Art, politics and the public square: From decoration to declaration!
- Submitting institution
-
Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 225919
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
10.1386/aps.6.1-2.19_1
- Title of journal
- Art & the Public Sphere
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 19
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 2042-793X
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/619302/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
B - Art & Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This article was funded by the Arts Council England (via a bursary from Birmingham Big Art Project) in response to the call for new research on public art to be published in a special double issue of the journal Art and the Public Sphere. The issue was commissioned to address an identified lack of recent writing on public art in the UK. The article readdresses this lack with a reading that understands contemporary public art as a mode of political praxis due to its position within the public realm in relation to three international examples: Tahrir Cinema (2011–present), Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s Chalk (1998–2006) and Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Street (2013). The article reframes contemporary public art as one that includes activist practice. It makes this argument through utilizing the philosophical discourse on the historical figure of the virtuoso from Hannah Arendt. The virtuoso is connected to the contemporary in this article through Paolo Virno’s proposition that the figure has become a model for the contemporary worker engaged in immaterial forms of labour now associated with the artist. The public square links the two conceptions of virtuoso (from Arendt and Virno); the thesis that contemporary art practice that takes place in the public square constitutes a political practice is then tested in examining the practice of the three case studies. The journal issue was launched at a public event on Public Art Thinking at Birmingham City University that brought together academics, artists, urban developers and public art commissioning agencies to examine the role that public art has in urban development and thus has a wider reach beyond art history. In examining examples from social practice and activism, the article further contributes to the growing discourse on the political efficacy of socially engaged art.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -