A Companion to Public Art

Cher Krause Knight, Harriet F. Senie, Dana Arnold, Cher Krause Knight, Harriet F. Senie

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118475348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

A Companion to Public Art is the only scholarly volume to examine the main issues, theories, and practices of public art on a comprehensive scale.

• Edited by two distinguished scholars with contributions from art historians, critics, curators, and art administrators, as well as artists themselves
• Includes 19 essays in four sections: tradition, site, audience, and critical frameworks
• Covers important topics in the field, including valorizing victims, public art in urban landscapes and on university campuses, the role of digital technologies, jury selection committees, and the intersection of public art and mass media
• Contains "artist's philosophy" essays, which address larger questions about an artist's body of work and the field of public art, by Julian Bonder, eteam (Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht), John Craig Freeman, Antony Gormley, Suzanne Lacy, Caleb Neelon, Tatzu Nishi, Greg Sholette, and Alan Sonfist.

Part I
Traditions

Introduction

Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie

Before we used the term “public art” to designate works in public spaces such projects consisted almost exclusively of memorials; today we consider memorials a distinct category of public art, one with a very long history. This tradition was seriously challenged during the twentieth century with the advent of modernism and its dual dictum to seemingly expunge figuration as well as the past. But with the success of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) in Washington, D.C., and the subsequent turn of the twenty‐first century, a renewed interest – if not mania, as Erika Doss suggests – in memorials emerged (Doss 2012). The prevalent focus on building memorials became so widespread that Public Art Dialogue devoted two special issues to the subject: “Memorials 1 – War and Peace” (Fall 2012) guest edited by Kirk Savage, and “Memorials 2 – The Culture of Remembrance” (Spring 2013) co‐edited by Knight and Senie and intended to cast a wide frame around the subject (Savage 2012; Knight and Senie 2013). Yet despite this significant surge of interest in the topic, memorials are still often viewed with considerable skepticism by many and considered a potential lightening rod by others. They are also products – and in a sense captives – of their respective time reflecting views of national identity, however conflicted these might be. All three of the artists’ philosophies and each of the five chapters in this part address such diverse aspects of memorials, variously defined.

We have made a conscious decision to italicize the titles of memorials and monuments, thereby challenging the standard convention in the field. This is a choice we made after a long period of deliberation: we have thought for years, quite literally, about doing so as we continue to co‐edit the Public Art Dialogue journal. Since italics denote an art specific status, a way of saying: “This is the title of an artwork, which is worthy of its name and recognition,” the lack of italics, we believe, relegates monuments and memorials to a second‐class status. Even if the primary reason for creating a memorial was based on sociopolitical issues, this does not negate its artistic status. The work was still conceived and designed to communicate with its audiences through a visual language, and likely one that builds upon preexisting artistic conventions and practices. We define memorials and monuments as “art” here – hopefully this will set a new precedent for the field.

Julian Bonder begins his artist’s philosophy, “Memory Works,” with observations about the pervasiveness of memory studies in many fields. To anchor his methodological approach he returns to the Latin root of the word, observing that “ ‘Memorial,’ ‘memento,’ ‘monument’ (like ‘monitor’) suggest not only commemoration but also to be aware – to mind and remind, warn, advise and to call for action.” In this context his “working memorials” are imbued with sociopolitical purpose, intended to increase personal and collective agency as well as “foster and encourage new kinds of public engagement aiming to make the world a better place.” His Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery (2012) in Nantes, France, designed in collaboration with Krysztof Wodiczko, has a distinct mission to empower people in the act of remembering, a mission he hopes will define a new tradition.

Antony Gormley artist’s philosophy is framed as a question. Titled “Public Art?” he begins with the assertion that art “has always been part of our collective commons.” For him: “There is no such thing as ‘public art.’ Either it’s art or it’s not” (an assertion later engaged by Cameron Cartiere in the “Epilogue” to this volume). He distinguishes two categories of such art: “temporal and performative or material and permanent.” Gormley is well known for his 2009 work for the Fourth Plinth commission in London, a series (run from 1999 to 2001 by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and recommenced in 2005 under the Greater London Authority) that each year commissions a different artist to make an artwork for the empty pedestal. His One & Other was an example of the temporal and perfomative type of art he had identified: a work that challenged the physical presence and conceptual basis of the traditional monument. One & Other lasted 100 days during which 2,400 people (selected from a pool of applicants that reflected a range of ethnic groups and geographic areas of the country) took their turns on the pedestal. Individuals were allocated one hour each on the plinth during which they were allowed to do anything they wished and could have any item(s) with them that they could personally carry. A live feed carried their performances to the Internet. The artist’s intention was to elevate everyday life rather than the traditional heroic generals or political leaders. This work perfectly illustrated Gormley’s belief that the “value of art is that it provides a bridge between particular experience and a universal ground on which the uniqueness of an individual response can be celebrated.” As he also asserts here: “You can see how the life of a place changes when you put an object in it that allows it to resonate.” In this case that “object” was actually a changing array of individuals. Gormley’s Angel of the North also questioned the nature of traditional public monuments. He was attracted to the site of this work (a mound located “to the east of the A1 motorway and that was constructed from the destroyed pithead baths of the St. Anne Colliery”) by the fact that it “represented the rapid forgetting of our own very immediate past – a forgetting of that tight relationship between coal, steel and engineering that was the Industrial Revolution.” As such Angel of the North marks a previous and now seemingly invisible part of shared history and landscape.

In the final artist’s philosophy in this Traditions part Alan Sonfist offers his “Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments,” a definition of and manifesto for a new type of commemoration altogether, one that has been the primary focus both of his art practice and his writings. Since we traditionally mark historic architectural sites and places where significant events occurred, Sonfist argues that it makes sense to also commemorate our environmental history. At one time he proposed 50 such sites in New York City: these included former marshlands and forests as potential sites for such monuments. Although he realized only one, Time Landscape at the corner of Houston Street and LaGuardia Place (a re‐creation/replanting of the foliage and greenery that once thrived there), his point is well taken. Without some territorial markers to chronicle their presence, natural environments seem to disappear with even more frequency than the manmade structures that help to define our surroundings. As many of the contributors to this part observed, memorials often retain their relevance through recurring ceremonies or rituals that take place at their sites; thus Sonfist posits celebrations of natural events as reminders of our environmental past.

Of all the events that have seared the consciousness of individual and societal memories in the twentieth century, perhaps none has been more powerful than the Holocaust. Here James E. Young (well known for his influential research on the subject) discusses the distinct characteristics of Holocaust memorials in Germany, Poland, Israel, and the United States in his incisive chapter “Memorializing the Holocaust.” As he makes clear, memorials are closely linked to both national history and identity. Thus in Germany, the country that perpetrated the genocide, memorialization is also what Young calls a “kind of penance for (former) crimes,” and has prompted the rise of some powerful counter‐memorials that are directly linked to the fate of the millions of Jews and others who were slaughtered. By comparing and contrasting acts of remembrance across national borders and identities Germany’s “memorial conundrum” comes into sharp focus. As Young asserts a “necessary breach” in the “memorial code” must occur in Germany: not only were horrific crimes against humanity committed there, but also the country must reckon with its role as the perpetrator of such. When a perpetrator of a crime assumes – or inherits, or cannot avoid – the responsibility of memorializing those who suffered at its hands the act of memorialization become decidedly more complicated. A nation that did not commit an offense has “only” to consider how to best remember and honor the victims, how to make sure their plight is not lost in the sweep of history. When it is the perpetrator that does the remembering the confession of sins becomes an integral part of the memorial process: the country must take accountability for its actions on the world stage. The reasons for doing so are complex and multilayered: confessions of guilt may accompany expressions of great remorse and deep grief, and a nation cannot move on without acknowledging its past in full. But memorials are not pardons, and while they can help us codify history and mourn loss they cannot absolve guilt – at home or abroad.

In Poland, both victimizer and victim during the Holocaust, commemoration is complicated by the typologies of victims, a subject also addressed in this part by Harriet F. Senie in “The Conflation of Heroes and Victims: A New Memorial Paradigm.” As in Germany, the sites of infamous concentration camps located in Poland offer irrefutable proof of the heinous crimes committed there and serve to imprint this history on the national landscape. National memory of the Holocaust in Israel is also conflicted, especially since it prompted the birth of the country. Here Jewish history before the Holocaust in particular is preserved in museums at various kibbutzim. This situation raises the important questions of: What is memorialized and what is not? And by whom? In the United States the Holocaust has arguably been nationalized by the presence of a museum devoted to its tragic legacy located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., near the National Museum of American History, a siting likely to heighten its resonance even further. As Senie observes elsewhere in this volume, the Holocaust continues to cast a long and pervasive shadow over subsequent memorials in this country.

Memorials in Chile are embroiled in similarly complex circumstances as are German Holocaust memorials. Chile’s government, for a time, followed a sanctioned policy of murdering a sizable number of its citizens. In Chile, however, official policy has mandated forgetting rather than remembering and admitting responsibility. In “Chilean Memorials to the Disappeared: Symbolic Reparations and Strategies of Resistance” Marisa Lerer identifies sharp distinctions in the ways the crimes committed under the leadership of General Augusto Pinochet were commemorated after his death in 2006. Under his military rule over 82,000 were arrested for ostensibly political reasons and another 200,000 were either exiled or chose exile as the only safe option. After Pinochet granted amnesty to all who had participated in the crimes against civilians, so‐called national reconciliation “became an unofficial policy for covering the dictatorship’s human rights violations.” This policy continued even during the country’s transition to democracy. Memorials built to commemorate the deaths of the disappeared revealed “negotiations, conflicts and debat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• A Companion to Public Art
• Part I: Traditions
• Part II: Site
• Part III: Audience
• Part IV: Frames
• Epilogue
• Index
• End User License Agreement