Front Porch Art

By Crispin Sartwell

On the median strip of Mount Royal Ave, between the Lyric Opera House and North Avenue, a down-home apparition has appeared. It's the front porch of a shack, the sort you might find in Appalachia. The lumber and door are from an old farm house. The roof is corrugated tin. There's an old rocking chair, and often folks are sitting up there, gossiping, whittling, or just hanging around.

It's intended to be a work of art. The artist, Nathan Danilowicz, brought the materials down from rural Pennsylvania, where his family originates. Nathan is a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the porch is his senior project.

I don't know Nathan, but I teach at MICA and I held my class out there on his porch the other day. Oddly enough we were talking about the role of art in public places. Specifically, we were talking about a piece - "Tilted Arc" - by the sculptor Richard Serra. A twelve-foot tall rusted steel wall, it was installed in Federal Plaza, a concrete zone separating a series of government office buildings in New York City.

Tilted Arc gave rise to a storm of protest. People said it was ugly, that it blocked their views and made it hard to walk across the plaza. After a circus-like public hearing, the work was removed in 1989.

In some ways, Tilted Arc was not a typical work of art. It was actively hostile to its site and the people who inhabited it; it was a kind of critique of the Federal government.

But in other ways it was perfectly typical: large, metal, abstract, and expensive. Most American public art is all of that. You know the sort of thing I mean; it adorns almost every bank headquarters and arts institution in America; it's a huge steel object plunked down amidst the concrete. That sort of art came into fashion in the 1960s under the aegis of artists such as David Smith, and it roars on unabated today.

Not to put too fine a point on it: art like that does not make you think anything; it does not make you feel anything; it does not make you see anything; it does not make you do anything. You gawk at it a couple of times and then forget it exists.

But the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional emptiness of such works - their humorlessness and uselessness - is exactly what recommends them to the bureaucracies that commission them. They offend no one, but they cost money, and that fact serves as a kind of badge of "culture" for bureaucracies.

Nathan's porch provides an utterly different idea of what public art can be. In a small way, it has already transformed its location into a place where people get together and socialize. It makes you think about poverty and affluence, about art and real life, about the rural and the urban.

I've already spent a fair amount of time on the porch, but there are other things I'd like to do there. I'd like to sit there and play my blues harp. I'd like to go there at the right moment and listen to the sound of rain on the tin roof. I'd like to hang a lantern from the eaves and hang out there at night.

Though art can be found in museums and in public plazas, maybe it can also be found in the things we use every day. Huge metal cubes might be art, but then again so might tea pots, or hip hop, or cars, or conversations.

While I was teaching on the porch, people kept stopping their cars and saying things like "You need an outhouse!" Guys roaring by in an ambulance, siren blaring, waved and smiled. So if you're in the mood, stop by and visit us on the porch. We'll listen to the traffic together and shoot the breeze.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at MICA.