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briefhistorybriefhistory · 8 years ago

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Charging Bull vs Fearless Girl: A Story About Public Art

The art world has had its fair share of controversy recently which has spilled out into mainstream media coverage. From Dana Schutz’s frankly exploitative painting of Emmett Till to recent protests at the opening of the Carl Andre show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the normally somewhat insular world of contemporary art has been grabbing headline after headline as artists court controversy so hard I thought for a moment we were back in 1997. The most recent headline to grab my attention? Arturo di Modica, the artist best known for the Charging Bull statue of Wall Street, is demanding the removal of the Fearless Girl rejoinder.

Charging Bull was installed on 15th December, 1989. Arturo di Modica didn’t have a commission or permit to install the statue where he did, but he installed it there in what has been referred to as a moment of guerrilla art. Workers at the New York Stock Exchange decided to call the police - after all, it’s not every day that an Italian man in a van drives up and installs a bull made of bronze and stainless steel on your front doorstep - and the NYPD seized the statue later that day. Public outcry led to the statue being re-installed at a new location two blocks away only six days later, complete with ceremony, on 21st December 1989.

Di Modica has described the bull as being a symbol of how he views America and American ideals - he has recently described it as representing “freedom, world peace, strength, power and love.” Other articles have quoted him as describing it as a symbol of an economic boom, something he has entwined with these Americanised ideals. I don’t feel the symbol of a charging bull is necessarily the most obvious representation of the concepts of love or peace, but regardless, di Modica has made clear it is, to him, a symbol of his adopted nation. To me, an outsider looking in on American culture, the bull reads as powerful, dynamic, dangerous. Its body curves and twists as if the creature is about to charge, lines of tension carved into its face and its tail lashing violently like a whip. Some have suggested di Modica created a symbol which represented the stock market itself, with its unpredictability and intensity.

Apologies as this image is actually part of artist Liu Bolin’s series Hiding in the City, it just happened to be the best image I could find. I’d like to clarify that Liu remains uninvolved in this fiasco.

However the statue is read, it stayed in the location at Bowling Green, a few blocks away from the NYSE, and as time has passed, has become part of the local culture of the area. Fast forward to International Women’s Day 2017, and another sculpture appeared opposite the bull, in almost every way its opposite. The statue was of a little girl made of bronze, her skirt whipping around her legs and her chin tilted defiantly upwards, towards the bull. Fearless Girl was meant to stay for a month, a piece of temporary art installed to prompt debate and discussion surrounding the role of women in finance, coinciding with IWD. Much like Charging Bull, however, the public reception to the work was overwhelming. Parents prompted their children to pose with her, women came from miles around to mimic her stance, the internet lit up with discussion and debate, much of it complimentary towards Fearless Girl. Following a public petition, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that Fearless Girl’s tenure would be extended until February 2018.

It eventually became clear that the statue had been commissioned by a commercial company, the State Street Global Advisors of Boston, which many, including di Modica himself, have loudly and publicly condemned. According to the papers, their intention was to spark the discussion which had emerged since the unveiling of the statue. Fearless Girl has drawn a number of interesting responses - including criticism that the symbol of women on Wall Street should most definitely not be that of a child - but perhaps the most interesting to me has been the debates surrounding the origins of Fearless Girl.

Many have argued that her provenance doesn’t matter - that now she’s here, she provides the public with a symbol of resistance, defiance - some have even suggested she represents a solitary figure of opposition to the endless, relentless march of capitalism. Others have argued that the statue performs one function above all others - she acts as a advertising campaign for State Street. In all of the debate and articles surrounding her, a good number have included the name of their company. Many feel suspicious that the company presuming to spark this debate doesn’t have the most diverse board room either, with only three of eleven board members being women. In fact - some have even pointed out that, while SSGA encourages the companies it has stakes in to diversify their boardrooms and leadership positions, even if they don’t, SSGA won’t stop investing in these companies.

Personally, I think it does matter who paid for her, in the same way that it matters that British Petroleum spent 26 years sponsoring major exhibitions at the Tate galleries. Money in art is present, it is always present and we should be critical of who pays for a commission, just like we should be critical of who sponsors an exhibition, who pays for a priceless work at auction, who uses the most exclusive and expensive materials in their work. For me, I do not think it is possible to separate either work from the economic conditions under which they have been created - capitalism - and how this influences, shapes and derails not just the art world, but the entire world. Yes, we should be critical that Fearless Girl was commissioned by a company who have something to gain from their own promotion, but we should also be critical of the economic system which di Modica is implicitly praising in his sparkling appraisal of the United States. Di Modica has created a work of art which celebrates a capitalist industry in a capitalist system in a capitalist country - for him to decry the Fearless Girl as an advertisement for SSGA is more than slightly ironic. No one here is without financial motive.

However Fearless Girl and its economic origins have been interpreted by the public, however, it has been thoroughly condemned by Arturo di Modica. Di Modica’s argument hits out at Fearless Girl for allegedly breaking di Modica’s copyright over the bronze bull. He says that, by placing the girl in direct opposition to the bull, the context of the bull has changed from a positive and charged message to one of fear, of admonition, and this has violated his copyright. He intends to sue, although no suit has been filed at the time of writing.

Now, I’m no expert in US copyright law, but as far as I understand the basic principle, it’s impossible to copyright an idea or a concept - just the manifestation of those ideas. So the sculpture itself is part of di Modica’s intellectual property, but he cannot claim that the copyright over this piece of work covers its conceptual ideas too. Such a thing is, in fact, laughable - does concept not change, mature and remanifest itself over time? Was Charging Bull not used to promote the Occupy Wall Street movement by Adbusters, and does this not add a new layer of conceptual development that di Modica could never have possibly accounted for? Concept is not a fixed or static quality, it is a constant evolution of how your work is read through the layers of history, through world events and changes in custom. One hundred years ago, as the world was modernising rapidly, di Monica’s bull would have likely been seen as antiquated, old fashioned, parochial in a time when the art world - and the public at large - were inundated with new technologies and advances in science. Today it could be read as a quaint throw back to more agrarian times.

Occupy Wall Street poster by Adbusters

Di Modica has seemingly internalised an idea that this one interpretation, this ephemeral quality of “Americanness” (an indefinable, distortable, subjective and some say say laughable idea in itself), is the only way to read Charging Bull and are intrinsic in that reading. All viewers must be struck by the undeniable “Americanness” of the animal - despite the fact that the idea of “Americanness” is mutable and ever-changing, and deeply influenced by your relationship with the United States and its inner workings. As I have mentioned above, to an outsider, the bull has no obvious qualities that one might attribute as American - indeed, the first time I saw the sculpture, before this scandal ever hit the front pages, my thoughts were - is this a representation of the aggression, of the fragile hyper masculinity of the finance industry? I didn’t think of America, I thought of the Spanish tradition of the running of the bulls, most notably practiced in Pamplona. After all, we can only understand art by drawing from our own lives, our own spheres of knowledge and experience to help us interpret how and why something has been made. A particularly patriotic viewer of Charging Bull may indeed see the positive, ephemeral qualities of Americanness in it - but an undocumented viewer who has experienced first hand violence from the police and other wings of the American state? They may see instead the racism and persecution they have experienced in the land of the free.

So where the artist’s intentions perhaps differ from the audience’s readings, where does this leave the work? In a normal gallery setting, a curator would look at the entire arrangement of work in relation to each other and look at what sort of reaction they wish to spark in an audience. A curator would choose to, or not choose to, place Fearless Girl in opposition to Charging Bull, and those decisions would be significant in how those works are understood by an audience. A good curator looks at the world as it is now and how the current political and economic debates influence how we see and interact with the world and its wider conceptual questions. For example, now, in Europe, many curators are responding to many political factors - the migrant crisis, Brexit, the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right. All of these have implications on how viewers understand the work and how we understand and parse the work around us. A skilful curator will lead an audience member through a journey where the artist’s intentions are explored but also challenged, refined, interpreted by the setting or context the work is placed in - and sometimes this involves pairing works by multiple artists who have made statements which have relevance to each other.

Bob and Roberta Smith respond to the Brexit referendum.

Di Modica is correct in one way - the placing of the girl does change the bull, it suggests a halt of the bull’s endless aggression, a target for it to aim at. This has conceptual ramifications for both works, but ultimately di Modica has suggested that there is one correct, patriotic reading of the bull, and anything that calls this reading into question is an infringement of his “rights.”

This brings us to the crux of what public art really is. There is no curator there to negotiate between the two artists and two pieces of work, no gallery structure to provide viewers with pamphlets which explain the artist intentions. Public art is a truly unmoderated interaction between a piece and the audience, in a much more direct way than a gallery experience can provide. Public art is made to be interpreted by the public without the conceptual assistance of a curator to pick out themes to focus on, the audience must interact with the work without interference and draw their own conclusions.

At times, this has been comical. An example from my hometown of Glasgow would be the monument to Arthur Wellesley, the First Duke of Wellington, also known as the Wellington Statue or, to us locals, “that statue with the cone on its head.” Despite discouragement from the local authorities and police, it’s been a tradition for this statue to wear a traffic cone as its hat and has been since at least the early 1980s, if not earlier. Allegedly, the local city council spends £10,000 per year in removing cones, just to have them put back up there by helpful members of the public. In 2013, the council proposed doubling the height of the plinth the statue sits on, but withdrew the plans after a massive public outcry.

Sometimes the horse gets a hat too.

People didn’t care about the statue - in fact, I had to Google the proper name of it - but they cared about the fact that it wears a bright orange cone on its head. A whole cone subculture has sprung up - you can now buy cone shaped hats, badges and knickknacks, and local news periodically runs baffled, alarmed headlines when the cone goes missing - and this local culture is an important one when we read the statue now. Of course, we must acknowledge that the artist, who had it erected in 1844, could not have possibly yearned for his work to be adorned with a small and distressingly orange cone, but we also cannot separate it from its modern day reinvention. It has taken on a new symbolism, a new importance which, for many people, supersedes its original aim to create a monument to the Duke of Wellington.

Popular left wing blog athousandflowers.net takes a stand in #conegate2013.

Which is more important, we might be tempted to ask. Which should we seek to preserve - the artist’s original intentions, or the response of the community into which a piece of work has been placed? I personally don’t believe an art work exists without an audience, which is not to say we should always pander to populist ideas of what audiences want to see, but rather to suggest that a community response to a piece of work is valid, powerful, and completely outside of an artist’s control. Isn’t that why we invest in public art? The idea is in the title - public art - art for the people, removed from the carefully controlled gallery environment so all people can interact with it, draw a conclusion as to how they feel about it, to relate it to their lives, and their neighbourhoods, and the reality of their day to day existence. The very best public art engages with the communities into which it is placed, and the public responds to the very best public art.

Many have pointed out the irony in di Modica’s demands that the space around his illegally installed work be preserved in accordance with his wishes. I’d suggest this goes even beyond irony, into a place of entitlement. When street artists make work on a wall, they don’t expect it will stay there forever, in the same form. Di Modica has implicitly placed himself above other guerrilla artists by demanding special concessions towards how he thinks his work should be viewed and interpreted. Di Modica does not wish the meaning of his work to change or mature or be understood in ways that differ from his intention - so why make it a piece of public art at all? Why not display it in a temperature controlled, properly humidified gallery, where a curator can have a pamphlet produced that covers the themes of his work? To use the world as your pedestal means being more flexible than di Modica has shown he can be, it means being able to accept that your work will be unmoderated, that the audience will respond to it in a broader and, perhaps at times, deeper way than work shown in a controlled environment.

In the end, to me, it doesn’t matter hugely if Fearless Girl stays or not. Personally, I do find her a mixed message, a beacon of wishy-washy liberal hope that by merely talking about the gender disparity, it will all go away. I find art which makes less of a sensationalistic headline more appreciable, on multiple levels. Fearless Girl has the subtlety of being whacked around the head with a baseball bat, and I don’t find myself rushing to defend what I see as a dressed up advertising campaign, but I appreciate the way she has been given new meaning by the dozens of people, adults and children, who pose with her every day and who do see her as a symbol they wish to rally behind.

However, what has baffled and alarmed me is the way di Modica has responded - through threats of lawsuit. Neither of these works has any more intrinsic right to the space, and neither has truly engaged with the community surrounding them, rather than simply creating populist messages to respond to a global phenomena, unspecific to the women of the finance industry.

Instead of focusing any further on those two works, I’d rather draw your attention to a piece of public art created in England by Jessie Brennan, entitled If This Were To Be Lost, created in 2016.

The phrase came from an earlier project Brennan ran in collaboration with the people of the local community in Peterborough, where the artist worked with the local community volunteers who run the Green Backyard, a community growing project, to create a vast archive of cyanotypes and audio recordings. The words were made in plywood and installed along the garden, where it is visible to passengers on the East Coast London-Edinburgh train. The photos Brennan puts on her website are, to me, a phenomenal and real exploration of what public art is. Why? Because she has openly shown children playing on the installation, making the space and the work their own. If that is not what public art is about, I have no idea what it is.

See If This Were To Be Lost on Brennan’s website here.

#arturo di modica #charging bull #fearless girl #cone heid #jessie brennan #if this were to be lost #public art #i'm not really a critic i just have a lot of feelings

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jeremystrele · 6 years ago

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A Mid-Century Wonder In Warrandyte

Homes

by Lucy Feagins, Editor

The renovated mid-century home of architect Adie Courtney, husband Andrew and grown-up sons Jack and Ben. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Statement charcoal tiles with turquoise grout in the kitchen. Vzug ovens and Qasir tubular rangehood. Kitchen stools by Grazia and Co. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

The ‘meals’ room. Danish table from Adie’s childhood family home paired with chairs sourced from Grandfather’s Axe. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

The family room. Mickey print (just visible) by Wayne Thiebaud. Panting (above) by Betty Mbitjana, the daughter of renowned Aboriginal artist Minnie Pwerle. Panting(below) of the family dog and blue ceramic vases by Adie. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Clock from Harrod’s London. Kitchen stools by Grazia and Co. Ceramic bowl on table by Cone 11 Ceramics. Painting (left) ‘Fire Dreaming’ by Adam Reid. Mickey print (right) by Wayne Thiebaud. Rug by Loom. ‘Lunar’ swivel chair from Arthur G. ‘Zoe’ side table with yellow base by Anaca Studio. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

The entry hall with a slot skylight shaft. Painting by Andrew Chan. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Adie, Andrew and Salty the dog. Salty is a bequest dog from the RSPCA Legacy Program – previously a working dog on a sheep farm in Violet Town, much loved by his owner who bequeathed his entire estate to the RSPCA. Adie and Andrew are now the proud ‘foster parents’ of Salty! Painting ‘Fire Dreaming’ by Adam Reid. Rug by Loom. ‘Lunar’ Swivel chair from Arthur G. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

The living room. What’s that in the corner, you ask?! The original diving helmet made in 1943 is a treasured family heirloom. Paintings by Andrew Chan. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Living Room with view towards entry. Cedar ceilings and gallery walls, concrete block walls. Bend sofa by Patricia Urquiola in the foreground. Borg Mogensen Lounge Chair in blue. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

No wonder so many Melbournites are making the move out to Warrandyte…hello trees! Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Living Room. Paintings (left) and pair of paintings hung on timber wall by Adie’s sister, Sal Courtney. Train painting by Andrew Chan. Bend sofa by Patricia Urquiola in the foreground. Borg Mogensen Lounge Chair in blue. – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

‘The Auto Care sign was unearthed at my parent-in-law’s mechanical workshop which they ran for over 25 years,’ Adie tells. Opposite painting by Adie. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Main Bedroom. Little black sculpture balls (on the table) and the bedside table – both made by Adie and Andrew’s son, Ben Robson. Painting by John McKie. Teapot by Dawn Buckley. In garden beyond – ‘Sotto’ by Lump Sculpture Studio. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Master bedroom with ensuite beyond. Painting above bed by Adie’s sister Sal. Pink and yellow painting in hall beyond by Adie. Photo – Caitlin Mills. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Architect Adie Courtney and family have lived in their incredible Warrandyte mid-century home since 2011. The bright and beautiful images here, though, belie the state Adie and husband Andrew initially found the home in, where flooding necessitated new drainings, services, cladding, lining, fittings and fixtures. But the couple could see the strong bones of this property, and the ‘something special’ that lay beneath the dripping carpets!

The 1960’s home was originally designed by architect David S Gordon, and Adie suspects the property was influenced by the McGlashan & Everist design for Heide II. With the concrete block fin walls and clean linear formal structure, it isn’t difficult to see this connection.

Since moving in, Adie and family have well-and-truly made it their own, as a space for art and living. Adie highlights timber-lined geometric skylight shafts as a particular favourite element, ‘each with differing angles, size and shape, giving a peek view of the eucalyptus canopy above.’ The continuous floor to ceiling panes of glass seamlessly connect inside and outside space – living the Warrandyte dream!

The family brought a large collection of art with them to the house, adding their own eclectic touches to the otherwise simple palette of concrete, timber, grey and white. Adie explains ‘we love how our collection of art really ‘pops’ on the walls.’ The art line-up includes stunning work by Adie’s sister Sal Courtney, New York-based Andrew Chan, Adie’s own ceramics, and sculptural works by sons Jack and Ben’s childhood. Adie enthuses, ‘we aimed to infuse our home with the essence of family – creating a real home.’

The furniture is a mix of ‘old, new, re-purposed and inherited’ – Adie’s parents’ table sits alongside Danish chairs, and a Patricia Urquiola Bend Sofa offers a soft curvy contrast to Andrew’s handmade table, made of reclaimed timbers. The turquoise dining chairs offer a bold splash, and were purchased under the guidance of interior designer Camilla Molders, who Adie explains was a ‘supreme hand holder’ in drawing together the interiors of the home.

This mid-century masterpiece is an architectural delight, but what makes it a beautiful home is the personality of the residents, which infuse every corner of the home. ‘We wanted the home to be about individuality’ Adie enthuses. Nailed it!

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