Andy Goldworthy's
It’s a funny thing about the physical world: Sometimes we just don’t see it. We strap on our seat belts, commute, drive through a coffee hut, wrinkle our foreheads at news on the radio, get gas… Maybe some warm spring day, we are randomly filled with an epiphanic spirit and look out our rolled-down window while breezing down Lafayette Avenue, only to see John Henry’s 80-foot-high steel sculpture Treemonisha there in the median. Maybe the thought is how did that giant red thing get there? Or who made that? Or maybe why have I never seen that before?
It’s sad to think we don’t have revelations like this every day—but Sculpture City is here to wake us up, to trigger that curiosity. Co-convened by Laumeier Sculpture Park executive director Marilu Knode and public art consultant Meridith McKinley of Via Partnership, it’s a yearlong program with several goals, the main one being to help us see and appreciate all of the art around us.
“About three years ago I decided, knowing we were going to have this 250th anniversary, that I really should go around and declare that in 2014, St. Louis is Sculpture City,” Knode says. The idea was to promote sculpture and public art, as well as all the organizations tied to both, within a 100-mile radius of the Gateway Arch. The steering committee decided very early on that it wanted interactive programming to make the experience relevant to local audiences. At the same time, it wanted to bring outside influences to St. Louis and expose those people to our rich sculptural heritage.
One of the tools to achieve the first goal was the Sculpture City website (sculpturecitystl.com), designed pro bono by Kiku Obata & Company. The logo, which at first glance appears to be an egg, is actually the negative space under the Arch and the shadow it casts—the perfect symbol of potentiality, as well as the ability to look at a familiar object in a new way.
“This is actually an Instagram feed, so any photo on your Instagram feed that uses the #sculptstl hashtag, the image will automatically post here,” explains McKinley, scrolling through images of the St. Louis statue in front of the Saint Louis Art Museum, Tony Tasset’s giant eyeball at Laumeier, even a little boy standing in front of a snowman. “When you click on it, you get them in color. When we put that up, I started using Instagram—I’d never used it before. It’s been really interesting, the journey between my home and my office, the quantity of sculptures that exist there. It’s caused me to open my eyes, and that’s part of the exercise.”
In addition to the photos, which flow in regularly, there are essays posted every other week or so, ranging from architectural historian Michael Allen’s piece about the destruction of Mill Creek Valley to Laumeier curator Dana Turkovic writing about inflatable snowmen as folk art. On Sculpture City’s Facebook page (facebook.com/sculpturecitystlouis2014), artists, historians, writers, and curators are posting photos for a series called “Always on View,” calling attention to, for instance, our three antique standpipe water towers (we have more of them than any other American city) or the Wainwright Building, Louis Sullivan’s terra-cotta masterpiece. The website also has a feed for events from collaborating institutions, including the Regional Arts Commission, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. The Webster University Film Series’ run of sculpture documentaries is also included; this month’s offering is Bending Sticks: The Sculpture of Patrick Dougherty.
The centerpiece event, however, is the Monument/Anti-Monument conference, set for April 10, 11, and 12. The event has attracted panelists from across the world, including curators, artists, architects, and urban planners; the keynote speaker, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, makes heavy use of audience interaction and technology to interpret the whole concept of sculpture in radically new ways. This is the event that takes the plastic bubble off of the snow globe, allowing the city to breathe in some outside influences, as well as show off St. Louis to creative people who have never visited.
Knode will lead a panel titled “The Ruins of Mound City,” dovetailing with Laumeier’s “Mound City” exhibit, which opens this month and looks at the mound-building Mississippian cultures that first settled the river valley. (It’s the second installment of Laumeier’s archaeology of place series; the first was 2013’s “The River Between Us.”) Other panels include “Artists Reclaim the Commons,” organized by Glenn Harper, editor of Sculpture Magazine, and “When Communities Reject Monuments,” led by Bradley Bailey, assistant professor of art history at Saint Louis University.
McKinley, who travels regularly for her public-art consulting work, says Monument/Anti-Monument has attracted attention outside of St. Louis because “it’s going to be unlike any conversation happening right now. The panel organizers are so excited to meet with the other panel organizers, because we’re bringing in people internationally.” Out-of-towners will get to tour Bellefontaine Cemetery, Old North St. Louis, Citygarden, the Gateway Arch, Monks Mound at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Forest Park, the new East Building at the Art Museum, and Laumeier, for the opening of “Mound City.” As is often the case, outsiders are often gobsmacked by what is in St. Louis—the quality of the art and architecture, the neighborhoods, the atmosphere. And that’s sometimes the shock that allows us to see our environment anew—that negative space under the Arch.
“St. Louis is such an incredibly important city in the history of the country,” Knode says, “and we’ve lost our position. We’ve lost our insistence on our relevance. And I think we are an increasingly relevant place.”
Monument/Anti-Monument is held at The Chase Park Plaza, 212 N. Kingshighway. For more information, call 314-664-5902 or go to sculpturecitystl.com. “Mound City” shows at Laumeier Sculpture Park (12580 Rott, 314-615-5278, laumeiersculpturepark.org) from April 11 through August 26.
