The city now is in the midst of a $6.1 million project to stabilize the underground parking garage and improve City Hall Plaza with new leaping flow fountains, more greenspace and an inviting atmosphere for the events that happen there each year.
The sculpture will be removed in Phase II of the plaza project, likely in the fall, and then placed in temporary storage. Discussions about where it will be relocated are ongoing, Valerie Lough, community information coordinator for the city, said.
“The sculpture’s removal is part of the design of the renovated plaza that will include fountains, artwork, seating areas and greenspace,” she said.
Lough said city officials had discussions with the Public Art Committee about the relocation.
Kevin Rose, historian for the Turner Foundation and member of the Public Art Committee, said the committee was not included on the discussion to remove Oracle’s Vision but asked for and received a meeting with city officials about the plan.
“While the committee does not have an official position, I know that several committee members, including myself, would have preferred to have kept the sculpture in place,” Rose said. “Still, we understand that our vision is not the city’s vision, and we look forward to working with them to make sure this sculpture remains on public view in a prominent downtown location.”
The piece will not be sold or donated to another city or to a museum, Lough said.
“Oracle’s Vision will always be among the treasures held by the city of Springfield,” Lough said, “and will be relocated to a different public space for residents and visitors to enjoy and interact with.”
Search for a new home
Rose said finding a new home for the sculpture is important.
“We are fortunate to have such an important work of sculpture in our community – few communities our size can boast of having modern sculpture from a prominent American artist like Ronald Bladen,” he said.
Oracle’s Vision cost $80,000 in 1981, with the city paying $20,000, the NEA $40,000 and the rest from donors. Adjusted for inflation, the work would cost about $275,000 now.
In a 2011 News-Sun piece about the sculpture, former mayor Roger Baker said: “In one evening, people went to bed knowing nothing about art. They woke up the next morning, and we had 80,000 art experts.”
The work even attracted the attention of horror movie legend Vincent Price, who saw the new sculpture in October 1981 when he came to Springfield touring with his one-man drama.
“There are those, I’m sure, who will denounce ‘Oracle’ as inaccessible and ugly,” Price told the newspaper, “just as there are probably those who would attack Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’ as only something foul involving a nearly nude man lying across a lady’s lap.”
Price, who had a degree in art history from Yale, authored a 1972 book, “The Vincent Price Treasury of American Art.”
Marianne Nave was part of the original committee that helped select art for the City Hall project, “but we never had any say on (Oracle’s Vision).”
She said a city commissioner serving on the committee made the call.
“The committee did a fine job up to the end,” Nave said.
She added: “I am sort of a history buff. It’s history now, so why not leave it there?”
Failed efforts to move it
Efforts to remove the sculpture in the past failed.
Once, in 1982, Bladen exercised his right of refusal in the contract regarding any new location for the piece.
In a two-sentence statement, Bladen said the sculpture was “designed for a specific site. I do not approve its relocation.”
After Bladen died of cancer in 1988, some tried to remove it by saying someone could climb on it and fall, suggesting it was unsafe. It remained in place for years to come.
“That thing has just been jinxed since the beginning,” said Mark Chepp, the executive director of the Southern Ohio Museum in Portsmouth, but formerly director of the Springfield Museum of Art and a Wittenberg University art history teacher. “That is the trouble with public art. People will take umbrage.”
At Wittenberg, Chepp used Oracle’s Vision as a good work of minimalism, and he called Bladen “a big deal.”
“It was really a forward-looking piece for Springfield,” he said.
Oracle’s Vision is not a general on a horse, Chepp said, not a specific representation.
“It is an experiential piece. It is not meant to represent any specific thing,” he said. “You bring your mindset to it. You can appreciate things just for what they are.”
Someplace it will be seen
Rose wrote about Oracle’s Vision around its 30th anniversary.
Bladen described Oracle’s Vision as “abstract resolution of form that presents a visual siting in keeping with an open building and plaza,” Rose’s research said.
Rose himself admitted an indifference to the sculpture until he researched it a dozen years ago.
“After looking into it, I have a newfound respect for it,” Rose said in a 2011 News-Sun piece.
Now, Rose acknowledged: “The current location has been significantly altered through the years, resulting in a site that is quite different from the sculpture’s original 1981 setting. Hopefully, the new location will offer better visibility and access, and be more in keeping with the open plaza that Bladen envisioned for this work.”
Nave, who still serves on many local groups, said, “If it has to be moved, to put it in Snyder Park somewhere ... Move it someplace where it will be seen.”
Chepp had other ideas about the piece’s fate.
He said the buildings and items around the plaza were in that same movement in architecture.
“This was meant to enhance that,” he said. “That is part of the problem with moving it. Where does it make sense? It’s meant to be viewed from that corner.”
Chepp said it is meaningless anywhere else, a point Bladen’s own protests about moving it confirmed.
“The only ethical thing to do is to destroy it,” he said. “Put it out of its misery.”
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