Terry Allen's "Nice" and "Shoe" busts

like Generals watching over the crowds!

The Art Guys have arrived

Installation started today:

Peter Schjeldahl - curator Navy Pier Walk 2004

Curating this year's Pierwalk was great fun for me.   I'm not used to operating on the supply side of exhibitions.  I'm often unhappy with how curators install works.  For once, my discontent found a more satisfying outlet than critical prose.  I could communicate it to guys with a crane.  For this thrill, I thank my Mr. Chicago, Joe Tabet; Cranemaster, Pat McDonald; and the crack Pier staff.  Their attentive support - with the occasional murmured, "Mm, you want to do that?" when, upon reflection, I most certainly didn't - gave me a distinct sense of beginners luck.

The grounds in front of the Pier and the spaces at its end, not to speak of a captive audience in the hundreds of thousands, are terrifically congenial to experiments in public sculpture.  I opted early on to avoid the Pier's wondrous promenade, which is a readymade art work in itself that subsumes hot dogs, kiosks, and cruise ships in a crazy gestalt.  Putting an artwork - which, if it cannot generate a zone of silent autonomy around itself, can't do much of anything - out there would be like tossing a kitten into a mosh pit.  But the sites that I was left to work with eased my job as a curator, which was to help art works make the best possible cases for themselves.  It was a matter of shifting something around until, with a click, it belonged.

How, or even whether, in a democracy, serious art can belong in public spaces is a question that I wanted to address.  I've often said that a public sculpture must deflect three questions with which we naturally greet any unexpected object in our vicinity:  "What is that? Why is it there? When will it go away?"  The trick is to arouse, in the unprepared viewer, an immediate response that prevents those deadly queries from kicking in.  The response needn't be positive at first.  It must only be particular, having to do with some specific aspect of the sculpture.  To be avoided, at all cost, is any self-improvement tone, such as implying that a work is good because it's good for us.  Edification is an optional pursuit of private life and not to be inflicted on innocent bystanders.

My criteria for jurying submitted projects - and for enhancing them with invitations to Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon - were, as I stated in an announcement of the show, crowd-friendliness, variety, and surprise.  As it happens, those values preoccupy many contemporary sculptors.  It's not a matter of pandering to vulgar taste - though there's nothing criminal about doing that - but of taking on its own terms the real world in which art, if it is to be more than a glorified hobby, must stake its claims.  When taken outside the shelter of museums and galleries, art doesn't just face different problems.  It is nearly a different enterprise.

It's not for me, as the curator, to judge the success of the works in this show.  I leave that up to the critics who, under the democratic conditions of public art in America, include everybody, I'll only note a common formal dynamic: near and far.  Most of the works deliver some dramatic impact, when seen from a distance, and exert a quieter, more intimate appeal, when approached.  Such doubleness is unusual for public sculpture, which, be it figurative or abstract, has always tended to invest its energies in the distant perspective, without considering the experience of viewers nearby.  This subtle change in sculptors' sensibility has big implications.  It reflects a wise acceptance of the unconquerable variousness of groups and individuals today, which defeats in advance any effort to impose one-size-fits-all meanings.

I love many old heroic sculptures:  generals on horses, and so on.  (Willem de Kooning alerted me to the greatness of Augustus Saint-Gaudens's General Sherman, near the Plaza Hotel:  He got the guy to sit right on the horse, de Kooning said.  "You know how hard that is?")  The closest that we have come lately to such civic idealism is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington:  a symbol of sheer loss, a vortex of grieving.  That exception proves the rule that, in order to justify itself in public, sculpture must now excuse its imposition on viewers in the mass by forming relationships with viewers one by one.  The entailed meaning is apt to be modest:  a touch of grace, a nudge of humor, a whiff of beauty.  The overriding imperative is only to connect. 

Peter Schjeldahl, 2004

Shepard Fairey mural - additional images

Shepard Fairey - Installation picture

Shepard Fairey - more pics of the mural

Check these out:

Harry Gordon sculpture for 2011

Here is an image of Harry Gordon's sculpture for NPW 12:

Dave Hickey - curator Navy Pier Walk 2002

"I consider juried exhibitions to be an extremely important part of visual culture in the United States, especially in the practice of sculpture where mobility is always an issue.

Art worlds by their very nature tend to become balkanized into regional and generational communities.  The juried show is one of the last remaining modalities designed to break down these vertical and horizontal barries, so I am always happy to participate.

Most of the work in the Navy Pier Walk exhibition was selected from submitted macquettes.  I began by selecting what I considered to be the best and most representive macquettes.  From this group, I selected the works that I thought would be most presentable when executed at scale.  I had no aesthetic agenda when selecting the work beyond the knowledge that a great many of the sculptures would be installed on the pier, in a fabricated environment, so I selected a fairly large percentage of fabricated sculpture.

At the completion of this first part of the process it became apparent that the macquettes I had selected, were for the most part, semi-abstract, semi-figurative work from mid-career artists working in the American Midwest.

But to create a more representative selection of the practice at this moment, I decided to curate into the show some rigorously abstract and rigorously figurative work, as well as work by some younger artists and older artists who work in the southern, eastern and western parts of the country.  (Financial considerations made it impossible to include European and Asian sculptures.)

The resulting exhibition, I think, is a fair survey of outdoor art at this moment.  From my perspective, there were some inevitable disappointments since the finished work did not always live up to the promise of the selected macquettes, but these were more than compensated for by a great many pleasant surprises.  I came away from the whole experience with a deepened respect for the citizens who populate the art world in Chicago and for the many artists who pursue the difficult and demanding practice of making modern art for outdoor settings."

Dave Hickey, art critic, analyst of Western culture and MacArthur Fellow was cited in the December 17, 2001 issue of TIME Magazine as an innovator whose ideas are changing the world.

Shepard Fairey - Statement for mural under Lake Shore Drive 2011

Shepard Fairey provided this statement after installing his mural on Grand Avenue under Lake Shore Drive:

"I think public art is very important as a way to capture peoples imaginations and encourage them to see public space as a forum for creative expression not just commercial advertising. I love the democracy of art in public, it is not intimidating in the way that galleries and museums can be. This specific mural is inspired by music graphics and music has always inspired me as a very democratic art form. Music can be about the pure pleasure of the listening experience just as art can be about the pleasure of the viewing experience. Both art forms have straight forward appeal but can also have deeper social and political content, however, music seems to have a much broader audience. I hope that public art works invite a broader audience the way that music does."

Ed Paschke statement on Public Art for Navy Pier Walk

Ed Paschke, Artist, Prof Northwestern U, was a co-founder of Navy Pier Walk and author of the Navy Pier Walk statement:

The importance of Public Art cannot be stressed enough as the 21st century gets underway. Technology is accelerating at a rate of speed faster than we can adapt to it. We are progressively more insulated from our primary emotional responses. Interactivity is being challenged and redefined on many levels. One of the most fundamental expamples of an interactive experience is responding to a painting or sculpture. By placing Art in an accessible setting the general public has an opportunity to get in touch with their basic critical faculties. We need these diverse, sensory, life enhancing experiences more than ever before.

List of Artists for Navy Pier Walk 2011

The exhibition will open July 1 2001 and run through the end of September 2011. We are excited to have multiple works from a few of the artists. Here are the artists:

Terry Allen
The Art Guys
Ronald Bladen
Harry Gordon
Ken Little
Peter Reginato
Shepard Fairey

Peter Schjeldahl in conversation with Joseph Tabet and Michael Workman

This article appeared in New City Chicago by Michael Workman. It is an interesting dialogue regarding the planning of the 2004 exhibition.

Eye Exam
Forever sculpture
Michael Workman

Patrons somehow not fully sated with seeing art at the pier last week have one last remaining reason to meander through crowds of gaping tourists in the blazing heat: Navy Pier Walk. Situated among the lemonade and spicy glazed popcorn stands of Gateway Park and Dock Street along the pier's southern promenade are some 28-odd works by approximately fifteen artists from around the world. Teenage couples walk arm-in-arm, barefoot children squeal with delight, stomping through the streams running off a fountain in the middle of the park, the spot where many of this sculpture show's prized selections are staged. Animals are big this year: there's a two-headed rubber ducky, a barrel-bodied pig, a tin chicken. Stuff that's definitely going to entertain the kids, but there are also a few serious twists. Three concrete coffins with steel handles tucked away in the picnic park near the pier's northeastern end resemble water or waste-processing casks. One lid sits slightly askew, while plaques mounted to the concrete sidewalk pronounce the names of outdated office equipment. Prayer booths (designated by a clasped pair of hands at the top of the booth) lure in patrons who can kneel on a bench while their prayers are taped by a recording device inside.

Director Joe Tabet and New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl (pronounced sheld-ALL), who Tabet tapped as juror for this annual summer show, are to blame for it all. Flash back to December: the two are meeting at the Moonstruck Diner in New York to discuss this year's available artistic choices and the daunting logistics of the show's shipping and installation. People trickle in off the street, grousing over menus. Each table in the diner's decked out in red and green "Season's Greetings" placemats under glass. Tabet slides into a corner booth and Schjeldahl, a gray-haired man in an orange and brown wool jacket and trim moustache, sits across from him. A knife squeaks against a ceramic plate.

Though it's his last year as director, in the three years this former stockbroker's been aboard, Tabet's ambition has always been to change what's seen as a show made flaccid by sloppy thought into a powerhouse of temporary sculpture. Much of his best effort at accomplishing this goal involves the participation of Schjeldahl. And the critic's personal philosophy--that art thrives under the direction of a strong and steady hand--was a major factor in the decision to invite him aboard as juror. Rising up through the ranks, he spent several years at the Village Voice before finally landing his current post at the New Yorker. Completely self-educated, Schjeldahl started out working for a news daily as a reporter, an experience that convinced him feature writing was a better outlet for his talents.

Tabet hands across a couple of catalogs from past Navy Pier Walk shows and Schjeldahl starts thumbing through, gazing intently. "Awful," he gasps, leafing past full-color images of sculpture shows curated by his colleagues, L.A. Times critic David Pagel and Las Vegas-based writer Dave Hickey. "Hickey's a philosopher. And I'm just a critic," he remarks. Colleague or not, each page of Hickey's catalog provokes a fresh lament. "Oh, can we have a moratorium on abstraction, just for this one?" Shaking his head, Schjeldahl opines on how abstract sculpture can't succeed because it has no necessary scale. "We're sensitive to gradations of scale. Unless it's next to a tall building, it looks small." he says, pointing out how, for the viewer, anything over 7 feet looks gigantic. "In the early days, when the show was run by sculptors, everything had to be over 10 feet." says Tabet. "Let's be happy we're not doing that anymore," Schjeldahl quips. They haven't. Hardly anything in this year's show has been dictated by scale though, with few exceptions, most works fit the human-scale format.

Both have their favorites, bantering a few names back and forth. It's then that British sculptor Richard Deacon comes up. His five-part "Infinity" sculpture series, at the southeast end of Gateway Park, ranks as a composite of the type of concise thought that characterizes this year's show. Each section, a congerie of what look like abraded silver pop-tabs, are piled across from one another in a formation that diffuses reflected sunlight into a glow at the center of the arrangement aswim with dust motes. It's a place in the show that tests the significance of memory-making, of joy and lighthearted amusements, of fleeting things that somehow last forever.


Navy Pier Walk 2004 is on display at Navy Pier, 600 East Grand, (312)595-7437, through fall.

Sculpture magazine review of Navy Pier Walk 2004

Pier Walk: Shrinking, Shrinking
by Victor Cassidy

http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag04/june04/web%20specials/cassidy.shtml

Tony Cragg, Stainless Steel Pillar.


Pier Walk, the annual outdoor sculpture exhibition at Chicago’s Navy Pier, shrinks steadily as commerce invades places where sculptures once stood. Originally constructed in 1916, Navy Pier is a long, shed-like structure, surrounded by a spacious pedestrian promenade that extends 3,000 feet out into Lake Michigan. The pier was largely derelict and threatened with demolition in the ’80s when the City of Chicago modernized it into a multi-use structure with amusements, restaurants, shops, theaters, and exposition halls. Fabulously successful, Navy Pier now attracts millions of visitors yearly and delivers millions of dollars in fees and tax revenues to the city.

The first International Art Exposition was held at Navy Pier in 1982, bringing dealers and collectors from all over the world. Artists organized to exhibit on Navy Pier during the expo, and, in 1995, two Chicago sculptors set up Pier Walk. Three years later, 178 outdoor sculptures were installed at Navy Pier from May through November.

As Navy Pier expanded commercially, management filled open areas with hot dog stands, beer gardens, picnic tables, and the like. Today, these interferences have driven public sculpture off the pier. Kiosks are now appearing in Gateway Park, a grassy area at the base of the pier where sculptors still show. This park is boxed in, with no room for expansion in any direction.

Andrew Rogers, Weightless 1.


The result is a dramatic reduction in the number of works exhibited—from 178 in 1998 to 80 in 2001, to 23 pieces by 15 artists in 2004. Joseph Tabet, the investment counselor who chairs Pier Walk’s Board of Directors, says that there’s “no official limit” to the number of pieces, but 25 “seems about right.” Pier Walk is “much more exclusive now,” he states. “It means more.”

Pier Walk has almost zero administrative overhead because Navy Pier provides office space and public relations support without charge. Pier Walk has no paid staff, and Board members volunteer their time. But Navy Pier takes away with one hand what it gives with the other. Hot dogs generate revenue, after all. Public sculptures do not.

Pier Walk commissioned New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl to curate the 2004 exhibition. Schjeldahl sees Pier Walk as a “festival” and “an experiment in possibilities and problems of serious artistic pleasure outside the walls of museums and galleries.” In choosing work, he looked for “crowd-friendliness, variety, and surprise”—nothing on a pedestal—and admits that his selection criteria made him “unfair to much good art whose character is more contemplative than gregarious, or whose style seemed familiar from past Pier Walks.” The show is temporary so Schjeldahl felt free to take some risks. His selections include Richard Deacon’s five flower-like metal structures (Infinity); Erik Geschke’s Safety First, a white, cube-like construction of steel sheet with many handles; Actual Size Artworks' amusing Trojan Piggybank, history's fattest pig made from cedar boards over a steel armature; and Zoran Mojsilov's granite Grandma’s Mountain, a very people-friendly work since the artist wants the public to sit and climb on it.

Richard Deacon, Infinity 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.


Artists like the exposure that Pier Walk gives them, and they enjoy the attention from a prominent art critic. Though Gateway Park is less than ideal, they shrug and make the best of it. “This is a quality show with a good reputation,” says the Australian Andrew Rogers, whose cast bronze Weightless #1 looks like it just floated down from the blue. “In an urban setting, you have to be good enough, strong enough to stand out.” Mojsilov has benefited tremendously from his six appearances in Pier Walk and doesn’t fret much about the surroundings. “Artists are like weeds,” he says. “The more you kill them, the more they grow back.”

Pier Walk 2004 remains open through November 8, 2004.

Peter Schjeldahl - curator of Navy Pier Walk 2005

Before and after images

Shepard Fairey kicks off UNDER LSD series. Public art with no boundaries.

We are back:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-talk-shepard-fairey-viaduct-20110501,0,1886888.story

Obama 'Hope' artist to show giant mural near Navy Pier

Shepard Fairey's 'Obey' part of lakefront art exhibition

 

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Navy Pier and street artist Shepard Fairey installed a giant poster mural at Grand Avenue under the Lake Shore Drive viaduct, the first piece of artwork to go on display as part of the "Navy Pier Walk 2011" public art exhibition. (Brian Cassella/Tribune)

6:46 p.m. CDT, May 1, 2011

Shepard Fairey, the artist best known for his Barack Obama "Hope" poster in 2008, is leaving his mark near Chicago's lakefront.

As part of the Navy Pier Walk 2011 art exhibition, Fairey has created a giant poster mural for the Lake Shore Drive viaduct at Grand Avenue. Measuring 130 by 10 feet, the "Obey" mural features a string of album-coverlike works. It is Fairey's first such installation in Chicago and will remain at the site through October.

The largest outdoor installation of its kind in the country, Navy Pier Walk 2011 opens July 1, after a five-year hiatus.

Fairey's mural will anchor the display. It is printed on standard copy paper using an oversize blueprint printer and applied to the surface of the viaduct with standard wallpaper glue, exhibition organizers said.

A water-based finish was applied to the artwork to protect against weather and graffiti. The installation was completed last week.

"As people examine Shepard Fairey's work on their way to Navy Pier or the lakefront, I hope they will enjoy seeing it, will think about the issues it raises and also gain a new appreciation of the transformative power of public art," said Joseph Tabet, curator of the walk.