Contemporary Art: Between Action and Work. The Cases of Krzysztof Wodiczcko and Jenny Holzer. Peter Lang Publisher, 2013 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Public art and the making of urban space
City, Territory and Architecture, 2014
Following in the footsteps of seminal studies like E. W. Soja Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000) or Miwon Kwon One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (2004), this article constitutes a contribution to our current understanding of contemporary societies, more specifically to the shaping of urban identities and the role of contemporary art when revealing the most current and ubiquitous mechanisms of cultural hegemony at the terrain of the visual arts. The interpretation is rooted in the analysis of concepts such as the site-specificity component of the works he discusses through the paper. To sum up, the article supposes a revision of historical and social aspects of public art, in which the language of hermeneutics intends to challenge rather than validate Modernity's set of discourses of what public art is mean to serve. The monster of public art: Kitsch Public art is the child of the postmodern condition. And the first and natural reaction against "geometric" urban
2011
The rapid development of the big European cities in the XXth century and the change of the traditional city into a metropolis ga ve birth not only to an extraordinary dynamic artistic culture but also to a culture of i nterpreting, dedicated to the study and explanation of these urban phenomena and their soci al effects. The aim of this paper is to build a bridge between various practices of contemp orary art as they can be found in public art (to be more specific: site-specific art, as we ill see) and a series of disciplines dealing with the studying of urban space: urban sociology, human geography and the anthropology of the everyday, all inspired by critical theories of culture and society. From this point on, we will be able to meditate upon public art’s role in the urban public space.
In this essay we will try to show how heterogeneity of public policies and art practices in last decade, contributed to the new realities in Europe, focusing especially on contradictory dynamics in the region of Southeast Europethe Balkans. We will explore hypothesis that in counterpoint, civil society artivism fighting against different vectors of social actions and global social dynamics has created new spaces of expression, both in digital and real world. Artivism reappeared out of necessity to fight pressures of the market, governmental directive policies, and indolence and incapacities of public institutional system in culture.
The Professorship of art and public space organizes a symposium on the transformations of the public realm and the possibilities for art and design to play a role there since the 1960s. Dutch policies regarding public space have a long history of ideas on the communal and educational potentials of visual art. Shifts in concepts and practices of public space as well as concepts of art have given this tradition new directions. During the last decades artworks have for instance been functioning as stimuli for the senses, as demarcations for specific places and spaces, and as agents for social change. This symposium focuses on the relation between art and the public domain in the post-industrial societies and more specifically on the transformations during the last 40 years.
2013
All sort of comprehensions and reflections about the city have been getting nourished from a diverse set of artistic practices that involve the presence of the artist in the street; one of the prime examples might be the relation between the poet Charles Baudelaire and the philosopher Walter Benjamin, in regard to Paris in the XIX century. Later on, this dynamic relation between Art, Urbanism and Architecture could be observed significantly in the contributions from diverse expressions: Dada, Surrealism, Lettrist International, Situationist International, Land Art, Minimal Art. All of them having in common the presence of the artist in the public space who acts, either as catalyzer in charge of inciting processes of transformation, or as collector in charge of documenting them. These registries, through the light of history, would multiply and reveal all sorts of meanings. This relation between artistic practice and urban reflection might be located in what Heidegger describes as th...
Poposki, Zoran. “Spaces of Democracy: Art, Politics, and Artivism in the Post-Socialist City”
Studia Politica: Art and Politics in (Post)communism, Vol. XI., no. 4, edited by Caterina Preda, 713-723. , 2011
http://www.ceeol.com/aspx/issuedetails.aspx?issueid=1ae80a9b-930b-437b-aea0-2ccda2f5913c In the countries of former Eastern Europe, the collapse of socialism and the subsequent onset of neoliberal capitalism have resulted in a massive transfiguration of urban public space at the hands of commercial interests. Examples include the proliferation of outdoor advertising that destroys the character of natural and historic urban landscapes, commercial events that restrict access to parks and squares, the design of retail kiosks and storefronts in and around public spaces that does not respect the local context sending a signal that it no longer represents the local community. Instead of public space where people interact freely, without the coercion of state institutions – the productive, constantly remade, democratic public space – there is space for recreation and entertainment where access is limited only to suitable members of the public: ”A controlled and orderly retreat where a properly behaved public might experience the spectacle of the city” (Mitchell). Drawing on insights from major theorists of public space, this paper explores the transformation of urban space in the post-socialist cities of Central and Southeast Europe (Skopje), focusing on examples of creative reuse, artistic conversion and social re-writing of the urban landscape in the face of massive economic, political and social changes.
Public artistic practices in favour and against gentrification
Post-industrial practices have led to the homogenization of the city, not only in its aesthetic but also in its population. Cities nowadays marginalise ethnic groups and working-class people, traditional inhabitants of those territories, while at the same time attract transitional population as managerial workers, students and tourists; people who can afford to live in these new paradises of consumption. In this new capitalist age, the role of art and cultural practices is vital as a tool for the regeneration of these areas. From galleries and museums to art in the public spaces, culture, in general, has had an increment in government and private support, not for the anti-utilitarian art for the art´s sake, but because art is a tested tool that generates both economic profit and social control. In this paper, I will address how art practices especially those in the public realm are used as tools for capitalist power, to redevelop spaces that can lead to gentrification processes, but also how art also can be a resource to resist and fight this devastating process.
SPACE AND PLACE IN URBAN CULTURE
When we think of art as an integral part of the construction and transformation of urban culture, we find the public space as the main stage of this event. The public space, as José Pedro Regatão defends, is "a territory of political character that reflects the structure of the society in which it operates." (Regatão, 2007). This way, we may think the crisis of social structure as being the responsible for the identity crisis of public spaces, which may lead them to what is called "non-places”. These correspond to a functional logic that creates a contractual level of social relations, in contrast to the concept of place, which brings together space, culture and memory. Places are reservoirs of memory. They cover a dual visible and invisible landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn is a landscape architect that defends the place as private, "a tapestry of woven contexts: global, disclosed and lasting and ephemeral, local and reveal, now and then, past and future..." (Spirn, 1998). Addressing concepts such as space, public space, place, home and urban art, we intend to understand how art is responsible for social transformation in communities and what’s their place within them. Placing art in city public spaces will enable a dialogue between the collective and the individual, often prompting personal memories to enable the appropriation of space/place city.
When does a place start to be an exhibition space? In 1986 Jan Hoet, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, organized Chambres d'Amis: an outdoor exhibition where fifty-eight artists exhibited in private apartments. The show invaded the private sphere of the city, leaving the perimeters of the museum. This historical example enables introducing a by now common contemporary situation where artistic institutions stage extramural exhibitions in “alternative” places. Indeed, in the last twenty years, one can recognize the proliferation of artistic proposals that exploit the non-ordinary aspect of a place to create a "spectacular" event. Besides, today, we also notice the multiplication of art centers, nonprofit associations, festivals, that made the alternative space an ordinary space, where sometimes space is inseparable from artworks. Through the deepening of two study cases, the Trussardi Foundation in Milan and the Nuit Blanche in Paris, the paper studies the aesthetical role of the place within exhibition design processes, thus suggesting the necessity of new vocabulary and a new definition of curatorial modes for the contemporary art.
Contemporary Public Art and Dialectical Aspects of the 'Democratization' of the Urban Public Space
Public Art Journal, 2021
This article lays out the claim that every open space is not a democratic space and the plurality of voices does not mean a plurality of discourses and democratic political existence. It discusses why it is important to always take into account the dialectical dimension of the urban space and public art and points to the perils of the ‘democratization’ of the public space. The author alerts us that some public arts are directly commissioned by the government for a more ‘democratic city’ and there are also those artistic projects that confront government-supported public artworks for the ‘democratization’ of the urban space, but display even more autocratic or exclusionary tendencies. She argues that, despite their radical potential, contemporary public art as the consolidator of political publics, does not simply concede the democratization of the public space. These publics can as well be constituted by neoliberal agendas, and even worse, authoritarianism. In the light of this critical perspective, the article asks: What kind of public art can then be appropriate for a democratic public?