Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund.
Recontextualizing Public Space
By Zhanna Veyts
Edited by Susan K. Freedman, Tom Eccles, Dan Cameron, Katy Siegel, Jeffrey Kastener, and Anne Wehr
New York: Merrell, 256 pages.
"The function of public art is to make or break a public space. On the one hand, it haunts down public spaces, it finds them where none existed before, in the nooks and crannies of privacy; the act of public art annexes territories, into the public realm. On the other hand, it loses public spaces; it takes a space that’s ordained to be public, an institutionalized public art space, and comes up from under it: the act of public art disintegrates the public space, so that the public can take it with them, on their backs or in their nerves." —Vito Acconci
In the urban landscape, public art has conventionally played the role of bridging metropolitan development and civic participation. As such, it utilizes an allegedly egalitarian distribution of (human) resources for visual communications of public discourse and discord, alike. Often, the work pursues a specific function of representing the community outgrowth of shared aesthetic values. What this implies is a participatory communal platform for the preservation of moral dignity. Yet disparate material agendas, along with the problem of means whereby production occurs, necessarily project a political shadow that outwardly effects the reception of the work. Suddenly, its very inception is laced with problematic issues of ownership, authorship, agency and agenda. The voice of the public work becomes muffled by its implicit function, confounding its outreaching accessibility. Does the shadow of politics neutralize or enliven the prospective effects of public art work? What are the effects of the public art on the visual vocabulary of its viewers?
The Public Art Fund, conceived in 1977, initially set out to provide artists with the institutional support necessary to use New York city as a site for public art making. In the years since its inception, the organization has supported numerous artists as they have changed the perception of art in the public domain and reshaped the urban landscape into a space of critical issues and communication. Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund is a contemporary survey of their works, as they have challenged notions of public site and public art alike. Chronicling every contributing artist with a bio, exhibition history, and selection of recommended reading, the entries are complemented by well-contextualized images attempting to give shape to the projects in a visual-spatial sense. Veteran activists such as Barbara Kruger, who was among the first to be backed by the fund, are featured alongside the stylized aesthetics of Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons. Kruger used the cityscape as a tabula rasa, coloring buses and billboards with adamant slogans that forced passersby to confront questions of the socialization of gender, consumerism and identity (just to name a few).
Conceptually based work, such as "Bisected Triangle/Interior Curve" by Dan Graham, alter the experience of the metropolis in a different way. Graham constructs a spatial kaleidoscope which a person can enter for ethereal sanctuary and a transformation of his view of the city. With its alternatively reflective and transparent surfaces, the work plays on its own visibility while expanding peripheral vision. The project cannot communicate on the page, but like many of the pieces featured in the book, beckons you to re-examine the objects that shape your cosmopolitan perceptions. This is the strength and shortcoming of the book; on the one hand, it serves as a visitor’s guide for the New Yorker to use to revisit the city, but in effect many of the works are no longer available or in progress to be reconsidered. The book succeeds as a short-term institutional history that enables the reader to review the Public Art Fund’s meritorious projects. However, with the open-ended questions posed by the text and the artwork, the reader will have to venture far beyond its pages for answers of any kind.
