine shops and gaudy botanicas and rice-and-beans counters, to the dealers and hookers and welfare studs and the hip-hop children hurrying home from school with their clothes on backward, and even to the angry and respectable neighbors who complained about negative images—ghetto images—and convinced John that he should take them down.
Some of those neighbors wanted statues of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, or statues of children in their graduation gowns, or of mothers carrying home the groceries, or of men in suits on their way to important jobs downtown—something to show the good side of the neighborhood to white people driving down Jerome to Yankee Stadium for a game, or taking a Bronx shortcut to their peaceful, prosperous suburban neighborhoods. A couple of policemen wanted statues of friendly policemen, helping people across the street or playing with babies. A couple of black bureaucrats talked about the pain of the neighborhood, and about people like Raymond, Corey, and Daleesha, lost to the streets, and about what happened when white artists like John Ahearn "glorified" that loss and insulted them. A lot of phone calls got made before the movers came, and a lot of politicians started worrying about petitions and protests and television crews and the Reverend Al Sharpton, and about John's three statues turning into a full-blown race scandal. It made no difference that the black Mayor of New York City, David Dinkins, had borrowed a fiberglass cast of Corey with his basketball and boom box and installed it on the lawn at Gracie Mansion when he presented the keys to the city to the black filmmaker Spike Lee. Or that the people who wanted statues of men in suits instead of Corey, Raymond, and Daleesha might be mocking the pain of the neighborhood as much as they thought John had mocked it, since in the South Bronx the men in suits are generally the men who are trying desperately to leave, not the men who have to stay. It made no difference that Corey, Raymond, and Daleesha might not think of themselves as "negative stereotypes"—though Raymond often says that as far as any kind of "correctness" goes he does not have much of a reputation. Raymond was distressed for his pit bull, who had died, because he loved the dog, and the thought that it would "live in bronze" consoled him. Raymond heard that "the community" didn't like the statues—but as far as he was concerned the community was the block where he and Corey and, indeed, John lived. The community was four buildings on Walton Avenue between 171st Street and 172nd Street, and had nothing to do with anyone five blocks south and one block west, at the traffic triangle. Raymond was right, because five blocks south and one block west turned out to be as far away as Manhattan. Raymond's community liked the statues, but to the people complaining at the traffic triangle John Ahearn was a white man, and Raymond, Corey, and Daleesha were just the statues that shamed them.
No one knows how to settle, or even define, the argument over public art and political correctness. The art world says it's about censorship. The activists say it's about "controlling the images." The critics (depending on their politics) either quote Gilles Deleuze and say it's about "the indignity of speaking for others," or they quote Hilton Kramer and say it's about saving Western civilization. The politicians like to call it "the multicultural dialogue," but the truth is that at this particularly angry moment in New York City the multicultural dialogue is really a lot of strange and disheartening monologues. People are talking, but they are not talking to each other. It doesn't matter if they are talking about public art, or about "the white male literary canon," or about whether students at law school have to argue briefs for fathers who want custody of their children because their wives are lesbians, or about whether Cleopatra was black, or about whether Raymond with his pit bull is a proper role model for the South Bronx children. It doesn't matter if art is an accident of its "interpretive moment," as the deconstructionists say, or if art is "timeless" and addresses pure aesthetic values, as a lot of artists would say—though not John Ahearn, who says, "Hey, making somebody unhappy? That's not interesting, that's heavy!" It doesn't matter if a statue of Raymond and his pit bull offends the guys at the Jerome Avenue pizzeria because they have no "taste" or because Raymond refused to leave the dog outside when he was ordering pizza and there was nothing they could do about it, since the dog was vicious, or because they think the neighborhood should be "represented" by a statue of a man in a suit, or, indeed, by one of them. People are suffering in the South Bronx. They live with poverty and crime and crack and unemployment, and they die young, from illness and overdose and overexposure if they are not murdered first. In the language of the debate, they are "disempowered," and to the extent that the language is correct they cannot do much about it except attack what they take to be the symbols of their powerlessness—a statue they didn't make, a textbook they didn't choose, a vocabulary of assumptions about culture that are not their assumptions. Sometimes the symbols focus them. More often, the symbols subvert them, and they exhaust what little energy surviving in the South Bronx has left them. As John says, "On my block, even getting yourself on welfare implies a high level of getting it together." Today, the neighbors who objected to John's statues are without a work of art for their traffic triangle, because they were more interested in the argument than in the alternatives, more interested in talking about the correctness of the statues than in replacing them. No one has written to the city, or to the newspapers, saying, "We're the community, and we're going to make a new work possible." In fifteen months, no one has even asked.
This is John's neighborhood: it is part of the poorest congressional district in the country; it has the fourth-highest rate of homicide in the city; a hundred and twenty thousand people live there, and a hundred and eighteen thousand are black or Hispanic; every second person is on some sort of public assistance; one out of every three adults is unemployed; one out of every four women tests H.I.V. positive when she goes to the hospital to have a baby, and no one knows how many men would test positive if there were a way to get them to the hospital, any more than anyone knows how many men would test positive for crack or heroin or any of the street mixtures known as "speedballs." The facts, of course, are misleading. They do not account for thousands of illegal immigrants; they do not distinguish between black, white, and Indian "Hispanics" (who are listed as "non-white" in the census) or, for that matter, between "Hispanics" and "Latinos," who may or may not have Spanish as their first language. They do not distinguish between the Dominican dealers and the Jamaican posses who come to the Bronx for a couple of years and split with their drug money and the Puerto Rican mothers and grandmothers who appear at three in the afternoon, when school lets out, to chase those dealers off the street so the children can play. The facts are stereotypes of race and class and culture—much more than John Ahearn's statues were stereotypes—which is why people who thought the statues should stay worry about what it means about "stereotypes" when poor people give something away for nothing in return. John wants to replace the statues, but the city might have to sell Raymond, Corey, and Daleesha to pay for the bronze and the foundry, and it is not certain now that John (or art or the neighbors) would survive the process of choosing the subjects of "correct" representation under the scrutiny of his community board, the police, the city bureaucracy, the guys at the pizzeria, and the woman who stood at the traffic triangle stopping traffic last fall to ask people if Corey, shirtless and a little flabby, was the "representation" they wanted.
John Ahearn is not the first New York artist to get caught up in arguments about representation. The year of the South Bronx bronzes was also the year that Jenny Marketou, a photographer with the job of decorating a Queens subway station, was accused of racism for taking pictures of Greek Americans—she was Greek—instead of African Americans, and the muralist Richard Haas, who had already decorated fifteen New York City walls, was asked to replace a panel in a series of reliefs on the history of immigration to New York. Haas had made the panels for the Baxter Street wall of a new city jail, on White Street. They were up for two years, and no one complained, but then a guard who had just been transferred from the prison on Rikers Island saw them, and told some friends at the Department of Correction Hispanic Society that what he took to be the "Hispanic" panel did not show "positive values," and after that a lot of people did complain. They said they didn't like the sign "Bodega" on a store in the panel, and they didn't like the fact that the bodega was closed—they thought it looked like "Hispanic failure," though Haas thought it looked like "Sunday"—and they didn't like the image of a junked car or of a woman with a bare midriff or of a man sleeping on the sidewalk. They thought the woman was a hooker and the man was drunk, and they were not much comforted or appeased when Haas said that the woman was based on a pretty blonde he had once seen in a book, roller-skating in Central Park, and that the man was homeless, and was there to "raise consciousness" in people walking by. Luis Cancel, the new commissioner of Cultural Affairs—and a Hispanic and an artist himself—called Haas then and told him "the process would continue." No one knew exactly how the process would continue, though people at Cultural Affairs talked about "the Phoenix precedent," which had to do with arguments about a piece of public art in Phoenix, and with how Phoenix settled those arguments. The "community" met, and friends of the artist's—his "advocates"—came to the meeting, and everyone testified, and then an "impartial jury" decided what the artist should do.
It was not a precedent that appealed to Haas, who says he preferred the kind of precedent set by Solomon on another one of his jailhouse panels—the mother who loved the baby most let go. He let go. He got together with six Hispanic leaders—they met in the Gauguin Room at Cultural Affairs, which was probably not the best room for talking about stereotypes. He had offered to change "bodega" to "supermarket" or "superette" or something else agreeble to them, but the leaders said no, "supermarket" was not enough, and eventually Haas painted out the panel, at his own expense. He offered to redo the panel. He asked for pictures of "appropriate" Hispanic images to consider, but he said he would refuse to submit his changes for "community" approval. He said that political correctness was a kind of censorship, and "every bit as evil to me as the censorship of a Pat Buchanan or a Jesse Helms."
Richard Haas is a worldly man. He is not on a mission, like John Ahearn, who wants to live and work quietly in the South Bronx at least as much as he wanted his statues to stay. Haas lives in Yonkers and works in an Art Deco Chelsea loft, with Piranesis on the wall and old kilims on the floor, and eats at the Century Club, and he has sat on the Art Commission himself and thought a lot about the city, and about making the city beautiful. As far as Haas is concerned, he has nothing to apologize for, and nothing to regret, either, except the fact that the city, which considers his project incomplete, still owes him a fourteen-thousand-dollar final payment. It does not sit well with Haas to be called a racist. He thinks that if the Hispanics on White Street got to choose his images of them, then the Jews on Baxter Street could reasonably complain about his panel on Jewish immigration, because it has to do with a Jewish sweatshop, and then the Chinese community could complain, because his Chinese panel is "all about business, and nobody's smiling." He says that to understand the tyranny of correctness you should think about what happened to Diego Rivera, whose politics "sank his art," or Frida Kahlo, whose last painting was of Stalin with a rose. He worries that good artists, like John Ahearn, are going to be frightened away from public projects by correctness, because correctness is a kind of collaboration, and really has nothing to do with art, and that in the end the public will have to live with art that is "not just wrong but dull."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Whose Art is It? by Jane Kramer. Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction / Catharine R. Stimpson 1Whose Art Is It? / Jane Kramer 37