California Journal: Prisons, Warhol, 'Glasnot', April 5, 1988, p. 100

In Manhattan, contemporary art may evoke visions of cash flow and career construction. At the California Department of Corrections, the value and meaning of art are regarded somewhat differently--to say the least. Art in prisons is supposed to be useful, educational, and therapeutic.

To Bill Cleveland, the widely admired program manager of Arts-in-Corrections, art workshops can do everything from "create a racial mix that you don't find anywhere else in the prisons," to "alleviate and expiate [inmates'] guilt through community work." A typical inmate, Cleveland explained, "has almost no tangible success or self-discipline and little ability to defer gratification. Art provides a model of quality-oriented activity with incredibly long-term goals."

Cleveland, a musician, speaks the sociology-infected language of the corrections world because he is frequently called upon to justify Arts-in-Corrections's $1.87 million budget on the basis of cost-benefit analyses or parole outcomes. (A 1987 study showed that two years after release, 69.2 per cent of the Arts-in-Corrections parolees had not returned to prison, compared to 42 percent overall.) With 300 civil servant/artists teaching 8000 inmates, this is the largest and most established program of its kind (although comparative data is difficult to obtain because there is no national umbrella organization for art in institutional settings).

The influence of the Arts-in-Corrections program is beginning to surface in noninstitutionalized California. Light From Another Country, an exhibition of work by 30 inmates and 15 artist/instructors recently debuted at San Francisco State University. (In August it will be at the Art Museum of Santa Cruz County.) Judith Bettelheim, chair of the committee that brought the show to the university gallery, argued strongly for its presentation there. "Difference is important," she observed. "Only Disney pretends we're all the same. . . . And who knows who's in prison these days? If you look at prisons around the world, even the word criminal becomes suspect."

Although this exhibition consists of the traditional two- and three-dimensional art media, the less traditional media are taught. Los Angeles artist Gary Glassman teaches video at the California Institute for Men in Chino and produces CIM TV, a video magazine. Minidocumentaries are complemented with typically playful features on fashion (how to customize prison garb) or responses to such questions as where inmates would rather be than in prison. Testimony to Glassman's success at CIM came from the now-defunct Fox Network's Wilton North Report, which contracted for 12, three-minute pieces, including one called The Funniest Man in Chino.

Glassman also collaborated with artist Jonathan Borofsky on an hour-long documentary called Prisoners, completed in 1985. (It will be screened at the Paula Cooper Gallery April 9 through 11.) Borofsky himself financed the $50,000 documentary, a compilation of interviews of 16 men and 16 women. (See the current Artforum for his interview with inmate James Pettaway.) What drew Borofsky to this material? "I've always been interested in prisons and the fear they represent. I've always felt imprisoned myself. The Human Condition is one name we almost called it." Borofsky's conviction about the universality of incarnation is not unique. Playwright Samuel Beckett is helping to fund an uncut version of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin, slated for late summer.

The idea of cultural life in prison/gulags is threatening to many people, especially the constituency of California's conservative Republican governor George Deukmejian. California Arts Council [CAC] artist-in-residence Beth Thielen notes that "there's increasing pressure now to prove that we make a difference, that we lower the recidivism rate. This is asked of no other CAC artist in institutions. Can you imagine, it's as if artists in hospitals were asked to cure cancer!" Glassman observed that "the gross version of this argument is to ask, 'Should tax money go to murderers?' while the refined version asks if one agency of government [CDC] should pay another [CAC]. Personally, I believe that the tax money spent is not only supporting artists but making a tangible difference."

May 24, 1988, p.110

Meanwhile, the Former East Village (II) showcase International With Monument has become Koury-Wingate Gallery, minus neocelebs Peter Halley and Jeff Koons. K-W's current exhibition is General Idea's series of AIDS paintings based on Robert Indiana's vividly colored Pop icon Love. (You know the famous image of that four-letter world from the postage stamps.) The paintings, accompanied by similar posters on the street, debuted earlier this year at Art Space in San Francisco to decidedly mixed responses. Whatever their viewpoints, the San Franciscans I spoke to noted that, save for a billboard near the gallery, the outreach posters were virtually invisible. How many posters have appeared in New York? A thousand throughout Manhattan, according to K-W's Elizabeth Koury. I haven't seen any outside of Soho, but anyone who's ever done any wheat-pasting knows that 1000 posters aren't going to blanket this island.

Another "exhibition" that won't be playing my neighborhood is Group Material's Inserts, a 12-page newsprint booklet with works by Mike Glier, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Nancy Linn, Richard Prince, Nancy Spero, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Carrie Mae Weems. It will appear in the Sunday New York Times on May 22, but only below 23rd Street and in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg/Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Originally intended to appear in the Daily News, the supplement was rejected by that paper. "We'd been negotiating with the Daily News for ages. But when they saw the artwork, they were shocked by the idea of text as art," Group Material member Julie Ault explained. "They didn't elaborate. Newsday gave us the runaround and the Times was completely accepting."

The total cost of the $17,500 project, funded by the New York Council on the Arts, the Public Art Fund, and Art Matter,Inc., was based in part on Daily News insert fees (about $9000) for a few issues (75,000 versus 115,000). The Times fee applies to a smaller area and runs $9200. The Public Art Fund is trying to negotiate a waiver from the Times to circumvent this "red-lining" of most of the city, although I wouldn't bet on PAF's success. (Max Frankel, are you reading?) But wherever I have to go to see this insert, it makes me giddy to imagine the so-called paper of record as an alternative space. No, I did not say alternative press.

When an Artist Breaks the Rules, July 12, 1988, p. 89

It's easy to castigate government for ineptitude or insensitivity, but what about when an artist breaks the rules? You think about the meaning of the term "double standard" and proceed very carefully. The artist in question is Marjorie Strider and the issue is Sunflower, a publicly sited sculpture that's overstayed its legal welcome.

Strider planted her realistic bronze on the traffic island at Franklin and West Broadway (a/k/a Finn Square) in April 1986. She'd received a six-month permit from the Department of Transportation and the green light from the Community Board 1--all standard operating procedure. In November, she requested a year's extension, which also required the go-ahead from the Art Commission. Sunflower got it with DOT's help--according to department spokesperson Victor Ross--and could remain on its Tribeca site through October 30, 1987.

Harvest time came and went. For eight months Sunflower has stood without a permit or liability insurance. On January 12, 1988, Community Board 1 unanimously passed a resolution affirming the established permit/review process for temporary artworks. A DOT letter to Strider dated March 31, 1988, demanded she removed the work within 30 days. The ultimatum passed and Strider met with Frank Addeo, DOT's director of community affairs, on the morning of May 6. "I'm considering my options," Addeo recalls her saying.

Why didn't Strider remove her work last fall? Or after the DOT ultimatum? Strider, who is working with a group called Friends of Finn Square to help convert the traffic island into a park, maintains that she has never been asked to remove the piece. "If people tell me to remove it, I'll remove it, but they haven't yet." What about the Community Board resolution of January? "I'm just asking for an extension.. . . . All we want to do is keep the sculpture there until the park happens." Hasn't the park already been included in this year's budget? "Yes."

So the showdown is set, but whatever the outcome nobody wins. Addeo's worried that the credibility of artists who might like to work with DOT be "damaged," and Ross characterizes Strider's failure to move Sunflower as "an affront to other artists." Ross also hinted to me that DOT will remove the piece imminently, perhaps by the time you read this. But on June 14 Strider presented the community board with petitions bearing 1000 signatures in favor of the sculpture's permanent installation. Such a move would require approval from the community board and the Art Commission. Were it to be considered by the community board, it would take at least a month, according to district Manager Paul Goldstein. At least. Stay tuned.

We want to create an ad agency for peace," says Marc Brody, founder of Picture Peace. If those two concepts seem a tad incompatible, Brody and his publications director, Steven Lundin, don't much resemble the peace activists I know either. "Madison Ave." probably describes their style more aptly than "Mt. Horeb," the Wisconsin town where Picture Peace is headquartered. But who knows? Perhaps Picture Peace is just what the world needs in the waning days of the Reagan-Gorbachev photo-opportunity wars.

The fledgling foundation-funded organization publishes prints and makes them available to peace groups for fundraising purposes. Brody and Lundin have produced handsome works by Kenneth Patchen and Judy Chicago, but that's not what brought them to New York in mid-June. They came to organize and publicize the Truckload of Peace; that is a truckload of art they'll unveil in Atlanta on July 16, just prio to the opening of the Democratic convention.

Forty-eight feet long, air-conditioned and track-lit, the big, white semi trailer/gallery will feature an eclectic group show by heavyweights Leon Golub, Joseph Beuys, May Stevens, Robert Arneson, Robert Longo, Ida Applebroog, Rimma and Valery Gerlovin, Nancy Spero, Christo, and Rudolf Baranik, among others. Picture Peace will assemble as many politicos as possible for the dedication (Jesse Jackson is at the top of the celeb wish list) and offer outreach art programming with children from low-income neighborhoods before the truck begins a nationwide tour. Lundin had hoped Christo might wrap the truck in Atlanta, but the wrap-master is unavailable. Too bad. The likelihood of an unimaginably tedious convention makes performance art the greatest gift any organization could give to the American people.

Percent for Art, November 12, 1991

The Department of Cultural Affairs-administered "Percent for Art Program" was legislated into being in 1982. It mandated that 1 per cent of the capital budget for city projects be set aside for works of art, up to a cap of $400,00 per project and an annual spending limit of $1.5 million. Based on a recent visit to five newly finished projects, I'd call it money exceedingly well spent.

My whirlwind tour--conducted by Percent for Art director Tom Finkelpearl--took in five newly constructed or refurbished uptown sites: P.S. 7 in the Kingsbridge section of the North Bronx (where artist Justen Ladda worked); the newly constructed Intermediate School 218 in upper Manhattan (Joyce Kozloff); Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (Houston Conwill); the East 107th Street Recreational Pier (Andrea Blum and Cavaglieri & Sultan); and the Overia D. Demsey "multiservice center" in a former school on West 127th Street (Vincent Smith).

Out-of-the-ordinary artistic processes yielded sophisticated, user-friendly artworks. Ladda's interviews at the school prompted his use of high-key color schemes for floor and wall tiles, mosaic surrounds on nature themes for drinking fountains, and painted bronze sculptures in niches of an astronaut and Mad Ludwig's (a/k/a Disney's) Castle. Kozloff's 62-foot-long mosaic frieze on the theme of Caribbean carnival mirrors the I.S. 218 neighborhood's ethnicity, but it also raised a few hackles among non-Caribbeans on the local community board.

The Percent for Art works also tell fascinating tales about the social history of New York. Houston Conwill's exquisite floor-work homage to Langston Hughes is laid on top of the Harlem Renaissance poet's ashes and pays tribute-in a mandalalike configuration of bronze texts and blue and ocher-colored terrazzo-to Hughes, bibliophile Arthur Schomburg, and their relationship. Vincent Smith, who painted the jaunty portable mural Jonkonnu Festival Wid/the Fizzly Rooster Band for the multiservice center is himself a Harlem art legend, virtually unknown below 125th street.

En masse, these public artworks make a brilliant case for the richness of civic life in New York. They also testify to the citizenly spirit of their creators. Budgets are small--four of the five cost less that $55,000--and give the number of (inflationary) years and agency meetings involved, most public artists I've talked to figure that they just about break even. Then why do they do it? They can't resist leaving their mark on a world larger than Soho. "Public art is a contradiction in terms," Ladda told me. "if it's public, than it's not art as we know it." He's right: it's better.

Antipathy/Apathy, June 23, 1992

Although it's received scant attention in the English-language press, a public-art brouhaha that's pitted artist Richard Haas against Hispanic professional groups has simmered for months--and finally been resolved. At issue was one panel of a series of Percent for Art murals that Haas produced for the White Street Detention Center in 1989. During a May 27 meeting between the artist and a coalition of Latino organizations coordinated by the Department of Corrections' Hispanic Society, Haas announced that he will redesign the offending panel. "I felt that there was no other solution that didn't jeopardize the entire project," the artist told me. " And I felt sympathetic [about their concerns]."

The contentious panel--one of seven comprising a timeline of immigration on the Lower East Side--portrays the contemporary Loisaida, complete with people of color selling fruit near a homeless person and a wrecked car. Realistic? Yes. Heroic? No. Other panels, by the way, offer painful memories of back-breaking labor in sweatshops, Chinese hand laundries, and the like. But memories are history; urban America is exploding now.

The Haas controversy recalls John Ahearn's 1991 decision to remove his controversial, city-funded sculpture of African Americans from a Harlem site. Like Ahearn, Haas responded to the concerns of disgruntled citizens. What about the public's role in this process? While Haas scrupulously followed the mandatory guidelines for the Department of Cultural Affairs' Percent for Art Review Process--he made presentations to the Chinatown Planning Council in 1986 and Community Board 1 in 1988--the Hispanic Society mounted its mural protest more than two years after the work's 1989 installation.

The public's tendency merely to react exacerbates the community outreach problem that plagues public-art programs across the country. Boston artists Mags Harries and Lajos Héder's five-mile-long, $474,000 freeway-side project was vandalized by a citizenry that largely failed to respond to calls for input. New York artist Andrea Blum designed a 7500-square-foot pavilion for Carlsbad, California, which recently drew 4000 petition signatures for radically modifying the work, although every household had received a mailer describing the project well in advance of its construction. As Carlsbad art manager Connie Beardsley observed, "Obviously a lot of people didn't pay attention."

February 15, 1994

If you're interested in really public art, you may know Mike Alewitz's art but not his name. The artist-in-residence for the New Jersey Industrial Union Council has designed the most controversial murals of the past decade, including the much censored Pathfinder painting in the West Village and the United Food and Commercial Workers' mural in Austin, Minnesota. (It was produced during the infamous Hormel strike and destroyed by the UFCW International.) "Agitprop," Gallery 1199's tribute to Alewitz, comprises not only documentary mural-photos, but painted banners for parade and demo use. Unlike shows at more traditional venues, this one reformulates many of the questions raised by socially engaged art of the moment. It also offers at least one hilariously skanky-looking answer: "Artists and workers of the world unite... You have nothing to lose but bad taste." (At the Martin Luther King Jr. Labor Center, 310 West 43rd Street, through March 4.)

Controversy, March 22, 1994

Shouldn't a politician have at least a teeny sense of humor? According to attorney Svetlana Schreiber and sculptor Billie Lawless--not only his real name, but the son of a judge--Cleveland mayor Michael White doesn't want to see Lawless's sculpture The Politician: A Toy installed on privately owned land in downtown Cleveland. The 28-foot-high kinetic work, sporting yellow neon hair and tricycle-esque wheels, is the sort of charmingly cartoonish sculpture a savvy politician would self-deprecatingly make his own. After a year and a half of fighting city hall's planning commission, Lawless was granted a "certificate of appropriateness" on February 18, and at that point Mayor White observed about the sculpture, "I don't like it and I'm not trying to block it." All that remained was for Cleveland building inspectors to issue a building permit on February 24--which they refused to do.

Neither city inspector nor planning commissioners returned my calls, but the chipper artist adamantly maintains that their last-minute change of heart came because Buffalo officials warned their Cleveland counterparts about his suit against them. The artist successfully sued Buffalo for physically assaulting his enormous, four-panel neon sculpture Green Lightning in 1984, and the New York Supreme Court is slated to rule soon about Lawless's right to damages. (Buffalo pols later tried to get GL deemed obscene, claiming that images of the space shuttle and a TV tubes are penises.) Green Lightning was uneventfully shown in Chicago and was recently bounced-postselection and preinstallation-from an exhibition at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. There are several more chapters of this Kafka-esque tales to be written, but you get the point: Billie Lawless is our pop Christo of the courtroom.

Can We Talk?, June 21, 1994

One casting of George Segal's Gay Liberation--the nation's first public, permanent, sculptural celebration of homosex--stands across the street from the celebrated Stonewall Inn in the Village, and another on the Stanford University campus. On May 16, seven drunken athletes, allegedly splattered the white, patinated bronze statue with black paint and wedged a bench between two of its four figures, resulting in approximately $8000 damage. Two weeks later, the local district attorney's office charged two of the students with felony vandalism and four with misdemeanor vandalism; both charges can bring $10,000 fines and jail time. The university's disciplinary process is also likely to be activated; administrators I spoke with (two asked not to be identified) were "certain" that the athletes will be brought up under Stanford's 19th-century "fundamental standard" of conduct. At an on-campus forum, however, lesbian and gay students expressed their anger that hate crime charges can't be brought because the California statute is triggered only by the violation of an individual's--rather than institution's--civil rights.

The vandalism's meaning--a symbolic and threatening assault or simply mischief that got out of hand--was in dispute. Wrestling coach Chris Horpel caused a furor when he attributed the problem to "students [who] are almost force-fed political correctness" and to police who made sure that "everyone knew" about the incident. (Although he retracted the first assertion, he apparently voiced no concern about the athlete-defendants' inability to express themselves grammatically: "I do not agree with the ideas presented forth with the statue," the press quoted one; "I don't have a destructive will against homosexuals," commented another.)

Despite diversions like Horpel's, groups and individuals at Stanford are finding ways of wresting educational value from intolerance by making it the subject of discussion. Breaking with a university tradition of quickly removing damaged artworks from view ( Gay Liberation was also vandalized in 1984, 1987, and 1990), administrators have left Segal's no longer pristine sculpture in place. Gay students took a full page ad in the student newspaper explicating their views of the incident. Related fall programming will likely include an appearance by Segal, according to Humanities Center head Wanda Corn. "For once, this sort of problem is getting the publicity it needs," Corn commented, "and students are even learning something about public sculpture."

Unfettered speech--or its lack--is also at issue in two other recent scandals. On May 25, the administration at San Francisco State University sandblasted a mural of Malcolm X from a student union wall because it contained an obviously anti-Semitic border of six-pointed stars containing dollar signs. Besides creating controversy, the mural was also vandalized twice: once by what Bay Area media termed a "multicultural" group containing Jews and African Americans, which splattered the 10-foot-square portrait with paint; and again by African American English professor Lois Lyles, who was cited for tussling with a student while she was trying to obliterate the stars and paint "stop fascism" alongside the image. University president Robert Corrigan initially said that he'd "like to give the students a chance to resolve this for themselves." But after the Student Union's governing board met on May 20 without determining a course of action, he took unilateral action that simply leaves a festering wound.