Diana Boros from the Political Science Department brought together this event on public art, inviting two artists and art professors from the Art and Art History Department and a professor from the International Languages and Cultures department of St. Mary’s College of Maryland to take part in the dialog. Lisa Scheer, one of the art professors works as a sculptor in the Washington D.C. area and has been creating commissioned public artworks for over fifteen years. Her colleague, Billy Friebele also creates public digital, and often interactive, artworks primarily in the D.C. Metro area. Katie Gantz, from the International Languages and Cultures department discussed her studies of historical and urban spaces in Paris and the relationship with street art.
Professor Boros began the discussion by defining public art as any form of art created or enacted in public; furthering this understanding by discussing the accessibility of art today because it is available to any one that comes across it. In this way, she views public art as democratic. Next, politics was defined as being seen not just in “policies but the myriad of interactions and rules to public life.” Because public art serves to re-conceptualize meanings in public space and provides new ways to see everyday life, Boros believes that public art is inherently political.
Following the concepts that Boros wanted us to consider, Lisa Scheer presented on her artwork. She gave the perspective of the artist and the process of how an artwork comes to live in the public. Scheer stated that not every object placed in the public sphere is actually art because it isn’t always about the artist but the context. As an object maker she engages with the circumstantial which she calls relational, communal, and integrative; she creates works based upon the physical site, the community of people, and the identity of the place. In this way, she views public art as collaboration with an existing space and with the viewer which she refers to as “participants.” I was very interested in the relationship between the artist, work, and the audience as participatory, or active, even in regards to fine art sculpture. While there is no specified interaction such as in the work of Billy Friebele (who presented next), the idea of considering viewership in a public space as a non-passive relationship is interesting in the context of my work outside of digital class.
Billy Friebele discussed site specific artworks that rely heavily on participation and the exchange of information. Friebele employs the use of digital tools and the ease of portable cameras and phones to create a new or expanded interaction with public space. There were two levels of public access to the works he created, one being the actual place in which the work is created or located, the second being the interaction on the internet. I was interested in the idea of the internet as a place for public art because I don’t often think of the web as an opportunity for art, but as a means of displaying images of my own 2-D works. The idea of participation is also what develops the artworks, they are based on both time and interaction, so that the work continues to evolve and grow—an idea I haven’t previously worked with.
Katie Gantz was the last speaker to present and she discussed the historical, old architecture of Paris that was developed during the Second Empire (from 1853-1871) by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussman in relation to the aesthetically and politically conflicting street art of the city. Haussman’s Paris is about the monumental, explained Gantz, it was for the whole and conformity, but street art is about the individual and uniqueness. From “Hello My Name Is…” stickers to works that shift the sightline of pedestrians from the architecture to the ground, or around light posts which expect viewers to be moving, street art interacts in a different way than the grandeur of the Paris city. In regards to the placement of the street art, I am interested in the idea of coming upon a work in the public that people stumble across or seek out. Something I want to work on in the second project of the semester is this sense of “finding” something in the public that is for your eyes only, or something that you really shouldn’t be seeing; a sense of deviance in the viewing of an object.
Without Boros’s explanation of politics at the beginning of the event, I would have wondered how public art could be viewed as an inherent connection politics. I often put politics into a box restricted by ideas on government campaigns and CSPAN. From the start however, Boros made clear that politics is larger than that and it involves how we think on a day-to-day basis, why we interact in certain ways, etc.
I did wish that more stress was placed on how public art affects a particular space or works on a civilian level. It was mentioned that art can create pride in a space or raise awareness, but I would have been interested to see particular cases where works were removed or caused an opposite intended reaction. For instance, I can think of Richard Serra’s commissioned work Tilted Arc (1979-1980) that was made to activate the space and instead, perhaps stimulated the space too much, causing irritation in pedestrians and “participants” so that the work was removed.