Don’t expect to see edgy art in public spaces

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/09/2003 (8056 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DON’T get your shirts in a knot, folks. Dead bunnies will not be strung up at Portage and Main any time soon.

In a city where oil paintings of Winnie-the-Pooh attract adoring multitudes, the idea of tax dollars going to pay artistes to honour their muses in public spaces has got to leave many knees a-jerking.

This is a city, after all, with depressingly pedestrian views of what constitutes acceptable art in an outdoor setting.

For 20 years, we banished John Nugent’s graceful No. 1 Northern steel wheatfield sculpture because of the tastes of a few cranky taxpayers.

Provincial officials caved in to pressure from the Métis lobby who objected to Marcien Lemay’s impressionist sculpture of Louis Riel on the Legislative Building Grounds.

Yes, we love senior sculptor Leo Mol’s Walt Disney-like deer in Assiniboine Park. But when an artist with an adventuresome streak, Diana Thorneycroft, hung a few rabbit carcasses (pre-slaughtered by a butcher) at a gallery setting in St. Norbert, she was accused of torturing Bambi on the taxpayers’ dime.

With this in mind, maybe city council’s belated decision this week to adopt a strategy to liven up the city’s streetscapes with visual art is a risky proposition — like suggesting user fees for garbage and gasoline.

But it shouldn’t be risky at all. It should be motherhood.

Plunked in the middle of the bald prairie, buried in snow for half the year, the leafless trees bent in the cold wind like branches in an L.L. FitzGerald painting, we’re in need of some beautifying.

Even if the beauty, occasionally, is in the eyes of a beholder other than ourselves.

This public art policy is a long time coming. It devotes $500,000 in the first year toward an unspecified number of projects. It stems from an idea recommended in 1997 by the Buchwald Arts Policy Review Panel, commissioned by then-mayor Susan Thompson.

Her successor, Glen Murray, pushed through most of the panel’s major recommendations, including the big one. Council is in the process of doubling the amount the city devotes to arts funding to $4 million per year. This is happening over four years, 25 per cent per annum.

Murray formed his Task Force on Public Art in May 2002, with landscape artist Heather Cram as chairwoman. The panel’s recommendations, finally passed by council, call for all projects to be first vetted by an advisory committee, then juried by a panel of so-called experts, most of them artists.

It is true. Artists can have their heads up their orifices in judging each other’s ability to produce masterworks. But their involvement is preferable to letting the bureaucrats or the politicians call the shots.

Otherwise we would end up with statues of Garth Steek and Lillian Thomas posing like Admiral Nelson at Waterloo.

Let’s be fair, here. As much as his new civic revenue-generating scheme is incensing his critics, the mayor’s on a roll.

CJOB’s Chuck Adler may be blowing steam, and Free Press editorialists may be punching holes, but the Globe and Mail in Toronto put his plan on the front page the other day. The message conveyed by the article: “Somebody in Winnipeg has a novel idea. Imagine that.”

The paper gave him an op-ed perch yesterday, accompanied by a large photo of His Eminence, to spout his vision of a Jane Jacobs-like future.

He mentioned his good buddy Jacobs on CBC Radio One’s The Current yesterday morning as well, when the Mother Corp gave him several minutes of free air time.

Next Thursday at the Fort Garry Hotel, he is hosting a lecture by the trendy U.S. urban economist Richard Florida. This is the guy whose book The Creative Class argues that the new engines of prosperity are cities that provide congenial environments for highly skilled knowledge workers.

Part of that environment is decent and voluminous public art, because it signifies someone cares about the urban landscape.

Mark my words. For the first few years, the juries’ choices will be entirely public friendly. The artists are not going to jeopardize the goodwill of the taxpayer nor their source of funds.

They know which side their bread is buttered on.

And there’s no rabbit meat in the sandwich.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca