Vaillancourt Fountain

Vaillancourt Fountain – the controversy in Justin Herman plaza – San Francisco.

This fountain has been the center of controversy since the day it was installed.  Created by Armand Vaillancourt in 1971, it is actually entitled “Québec libre!” It is representative of the relationship between Vaillancourt’s art and his political convictions. It is a huge concrete fountain, 200 feet long, 140 feet wide and 36 feet high. The night before its inauguration, Vaillancourt inscribed Québec libre! in red letters, to note his undying support for the Quebec sovereignty movement and more largely, his support for the freedom of all people. The following day, seeing that the city’s employees erased the inscription, he jumped on the sculpture to reinscribe the sentence many times.

In 1987 the fountain became the object of a polemic involving U2’s Bono. During a free concert, Bono climbed the sculpture in front of the 20,000 people in attendance and wrote Rock & Roll stops the traffic. Reacting to the act, the city’s mayor (Dianne Feinstein) declared that she deplored the sculpture’s vandalism and that this kind of act could be punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment. Vaillancourt was then contacted to learn if he supported the gesture, which he answered by going to U2’s concert in Oakland the following day, where he wrote “Stop the madness” on the stage, in front of 70,000 people. He defended Bono’s gesture, after a speech on injustice, declaring that graffiti is a necessary evil as young people do not generally have the same access to newspapers, and media in general, as politicians do to express themselves.

All this seems so silly today, but we have come so far in our regards to what is free speech and how public art and graffiti are accepted today.

The other “controversy” is that you either love it or hate it.  There is rarely any in between when it comes to this piece of public art.  At its dedication, people handed out handbills calling it a “howling obscenity” and “pestiferous eyesore”.  I personally love it.  You can climb on it, you can wade in it, it makes a very powerful noise which is amazing in itself.

In 2004, Aaron Peskin, a local supervisor spearheaded a drive to have the fountain removed, he says the city doesn’t want to pay the annual $250,000 in electricity costs to pump 30,000 gallons of water through the square tubes; and it has become an “attractive nuisance,” providing a sheltered public space where the homeless sleep at night.  While one can’t argue with those facts, the entire city has warrens of places for the homeless, and most great cities have great fountains, sometimes, you just have to admit, yours is a tad odd, but it is part of your city’s history.