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Siah Armajani Notations for Streets, No. 14, 1992 mixed media 48 x 28 x 6 in. One of the fundamental beliefs we share is that public art is non-monumental. It is low, common and near to the people. It's an anomaly in a democracy to celebrate with monuments. A true democracy does not provide ‘heroes' as it requires each citizen to participate fully in everyday life, and to contribute to public good.1 Siah Armajani, 1986 Siah Armajani hopes his art will ameliorate social hierarchies inherent in contemporary culture. His bridges, reading rooms, and the many other public art projects with which he has been involved since the late 1960s are designed to represent traditional American ideals of community and social responsibility. Inspired by the democratic principles of Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and especially by the writings of American philosopher and educator John Dewey, Armajani believes in the social value of incorporating art into everyday life. He draws attention to the beauty of American vernacular culture by using materials and forms common to the urban and rural landscape of the American Midwest. Self-described as a Midwestern populist, Armajani manages to capture an authentically American sensibility in his art despite--or perhaps because of--the fact that the Iranian-born artist did not set foot in this country until 1960 at the age of twenty-one. 2 "Public art should not intimidate or assault or control the public," explains Armajani. "It should be neighborly. It should enhance a given place. The word "art" in public art is not a genteel art. It is a missionary art. The public artist is a citizen first."3 Armajani's ability to convey these beliefs fundamental to American democracy using modern principles of design has won him many public commissions, including one to create the caldron for the Olympic flame at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. As with his large, site-specific installations, Armajani has explored architectural forms as metaphors for community in the Streets series, which he produced between 1992 and 1993. Working at studio scale, the artist represents miniature scenes using ready-made dollhouse furniture that capture the "neighborliness" of American middle-class domestic architecture. The wall-hung assemblages and small, free-standing sculptures are meditations on the idea of space as a social and philosophic construction. In Notations No. 14, Armajani creates a deliberate disjunction in size and scale by ignoring traditional devices for representing the gradual diminution of forms in space. Instead, he adopts the vertical ordering of space common to Persian miniatures and traditional Japanese landscape painting. His assemblage of objects-- bay window, silo, picket fencing, as well as a textual fragment by William Carlos Williams--serve as metonyms for a vast landscape of American middle-class values and ideals. Megan Bahr |