What is Public (Art)? New Practices, New Purposes

I’m a better conversationalist than I am a writer (I think), so I’d like to begin this essay as a conversation.

This one is about the public: Space, sphere, culture.

Public came into my vocabulary and consciousness quite recently (three years ago? four?), without any particular announcement of its arrival. Though I’ve been interested in many things that are cousins of public (graffiti and street art, installations, flea markets, found objects, Hollywood hot dogs, libraries and an efficient transportation system), I had no language under which to catalogue all my preoccupations. I was enamored with all the nouns and verbs that occur and unfold within shared, communal spaces, but was there one word under which to unite them all?

I first heard about the notion of the public via Teddy Cruz who was teaching a course called “Structures of Art: Public Culture” — or something like that. And though he was talking about public spaces specifically, something sparked an awareness in me that I had found a word, which somehow expressed a larger phenomenon I suspected was happening way beyond the terribly disinterested student body surrounding me.

Today’s zeitgeist: Public. It’s new (sort of). It is an ongoing discourse amongst artists, curators, theorists and cultural producers (leading to symposiums, salons, conferences and publications) as well as an evolving artistic practice which has given form to collective groups like Not a Cornfield (image at top), Fallen Fruit, Machine Projects, Islands of LA (just in LA), who explicitly or not align themselves as producers of public work; and it is the focus of several sexy graduate programs (just in the Southern California region: USC Masters in Public Art Studies, Otis Public Practice, UCSD Public Culture initiative).

Up until now, the closest artists ever came to realizing the power of the public was around the 60s when Warhol and a band of artists propelled the growth of Pop. But Pop was an inward gazing circle of artists and cultural producers who appropriated the visual techniques and symbols of popular commercial culture to produce their own private semiotics. Pop was public like black-face was black.

The public remains confined to the language of academics and administrators. In the language of cities, public elicits images of bland parks, dirty toilets, empty streets or strained highways. The lifestyle and habits of American cities and its citizens have developed much like Pop – taking what it can from the communal and turning back toward itself. Nothing communal, nothing shared, just an enclosed looping system. American urban life as a trajectory from one bubble to the next: The home > car > work > car > restaurant > car > home.

Public is vague, and it is flexible. It is perhaps controversial because the very ambiguity of the term lends itself to faux amis definitions. The broad scope of what is public leads inevitably to untenable boundaries in defining what is not public. It is not about making objects. It is perhaps about people. Strike that; it is about relationships. Museums are public, but there are so much mental / physical conditioning expected when entering a museum that they are not, in fact, truly public.

Public is the new postmodern. A new art practice and artistic positioning that can trace its long, convoluted lineage back to artists like Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Long and Situationists like Constant Nieuwenhuys. I’m sure that I neglect more than a few.

This is Part 1 of a series of exploratory essays in examining the nature of public art. Why public, why now? What are the historical traces? How are artists interpreting and propounding the idea of Public in their works? And what is the (ahem) public reaction?

I look forward to reporting back.

Tags: Public Practices (column)