Public Sculpture Steps Up@Art

Roberta Smith writes:

Over the past 15 years public sculpture has become one of contemporary art’s more exciting areas of endeavor and certainly its most dramatically improved one.

Some recent successes have included Mark Wallinger’s 1999 “Ecce Homo,” a life-size figure of Jesus in London, shown at left; and Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” in Chicago, nicknamed the Bean. Freely mixing elements of Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Realism, these pieces also often benefit from new technologies and materials, making them dynamic and provocative.

Photo: John Riddy, Courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

Certain artists may do their best work in the public arena. The Kapoor Bean, for example, converts the artist’s sometimes glib involvement with reflective surfaces into an enveloping experience that is both humorous and almost sublime.

Photo: Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

No one has been more important to the revival of public art than Jeff Koons, whose career is the subject of an illuminating if rather crowded survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Photo: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

“Puppy” (1992) by Jeff Koons at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. IIt was Koons’s giant “Puppy” which broadcast most loudly and clearly that public sculpture was neither an exhausted form nor necessarily a dumbed-down one.

“Puppy” was first shown in June, 1992, in Arolsen, Germany, near Kassel, where the international mega-show “Documenta 9” was opening. Scores of art-world denizens went to see what Mr. Koons was up to.

Photo: Miguel Tona/European Pressphoto Agency

What they found was something shocking about its simplicity, accessibility and pleasure. “Puppy” was intensely loveable, triggering a laugh-out-loud visual delight that expanded your sense of the human capacity for joy. It was nature at her most colorful and fragile. The flowery semblance of fur made “Puppy” almost living flesh, like us.

Photo: Rafa Rivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Puppy” also provided a karmic bookend for an something that happened almost exactly three years before its Arolsen debut: the removal, in March, 1989, of Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” from the plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Office building in Lower Manhattan. The dismantling came in the wake of a suit brought by the people who worked in the building – they hated the Serra — and days of acrimonious public hearings overseen by the Government Services Administration.

Photo: Dith Pran/The New York Times

Richard Serra’s sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007. “Tilted Arc” was in many ways the dark before the dawn not only of the Koons “Puppy,” but also of the shining achievement of Serra’s own post- Arc work. Serra has in essence taken his revenge on the public by making stronger, more elaborate pieces that it could not resist — judging from the way people line up these days to walk through his torqued ellipses, spirals and arcs.

Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The “Puppy” set a high standard that Koons himself reached again only with his recent works in gleaming high chromium stainless steel, especially his prim yet erotic “Balloon Dog” sculptures.

Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times

The show in Chicago is almost a primer of do’s and don’ts in public sculpture. The best of its 60 pieces, which span from 1979 to 2007, have the same irresistibility of the “Puppy” — you are drawn toward them by their familiarity only to realize that they are unprecedented.

Photo: Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press

His sculpture has required a level of perfection that has, at times, nearly brought Koons’s art to a standstill as he struggled to get exactly what he wanted in terms of the transparent color, surface shininess and physical details of the high chromium stainless steel pieces. The enormous time-spans recorded for these works reflect the effort: the “Balloon Dog (Orange)” is 1994-2000; the equally good “Cracked Egg (Magenta),” with its intimations of new-born innocence, is 1994-2006.

Photo: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Koons’s “Rabbit” was part of the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade in 2007. Koons’s art enacts the basic exchange of public sculpture. We literally see ourselves in his alluring reflective surfaces; his buoyant forms reach deep into our childhood with its accompanying feelings of hope and optimism.

Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times

@Source: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/24/arts/0824-KOONS_index.html