Public Art, Arts and Revitalization

1. Artists & Places (report and project)

The aim of PROJECT was to evaluate the contribution that artists can make to regeneration and development, by involving them in projects in a strategic way. It brought artists into schemes from West Lothian to Hackney. Unlike other art schemes, PROJECT did not fund specific art works. Development professionals had to apply to work with artists, and the awards were given to regeneration schemes rather than individual artists.

Independent evaluation of the initiative found that artists raised the quality of projects, with one developer reporting that the experience had fundamentally changed the way they work.
Artists & Places features six case studies of PROJECT-funded schemes.

2. Symposium: Art in Public Contexts: the contemporary approach

A report on the conference, from Public Art Online (UK). There's a lot in the report, I found this section particularly interesting and wonder if there is an article somewhere, based on this presentation:

Developments in the 'public realm'
Claire Doherty gave a brief yet comprehensive survey of academic writing on public art and developments in the public realm, covering:

- Habermas’s concept of the bourgeois public sphere as essentially masculine
- Art can change how you see a place especially when it is encountered unexpectedly
- The role of public art in making the familiar strange e.g. Richard Wilson’s – ‘Turning the Place Over’ in Liverpool; Ivan and Heather Morrison’s ‘crashed’ lorry spilling flowers
- Miwon Kwon – One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
- Richard Serra: “to remove the work is to destroy the work” e.g. artwork is completely site-specific.
- Robert Smithson – Spiral Jetty, Utah and Great Salt Lake – sculpture on a massive scale.
- Francis Alys – When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) – visibility of participants and the work that went into making the artwork; the artist aimed to ‘de-romanticise’ land art
- Increasing internationalism – mobilisation of artists across the world
- Influence of the Situationists of the 1950s and 1960s – but the difference now is that most artists working in this way are commissioned rather than working independently / clandestinely
- Fictional walks by Janet Cardiff: exploring the urban environment
- The recent interest in the human scale and impact of artworks e.g. the RSA Arts & Ecology programme.
- How can we judge these artworks if ‘Everyone is an artist’? (Joseph Beuys)
- Kwon ‘art in the public interest’ is replacing art in public spaces – art as public space
- Compromising between the autonomy of the artist and social interventionism.
- Cultural tourism – is the place becoming more important than the art? e.g. Istanbul, Muenster
- Different models of commissioning e.g. ‘art as spectacle’: temporary projects that live on in memory even when the audience only gets a fleeting glimpse

Also see this blog entry, "Lulu Loves London: platform for art" for info on the London program.