Framing Art and Its Uses in Public Space

Abstract

This book examines the everyday use of artworks in public settings. The forms and means of art, and of public art specifically, vary considerably between different national and regional contexts, having followed different development trajectories. As a consequence, the geographically widespread studies collected here consider art in public spaces from a perspective much broader than the 'plop art' of large abstract sculptures in corporate plazas and wider, too, than that defined by many official programs of 'public art', which often determine or imply particular forms, sites, production processes, audiences, kinds of interaction, and particular preconceptions about ownership and value (Cartiere 2008). The book examines a diversity of commissioned and unofficial artworks, including sculptures, memorials, landscaping works, street art, street furniture, performance art, sound art, media installations and other hybrid and emerging forms of creative expression in the public realm. Public engagement with such works varies greatly. The book's contributors show that people's encounters with art are not limited to passive reception, and they are not necessarily as the artist, curator or sponsor intended. People seem to make use of art in public spaces on their own terms. These varied uses reflect the disparate, often unanticipated audiences that the art is exposed to and the freedoms of feeling and action that public settings often allow. We feel that an examination of the varied perceptions of 'users' and actions around art in the public realm can provide fresh insight into art's purposes, benefits and reception. The diverse formal and experiential qualities of art, and the distinctive uses these enable, also shed new light on the design, use and meaning of public space more broadly.