Letters & Replies Visual Art
LettersReaders on Brandon Cowen’s unsigned Dunmore floodwall mural
We received 41 letters about the Dunmore floodwall. Eleven were about the mural. Here are eight of them.
Issue 1149 Compiled by the letters desk
From the editor
Brandon Cowen’s unsigned 90-foot mural on the Dunmore floodwall has produced forty-one letters in a fortnight, which is more mail than this paper has had about anything since the ferry timetable. Eleven of the forty-one were actually about the mural. The other thirty were about parking, the smell at the pump house, the rail crossing, and one gentleman’s long-standing feud with the harbour railings. We have printed eight of the eleven, plus one of the thirty, because it was the best written of them and because he is not wrong.
Two housekeeping notes. Junius Okonkwo-Peralta’s review of 30 August ended with a challenge to the artist and a judgement on the third panel:
“It is the mural’s only real failure and it is a failure of nerve, not of skill.”
Nine of the eleven letters take issue with that sentence. Our critic has read all of them and has asked us to say that he stands by it. Second: we approached Brandon Cowen for a response to this page and did not receive one, which will surprise nobody who read the review.
— The Letters Desk
Readers on Brandon Cowen’s floodwall mural
Printed in the order received. Edited for length; not for temper.
Forty-one gallons and a plank across two ladders
I painted signs in this district for thirty-eight years, most of them under my father’s name, and I would like to say something about that wall that your critic did not have the trade to say.
Nine colours over ninety feet is not restraint, it is arithmetic. Every colour you add is another bucket to carry up, another edge to keep wet, another chance to leave a lap mark that shows at four in the afternoon for the next twenty years. He used one-shot enamel for the fine work, which is the correct and unfashionable answer, and he cut those lines freehand off a plank between two ladders at eight and a half feet, in the wind off the water, and they are still straight at the far end. Go and sight down the waterline in panel one with your eye against the concrete. It does not move.
As for the eleven houses. Mr Okonkwo-Peralta calls that panel a failure of nerve. It is ruled work, and ruled work is what a sign painter does when he wants you to stop admiring the hand and start counting. He wanted you to count to eleven and find the seventh window dark. You did count. You wrote a whole paragraph about the seventh window. That is not a panel failing, sir, that is a panel working on you while you complain about it.
The loudest unsigned thing in town
Roman Feltz was right and your paper buried him under three rebuttals in a row, which is a strange way to run an argument you claim to be presenting fairly.
A refusal is a statement. Declining the grant is a statement. Skipping your own unveiling is a statement, and painting out your own initials twice — twice! — with fresh grey you had to go and mix is not modesty, it is editing. Every one of those choices is an authorial decision about how the work is received, and every one of them landed on the front of this newspaper. If the object was to disappear, the object failed, and I do not believe for a second that a man who thought about the wall that carefully failed to think about that.
I like the mural. I have looked at it four times. I would simply like everyone to stop describing the most discussed artistic gesture of the year in Port Alden as an absence of gesture. Brandon Cowen made choices. He can own them.
Panel four, and a cat called Dorcas
I am going to disagree with the previous argument, and with the general tone of the conversation, and I will try to do it without embarrassing myself.
In 2018 I went into the hospital for nine weeks and I could not keep my cat. The Paws Collective took her. Her name was Dorcas, she was grey with a white chin, and she was in that annex on Dunmore Street on the night of the fire in November 2019. She came out of it. She was seventeen when her kidneys went in the spring of 2022 and I had her for three and a half more years than I was ever going to have her, and I know exactly why.
Panel four is a black rectangle with a door standing open in it and twenty little pale shapes going up and away to the right, drawn so thin you cannot see them at two in the afternoon. There is no writing on it. There is no date on it, no name, no plaque, nothing telling you what you are looking at. You have to already know, or you have to stand there long enough to work it out.
I go on a Tuesday morning when the light is low and I count them. There are twenty. There are always twenty. Whatever else that wall is doing, and whatever anybody wants to argue about signatures, Brandon Cowen counted to twenty before he painted it, and he got it right, and he did not put his name next to it, and I would ask the people writing in about performance to consider that some of us do not experience it that way at all.
Nobody has said one word about the parking
Four pages on a wall and not one line on what has happened to the pump-house lot.
There are eleven spaces down there. Eleven. They are for the people who use the launch ramp and for the fellow who services the pump, and since June they have been full every weekend with cars from Ashport belonging to people who want to walk ninety feet and take photographs. Twice now I have watched somebody stop dead in the middle of Dunmore, in the road, at the rail crossing, to look out the window at it. That crossing has no gates. It has a sign and a hope.
The mural is fine. My wife likes the boats. I would simply point out that the city found eleven weeks to let a man paint a floodwall and cannot find one afternoon to paint six lines and an arrow on the tarmac forty feet away.
A correction about the $1,800
Your review states that the $1,800 declined was the arts council’s entire discretionary budget for public art this year. That is very nearly true and I would like to make it exactly true, because the difference matters to the argument you built on top of it.
The council’s public-art line for 2023 is $6,400. Of that, $4,600 was already committed before June to maintenance — the band shell roof, and the annual repaint of the harbour railings, which is not glamorous and which nobody writes to us about. The $1,800 was what remained, and it was the whole of what remained, so your point about a town being out-spent on its own floodwall by one man with a card stands and I am not trying to soften it.
One further note for the record. The grant was never formally awarded and therefore was not, strictly, declined. Brandon Cowen came to the June meeting, sat at the back, and told the chair before the vote that he would rather we kept it. There was no application and no paperwork. I mention it only because two people have since told me he turned down money the council had voted him, and the council never got the chance.
It is not about boats
I am sixteen and I have lived here my whole life and every single piece of art in this town is about boats. The bank has boats. The library has a boat. There is a boat on the water tower.
Panel one has boats in it, I know, but they are lying in the mud with nothing in them, which is not the same thing at all. The rest of it is a substation and a street of houses and a door and an empty crossroads. That is the first time I have seen anything in Port Alden that was about Port Alden and not about the harbour.
Also it is on a floodwall, which everybody walks past and nobody has to buy a ticket for. I do not care whether Brandon Cowen signs it.
I have touched it up twice and I would like that known
On the second Sunday in July somebody put a tag across the bottom of panel two, about three feet of it, in silver. I matched the black as near as I could out of a tin I had in the shed and I took it off in about forty minutes. In August somebody did the same thing to the corner of panel five and I did that one as well.
I am not asking for a plaque. I am aware of the irony and I would ask your letters editor not to make the joke.
What I am asking is that people know it happens, because if it happens and nobody deals with it in the first week it stops being a mural and starts being a wall with something on it. If anyone wants to know what colour, come and ask me. I have the tin.
Sign it
He should sign it. That is the entire letter. A man who makes a thing that good and will not put his name on it is making the rest of us look bad, and I think he knows it.
How to write to us
Letters run to a maximum of 250 words. Send them to Letters, Sawtooth Weekly, Unit 3, 210 Bell Street, Port Alden, or leave them in the slot in the door, which is checked on Mondays and Thursdays.
Include your full name and your neighbourhood. We do not print anonymous letters, and we are aware, this week more than most, of how that reads. We reserve the right to edit for length, clarity and the law, and we will cut from the bottom, so put the point you care about first.
We do not print open letters addressed to somebody else, letters about a business you own, or the same letter twice. Deadline is noon on Monday for that week’s issue.