Mark di Suvero’s “Joie de Vivre” has inadvertently found itself in the middle of the biggest protest movement in America today and not everyone likes it. Now a small spat on on the sculpture itself raises some questions.
public art
Liza Eliano and I stopped by Occupy Wall Street yesterday and we picked up a copy of the first edition of the Occupied Wall Street Journal. A four-page broadsheet, the back had a funny map marking that made us laugh out loud. “Art / Signs” are marked with a ♥ but Abstract Expressionist sculptor Mark di Suvero’s “Joie de Vivre” (2006?) is marked with the term “Weird Red Thing” — LOL!
The City of Brotherly Love must love supersized objects because they now have a fourth large-scale art work by Pop art master Claes Oldenburg.
What role can/ should street art play in a broader program of national memorials and monuments. Can we as a public take these kinds of installations seriously, or will the intent of the artist always be suspect?
Waterfalls now cascade and soothe at Ground Zero. Actually, the word “ground zero” may soon wither into an anachronism because the new memorial is a stunning work of art in its own right.
On March 24, 2004 in Johannesburg, South Africa, a mammoth sculpture of legendary former president and icon Nelson Mandela was unveiled. Over 15 feet tall, this sculpture was commissioned to stand in the center of Nelson Mandela square in Sandton City, an upscale shopping mall in a well-to-do part of the city.
Washington, DC — “Dub poet Mutabaruka found it necessary to argue, in a public contribution on the subject, that the statue [Emancipation Monument], which represents a woman and a man, both nude standing in a pool of water and looking upward as a symbolic representation of the spiritual emancipation from Slavery, was ‘gay’ because the male figure did not respond sexually to the presence of the naked female figure.” explains Veerle Poupeye, Director of the National Gallery of Jamaica.
A new Marilyn Monroe sculpture went up in Chicago but homegrown reaction to the sculpture has been “almost uniformly negative” … though you wouldn’t know if you were checking Flickr.
Mad Homes is a fascinating lo-fi community approach to public installation. A local nonprofit, Mad Art, invited 14 artists to create interventions in homes that are soon to be demolished in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The result is a mixture of installations that consume, infiltrate and surround the soon to be doomed and still perfectly well kept and usable houses.
City Hall Park is an excellent venue for Sol Lewitt’s sculptures. In the white cube, the problem is that the artist’s three dimensional structures can blend in precariously well with the similarly minimal geometric space, camouflaging their distinctiveness from the viewer. It is good to see Lewitt’s work contrasted with the park’s lush greens and lavish beaux arts architecture. In this context, his works appear like precious and unique islands of understatement.
