Long before there was a Bangor, explorers from Spain and Portugal sailed up the Kenduskeag in search of Norumbega, a legendary city made of silver, crystal, and gemstones. They found no treasure; but those who came after them sought and found something far more valuable than silver and gold, and those are the ideals that guide man to a higher existence.
Ideals are directive of human behavior, and the ideals of Maine, expressed by our poets and artists, made America into a land where Norumbega was momentarily within reach, not merely in terms of material goods, but more importantly in terms of the goods of the human spirit.
Little remains of these ideals today. The ideals of an earlier age exist as an echo drowned out by the din of commercialism, or as a light that flickers and dies out in the glare of the digital age. The echo dies out in the ears of our elderly as well, or is heard in garbled form on the lips of our clergy. The light rests briefly on the monuments of Norumbega Mall, in the real heart of our city, where we have a statue of the ideal statesman, Hannibal Hamlin, and not far away, Lady Victory, a torch in each hand, commemorating the lives of the sons of Bangor lost in battle.
This loss of ideals must necessarily lead to chaos, or at least that was the conclusion of Sigmund Freud, an expert on the instinctual forces in man. Freud taught that a society that loses its ideals in art, music and literature must necessarily revert to the primitive. Sadly, Freud’s prediction is being fulfilled in our city.
The floating sculpture to be placed in the Kenduskeag Stream on the Norumbega Mall this summer is just such a return to the primitive. (At this stage, the sculpture exists as a rendering that could change.) It is said to be provocative, and therefore of value. But art must do more than provoke, because graffiti does the same. Graffiti also confronts existing standards of morality and is intended to shock. And like graffiti, the proposed sculpture is intensely idiosyncratic. It offers no ideal to the community at large, and expresses merely the inscrutable thoughts and purposes of the artist. Moreover, like graffiti, it is pathological. Graffiti places more value on base instinct than it places on the whole personality of man, and therefore debases those who create the graffiti and those who view it.
Although the artist’s materials and her method of creation are different, the sculpture is therefore, precisely that, a three-dimensional work of graffiti. Worse, the artist, the museum, and the City Council have chosen to place it in the part of Bangor where graffiti can do and has done the most harm.
To place such a sculpture in Norumbega Mall will be a wound to the heart of the city. And that may be the real reason why the artist chose to anchor the sculpture in the stream, rather than placing it on the mall itself, at eye level with the monuments.
We cannot imagine that this “work of art” will encourage many families to shop in downtown Bangor. A person of sound common sense will reasonably conclude that it is best to avoid a city that approves of, and pays for, such a sculpture. Thus, even as regards the sole argument of concern to the City Council, the profit motive, the sculpture is a detriment.
We would expect the colleges and universities of Maine to promote modern art to the exclusion of traditional forms of beauty. But they do not. Academics know that young people are by nature idealists. Our young people crave the ideals that are the birthright and patrimony of all mankind. And that is why, next to the formless works of modern art that dot our green campuses, we still see artistic representations, done either in stained glass or in bronze, the wildlife of Maine, our streams and meadows, and above these a deep blue sky and Polaris, the North Star, which directs and guides mankind. And this is the art Bangor needs, not art that is an excursion into the primitive and the pathological.
Fritz Spencer of Old Town is the former editor of the Christian Civic League RECORD.