P1: Jessie Otto hite

February 16 , 2006

Jessie Otto Hite can be found in the Regents' Room in the MOO.

bot description:
February 8, 2006: Jessie Otto Hite, director of the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, speaking on behalf of the museum to President Powers and the Board of Directors.

Keywords are in [brackets].  Director Hite's arguments are fairly sequential, so try to ask her questions after she has already brought up a subject.  Say 'hi' to start.  You may have to type 'activate Jessie Otto Hite.'

Director Hite will use visual images in her speech.
Fig. 1: http://www.amorphism.net/bump/p3/blanton-museum.jpg
Fig. 2: http://www.amorphism.net/bump/p3/diana.jpg
Fig. 3: http://www.amorphism.net/bump/p3/stegosaurus.jpg

hi, hello
Good evening, President Powers, Directors.  May I [begin]?

begin
Thanks to your support, Austin will soon be home to the state's third largest art museum and the largest university art museum in the country.  Now I know you must be tired of me coming up here and constantly asking for money, but before the Blanton opens in April, I would like you to consider yet another acquisition.  Please consider setting aside another $2 million for a large, modernist sculpture for the museum [plaza].

plaza
The sculpture I envision will be placed in the wide plaza in front of the new museum, in an area meant to serve as a gathering place for scholars and students (see Fig. 1).  I do not yet have a specific sculpture in mind, but I advocate a piece by Alexander Calder.  The modern sculptural style of this artist not only embodies some of the Blanton's most important ideals, but would also be the best style for the campus environment.  The Blanton's collection includes many sculptures in many different styles, but the sculpture for the plaza should be given special consideration because of its high exposure and symbolic nature.  Images of the Blanton Museum building have already been used to represent the Blanton institution, and the plaza sculpture will likely have a similarly high-profile role in shaping the Blanton's image.  Thus, it is of critical importance for the Museum that the plaza sculpture be [chosen] wisely.  Furthermore, the plaza sculpture should reflect the Blanton's importance.  Alexander Calder is a very prestigious and well-respected artist.  One of Calder's mobiles hangs in the National Gallery in Washington.

chosen
Given the high-traffic area in which the plaza sculpture will be placed and the Blanton's large student audience, it is vital that the sculpture embody those artistic ideas and aesthetic valued with which we, as an institution, want to imbue in our students.  Calder is a highly conceptual, entirely abstract artist, whose sculptures are not representational of any recognizable form.  I believe that this non-representational sculptural style is best for campus sculpture, particularly for the Blanton's plaza.  The question of what sculptural style is "best" for campus is a difficult one because it raises the issue of how to determine that a style is the "best."  The real question is: what makes art "good"?  What is art's [purpose]?"

purpose
Answers to this question have differed over time.  An artist from the Middle Ages might say that art and the artist exist for a social purpose, to glorify God, a view that excludes aesthetic value.  Traditionally art, particularly public sculpture, is used to express the ideals or values of the individual or institution that commissioned it.  This is the purpose the University of Texas has generally affirmed.  As a result of, nearly all of the sculpture on this campus is in a realistic or at least representational style.  For example, Mustangs (1947), by A. Phimister Proctor, is "a tribute to the 'Spirit of the West'".  The sculpture of several horses tearing down a slope is situated near the Texas Memorial Museum.  The Torchbearers by Charles Umlauf, near the FAC, shows two runners handing off a torch.  Though the proportions of the runners are somewhat exaggerated, the purpose of the sculpture is primarily to express an ideal -- the value of cooperation to achieve a goal.  The Honors Quad on Whitis St has a sculpture of the Roman goddess Diana in the center, in a realistic, Neoclassical style (see Fig. 2).  Diana reminds the wandering honors student of Western culture's roots in antiquity as well as symbolizing great achievement.  The University of Texas also houses several sculptures of historical figures, such as Martin Luthor King and George Washington.  In general, the majority of this campus's sculpture serves a non-[aesthetic] purpose: honoring a historical figure or expressing a certain ideal.  To serve these purposes, a sculpture must be representational.

aesthetic
However, public sculpture can and should emphasize the aesthetic rather than the symbolic.  Picasso believed that art should affect people individually, saying "The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."  If public sculpture is considered in terms of its aesthetic value, a representational style is no longer necessary.  Yet the campus boasts only a few abstract sculptures, such as the bronze one by the Art building, which only art majors encounter regularly.  It's time for a change.  The new Blanton Museum should look to the future by prominently featuring an abstract, non-representational sculpture (see Fig. 3).  I recognize that this purchase would represent a sharp change from the sculpture favored by UT in the past, but I believe that [change] is long overdue.

change
First, a modern, abstract work by Alexander Calder would be much more appropriate for the Blanton Museum, given our architectural style.  Though the Blanton Museum incorporates elements from UT's Spanish-Colonial Revival architecture, it is primarily a modern building.  A modern sculpture would simply "fit in" better at the proposed site.  In the vast, empty plaza, a representational sculpture would appear dwarfed and out of [place].

place
Second, a modern, non-representational style like Calder's is simply more appropriate for a future-oriented university atmosphere.  Though modernism as a movement is generally considered to have begun in 1913, nonobjective sculpture did not dominate the art world until WWII.  The choice between classical and modern art is the choice between two purposes: recalling the past and looking to the future.  An emphasis on progress and "the new" in modernist movements, such as Futurism, is one that is particularly relevant on a college campus.  However, this is not to say that the Blanton intends to ignore artistic roots.  Having acquired the Suida-Manning collection, the Blanton now has an impressive quantity of Old Master works -- in fact, the largest holding of Old Master drawings in the South and Southwest.  Ultimately, however, the focus of a university museum should be on the new, because our purpose is not simply to educate students about what has gone before but also to spur them to break [new] ground.

new
Finally, I believe that an abstract style is more appropriate for public sculpture in general because of the problems with representational sculpture.  Charles Umlauf is Austin's most prolific and best-known sculptor, but personally, I find his work kitschy.  Milan Kundera defined kitsch as an "aesthetic ideal" in his great novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The motifs of representational public sculpture tend to be incredibly straightforward: the mother and child, the torchbearers, the family, etc.  Like the "kitsch" Kundera warns against, Umlauf's sculpture "[derives] from basic images people have engraved in their memories."  I also consider abstract sculpture to be more original than representational work.  Representational work takes aesthetic forms available in nature and replicates them, perhaps exaggerating or softening them slightly.  Abstract expression does not rely on duplication to connect to the viewer.  The Blanton ought to be concerned with the creation of new aestheticism.  You may not agree with me that abstract expressionism is superior to representational sculpture, or that it is the best style for public sculpture.  You may not even believe that abstract art is truly "art."  In response, I would ask you to spend an hour in front of a Rothko or one of Calder's mobiles.  Thank you for your time.

Works Cited

Veronica Castelo.  " Cooped up art can breathe again at Blanton Museum." (January 24, 2006), http://www.news8austin.com/content/your_news/default.asp?ArID=154316 (accessed February 16, 2006).
Sculpture in Austin. pg. 7.
Sculpture in Austin.  pg. 9.
"Our New Home." http://www.blantonmuseum.org/our_new_home/our_new_home.html#facilities (accessed February 1, 2006).
Cora Oltersdorf . " TxTell: The Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance and Baroque Art." http://txtell.lib.utexas.edu/stories/s0006-full.html (Accessed February 2, 2006).
Kundera, Milan. 1999. The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  New York: Harper Collins.  251.