Going Public

The autumn arts scene in Stockholm has begun with a flurry of activity around public art. But looking at the collection of ideas and topics particularly as they have been presented in the press, one thing that strikes me is that the debate seems less about public art as cultural production in the public forum and more about art that has been sponsored with public funds presented in the public domain.

A pretty crude distinction perhaps, but the emphasis becomes cruder still; are we getting value for money or did we win the popularity contest. Questions of validity, acceptability, correctness are therefore automatically framed within a discussion of funding that in itself seems inevitably to beg a partial distance between artist and for want of a better term audience. (So what ever happened to the debate that Duchamp so beguilingly invited in a ready-made fashion on the shortening of the distance between viewer and maker or have we also given up on the thought of the audience fulfilling the work, public art, empty without presence.)

The term ‘public’ is one of those marvelous hegemonic misnomers. What we usually mean is, not us, but them. Often we also mean, those that shout loudest and less often the majority. The problem in attaching the word to art. is that by implication the precept that is, the private, is at the same time over-determined and adumbrated. We invent the public as an excuse or worse give it the millstone of ‘for everyone’.

If the question is; must public art as publicly funded art, beget arbitration the answer is quite clearly yes. The third party of the process of commission and execution is not an uncritical voice and therefore acts to mediate, re-mediate and contextualize the creation of any work. That can mean quite simply a foreshortening of the artist’s intentions or at least an additional point of reference. The empty appeal to relational aesthetics and the false view of community as an immanent collectivity are just two instances of our current critical myopia.

What one might add instead is that street art can attract graffiti but only does so at the moment that someone loses respect for the work. This seems an interesting pace to begin. The public work is always the canvas for another artist and will be used as such as soon as the one outweighs the relevance of the other.

The image that opened this is of local community workers in Bristol restoring a Banksy mural that was vandalized by an anti-graffiti group.

local community workers in Bristol restoring a Banksy mural that was vandalized by an anti-graffiti group.