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- Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012
Art & the Public Sphere - Volume 2, Issue 1-3, 2012
Volume 2, Issue 1-3, 2012
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Charting public art – a quantitative and qualitative approach to understanding sustainable social influences of art in the public realm
More LessAbstractAs public art continues to serve as a cultural cornerstone in the regeneration strategies of urban areas across North America and the European Union, the need for quantitative data on the sustainable economic, environmental and social impacts to support the beneficial claims of art in the public realm is becoming increasingly imperative. While much has been written to explore the development and expansion of public art, particularly as an agent of urban change, little by way of substantive evidence exists to support the anecdotal evidence and qualitative observations that underlie the argument of public art as a sustainable vehicle for urban regeneration and social change. This article explores some of the assumptions regarding the long-term effects of public art in the urban environment and outlines the development of a multi-disciplinary project in Vancouver, British Columbia that is endeavouring to develop a series of socially engaged public art projects to lay the foundation for research that aims to garner valuable qualitative and quantitative data reflecting the influences of public art within Canadian urban society.
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Art-led regeneration in Margate: Learning from Moonbow Jakes Café and Lido Nightclub intervention
Authors: Loretta Lees and John McKiernanAbstractThis article considers whether a new iconic landmark – the Turner Contemporary – is likely to be a successful vehicle for the regeneration of the English seaside town of Margate in Kent. It does so by looking at the socio-economic context of Margate, the evidence about top-down models of art-led regeneration, and the data collected in a bottom up arts initiative – Moonbow Jakes Café and Lido Nightclub intervention – which was opened at the same time as the Turner Contemporary in the Summer of 2011.
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Owning the city: Civic art’s historical practice and contemporary meaning in Yangon
By Ian MorleyAbstractIn recent decades studies on urban development in South East (SE) Asia have focused on a few cities at the expense of overlooking others. Consequently in comparison to some of the region’s metropolises relatively little is known about Rangoon even though its population is in excess of five million people, it is a fundamental component in the economic and cultural make-up of Burma – the largest country in mainland SE Asia, and is a locale rich in built heritage. Yet the existence of much of the city’s historic downtown district, an environment long recognized for its beauty, is now under serious threat. Vast numbers of colonial era edifices are in a state of disrepair. Others are derelict, and some have been condemned for demolition. However, with civil society in Burma undergoing reform as a consequence of political restructuring in 2011, attempts are now being made to formulate policy to safeguard Rangoon’s environmental and artistic integrity. One means by which this is being realized is via appreciating civic art.
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Off with her head: The representation of women in public sculpture
More LessAbstractPublic statues and memorials play an important role in shaping collective memory and identity. This article explores the gendered dimension of public sculpture by examining two dominant constructs of women in public memorials: woman as victim and woman as tragic hero. The article will examine the ways in which gendered processes and relationships create, reproduce and transform public space. This article will argue that depictions of women in public sculpture and memorial influence discourses and representations about sex and gender.
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Can art turn two publics (and) spaces into one? Joubert Park versus the Johannesburg Art Gallery in the inner City of Johannesburg
More LessAbstractJoubert Park is the biggest and oldest park in Johannesburg. Very attractive for white people since its foundation, this park – as the rest of the inner city – has been facing a cycle of decline from the late 1980s, marked by white flight, urban decay and violence. In the post-apartheid context, a fence was erected around the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), the municipal museum adjacent to the park, to protect it from the supposedly ‘dangerous’ people living in the area. From then, two separate spaces and publics have emerged, separated from one another not only by a fence, but also by mutual fear. To address this socio-spatial division, several artists and JAG curators have been promoting art projects in order to reconnect the physical and social spaces of the gallery with the ones of the park, and vice versa. Analysing thanks to qualitative methods (mainly observations and interviews) three art interventions that happened in the park from 2005 to 2010, I argue that public art can be a means to reveal the symbolical barriers that structure urban spaces beyond the physical ones, to challenge them, and ultimately to produce a more inclusive city.
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The consumption of communism: Changing representations of Statue Park Museum and Budapest
More LessAbstractStatue Park Museum created on the outskirts of Budapest is a symbol of the changing times in Eastern and Central Europe. It exemplifies how cultural meaning can alter in response to ideological representations and memory of the communist era, ‘silent revolution’ and the new reality of post-communist ‘freedom’. The Park is an intriguing site of decommissioned public statuary that theoretically can be interpreted as an overlap of modernist and postmodernist discourses of the public sphere. It encourages identification by a range of publics and viewer gazes offering ambiguity and irony. There is a redefinition of space as commercial interest offering particular ‘privatist’ discourses severed from reference to the past, echoing changes in the political economy of Hungary. Much ambivalence has been created by post-communist agendas, the reconstruction of history and related notions of heritage. This is considered in light of the rebranding of Budapest in relation to national and civic identity, underpinned by neo-liberal discourse.
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Planning a suburban public artscape: The case of Mississauga, Canada
Authors: Alison Bain and Zainub VerjeeAbstractThis article critically examines the cultural planning and policy frameworks recently developed in the suburban municipality of Mississauga, now considered Canada’s sixth largest city, to ameliorate an impoverished public artscape. In the absence of a public art programme and a three-decades-long anti-art mayoral regime, Mississauga’s public artscape has emerged in an ad hoc manner with no rationale for the distribution of art within the city and no strategy for engaging and empowering diverse publics. An analysis of Mississauga’s first Culture Master Plan (2009) reveals that public art is treated as a straightforward mechanism for animating the public realm despite the lived suburban realities of significant spatial distances, high car dependence, nine-to-five commuting patterns, low foot traffic and enormous cultural diversity. A critique of the ensuing Framework for a Public Art Program (2010) report produced by the Culture Division is used to evaluate the most recent addition to Mississauga’s public art collection, the sculpture Buen Amigo (2011) by Chilean artist Francisco Gazitua. The sculpture was privately commissioned by the developers of the Absolute World luxury condominium 56-storey towers by Beijing architect Yansong Ma. The towers and the sculpture are intended to be landmarks that help to brand the suburban municipality as culturally sophisticated and economically dynamic. This article considers the spatial politics and interrelationships between the different urban actors involved in the selection of one work of public art and critically assesses the cultural policy frameworks that informed this decision-making process.
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The Future of Toronto’s Nuit blanche
More LessAbstractThis article outlines the stages that have led up to the current Nuit blanche visual art festival in Toronto struggling with its own success. I will begin by addressing the City’s whole-hearted acceptance of Richard Florida’s ‘creative class’ theory and its relationship with the festival. Toronto’s acceptance of the Floridian understanding of culture as an economic driver has made the Scotiabank Nuit blanche festival vulnerable to influences that have nothing to do with creative criticality. Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of fields will be used to understand how these organizational changes make the festival vulnerable to unintended or even undesirable changes in the way the audience interacts with the artworks. Finally I will offer a possible strategy of how to shift the future direction of the festival using M. de Certeau’s writing ‘Walking in the city’ and Reynolds and Fitzpatrick’s further articulation of ‘transversality’1 to allow for more diversification in viewership and the artworks themselves.
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Just art, politics and publics: Researching geographies of public art and accountability
More LessAbstractThis article draws a geographical research agenda on public art and accountability. The rationale for doing so lies in what I consider the ‘bird’s-eye doctrine’ that prevails in today’s publicly funded urban public-art practice. I argue that the roles and uses of art in urban public space are primarily understood and designed through the chiefly essentialist eye of public art’s enablers, being particularly policy-makers, planners, artists and practitioners. Such bird’s-eye doctrine scarcely challenges the everyday social realities of public art from the ground level, that is, from the eyes of the very publics for whom public art is and should ideally be intended. On the basis of a literature study and the author’s previous empirical research, this article provides pointers for how future research could further geographically disentangle public-art practices at the crossroads of the domains of the publics, politics and art. More particularly, such research should dwell on the extent to which public-art practices account and should account for genuinely involving the publics in the preparation, realization, evaluation and everyday social realities of public art at different yet co-emerging socio-spatial levels of public-art practice.
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Reviews
Authors: Fiona Allen, Benjamin Fallon, Mark Hutchinson and Gretchen CoombsAbstract‘Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013’, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom, 8 November 2013–2 February 2014
Anne Ben BarbarMiyim?/Mom, am I Barbarian?, Istanbul Biennial 2013 Istanbul, Turkey, 25 June–25 September 2013
Tarrying with the Avant-Garde
Brave New Avant Garde: Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics, Marc Léger (2012) Winchester: Zero Books, 198 pp., ISBN: 9781780990507, p/bk, £12.99
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Claire Bishop (2012) London: Verso, 382 pp., ISBN: 9781844676903, p/bk
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