Reviews and Articles
This is not really a review (11/21/2015)
(It is obvious from the reviews and articles posted above --- not presented in any particular order, forgive me --- that from 1986-2004 I wrote about art in El Paso, Las Cruces, and Juarez for local newspapers --- most notably in a weekly column for the El Paso Herald Post --- as well as for regional and national arts publications such as Artweek, LA; ArtSpace, Albuquerque; ArtL!es, Houston, Forum, etc. The following essay is self-explanatory, and, now living away from the El Paso region, I post it in response to a current and seemingly unending public art clash in that city.)
The ongoing controversy surrounding El Paso’s public art piece Uplift by Margarita Cabrera might deserve some aesthetic rather than social/political debate, so here goes.
A couple of caveats are required: The characters in this drama are all known by me with the exception of City Manager Tommy Gonzalez, who played a very important part in this mess. The MCAD contracts are also familiar to me, since, in 1995, my husband Willie Ray Parish created the city’s first major outdoor public sculpture (its second public commission) consisting of one major and four minor pieces in a sculpture park on Alabama, and I know what is required of a successful public art project. Flexibility, openness to suggestions and vetoes, cooperation with fabricators and civic engineers, and sensitivity to the public are “givens.” There are books on the subject, and I believe the city’s public art program, since the Uplift brouhaha (still ongoing), has all local artists selected for commissions undergo education about the process, the rules, the requirements.
Another real problem is that, until now, reviewing art that I have not actually seen has been something I would have rejected outright. One of art’s first lessons is that reproductions of art and the art itself are not the same. Sculpture adds another warning: it is made to be seen from many angles, levels, and viewpoints, so a photographer’s choice of p.o.v. merely hints at one’s experience of the piece in spatial reality. Sculpture of a non-figurative type is meant to be viewed and debated in context, in the round, but in this case photographs provide my only means of critical response. It occurs to me, though, that in sculpture courses and 3-d design classes, review and critique of drawings provide the first step of a review; maquettes and scale models come next; finally, and for good reason, the actual work on a piece can begin. So in that spirit, let me make a critical response. (Uplift can be seen in many stages in photographs posted online; simply search for “Margarita Cabrera Uplift images” and you’ll see the designs, plural, and the metamorphosis over time.)
So here goes.
The initial proposal for Uplift, shown on at least one website dedicated to the piece and its intentions, was a good one. Yes, design-wise, there might be some criticism of its extreme diagonal over-emphasis, but the concept --- guns into birds, swords into plowshares --- seemed good enough and relevant enough to overrule sculptural issues. Most of the early images are of paper models, showing an animated upward sweep of fluttery winged forms. Why the artist (and MCAD) abandoned this design remains a mystery to me, but let me throw out a couple of obvious possibilities. Taking construction and stability into account, the welding of the multitude of delicate shapes would have necessitated welds of over-the-top strength and reliability. This is the reality of public art: it has to be safe over the long term. (On the day following the eventual design’s installation, El Paso endured 80 mph winds.) Structural integrity trumps all else.
Then there might have been problems with the artist's early intention to melt guns into the medium proposed for casting the birds. Santa Fe melts guns and makes outdoor public benches with the results; perhaps El Paso doesn’t have such a facility, or perhaps the cost of such a procedure ran well over the relatively modest funding for this project. All this is conjecture and guesswork, but educated guesswork.
No matter. There came a second design that totally contradicted the artist’s original concept and composition. And title. The “birds” became flat metal abstractions, not recognizable as birds in flight, with designs created in the manner of papel picado with community input. All good, so far. But these planar shapes (having --- am I the only one to notice? --- a rather phallic shape between stylized wingy-thingies) were then constructed into rectangular “pods” that were eventually welded together. Instead of suggesting an upward release, the resulting overall sculpture became a bottom-heavy series of planar units, a layer-cake-structure topped by an extension of cubes, trading gesture and movement for symmetrical stability. Instead of Uplift, we get Squat.
But, for the artist, here was the rub: what to do with the guns? They were so important to the original concept, how might they now be included? Reports vary in the visible weapons’ descriptions. Some still describe the piece as being made from melted guns; this is incorrect. There continue to be statements about gun fragments placed in or around the base, then other descriptions of recognizable gun parts within the structure itself. It's all a muddle.
Photographs don’t show either (fragments in base; gun parts in/on the sculpture) to my satisfaction, so I will go back to what the photos do show, and this, to the critical me, is the game-changer. Photos from the day of installation show, along with a “frontal view” of the circular layers, a “side view.” A hint: non-figurative sculpture doesn’t have a front or a back, or sides, and when situated in a roundabout, for heaven’s sake, the most basic “in the round” lesson appears to have been ignored. Stability may have determined the need for the distracting supports, pipes at angles that stabilize the bird-cube units, but the “side view” alone pushed my Reject button!
(A funny aside: A friend who lives in the Country Club neighborhood walked his dog to the site on installation day. He described in a less-than-positive way the supporting poles that went this way and that, distracting to whatever else was to come. He also noticed something I’ve not seen in the photo-documentation: a gun, maybe more than one, maybe in parts, I cannot say. But he jokingly confronted the artist: Do you know, he said, that this --- gun, gun fragment, gun-something --- is pointing directly at Woody Hunt’s house? And he had a big laugh.)
El Paso now awaits a third version, and one can only hope that the artist, MCAD, and city engineers can pursue it in a mutually cooperative manner required of such a project. Questions have to be answered with absolute certainty and with approval of engineers, traffic officials, etc. Is it appropriate to the site? Will it withstand the elements? Will it enhance the location rather than create unnecessary complications and community friction?
Art can be (and often is and often should be) provocative as well as formally satisfying. But public art is another animal altogether, and it requires a different and rigid set of expectations and follow-through. It’s always a learning curve, and I only hope everyone involved can learn from the past mistakes --- enough to go around, by all involved --- and move beyond them for the sake of the artist, the city, its officials, and the public.
P.S. (11/25) After posting this I was redirected to online photographs of the installation that DO show gun parts: barrels and shell cylinders and other weapons' part clearly visible along with the bird abstractions. No further comment.
