If you’ve walked from Grand Army Plaza down Eastern Parkway, chances are you’ve come across two big yellow letters outside of the Brooklyn Museum. Facing east, towards Crown Heights, they spell the word ‘YO,’ and facing west, ‘OY.’
OY/YO, by the artist Deborah Kass, was first installed in Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2015. It “celebrates Brooklyn’s ethnic communities with whimsy and warmth,” according to Two Trees Management, the development company who commissioned it. Its current plaque reads,
Deborah Kass conceived OY/YO during U.S. President Barack Obama’s first term. Her first monumental sculpture, it references ‘the American promise of equality and fairness… With hate and division now on the rise, it is urgent to see our commonalities, what we share, and what brings us together.’ YO refers to both the Spanish pronoun for ‘I’ and the popular slang greeting, while OY is a Yiddish word expressing dismay or annoyance. Here, OY/YO speaks to the ever-evolving social dynamics among Brooklyn communities.
For those who live in the surrounding neighborhoods, it’s one of the pieces of public art with which you have the most regular relationship.
Traffic reports show that in 2023, about 36,000 vehicles used that segment of Eastern Parkway per day. If you live nearby, it’s probably the piece of public art with which you have the most regular relationship. And while social dynamics in Brooklyn (and everywhere else) have changed since 2015, OY/YO hasn’t.
It might be due for a ten-year check-up. How has the sculpture’s meaning changed since it was first installed? A close look will reveal a development in the relationship between public art and its audience.
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For most of history, the function of public art was religious instruction. Let’s imagine a parishioner standing under the dome of a grand cathedral. Looking up, he would see a scene (or scenes) from scripture. The ceilings are high above, untouchable; he is way down below. Perhaps he is one among many visitors. What experience does the church wish for him? The grandness, hopefully, will make him feel a sense of awe, humility, of smallness. The more perfect the work, the more he would understand God’s heavenly power as true and the church’s earthly power as just. Pope Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, said, “What writing presents to readers, a picture presents to the unlearned who look at it.” The audience — ‘the public’ — was the masses of illiterate faithful.
Then came the Enlightenment, wars, colonization, nation-states. Soon coffers all over Europe were heavy with the spoils of industrialization and conquest. Public art then went beyond the church — it taught the masses a new national pride. This was happening in America as early as 1781, when Congress chose to memorialize the victory over the British at Yorktown with a marble column adorned with emblems.
During the 19th century, governments and patrons across the country commissioned public monuments to interpret and teach history. While America pushed west, Manhattan crawled north. Streets were opened, parks were planned, plazas constructed. Union Square got its first sculpture in 1856 — of George Washington on horseback. Central Park received busts, fountains, and ancient Egyptian needles. Washington Square Park and Grand Army Plaza welcomed triumphal arches. And of course, there is the Statue of Liberty.
The shift away from instructive monuments began when funds dried up in the 1930s and was complete by the seventies. A different kind of public art began to appear, one that was increasingly conceptual, site-specific, and interested in dialogue with its audience. Many artists — though not Kass, who had decided on painting as her medium — felt the pull of the streets.
One appeal of the public realm was that it could offer a wider ‘public’ a chance to have meaningful experiences with art far away from the rarefied air of institutions. When a painting is hung from the wall of the Met, it is forever changed; it becomes enriched by the museum and its history — the physical size of the building, its wealth, the other paintings housed there with it. A plaque is fixed next to it; historians are paid to study and explain it. It is photographed; today, those photos are circulated online. “Its meaning,” writes John Berger, “can no longer be found in what it says but in what it is.” Berger calls this mystification. The painting is preceded by learned ideas and associations, a mystifying aura surrounds it. It becomes an ‘art object.’
An artist working in the public realm, contrarily, knows that you will see their work there, surrounded by sights, sounds, smells, text, and everything associated with them. These environmental elements are invited to become part of its language. They are part of what makes the work a complete whole.
And if the artist successfully moves you to approach their work and look, their vision of the world is there for you — you might feel changed by what they see and you don’t. And if the environment is part of what completes the art, then, reflexively, you can change your environment too.
This is how art can be political. In Berger’s words, seeing how an artist sees can “increase our awareness of our own potentiality.” Put differently, art can be a kind of dialectical trigger; it can lead to a new consciousness, which can lead to action. The promise of public art is that action is directly connected with place.
This is not to say that all public art is safe from mystification. Just as photography revolutionized painting by making an image reproducible, the internet has done the same to photography by reconfiguring how those reproduced images are made available for public consumption. A more recent innovation has affected all art, but specifically public art, ever since Instagram added it in 2011: the hashtag.
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There is no fence around OY/YO. You can walk right up and touch it. What do you see?
Most would see something big and yellow. Facing east, the letters spell ‘YO,’ and facing west, ‘OY.’ The words are in all-caps, mounted on a black metal base, positioned at a right angle with the street and museum on either side. If you approach it, you notice that the surface is a bit weathered; chipping paint exposes metal in worn down areas. If you tap it, you hear resonance — it is hollow. It has been climbed on and defaced; you can see where the graffiti has been scrubbed off and covered up. The artist’s signature, D. Kass, is engraved in squiggly letters towards the bottom.
And then there is everything else one might receive from the sculpture; in other words, the subjective experience. ‘OY,’ I understand, is a Yiddish term expressing angst and exasperation. I also know that for religious Jews, it can have an intense devotional weight, a two letter plea to God. ‘YO’ is a greeting originating in Black slang which has since become more-or-less integrated into American English. I also know that a Spanish speaker will use both terms, the latter as the pronoun ‘I’, the former as a contraction of ‘oye!’ ‘hey!’ Some of the scrubbed-off graffiti, I remember, is from last year’s pro-Palestine protests.
In their primary, culturally understood usage, ‘OY’ and ‘YO’ are linguistic caricatures. They are gestural words — the big noses and lips of language, the exaggerated features. Meaning comes with them prepackaged: in each is a history, a memory, a set of ideas — some mix of fact and legend — about Jewish and Black people. (To be clear, there is nothing essentially evil in using caricature as an element of visual art, no more than there is using the word ‘fuggetaboutit’ in a poem. It is up to the painter or the poet to choose from the infinite combination of visual or language elements available, and to use them wisely.)
The viewer is urged to feel a kind of happy awareness, a pleasant whiff of shared history. This is art put to use — the stuff of public monuments. Its alibi is public sculpture.
But these many meanings are impoverished as soon as the sculpture is put to use. Let’s return to where OY/YO was originally installed. To place any art exactly between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, especially a piece so big, yellow, and caricatural, is to invite photography. The sculpture is posing for us, as it encourages visitors to pose with it, while the plaque urges us to share it using the hashtag #oyyo. By design, the first place the public will experience the sculpture is on a cell phone.
It also lends itself to reproduction. Let’s go about a quarter of a mile west of OY/YO down the parkway for a comparison. The power of the Grand Army Plaza arch comes from every other arch that preceded it, dating back to Rome; in every new arch lives the whole history of western civilization. But the arch, like the equestrian statue or the obelisk, has no specific relationship with its site — it instead conquers and asserts itself over it. As copies of OY/YO are installed, first at Stanford University, then in Philadelphia, the particular relationship between sculpture and site is weakened; the mystifying effect is multiplied.
And inevitably, people talk about it. “It celebrates the linguistic and cultural and racial and gender and sexual and — every diversity of this city, because those sounds, ‘OY’ and ‘YO’, are universal throughout all of our languages,” said Josh Perelman, introducing Kass to talk about the piece in Philadelphia. On the Brooklyn Museum’s website, the blurb reads, “She borrowed Ed Ruscha’s bold yellow letters, the self-referential title of the 1901 painting Yo, Picasso (I, Picasso), and the impressive size of Robert Indiana’s steel Love sculptures. Then, she transformed those elements to honor the diversity that has historically been overshadowed by famous white men.” Kass herself said that the sculpture is about “the American promise of equality and fairness… With hate and division now on the rise, it is urgent to see our commonalities, what we share, and what brings us together.”
Another key element of mystification, according to Berger, is “the process of explaining away what otherwise might be evident.” It denies the viewer the opportunity to have a personal emotional reaction to the sculpture based on their own lived experience and relationship with its physical, and in this case, linguistic elements. Instead we are meant to feel something about equality and fairness, culture, identity, New York — a kind of political consciousness, though less a specific knowledge than an awareness of knowledge.
We start with the raw material of the work itself (the two words and the meanings attached to them, their rendering as sculpture) and end with the concept it suggests once it is put to use (a political awareness). Roland Barthes would call this union of form and concept myth. “The knowledge contained in a mythical concept is confused, made of yielding, shapeless associations … it is a formless, unstable, nebulous condensation, whose unity and coherence are above all due to its function.” The viewer is urged to feel a kind of happy awareness, a pleasant whiff of shared history. This is art put to use — the stuff of public monuments. Its alibi is public sculpture.
Myth, according to Barthes, is a kind of depoliticized speech. “Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification.” In other words, myth “transforms history into nature.” Opposite the sculpture, a vague coexistence of the ideas of ‘Black’ and ‘Jewish’ are to wash over the viewer, to be assimilated as something “natural and eternal;” you feel a renewed faith in a purified politics, and then you walk away.
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I’m not sure if there is a general consensus on the sculpture. But anecdotally, I’ve heard a word used a few times by those I’ve spoken with: cringe.
If myth has a functional use; cringe is what happens when myth backfires. There has been some rupture; you notice the drool on your chin. Barthes writes, “There is no fixity in mythical concepts: they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely.” A collective cringe could mean that the historical moment once ripe for this particular myth has passed.
In the meantime, I will continue to walk by the sculpture twice a day. Each time I do, I will slap my palm to my forehead and utter a certain two-letter cry expressing angst and exasperation: “Oy.”
