What Art Means When It's Gone (Part 1)

Nicol Stavlas is an essayist and poet. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth River, Canary, Flyway, Blue Lake Review, Third Wednesday and Willows Wept, among others. She blogs at Last Maple.

This story could be told in many ways, but I will begin at the Third Street Bridge. It is an old railroad tressel bridge, long forgotten by the passenger trains that once coursed through our southern Indiana town. The rails were pulled after the last freight engine left the McDoel Switchyard in 2004. Wooden ties, scattered and black, littered the edges of meadow and wood that crept just up to the railway. The track ballast left a gravel path, the only marker of the train's long trek through the abandoned corridor. When I moved into McDoel Gardens neighborhood in 2006, I walked to town as the train once ran—from the McDoel Switchyard (Planning PDF), north through the old industrial area, past wooded lots and backs of hotels, over the Third Street bridge, to the city center. So it was: weed and bramble and building backs, a path, a bridge.


I remember the day I found geese stenciled on the bridge. Then a tree, a poem, a hand. Then cut silhouettes of bodies, icons and images, politics and dreams. Stencils mapped over stencils, a conversation. In the evenings, on my way home, I would pause on the Third Street Bridge, above the rush of traffic, struck always by the gift of this hidden gallery.

The art space was untouched by Bloomington city officials until 2009, when the bridge was painted black, the path paved and then “opened” to the city. There was a parade, a ribbon cutting, an event. Murals and statues were commissioned to line the path. The city government began to name, to lay claim to, a revisionist version of the townscape I had known.

The path was named the “B-line” and was advertised as part of the new Bloomington Entertainment and Arts District (BEAD)—a “district” that covers the whole expanse of Bloomington's downtown. When pressed, the Assistant Director of BEAD, Miah Michaelsen, suggests that re-naming the downtown  an “arts district” is to choose one of many possible definitions for the space. In her mind, however, an arts district creates a clearer sense of “community”  and “inclusivity” than other definitions. Michaelsen suggested that identifying the downtown as an arts district might also create a possible understanding of the space, “as an arts district might help some people understand what sort of experiences they might logically expect to have here, what it might look like, what it might feel like.” In this proposal, a city identity is written—one that scripts “art” as it's center, while, with the same hand, it defaces and covers over the public art in which our community has long participated.

The move to (re)create and delineate the downtown space as an artistic zone has open economic and political aims. That the city's assistant director for the arts district is actually titled the “Assistant Economic Development Director for the Arts” reveals the stakes and purposes of the “public art” that is commissioned and tolerated. So, too, does the aesthetic: the bridge is painted black, painted black again, painted black, to cover vandalism (which is not, in this manifestation, called art). It seems striking that the rhetorical use of the word “art,” established in city discourses, in partnership with words like “inclusion,” “community,” and “economy,” can not seem to dialogue with the word “art” as it is linked to stenciling and street art, now criminalized and demonized under the broad term “graffiti”—a class D felony in Bloomington (Collateral Consequences PDF).

In our interview, Michaelsen speaks carefully about the city's official position on the bridge, but slips, herself, in the tension, recognizing “street art” and “artists” in a way the city government's website refuses. She even laments, “My biggest regret was, as we were developing that bridge, we didn't let the artists know that it would be painted over. We didn't do that, and I regret it because…I  know that there had been a visual dialogue that had been going on in that community for a long time, and we should have honored that and said, 'we've got to do this, but we want to give you one more chance if you want to capture it, photograph it, or have one more moment to put one more thing there.'” It was meant, certainly, to sound generous, but when Michaelsen positioned the painting over of the bridge as a need, she obscured the fact that there was a choice made. When asked directly, she informed me that it was the Parks and Recreation Department—not her own—that made this decision, but that she could “understand the need for a more neutral look and feel.” In a city attempting to define itself by the terms of  its art, I was surprised by how easily art was compromised for neutrality.

Embedded in the concept of a “neutral look and feel” are clear controls on what public art can be and mean. Michaelsen admits, for many artists, the city has been “too prescriptive.” “We err on the side of being government,” she jokes. For artists, this is a dangerous jest—coded with terms of selective censorship and erasure. Now that the city government locates its economic possibility and public identity within an arts district, it seems that public art will only be increasingly confined by the terms of government-embraced art. Michaelsen does not deny this, but instead suggests that this is actually a site in which more opportunities for artists could be created. “We're a pretty accessible government,” she claims, “there's tons of opportunity for public content—and lots of opportunity for people to talk to us and propose whatever it might be that they want to do.” I question how these conversations can be had, if people come to a government's open forum already at the disadvantage of being “citizen” and not “government.” I ask about how not only the common citizen, but the criminal (for that is how the city refers to our street artists) might feel welcome in the 'public forums.' Michaelsen shakes her head, “I don't know,” she says. “I don't know.” I am stung by this impossibility...

Editor's note: This essay was originally published in TRACHODON 4. It appears on Cheek Teeth in a 3-part series with imagery previously unavailable for the print edition. Stay tuned for Part 2 later this week.