Marcus Young, City Artist in Residence, Public Art Saint Paul

“Are we the only two in our species?” were the words Mierle Laderman Ukeles said to me when we met a few years ago.  Mierle is Artist-in-Residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation and someone I admire greatly.  She has been in that unique position for the last 35 years.  I am the current City Artist in Residence for Saint Paul, Minnesota.  Sitting in her large Public Works office in Lower Manhattan, we looked at each other with smiles and disbelief on our faces.  We had found each other, two anomalies in the world of art.  If, however, we were the only two in our species, what species would that be?

I have come to describe myself as a virus. As odd as it sounds, I think it’s instructive of how I exist and work as an artist within the city.  I am a foreign organism inserted into the body of the city.  Since 2006, Public Art Saint Paul has placed me within the City of Saint Paul, housed in the Public Works department but free to float and work throughout.  The program is a private-public partnership and has become one-of-a kind in the nation.

Given the freedom to find my purpose, I began observing the city as a set of systems.  Not an object maker and with limited desire and capacity to make work on my own, I saw how I could possibly attach myself to systems of the city to produce art.  These life-sustaining systems—traffic, sewers, forestry, construction, libraries, etc.—are like organs or systems of the body.  If I am a virus, and the city a body, could we co-exist well?  Could I do some good?  Recently, when I described myself this way to the Mayor, the Mayor liked the metaphor and immediately added to it.  He reminded me that a virus at the right dosage is a vaccination.

An artist is usually thought of as a maker of beautiful things, and the city is a collection of places in which to place these beautiful things.  It is quite a leap to think of an artist as a virus and the city as a body.  If, however, we can accept this unusual metaphor, there is a yet another challenging conceptual leap to make.  If the city is a body, then what is the city’s mind and spirit, how does it work and express itself, and who attends to it, cares for it, and cultivates it?

The uncertainty of how to answer this question is telling.  It is very much like a realization I had years ago when I started understanding how little I knew about my own inner life.  It was quietly shocking to me that with all the education I’ve had and the years of life experience I could not understand the basics of how my spirit works.  What can I do to help myself when I become dispirited? What does it mean for a city to be dispirited?  And conversely when we are happy what is that practice of happiness, how do we sustain it, and how do we not take it for granted?  Eventually, an essential arts question arises: Does a city like Saint Paul need artists in the very midst of its work to help the city progress and to care for its residents’ well-being?

I guess today I have more questions than answers.  In my five years in residence, I have had a great civics lesson.  Learning how the city works has given me and the program a new outlook, a new sense of discovery.  As an artist-virus in the city-body, I can see the possibility of a new form of art—art that only a city can make.  I hope to write more about it in my next blog posting.