{"id":10058,"date":"2022-01-03T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-03T18:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.arch.tamu.edu\/?p=10058"},"modified":"2022-06-15T11:51:00","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T16:51:00","slug":"why-public-art-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pvfa.tamu.edu\/news\/2022\/01\/03\/why-public-art-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Public Art Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Researching public art’s rise to relevance and women artists’ struggle for equality<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Public art, and its detractors, go hand in hand. An online search quickly reveals results like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhy Public Art is So Consistently Awful,\u201d \u201cWhat is the Point of Public Art if the Public Does Not Like It,\u201d and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These aren\u2019t new complaints, said Susanneh Bieber, an award-winning art and architectural historian in the Texas A&M departments of visualization and architecture whose research focuses on American artists of the 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That era\u2019s artists were well aware that many view art as frivolous and elitist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art for Change<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bieber, who is writing a book about \u201860s art, said many of the era\u2019s artists engaged with the built environment because they wanted to make their art more relevant to the general public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their effort worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although plenty of public art naysayers remain, as reflected in those search results,\u201860s artists were indeed able to significantly elevate public art\u2019s relevance to the general public. They did something important \u2014 their art helped change how American society looks at \u201cbig picture\u201d matters such as the Vietnam War. They showed that art can inspire a society to question the status quo and to critically reevaluate historical events from different perspectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bieber\u2019s research also reveals female artists\u2019 previously unsung contributions as well as their struggles with art world sexism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A New Way to Look at Sculpture<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the \u201860s, artists such as Claes Oldenburg began to reimagine the monument, a staple of public art for centuries. Monuments traditionally celebrate war victories or heroism in a vertical orientation \u2014 a man on a horse on a pedestal is a typical case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oldenburg had different ideas about monuments. He reimagined well-known structures such as the Washington Monument, for example, in a drawing of a giant pair of scissors pointed skyward. \u201cDesigns like these, which he never intended to be built, have a light-hearted touch but seriously rethink what a monument could be,\u201d said Bieber. \u201cHe\u2019s questioning society\u2019s framework of what a monument is honoring, for whom and for what purposes it was built.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bieber
Bieber, who studies the relationship between art, architecture and the built environment, makes a presentation during the 2018 research symposium hosted by the College of Architecture<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Art as Protest<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1969, as the U.S. war in Vietnam and antiwar protests in the U.S. raged, Oldenburg, supported by a group of Yale University faculty and students, built a monument that served as a protest against the war and as the centerpiece of a campus protest area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The piece, \u201cLipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,\u201d was a tank made of painted plywood with an inflatable, lipstick \u201cbullet\u201d pointing skyward from its center. Placed overlooking the campus\u2019 World War I memorial and the president\u2019s office, the piece resists a simple interpretation, but like his Washington Monument\/scissors drawing, it\u2019s Oldenburg\u2019s way of asking what values a monument reflects and how it perpetuates these values, said Bieber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another artist who rose to prominence in the \u201860s, Robert Smithson, also questioned monuments\u2019 form and purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before his untimely death in a 1973 airplane crash, Smithson created sculptures for display in landscapes instead of indoors, sometimes using reflected materials and glass sheets \u2014 a departure from the white\/gray surfaces of traditional monuments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSmithson\u2019s pieces acknowledge different kinds of histories, not just the history of victory as told by white men, but histories that acknowledge pain, suppression, or environmental degradation,\u201d said Bieber. \u201cHe influenced later artists, who further developed his artistic concepts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, in the \u201880s, the efforts of \u201860s artists led to something that changed society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art to Remember<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In early 1981, Maya Lin, a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, submitted what would become the winning entry in a national design competition for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the National Mall in Washington D.C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her design echoes the tradition- breaking work of Oldenburg, Smithson and their 60s contemporaries with its reflective, polished black granite instead of monuments\u2019 traditional white limestone or marble, and its horizontal, not vertical, orientation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe monument, instead of making a heroic statement, honors those who died, acknowledges the cost of war, asks us to consider the arguments for war and the arguments against it,\u201d said Bieber. \u201cIt\u2019s not a \u2018black and white\u2019 statement.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tSusanneh Bieber\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/h4>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t\tAssociate Professor\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t979.845.4601<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEmail Susanneh Bieber<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/section>\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Researching public art’s rise to relevance and women artists’ struggle for equality Public art, and its detractors, go hand in hand. An online search quickly reveals results like: \u201cWhy Public Art is So Consistently Awful,\u201d \u201cWhat is the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":10059,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[59,61,62,58,63,90],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Public Art Matters - Texas A&M University<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/pvfa.tamu.edu\/news\/2022\/01\/03\/why-public-art-matters\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Public Art Matters\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Researching public art’s rise to relevance and women artists’ struggle for equality Public art, and its detractors, go hand in hand. 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