EC & BCG on public art.

A walk through Seal Point Park, San Mateo.

BCG: Public art is flawed from the start. The point of art is to express something that’s deep within somebody. Whereas public art is always going to be decoration. It can be all sorts of decoration like this one:

… it’s wind related, all these sculptures in this park seem to move with wind. Or public art can be political. We can’t change the system so we’re going to put up some graffiti or posters or murals that will make us feel better. All of it is decoration, you might as well paint the place pink or green or whatever it is. You get some sculpture like this and you’re like “oh we have a wasteland which we’re going to turn into a public park, a public park should have art, used to be that we would put up famous dead soldiers, memorialize them, now we’re gonna put up sculptures so people have something interesting to look at.” It’s not interesting! Cause all it does is show that wind is blowing. Show that there are these metal sculptures that look like they were put together by highschoolers and they move in the wind, they turn around and round. So, if they were actually put up by highschoolers at least they would serve some purpose, they could put it on their college resume, say performative improvement in community service, but all this does is pad an artist resume so that they can go off and do even more shitty public art somewhere else.

EC: I guess we had to replace the dead soldier memorials with something.

BCG: Prospect Park is in a sense a whole big piece of public art – actually Prospect Park’s construction had the social goal of getting people to be together, so in a sense it also had a sort of political aspect to it.

EC: Is there public art in Prospect Park?

BCG: Well, the big arch at Grand Army Plaza is a victory arch facing South, normally victory arches face North but this one faces south as a big finger up to the Southerners. And then there’s various generals who won battles in the Civil War sort of dotted around the whole place.
The way they put the park together, it was a bunch of fields that they plowed over to make the paths and lawns so we people could walk through it sort of mysteriously. They used a sort of cod Chinese philosophy of balance, there’s a water part, a mountain part, a flat part. They tried to have those things balanced.

EC: That feels really different from a wind sculpture.

BCG: Exactly, right. Public art as the whole landscape versus public art as decoration and things to look at. So this whole park we’re in right now would have been better if it was left as a landfill or whatever it was, on the side of the bay. But by dotting shite around it all you’re doing is putting raisins into a dog turd. And nobody needs that.

EC: What do you think about metered binoculars they always have in public parks?

BCG: The fact that you have to pay to see the view that you can see without the binoculars, that’s an example of people only valuing the things that cost money. Once you pay for it, you look a little closer, and you may see some more details. But you really end up seeing the same thing, those binoculars are always scratched or you can’t get your eyes on it right. What’s interesting in public, especially in California, is the complete disregard of aesthetics with electricity poles, pylons, they just do it in the most efficient way. So the bay, which is so beautiful, is completely lined with these high tension wire electric pylons. They just stride across the countryside. That defines the landscape in a way that I find aesthetically pleasing. You can appreciate nature more because it is man-made, and you can appreciate the power of the metal because of the geometric patterns it makes against the irregularity of the water. That is accidental art that I find aesthetically pleasing.

EC: Most people would disagree with that. I find them to be disruptive. I don’t think they’re heinous but maybe a little dystopian.

BCG: You’re probably right. There’s some part of me that likes the dystopian march across the countryside. That’s actually one of the aesthetics of California that I first appreciated when I came here. The fact that you have a piece of nature and next to it some hideous piece of architecture. Two palm trees in front of a neon self storage facility.