The Essential New Art Examiner

Public Domain

H am z a W alker Public Domain Frank Stella—The Town-Ho’s Story January 1994 Ralph Metcalfe Federal Building Clark St. and Jackson Blvd., Chicago The fact that contemporary public art is extremely problematic is perhaps the very reason it has witnessed a surge of activity over the past decade. Originally the offspring of the museum/gallery discourse, public art has become largely independent of its parent, and as the diversity and depth of its projects attest, it has now reached puberty. But like those films shown in Human Development 101 told us, puberty is in many ways a nasty age, when the pubescent subject’s actions oscillate between rebellion and reconciliation with the forces that are shaping it. In short, puberty signals an identity crisis. This is compounded in public art by an acute case of schizophrenia, with its two principle personalities , “Public” and “Art,” each having its own identity crisis. With neither Public nor Art being able to define itself, the multitude of recent controversies seems unavoidable. And those involved on all sides have been left so defensive that it’s hard to imagine the era that brought into being the Federal Art-in-Architecture Program and the host of state and local public art programs for which it served as a model. But the recent wave of public art projects hasn’t so much resolved the dilemma between art and audience as it has further signified the problem. Extending the analogy of public art’s pubescence a little further and projecting this dilemma on to some of public art’s recent high points provides the complex backdrop against which Frank Stella’s The Town-Ho’s 218   T h e E s s e n t i a l N ew A rt E xaminer Story, a new public artwork commissioned through the Federal Art-inArchitecture Program, arrived in Chicago this fall. If Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc fiasco announced public art’s maturation with all the grace of a young boy’s cracking voice, then Sculpture Chicago’s “Culture in Action” series represents stages of guilt and denial about public art’s privileged museum upbringing. These two contrary projects set an interesting context for three tons of discombobulated steel and aluminum to be heaped 22 feet high in the lobby of the new Ralph Metcalfe Federal Building in the Loop. Like a boy who revels in behaving like his father, The Town-Ho’s Story unapologetically lays claim to its museum roots. Public art’s earlier phase, circa 1972, when big abstract metal things were all the rage, has returned with a vengeance. But gone are the polished geometric forms that lulled audiences into forgetting or not even bothering to care about an artwork’s existence. If I were to liken The Town-Ho’s Story to anything it would be a cross between an Anselm Kiefer and a John Chamberlain, although it makes Chamberlain’s Doorful of Syrup, a work located just up the street in the lobby of the Leo Burnett Building, look tame. Stylistically, TownHo is a wake-up call much closer to Neo-Expressionism than straight abstraction-poles, planes, and sheets are crinkled, strewn, dipped, crunched, corrugated, and dented. Metal in every conceivable form is allowed to co-exist in a relaxed way to form a monotonous heap that resists an easy, immediate reading. Unlike Knights and Squires and Loomings, two of Stella’s works installed nearby in the lobby of 181 W. Madison St., The Town-Ho’s Story is relatively monochromatic, despite a pale swatch of color here and there. The two Madison Street works are wall pieces from 1990, and their allegiance to the wall, in conjunction with a series of repeating hoops and Nike-like swooshes gives them the look of a pair of gaudy corporate earrings, as well as a calculated wackiness reminiscent of MTV editing. With Town-Ho, Stella has resolved these problems by forsaking the wall and working in the round. An aggressively clunky, top-heavy composition, the sculpture never rests easy—from certain angles it appears to teeter, looming threateningly on a base that is conspicuously orderly and clean, with a zoo-like railing clearly designed to keep this beast at bay. The piece actually consists of three components, The Town-Ho’s Story being the largest. It shares a base with The Gam and Postscript; all three components take their names from chapter titles in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Stella...