Crossman Gallery

MURPHY’S LAW LETTERS
milwaukeemagazine.com

You have to hand it to city of Milwaukee bureaucrats. They managed to take the most benign work of art – something with no sex or nudity, abstract or difficult images – and turn it into a huge, overblown controversy that erupted last week. A few aldermen reacted with confusion and outrage to the playful artwork proposed for Wisconsin Avenue, and arts defenders then heaped abuse on the officials, with one bozo, former gallery owner Mike Brenner, threatening to defecate on the lawns of the aldermen. What a black comedy.

In the meantime, no one has bothered to fully explain how and why this artwork was created – and why we should care if it gets killed. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel art critic Mary Louise Schumacher has breathlessly kept up http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/entertainment/42440652.html with every blogger and windbag with an opinion on the subject (at times like this, the explosion of Internet “journalism” begins to resemble the spread of kudzu), but hasn’t done the reporting people need to understand the issue.

The genesis of this work of art goes back to the late 1990s, when the city of Milwaukee created a Downtown master plan that was intended to beautify the area and make it more exciting. The city then applied for and won some $24 million in Federal Highway Administration money allocated to reduce automobile congestion and encourage pedestrian traffic, which in turn was funded through the state Department of Transportation. The grant is an 80/20 match, meaning the feds pay 80 percent and the city pays just 20 percent for a plan that would help draw people – both locals and tourists – Downtown. For decades, the Federal Highway Administration has helped fund such projects, which have often included an art component.

The city hired Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP to do a “Pedestrian Corridor Study,” completed in 2002, which recommended various streetscaping: fencing, shrubbery, textured crosswalks, decorative lighting, even better-looking trash receptacles. One of the first areas to get this redo was Wisconsin Avenue from Second to Fourth streets. Skidmore also proposed that public art could add to this pedestrian-friendly ambience.

To that end, the city hired Regina Flanagan, who has decades of experience in the field, having previously run Wisconsin’s and then Minnesota’s Percent for Art programs. Flanagan did a study of where public art could best be incorporated into the streetscaping and then helped lead a committee of nine others. It included art experts like David Gordon (former head of the Milwaukee Art Museum) and Curtis Carter (former head of Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art), several representatives of downtown business groups (like Beth Nichols, who runs the Downtown Business Improvement District) and members of the city Department of Public Works and state Department of Transportation. The committee chose the location for a demonstration art project (Wisconsin Avenue, from the river to Prospect Avenue) and then did the equivalent of a public bidding process: Artists from across the country could apply for the job of creating the art work.

The committee reviewed all the applications, chose three finalists, and brought them in for interviews. Their unanimous choice was Janet Zweig, a Milwaukee-born artist who grew up in Chicago and now lives in Brooklyn, and has extensive experience creating public art in numerous cities. “The committee was very enthusiastic,” says Flanagan. “They liked her work; it was playful and pedestrian-oriented. They also felt she’d be easy to work with.”

Zweig chose the easternmost block of Wisconsin Avenue, which leads to the di Suvero sculpture and the art museum’s Calatrava addition, a work so successful it has become the logo for Visit Milwaukee. She wanted to reinforce the streetscaping on that block. “I love Milwaukee and that part of Wisconsin Avenue. I think it’s a charming place,” Zweig says.

Her concept was to install eye-level kiosks on street lamp posts that would present little animated plays. Triggered by a motion detector, the plays would start as pedestrians approached. “It’s meant to be a piece about walking in Milwaukee, and the experience of the artwork changes as you walk down the street,” Zweig says. “The little tiny people (in the animated plays) are mirroring the people walking down the street. It’s meant to encourage pedestrian activity and discussion.”

The playlets are created using the old flip sign technology once used by railroads. “It’s a beloved technology,” she says. “It you use the latest technology, it quickly becomes dated.” By contrast, she felt, this would reinvent the old flip sign technology into something timeless and charming.

Zweig wanted to use Milwaukee writers and filmmakers to help create the animated plays. There would be 15 plays – three rotating on each of five kiosks. Zweig would operate as the director of this. The plays would have to be interesting enough (“powerful and poetic” she says) to not get stale with repetition. But the technology would also allow for periodic replacement of the plays with new ones, perhaps on an annual basis.

Each of the 15 short plays would require 80 flip signs split in two, or 2,400 images, all of which would have to be designed and silk-screened. The entire work would cost $300,000, of which the federal government would pay $240,000, which would include about $30,000 for Milwaukee company AFX Sign Effectz to fabricate the flip sign containers, and another $30,000-$35,000 to pay the local filmmakers and writers.

The Common Council had already approved the city funding for the streetscaping, which was to include an art project. But the standard procedure, says Bob Bryson of DPW, is to get approval for each stage of the streetscaping. Normally, of course, it’s a rubber stamp process. Common Council members aren’t going to give thumbs up or down on shrubbery and fences. But (gulp) art?

Long experience in many cities (including Milwaukee, where the Blue Shirt artwork was killed) has proven that elected officials (who, after all, must defend their decision to constituents) need some context for viewing art. Flanagan is a veteran of such meetings, but her contract had expired, and Bryson and DPW hadn’t gotten around to securing a federal grant to extend it. Zweig herself could have done a beautiful job of explaining the work. But Bryson, whose expertise is city lighting, unaccountably decided he would brief the Common Council’s Public Works Committee.

Zweig asked Bryson to appear before the committee, but he told her that wouldn’t be necessary, she says. Bad mistake. The aldermen cut Bryson off before he had a chance to fully explain the project. They might have been a little more polite to Zweig.

“It would have been better to have the artist there,” Bryson now concedes. “I don’t know much about art. In hindsight, there’s a lot of stuff I would do differently.”

Zweig says she has high-res images of the proposed work she could have presented. “In a way,” she says, “I don’t blame the aldermen. They were taken by surprise and in a way they couldn’t interpret.”

Their comments seemed foolish and soon met with the contempt of the dreaded arts lovers, who shall brook no objection to art. That, in turn, provoked the wrath of the arts haters, who shall suffer not one dollar taxed for art. “There’s a group of people on both sides who want to enflame this, who have escalated the hostility,” says Flanagan.

As the Calatrava addition proved, people in this city can embrace art. It is, however, much harder to do this based on a mock-up of the work with an out-of-context description of it. 

I don’t know if this is a great work of art, but I think it’s a smart idea that would be fun for pedestrians and catnip for tourists. It would complement the streetscaping of the city’s decade-old Downtown project, add to the ambience of that block of Wisconsin Avenue, and reinforce the new, post-Calatrava image of Milwaukee. The city’s entire contribution of $60,000 would go to local workers – both industrial and artistic.

Killing the artwork would waste all the federal money that has gone to the artist so far (and Zweig could sue to demand the city’s portion of it), and waste all the time put in by volunteers from the arts and business community, who have worked to improve Downtown. Coming after the Blue Shirt’s death, it would make it all the more unlikely that any major art project could be created in Milwaukee.

On the other hand, we don’t really “need” this art. The city and the citizenry can get by perfectly well without it. So why spend a cent on it?

Of course, we also don’t need the new shrubbery, fencing and decorative lighting that’s been added to Wisconsin Avenue. We don’t need the stone lions of Lake Park, the canopy of city-maintained trees on countless city streets or the new night lights at the Mitchell Park Domes. We didn’t need to spend more to create the enhanced design for the Sixth Street Viaduct, the glorious arch of the Hoan Bridge, or the newly retro City Hall clock. Across the city we have added countless examples of completely unneeded improvements that have added mystery and beauty to our lives. Perhaps Zweig’s artistry can be just as powerfully unnecessary.

\

slate.com