They dot the landscape like visitors from Mars: outdoor sculptures. But what the heck are they trying to say?

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

We called it "Fightin' Red Onion Head." That wasn't its official name, of course, and the artist—allegedly a New Yorker—who crafted it from sheets of painted metal probably would have flipped his beret at the derogation. But then, we didn't ask for it—it just showed up on the lawn outside our dorms during my freshman year at Penn State University.

It was a big red silhouette of a soldier, maybe 12 feet tall, inspired by Robert Capa's Spanish Civil War photograph of a patriot being shot, falling backward, left hand still gripping his rifle as his head jerks up. The photo is riveting. The statue, unfortunately, was just riveted—thin slabs of scarlet steel bolted to a set of railroad tracks that ran about five yards through the grass and ended.

Someone explained to me that the tracks were supposed to represent the Holocaust, that the piece as a whole was a sweeping indictment of fascism and war. Hmmph. Undergrads that we were, we looked at the outsize gun and bulbous brainpan and gave it our own name. Later in the year, pranksters took to taping big smiley faces on its blank visage. Some of us thought that was an improvement.

This was all quite disrespectful and, in the more extreme cases, outright vandalistic. But then, public art invites commentary of all kinds. Unlike works in a gallery or museum, public sculpture resides in the common spaces, where people who may have no art inclinations whatsoever can suddenly find themselves face to face with abstract expressionism. Which is, of course, the point. As University of Tennessee art professor Dennis Peacock says, "It's another format for providing ideas, another way of opening up the world a little."

Knoxville might not seem exactly rife with that kind of opportunity. But even leaving aside the obligatory war memorials and the by now familiar Alex Haley statue in Morningside Park, there's at least a double handful of structures in and around the city capable of drawing passers-by to a halt as they ponder the inevitable question: "What is that?"

On the Streets

For example, there's the rowboat man. Half-submerged in a bronze boat, oars dipped into the Centre Square bricks on the corner of Church and Gay streets, he's a favorite of camera-wielding tourists and climbing kids. (Although not dogs, apparently—one afternoon, I came across a German Shepherd barking ferociously at the statue as the dog's owner pulled vainly on his leash.)

There's been a lot of speculation about its significance. Some literary-minded residents have wondered if he's supposed to be Cornelius Suttree, the namesake hero of Cormac McCarthy's Knoxville-based Suttree. Or maybe he's a herald for the Vol Navy, optimistically stroking upstream for the 'Bama game. I find more definitive but less colorful answers on the third floor of Two Centre Square, in the offices of Triad Development, which owns the building and its plaza.

When I start to ask about the mysterious rower, a friendly secretary at the front desk pulls open a drawer and removes a manila folder full of press clippings. According to a News-Sentinel story from 1989—when the statue was dedicated—it was sculpted by a guy named David Phelps, under commission from Triad (which paid $40,000 for it). Phelps told the paper the statue was supposed to represent perseverance in the face of adversity. (It was apparently a common theme in his work—he did another sculpture for a Phoenix, Ariz., park of a man dragging a rowboat across dry land toward a lagoon.)

At the time, Phelps lived in Norman, Okla., but there's no listing for him there now, so I don't get a chance to ask him about Suttree or any other Knox-related inspiration.

I also had no luck finding the sculptor of downtown's second most visible artwork—the cartoonish treble clef in the awkwardly named "East Tennessee Tribute to Country Music Park," on the corner of Gay Street and Summitt Hill. The News-Sentinel commissioned and donated it to the city in 1986, to celebrate the paper's centennial year. I've always wondered a little bit about it—why a treble clef? A lot of the country music pioneers whose names are listed on the statue's base never even learned to read music. A banjo or fiddle—or a still or a Bible, for that matter—might have been more appropriate.

So it doesn't surprise me the sculptor has a decidedly un-East Tennessee name: Paul Jacques Betouliere. Somehow, the sculpture would make more sense as a French impression of country music. The city recently re-landscaped the park, installing new bushes and flowers. But the statue itself is in disrepair, its coating cracked and flaking.

Big Art on Campus

Maintenance is a big problem with public art, as I discover at the University of Tennessee. On a tour of the eight pieces that make up UT's permanent outdoor sculpture assemblage—known as the Reese Collection—I find several sporting rust, cobwebs, and other detritus. Peacock, a sculptor who helped put the collection together, bemoans the lack of attention from UT's physical plant department. "If we don't take care of them, in a few years they'll be gone," he warns.

Still, it's an impressive group. Spread out across the heart of campus, the sculptures are provocative, funny, and sometimes haunting. My guide is Cindy Spangler, manager of collections for UT's Ewing Gallery. "This is Jim Buonaccorsi—kind of a Road Warrior motif," she says, gesturing at "Armor Pierce," a piece in a courtyard outside the west end of the Arts and Architecture building. A metal platform mounted on cinder blocks, it has four rifle range head-and-shoulders silhouettes plugged with bulletholes. Each silhouette is inscribed with observations like, "We've become more effective killers."

Other highlights include Blane De St. Croix's "Rare Pages III," a bookshelf of concrete tiles, each one a pictogram of an endangered species; L. Benson Warren's "In Search of Noah," a graceful, mysterious boat laden with religious symbolism; and two wiry figures by UT business school grad John Payne—"Untitled," a tightrope walker suspended mid-stride over an entrance to the nursing college, and "All of the Above," a skeletal figure, maybe a preacher, waving a book from the roof of the parking garage next to the University Center.

My favorite is probably the sly "Betula Chalyb Ferruginous," two imitation trees set inconspicuously on Circle Park between McClung Museum and the College of Communications. Rusted a purplish brown, the trees are strikingly lifelike until you look close and see they're constructed of what looks like muffler parts. What gives the sculpture its zing is an accompanying plaque, a parody of the explanatory signs you find along nature trails. It identifies the trees as "pseudo betula chalyb ferruginous; Common name—false steel birch. Habitat: De-Forested regions unable to support 'archaic organic' models."

The Reese Collection arose from annual and biannual sculpture tours UT sponsored from 1982-1995. Originally conceived as a way to pull World's Fair visitors onto campus, the tours took on a life of their own. Sculptors from around the region—and sometimes the nation—would lend works to be placed on campus. Starting in 1987, UT began buying one or more of the pieces from each show, forming the collection (named after then-Chancellor Jack Reese). Funding was minimal—mostly just transportation and installation—but the tour was in the brutal budget cuts of 1996.

There are a few other sculptures around UT, purchased independently by one group or another. Two are works by Julie Warren, UT's first fine arts sculpture grad in 1965. Now nationally known, she's represented on campus by two pink marble pieces: an untitled, vaguely skull-like boulder outside the "spam can" business building, and a short column on Cumberland with what looks life a large Lifesaver in the middle. The latter, I'm afraid, gives me flashbacks to Fightin' Red Onion Head. The sculpture itself is fine, even a little playful. But the accompanying text on a nearby plaque takes the fun out of it, talking about connections to the earth and the "flora and fauna of the world." I know I've read enough when I reach the line, "The androgynous, totemic form represents an archaic/futuristic symbol of humankind."

Birth of the Sunsphere

"I've heard it called a lot of things, but never public sculpture," Butch Robertson says with a laugh. Robertson is an architect with Community Tectonics, a firm best known for designing schools, civic centers, and hotels. But maybe its most significant—and certainly its most visible—contribution to the Knoxville gestalt is a 266-foot tower of steel and glass: the Sunsphere.

Is it sculpture? Well, a fascinating book produced by Community Tectonics for the 1982 World's Fair calls it a "permanent, single, multi-storied, habitable sphere." But since nobody actually lives in it—as far as I know—and few people even make the trek to its observation decks, the Sunsphere functions principally as a monument, to be seen and admired (or grumbled about) from without. It's not a building in the conventional sense of the word, and it has clear symbolic intent. My dictionary defines art as "creative or imaginative activity, especially the expressive arrangement of elements within a medium." I say the Sunsphere qualifies.

According to the book Robertson lent me, Knox-ville's golden orb began to materialize one November afternoon in 1979. Community Tectonics was designing a fast food restaurant for client Litton Cochran, who also happened to be on the management committee of the 1982 World's Fair. Chatting after the meeting, Cochran mentioned the Fair still lacked a "theme structure or focal point," something that would immediately identify it the way the geodesic dome embodied Montreal's Expo or the Trylon and Perisphere symbolized the 1939 New York fair. He asked the architects if they could come up with a proposal—preferably something he could present at a committee meeting the next morning.

As the story goes, Community Tectonics president Bill Denton and co-founder Hubert Bebb sat down at opposite ends of a conference table and started brainstorming. It's not clear who first seized on the sun symbol, but both immediately saw its resonance with a Fair that was to revolve around energy and technology. Within a few hours, they had drafted a sketchy proposal for something called a Sunsphere and dispatched it via courier to Cochran. The next day, the Fair's management committee approved it.

Early sketches and models show a much shorter pedestal, making the sphere look kind of like a gold golf ball on a tee. To get approval for a taller structure, the corporation that formed to finance the Sunsphere had to navigate building codes, which, as the book notes, were "written to regulate conventional houses and office buildings and factories, not unusual structures like golden glass spheres supported by towers." But the designers persevered and eventually gained the needed variances.

Some Sunsphere facts: that's real 24-karat gold you see glinting in the afternoon sun—the inner surface of the glass is lined with a vinyl film shot through with gold dust; there are 14,000 square feet of glass on its surface—each pane cost about $1,000; for a while, until a New Jersey glass firm stepped forward, designers thought they would have to settle for silver glass (a moonsphere?).

Robertson through the years has heard jokes and put-downs about the sphere. He hasn't seen the Simpsons episode where Bart knocks it over with a slingshot, but he's heard about it. And he probably can't help sounding a little defensive when its architectural worth is questioned. "I don't think we set out to redefine the skyline with that thing," he says.

But whatever people think of it, the 16-year-old Sunsphere is a symbol of the city, the thing that lets visitors know that, yes, they are in Knoxville. "We didn't have any ambitions that grand for it," Robertson says. But, he notes, "I've seen a lot of logos recently [in Knoxville] where that was incorporated into it." (For example, it leaps out of the Knox County Tourist Commission's new poster of Knoxville icons.)

Me, I like the Sunsphere and the rowboat man. They're a little goofy, but Knoxville can use a little goofiness. I also admire the diversity of UT's sculptures, although I'm sorry I missed the heyday of the sculpture tours. Twenty or 30 pieces spread out across campus would have more of an impact, give more chances to turn a corner and run into something unexpected. And if you don't like it, you can always look the other way—or bark.