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)
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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.