Jim Melchert, Director of the NEA Visual Arts Program, Annual Report 1980

James Melchert

Director, NEA Visual Arts Program 

Annual Report 1980 

(Copied from NEA website with Charlotee Murphy’s emphasis included)

We had rivers of proposals and applications come through again this year. One of the impressive things that we have been noticing is the diversity of modes of artmaking. Artists are working in new mediums that they have invented themselves; some are seriously working with such subjects as ecological and social structures. Today artists are forcing us to redefine traditional disciplines and even to revise our preconceptions of what art is. Artists who focus on art for and of public places are no exception. The past year has shown us how differently they can approach public projects. The Art Commission of King County, Washington, for example, invited artists to find ways of transforming exhausted strip-mining sites. That may sound like an odd assignment to give to artists, but it isn’t when you consider how artists are naturally involved in transformation. To render a scar in the landscape into a wonderful place to be is a perfect job for some artists. Alan Sonfist, for example, has developed ways of restoring vegetation to a city. He brings in a research team that finds out what the landscape looked like hundreds of years ago before the city was there. He reintroduces those grasses, those shrubs, those trees, so that you have a city block in lower Manhattan with the old landscape. It’s a long way from the days when we thought of a public artwork as a statue of a prominent citizen on horseback or an arty shape designed with no concern for where it would appear. In past years we’ve seen some regrettable results when the artwork is an afterthought, commissioned and installed after all else is completed. A sculpure in that situation often ends up looking as though it were stuck on where it didn’t belong. Recently, the Visual Arts Program has had some success in bringing architects and artists together while a project is still being planned. We’re beginning to see some sensational results from this kind of collaboration. Commissions for art in an architectural context may involve not only sculptors and painters but also craftspeople. Such collaboration used to be common practice: The craftswork at Timberline Lodge or the Library of Congress is integral to those buildings. Commissions to craftspeople this past year have included the flooring of a plaza and wrought ironwork in the plaza furniture. The new category of Building Arts encourages research leading to the design of components for buildings. Building Arts also encourages research leading to the building of one-of-a-kind houses for personal use. Especially on the West Coast and in the Southwest, large numbers of artists are moving to rural areas, buying land in the wilderness and building on it. They are handbuilding their own houses and doing it with ingenuity and a great sense of purpose. The results are frequently quite beautiful and closely attuned to the land and the climate. Instead of building a house that might be suitable anywhere and then hooking up their energy sources, they are starting with their energy sources. A sculptor in New Mexico, for example, designed his own hydro-electric system to tap a stream on his property and then built his house around it. Considering the increasing scarcity of energy sources and materials, such demonstrations of alternatives are timely and worth encouraging. Questions of supply and survival worry photographers as well. The days of silver printing seem to be numbered. With the invention of new processes and alternatives to silver, photographic artists will undoubtedly surprise us with new imagery. Artists are that resourceful. Again this year, the Visual Arts Program has delighted in helping increase the number of first-rate photography exhibitions and publishing activities throughout the country. Public awareness of photographic art has grown rapidly; the increase in shows and sales reflects it. And yet there’s reason to doubt that the nature of photographic art is understood. People tend to think of it in terms of painting, as though it were possible to draw analogies between two such inherently different disciplines. For example, critics look for periods of Abstract Expressionism and Formalism to appear. Again, the difficulty can be traced back to faulty preconceptions which get in the way of seeing. If we can trust artists to be our eyes, we’ll find that they can free us from outlived notions of what a discipline is like or of the nature of art itself. Our artists can even bring us revelations of the world, providing we let them.