Reading about Public Art

Marc Quinn Alison Lapper pregnant Fourth Plinth commission Image courtesy Cat Newton-Groves

This text is meant to be a short review of existing literature on public art and a brief discussion of some of the most current themes that are emerging from it. Ideas around public art have been thrashed out for about twenty years-in the media, in critical literature and in public dialogues. Artists have responded to the critical issues, as have people in commissioning positions, although the rift between these two groups is quite entrenched. In this piece of writing, I'd like to identify some of the more sensitive and sensible voices on the subject, as well as what I see as the most compelling recent texts. By necessity it's partial, so I've included a bibliography at the end that lists many more.

The wide literature on public art was more or less inaugurated in the late 1980s by Arlene Raven in the US and Malcom Miles in the UK. Whilst Raven pushed an activist agenda, Miles addressed the big issue of art and urban regeneration. Subsequent writers have pitched their arguments to different audiences, ranging from the bureaucratic to the socially-aware to the political-academic intelligentsia. Some authors put public art into the canon of twentieth-century art history (as if to say that public art is imbricated in avant-garde practice - Richard Serra, Claes Oldenburg and 80s 'Pictures' artists like Jenny Holzer feature heavily in these); others see public art and artists who choose to work in this arena as a context very different from mainstream art history. The most notable of the latter is artist Suzanne Lacy's edited volume, Mapping the Terrain (1995), and the term she coined in it, 'new genre public art'. Lacy's explicit focus is on the 'community' aspect of public art, as well as its ability to address 'real' social issues. She considers public art a 'highly competitive alternative gallery system'.¹ She also eschews artists who have successful careers in the art world who periodically make public art works, or thematise the idea of public communication in their work. For Lacy, the most successful public art projects are ones where the artist works as a kind of agent, or facilitator, and is connected to or connects themselves in a genuine way to a real constituency rather than an abstract 'public'.

Antony Gormley Another Place, 1997

There are also a number of books that are aimed at sites and practices that are themselves on the edge of redefinition, as if to counter that the most urgent and challenging public art is the least institutionalised, the least bureaucratised, and the most aware of the complex of discourses around the practice - around late capitalism, urbanism, the media sphere, interactivity ('access'), social work, democratic politics, questions of audience(s), and how to measure 'success' in any meaningful way (for whom, and in what terms). The key starting point for all the post 1980s texts on public art is a move away from what American artist Judith Baca called the 'cannon in the park' - that is, the old-style monument, such as a classical needle or equestrian statue. Baca argues that 'public art has been meant to accomplish one thing-to put us in awe of the power of our government or the power of corporate sponsorship... '² Indeed, equal distain is held for the modernist sculpture set in an urban plaza, such as a Calder or a Miro, which has been dubbed 'plop art' or, in Lucy Lippard's words, 'the turd in the plaza'. Back in 1990 W.J.T. Mitchell constructed an opposition between public art that was 'utopian' versus 'critical', in other words between art that idealises and art that disrupts. Mitchell's terms are interesting because they cut across the differences between plop art and community art. You can imagine an Oldenburg being critical and a community-based programme utopian. In any case, there is no doubt that public art now includes temporary, community-oriented, immaterial, and 'site-sensitive' projects-indeed, these have been accommodated into commissioned projects (and a reflection of this in the UK context is that the Arts Council has made 'public art' a sub-category of Visual Arts funding). The current focus in the literature is no longer between static, permanent works and temporary, immaterial ones, but on the relationship between the artist and the community - to what degree are they of the community and able and willing to speak for it, and what happens to artistic autonomy when specific social agendas are overlaid on it - or whether this itself is an outdated idea.

In what follows I'm going to focus on three books, by Lucy Lippard, Grant Kester and Miwon Kwon. They offer different perspectives on public art, each pitching toward a different set of narratives and imperatives; each feels urgent, although for highly different reasons.

Kevin Reid Harry Butler Stuntman Extraordinaire - Ring of Fire Jump, 2004

Miwon Kwon's 2003 book, One Place After Another takes a historical-critical view of the way the term 'site-specific' was enfolded into the discourse on public art in the 1990s. She is particularly worried by the troubling formula that 'new genre public art' has become in commissioning circles: find an artist with a social agenda and match them to an existing community group. In this equation art becomes social work, which she thinks is bad for art in terms of creativity and independence, but also for critical practices which become unlikely when art is hitched to a fuzzy liberal agenda. For Kwon, all of the transgressive and subversive gestures which were the domain of the avant-garde in the early part of the twentieth century have become mere glosses, patinas of radicality that cover what is essentially conservative work, fully-assimilated into political agendas but rarely truly effective as community projects or as artistic ones. For her the stakes are high; the debate on public art comes down to 'the future of democracy', in other words whether we live in a progressive society that both looks after its citizens properly and leaves room for protest. If art becomes a salve, it absolves those in power from making structural changes that condition social inequality.

The book is made up of case studies where Kwon deftly penetrates the publicity of some public art projects and the controversies surrounding others. She runs through the infamous dismantling of Richard Serra's 'Titled Arc' and the lesser-known story of the voluntary removal by Bronx-based artist John Ahearn of his South Bronx Sculpture Park. She covers Mary Jane Jacobs' generally heralded summer - long 1993 show in Chicago, 'Culture in Action', which featured a work by Lacy. In each of these, Kwon probes the idea of 'community' - how it's identified by the artist, whether it exists in advance of the project or is created through it, how it's formalised, and who ends up representing it. Her discussion raises a key question that's shared by arts professionals and community groups but not always artists: how the quality or success of public art is evaluated. There's no formula, but Kwon's case studies are complex and her analysis probing of who benefits and how.

Philippa Lawrence Bound, 2003

Kwon ends up identifying a type of art some people would hardly recognise as being public art, as it is neither 'plop art' nor community work. She calls it 'site-oriented' and 'discursive'. Site becomes not place but defined as various discourses relating to the public realm - e.g. politics, national identity, and social networks. This kind of art doesn't reject existing institutional spaces where art is already expected to be seen, but infiltrates them critically. The artists she cites, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Renee Green, Christian Phillip Muller and Fred Wilson, are, she notes, all associated with the idea of 'nomadic' art. Indeed, these artists are pretty well known by now and likely to be found working in the circuit of international biennials, events like Munster or Manifesta that often function like a hybrid form of exhibition and urban regeneration plan. This type of work effects a critique of existing social relations or politics, and performs it for the artist and their collaborators as well as audiences, both local and international. However, the definition Kwon offers is also the book's limitation - for one, recent discussions around nomadic art practices are critical of such voluntary movement, and the minimal connection that can exist between an artist landing somewhere not at home for a relatively short time. The practical model she put forward appears to have been historically specific.

Grant Kester's recent book, Conversation Pieces (2004) has some similar concerns to Kwon's - he's interested in site- or community-specific works of art, and how they intervene into social issues. He's similarly invested in evaluating the claims to 'community' that people make on behalf of these kinds of art projects, and identifying situations where a genuine transformative process exists. Kester and Kwon are in dialogue in these two books - she cites him several times, and he rebuts her critique of his previous writing in a long passage in his last chapter. Their argument is over the autonomy of the individual, whether artist or community member. Kwon relies on a model of critique - where notions of identity and social reality are disrupted through the artwork and the collaborative process. Much of Kester's book is an attempt to mark out a space beyond critique, which he sees as based on an old avant-garde trope that places the artist outside or against society. He introduces a new term, 'dialogic art', and his text moves between examples of effective community-based art projects, theoretical discussions about communication and community, and aesthetics.

Nick Turvey Sub-Cellular, 2007

Kester's attack is two pronged: he looks at models of communication in avant-garde theory, and reconsiders a poststructuralist bias he identifies as scepticism towards any kind of group where the individual risks being subsumed. In a long passage describing Jean-Luc Nancy's 1987 book, The Inoperative Community, he points out that Deleuze in particular (who is the source for theories of nomadism) challenges any process of identification that takes place when individual and group identity merge. According to Deleuze, it's all dangerous, not only because it can so easily turn totalitarian, but the very notion of a fixed individual identity is a fiction. Following Nancy, Kester argues that community can be based on identities that are in negotiation, rather than being essentialist. Indeed this may be why we seek communities, and so many of them. Kester points out that there are limitations to Nancy's ideas, particularly an intractable opposition he sets up between dialogical processes and ones that are 'specular'. In other words, there always appears at some moment the need to 'represent' the group and its individuals, and the effect is a form of violence against the fluidity of relations between individuals and individuals and groups. Kester points out that Nancy himself falls back on the avant-garde belief in rupture, and counters that this gives too much power to representation as something fixed and negative.

Kester has no illusions about the limitations of dialogical art practices, or of activist ones for that matter. He writes, 'Not all conflicts can be resolved by free and open exchange because not all conflicts are the result of a failure among a given set of interlocutors to fully 'understand' or empathize with each other'.³ He works hard not to idealise the artists he cites as doing exemplary work (WochenKlausur, Helen and Newton Harrison, Stephen Willats, Suzanne Lacy, Littoral, among the best known) and, perhaps better than Kwon does, holds a magnifying glass up to a range of their projects. Kester's conclusion is to the point: the best activist and dialogical art has left little trace in the critical literature almost as a result of the fact that the distance between the artist and audience was negligible - this is the goal, but it also indicates how marginalised this kind of practice remains within the art world and critical discourse, not to mention bureaucracies. The best work slips under the radar.

Ally Wallace Blink 3, 2004

The oldest of the three books, Lucy Lippard's The Lure of the Local (1997), remains relevant not only because of Lippard's longstanding involvement with innovative art practices, but the ruminative and informed way she explores in it ideas of locality and place. Set within a discourse of cultural geography, she writes that she 'is concerned not with the history of nature and the landscape but with the historical narrative as it is written in the landscape or place by the people who live or lived there'.⁴ The definition of landscape she develops breaks down the apparently intransigent opposition between urban, suburban and rural. It unpacks the wide assumption than public art is located in cities, and that art projects in the landscape, the suburbs or in small towns are parochial. As Lippard argues, 'nature' is only where we are not. Consequently continuity exists between works sited in the 'land' versus in urban plazas; all are human interventions. Most explicitly her argument is against 'plop art', and she catalogues throughout the book examples of projects that are imposed on the place rather than generative out of it (in this aspect her book is of its time). Not surprisingly, perhaps, she favours the idea of the local artist, or the outsider who 'really does their homework', whether they be from a small town or a big city, and describes the best public art as 'place-specific'. She does not, however, prescribe the type of practice, and amongst the modes of address she cites are craft, land art, site-specific art, photography, community arts, and urban art/design projects. A successful work would be one that reflects a deep connection with place, but also helps perform a realisation of such connections for the viewers and communities who live and work in the place where the art is commissioned. This occurs through strategies of provocation and defamilairisation.

The later chapters of the book look at public art explicitly. She traces a historical trajectory (American-centred, no doubt) that begins with New Deal murals of the 1930s, runs through early 60s art events aimed at the breakdown between art and life, and late 60s conceptual practices that 'reframed' existing locales and experiences rather than making new objects. A key moment for Lippard is 70s activist art, which emphasised the collective over the individual and consistently challenged the status quo of both the art world and the state. She notes wryly that these dialogues were 'selectively accepted into the mainstream' of the art world in the late 1980s, with antecedents elided by artists like Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Dennis Adams and Krzysztof Wodiszco. Indeed, this touches on a theme that runs throughout Lippard's argument, and that is a suspicion of the marketplace and culture industry that favours spectacular and media-friendly works. Lippard's focus is elsewhere: on small-scale, long-haul works. She proffers a definition of good public art: 'accessible art of any species that cares about, challenges, involves, and consults the audience for or with whom it is made, respecting community and environment'.⁵ This is emphatically against the imposition of elitist, art-world concerns, whatever forms they take, and for communication. She asks, 'How, for instance, could a whole village become a public artwork without disturbing or invading it?'⁶

Lippard's unabashed idealism in this book is its charm. Her credentials as an activist as well as an interpreter/supporter of avant-garde practices give her a lot of leeway. She writes, a propos of an ending: 'Some of the ideas conveyed here will be (and have been) attacked as retrograde. So be it. I am tired of the prevailing disrespect for emotive retrospection ... One way society disempowers people is to give them no credit for their thoughts and accomplishments. ... a portion of the multicentered population is in fact longing to belong and is looking for ways to do so without becoming reactionary'.⁷

Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate. Photo credit: Alison Green

My own conclusion at the end of this survey is to wonder whether the subtlety of these complex, ephemeral and local projects can ever compete with the more successful examples of contemporary plop art, like Anthony Gormley's 'Angel of the North', the Fourth Plinth Project in Trafalgar Square, and, to cite something I recently saw, Anish Kapoor's 'Cloud Gate' (known popularly as 'The Bean') in Chicago's Millennium Park. The Gormley sculpture in particular is insanely popular, and it suggests an ongoing need in the psyche of both individuals and governments for lasting, physical symbols (not to mention a functionalist need to justify spending). Kapoor's sculpture is a case in point: on a bright but very cold February day, this shiny object beckoned me into an otherwise soulless (although brand new) public plaza. And it delivered a series of phenomenal and sensorial punches, first a distorted but hyperreal reflection of Chicago's iconic skyline, then my own (also distorted) image close up, and finally, as I walked underneath, its disappearance into a infinitely reflective vortex at the piece's centre. On the level of individual experience, my pleasure centred on the very loss of my own representation. The sculpture reproduces a hierarchical structure that already exists: the financial and bureaucratic power it represents literally effaced me underneath it, and I disappeared. Then again, like a Fort-Da game, I was fully able to reassert my own power over the experience, to find myself again, and walk away. All of the limitations and possibilities were mapped out: functionalist urban planning, a work made by an artist from outside the community (and country), the intractability of corporate power, and the individuality of my own experience rather than a prescribed one. The way Kapoor's work links this commonplace 'public' experience with an individual one suggests to me that there is some discursive space to talk about permanent and spectacular works of public art that could be somehow both 'critical' and affirmative.

Michael Pinsky Life Pulse, 2005

Notes:

1. Suzanne Lacy, 'Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art', in New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), p. 172.
2. Baca, as quoted in Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 265.
3. Grant Kessler, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004, p. 182.
4. Lippard, Lure of the Local, p. 7. Italics hers.
5. Ibid., p 265
6. Ibid., p 287
7. Ibid., 292. Her Italics

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This article has been illustrated with works by artists represented on the Axis website, except the illustrations of Anish Kapoor's 'Cloud Gate', these images are the authors own.