THIS ARTIST has collaborated with the architect to make art that fits with and contributes to the experience of the architecture within which it situates (Alix Soubiran at Glendale Youth Services Library, Johnson Favaro 2022)
For most of our history artists had jobs, what we might now call commissions that unlike contemporary commissions (“here’s some money, do what you want”) were highly prescribed tasks with required outcomes, budgets, and schedules. Artists were given a program (an assignment) to follow. Paint this biblical story in this way and make it fit here, sculpt a statue of that military hero and put it there, and so on.
IRRELEVANT WORKS OF ART that treat these public buildings as white box galleries and which have nothing to do with the architecture of the buildings contribute nothing to the public’s experience of the buildings. (Purchased art for the Riverside Library above; Non-commissioned art placed at the West Hollywood Library below)
MAYBE SOMEWHERE BUT NOT HERE would this art make sense. What does it mean? Why that subject matter? Why that shape, color or position? Why such as imposition? (Origami Horse Sculpture at Los Angeles Trade Technical College South Campus Project, Johnson Favaro, Los Angeles, CA 2011)
They called this kind of an assignment a “program.” In architecture we still recognize what a program is although mainly it prescribes functional requirements while a hundred years ago (and even now although to a lesser degree) it would have also prescribed “stylistic” requirements. But that painters and sculptors ever had to work under the demands of a program (a subject, a story, or style) by those who paid them may to us seem outrageous, if not unbelievable.
SCULPTURE OR ARCHITECTURE? Who cares? The reliefs, surfaces and volumes of the buildings work together to create an integrated work of art –an aspiration that for millennia we seemed to have taken for granted (Temple of Hathora at Dendera, Egypt, ca 50-24 BCE above; Mayan Governor’s Palace, Uxmal, Mexico, ca 900 AD below)
WHETHER EAST OR WEST (OR NORTH OR SOUTH) our traditions of painting emerged from painting on walls, first caves, then buildings. (Sultan Ahmed Mosque, Istanbul, ca 1610 above; Sistine Chapel, ca 1510, Vatican City, below)
WHETHER SPIRITUAL OR SECULAR sculptors did often work under the requirements of a program and the requirement that what they sculpted fit with and emerge from the architecture of its setting (Ancient Borobudur Buddhist Temple.ca Java, ca 900 AD Indonesia, above; Medici Tomb, Michelangelo, Chiesa San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy, ca 1520)
Historians might be able to explain when, how and why painters and sculptors broke free from the constraints of making a living by following the dictates of others. But maybe it was 1) the diversification of subject matter (landscapes, still-life scenes, secular and profane subject matter); or 2) the diversification of clientele-- merchants, wealthy land owners and other affluent types who could afford to buy art; or 3) the increasing agency of increasingly sophisticated artists who preferred the freedom (and the risk) associated with what we might now call “free-lance” work (the bohemian thing -- starving artists willing to sacrifice everything for “their art”).
REJECTED by his patron, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s first attempt at this commissioned work--an altarpiece depicting Saint Matthew writing New Testament scripture-- was seen as too lacking in respect for the saint at which point the painter was requested (required? forced?) to start over with a new one (First attempt, 1602 now destroyed, left; Second attempt, 1602, San Luigi Dei Francesi, Rome, left)
THE COMMUNIST ARTIST Diego Rivera was commissioned by the capitalist Rockefeller family to paint a mural for Rockefeller Center in 1933. When Rivera included a portrait of Lenin, Rockefeller demanded that it be removed, Rivera refused and Rockefeller had the mural removed and destroyed (Diego Rivera painting “Man at the Crossroads”, above; a reconstruction of the destroyed mural, below)
Or maybe it was also 4) the invention of the museum in the 18th century, its dissemination and popularization in the 19th century and its transformation into a place where not only the work of dead artists (usually ripped out of their original context) but also living artists were and are exhibited (MOMA, MOCA); or 5) the arrival of the white box gallery where the work of artists is exhibited as a standalone object (and commodity to be bought and sold by gallerists, brokers and inevitably investors and speculators).
A ONCE LAUDABLE ASPIRATION to bring modern art to the public has devolved into the dumbing down of public art (Flamingo, Federal Plaza, Alexander Calder, Chicago, ca 1974, above; Public art in the median strip of Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA ca 2020, below)
PERSONAL INTERESTS IMPOSED UPON PUBLIC SPACES are now the prerogative of ambitious artists who work at large scales (Clara Clara, Richard Serra, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, ca 1983, above, Levitated Mass, LACMA, Los Angeles, Michael Heizer, ca 2012, below)
Regardless we have come to expect that artists refer to “their art” and those in the know will refer to “their art” by their name more than the name of the art the artist has given their art (“I bought a Bacon the other day, did you know that she has a Richter?”). And for those of us who can’t afford a Bacon or a Richter (or Monet or Manet) we have mostly experienced most art for most of the 20th century and well into the 21st in isolated settings confined within art galleries and museums.
BIG AND HARD to make (and move) works of art that are installed within white box galleries, as moving as they sometimes are, are also elitist projects that only a few will ever enjoy despite their sensationalist overtones. (Serra above, Heizer below)
PRIVATELY FUNDED WORKS OF ART that are environmental and urban in scale and in the middle of nowhere, while spectacular in ambition and outcome, are hardly available to the public nor could they ever contribute to most people’s daily lives (James Turrell, Roden Crater, AZ above; Michael Heizer, Monumental City, NV, below)
This has not gone unnoticed by those artists who chomp at that bit by staging supposedly anti-elitist rebellions with the offering of ever-expanding range of genres (written, assemblage, installation, performance, projection, street, land, etc) that can be presented in an ever-expanding range of settings outside of the gallery or museum space—often in public spaces and in your face (bad ass art). And, therefore, even as we have become accustomed to art outside of the gallery setting and artists behaving badly we might also be forgiven for expecting that we should live in a world flush with more good and less bad public art.
RECIPROCITY IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE is masterfully demonstrated at the Piazza Campidoglio in Rome by an architect willing to choreograph a public space entirely around a statue (Marcus Aurelius) and poorly demonstrated at the Federal Plaza in New York by an artist willingly to subvert the design of an (admittedly poorly designed) existing public space. (Campidoglio, Michelangelo, ca 1538 left; Tilted Arc, Richard Serra, ca 1981 right)
ARTISTS WERE ONCE CAPABLE of creating great public art based on a program that was assigned to them, whereas now it seems only architects are. (Trajan’s Column, Rome, ca 113 AD, above; Eisenhower Monument, Frank Gehry, Washington DC, ca 2020 below)
Nor has it gone unnoticed by well-meaning public servants who believe that art should be for everyone without having to buy it or a museum ticket to see it. This has manifested in what we in our line of work encounter as the public art requirement, that is, the requirement by local governments that within a building’s project budget funds be set aside for the hiring of an artist to incorporate their art into the building. As a remnant of what we used to understand to be the purpose of art the aspiration is always expressed that the art be integrated into the architecture of the building.
THE ART OF A BUILDING use to be at the service of the architecture of the building whereas we now witness more often the opposite (Sankt Wolfgang Altarpiece, ca 1470-80, Austria above; Rothko Chapel, Philip Johnson, ca 1971, Houston, TX below)
It rarely works. Probably because 1) Artists don’t make a lot of money from it, so the accomplished ones are not interested; 2) The selection of the artist happens by a committee nearly always comprised of opinionated people of whom few know what they’re looking at; and, 3) artists don’t like to be told what to do —it is after all ‘their art.” (Architects don’t either, but when we embrace what we’re told to do, when we take it seriously we often come up with something surprising and surprisingly better than what we might have come up with on our own).
THE ATTEMPT WAS MADE to integrate the work of an artist authentically and prominently into the architecture of this building by its architect before controversies involving the artist intervened and prevented the effort’s realization (Studies by Johnson Favaro to incorporate murals by Shepard Fairey onto the exterior of the West Hollywood Library, ca 2008)
THE ADDITION OF BAD ART to a space already graced by excellent art degrades the look and value of the original art (David Wiseman at West Hollywood Library, left; Unknown artist at West Hollywood Library, right)
BAD CHOICES made by a city official without any input from the architect or anyone except herself (on trips to local “art fairs”) with, we suppose, an assignment to purchase art and a budget with which to purchase it contributed little to the quality of the interior environment of this building. (Riverside Main Library Children’s Library, Johnson Favaro 2021)
WHAT ARE WE TO UNDERSTAND by the imposition of this (we hope) humorous statement about (or subversion of?) a serious, and yet (we hope) not somber, building? (Riverside Main Library Children’s Library, Johnson Favaro 2021)
We have had in our public work positive experiences and outcomes, but rarely, and usually only when we have had a say (or, even better, the last say) in the selection of the artist, and when in contemplating the selection we have in mind where and how that artist’s work might fit within the architecture of the building whose design we are working on—and most crucially when we find the rare artist willing to work within the requirements of an assignment, one they have not dreamt up on their own, one in which they are encouraged to step outside of themselves and into a world in which they live both in freedom and service to others.
HUMOROUS AND LIGHTHEARTED ART when seriously considered by both artist and architect in a collaborative design effort can be achieved in a way that the art and the architecture mutually benefit (Alix Soubiran at Glendale Youth Services Library Study Hall, Johnson Favaro 2021-2023)