The fear, the kind of primal fear that makes your face twitch, set in after I read an old Tribune profile of Dan Webb, the Chicago lawyer who successfully prosecuted John Poindexter in the Iran-contra case.
The boyish-looking Webb, the profile said, liked to “crush” the witnesses he cross-examined.
Fortunately, he was going to be on my side. But there was plenty to fear from the opposing lawyers who would be cross-examining me during a mock trial titled “Slats Grobnik v. Public Art” and staged for the recent Chicago Humanities Festival.
“You look nervous,” the festival’s director, Eileen Mackevich, said at a fancy dinner before the trial started at the Field Museum of Natural History.
“Yeah,” I muttered, when what I meant was: “I’m more petrified than the rocks in this place.”
The fictional premise of the trial was this:
A blue-ribbon panel of art experts had recommended that the city of Chicago pay $2 million for Richard Serra’s controversial sculpture “Tilted Arc” and put it on a plaza being built in front of the Field Museum.
In response, the late columnist Mike Royko’s fictional drinking buddy, the Everyman known as Slats Grobnik, had filed a lawsuit trying to prevent the city from carrying out its plan, claiming that the sculpture would be a public nuisance.
This was the same “Tilted Arc” — a 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high, 77-ton slab of rusting steel — that, in real life, was removed from the Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan 10 years ago. Federal office workers had signed petitions saying it was ugly and obtrusive. Ever since, it has been gathering dust in a warehouse in Brooklyn.
At a time when public art remains the subject of nationwide controversy, the issues raised by the mock trial were anything but make-believe.
Who should have the ultimate say over public art, the public that pays for it or art experts who probably are more qualified to select it?
How is public art different from private art, the kind that goes in a basement or back yard or within the walls of a museum?
The 30th anniversary of the Picasso sculpture’s arrival on Daley Plaza — now an icon of the city but initially derided as resembling a baboon, an Afghan hound and Barbara Streisand in a Viking helmet — heightened the trial’s tension.
The Picasso enabled lawyers representing the city — Jack Guthman and Steven Handler, who actually work for private firms, and Scott Lassar, the interim U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois — to argue that Chicago had been farsighted then and that it ought to be visionary now.
The Picasso and “Tilted Arc” are made out of the same rusting steel, the lawyers said.
You’ll get used it, they said of “Tilted Arc.”
You might even come to like it.
Our side — Slats’ side — wasn’t buying it.
We conceded that Serra is a great sculptor. We didn’t dispute that “Tilted Arc” might be a work of art that said something powerful about our times.
The crux of our case, as shaped by lawyers Lowell Sachnoff, Patricia Bobb and Webb, was that “Tilted Arc” would be chronically out of place on the new plaza. Designed by Teng & Associates of Chicago, the plaza opens next summer as part of a lakefront museum campus made possible by moving the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive west of Soldier Field.
“Tilted Arc” would block views of the museum and Lake Michigan, we showed. It would block the path of people using the plaza. It would impede the museum’s ability to hold a wide range of outdoor events, like sit-down dinners.
“Plaza Interruptus,” I called it.
This phrase led the mock trial judge, Susan Getzendanner, a former U.S. District Court judge, to ask with a sly grin what I thought of the Washington Monument.
No comment, your honor.
But here’s a point we didn’t talk about at the trial.
The relationship between architecture and sculpture used to be pretty well-defined. Buildings framed public plazas, and sculptures filled them with dynamic forms. Even a modern setting like Chicago’s Federal Center Plaza — at once enclosed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s black, curtain-walled high-rises and enlivened by Alexander Calder’s springy, red stabile “Flamingo” — followed that traditional model.
“Tilted Arc” is one example of how those boundaries are breaking down.
Put “Tilted Arc” in a plaza, and it will shape public space, as the wall of a building does. Lots of Serra’s latest work, in fact, has aspects of architecture. In a Manhattan gallery, he’s just unveiled “Torqued Ellipses,” three massive, out-of-kilter enclosures made of steel. The ellipses are based on the oval volumes of a Borromini church in Rome.
To fabricate the pieces, Serra got help from an engineer in the office of his friend, the Santa Monica, Calif., architect Frank Gehry. Further illustrating the collapse of the walls between disciplines, Gehry is an architect whose buildings, like the spectacular new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, resemble sculpture.
Here’s the twist: Whereas gallery-goers choose to experience “Torqued Ellipses,” the public would have had no choice but to come in contact with “Tilted Arc.”
The jury, which consisted of an audience of about 700 people who had paid $250 a plate to benefit the festival, apparently did not relish the prospect of brushing up against Serra’s rusting steel walls.
It sided with Slats and our argument that “Tilted Arc” would exceed the boundaries of acceptable public art because it would be a visual and functional obstruction.
Whew!
As for all the stories I’ve written over the years that might have enabled the other side to crush me during cross-examination — well, I’ll never tell.
