Nobody Asked for This

On April 10, Marco Cochrane’s 45-foot-tall metal sculpture of a nude woman, titled R-Evolution, was unveiled to the public at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza. She will stand there, her butt facing the Ferry Building, her mechanized chest “breathing” for one hour each day, for at least six months, possibly a whole year.

As I gazed up at this monumental steel and mesh sculpture on Thursday, I felt embarrassed for the city of San Francisco.

Look, I don’t write negative reviews often. When I do pan something, it’s in the interest of public service (should you pay $40 for that?), and with the acknowledgement that I might not be the intended audience of a certain thing.

One of several problems with R-Evolution is that we are all the audience for this thing, and no one asked us if we wanted it.

I admit, the Burning Man aesthetic is not my aesthetic. While R-Evolution is certainly a feat of engineering and fabrication, it doesn’t succeed for me as a standalone artwork removed from the stark landscape and pounding EDM of the Playa. Also, why would we seek to occlude our hard-won view of the Ferry Building?

Embarcadero Plaza, shadeless, polarizing, is a complex site filled with real pieces of architectural and cultural history. (Save the Vaillancourt Fountain!) R-Evolution, made for a party in the desert, has no relationship to its new urban surroundings and everyday city life.

And then there’s the “feminism” of it all.

San Francisco, like all American cities, has a major gender imbalance when it comes to its public art — both in terms of who’s represented by it and who made it. We even passed a 2018 ordinance declaring that a meager 30% of statues, street signs and parks on city-owned property should honor historical women. Since then, we’ve added just one such monument to our Civic Art Collection.

And though R-Evolution is based on real-life model Deja Solis (as impossibly proportioned as she seems), she is neither a historical figure nor named. That may be Alma de Bretteville Spreckels atop the Dewey Monument in Union Square, but really she’s just a symbol of colonial military victory. People are tired of retrograde symbols; according to San Francisco’s Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee, the Dewey Monument is one of the least-liked monuments in the Civic Art Collection.

R-Evolution, in a very old-fashioned way, is not a singular person, but a self-declared symbol of “divine feminine energy” — a giant nude sculpture of a woman made by a man. We should know by now that a depiction of a woman is not inherently feminist.

But when we give our public space over to third-party art agencies and privately funded artwork, maybe all we can expect is out-of-place aesthetics and half-baked messages of representation. (Similarly plopped-down temporary artworks now dot the Great Highway and JFK Drive, thanks to agencies like Building 180 and Illuminate.)

So how did R-Evolution even get here?

The sculpture, which was built on Treasure Island and debuted at Burning Man in 2015, was originally meant for temporary installation at Union Square. The Union Square Alliance, which includes neighborhood business owners, was very excited for the attention (and foot traffic) the sculpture might bring to the beleaguered commercial district. But at the last minute, engineers deemed the 32,000-pound sculpture too heavy for the plaza tiles and the garage below.

The Recreation and Parks Department pivoted to another location: Embarcadero Plaza. In a March 3 meeting, when the San Francisco Arts Commission approved the installation in an 11-to-1 vote, several commissioners noted the sculpture is “controversial.”

Commissioner JD Beltran, the lone nay, noted that had this been an SFAC commission, “one of the things that we do, that has not been done … is that we seek pretty extensive public comment about the effect of the statue on the community.”

Because R-Evolution is a temporary installation, privately funded by the Sijbrandij Foundation, organized by Building 180, and hosted by Recreation and Parks, it did not go through a period of public feedback. The commission received just three emails prior to their March 3 meeting, most worried about the sculpture’s effect on plaza vendors.

In contrast, the Potrero Yard Modernization Project, a bus maintenance facility and affordable housing development set to be built across the street from KQED, allowed for two weeks of comment on its public art components. Posters put up around the neighborhood made sure everyone in the vicinity knew how to add their two cents.

Ultimately the review panel for the bus depot may not choose the art I would like to see from my office window, but that’s OK. My opinion was requested and absorbed by someone at some point in the decision-making process. I am the public, I had a say in my art.

R-Evolution is public art only in the most literal sense: It exists in public space. But the public — as in, the people — had nothing to do with it.