For nearly two months, Marilyn Monroe — rather, a giant bronze likeness of her — has loomed over Michigan Avenue frozen in her famous subway stance from “The Seven Year Itch.” The 26-foot Forever Marilyn draws hordes of camera-wielding tourists under the shadow of her skirt, and has been around long enough to survive its first scar: Graffiti tagged on the back of her right calf, which has since been remedied. As of Monday afternoon, no arrests had been made.
Tourist and vandalism allure aside, Forever Marilyn (created by artist Seward Johnson) has sparked debate about whether such large scale, public works of art qualify as Art with a capital A. It’s not a new conversation. We’ve been having it at least since the 1977 unveiling of Claes Oldenburg’s Batcolumn or maybe even 10 years prior, when Daley Plaza welcomed the Picasso.
Still, Forever Marilyn refreshes the debate: When considering art, especially public art, does size matter?
This summer, less than a mile north of Marilyn, an enormous coat hanger is bent into the plaza in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art as if tossed from the giant Marilyn’s closet. To the east, a nonsensical plea for help, FIX-ICE MACHENE, is misspelled in 12-foot wooden letters on Navy Pier’s front lawn. And in the Loop, a nine-story mural on a building at State and Washington streets orders its viewers to GO DO GOOD in alarmingly large black block letters against a canary-yellow background.
It’s almost as if the city is being taken over by giant art.
“One thing (to consider) is just the very basic human instinct to take a photo of something that’s out of scale,” said Michael Darling, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art who commissioned British-born artist Mark Handforth to create the coat hanger and its oversized companions.
“We think about how weird something looks,” Darling said, “but also I definitely don’t mind the notion of spectacle — and creating something big and impressive and unusual in a site like (Pioneer Court) — that can galvanize the public’s interest.”
In Darling’s mind, all of this summer’s major public exhibitors — Handforth, Johnson, FIX-ICE MACHENE’s The Art Guys and GO DO GOOD’s Kay Rosen — are using the scale of their art to try to reckon with the scale of the city. They just speak different creative languages.
“The scale of the Seward Johnson piece is impressive, and commands that space in a way,” Darling said of Forever Marilyn. “It really works, whether you like the piece and how it’s executed and what that means.”
The sculpture’s size is one of the first things passers-by noticed when it was erected in early July.
“It’s nice to see the scale,” said Christopher Walberg, a West Town resident caught staring as the sculpture went up. Admitting he liked most of Johnson’s work, Walberg said the scale “does allow for some interaction with tourists.”
James Rondeau, curator and chairman of the department of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, said that regardless of scale, different works of art have different jobs to do, in trying to address different audiences.
“Maybe Seward has designed his work to entertain and amuse — and that’s fine; there’s space for everyone, I think,” Rondeau said. “But different artists appeal to different audiences. The Handforth installation is very much about public space, but that’s being contextualized by the location of a plaza in front of an art museum: It doesn’t necessarily need to aspire to do so many different jobs. It’s the job of the artist to put different and challenging works of art in front of their audiences.”
A happy medium of entertaining and challenging, Rondeau said, might be found in Rosen’s GO DO GOOD installation above Old Navy on State Street, commissioned by the Chicago Loop Alliance for its second annual summer installation of public art.
“Between Tony Tasset last year and Kay Rosen this year, (Chicago Loop Alliance) is really striking a balance with something that can be popular and entertaining and almost promotional, but also really intelligent and creative and important,” said Rondeau, who is serving on alliance’s committee for the yet-unnamed 2012 installation. “That’s an example of (art) that is doing several jobs at once. It was hoped that it would entertain and be popular and successful, not threatening or for a specialized audience, but at the same time it made a statement that was deeply important in terms of the dialogue with the community. It struck a balance.”
Rosen, who often installs her large textual works in public on billboards, buildings and other large, flat surfaces, has said that the Loop location for GO DO GOOD was ideal because she’d hoped its height might drown out some of the Loop’s surrounding “visual noise.”
“I think that’s a plus,” Rosen said via telephone prior to installation of the work, “that it is a part of the visual noise on State Street but rises above it all.”
But on the morning of GO DO GOOD’s unveiling, several pedestrians said they’d misunderstood the new signage to be an advertising campaign — something Rosen hadn’t intended.
Which is one major issue facing big art: Take it out of the museum or gallery, put it on the street, and the public might get the wrong idea. Just because something’s large enough to draw a crowd doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be understood by that crowd as fine art, especially if, like Forever Marilyn, it’s anchored on a busy plaza as opposed to tucked into the corner of a gallery behind a stanchion.
Johnson said he was well aware that Forever Marilyn’s placement in Pioneer Court, with which his Sculpture Foundation is tied financially, would cause a stir.
“I think that the subject of scale is intriguing and it does not surprise me that most artists working in the field of public art confront it,” Johnson said via email. The octogenarian is accustomed to criticism, having now completed several oversized bronze sculptures in his “Icons Revisited” series of pop-culture icons.
“There is no question that choices of scale require the viewer to see something in a new way,” Johnson said. “I like quite a lot of the out-sized artwork that I see. I respond to the idea of everyday objects made to be seen from a different perspective, though I am not familiar with the installation at the MCA.”
That installation has garnered steady picture-taking traffic despite its location off Michigan Avenue, according to Darling, its curator.
But its placement in front of a museum sends viewers a different message, according to Handforth: The focus is public space, but with the caveat that anyone who sees it will do so in the context of the museum behind it.
“Art’s weird now, because its relationship to the public is a very twisted one,” Handforth said via telephone from Florida, where he is based. “Very often it’s inside museums that the public doesn’t feel are open to them. My piece at the MCA, to put it on the street is like saying, ‘Come see my show, come see what’s inside the museum.’ I think there’s something really good about that, about stretching what the museum is and that it’s open to everyone.
“I think by definition, the sense is (art) something is imposed on people, that’s why it sometimes gets such hostile reactions. I think people don’t want to have art or culture imposed on them. That’s why public art is such a quagmire, to be honest.”
Michael Galbreth of the Houston-based Art Guys, the duo behind Navy Pier’s FIX-ICE MACHENE curated for Navy Pier Walk by Joseph Tabet, explained that large, public art often has the affect of someone speaking too loudly in a restaurant. You notice it, whether you’d planned to or not. And that can be annoying.
“We (as artists) want to have an interaction with people that’s going to call attention to them by calling attention to an object that they’re confronted with,” Galbreth said. “If you shift peoples’ sense of context or themselves in a certain way — and absurdity in art does that — then it makes people by default attentive to themselves and the world. It’s all we can do, even if just for a moment.”
It’s the reason that Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate works, according to every one of this story’s sources, each of whom mentioned “The Bean” independently.
The Art Institute’s Rondeau said what’s most successful about Kapoor’s sculpture isn’t just that it’s big, but images its viewer, instantly capturing something of interest.
“In Millennium Park, there’s this tandem between Kapoor and (Crown Fountain artist Jaume) Plensa, and it’s absolutely no coincidence that they both allow citizens to see themselves,” Rondeau said. “In that, they’re successful: They’re creating a standard to which all public art has to aspire, and that’s this level of entertainment.”
Why, then, is Forever Marilyn given such a hard time? It’s big, it’s recognizable, it makes people stop in their tracks.
But it’s too easy, according to Darling.
“It’s so well known, it’s kind of banal, in a way,” Darling said. “There’s something so saccharine about the images (Johnson) uses; it’s the same aesthetic you’d find in a dentist office or something. So much of pop culture has moved beyond that and become so much more sophisticated, it just feels really kitschy to see something like that.”
So big is good, kitsch is bad?
Sort of. For art to be successful, no matter how big it is, there’s got to be a hook.
“There is a variety of these things, and it’s great that people are debating it,” Darling said. “I think that’s healthy, and maybe this preponderance of negative feedback about the Johnson is kind of a good indication of the sophistication in Chicago for prevailing tastes. It might be a nice barometer to keep in mind about what interests Chicago, and maybe make people think twice about what they put up. Maybe this city can handle more than that.”
Twitter @LaurenViera
