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