Public art incites public opinion

Author: Andrew Ngeow

Smog, LOVE, Frisbee Dog. The names and forms are familiar - sculptures that puncuate our campus and enter our everyday space. The approximately 15 sculptures placed around the buildings and dips of Middlebury's landscape live with us - we pass them on almost any walk across campus, they enter our vision and they become familiar. Public sculpture, more than art hanging on the white walls of a gallery, becomes part of our everday lives, whether we like it or not. It is only natural, then, that many of the College's public works have created controversy over the years. From appreciation to dislike to awe, countless opinions circulate concerning Tony Smith's Smog, Robert Indiana's LOVE, Patrick Villiers Farrow's Frisbee Dog and Middlebury's other public works. While controversy may be counter-productive in some contexts, on the College's campus it seems to instead become the food for progressive intellectual debate. Though controversary surrounding art did spiral out of control in 1983 when a sculpture by the renowned sculptor Vito Acconci was torched, students have since expressed their views in a more acceptable and productive forum. Deborah Fisher's recently installed Solid State Change carries on the this tradition of productive debate on the role of public art on the College's campus.

Since Brooklyn-based artist Deborah Fisher's 6,000 pound sculpture Solid State Change was installed behind Hillcrest Environmental center in late summer, it has created a buzz on campus. Is this art? What does it mean? Why tires? Does art have to beautiful, or is it simply there to create discussion and to activate thought? The list of questions goes on and the debate continues. Fisher came to the College on Oct. 25 to discuss her work in a lecture in Hillcrest. There, she spoke about her oeuvre and her inspirations - cultural and environmental - behind the piece. While she stated that she was not here at the College to convince people to like the work or to find it beautiful, she was here to reveal her thoughts about what the sculpture means in relation to the world at large and, more specifically, to the College. Fisher does not consider herself a political artist, but she is an artist who deals in the fundamentals of reality in hopes to create discussion and change. Solid State Change aims to do just that - create discussion about the work and what in means in the larger context of the world.


The Middlebury Campus: You consider yourself a sculptor, correct? How did you first become interested in sculpture?

Deborah Fisher: I took a class, you know? I really liked building things and I never thought that I would. I took a class and I really, really enjoyed it. I was actually a poetry major, but I really liked this sculpture class so I just kept making things. It would just make me feel good. When you are making words up in your head they can be anything and it is incredibly elusive. There is something extremely concrete about making a concrete thing in the fact that it is not a metaphor and it can't change. I was very drawn to that.

TC: You find sculpture more accessible? Solid State Change is a public sculpture -why public art?

DF: I work at a sculpture park in Long Island City called the Socrates Sculpture Park. I think about public art and a lot about what I think of art in general is very much about my experience working there. I have a weird situation. I don't have an indoor studio; I just go to this public park. There, I take care of all of the tools and in exchange, I have an outdoor studio. The point of the park is to give people an opportunity to make public art when they normally wouldn't, so it's a really good thing. There are two shows a year. When I took the job, I took it because I thought, well, I know the things required and I needed a studio space so I thought, well that space will be weird and cool. I am there all the time, my dog practically lives there, and I know all of the people who go there. I break up fights and I tell kids not to cut class in the park and I get to watch people live in it all the time, and that is politically important - to be able to see something every single day, and not as a destination, but as an actual part of your life. So your opinion can change. So that you can see something and really hate it, but then see how it grows on you overtime. And you can continue to hate it or not. I think that is good - it makes people curious. And that is politically important. More and more I am interested in public art because of my experience with the park and how I see the work interact with this public place.

TC: You said politically important. Do you consider yourself a political artist? Is there a political driving force behind your work?

DF: No, I am not interested in politics at all, because I am an artist - I make art. But I think that we live in a really weird time politically and it is very important for artists to work with that fact instead of ignore it. We are living in a time when it is very hard to be curious and it is very difficult to figure out what is real and what is not real. It is a very difficult time to figure out who is powerful and who is not powerful. There are a lot of problems - very weird problems - like environmental issues and as you can see, I make a lot of work about the environment. And there are also a lot of really weird political issues - all of a sudden we are torturing people and because we say we are not torturing people it is okay. And that is what I am talking about when I say words are wiggly. You can just say whatever you want and all of a sudden it's true. The power of art is extremely limited, I don't think it is politically interesting to make political propaganda that will tell you what to think about politics, but I do think that it is very important to be making art that is about how to be curious and that is about how to think about what is going on in the world. I think that has a lot of political power.

TC: How do you see Solid State Change fitting into this discussion? The piece definitely seems to be charged with environmental content.

DF: It has content, yes. I came here and I visited and I was really deeply struck by hopeful the Middlebury Community is about environmental issues. At this time last year An Inconvient Truth hadn't come out yet and the big pop science, popular cultural thing that was going on with environmentalism was Tim Flannery's The Weathermakers. It was a scare fest. It was spooky. And how do you relate to that? So it was really beautiful to come here and see people say no, we have the negative capacity to wrap our minds around something like global warming and do something about it and spend some time and money and make changes that are positive in our environment. And that was very beautiful. And coming from New York I looked at this setting and wow, it's so idyllic, that frankly I was cynical. Yeah, it's really easy to be hopeful when it's so beautiful here. Every time you see a dichotomy like that I think it is really important to move past it and through it. In a lot of my work, I put two things together that are supposed to fight or decay, one against another, or one weight is supposed to act against another weight, and then I like to see what happens.

What I did with Solid State Change is that I started with a representation of this place which is the cement shape on the bottom and then I just piled on top of it what I could find around the park. There is a tire recycler right next door to the park. I mean I live in my waste stream in New York in a very big way. So bringing together that sense of hopefulness with that sense of art and-this is a cheesy metaphor-but reality. Putting those things together and seeing what happens. What you get is this nice symbiosis where the two shapes [the cement base and the tire structure] talk to each other, they made each other. The weight of the tires and the electrical wire on top changed the shape of the cement, and
then the cement totally dictated the shape of the tires, so there is this whole conversation. What I wanted to do was make a physical representation of that conversation. That's all I wanted to do, and then see what the sculpture would do once it was here. So now people are going to like on it or not, or they will sit on it or walk by it. It will take on its own life.

TC: And there has been discussion about the work on campus, and there have been mixed reactions.

DF: And that's good. As far as I am concerned, I am not here to make sure everybody likes it as much as I am here to make sure that it is something that creates thought and discussion and keeps sitting there in your space and making conversations happen. So great, I'm really glad.

TC: Could you speak a bit more about how you used Vermont's geology in the piece? What did you hope to accomplish through this?

DF: The cement shape is the rock formation that is underneath all of Middlebury right now. The Middlebury syncline. A lot of things are thrown into that idea, because the syncline used to be an ancient ocean floor and now there are mountains and that is a huge change. And fundamentally that is what this piece is about - that change is this constant, unyielding process. It is not about revolutions and sort of "breaking eggs to get an omelet" rapid change, but it is a constant force that is changing things. I was looking for symbols of that hopefulness that I found when I first came to Middlebury, because that was really beautiful. And there was that big story of hope and change, right in the geology. There was this ancient ocean floor and now there are mountains. I think that change is very beautiful. And the record of that change is the metaphoric rock, which is another really beautiful metaphor that seems to say that it is not about a very rapid throwing away of everything and starting everything fresh. It is doing something totally impossible - it is changing the shape of rock, you can't change a rock, you know? But then you know this story of the metamorphic rock and begin to understand that actually you can - you can change it. So making that [representation of] metamorphic rock move through the whole piece seems very important.