TREMBLIN, Mathieu. « From Post-Posters to Un gilet ». In : Graffiti, Street Art & Urban Creativity Scientific Journal. Novembre 2019, « Desire Lines: Literal », vol. 5, no 1, pp. 78–87. (original) (raw)
Art as Encounter , Part of the Publication Being Public, Valiz 2017
In this essay I will discuss the specific nature of art practices in which the artist and his audience are moving away from the more traditional relationship in which the artist merely displays his art in museums or public spaces. The practices I am writing about consist of intimate and personal processes made possible by the grace of the artistic space that is separating itself from the coded space around it. In these practices the public takes on a different role than that of the passive spectator. The involvement of the public in what art is and can be becomes part of the experience. This turns art into something to be a part of rather than something that is simply handed over to you. More specifically, these art practices allow for a time and site-specific situated form of co-ownership, through which the artistic environment created by the artist becomes the condition for experiencing new ideas and insights. In relation to theatre, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (1940-) writes in The Emancipated Spectator (2015) about “a theater without an audience” that “no longer tempts with its images but teaches the audience something that turns them into active participants rather than passive voyeurs”. (Rancière 2015: 9-10) These practices are not new. New is perhaps the shift of focus from public participation in processes of interaction towards developing a theatrical space that not only makes other types of expression possible, but also taking on other roles and with that, other perspectives. This notion will therefore be the main focus of this text. Whereas Jacques Rancière talks about the aesthetic space (Rancière 2007) because of its emphasis on sharing the sensory (le partage du sensible), in the case of situated art I’d rather talk about the theatrical or artistic space, indicating a space that corresponds to the domain of the arts. But one can also speak of a staged space, a space that has been constructed and is thus able to separate itself from the space around it. In any case, it is important that this space not only mobilises the senses but also the will to act.
2009
Since the beginning of Modernity, the "political" artist, a polemicist, has held the hope of escaping the cramped quarters of the studio to claim a place in the public square and so gain greater public visibility: a gesture that, as such, is already a political act, initiating responsibility on the part of the artist in relation to society. Today, the tradition of the happening and of a "Diogenian"* art, loudly and proudly affirming its place in the city, is giving way to methods of discreet infiltration and interference, aptly qualified by Patrice Loubier as furtive forms? actions that seem anodyne and that have no a priori political content in the sense in which we used the term 30 years ago. Nonetheless, it would be an error to find any detachment on the part of the artist in such sobriety.
Anamnesis : Dialogues of Art in Public Spaces
UPI2Mbooks, 2018
Antique term anamnesis denotes recollection or remembrance, to gather something that was lost, forgotten or erased. We are talking about something very old and archaic that made us the way we are now. But anamnesis also denotes a work that transforms its subject to produce always something new. The task of anamnesis is to recollect the old and to produce the new. The book Anamneses: Dialogues of Art in Public Spaces, synthesizes current urban culture starting with an agonistic society characterized by an inquiry of existing consensus and by disagreement between past and present, in order to be used as a heuristic tool for better understanding of the role of cultural particularization as opposed to globalization and other transnational processes connected with urban culture. The book is divided into nine chapters covering theoretical, investigatory and practical approaches to documenting and acting in public spaces and city, using various art formats. Logic of selected works doesn't always reflect a quality of works or a place of their positioning, but also the way those works and the place (location) itself interact with each other in a new and novel way. Selected artists managed to avoid not only restrictions of art conventions, but also restrictions of traditional and institutional spaces and their products such as museums and galleries. This art insists on relocation of the center of gravity from universal tendencies of modernists' abstraction to the reality of "ordinary" people and their "common" experiences in public spaces. The book Anamneses: Dialogues of Art in Public Spaces is a critical inquiry of the culture of space and of economic exploitation of public spaces in order to show a wide span of art practices that enable citizens to become co-creators of public spaces. Illustrated with selected examples in this book, contemporary art in public spaces creates a particular point of view on collective culture and its affirmation in urban life. The book explores ways in which art interventions and practices transform and symbolically shape public spaces, that is to say ways in which they participate and change the meaning of public spaces, where users could feel in a different way experimental character of sensory experience.
Anonymous Reflections of Art in Public Spaces Examples From the World
Anonymous Reflections of Art in Public Spaces Examples From the World, 2022
As identical and comparable with humanity’s existence, art has existed in its own sphere or created a space for itself through- out history. These spaces represent oneness in private and individual spheres from time to time, while they sometimes mean oneness in a public space. Art is also precious and effective in public spaces as a reflection of culture and human discourse and action. This study tries to reveal this value based on examples from different cities and different countries and aims to examine draw- ing-based street art and graffiti existing in the public space with some concepts like culture, space, and experience. In line with this purpose, knowledge is produced basically from observation techniques and experience. The existence of the said works has been examined and photographed on site, some examples expressing the discourse have been selected from dozens of photographs, and then phenomenological information has been analyzed with literature information. Then knowledge has been sought to be produced. In this context, the uniting, experience-creating, space-creating, and life-forming effects of the work of art have been ob- served, and its relations with culture and practice have been examined. Then the meaning has been explored as independent of the criteria like identity and brand. As a different discourse, it is stated in this study that what constitutes the reality of drawing-based works of art and graffiti in the public space is neither the name written under each piece nor the capitalist economies and dominant political views but the social acceptance of the work, the relationship it establishes with culture and its meaning.
Art on the Streets:Past and present practices
De vidas Artes, 2019
This paper explores just some of the many ways in which artistic practices have appeared on streets, and even though the focus will mainly be on the visual arts, the framework will also account for a much broader creative approach of the public space. A secondary theme of the research will be that of observing the ever-evolving relationship of the aforementioned practices with institutions, both established art ones and the ones pertaining to the city, and the policies in between. Seeing the changes on both sides, we analyze them from a social perspective. As radical art starts to find its way into museums and as 'vandalism' is co-opted and heralds gentrification, we can only wonder if the street has gone soft or whether the roughness just increasingly and comfortably out of sight, and how does this affect the right to the 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.
Public space and its many possible uses hold a central position in human life and the functioning of a society. Public space – whether as a real site, a representation or an imaginary vision – is also the place where different aesthetics develop, are presented and confronted to one another. This course will explore the relation between public space and the visual and spatial arts, in three major articulations. The first will interrogate public space as a (partly) aesthetic conception, both when new spaces are created and when existing ones are modified. Different scales and different degrees of ambition will be examined, from the Spanish Steps in Rome to the paving of the streets of Lausanne. The second axis will deal with the presence of artworks in public space, taking an interest in their function or meaning within a site, their modification of an existing space, or various types of human interaction with them. The third articulation will study the presence and role of public spaces in the pictorial arts, noting the selective or transformative appropriation of real sites by the artist, the selection of specific figures, activities, and moments, and the significant shaping of imaginary public spaces.
Art Inqiuiry
Within the article "Manifestations of public art" and through photographic projects (subPark 2014-..., Travel Documents, 2015-2016), I am asking the question whether modern art needs and strives for nature in proxemic and historical dimension as an area of "salvaged green", evoking ways of viewing specific to prewar architects of cities incorporated into Polish borders after 1945. Grabiszyński Park, former German cemetery, demolished in the 1960s, eventually transformed into a green area. Structures of trees are subjected to creative analysis comprised in categories of anonymous manifestations of public art. Community of outliers born within the area of prewar city and its vicinity as well as expelled Germans and emigrants photographed in several parks of Poland and Germany were invited to participate in the project. The position regarding visual form being the result of social relations and the phenomenon of autoreference has been presented.
Public art in nomadic contexts
Urban Screens Reader, 2009
This chapter discusses some urban interventions I did using commercial electronic billboards in São Paulo between 2002 and 2004. All the projects happened in networked environments, dealing with collective forms of appropriation of the advertisement system as public space. They allow us to discuss public art in a nomadic context where the interface becomes the message.