moose suck
smart...@my-deja.com
this was on the "front page" of satirical online daily suck.com today.
so brilliant! so true!
http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/10/10/1.html
BUT IS IT COW?
In decades past, public art meant statues of war heroes sitting on
horses. Later it meant dauby murals packed with crowds of heterogeneous
citizens working hard to open food co-ops in blighted neighborhoods or
build playgrounds in vacant lots. Nobody loved these murals, which had
more in common with the illustrations in The Watchtower than with Diego
Rivera, but passersby learned to ignore them. Sometimes, famous artists
were hired to create outsized sculptures for the empty plazas in
downtown business districts. Some of these, like Richard Serra's Tilted
Arc, proved too forbidding for bankers and lawyers scurrying off to
work. The Claes Oldenburg model — you can't go wrong with household
objects made gigantic — won out, and the essential blandness of that
model has only recently come to full, underwhelming fruition. This
summer, Jeff Koons's monumental public topiary Puppy dominated
Rockefeller Center like the world's biggest mascot, it's giantism made
friendly by its cuteness. Whatever Koons intended, no one really
complained. Maybe the piece was a commentary on Disneyfication, maybe
Koons just likes puppies; maybe it belonged in front of FAO Schwartz,
maybe it loomed as a reproach to a dumbed-down world. It's gone now,
anyway.
The cow parade is over, too, but only in New York. Everywhere else,
cattle are becoming cosmopolitan fixtures. Mural-painted fiberglass
cows — like horses without their generals — are the landmarks that make
it easier to herd tourists and workers through town. They keep the eyes
occupied so nobody's spooked into a stampede. Cows on Parade, as this
outdoor celebration of bovinity that premiered in Zurich in 1998 is
called, has rumbled into America's heart since its US debut last year
in Chicago. As the parade of cows turns our cities into the exploded
living room of an Elmer's Glue memorabilia collector, art has never
been more vagrant. It's been ushered from the scene as quickly as a
wino standing in front of a liquor store window with a brick in his
hand.
Dozens of cities are embracing the cows' non-aesthetic. Art cows have
been installed in Calgary, in Plainview, Texas, and in Waco, where
evidently the "wacows" are re-establishing the civic pride bulldozed
over by the FBI. (Did the town reject the slogan "I'm wacko for
wacows"?) According to a preface in the coffee table book Cows on
Parade in Chicago, "CowParade WorldWide, which is headquartered in West
Hartford, Connecticut, has been entrusted by the Zurich Retail Trade
Association with the responsibility of bringing the Cows on Parade
concept to a variety of challenging venues." "Challenging venues," here
means "cities in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere." Other towns
have gone forward without the Swiss-by-way-of-Connecticut seal of
approval. Cincinnati and Peoria have installed art pigs. Belfast,
Maine, has art bears. Lexington, Ky., features horses (minus soldiers).
Toronto and Whitefish, Mont., went in for moose. Buffalo, N.Y., in a
fine display of civic predictability, chose buffaloes. Some cities
ignored the artistic possibilities inherent in mammalian forms
altogether. Instead of armadillos or opossums New Orleans picked fish.
So did Boston, which has a Cavalcade of Cod chosen not so much to honor
the Sacred Cod that hangs in the Massachusetts State House, nor as a
symbol of the industry that fed New Englanders for three hundred years,
but because Cod is one letter off from Cow.
Painted cows, long used to advertise ice cream parlors and dairies, are
the cherry on top of the new urban safety parfait. Now they don't just
advertise specific restaurants, they're generic markers meaning
"guidebook-approved restaurant here" or "photo spot." Who would've
guessed a few hundred fiberglass ruminants could bring such happiness
(or, in the parlance of every p.r.-driven news stories about the cows,
such "udder" joy), generate so much revenue, and help out charities and
artists at the same time? All the world loves a cow. Newspaper story
after newspaper story trumpets the windfall trifecta of corporate
sponsorship, tourist dollars, and charity auctions. Faced with normal-
sized fiberglass animals, even vandals are overcome by cuteness. In
Chicago, graffiti was replaced by art cowshit; in Boston, cigarette
butts are routinely stuck in the cods' mouths. And there's no killing
floor for these heifers. After corporation-chosen artists slap a little
paint on them and they're put on view for a few months in spots
frequented by out-of-towners, the art cows are auctioned off to raise
money for charity. Buyers can then display them in the lobbies of their
offices or on their roofs at Christmas or in the shallow ends of their
swimming pools. The corporations, the cities and the charities who
benefit from the art cows have reason to be happy. Chicago figures it
made $200 million from the cows (more than the 1996 Democratic National
Convention brought in), and then raised $3.5 million for charity when
it auctioned them off. As a civic project, that's good with a capital
G, but a prediction is in order: by the year 2015, the phrase painted
cow will have replaced white elephant in the lexicon of worthlessness.
Unlike the massive, rusted metal walls that have inspired loathing in
the past when placed as art in public thoroughfares, friendly cattle
reproduced on a human scale and painted in bright colors threaten no
one and don't arouse active hostility. Made for the most part by an
army of anonymous artists with names like Gallery 37 Apprentice Artists
and Flair Communications, they lack the monolithic intent of most
conceptual public art. Far from making statements, artists aren't even
making reputations on them.
Nor are they using commissions for down payments on summer places so
they can escape the city while poorer urbanites have to dodge their
work in the heat. An artist who made three of the fish in New Orleans
estimated that she earned about 27 cents an hour for her labor, a rate
more likely on the floor of a Jakarta pants factory than in the lobby
of a corporate office tower. Maybe that's because as art, the art cows
fall short of even the kind of paintings found in hotel rooms. This is
what art becomes when the Darth Vader suit from Star Wars becomes the
centerpiece in a museum tour — art as an advertisement for
entertainment to come.
And if the art cows aren't really art, are the people who make them
artists? Parade 0f Cows-style projects continue the family-friendly
makeover of our cities by dispensing with anything recognizable as art.
Childish — babyish would be more accurate — parodies of real art abound
in the Cow Parade. "Picowsos" make up a good number of the plastic
herd, including one in New York called "Mooma" positioned in front of —
guess where? — MOMA. In another clever play on words, there's a
"Moondrian." Van Gogh is victimized repeatedly, as he always is in
displays like this.
It's the very young and the very, very young at heart who constitute
the only appreciative audience for the cow work. Implicit in the cows
is the idea that art is scary and needs puns to make it kind. When each
city isn't claiming that "we do things different around here," they're
reminding us that it's all for fun. In St. Paul, where the civic
fathers have installed art Snoopys in honor of favorite son Charles
Schulz, they claim that the project "celebrates the joy of being
Snoopy." It's hard to think of a theme less controversial than "the joy
of being Snoopy." Even elephant dung couldn't water that up. This is
gift shop art displayed outdoors, yard decoration brought in from the
suburbs and deposited on safety islands in the city, garden gnomes in
spats. In most cities there are still places with names like Outdoor
Glamour, parking lots offering unpainted concrete Virgin Marys for
sale. How are the cows (which anyone can buy, too) different from these
bathtub Madonnas? This is concrete art at its most literal. The
pasteurized, suburban embrace of cow art had already shown how
completely removed the image of the cow is from its fly-buzzed origins;
now that banal, folksy nostalgia is forcibly inserted into city life.
Supposedly a celebration of innocence, it's really folk art mass-
produced for the child in all of us, the one who likes to go into town
and spend money on trinkets and slushies.
Appeals to the kid in all of us aren't an accident. If people's
reactions can be reduced to the most childish level, no one can really
criticize. When something is all about the kids, noticing that it's
lousy becomes an act of cruelty. Just as First Night celebrations
turned that most adult of holidays, New Year's Eve, into a kindergarten
field trip, the cows reduce art to the level of construction-paper
turkeys made by tracing your hand. The cows' literality assumes people
need colored-plastic coverings on the handles of their scissors to tell
right from left. This is art for the Garfield sticker crowd. Abstract
art used to be jeered at by the yahoos, but now even representational
art is too much for people to be expected to take. Today, art has to be
character-based before it gets the stamp of approval. In order to make
public art palatable, figures familiar from Saturday morning cartoons
have to be licensed and put into service on its behalf. This has been a
success beyond Lynne Cheney's most vat-separated dreams. There's no
better way to avoid controversy in public art than by turning it into a
kiddie ride at the fair. So much for the carnivalesque. The art cows,
intended with the best wishes of their civic herdsmen to introduce
children to the kooky world of art, instead prevent them from
understanding it by making it dumb as a cow. T. W. Adorno reminds us
that the important thing about kitsch is that it "sets free for a
moment the glittering realization that you have wasted your life." We
can thank The Parade of Cows for allowing the entire world to
experience Adorno's realization all at once. Traveling from city to
city, we can rest assured that a cow made to look like a piggy bank
will be there to greet us, just as a cow in a skateboarding outfit will
bid us au revoir in the city we left behind. What could be more
comforting?
Bovinalia has always been popular. Cows are a familiar, soothing image.
Who doesn't immediately associate them with complacency? It's not hard
to understand the appeal of a herd of silent, helpful animals, each a
gaily painted individual. Look, this one's dressed as a waiter! Here's
one that looks like a construction worker! How did we get to the point
where being depicted as a cow is a tribute to your profession? Is cow-
like a compliment now? It may seem that public art has sunk to a new
low (that's the only pun the CowParade publicists forgot), but this
isn't public art, it's public entertainment.
And if that's entertainment, I'm a Hottentot. That people put up with
the art cows proves our cities are now officially too safe. In an alert
society, the cows would've been rejected as the corporate shills they
are, not greeted with hugs of recognition and flowers around their
necks. To their credit, art cows have proved truly exceptional in one
area: They're perfect for blocking the homeless from view. But the
corporate world can make up for its inadvertent slight to the outdoor
living community. It's not too late to turn the Cow Parade into a
project that benefits everyone. Corporations, sponsor a bum! Assign
each one a cow and give him a can of gas and a book of matches so he
can torch it. Not only will that provide a little warmth, it'll also
give tourists the impression that our bums aren't going hungry. The
Parade of Cows On Fire is one hobo barbecue we can all get behind, and
the pretty blue flame that burning fiberglass produces would be a work
of art to rival any Picowso. People, can we pencil that in for First
Night?
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