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Sunday, October 03, 2004
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DEVICE TO ROOT OUT EVIL
Universities are notorious dupes for shitty outdoor sculpture. There are a number of reasons for this. First, universities are anxious to project an air of cultural sophistication, and artworks that urge a cool acceptance of subversive notions help them out. Second, universities wish to be seen as playful, not merely serious, places. They wish to say Well, sure, we ponder Pindar, but we’re also fun, and hip. So they buy a lot of brightly colored abstract stuff - huge blue balls suspended over fountains, outsized orange projectiles - as well as zoomorphic oddities, like the hippopotamus UD’s campus has lately hauled in front of the performance center. Why a hippo? Was George Washington a hippophile? No, but the university’s president is in search of a mascot. The University of Maryland, where UD’s husband teaches, has a deeply entrenched turtle mascot whose every appearance in statue form knits up this huge and diverse academic community with a sense of common purpose. The hippo is intended to do this for UD’s campus. In an “unprecedented” move, however, the president of Stanford University today “terminated plans to acquire a 25-foot sculpture from prominent New York-based artist Dennis Oppenheim.” “Device to Root Out Evil” is an upended church, its steeple dug deeply into the ground, its pews sticking high in the air. The depressingly obvious meaning of this sculpture - religion is an idiot’s game because it thinks it can distinguish between good and evil the way, say, a pig’s snout can smell out a truffle - is more than enough to disqualify it from display, UD figures, in an even minimally sentient environment. But it isn’t exactly the piece’s stupidity that did it in. Its crude message offended Stanford’s Dean of Religious Life, and he asked that it be rejected. The sculptor is really pissed off: “I’m out $100,000 easy,” says Oppenheim. And anyway, the piece isn’t about religion: “It’s about the fusion of sculpture and architecture. … [A church] is the only structure with a protruding spire to go into the ground.” The Chrysler Building? Disney Castle? Any New England town hall? Any Stalinist Palace of Culture? Either side of the Taj Mahal? Anyway, after a certain amount of sniffling about censorship, Stanford will pay off the guy. He’s already named his price. [ps: This is installation number one of a University Diaries series titled Dumb Shit That Artists Say.] |