University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Re-creating the city; place-making through public art

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Re-creating the city; place-making through public art

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RE-CREATING THE CITY;
PLACE-MAKING THROUGH PUBLIC ART

by

Ruth Wallach

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2007

Copyright 2007 Ruth Wallach

ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

CHAPTER 1: THE CITY AS A LIVED EXPERIENCE: A PERSONAL STATEMENT

CHAPTER 2: INTRODUCTION: THE REPRESENTATION OF URBAN PUBLIC
SPACE
(A). Urban Space as Public Place: A Thematic Review
(B). The Public(s): Toward a Thematic Concept

CHAPTER 3: TWO CASE STUDIES: THE CITY AS A PUBLIC PLACE
(A). Books of Groningen: The Publicity of Art
(B). Los Angeles Metro Art: The Historicity of Public Art

CHAPTER 4: DISCUSSION: THE PUBLICNESS OF THE PROJECTS

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION: TOWARD READING THE CITY IN A DISTRACTED
STATE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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ABSTRACT

Two examples of public art in transit locations, the temporary Books of Groningen,
curated by Daniel Libeskind in the provincial Dutch capital of Groningen, and the
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s permanent Metro Art
works at the Metro Rail stations, are analyzed as place making projects. The thesis
traces how the urban environment has been theorized as a space, and examines the
extent to which “art in public places” and “art in the public interest” models
symbolically infuse a sense of place into the contemporary conceptions of the city.
The first two sections examine themes from urban studies within the discipline of
public art; the remaining three sections describe specific art works within the two
case studies and discuss their publicness and historicity. The thesis argues that
despite the differences in their settings and ideas, the projects construct a synoptic
vision of the city as a formal public place.

1
CHAPTER 1: THE CITY AS A LIVED EXPERIENCE: A PERSONAL STATEMENT
My family and I immigrated to the United States and arrived directly in Los
Angeles in the middle of one night, in December 1979. My father came to pick us
up at the airport in an old but functioning jalopy, and slowly drove us to an
apartment he rented in Torrance, California. My memory of that first night’s journey
in America is cloudy, yet simultaneously definitive. I remember driving on the
freeway, then down Hawthorne Boulevard, and then entering a sea of single-family
homes. I had never seen a landscape like this my life. The next day we went for a
walk, but in the following days we mostly drove. I was drowning in the eight-lane
boulevards framed by low commercial buildings with flat roofs. Slowly, business
and street signs emerged as markers by which I could situate myself within the city.
But where was the city? Where did Torrance end and Carson or Lawndale begin?
Vilnius, the capital of Soviet Lithuania, where I was born, had a cathedral, plazas,
statues, a river, distinctive neighborhoods, and lots of people on the streets and
trolleys. It had Soviet-era apartment blocks ringing the city, beyond which the dense
urban core seemed to end and give way to the country-side and small towns and
villages. It had an icon – a medieval tower on the hill, reproduced on all postcards.
Tel Aviv, a much younger city, where I spent my early adolescence, had no historic
icons. It had different neighborhoods, distinctive shopping districts, public
monuments, crowded busses, and a unique enclave encompassing the ancient port of
Jaffa, with its medieval warren of streets. Tel-Aviv’s urban area also had palpable
boundaries. Torrance did not appear to have any, just street signs announcing the

2
presence of another municipality. The eight-lane boulevards did not end, and the
same franchise signs continued branding identical-looking mini-malls.
Eventually, I began to map out the routes and the neighborhoods in Los
Angeles. I started looking for monuments and equestrian statues, and found the
Hollywood sign and a bronze Father Serra lifting his cross to the skies. There was
interesting civic architecture and curious vernacular design, and there were the Watts
Towers (which could be an icon for Los Angeles, but were not). I knew what a city
was (didn’t everyone?), and Los Angeles was not a city. Much later, in 2001, I heard
Rem Koolhaas speak about global cities. During his talk he showed slides of Lagos,
Nigeria. Lagos on the slides reminded me of Los Angeles.
Although I have lived in Los Angeles for a very long time and I can’t
imagine living elsewhere, I still search for the city. This thesis is part of the search.
I have preconceptions about the urban environment that are contradictory. The city
is an all consuming experience, but how can the experience of a long-time resident
be described? Los Angeles is a geography seen in movement, and after so many
years of moving through it I am lucky to still see its places anew, as if freshly framed
through the camera eye. I like public art that wows me, but wonder whether such
amazement ought to be constantly sustained and fed? I am part of the middle class
public, but even the East European bourgeoisie of my childhood was historically
fragmented by the long 19
th
century and the upheavals of the 20
th
, and by ethnic and
cultural identities. As a believer in layers of personal and public identities, I prefer
to use the term publics to the singular public, because the former suggests the infinite

3
possibilities of urbanism constructed for a plurality of voices, people, and spaces. I
am fascinated with the process of mining community histories, but hesitate to call
community-based art public. Urban public art in democratic societies is about both
collective utopias and dystopias, and about neither at the same time. Instead, I adopt
the word heterotopia, as an extension of the original medical definition of tissue
graft (such as grafting of artifice, of ornamentation, or of ideas), and despite the
challenges this term poses in Michel Foucault’s definition of another space, a space
of interstices, of overlapping boundaries, of contested and shifting identities. I am a
modernist at heart, yet question the premises of a normative public urban space that
utopia inscribes. Heterotopia, therefore, offers a middle ground in which to navigate
the public sphere, one that eschews the more totalizing dimensions of modernism’s
utopian impulses.
In writing this thesis I relied on a variety of photographs of the works
discussed, which I could not reproduce due to copyright restrictions. I used my own
photographs for all the Metro Art works. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan
Transportation Authority has a vast collection of images of all its Metro Art projects.
For the Books of Groningen works I relied on images found in the catalog edited by
Papadakis, Marking the City Boundaries: Groningen, a monograph edited by
Casciato, Learning from Groningen, and a Dutch web site,
http://skye.fol.nl/citymark.html, all of which are listed in the bibliography.

4
CHAPTER 2: INTRODUCTION: THE REPRESENTATION OF URBAN PUBLIC SPACE
Rather than the more traditional parks or plazas that we have come to
understand as emblematic of public space in historical cities, it is the urban routes,
such as streets, sidewalks, and, particularly, transportation lines, that offer the closest
approximation of public space in a contemporary, pluralistic, and commercialized
built environment where the boundaries between the private and the public are
extremely porous. In exploring how public art engages and transforms the
contemporary city, two distinctly different projects that mark city transportation
routes begin to establish parameters with which to problematize the debate at the
heart of public art. That debate centers around the function of public art as an
aesthetic and place-making tool and as a public commemorative repository of
collective urban experiences. The two projects I will analyze are the permanent
public art installations located at the Metro Rail stations in Los Angeles (funded
through the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or Metro),
and the ten temporary road markers sponsored by the Dutch city of Groningen to
commemorate its millennium. The geography and the ideas represented in these
projects are vastly different; yet they both define the urban environment through
symbolic and aesthetic means in a synoptic vision, in order to conceive of the city as
a unified memorable and comprehensible place.
The idea that the city is an aesthetic and memorial form is not new. Neither
is the practice of reshaping city spaces for political and economic purposes through
public works and through visual reorganization that overlay or erase existing place-

5
makers. Baroque Rome offers a notable, although by far not exclusive, example of
the melding of aesthetic and political practices in urban redesign. In Design of Cities
Edmund Bacon discusses Pope Sixtus V’s efforts to recreate Rome into a premier
city in Christendom by conceiving of a
basic overall design structure in the form of a movement system as
an idea, and at the same time the need to tie down its critical parts
in positive physical forms which could not easily be removed. He
hit upon the happy notion of using Egyptian obelisks, of which
Rome had a substantial number, and erected these at important
points within the structure of his design.
1

The unification of Rome’s space through orderly points punctuated by
columns expanded in the following century. Richard Krautheimer, in The Rome of
Alexander VII, 1655-1667, extensively describes the re-conceptualization of Baroque
Rome with its historical accretion of narrow streets and irregular spaces by Pope
Alexander VII in terms of “[l]ong straight streets and regular open squares, clearly
outlined…the basic elements of an ideal of urban beauty."
2
The Pope embarked on
his major public works projects to reshape the city into an urban ideal. In the
process, he also oversaw the positioning of various fountains and columns within
public plazas. In his view, the image of the new, visually more regulated Rome,
provided decorum and dignity due to a major city where public behavior could be
ritually stage-set as if in a theater.
3
The Pope was conscious of the haphazard effect
on Rome’s visitors of its impractical layout and traffic, and sought to position the

1
Bacon, Design of Cities, 131.
2
Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, 35.
3
Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, 7, 114-115.

6
Eternal City as equal to other international urban centers not only politically but also
aesthetically. Similar to the example of Baroque Rome (there are other examples of
redesigning cities through transportation axes, such as John Nash’s 1818 plan for
London’s Regent Street, Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1790s plan for Washington, DC,
centering around the Mall and the Potomac River, or Baron Georges-Eugène
Haussmann’s remaking of central Parisian boulevards in the 1860s, to cite just a
few), the two projects I examine mark urban transportation routes within a cohesive
aesthetic framework despite the fact that they come from two very different practices
of design for public spaces. Unlike earlier historic examples, the two projects are
rooted in contemporary democratic processes, so that the city is symbolically
patterned into a comprehensible urban place for consumption by all its citizens.
While reasons for reshaping cities on an aesthetic level are varied and
complex, urban socio-economic redevelopment is often a major (although not an
exclusive) driving force behind beautification and public art programs. Various
projects for the redevelopment of downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Santa
Monica in Southern California, François Mitterand’s Grands Travaux in Paris, or
many cities’ massive rebuilding projects to accommodate the Olympic Games are
just a few examples of recent large scale public and private urban works programs
which include major art components. The inclusion of art and design within urban
redevelopment melds the commercial and artistic capital, which is often
individualized, with the practical needs of the civic power structures to contextualize
the use of public spaces, thus creating a powerful symbolic symbiosis. Public art is

7
part of this process. Although the field of public art studies is fairly young, it has
gone through several paradigms in the latter part of the 20
th
century, from art-in-
public places (whereby a work of art is placed by a private or public entity within a
public location, often regardless of the context of that location) to art-as-public-
spaces approach (works of art contextualizing particular types of public spaces) to
art-in-the-public-interest model (art in the service of the community).
4
Because
much of contemporary public art, no matter the model used, is about the valorization
of place-making and commemoration within the urban form, the field of public art
studies has absorbed a variety of theoretical constructs about public place-making
from other disciplines. This chapter summarizes a variety of themes, particularly
related to the economic and commemorative commodification of urban places, that
shape discussions about site-specific public art works.
5
Theoretical frameworks
often approach society with the purpose of analyzing hegemonic structures. Social
theorists view the public sphere within the context of a debate on the
interrelationship among groups, defining them through economic or cultural
discourse, and analyze space and place-making as resulting from political ideologies.
Urban environments are complex socio-political and spatial organisms; they are also
spectacles, panoramas, and symbols of enforced aesthetic ideas. They function as
repositories of memory, both individual and collective, although the nature of the

4
Kwon, One Place After Another, 60.
5
Marxism, studies of everyday practices, post-modern and post-structuralist analyses, are among the
major thematic strands influencing the theorizing of urban environments and of the economics of
artistic production and consumption.

8
memories and their public manifestations are topics of continuing analysis. Using
the two case studies, I argue that public art is part of the emblematic language that
contextualizes urban space as place, a piece of the puzzle that maps the urban
experience for the public(s) at large.

(A). Urban Space as Public Place: A Thematic Review
In the 19
th
century, the French poet Charles Baudelaire iconically
romanticized Paris and its streets by filtering the urban experience through the eyes
of an aesthete, thus ignoring the socio-economic aspects of the times. In his famous
1860s essay, The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire enunciated aesthetic
sensibilities relevant to his time and place, and his descriptions of modernity and of
the artist-spectator of city life have been influential in subsequent theorizing of the
urban setting in the history of art and architecture. Baudelaire’s city is a
concentration of public spectacle, where public space is defined by the street full of
cafés and other anchors of commercialized leisure, such as arcades, parks, and
department stores, where habitués observe or join at will the fast-paced life
extending well into the gas-lit evenings. Baudelaire’s modern painter is a flâneur,
the man of the crowd who “hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in
pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched
him,"
6
while rapidly sketching scenes of bourgeois "pageant of fashion."
7
This

6
Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 7.
7
Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 4.

9
genteel spectator of city life passionately delves into “the heart of the multitude,
amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite."
8

Modernity is the womb of Baudelaire's urban, ephemeral, fugitive, and elegant
spectacle of the streets, and the male gazer is its iconic and impressionistic archivist,
recording both his own and others’ experiences of walking the city. Nancy Forgione
points out that the painter-flâneurs visually explored the experience of walking in the
wake of Baron Haussmann’s disruptions to the urban environment, adapting the
redeveloped city on an individual and meditative level.
9
At the same time, as Walter
Benjamin observed, Baudelaire’s and other 19
th
century artists’ flânerie, exemplified
by their personal aesthetic relationship to the bourgeois city, was inextricably
intertwined with the political force of the marketplace.
10

The concept of the city and its arteries as seen through the aesthetic eye has
acquired a further complexity thanks to the sociological and political theories of the
20
th
century, particularly those concerned with examining the public sphere. The
concepts of public space and public place are often used interchangeably, yet there is
a subtle difference, partly related to mental and physical spatial constructs and their
permeability. The art historian Lucy Lippard contextualizes the “seductive embrace
of place” in contemporary society within the framework of the public and the
private. Place, she writes, is something that is seen from inside:

8
Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 9.
9
Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion,” 682.
10
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 133.

10
“[t]he word place has psychological echoes as well as social
ramifications. ‘Someplace’ is what we are looking for. ‘No place’
is where these elements are unknown or invisible, but in fact every
place has them, although some are being buried beneath the asphalt
of the monoculture, the ‘geography of nowhere.’ ‘Placelessness,’
then, may simply be place ignored, unseen, or unknown.”
11

Placelessness and its re-making into a place through human activity, social
interactions, mnemonic and cultural devices, and through art, is a concept
particularly relevant to contemporary urban environments where the borderline
between the public and private are ambiguous and, moreover, commercialized. This
borderline is increasingly mediated not just through the flow of human-related
activities, but also through various modes of symbolic production. Lippard’s thought
that “place is background, which bears records of hybrid culture and hybrid histories
that must be woven into the everyday and the mainstream”
12
points to the complexity
of the task of contemporary place-making and public memorializing of history that
public art is often called to undertake.
Place-making in the built and the urban environment, particularly within the
contexts of pervasive transportation and communication networks, is an act of
negotiating personal and social relations, and of mapping the city in symbolic and
ritualistic patterns of language, intimately connected to daily activities. Michel de
Certeau, analyzing the space of everyday life, aptly wrote: “In modern Athens, the
vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home,

11
Lippard, The Lure of the Local, 9.
12
Lippard, The Lure of the Local, 8.

11
one takes a ‘metaphor’ – a bus or a train.”
13
Within the metaphoric context, the city
is an immense “texturology….The act of walking is to the urban system what the
speech act is to language or to the statement uttered.”
14
Certeau’s overlay of
metaphor upon the urban networks of transportation underscores the city as both a
physical and an abstracted concept. Just as a written text is a system of signs, so too
the street, transformed by the walker or driver into practiced space, is a heterotopia,
infused with geographic and social meanings that overlay or displace each other, and
that are continuously re-mapped by both the individual and the power apparatuses.
Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is a space of deviance and otherness, which
offers an alternative to totalizing institutionalized social power structures, whether
utopian or dystopian.
15
David Grahame Shane further elaborates on Foucault’s
concept, by explaining that in the urban context, “heterotopia contains within itself
multiple compartments that can hold contradictory and complementary spaces; that
is, a heterotopia is a ‘single real place made up of several spaces, several sites that
are themselves incompatible.’”
16
While Certeau does not share Foucault’s obsession
with institutionalized and penalizing power structures, he analyzes the practices of
everyday navigation of the city within a generally dialectical framework, juxtaposing

13
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 115.
14
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92, 98.
15
In his article, “Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” where he laid out the meaning of
heterotopia, Foucault discusses sanctified spaces, sites of stasis and flows, utopia and heterotopia
mirroring and feeding each other as imaginary and real spaces, heterotopias linked together by
asynchronous slices of time, and the public-non/public nature of heterotopias. Foucault packed the
concept, which he borrowed from medicine, with meanings that are difficult to assemble into a
cohesive interpretation.
16
Shane, Recombinant Urbanism, 232.

12
institutional authoritarian strategies, such as seeing the city as a whole (as if from
above), and individual tactics, such as navigating city streets (from below). “Space
is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is
transformed into a space by walkers.”
17
Within the framework of the strategic and
the tactical, Certeau analyzes two types of symbolic descriptions of places, the map
and the tour. The first allows for seeing (or knowing) places, the second refers to
directions for moving through spaces.
18
Physical maps combine various levels of
seeing and touring, mixing the authoritarian ordering of place with its individual use.
Certeau discusses early European medieval and Aztec maps, which were associated
with historic events and specific places, prescribed actions (for example, those
related to pilgrimages), and included iconic glosses as illustrative elements. “The
map thus collates on the same plane heterogeneous places, some received from a
tradition and others produced by observation.”
19
Throughout the modern era, maps
increasingly became autonomous geometric representations of spatial geography
culminating in such products as Thomas Guide maps and road atlases, topographical
maps, Geographic Information Systems, etc. The paring down of contemporary
maps to the representation of rational Euclidean space (although maps are not just
simply that) is a highly symbolic and restrictive means of representing space and
place. Yet even contemporary maps, coded for generic public use, are formally read
and interpreted for a variety of cognitive needs.

17
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117.
18
Certeau., The Practice of Everyday Life,119.
19
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 121.

13
I use Focault’s term heterotopia loosely to indicate that the spatial
relationships contextualizing the processes of urban social mapping are multi-
layered, allowing for a variety of real, imaginary, and aesthetic readings, some of
which are oppositional.
20
I dwell at some length on this because maps are means of
symbolically representing terrain and its relationship to social processes that
constitute the spaces of everyday life. One of public art’s many functions is also to
artificially map places and sites, in recognition that they are “not just a physical
manifestation, but one that is constituted through social, economic, and political
processes.”
21
Site specificity injects public art into contemporary political discourse.
Art historians theorize the site within the framework of social and political
contestation over ideology and hegemonic power. In this vein, Rosalyn Deutsche,
following Henri Lefebvre, argues that under modern capitalism space has become
abstracted, homogenized and compartmentalized for the purposes of commercial
exchange and political inclusions/exclusions.
22
She further argues that public art is a
tool for depoliticizing public space, because it allows urban developers to map the
city as a technical and aesthetic form, and not as a social and political one.
Deutsche’s argument that public art is a tool within larger socio-economic
restructuring of urban environments forms the basis for Miwon Kwon’s critical
examination of the ways in which community public art exacerbates uneven
communal power relations by re-marginalizing and re-colonizing disenfranchised

20
Foucault, “Other Spaces,” 12.
21
Kwon, One Place After Another, 3.
22
Deutsche, Evictions, 75, 76.

14
groups.
23
Kwon agrees with Deutsche that public art has the capacity to map social
relations within urban spaces. Yet she argues that this purpose is suppressed by the
predominant economic forces, which appropriate the myth of artistic production as
de-politicized and sui-generis:
Certainly, site-specific art can lead to the unearthing of repressed
histories, help provide greater visibility to marginalized groups and
issues, and initiate the re(dis)covery of “minor” places so far
ignored by the dominant culture. But inasmuch as the current
socioeconomic order thrives on the (artificial) production and
(mass) consumption of difference (for difference sake), the siting
of art in “real” places can also be a means to extract the social and
historic dimensions of these places…It is within this framework, in
which art serves to generate a sense of authenticity and uniqueness
of place for quasi-promotional agendas.
24

(B). The Public(s): Toward a Thematic Concept
While the arguments about public art as a tool within larger socio-economic
urban restructuring are forceful and compelling, they offer a totalizing framework,
accommodating certain notions of public space and of the effects of public art, but
provide little critical analysis of the public itself with the exception of the red flag
warning that the public is not a unified, uncontested totality. Moreover, the term
public does not have a single definition. It can refer, for instance, to the nexus of
social relations where the individual relinquishes personal control over his/her
movement. Virginia Woolf describes this in her essay on walking the public spaces

23
Miwon Kwon’s entire One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity is devoted
to the critical unpacking of contemporary public art’s relationship to hegemonic power structures.
24
Kwon, One Place After Another, 53-54.

15
of the city for a trivial but personally important purpose of buying a lead pencil, “We
are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house…we shed the self our
friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous
trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.”
25

Within the spaces of social interactions, the public is a network. It is possibly
democratic and pluralistic, but it is not necessarily benevolent. The public inhabits a
complex realm comprised of political, urban, and commercial spaces, and of popular
entertainment. It generates a variety of meanings, including aesthetic, for anything
that enters its space. The contemporary public may lack the ability to coalesce
around common symbols, presenting challenges to any attempt at a unifying
expression. For the purpose of urban place-making, however, the term public
appears to connote the bourgeoisie (in its Western meaning), encompassing several
economic layers between the lower and the middle classes.
An important historic development in mapping the public urban experience is
the displacement in Western Europe in the 18
th
century of the church authority and
court society by the ascendant bourgeoisie as a defining and legitimizing social
arrangement. Jürgen Habermas, in analyzing and defending the historic
development of the middle class public sphere as a lynchpin of the Enlightenment,
describes it as that which “may be conceived above all as the sphere of private
people come together as a public.”
26
Habermas argues that the public sphere is in

25
Woolf, Street Haunting, 2-3.
26
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 27.

16
principle all-inclusive, at least in the realms of civic and economic discourse.
27
He
articulates a powerful concept of the public, one that is focused on civil institution
and rational public debate. Nevertheless, and possibly because Habermas’
institutionalized public sphere has its limitations, contemporary bourgeoisie or
middle class is understood as being a fairly porous category, and purposely so, in
order to invoke different public(s) at different times. Thus, members of the urban
middle class can be locals or tourists, they move through public space (streets,
sidewalks, plazas, lobbies, transportation lines) on their way somewhere (work,
leisure, home, etc.), or to linger. Members of the middle class are generally
employed, displaying a modicum of learned decorum and some awareness that
public space is not their private space. The middle class public(s) are also, in a broad
sense, performative, as they continuously incorporate and enact socially constructed
identities through language, gestures, and other social conventions.
28
There are
conventions for dress, gendered behavior and codes of self expression that take place
in public spaces, and that get reproduced through a variety of symbolic, social and
institutional settings. The spectrum for the public(s)’ performativity is wide, but
there are edges, and these edges are continuously re-defined through economy and
geography. The working poor
29
and those who identify strongly with ethnic groups
are sometimes construed as part of a broad and democratic definition of the middle

27
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 36-37.
28
Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 270, 272.
29
The United States Federal Government specifies economic poverty guidelines based on family size.
Thus, a family of 4 earning under $25,000 is considered within the threshold of poverty. Federal
Register, 71 (January 24, 2006): 3848-3849.

17
class public(s), a definition that is based, at least in the United States, on the
enduring symbol of gradual assimilation and moving up the economic ladder. At the
same time, the collective public, or, rather, civic agencies acting on its behalf,
construe the public realm in rational terms, à la Habermas. In this way, civic
organizations such as public art agencies attempt to meaningfully articulate
discussions on culture, bridging the generalized needs of civil society and those of its
private members. In particular, public art agencies map the symbolic context for the
preservation and propagation of urban collective memory, by giving it a tangible
mode of visual expression. It is useful here to remember Maurice Halbwachs’
argument that human memory can meaningfully function only within a collective
context. Thus, collective memory is a representation of the past that is shared by
specific social groups, and it defines their relationship to places, both symbolically
and physically. Halbwachs argues that collective memory is always selective, and it
is always spatial, “we can understand how we recapture the past only by
understanding how it is, in effect, preserved by our physical surroundings,”
30

although he says little about the power structures that play a role in the selection and
codification of memory within the public realm. The stability of the physical scene
is intertwined with common memory, and is a potent force in binding people
together and allowing them to communicate with each other. As a symbolic
mapping device, public art is an important component in the selective production of
spatial language, urban memory, and social experiences, and it is part of the political,

30
Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 140.

18
social, and mythic texturology of the urban realm. To use Paulette Singley’s terms,
public art has a role as an archaeological sondage, or probe, that brings into relief the
cartographic and cognitive coordinates that form the centers, spines, and borders of a
city.
31
Public art is a type of archive for the repository of contemporary urban
heterotopic experiences, because it maps and documents the disparate ritual
consumption of public space.

31
In her essay “Los Angeles-Between Cognitive Mapping and Dirty Realism,” Singley argues that the
tools of postmodernism which conceptualize Los Angeles as unmappable can, instead, provide a basis
for the cognitive framing of the city’s grid.

19
CHAPTER 3: TWO CASE STUDIES: THE CITY AS A PUBLIC PLACE
To explore the emblematic themes of public art in public places, I will
examine two different projects that mark urban spaces of transit through public art
installations, thus placing what lies within these spaces as part of urban place-making
narratives. One of the projects re-marks city boundaries of the north-eastern Dutch
city of Groningen, through a program of contemporary monumental works placed
along highways, canals, and railways radiating from the center of the city. The other
re-inscribes the histories of Los Angeles into a geographically centralized narrative,
through visual and environmental installations at the Metro Rail stations. In both
cases, the markings are imprinted within urban transportation routes. In Groningen,
the city used art-in-public-places (or event art, around which to orchestrate a
promotional campaign for the revitalized city) to commemorate its medieval
boundaries and to circumscribe a specific physical and economic geography; in the
case of Los Angeles, Metro required that all stations of the new Metro Rail system
incorporate works of public art, thus symbolically marking the stations for public use
in a city that is known for its boosterist history of private commercial development.
There is considerable contrast between these projects. They occur in two very
different cities – Groningen is a medium sized, fairly homogenous, Dutch city of
about 180,000 residents with an old center originally surrounded by walls, and Los
Angeles is a sprawling modern metropolis of seemingly independent neighborhoods,
suburbs, and exurbs, encompassing a city of almost 4 million within a county of 10
million culturally diverse residents. The intellectual and aesthetic foundations for

20
these markers are different, as well. Yet despite their considerable difference, both
projects speak of the city as a potentially unified work of aesthetic production,
capable of infusing the public realm with symbolic meaning
Although the Books of Groningen project appears to memorialize a medieval
town securing its distinctiveness from its surroundings through a physical remapping
of its borders, it relies on a contemporary definition of the city as a concentration of
communication technologies, artistic and intellectual creativity, economic
production, all harnessed for a socio-economic renaissance. This project also
accommodates postmodern ideas of art displaced from gallery space into the public
realm, ostensibly in order to hold up an aesthetic and critical mirror to monolithic
public (i.e., bourgeois) taste. The Los Angeles Metro Art projects are much more
populist in nature. They map this enormous city as user-friendly by making the
Metro Rail system a pleasant transit space for all. In this case, art provides a context
for a unified public activity, as well as a textual and textured excursion through the
various histories within the city. Both projects are strongly rooted in an orthodox
conception of urban environments as defined by grand public places and major
public works, as well as by receptive and culturally homogenized public(s), although
they address these issues through a different visual and place-making language.
Both projects are metaphoric, narrating space through design practices, albeit using
different idioms.
The meaning and importance of place is a common theme running through
the various theories of the urban environment. In his book about non-places Marc

21
Augé argues that contemporary post-industrial societies are more about space than
about place. Space is an abstract term, malleable in its plasticity to a variety of
physical and temporal organizational principles, and is particularly useful for mobile
societies. Augé calls the spaces of supermodernity non-places, a term applicable to
spaces inhabited by transit, commerce, and leisure activities.
32
Furthermore,
according to Augé, non-places are defined through the transmission of information
and image, and he constructs non-places as essentially banal:
Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in
this sense they are non-places…..But the real-non places of
supermodernity – the ones we inhabit when we are driving down
the motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting in an
airport lounge waiting for the next flight to London or Marseille –
have the peculiarity that they are defined partly by the words and
texts they offer us: their ‘instructions for use’, which may be
prescriptive (‘Take right-hand lane’), prohibitive (‘No smoking’)
or informative (‘You are now entering the Beaujolais region’).
33

Augé’s non-places are heterotopic, layering space with a multiplicity of usage,
hyperstacking of information, and over-simulation of the real. Yet despite his
dispassionate analysis of the spaces of transit as the geography of non-places, Augé,
in another text, personalizes a quintessential urban transportation experience, his
daily routine of riding in the Paris metro. In this account, the metro emerges as a
physical manifestation, a place for the repository of personal memories, which are
not only relevant to Augé’s life, but also to that of his parents and other riders of the

32
Augé, Non-Places, p. 94.
33
Augé, Non-Places, 96. Parentheses in the original.

22
system: “To every station are tied knots of memories that cannot be untangled.”
34

Augé writes that use of the metro and its itineraries contextualizes the daily ritual for
the regular traveler and that these actions possess symbolic meaning in defining the
rhythms of the quotidian.
35
In fact, Augé mythologizes riding the subway: “The
ways of the metro, like those of the Lord, are impenetrable: they are traveled
endlessly, but all this agitation acquires meaning only at the end, in provisionally
disillusioned wisdom of a backward glance.”
36
He romanticizes the physical
geography of the metro, “the spectacle of the subway has a…romantic character,
especially in the tunnels connecting different lines that passengers use to change
trains the way one changes a symbolic system and practice.”
37
The Paris metro
stations are also repositories of historic and geographic collective memories, where
the name of each station references particular places and events within the national
history of France. The collective historic memory is thus commingled with
individual memories and rituals, adding a narrative to public transportation that fills
the porous borders between public display and private use. Cities that are
historically or personally contextualized by architecture and by public social places
“which support public uses appropriate for a high density urban environment,”
38

function as places for members of the public. Such tactical uses are determined by
individuals, whose daily existence, according to Certeau is repetitive and

34
Augé, In the Metro, 5, 9.
35
Augé, In the Metro, 6, 56.
36
Augé, In the Metro, 9.
37
Augé, In the Metro, 56.
38
Decker, The Modern City Revisited, p. 2.

23
unconscious, and whose movements and social and mnemonic mapping are not
entirely determined by the organization of the city, because individuals adopt the
urban organization and render it habitable in their personal, improvisational and
opportunistic ways.
Similar superimposing of a multiplicity of personal and civic meanings onto
the urban non-places is often accomplished through the incorporation of public art
works. Public art concretizes the city as a distinctive and legible geographic
environment
39
at a time when the concept of the city has been deconstructed as a
place and reconstructed as a space. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas casts the
contemporary urban environment as a generic city. In his polemic, cities are
sociological happenings where the absence of real historic memories is made into an
industry that generates simulated history (à la Hollywood movie production), which
in turn fosters tourism. The contemporary generic city has no archeological layers,
aspiring instead toward what he calls tropicality,
40
engendered in hotel architecture
with its climate controlled environment of atria, and with certain ubiquitous
attractions such as what he calls waterfronts (with or without actual water).
41
The
urban historian Paul Virilio, a participant in the Books of Groningen project, argues
that the physical dimension of contemporary cities has been dissolved, and that space
is merely an extension of the technological and the economic, as for example when
he says that “the way one gains access to the city is no longer through a gate, an arch

39
Lynch, The Image of the City, 5.
40
Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” 1255.
41
Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” 1257.

24
of triumph, but rather through an electronic audiencing system whose users are not
so much inhabitants or privileged residents as they are interlocutors in permanent
transit.”
42
The idea of urban physical boundaries is important, yet for Virilio that
idea is exemplified less by surface than by interface, as when he asks: “Does a
greater metropolis still have a façade?”
43
The answer is, ultimately, no. The
contemporary city is mechanistic, a node in the networks, an agglomeration of
communication lines, in which time and space become irrelevant. Architecture is no
longer an organizing principle for urban space, because it is de-centered by other
technologies and replaced, as Virilio notes, by a “monumental wait for service in
front of machinery.”
44
If in the past cities may have had geographic and
ethnographic identities, contemporary cities lack a unifying fabric, and are spatially
unmappable and cognitively incomprehensible. The two projects offer distinct
examples concerned with reversing the dissolution and instability of our mental
construct of cities as places. They are of two common types – art in public places
and public art, both installed at urban transportation nodes. The descriptions of the
project, along with the accompanying images, are intended to set a visual
background to the subsequent examination of the discourse surrounding their
conception and installation, as well as their larger meaning within the urban aesthetic
context. Daniel Libeskind, the overall designer of the Books of Groningen, is an
architect particularly noted in the United States for receiving the initial commission

42
Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” 16.
43
Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” 17.
44
Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” 19.

25
to construct a master plan for the World Trade Center, although his association with
that plan officially ended in 2004. His architecture uses a visual language of angles,
voids, and broken lines. Libeskind’s work also has appeared in galleries and
international art shows. The Books of Groningen project marks the boundaries
between the urban and non-urban environments, and is part of the city of
Groningen’s larger program of artistic and architectural redevelopment. By contrast,
the Metro Art program is part of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan
Transportation Authority, a large civic agency that oversees public bus and rail
transportation within the Los Angeles County. The Metro Art program is noted
particularly for incorporating temporary and permanent public art into the stations of
the re-nascent city rail, as well as into select stations of some of the bus-ways and
county commuter rail. Metro Art projects, all created by artists, and many developed
in tandem with the architectural and engineering designs of the stations, mark the
boundary between private automobile transportation and public transit, and provide a
centralized narrative to a dispersed metropolitan area.

(A). Books of Groningen: The Publicity of Art
The city of Groningen conceived of the city marking project as part of an
effort to commemorate a millennium since its first mention in medieval annals in the
year 1040. The city began developing a large urban re-design program in the 1980s,
partly prodded by Frank Mohr, a retired businessman with interest in the arts, who
also was instrumental in establishing the Institute for (Post) Graduate Studies and

26
Research in the Arts and Emerging Media at the University of Groningen.
Groningen, a mid-size Dutch city of 180,000 inhabitants, is a provincial capital. It
has been a node in the Dutch foreign trade with its northern neighbors since the
Middle Ages.
45
During the industrial period in the 19
th
century the city developed a
prominence in the natural gas industry. This is still true, so much so that the
Nederlandse Gasunie, the Dutch gas company, was a major financial backer of
Groningen’s recent large public works projects in city center, including the building
of the new Groninger Museum and the main public library, designed by
contemporary European architects.
46
Rather than opening the city commemorative
marking project to a design competition, Groningen invited the architect Daniel
Libeskind to create a plan. Libeskind, well versed in the post-modern
problematization of authorial intent, is quoted in an article by the German artist and
critic Volker Grassmuck as having remarked:
They asked me to make a master-plan. But I said, that is not
possible. Something like the mastering of a problem does not
exist. Mastering is the product of an ideology of control, an
ideology that pretends to know everything, overlook everything.
What I made was a critique of the master-plan.
47

Nevertheless, Libeskind proceeded to exercise authorial control and created a curated
commemorative art project called in Dutch Stadsmarkering Groningen, the intent of
which was to re-mark the boundaries of the city in time and space. The proposal

45
Burke, The Making of Dutch Towns, 26.
46
Martin, “The City,” 9. The new Nederlandse Gasunie headquarters in Groningen were designed in
the mid-1990s by a local Dutch architectural firm Architectenburo Alberts & van Huut, and the
building is a showcase for the company.
47
Grassmuck, “A Combinatorial Cosmology of the Contemporary City,” section 3, paragraph 3.

27
itself, submitted to the City Council, came in the physical form of a book made of
aluminum plates held together with nuts and bolts,
48
and became popularly known as
The Books of Groningen. The proposal described the city as a semeiotic system of
signification, both physical and symbolic, arranged in a complex matrix of abstract
ideas which incorporated the names of ancient Greek muses of the arts, color
schemes, generic places within the city, and units of time, to create what may be
called an urban cosmology. Libeskind described the project thus:
The Books of Groningen are the emblems whose marks outline the
spiritual destiny of the city. In turn, the city marks the trace of the
historical text read and written by the citizens of the once and the
yet to-be City, permanently remarking the boundaries of
Groningen in time and space….The differentiated intervals of time
erased by each citizen’s heart beat and the articulated openings
measured out in the space of the world are the dimensions in which
the written-read imagined-realized, deserted-fulfilled is enacted.
49

Grassmuck attributes the resulting magical and irrational matrix of urban and historic
signs to Libeskind’s own interests in Kabbalistic mysticism and allegorical language.
Allegory and mystical symbolism played a role in other Libeskind projects, notably
and famously in the Berlin Jewish Museum, which broke ground in 1992, around the
time of the Books of Groningen, “The Jewish Museum is conceived as an emblem in
which the Invisible and Visible are the structural features which have been gathered
in this space of Berlin and laid bare in an architecture where the unnamed remains

48
Libeskind has a long standing interest in text, books, and reading, and he explores these concepts,
particularly in deconstructing architecture as text, in works such as the Reading Machine, which he
designed for the 1985 Venice Biennial.
49
Libeskind, “Marking the City Boundaries, Groningen, 1989-1992,” Flat File 10, Getty Research
Institute.

28
the name which keeps still.”
50
Once Groningen accepted the premise of Libeskind’s
proposal, the city committed to bring it to concrete fruition.
The proposal connected nine important access routes into the city, starting
from the south and moving clockwise, each marked by a monument named after a
letter of the city's ancient name, Cruoninga. While the majority of selected routes
were roadways, some bicycle pathways and canals were also marked. The proposal
was then interpreted by several invited “creative all-round
intellectuals”
51
with international reputations in a variety of disciplines, although
some of the participants have worked on previous projects in the city. The group
consisted of ten men, including three architects, a playwright, a dance choreographer,
an architectural historian, two visual artists, an economist, and an urban theorist, who
responded to Libeskind’s overall project idea with varying degrees of literalness.
The markers, inaugurated in December 1990, are located along a 60 kilometer-long
peripheral line that circles the city, a distance a little bit over 37 miles. When the
project opened in the early 1990s there were bus tours taking visitors to see them,
although some of the markers are also accessible by foot and bicycle. As described
below, based on the creators’ personal statements, written for an exhibition at the
Groninger Museum, Libeskind’s cosmology provided a loose framework for the
participants to explore very different and very personal conceptual ideas. Some of
the designers were more explicit in describing their intentions than others. It is

50
Libeskind, Jewish Museum Berlin, [6].
51
Grassmuck, “A Combinatorial Cosmology of the Contemporary City,” part 3, paragraph 7.

29
unclear from their descriptions whether they shared concepts amongst themselves,
beyond the loose and obscure framework Libeskind provided. The architectural
historian Kurt Forster created a marker titled Gate Tower Clio for the letter C,
commemorating the city’s prominence in the natural gas industry and in agriculture.
Forster designed an inclining pylon bearing seven flame-shaped weather vanes,
which represent the days of the week. Each day at 10:40 in morning and evening (an
allusion to the first mention of the city in medieval annals composed in the year
1040), blue neon digits on top of the pylon light up for one minute. Forster’s stated
purpose was to mark elements of city history, “I wanted real things to signal by their
very presence what the visitor can know about Groningen, about its history and its
character.”
52
Forster also alluded to the more general historic purpose of a public
column, when he wrote “As a column at the entrance to a town famous for
shipbuilding, the electric pylon becomes a modern columna rostrata, a
commemorative marker studded with flames in allusion to the bronze prows of
captured ships in antiquity.”
53

The economist Akira Asada designed a three page book as a marker for the
letter R, a monumental book within Libeskind’s book of symbols. Page one,
symbolizing the foundation of the city, is built of stone, like a medieval wall, with
video monitors imbedded in it. Referring to the modern city as a node on global
communications networks, page two is a glass box with an LED panel, which can be

52
Forster, “Book C,” 29.
53
Forster, “Book C,” 29. Italics by Forster.

30
used to display information related to economic activities of the city. Page three is
made of iron, with the letter R inlaid upon it. This page is a bridge over water, lying
across a canal, and functions as access to "the living dialectic of pages one and
two,"
54
old and new technologies, philosophies, and economic theories. The base of
the marker is inlaid with transparent film bearing random quotes from famous
European and Japanese economic and philosophical texts. This marker’s shape is a
literal interpretation of a book as a physical object, with Asada claiming that
In Book R, one will read enigmatic phrases simultaneously
confirming and disturbing… the city boundaries such as….(’The
exchange of commodities begins where communities end.’) A city
is the place for commodity exchange. You are going inside the
city, but its inside is in fact an ‘outside.’
55

The architect Daniel Libeskind’s marker for the letter U is titled A Walk
Along the Boundary. It is a billboard displaying a collage of images from movies
and art history, supported by a grove of metal poles pointing in different directions.
The effect is that of an informational puzzle simultaneously marking everywhere and
nowhere. Libeskind statement for the exhibition catalog about this piece opens with
a description drawn from his reading of Gustave Flaubert’s controversial unfinished
novel of 1880, Bouvard et Pécuchet. This episodic, proto-semeiotic novel, and
particularly its last chapter, the “Dictionary of Accepted Ideas,” capture Flaubert’s
misanthropic indictment of received bourgeois social and intellectual wisdom of his
times. Libeskind is using Flaubert to express his own pessimism with the

54
Asada, “Book R,” 35.
55
Asada, “Book R,” 35. Parentheses in the original.

31
mechanistic vulgarity of contemporary urban space. Libeskind’s own lengthy
statement about the marker is prolix and obscure, subdivided into chapters with such
titles as Manual Piety and Still Life with Red Predictions. It forms a personal
meditation, which has a musical rhythm to it, as for example in this sentence:
“Nowadays forms have abandoned their last function – fastening a pen nib to a pillar
with a touch of spittle – rolling straight into the sinister thimble held by Sinbad the
Sailor.”
56

The marker for the letter O is designed by the performance artist Thom
Puckey. It is a brick chimney from which protrudes a tree-like sculpture made of
copper, its branches shaped like flames or tentacles. This is possibly a commentary
on the history of the old brick-laying method of construction, once important to the
development of Groningen and other old cities. It also is a commentary on the
radical changes in the 20
th
century, when industrial age, brick-and-mortar economies
were displaced by information age economies which rely on both transnational and
very localized and specialized communication networks.
The letter N is designed by the architect Gunnar Daan. The marker is an
architectural mesh positioned above a bicycle path near a canal. In his own
description of the marker Daan asks “what remains [of architecture] if the roof, the
window, the doors, the carpet, the sink, and the light switches have disappeared?
What remains is geometry, size, and proportion, rhythm, structure, a catalogue of

56
Libeskind, “A Walk Along the Boundary,” 43.

32
types.”
57
Daan directly links his marker to a definition of a city, which has echoes of
Habermas’ description of 18
th
century public space, although not necessarily of
Groningen per se: “The drawings of streets and stoa in the nets might initiate ideas
about the city - vaguely associated with politics or the café life.”
58

The marker for the letter I, titled Brüchstück für Luigi Nono (A Fragment for
Luigi Nono) and designed by the playwright Heiner Müller, is a black stele with an
epitaph to the 20
th
century Italian composer, located next to six tombstones that
together feature a relief of a world map.
59
Marked in red on the map are locations of
contemporary wars. Hidden microphones play a musical composition by Nono,
which includes the sounds of children and women screaming, and which
commemorates the atrocities of the Auschwitz death camp.
The marker for the letter N is a piece of land art designed by the
choreographer William Forsythe. It consists of a 400 meter canal (approximately
1300 feet) with a bar laid across it. On one side of the canal are young trees, pulled
down into a semi-arc by wires attached to the bar, creating a canopy over the canal.
Like Libeskind, Forsythe uses a poetic language that has its own rhythm in
describing his project, which encompasses the geography and the history of the
maritime merchant class in Holland: “…and tillings of these soiled surrounded vistas
of the idyllic damp dyked landscrapes of that place where the mistered boats bent

57
Daan, “Book N,” 53.
58
Daan, “Book N,” 53.
59
In an homage a decade later to Nono, Libeskind designed the costumes and sets for a 2004 staging
of the composer’s collage-like 1960 opera Intolleranza at the Saarbrücken’s Saarländisches
Staatstheater.

33
boughs for the future opportunities of burgers burroughed into the commune.”
60
In
direct reference to some of the other works within this project, Forsythe also asks a
relevant question, “by the way, where were the women?”
61

The architect John Hejduk’s marker for the letter G is called The Tower of
Cards/The Tower of Letters/The Joker’s Perch. It consists of a slender tower of
cards symbolizing time, a second tower bearing a wheel of fortune on which
a joker sits, and a third tower spelling the name of the city. This work, which
references time and movement,
62
explicitly relates to Libeskind’s kabbalistic interest
and to the Kabbalah’s fascination with numerology. Nevertheless, as a concept it is
somewhat of a disappointment for a designer of Hejduk’s caliber as a visionary
theorist and a practicing architect known for his explorations of spatial organization
and object representation.
The marker for the letter A, Architektron Urania, is designed by the
artist/architect team of Leonhard Lapin and Enn Laansoo. It is a double helix tower,
symbolic of life, and meant to be a navigational beacon. The top is capped by a
cover functioning as a border between heaven and earth, which is supposed to
feature a cosmic navigational instrument to represent enlightenment.
63

In the city center is a marker called Narcissus, designed by the urban theorist
Paul Virilio. It is a well located at the base of a church tower. Positioned in the

60
Forsythe, “Book N,” 63.
61
Forsythe, “Book N,” 63.
62
Hejduk, “Book G,” 67.
63
Lapin and Laansoo, “Book A,” 73.

34
center of the city, it is also the center of inertia,
64
although the other markers do not
radiate from it. It is a tomb, a time capsule, an antithesis to the technological
networks of control that underscore Virilio's thoughts on contemporary urban
development.

(B). Los Angeles Metro Art: The Historicity of Public Art
City identity and its historic context play out differently in the public art
commissions in the Los Angeles Metro. These projects were conceived of as an
integral part of the city’s development of a new Metro Rail system, and some were
the result of collaborations between artists and metro station architects, through the
agency of the Los Angeles County’s Metro. Its Metro Art program has
commissioned over 250 artists for a wide variety of original art projects through a
percent for art funding. “Artists are selected through a peer review process with
community input; all works are created especially for their transit-related sites.”
65

Close to 80 public art works have been installed in the stations of the four Metro Rail
lines, which were constructed since the mid-1990s, and at least several dozen more
are in the plans for the expanding rail routes. In addition to Metro Rail, there are
public art works on selected bus stops, in suburban train stations, and in other transit
areas. There Metro Art program also funds poetry readings, art posters
commemorating communities, and temporary art exhibitions funded through the

64
Virilio, “Principle,” 78.
65
Metro Art, http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/default.htm, (accessed September 13, 2006).

35
Metro Art program. From among all these programs, I selected to highlight
permanent works in the Metro Rail stations, in part because all rail stations include
public art, unlike city bus or commuter train stations, and in part because they
function as place-making symbols for a city that is redefining its urban form.
While the number of permanent public art works in the Metro Rail stations
are too numerous to describe here, the intellectual sources for many of them are
specific histories of the city and its communities. The majority are described on the
Metro’s Metro Art web site, http://www.metro.net/art. In some cases the works
complement a pre-existing station design, and in other cases, particularly in the case
of the Metro Red Line which is entirely underground, they form an integral part of
the station design. Visually, they fall into several general categories. Some stations
feature tile murals, and on some occasions, members of local communities where the
stations are located have participated in the process of mural creation. An example is
the mural composition on the Metro Blue Line’s Slauson station created by the
muralists East Los Streetscapers, veterans of the East Los Angeles murals movement
that goes back into the late 1960s. The work is called South Central Suite, and its
various elements explore the social history of the neighborhood around the station, as
well as the history of the larger geographic area, from prehistoric times to the 20
th

century. On the street level the large ceramic and concrete panels “celebrate the
values that are shared by the people who live and work in the station area: love and

36
family, church and school, work ethic and community service.”
66
At the platform
level, the smaller porcelain-enameled steel murals survey the area’s geologic and
historic periods, spanning the continental drift, prehistoric life, the first human being,
Native American cultures, Mexican ranchos, urbanization, etc.
67

Some stations feature sculptural works, such as Therman Statom’s Into the
Light at Westlake/MacArthur Park station on the Metro Red Line. In this work,
massive sculptures in various media depicting a house, a ladder, a leaf, a cone, and a
diamond shape float in ethereal light, suspended from the station's skylight and
change in perspective as commuters pass underneath them. This gargantuan
rendition of ordinary objects represents “positive forces” creating shadow patterns on
the floor “as the glass and metal pieces collect and refract the changing natural light
filtering through the skylight above.”
68

A different example of a sculptural composition is Stephen Antonakos’
Neons for Pershing Square on the Metro Red Line station at Pershing Square in the
center of Los Angeles. This work commemorates the first neon sign in the United
States, which was installed near Pershing Square in 1924. The neon sculptures are
suspended from the station’s high ceiling, bringing about an aesthetic experience,
since they are “meant to be seen each for themselves, in combinations and as a total
group….not only the columns [of the station], the ceiling and the walls, but the space

66
East Los Streetscapers, South Central Suite, 1995,
http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_mrblels.htm (accessed September 7, 2006).
67
East Los Streetscapers.
68
Therman Statom, Into the Light, 1993, http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_mrrlwts.htm
(accessed September 7, 2006).

37
all around them is brought into the experience of the art.”
69
Similarly, Statom’s
work, discussed earlier, emphasizes aesthetic experience in what otherwise would be
a mundane enclosed subterranean space. These and other monumental sculptural
compositions on the Metro Rail are visually arresting and function independently of
their historic reference.
Some of the sculptural works are functional, such as Horace Washington’s A
Tribute to Industry at the Vernon station on the Metro Blue Line, where sculptural
seating pays tribute to this industrial area's century-old garment and manufacturing
economies,
70
while enhancing the narrow sliver of the open-air station. Another
functional work is Mineko Grimmer’s Companions at the Hawthorne/Interstate 105
station on the Metro Green Line. Companions are whimsical abstract bronze figures
that are intended to interact with passengers. Originally they contained highly
polished and reflective surfaces, mirroring and distorting passengers’ features, and
offering a reflection on the public’s broad diversity. However, because these
reflective surfaces are labor intensive to maintain, the figures currently function as
perches for those waiting for the subway cars on this Metro Rail line, which runs in
the middle of a very busy freeway. As the Metro Art web site states, they “introduce

69
Stephen Antonakos, Neons for Pershing Square, 1993,
http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_mrrlpsa.htm (accessed September 6, 2006).
70
Horace Washington, A Tribute to Industry, 1994,
http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_mrblvhw.htm, (accessed September 6, 2006).

38
human scale to the often overwhelming environment”
71
of the urban highway,
despite the loss of their shiny interactive surface.
Many of the Metro Rail stations feature installations where a larger story is
told through compounded and complex artistic design. The Aviation station on the
Metro Green Line, for example, is entirely devoted to Richard Turner’s paean to the
aviation industry. Civil aviation was instrumental in the development of Los
Angeles in the post-World War II period, and in institutionalizing middle-class
lifestyle:
References to the landscaping and furniture of the middle-class
American home are combined with elements of Los Angeles
vernacular architecture to create a station that is a synthesis of the
home and the workplace. Flagstone paving, suburban landscaping
and furniture casually arranged in conversational groupings bring
the comfortable ambiance of the middle-class home to a potentially
impersonal public space. The colored concrete chairs and coffee
tables are arranged on terrazzo "rugs" and invite passengers to sit
down and feel at home. Streamlined boomerangs, palettes and
kidney-bean shaped wall sculptures recall the vocabulary of 1950's
modernist sculpture. Overhead, the cantilevered roof of brushed
aluminum barrel vaults and decorative struts at once suggest both
aircraft structure and California's renowned carwash architecture.
Silhouettes of classic modern furniture float down the elevator
glass, and pay tribute to innovations of mid-20th-century design.
Waiting for their trains, passengers are shielded from the wind by
glass screens printed with quotations from Beat Generation writers
Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, as well as by African
American writers Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, reminding
commuters that the prosperity and optimism of the 1950s were not
shared by all.
72

71
Mineko Grimmer, Companions, 1995, http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_mrglhmg.htm
(accessed September 7, 2006).
72
Richard Turner, Untitled, 1995, http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_mrglart.htm (accessed
September 6, 2006)

39
This work brings the comfort of private living-room space into the public realm,
allowing for the semi-private contemplation of the literary quotes, which counteract
the exuberance of mid-century bourgeois culture and speak of the anomie of that
period.
Other stations also include compounded public art works, which, like
Turner’s, mediate between private contemplation and collective memory. One of
several historically complex narratives is Margaret Garcia’s Universal City station
on the Metro Red Line. Today, Universal City is famous for its studio lot
amusement park and for Jon Jerde’s simulated townscape in the City Walk shopping
mall. However, the site of the station is adjacent to Campo de Cahuenga, where in
1847 Mexico relinquished control of California, which joined the United States in
1850. The art work at the station provides a complex experience for any viewer
interested not just in the history of the place but also in the ways that histories are
written, mixing text with images of people and objects. Garcia named her work The
Trees of Califas, using an old Spanish name for California, saying that the “station is
situated on a sacred site, sacred because of its history, our history.”
73
The escalator
level gives view to a bilingual and detailed timeline highlighting many important
dates and events related to the area. The station’s public art revolves around
supporting columns clad in handmade colorful tiles offering a detailed visual and
textual record of the events leading to the pivotal point where Mexico relinquished
territorial control. The text on the tile panels does not just reference the history of

73
Maese, “MTA Art Transports Passengers Into Another World,” 5.

40
Campo de Cahuenga, but provides a broader view on the 19
th
century history of the
political relations and skirmishes between the United States and Mexico in the
Southwest. Echoing Dolores Hayden’s emphasis on mining urban landscapes to
nurture citizens’ public memory in order to resurrect the contested social and
political history of city spaces,
74
the artist writes: “The history of this station is so
important and so overlooked, for the indigenous peoples, the Gabrielino-Tongva
tribes, the Mexican settlers – half of whom were of African descent – and for the
United States immigrants who came and settled here.”
75
Kate Diamond, the architect
who worked with Garcia on designing the station, concurred with this sentiment
when she wrote “our goal was more than just design of a wonderful, functional
subway station that would serve the transit-going public. Our mission was to make
this important California history visible again.”
76

74
Hayden, The Power of Place, 99, 11.
75
Garcia, Untitled, 2000, http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_mrrlumg.htm (accessed
September 7, 2006).
76
Diamond, Untitled, 2000, http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/ma_mrrlumg.htm (accessed
September 7, 2006).

41
CHAPTER 4: DISCUSSION: THE PUBLICNESS OF THE PROJECTS
The Books of Groningen markers are to come down in the year 2040, the
millennium anniversary of the city. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Libeskind
invited proposals from ten intellectuals who were either based in Europe or had
significant work on the continent, in Holland, neighboring Germany and other north
European countries. Unlike the Metro Art projects, which required participation by
practicing artists, both men and women, the Groningen project accepted works from
those outside of the design professions, and involved only men. All Groningen
participants were noted in their fields for their theoretical interests in semeiotics,
aesthetic theories, or economic philosophy.
The markers represent the city of Groningen as a nexus of aesthetic, political,
and ecological ideas. Art as symbolic representation of complex issues has left the
gallery space and entered the public space of roadways, without apparent initial
involvement on the part of the public except as represented by the City’s government
and by Frank Mohr, the businessman and art visionary of the city. There is some
evidence, however, of public reaction to the placement of the markers and to the
aesthetic ideas expressed in them. Almost all the projects had to be altered from the
way they were originally designed. Some changes had to do with safety, others with
cost. Kurt Forster initially planned to install real gas-flames on his pylon, but that
proved prohibitively expensive and was rejected as being too dangerous. Originally,
his marker was placed at the tip of an island on a canal, but it was moved to another
location several years after installation as a result of litigation on behalf of some of

42
Groningen’s citizens who did not want a tall electrified tower in the middle of what
was seen as the last natural preserve near the rapidly expanding city.
77
Heiner
Müller’s funereal marker, which was designed to be seen from above and to be heard
from the ground level, was a comment on 20
th
century wars and destruction. This
topic, difficult under any circumstances, generated a public debate within the city
and its government about the work’s topical appropriateness to Groningen. John
Hejduk’s marker of three towers was criticized for its cheap cynicism and for
looking like a “billboard alongside an American highway announcing that there are x
miles to go before the next attraction.”
78
In January 1991 someone tried to steal the
joker from his wheel of fortune, and it subsequently ended up at the Groningen
police headquarters. The original design for Lapin and Laansoo’s double helix
tower, positioned near railroad tracks, called for a stairwell to be used by members of
the public willing to ascend toward the stars, and an open platform at the top. As the
designers wrote, those who climbed the stairs to the platform for a moment of
meditation would become partners “of midday and midnight spirits,” figuratively
enlightened “by the illumination of the tower, to be switched on by approaching
trains.” The whole tower was to be “softly illuminated by thin neon light, encircling
the double spiral. It is automatically switched off after the train has passed.”
79
For
safety reasons, the erected tower did not include the first two meters of the stairs and

77
Grassmuck, description of Kurt Forster’s marker, paragraph 3.
78
Grassmuck, description of John Hejduk’s marker, paragraph 3. Grassmuck is quoting from an
article in the Rotterdam daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad, December 29, 1990.
79
Lapin and Laansoo, “Book A,” 73.

43
had a sealed top rather than a platform, turning into a dead beginning and a dead end.
It is not clear whether the tower still receives illumination from the automatic neon
light. Possibly not, as there are no further descriptions of this feature. The tower
has thus turned into a metaphor on the expiring enlightenment in the age of
commercialism.
Akira Asada directly acknowledged public reaction, some of which has
resulted in graffiti on his “book”, in the postscript to the description of his marker.
His statement is appreciative of the public’s intervention, while self-aggrandizing at
the same time:
The realized work is based on a reading of our Book by the people
of Groningen….They read our Book in their own way, and they
read it marvelously. After all, we cannot help admiring the daring
intelligence of the citizens of Groningen, who understand the
seemingly paradoxical fact that the identity of a city, if such a
thing exists at all, can only be found by strangers.
80

Most of these markers do not serve a practical function, and as such emerge
from a tradition of the architecture of symbolic monuments, particularly those which
announce the city, such as memorial archways (for example, the Arc de Triomphe)
or obelisques (e.g., the Washington monument). Yet unlike most traditional
monuments, they lack inscription or any overt reference to place or history. They are
abstractions. Given Daniel Libeskind’s interests in symbols and how they generate
meaning, this is intentional. The project, as conceived of and curated by Libeskind,
who is also one of the participants, is arcane. His criteria involving artistic, political,

80
Asada, “Book R,” 35.

44
and disparate historic concepts such as, for example, the following: Lyric; Tavern;
5pm; Politics; White; Terpsichore for the discipline Architecture, taken up by
Gunnar Daan who designed the architectural mesh for the marker N,
81
or Gold;
Rhetoric; Library; Dialectic; 12pm; Polyhymnia for the discipline of Visual Arts,
given to Thom Puckey, the designer of the marker O
82
(the other criteria are similar),
problematize curatorial practice in public places. If the markers speak mostly to the
“artists” of the project and to the curators and audience of the subsequent Groninger
Museum show and its catalog, they pose a question about the place of arcane and
idiosyncratic ideas and objects outside of the walls of academia and museums.
Libeskind imprints on the blank canvas of the city the Art (or is it Architecture?)
which corresponds to his interests, overriding the public(s)’ presumed interests in
expressive city places, which may or may not be the same as his. Kari Jormakka,
describing Libeskind’s work in his book on architecture as ritual practice, notes,
“Libeskind likes to call attention to the blatant uselessness of his buildings….
Libeskind seems indebted to the Ruskinian principle that economic sacrifice is the
essence of the divine in architecture. Indeed, many celebrated monuments represent
a conspicuous waste and lack of any obvious function.”
83
Roland Barthes, also
quoted by Jormakka, writes how the conspicuous lack of practical function of the
Eiffel Tower provides it with pure signification that continuously attracts meaning.
In other words, the Eiffel Tower’s practical uselessness makes it a total monument,

81
Daan, “Book N,” 52.
82
Puckey, “Book O,” 48.
83
Jormakka, Heimlich Manoeuvres, 25.

45
recognized as symbolically synonymous with the city of Paris.
84
As a project, the
Books of Groningen is a variation on Kwon’s art-in-public-places model, but only in
so far as it ties the “myth of the artist as a privileged source of originality with the
customary belief in places as ready reservoirs of unique identity.”
85
Otherwise, there
is little publicness about these projects with the exception of their placement within
public spaces.
As architecture of conspicuous waste which carries semeiotic meaning, to use
Kari Jormakka’s term, the markers of Groningen also have more contemporary
vernacular counterparts, particularly roadside billboards and signs. In their book
Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi, Scott-Brown, and Izenour write about the
roadside mini-mall strip (a non-place in Augé’s terms, emblematic of the American
urban environment and also common in Europe) as heir to historic monumental
landscapes such as the gardens in Versailles:
The A&P parking lot is a current phase in the evolution of vast
space since Versailles. The space which divides high-speed
highway and low, sparse buildings produces no enclosure and little
direction….To move through this landscape is to move over vast
expansive texture, the megatexture of the commercial
landscape….But it is the highway signs through their sculptural
forms or pictorial silhouettes, their particular positions in space,
their infected shapes, and their graphic meaning, which identify
and unify the megatexture…. Symbol dominates space.
86

Similarly, the Books of Groningen are designed to dominate the flat landscape of
Holland, commemorating the designers’ complex ideas about aesthetics, the flow of

84
Barthes, The Eiffel Tower, 4.
85
Kwon, One Place After Another, 55.
86
Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 15.

46
city spaces, personal politics, notions about nature, etc., while at the same time
symbolically encompassing and defining the city for ritualized, marketed
consumption. The markers may speak to an individual member of the public, but if
they do not, that does not matter, as legibility is not necessarily an important
component of the works. The project’s design solicited little public discussion, and
the markers themselves do not elicit dialogue, as they represent the designers’
individualistic statements. Within such a monological conception, an inhabitant's or
visitor's opinion is almost irrelevant, specific histories are immaterial, neighborhoods
and communities subsumed in a synoptic vision of the city as geographically and
intellectually distinct entity and, to all appearances, culturally homogenized. At the
same time, they insert the private contemplation of the museum into the horizontal
public space of the countryside, producing a cultural cross-contamination. The
project creates a liminal space that is potentially heterotopic, combining Art and
Architecture with official memorial commemoration (and its corollary, erasure) of
city history, while on a collision course with populist (but not necessarily popular)
sentiment.
Since the early 1980s, Groningen’s government acted on a vision of a
coherent, compact city, positioning itself as representative of the common identity of
many medium-sized urban areas in Western Europe.
87
The 1986 master plan of
Groningen revolved around the concepts of “connection” and “coherence”, the
purpose of which was to reinforce the existing city as a whole rather than allowing it

87
Casciato, Learning from Groningen, 6.

47
to fragment through unchecked development.
88
Marijke Martin, describing the
connection between the master plan and the eventual commissioning of the
Libeskind project, writes:
An unusual translation of this coherent, compact vision of the city
and of the need to define it as such in a recognizable way, was
given form in the unique experiment of marking the city
boundaries on the basis of the virtual city map of Groningen that
Daniel Libeskind formulated on the initiative of the Department of
Urban Planning….[The city is] a public domain par excellence….a
continuously written book….both a place in which to live and
work, and also literally a stage for all kinds of (temporary)
manifestations and activities.
89

As part of re-establishing a collective identity of Groningen, the city embarked on
several large scale public projects to redevelop its center. The city’s redevelopment
included, among other projects, housing designed by the Dutch architect Rem
Koolhaas, the public library designed by Giorgio Grassi, and the Groninger Museum,
designed by Atelier Mendini. In addition to new architecture, several streets, a
medieval square, and the waterfront were also given over to massive redesign to
improve pedestrian environment. The inclusion of several internationally known and
local architects in the redesign of city center meant that the collective vision of the
city was told in highly individualized ways, since all participants, Libeskind
included, were notable for their philosophies of aesthetics and conceptual design
ideas for the built environment. An old provincial capital and a mercantile and
academic center, the city of Groningen moved toward the 21st century in a concerted

88
Martin, “The City,” 14.
89
Martin, “The City,” 9, 15.

48
civic effort of branding its urban core through art and design. The city’s mediation of
the tension between the centralization of its civic vision and the fragmentation of
various design ideas manifested itself in two temporary projects, the melding of
architectonic space with music through a series of pavilions, sponsored for an urban
festival in 1990 by the Groninger Museum, and the Books of Groningen markers, the
concepts for which were developed and implemented at around the same time, as
part of the city’s celebration of its aesthetic and economic renaissance. Tellingly,
although perhaps not intentionally, alluding to the ways in which architecture
subsumed art and memory, Gunnar Daan, an architect and one of the participants of
the markers project, wrote, “In Daniel Libeskind’s plan, he is asked to mark the city
with architecture. The commission is free from conventions and the corresponding
laws and customs.”
90
Perhaps so, although in view of the city’s heavy financial
investment into redesigning the urban environment, and with it the consumption of
urban public space, this is hardly convincing and, moreover, self-serving. The
powerful linking of architecture and art with economics and politics, described by
Krautheimer in his account of Baroque Rome, and updated by Walter Benjamin to
include bourgeois urban culture, as when he wrote about 19th century Paris that “the
phantasmagoria of capitalist culture attains its most radiant unfolding in the world
exhibition of 1867,”
91
is germane to the discussion about Groningen. Daan’s
privileged presumption of disinterestedness and unconventionality finds its place

90
Daan, “Book N,” 53.
91
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 37.

49
within the urban promotion of Groningen not just in the city’s economic investment,
but also in visual and intellectual connections among the different projects. For
example, both Libeskind’s marker and the East pavilion of the Groninger Museum
designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au, projects created at around the same time, reflect a
configuration of similar shapes that point in various directions. “They [Coop
Himmelb(l)au] do not take the established norms and values as their starting point,
preferring the spirit of the present: fragmentation, chaos, contrast, and movement”
92

states the Groninger Museum’s web site, echoing some of the themes also featured in
Libeskind’s work. Given that Libeskind was involved at various levels in the
redesign of the center of Groningen, and that most of the architects involved were
familiar with each other’s design philosophies and work, further examination into the
intertwining of art and design with urban economic redevelopment is warranted.
The Groningen markers stand near highways and other transportation routes,
thrust into view in a horizontal, flat landscape. While at least several of the markers
require compounded contemplation and closer inspection, notably Akira Asada’s and
Heiner Müller’s, which include detailed components, most others can be taken in
fairly quickly by the eye of a passer-by traveling in an automobile. Their deeper
meaning is obscured without a curatorial description; nevertheless, the markers are
eye catching because of their visibility above ground. It is unlikely that a habitual
driver or walker will experience all ten markers within the same trip, so their

92
Groninger Museum, http://www.groningermuseum.nl/index.php?id=2147 (accessed January 18,
2007)

50
monumentality is individualized. Given that the original impetus for the project was
to temporarily commemorate the millennial anniversary of the city, the monumental
Books fulfill this function, albeit in a rather orthodox way, reminiscent of the
connected nodal points of Baroque Rome. They invoke a strong intellectual and
aesthetic reaction from the public and from City Council and a certain amount of
fascination from art historians and architects as part of contemporary commentary on
what makes a city and an urban place. They are nodes on networks bearing trains,
cars, bicycles, electric cables, and other means of transportation and communication.
According to a local architect, the Books are a “typical example of a theatrical
approach”
93
to space, providing “calculated entertainment value. The city as an
intoxicating amusement park.
94
There was a general feeling that the markers could
not possibly have succeeded in any deeper sense: ‘Identity is most of the time
nothing more than a set of prejudices.’”
95
Because these markers are difficult to read
without curatorial intervention, their effect as urban place-makers is ambiguous and
difficult to articulate beyond the initial surprise and fascination.
The Los Angeles Metro Art works described in the previous chapter, as well
as the many other public art works installed as part of the development of the Los
Angeles Metro Rail, are emblematic of Metro Art in many American cities. Many
city governments are looking to curb urban sprawl by investing into public
transportation networks, better station design, and a better overall experience for the

93
Harm Tilman, quoted in Grassmuck, section 4, paragraph 2.
94
Syntax in the original.
95
Geert Bekaert, quoted in Grassmuck, section 4, paragraph 2.

51
habitual commuter and the occasional tourist. Yet despite a strong commitment to a
more congenial urban experience for the public, what constitutes good urban
experience or how the public is defined are concepts rarely articulated by the
sponsoring agencies. This is in part because these concepts are extremely political,
but also because the artists and the public art planners view them in somewhat
different terms. Art for the artist, such as Vito Acconci (someone with public art
projects, although not a participant in the Los Angeles Metro program), is “a finished
fact, it can’t be modified – the art is inviolable, the artist can’t be interfered with.”
96

Art for the planner involves a process, articulated by Acconci in the following way:
“a public art proposal is like bargaining for a contract….[it] is a beginning of a
discussion.”
97
In addition, those involved in public art processes rarely openly
discuss how members of the public map urban spaces of flows, such as the metro, or
how they read and reproduce that space. Methodologies differ, and the language of
the artists is not the same as that used by architects, historians, or urban
ethnographers. The profession of urban planning has its own framework of
communication, combining practical applications within the bureaucratic processes
which characterize city government. If public art is to be meaningful to the broad
public(s) that it purports to serves, there ought to be a way of communicating about
meanings and processes that relates to the expectations of different audiences,
including the expectations of public and private developers who often make

96
Finkelpearl, “Interview: Vito Acconci,” 189.
97
Finkelpearl, “Interview: Vito Acconci,” 189.

52
decisions about funding. Because the field of public art is a hybrid discipline relying
on other, more established, disciplines for its language, and because it is also in part
a practical application of public administration norms, its own definitions of the
purposes of public art works are fragmented. Discussions about public art skirt the
issue of what makes good art, because of the complexity of defining the place of
aesthetics within the social, urban and political reproductions of city spaces, as
theorized, for example, by Certeau, Lefebvre, and others. The interstice between the
theorized urban space and the purportedly pluralistic practice of public art is fraught
with the politics of power. On an official level, significant for civic policy and for
funding, the role of public art in contemporary society is to beautify cities so as to
make their consumption more pleasing, comfortable, and safe. Rosalyn Deutsche
critiques what she calls new art’s (this includes public art) reductivist approach to
fulfilling “supposedly essential human and social needs….Just as function is limited
to utilitarianism, social activity is constricted to narrow problem solving so that the
provision of useful objects automatically collapses into a social good.”
98
Public art’s
function for social and public benefit, she argues, feeds into the hegemonic discourse
on urban integration, so that art “prescribes places in the city for people to sit, to
stand, to play, to eat, to read, even to dream. Building on this foundation, the new art
claims to unify a whole sequence of divided spheres.”
99
To follow up on Deutsche,
from the perspective of city planning, public art becomes part of urban improvement

98
Deutsche,Evictions, 65.
99
Deutsche, Evictions, 65.

53
projects and serves as an index of urban sophistication.
100
This function includes
such high-concept Art-and-Architecture-in-public-places projects as the Books of
Groningen, but also art-in-the-public-interest projects, such as Metro Art. Both
projects face the same theoretical dilemmas. Typically, public art commissions
require a certain amount of community input, a concept that is difficult to embrace
intellectually (what is the community?) and practically (when does community input
begin and end?). In the case of Metro Art such commissions are further
problematized by the transit setting. Public art in transit locations is important in
urban mitigation processes that include building new or improving existing public
transportation systems, or it can be used for the purpose of changing the perception
of a skeptical public toward public transit. While this skepticism arises from a
variety of historic economic and urban development conditions, it is in part aesthetic.
Older public transportation systems, such as early 20
th
century metro in Paris or New
York, are now romanticized for a kind of gesamtkunstwerk, the fusing of art and
architecture to beautify the functional engineering design of subway stations.
Because contemporary architecture is largely unadorned and because public places
are framed by cheap prefabricated materials, public art to some extent fills the void
left by lack of ornamentation. It also functions in mitigating the impersonal effects
of generic urbanization on the social fabric of public spaces. In her 1989 essay,
Wendy Feuer wrote a succinct summary describing the dilemmas of the social
relevance of artistic and aesthetic ideas for transit works. After describing a

100
Sotero, Metro Report.

54
controversy surrounding a temporary performance work designed for the New York
Metropolitan Transportation Authority in the mid-1980s, Feuer commented:
Should a state agency that serves such a broad spectrum of the
population sponsor work that is esoteric, confrontational or
politically-or-sexually-controversial? What is the responsibility to
people who have not paid to see art but have paid to be provided
with transportation services? Is the art doomed to mediocrity?….
The public sector imposes a different set of demands on the artist;
the art must speak to the multiple populations that avail themselves
to the MTA’s services….The work in a system as large as New
York City’s should be challenging, abstract, representational,
thought-provoking, decorative, informational, beautiful.
101

Public art functions as a means to alleviate uniformity in station design, because
otherwise rail stations would be framed as non-places, but the question whether art
can or should be representational, thought-provoking, beautiful, challenging,
abstract, and decorative, to use Feuer’s words, presents certain challenges.
Importantly, some of these aspirations are potentially contradictory, not only from
the point of view of the artist, but also in relation to the public(s)’ interactions with
spaces and services. Feuer, writing more recently about metro art in Taiwan,
mentions that in that country artists are directed to present their work “in a vivacious,
interesting, friendly, and lively way….Metro public art should arouse the sympathy
of the public and should be simple and easily understood, and furthermore amuse
people and make people feel relaxed and pleasant.”
102
Whether this applies to
Taiwan or any other place, such a directive presents a dilemma for both the artist and

101
Feuer, “Public Art from a Public Sector Perspective,” 151.
102
Feuer, "International Conference on Transportation and Public Art,” 37.

55
the public because it points to a cookie-cutter mentality on the part of civic
administration.
Creating a sense of inhabited and habitable place in urban transportation
nodes is an important theme in the implementation of public art, particularly in a
large contemporary metropolis like Los Angeles, which is multi-centered and
suburbanized. The metropolis is struggling to get beyond the legacy of car culture,
which formed the basis for its modernist urban architecture, unconnected to its
geographic surroundings or to city history. Furthermore, the Metro Art program in
Los Angeles responds to the needs of Metro planners to create both pleasant and
inspiring public spaces within the stations. In order to inspire commuters, many of
the artists choose to memorialize strands of the city’s local histories, geographies and
communities. Yet historic narratives are complex, because they do not just unearth
facts but their interpretations, as well. For example, the artist Sheila Klein, in
discussing her design for the Metro Red Line station at Hollywood Boulevard and
Highland Street puts her interrogation of the local geography in gendered terms:
“what sleeps under Hollywood? My premise is that it was a very sexy woman…the
station is meant to be very sexy, very sensual.”
103
Elsewhere, she elaborates further,
“What I wanted to do was to give the station bones, a pelvis, a hairdo…the way out
stuff that has never been done…Let’s turn the wheel back once again to the greatness
of Hollywood.”
104
Yet her interpretation of the former greatness of Hollywood and

103
Sheppard, “Subterranean Décor Adds Homeward Hues,” 14.
104
Maese, “MTA Art Transports Passengers Into Another World,” 5.

56
of the femininity of its stars may be somewhat too feminist, especially when she
describes the light sconces over the train tracks as representing fallopian tubes that
go with the pelvic bones symbolized by the curved train tunnels. In a different
interpretation, someone else sees the light sconces at this station as “the legs of
kicking chorus girls in a classic Busby Berkeley film.”
105
The aesthetic implications
of this description, which focuses on the visual candy of the Hollywood golden age
chorus movies, is different from Klein’s physiological interpretation with its roots in
second wave American feminism. Both interpretations give different shades to the
symbol of Hollywood.
The mining of ethnic histories is also complex, particularly in Los Angeles
with its history of romanticizing the other (particularly its Mexican past), while
simultaneously erasing its traces in the process. Margaret Garcia’s interpretation of
the history of Campo de Cahuenga, briefly highlighted in the previous chapter, was
challenged by a local historic preservation group. It was not the only work of Metro
Art which received political attention due to long-standing debates within California
and the United States over social history. The theatrical subterranean space of the
Universal City Metro Rail station became literally the theater of a debate over what
histories are important to be written within its confines and made available to the
commuter public. Metro Art works speak of the artists’ understanding of the city’s
history and mythology, and as such they can be analyzed by art historians and critics,
but how do they speak to the passengers’ interactions with the city as a place?

105
Sheppard, “Subterranean Décor Adds Homeward Hues,” 14.

57
Nicolai Ouroussoff, the former architectural critic of the Los Angeles Times, writes
in his commentary on the Metro Red Line
106
that subways are symbols of
“egalitarian values, places where the varied faces of the city confront one another on
equal terms.”
107
In a similar vein, public art administrators argue that art funded by
the public and created for the public transportation setting such as the urban rail,
must speak to a broad cross-section of the populace, many of
whom have never visited an art museum or gallery. MTA
customers’ artistic tastes are diverse: there are those who prefer
work that is political, provocative, confrontational, abstract,
representational, ethnic, functional, decorative, beautiful,
informative, historical, colorful, text-based, non-text-based,
cutting-edge, folksy, hi-tech, lo-tech…and those who have no
interest in art whatsoever.
108

Such statements, both on theoretical and practical levels, appear to take quite a few
things for granted: for example, that public transportation is a level playing field, that
public art is in direct opposition to museum Art, the latter somehow inaccessible or
inappropriate for a public environment, that art has a normative, universal definition,
or that art is a defined economic and cultural good. There is also a presumption that
the Metro Art projects are, through the public bureaucratic selection process,
inherently comprehensible to members of the publics and do not require curatorial
intervention. This debate leaves out those on whose behalf it is waged; however, this
does not diminish the public-ness of Metro Art in the sense that Habermas defined the
public as the site for opinion and debate based on shared normative but potentially

106
The Metro Red Line is the only Metro Rail entirely underground. It is considered the jewel of the
Metro Art program, and is frequently featured in Metro publicity. Metro offers monthly curated
public art tours on the Metro Red Line, but not on its other routes.
107
Ouroussoff, “The Red Line: Architecture as Afterthought,” 5.
108
Emsden, “Counterpunch; Critic of Metro Rail vs. Reality,” 3.

58
unstated values. Yet what is the norm against which to judge the context created by
public art in transit locations? Metro Art provides an added attraction for a somewhat
different mix of users of Metro Rail than those who ride the older system of public
busses. For example, of the 14,000 public bus riders who filled out a Metro survey
between May 9 and June 16, 2006 (out of an average of about 1,500,000 bus riders
per week), 61% of the respondents identified themselves as Latino, 20% as Black,
9% as White, and various other ethnic groups comprised about 10%. Given that
overall non-Whites constitute the lower socio-economic groups in Los Angeles
County, these snap-shot survey results show that 80% of bus riders are of lower
economic class.
109
During an overlapping two week period in June of the same year,
1555 Metro Rail riders returned surveys (out of an average of 250,000 weekly riders),
indicating that 65% were Latino or Black, and 18% were White.
110
The difference in
ethnicity of those riding the public busses from those riding the rail system points to a
somewhat different user base for Metro Rail services. Because the statistical
information collected is extremely brief, it points rather indefinitely to the possibility
that Metro Art curatorial practices are intended for the enjoyment of a public that is
more White and somewhat better off economically than the bus riders. What are the
place-making and aesthetic functions of Metro Art for the various ethnic and
economic groups using Los Angeles’ public transportation? If Metro Art works

109
Spring 2006: Metro Bus Customer Satisfaction Survey. Courtesy of Metro, received by the author
November 2006.
110
Spring 2006: Metro Rail Customer Satisfaction Survey. Courtesy of Metro, received by the author
November 2006.

59
create a pleasing, educational, and informational environment, as public art
administrators imply they should, are they didactic and patronizing of the public?
And what is at stake for this city that prides itself on being a cultural mecca, if the
audience for these projects is made up of working-class Angelinos who inhabit Metro
spaces and read them, however fleetingly, on a quotidian basis? Despite the lingering
questions, Metro Art works are emblematic of a city that has matured into making a
serious aesthetic investment into its spaces of flows, on par with many other great
cities around the world. The symbolic cacophony created by Metro Art is
heterotopic, as it supports potentially multiple and imaginary interpretations by the
many different publics that use Los Angeles’ public transportation, and who are not
part of the overriding, Hollywood-inspired, mythology of the city as the land of
sunshine and noir populated by photogenic people.

60
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION: TOWARD READING THE CITY IN A DISTRACTED STATE
There are marked differences in the ways public art was conceived of in the
two projects, and the contrast is most visible in the political processes and aesthetic
ideologies. Stadsmarkering Groningen is a curated Art in public places project,
which in this case happens to be installed on transportation routes. The project is
headed by an architect with an international reputation, who conceives of the city as
a designed space. The ten markers would make for a more compelling and
accessible city art collection if they were assembled in a sculpture garden in close
proximity to each other, affording visitors a more holistic contemplation of the
interrelationship between technology and city history, nature and artifice. As a
public sculpture garden, the project could even render some of the critique of the
globalizing, pop culture-infused commercial environment of many cities more
transparent to a self-selected audience. The art works on the Los Angeles Metro Rail
system are art-in-the-public-interest in the sense that the involvement of community
stakeholders (mostly through Metro’s public art selection process) and the creation
of a pleasant environment for the passengers were of great importance to the
commissioning public agency. The often complicated historic content of many of
the Metro Art works, as exemplified by Margaret Garcia’s project for Universal City
station on the Metro Red Line, layers them with the representation of the complexity
of the public(s).
It is unclear whether members of the public pay attention to the political,
sociological, and aesthetic ideas reflected in Los Angeles Metro Art projects or in the

61
Groningen works. It may be that members of the public, on whose behalf the works
are commissioned, notice the works in a state of distraction, incidentally, while in
transit. A quotidian transit setting does not preclude an occasional or deliberate
opinion, but it also does not foster it. Writing in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin
described the state of distraction in discussing human perception of architecture and
of film. He noted that while the then new medium of film positioned the public as a
critic, “this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-
minded one.”
111
As part of a daily function of transit, both projects advocate for an
urban place-making – the Books are concerned with aesthetic design and Metro Art
with public legibility. They are, by necessity, synoptic, providing a general
encapsulation of the city through imagery intended for public consumption.
Analyzing city form, Kevin Lynch wrote four decades ago that people seize upon
city images and read patterns into them to make cities legible, even if the images
themselves are confusing and discontinuous, or have weak and ambiguous
boundaries.
112
In their own way, both projects respond to social needs for well
organized, poetic and symbolic environments, which speak “of the individuals and
their complex society, of their aspirations and their historical tradition, of the natural
setting, and of the complicated functions and movements of the city world.”
113

111
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 240-241.
112
Lynch, The Image of the City, 25, 32.
113
Lynch, The Image of the City, 119.

62
Nancy Stieber, in an essay for the catalog on the Books of Groningen, argues
that the Books mark the city as an allegorical space to be read over time, thus
contributing an important layer to Groningen’s urban context:
The markers are not set up to be read in a given way, but they have
been set up to be read…. The point here is less to identify specific
antecedents than to indicate that the collage of images is drawn
from a similar emblematic tradition. Libeskind is playing with
these systems, and thereby celebrating the ludic and human
inclination to seek meaning.
114

Stieber does not indicate who should read the markers, because she assumes that
there is a universal human interest in reading meaning into images. The Los Angeles
Metro Rail, like Marc Augé’s Paris subway, generates meaning for the urban
environment through public art by attempting to speak to working class mass transit-
using publics. In both projects, city meaning is sought through an intellectual
unification centered on transportation routes. The Los Angeles Metro Rail system
symbolically brings together a conglomeration of disparate geographies of the
megalopolis by centering on the downtown area, regardless of actual traffic patterns
in what is a dispersed city.
115
Los Angeles’ 20
th
century history of urban
development is shaped by the freeway. It is the freeway, which “ultimately created
the signature landscape of modernist Los Angeles – a flat totalization, uniting a
fragmented mosaic of polarized neighborhoods segregated by race, ethnicity, gender,
and class.”
116

114
Stieber, "The Triumph of Play," 11, 13.
115
Wachs, “The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles,” 140.
116
Dear, “In the City, Time Becomes Visible,” 97.

63
The freeway is a potent symbol for the city, immortalized by Reyner Banham
as Los Angeles’ Autopia. Major cities are known by their symbols,
117
and Los
Angeles has plenty of internationally recognized symbols in addition to the freeway,
such as palm trees in Beverly Hills, the Hollywood sign, and the Los Angeles
International Airport theme restaurant. These refer mostly to the film industry,
obscuring other aspects of the city. Groningen is noted in architecture literature for
its contemporary architecture, although less so than the larger Dutch cities, but it
does not have internationally recognized symbols. Urban transportation systems
form a part of the unified symbolic identity and of its public ownership. Many urban
rail systems have symbolic significance because their unified visual design becomes
a recognized part of the city fabric, such as Hector Guimard’s Art Nouveau portals to
the Paris metro, or Harry Weese and Associates’ coffered station vaults of the
Washington, DC metro. Instead of following this traditional model, the Metro,
particularly in the Metro Red Line, but also to some extent in the Blue, Green, and
Gold Lines, planned that in each station different artists create visual markers for the
histories and cultures of the surrounding areas. The Los Angeles Metro Rail stations
are a series of enclosures which function as stages for public action and spectacle,
and which are further defined as public spaces by Metro Art installations. Public art
works invite the public to interact with the spaces that are imbued with the visual
mnemonics of geography and history. The Groningen project unifies a city with a
small historic core surrounded by 20
th
century urban development that spilled over

117
Wachs, “The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles,” 106.

64
the former ramparts, by marking its boundaries with the countryside (are there no
suburbs in Groningen?). It stresses a meta-reading of the city, “not so much the
formal and aesthetic aspects of the phenomenon of the city and its boundaries, but
much more the meaning of the phenomenon and its philosophical significance.”
118

Libeskind is concerned less with the public, but his program is still about art
commemorating the urban in a public space. The historian Frances Yates, in her
seminal book The Art of Memory wrote with eloquent erudition about the formal way
in which the arts commemorate by creating memory images,
It is not difficult to get hold of the general principles of
mnemonics….The first step was to imprint on the memory of a
series of loci or places. The commonest, though not the only, type
of mnemonic place system used was the architectural type. The
clearest description of the process is that given by Quintilian. In
order to form a series of places in memory, he says, a building is to
be remembered….The images by which the speech is to be
remembered…are then placed in imagination in the places which
have been memorized in the building.
119

Accordingly, the visual image propels the sequence of remembered facts, forming a
path in the narrative structure of memory. Metro Art and city markers are types of
visual images that create and validate urban collective memories. These works are
mnemonic devices, which potentially accommodate as many memories as there are
social groups willing to read them, because, as Maurice Halbwachs wrote, memory is
by nature multiple yet specific, collective and plural, yet individual. An important
question for any kind of art projects within a transportation setting is how can

118
Stieber, “The Triumph of Play,” 17.
119
Yates, The Art of Memory, 3.

65
memory be achieved and retained if public art is experienced in a state of
distraction?
The idea of marking the city as a series of interconnected public spaces, as
well as a center of concentrated human activities, spans across historic periods and
cultures. The former, defining the city as a centered and logical physical space is
important particularly in the case of Los Angeles. The latter, describing the city as a
palimpsest of cultural and memorial symbols plays a greater role in Groningen.
These projects conceptualize the cities as centered public (as opposed to private or
corporate) realms, spatially united and centralized as discursive sites.
120
Both cities,
through these projects, are updating their historic urban text.
This thesis arises in part from a conscious examination of my interests in the
urban spaces of flows. As a tourist (even in my own city of Los Angeles), I am
aware of my status as a flâneuse, botanizing the asphalt, to use one of Walter
Benjamin’s terms.
121
I am a member of the spectating audience and a consumer of
public spaces and panoramas, also aptly described by Benjamin.
122
Although in the
beginning of my thesis I state that the spaces of transportation are public places, they
are increasingly part of the phantasmagoric commodified spaces of mass consumer
culture.
123
City governments exert public control over these spaces through public
art, thus valorizing urban identity at a time of a “fundamental cultural shift in which

120
Charlesworth, City Edge, 2-3.
121
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 68.
122
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 34.
123
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 40.

66
architecture and urban planning, formerly the primary media for expressing a vision
of the city, are displaced by other media more intimate with marketing and
advertising.”
124
As a daily user of public transportation, I try to distinguish, albeit in
a distracted state, among the different kinds of markers that Los Angeles assaults me
with, to map my own meanderings through the city’s geography and history.
I originally wanted to contrast the two projects. The genesis of the Books of
Groningen is in architectural drawings and plans, encapsulating a system of markers.
Because none of the participants are artists, it is fair to pose the question whether this
project is public art. Yes, because the markers intervene in the landscape on a visual
and symbolic level, and are designed to function as an artificial stimulation of the
imagination and the senses. The Metro Art projects are governed by the processes of
a civic bureaucratic agency, the primary function of which is not art but public
transportation. The projects are public art not only because the program sanctions
them as such, but primarily because they represent the artists’ creative interventions
within the stations to create symbolic and imaginary evocations of public spaces,
places, and local histories. I initially accepted both programs as examples of public
art, and at first construed the Books of Groningen as a critique of a synoptic view of
the city, in contrast to Los Angeles, which appeared to embrace a unified view of the
metropolis as constitutive of many parts. As a librarian I was also interested in the
different modes of dissemination of information about the projects. The Books of
Groningen is first and foremost a book, which, in turn, generated an exhibition with

124
Kwon, One Place After Another, 54.

67
an accompanying catalog, as well as discussions published in news and journal
sources and on the World Wide Web. It is a finite project, bound to a certain extent
by the published information and by the temporary nature of the program. The
Metro Art projects have been discussed in news and other publications, less because
of their own intellectual or artistic merits, and more as part of larger discussions
about public transportation funding or trends within art in transit projects around the
world. As the Los Angeles Metro expands its rail lines and the number of permanent
and temporary projects increases, Metro Art has the potential to be a program
without boundaries, unified only by its stated objective to create a sense of place and
engage transit riders.
125

The further I thought through these projects, the more they began to converge
in ways that I originally did not anticipate. I came to appreciate that both attempt to
counteract the postmodern, networked city, characterized as a space without a
coherent language, without a unifying syntax, unmappable.
126
Art was an instrument
used to define spaces as public, however that public was conceived. To a certain
extent, the Groningen and Los Angeles art works within transportation nodes blurred
the dichotomy between public places as visual or iconic, and public places as an
“occupied milieu, the effects and significance of which accrue through tactility, use,
and engagement over time.”
127
These projects could not “be reduced under largely

125
Metro Art, http://www.metro.net/about_us/metroart/default.htm, (accessed September 13,2006).
126
Leong, “Readings of the Attenuated Landscape,” 210.
127
Corner, “Eidetic Operations and New Landscape,” 158.

68
representational regimes to simply expressing or commenting”
128
on the human
condition, although there was more of that in the philosophical underpinnings of the
Groningen project. Art as a tool became a symbolic invocation of the city,
something that lets the public not just look at the environment but see it and situate
within it. Frank Mohr, the power behind the Groningen project, titled his
introduction to the exhibition catalog: “I am proud to live in a city.”
129
Perhaps the
Los Angeles Metro planners would like the commuters to say: “I am proud to work
in the city.”
I was limited in this thesis by several circumstances. The Books of
Groningen project is described in various exhibition catalogs and mentioned by
writers relating it to the philosophies of aesthetics and the built environment. Yet the
dearth of information about the relationship of the public commissioning process to
the project suggests that this and similar projects offer fertile ground for public art
studies. Analyses of the Books markers are mostly valedictory and do not offer a
framework for critique of the project’s publicness. In the case of the Los Angeles
Metro Art projects, besides the politically astute but intellectually ambiguous civic
contention that art connects society, brightens the mundane, and brings humanity to
the alienated urban core, there seemed to be little describing the vision of common
urban public space to buttress the place-making function of public art. The reaction

128
Corner, “Eidetic Operations and New Landscape,” 158.
129
Mohr, “I Am Proud to Live in a City,” 7.

69
of the public in both cases is mostly documented in the negative, and mostly from
news sources.
It is my contention that civic leaders in both cases implicitly accepted a
particular vision of a city as rooted in a historic or memorial tradition, and
implemented that vision through two very different kinds of commissions of art in
public spaces. Despite the fact that history and memory are two different things,
they are often connected together in discussions on public places, and I implicitly
treat them as such in the thesis, conflating ideas within the works of Habermas and
Halbwachs. Art is a tool that creates city emblems, which are part of the intellectual
symbols contextualizing urban spaces as described by Certeau. It is fitting,
therefore, to close this paper with a mention of yet another symbolic function of the
art of the city, articulated by Benjamin and Kwon, that of propagating capitalist
consumer culture. “Art brings in tourists and deep-pocketed sophisticates. World-
class cities have buildings designed by famous architects, controversial public art
pieces and passels of van Goghs. World-class cities in turn attract large companies,
community investment and good international press. Art, in short, is good
business.”
130
City business, that is.

130
Steinhauer, “The Arts Administration,” 2.1.

70
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Two examples of public art in transit locations, the temporary Books of Groningen, curated by Daniel Libeskind in the provincial Dutch capital of Groningen, and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's permanent Metro Art works at the Metro Rail stations, are analyzed as place making projects. The thesis traces how the urban environment has been theorized as a space, and examines the extent to which "art in public places" and "art in the public interest" models symbolically infuse a sense of place into the contemporary conceptions of the city. The first two sections examine themes from urban studies within the discipline of public art

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Asset Metadata

Creator Wallach, Ruth (author)

Core Title Re-creating the city; place-making through public art

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 04/11/2007

Defense Date 05/01/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Books of Groningen,Daniel Libeskind,Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority,metro art,OAI-PMH Harvest,public sphere

Place Name Los Angeles (counties)

Language English

Advisor Levy, Caryl (committee chair), Singley, Paulette (committee chair), Pardo, Jorge (committee member)

Creator Email rwallach@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m376

Unique identifier UC1328930

Identifier etd-Wallach-20070411 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-323829 (legacy record id),usctheses-m376 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Wallach-20070411.pdf

Dmrecord 323829

Document Type Thesis

Rights Wallach, Ruth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu