(left) Carlos Rolón, Gild the Lily (Caribbean Hybrid I, II, III), 2019, vinyl, 516 x 540 x 504 inches. © Carlos Rolón, Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York. Photo by Kevin J. Miyazaki for Sculpture Milwaukee. (right) Haas Brothers, Handy Warhol and Handy Darling, 2019 cast bronze, solar light fixtures, 36 x 27 ½ x 27 ½ inches. © Haas Brothers, Courtesy the artists and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York. Photo by Kevin J. Miyazaki for Sculpture Milwaukee
According to Sculpture Milwaukee’s press materials, the organization “is part of our community re-imagining how we want to bring inclusion and diversity to our 21st century city.” “Inclusion” and “diversity” are very loaded terms at the moment. We’ve been conditioned through so much pop-rhetoric to consider those terms’ secondary cultural significance before the spirit of their original meanings. So how does one find that original spirit?
Contexts and roles shape how we engage with society, and art is meant to put those roles and contexts into question. From Berthold Brecht’s notion of estrangement to Jasper Johns’ urging us to finally “do something else” when making a work of art, encouraging a reevaluation of the world is art’s primary function. For Ezra Pound, the urge was simply to “make it new.”
For the 22 public sculptures that make up Sculpture Milwaukee, the “it” that’s new is the nature and quality of engagement itself. Most of the daily flaneurs and lunchers in the park on Wisconsin Avenue under the Northwestern Mutual tower are probably not looking for a 50-ft high stainless-steel tree by Roxy Paine. The branching metallic lifeform engages most of its viewers in a much different way than does a similar work by him atop the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where one expects to see such art. It’s thus capable of enlisting a more diverse set of viewers and raising a more inclusive set of questions.
Similarly, Elmgreen and Dragset’s oversized bronze telescope across the street in O’Donnell Park forces viewers not necessarily in “art mode” to contend with a weird version of a familiar object that is serving a much different symbolic function. The telescope is vaguely aimed in the direction of our local temple of fine art, The Milwaukee Art Museum, which for all its wonderful treasures can hardly surprise us with them. A Greater Perspective on the other hand gathers our interest simply by being where you don’t expect it to be.
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Heading west on foot from the waterfront towards North 5th Street on both sides of Wisconsin Avenue, a wonderfully eclectic array of sculptural oddities dot plazas, windows and flower beds. 22 pieces of public sculpture in all, and available with descriptions and audio clips on an ap that can be downloaded to a smartphone. Most of the works are by relatively high-profile global practitioners like Sean Scully, B. Wurtz, Sam Durant, and John Baldessari, with a few local and/or developing makers mixed in. Curating such an ambitious program for the widest possible audience couldn’t have been easy, and the team at Sculpture Milwaukee have delicately satisfied many competing objectives and demands. Red Grooms’ Hot Dog Vendor works on several levels: it’s unexpected as an installation, but with expectedly appropriate subject matter. The cartoonish figures and a dog are approachable for families with kids but are still familiar to art cognoscenti for whom the walking tour might be a dedicated event.
Other works even more thoroughly reimagine the spaces they occupy. Carlos Rolón’s Gilded Lily installation bathes the cubed modernist atrium of the Chase Bank building in translucent color. It covers the walls in images of exotic vegetation and organic forms that interact fruitfully with the stark geometry we’re used to in the location. As a native of Puerto Rico, Rolón also broaches issues of colonialism gracefully through form and metaphor in a space one would not expect to engage in such a discussion. It’s a case where art finds us with our defenses down; while reading the news, drinking a coffee, and hurrying off to work…and then goes to work itself.
Newness as Pound considered was about shaking things up. It was about keeping art from slipping into repetitious platitudes and formulaic representation. Pound would have considered diversity and inclusivity to be fortunate functions of the primary ethic, rather than ethics in themselves. If we make things new, diversity and inclusivity will be natural outcomes. Diversity of peoples, experiences, viewpoints, and mindsets…of everything that repetition and convention turn to stone. Good things follow when regular strides are interrupted to notice the surroundings. And even better things if the surroundings are a flower garden where Radcliffe Bailey’s bronze of W.E.B. Dubois plaintively stares at you from a bench on Wisconsin Avenue.
