Art!
During a London layover in 2002, I went to see the West End play Art by Yasmina Reza. That was a fun, acerbic and self-deprecating deconstruction of what art means. Art is one of the biggest and smartest theatre hits of the last three decades, and won the Molière, Olivier and Tony Awards. The production I saw starred George Segal and Richard Griffiths as the art lovers, one of whom buys a blank canvas and claims it is highbrow art. I’ve known about George Segal since I saw him on telly in “Who’s killing the great chefs of Europe?” – a 1978 mystery/comedy adapted from the novel of food critic/writer Nan Lyons and her husband.
In December 2013, Nan Lyons was my passenger. She was well into her 80s by then. She was one lovely lady and we talked a lot during that flight. She was on her way back to New York after a food tour of Spain. We talked about her food writing and the movie, my PhD project, publishers and the life of writers. We stayed in touch for a while.
I love how through my part-time job as a cabin crew, I have learned as much about art and culture as I have from my academic studies at university.
While exhibiting artworks in the context of the airport’s location/culture is an altruistic intention, what we are witnessing, especially in airports of Middle Eastern countries which can afford that kind of luxury, is the random acquisition of Western trophy artworks. This is an effort of vanity to adorn oneself with the most expensive of the current artworks, because one has the petrodollars do so. These airports are not museums and not the white cube kind of gallery interiors. They are new hybrid exhibition places that might revolutionize the world of curating, exhibiting art and even auctioning art.
The giant Urs Fischer teddy bear sculpture “Lamp Bear” (this blog post’s featured image) is now featured at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Quatar, the airport, that offers free involuntary pelvic exams to female passengers! The sculpture weighs 35,000 pounds and stands 23 feet tall, and was previously displayed in front of the Seagram Building on New York’s Park Avenue. The teddy bear was auctioned off at Christie’s New York for just over USD 6.8 million in 2012 to a member of Qatar’s royal family. The Qatar Museum Authority oversees public art installations by local and international artists in its continued commitment to the development of its Public Art program which also covers the airport.
Art in Airports
Way back in 1966, landscape artist Robert Smithson was one of the first artists to collaborate in the design of an airport. His sketches of what was later called land-art for the masterplan of the Dallas Fort Worth Airport were eventually dismissed. But his collaboration on this big scale project inspired him to his nonsites and earthworks creations, the most famous of which was the Spiral Jetty on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Smithson’s most remembered work was an earthwork sculpture created out of rocks and salt crystals, it represented a counterclock spiral one third of a mile long and jutting from the shore into the lake. Visitors could walk on this man-made natural formation, depending on the water level of the lake. Unhappy with the inert art presentation in museums, Smithson envisioned his land-art to be site-specific and in relationship with nature. It has since mostly eroded due to natural causes.
The Spiral Jetty resembled a galaxy in its shape. However, the flâneur walked around it in an anti-clockwise direction, and is thereby prompted not only to consider cosmology but also to move backwards through geological time. Smithson voiced an institutional critique of the cultural limitations and neutral spaces of art museums and emphasized that his site was a place in the world where art is inseparable from its context. His sites included locations in the American West as well as Mexico.
Some airports have opened museums and curate alternating exhibits. Others proudly display works by Urs Fischer, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein. Atlanta’s new international terminal spent USD 5 million on art. San Francisco International, considered a leader in airport art, has spent more than USD 15 million since the 1970s.
Airport art programs have emerged all over the world – at Miami Airport, Dallas Fort Worth, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles Airports, Doha and Mumbai airports … Many airports have long housed iconic works, such as the Alexander Calder sculpture “Flight” at New York’s Kennedy International Airport and Michael Hayden’s 1987 neon light show set to music in an underground walkway between the United Airlines concourses at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
Unlike the terminals of the past, new airports typically boast large, open spaces and atriums that create unique opportunities for large-scale sculptures.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport has a large collection of contemporary sculptures. But the airport also has a collection of Dutch masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum on rotating display. The airport takes extra precautions for its expensive paintings. Its museum is in one of the most secure places in the airport, after passport control. The paintings are secured behind glass in a climate-controlled environment
London Heathrow recently unveiled a permanent installation at Terminal 2. Slipstream is Europe’s largest privately funded sculpture and one of the longest artworks in Europe at 70 meters. Created in 2014 by British sculptor Richard Wilson, its purpose is to make the passengers stop in their tracks and marvel through the volume of the new terminal, frozen in time and space.
As mentioned in my blog Come Stroll with Me, Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport Terminal 2 (2014, SOM) has its own art curator.
The American Association of Airport Executives has held an annual meeting of airport art program officials ever since 9/11, as airports were desperate to make the experience calmer and more humanizing for passengers.
New security requirements create a panopticon of surveillance and suspicion for the traveler and art can de-stress and classy up the airport experience.
Denver International Airport was the first airport created with an integrated art program, with 30 permanent art exhibits on display and varying exhibitions. Further reading about this is to be found in the blog post about Denver.
Sources:
Teddy Bear, by Urs Fischer, Hamad International Airport, Doha. Photograph courtesy of Max221B, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Salma Awad, Delayed Doha airport gets USD 6.8m giant teddy bear, Arabian Business, 16 Dec 2013.
https://www.flydenver.com/about/art_culture/program
http://www.nationalartsprogram.org/news/airports-art-lovers
Catherine Caesar, “Long Read: The Cultural Politics of Air Travel: Art at Dallas Fort Worth Airport, 2013.
Robert Smithson, Selected Writings. https://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm.
Eugenie Tsai, “Robert Smithson: Plotting a Line from Passaic, New Jersey, to Amarillo, Texas.” Robert Smithson, 2004.
