Professional Jaywalker: Richard Posner on crossing from the studio to public art

Richard Posner has received commissions for major large-scale works at science museums, federal buildings, urban parks, universities, hospitals and numerous private locations. Here he talks to Los Angeles-based writer Douglas Eby about public art that is as important for what it does as for what it is. —Eds.

"Public and studio art practices are different disciplines—for me," claims Richard Posner, a Los Angeles-based visual artist. "The public-art arena forces an artist to learn how to become an aesthetic samurai— someone who is visually literate, streetwise and fluent in both interdisciplinary communication and cross-cultural understanding. Public-art practice is a process that embraces both 'the public' and 'the art' as equal sides of the same equation."

Richard Posner knows whereof he speaks: a Fulbright Scholar, and recipient of McKnight, Jerome, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowships, Posner has received public commissions for major large-scale works at science museums, federal buildings, urban parks, universities, hospitals and numerous private locations. His studio work is also in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Smithsonian, The American Embassy in Stockholm and in numerous private collections. Posner says,

The completed [public-art] work, shaped by discussion and debate, is as important for what it does as for what it is. A Socratic question-and-answer process among all members of a design team forms the search for the right questions to ask of a particular place, at a specific time, that addresses the people who will use it.

Posner notes these critical questions may include:

Does the site currently exist? If so, how is it used? If not, what kinds of intentional and unintentional activities do you foresee happening there? How do you want to feel when you approach, enter and exit the space? Will there be first-time as well as repeat users? Is the location a 'verb'—a kinetic interactive space—or a 'noun'—static and discrete? What is the history of the area? Are there future development plans? What are the daytime and nighttime site conditions? What effect does seasonal, as well as indoor and outdoor temperature, have on the location? What is the acoustic and tactile landscape? Is there pedestrian and vehicular access? What role, if any, does the 'borrowed landscape' play in shaping the project? And, last but not least: what are our budgetary and schedule parameters? How can each of our skills as a visual artist, architect, engineer, landscape architect, etc., be of service?

Posner says he finds that the "ability to navigate the currents and eddies of the public-art administrative process requires the eye of a journalist, the ear of a poet, the hide of an armadillo, the serenity of an airline pilot and the ability to swim." These characteristics, along with a dozen other survival skills, come in handy when, as artist David Ireland and I once listed, any of the following happen:

1. The wrong artist is selected for the project
2. The client doesn't like the artist or proposal
3. The administrator or client retires from the project
4. The artist, client or fabricator goes broke
5. The project takes three to five years to complete
6. The collaboration is poorly conceived
7. A disagreement between artist, architect and administrator puts the kibosh on the project
8. The project is put on hold or stopped
9. The artist ends up having to economically subsidize the project
10. The administrator urges the artist to be "more considerate" of the project budget.
11. The necessity to be on the road a lot takes its toll.

"Studio-art practice, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal," Posner says. He observes that graduates of academic studio-art programs are trained to make statements, more than to ask questions. This should come as no surprise, since most college and university studio-art faculty have little or no experience in doing community-based art. Students learn gallery-world language—its customs and mating rituals, all the trappings of connoisseurship that manifest themselves in statements like, 'This is who I am. This is what I do.' Public comment is neither invited nor welcome. Although ill-prepared for the rigors of Socratic inquiry (and inquisition) that are inherent in public-art practice, each year fresh cadres of unemployed—and unemployable—MFAs struggle to wean themselves from the academic teat and 'do public art.'

Posner notes that some artists are able to make the transition from the studio to the public-art world, including himself:

I happen to find sustenance and nourishment in both. I suppose this is because professional jay-walking is an occupational necessity for the type of work I do—other occupational requirements are being impervious to insult or rejection. I need the freedom to travel between disciplines, and not worry about critics who act like self-appointed cops of the beat, writing jay-walking tickets for crossing between the lines.

Ironically, Thomas Jefferson, the patron saint of professional jay-walkers, would be hard pressed to have his designs for Monticello or the University of Virginia realized today with public funds. The reduction, and in many cases elimination, of federal, state and city art budgets have coincided with a national epidemic of 'content-phobia.' Jefferson would find his dictum that 'design activity and political thought are indivisible' is anathema in much of today's art world.

Posner recalls,

For two decades, I realized numerous percent-for-art projects that examined the relationship between American institutions and the people they serve. The very qualities of Jeffersonian "design activity and political thought" these projects were praised for have now fallen in disfavor. As an art consultant recently told me, "Your work is too public, it attracts too many people—including the homeless, aliens and undesirables." An arts administrator, in response to a courthouse proposal that incorporated a three-dimensional representation of the letters T-R-U-T-H, informed me that "The truth is incompatible with the mission of our County Regional Justice Center." Another consultant confided, "Your work is too FM. We want something more AM." I thanked her for providing new insight into the expression "substance abuse."

My current projects are a hybrid of what I once viewed as separate studio and public activities. The first, Hope Diamond (High Performance, Summer, 1993), was realized in 1992, and I am now preparing the LIVE NOT ON EVIL Anti-Fascist Theme Park for exhibition and travel. In both instances, the actual models and drawings in themselves are less important as 'artwork' than as a 'stage set'—an empty vessel, to be filled by public interaction and discourse.

This article originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Fall 1996.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002