Along the Way

A passerby volunteered that it was “repugnant, gross, and unesoteric,” although I think he meant “unaesthetic.” A letter to the newspaper called it “a stylized dog with a pagoda on its back.” Another suggested it be renamed “Dragonfly Airport.” A county supervisor scowled that it should be condemned under the Urban Blight Act. But, when it became a campaign issue, a candidate for mayor said he thought “this community ought to lighten up a little bit.” Finally an exasperated commentator sputtered, “Grow up, Tucson!”

AND THEY CALL THAT SCULPTURE?

This monsoon of invective was triggered by a seemingly benign $150,000 present the city gave its downtown in the summer of 1991: a commissioned sculpture by David Black of Columbus, Ohio, titled Sonora. The red steel behemoth was installed in a prominent location, in the plaza of the new main library at Stone Avenue and Pennington Street, and the howls of outrage began before the workmen's dust settled. A week after the dedication, The Arizona Daily Star devoted 3/4ths of a page to letters about it. Three correspondents were for it, eight were furious.

Nothing, except talk of freeways, seems to rile Tucson as much as public sculpture. Sonora was only the latest in a decade-long string of such imbroglios.

In 1981 a delegation of Mexican journalists presented the city with an imposing 14-foot-high bronze equestrian statue of Pancho Villa. As gifts of friendship go, this was admittedly a little odd: Villa, a controversial figure even in Mexico today, is best remembered north of the border for leading the only invasion of the U.S. mainland this century, at Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916.

Tucson reacted as if Villa had staged the raid only last weekend. The mayor boycotted the dedication ceremony. A midnight commentator painted a yellow stripe down Villa's back. Historians furiously debated whether Villa was a Mexican revolutionary hero or a mere terrorist. One man pounded 19 white crosses into the grass beside the statue to commemorate the deaths of the 19 Americans in the Columbus raid, and a crowd of Mexican-Americans came out to protest his protest.

And four years after Villa was installed in Veinte de Agosto Park downtown, the Tucson Citizen polled its readers on their favorite public sculpture. Winner: Pancho Villa.

Controversy has engulfed several public sculptures at the University of Arizona, most fiercely Athena Tacha's Curving Arcades at the Campbell Avenue Third Street campus entrance. As it was being installed, a poll of students found 56 percent upset about it. Star columnist Steve Emerine said it looked like rows of giant tweezers stuck in the grass. Tacha,smoldering from the reception Tucson was giving her work, fired back, unleashing the dreaded Ph-word: Philistines.

Well, what about it? Is all the fighting a sign of Tucson's intellectual vitality, or are we indeed yokels?

I thought I'd ask the Star and Citizen's art critics, who spend their furrowed-brow time pondering just these questions. Both said Tucson is no freak; public sculpture always has been controversial. “Michelangelo's David was literally stoned when it was rolled through the streets for the first time,” said the Star's Robert S. Cauthorn. “The Eiffel Tower was famous for the rage it engendered. The reason these things upset people is that they're both baffling and enduring.” The Citizen's Charlotte Lowe said the reason public sculpture so vexes the populace is that it's bought with our money. “Because it's 'public,' we're made to expect it will fulfill our needs,” she said. “It's not so much seen as art, but as a public service. If it's hot outside, we want it to make us feel cool. If it's cold, we want it to make us feel warm. We want it to address all our emotional needs.

“When you say 'public sculpture,' people think, 'It's mine.' In Japan they call it 'open-air sculpture.' They don't have half the problems with it that we do. Their term addresses the air rather than the public.” Black, whose crimson Sonora creation was in the eye of the latest public hurricane, said he wasn't hurt by the “honest criticism” heaped on his work. He did, however, think this sort of controversy is peculiarly American. “It's public money that bought it,” he said. “And public sculpture, for most Americans, is an option. A library is a necessity, but the sculpture in front of it isn't. Europeans take it in stride. For them, it's part of being civilized.” Perhaps. But I know I'd rather live in a town where people write smoking letters and stage demonstrations over a sculpture than in a mature, sophisticated old-world city where people wait to read the art critics before they decide what they should think. As we fight about art, we learn about it. As we battle over public sculpture and architecture, we express our concern about the urban environment we're building for ourselves. Nothing wrong with any of this.

Myself, I'm undecided about Black's Sonora. The sober-observer half of my brain (I critique architecture for the Tucson Weekly) finds it an unfocused jumble of images, too many ideas vying for attention at once: abstract images of mountains, bell towers, prehistoric pots, and an Oriental pagoda. Better it should have been a simple dragonfly airport. The emotional half loves the weird serpentine shadow that Sonora's undulating tail casts on the plaza in the afternoon and savors even more all the hell this sculpture has raised.

At any rate, Tucson has a prominent downtown landmark, and Sonora has acquired a nickname that suggests we're beginning to get used to it, sort of. “I'll meet you for lunch downtown,” we now say, “by The Red Thing.”