Sebastien Angel | Plateau's mission falls flat

Head up Locust Walk toward Qdoba, and you'll eventually find an affront to the community.

That's what Robert Christian, writing for the University City Review, calls Plateau. The perforated steel sculpture debuted on the field at 40th and Locust streets last year amid protest from guardians of good taste all over Penn.

You can fill in your own expression to describe the controversial structure: cold, industrial and uninviting are some of the ones I've heard.

But none of those captures the most insulting thing about it: the way Plateau is presented.

The artist, Andrea Blum, expounded on its purpose in its dedication ceremony on Oct. 16. Apparently, the goal is to "zip various communities together."

"The dividing line was obvious before," she remarked, referring to the disconnect between the Penn and West Philadelphia communities.

Don't worry, though. It's all gone now.

Thanks to a structure that would be more at home in a prison, Penn students and West Philadelphia residents now spend their days out at Clark Park lighting candles and singing "Kum-ba-yah."

What a joke.

On a recent afternoon, I spent a few hours at Plateau. Unsurprisingly, I didn't see a circle of people holding hands and humming. In fact, I didn't see anyone interacting with anyone else unless a group had come to the sculpture together.

I realize that two vastly different communities aren't going to be united within a couple of hours on an autumn afternoon. But I'm not sure how else Blum's plans are supposed to come to fruition.

Neither does Ian Lloyd, who's worked at both Drexel and Penn but was "just visiting" on the afternoon in question.

When I asked Lloyd about the 40th Street prison as a conduit for Penn/West Philly relations, he looked at me incredulously.

"It's more like a barrier," he said.

Nobody I talked to that afternoon had anything encouraging to say about the great Plateau initiative. Again, that's not surprising, since most of the time they were all by themselves on the structure.

As for the aesthetic merits of the piece? When Lloyd first saw Plateau's design, he thought it was going to be a structure that just hung other art.

And on the scale of student reaction to Plateau, that is probably a generous assessment.

But there's no reason why hideous art can't be a well-liked success at Penn. Consider the competition - one of Penn's favorite pieces of art can be found at the bottom of a woman's purse. Another, the statue of Benjamin Franklin, is frequently urinated on.

And the split button's popularity isn't due to some utopian theory of unity for Philadelphia.

It's popular because people have been walking past it on their way to class every year for the past 20 years. Little kids enjoy climbing on it. Drunk undergrads have sex in its shadow.

All of those (well, only two, for the unadventurous) are achievable for Plateau. It's also relatively unobtrusive, and it looks OK at night from a Rodin College House window.

That's won't do it for Blum, though.

It's not enough for her art to make the cover of a Penn admissions brochure - we also have to hear about how her art is going to reverse the course of the city's history.

I sure hope that the committee that approved and executed Plateau - a committee which didn't get any student input - didn't choose it because of Blum's ambitious scheme.

Covenant - the so-called "bloody tampons" - has merit, but not because it has the cure for Alzheimer's disease. It's just an intriguing piece of art. Plateau, I feel, has the same potential.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote in an essay of a poem that was written "solely for the poem's sake." Eventually, that concept found popular use: "art for art's sake."

That's the principle that's been guiding our appreciation of Penn's art. Blum and her piece should be no different.

Sebastien Angel is a College sophomore from Worcester, Mass. His e-mail address is angel@dailypennsylvanian.com. Overnight Celebrity appears on Wednesdays.

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