We wandered through Cowboys Stadium, members of the art class, well-dressed and well-heeled with glasses of white wine in our hands. Sushi mysteriously appeared around corners on silver platters born by young cocktail waitresses with milky long legs sticking out of little black dresses. A couple of hours into a party on March 8 unveiling Dallas Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones’ new collection of art and art installations in the stadium, much wine and liquor had been drunk, ties were loose, and a man staggering along with our tour in a clean, well-tailored black suit blabbered about art as education, popping loose-lipped jokes about mistaking stand-alone concession stands as sculptural objects. I felt like I was suddenly in a scene in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, in which Marcelo joins guests at an aristocratic party on a trek through an ancient palazzo looking for ghosts.

It was not the first time my mind drifted to Rome that evening. Earlier in the night, Jerry Jones spoke of his gargantuan new stadium as a Coliseum. Sitting in the stadium seats in the great vastness of the field area, it was hard not to take his references seriously. There is something imperial about this space’s ambition. The success of the space thus far (it had already hosted the largest crowds ever for a football and basketball game, and it hosted the third largest crowd in boxing history) has quickly turned it into the centerpiece of American spectacle. In less than a year it will house the first of what will likely be many Super Bowls, and the entire country will descend on this place. They will find not just a large stadium, but a stadium whose architecture and art create a monument to a selection of American cultural values: status and power, entertainment and luxury.

Mel Bochner, Win! (2009), Acrylic on wall. (Photo courtesy of the Dallas Cowboys)

It is significant that Jones has included very fine works by great contemporary artists to bolster the stadium’s dialectic. The artists were chosen by an advisory team made up of curators, collectors, and art consultants, and they include Olafur Eliasson, Annette Lawrence, Mathew Richie, Doug Aitken, Ricci Albenda, Dave Muller, Terry Haggerty, Daniel Buren, Franz Ackermann, Lawrence Weiner, Gary Simmons, Mel Bochner, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jim Isermann, Teresita Fernandez, Wayne Gonzales, and Jacqueline Humphries. As a monument, Jones has succeeded in creating something unabashedly new and very puzzling. What is new is the creation of a monument of this size and ambition that conveys something both imperial and democratic. Its magnitude conveys power and wealth with the ferocity of shock and awe, while its egalitarian function is to amuse and satisfy each and every member in the crowd. What is puzzling is how the art objects themselves confront and bolster the idea of space as amusement, while their quality contributes to the perception of the space as a monument to high-status. The context is one of great tension and continual confrontation.

Some of the work engages this tension more overtly than others. Perhaps the most direct addressing of the irony of its own inclusion in Cowboys Stadium is a piece by Mel Bochner called Win (2009). Black letters on a white background repeat words used by arena crowds to cheer the action on field, beginning with the benign “win” and progressing through language with increasingly violent connotations: “Vanquish, conquer, clobber, crush ‘em, beat ‘em to a pulp, skin ‘em alive, bring ‘em to their knees.”

Franz Ackermann, Coming Home and (Meet Me) At the Waterfall (2009). Acrylic on wall. (Photo courtesy of the Dallas Cowboys)

Gary Simmons’ Blue Field Explosions (2009) shows two white cloud bursts, almost like the drawings of explosions in comic books, on a Cowboys-blue background. The work is painted on a large wall in an open space filled only with zigzaging elevators. The open-endedness of the work allows for considerations of a great number of confrontations and their violent reactions: from the players on the field to color in the space.

The interior space of Cowboys stadium is part of what is so mind boggling about the structure. There is the vastness of the field area, but behind the seats, hallways twist and turn, elevators open into tight corridors, and exit ramps jut through great open halls. Each time you turn a corner you are confronted with one of four or five identical spaces that you can only tell apart by the changing art hung on its walls. The stadium’s simple modernity, its white-walled monotony, allows the art to pop and arrest the viewer’s attention. Franz Ackermann’s installation Coming Home and (Meet Me) At the Waterfall (2009) so completely dominates you perception while moving up an elevator that your experience is one of passing through the art, not by it.

Terry Haggerty, Two Minds (2009). Acrylic on wall. (Photo courtesy of the Dallas Cowboys)

Other works command similar awareness of how you experience a place, though with less perceptual violence. These include the four works installed over the concession area: Daniel Buren’s Unexpected Variable Configurations: A Work in Situ (1998), Ricci Albenda’s Interior Landscape, Full Spectrum (2009), Dave Muller’s Solar Arrangement (2009), and Terry Haggerty’s Two Minds (2009). These works all force you to reconsider your experience of place and action (waiting on line at the concession stand), while at the same time transforming otherwise forgotten walls into landmarks.

Matthew Ritchie, Line of Play (2009), Powder coated aluminum, vinyl and acrylic. (Photo courtesy of the Dallas Cowboys)

Matthew Richie’s Line of Play (2009) is an actual depiction of confrontation, described by the artist as a battle between two opposing forces. The images in the work emerge from the black X’s, O’s, and vectors of a football playbook, which dart and circle until they become large masses of color and marks, curling lines spinning off like tentacles. The work is installed on opposing walls in an entryway and it creates a kind of gate – a battle scene that must be passed through to enter the stadium. Another narrative work by Trent Doyle Hancock, From a Legend to a Choir (2009), is more personal than Richie’s metaphoric struggle. Hancock’s beautiful and vibrant vinyl print is a confusing cluster of objects, characters, and words. It is a reference-filled piece – from the Garden of Eden to imaginations of Jean-Michel Basquiat – that depicts the artist’s own highly personalized narrative, one that is nearly imperceptible from the work itself, and so the images and objects in the work invite the audience to invent other narrative imaginations. The result is a very large public work of art that is remarkably intimate and personal.

Trenton Doyle Hancock, From a Legend to a Choir (2009) Vinyl print. (Photo courtesy of the Dallas Cowboys)

This effect of evoking the intimate despite its presence in a space as impersonal as a stadium is not unique to Hancock’s work; it is a characteristic that unites all of the work in Cowboys stadium. Part of the intention is to reorient visitors, to take members of the nameless crowd into a personal experience of a space. In our seats we cheer as one, united in the camaraderie of spectacle. In the hallways the art cheers us on, forcing an encountering of ourselves as individuals, making us aware of the objectivity of our experience as crowd-member, our place as persons in a stadium.

This effect is the most fascinating aspect of Cowboys Stadium. It is a monument that conveys grandeur while its artwork continually arrests the viewer away from the monument-as-such. The art is arousing and edifying, it celebrates the play of sport, while humanizing the scale of the stadium. It is anti-imperial imperialism, a spectacle of power at war with itself, that confounds its own message of grandiosity. There is an unending game being played in Cowboys Stadium: moving through the spaces, you never quite know which artist’s tongue is planted in his or her cheek.

Main image: Gary Simmons’ Blue Field Explosions (2009) Photo courtesy of the Dallas Cowboys.