A BETTER IDEA FOR THE FONZ

Use the Bronze for Bullets, Instead

By Michael Horne

A Few Thoughts on

The Bronze Fonz

The Organization

Visit Milwaukee, the non-profit organization that wants to bring a statue of “The Fonz” to Milwaukee received $4,116,000 in public funding last year.

The source was the tax percentages collected by the Wisconsin Center District (WCD) from Milwaukee County food and beverage sales (0.25%), automobile rental fees (3%) and hotel room charges (2%). An additional 7 % tax is levied on City of Milwaukee hotel room charges. About one quarter of WCD tax revenue goes to Visit Milwaukee; the balance goes to pay off a $185 million bond issue.

So, Visit Milwaukee is a tax-supported organization. Let’s bear that in mind. What are they doing with their time, and our money?

The Proposal

Visit Milwaukee has proposed an $85,000, privately funded statue of The Fonz, a fictional character from a Hollywood-produced sitcom set in, but with no other connection to, Milwaukee. The Fonz was a character in a sitcom, “Happy Days,” a product owned by Viacom, an entertainment corporation that derives revenues from the intellectual property it owns. “Happy Days,” the first season, has been released on DVD and retails for $49.99.

The Location

The location proposed for the siting of the sculpture is the Chase Bank Plaza, west of N. Water Street and south of E. Wisconsin Avenue. It has been the principal intersection of Milwaukee for 172 years.

Chase is the colloquial name of JPMorgan Chase, a large international bank. The JPMorgan Chase Art Collection was founded in 1959 by David Rockefeller, then the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. The collection features 30,000 items displayed in 450 locations around the world. Without reference to a catalogue raisonne it is not possible to determine if any of the items are sculptures of television sitcom icons. However, the collection includes work by such sculptors as Louise Nevelson, Donald Judd, Alexander Calder, Jeff Koons, and Jean Dubuffet, none of whom include sitcom caricatures among their oeuvre, and the work of any one of whom would be an addition to this city. So Chase Bank, which does not own Chase Plaza, could probably do better than Visit Milwaukee’s Fonz just from its own collection. J. Pierpont Morgan, the other half of Chase, was a fabled collector of such sculptures as Lucas Cranach’s Martin Luther and Antonio Rosselino’s virgin and child. He would likely scoff at having a sitcom character sculpture in the courtyard of his bank.

The Artist

All we know about the Visit Milwaukee Fonz is that “four artists have been contacted.” We do not know their names or their work at this time. We do not know how they were chosen and vetted, or by whom. In contrast, Mr. Rockefeller’s art decisions were guided by “an illustrious group of art experts” including Alfred Barr, Dorothy Miller, James Johnson Sweeney, Robert Hale, Perry Rathbone and Gordon Bunshaft, architect of the Museum of Modern Art, which does not have any Fonzies in its collection.

Figurative and Portrait Sculpture in the 21^st Century

The heyday of public figurative and portrait sculpture was the late 19^th century, when Civil War Generals were sculpted in abundance and plopped in every public square in the country, only to be neglected for a century. How abundant? This very city has two outdoor sculptures of Gen. Erastus B. Wolcott.

Who?

Exactly. If we have forgotten the father of the Western Sanitary Commission, the founder of the Milwaukee Soldier’s Home, the first doctor to perform kidney surgery, and the husband of Wisconsin’s first woman doctor, how can we expect posterity to remember the accomplishments of The Fonz?

Alas, figurative sculpture barely survived the 19^th century, when Rodin began deconstructing it, and has no need for a revival in the 21^st. But it is safe, which means by definition that it is not art, with very few exceptions. Duane Hanson, J. Seward Johnson and Frederick Hart, for example, come to mind. Hanson’s realistic sculptures were portraits of anonymous people like the janitor in the Milwaukee Art Museum Collection. Hart’s were of idealized folks like Adam and Eve, as seen in the National Cathedral. Neither did portraits, per se, especially of television sitcom characters.

Milwaukee has recently installed a few figurative sculptures like the dreadful children outside the Betty Brin Museum and the firefighter (who really isn’t that bad) resting on his bench outside Milwaukee Fire House 10 on N. Broadway in the Third Ward. In recent years one portrait sculpture was unveiled, a copy of a Gandhi sculpture from outside the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. that does double duty outside Milwaukee’s Courthouse. But then Gandhi was no Fonz. We do not include in this survey sculptures of athletes, but those we've seen are likely of the artistic caliber expected of the Fonz project.

Summary

Civic statuary is a public blessing – of sorts – and should not be entered into lightly. It should not be erected to promote the moneymaking characters of Hollywood studios, and should involve actual artists creating actual, unique artworks, ideally for specific sites. A Bronze Fonz would do Milwaukee no good. Sitcom characters do to sculpture what ducks do to paintings – they make them horrible. The public would be better served if we used the Fonz’s bronze for bullets.