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Leonardo The Aesthete in Pittsburgh: Public Sculpture in an Ordinary American City Author(s): David Carrier Source: Leonardo, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2003), pp. 35-39 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577278 . Accessed: 10/06/2014 12:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Leonardo. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 62.122.72.48 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 12:41:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Aesthete in Pittsburgh: Public Sculpture in an Ordinary American City

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Leonardo

The Aesthete in Pittsburgh: Public Sculpture in an Ordinary American CityAuthor(s): David CarrierSource: Leonardo, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2003), pp. 35-39Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577278 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 12:41

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLeonardo.

http://www.jstor.org

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Page 2: The Aesthete in Pittsburgh: Public Sculpture in an Ordinary American City

INVITED REVIEW

The Aesthete in Pittsburgh:

Public Sculpture in an Ordinary

American City

David Carrier

M any discussions of public sculpture focus on a few famously controversial artworks. But we can best un- derstand public sculpture by first studying quite ordinary works. A great deal can be learned about the problems and prospects of public sculpture by looking at such art in Pitts- burgh. It is a city I know well, for I have lived and worked there for 25 years. Looking around Pittsburgh as if it were an unfa- miliar city while writing this essay was revelatory. One learns much about the aesthetic potential of a place by thinking about its geography and history.

This is not a complete survey of public art in Pittsburgh. Nor does it discuss sculpture planned for the near future or

compare Pittsburgh's public art with that in other cities. Using a few examples, I simply aim to understand the role public sculpture plays in an ordinary American city.

A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF PITTSBURGH

Pittsburgh was not always an ordinary place-once it was "Steel

City." The Seattle of the late 19th century, it was the place where many new American fortunes were very quickly made. Its site is the key to the city's history-it is centered at the junc- tion of three rivers. The downtown, the Golden Triangle, is the triangle formed where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers come from the east and meet to form the Ohio. Those three rivers were the basis for the local economy when Pitts-

burgh was a world-class industrial capital. Coal and iron ore were easy to ship on the rivers to the mills. In the old days, the heavily polluted city was a destination for emigrants seeking jobs. Now, Pittsburgh's steel mills are mostly dismantled, and the air is clear. The city itself is relatively depopulated-many people have moved, some to live nearby in the suburbs.

A great deal of money was made here, but the art collec- tions of the nouveau riche Pittsburghers and their children ended up in museums elsewhere-in the Frick in Manhattan; in Andrew and Paul Mellon's contributions to the National Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art; and in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The grand wealth of turn-of- the-century Pittsburgh has left surprisingly few lasting traces in the local art world. Andrew Carnegie wanted the museum

David Carrier (educator), Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106-7110, U.S.A. E-mail:

<[email protected]>.

in Pittsburgh bearing his name, the Carnegie Institute, to produce ex- hibitions of contemporary art; he was not interested in building a col- lection. (He also endowed the Mel- lon Institute, now part of Carnegie Mellon University, a separate insti- tution.) The disappearance of the steel industry turned Pittsburgh into a pleasant backwater, a typical rust-belt city, with no special con- cern for the collection or study of

ABSTRACT

There is a great deal of public art in Pittsburgh. Surveying some examples of this public sculpture suggests some general lessons about the role of such art. Art in public spaces needs to be accessible to the public. One way to make it so is to present local history, com- memorating local sports heroes, politicians or artists. Public art also needs to be placed in a way that is sensitive to local history. Most public art in Pittsburgh is not successful because it does not deal with the interesting history of that city. Much sculpture that is successful in a museum is not good public art, and some successful public art in Pitts- burgh does not belong in a museum.

the visual arts. The local art schools are provincial, like most such schools everywhere. Sports are important in Pittsburgh- but art plays a relatively minor role in the life of the commu- nity.

Pittsburgh's museums lack the funding necessary to present more than a small number of major exhibitions. The most im- portant event in the local art world, the Carnegie Interna- tional, presents new work by the best-known contemporary artists exhibiting in New York and Europe. A new museum, al- lied with the Carnegie, is devoted to Andy Warhol, the most famous visual artist born here. Pittsburgh is a typical Ameri- can city-the ambitious art exhibited here is being made else- where. Much of the local public art, new and old, is like that found in every such place. That is why the study of Pittsburgh's public sculpture is of general interest. You can learn much about art in American urban sites by driving around in Pitts- burgh with a guidebook in hand.

PITTSBURGH'S SITE

To understand public sculpture, one needs to know the char- acteristics of its site. Entering Pittsburgh's downtown going east from the airport, a driver comes through a long tunnel onto the Fort Pitt Bridge to suddenly confront the skyscrap- ers of the Golden Triangle. Although few of these individual buildings have any special architectural distinction, as an en- semble they are impressive. The white ethnic neighborhoods of the North Side and, across the Monongahela, on the South Side, not far from the Golden Triangle, are separated from this downtown by the rivers. Downtown and the ethnic neigh- borhoods to its south and north are being gentrified. The large stadium for the baseball and football teams is on the North Side, within easy walking distance of the Golden Triangle. The

LEONARD O, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 35-39, 2003 ? 2003 ISAST

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views one sees while walking across the bridges from downtown to the stadium are grand.

With the exception of one small area to the north of downtown and a park at the tip of the Golden Triangle, there is no ready access to Pittsburgh's rivers. There are potentially magnificent vistas from downtown onto the rivers, but Pitts- burgh does not make effective use of its site. Because downtown is small, few peo- ple live there. Except in the area around the concert halls on the evenings of per- formances, there are relatively few peo- ple on the streets after the offices close. In many cities, the art museum is down- town and so provides some base for cul- tural activities. In Pittsburgh, the major cultural institutions-the Carnegie Mu- seum, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University-are located in Oakland, a few miles east of down- town, adjoining lower-middle-class neigh- borhoods on the city side and middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods, Squirrel Hill and Shadyside, to the east.

Between Oakland and the Golden Tri- angle is the Hill District. This neighbor- hood has magnificent views on its hills, which rise high above both Oakland and downtown. The Hill District ought to be prime real estate, for it provides direct access to downtown on one side and to the universities, museums and medical centers of Oakland on the other side. But today it is an impoverished African- American neighborhood. The major thoroughfares from the Golden Triangle to Oakland run north or south of the Hill District, avoiding this area. Outsiders do not enter these uninviting, run-down streets. Driving from Oakland to down- town, one sees the distant skyscrapers while bypassing this area. The physical position of the Hill District, central but avoided by drivers, highly visible but iso- lated from the city life, stands in all too obvious a way for the social position of the local minority population. Pitts- burgh, a heavily segregated city, has a his- tory of bad racial relations.

EXAMPLES OF PITTSBURGH'S PUBLIC SCULPTURE The North Side, just across the Allegheny River from downtown, is a good place to begin looking at local public sculpture. One can see the downtown, the highway coming from the airport and the three rivers. To the east beyond downtown, however, the Hill District blocks the view of Oakland. A number of older public sculptures are found in this area. In a park within walking distance of the sky-

scrapers of downtown, Thomas Armstrong (1889), artist unknown, memorializes this local labor leader (1840-1887). This sculpture, 18 ft high, is visible from the road but more accessible to walkers. A ca- sual viewer would hardly know the iden- tity of this figure. Armstrong was a friend of Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor. After being toppled by a vehicle, the statue was moved to a location near Armstrong's former home. Representing Armstrong in a three-piece suit, befitting his work as negotiator, this monument to a once- famous figure does not identify him as a labor leader. Since Armstrong's is not a household name, and the neighborhood has changed, the passage of time has made the significance of the statue hard to identify.

A short walk to the west takes us to Peter C. Reniers's Soldiers' Monument (1871). Unlike the monument to Arm- strong, this sculpture refers to an event known to everyone. This towering Civil War memorial is topped by an 11-ft statue of Fame. The names of battle sites-Get- tysburg, Vicksburg, Antietam, Appomat- tox-are inscribed on the base, which also has carved on it a portion of Lin- coln's second inaugural address. Four thousand soldiers from the city and the surrounding Allegheny County area died in the Civil War. Originally this monu- ment, then somewhat larger, was set on a hill, which in 1929 was leveled for an athletic field. Tastes changed, and the old monument seemed too ornate. As it stands now, in a park on the North Side, between heavily used train tracks and an elegant pond with ducks, Soldiers'Monu- ment has a certain forlorn dignity. Facing south, the monument has no visible re- lationship to downtown. There is no log- ical reason for it to be set where it is placed. The words at the base are imme- diately comprehensible, but without a guidebook it would be hard to know the significance of the statue at the top. The monument is high, and so the figure at the top is hard to identify. Neither its iconography nor its site make reference to Pittsburgh's role in the Civil War.

A short walk south takes us to the sports stadium on the North Side [1]. Unlike Reniers's sculpture, J.P. "Honus Wagner" (1995) by Frank Vittor, a 10-ft- high bronze sculpture on a 7-ft base, has a readily identifiable subject. Wagner was a great shortstop who played for the Pitts- burgh Pirates for more than 20 years. The Italian-born Vittor produced many local public sculptures. This sculpture too was moved; originally the Pirates' field was in Schenley Park, in Oakland.

Only the home plate has been preserved in what today has become a building of the University of Pittsburgh. In 1972 this sculpture was set at Gate C, at the en- trance to Three Rivers Stadium, then the new baseball and football stadium. This is populist art in a populist environment. People walking in to buy tickets see a sculpture of a figure associated with the Pittsburgh Pirates. It is easy for academ- ics to be ironical about such sculptures, but how many major modernist artists have depicted baseball or football he- roes? It would be absurd to put a museum- quality sculpture on this site, and silly to put any work of art by Vittor in a mu- seum. This sculpture is the most success- ful of the Pittsburgh public artworks on the North Side because it matches its set- ting perfectly. In a perfect setting, an ar- tistically modest but appropriately sited artwork can be a real success.

Allegheny Landing Sculpture Park (1984) places work by four different artists in an extraordinarily good setting, a newly gentrified part of the North Side at the edge of the Allegheny River over- looking downtown to the south. When I reviewed this display in 1984, there was a Harley-Davidson dealer nearby. Today there are new large office buildings just north of this park, and the new Warhol Museum isjust a block to the north. That museum was planned after this public sculpture was installed.

Here the rivers are accessible. When the waters are high, they come up almost to the base of this park.

In Allegheny Landing Sculpture Park, Ned Smyth's Piazza Lavoro and Mythic Source is a tribute to work, one part on a hillside above a mosaic pavement, the other sec- tion right by the riverfront. The sculp- ture contrasts working men and women with an unspoiled nature-it is an alle- gorical history of the city. A plaque says that the sculpture "suggests the heights to which civilization may be elevated." Nature is signified by palm trees. In a gallery I expect contemporary art to be esoteric, but in this public setting sculp- ture needs to communicate without com- mentary. Why, in Pittsburgh, associate nature with palm trees? Why are the workers nude and set in a circular plat- form? The references here are esoteric, and so this sculpture is surely incompre- hensible to the larger public. Even Italian-Americans who understand why Smyth calls the upper part of his sculp- ture Piazza Lavoro will wonder what con- nection his figures have with the steel industry.

To the left of the sculpture, looking up from the river just beyond Mythic Source,

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Isaac Witkins's The Forks represents the nearby three river forks in aluminum. On the right, George Sugarman's Pittsburgh Variations is a multi-unit metal construc- tion representing the region's woods in green, a paddle wheel of a river boat in green and blue, a smelting crucible in or- ange and black, and the Golden Trian- gle in gold. Visitors can sit under the metal representations of trees, go within the triangle or stroll through the cru- cible. Witkins and Sugarman both estab- lished the relation of their works to the site by creating in essence miniature models of the city. Though easier to un- derstand than Smyth's work, these sculp- tures still are not effective artworks. They are redundant. What need have viewers of these maps when they can look across to the Golden Triangle itself?

George Danhires's The Builders depicts two construction workers, slightly smaller than life size. Seen quickly from a dis- tance, this sculpture can convey the illu- sion that two men have walked into the sculpture park and started on a plan to construct something. Trompe l'oeil sculpture is always popular because ev- eryone understands that skill is required to make such art. The Builders is an old- fashioned sculpture but for its abolition of the pedestal, a development associated in part with abstract sculpture. The sculp- tor who made Thomas Armstrong would understand these figures, but he would be astonished to see them set on the ground. The sculpture really does not use the location of Allegheny Landing Sculp- ture Park to good effect. Some readily recognizable historical figures associated with Pittsburgh might be more effective.

None of the sculptures in Allegheny Landing Sculpture Park, though made by well-known artists, are in themselves ex- ceptional artworks. Nor do any of them have a connection with the site. Set to- gether, in a relatively small space, four works in such different styles hardly add up to a harmonious whole. This project was developed by a committee. In the confines of a museum gallery or a church, we customarily focus on the one painting or sculpture before us, without expecting that the artworks assembled in that one space will relate harmoniously. But in an outdoor setting we inevitably evaluate sculptures as an ensemble. Allegheny Landing Sculpture Park would work bet- ter had any one of these four artists been given the entire commission; and it could have been magnificent had some sculp- tor used the grand vista effectively. Since the view towards downtown makes this lo- cation special, the site would be more ef- fectively used, and more popular, were all

the four sculptures removed and park benches installed.

Let us now drive south across the Al- legheny River into the Golden Triangle, stopping to look at the most famous building in Pittsburgh, H.H. Richard- son's Allegheny CountyJail (1884-1888), a masterpiece that is nobly expressive of its gloomy purpose and as superb an ex- ample of granite masonry as exists any- where [2]. Next door the pair of lions on the Courthouse by anonymous late-19th- century carvers deserves attention.

We then continue east, driving into the Hill District. A short distance from down- town, Thaddeus Mosley's Phoenix (1979) is set outside a library in the Hill District. On the street coming up to the sculpture many houses have been demolished or boarded up. It is surprising to find empty lots so close to downtown. A freeway bru- tally cutting through this district permits commuters in Oakland to get 20 miles out of the city in 25 minutes. Apart from the racial implications of this malignant neglect, the failure to preserve or de- velop what should be prime real estate is a sad waste of space. The Hill District gets better to the east, where there is new housing.

Mosley, who has exhibited in the Carnegie and around town, might have had a real career in a more supportive environment. A self-taught artist, he stud- ied journalism at the University of Pitts- burgh in the 1950s. Until recently, he supported himself by working in the post office. In such difficult circumstances, it is amazing that he became a serious artist. Interested in early modernist sculpture, Mosley developed an ambitious synthesis of these European sources and African tribal art. Phoenix, a rocket-like shape, was intended to express the hope that after the riots of the 1960s the Hill District might find new life. That has not really happened, and what was meant to be a sign of hope instead reinforces the clear sense of desolation that one can feel here even on a sunny day. The closed wings of Mosley's Phoenix seem unlikely to open- this bird is unlikely ever to take flight. Here the mismatch between the good in- tentions of the artist (and his patrons) and the present state of the neighbor- hood is dismaying. It would be unfair to blame its failure on Mosley-though he can legitimately be criticized for failing to develop an iconography accessible to his community.

Let us now drive further east, travers- ing the Hill District to reach the east side of Oakland, going through Schenley Park and across to the South Side of Oak- land to Carnegie Mellon University.

Clark Winter's The Love of Two Oranges (1969) is set outside a brutally executed building housing engineering depart- ments. The art building, a wonderful older Beaux Arts construction, is some distance away. In this work Winter, a pro- fessor at Carnegie Mellon from 1955 to 1972, employs a local version of a well- established style of abstraction. Four large blocks, mounted at shoulder height on a pedestal, are set at angles. Why four blocks to show the love of two oranges? Since the title seems highly arbitrary- perhaps Winter meant to allude to Prokofiev's opera The Love of Three Or- anges-that is an uninteresting question. The Love of Two Oranges is unstable but not dynamic. This sculpture is essentially in- visible to the students and faculty, who walk around it to enter the building with- out taking any notice of it. Having no re- lation to the site, either spatially or in terms of its colors, The Love of Two Oranges appears to have been set down entirely arbitrarily. It might be placed anywhere on campus, or removed entirely, without being missed. Andy Warhol, the most in- fluential artist of the late 20th century, was a graduate of Carnegie Mellon Uni- versity, which has no memorial to him. Warhol did not make public sculpture, but Winter might have learned from him, for part of Warhol's genius was his aware- ness of how an artist needs to respond to an audience. What sculpture might suit the entrance to a building housing sci- entists? The Love of Two Oranges does not provide an answer to that obvious ques- tion. It is disappointing that a university whose art department has included very distinguished graduates-Mel Bochner and Philip Pearlstein amongst them- and that once had a famous professor of architectural history, Howard Saalman, has not thought more about its public sculpture. The Love of Two Oranges is a weak sculpture on a difficult site.

Let us walk north across the Carnegie Mellon campus to Forbes Avenue and go west a few blocks, to the front entrance of the Carnegie Museum, which is op- posite the University of Pittsburgh.

Richard Serra's Carnegie (1984-1985), set on the property of the museum, at the front entrance to the right of a fountain, is the most conspicuous sculpture by a fa- mous artist in Pittsburgh. Commissioned by the museum in conjunction with the 1984 International, it functions as a pub- lic artwork for anyone going along Forbes Avenue. With four heavy, 38-ft-tall plates balanced to form a small space that the viewer can enter, this simple-looking sculpture is surprisingly complex. Walk- ing around it, the viewer realizes how dif-

Carrie The Aesthete in Pittsburgh 37

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ficult it is to describe the changing views presented by the four planes. Carnegie is subtler than it might at first appear. I walked by it for years before I discovered that it can be entered. Inside you are cut off from any view of the surrounding buildings-this interior can feel menac- ing. But on a clear night, one can look up and see the stars. Carnegie is almost as high as the Carnegie Museum, but small compared with the apartment building across the street or the Cathedral of Learning, the skyscraper building of the University of Pittsburgh, slightly further east down Forbes Avenue.

On the other side of the Carnegie, the large sculptures in the court, surrounded on three sides by the museum, are tucked within the museum's space. Invisible from the street, these works thus do not count as public sculptures. Carnegie, standing near the street, marks a transi- tion between the public space and the museum. Entering the sculpture is like going into a very small room, a space whose relation to the street outside or the museum is hard to imagine when you are inside. This Serra sculpture has not been the source of serious controversy. Visible to any passerby, it stands on museum property and was privately funded. Carnegie, notwithstanding its name, is not significantly connected with the Carnegie Museum or Pittsburgh's steel industry. The fascinating interior space has no particular connection to Pitts- burgh's history or its landscape. Serra's steel may be taken to refer to Pitts- burgh-Steel City-but his public works of this period are usually constructed from steel.

When I asked students to write about Carnegie, I was surprised how few of them had previously noticed this immense sculpture, which is close to their campus. Initially, few of them liked it. Many of them hated it and few were prepared, even after much coaching from me, to aesthetically enjoy walking around it and entering its interior. Some thought it a rusty monstrosity and many of them said what I too think obvious-that it ex- presses menace-and observed the con- trast between the ominous interior and the outside. No one would think Serra's sculpture cuddly-it may inspire respect but it does not command affection.

Carnegie lacks an effective relation to its site. Serra, often considered a great sculptor, is a very uneven public artist. His St. John's Rotary Arc (1980, now dis- mantled) redeemed an impossible site, the empty circular area, originally the site of a church, inside the entrance to the Holland Tunnel in lower Manhattan, a

wasted space until the Serra work was in- stalled. By contrast, Carnegie is a good, but not great, public sculpture. It does not use the contrast between inside and out- side spaces in an equally challenging way. Had Serra been offered a site outside the museum, perhaps he could have re- sponded more interestingly to Pitts- burgh. But, then, of course, it is likely that his work would have been more con- troversial. Perhaps Carnegie would have been more effective had it been contro- versial, for then it might have gotten peo- ple to reflect on the limitations of other public sculptures in Pittsburgh.

LESSONS To BE LEARNED FROM THIS TOUR

Sculpture in the museum, judged for its aesthetic qualities, has an essentially pri- vate role in that public setting. Since the 1960s, much American sculpture has been very large, but most of this work is intended for art galleries or museums. The large scale of recent American art thus does not mean that this sculpture is effective public sculpture. Working on this scale, it is relatively easy for artists to make public works. There are, of course, many artists who still make old-fashioned monuments, not unlike the 19th-century sculptures in Pittsburgh. But such work is not taken seriously in the art world. Art critics are not likely to be interested in figurative, celebratory sculptures such as J.P "Honus Wagner."

As Robert Hughes wrote, with refer- ence to Serra's Titled Arc, "good art may not necessarily be good public art" [3]. Conversely, I would add that good pub- lic sculpture may not be good sculp- ture-that is, it may not be attractive in a museum setting. JP. "Honus Wagner" is a good public sculpture, but not a good sculpture. Carnegie is a good sculpture, but not a successful public sculpture. The greatest modernist sculptors-Rodin, Brancusi, Giacometti, Picasso, Matisse- made relatively few site-specific sculp- tures. Neither did David Smith nor his successors make much such art. No

major 20th-century sculptors have been primarily concerned with public spaces outside the museum. Thus there are rel- atively few models for serious public sculpture. A great deal of public sculp- ture has been made in the 20th century, but almost all of it by artists with no major place in art history.

A large amount of the more presti- gious urban sculpture found in cities everywhere consists of publicly sited works by well-known artists. Such art serves an essentially ornamental role.

Usually the artist does not have any ac- tive concern with the placement of his art. Civic pride demands that a city dis- play evidence of its wealth and cultural interests, but such trophy art is not usu- ally aesthetically significant, for it has no historical or visual relationship to the city in which it is set. Most such work could be placed anywhere-in any city any- where; or, equally well, in any museum or large private space. New York and Los Angeles have much richer artistic cul- tures than Pittsburgh, but essentially the same observations could be made about almost all the sculpture sited in public spaces in those cities as well.

Public sculpture can be significant when it responds to a particular site or memorializes local events of public sig- nificance. In cases where sculpture set in public has a merely private significance, it remains outside the local culture. JP. "Honus Wagner" is a good public sculp- ture, though not a good sculpture, be- cause it stands in an appropriate site and commemorates someone known to many people who attend ballgames. Allegheny Landing Sculpture Park is a waste of a great site, partly because none of the artists responded interestingly to that lo- cation, but also because four responses to the site effectively cancel each other out, and would do so even were they all individually excellent. And Carnegie is a good sculpture that, because its presence in front of the Carnegie Museum is gra- tuitous, is not a successful public sculp- ture. On the original Carnegie buildings the sculptures of allegorical figures rep- resenting literature, music, art and sci- ence and the portraits of Shakespeare, Bach, Michelangelo and Galileo (all 1907) byJohn Massey Rhind fit in with the architecture of that older wing. Richard Serra had a harder task-the modernist architecture of the new wing behind Carnegie is not as sympathetic to sculpture.

Serra's conception of site-specific art is one essential starting point for anyone interested in these issues:

[Public] sculptures by Noguchi and Calder ... have nothing to do with the contexts in which they're placed. At best, they are studio made and site adjusted. They are displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, "We represent modern art" [4].

That is exactly right. The obvious models of great public sculpture come from European cities that have pre- served their historical centers. Rome, central Paris and the entire city of Venice function today as museum-like settings. American cities are newer-and we

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Americans tend to tear down buildings quickly. In London the Albert Memorial by G.G. Scott (1863-1872) is not a dis- tinguished sculpture, but with time this Victorian monument has come to in- spire affection. A short walk north of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Albert Memorial fits nicely in its neighborhood. None of the public sculpture now in Pittsburgh plays such a role. Public sculp- ture in a city like Pittsburgh should en- hance its setting and bring out the character of the city's architectural rela- tionships. It is the site that matters, for in the right position good art could bring the city into focus. Many Ameri- cans love to walk in central Paris or Venice, enjoying the ambience of those cities. It is surprising that when they come home to Pittsburgh, or to New York, such people do not think more about the aesthetics of their everyday en- vironments and seek to replicate the fea- tures they enjoy in European cities.

If most public sculpture is bad, why then is there so much of it? Here an anal- ogy with classical music performances is helpful. Every city desires a symphony, and large cities also want an opera. Clas- sical music has cultural prestige. Cities seek also to have baseball, basketball and football teams. Almost everyone attend- ing sports events knows the rules, and

many spectators are connoisseurs, able to evaluate the players expertly. By con- trast, American classical music audiences are not very discriminating. People clap between movements of a sonata; at the opera they demand supertitles. One of the pleasures of attending opera in Italy is hearing praise and boos. In that coun- try, opera remains a live tradition. Amer- ican audiences, insecure in their taste, are absurdly deferential to the perform- ers. Americans have a knowledge of sports, but little confidence in their artis- tic judgments. And so, while there is fi- nancial support for the musical and visual arts, few people have the confi- dence to make forceful judgments. Within the museum, experts make deci- sions-and the public mostly accepts these decisions without question. With public sculpture, the situation is more difficult. While there is a demand for public sculpture, no one has thought through the issues of how to suitably present art in a public space.

References and Notes

1. Since this account was written, this stadium has been demolished and replaced by separate baseball and football stadiums.

2. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1971) p. 317.

3. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1996) p. 369.

4. Richard Serra, Writings/Interviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994) p. 126.

Bibliography

Carrier, David. "Allegheny Landing Sculpture,' Art- forum 23, No. 4 (December 1984) p. 92.

Carrier, David. 'Thaddeus Mosley, Carnegie Museum ofArt,"Artforum36, No. 12 (December 1997) p. 122.

Clark, Vicky A. International Encounters: The Carnegie International and Contemporary Art, 1896-1996 (Pitts- burgh, PA: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1996).

Evert, Marilyn. DiscoveringPittsburgh's Sculpture, with photographs by Vernon Gay (Pittsburgh, PA: Uni- versity of Pittsburgh Press, 1983).

Lewis, David. Thaddeus Mosley: African-American Sculp- tor (Carnegie Museum of Art, 1997).

Toker, Franklin. Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait (Uni- versity Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986).

Manuscript received 7 November 2000.

David Carrier is Champney Family Professor, Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art.

Carrier The Aesthete in Pittsburgh 39

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