Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette
Artist Brett Yasko says he doesn't want the public art project "Market Square" to be thought of as a political piece.
I see it as live theater. Come and watch what's going on, for better or for worse."
Brett Yasko was talking about "Market Square," the title, location and subject of the public art piece he created for this year's Three Rivers Arts Festival.
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Yasko was handed both a plum and a challenge when he was invited to provide the public art this year. It's a prestigious, if often controversial, component of the 17-day festival. But, because of the festival's footprint shift away from Point State Park, his assigned site was anything but a field of uncompromised green.
The large urban square is surrounded by a variety of shops, crisscrossed by streets, bisected by bus routes and populated by resident pigeons and a variety of people. Recently it served as a set for a television miniseries. Periodically it draws the attention of city planners and politicians who feel it's in need of a makeover, as is happening now.
After spending some time on site, Yasko decided that its real impact lay with the people who use it.
His initial idea was to interview them to gain a sense of who they were, but when that failed he had to turn to the dark side to attain his goal.
For the first two days of visits, notebook in hand, he recorded what his interviewees told him only to conclude, "This is not what I want this to be. This is not what it can be."
People became formal, their comments weighted. "It was missing something," Yasko says. "This element of real. It didn't seem real."
A change of tactics was in order.
"A great thing about Market Square is its layout. It dawned on me how easy it was to do this, kind of, eavesdropping in this place. It sounds horrible, but I would eavesdrop on people. I'd listen to their conversations and write them down. I had a notebook, and I just sort of sidled up to people." Sitting next to them, he "listened and wrote," pretending to be absorbed in something of his own.
Yasko began visiting the square in April. Only two or three times did conversations stop when he approached.
"It's a weird thing to do that," Yasko says, and it took him a bit of time to get into the rhythm. "I had to get my head around it at first."
Some days were more productive than others. "It's sort of like fishing." But he's pleased with what he got. "There's a candor there that's really interesting to me, and what I thought this piece needed to have."
His only criterion was that a conversation was occurring. "I was listening to people with three-piece suits on and people who looked like they hadn't slept in four days."
People talked about "the war going on, poverty, local politics. For the regulars, there's this worry about what Market Square is going to become," he says. Topics range from the recent daytime Downtown shooting on Smithfield Street to minutia about people's jobs. A police officer talks about the difference between Market and Regent Square pigeons. "It's not all heavy handed and hard."
"Nothing is obscene, but there are some really raw parts of it."
At the end of his research, Yasko gleaned from his notebook 34 excerpts from the conversations that he'll display, one at a time and two per day, at locations in the square where they took place.
He compares their physical presentation to low-tech message boards -- letters painted on individual square tiles, black on white, that will be rearranged for each quote and lay flat on the ground. Yasko designed the typeface based on a font that worked visually well on a square background.
"I'm a graphic designer, so it's hard for me to think in a way other than as a design project." He employed "elements of graphic design that I'm interested in," such as typography and words.
Mt. Lebanon woodworker Lyle Clevenger Jr. fabricated the 400 wood tiles, and Alpha Screen Graphics in the South Side Terminal Building fabricated the letter forms. Arriving at a total count took a little planning, as Yasko figured how many of each letter he'd need to cover all the quotes.
There's no punctuation so the viewer will have to work a little to decipher the comments, comparable to the effort Yasko extended to get the conversations. "I call it Christopher Wool style," Yasko says, referring to a contemporary American artist whose text painting greets visitors who enter Carnegie Museum of Art through the parking lot vestibule.
The excerpts range from approximately 250 to 380 tiles each, and Yasko will change them daily at noon and at 4 p.m., introducing a performance aspect to the work.
Oh, and did we mention that the tiles are two feet square? Each.
"People are going to be watching this crazy guy and asking what the heck is he doing," Yasko predicts.
He says to really appreciate the piece will require more than one visit. "There's a momentum to it. The process of the 17 days as one whole is going to be more important than any one time."
The progression will be documented by video and photographs, and Yasko, who's been taking process photographs from the beginning, plans a book on the project.
Yasko was born in Harrisburg in 1968 and was reared in Sewickley. He studied visual media with a concentration in film at American University, Washington, D.C., from which he earned his undergraduate degree, and considered becoming a documentary filmmaker. Later he completed a program that focused on advertising at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta. He lives in the Strip District with his wife, Sarah, and sons Nate and Jakob.
He's been employed as a graphic designer for a decade and established his own studio, Brett Yasko, in 2003, working with cultural-, community- and arts-related clients. Readers have probably seen his work without realizing it -- for example the sharp new gallery brochure for the Carnegie's Forum exhibitions, a combination of professionalism and creativity that consistently achieves that fine line accomplishment of being so good that it has a wow factor and so humble that it doesn't draw attention to itself. Yasko is also an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design.
In 2004, he created Partisan Project, a nonprofit organization of designers and artists working for political change. The group's potent red, white and blue posters popped up all over town during that year's presidential campaign.
Yasko says that he doesn't want "Market Square" to be thought of as a political piece. That said, issues ranging from the ubiquitousness of technology that can record, audibly or visually, every aspect of individual's lives, to the implications of the Patriot Act, come to mind when considering his methodology.
And then there are those questions that keep coming into Yasko's mind, such as "Who is Market Square for? The people who are there daily? Or someone in Shadyside who never goes there and they're trying to attract?"
Yasko says he isn't knocking the efforts of people who are working hard to do something positive for the square. "I don't think the city should let things run amok." But he's also concerned that it will be anesthetized into a Disney World.
"Everyone wants to strip down Pittsburgh and make it this clean, pristine spot. What makes cities fascinating and attractive is when they're a little dangerous, a little raw."
First Published: May 31, 2007, 1:00 a.m.
