City Yard: A memorial verb without an object

Posted on May 7, 2012 by adina

These intriguing images, previewed in last week’s “In Search of a Label” post, depict a public artwork by Sheila Klein called “City Yard,” commissioned as part of the development of the Frontier Airlines Center in Milwaukee in the 1990s. Information about the artwork and its history has proved elusive for an observer based outside of Milwaukee. I’ve had to rely on a Wikipedia “stub” for a basic description of the piece noting the media as: “landscape elements, limestone architectural ornament, and salvaged public works objects such as fire hydrants and the classic blue police call box.” The stub references a 1998 article by James Auer in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called “INGRAINED Art – Creative works spice up personality of new convention center.” Unfortunately, the Journal Sentinel’s online archive, a sadly aborted project powered by Google, is devoid of a scan for the article’s date.

So, without the time to interview the artist, what’s left to an observer is the artwork itself. At first glance, “City Yard” might seem to be a generic public space beside a generic convention center, all wrought-iron rails and brick planters. But upon closer examination, the architectural elements and “public works objects” stand reverently, like monuments in a graveyard. The words beneath the lions’ mouths on the four-sided central structure of the piece further evoke a memorial sentiment: “Gone But Not Forgotten.” Like the stairway leading up to a tree that marks the border of the space closest to the convention center building, the whole piece seems to be a question mark incarnate. Who or what is gone? How are we to avoid forgetting if we don’t know what we are commemorating? Are we mourning for a time when the civic structure of the city provided a sense of comfort and community? There are still police officers and and firefighters without these particular call boxes and hydrants. But these objects inhabit a protected past behind their wrought-iron fences.

In a museum, the same objects might be used to tell a story, to narrate the development of cherished institutions within a meta-narrative of progress. At the nearby Milwaukee Public Museum, the slightly miniaturized buildings and scenes of the “Streets of Old Milwaukee” exhibit seem to do just that, flavored with a heavy infusion of nostalgia. “City Yard” is not exactly nostalgic, nor is it entirely mournful, and it is certainly not informative. It is an ephemeral timescape, a verb without an object, entreating the busy visitors to a modern convention center to remember for remembering’s sake.

~ Adina Langer

Update on the Journal

Posted on May 1, 2012 by jdichtl

At the OAH/NCPH Annual Meeting in Milwaukee, NCPH President Marty Blatt, Vice President Bob Weyeneth, and Executive Director John Dichtl sat down with the chair of the history department at the University of California Santa Barbara, John Majewski, and the Editor of The Public Historian, Randy Bergstrom, to discuss the future of The Public Historian and housing the editorial offices at UCSB in partnership with NCPH. We agreed to establish an interim two-year agreement, through December 2014, during which we will explore various options for the future of the journal: continuing the partnership between NCPH and UCSB, adding additional institutions to the partnership, or going separate ways in a prepared and amicable transition. The agreement itself needs to be drafted and will need to be approved by UCSB’s Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts and NCPH’s Board of Directors, but both sides are optimistic. It was a cordial and constructive meeting, looking toward the future.

While the precise terms of the interim agreement are not yet finalized, here are some of the specifics that NCPH and UCSB expect to be included. UCSB will hire a new managing editor for The Public Historian in 2012. Randy Bergstrom will remain as editor and may be joined by a co-editor from within UCSB or a public historian from outside the university. The current Editorial Board will continue in the same way it has been operating, and the NCPH president will continue to appoint new members in consultation with The Public Historian editor/co-editors and managing editor. NCPH members will continue to receive The Public Historian as a benefit of membership at least through 2014.

Because there has been intense membership interest in the negotiations between NCPH and UCSB on the future of the journal, it is important for all to understand what has led to this interim agreement. First the broad outlines of the timeline. The Public Historian was founded at UCSB in 1978 and has been edited there ever since. It is published by the University of California Press for UCSB and NCPH. NCPH has a publishing contract with UC Press and UCSB, as well as a separate contract with UCSB for housing the editorial office. It is the latter contract that has been under discussion, because it expired in 2009. In this sense, this most recent round of negotiations has been going on for the last three years. Since 2009, and particularly throughout 2011, NCPH and UCSB discussed the nature and level of support for the editorial offices as proposed for future years by UCSB. All of the UCSB proposals would have represented a change from the current editorial arrangement, including changes in material support; there was never an option of status quo continue-as-usual. These discussions were eventually unsuccessful in producing an extension of the contract. As a result, the NCPH Board of Directors voted to terminate the relationship with UCSB, effective January 4, 2013. The tentative interim agreement reached in Milwaukee would unite NCPH and UCSB for an additional twenty-four months, from January 4, 2013, to December 31, 2014. That’s the big picture of how we got to where we are today.

All of us hope that this interim arrangement will address the issues that surfaced as NCPH and UCSB were attempting over the past couple of years to reach agreement on extending the 2009 contract. During these discussions, the parties had a series of candid conversations about the current California and UCSB budget situations and their likely trajectory. We discussed both impending and approaching personnel changes of which NCPH was made aware. We discussed various proposals for the future of the journal’s editorial offices that incorporated these budgetary and staffing realities as a way to keep the offices at UCSB. We also tried to imagine new partnerships with other universities and public history institutions. As important as anything, we discovered two complex issues on which each party learned it had its own views. First was a set of legal questions related to the ownership of trademark (or the right to use the name The Public Historian) going forward. Second were financial concerns related to an appropriate future allocation of revenues from institutional subscriptions.

It had never been NCPH’s intention to terminate the relationship with UCSB as it went into discussions on extending the contract. However, as business negotiations continued into 2011, the NCPH Board of Directors realized it needed to begin contemplating a contingency plan to protect the organization and the journal. Consideration was given to finding a potential new home for the editorial offices should the negotiations founder. Pursuing this alternative was complicated because of the continuing and differing views about trademark. The NCPH Board went so far as to prepare a draft Request for Proposals, but it was precluded from issuing the RFP when it learned it would have to include disclaimers related to UCSB’s claim on trademark that would have rendered the RFP ineffective in soliciting proposals. NCPH did test the waters informally with a half-dozen institutions within the public history community to gauge general interest for hosting a journal, perhaps on a rotating basis for five to seven years, which is a common model for many academic journals. Without the option of an RFP and with negotiations appearing unproductive, NCPH approached American University and the Smithsonian Institution, which had indicated some initial interest in response to an NCPH inquiry. While the contours of a potential NCPH-AU-SI partnership were coming into focus as a potential “lifeline” in a difficult situation, NCPH also explored the idea of creating a partnership editorial arrangement linking UCSB with American University and the Smithsonian Institution. In the end, though, NCPH could not make the details work for this “grand collaboration.”

This is the background and context for the Board of Directors’ decision to terminate. We appreciate that it may have seemed abrupt to many in the membership. However, much of the content of the discussions involved delicate, often confidential, legal, financial, and personnel issues. The good news is that this is now a matter for full public discussion. The 90-minute Open Forum was added to the Milwaukee program in order to create a venue for answering questions about the business negotiations that have led us to this point. We were especially pleased that Randy Bergstrom was able to join Marty Blatt, Bob Weyeneth, and John Dichtl on the dais for the give-and-take of this discussion.

We remain grateful for the support and flexibility of colleagues at American University and the Smithsonian Institution during the past several months and for their willingness to help reimagine a public history journal.

This synopsis is intended to provide background for members who were unable to attend the Milwaukee conference, as well as to stitch together a more comprehensible narrative of the recent history for everyone. It is also intended to point us in the direction of moving forward. NCPH has formed a task force charged with envisioning a journal for the 21st century. It will work with the current Public Historian Editorial Board members and staff—as well as with the full NCPH membership—to imagine what a public history journal should look like, as the field becomes increasingly global and digital. We are interested in exploring how digital media can be used to enhance and inform publication; how the journal can intersect with other publications and communication venues such as social media; what new kinds of article, discussion, and review formats can be incorporated within the journal; and how current readers and new audiences want to use the journal. NCPH welcomes input and ideas from all public historians, both members and non-members. These are exciting times for our field, with the possibilities of digital directions and internationalization on everyone’s mind. Help us envision the future.

Bob Weyeneth
University of South Carolina
NCPH President
weyeneth@sc.edu

John Dichtl
NCPH Executive Director
jdichtl@iupui.edu

For a summary of the Open Forum, see
http://publichistorycommons.org/elephant-in-the-conference-room-the-public-historia/

Reading the convention center

Posted on April 21, 2012 by cathy

Frontier Airlines Center, MIlwaukee

It’s always a pleasure to reconnect with colleagues and friends at a conference, and to have face-to-face conversations that enrich to the increasingly digitized interactions that professional life entails. But the conference experience is also rich with ironies for me, probably because I can’t help thinking about how the kinds of environments in which we hold these gatherings–usually big downtown hotels and convention centers–have been created, how they fit within their social, spatial, and economic contexts, and how we of the mobile knowledge classes fit within them.

This kind of irony cropped up yesterday while I was having lunch with two colleagues from New England–people I tend to see more frequently at distant conferences than in our native settings. We all commented on that, and also on the disjunction between the topic we were meeting to talk about–our shared interest in finding a way to connect our public history work more closely with discourse and activism around climate change and environmentalism–and the fact that we were eating in a restaurant that proudly poured its imported-from-Fiji drinking water out of plastic bottles (“For the Planet” it said on the side). Given the tightness of conference schedules and the realities of several thousand people looking for a quick meal in the same sixty minutes, we didn’t have time to follow our consciences elsewhere, which is characteristic of a lot of the ways that we end up accommodating to contemporary capitalism and its energy-intensive way of living.

The 1909 Milwaukee Auditorium on the site of the current Frontier Airlines Center (Source: http://www.midwestairlinescenter.com/galleries/8-historicimagesfromthemilwaukeeauditorium)

These ironies are easier to ignore–but all the more troubling to me for that–within the bubble that is the convention center complex where the conference is taking place. This 1998 redevelopment on the site of an early 20th-century auditorium (itself built on the site of a late 19th-century industrial exposition building) is an immense structure whose street-level façade, shown at the top of this post, is apparently intended to evoke the German-American architecture in the surrounding downtown. To me it evokes the kind of generic convention-center architecture that is ubiquitous in cities trying to revitalize their downtowns, and the center’s website makes no bones about its economic mission: “to support Milwaukee’s economy by attracting visitors and wealth to the community.” There’s lots that’s interesting and beautiful in Milwaukee’s downtown, but there are also many signs of a city core that’s struggling to attract people and businesses: empty retail space, massive parking garages, a flagship department store converted into lofts.

Ghost sign, Historic Third Ward, Milwaukee

One thing that caught my eye the other morning was a new “ghost sign” on an office building near the convention center. Older painted ghost signs have become artifactual symbols of historical depth, but the newer ones are a bit spooky, signalling the volatility of globalized capitalism and its effects on urban places. The name of the Frontier Airlines Center (née Midway Airlines Center) itself reflects this ephemerality.

New ghost sign, Milwaukee

And the interior of the convention center is also a fascinating study in the use of heritage display and place-making techniques to try to overcome what is essentially a “non-place.” It’s filled with quotes from Wisconsin literature (including the wonderful one below about pleasantness being “the machismo of the Midwest,” with people letting smiles hover on their faces “like the dare of a cat”).

from "'Joy' Like Life" by Lorrie Moore

There’s a mosaic map of the state in the entry foyer, with colorful insets for various products and industries. And alongside the escalator leading to the skywalk that connects the center with my hotel, there’s an exhibit of black and white photos focusing on polka, taken between 1976 and 1990. There’s even a button that promises polka music if you push it, although it seems to be out of order (“Polka, y u no play?” one conference-goer tweeted plaintively.)

Entry foyer, Frontier Airlines Cente

The place is, in part, a pseudo-museum, using techniques of historical display to create an aura of “pastness” and “hereness” while servicing the needs of mobile capital and people. The irony of this for me is that at least this week, quite a number of those people have gathered to talk about the constructions of memory, history, sense of place, and community, without seeming to notice the ironic erasure or masking of local history by many of the spaces in which we meet. In inhabiting these spaces, are we accommodating to many of the kinds of conditions that we are actually critical of in our work? It sometimes seems that way to me (although it doesn’t keep me from accommodating to them along with everyone else–it just means I spend perhaps more time wondering about it!).