Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editorial Introduction to the Topical Issue “Does Public Art Have to Be Bad Art?”

2019; De Gruyter; Volume: 2; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1515/opphil-2019-0041

2543-8875

Mark Kingwell,

Art History and Market Analysis

Both the title and the call for papers for this topical issue were phrased with deliberate provocation in mind.So many discussions of public art seem to involve contentious views, citizen outcry, and conflict between 'the general public' (who must experience and live with the art) and the creators or curators of that art (who can sometimes seem, or be, elitist, arrogant, and irresponsible).The provocation, therefore, was deliberate but not without reflection.We wanted the articles in this issue to extend and expand on familiar disputes between citizens and government agencies, or corporations, who might commission public art works.We also wanted, naturally, to query the notion of 'bad art' in the context of the public sphere, especially in the places where everyday experience leads us to expect encounters with public art: parks, plazas, shared courtyards, airports, subway systems.It is worth noting the obvious links among these various sites, namely, that they are almost always urban and unavoidable.I may choose to drive to a non-gallery artwork such as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah), or Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's Prada Marfa (2005, Valentine, Texas), or Seven Magic Mountains (2016, Las Vegas, Nevada) by Ugo Rondinone, or Alfredo Barsuglia's Social Pool (2014, Mojave Desert, California).Here, remoteness is often part of the work.In these cited examples, desert or near wilderness is absolutely figured as part of the installation, as is the journey to overcome that remoteness.Similar logics can be observed in works in other topographies: isolated hilltops, remote forests, circuitous hikes.We might define these works as destination art, rather than public art, since they call to us from a distance and employ that distance as an essential element of their aesthetic effect, even as they refuse the confines of the gallery or museum space.But in some cases, works of public art conjoin proximity with distance.Consider, for example, Diller Scofido + Renfro's Blur Building (Yverdon-les-Bain, Switzerland, 2002), which created an intersection of lake, bridge, building, and natural mist features to allow an experience of gorgeous uncanniness.Or Christo's monumental Floating Piers (Lake Iseo, Italy, 2018), which moved beyond earlier experiments with draped buildings in the centre of cities (the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin) and the fabric gates in New York's Central Park, to create instead a destination experience of walking on water.One must also mention here the ill-fated large-scale project of Christo and Jeanne-Claude to cover California and Japan with giant umbrellas (1991), which resulted in two deaths.'Bad public art' does not meet the case for such calamity, which among things was satirized by the television show The Simpsons, where the character Homer, doofus head of the family and briefly an aspiring public artist, muses on the inspiration provided by a dangerous installation: "Killer umbrellas?Excellent!"1.Such excesses aside, public art in the usual sense functions at least in part via proximity, not distance.This aspect of publicness is clearly more available in urban settings than elsewhere.That is, such art must remain accessible to an ordinary public, not just a motivated (and perhaps affluent) one who can traverse 1 Season 10, Episode 19.