Public Artworks Research Articles

AFK: street-art

In murals depicting prominent figures as martyrs AFK has reconnected the emerging form of street-art to art's ability to maintain our relation to the sacred. Cannily drawing on ambiguities concerning victimhood, pleasure, and mob logic AFK has made headlines, and have reignited debates concerning the place of street-art in the public domain and in the space of arts. Inscriptions is happy to present a series of public artworks by AFK in this issue.

Assembling Birrarung Wilam: a case study of Indigenous public artwork in the city

ABSTRACTIndigenous public artworks in Australian urban spaces have challenged assumptions of Indigenous absence from the city. This paper examines the construction of Birrarung Wilam, in central Melbourne, in the period 2005–2008. We use archival documents and semi-structured interviews to analyse the collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants in a project sponsored by the city. We show the particular mediating contribution of ‘fabricators’: a group of commissioned workers and tradespeople with material-specific expertise. Person to person encounters occurred through the modules of project management, with limited scope for long-term engagement. Despite being embedded in formal state-based recognition, Birrarung Wilam asserts Indigenous self-recognition through the renewal and adaptation of Indigenous material practices and traditions and the refusal to provide straightforward interpretive materials at the site. The study provides support for arguments that challenge a simple binary of co-option and resistance in interpreting such public art practice.

Icons of colonial injustice: From photographs to public art

In the archive of Australian photography, few images point to the gross injustices experienced by Indigenous Australians more forcefully than a 1906 photograph depicting a group of Aboriginal people in neck chains. More recently, few images point to Indigenous self-empowerment more powerfully than a 1993 press photograph of footballer Nicky Winmar lifting his jumper to point proudly to his dark skin. This article explores the extraordinary legacy of these two images and specifically their translation into prominent contemporary public artworks – respectively, a street mural in inner Melbourne and a statue located outside a major football stadium in Perth. I argue that by drawing on, but also extending, the original content of the images, these public translations of the photographs, and the story of their coming into being, become another chapter in the lives of the images. Moreover, in the shift from print to pavement, they transform public spaces into sites of public pedagogy.

A pleasant coach journey across the political frontier: Public art and suburban dissensus

‘Six Moments in Kingston Town’ was an art project developed by the Public Art Commission in May 2019 that sought to collectively speak to the diverse cultures and shared histories of the City of Kingston, south of Melbourne. A series of leading Australian artists were commissioned to work with local community groups to develop projects that spoke to the complex, rich and interwoven social fabrics of this region, concentrating on the period of the mid-1970s to early 1980s. Using as key case studies events such as the election of Moorabbin’s first female councillor in 1976, a selection of nationally famous political protests in 1982, and the disappearance of aviator Fred Valentich who flew out from Moorabbin airport in 1978 never to be seen again, the project sought to highlight hidden or obscured historical moments that impacted well beyond the Kingston region. This text examines how curatorial practice via the commissioning of a series of iterative, place-specific, temporary projects can serve to nurture resilient communities while showcasing adventurous, challenging contemporary art. In picking up on local gestures, materials and events that clearly resonate with our contemporary milieu, we bring into question art’s repeated teleology – one that eschews resistance in favour of its own disappearance into a kind of utopic consensus, where politics, art, culture and the economy fuse into a life of communal accord. In this article, we argue that the making of public artworks as dissensus serves to resist the collapse of art into life and, therefore, the danger that, with the disappearance of art, politics is doomed as well. As the article progresses, we pick up on a number of theoretical threads that present the works as ruptures in our conventional approaches to these sites and their histories.

Being-in-the-Breathable: An Annotated Walk

This article explicates Robert Bean and Barbara Lounder’s 2017 collaborative artwork and public pedagogy project, Breathing-in-the-Breathable: An annotated walk. The authors contextualize the artwork in relation to its site, the ruins of a nineteenth-century tuberculosis sanatorium in the small Polish town of Sokołowsko. This site is a place historically associated with disease, healing and deadly conflict. The participatory project utilized an event score, objects, sound and embodied movement in exploring how the atmosphere and environment became explicit and weaponized by the use of gas warfare during the First and Second World Wars. Along with the site itself, the concept of ‘Being-in-the-Breathable’ (Sloterdijk, 2009) provided Bean and Lounder with a framework for this collaborative public artwork. The artists adopted walking as a creative method that disturbs histories, ideologies and habits, while simultaneously creating new networks of meaning spanning temporal frames, spaces, disciplinary boundaries, and embodied sensorial modalities (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008). The authors illustrate key points in the 90-minute artwork with colour images documenting the event.

Commentary: Art Ignites Change

Commentary: Art Ignites Change

Making Content Relevant (Or Not): Exploring the Outcomes of a Project-Based Curriculum in Post-Secondary Art Appreciation

Because college students often struggle to understand the relevance of isolated and abstract art content to their programs of study and daily lives, this study explores the potential to generate meaningful education through a project-based curriculum in a college Art Appreciation course. Informed by research from educational psychology and neuroscience, this curriculum design was intended to help students (all non-art majors) connect course content to their social, emotional and physical realities and offer the potential to improve them. In class, students explored forms of visual communication, various media, and the relationship between art and culture before applying their findings to the design of a public artwork for their nearly art-free campus. Based on a constructivist epistemology and a phenomenological methodology, this study utilized participant observation, student projects and illustrated reflections as data sources. The results suggest positive outcomes, such as demonstrable understanding and application of course content as well as shortcomings, specifically the potential to fortify and actualize these connections.

Politics of belonging in Brussels’ European Quarter

ABSTRACT The European Union (EU) has been criticised for a lack of imageries and sites of memory that nation-states have traditionally utilised in their identity-building. The EU, along with other actors, has responded to this iconographic deficit with memory and heritage initiatives and branding campaigns. This article explores how this deficit is dealt with in the European Quarter in Brussels by enlivening it through cultural regeneration and creating narratives that link Europe’s and the EU’s past with the present. The article utilises hermeneutic phenomenological approach combining observation and interpretation of diverse place-making practices, such as monuments, memorials, public artworks, history plaques, and naming of administration buildings, with close reading of the EU’s marketing and promotional material. It examines how a feeling of belonging to Europe and the EU is advanced in the Quarter and how it is sought to be turned into a European collective place. The article indicates how the Quarter’s politics of belonging ignores various layers of meanings related to its history and present. The Quarter’s invitation to belong is selective as its narratives focus on male actors and ignore colonial references and today’s multi-ethnic reality in the neighbourhood.

Metamorphic Material: Anatsui, Adams, Marx

ABSTRACTCalligraphy, maps, roots, mazes, tapestries—in their work, El Anatsui from Ghana and Igshaan Adams and Gerhard Marx, both from South Africa, explore arcane, semi-abstract languages of sign and code. Employing immersive tactics of collapsibility and fluidity of form, they interrogate the primacy of omniscient, objective, or imperial perspective. Each artist uses discarded materials—prosaic articles that come with their own familiar, sometimes toxic, clutch of correspondences. These matter-of-fact materials are then broken down into unrecognisable matter and reconstituted to create intriguing forms that propose provisional, contradictory, shifting modes and logics. Drawing on the mutually forged philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I read the work of these three artists as actively de-mapping the fixed codes mapped into the substances, surfaces, and textures of their everyday worlds. Their practice involves embodied, conscious rituals of sourcing discarded materials and forging them into imaginative, open-ended calligraphic tapestries, collage drawings, and aluminium assemblages. This actively transformative practice presents a model for what it looks like to undo the ideological structures through which the world is filtered. These artists are unmaking the imprints and violent co-options of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “Oedipal”, by working through its physical imprints in the inherited material of the world. In this article, I argue that their abstracting, metamorphic treatment of materials and inherited symbolic codes counters the literalism, binarism, and political expediency that inform dominant discourses around the removal, destruction, commissioning, or making of monuments, memorials, or public artworks in decolonising contexts.

"Hot Issue" Critical Review: The "Culture Wars" and Social Polarization: Effects on Historical Monuments and Tourism

This hot issue article examines the convergence in experience between the "developing" world's post-colonial experience during the 20th century and the "developed" world's liberal/progressive social agenda in the 21st century. In it, Tan and Mura highlight the role of the "culture wars" in creating new "minority" groups based not on ethnicity or social class but on social ideology, whose disagreements with dominant majority groups threatens to unleash a new round of heritage destruction worldwide. Citing the public display of monuments to the Confederate States of America as an example of this new sensitivity, the reviewers conclude that although tourist consumption, the passage of time, and the absence of "living communities" can each act collectively to remove the stigma of ideology from monumental constructs, it remains to be seen which monuments will survive this period of social change to be appreciated as memorials to their time. Tan and Mura nevertheless identify the tourism industry as being uniquely empowered to preserve even monuments to "inconvenient" histories that are still important as place-makers for their cities or as works of public art for their host countries. (Abstract by the Critical Reviews Editor)

Exploring Brazil with the Bandeirantes: Reactions to a Public Artwork in the City of São Paulo

ABSTRACTThis article draws attention to two spray-painting actions that occurred simultaneously in the city of São Paulo (Brazil) in 2016, when two large-scale public artworks with a common theme were targeted. I shall discuss the reactions to these “attacks”, since they raised questions regarding both the representation of ancient heroes and our colonial past. While several people condemned what they considered the destruction of public property, many stood up in defence of these actions, as the targeted artworks celebrate individuals responsible for the genocide and slavery of native Brazilians, individuals who have finally fallen out of favour in Brazil.

Diversity in and among Rhetorical Traditions

Diversity in and among Rhetorical Traditions

Street Art and Graffiti in the Context of a City

Abstract The paper presents data from interviews conducted in 2006–2007 with four representatives of the Prague street art and graffiti scene who worked in the Czech capital city at the beginning of the 2000s. Part of the article deals with creative activities in the Prague subway where most of the interviewed authors created their works. The author thus offers the perspective of the authors of the Prague street art and graffiti scenes and presents their view of the (il)legal works of art from around ten years ago in the context of the current discourse in social sciences. Over the last twenty years, this discourse has evolved to such an extent that it now enables to see the phenomenon of urban public works of art as a phenomenon full of paradoxes. Graffiti and street art therefore cannot be interpreted only from the point of view of legality or the art of resistance. Their definition must remain sufficiently open, since certain ambivalence, contradiction and ghostliness are characteristic of it equally as of life in a modern global city that is inherently tied to it.

Classification of basic artistic media based on a deep convolutional approach

Artistic media play an important role in recognizing and classifying artworks in many artwork classification works and public artwork databases. We employ deep CNN structure to recognize artistic media from artworks and to classify them into predetermined categories. For this purpose, we define basic artistic media as oilpaint brush, pastel, pencil and watercolor and build artwork image dataset by collecting artwork images from various websites. To build our classifier, we implement various recent deep CNN structures and compare their performances. Among them, we select DenseNet, which shows best performance for recognizing artistic media. Through the human baseline experiment, we show that the performance of our classifier is compatible with that of trained human. Furthermore, we also show that our classifier shows a similar recognition and classification pattern with human in terms of well-classifying media, ill-classifying media, confusing pair and confusing case. We also collect synthesized oilpaint artwork images from fourteen important oilpaint literatures and apply them to our classifier. Our classifier shows a meaningful performance, which will lead to an evaluation scheme for the artistic media simulation techniques of non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) society.

The Seashells of an Iconic Public Artwork: Diversity and Provenance of the Mollusks of the Watts Towers

The Watts Towers (WT), an iconic Los Angeles artwork created by Sabato Rodia in 1921–1954, is covered with mosaics whose elements include thousands of mollusk shells. Little is known about the diversity or sources of these shells. Here, we document the diversity of mollusk shells present in the WT and use data on their characteristics to make inferences about their provenance. We identified shells of 34 species, 24 of them bivalves (clams and their relatives) and 10 gastropods (snails). Almost all (29/34) of these species are native to southern California shorelines, especially those of bays and estuaries. Rodia could have accessed these sites on foot, by automobile, or by using the Red Car trolley system. Some of the bivalve shells bear drill holes made by naticid gastropods, suggesting that they were collected post-mortem, presumably after they had washed up on beaches. These observations are consistent with the sparse documentary evidence on the origin of the shells of the WT. This detailed information on the diversity of the seashells of the WT should be of utility to conservators, and of interest to scholars of and visitors to the WT.

New Public Monuments: Urban Art and Everyday Aesthetic Experience

Abstract The role and function of public art is currently undergoing some large-scale changes. Many new artworks which are situated within the already existing urban sphere, seem to be changing the definition of public art, each in their own way. Simultaneously, there exists a trend that endorses more traditional forms of public art. Juxtaposing and comparing the aesthetic implications of different types of artworks, it is possible to see how they contribute to the contemporary understanding of the urban sphere. In this paper, I take a look at the explicit and implicit aesthetic values that these simultaneously existing contemporary forms of public art are based on. The cases selected for closer look are examples of prominent and recent works of public art from downtown Helsinki: He who Brings the Light (unveiled in 2017) by Pekka Kauhanen and Running Man (performed in 2016-17) by Nestori Syrjala. What space and what kind of position is subscribed to the perceiver by these very different types of yet equally established artworks? What kind of experiences and possibilities of participation do these works entail? The focus is on the undergoing redefinition of public art that revolves around these questions.

Public Art Work for Creating Hangang Artpark - Focus on A Project ‘Thinking of Each Other’ -

Hangang Artpark construction is an enterprise founded in 2018 that involved installing public artworks created by 37 different people (teams) in Hangang Park located in Yeouido and Ichon Park. An iconic public space in Seoul, Hangang Park is turning into an even better public space due to the efforts to change the park into an eco-friendly, cultural-artistic space in tandem with the change in times. The objective of the Hangang Artpark construction business is to augment the environmental and scenic value of Hangang not only to provide a space for leisurely activities but also to revive it as a cultural-artistic area. This is a study of the concept and the design and installation processes of “Thinking of each other”, a project by the Hangang Artpark construction business. This art piece has been installed in the wetlands and it trails along Ichon Hangang Park, which was created during the environmental recovery project. The piece consists of sculptures molded into animal shapes that are unique to the location and ecology of the area, displayed in harmony with the park’s street furniture. By showing the coexistence of animals that existed in Hangang in the past along with the current inhabitants and the natural enemies of these inhabitants, the piece displays an ecofriendly scene. Moreover, by incorporating this piece into the street facilities of the park, such as gazebos, streetlights, surveillance cameras, and perches, the piece exhibits a different kind of street view compared to the installation style of other conventional environmental artworks. The various sculptures are installed along with the street facilities throughout the trail, rather than in a specific location intended for artworks, thereby achieving harmony with the park scene. In so doing, the piece elicits in the beholder an environment-friendly way of thinking, and at the same time, gives them a sense of calm and pleasure. Further, the paper researches the methods of safely installing art pieces in public spaces and of maintaining these installations.

Kent, Kimlik ve Sanat: Anafartalar Çarşısı ve Kamusal Sanat Üzerine Bir İnceleme

Son yıllarda kentsel dönüşümün yaygın olarak gerçekleştiği Ankara’da Ulus Tarihi Kent Projesi kapsamında yıkılması planlanan yerlerden biri de Anafartalar Çarşısı’dır. Bu makalede, Ulus Meydanı’nın tarihsel dönüşümü ve Anafartalar Çarşısı incelenmektedir. Ankara’da siyasal kamusallığın yerini ticari bir kamusallığın almasının istendiği bir dönemin ürünü olan çarşı, dönemin önde gelen sanatçılarına ait olan birçok kamusal sanat eserini barındırmaktadır. Bu anlamda çarşı, 1960’larda ortaya çıkan ve şehir mekânlarını sanatı her sınıftan bireyin etkileşimine sunacak şekilde etkin kılmayı amaçlayan kamusal sanat akımının etkisini içeren bir anlayışla tasarlanmıştır. Çarşı’da seramik sanatının Türkiye’deki öncü isimlerinin eserleri yer almaktadır. Bu çerçevede özellikle orta ve dar gelirli bireylerin ticaret alanı olarak kurgulanan Anafartalar Çarşısı’nın yıkılması, orta ve dar gelirlilerin ulaşabileceği nadir kamusal sanat alanlarından birinin ortadan kalkmasına neden olacaktır. Çalışmada kentsel dönüşümün bu anlamda kentsel hafızayı ve kamusal sanatı da içeren bütüncül bir yaklaşımla planlanması önerilmektedir.

The Public Utteraton Machines: Recording What People Think of Public Art in New York City

In 2015–2016 the author installed interactive public artworks on sidewalks in Brooklyn and Queens using ordinary city permits. The locations were chosen in counterbalance to the dominant choices of location for public art in New York, which tends to be placed in Manhattan or other tourist-concentrated areas. The works are entitled the Public Utteraton Machines and enable passersby to utter their opinions about other public art in the city as well as art’s role in society. The device’s earpiece recorded over 100 open-ended narratives and 391 responses to quantitative data questions via an integrated e-paper display screen. This public art project combines social practice with object-based public art into a conceptual public art practice that forms a commons or civic art. Sound archives of the responses can be found at local libraries in Queens and Brooklyn and at http://utteraton.com/ .

Sana Al‐Nour: the development of a unique integrated artwork

ABSTRACTSana Al‐Nour, a unique structure and the largest public artwork in the Middle East, stands at the centre of the new terminal at Abu Dhabi airport, hovering between the Departures and Arrivals areas. Originally conceived as a device to deflect daylight from the upper, daylit departures space to the lower, darker arrivals hall, it is also an integral part of the air recirculation system, guiding air through the void in which it floats, as well as being a space‐maker from below and a way‐finding marker from above. A circular, triangular‐mesh rotated hyperboloid cable‐net, suspended from a central axial strut between two compression rings, the piece comprises 1,632 heat‐bent and (mostly) chemically‐strengthened laminated units, with a bi‐colour varying opacity interlayer (semi‐reflective silver on the outside and sky blue on the inside) attached to 152 cables. The sculpture is 23 m high and 30 m diameter, and weighs approximately 92 tonnes. The structure has taken ten years, from conception to completion. The paper will deal with the generation of the concept and its development through initial stages to the execution and production of parts. It will deal with the visual design issues, spatial concerns, technical context in terms of light and airflow, project organisation, security, installation and maintenance. A unique project in a unique space, the description will attempt to draw general conclusions about the implications for the integration of artworks in complex public and semi‐public spaces.