.POETRY AND ART IN CHICAGO:  A PROSIMETRICAL COMPLAINT.

by Robert Klein Engler

Part Two of a two-part essay. Part One appeared in the Jan '03 issue.

The relations that exist between the social and political condition of a people and the genius of its authors are always numerous, whoever knows the one is never completely ignorant of the other...Taken as a whole, literature in democratic ages can never present, as it does in the periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, and regularity...The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste.

Tocqueville saw this desire "to stir the passions" as a natural outgrowth of democracy. Though democratic societies would favor mediocrity over excellence, that mediocrity was not to be promoted by the state. This French thinker believed that eventually America would create its own kind of art and literature. In its Midwest capital, that creation is hindered by politicalization.

Here, the moribund liberal state furthers mediocrity because it is in the political interest of the state to do so. Liberal ideology in its moribund form produces its opposite. If the art that does emerge is critical of the state, it is ignored and excluded.

It is a sad thing when a people tend to mediocrity, but it is another much more disappointing thing when government encourages their mediocrity. In Chicago, mediocrity from the bottom up is nothing new; what is new is that here mediocrity has been and continues to be institutionalized from the top down.

Two examples of institutional prevention, one from the poetry and the other from the public art arena, will flesh the bones of my complaint:  the 2001 Sun-Times poetry contest and the Chicago Riverwalk Gateway competition. I assert that the winners of these contests got their awards, not by virtue of artistic craft, but rather, by virtue of political and ideological connection.

The Sun-Times poetry contest evolved out of Chicago slam and performance. The first-place poem, "Black Poets on Death's Corner" by performance poet Tyehimba Jess, was selected by Mark Strand, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry and professor at the University of Chicago, Marc Smith, founder of the performance poetry phenomenon, the "slam,'' and Regie Gibson, the man on whose life the film Love Jones was based. I contend that Jess's poem ("Black boy bears diamond studded/ black cap bearing legend of/ black life spray painted/ on brick corner wall:  RIP L.C.") is not a first class poem worthy of such honor, but rather, that its selection is merely propaganda for the failed concerns of a moribund liberalism.

See for yourself:  some of the other winning poems were even worse. Now, I know full well that a critic of contests runs the risk of sounding like sour grapes. However, if those grapes can be transformed into a vintage wine, then perhaps words of condemnation will change to expressions of gratitude.

The Sun-Times has confirmed to me that none of the three judges read all of the more than 5,000 entries and that the poems were prescreened by various unnamed readers. Many poets I know questioned the integrity of this process. "One judge had no integrity, another judge can't even spell the word, and a third judge forgot what it meant," was a typical comment. Based on the results printed in the Sun-Times, I find that the judges recognized mediocrity and rewarded it. But what of the screeners who determined which poems made the first cut or the second? How many poems did the judges in fact read, individually and in common? These questions need answers if the Sun-Times poetry contest is to continue and be creditable.

In a letter to the Chicagopoetry.com web site, Jane Kostowicz wrote:

Does anyone find it a bit suspicious that Tyehimba Jess, the first place $1,000 winner, is best friends with Regie Gibson, one of the judges, and was on The Green Mill slam team, and that Marc Smith, one of the other judges, hosts at the Green Mill?

In view of these results, it seems the Sun-Times would have been better served if its contest judges had just thrown all the entries into a revolving drum and drawn three at random. But it's just business as usual in the Chicago arts scene:   institutional use of art to placate the minorities, garner votes, and stem social unrest, while city officials prove themselves to be the Philistines everyone suspected them of being.

What serious artists and poets are left in the city need to reassess their careers. If they choose to engage the world, then they may have to put their art in the service of a rival politics, a politics that improves the public art in Chicago.

Just as a counterfeit coin has two sides, so does the counterfeit ideology of art in Chicago. Like poetry, the visual arts are afflicted, too. I used to think that Mary Kloak Wolf, whose South Loop gallery is bulging with material destined for a landfill, was the only Chicago artist whose every piece was irredeemably bad. But I have since seen Ellen Lanyon's "Riverwalk Gateway," installed at the pedestrian and bicycle passageway under the Lake Shore Drive Bridge.

The Riverwalk Gateway Project is a series of ceramic murals. The $190,000 commission, the city's most expensive artwork to date, consists of 16 narrative panels and 12 decorative panels installed along parallel walls of the Riverwalk tunnel. The narrative panels trace the history of the Chicago River, from the explorations of Marquette and Joliet, through modern-day river clean-up efforts.

Faceless bodies row canoes, maps unroll like the lids off sardine cans, too many silhouettes float in space, and giant, green fish jump over toothpick bridges. The draftsmanship of these murals is weak, the colors thin, and the composition high-schoolish.

"Public art is hard to do well, and I think Ellen has done a magnificent job with this one," said Daniel Schulman, associate curator in the department of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. "She knows the city's history and worked from her complete expressive arsenal. I think this could be the most successful public art project in Chicago so far." When the moribund liberal state needs a spokesperson to spin its failures, it can always find one at the AIC.

The Chicago Reader reported the rigmarole over this project. A man sued the city for breach of contract, claiming sources from the art agency which helped to sponsor the project said that they had to have a woman artist, that there was already enough work by men displayed around the city. Thus, the specter of Affirmative Action haunts the Riverwalk Gateway. The controversy is now about ideology and Affirmative Action and not art.

How many of those new faces on these decision-making committees are familiar with Lorado Taft and his ideas? Born in 1860 in Elmwood, Illinois, Taft's values about public art are still important today. Is the aim of public art to affirm American ideals and lift up the spirits of all those who view it, or is it to give those who are from this in-group or that out-group a chance to be seen, even if they make up by affiliation for what they lack in talent? For Chicago arts administrators, the answer is political—and not uplifting.

The Fountain of the Great Lakes by Lorado Taft shows Lanyon's work for the failure it is. We do well to look at and read Taft again, and then seriously consider his work before we spend more tax money on Affirmative Action public art projects.

Timothy J. Gravy's book, Public Sculpture:  Lorado Taft and the Beautification of Chicago, (University of Illinois Press) tells the story. Spend an afternoon walking around the city and looking at the Riverwalk Gateway and The Fountain of the Great Lakes. See whether you don't agree with Taft that the Riverwalk Gateway is another "nondescript pile of masonry." Take a walk in late November, when a few trees in the park hold on to their bitter confetti of burgundy and gold. Clouds hang over the lake like a bruise against the prairie sky.

Walk through the tunnel of patronage and sense that the New World no longer seems new, feel the old demons return. What look like thugs huddle by fires in oil drums to keep warm. All around, cotton-drab citizens, their eyes and ears numb, file off to work. Hungry, they would rather have a turnip than a turn of phrase. Soon, moribund liberalism will begin to eat its children.

The hardworking people of Chicago deserve better than what issues when politics combine with art and poetry. They deserve the same grace which the rich can afford on their suburban estates, not propaganda masquerading as social justice. Hollywood's elite and liberalism's wealthy support policies of Affirmative Action and debased taste because they realize such policies are borne into town on the swayed backs of the working class, not on their secure fortunes.

Politicians who are in power thanks to their affirmative action policies think that by giving space to the mediocre they can stay in power. They do this at the expense of the workers whose taxes they squander on a public art that is not worthy of a free people. No one would tolerate such an attitude toward the performance in a professional sports arena. Why should we have to see it under Lake Shore Drive or in the pages of the Sun-Times?

In his recent book, My Love Affair With America (The Free Press), Norman Podhoretz considers the accomplishments of the world's great civilizations, such as czarist Russia and Periclean Athens.

I believe with all my heart that the United States of America belongs on that list. [Yet,] we have not earned a place on it, as the others mainly did, by our contributions to the arts. In this respect, we have not fulfilled the dreams of John Adams.

This observation could be discounted as the grumbling of a New York intellectual who looks down his nose at Chicago, and the even lesser art made here, but I believe it is more than that.

Podhoretz may be correct about American art in general. And the proof he needs is right here. That a work like Ellen Lanyon's Riverwalk Gateway could be selected and installed at great expense proves that the political machine that runs this city is bringing us mediocrity in the name of Affirmative Action repackaged as "diversity." Where will it end? Certainly not with an enlightened public. It is enough to recall the words of Boethius:  "[I]nasmuch as you are ignorant of the end of all things, you imagine that worthless and wicked men are powerful and happy."

For many ordinary working people in Chicago, contemporary art and poetry are mysteries. They feel obliged to like art and poetry, but cannot relate well to what they see and hear, and so feel guilty and dismayed. Soon, they just ignore it all, leaving it up to the specialists, the arts administrators and educators who now control most public art and poetry.

If there were a way to understand the art and poetry of Chicago, a theory to explain all the particulars seen and heard in the public realm, then many ordinary Chicagoans would take more interest in the work advanced by the city's art experts. I propose such a theory in this essay. Simply put, most public art and poetry in Chicago is propaganda for the moribund liberal state; in Chicago, most public and much private art gets made for the sake of votes, hardly ever as art for art's sake. If an ordinary Chicagoan goes to a gallery or to a poetry event with that understanding, what he sees will be transparent, what he hears will be clear. Moreover, he will rightly conclude that this art and poetry propaganda is dreadful propaganda at that.

Public galleries and poetry events further a wish for equality at the expense of reality. No mystery, art and poetry are really the sleight of hand we know as Chicago politics, the same sleight of hand that lets dead men vote. The bad becomes the good for the sake of power. Chicago makes its good artists suffer and its bad artists prosper.

Yet, there is an uneasiness in the city. The art and poetry which moribund liberals thought would save them—and their political ideology—has brought them to the edge of the New World and they are afraid of falling off. They cannot bear to acknowledge that events have pricked the balloon of their ideology, even as they see that ordinary people no longer come to the shrines of art to worship and offer alms.

Watch how the true believers hurry from one emptiness to another, still hoping that this gallery or that declamation will reaffirm what they were taught to believe. Barring that, they hurry from one arbitrary appointment to the next. That woman wearing Birkenstock sandals wants to get her childbirth out of the way quickly so she can climb a mountain. This man driving a BMW needs more illegal aliens to staff his landscaping business. That professor is impatient with his students and insults them if they dream of being firemen. Like a patient delirious and near the end, moribund liberal art cries out one incoherent avowal after

None of the deathwatchers dares admit that their purges will sweep away America along with the patient; the nation will pass in the wind like the leaf confetti of November. In its place, a hodgepodge of do-rags, fu-dogs, and taco stands tend the mongrel souls of the new Chicago. Born from resentment and the policies of a moribund liberalism, the barbarians wait to inherit the city and decorate it with their dayglow cartoons. Perhaps they will appear tomorrow in the street wearing the gray uniform of postmodernism.

When we let art and poetry be politicized, we create an opening where the relative values of postmodernism dominate. This is the irony of the Sun-Times poetry contest and the Riverwalk Gateway. The standards that these contests supposed instead sink into the muck of politics and posturing. Even the Pulitzer Prize and the bucolic Illinois poets who win it succumb to the corrosion of relativism. We end up praising the pathetic, because, after all, everyone can be pathetic.

When politics dominate the arts, the public gets cut-rate poems and ugly murals under the Lake Shore Drive Bridge. If this trend continues, Chicago will need a separate art landfill just to hold all this mediocrity (along with the garbage churned out by its student Gallery 37).

Someday, perhaps in a more sensible though barren future, one yet unborn may stir the embers and find a few scraps of poetry and art in the ashes. For him, this essay will be a long-delayed report from the interior.