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Document 1 of 1 Saving public sculpture Author: Grant, Daniel ProQuest document link Abstract: As many public works of art fall into disrepair, artists must increase their awareness about thedurability of their artwork, including sculpture. Art is not considered to have a life expectancy, but the growingmaintenance issue raises the question of just how permanent public art is. Full text: Headnote With many public works of art in dire condition, artists must take more responsibility in ensuring the longevity oftheir work. Just a few years after its completion, in 1991, Athena Tacha's granite public sculpture Memory Path wasbecoming unrecognizably stained and corroded at its site in Sarasota, Florida. The photographic imagessandblasted into sections of the stone were rapidly losing their clarity, and the formerly smooth surface wasincreasingly pitted. Why? City maintenance workers were hosing down the work and watering the surroundinggrass with recycled water, which is acidic and has a high bacteria count. Unfortunately, repairing the artworkhas been a slow and unsatisfactory process. Memory Path, however, received a better fate than Marianthe, another of Tacha's public works of art.Commissioned by the University of South Florida at Fort Myers in 1985, the sculpture--constructed of bricks andmetal supports in a spiral maze--was scrapped last February when rust weakened the entire structure andmade it a potential hazard to students who might walk on or near it. "I leave very specific maintenanceinstructions, and no one follows them," says Tacha. "A damaged work is detrimental to my reputation, andremoving a work both damages and lessens my reputation, first because there is nothing left for people to see,and second, because it leaves the impression my work isn't durable." The condition of outdoor monuments and other artworks has been a subject of concern since the 1980s. A five-year study by the Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization Save Outdoor Sculpture, completed in 1995,identified 32,000 artworks throughout the United States, half of which were in need of significant conservationtreatment, 10 percent urgently. The main causes of the deterioration are vandalism, pollution or the climate,cars or trucks that crash into the work, the fragility of the materials, and failure to provide regular andappropriate maintenance. A growing number of public (frequently outdoor) works of art have been commissioned since the 1970s, spurredby Percent-for-Art regulations that require governmental agencies to spend between one-half of one percentand one percent of building construction or renovation funds on the acquisition of artwork for those sites. Inaddition, many airports and transportation authorities, corporations, and universities have set aside money forthe purchase of large-scale sculptures and murals. Unfortunately, this growth has been accompanied byincreasing complaints that no one is taking care of these pieces, leading to their rapid deterioration. "They never kept my work in good repair," New York City sculptor Nancy Holt says about her 1984 Waterworkinstallation on the grounds of Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, which finally removed the piece in 1995."They just slowly let it fall apart." Another New York sculptor, Judy Pfaff, found that a 1992 public pieceanchored to a Miami police station, which had been commissioned by the Dade County Percent-for-- Artordinance, was badly damaged by a roof leak at the station. Ironically, the work's name was Aqua Vitae, and itwas totally destroyed. In the early 1990s, a public work representing a sharecropper shack by Athens, Georgia. sculptor BeverlyBuchanan, which was owned by the city of Atlanta and located in a municipal park, was damaged by homelesspeople. Instead of repairing the piece, the city removed the bolts that kept the sculpture in place and put it in

storage, where it has remained. Buchanan's lawyer in Atlanta, William Gignilliat, says, "We've been able to keepthe city from destroying it, but that's about it. They have no intention of repairing or putting it on display everagain." Art is not considered to have a life expectancy, but the growing maintenance issue raises the question of justhow permanent public art is. "Personally, I'm a proponent of temporary public works of art," says Jack Becker,the editor of Public Art Review, the leading journal in the field. "The owners of too many of these works justdon't accept responsibility for them." Tom Eccles, the director of the Public Art Fund in New York City, whichprimarily commissions short-term installations of public works of art, agrees. "Contractually, 20 years is as far asanyone can go," he says. "A private developer may commission a work and be very enthusiastic about it, butbuildings change hands over time, and no one wants to be tied to a work in perpetuity." That is certainly theproblem faced by Forrest Myers, an artist in Brooklyn, whose 1972 sculptural installation on the exterior wall ofa building at the intersection of Houston Street and Broadway in New York City became a source of contentionwith the property's new owner. In 1997, the owner announced that he wanted to remove the sculpture, replacingit with billboard signage through which he could earn thousands of dollars. The city's Landmarks PreservationCommission stopped the owner from taking down Myers' piece, but according to the artist, "he switched tactics,using what I call 'demolition by neglect.' He is not making repairs on the wall or repainting it; he put scaffoldingaround the wall and my work, claiming that there is a safety hazard. Basically he wants to make it look so badthat the city will require him to take it down." Myers has formed a committee to raise money to save the wall. Changing ownership was also the problem faced by Tacha. In the early 1990s, the University of South Floridasold the land on which Marianthe was located to Edison Community College, which never repaired or providedmaintenance to the work, even after Save Outdoor Sculpture notified Edison that repairs were needed. Althoughher commissioning contract with the University of South Florida required the institution to provide regularmaintenance, Tacha, who lives in Washington, DC, says that she "cannot afford a protracted breach of contractlawsuit in Florida courts against two institutions with unlimited legal resources, nor can I afford the emotionaldrain of it." For its part, Edison Community College claimed that the extensive rust that made the piece unstablewithin only 14 years proved that the work itself was improperly constructed and composed of nondurablematerials. Because the contractor she used to construct the work had died (no one for her to sue) and the Ohio-based engineer who assisted in the design had retired, Tacha decided that all she could do was walk away fromthe piece. Legal complications and emotional turmoil also convinced Pfaff not to pursue her contractual rights for the workat the Miami police station. "I had so much trouble installing it and the police's reaction was so negative that Ididn't want anything more to do with it," she says. Similarly, New York sculptor Alan Sonfist decided to forgo alawsuit against the city of St. Louis when it tore down a work that city maintenance workers had not properlymaintained. "I didn't want to spend a month or two in St. Louis pursuing this; I thought I'd get an ulcer," he says.Ultimately, Tacha, Pfaff, and Sonfist were paid in full for their respective works, and the loss was primarily totheir reputations. Their works exist now only in the photographic documentation of the installations. Artists have been protected from unsoughtafter changes to, or the wholesale destruction of, their work by theVisual Artists Rights Act, which was enacted into law in 1990. An amendment to the federal copyright law, theact allows artists to disassociate themselves from artworks that have been altered and bring a lawsuit in theevent of destruction. The law does not cover damage to the work caused by a lack of maintenance (anexception exists in the law for the "modification of a work of visual art as the result of the passing of time orinherent nature of materials"). Only one legal case filed under the act has been decided in the artist's favor,involving Indianapolis sculptor Jan Randolph Martin, who sued the city of Indianapolis in 1996 for demolishing apublic sculpture that he had created on land that the city had subsequently acquired. He was awarded 20,000 instatutory damages and $131,000 in attorney's fees and court costs. Although the decision created a usefulprecedent for other artists who seek to defend their rights under the Visual Artists Rights Act, the high cost of

legal and court fees as compared to the potential payment for damages reveals why some artists choose not topursue their legal options and, instead, walk away. "You make something; you put it out in the world and hopethat people will respond," says New York City sculptor Mary Miss. "Certainly, you hope at least that it will not beso damaged or neglected that it's no longer the same piece you created. Under the law, you can remove yourname from it that's not much consolation." The key to ensuring that one's installed public artwork is properly maintained, lawyers for the artists claim, is towrite maintenance instructions clearly into the commissioning agreement. Ann Garfinkle, an attorney inWashington, DC, who has represented Tacha and other artists involved in public art commissions, stated thatcontracts should ideally include clauses requiring a budget for maintenance and repairs; periodic inspections ofthe work (with photographs taken of the piece and a condition report written up by the inspector); regularmaintenance (such as cleaning, regrouting, or repainting); immediate notification of the artist in the event ofdamage; a requirement that the artist meet with someone to discuss how best to conserve the work; andmonetary damages to the artist if the owner fails to live up to the maintenance agreement. A growing number of cities and counties with Percent-for-Art statutes-- Buffalo, Dayton, Denver, Richmond, St.Paul, and Broward County, Florida-- have adjusted these laws to include money for maintenance. "We changedfrom a one-percent-for-art program to a two-percent-for-art program, using the extra money for care andpreservation," says Nancy Knutson of the Broward Cultural Affairs Council, which oversees the public artprogram. The General Services Administration's annual budget for maintenance and conservation edges closeto $1 million. Artists themselves, however, need to use the most durable materials and understand the types of care that theirmaterials and designs require. "Part of the challenge of creating public art is combining appropriate materialsand an artistic vision," Sonfist says. "If you are putting something into the ground, you have to consider theacidity of the soil. If you are working in a place that is very humid or very dry, you have to know how yourmaterials will interact with that environment. Furthermore, when the piece is created and installed, themaintenance should be clearly spelled out in writing for the owners." In many cases, the artists don't know how their work will hold up, nor do they understand how to maintain it orrepair damage. Early on in the General Services Administration's art conservation program, "artists came in todo conservation, and deterioration recurred," says Alicia Weber, the chief of the fine arts program. "After that,we stopped using the artists and relied exclusively on conservators. Artists generally seem happy to defer to theconservators anyway." It is rare that the individuals or panelists involved in selecting public art include conservators, engineers, orothers with a specific knowledge of how an artwork, which they see in design or a small-scale model, should becared for and the long-term costs of its upkeep. Two notable exceptions are the Leigh Yawkey Woodson ArtMuseum in Wausau, Wisconsin, and the Fairmount Park Art Association in Philadelphia, where maintenanceand conservation concerns are part of the selection process. "We're too small a museum to have a fulltime art conservator," says Jane Weinke, the curator of collections atLeigh Yawkey Woodson, "so I've spent a lot of time with conservators at the Upper Midwest ConservationAssociation [a regional conservation lab that works for small museums in the geographical area] to learn how totake care of works and to spot the ones that are going to need a lot of care. Seeing as a conservator seescertainly makes you look at artworks differently." That knowledge of the durability of materials and how theyinteract with the environment has benefited the museum, which regularly purchases artworks for its sculpturegarden. In fact, three of the museum's 12 outside sculptures are regularly brought in for the winter for repair andto limit their exposure to the elements. She notes that artists sometimes provide instructions for themaintenance of their work, but their ideas are frequently not appropriate to the conditions at the museum. "Thewaxes and patinas that they recommend may work where they live, but they don't work in the upper Midwest,"she says. "When we've followed their suggestions, the works haven't weathered well."

At the Fairmount Park Art Association, how the pieces are going to hold up is a key element in thecommissioning process, and the staff works with artists to "find the most durable materials that still meet theintegrity of the artistic idea," according to Laura Griffith, the assistant director. One project on which thismaintenance-conscious approach has worked successfully is Jody Pinto's Fingerspan, a 1987 piece offunctional art (a bridge) located at Fairmount Park. The idea for the bridge over a water hole went throughnumerous permutations before it was finally constructed, starting first as a wooden pier, switching to Cor-tensteel, and finally developing an open-lattice weave of weathering steel for the floor of the bridge in order topermit drainage of water and lessen the likelihood of the metal rusting. The Fairmount Park Art Association's knowledge was hard won, having seen the damage caused by collectingwater in an early commissioned piece by Louise Nevelson, Atmosphere and Environment XII. In that work,made of Corten steel, water filtered through cracks and eventually began pushing out the boxes that composedthe work. The piece had to be completely disassembled and drainage holes drilled in before it could be installedoutside again. The Art Association required an engineer to approve Pinto's design and its materials before it went intoconstruction, and Pinto worked with an engineer in Philadelphia, Samuel Y. Harris, who found the mostappropriate gauge of steel and the types of joints and bolting needed for the work's structural integrity. Theproject offered a great learning experience for the artist, who has subsequently done a number of functionalpublic artworks. "The needs of maintenance really change the design," she says. "When you try to develop anidea with maintenance and conservation in mind, it forces you to simplify the design." AuthorAffiliation Daniel Grant is the author of The Fine Artist's Career Guide, How to Start and Succeed as an Artist, and TheArtist's Resource Handbook, (all Allworth Press, New York, New York), among other books and magazine andnewspaper articles. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Subject: Sculpture; Public art; Publication title: American Artist Volume: 64 Issue: 697 Pages: 18-22 Number of pages: 5 Publication year: 2000 Publication date: Aug 2000 Year: 2000 Publisher: Nielsen Business Media Place of publication: New York Country of publication: United States Publication subject: Art, Museums And Art Galleries ISSN: 00027375 CODEN: AARTA8 Source type: Magazines Language of publication: English

Document type: Feature ProQuest document ID: 232329459 Document URL:http://search.proquest.com.ezaccess.library.uitm.edu.my/docview/232329459?accountid=42518 Copyright: Copyright BPI Communications Inc. Aug 2000 Last updated: 2011-09-07 Database: Arts & Humanities Full Text

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