Sculptures and Street Performers

"All eyes on me in the center of the ring just like a circus": The classy taste-maker, Britney Spears, even wrote a song on the subjectToday, I was walking along Fifth Avenue near Central Park. While I was taking in the budding green trees and the lush grasses I failed to immediately notice a similar energy in the people. It wasn’t the warmest of our spring transition, but it was a Sunday, and Sundays (the warm ones) call for relaxation outside. So, I started looking at the people. As my friend and I came to the corner of 57th and 5th, a corner of plaza ubiquity, I noticed that the three squares were dotted with people. There were some larger dots, smaller dots, medium dots, but on the whole the plazas were well dotted. (As opposed to the dot-less Winter season).
And all of the sudden Tuan popped into my head. He sure is doing a good job with that increasing “the burden of awareness” (203) thing. In Chapter 12 Tuan says that objects, more specifically sculptures, “have the power to create a sense of place by their own physical presence….[that] A single inanimate object can be the focus of a world”(162). That, like people, they seem to make their own spaces. In the three surrounding plazas I could discern three dominating central objects. The Apple Store Plaza has its Apple Store atrium jutting through the pavement. The Grand Army Plaza has its grand armed statue and its less glorified sister plaza has its less glorified fountain.
People seemed to be congregating around places to sit and places close to the central objects, similar to what the video in class revealed to us: that people sit where there are places to sit. It also said, however, that people tend to avoid open, central spaces. Which seemed as well true. The fringes of the plazas, lined with benches and ledges were popular places to sit and stand. Also, the objects, close to the actual centers of the spaces, were crowded with people. It seems that people indeed liked being near the center. This doesn’t prove that the video was false, if anything it shows how right it was. The video spoke about how people didn’t like to be in central, OPEN spaces. What the statue, the fountain, and the atrium do is diffuse the central space. By placing something there they have made it more comfortable to be there.
Tuan also says that ordered spaces are indicative of cultural rhythm. In this way, it seems that people don’t like to feel they are the focus of all random street attention. They don’t want to feel that everyone’s looking at them, scrutinizing their appearance and actions. Yet people ARE in the center, reclining at the base of statues and the steps of fountains, mingling with the focal object. An explanation could be that these three inanimate objects function in the same way as a street performer does (who, incidentally, usually stands at the center of a space). By drawing attention to himself he lures a crowd. They feel comfortable standing around him, populating a central open space and so they stay. But once he’s finished and moved to the next block, the crowd disperses. The mass of people no longer feels at ease in this center of focus, so it backs away, back onto the benches and fringe hideouts.
It seems that people, though usually only feeling comfortable at the edges and not wanting to dominate public attention, congregate around these objects because it allows them to a) sit where there is place to sit and more importantly b) because it lessens their burden of self awareness. Like with the situation of the street performer, the person gets to advantage of central view without all the responsibilities of being the center of attention. So, it seems that statues perform a vital function, making people feel comfortable in the most area of an open plaza, while also making it that much more beautiful.