Posted on 09/19/2005 1:45:53 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board's plan to bring CowParade, the world's largest public art event, to Madison, WI next summer should be fun. But Madison being Madison, let me be the first to predict that it won't come off without some controversy.
CowParade Wisconsin 2006 will consist of 100 fiberglass cows painted by Wisconsin artists and exhibited all around the city. I was in Chicago several years ago when they had the cow parade along Michigan Avenue and it was a kick.
But I also know from previous columns that the cows can be controversial. We're talking about public art, after all, and one person's art is another's cow pie.
You need only consider the example of sometime Madisonian David Lynch, the famed director and longtime personal and professional partner of Madison native Mary Sweeney.
In 2000, a year after the Chicago cow parade, the cows moved to New York City. Lynch was asked to contribute a cow.
Apparently Lynch was feeling more "Blue Velvet" than "Straight Story" when he went to work on his cow. He called the cow "Eat My Fear."
According to a story in the New Yorker magazine, Lynch's cow was on exhibit for only two hours before it was pulled.
Parks Commissioner Henry Stern told the magazine: "There were knives and forks stuck in its butt. Then I saw the back, all torn open, and the cow's head, rammed into its midsection, and the blood and entrails and gore."
Lynch replied, "My cow is not pretty, but it is pretty to me."
A few weeks after that column ran, I received one of the stranger calls I've received in a decade of writing a daily column.
The call began with a woman saying in a loud voice, "Can you hear me? I'm just getting into a cab in Manhattan."
Then she said, "West 86th Street!"
"What?"
"I was talking to the cab driver."
"Of course."
Once she was settled in the cab, my caller turned out to be a New York City artist named Rachel Dobkin.
"I read about David Lynch's cow in your column," Dobkin said. "Can you put me in touch with him?"
Dobkin said she had found my column on the Internet and wanted to talk to Lynch because she, too, had suffered at the hands of narrow-minded bureaucrats. "They put my cow in the basement!" Dobkin said.
"I have this thing about cows," the artist continued. "I like cows. So I did a cow for CowParade."
I asked Dobkin what her cow looked like.
"The top was all yellow and very much pro-New York," she said. "You know, rah, rah, the city that never sleeps. But then you get to the underbelly - get it? - and it's a very dark blue."
Dobkin continued: "I put on a bunch of cockroaches with New York police insignias. Then I put on a couple of really big cockroaches and you know what name I put on them? Rudy Giuliani."
Giuliani, of course, was then the mayor of New York City.
Amazingly, for almost two weeks Dobkin's cow was included in the parade.
"It was fun to go out and watch people look at my cow," she said. "But then a friend of mine was taking someone to see it and when he got there, it was gone. They had put it in a basement. They said it contained inappropriate political language."
Dobkin said she was hoping the American Civil Liberties Union would take on her case and get her cow back on exhibit. "If not," she said, "maybe I'll bring it to Madison. Think your mayor would object?"
Well, by next summer, it will have been six years since the New York parade. New York has a new mayor, and so, for that matter, does Madison.
In perusing the "Open Call to Artists" literature for the Madison cow parade, I noted the following: "Designs that are religious, political or sexual in nature will not be accepted."
I'm afraid Dobkin's cow wouldn't cut it.
David Lynch's cow, on the other hand, would not seem to fall into any of the taboo design categories. Somehow I doubt he still has it, but you never know.
I'll say again, having seen them in Chicago, the cow parade is a lot of fun. But I also don't see how we can set 100 artists loose in Madison without at least some controversy resulting. What is art? The City Council could argue that one till the cows come home.
Freedom of speech, freedom of expression.
Some works of art are downright offensive but it's tough to get around their right to create it. At least Cow Lady didn't create a cow that glorified terrorism or pedophilia.
The right to "create" it or the "right" to exhibit it on public property in an event coordinated with civic dollars?
They have every right to create it. The ACLU has no business in telling a community they "have" to include a cow.
Yes, it's private funds, Milk Marketing board, but I honed in on the "public art" phrase.
When she said "ACLU" I groaned, too.
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