Forgive the recent silence; I have been preoccupied by a tough deadline. I was asked to write about my city museum research for a collection of essays on cities and memory, to be published (in Finnish) by the Finnish Literature Society. Now that I have sent my draft off to the editor, I can turn my attention back to you, dear reader.One of the topics I discuss in my essay is historically-themed public art. I think it can be a particularly interesting way to interpret city history, and at the same time build meaningful urban spaces. Here are a few examples of particularly successful pieces:First, there’s the sculpture pictured above, at the beginning of the post. It’s Balancing Act by Stephan Balkenhol, on Axel-Springer-Strasse in Berlin. It poignantly marks the borderland of the Berlin Wall with a larger-than-life figure of a man, perched on a section of the Wall as if it were a tightrope. The effect is iconographic: anyone who knows even a little bit about the history of Berlin immediately gets the message with no need for complicated interpretation.
I also love this piece in Philadelphia. In 1976 architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown recreated the frame of Benjamin Franklin’s former house, just off Market Street. Nicknamed the Ghost House, it is an evocative and award-winning piece that writes Franklin back into the landscape of the city he so influenced.
And here’s a project from 1989 in Los Angeles, Biddy Mason Park. It’s a collaboration between the architectural historian Dolores Hayden and two artists, Betye Saar and Shelia Levrant de Bretteville. The park commemorates the site of Biddy Mason’s home with two pieces of historical art. Biddy Mason was a slave who petitioned and won her freedom in the courts in 1856. She also eventually owned a significant amount of property in what is now downtown LA. While she was well known in her own community, she was not particularly remembered by mainstream American history until this project came along. She was a midwife and healer, and embedded in the concrete wall are impressions of objects from her everyday life—a midwife’s bag, a medicine bottle, scissors, a spool of thread.
This is an interesting one that suggests possibilities for city history, even if it’s not quite that itself. Denise Ziegler’s 1999 Epigrams for Helsinki Citizens consists of messages cast into eight manhole covers throughout the city. It’s the kind of special thing you have to know about and look for, promoting a sense of discovery and belonging.
And this is Edge of the Trees by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley, outside the Museum of Sydney. It symbolizes the first contact between the two cultures, when Arther Phillip's First Fleet sailed into Sydney Harbor in 1788 while the area's aboriginal people watched from the shore.
Here’s one that’s a little more abstract: the Chicago Bean, formally titled Cloud Gate, by Anish Kapoor. While its connections to Chicago history aren’t that direct, I love that its highly-reflective surface acts as a mirror, situating each viewer in relation to the city skyline: in case you have forgotten, you are here, in Chicago. That's right, Chicago.
And lastly, here’s a lovely little memorial that's halfway hidden, at Suomenlinna, the old island fortress in Helsinki Harbor. It alludes to the 1918 Civil War in Finland, an event that still isn’t completely resolved in the country’s collective memory. After the war, one of the prison camps for Red soldiers (the side that lost) was established on Suomenlinna. There was a food shortage throughout Finland, and food was particularly scarce in the prison camps. Thousands of prisoners eventually died of hunger and disease in 1918 and 1919 at Suomenlinna and in the other prison camps. Marja Kanervo, who created the memorial, explains how it works: “The years cut in the broken bedrock will disappear as slowly as the marks of violence, stretching over generations. In addition to being a physical contact to the silent world of the dead, the rippling water is also a wearing tool, which, like time, shall finally do its task. Until then, the emotions and traumatic memories stirred by the artwork take place in the present.”I lived in Washington, DC in the late 1990s. It’s a city full of neoclassical architecture meant to visually reinforce the power of the American federal government. It’s also full of public art in the form of memorials: some that are treasured by the public—the Lincoln and Washington monuments, Maya Lin’s groundbreaking Vietnam Veterans Memorial—but also a lot of dead white men, made of bronze or stone, with or without horses, that get little attention these days. I’m sure those military men and city fathers were important and known to past generations, but most of them have been forgotten with the march of time. I remember once while I was living in DC I made a trip to Cleveland and was caught off-guard by the contemporary public art there—colorful pieces, abstract pieces, pieces I doubted would ever get through committee in DC. My point being that each generation writes its own history, and therefore our commemorations and allusions to it through public art need to be a continuous process that never stops. Which is why I find this temporary piece made for a Helsinki festival in 2005 intriguing:
It’s called Time Signal, by Elina Lifländer and Eliisa Suominen, and it creates a dialogue between a statue of the poet Eino Leino created in 1953 and the present day. I couldn’t find much online about the artists’ intent—I think the female silhouette may represent the writer Onerva Lehtinen, his lover—but even simply imagining the possibilities is interesting.I’m going to end with a few public spaces I’ve encountered in my explorations over the past few months that seem to be screaming for public art:
The courtyard of the Stockholm City Museum. I was there on the cusp of the tourist season, so maybe it doesn’t stay this empty all summer long. And I’m sure there are good reasons to keep it a flexible, programmable space. But can’t you imagine some colorful and intriguing historical public art as a centerpiece?
Tunnelgatan, also in Stockholm. This is a very long, public tunnel near the center of the city that saves you from walking up a steep flight of stairs only to go back down another one. Right now, its yellow walls are bare. Hmmm.
And finally, this is an old gasometer (or gas holder) in Helsinki, just northeast of city centre. Gasometers are used to store natural gas; they are more common in Europe than in the US. This particular one is part of an abandoned industrial complex that is slated for redevelopment as a cultural center. In Dresden, the architect Yadegar Asisi transformed one of these gasometers into a 360 panorama of the 18th-century city. You can stand in the center and be enveloped by 1756 Dresden. Asisi did a similar panorama of 312 Rome for a gasometer in Leipzig; in 2009 it was replaced by a view of the Amazon rain forest. What should Helsinki do with its gasometer?
Thinking the Present Historically
Another essay in City Museums and City Development is written by two curators from the Museum of Sydney, Caroline Butler-Bowdon and Susan Hunt. Their approach to interpreting Sydney is something they call “thinking the present historically.” The museum staff uses the past to inform the present experience of Sydney residents, with particular attention to contemporary social and political issues and to the city’s ethnic diversity. Therefore the goal is not simply to illuminate Sydney’s history, but to make a statement or ask a question that is relevant and useful to today’s Sydneysiders.While some of the content developed by the Museum of Sydney does focus on traditional historical themes (for example, a current exhibition, 1810: Expanding Sydney, describes Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s influence on the city in the early 19th century), the staff is just as likely to produce exhibitions and programming about Sydney now, with little overt reference to history.An exhibition titled My City of Sydney (2004-2006) explored the question of what makes Sydney, Sydney. It involved a documentary film, commissioned by the museum, in which Sydney residents “tell personal stories of places significant to them” (p.79), as a well as several installations by contemporary Sydney artists (one featured residents’ home movies; another is described as “a family photo album of a city”).Meanwhile, a series of symposiums over the last ten years addressing a range of contemporary issues—from urban redevelopment and sustainability to demographic shifts to the Olympics—have resulted in two major publications: Debating the City: An Anthology (2001) and Talking about Sydney: Population, Community, and Culture in Contemporary Sydney (2006)Another exhibition, Sydney Now (2007-2008), presented the work of 24 contemporary photojournalists, portraying the “everyday lives of ordinary citizens.” A user-generated component to the exhibition, My Sydney Now, invited members of the public to submit a photograph that “best captured life in Sydney” via Flckr. A panel of judges then chose three of these images to be included alongside the work of the professional photojournalists in the bricks-and-mortar exhibition.Indeed, the Museum of Sydney collaborates frequently with contemporary artists, particularly photographers. The 2003 exhibition Welcome to Sydney featured panoramic portrait photographs by Anne Zahalka of Sydneysiders from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, each one shot in a different location throughout the city. The exhibition attempted to spark dialogue about diversity and identity amidst “the recent climate of intense controversy over Australia’s immigration policies and treatment of refugees.” (p. 79) For another project, Eora Crossing, the museum worked with the “physical theatre” company Legs on the Wall to create an outdoor performance piece than ran for three nights during Sydney Festival 2004. Part indigenous dance, part storytelling, and part acrobatics, the piece involved dancers hanging by rigging from the skyscrapers of downtown Sydney with the museum building, which stands on the site of the first colonial Government House, serving as the centerpiece. In a city still dealing with the legacy of colonialism, Eora Crossing addressed what white occupation meant for Sydney’s indigenous Cadigal people.I must confess I have never been to Australia, so I am learning about the Museum of Sydney second-hand. But here are some thoughts after a few hours studying archived material online. First, after working for so long in a city where public history is fixated on the 18th century, the idea of interpreting the present is refreshing, maybe even downright liberating. I got excited by some of these projects; if I lived in Sydney I’d want to see them all. But I’m not the typical visitor, so of course my question is whether or not this approach leads to a more successful visitor experience or a more engaged public. The museum’s annual visitation (paid admission plus comp tickets and public program attendance) averages a little shy of 100,000 from 2004 to 2008. This is certainly respectable but not stellar. I’m thinking about other ways to measure. In the meantime, this concept makes sense intuitively to me—after all, how often have museums been admonished to use visitors’ own experience as a point of departure, instead of starting with something abstract or remote? For a history museum, what could be closer to visitors’ own experience than the present?Second, working with contemporary artists could be a particularly useful approach for city museums that don’t have strong collections. History museums usually rely on their collections to do the heavy lifting, and rightfully so. But in today’s market the development of a comprehensive collection can be cost-prohibitive. For city museums that are just starting out—or for those that never acquired vast stores of artifacts in the first place—providing venues for artists to make statements about the city, if done thoughtfully, could be just as powerful and authentic.And third, I wish I had been there to watch those dancers hanging from the sky. What an interesting example of place-specific programming, not to mention public spectacle. I’m sure there are thousands of Sydneysiders out there who can’t walk by the museum building without thinking of it. Metrics be damned, I have to believe that experiences like this one knit us together as part of a shared urban community, even if the stitches are loose and uneven. The strange and unexpected, shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of strangers—that’s what city life is all about.
LAYARing History
Earlier this week I blogged about my interest in combining GPS and city history. A colleague recently sent me a link to a project launched by the Powerhouse, Sydney’s museum of science and design. Today I had a chance to sit down and explore. It uses Layar, an augmented reality tool. If you’re saying to yourself, “Hunh?” then here’s what it means. If you have an IPhone or an Android phone, Layar registers your location and will pull up GPS-encoded information—for example, the closest café, any public events currently taking place, nearby “Tweeters”—as you walk around. In other words it augments your experience of a real place. The Powerhouse has loaded historic photographs of Sydney into Layar. The photos are geo-tagged with coordinates as close as possible to the photographer’s original viewpoint. That means you can pull out your phone in the central business district and pull up what Sydney would have looked like from that same spot in, say, 1926. Layar is still a relatively new tool for museums. The Stedelijk, Amsterdam’s contemporary art museum, offers a Layar opportunity for users to design their own public art and install it virtually on the streets of the city. And two developers in Germany have created a virtual version of the Berlin Wall, where the real wall used to stand, raising all sorts of implications for city museums (imagine using Layar to remake all our bulldozed landmarks). Other museums are using different augmented reality tools besides Layar within the bricks-and-mortar exhibition space (examples include the “Mobile Augmented Reality Quest,” the Allard Pierson Museum, and the Louvre). This is interesting stuff. I caution that technology for technology’s sake is never a good idea. And it’s going to take years for the small museums to get around to such projects—they’re still struggling to pay the electricity bill. But let’s at least spend a little time dreaming about the possibilities. For example, historic sites face significant physical challenges because proper preservation requires so many restrictions. Why not use augmented reality to recreate for visitors what a particular historic space looked like, without having to make any real changes to walls, floors, and furnishings? Or why not have residents create their own mental maps in Layar of their most important urban places? And speaking of layered history, with an e this time, why not use augmented reality to show a street corner in Sydney not just in 1926, but from prehistory up through present day? The past is present, indeed.