The document discusses various topics related to public art including:
- The marginalization of artists in public art projects
- Different levels of engagement artists can have, from individual technical work to long-term community embeddedness
- Issues of representation, gentrification, and the commodification of place through public art
- The broad definition of what constitutes public art
- International examples of organizations taking critical approaches to art and urbanism
5. “ Certainly site-specific art can lead to the unearthing of repressed histories, provide support for greater visibility of marginalized groups and issues, and initiate the re(dis)covery of 'minor' places so far ignored by the dominant culture. But inasmuch as the current socio-economic order thrives on the (artificial) production and the (mass) consumption of difference (for difference’s sake), the siting of art in 'real' places can also be a means to extract the social and historical dimensions out of places to variously serve the thematic drive of an artist, satisfy institutional demographic profiles, or fulfill the fiscal needs of a city.” Miwon Kwon “ One Place After Another”
6. "when you are asked to do a public art project, you're asked to do something that's peripheral to the building designed by the architect; you're asked to do something on the margin; you don't get the main space, you're put in the corner. And sometimes it's worse than that; we've been working a long time on a project where architects are saying things like, "well, we need some art overlay here." So the artist is asked to provide something like paint, or wall paper, or a carpet. Or sometimes not even that; some architects- maybe understandably- want their walls and floors to be left alone, untampered with; so, what they want is floating art, maybe an 'art float' separate from their walls, from their floor. As a public artist, your're asked to do something extra, something unnecessary. The ticket counters have been designed, the transfer corridors have been designed, all of the airport that's actually needed and usable has already been designed by the architect; yet the city has a One Percent for Art law, so art has to come in at the last minute, like a deux ex machina, like an architect's nightmare.".........There shouldn't be a separate field called public art, there should be only architecture and landscape architecture projects, that everyone - including so-called artists can apply for. From an Interview with Vito Acconci on Art Architecture, Arvada, and Storefront in Tom Finklepearl's Dialogues in Public Art, pp175. MIT press, 2000.
7. “ Public art excludes no media, materials, or process. It can require years of planning, consultation and approval to develop, or it can occur spontaneously and unsanctioned. It can be momentary or lasting. It can at once excavate the past and envision the future. With a broadening of the conception of public, it can happen at almost any time, with anyone, and virtually anywhere…even in galleries and museums and other private settings. Public art is always art.” Patricia C. Philips
8. Public art operates in the terrain between the private and the political, the term public may apply to any process or forum of mediation between the individuals and the social structure in which the individual exists. A negotiation between the articulation of personal and collective identity, art which engages with the notion of the public might begin to question or activate the subject and the subjective response to these relative notions of publicness, history, community, identity and meaning. Making the activity of personal and community identity formation public, creating spaces or structures where the private might interact with respond to and articulate the formation of identity within the public realm. Seamus Nolan 2008 Public art operates in the terrain between the private and the political, the term public may apply to any process or forum of mediation between the individuals and the social structure in which the individual exists. Seamus Nolan 2008
