Abstract
Previous scholarship on public art has surveyed – in a usually discursive and at times overly generalised mode – how experts assume or ascribe a plethora of roles and (mis)uses regarding art in various political, economic, social and cultural geographical contexts. Public-art studies, nevertheless, are still remiss in indicating how experts socially negotiate such capacities of public art within in-vivo micropublics (cf. Amin, 2002): the socio-culturally diverse (micro)sites of everyday encounter. This paper attempts to move beyond “representational” knowledges by engaging with experts’ lived experiences of contemporary public art along socio-spatial scales of three conceptual anchor points: art, public space and audience. Based on participatory, expert-led research (2012) in the context of Rotterdam, the paper analyses experts’ lived “agonistic” encounters (Mouffe, 2000) subsistent in public-art practice. This practice ranges from the bodily experiential scale of the artist, enabler and user of public space to community mentalities and interventions, local cultural policy directions and state governmentalities and praxes. The empirical analysis reveals how the experts’ socially negotiated images and imaginations of public art’s roles and (mis)uses critically attend to artistic production, the consumption of public space and audience involvement in a socio-spatially interlaced and multiscalar fashion. The paper argues that the pursued non-representational method can be employed in research, policy and practice to raise deeper awareness within the expert sphere about everyday encounter with public art and ensuing issues of audiencing in particular.
Highlights
I am grateful to Sculpture International Rotterdam (SIR) for offering a spellbinding platform for my expert session at the 2012 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR)
The aesthetic practice of social public-art engagement, as enveloped in the expert event, might let us think about inter-subject and subject-object formations over different places and times
Some fundamental questioning pointers in the public-art process are: who should produce public art and for whom? How should the artwork look and be like? For which public space should it be designed? To what extent and how should the various publics be involved in the public-art process?
Summary
It is in this where public art intrinsically inhabits a socio-spatial reality beyond its reified dimension, that is material reality In such real-imagined sphere – or “third space” (Soja, 1996) – the creators and enablers, i.e. experts, of public art endeavour to convey images of social space that may but do not necessarily fit in with the everyday use and experience of public space among other experts as well as diverse audiences of public art. 15 In the grounded purview of this study’s expert-led design on lived experiences of public art, I employ the epistemological tenet of proxemics (cf Lefebvre, 1991; Smith et al, 2009) This means that I attempt to probe into the microgeographies of experts’ images and imaginations of the roles and (mis)uses of art in public space. The multiscalar experts’ images and imaginations attended to three particular issues of scale that are elaborated hereinafter: artistic production, consumption of public space, and audience participation
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