After several decades of planning, fund-raising, and other forms of bureaucratic back-and-forthing, the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden opened the other day on the Mall, across the street from the National Archives in our nation’s capital. As art lovers know, Washington already had a sculpture garden. It lies on the other side of the Mall, in a sunken terrace next to the Hirshhorn Museum, which is shaped like a doughnut. The new sculpture garden is superior in almost every respect. It is not shaped like a doughnut, for example; it is shaped like a big garden — a six-acre rectangle of decidious trees and winding walks and flowering shrubs. The only thing that bears even the remotest resemblance to a doughnut is a shimmering circular fountain in the middle of the garden. There is also a sculpture by Joan Miro with the word “Eclair” in the title, but this has nothing to do with baked goods of any kind. I’m pretty sure (Fig. I).
A pleasanter place than the new garden is not to be found in all of Washington. Already, however, you can hear the carping of critics. The garden, complains one, represents a “jumble of styles,” with works cast in “diverse media” like stainless steel, cinder block, and fiberglass. I take the point. Entering the garden, one is instantly confronted with discordant examples of neoclassicism, homey landscaping in the British picturesque style, and the something-or-otherism of our modern sculptors. It’s confusing, but all are easily transmutable into my own favored medium — Pilot Varsity Disposable Fountain Pen on Reporter’s Notebook (Reorder # 25-280, from American Pad and Paper Co. in Dallas, Texas) — as can be seen in Fig. II, which offers an intensely personal interpretation of the neoclassical post and wrought-iron fencing at the Northwest entrance to the garden.
This post, in my opinion, gives a promising greeting to the visitor, a genuflection to the solemn, neoclassical lines of John Russell Pope’s great West Building across Sixth Street. But the first piece of sculpture that the visitor encounters alters the mood decisively. It is by Claes Oldenburg. The guidebook, available at the garden entrance, explains: “One of Oldenburg’s favorite office supplies was a typewriter eraser.” Hence Typewriter Eraser Scale X, in which the artist used stainless steel and fiberglass to make a very large typewriter eraser. “The sculpture presents a giant eraser,” the guidebook further explains, as if further explanation were necessary. As I stood before it, struggling with my own interpretation of this particular office s
upply (Fig. III), an elderly man in an Orioles cap and his wife stopped dead in their tracks.
“What is it?” the man barked at her.
The woman shrugged.
“It’s a typewriter eraser,” I said, butting in.
He stared at me. “I know it’s a typewriter eraser,” he said, as though addressing an imbecile. “But what the hell is it?”
This man lacked the spirit of whimsy with which it is best to approach many of the sculptures. He also lacked the guidebook. It especially helps if you keep consulting the guidebook. As when viewing any work of modern art, you must have with you at all times a piece of paper that explains what you are viewing. Otherwise you will be totally at sea, assuming you are not a college professor or Hilton Kramer. A case in point: Barry Flanagan’s Thinker on a Rock (Fig. IV), which is a piece of bronze representing a big bunny rabbit sitting on a rock, thinking. Flanagan, says the guidebook, was “reacting against the formal, constructed metal sculpture to which he was exposed in art school.” It’s hard to believe, looking at Thinker, that Barry Flanagan went to art school, but that’s why we have guidebooks. Perhaps I should explain something about Fig. IV. The figure to the right is not part of Thinker. It is a little boy clowning around for his parents, who were taking his picture. The boy was thus making his own statement on the nature of postmodern whimsy — an act of postpostmodern meta-whimsy, if I’m keeping this straight.
Not all the pieces in the sculpture garden are whimsical. Some of them are so unwhimsical it’s not funny. I took a break from my work and sat on one of the benches circling the fountain and suddenly felt uneasy, as though I were being looked at — although “looked at” isn’t the right phrase. Behind me, in a stand of linden trees, was Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Puellae (Girls), a group of thirty bronze figures that are three-feet high and look exactly like Fig. V., except replicated fifteen times. Their “repetitious presentation has been regarded as the artist’s personal response to totalitarianism.” This is probably why the artist has, as you’ll notice, cut their heads off. “These figures can be arranged in any configuration,” says the guidebook, but here they are placed facing the fountain — although “facing” isn’t the right word either, since, again, they don’t have heads.
Beyond Puellae is the work that many critics are already hailing as the garden’s masterpiece. This is Aurora by Mark di Suvero (Fig. VI), and if it is not the finest of the garden’s works it is undeniably the heaviest: “eight tons of steel over three diagonal supports combine massive scale with elegance of proportion,” as the guidebook puts it. “Several of the linear elements converge within a central circular hub and then explode outward, imparting tension.” Also, by the way, the linear elements converge to create the logo of the Circle K chain of convenience stores. The guidebook doesn’t mention this.
And what is the garden’s total effect on the average visitor? “The appeal is chiefly cerebral and retinal,” complained the Washington Post. “The dominant emotion is the virtual absence of any strong emotion.” But this is not true, to judge by my own experience. Before I left the garden I stopped to assay Joel Shapiro’s aptly titled Untitled (Fig. VII), which allows us to “encounter a multiplicity of animated compositions.” I found myself once again next to the man in the Orioles cap, who stood staring, displeased. “What’s it called?” he snapped at his wife, after several long moments of silence. He disdained even to lean over to read the plaque himself. She bent down towards the little card and then straightened up.
“Untitled,” she said.
“You see?” he barked. “You see? He didn’t know any better than we do what the f — it is.”
His face, as he turned it toward me, was dark: the face of a taxpayer, its linear elements converging to create a sense of strong emotion, ready to explode outward (Fig. VIII).
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
