dayton is not in ohio

How can I introduce Cermak Plaza? It’s wonderful and tragic. It’s a mile from my house. It’s a depressing strip mall. It’s like finding a treasure map…

It begins when a man named David Bermant makes a fortune developing strip shopping centers in the U.S. after WWII. As a collector and lover of art he starts to commission the creation of sculptures for his shopping centers along the East Coast and California. He spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money placing artworks, many of which the public hates, in his shopping centers. The list of the museums that own work by the artists represented in his strip malls are not what you’d probably expect from artists whose works share space with beauty salons, Hispanic grocery markets and Walgreen’s — museums like MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery, every MOCA under the sun… not to mention international museums like the Tate, or the Centre Pompidou. And now most of the best are gone, destroyed by the elements or by public opinion. What remains is the decaying graveyard of a fairly bold experiment in public art. Far more interesting than most of the remaining sculptures, are the missing sculptures.

I discovered Cermak Plaza in roughly the same way most people do: I was shopping at Circuit City and I noticed, way out in the middle of the parking lot, a fifty-foot shish kebab of outdated cars. On closer inspection I found an old, deteriorated plaque:

Spindle
by Dustin Shuler, 1989

The automobile, the computer, and the television are the three technological wonders of the Twentieth Century that have most profoundly influenced our culture.

Artist Dustin Shuler, with his finger on the pulse of the Twentieth Century, has chosen the automobile as the subject matter of his art.

Spindle lifts the auto out of its ordinary place, and by relocating it as we’ve never seen before causes us to look again — to question its priority and importance in our daily living. Is it an object for veneration? If so, should it be?

Dustin Shuler was born in 1948 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and now lives and works in the Los Angeles area. He has auto works in the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, California; the Department of Motor Vehicles of the State of California in San Jose; and at the San Francisco Parking Authority in San Francisco, California.

The last time I had seen an odd public object that had a similar text — title, artist, statement, bio — it was in Salzburg, Austria when I saw Paola Pivi’s A Helicopter Upside Downin a Public Place. My students were perplexed by it. I said that it was probably art. It was the sign that set the record straight.

All I knew at this point was that whoever put this spire in Cermak Plaza thought of it as a work of art, not simply just some attention grabbing parking lot gimmick. This made me wonder if there was more. What I discovered was that there was much more, and soon it was as if I were exploring a mysterious abandoned civilization that only I could see. Welcome to Cermak Plaza.