Personal Views: Public Art Research Project

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1 Personal Views: Public Art Research Project Vox Pop (The Family) by John Clinch, 1988 Queens Court, thecentre:mk Professor Doreen Massey, BA (Oxon), MA (Phila) & Dr Gillian Rose, BA (Cambs) Social Sciences Faculty, The Open University Commissioned by Artpoint on behalf of Milton Keynes Council 1

2 Introduction Public art, in its very name, brings together a number of worlds, and a number of different avenues of inquiry. The exploration presented here comes from geographers. There is a well-established debate about public art among practitioners and curators in the arts field. There, a question often asked is: what is it about some kinds of art that can make it public? We come at the same question from our own starting point. We recognise that, sometimes, categories such as public art can be produced, and take on life, as a result of having to conform to the demands of funding, or perhaps through the desire of groups to distinguish themselves one from another. We are not part of those dynamics and have in consequence approached the subject from a different angle. Nor have we worked with an understanding of art being public just as a result of the manner in which the art is produced or where it is displayed (although these might be important components to consider). Instead, we are interested in thinking about what public might mean and how that is tied into notions of place, of identity, and of social diversity. All these terms have in recent years been challenged in their long-accepted understandings by social scientists and theorists, geographers among them, and some of the new thinking which has resulted has potentially significant implications for how we might also reconceptualise the notion of the public. Our brief enjoined us to reflect upon public art in the context of new thinking about place and the identity of place. This is what we have done, and much of what follows is concerned with the construction of place and what that might mean for public art. What this exploration also implies, however, is that it may be necessary to rethink what is meant by public. And this in turn, we conclude, might have implications for what makes a piece of art a piece of public art. By working through our understandings of space, place, identity and public, then, we conclude by offering our own definition of public art. Place There are many ways of conceptualising place. Each leads to its own way of understanding the notion of a sense of place and each, we would argue, might point 2

3 towards a different way of understanding what might be meant by the public sphere and in particular by public space. The way in which one understands place, in other words, can have enormous social consequences, which can be reflected in policy, and particularly policy towards public art. There is one popular and influential approach to understanding place which emphasises: boundedness an essential (and in extreme cases unchanging) character a coherent community a common understanding an essence which is internally generated (which grows out of the soil ) inherited traditions. There are many ways in which this view of place may be appealing both to policymakers and to (elements of) a local population. It can provide a sense of community; it can offer a sense of security and anchorage through emphasising long-established familiarity; it holds out a notion of tradition which is unchanging and thereby reliable (save as inevitably being under constant threat of loss). These characteristics are not unimportant, and people s desire for those kinds of security and sense of belonging need to be recognised and addressed. This kind of understanding of place has both increased in its appeal in the present era of globalisation and time-space compression and come under severe critique. Its appeal has increased, at least on some accounts (eg Harvey, 1989), as people have come to take refuge in the local, in this particular formulation, as a haven from the constant and unsettling flux of globalisation. Place, on this account, functions as a knowable location of security. At the very same time, however, that imagination of place has come under increasing criticism. On the one hand the critique has been empirical and again draws its inspiration from the changes under way as a result of (or as a part of) globalisation. It argues quite simply that in the current age to imagine any place as unchanging or self-contained flies in the face of the facts. It may for some be a comforting myth, but it has no basis in the real world. On the other hand there has also been a socio-political element to the critique which points to what it sees as the dangers of this myth of place. The chief lines of argument here are that this kind of understanding of place can lead to: 3

4 the formation of a social geography of us and them; of insiders and outsiders; of those who belong and those who do not (on a wider canvass one might point here to some of the extreme and exclusivist nationalisms which have been witnessed in the late 20 th century they relied precisely on such a notion of place) a commitment to unchangingness. The character of the place is known, its traditions established, and the effort must now be to guard against their loss the converse of these things a lack of understanding of the complexities and multiplicities of place, its constituent diversities and potential conflicts. MILTON KEYNES: One point which might immediately be made is that Milton Keynes both is unsuitable for analysis as a place through such a lens and stands as a challenge to it. We shall return to this point later, but it is important to note that much of Milton Keynes self-presentation, for instance in its literature, already escapes some of these over-enclosed and static understandings of place. An alternative approach to place would recognise very different characteristics. Instead of closure, openness is stressed: to influences, to trade, to cultural flows, to migrations this is place as meeting place, the intersection of numerous trajectories of all kinds brought together in physical proximity. The challenge of place, in this view, is not the maintenance of already-existing traditions (though this may be an important element); rather it is the constant negotiation which is needed, in order that differences may reside together. Such negotiation will go on, necessarily at a multiplicity of scales, from the little quotidian tolerances and intolerances to more structured negotiations between different social groups. On the one hand might be how a park can be a site of potentially conflictual accommodation between dog owners, children, amateur footballers, and those who long for nothing more than a few moments peace and quiet. On the other hand this negotiation might entail a fraught struggle, say between different ethnic groups, over how to live in close proximity. This understanding of place, then, sees internal diversity and complexity (rather than coherence) as at the core of the essence of place. And it sees the processes of negotiation of that diversity as part of the character of place. Tradition, here, is something which is continually under construction the responsibility is therefore not just to hang on to it but to build it. This is place as practised. Such a view, as we have said, does not imply ignoring the past (all the different processes, practices and trajectories which have interwoven to make this place what it is); but it does mean not romanticising it or holding it in aspic, nor allowing it to dominate the present. The past of 4

5 a place is part of its present and future and it is in that guise that it can best contribute to the making of a sense of identity. Finally, spaces and places, of course, have both material characteristics and immaterial ones. And the meetings which produce spaces and places, the negotiations, are a product of both. On the one hand there are (say) the buildings, the lampposts, the rubbish bins, the railings, the noise and patterns of movement on the other there are the social relations, and the understandings and emotions the way people congregate or avoid each other, the differential welcoming and repelling of different groups in different sites, the common understandings of how to behave, feelings of being at home or feelings of fear. These aspects are linked and play off each other. The silence of a church, the particular nature of that silence, is a product of the physical building, of social conventions of behaviour and of human attitudes, beliefs, feelings and behaviours (and the gathering of those things together reinforces the behaviour and the social conventions), and the silence which is a product of all these things is integral to the distinctiveness of this space. This particular space both is and is produced by the combination of the nature of its materiality, its sociability, its meanings and its emotional resonance. The phrase a sense of place is often used to convey all these qualities; it refers to the particular combination of them that is unique to any one place. The particularity of any combination is not necessarily easy to tease out. It often takes an extended period of research of a more or less formal kind to gain a real understanding of the complexity of any one place. In a place such as a city or a neighbourhood, then, the various constituent spaces are not just containers within which people live out their daily lives. It is the living out of these daily lives which is itself a part of the making of the space: all those embodied ways of doing things, often quite routinised things, and often quite small scales, and around particular constellations of objects, produce the spaces and places of an urban area. It is even argued by some that we can understand humanly produced artefacts (the buildings, say, or an art object) as temporally/temporarily congealed social relations. Certainly they reflect and affect social relations. And the space is produced, not just by the configuration of the material things, but by our social relations to them and to each other. Space is constantly produced and modified. When you walk into an empty square you change, just a little, its nature as a space ; we, and material objects, continually and jointly produce space. 5

6 Public Following this account of place, what then can we say of public space? The view of place as closed and static produces a particular understanding of public space. It can lead to a view of public space as an apparently open arena which all can unproblematically enter. However, just as a this version of place actually produces outsiders, so there will also be groups who cannot in fact enter this sort of public space. It might also connect with a role for public art as a collective mirror, offering each member of society an image of that membership while leaving those who are not allowed to be members unseen and unseeing (Lefebvre). However, our preferred understanding of place leads to a rather different understanding of public space. If place is open, practised, diverse, sometimes conflictual, in many kinds of ways, then so too must our understanding of the public be. This is an alternative view of public space. The public, here, is understood as an arena in which many diverse kinds of people can come together and engage. It is understood as an open arena, from which no-one should be excluded because they are poor, or black, or female, or foreign, for example. In a world structured simultaneously by increasing global flows of people and increasing efforts to control that flow, the public in this sense often functions as a goal towards which liberal societies should aim. Indeed, much of the academic literature on public space is prescriptive. This kind of public is an ideal. Although it is sometimes suggested that, historically, it is an ideal that has been achieved (in the work of Richard Sennett, for example), it is more often used now as an ideal against which present failures can be measured. This is certainly the case in much recent writing on public art. Like our understanding of place, then, public is about social relationality. But while a particular place may be articulated by a range of different socialities, among other things, a public is defined by a certain kind of social relationality. A public is about social processes, practices and relations between people that negotiate social differences. And it therefore happens in spaces where social differences are very often evident: in streets, shops, parks, malls, markets, squares, playgrounds, car parks, stations. All these places become public when social differences are negotiated within them. Public spaces, then, do not simply exist. Their existence depends, instead, on what happens in them, what kinds of interactions take place to create them. Just as not all shopping malls are public, we might also note here that, for a range of reasons, some of which the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has outlined, art galleries are very often places where certain kinds of 6

7 people are not made to feel particularly welcome: tolerated, but only just. Art galleries are in consequence often rather weak public spaces. We should say here a little more explicitly what we mean by the negotiation of social difference as that which defines public space. By negotiation, we intend to refer to a whole spectrum of interactions between people that run from mutual indifference to active engagement. What these various kinds of interactions have in common is an engagement with social difference and a commitment to sharing certain material spaces. This definition of the negotiations that produce public space differentiates the public. Since negotiation can take different forms, so too can public space: it can take stronger and weaker forms. In a weak version of public, espoused by writers such as Jane Jacobs, the tolerance that makes certain locations public is just that: a tolerance and little more. People negotiate others differences through strategies such as indifference, avoiding eye contact. While a certain level of politeness is extended to all holding lift doors open, helping buggies up and down stairs the engagement with difference is rather passive. A stronger version of public sociality would involve a more active engagement with different others. This might mean participating in a public meeting, or actively intervening to help someone, or even getting involved in some kind of community group or project. These kind of activities imply a stronger involvement with those who are different from yourself; they imply a commitment to find out enough about them, and to give enough of yourself, to allow working together. These kind of negotiations and alliances may be provisional, contingent and temporary. But then so too may the public spaces they create be. We think it s important to begin to differentiate different kinds of publics, just as it is important to think about place as complex and differentiated. On this view, any space is relationally constructed: it will be easier for some than others simply to enter, and it will contain, and be formed through, its own interactive dynamics and intersecting power-relations. Thus just designing-in an open square, for instance, is insufficient to guarantee, or enable, its public nature. A public place, on this reading, is one where some kind of negotiation can happen, even the exploration of conflict; a space which can respond to the need to constitute a sense of the social. An analysis of these potential dynamics needs to be integral to the provision of public space. 7

8 Milton Keynes is self-evidently a place where tradition and identity are always under construction; it is clearly a new place in which a range of different trajectories has been brought into physical proximity (and therefore into negotiation). Chris Murray in his review of place marketing points to, and challenges, the overwhelmingly dominant presentation, in place-marketing material, of images which are historical (especially medieval) and which evince a sense of the constancy and unchangingness of the place. He writes The past and a lack of change in the environment is constantly pushed, leaving one feeling that nothing has happened in the last four hundred years (p.25). Milton Keynes, on this issue, is already ahead of the game. Its dominant selfpresentation is resolutely (and, perhaps, necessarily) one of the present and the future. Its history has been one of urban experimentation on a whole variety of fronts; and the new city centre plan aims to make that into a tradition, part of the identity of this city. Indeed it talks of a tradition of innovation. Milton Keynes is also self-evidently an open, unbounded place, and this too is recognised in much of its self-presentation. (Again, Chris Murray s pamphlet points to the comparative rarity of this see for instance pages ) Identity In writing about place and public space in this way we are also thinking of accounts of how to capture the identity of a particular space, and it is perhaps important to note that this rethinking of identity has taken place over recent years over wide spectrum of social and cultural studies. That is, the way we conceptualise the identity of individuals and of social groups has been re-evaluated along similar lines to the revisions of place and public space. Instead of conceiving of identity as a given, with essential and internally-given characteristics, the making of identity has come to be stressed much more, and also the fact that this making is a product of interaction with others. In social science terminology, this is identity (or uniqueness) as constructed relationally and through practices engagements which are material and social. This raises two points which are significant for the exploration here. First, it is as a result of this rethinking of identity that we have laid such stress on the fact that places are internally diverse. In itself this although in practice often ignored is fairly uncontroversial. However, taking seriously the notion of identity indicated above means that the constituents of this diversity can not be simply assumed. For they themselves will be constantly evolving and evolving in relation to each other. For social groups and individual people have complex and multiple identities too, cross-cut by a whole range of different lines of commonality with and in relation to others. This raises 8

9 difficult questions in relation to any kind of public policy intervention for it will often be difficult to know in advance which lines of identification will be significant in any particular situation. Should we assume ethnicity, say, is important? Maybe age, gender, and (dis)ability are more significant for the place, and the question, under debate. Again, the need for careful, place-specified research is evident. Moreover any such intervention may well itself produce, call into being, new or different or unexpected lines of differentiation. It will itself be an intervention into social space. Second, then, we can consider public art as precisely such an intervention. From what has been said so far, we can already draw out some implications for thinking about the role of public art. We can, for instance, argue that: it will not just be an insertion into a space/place; it will help produce that space, and it may do this both as a material object (if it is such) and as a set of practices. It will also be some kind of intervention into the negotiation of difference which is place, and it is likely to interpellate some differences (some elements of the constituent diversity) more than others. Finally, a piece of public art may provoke or bring out into the open new lines of differentiation. Some implications, so far, for a programme of public art 1 Rather than public art performing the function of representation of or interpellation of a supposed community coherence, it is more constructive, and more responsive to a revised notion of place, to think of it as an active insertion into the negotiations which go to make up a place. Indeed we would argue that it will inevitably be this, whether this is the intention or not. Better then, that the fact is consciously recognised. 2 This means that planning any programme of public art requires serious, timeconsuming investigation of, and thought about, the specificity of this particular place. It means: asking what lines of diversity, which intersecting trajectories, might be most significant here exploring what edges of actual or potential conflict may be emerging (and addressable) in those intersections exploring the possibility of active local engagement as part of a responsiveness to the dynamics of particularity. It might well be that a public art programme might wish to take this further and distinguish between different locations within the overall place Milton Keynes. In which case, all of the above needs to be carried out for each location. 9

10 3 The nature of the insertion of public art into the practices of place also needs to be considered. What role, specifically, is it expected to play? Why is a piece of art even wanted here? Again, it might be appropriate for this role to vary between different locations within a city. If this approach is followed, then this variation can be explicit and debated. In general, given the proposition that space is constituted relationally the question must be addressed as to how a public art project will contribute to (or change) the making of the relevant space. 4 The previous question is important. What role is a piece of art supposed to play? In what way, and to what end, does it link up with, or maybe even challenge, the ongoing intersection of trajectories which is this place? This question takes us more directly to discussions about public art itself. Within the debate about the role of public art, one position has been argued which has some similarities with what has been argued above but which we also believe needs further elaboration and nuancing. Prominent here is the writing of Rosalyn Deutsche who has argued strenuously for recognition of the necessarily conflictual nature of the public. Given this, the role of public art in Deutsche s view is to make explicit and to tap into those conflicts. Deutsche is writing in the context of a New York in which a tendency for wealthy institutions to commission public art in the vein of bland monumentalism coexists with violent conflicts and inequalities which the art on the one hand exemplifies but on the other hand totally ignores. We take her arguments very seriously; we have argued above for the central recognition of potentially conflictive diversity as the root of the formation of the uniqueness of place. However, if we take seriously the conceptualisation of place outlined above then it is possible to see multiple ways in which public art can play a role within this diversity and inequality. Sometimes indeed one might want it to lay bare the conflicts (Murray s example from place marketing from South Africa may be interesting here); many times one might want it to be provocative, to act as a stimulus to thought, to provoke other ways of looking or being. At other times, though, the most constructive relation to adopt to a particular place (set of negotiations) might be celebration. At yet others it might be that what is most needed is a feeling of being cherished, of having things of beauty it is not to relapse into environmental determinism to appreciate that the quality of the physical surroundings can either nourish or undermine feelings of dignity and self-worth. Two points immediately arise here: first that a programme of public art is in this sense inevitably political (in the larger sense of that word) and at its best will be responsively political; second that the term public art itself can also be extended in its potential reference. We would both wish to point, for instance, to the 10

11 extraordinary beauty of the planting and landscaping in Milton Keynes, and the way it brings the seasons into the city. (At this point, our argument intersects with Heatherwick Studio s in Public Art in Central Milton Keynes, which we take up elsewhere in this paper.) 5 How might one imagine a public art which is responsive to the external relationality of place? Some art may pick up on those relationalities which go beyond place. Instead of being an insertion into the constellation of trajectories that produce this place here, they may track outwards along webs of contact which elements of this place here have with the world beyond. Works in certain cities which explore slavery, for instance, are in some ways attempts to do this both geographically and historically. They ask on what wider relations this place is founded, for that too is part of its identity. In this context, we wonder if the pagoda in Milton Keynes works in this way. 6 There is one specific issue here which it might be important to address. Public art is often commissioned in association with, indeed as an integral part of, projects of urban regeneration. Given what has been said above, this raises some interesting questions. In particular, it poses in acute form the question: what is this art for? What is it supposed to do? Indeed is it true that to regenerate a civic centre (say), or a neighbourhood, you need a bit of art? Such a placing of art, at its worst, could be more than obfuscatory, simply a demonstration that this is regeneration. Symbolic of the fact that something has been done. But then what has been done? At issue here is that regeneration itself can have many meanings: it can be purely physical; it can be primarily social; it can be mainly directed at feelings of self-worth; it can be a mixture of these things. The role of art in each of these might be quite different. And the role of something we might call public art as that which invites negotiation between social difference might be different again. 7 Regeneration does raise very directly the important point that places also change over time. As we have been stressing, the characteristics of places are not static; and as well as the dynamism of the everyday, there are longer term changes that occur. Different groups of people come and settle, others leave again; economic change can radically alter a sense of place; political change can also change a whole range of elements of a place. This kind of change also has implications for public art, in that the context of an artwork may change quite radically over time, and that may change its meaning. The section below turns more directly to public art, to develop these points more fully. 11

12 Public art The temptation to define art in clear and certain terms is great. Definitions themselves have varied enormously, of course, from Kantian definitions based on notions of universally recognisable beauty, to anthropological claims that art is whatever a particular society deems it to be. Debates about public art have not been immune from this desire to define. Again, specific definitions vary. Lucy Lippard has described public art, for example, as accessible work of any kind that cares about, challenges, involves, and consults the audience for or with whom it was made, respecting community and environment ; while according to Malcolm Miles, public art is a form of street life, a means to articulate the implicit values of a city when its users occupy the place of determining what the city is, and he also suggests that it actively engages with and intervenes in its audiences. Although these definitions are not necessarily compatible, there still seems to be that desire to establish just what public art is. What would happen, though, if we stopped worrying about how to define public art as if it were a singular entity? There are various reasons for making such an effort. The first, and obvious to all who have engaged with the genre, is that the form and effects of what gets called public art under any definition vary enormously. Artists do a whole range of very different things, in different locations, with very different effects. (And this has spawned yet more definitions, such as Suzanne Lacey s new genre public art.) But there are also some more pressing conceptual reasons why we might pause in the search for a definition. Some of these reasons relate to how we think of public art, in particular its relation to its audiences; others relate to how we think of the artworks themselves. Many of them, though, are forced by the acknowledgement that artworks are always situated in a place. They are always place-specific. The desire to define public art by its practitioners and critics has a paradox at its heart. In one form or another, all definitions of public art assume some kind of involvement in the art by people other than its sponsors, makers and critics. Big sculptures in public spaces are put there, among other reasons, on the assumption that the people who pass through those spaces will see the sculpture and in some way be affected by it. Community murals are facilitated in order to involve a group of non-artists in an artistic process. Kids with spray cans are invited to make graffiti art in a gallery. Desks and walls and curtains and flooring are designed by artists for the public who visit theatres or swimming pools. And so on. One way or another, the public of public art implies the people who receive the art. Yet the consistent desire to define public art never but never goes to specific audiences and asks them anything about 12

13 that art. Instead, knowledge about public art, including its definition, is kept as the exclusive preserve of critics and practitioners. Now, we don t want to argue that definitions of art, including public art, should be made only by the audiences for particular artworks (although why the privilege of defining art should rest so exclusively with artists and critics might also be questioned). Rather, what we want to do by introducing notions of audience, and place, into discussions of public art is to try to open up what the term public art might mean in rather more systematic ways than the current plethora of definitions allow. So, let s continue with the audiences of artworks. Now, asking specific people what they think about a particular piece of public art might well, all too easily, get into that is it art or isn t it kind of dead end. But, on the other hand, it might not. Particularly if the asking is done in such a way as to not raise the spectre of art, initially at least. Asking an audience if they liked something, why, how, if it moved them, made them think about certain things, challenged them, shocked them, could all be done without mentioning the word art once. These kinds of questions would tell the questioner a great deal about the most fundamental thing currently assumed about all kinds of public art that it affects its audience in some way. It would unpack that assumption most productively. It would be able to examine just what kind of effects, if any, a particular artwork was having, how and why and for whom. And from that, a more nuanced understanding of this complex thing currently sprawling untidily under the umbrella of public art might come. It is strange, then, that the audience, or the community, for all its centrality to current definitions of public art, is never allowed to produce its own definitions of whether and how a particular piece is effective or affective. Examining audiences responses might allow a much more thorough understanding of how a public artwork is functioning. It might also bring to light aspects those complex negotiations at work in any place. In particular, we would suggest that there are three dimensions of those audience responses that would bear careful scrutiny. The first is the range of registers through which an artwork may evoke a response, the second is how we think of the identity of an audience, and the third is how we envisage the potentialities of an artwork. These three are important because each of them is central to how audiences perceive artworks; but they are also important to think about because, like 'place' and 'identity' and 'public', they are diverse. 13

14 art. Understanding that diversity helps us to pinpoint our own understanding of public The first is the range of registers through which a public artwork might have an effect. Here, we are thinking of the different kinds of effects and affects public art projects may have. The effect of some public art is openly didactic, for example; this is most likely if text is used for slogans, for example. Other work uses text or other means to ask more reflective or meditative questions, to ponder dilemmas. This is work whose effects we might describe as challenging. Its making and its audiencing rub against the grain of everyday assumptions and make its audience think again about something they are taking for granted. Other public art may have the effect simply of being beautiful. It might pierce everyday routine and public space with something truly gorgeous, and make some people stop and pause in another way. It may not be visual; it may make appeal to other senses. Its effect might be wordless, sublime, numinous; it too may challenge but in a different register. The effect of other public art may to mourn, or to celebrate or even horrify. But it seems important to explore the potential range of kinds of responses that public art may evoke, from the sloganising to the emotional to the unspeakable. Moreover, few works will be in themselves one type or another: the effect and affect will be a product of the nature of its intervention into a particular space. In the context of MK in particular, we are interested in public art that has no apparent effect. Statues that are ignored, murals that are not seen, invisible tree sculptures. Public artworks that are walked past without a glance, that don t make (some) people stop and look. MK is city designed with and for public art; its artworks are of a piece with its road layout, architecture and planting. They were neither dropped in nor nurtured from below, to use the dichotomy that structures so much writing on public art; nor, mostly, were they dropped or nurtured in relation to existing places. Instead, the place grew with them and they with the place. They are integrated into the texture of MK urbanity in an unusual, if not unique kind of way. Is this why people seem to so rarely stop and stare at them? Are they so familiar that they are no longer seen? Or are they so familiar that they don t need to be seen head-on, as it were, for their effect to happen? While talking to people about these artworks is the only way to answer this question, acknowledging the possibility of this range of affective reaction to public 14

15 artworks is important. It is important because it relates to the range of kinds of public spaces which we have already discussed. We suggested that we might think of different public spaces on a kind of continuum from weak to strong, where weak public spaces involve tolerance of social difference while strong ones involve an active engagement with social difference. We might begin therefore be tempted to argue, for example, that the familiarity of much public art in Milton Keynes is weak public art. Weak not on some kind of transcendental aesthetic scale, but weak because it invokes a weak kind of public space. A weak kind of public space in which people simply rub alongside each other, tolerant but distant, easy but uninterested. And a weak kind of public art which facilitates that passive kind of negotiation. It doesn t challenge, it doesn t intervene; rather, it smoothes and integrates. Indeed this may reflect something of the character of this city, which seems quite open and democratic, but in an individualistic way. This is very much the kind of public art that the Thomas Heatherwick Studio seems to advocate for Milton Keynes. In arguing that an overall artistic integrity should be maintained for the centre of the city, the Studio emphasises totality, coherence and wholeness. It s about holding the city together visually, which presumably parallels an effort to hold the city together socially too (although the Studio s document typically says very little about local people). Other kinds of public art might engage and provoke a much stronger version of public space, however. A challenging piece that punctuates that everyday tolerance and demands reflection and a more sustained engagement with difference may contribute towards a strong public. The second aspect of audiences reactions to public artworks that bear on questions of place and identity, is the whole notion of identity. If, as we are arguing, place is made by the relations between things if place happens in the interactions between people, objects, matter organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate then how a particular group of people respond to an art object is of fundamental importance to our understanding of how that object is working. As we have argued, we critics and artists cannot just assume that we know its effects, what it does and therefore what it is. If we want to know what a particular artwork is doing, we need to find out from the people it s doing it with. As part of our explorations for this research, we sat at a small distance from the entrance to the public library in Milton Keynes and watched as people 15

16 went to and fro past Andre Wallace s The Whisper. It was a bright December day, not warm, not a time for lingering, but not rainy or inhospitable. This is a very public space in a classic sense, and is described as such in the City Artwalk brochure: its site outside the public library, a space where people meet and socialise. We observed as people came and went. No-one looked at this piece of public art. No response was immediately visible. But this in itself raised questions (including about those terms immediately and visible ) which relate to our wider discussions. First, yes this is a public space in the sense that no categories of people are formally excluded (though there may, as always, be differential access). Yet libraries historically have been understood as places of knowledge, perhaps with connotations of seriousness and portentousness. Indeed, knowledge has often been seen as a male affair too. Public libraries have changed vastly over the years so perhaps the very unremarkability of the presence of young women, comfortable in this space, was a way of confirming, underlining, the nature of this shift. Nonetheless, even if only in confirmation, the material presence of such a work could have an effect on this space. For one of us (from Manchester) childhood memories of statues were confined to the heroic man variety (apart from one of Queen Victoria, notable for always having a pigeon on her head) and were thoroughly alienating. Maybe the unremarked familiarity of Wallace s work both registers in its very uncontroversiality something of an advance (the result of previous negotiations of this kind of public space) and at the same time does something to the space quietly confirming, in a quotidian way, to young women, that yes you can do/be here. But even this is not certain. The negotiation of what is public continues and this work plays a part in it. The fact what this was an intervention with an active effect was confirmed by small, sexist paint daubings on the bodies of the sitters. Clearly the public presence of young female bodies, no matter how monumental, does still provoke an antagonistic response from some. Or again (we have to address this possibility), do people ignore The Whisper, knowing full well that it is here but (like the classic public monuments to great-men-on-horseback) feel that it is beyond their reach to influence another thing put there by them? 16

17 But that group of people is likely to be various. The audience of an artwork is likely to be diverse. Indeed, working with our definition of public, that audience must be diverse for the artwork to qualify as public in the first place. But how do we understand that diversity? What sort of social identity, social differences, does a public artwork engage with? So far, our argument hasn t spelt out in much detail how we think of social differences. In fact, this is one aspect of this project that we find especially interesting. For it seems to us that some of the usual ways in which social scientists understand social difference might be thrown into question by exploring the effects of particular public artworks. The usual categories of social differentiation that we use as social scientists are class, gender, race, sexuality and ablebodiedness. But our observation of artworks in Milton Keynes and elsewhere suggests that these categories may not be adequate to understanding the effects of public art. To take a small example, one of the things that strikes us about the statues placed around the central shopping and theatre areas of MK is that children have a much more tactile relationship with the sculptures than adults. Kids will walk onto the bases of the sculptures to get a good look and to touch the figures or shapes, whereas adults stand at a distance: a small example, as we say, of how different people engage with different artworks in different ways. Indeed, given the population structure of Milton Keynes, age and ageing might be interesting dimensions to explore. It is necessary to admit and explore these differences. It seems necessary because we think it is the artworks themselves that are, in part, producing these differences. So, to repeat, we are not arguing that the audience or, rather, a specific audience is always right about art. We are not suggesting that the audience, and the audience alone, determines an artwork. Rather, we d like to retain a sense that artworks themselves have their own agency, to a degree. As a particular kinds of object or event, each artwork has its own unique range of resources: resources of colour, light, shape, form, composition, sound, smell, change, volume, dynamism, text, and so on. We would suggest that these offer a range of potentialities with which an audience can engage. While a particular audience might engage in particular ways with certain of these potentialities, another audience, because they are working with different elements from the same object s repertoire of resources, may experience that object very differently. Yet the possibilities for multiple interpretations by different audiences are not endless because the potentialities of an artwork are not. The limits of an 17

18 artwork s potentialities place limits on its effects with an audience. The effects of a piece of public art are the result of the relations between the artwork and its audiences. So, as we ve said, an implication of this which, as social scientists we find particularly challenging, is that the agency of an artwork may force us to rethink the categories through which we usually understand social diversity. In arguing that audiences for any artwork will be (more or less) diverse, we usually work with the categories class, gender, race and sexuality in order to describe that diversity. However, in suggesting that an artwork may itself contribute to the making of an audience, we are also suggesting that these categories may not always be the most useful with which to work. This is an area in which much more research is needed. But the kind of thing we mean has already been suggested in our comments on the sculptures in central MK. Here, we might tentatively suggest that childhood is a crucial category in understanding how different people react to the potentialities of those sculptures, and that certain kinds of figurative bronze statues without plinths have made us think that. So, in thinking about how certain artworks intervene in particular places, we want to emphasise the variety of possible interventions. These are various because an artwork and its audiences are both complex, and the relation between a specific piece of art and its particular audiences will be unique. Moreover, these relations will change with time. They may be different as the artwork is being planned, made, and seen, heard and/or touched. They may be different as the audiences themselves change over time. In discussing the notion that different audiences will see different pieces of public art in different ways, it is important not to lose sight of the public, however. It has long been a truism in academic cultural studies that audiences make their own meanings from cultural objects of all kinds. However, when exploring the notion of public art specifically, that truism needs qualifying. It isn t enough simply to acknowledge the diversity of audiences. For an artwork to be public, it needs to invite engagement not only from different groups, but between them. It needs to have some potentiality for the negotiation of social differences. The negotiation can be strong or weak. But for an artwork to be public, in our argument, that negotiation has to be part of what the artwork does. If negotiation among diverse social identities is not invited, then the artwork is not public. 18

19 Conclusion So, in the end, we are offering a definition of public art. To repeat ourselves: for an artwork to be public, negotiation between social differences has to be part of what the artwork does. If negotiation among diverse social identities is not invited, then the artwork is not public. But this is a definition that comes to life only through exploring particular artworks in particular places. And it s a definition that recognises different forms of that life: strong and weak, emotional or cerebral, representational or not. We hope that by breaking down some of the terms of debate, clarifying them and putting them back together again in particular combinations, we ve offered some ways through the maze of public art for understanding its role in relation to place and identity. To pursue this conclusion in relation to an example we ve already discussed Wallace s statue The Whisper we suggest that the paint on the women s bodies does make this a work of public art. Unpleasant as this graffiti makes us personally feel, the statue certainly seems to be functioning as a means through which debates about social difference in this case, gender are carried on. Summary This is, then, not a definition of public art which draws easy-to-read lines. We don t think such distinctions can be hard and fast in this way. What makes an artwork public is rather, we argue, dependent on its insertion into and its effects on those complex intersections which go to make up place. This is, potentially, quite a demanding proposition. It is a definition of public art that is open to the specificities of place in space and time. In particular, we would argue, for art to be thoroughly public art it needs in some way to engage in constituting that public. At minimum, in considering a new work, this implies the following: a real exploration of the particularity of place (in the terms outlined in the first section of this paper), where the place may be as big as a city, or it may be a neighbourhood, or it may be a more precise location; 19

20 an exploration of the publicness, or the desired publicness, at issue; an understanding of the role which it is imagined a work of public art could play in this place. Baldly: why? It should be noted that all these steps require time for exploration, for thinking, for engagement, and on the part of all the participants in the process commissioners, curators, artists. Finally, to spell out one further implication of our argument, this understanding of public art is interdisciplinary and therefore well suits the collaborative nature of public art projects. However, it does imply that all participants of any project and particularly the artists should be involved from the very beginning. End. 20

21 References Deutsche, R (1996) Evictions, Masachusetts. Harvey, D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford. Heatherwick Studio (2002) Public Art in Central Milton Keynes, Milton Keynes. Lacey, S ed, (1995) Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle. Lefevre, H, (1991) The Production of Space, Oxford. Lippard, L (1995) Looking around: where we are, where we could be, in S Lacey, ed, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle. Miles, M (1997) Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures, London. Murray, C (2001) Making Sense of Place, Comedia and De Montfort University. Sennett, R, (1986) The Fall of Public Man, New York. The Researchers Doreen Massey is Professor of Geography at The Open University. She has written widely on issues of space and place, linking theoretical issues of conceptualisation with matters of practice and politics. She has worked in a number of contexts with artists and architects, contributing for instance to the Strangely Familiar exhibition and book, The Unknown City, to the Tate Modern catalogue, and to the Liverpool Biennial She contributed also to Artangel s collection on Rachael Whiteread s House. Most recently her work has been used by the Berlin-based artist Jakob Kolding in his production Posters. Doreen is co-founder and joint editor of Soundings: a journal of politics and culture. Gillian Rose is Senior Lecturer in Geography at The Open University. She has taught feminist and cultural geographies at the universities of Edinburgh and London, and is the author of Visual Methodologies (Sage, 2001) as well as several papers on various kinds of photography. A collection of essays on landscape, Deterritorialisations, co-edited with Mark Dorrian, is forthcoming from Black Dog Press. Artpoint is a visual arts agency that provides consultancy and project development services to clients throughout the Southern and South East Arts Council region. For the past five years it has been providing public art consultancy and management services to Milton Keynes Council. Contact: ruth.charity@artpoint-trust.org.uk Further information on artworks and public art projects in Milton Keynes can be found at and Copyright: Artpoint Trust: July

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