As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither
art nor civilization is secure.
—John Dewey, Art as Experience
The
creation of art in public places requires the eye of a poet,
the ear of a journalist, and the hide of an armadillo. By intention
or consequence, this work illuminates the relationship between
the institutions that shape and define American life and the
people they serve.
—Richard Posner, “Intervention and Alchemy: A Public
Art Primer”
Nobody
knows who the public is or what it wants or needs.
—David Antin
For
the eleventh issue of Chain (we still can’t quite believe
we forgot to celebrate our 10th anniversary issue), we put out
a call for work that addresses “public forms.” When
we came up with the topic, we were thinking about what is commonly
called “public art” (visual artworks that are publicly
displayed and frequently supported by public funds), but also
about various forms of art that happen outside of usual performance
and publication contexts such as street art, political speeches,
poster campaigns, architectural design, mail art, community theater,
speaker’s corners, poetry written for specific public occasions,
etc. In other words, we wanted an issue that would investigate
art that is created by/for communities or “the public”
in its broader definitions.
We
received an amazing array of materials that ask us to re-evaluate
the ambient substance of our lives—the forms and forums that
surround us everyday. These for(u)ms include letters to the editor,
web sites, eulogies, nodding hello, speech-making, occasional
poems, anti-war signs, line marking on public streets, market
research surveys, murals, text on truckbeds, protest marches,
car alarms, surveillance cameras, aerial views, classified ads,
t-shirts, graffiti and graffiti-proofing, internet spam, stickers
in phone booths, prophecies, billboards, eye-witness reports,
architecture, internet discussion groups, call boxes, banisters,
shadows, cemeteries, and train station flip signs.
These everyday forms were accompanied by seemingly simple actions
which have extraordinary cultural resonance, such as planting
subversive signs in corporate sign groves, planting papaya seeds
on “public” land in Hawai‘i, creating a giant footprint
on a beach, or building a private office for a public telephone.
And then there are the less simple actions, such as staging a
city-wide play that enacts the dreams of the people of Lille,
France; critiquing the politics behind the Capital of Culture
competition in Europe; analyzing the debate over the World Trace
Center memorial; or comparing the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas
in Afghanistan to the toppling of the Saddam Hussein sculpture
in Firdos Square.
The
pieces here reference sites all over the world, from the Prostitution
Toleration Zone in Rotterdam, to the gutters of Valparaiso, to
the Garden of Eden. But we have also included a number of “reports
from the field”—a kind of survey of the local public
art that some of our readers find themselves admiring/rejecting/questioning.
These reports cover the “Dance Steps on Broadway” in
Seattle, a bench in Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife
Refuge, an Argentinean small press that makes books out of cardboard
collected by the unemployed, signs on overpasses that cross I-495
in New England, the “It’s a Small World” ride in
Walt Disney World, the movement of elk in Rocky Mountain National
Park, the “empty” buildings of Detroit, a “surfer
dude” sculpture in Santa Cruz, and a mechanical beet collector
in Loveland, Colorado.
As
always, we hope the readers of Chain will be as surprised and
provoked by these works as we were upon first receiving them in
the mail. We hope it will be a conversation that continues, as
our eyes open to the possibilities of public site/sight.
--JO
& JS
