DANCING IN THE LANDSCAPE

Athena Tacha's belief that art should be enjoyed by everyone has led to the creation of over thirty public sculptures in twenty-five years. Nearly all of them, from Alaska to Florida and New York to Arizona, are reproduced full-page in the book "Dancing in the Landscape:the Sculpture of Athena Tacha" - the second book on the artist to appear in the last couple of years ("Cosmic Rhythms: Athena Tacha's Public Sculpture", 1999, is equally inclusive but stresses more her biography and early work). Tacha's lucid documentation of her executed sculptures, as well as of fifty "finalist's proposals" for other competitions, accompany over 200 color illustrations.

As a pioneer of "site specific" sculpture in the 1970's, Tacha completed her first two public works in Ohio: Oberlin, where she taught sculpture at Oberlin College, and downtown Cleveland. Other commissions followed quickly. Most of them resulted from winning competitions, and she is as candid when she writes about losing a competition as when she wins. Few proposals were made in the abstract. Nearly always, Tacha's consideration of the site and its use is the impetus for the design.

"Connections", commissioned for the City of Philadelphia in 1981 and completed in 1992, is, I believe, an ideal manifestation of her art. Probably one of the first parks designed as an environmental sculpture, it covers an entire city block. Tacha writes, "I modeled the land through terraced planters, while coloring and texturing it with flowering ground-covers, trees and rocks." Various neighborhoods surround the park and Tacha's goal was to connect them with a "park that will offer a quiet atmosphere for relaxing, picnicking, jogging and playing. More than that, I hope it will offer a magical and healing environment within the stressful fabric of an inner city."

The book is divided into sections, one for each category of her large, creative production: Waterfronts, Parks and Plazas, Steps and Pathways, Waterfalls and Fountains, Mazes, Arcades and Colonnades, Memorials. We, the public, are participants in Tacha's sculptures. We can walk around them, sit on them, or wander through them. In doing so, the sculptures may obfuscate our sense of time, space and gravity. And although the book doesn't say this, the sculptures are fun. From personal experience I can say that Tacha's public art has given me more pleasure than any marble politician on a plinth or bronze hero on a horse.

Harriet Senie's essay introduces the reader to Tacha's background and the evolution of her work. Senie also addresses the tragedy of the lack of care and destruction of public art. Some of Tacha's thoughtfully conceived, carefully constructed work has been damaged or completely destroyed. This reason alone makes the book an invaluable record of her public art.

In an interview with Glenn Harper, Tacha explains what her work means to her: "I always want to get away from typical art that goes in museums and collections. That's why I do public art, to escape the consumerism and contextualization of art. It goes against the grain to follow Duchamp's principle that whatever you put in a museum is art. To me, it has to be made or intended as art. I don't care if people call my work art, but I make it to communicate something."

Harper's interview is of special interest because it dwells on Tacha's private art. There have been only a few exhibitions of these small and personal sculptures created from ingredients as unexpected as the works themselves: abalone shells, wine corks, feathers, discarded thread, pine cones, broken glass from automobile accidents, and expanded sprayed foam found in a London construction gondola. The small but lovely reproductions in the interview show us what has emerged from this motley assortment: helmets, armor, masks and shields stemming from reality and ending in the realm of fantasy.

They are at once ironic and ambiguous: in Double Sided-Shield for Ellen, Tacha explains, "the abalone shells are stuck on window screening, so it is a flexible shield, and the back is coated with broken glass from automobile accidents. It is both scratchy when you hold it, and it can't protect you because it's floppy. Again it pursues the built-in contradictions of these works." Many of these small pieces are dedicated to dear friends who have died from cancer. They are little memorials to "the vulnerability of the human body that nothing can protect."

If nothing else, the private sculpture reveals the cosmic scope of Tacha's irrepressible imagination. But more than that, it tells us a lot about the depth of her feelings, her caring for friends, and allows us glimpses into the secret places in her mind. Although this is a small portion of the book, it tells us a great deal about the woman who creates the public sculpture and whose verbal gift crystallizes her ideas here in Dancing in the Landscape.

In spite of its small print (its only fault), this handsomely illustrated and designed volume is a highly fascinating and informative reference for students, teachers, landscape architects, historians and anyone interested in today's environment.

Elizabeth McClelland

Tilted Arc by Richard Serra, one of the largest public sculptures commissioned for a Federal building, was removed from its New York site in 1989, only eight years after it was installed, as a result of the most famous conflict between artist and public opinion. The book describes in detail the fate of a difficult work by this great (if macho) living sculptor, analyzing the multiple issues and problems that surround the public art process. Harriet Senie is one of the very rare modern art historians who have concentrated on public art, and the one who knows most about its history and politics. Unencumbered by the complexities of present critical theory, she writes in the simple language of the journalist (not inappropriate for the subject and its audience), trying to be fair to all points of view.

The Preface of the book outlines its entire content, while the four chapters (1. Commission, Installation, Removal; 2. Public Opinion; 3. Reframing the Controversy; and 4. After Tilted Arc) are neatly divided into many subsections with titles easy to follow. A Conclusion summarizes the subject and the complex questions it raises. In-between, Senie manages to discuss quite a bit of Serra's art before and after Tilted Arc, and to quote his uncompromising and always illuminating opinions... The fifty-five b&w reproductions, while of rather grim grayness, illustrate adequately the artist's related works and comparable public plazas with sculptures by other artists.

Aside from bringing together a great deal of material about this particular public art debate, Senie's book is also an invaluable source of information on public art policies in this country and on the history of federally-sponsored public art of the last quarter of the 20th century (the NEA and GSA programs). While perhaps a little repetitive, it is a goldmine of information and a must for artists, historians and policy makers interested in public sculpture.