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Battle on Big Chico Creek

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Dumbed-Down and Decorative

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Termites, Travel, and Turmoil

We live in an incredibly dumbed-down visual culture," said Sheri Simons, artist and associate professor in California State University, Chico's Department of Art and Art History. Simons said that because our environment is filled with sound bites for the eye-those instantly recognizable visual snippets of billboard and television imagery-publicly funded art that challenges this visual culture or is not instantly recognizable is inevitably controversial.

Students in Simons' class Big Projects: Public Space and You (fall 1998) discovered the need to consider public reaction when creating large-scale works. Simons encouraged students to understand how public places are used, what meanings they have for people, what art experiences can be created in them, and how the public interacts with those experiences. Before designing their own projects, students learned about past projects.

Artists have always challenged our aesthetic comfort levels and our visual, cultural, social, or political assumptions. Art in public spaces is frequently dismissed until people have a chance to live with it, interact with it, and make it their own. When Maya Lin created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, it was greeted with cries of dismay by those who believed war memorials must include the more familiar and comfortable representational view of soldiers. Yet this memorial has become one of the most treasured and emotionally evocative large-scale works of our time-a place people visit to mourn, heal, and remember. Sometimes public controversy prevents the creation of an art piece. Recently, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors overturned an arts commission choice of an 18-foot sculpture by Buster Simpson for the Embarcadero.

Simons, whose large-scale works can be viewed in Sacramento and Seattle, is no stranger to controversy. In 1997, the Seattle Arts Commission selected Simons to build sculptures for a new courthouse. As Simons and her students installed the piece in the uncompleted juvenile justice section of the courthouse, one of the drywallers stopped to stare. "What is this? Oh, man, I could do this when I'm drunk," he said in disgust. The art piece comprised a series of scenes inside fourteen large and small boxes recessed into the wall. "When you walked by, you looked at it as someone's home," explained Simons. "It wasn't a doll house; it was a place to let your mind roam." Simons used an abundance of cloth in the piece, creating dream-like scenes of escape and comfort.

Not everyone was comforted, however. Several months after the installation, Simons returned to Seattle to alter a box containing a child's green chair with a nest on it. Where she thought she had created a place of rest, a police officer saw an electric chair. While she was altering the piece, the disapproving drywaller approached her and demanded, "What are you doing?" When Simons explained the changes, he was outraged. "That was my favorite one!" he claimed.

"Art gives you this opportunity to sort of wake up for a minute and ask, 'Who am I, where am I, what am I doing?' It's nothing really new. It's our role as artistis in society, it's what we do-ask questions, change you a little bit," said Michael Bishop, artist, Fulbright scholar, and professor in the Department of Art and Art History since 1978. In 1991, Bishop and Simons each created pieces for the library in Sacramento. Simons was not at CSU, Chico then, and the two artists did not meet, but both sent admiring comments to the arts coordinator about the other's work. When Simons joined the CSU, Chico faculty in 1992, she and Bishop talked about working together. Their opportunity came when the Chico Arts Commission requested proposals for the municipal building.

Publicly funded art is relatively new for Chico. Like many other communities, Chico established an ordinance setting aside 1 percent of the construction costs of public buildings for on-site public art. Artists present ideas and models to an arts panel selected by the arts commission. After extensive review, a piece is chosen and presented to the city council for approval.

By having a variety of art pieces in public places, a community can give its citizens the opportunity for real art experiences, which Mary Gardner (Art, '80-'87), art projects coordinator for the City of Chico, defines as experiences that change the viewer. "They're not immediately forgotten, and you may even find yourself referencing them at some point. You may see something else or go through something in your life and think, 'Wow, that's what that artist meant,'" she explained.

Simons and Bishop's proposal was designed for the lobby of the municipal building, a space currently lined with unused chairs separated by groupings of large plants. (See photo above.) Bishop and Simons wanted to activate the space.

Their design consisted of two large fabricated couches on the main floor; a series of fabricated vessels filled with sand and writings from the community arranged at the edges of the space and on the second-floor ledge; and two microphones suspended from the third-floor ceiling. The piece was designed as a large community project with schoolchildren, community groups, and individuals writing stories to be buried in the vessels. "Filling the vessels with all of these writings would put the community back into the community space," said Bishop. The artists had also talked with people interested in performing in or creating performance works for the space, from classical music concerts to theatrical productions. Unfortunately, none of it would come to be.

"People are always hesitant about something they don't understand, something that's new, something that's different," said Bishop, referring to the controversy that emerged over the proposal, derisively dubbed "Jars and Couches" by detractors. Although the arts commission chose the piece and it was accepted by the city council, controversy over its artistic value and $45,000 price tag raged, becoming an issue in last year's city council elections. At their December 15, 1998, meeting, the city council rescinded their choice and accepted a more decorative piece for the municipal building.

Bishop and Simons were, to say the least, surprised. They thought their work was relatively tame. "A faction of people were threatened by contemporary art and new ideas," said Bishop.

"I don't pretend that I know recombinant DNA or how they got that sheep from a sheep....We've all had to be educated," said Simons. She sees the controversy over this piece as part of the education process communities go through as they develop an arts program, the growing pains in a community's relationship with art.

by Barbara Alderson, University Publications