Lansing’s Gearhead Statue Is Broken and No One Will Fix It

Lansing — This city is filled with cranks. Most are confined to the Capitol, pushing cantankerous schemes on the rest of the state, but one is out in broad daylight, however, as part of a larger-than-life steel sculpture that once held promise as a scion of cultural renewal in the city.

The steel gearhead statue, an interactive piece titled Promise of a Dreamer, does catch the eye as sunlight glints off its shiny metal on a summer day. There’s only one problem—it doesn’t work. The gears don’t move anymore.

The hottest trend in large-scale sculpture over the last decade, in case you don’t follow the art world, has been interactive kinetic pieces like this one. Massive works, with a way for viewers to make them move somehow.

For this piece, that means a crank below the gearhead’s face. A circular wheel for viewers to spin, connected to the gear shaft, which in theory is supposed to move the rest of the gears stretching all along a metal outcropping spearing out of the sculpture’s forehead.

Erected in 2017, the piece was intended to symbolize the cultural institutions it points toward on Museum Drive. The R.E. Olds Museum, the Impression 5 Science Center, and such. It cost $75,000, funded by the city of Lansing and a slew of nonprofit arts and cultural organizations.

It’s meant, obviously, to be evocative of thought engendered by exposure to science, math, art, and engineering. We won’t mention that it’s right next door to Omar’s Showbar, Lansing’s favorite downtown strip club. Talk about getting your gears turning.

The sculpture’s metaphor is pretty on the nose, bordering on kitsch, but it’s almost forgivable by the choice of material alone. Made entirely from stainless steel, it has a strong presence and truly draws the eye on a sunny day. The reflective metal shines brightly, warping the image of its surroundings like an obtuse mirror.

The disappointment, of course, is that when you wander up to the giant head and spin the crank, nothing happens. It spins aimlessly, and the gears never turn. The most basic function of the piece, somehow, is broken.

This comes as no surprise for anyone who lives in Lansing, spends time there, or is negatively affected by similarly dysfunctional systems put in place just down the road.

Why would we ever expect the nice things we build to actually be maintained and work? Instead we just create make-work programs to funnel tax dollars out to god knows where, with nice photo ops of politicians at their launch day, soon to be forgotten.

It’s certainly not the most brilliant statue in the world. The meaning of it is a little too on the nose. But it’s hard to even criticize it as an artwork, when the basic kinetic element of the sculpture doesn’t even work anymore.

I can’t imagine the fix is even that difficult. Just spray some WD-40 in there and unstick the gears. That’s the Michigan way. It’d take all of 20 minutes to open it up and figure it out.

The cost to keeping things nice is just intentionality, the smallest modicum of planning and thought. To think, for two seconds, “Hey, maybe someone should go check on that fancy statue every few months and make sure it works.”

It’s been said before, but it bears saying again. We don’t have to live like this, we choose to. Shoddy governance leads to slow decline, and suddenly the fountains run dry, the downtown is filled with fentanyl-smoking vagrants, and the fancy kinetic statues don’t even work.

No one’s defaced the statue yet, but that’s next. Then the gears start falling off altogether, and everyone looks away, abdicating responsibility. We could make a change, and make things work in our cities again.

Until then, we might just have to fix this statue ourselves.