Public Artist No. 1

I met Mel Ziegler last Friday outside Bank of America on the Corner. Over a dark blazer and black overcoat, his face wore the numbed expression of hours spent in committee. With him were Allison Turner and Ashley LeFew, two members of the Student Arts Board, which brought Ziegler to U.Va. and is working to make his proposed public art project for the university a reality. We planned to have dinner downtown to discuss the day’s meeting of the Committee on Public Art, where the three had spent most of the afternoon defending Ziegler’s proposal. Large questions had been raised at the meeting—about permissions, about the consequences of painting on historic buildings—and all three were concerned that they might delay the project until the fall.

Each year, a percentage of the student activities fee collected with U.Va. tuition is withdrawn to fund the arts at the university. Money is set aside to finance a project or projects in one of three areas: music, visual arts, and drama. The allocation supports residencies, performances, and events held by and for the artist(s) and rotates among the three disciplines annually.

This year, the Student Arts Board was charged with using the money to bring a visual artist to U.Va. Last spring, the board—composed of art and art history students, photography professor Bill Wiley, and Jen Rau, an advisor from the University Programs Council—awarded it as the “Big Bang Award” to Ziegler, an artist and professor of art at Vanderbilt University. Previous recipients of the award, which “is presented to individuals who foster communitywide involvement in the arts,” include Tim Rollins, founder of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), a community arts initiative in the Bronx, and Agnes Denes, who is best known for growing and harvesting two acres of wheat in downtown Manhattan. The grant funds Ziegler’s residency at U.Va. and commissions him to create a grounds-wide public arts project and gallery show at Ruffin Hall.

According to Allison, who gave me a short history of the decision, the Arts Board chose Ziegler for his interest and expertise in public arts and collaborative community projects. The proposal he eventually submitted, called “Feeling A Little Off-Color”, is relatively straightforward in its methods—briefly, he would have a number of columns around grounds painted with a color chosen by community members, then painted back—but conceptually challenging. It ranks among Ziegler's best interventions, as he likes to call them—works of “public art” whose purpose is to upset conventions (architectural, institutional, aesthetic) and to instigate uncertainty and reflection about what is and who makes public space.

In 1989, Ziegler and his then-partner, Kate Ericson, created a project at San Diego State University of size and scale similar to the one planned for U.Va. Called “College Ivory”, it had the artists hire a student to calculate the building cost of the school’s new art gallery. They also used a formula to determine the 1989 construction cost of every building on campus. The final figures were then displayed in large lettering in front of campus buildings and in the gallery. (“College Ivory” and other Ericson/Ziegler collaborations are “collected” in America Starts Here (MIT Press, 2005), a profile of their work available at the Fine Arts Library. It is inadequate as a monograph—the artists’ work deliberately resists the book treatment—but it has excellent pictures of their past work, several worthwhile essays, and an interview with Ziegler.)

The Student Arts Board first met with Ziegler in spring 2008. His collaboration was finalized that fall, at which time he submitted a preliminary draft of “Feeling A Little Off-Color” to Beth Turner, Vice Provost for the Arts. The final project proposal emerged this January. Drawn from his time spent roaming Grounds, it focuses on “the combination of the classical, almost foreboding columns [and] the color white” with the purpose of teasing out the “aspects of power, control, and conformity” inherent in the school’s “relentless quoting of the historic design” of Jefferson’s original campus. (1) Last November, Ziegler expressed his ideas about painting columns and gave a survey of his work and methods at a public lecture at Campbell Hall in the School of Architecture. Over the next month, he finalized a list of potential sites (which had been submitted with the proposal) and met with Leonard Weeks, contracts manager from the U.Va. Department of Facilities Management, to assess the cost and practicality of hiring painters to carry out the project.

It is only in the last two weeks that Ziegler’s project has run into much resistance; it is also two weeks since most members of the Committee on Public Art first saw his proposal. In its most recent meetings (on January 28th and last Friday, February 5th), Committee members questioned or entertained challenges to the project on a number of points. (The Committee on Public Art is a function of the Office of the President. John Casteen III will approve or reject the project, but his decision will supposedly reflect that of the committee. He is not a committee member, and he did not attend either meeting.)

At the first session, a committee member pointed out that a precedent had already been set for painting on buildings at U.Va.: the Zs and IMPs that appear on nearly every brick surface touched by students. The comparison sounds reasonable at first—if “secret” societies can paint on the university’s buildings, why not a commissioned artist?—but, as Allison worried to me, it is shallow, even counterproductive: the IMP and Z are more glorified gang tags than public art—mysterious, but empty of any social message (except, maybe, “you are not in this club”). Ziegler’s proposal, on the other hand, is a charismatic intervention, meant to instigate people to talk about the columns, about whiteness, and about the reasons the color chosen in caucus “represents” that caucus. Leafing through the proposal, I interpreted his point to be to make people look actively and critically (which is not to say humorlessly, or without an appreciation for the kitsch value of the bulging, oversized columns that front a building like John Paul Jones Arena) at how the landscape we inhabit structures the way we work, interact, even think, and to make our architectural pieties (that white columns and brick are traditional in themselves, or politically neutral, for example) less certain.

Ziegler’s preoccupation with neo-Jeffersonian motifs and U.Va.’s public identity tackles the same problem addressed by the twenty-four members of the school's architecture faculty who, in September 2005, signed an open letter to the Cavalier Daily titled "What Are The Jeffersonian Architectural Ideals?" In that letter, which appeared around the same time that the plan for the South Lawn Project became public, the faculty set out the following maxims: “We stand for an architecture that engages tradition but is not ashamed of having been built in the twenty-first century. We stand for an architecture that evokes the qualities of traditional architecture, construction, and craft without recourse to symbolic, synthetic veneers lacking any virtue beyond familiarity.” The letter also called for new building projects to “be debated openly at every level of the University.” The professors’ appeal for greater community involvement is especially resonant in Ziegler’s proposal: in his plan, the people who work in the buildings whose columns are to be painted will choose the paint's colors.

University Architect David Neuman was quoted in an article for Inside Higher Ed defending the columns in response to the professors’ letter: “Many people identify with [them] . . . And even on the arena, with that super scale, I think there’s just this sense of identity, that, for some people, every piece of architecture has to relate to very obviously.”

It was Neuman who raised questions at the January 28th meeting of whether the columns’ paint would flake and reveal spots of color after being painted over at the end of the project. He also wondered to the committee whether painters would drip on the buildings, and if the columns, repainted white, would match the other columns’ whiteness. “I think a number of committee members thought that the ‘concept’ had not been fully developed into a proposal in terms of artistic intent, implementation techniques, and scope” he said, “and [we] asked that it be more complete prior to reaching a recommendation.” The committee did not call Ziegler, who would not come to U.Va. until the next week, to allow him to respond to those concerns—and to the question, raised late in the meeting, if the painted columns might incite students to vandalize university buildings. That objection did not make it into the meeting’s summary minutes, which list the committee’s main concerns as “the materials (the paint), the process (choosing the colors), the locations (historic buildings).”

Several members had praise for the project. Beth Turner, Vice Provost for Public Arts, was noted saying “the project would engage the university in a discussion about public art” and that it would “‘up’ the creative index in a meaningful way” at the school. And though the motion was approved to forward the proposal (on the condition that Ziegler himself “choose the colors, reconsider the materials and the committees choosing the sites”) even more objections were raised at the next meeting, on February 5th. Jenny Smith—a student representative on the Committee for Public Art—had reported to Student Council on the project; their response was to suggest that students wouldn’t understand Ziegler’s project was “art,” and that they might take it as an excuse to deface university property. More practically (and problematically), it became clear that permission might yet have to be obtained from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to paint some of the sites. The meeting was not a voting session, and approval was again delayed in order for Ziegler to flesh out the proposal.

The original schedule has painting begin in early March. If the project is not approved within about a week, it will have to be postponed, most likely until the fall semester. The Student Arts Board is proceeding as if the proposal has been approved, planning a symposium of representatives of different departments to explain the significance of color and whiteness to the project and engage community members. Ziegler has returned to Nashville and will continue to work on the project from his post there.

At dinner, I asked Ziegler about if he expected a certain response for the project. “It’s not important that students understand that it’s art, just that it’s a change. I don’t want it to be passive—I don’t want it to be aggressive, either—and not critical, but a critique. A dialogue and discussion across disciplines."

“When I was younger, I just kind of invented my own sites. There was a point when Kate and I were working together when we decided we really missed that [freedom]—we needed to get back. She died before we could shift momentum that way. U.Va. is a real opportunity for me to embrace the pedagogical community in a variety of ways. I’m grateful for the Student Art Board’s invitation and want to make this work for them . . . It’s those students’ project, really.”

Ziegler is going to work on a way to give the Committee on Public Art more information without compromising what’s essential to the project. “It wasn’t meant just to discuss color. It’s also about the paint—it addresses the architecture and the columns. Columns have numerous connotations—the plantation, but also an embodiment of the labor that went into building it. It has to do with power. What types of buildings have columns? Banks, temples. I think I’m correct that Jefferson’s design also pulls in a Classical aspect.”

“Something about encouraging a democracy of ideas,” I tossed out.

He chuckled softly—“Yeah.”