Shared Metaphysic

Context: The Providence River walk is bloated with monuments and city-sanctioned public art. The hodgepodge is almost endearing, encapsulating the full spectrum of possible modes--from neoclassical war monuments to minimalist structures to "fanciful" art-cow-esque interventions to fluxus anti-sculpture. There is also the River Fire--which perhaps deserves a entry of its own--a happening which, through its institutionalization, channels primal energies more in the fashion of a football bonfire than an art installation. We see weird mixes of the utopian and the memorial impulse, as with signs promising future monuments. Notice how a Holocaust memorial's future site is announced with the solemnity regularly reserved for the opening of a new Denny's. The memorial impulse captures all surfaces, even the paving stones. Because of its ubiquity, one wonders upon the story behind a simple greyish box: what morbidity does this immortalize? However, it is only an engineered enclosure or rather "The Engineered Enclosure"(tm). What does it enclose? Mystery enough for art lovers. There are more modernist structures, my favorite of which can be described as Richard Serra-lite, composed of rusted metal, with a sun roof. What is interesting about this piece is that in a public space, it provides an intimate hideaway; its surface has become a communications network for graffiti artists and others. Just a nose or two above drowning in art-cow tackiness is the man in the river, who floats just a stone's throw from the metallic cock-ring of pain. It's a fine line between sanctioned whimsicality and true mischief. But it's a line that is discernible between the floating man and some ceramic tiles that are attached to random points on one of the small bridges that cross the river. On the surface, they seem innocuous, in the style of fairly typical subway art. But a closer look at they way they are attached to the bridge reveals a shoddy workmanship that would not accompany contemporary city art. Checking their website (included on the tile), one finds that it is a situationist-inspired spontaneous intervention. I think their subversive intent is lost, however, on the casual observer. No, I prefer the blithe junkiness of the Woonasquatucket Primitive after all.

To explain his resistance to public art that reflected communal desire and harmonized with the space in which it was built, Richard Serra pointed out that "there is no socially shared metaphysic" (qtd. Finkelpearl 35). What the hodgepodge of structures on the River Walk reveals is that indeed there is. Everybody loves a miniature golf course.

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