Public Art u need, Public Art for all, Public Art as boycott: directions in artists' responses to the present state of public art in the UK (original) (raw)

The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm

2020

This multidisciplinary companion offers a comprehensive overview of the global arena of public art. It is organised around four distinct topics: activation, social justice, memory and identity, and ecology, with a final chapter mapping significant works of public and social practice art around the world between 2008 and 2018. The thematic approach brings into view similarities and differences in the recent globalisation of public art practices, while the multidisciplinary emphasis allows for a consideration of the complex outcomes and consequences of such practices, as they engage different disciplines and communities and affect a diversity of audiences beyond the existing 'art world'. The book will highlight an international selection of artist projects that illustrate the themes. This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, art history, urban studies, and museum studies.

Public Art: a Review. Social and Political Practices

CPSL Vol.5 no.2, 2023

Public art covers a range of phenomena in which aesthetics and urban life intersect. Public art introduces a broad of practices that opened to a number of interpretations regards their contributions to the urban environment, functions as a key factor in a city's regeneration policies, and is the primary fuel of urban capital production and accumulation today. The article focuses on the art practices that declare ethical commitments with the social-political sphere, promoting participatory and collaboratively-led activities, converging thus with the dynamics of activist practices. The article reconsiders the role of public art as a socio-political agent, taking into account the timeless self-defining and self-regulating autonomy of visual arts, which claims the right to set specific norms of cultural inclusion and exclusion in the public space, reducing thus the multiculturalism of urban life to the restrictive framework of a one-dimensional culture. The paper elaborates on some aspects of the discussions about the social-political engagements of public art, developing a brief discussion of some of the most current themes emerging from it.

Public Art: A Critical Approach

In this dissertation, I provide a philosophical analysis of public art. I focus on its “publicness,” and draw implications at the level of public art’s ontology, appreciation, and value. I uphold the view that an artwork is public when received within a public sphere rather than within artworld institutions. I further argue that, as a consequence of the peculiar nature of its reception, public art possesses an essential value that is distinctively non-aesthetic: to promote political participation and to encourage tolerance. By examining how public art and its value(s) relate to the public domain in the context of pluralistic democracies, this dissertation also contributes to a fuller understanding of an important aspect of our social world.

You Make It Amazing: The Rhetoric of Art and Urban Regeneration in the Case of The Public

Journal of Visual Literacy

Arts councils and departments of culture tell policy makers that the arts are not only valuable in themselves, but for their contribution to the economy, urban regeneration and social inclusion. However, there is significant debate as to whether public art produced under social arts policy can deliver on expectations. This essay examines a recent, controversial urban regeneration project, West Bromwich's The Public designed by Will Alsop, in order to assess its visual, symbolic, and material resources. The analysis reveals that, while the gallery functions, at least partially, to construct a shared public experience of West Midland and its culture, it is an experience encapsulated within and aesthetically made over by The Public such that The Public becomes a replacement scene, thereby undermining the community and at least some of its goals.

STUCK BETWEEN DISCIPLINES – NOTES ON PUBLIC ART DISCOURSE IN 2012

In surveying where the field of public art practice and research currently stands in 2011, there remains a deficit of critical discourse - what some would call “theory”, and others research-oriented approaches to urban public art practice and interpretation. Furthermore, public art has yet to mature as a field and begin to take account of it’s own histories, both past and present. In this essay, I claim that in order to understand public art, it is necessary to investigate the space that informs it, that of public space. It is necessary to dig into more complex territory to do this.

Lets Go Outside: Art in Public - Introduction

Let's Go Outside: Art in Public, 2022

As I write this introduction in October 2021, we are emerging from Melbourne’s latest lockdown, which lasted seventy-seven days. Since the pandemic started, Melbournians have endured more than 250 days in lockdown—the longest period anywhere in the world. Living through this much time governed by necessary but substantial public health restrictions—with access to the outdoors parcelled out into blocks of one to two hours; excursions confined to five, ten or fifteen kilometre radiuses, before curfew at 8pm or 9pm; and activities reduced to exercise or recreation with one other person, grocery shopping, or giving or receiving care— makes your nostalgia for times when going outside was less regulated and policed profoundly acute. With the benefit of hindsight, I think of the Let’s Go Outside symposium as a momentous and auspicious gathering, given that the COVID-19 crisis would profoundly limit our capacity to travel and assemble in person a mere six months later. Consequently, it has been our intention as editors from the outset to retain the spirit of the original symposium and to include a number of perspectives from across the diverse range of public art output in Australia and internationally. Taking up debates from Let’s Go Outside, this edited reader reflects on the growing interest in making and presenting art outside of conventional gallery contexts and explores the opportunities and complexities of realising art in the public realm. Our case studies expand on topics relevant to artists, designers, art consultants, policymakers, commissioners and curators working in this area, including indigenising the public realm; producing memorials to difficult pasts; placemaking and urban renewal; commissioning models; considerations of access, inclusion and diversity; and public art practices that are experimental, temporary and socially engaged. As well as case studies, the publication’s twenty-one contributions include critical essays, artist pages, creative explorations, as well as interviews and features on key practitioners in the field. The book aims to situate and contrast Australia’s unique approaches to public art by featuring essays on public art commissioning and practice internationally, including Hong Kong, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Indonesia, the US and the UK, and features the perspectives of twenty-five scholars, public artists and collectives.