This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Art papers. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1981-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1981)
Reflections on the Tragedy of The Great Southwest Industrial Park Sculpture John Howett The 3,000 acre Atlanta Gateway Park on Fulton Industrial Boulevard, two miles off U.S. Interstate 20, near Six Flags over Georgia, opened November 1, 1968, as the Great Southwest Industrial Park. At the time of the opening approximately 300 acres had been developed over a two year period of construction based on a design by Dallas landscape architect J.O. Lambert with buildings coordinated in color and materials by Josef Albers. Although few Atlantans seem to know or care, the Park in cluded thirty pieces of contemporary sculpture, and there were plans to acquire 1,000 over a ten year period. Even with the first thirty pieces installed for the opening, the Great Southwest Industrial Park was the largest public collection of monumen tal contemporary sculpture in the world. The names of the artists read like a Who’s Who of the 1960’s: Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Beverly Pepper, Kenneth Snelson, Peter Forakis, Forest Myers, Tal Streeter, Mon Levinson, Robert Murray, Lyman Kipp, Will Insley and on and Art Papers September-October 1981 on. A few local artists were pur chased. Dorothy Berge had a piece in the original thirty. The project of combining the Great Southwest Industrial Park with Six Flags over Georgia was the brainchild of the entrepreneur from Dallas, Angus Gilchrist Wynne, Jr.. Wynne chose the late Douglas MacAgy, Associate Director of the N.E.A. and former Director of the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Art, to select the sculpture for his industrial park. Gudmund Vigtel, Director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, was one of the consultants assisting MacAgy. Wynne envisioned a 3,000 acre industrial park of looping boulevards embracing grassy knolls with coor dinated buildings as background for contemporary sculpture. At the same time, he planned Six Flags Over Georgia (as he had in Texas) to bring crowds of people for entertainment who would also visit the sculpture park. It was a true vision of the six ties: private enterprise and art work ing together (while we destroyed the enemy of this capitalist paradise in far away Viet Nam). Since President Reagan seems to have a similar nos talgic dream, what happened to the Great Southwest Industrial Park may be a timely lesson in the pitfalls of art dependent upon private enterprise (while we pour money into weapons to defend the dream). By 1971, barely five years after the Park opened, it was taken over by MGIC Investment Corporation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the ten years since that company has been in charge of what is now called The Atlanta Gateway Park, it is obvious that only profits matter and that the vision of Angus Wynne was not trans ferred. The park has expanded to at least triple its size in 1968, but, in spite of the fact that the new owners use a more euphemistic name, dropping the word “industrial” and referring directly to the large sculpture by Peter Forakis, Gateway, 1967, both in their logo and title, they do not seem to care at all for the art nor the design of the park as it was originally conceiv ed. Today trucks rumble through weed-grown, trash-strewn lots with empty pedestals and rusted hulks of once splendid works of art. The “park” has become a dead place, a cemetary of late sixties’ Minimalism. Perhaps the death of the park has been foreshadowed. The Atlanta Gateway Park is built on the site of a pre-Columbian Hopewell Indian set tlement discovered at the turn of the century. Emory and Tulane both have artifacts taken from this site which is now preserved in asphalt. Further more, near the center of the original 300 acre development earth digging machines had scooped around an old Protestant graveyard leveling the ground below but leaving the high hill where the dead are buried stranded and looking like an apple core chewed all around with the grave stones and a few trees occupying the stem end. It would seem that the historical func tion of the place is consistent with its current evolution into a contem porary cultural burial site. Opening night in 1968 was, however, alive and the most elaborate and gala affair of its kind in Atlanta since Gone With the Wind. The people-mover trains from Six Flags were pressed into service at the park to take visitors from sculpture to sculpture between tents lavish with food and drink while search lights illuminated the festivities and swept the evening sky. Peter Forakis’ giant red triangular pipe piece had been commissioned to span the main entrance. Just inside on the grassy parkway was a Michael Steiner which is gone now. The MGIC people have sold some pieces and hauled some away to their homebase in Milwaukee. These, of course, have turned out to be the luckier ones since those that remain have been neglected and vandalized. An historian cannot help associating this with Lord Elgin looting the Parthenon and shipping pieces of it to London in 1802, while
