When I was growing up, it was strict, with church twice on Sundays and once in the middle of the week. But our Sunday routine usually allowed us kids some “free time” alone between lunch and dinner.
For some, that free time might have led to bad ends, like cigarettes and, yes, pool halls. For me, it was art. An eighth-grade school tour that fall had gotten me hooked on museum art. From then on that year, I spent at least every other Sunday afternoon at the museum.
I never told my parents where I was headed. Think Rubens. Voluptuous nudes, a little plump, maybe, but definitely capable of corrupting the young. However, even as a 12-year-old, I knew that it wasn’t sinful lust I was feeling. That’s because I felt the same way when I looked at all the other art on the museum walls.
It was love.
And since then, I have been unwaveringly in love with art.
That’s why I’m so ticked at the cops.
These days, I live near the Denver Art Museum and the Denver Public Library, near the Civic Center heart of the city. I have seen the new addition to the DAM gather itself into a great Starship of the Rockies. With the Ponti and the Graves buildings nearby, the Starship may generate an architectural tension that will create a vortex of international attention.
That’s what I’m worried about.
Before they closed the museum’s Palette’s restaurant for reconstruction, I’d photocopy a research article at the library, then go to the DAM for a cup of their chicken soup. I’d sit near the big window, facing the library and the huge red-orange alien spider trapped between the art museum and the library.
One bright March afternoon last year, I had an article to read. I got a seat inside at one of the little museum tables. At the next table was an elderly couple wearing matching Minnesota sweaters.
Outside, sitting on the green metal bench that surrounds the red-orange spider (to protect the blind), was, from the look of him, a homeless man. Between his legs was a dirty white 5-gallon mortar bucket with a yellow label. He was wearing ragged blue overalls.
His beard was shaggy, the same color as Van Gogh’s. And it was near enough to the color of the alien spider to have been intended. I saw it as a composition, a tableau of urban life – eyes drawn from the giant I-beam legs of the spider down to the Van Gogh swatch of the poor man’s beard, ending finally at the bright flick of the bucket’s label.
He opened the bucket and scrounged through it, pulling out a piece of cloth, then closed the bucket again. He blew his nose, stuffed the rag in his pocket, and sat, elbows on knees, warming in the afternoon sun. He was the only person on the bench, bothering no one. Just sitting in the springtime Denver sun. Being.
Then, into the composition strode the legs of two horses, both a reddish-roanish brown. Horse cops. You could see the homeless man framed between the horses’ front and hind legs. He looked up, apparently was asked a question by the cops. His mouth moved briefly. The cops must have said something, because he nodded, then slumped a bit over his bucket.
After a minute, while the cops waited, he stood up wearily, lifting his bucket of belongings, and slowly shuffled away from the alien spider toward the park.
Now, I believe that public art – like the giant spider, and the red chair with the horse – should serve the entire community, however it needs to. That includes the homeless. Even if they’re just sitting on a warning bench, weary from the world. Or seeking shade under the big red chair.
Am I alone in this?
I turned to the elderly couple and tilted my head toward the hassling by the horse cops. “Did you see that?”
“About the homeless man?” the woman asked. I nodded yes.
She said, “Disgraceful.” I nodded in agreement. I hope she meant the cops.
What I’m afraid of now is that when the Starship of the Rockies opens next fall, the horse cops will “sweep” the plaza regularly, to cleanse the tourists’ view of Denver’s riff-raff.
It’s ironic that the van Bruggen and Oldenburg outdoor sculpture “Big Sweep,” with its giant dust pan, will play a dominant role in that view.
Stephen Terence Gould is an independent scholar in Denver.
