Art by the glass

This is some cool creativity – and it features a Clevelander.

Creativity gone wrong

Not all creativity is good. (I feel like Hagrid: “Harry, not all wizards are good.”) Sometimes, through unconcern, poor research, poor execution or just plain evil intentions, creative projects cause terrible harm.

And when the same creative people cause terrible harm over and over again, they need to be stopped. There are lots of individuals and groups who match the description, but the one I’m talking about right now is the Army Corps of Engineers.

It seems to fall into the creative category of “appallingly misguided.” The corps has been responsible for some of the most environment-destroying projects in modern U.S. history, including Hoover Dam and the draining of the Everglades. It created the New Orleans levees that have wrecked the marshlands protecting the Mississippi Delta from hurricanes and – more horribly for humans - failed during Hurricane Katrina, drowning the city and many of its inhabitants. These poorly-thought-out creative engineering projects continue to cause problems and endless hassles for the regions affected by them.

And there are more coming. I’m particularly concerned about the new dike that will help create landfill for a shifted Port of Cleveland site and the  redesign of the I-90 Innerbelt that snakes around Cleveland’s city center. The corps is necessarily involved with both and that gives me nightmares. What permanently damaging practices and structural designs will they invent next? And how much will we have to pay to undo what’s likely to cost hundreds of millions to build in the first place?

They’re as destructively constructive as beavers. The Everglades, New Orleans and the environment around Hoover Dam and the resulting Lake Mead may never recover from what they did.  And Cleveland has enough problems without allowing such a shortsighted bunch to affect its future.

So now that this town is about to see some federal stimulus money for infrastructure work, I hope local residents and the local governments – city and county – will demand thorough independent studies to determine what the real effects of corps involvement in the projects will be.

Saving Detroit creatively

TIME magazine has a great story this week about Detroit trying to reimagine itself as a smaller, greener city with gardens and urban farming where dense neighborhoods used to be before the auto industry started dwindling decades ago.

Those interested in the revitalization of post-industrial cities, especially in the U. S. Rust Belt, should read the part about scores of artists taking over the Russell Industrial Center’s one million square feet of  vacant, decaying space and starting to give the structure new life.  It’s another vivid example of the power artists have to redevelop troubled communities if they’re encouraged to take over abandoned buildings, generate economic activity and fuel community spirit.

For more information and stories about the role of artists and other creative people as urban rescuers, read the executive summary of From Rust Belt to Artist Belt, a white paper issued by Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture following its May 14, 2008 symposium of the same name, which drew experts in arts and community development from around the nation. For the full report, go to www.cpacbiz.org.

Detroit’s Russell Industrial Center

We have to solve the property problem

If ever a city needed to get creative fast, it’s Cleveland. We need some top legal, financial and business minds to lock themselves in a conference room with proven idea people and not come out until they have a workable strategy for untangling Cleveland from the poisonous spider’s web of mass home abandonment and foreclosure described in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine story .

I’m thinking a streamlined legal process. Nimble public-private partnerships.  Mandatory jail time for nonresident property owners – be they bankers, mortgage brokers, developers or landlords – who neglect their properties and cheat  their buyers and renters. Heavy damages, too, so there’d be money for the city to repair or demolish those houses. And incentives for responsible people to buy, fix up, and live for a long time in, the salvageable homes.

This real-estate disaster is Cleveland’s Bay of Pigs, its Black Plague, its Apocalypse. And it hasn’t descended on us from out of the blue – it started a long time ago and is simply getting much worse quickly. For decades, our leaders haven’t done enough. And now, there isn’t going to be much of a city left if we don’t hurry.

So I’m not kidding: If Cleveland’s and Cuyhoga County’s political, business, law and creative leadership will do this much - select and invite the best minds from these national sectors - I’ll book the room and pay for all the pizza. Cleveland’s strangling in its own sticky mess. Let’s set it free.

Prescription for Cleveland: public-art therapy

Something snapped yesterday. Maybe it’s because I seem to be getting a cold.

But as I was driving through the University Circle section of Cleveland, Ohio, on an afternoon of mud-brown earth, crumbling pavement and dark, pouring skies, I passed a newish art installation in the median – a couple of dull shapes made of ordinary stones – and suddenly, I had had it.

Simply … had it. Why does so much of the public art in this city look like part of the urban blight? Don’t we have enough heaps of rubble and rusting hulks already? Do poverty and decay and collective depression improve somehow because they’ve been referenced in a rockpile or a crude, steel sculpture that looks like an exploded muffler?

Cleveland’s public-art projects tend to solicit works that reflect, and comment on, our gritty life here in the Rust Belt. Maybe people think this gives the works more meaning and importance than brightly decorative pieces would have.

I don’t think it works that way. Frankly, I think most public art of any style tends to lack significant content, probably because no one wants to get into any more fights about using taxpayer dollars for pieces that might prove controversial.  But I also think the strain of trying to make a deep but publicly acceptable statement about industrialism and urban ills too often results in a simple, platitudinous literalism about ugliness. 

 We have enough ugliness here in Cleveland. It gets to all of us so much that our chronic outlook on life has become as gloomy as our winters. I would like artists to comment on this as much, and in as many ways, as they like in work that will be displayed in galleries and museums. But on the streets of Cleveland, we need color and beauty.

See, Clevelanders are sort of like alcoholics. We’re always sodden with defeat and self-loathing. Our putting up public art that’s all about our rotting infrastructure and bleak climate and faded glory days is like a drunk buying another bottle of whiskey. We need to get off the depressants.

We need color and beauty. Color and beauty aren’t shallow. They can express great things, even sorrowful or disturbing things. The difference between them and art that looks like factory waste is that color and beauty will make our city thrilling to be in. Our people will throng our sidewalks instead of hiding inside, because vivid reds and golds and azures make their hearts leap up. Gorgeous architecture and murals, brilliant sculpture and color-lighted streets will draw people from other places to see how beautiful and special Cleveland looks. They will want to be here, to stay here.   

Will they want to stay here if they see the art on the Detroit-Superior Bridge that took years and years to get and looks mostly like plain lampposts with a few hard-to-see twiddly things on top? Will a glimpse of the gray, patterned pavers and the cut-out steel trash bins on the new Euclid Corridor keep any of us locals from throwing ourselves under a bus on a sullen February day? 

Or how about those giant metal contraptions on East Superior Avenue that look like some salvage company dropped a load off the truck?

Will they save anybody’s sanity?

Exactly. So could we start changing our view by changing our look, please? Now?

 Euclid Corridor crosswalk art.                                                                              2007  N. Bryson