Column: Ann Arbor’s Lumps of Art

Editor’s note: On Nov. 14, 2011, the Ann Arbor city council held a working session on the subject of its public art ordinance – the Percent for Art program. On Nov. 21, the council will take up the issue of a revision to the public art ordinance, which was postponed from its Sept. 19 meeting. The proposed revisions to the ordinance include prohibiting the use of the street repair millage for public art, and a requirement that public art funds be spent within a certain time period.

I am not a lunatic.

There.

Mostly, when you begin by asserting a lack of mental illness, you’ve already lost the argument. No matter what the argument is. Yet I remain steadfast.

I am not a lunatic.

It’s a testament, I think, to the political skill of Ann Arbor’s elected officials and supporters of public art that I have to begin that way. The majority of these officials and members of the arts community have so far been resistant to calls for revision to the city’s public art ordinance. That ordinance allocates 1% of all city capital improvement projects to fund public works of art.

The current conversation about the city’s public art ordinance is one that makes critics of the ordinance into lunatics.

We are lunatics, because we just don’t understand the value of art to society in general. We are lunatics, because we just don’t understand the importance of art to Ann Arbor’s heart and soul in particular. We are lunatics, because we don’t understand how little money the ordinance generates for art. We are lunatics, because we don’t understand how long it takes to bring a large work of art to fruition. And so on.

Actually, I do understand all of that. And more.

But to convince you I’m not a lunatic, I’d like to begin by sharing a vignette from a significant academic paper on semantics, written by Angelika Kratzer back in 1989. (No, seriously, I’m not a lunatic.) I’m picking Kratzer’s “Investigation into the Lumps of Thought” because it features a dialogue with a genuine, bona fide, authentic lunatic.

That guy, now he’s a lunatic.

By the end of this column, I hope to have convinced you that I’m nothing like that guy.

Of the subfields in the academic discipline of linguistics, it’s semantics, the science of meaning, that is perhaps the murkiest. But occasionally, a semanticist will write something that is accessible even to someone like me and you. In Kratzer’s 1989 paper, she establishes the foundation of an event-based semantics.

And she does it by appealing to everyone’s basic intuition that allows people to distinguish between someone who’s being persnickety (the pedant) and someone who’s flat-out crazy (the lunatic). From Kratzer’s “Investigation into Lumps of Thought“:

Imagine the following situation: One evening in 1905, Paula painted a still life with apples and bananas. She spent most of the evening painting and left the easel only to make herself a cup of tea, eat a piece of bread, discard a banana or look for an apple displaying a particular shade of red. Against the background of this situation, consider the following two dialogues that might have taken place the following day:

Dialogue with a Pedant
Pedant: What did you do yesterday evening?
Paula: The only thing I did yesterday evening was paint this still life over there.
Pedant: This cannot be true. You must have done something else like eat, drink, look out of the window.
Paula: Yes, strictly speaking, I did other things besides paint this still life. I made myself a cup of tea, ate a piece of bread, discarded a banana, and went to the kitchen to look for an apple.

Dialogue with a Lunatic
Lunatic: What did you do yesterday evening?
Paula: The only thing I did yesterday evening was paint this still life over there.
Lunatic: This is not true. You also painted these apples and you also painted these bananas. Hence painting this still life was not the only thing you did yesterday evening.

Kratzer is appealing to a basic intuition: Some things that happen in the world get lumped together in people’s minds as part of the same event; but other things are intuitively understood as separate events. It’s easy to peg the pedant as just that – a jerk who in Kratzer’s phrase is “a captive of his unfortunate character.” The lunatic isn’t a jerk – he’s just crazy. The “event” of someone painting a still life with a banana and an apple, already includes painting the apple and the banana. So a person can’t rationally claim to have done three separate things – paint an apple, paint a banana, and paint a still life with an apple and a banana.

How are “events” relevant to the city of Ann Arbor’s public art program?

First, note that Ann Arbor’s public art ordinance does not require that 1% of revenues to particular funds be spent on public art. What the public art ordinance does require is that 1% of the budget for each capital improvement project be set aside for public art. There must be an “event” of some construction project to which the public art money is tied. So, what the ordinance does is establish legislatively a link between an actual construction project – for which the city has determined there is an independent need – and funding for public art.

The city of Ann Arbor would like, in some sense, to analyze the construction of a project, which it needed to build anyway, as part of the same “event” as the construction of a piece of public art, paid for out of that project’s budget. This was expressed by city councilmember Carsten Hohnke at the council’s Sept. 19, 2011 meeting, when he suggested that the ordinance simply says something about the way that the city builds the things it chooses to build.

Why is it important for the city to lump the event of constructing a piece of art into the event of constructing, for example, a seat wall in a park? It’s related to the legality of using project budget funds for purposes other than those for which they are legally dedicated. For example, when Ann Arbor residents voted to approve a tax to pay for capital improvements in parks, they did not approve that tax money for any other purpose than capital improvements in parks. In the current local debate on public art, I don’t think there’s any dispute about the idea that money generated by the parks capital improvement tax can’t be used for anything other than capital improvements in parks.

What’s disputed, I think, is whether pieces of art like Traven Pelletier’s metal tree sculptures in West Park are really part of the same “event” of the capital improvement project, out of which budget the art was funded. (Pelletier’s trees were planned and built in coordination with a seat wall construction project near the West Park bandshell, as part of a broader West Park renovation. The trees were the first pieces of art to be installed under the city’s Percent for Art program, which was created in 2007.)

At the Sept. 19 city council meeting, Hohnke ventured that the fountain designed by Herbert Dreiseitl, and paid for with public art funds, was characterized by the city’s decision to construct a building with a public plaza. And the way that public plaza was designed and built included a piece of public art. I don’t think that’s actually a legitimate way of describing the “way” the municipal center was designed and built. A legitimate way of describing it includes three events – design and construction of the building, the plaza, and the piece of art.

Similarly, I don’t think that Pelletier’s metal tree sculptures are part of the same “event” as the design and construction of the West Park seat walls. I’m just not buying the idea that it’s even possible to design and build seat walls – a capital improvement determined by the city to be needed – in a metal-tree-sculpture kind of way. But I’m willing to grant that you could build seat walls here, and then you could build metal trees right there – as two separate, distinct projects.

So modifying Kratzer’s dialogues with the pedant and the lunatic to adapt them to the West Park scenario would make for something like the following:

Dialogue with a Pedant
Pedant: What did you do last summer?
Paula: The only thing I did last summer was design and build these seat walls in West Park.
Pedant: This cannot be true. You must have done something else, like travel to the park, pet one of the dogs who run through the park, look up at the sky.
Paula: Yes, strictly speaking, I did other things besides build and design the seat walls in West Park. I played basketball at the court in West Park, watched the swirl concentrators get installed, and washed my clothes of all the construction dirt that accumulated in them.

Dialogue with Lunatic (A)
Lunatic: What did you do last summer?
Paula: The only thing I did last summer was design and build these seat walls in West Park.
Lunatic: This is not true. You also mortared those rocks together and you also leveled off the dirt behind the rocks you had set together. Hence designing and building these seat walls in West Park was not the only thing you did last summer.

Dialogue with a “Lunatic” (B)
Lunatic: What did you do last summer?
Paula: The only thing I did last summer was design and build these seat walls in West Park.
Lunatic: This is not true. You also designed and built a metal tree sculpture next to the seat walls. Hence, designing and building these seat walls in West Park was not the only thing you did last summer.

Lunatic (A) is a lunatic, in the same way that Kratzer’s lunatic is a lunatic. It’s my contention, however, that Lunatic (B) is not a lunatic at all, but rather just a guy who can see what anyone else can: Construction of the tree sculptures isn’t part of the same “event” as the seat wall construction. You can look at the sculpture and tell that; but the fact that the city had to hire an actual artist and create a request for proposals is also a tip-off to the fact that these are separate and distinct projects.

You can imagine situations where the art is somehow more deeply integrated into a project. For example, that painting by Alvey Jones, included as the lead art at the top of this column, is not hanging on a wall. It’s actually the panel that covers the access to the attic of my house.

That was a private capital improvement project undertaken a couple of summers ago.

For that particular project, I can at least entertain the idea that the painting is actually part of the attic access replacement project. One way I can tell is this: If I remove Alvey’s painting, I no longer have the covering to the attic access. By way of contrast, if we were to remove the metal trees in West Park, we’d still have functional seat walls. And if we were to remove Dreiseitl’s fountain, we’d still have a functional public plaza.

If Ann Arbor’s public art projects were integrated in their respective capital improvement projects the same way that Alvey Jones’ painting is integrated into my attic access panel, I think that would go a long way towards a legal defense for the use of the funds. [Ann Arbor city attorney Stephen Postema has for a few years now declined to offer a written opinion for public perusal explaining his view of the legal foundation for the program, which at least on its face violates the prohibition against using dedicated funds for purposes other than which they are dedicated.]

But even then, you’d still have a situation where, by ordinance, the city would be required to make every capital improvement project 1% more expensive than it needs to be. I’m not sure that’s a great public policy position to take.

Something like 5% of The Chronicle’s freelance budget goes to compensate Alvey Jones for the monthly Bezonki cartoon. So I understand the significance and the importance of art both generally and specifically – to the point that I’m willing to reach into my own pocket to add art to The Chronicle, even though that falls outside the scope of our main mission of covering local government and civic affairs.

But I’d be a lunatic to allow my local government to reach into my pocket, even just that tiny little one-percent bit, to acquire pieces of art for us to own as a community, when we voters haven’t authorized the city to do that.

And I’m not a lunatic.

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