Why do public art ‘experts’ mess with success?: Keenan
When a piece of public art unexpectedly brings joy — like the TORONTO sign or the street-corner Henry Moore — we shouldn’t overthink it.

TheStar.com
Oct. 3, 2016
Edward Keenan

The TORONTO sign — the name of the city spelled out larger than life in bright, primary-coloured lights — is, as I’ve said before, public art lightning in a bottle. An inexpensive and unheralded installation that was supposed to be temporary and almost instantly became much-admired, much-heralded, beloved.

It was the goofy thing we didn’t know we needed to bring a touch of magical life to Nathan Phillips Square. A splash of braggy colour, a focal point, a tangible item that anchors a sense of place simply by naming that place.

So successful was it that politicians actually started debating whether we should make more of them, and tour them around the city to give everyone a taste of the fun. That idea, I thought, was overdoing it, and seemed to miss the point.

And yet I was surprised to read this week that the designers of the long-unfolding revamp of Nathan Phillips Square don’t like it. Or at least, think its time has passed.

Asked about it by Now Magazine writer Jonathan Goldsbie, Chris Pommer said first, “I think that as a temporary, event-based object, it’s fantastic.” But then he goes on to say, “From the perspective of someone who’s worked for almost a decade on trying to reopen the square so that basically everything can go on, to put something like that in permanently not only begins to undermine the process of creating that openness, but I think also takes away from the specialness of that event.”

Andrew Frontini, his design partner, goes on, “It’s kind of a guest that shouldn’t outstay its welcome,” and then eventually compares its continued presence to leaving the Christmas tree up until October. “Well I mean, I hope the plan is not to restore it.”

Well, I mean, that is the plan, actually.

The city’s staff are supposed to present exactly such a plan to councillors in October, partly due to the overwhelming popular support for making the thing permanent.

Look, I understand that if you’ve taken a decade or more to carefully plan something with specific goals in mind, as Pommer and Frontini have, it’s a bit off-putting to have some playful, improvised bit of something else plonked in the middle of it unexpectedly. But I also respectfully disagree that most people think it has overstayed its welcome.

As Frontini himself says: “They love it! They love it!” And I think when people love something, you don’t take it away from them — especially when it comes to public art.

There are giant indistinct hunks of brown metal all over the city attesting to the difficulty of creating public art people will notice and enjoy and interact with.

My own sense is that successful public art is as much accident as artistry: take the haunting portraits of commuters in the new-ish murals at Union Station, successful art, I think, in depicting existential loneliness and misery and movement. And yet, as I’ve written before, as public art it is oppressive: creating or exacerbating a mood of alienation in exactly the place where people are already suffering the anxieties and miseries of commuting, an inescapable fog of darkness encountered by many at the very start and very end of every workday.

Somber public art has its place (the Washington, D.C. Vietnam War Memorial, the stark reminder of our legacy of racism at the Immigration Museum in Halifax, the haunting memorial to Irish Famine victims on the Toronto waterfront, to name some moving examples).

I’m just not sure the train platform of one of the busiest stations in the city is the venue to provoke strong negative emotion.

But the point is, sometimes almost crudely simple things work, once they’re in place, and sometimes sophisticated artistry doesn’t work. It’s hard to tell how a piece is going to make people feel — or if it will make them feel anything at all — until it is there. And so when you stumble onto success, please don’t mess with it.

It’s a lesson I wish the Art Gallery of Ontario would take to heart. As my colleague Shawn Micallef recently wrote of the large Henry Moore sculpture outside the museum, at the corner of McCaul and Dundas Sts., “its bronze clefts are polished bright by the endless rub of soft bums sitting inside it and the kids using it as a slide. It’s become part of the landscape as much as the CN Tower, but at a human scale.”

The AGO plans to move it around to Grange Park, in its backyard. The hope, they say, is to liven up that neglected space. But in doing so they risk messing up one of their greatest contributions to the city — a sculpture that can be viewed from the streetcar, or can liven up the wait for one.

A piece of joy, an experience of art, in that most mundane of places: the street corner. Perhaps it will be a success in its new location, but it will not be as much fun as an add-on to a playground as it was providing an abstract playground on the sidewalk. They have a work of art that is as admired and enjoyed as any in the city, and they think they can somehow improve on it by moving it to a less busy place. I’m skeptical.

Nothing about these examples — any of them — inspires me to think those who should have some expertise in public art and public space really understand what they are dealing with. Not in the way that those climbing and sliding on Moore’s sculpture or those taking smiling photos next to the brightly coloured letters understand.

If something brings you joy, especially in a place you didn’t expect to feel joyful, you don’t overthink it. You don’t try to strategize an improvement on it. You just enjoy it, for as long as you can make that feeling last.