Power To The People

By Millie Hanson
Visual Arts Editor

It seems that Fargoans are being continually prodded into thinking about adding art to public spaces.

In the last few months there have been meetings about how to develop visually appealing stormwater retention ponds that are multi-purpose instead of single-purpose, rumors of bringing the Sodbuster back, and public forums about how to go about incorporating appropriate and site-specific public art into our unused public spaces.

When city planners and our museums get involved with artists that can help them realize these visions, we should sit up, pay attention, and be part of defining how our public spaces will look in the years to come.

In 1982, Sodbuster San Isidro was installed on the corner of Main and Broadway to mixed reviews. Like any thought-provoking art made of non-traditonal materials, those who encountered it on a daily or weekly basis grew increasingly resigned to or fond of its presence as a reminder of the pioneering history of the Midwest.

More traditional and memorial public sculptures can be seen in Fargo (next to the downtown library, in Island Park for example) were cast in bronze. But Sodbuster, by Luis Jiménez, was made of fiberglass and repeatedly coated with thin automotive grade resins which gave it incredible lustre, making it seems to glow from within. For two decades it weathered from the climate, cuastic exhaust from vehicles traveling along one the region’s busiest streets, and countless vibrations from trains whose tracks were just feet away.

Sodbuster resonates with the people here. This was abundantly clear three weeks ago at the Plains Art Museum. The public discussion to plan for future restoration and return was at times impassioned. And the most amazing thing was to hear people from local agencies competing to be Sodbuster’s new home. Who would have thought, people in Fargo are in love with their public art!

And this is just the beginning of the goings-on around here.

Maybe you’ve heard of The Fargo Project, part of the longer-reaching Go 2030 plans of being a “vibrant and sustainable city,” written about by HPR’s Paul Hankel, and availble online. It has the city joining forces with ecological artist Jackie Brookner.

She recently helped St. Louis with their community-based and landscape-sized project, called Public Art & Ecology: A Watershed Project for The Confluence. This was one project in a bigger part of their city’s overall plan to mitigate the Mississippi river’s yearly flooding.

Maybe it was a question of momentum and public collaboration but it seems like more and more cities are putting credence into public art. Closer to home, we have heard from three public artists whose work can inform Fargo with their solutions and of our possibilities.

Kinji (Kin-jee) Akagawa and Rebecca Krinke (Krin-kee) are university professors in Minneapolis at MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) and the University of Minnesota respectively. Patrick Marold is a practicing public artist who collaborates with the Rocky Mountain division of U.S. General Services Administration with the mission of “working alongside architecture teams, to create major works of art for new federal building projects, a tradition dating back to the mid-1800s in the United States.”

October brought Akagawa to discuss his work “Feeling Beauty in the City.” He brings a multitude of things to the table as he is from another culture (Akagawa grew up in Tokyo) and is one of the pioneering voices in public art in America.

Akagawa spoke of three related concepts: preconvention (how we orient ourselves to understand the world, e.i. what is art, what is money), convention, and post-convention which changes by location, context, and art aesthetic. Coming from another culture, he spoke of defining the art we appreciate here.

“What is American art? How can we get away from the European authoritarian definition?”

“We are more multicultural than ever. How do we discover our own beauty?” Insighful and hard questions, but worth pondering because we are to decide what public art to introduce into our daily lives.

Is public art as the new public relations? November brought us Patrick Marold and Rebecca Krinke to expand our depth of knowledge in the public art realm.

Marold had people considering his inspiration along with his work: wool from sheep lodging in the forsaken steel beams around fjords from Iceland’s defunct military installations and Rwandan murals that use ashes from the fireplaces to make highly graphic marks on the whitewashed walls of their homes.

His works include wooden sculptures in plexiglass cases inside the Denver Public Courthouse, a pedestrian bridge that uses an old railroad bridge structure to which Marold added steel rods to show another dimension and awareness of light, and and a temporary installation in Vail, Colorado called the Windmill Project made of light-generating windmills were borne out of his desire to map and harness wind.

Megan Johnston, the new PAM curator, had some pointed questions for him at the end of his slideshow.

“What is good public art, and how can we convince public officials and others in local government that we need good public art?”

Marold responded by saying that he practices good public art by establishing a routine of being fully conscious of a place and getting in touch and maintaining a tactile dialogue.

“I try to maintain my own engagement at all stages of the project even though I have help and so I embraces the challenges and stay flexible to meet them.” A perfect example of personally invested carry-through that is needed to stay engaged over the long run.

“I look for exchanges of energy when I approaches a public space, then I build on the dynamics inherent to that space.” Naturally, his work feels like an intentional and integral part of the public space. He also looks for the relationships that people have with the spaces and tries to make art that will resonate on a profoundly basic level with them.

For the Denver Federal Courthouse, he did four small pieces with wood that are encased in plexiglass cubes set up on pedestals.

“I explore the spaces in wood where it begins to crack and open up.” The idea was to bring a momentary small pool of serenity to an otherwise antiseptic, stress-inducing atmosphere in a governmental space.

No stranger to working with water, he is working on some pieces in Seattle that is going over a confluence of two streams and cutting boulders, “like slicing bread,” with wire and diamond bandsaws. They are being machined to interlock when reassembled. There was discussion about doing something like this for our own Red River.

Rebecca Krinke thinks of herself as a participatory public artist who is reinventing contact with nature and also giving people a place to express their feelings in public.

At U of M, her “Table for Contemplation and Action (A Place to Share Beauty and Fear)” is a light wooden table in a Swedishly simple style where moss, pine needles, bark or other natural elements sit in a sunken, square space in the center. She often changes the natural elements so that the students are made aware and look for these new bits of nature.

There is a glass vessel attached to the table with a prohibitive narrow mouth so that stressed out students or any passerby can deposit slips of paper with written thoughts of hopes or fears or frustrations without worrying about reprisal.

When the comment receptacles is full, she takes the comments out through the skinny neck without reading them and burns them. The students really like the idea of getting a private thought out, having it kept private, then having it destroyed permanently in the social contract that Krinke made. They are also free to eat at the table, have meetings, whatever they want.

“Thanks for the opportunity to jettison extra thought baggage.”

Krinke was touched at how much the students adopted the table: someone left a vase with a flower in it, and books of Psalms and books of Hours have been left.

“There are vast amounts of spaces inside our buildings that are under-utilized, generic and dull.” The courtyard in the College of Design at the U of M had been left pretty much empty. Krinke, simply by putting the table with its paper note receptacle in the space, had an impact.

“Unseen/Seen: The Mapping of Joy and Pain” was a temporary, moving, interactive artwork that Krinke experimented with during the summer of 2011. The map, 7 to 8 feet long by her estimation and laser cut to show all the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul by name, moved around to different public parks and was up only for a few hours in each. A large gold and grey sculpture traveled with it, helping to draw attention.

She wanted to promote “face to face” interaction in this age of what she feels is electronic, internet-based isolation and was just as surprised by expressed candor as she was with U of M’s table.

“I don’t have enough joy in my life,” one woman was heard saying while mapping.

The public was invited to color gold where they had experienced joy, and gray where they had experienced pain. The first markings of joy were predictably around the lakes and the Mississippi River, but also Lakewood Cemetary. Hospitals, the U of M, and Minehaha Falls had both joy and pain associated with them.

Krinke was surprised that people started to talk and the shared moments and honesty that sprang forth while they were mapping. She had never talked to homeless people who lived in the parks. It sounds cliché that a lawyer was talking to a student, alongside a homeless person and all of them plotting points of joy and pain.

“Just hand me the gray.”

Her project Visitation is still going on today. Krinke has an avid interest in making people’s stories public that would not be known otherwise. She started by inteviewing Nina in Northeast Minneapolis. Nina is a Ukrainian refugee who was taken off the street, literally kidnapped, in World War II by German soldiers at the age of 16 and taken via train to Germany and made a slave laborer. Krinke was left speechless by Nina’s story and dismayed that she had never heard anything about the 2 million Ukranians who suffered the same fate.

Krinke has since expanded the scope of the project to different areas around the Twin Cities and marveling at how little time, effort and cost is needed and anyone can participate.

“This is a simple public art project that costs no money, and exposes me to the things that people don’t normally share with strangers, the invisible.”

Every month she uses a new location and blogs about it at http://tiny.cc/hk6gh. She posts questions, printed on copy paper with black ink on telephone poles with two question. The question on top: Do you have stress to unburden? On the bottom is the question: Do you have joy to share? This is the first part of her larger idea of making a temporary, movable writing room where one can write in private.

She had everyone in the audience at City Hall write about a place that brought them joy or pain and a lot of people wrote about Island Park as their place of joy.

When asked about the practice of getting public art into cities, Krinke spoke of hearing things from the public just “going through the motions” because they (city gov’t) had to have a public meeting and about how artists just show up with plans, then expecting the public to want to take part in them.

“We just don’t spend enough time evaluating our emotional attachment to place. If a place isn’t loved, it won’t be sustainable, it won’t have champions.”

For more information about Sodbuster San Isidro, go to http://tiny.cc/trmya

Fargo 2030’s website for public input: http://tiny.cc/go2030

Jackie Brookner and the NEA’s Our Town in Fargo: http://qr.net/OurTown

Kinji Akagawa’s Minnesota Original interview: http://tiny.cc/won5i

Partrick Marold’s website: http://tiny.cc/pmar

Rebecca Krinke’s website: http://tiny.cc/n5ar6

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