Public realm art can be a place where something remains or a site in which something happens. It can also be of the body.
NARRATIVE ENVIRONMENTS
Public spaces are telling stories to those who use it. Putting across messages of how they want to be received or perceived. Don’t just think about how your work looks, but how it engages with the user and viewer within that environment, it is a process of the eye. mind and body.
The Construction of Identity in Relation to Community & Location can be applied in a variety of way:
- LAND ART
- PROCESS ART
- PERFORMANCE ART
- CONCEPTUAL ART
- INSTALLATION ART
- COMMUNITY BASED ART
- PUBLIC ART
THE WORK AND CONTEXT ARE INSEPARABLE UNREPEATABLE / IMMOBILE – “To remove the work is to destroy the work”.
An example of this is ‘Tilted Arc’ by Richard Serra, a site specific installation commissioned by the United States General Services Administration ‘Arts-in-Architecture’ program for the Foley Federal Plaza in front of the Jacob Javits Federal Building in Manhattan, New York City in 1979. Made from unfinished steel it’s facet is designed to change with the movement of the people walking past it, engaging them as they moved through the Plaza, a place which would normally be passed through on the way to somewhere else. Without it being sited here the work looses its meaning and the work once placed belonged to the commissioners and not to the artist. The steel itself would change over time and weather giving it a different patina and ultimately affecting the experience. Below is the work in place at the Plaza. You can see how it carves up and divides literally the whole space. In order to get to the other side you have to walk all the way around it in a space, which previously had total freedom of vision and motion for it’s users. The problem with the work in this instance is that it is used by people who want and need to move through it freely to get to work and are not interested in necessarily being engaged during that process.
The work was negatively received by both the art world and the public, which resulted in a public trail to determine the fate of the work.
Because the sculpture forced the site to function as an extension of the sculpture, it was in effect “holding the site hostage.” Calvin Tomkins, an art critic for The New Yorker magazine, was quoted saying, “I think it is perfectly legitimate to question whether public spaces and public funds are the right context for work that appeals to so few people – no matter how far it advances the concept of sculpture.” The Storefront for Art and Architecture invited prominent NYC artists and architects to envision the future plaza as a protest in “After Tilted Arc”
Commuters argued it disrupted the flow of the space and within months over 1300 people signed a petition for it’s removal. A trial was set up to determine the fate of the sculpture and what I found interesting was that despite the number above petitioning its removal there was only 58 who testified for removal against 122 in favour of it remaining. Many artists, sculptors, art historians and a psychiatrist testified to keep the work at the site with largely opposition coming from the public. It was also argued that the sculpture would,
“run the risk of deflecting explosions into government buildings opposite and impeded adequate surveillance of the area beyond.”
This involves issues with public safety, health and safety, privacy/surveillance and potential terrorism attacks! The jury voted 4-1 to remove the work but the sculptor Serra appealed this decision which resulted in years of litigation. The work was removed and kept in storage but due to it’s conceptual design it was never installed again as the point of the work was specifically to interact with people using the Plaza. The conceptual design of this work is really interesting to me in it’s simplicity, working with the natural movement of the people using the space. A living work which changes minuet upon minuet allowing for a unique relationship between the material and the environment around it. The scale is enormous and perhaps a shorter section could of been installed, which would still allow for this interaction to take place but without disrupting peoples commute. The interaction through disruption is essentially part of the meaning of the work or maybe it became the meaning. Did Serra intend for it to be so disruptive as apposed to interactive? Can we really know how an installation will work until it is sited in the space and when people react to it?
Public Realm 