Over the weekend, the Nasher Sculpture Center announced the third of ten public art projects commissioned as part of Nasher XChange, launched to celebrate the museum’s tenth anniversary. Ugo Rondinone, a Swiss-born, New York-based artist will construct a multi-colored pier at Fish Trap Lake in West Dallas that will extend out across the water. The description of the project suggests that the pier will invite viewers to immerse themselves in a new vantage point at Fish Trap Lake, one that blends an experience of the Texas sky, the multi-colored structure, and the water.
The piece feels like something new for an artist who is constantly reinventing himself. With Rondinone, there have been the target paintings, the grinning blob sculptures, the multi-colored signs in the sky, and most recently, the primitive oversized public sculptures showing concurrently with a gallery exhibition of similar forms. One through-line in Rondinone’s work is an exploration of the emotional and mental reaction of the viewer to the work. Sometimes, as Roberta Smith writes about his latest show at Gladstone Gallery, Rondinone may be “spoofing the very idea of emotional expression, reminding us that we read as much into most artworks as we extract from them.” Other times, the pieces seem to be a sincere effort to lead the viewer into a meditative state. The proposed project for the Nasher seems to share some qualities with the work of James Turrell, creating a work of art that doubles as a site of meditation and transcendental experience.
The choice of locations is also intriguing for a few reasons. One is that the site is on land that once was part of La Reunion, the 19th century utopian socialist settlement of French, Swiss, and German artists and intellectuals. There are connections, then, between both the artist’s own heritage, a progressive social vision implicit in the project, and the artwork’s attempt to recast Fish Trap Lake, a former industrial pit, as a kind of bucolic Walden’s pond. Another interesting aspect of the location is that the land is the site of what was, at the time it was built, one of the largest public housing projects in the country. Thus we get the third project in a row that the Nasher has commissioned that seems deliberately designed to transform an otherwise marginalized area of the city into an attraction, simultaneously offering the community something that elevates their neighborhood, while challenging Dallas residents to encounter overlooked parts of the city.
I suppose this social activist tone that is increasingly prevalent in the Nasher XChange shouldn’t come as any surprise. At the kick-off announcement, the Nasher’s director, Jeremy Strick, said the museum sought “art created and inspired through the very essence and part of our diverse communities – an art that reflects back on the places and its future.” Also, as part of its organizational strategy, the Nasher XChange offered a somewhat new way for the city to approach the creation of public art, freeing artists to seek out their own locations.
Those artists chose to construct work from recycled materials on the grounds of a dump-turned-preserve in far South Dallas (Ruben Ochoa at the Trinity River Audubon Center); a community marketplace that will be the product of an amorphous collaboration between members and volunteers in an overlooked immigrant and indigent community (Rick Lowe’s work in Vickery Meadow); and now a Swiss artist’s attempt to introduce a kind of stage for transcendental meditation in the heart of West Dallas.
These three projects got me thinking about what seems, at first, to be a disarming of the didactic nature of public art at work in the Nasher XChange. For centuries, the primary role of public art was to promote and proclaim the values of a given culture, and what was valuable most often related to the active forces that appeared to hold that culture together: politics, religion, military strength and valor. Thus we got a long tradition of obelisks; columns; arches; church facades; and religious, military and political statuary. With the Nasher’s project, however, we get an inversion: instead of projects that seek to exalt or serve the powerful in our society, they turn their attention to the powerless or ordinary citizen.
In this way, the entirety of the Nasher’s Xchange program begins to take on its own interesting dimension as an umbrella that holds together all these individual ideas. And when taken as a whole, the Nasher XChange is not as much a deviation from didactic public expression as it might seem. Consider one of the most famous historical examples of monumental sculpture: Trajan’s Column in Rome. Twisted around the face of the stone column are carved reliefs that retell of the triumphant victories of the Emperor Trajan during the Dacian Wars. The public nature of the work is integral to its function. The story is meant to celebrate, boast, and remind Romans of their success of war, yes, but also of the stories and events that were considered by the imperial rulers to be important to how the Roman people understand their culture.
Taken as a whole, we could begin to read the Nasher’s Xchange in similar way. There are narratives created around each of the projects. Sometimes the narratives are contained within the work itself – a transcendental experience that will be activated when a viewer steps onto the finished pier, a community marketplace that will transpire over a number of months. But there are also narratives that surround the creation of each piece: the way each project takes up the historical or cultural resonance of a location, activates overlooked area, invites individuals to discover overlooked or neglected neighborhoods, and offers an art gift to a specific neighborhood that seeks to engender that area with a new sense of pride. When taken together, these stories create a broader narrative in relief. They are the narrative chunks that the artists believe should be put up in plain view, to serve as a new lens on our own city, history, and culture.
