March 02, 2008
If The Light Rail's Late, Just Take The Stonegate
Two views of A New Path, by Ilan Averbuch of New York, situated on the Valley Metro Light Rail Line just East of Central Avenue on Camelback Road, on the South side.
by Jerome du Bois
Looking back, I see that my main objection to the public art I've criticized in this Valley centers on the artists' egos eclipsing any sensitive response to the actual location of the sculpture's realization. So here we have yet another misnamed, misplaced, displaced, noplace piece, which could have been made anywhere, and parts of which already have been. Some of these elements go back twenty years in the artist's repertoire, in three different sites, and somebody tell me what they have to do with Phoenix, the Valley, the desert . . . the future? It's a rough rehash, a drudgy trudge along an old, threadbare path. This thing is his thing, not our thing; it's got nothing to do with us. And that's what makes me mad.
I obtained a publicity pdf about this piece. The main blurb reads,
Design Team Artist Ilan Averbuch, will work with stone and other desert based materials to create a landmark sculpture at the entrance to the light rails station on Camelback. The work is highly expressive in its forms, lit at night and has smaller interrelated elements within the station platform.
--Major landmark sculpture acts as "gateway" to downtown Phoenix.
-- Artwork generates dialogue about the relationship between architecture and the amorphic forms of the sculpture.
First, there's nothing "desert based" about the artist's materials, except perhaps the tree in the ancillary bench piece nearer the station. But this circle and its "matchbook people," as Catherine dubbed them, could have been made anywhere; they are as geographically nonspecific as the outlined couple in Julian Opie's aphasic LED piece down at the Phoenix Art Museum. This stonegate is merely another riff in Averbuch's schtick, as if we must have a recognizable Averbuch in Phoenix, like a concrete feather in our cowboy hat.
The work is not "highly expressive in its forms" at all. Rough-hewn blocks form the simplest expression, and the circle of stones, both horizontal and vertical, has been created millions of times, by countless callused hands, since before we learned to call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens. Usually there's fire in the center, or the stone circle creates a threshold, the physical pause of a gateway between two very different worlds; here there's nothing so dramatic.
Look at those top-heavy blockheads swaying and bobbing their awkward cartoonish selves across the threshold of the "New Path." Throughout history, thresholds have been portentous, a signal of significant transitions, of wrenching transformations. No longer. There's just as good as here, same-same-same, stuttering steel parentheses. Who will be the first to call them "whimsical"? even though they're clunky?
Isn't this the Light Rail? This thing looks as heavy as anything Sisyphus faced. What ever happened to the shiny fast future --here we are, there we go, glendalephoenixmesa in a blur? And though I'm only on the very edge of pop culture, I almost immediately thought of the movie Stargate, and its television clones, and how this clunker falls far short of the intricate carvings of those uncanny stonemetal circles. Contemporary artists often seem to think, erroneously, that their works are immune from comparison to popular culture, as if people separated their judgments of objects according to whether the creator had an MFA or not. But of course people don't do that. I'm saying the gates of the various Stargates expose this "New Path" as lazy and tedious, and many riders on the Rail will be making the same comparison.
At Central and Camelback the Line, depending on its direction of travel, makes major turns South (Eastbound) and/or West (Westbound). As a "gateway to downtown Phoenix," a city almost cringingly anxious about being seen as cutting-edge, this sculpture seems far too crude; it looks like it was put together as a joke by New Deal steelworkers from leftover construction scraps: "Workers Heading Home." All that's missing are the lunchboxes.
If they wanted to stick with raw forms and rusting steel, the selection committee would have been wiser to commission something by Pete Deise --some kind of giant bursting metal desert flower, something with curve and verve, uplift and spin, and interesting from every angle; this is where the Line swings, right? (I was surprised that Mr. Deise was not selected for a single installation along the Line. Less than half the selected artists are locals. You can find the list of artists and artworks here. Just scroll down.)
I don't know who was on the selection committee, and I'm not going to bother to find out. I don't really need more people mad at me. But Ilan Averbuch, like Janet Echelman, did not respond to Phoenix; he just recycled some old ideas, and that was good enough for the folks downtown.
And when some art expert said to them--
Artwork generates dialogue about the relationship between architecture and the amorphic forms of the sculpture
--maybe they just nodded in agreement. But it's an incoherent, trumped-up sentence. "Amorphic" is a synonym for "amorphous," which means "formless," so the phrase would read "the formless forms of the sculpture." And of the course the sculpture has well-defined forms; I could have described it easily without the photos. Finally, when I compare "A New Path" with its surroundings, I see an orderly layout of urban bustle, useful and functional --and right in the middle there's this clutter of fake folk profundity, but it's about another place, maybe even another time. It doesn't belong there.
PS. And can we please call our city Phoenix ? I've noticed a dismaying tendency among local so-called culture writers to jigger up some hip name: The 'Nix, CenPho, P-Town, Pho-Town. Phoenix is an ancient and noble name, a name that embodies a legend about the deepest dream of humanity: resurrection. It is an image, not of hope, but of hope realized. It's a beautiful name.
Posted by Jerome at March 2, 2008 08:26 AM | TrackBack