The responsibility of art in public spaces

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle got me thinking about art in public spaces. The article was about the design collective Rebar, and their now-annual event Park(ing) Day, which this year happens on September 19.  Readers of my earlier post about the event will recall that it essentially takes over parking spaces with artful micro-parks. One of Rebar’s members, John Bela, was quoted as saying: “It’s not just about parks, it’s about rethinking streets and how we use urban lands—a much broader idea….”

In popular usage the word environment has come to connote the natural world.  But if we take the broader view, the environment includes everything around us; etymologically  the word in fact derives from “round about.”  In an urban setting that includes a lot of non-natural things. When it exists in a public space, art automatically becomes part of the environment.  What is the effect of that, both on the environment and on the people who live in it?  How should we use our urban lands?

Consider “Cupid’s Span,” the 60-foot-high painted fiberglass and stainless steel sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen on San Francisco’s waterfront:

When the sculpture first went up in 2002, I hated it.  I thought it was too massive and out of scale for its location and detracted from the beauty of the waterfront.  Messed up the environment, in other words.  But over the years, as I walked by it frequently, I gradually began to look at it differently and now I really like it.  One of the things that changed my mind was that I looked at it from a different angle:

Photo by Elizabeth Mangelsdorf, SF Chronicle

I saw it as an echo of the Bay Bridge, fitting wonderfully in its space.  It is still the same piece in the same environment, but it forced me to look at it, to think about it, to see my environment differently.

This, to me, is the main responsibility of art in public spaces.  Public space is at a premium in most cities, and it is important that we use it well, that we use it for public benefit.  But what defines public benefit?  Public art is inevitably controversial, and we can’t expect it to please everyone.  If we are going to make art part of our environment, we should make it a positive part.  Not positive in the sense of pretty or feel-good, but positive in the sense of giving us something we didn’t have before and thereby enriching the environment. Ideally, it will complement the other parts of the environment, but even if it doesn’t it can be an enrichment in that it makes us look and makes us think.  We and the environment will both benefit from that.