Christoph Kasper

On The Crown Fountain/Chicago, Jaume Plensa (Barcelona)

�All form is a face looking at us” – is one of the most striking quotations issued by Serge Daney, a well known movie critic and often cited in Nicolas Bourriaud´s “Relational Aesthetics”. I can barely forget a very haunting experience of facing various faces and it actually stems from a visit to a square in Chicago, called the ‘Crown Fountain’. Sojourning Chicago’s Millenium Park for the very first time, I was fascinated upon viewing this artwork and it struck me that the video screen might be as fascinated by my presence as I was of it, because its pictures were continuously flipping. Motion, Interaction, various relations… this “modern art against the grain” as mentioned by Bourriaud could hence only be beautiful. But wait, is it really as simple as it sounds?

Bourriaud´s theory is actually more complicated whereas the object’s architecture in Chicago was quite simple: The Crown Fountain consists of two 50-foot glass block towers at each end of a shallow reflecting pool. The towers project video images from a broad social spectrum of Chicago citizens, a reference - quoting the tourist information brochure - to the traditional use of gargoyles in fountains, where faces of mythological beings were sculpted with open mouths to allow water flow out.

This adaptation of conventional use awoke my attention - in particular, animation of a traditional technique, namely the distribution of information by a video wall, but attempting to use itself to disclose a very progressive modern form of art. I was struggling to find an object after my journey through Bourriaud´s article, as he demands one should get rid of every aesthetic theory of the past. However, considering the unconventional purpose of this video wall- in comparison to the usual amount of information flooding video walls all around Chicago, I persuaded myself to investigate such a suspicious object. There isn’t any reasonable purpose in Plensa’s Wall, that we could call efficiency, but rather a number of aspects that allow us to label this video wall a ‘relational artwork’, to which inquiry Bourriaud is highly committed.

In this way, our video wall features a very high recreational value, more precisely a value for the public, especially during summer. Hot steamy days aren’t rare during Chicago’s hot season and people appreciate the refreshment of jumping under Jaume Plensa’s cool water stream. Between rational business or tightly scheduled sightseeing tours originates a place which Bourriaud namely calls a ‘social interstice’. Contrasting the everyday-life of a huge metropolis, people come in contact to each other by cracking jokes, trading business opinions or reporting their tourist experiences. This “communication zone”, citing Bourriaud, elicits and exchanges information through people’s interaction– even without any certain goal or purpose like negotiating a billion-dollar deal, which concurrently happens right beyond the fountain in the Wrighley Building. The beauty of the wall is probably revealed in the loss of its original use and its acquisition of an ‘exchange value’. Therefore, this place both fits into the overall system of the city and matches accurately Bourriaud’s definition of a modern artwork.

As I gazed at this wall, I wondered what it would be like if I was one of the 1,000 videotaped inhabitants who appear and instantly fade away on the video wall. Although the majority of visitors just desire to get splashed by the cool water stream, I would be curious if any of the visitors were gazing at the screen and watching my face. I went further into this question and by recalling my experience of this visit: Yes, people did. Either some looked at the wall, or they took a picture of it. The encounter of these different faces highlights Bourriaud’s idea of non-availability as they represent fast-switching objects, only viewable at a random time. Hence considering Plensa’s video wall, there is no guarantee that one will experience a desired object (e.g. a painting) as one could see by walking just a few steps further into the Chicago Art Institute. Within a few seconds, one has to fix one’s gaze on the wall, perceive the face and generate an opinion. This typology might be comparable to Marcel Duchamps “Rendez-vous D’art”, an installation which arbitrarily ordained certain objects into ready-mades. Hence, the video wall introduces a similar “rendez-vous”, by taking into account the important role of a relational dimension.

The collection of faces, Plensa's tribute to Chicagoans, was taken from a cross-section of 1,000 residents. By portraining a well-selected section of different faces of Chicagos inhabitants, Plensa is also dealing in cultural terms. In a later chapter, Bourriaud poses a crucial question regarding the appropriate method to exhibit the cultural relation of an artwork to its content. He notes that video nowadays has become a predominant medium. For me, there is no better way to facilitate this cultural method- namely Plensa’s face casting - by using video recording as an accurate media tool. The whole vitality of the citizen’s faces, which also forms their beauty, is featured by the moving image of the video. This beauty can only be enhanced by a video installation, which brings peoples emotion and appearance most closely to reality.

I have to note that for me, the simplicity of the Crown Fountain doesn’t conceal any artistic claims. There are furthermore too many forms of abstract artwork around which do not feature a quite useful, interactive and communicative purpose like the Fountain does. In agreement with Bourriaud, I think that nowadays there’s a lot of space for unconventional purposes of modern art beside the conventional aesthetic benchmarks. Someday there might be an aesthetic theory that declares – by just going one step beyond Bourriaud - the whole world as an artwork itself. As there’s nothing more obvious for me now, I hereby do this.