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A. Remesar (Ed)

Urban RegenerationA Challange for Public Art

2005 EDITION

ISBN 84-475-1737-3

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A CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ARTURBAN REGENERAURBAN REGENERAURBAN REGENERAURBAN REGENERAURBAN REGENERATIONTIONTIONTIONTION

A CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ARTA CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ARTA CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ARTA CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ARTA CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ART

A. RA. RA. RA. RA. Remesar (ed)emesar (ed)emesar (ed)emesar (ed)emesar (ed)

MONOGRAFIES

PSICO-SOCIO-AMBIENTALS

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URBAN REGENERATION

Monografies Psico-Socio-AmbientalsMonografies Psico-Socio-AmbientalsMonografies Psico-Socio-AmbientalsMonografies Psico-Socio-AmbientalsMonografies Psico-Socio-AmbientalsTítols publicatsTítols publicatsTítols publicatsTítols publicatsTítols publicats

1. Perfils socials en la intervenció ambiental. Una perspectiva professional

2.- Impacte ambiental del desviament del riu Llobregat en el municipi de El Prat. Aspectes Socials.

3.- Efectos ambientales y rechazo social de una planta de reciclaje de basuras. Propuestas para su minimazión

4.- Barcelona Parks. Impact of environmental, architectural, urbanistic and social characteristics on litering and vandalism

5.- Una nova relació amb la natura i amb la gent. L'experiència dels voluntaris de Collserola

6.- Urban regeneration. A challenge for public art

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A CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ARTURBAN REGENERAURBAN REGENERAURBAN REGENERAURBAN REGENERAURBAN REGENERATIONTIONTIONTIONTION

A CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ARTA CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ARTA CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ARTA CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ARTA CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ART

Antoni RemesarAntoni RemesarAntoni RemesarAntoni RemesarAntoni Remesar(Editor)(Editor)(Editor)(Editor)(Editor)

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URBAN REGENERATIONBIBLIOTECA DE LA UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA. Dades catalogràfiques

Urban Regeneration. A challenge for Public Art. - (Monografies psico-socio-ambientals;, 6)

Referències bibliogràfiquesISBN

I. Remesar, A II. Colecció III.1. Urban regeneration 2. Public Art

© PUBLICACIONS DE LA UNVIERSITAT DE BARCELONA

Monografies Psico- Socio- AmbientalsDirector: Enric PolCoordinador: Tomeu VidalComposició: A. RemesarDisseny gràfic: A. RemesarDipòsit legal: B-27.006-97ISBN 84-475-1737-3

imprès sobre paper ecològic

Tots els drets d'aquesta publicació (inclós el disseny de la coberta)PUBLICACIONS DE LA UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA

Direcció i Administració de la publicació:PUBLICACIONS DE LA UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONAGran Via, 58508007 BarcelonaTel . +34-3- 403 54 36Fax . +34-3-318 52 67

Màster Intervenció Ambiental. Programa organitzat per:Departament de Psicologia SocialDivisió de Ciències de la SalutUniversitat de Barcelona

Departament de ProjectesEscola Tècnica Superior d'ArquitecturaUniversitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Aquest exemplar ha estat possible amb el suport de:

• Erasmus ICP UK-1241

• Divisió de Ciències Humanes i Socials. Unversitat de Barcelona

• Fundació Antoni Tàpies

• Autoritat Portuària de Barcelona

• Ajuntament de Barcelona

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A CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ART

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URBAN REGENERATION

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Public art is under question. Taking art out of the galleries and intothe public domain is not necessar-

ily a straightforward step.Public art can involve a variety of pub-

lic places: • parks in the city but too naturalparks • libraries • hospitals • streets • hous-ing estates • public buildings • shoppingcentres ...that is to say, anywhere where peo-ple live, work or take their leisure.

Public art can take so many differentforms and shapes. Public art can mean: •small sculptures • big sculptures • murals• paintings • street furniture • buildings •tramways or buses • fountains • bridges andarches • communication towers• signallingsystems • sports infrastructures ...

Some of these artistic features can beconsidered monuments, not so the otherones.

Public art has different functions: • tocommemorate • to improve the visual land-scape • to help economic regenerationthrough tourism and investment • to helpartistic and cultural regeneration • to iden-tify a community • to help people to man-age public space • to answer to a more gen-eral policy on quality of life. • ...

MONUMENTS

As it was pointed out by Lefèbvre (1972)monuments represent an essential aspect forthe definition of the city as a work in thesense of work of art.

The monument is the expression of anidentity and not a large and rethoric vacuumconstructed to hide problematic facts(Bohigas, 1982).

But what does the expression of an iden-tity?. Who can decide the type of identity?Which are the best ways to translate it intoan expression?

Most of public art is half-hearted or in-appropriate (Lewis 1990). Most of public artcan be considered as a decorative after-thought or, from bad to worse, «the turd inthe plaza».

Writing about murals, Owen Kellystated that they can «simply oppress the peo-ple. They are ideological advertisements.They demand attention from the passer-byin a way which brooks no argument, andthey shout at a volume which makes recep-tion compulsory to all but the blind» (1984)

Public Art.An Ethical Approach

Antoni Remesar

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URBAN REGENERATION

FUNDING PUBLIC ART

Public art must be, both for the peopleand by the people. That means a fundingpolicy based in its turn in a consultationpolicy quite rare and difficult to run.

Usually there is no consultation. If it ex-ists it reproduces the aesthetic values of an«art lobby». These values are based uponclass and education barriers, elitist and dis-criminatory, hidden beneath the rethoric ofart for all.

Through funding public art representsthe distribution of wealth from the workingclasses to subsidise the institutions of theupper classes.

Despite this argumentation we can findsome economic arguments for the fundingof public art. As a part of cultural industries:

• the arts are a cost-effective form ofemployment because they labour-in-tensive scheme.• the arts cross-subsidize education,providing educational resources andfacilities• the arts are seen as important featuresin the development of tourism ( for theUK the tourism payback represents a40% of the public funding of arts)• the arts, they have an multiplicableeffect on commercial cultural industries

But, as it was posed before, as far asfunding public art is a matter of class andeducation, it can be dangerous to use theseeconomic statements.

The use of culture to promote economicactivity can be, however, a dangerousweapon. Using cultural facilities to promotetourism and attract business usually meanspromoting just the sort of prestigious cul-ture aimed at high-income groups that thesubsidized arts promote now.

PUBLICPUBLICPUBLICPUBLICPUBLIC ARTARTARTARTART ONONONONON THETHETHETHETHE SITESITESITESITESITE

Throughout the previous discussion wehave been using the concept of public art intwo different meanings.

First of all we consider public art as afunding activity through public money,without entering into hat sort of final aes-thetic output. We have also been consider-ing the important role of public art in localan regional development initiatives. Thereis a long list of cities that have used or actu-ally use «art and culture investment

schemes» as a dynamic gear for business de-velopment ( Columbus, New Orleans,Seattle, Barcelona, Glasgow, Birmingham,Cardiff, Paris, Toronto...). In this context Artis one of the masterpieces for the promotionof a city, although its effectiveness is almostimpossible to evaluate because of the new-ness.

Second, we introduced the concept ofpublic art, as a piece of art located in thepublic space and suggested that most of pub-lic art is cowardly if not inappropriate.

Placed in this second scope, more relatedwith an internal analysis of public art, it’simportant to consider the Wernick’s (1991)suggestive hypothesis . Following him wecan consider that the pan-promotional ofcontemporary communications (private aswell as public, political, academic, artistic,etc) could itself account for many of the fea-tures -intertextuallity, de-referenciality, ab-sorption of the real into its image, etc- heldto characterize the postmodern.

Since the traditional principle of integra-tion of the arts has lost its meaning the «artlobby» has promoted a kind of public artexcessively open, individualistic, spectacu-lar and rarely challenging (Taylor, 1987).

May be some of the most importantachievements in funding public art havebeen those of Glasgow or Barcelona. Workcarried out on refurbishing and cleaningbuildings in the city centre, has considerablyimproved the aesthetics of the environment,without requiring a great deal of artistic in-put. Trees have been planted and small openspaces created to make the old Palladianidea possible: the wider a street is, the bet-ter we can see the façades.

On the other hand this kind of actionallows a re-utilization and re-monumentali-zation of the city thanks to regeneration.

In a general cultural context concernedwith the environment, it may be useful tore-think (re-engineer) the set of values thathave to support the artistic work. Confront-ing the elitist, discriminatory and rethoricvalues of the «art lobby» we can set, follow-ing Lewis (1990) and Blake (1974), these otherones:

• The value of diversityWe can maintain the existing urbanlandscape. We can improve it throughregeneration• The value of innovationWe can try new materials and new waysto use the old ones• The value of art in environmentNo more zoning and concentration in

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central areas. Analyse the environmen-tal impact. Low budget thinking. Recy-cling attitude.• The value of social pleasureWork to a human scale.• The value of creative expressionTo shelve the idea of creating master-pieces• The economic value of artTo use art properly as a form of pro-motion and local development

Maybe art in public space has to fitMilizzia’s principles respect to monuments:

• They have to be significant and ex-pressive...• With a simple structure...• With a clear and brief interpretation...

so they can produce the expected effecton the public.

REFERENCES

Blake, P.Form follows Fiasco. Boston. Toronto. 1974

Lewis, JArt, Culture & Enterprise. Routledge, 1990

Kelly, OCommunity, Art and the State. London.Comedia. 1984

Wernick,APromotional Culture. London. SAGE.1991

Bohigas, OReconstrucció de Barcelona. Ed.62. 1985

Taylor, BModernism,Post-Modernism, Realism.Winchester School of Art.1987

Lefèbvre, HEspace et Politique. Anthropos. 1972

SOME POSSIBLE QUESTIONS TOBE DISCUSSED ON THE SEMINAR

I proposed to the participants the follow-ing questions in order to set a frame for thediscussions during the seminar:

1.- Is it the same to talk about public artand art in public spaces?

2.- As most of public art commissionsdepend upon public money, are the waysinstitutions and governments spend moneyon this subject the best ones?

3.- Which is the idea the citizen has aboutart in public spaces?

4.- How can the consideration of publicart affect the development of art studentscurricula?

5.- Which is and will be the role of theartist and the role of interdisciplinary works?

6.- How does the political design of a cityaffects the development of public art?

7.- How can public art be consideredfrom the perspective of community art?

8.- Are there significant differences be-tween public and private funding ?

9.- Which are the boundaries betweenart and design from the perspective of pub-lic space?

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URBAN REGENERATION

Index

Public Art. An Ethical Approach ................................................................................................7Antoni Remesar

Part IArt and Design in / for Public Space. From Monumental Art to Interactivity

• Issues affecting the practising artist working to public commission .....................................13 Ray Smith• Public Art and its integration in the Urban Environment ....................................................... 19 Montserrat Casanovas• The Japanese Experience ....................................................................................................24 Alicia Castán• A place for strangeness. Chronicle of a journey through the Sant Boi's Public Art ........... 32 M. Peran• Product Design in the Public Domain : .................................................................................38 Mike Stevenson• For an Interactive Art ............................................................................................................47 Ian Rawlinson• Public Sculpture.Interaction between disciplinary fields ...................................................... 52 Ascen García

Part IIForms and Representations of Public Art/ Public Space. The Producer/ User dilemma

• Public Art / Public Space ...................................................................................................... 61 Chaké Matossian• Symbolism a priori •Symbolism a posteriori .........................................................................71 Enric Pol• Public Space and Social Identity .......................................................................................... 77 Sergi Valera• The Citizen's Attitude ............................................................................................................86 Núria Franco• Cognitive Maps and the Pictorial Representation of the Environment ............................... 91 F. Hernández

Part III

Public Art / Cities in Competition. Strategies, bridges and gateways

• Waterfronts of Art .................................................................................................................. 97 FERNANDO ÁLVAREZ

• Gateways of fear / Bridges of pride ....................................................................................103 JOHN HYATT

• Visions of new City Places ................................................................................................. 111 John Gingell• Public Art in Urban Regeneration : An Economic Assessment .......................................... 116 Anthony Bovaird• Public Art: Towards a theoretical framework ......................................................................128 Antoni Remesar

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Art and Designin / for Public

Space

From MonumentalArt to Interactivity

Ray SmithSculptor. Faculty of Art and DesignUniversity of Plymouth (Exeter)

Montse CasanovasDepartment of Sculpture.University of Barcelona

Alicia CastanPolytechincal University ofCatalonia

Dr. Martí PeranDepartment of History of ArtUniversity of Barcelona

Mike StevensonDesigner. Head of the Departmentof 3D Design. Faculty of Art andDesignUniversity of Plymouth (Exeter)

Ian RawlinsonArtist. Department of Fine ArtsManchester MetropolitanUniversity

Dr. Ascen GarcíaDepartment of SculptureUniversity of Barcelona

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But for the fine artist in particular, thearena of commissioned art does represent asignificant territorial shift and a whole newset of issues come into play. Whether, for ex-ample, by working within a different set ofconstraints, he or she is in some way sub-scribing to the politics that adhere to the par-ticular nature of the development or to thestructure within which the commission hasbeen set up. Furthermore there may be aneed to re-evaluate, or even to consider forthe first time, the nature of the relationshipbetween a proposed work and a potentialaudience. The highly successful internationalartist on the contemporary gallery circuit canbe largely invisible to a majority public au-dience, but when the work is set squarelywithin the public domain, it is inescapablyimposed on the world at large.

Considerations about the relationshipbetween processes and materials also comeinto play within the arena of commissionedart. For first thoughts about the possibilitiesfor realising artworks in particular situationsare very often in relation to the kinds of ma-terials or technologies that can be appropri-ately used. This may be a reversal of the nor-mal procedure for many artists, whose workoften develops and emerges during thecourse of regular studio practice and whereconsiderations about materials or technolo-gies simply relate to the development of thework itself, independent of any setting.

In recent years there has been considerable debate about the contextswithin which contemporary art can

function. Artists have increasingly movedaway from the idea that the art gallery ormuseum should provide the principal arenaand focus for contemporary art and we areseeing artists working in a far wider rangeof contexts.

There are historical precedents for amove away from the constraints of the gal-lery. Indeed, from a historical perspective,the gallery context for art would play a rela-tively minor role, since art in most cultureshas had a considerably more visible and ac-cessible space in which to operate than thecircumscribed and often marginalised one inwhich much contemporary art of our owntime has taken place.

So artists have sought a wider contextin which to give their imaginations greaterscope. This has coincided with the growthof new kinds of art practice in which artistshave been quick to respond to the potentialof innovative technology, for example. Themassive growth in the accessibility and thepotential of the computer, the video or thelaser, for example, has provided a fertilesource of new ideas for art. In some cases,these technology-led initiatives have been in-corporated into more traditional areas of artpractice, resulting in the development andbroadening of scope of the latter.

Issues affecting thepractising artist workingto public commission

Ray Smith

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The opening out of a broader, more vis-ible, arena for art, also brings with it anumber of other problems for the fine artist.My own experience of working almost ex-clusively in the area of commissioned artduring the last decade, has demonstrated tome, for example, that artists are often placedin a highly vulnerable situation. They aresubject to high levels of stress. They can quiteeasily be exposed to unacceptable levels ofrisk and are very often expected to have ex-pertise in areas in which they are neitherwell-versed nor well-qualified. They findthemselves having to rely on others to amuch greater extent than in private studiopractice. Where this is associated with newideas and new techniques and the work isalso subject to strict contractual deadlines,artists are particularly exposed.

Last week I went to see a work of minethat had been installed according to my in-structions in a group show in an art gallery.I had responded to an earlier request fromthe director to provide a work for his showand I was pleased to see that my piece hadbeen set out on the gallery wall according tomy precise design and in the specified col-ours. I had created this work in my studiowithout reference to anyone else. I had nothad to seek approval at any stage. The workwas accepted on trust. When I saw it, mysense of complicity with the work made mewant to celebrate and defend the particularfreedom that is granted to artists, a freedomthat represents a clear space for independ-ent thought and action. The piece was, as itwere, a ‘private’ work. I asked myselfwhether it is possible to be able to celebratethis same freedom in the area of ‘public art’?

I may have thought about this in par-ticular, because during the last nine months,I have been engaged on a complex ‘art in apublic space’ commission involving twomajor works.

One of them may have been inspired bymy childhood memory of the coloured tabletennis balls with numbers painted on them,which floated and bounced on jets of air, inthe bingo section of an amusement arcadein the seaside town in which I was broughtup.

This work is located in a city centre siteoutside a theatre. I had the idea of giving theimpresssion of floating a five tonne block ofnatural stone on jets of water. The stonewould actually sit on three steel legs, aroundwhich foaming jets of water would concealthe steelwork. I then discovered that I coulduse flat water bearings in a chamber cut into

the base of the rock to actually lift it on acushion of water and that it could then berotated using a simple turbine. Ten monthsafter the initial idea, the work is installed,but it still needs fine tuning to a point atwhich our control over each aspect is entirelyconsistent and reliable.

This work has involved constant com-munication with the client - a city councildevelopment agency - with the client’s ownarchitects and structural engineers, with thein-house design consultancy that advises theclient on all aspects of a scheme includingthe mechanical and electrical areas, with myown structural engineers, my own designand fabrication sub-contractors and materialsuppliers, including mechanical, hydraulicand water system specialists, with the maincontractor and with the art agency whichbrokered the deal. When I respond to a faxor send one, copies may have to be issued toup to eight separate individuals or institu-tions. So far, the correspondence would filla thick book. Such can be the practical real-ity of what is called ‘public art’. The artist asadministrator, filling files with reams of pa-per and attempting to unravel the complexi-ties of esoteric queries. We need to ask our-selves very seriously whether artists have thegenuine expertise or professional training toposition themselves comfortably at the cen-tre of this process.

As a self-employed artist, working onmy own, I have none of the back-up pro-vided by the institutions which support theother professionals working on this scheme.I am relying on the expertise of others andon the fact that if I am assured by a com-pany that they can deliver what I have re-quested, they will do so. Very often, thisprocess is compounded by the fact that it isin the nature of the artwork that the idea isuntried and untested. We are, in reality, cre-ating prototypes every time we make a newwork. But the responsibility for a satisfac-tory final work rests with the artist.

Several years ago, for example, I wascontracted to create a work I had conceivedwhich involved quite complex steelwork.The company I approached to make thework had successfully fabricated anotherlarge-scale work for me during the previousyear and they assured me that I could relyon them to fabricate and deliver within therelatively short term of the contract. I did notinsist on having this assurance in writing,however, and with only a few weeks to gobefore installation, the company decided thatthey did not have the time to make the work

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themselves but would endeavour to find an-other company to do the job. There was noway the client would countenance a delayand so this created enormous pressure oneveryone involved in the work . Although itwas finally installed within the contractdeadline, the work had had to be completedat a quite inappropriate speed. It meant thatinstead of being able to take time and par-ticular care at each stage of the work, the fab-ricators had to simply press on, working allhours until it was completed. When, as anartist, you alone have the responsiblity for acomplex and expensive work, I can assureyou that during weeks like these, you areworking under great strain.

I and colleagues of mine, could relatedozens of similar instances. What they dem-onstrate is the vulnerablity of the artist insituations in which they may feel they havebeen able to make assumptions or have ex-pectations which have not subsequentlybeen fulfilled. It can be so easy to makewrong assumptions. For example, I acquiredsome large blocks of granite from one quarryfor one work and then assumed that for an-other work, a similar process and time sched-ule would enable me to obtain similar blocksfrom another quarry. I soon realized that youhave to be able to adapt to a completely newframework of operation each time you use anew supplier of raw materials, for example,or a new fabricator or engineer. Such expe-riences demonstrate a need which many art-ists find to their cost is absolutely essential;that is, to ensure that everything is commit-ted to paper throughout the whole processof conceiving, costing and making the work.

They confirm the notion that with eachnew work you really are starting again fromscratch.

As an artist, I feel I am working just toprotect and nurture my simple art ideathrough a complex and often treacherousprocess of realisation. But even when thework is successfully installed, we may findthat, at the end of a process which necessar-ily includes keeping the client informed ofall stages of the work, including the modifi-cations and adjustments that inevitably ariseout of the process of making, there may wellbe a hostile and vociferous body of opinionwhich claims the work does not look exactlythe same as the tiny maquette that precededit!

It may help to protect the artist if a codeof practice were established, a set of princi-ples which could help to guide artiststhrough some of the potential dangers asso-ciated with such projects.

In practice, it would be extremely diffi-cult to do this, since ‘public art’ schemes areso diverse. You are responding to a quite dif-ferent set of circumstances and interactingwith such different groups of people in eachcase. Art is, by its nature, unexpected, andas much as you may think you have ac-counted for everything, there will always beunforeseen elements that will impact, to agreater or lesser extent, on the process.

One simple answer to the kindsof risks I have mentionedabove, is to take the respon-

siblity for the fabrication of a major workaway from the artist altogether, especiallywhere the artist does not have the particularprofessional skills and administrative orpractical expertise required to realise the idea. This is commonly accepted in certain situ-ations. For example, where there are bigbudgets and large-scale site-specificschemes, often involving artists of interna-tional reputation, it is common to set up anenabling administrative structure which hasthe expertise and the muscle to take on re-sponsibility for the realisation of the work.This is an ideal situation. It effectively allowsthe artist to work as a consultant on his orher own work. The artist’s focus is directedsolely towards the artwork itself and is notdeflected by tough contractual or other prob-lems. I have worked in this way on a smallnumber of occasions. On each occasion Ihave felt in tune with the idea throughout,and comfortable with the process of makingand with the control that I was able to exer-cise over the realisation of the work.

For example, I was presented with thissite in Gateshead in Northern England in1989. The only limitation was that the sitewas to have a monorail passing through it .This meant that although the work neededto be large-scale, it could not be vertical. Iwas casually making drawings of figureswith their arms up, when I realised that ifthey were silhouettes, it would be impossi-ble to tell whether their arms were raised incelebration or in terror. This intuition wasthe source of the proposal as I developed it,working with chinese brushes to make manyrapid drawings which crystalised into a setof two men and two women reproduced twohundred and fifty times each. I created a pro-posal for over a thousand red steel figuresfilling the basin of land. Some observers feltthat it alluded to events in China of the pre-vious June and particularly to the way inwhich optimism had turned to terror. Oth-ers felt that the work reflected events in East-

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float in space. For ten years I made suchworks by hand, refining my skills with thejig saw. Then I was able to afford the tech-nology which allows the drawing to be digi-tised and translated into new, often intrac-table, materials far better than I could everdo by hand. So when I was asked to create afloor sculpture for a new Centre for the Natu-ral Environment in Berkshire, I had an ideafor a new way of working with this technol-ogy. I proposed laser-cutting the drawings Iwished to use, out of agglomerate marbleslab, setting these into the floor in cement,filling the spaces with terrazzo and grind-ing back to a polished finish. I was convincedit would work. I felt it would bring togetherthe traditional craft skills of terrazzo with anew exciting technology.

I had taken this project on and con-tracted to deliver. The client was enthusias-tic, but the architect and the main contractorhad grave reservations about the process. Icould easily have gone for an alternativemosaic solution, but decided to go throughwith the new idea. Such commissions pro-vide the opportunities which allow the art-ist to develop new ways of making art. Youhave to weigh the risk and you cannot avoidthe risk. In this case, it was not at all straight-forward. The cut-outs were complex and itproved almost impossible to get them out ofthe slabs of marble in one piece once theyhad been laser-cut. At one low point I almosttelephoned the architect to admit defeat. Butin the end I managed to install the piece suc-cessfully on time and ready for the openingof the centre.

This was a relatively small work, thoughthe consequences of failure were realenough. There is an irony in the fact that thevery nature of the profession dictates that theartist is constantly on the look out for newperspectives and new solutions about whichthere can be no certainty, whilst clients de-mand cast-iron guarantees and assurances.

Opportunities have to be seized. Wehave a need to make art and yet we are walk-ing a tight-rope. Should I have relied on anacceptably tried and tested method of pro-duction or was I right to invent one?

Allied to the issue of what is practicalfor a particular site, is the broader notion ofappropriateness. It is an issue which is neverfar from artists working in the area of com-missioned art.

For while an artist may consider that awork is appropriate to a particular site be-cause it might, for example, challenge theway the site is perceived, a tenant or user of

ern Europe with the new spirit of democra-tisation and the overthrowing of repressivedictatorships. There were those who saw aconnection with the Chinese terra-cottaarmy. Others saw the work as more abstractand formal, with the complementary con-trast of the red figures like a field of red pop-pies against the green landscape, each en-hancing an awareness of the other. Theproject organisation was taken care of in anentirely expert and professional way. It al-lowed me to focus on all the critical factorswhich determined the precise appearance ofthe work.

This may be an ideal situation for theartist, but it is by no means commonplace.The reality of commissioning at a more mu-nicipal level is, more often than not, that oncea proposal is adopted, the artist will be ex-pected to take on the contract for the com-plete work including installation. The back-up expertise mentioned above simply doesnot exist. If needed, it has to be found by theartist. It is often simply assumed by the com-missioners that the artist has the requiredlevel of expertise in all appropriate areas. Forit is very often the case that a municipal au-thority or a developer is undertaking a firstmajor ‘art in public places’ scheme. Theremay well be one person with art expertiseon the panel, but very often the rest of thecommittee has no experience in this area andthere is inevitably a certain arbitrarinessabout the selection of the artist. Moreover,they tend to look to the artist to take the lead.This can, of course, be exciting and challeng-ing, but the artist has also to view the chal-lenge with a measure of objectivity.

In any new context for commissionedart, the artist generally allows the particularnature of the site to direct the course of hisor her ideas - perhaps in just the same waythat the particular space of an art gallerymight do. This may, of course, be in relationto a type of work that the artist has alreadymade and feels confident about in practicalterms. Or it may be that the site suggests anew way of working that draws upon theold way, or that it suggests something alto-gether new. None of these possiblilities needbe excluded, though there are obvious risksattached to the latter. Let me give a practicalexample.

Much of my own work has incorporatedlaser technology to cut steel with the kind offluency you can create with the toe of abrush. The original idea was to free a brushdrawing from the two dimensional surfaceof the sketchbook and allow it to stand or

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the site may well consider the work inap-propriate because it seems at odds with itssetting.

One point of view is that those who com-mission must maintain their faith in the in-tegrity of the work of the chosen artist byallowing that artist complete freedom in cre-ating the commissioned work. By this means,the artist’s work is uncompromised by any‘aesthetic’ negotiations with the commission-ers. Such an approach takes on trust the ca-pacity of the artist to respond to the particu-lar nature of the location with integrity, eventhough this may be leaving the concept ofappropriateness to the artist.

In such cases, the particular choice of theartist is critical. In practical terms, it is likelythat the selection committee will have a verygood idea of the work of the artists they areconsidering, with visual examples of thekind of work they might expect to see. In thecase of artists of international reputation, thisis particularly evident.

Another point of view maintainsthat if art is going to be ‘imposed’ on the public, the only

way to establish genuine appropriateness iswhen the art solution arises out of a processof close collaboration between the artist andall those who are involved, including plan-ners, architects, engineers, agents, sponsorsand clients. Among the issues that will becentral to this kind of collaboration will be aconsideration of the expectations of all thoseconcerned and a desire to accommodatethese expectations in the negotiated result.Such an approach may require artists to ad-just their working methods, but it is not nec-essarily the path to compromise, nor the ne-gotiating out of the frame, of creativity, in-tuition or imagination. Many artists havefound that what they might previously haveconsidered to be constraints in fact allowthem to sharpen their focus and come upwith new ideas.

In practice, you find that whereas insome commissions you are left entirely toyourself to complete the work as you see fit,in others there is a genuine desire amongparticipants to be involved. Each new situa-tion needs to be assessed at the outset fromthis point of view. At best, a genuine andpositive collaboration may develop. Atworst, it may well be that the committeemember who feels ignored during the proc-ess of making will be the one to make a fussabout the result.

Temporary projects are often the ones inwhich you are left to yourself to create awork. Three years ago, I was invited for afixed budget to create an illuminated night-time work in a seaside town. I was free tochoose whatever site and to make whateverpiece I liked. I spent a day wandering aim-lessly around the town. Finally I went to thePier, walked down some steps and saw thehuge complex structure of massive beamsand girders underneath it. This was an in-credible sculpture in itself and one that sim-ply needed illuminating with strong coldlight.

Designed to be seen after nightfall, bothfrom the distant cliff-tops and from veryclose-to, my lighting sculpture illuminates aworld with a totally distinct atmospherefrom that of the summer show going on inthe theatre above. Here the vast concretestructure has a unique and powerful atmos-phere and one that is constantly changingwith the mood of the sea as it slaps or roarsagainst the concrete. When it is lit up like astage set, it becomes a massive piece of sculp-ture, with its seaweed greens and iron oxidestains painted by the sea itself.

In this work I tried to give expression tothe kind of feeling shared by everyone whospends time in a seaside resort and who leansover a sea wall or wanders on the beach atnight and looks out to sea. Behind one arethe colourful illuminations, the lights of thesummer shows, the noise of the crowds. Butin front and beyond, is the dark, restless massof the sea.

The free hand I was given, allowed meto turn what would have been a small-scalework into a much larger project. I managedto increase the budget threefold by raisingadditional sponsorship and persuadingmanufacturers to donate their products atcost.

Two and a half years later, this six weektemporary project is still operating. Theyreplaced the lamps this year because the con-servative party was holding its annual con-ference in the town and the town council-lors thought that the additional lighting un-der the pier posed less of a security risk.

Genuine collaboration can trigger theintuition and the imagination, leading to realinnovation. I may have used the last projectas an example of the benefits of being left toone’s own devices, but the work could nothave been achieved without the expertiseand advice of my lighting consultants. Suchcollaborative relationships are the bedrockon which successful projects are built.

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URBAN REGENERATION

group. I incorporated seven separate piecesof artwork in the floor design and each ofthe metal cut-outs on the wall was based ona paper cut-out made by individual children.

Another of the more positive aspects ofcollaboration is that with professional col-leagues. On one project last year, I was ableto get my hands on the building before theystarted the brickwork. A fruitful relationshipwith the architect and the brick companyenabled me to create a sculpture in the brick-work itself. I also managed to persuade art-ist, Richard Long, to collaborate on a 23 me-tre ceramic tile work in which he poured theblue ‘water-line’ along the length of the tilesbefore firing. We laid the tiles out from myfront door through the cloakroom and mainroom down to the kitchen and Richard prac-tised a forward pour and a backward pourin the street outside with various jugs andteapots before opting for a backward pourwith the teapot and making the work itself.Such collaborations are both enriching andinspiring for artists.

I began this talk by warning of someof the dangers for artists associatedwith art in public space schemes. But

I have also pointed out much that is positiveabout this area of art practice. It can be easyfor those who have no experience in this areato think that in any project of this kind youbegin by being constrained. There may belimitations of scale, or space, or budget, butthat would be true even for gallery work. Infact, each context is an entirely new one andyou always start with a completely blanksheet. The potential for art in any new situa-tion is limited only by the imagination of theartist. This is why, despite all the drawbacks,it remains such a fruitful area in which towork as an artist.

[The paper above incorporates some passagesof my own writing from a feasibility study preparedby ‘Public Arts’ for the City of Liverpool :‘Participate - an Art in Public Places Strategy forLiverpool’ May 1994.]

I was involved in a different kind of col-laboration - a collaboration with the end-us-ers - in a scheme in which a new communitycentre was proposed for blocks of flats on aLondon estate in need of regeneration. Theimpetus had come from the local tenantsassociation from which a local steering grouphad been set up. This group, which was bestplaced to understand the needs of the resi-dents, had been consulted at all stages of theplanning of the centre.

They decided there were elementswithin the scheme that could be handed overto an artist under the borough council’s ‘percent for art’ scheme. For example, thereneeded to be a series of bollards to preventcars from driving too close to the building.Security grills were required for the win-dows and a sign at the entrance to the cen-tre. In the creche area inside the building theywanted a decorated floor.

The tenants group themselves chose theshortlist and went on to choose the artistwhose preliminary ideas they liked. Thisseemed to me an excellent way of choosingan artist. They were, after all, the ones whowere going to be using the centre. This wasa happy collaboration. Like most successfulcollaborations, it was built on mutual respectand trust. The tenants were not there withany particular art or other professional ex-pertise, but they were completely practicaland enthusiastic and made the kinds of sug-gestions which demonstrated that they wereabsolutely in tune with the ideas. This wasnot a qestion of watering down ideas torender them acceptable, but rather of find-ing new ideas that felt right for a particularsite.

Collaborations with children can createa genuinely reciprocal art relationship. Lastyear I worked in the little two-room Educa-tion Unit in a hospital on one morning aweek for many weeks. I set up a workingprocess by which sick children were able tocreate the basic pictorial elements whichwould feature in an old corridor that wewere trying to improve. I had made somefirm decisions in advance about the natureand structure of the work and I had decidedwhich technologies we would be using, so Ialso knew how we would be working withthe children. This was necessary if there wasto be a sense of continuity and integrationwithin the corridor as a whole. But how thework actually came out could only be deter-mined by what the children produced. Sothere was a sense of anticipation and excite-ment each time we worked with a new

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"The presence of works of art always char-acterized its context, showed its history...the con-text determined the ideas of space and time, es-tablishing a positive relation between the indi-vidual and the ambient". 2

At present there have been somechanges in the meaning of public art, due tothe changes in conditions and possibilitiesin public life, as well as other profound so-cial changes. The concept had evolved andhas extended its forms and functions, bothin the fields it performs and the possibleplacings. The use of large scales on openspaces and environmental character aresome of the most characteristic aspects. As aresult, the relationships among architecture,public and the patron have also changed.

The diverse aspects connected topublic art, lend themselves at different in-terpretations reason for which it would benecessary to unify criteria and create a com-mon theoretic base among researchers andthe disciplines that intervene, establishingamong them a communication to carry outmultidisciplinary researches. How the sur-rounding is perceived, its effects on it, andthe conduct which are the most importantaspects how to foresee the effects,... must beknown in order to improve the chance offoreseeing the results and the decisions thatmust be taken. A better understanding ofthe effects of the physical environment of

T he city has always been asetting where the culturalmanifestations of each historical

period have met and its image has trans-formed itself due to the different social, po-litical and economic situations. Man and thephysical environment created by himself,sustain a relationship of reciprocity and in-teraction, the environment being a reflectionof the man who created it, and at the sametime influenced him and his behaviour.

Public art is not a new concept, it hasexisted since ancient times. It has deep his-torical roots and traditions in different cul-tures and periods. It has always been closelylinked to political, economic and religiouspowers, and its functions and uses havechanged with time. The art we find in pub-lic space indicated the present social andcultural situation, as well as the artistic andaesthetic tendencies. The policy carried outin this sense contributes to the city havingsome distinguishing marks and a particularimage. There is a close relationship betweenart and city, it such was that: "works of art -bein monuments or moving objects- still make upan environmental fabric of modern life". 1

Man has always transformed the en-vironment according to his convenience, andall cultures, in one way or the other, haveintervened in its most immediate surround-ing to make it more pleasant.

Public Art and itsintegration in theUrban Environment

Montserrat Casanovas

20

URBAN REGENERATION

THE CONCEPT OF PUBLIC ART

Public art in a generic sense is an artplaced in public space. If we define it in thetraditional way it is the art ordered, paid andproperty of the State. According to its ac-cessibility we could say that it is normallyfound in the exterior. In its suitable aspect itis conceived and achieved according to a setenvironment.

All these definitions are as broad as theyare not concrete, and none fit wholly thepresent concept of this term, that is distin-guished for including diverse variants ac-cording to its origin, placing or integration.Possibly the definition that best puts to-gether the concept is that by JavierMaderuelo: "an specific type of art whose des-tiny is the entirety of non specialized citizens incontemporary art and whose placing is openpublic space... It is not an style and it developsregardless of forms or the materials and scales"6

When we refer to public art we do so ina global sense, including different possibili-ties to understand the concept. Public artas an art see against private art, which iscarried out and placed by public initiative,that is paid by all. Art in Public Space, pri-vate initiative art or semipublic, where Cor-porate Art is also included. Art in space orpublic use which we find in spaces that al-though have a public function, art of pri-vate or semipublic nature.

Urban art as an integrated art in urbanspace. Environmental art as an art closelylinked to the environment or art in the land-scape which we can find in gardens or ruralenvironments. In each of these cases its func-tion and the relationship that will be estab-lished with the environment and the publicwill vary significantly. But one way or theother it will become part of the visual cul-ture of an specific context.

Urban spaces can be defined as a seriesof gradations between public and privateuse. It is evident that the concept of publicart is closely linked with that of publicspace, understood as "a common groundwhere people carry out the functional activitiesand rituals that bind a community, whether itis in the normal daily routine or the periodic fes-tivities" 7

There are different types of urbanspaces, but as public life develops with theculture, new spaces can be needed and theold ones remain discarded or reactivated.The artistic intervention must be appropri-

man and the interaction between the social,psychological and physical context, helps oneof the main aspects in public art: Its integra-tion in public space in all ways.

WHAT IS AND WHAT IS NOT URBANSPACE

Thinking about public art and its inte-gration in urban space inevitable takes us tothe question of what we can consider art andwhat we cannot consider art. The fact thatthe public art is made for the citizen and islocated in his environment does not neces-sarily means that all art is public placed inan urban space .

"Urban place is a place of objects -that is tosay things made- and between the objects and thework of art there is a hierarchy difference-that isto say a difference in quality, value- but alwayswithin a same category or the same series" 3

To try to establish rigid parameters in thematter is practically impossible, as severalsubjective factors take part on personal tasteand historical context. Already in the year1907 Aloïs Riegl wrote: "according to presentideas, there is no absolute artistic value, only arelative value modern.. According to the mostrecent conceptions, the artistic value of a monu-ment is measured by its proximity to the modernrequirements of art, requirements that, surely,are ever further away from finding a clear formu-lation and that is harshness they will never find,as they vary unceasingly from one subject to an-other and from one moment to another." 4

At present the borders between the dif-ferent disciplines that intervene in the envi-ronment are less and less rigid. The symbio-sis among sculpture, architecture and designoccur frequently, as a result it is possible tofind architectural sculptures, sculptural ar-chitecture, design as sculpture, sculpture asdesign,... among many other variations. Thisadds further complexity to the approach aswe can find urban household goods that canbe considered minimalistic, or engineeringgoods with a clear sculptural treatment, thatcan work in urban space a lot better that somesculptures.

Giulio Carlo Argan clarified this as-pect in the following sentence: "In the presentstate of culture it is said that the same object canbe at the same time art and not art, the intentionof the attitude of the artists moral sense beingsufficient or ever the spectators." 5

21


ate according to the different placings onurban geography.

The evolution and transformation ofpublic space is summed up in the followingsentence by Josep Ramoneda: "At presentpublic space can be equally "Las Ramblas" assome big stores, a park and a football ground, thestreet and a big disco." 8

All spaces except for those strictly pri-vate can be considered public spaces. Theideal requirements that they must have are:supportive, democratic and meaningful.

INTEGRATION ON THE URBANENVIRONMENT

Consideration for siting art works willdepend of whether the work is part of thearchitectural fabric, or is to be placed in re-lation to internal or external architecturalspaces, or sites independently in an urbancontext. From the moment in which the ar-chitect plans the presence of public art inthe space, the aesthetic or strategic value thatit will have has to be considered and theimplications for the environment.

Art can be another object in the envi-ronment or it can contribute to a visual qual-ity and convert spaces into places for peo-ple, distinguishing an urban space and pro-viding an identity, as well as contributing tocreate pleasant environments. This possibil-ity of helping to transform spaces, dependson having took physical factors as well asenvironmental and social factors of context.

The rapprochement among the differ-ent disciplines - psychologists, anthropolo-gists, planners, architects, artists,..- as wellas the implicated areas of responsibility -normally political and bureaucratic- hadeffects on the attainment of more satisfactoryand foreseeable results. IT will be frequentlynecessary to foment a better communicationplanning and execution. The artist has to befully integrated in this interdisciplinarywork and having public art only as a pre-text for its orientation and the personal pro-motion on its work has to be avoided. Theprocess on artistic creation should be simi-lar to that followed in an architectural projectin such a way that it could be changed ac-cording to needs.

The line maintained between public artand architecture is frequently very close inthe sense that the artist's performances arenormally placed in the spaces created onmodified by architects. The space produced

by the artist is inscribed and operates in thearchitectural space.

The classical concept on decorating fre-quently thought as pejorative by contem-porary art has evolved in public art accord-ing to present needs and has adopted a moreVanguardist aesthetic. But decoration andembellishment have to be distinguishedfrom art considered as a plastic object thatdecorates an space or an architectural objectwith a sense on submission and the artisticdecoration and environment configurationthat implies an intervention at the creationstage that will be applied to a form that isbeing performed.

It is included in the conception and isnot added subsequently be it an architec-tural form on at environmental level. If con-temporary public art tries to contribute anintegrated decoration this is to be a plannedand thought intervention at the same timecreating the spaces where they have to beplaced because they are part of the project.This is totally different from the fact thatonce a project has been conceived and elabo-rated the artist is invited to take part. Inte-gral art in the environment stops beingmerely a plastic work to become a generat-ing focus on urban space.

The main feature on public art is its mo-bility and its permanent character. Once in-stalled it cannot be moved on sold and sodoes not respond to the speculative intereststhat frequently surround gallery art. In con-trast the physical and environmental con-ditions in which is integrated are variableand are in constant process on change -ontemporary on irreversible character that willbe evident in a short on long term like me-teorological phenomenons changes on sea-son light pollution type on public who usethe space vandalism presence on cars,...These factors must be considered beforehandtogether with maintenance. Changes to theurban environment have also to be addedand the presence on other elements whichwill be subsequently placed and that willconsequently affect and modify it.

The integration of public art depends onthe interaction that it maintains with the en-vironment and on the physical and ambi-ence perception one has on it. The interac-tion on public art and the climate go closelylinked with that on man -considering theindividual on society- and the environment.It takes us to the triangle defined by publicart the environment and man. The aspectson the context which affect people dependon the social and cultural variables as well

22

URBAN REGENERATION

make more informed choices about their en-vironment in general.

The decision to consult will dependon whether there is an identifiable commu-nity on users who identify with a place onspace as an interest group and whether theintended art work will imply a change onusage on status on the proposed site whichwill affect the community. The decision toconsult will also depend on whether the ini-tiative comes from local authorities or theprivate sector.

The main aim on public art placed inurban space is the improvement on the qual-ity on the environment considering it as:

"group on symbolic perceptive cognitiveproperties that a given group considers de-sirable. This requires some knowledge onsocial and intellectual history anthropologypsychology philosophy and artª in short itrequires knowing how a given group seesand values the world in which he lives andhow this vision and values affect his action...It is ·a changeable concept which is ex-pressed by the cultural choices made fromamong several possibilities but it also hasmore constant components that can be com-mon with time and culture. 9

CONCLUSION

At present there is a growing concernin developed countries for the micro-envi-ronment conditions and an increasingamount on importance is given to its aftereffects on human quality on life.

The relationship between an indi-vidual and his most immediate context hasto improve to avoid the imbalances causedby technological development that is not fol-lowed by a development in the quality onthe environment. As mentioned by severalauthors:

"Key social issues we believe that mustbe addressed in the future evolution on pub-lic space". 10

Public space and its use can help tocreate a more human culture. Public art mustgo further than the merely artistic field andmust have a social duty contributing in a di-rect and committed way in the improvementon the environment and consequently so-cial behaviour recovering the human factorin environmental design providing morecomfort security and pleasure.

as the nature on the scene and man's physi-ological and psychological features. We canconsider the simple aspects that exert ·stimulus on an individual (light, sound, onthe more general perception and the proce-dures used to integrate the environmentalstimulation and aesthetic experience and theway they affect the use it makes on the en-vironment. It is for this reason that it is nec-essary to define beforehand the public'sneeds and wishes in the same way that aes-thetic on stylistic aspects are considered andavoid form to prevail oven function. Regard-ing stylistic reading it will only be accessi-ble to specific social on cultural group whoknows the grammar on its forms.

THE SOCIAL DIMENSION

As I have already mentioned the in-tegration on public art in an specific contextis also referred to the form as the individualon the community perceive it and the accept-ance on refusal that they will subsequentlyreveal.

This social dimension on the artmakes it popular and communicative. Theart is to be liked and accepted by the largestnumber on people against an elitist art onlyunderstandable to a reduced number on ex-perts. As for an audience and it will be ac-cording to its size placing and social accept-ance. Any intervention by man communi-cates something even if the initial intentionsare obscure or ignored. Communication isestablished between art and the observer insuch a way that the observer "looks at thework and appreciates its merits as an inde-pendent piece. Whereas the subconscious"sees and reacts according to the relation-ship with its placing.

To achieve a social integration art hasto be considered as having some character-istics that favour it such as¾ stylisticallypleasant on accessible and comprehensibleunderstanding -both in scale and form- andthat it favours implicit human relationships.

In placing art in public spaces choicesare made on behalf on others and the artwork brings about a change in the environ-ment. It is important therefore that peopledo not feel that something has been foistedupon them without consideration on theirneeds interests on feelings. Giving people thechance to experience a variety on works ina consultation exercise also allows them to

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NOTES

1. Argan G. C.Historia de la ciudad como historia del arteLaia. Barcelona 1983.

2. Argan. op.cit.

3. Argan. op.cit. Introduction by Bruno Cotardi

4. Riegl Aloïs. El culto moderno a los monumentos Visor.Madrid 1987.

5. Argan G. C. op.cit.

6. Maderuelo J.. El espacio raptado. Mondadori. Madrid 1990.

7. VVAAPublic Space. Cambridge University Press. USA1992.

8. Ramoneda Josep "Comunicación". LaVanguardia 30-12-1994

9. Rapoport A. Aspectos de la calidad del entorno. La GayaCiencia. Barcelona 1974.

10. VVAA. Public Spaces. op.cit.

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URBAN REGENERATION

INTRODUCTION TO TRADITIONALJ A P A N

ART AND NATURE IN JAPAN

Before speaking about art in Japan, it isa good idea to explain the nature of the coun-try. The reason for this is because Japaneseart is altogether connected to its environmentand reflects the close relationship man-na-ture.

The land is made up of a chain of islandsstretched out in a long arch from north tosouth. The different climatic conditions thatprevail within Japan produce different kindsof environments, from subarctic in the northto subtropical in the south, and the charac-ter of the people of each region reflects thelandscape that surrounds them. The relation-ship between man and the environment inwhich he lives forms the basis on which hisculture is built.

The Japanese people are characterisedby: discipline, concentration in work, and fi-delity to the group. The origin for this comesfrom the cultivation of rice, which is directlyconnected to their climate. This type of cul-tivation requires intensive group labour thatcreates a society based on communal soli-darity, since rice collecting needs a lot of peo-ple working together when it is harvest time.

This produces a culture which is differentfrom wheat-growing agricultures. This wayof working in a group has evolved from ricecultivation to present-day Japanese compa-nies. The fact that traditional Japanese art isnever far from nature reflects both the com-plexity of environmental conditions and thesensitivity with which people interact withtheir environment.

Japanese culture has also been influ-enced throughout history by the cultures ofKorea and China. Buddhism, which gov-erned the spiritual realm, and Confucianism,the philosophy which gave order to state andsociety, as well as an orthography which pro-vided the means for written communication,came from China via Korea.

From the eighth century on, these im-ported institutions and arts were graduallytransformed within the Japanese environ-ment. Buddhism was transformed into a re-ligion for the protection of the state to a faithoriented towards salvation of the individual.

The Japanese felt the urge to make allartistic creations beautiful, be they templesand Buddhist statues, which was differentfrom Chinese Buddhism.

The co-existence of foreign and Japanesestyles of expression can also be seen in theprocess of assimilating the Western civilisa-tion later introduced to Japan. The follow-ing were introduced into the country: Ca-

The JapaneseExperience

Alicia Castán

25


As described before, the Japanese aresurrounded by a natural environment in con-stant flux. In order to adapt to this inces-santly changing natural environment, theJapanese had to become observant of natu-ral phenomena and learn techniques of liv-ing in harmony with it. Art was a way of let-ting nature speak for man.

In another sense, Japanese art was astatement of the meaning of time. We can un-derstand this by looking at the changes inthe four seasons which show the natural flowof time. For the Japanese, time is not simplya straight line which moves from the past tothe future, but an ever-recycling circle. Manyof the Europeans and Americans who cameto Japan in the early Meiji period were quickto observe the very different principles uponwhich Japanese art and design were based.Symmetry and balance in European tradi-tion is geometric balance, as a scale. But inJapan, balance is generally calculated by thebeam balance. When dividing a rectangle inhalf, the natural response in European tra-dition is to divide it through the centre intosymmetrical halves, but in Japan there is atendency to divide it with a diagonal orslanted line.

As explained before, art is intended forordinary life; it offers pleasure and makesthe daily lives of the people beautiful. Forthis reason too, art materials are not gener-ally rare or particularly expensive.

Qualities that are not present are the el-ements of magnificence of grandeur.

TRANSITION TO THE MODERNISATION

Modernisation arrived at Japan, follow-ing closely in the footsteps of European in-dustrialised nations.

Machine-based civilizations gave themasses a new and rational way of life, withprosperity and comfort.

In Japan’s case, industrialisation wasoriented towards production of armamentsand of manufactured products for export.Japan has substituted the army that invadedAsia and part of the Pacific until World WarII, for another kind of peaceful invasionwhich fills the entire world with electronicand motor car goods.

The Japanese economy grew rapidlyuntil the end of the 1980s, when the economicbubble collapsed and the economy fell. Inspite of this, the Japanese continue to go onwith their technology. Some examples of thisinclude the Osaka airport on the sea and afuture skyscraper with a height of 4 kilome-tres.

tholicism, Jesuit missionaries, culture and thenew technology centred on firearms.

Despite foreign cultural influences, in-digenous culture continued to mature. Dur-ing the Edo period, a rigidly structured feu-dal society was established. Japan was bro-ken up into numerous domains and each onedeveloped a local culture. In the middle ofthe nineteenth century, Japan ended its iso-lation and began building a unified andmodern society based on European andAmerican models. For the society as a whole,modernisation meant constructing a consti-tutional state and establishing an industrialsociety. For the economy it meant adoptingthe capitalist system, and culturally, it meantbuilding a public education system based onWestern systems of thought.

This great transformation took place ina relatively short period of time. We haveseen another point of the Japanese charac-ter: the emphasis on learning about aliencultures and adapting them to their ownlives without leaving their culture.

The reason for this rapid transformationthrough Japanese history has been the habitof rising again after suffering continuousearthquakes, tsunamis, imperialistic wars,and World War II. Each time, the country wasdestroyed and the citizens felt a strong spiritof reconstruction combined with a desire toimprove their techniques by studying andadapting foreign ones.

CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE ART

Art was required, first of all, to create aself-contained microcosm. Perhaps what Imean is best illustrated by the design of thetea ceremony. The ceremonial preparation oftea is conducted within the closed space ofthe tea ceremony room, using fire and wa-ter, basic elements of human culture. The teaceremony developed into a self-containedsystem, the essence of man’s daily activities.Each utensil used and every movement,down to the smallest gesture, must be beau-tiful and aesthetically pleasing. This is themeaning of an aesthetic system.

A similar example may be found inikebana, or flower arrangement. The art offlower arranging began with the flowers ar-ranged as offerings at Buddhist altars, anddeveloped as room decoration. The flowerswere to be arranged on three main lines:“heaven”, “earth”, and “human.” Art wasnot simply a decoration or an expression ofa function, but served as a vehicle for the in-finite development of one’s thinking.

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URBAN REGENERATION

the Zen culture. Austerity was reflected inall the arts. Sculpture became extremely re-alistic in style and vigourous in expression.Zen culture was reflected in the purity andsimplicity of the architecture of the periodas well as in illustrated scrolls and portraitpainting. The fourteenth century saw the de-velopment of Sumie, the delicate style ofbrush painting with black ink.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centurieswere a time of transition. It was a period ofgreat artistic sophistication. Artists expressedthemselves in bright colours and elaboratedesigns. Castles and temples were decoratedwith elaborate wood carvings. Masks ofgreat artistic refinement began to be wornin the noh dramas.

During the Edo period, the Ukiyoe printwon immense popularity and influenced Eu-ropean art in the latter half of the nineteenthcentury. The theme of Ukiyoe prints wereentertainment places, theatres and sumocompetition. Sculpture declined during theEdo period, but considerable advances weremade in handicrafts.

The second half of the nineteenth cen-tury was a period when Western influencesarrived to Japanese art. Japan became awareof Western superiority in science and tech-nology, so all its work was directed towardsattaining the same level.

In the case of art, the initial situation wasdepressing because utilitarianism domi-nated. But modern techniques were intro-duced and a new kind of Japanese art ap-peared.

Today, Western forms and traditionalJapanese styles exist side by side, in a newprocess of mutual assimilation.

Japan is a fertile field willing to acceptall kinds of cultures, but this field is condi-tioned by nature and other Japanese circum-stances which demonstrate their main char-acteristics: adaptability and multiplicity.

JAPANESE ART IN MODERN TIMES

In spite of this mutual assimilation ofWestern and Japanese art, at the present time,art in Japan is less important than it wassome time ago because of modernisation.

The budget for technology takes prior-ity over the art budget. Society has changedinto a commercial and business society,transforming the traditional natural land-scape into a urban landscape. With this trans-formation, it seems that the Japanese peoplehave forgotten their culture, their delicate

But, what is the role of art now? Sinceabout the middle of this century, people havebegun to realise that a civilisation based onmachines and technology cannot stand onscientific universality alone, but must beadapted to and harmonised with human life.This has given birth to industrial design,design that fuse the civilisation of inorganicmachines with the organic nature of humanlife. This will be made possible through con-stant attention to man’s way of living and tothe relationship between man and nature.

At the same time that environmentchanges, Japanese art changes, but no mat-ter what technology brings, there will be areappraisal of the significance of historicalJapanese art.

HISTORY OF JAPANESE ART

Art in Japan has its origins around 7,000B.C. At that time, it consisted of clay jars withrope marks. This went on until around thefourth century B.C.

The subsequent period was distin-guished by the huge tombs and the intro-duction of agriculture and iron tools fromAsia. It was the first period of Japanese im-perialism. The introduction of Buddhism ledto a cultural period of sudden artistic flow-ering. Many Buddhist temples were built, in-cluding the Horyugi Temple, which is be-lieved to be the oldest wooden building inthe world.

During the seventh century A.D., astrong Chinese and Indian influence was ex-perienced. Flatness of form and stiffness ofexpression in sculpture were replaced bygrace and vigour. The Golden Age of Bud-dhist sculpture then began in Japan, whichreflected a high degree of realism, combinedwith a rare serenity.

An idealised style of expression returnedin the following years, when the mysticalteachings of the esoteric Shingon Buddhistsect influenced the sculpture of the time. Thestatues of this era were massive in form andmystic in expression.

At the end of the twelfth century, con-tact with China had been broken and the in-fluences previously introduced from abroadwere assimilated to involve a new type ofJapanese art. Delicacy and exquisiteness ofform marked the new artistic taste. Paintingassumed an important role during this pe-riod.

During the first half of the thirteenthcentury, Japan developed into a feudal so-cial structure. This period was influenced by

27


pan’s astronomically high land prices. Theratio between land prices and building costsis almost 10:1. Thus, in spite of being an ex-pensive building, it will never be too expen-sive in relation to land prices.

HIERARCHY AND THE SELECTION OFARCHITECTS AND ARTISTS

For all its modern dressing, Japan is stillan extremely hierarchical society and the capon opportunities is in many ways deter-mined by the year of one’s birth comparedto the other members of the profession.

In Japan, people know the type of rolethat can be expected of them. The architectswho emerged after World War II had the roleof building a new Japan. An example is theHiroshima Peace Memorial Centre by KenzoTange. The second generation appeared inthe early sixties, with the Metabolism Move-ment. They have been building the cultureinfrastructure of Japan, the universities, li-braries and museums. Architects from thisperiod Isozaky, Taniguchi and Maki havecontinued designing this kind of buildinguntil the present.

The third generation, including TadaoAndo, is situated in the early 1970s. Thesearchitects started with small houses, givingthem great philosophical importance. As theJapanese economy improved, these archi-tects switched to commercial projects. Butthis generation is still excluded from majorcivic and cultural commissions. They are al-lowed to design museums only at the re-gional and local level.

The fourth generation is the present one,which as I have explained before, works onlyon commercial buildings.

So we can see the closed Japanese sys-tem. This system is not just in architecture;it is also used in the rest of artistic works. Aspart of the foreign cultural influences, artcompetitions came to Japan.

The way to choose artists, artwork andthe public spaces for them consists of the fol-lowing:

• Mayors, governors, politicians, headsof companies, as the elite people whichthey are, select the artist which they like.• An art committee consisting of pro-fessionals selects the artist.• In line with Western influence, theartist is chosen through open competi-tions or selected competitions.

On the one hand, there is a committeethat decides the winning artwork and as-signs it a price.

taste for nature and art, its relationship todaily life, the importance of a pleasing envi-ronment, and the purity and simplicity of thearchitecture. Historically, there were moreartistic expressions, such as Ukiyoe (woodcut printing), Kabuki (classic drama), tea cer-emony and flower arrangement. These wereart for the people and by the people, becausethey did it and enjoyed it. These expressionswere not sponsored by the government be-cause of their close connection to the aver-age people in Japan.

This kind of art was hardly ever foundin public spaces such as plazas and boul-evards because they were not common ele-ments in Japanese cities. Nevertheless, thesituation changed quite a lot after World WarII. Now it is possible to find much art in pub-lic spaces, in parks, along city streets, andmost of all, in commercial developments.You can also find art in museums, open-airmuseums and exhibition halls.

The arts in commercial development aresponsored by private companies whereasmuseum art is sponsored by the govern-ment.

The most obvious change in the urbanlandscape during recent years has been thenumber and variety of commercial buildingswhich continue to multiply rapidly: restau-rants, hotels, clothing boutiques, book stores,and so on. These commercial possibilitiesoffer the younger generation of architects thechance to build large projects with generousbudgets in the centres of the main cities. Forthis generation, architectural opportunitiesare essentially commercial. The fact is thatthe greater part of the budget of the countryis spent on commerce. Clients want to usethe building itself as advertising to attractbusiness.

As a result, it is difficult to locate art-work, because on the one hand, governmentand private funding do not spend on cul-tural buildings such as museums and exhi-bition halls. On the other hand, if a privatecompany wants to spend money on art, itspurpose is actually advertising, and so art-work becomes low quality and strident, ingeneral. In fact, 1% of public funding is forcultural and artistic works.

Another reason that explains the lownumber of art buildings is because, at thepresent time, buildings are not permanent.In other words, once a building starts to loseits novelty, it is changed into another, newerbuilding, because it is losing profits. Thiseasy way to rebuild is possible because con-struction costs are very small relative to Ja-

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URBAN REGENERATION

have lost their identity and became just a bigobject in a city. Thus, with regard to compe-titions, the normal situation consists of try-ing to create a project that also has artisticpurposes. In most cases, the project pro-gramme is determined by the committee ofa local government. For example, a pro-gramme based on a combined museum, lec-ture space, restaurant and library may beonly specifically regulated in terms of floorarea and seating capacity. The selected ar-chitect has to design a building that housesthe selected programme and, more impor-tantly, which maximises the monumentvalue, a tendency reflected by the generousamount of money supplied for constructionin contrast to the relatively small funds formuseum management and building main-tenance.

At the present time, the Japanese soci-ety gives too much importance to the facevalue of art as well as architecture. Japanesecompanies and government use artwork toattract business. This artwork must please alarge group of people and it is difficult torespond to the different tastes. The conse-quences are artwork without any argumentor relationship to its environment, just animpact designed to surprise.

On the other hand, the Japanese govern-ment spends more money on the construc-tion of roads, motorways and railways thanon art. And, speaking about art, politiciansstill measure a museum by the number ofvisitors it attracts.

Private funding for art very much de-pends upon the country’s economic situa-tion. Because of the recent recession, manyprivate companies cannot now afford tospend any money on art. We could also men-tion the fact that the Japanese governmentspends less on art than the governments ofother countries.

JAPANESE REACTION TO PUBLIC ART

Art in public spaces in Japan is still avery new thing, so people appreciate it withjust curiosity and respect. This is the com-mon way to accept and adapt to new thingsfrom foreign countries in general with curi-osity because Japanese people love newthings and they feel the necessity of gettingto know them -with respect- because Japa-nese people always adapt things that theylike and do not adapt but do respect thosethings that they do not like.

The problem is that there are so manythings happening in Japanese public spaces

But the most frequently used method isa committee which chooses the artist. Theygive him general instructions about the art-work and about the site, although sometimesthe site is not specified. In the majority ofthe cases, the committee chooses the archi-tect as well, if it is necessary to construct thepublic space. So the architect and the artisthave to work together. In addition, the com-mittee selects the art producer who organ-ises the relationship between the artworkand the public space.

Usually all these competitions areclosed. Here the reasoning is the same as inthe case of architects and their generationalroles. Artists are selected according to theirage, experience and renown.

PRIVATE AND PUBLIC FUNDING

There are two different ways to make art,depending on the sponsor. The art budgetof a private funding source, such as a pri-vate company, is larger because the art willbe used to increase the company’s profitswhereas public funding comes from the cen-tral government or, in most of the cases, froma local government.

Local government budget funding isprovided by central political bodies in aneffort to gain political support in their respec-tive localities. At worst, then, such projectsare manipulated as an political event and donot reflect any cultural consciousness. Un-fortunately, this emphasis on symbolism hasoften devolved into a simple focus on fash-ion or style. Art funding at the local govern-ment level is 1% of all public funding. Inrural regions, there is an increased interestin local identity, at least at face value. Thismeans that the local government sponsorscultural and artistic projects in order to gainimportance.

In fact, these projects, such as museums,libraries and gymnasiums, are built asmonuments to commemorate the anniver-sary of the city. In Japan the meaning ofmonument is so very confused now. Some-times the Japanese people call both a largesculpture and a public building, monuments.The idea of the remembrance of a personal-ity or past action has been on the decline,because the identify concept for the Japanesepeople is now so diversified. Before WorldWar II, Japan had its nationalistic goals butnow people find meaning of life in many dif-ferent ways. There are no hero politicians orleaders to follow, so people try to find thetype of identity themselves. Monuments

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• As part of city promotions, sculpturesare permanently placed, and streetsculpture exhibitions are held tempo-rarily.• A decision that has been taken by pre-fectures is to use 1% of their construc-tion budgets for art.

In this way, art has appeared in townsalong with social currents in terms of urbanplanning, construction and cultural support.This is significant as it is the first contact ofart with society outside of museums andgalleries, but it has caused some problems.

• To meet architectural needs, many artworks are designed as supplementary partsof architecture and turn out to be boring andunrelated.

• In accordance with the homogenousurban space in Japan, artwork made of stoneand stainless steel with elaborate details arepopular; this is a very Japanese style.

• For public spaces, advisory commit-tees and municipalities like to select artistswith achievements in public art, which per-mits the emergence of similar works all overJapan. So the artists’ group is too closed.

• The absence of art directors who areknowledgeable about both art space on thecommittee’s majority decisions makes it dif-ficult to select artwork or artists with clearthemes.

• Public art plans proceed in such ademocratic manner that there are too manylow-quality works. The reason for this is thatthe committee tries to please many people,something difficult to achieve.

• Outdoor facilities firms with a cleartheme provide more and more works as partof their architectural designs simply to meetthese demands. So there is a necessity ofthinking about the relation of the artwork toits environment.

• Another problem is that maintenanceof the artwork is not decided on from theinitial stages.

FARET TACHIKAWAAN INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECT

A self-sufficient city, called FaretTachikawa, has been recently created in anarea outside Tokyo which provides solutionsto these problems. At present, the Tokyo Met-ropolitan Area is changing its urban struc-ture from centralisation to multi-polariseation. The Housing and Urban De-velopment Corporation has created this city,and it is controlled and financed by the gov-

in the city. There are many signboards, tel-ephone boxes, strange looking buildings,some traditional, some modern, many col-oured objects, and too many people. In sucha chaotic condition, it is almost impossibleto recognise the existence of art in publicspaces.

ART AND DESIGN

Art is a creation based on a free expres-sion of individuals. It affects the psychologi-cal needs of people. It is a unique produc-tion.

Design is a creation limited by pro-gramme requirements and objectives. It af-fects the functional needs of people. It is amass production.

Boundaries between art and design fromthe perspective of the public are related tothe social, economic and cultural level of thepeople. For the lower cultural level, bounda-ries are clearly defined whereas for thehigher cultural level, boundaries become ob-scure. For example, for simply surviving,you do not need an artistic environment, youneed well-designed shelter.

Interdisciplinary works between differ-ent fields are becoming more and more com-mon in Japan. The use of computers has es-pecially helped to relate all kinds of art ex-pressions. But in Japanese universities, FineArts and Design usually belong to the samedepartment and Architecture, Civil Engi-neering and Urban Planning belong to theEngineering Department. So there is no re-lationship at the student level between FineArts and Architecture.

ART IN PUBLIC SPACES

In Japan, public art had its origin in theneed to provide expression and characteris-tics for inhuman urban spaces. Here aresome of the characteristics of Japanese pub-lic art.

• Japanese public art is greatly influ-enced by the United States, where pub-lic art plans have been implemented fornearly 100 years.• In urban redevelopment, the need foropen spaces and the rise of floor spaceindex for cultural facilities require artinstallations.• Many town plans adapt the public artstyle which has been spread through theopen air sculpture exhibition.• Abstract sculptures have been veryfashionable objects.

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URBAN REGENERATION

ments are like unaesthetic back streets andsidewalks. In there, people’s viewpoints willbe activated and an ordinary cityscape willturn into a space full of joy and excitement.

• The Gallery Streets are along the cen-tral axes of the four directions. People canwalk along the street with a feeling of stroll-ing through an art gallery.

• The landmarks are the placements ofthe Strangers. The Strangers are large, hu-man-like figures that attract the visitors tothis town of discovery. Even the signpostsare converted into artwork.

STANDARDS USED IN SELECTINGARTISTS

• Artists who have established a main-stream style in contemporary art.• Artists who have shown their workin major exhibitions in the world.• Artists who have shown their workin exhibitions of contemporary art thatare well-recognised in Japan.• Artists with high expectations fromthe public of being successful in the fu-ture.

All the artists are from different ethnicbackgrounds and must be living.

THE VIEWPOINT OF THE ART PLANNER

The art planner, Fram Kitagawa, wantedthis town to be like a forest. The town wouldchange its aspect between the morning andevening, it would also be different duringthe week and during the weekend. For ex-ample, a lady with a dog would visit thisbusiness town and it would be a playgroundfor children.

And then, instead of being providedwith a stage by architecture or being neededin terms of change, art could make its ap-pearance as a necessary condition to turn acity into a forest of imagination. In a forest,one hears the different sounds of animals;in an urban forest, one hears the whisper ofthe different human beings who dwell in thetown and who provide the opportunity toregenerate the city.

In these words, we can see differentpoints of the Japanese culture reflected at thepresent time.

This art planner wanted a town in con-tinuous transformation. I have explained be-fore the influence of climate on the Japanesecharacter, the different kinds of environ-ments, from the north to the south of the

ernment. It is located in an area previouslyoccupied by the American army base and itstotal area is 5.9 hectares. Faret Tachikawa isa business and commercial area divided intoseven districts where eleven buildings willbe erected. In the downtown area, there aredepartment stores, hotels, movie theatresand other stores, and around them there areoffices.

To fulfil the functions of a business cityand to provide people with a nice environ-ment for working, studying and resting,Faret Tachikawa tries to integrate art into thetown by the cooperation of 90 artists from35 countries.

First of all, the agency selected one artproducer for the development from 5 candi-dates by competition. Then, the art producerproposed that contemporary art be used todesign the city environment. The art pro-ducer chose 90 well-known contemporaryartists from all over the world to participatein the project. The total amount of moneypaid for the artists is about $US 1,000,000.

The following points form the basic con-cept of the art plan:

• A new city tends to be expressionless,but introducing various kinds of art from ahuman viewpoint will inspire both expres-siveness and familiarity.

• The functional elements of the exte-rior space, for example, building walls, ven-tilating towers, buffers and so on, will beturned into artwork. So a city plan can inte-grate town and art.

• International contemporary art of 90artists acts as a mirror reflecting the worldwe live in now. The idea is to create a townwhere we can listen to this chaotic world andthe people living there at the end of the twen-tieth century. Through art, the town can per-ceive and respond to calls from the world.

PLACEMENT OF WORKS OF ART

When considering the art plan, theproject organisers started off by assumingthat this town was like a “village”. At thepresent time, a city can be an actualizationof the richness of a village, and this new cityhopes to open up to the outside world. Thedifferent artwork will be a documentary ofthe present generation to the future genera-tions.

There are 105 places divided in threeways: the stage, the Gallery Streets, and thelandmarks.

• Stage is a place that becomes the spaceof everyone to enjoy festivities. The place-

31


country, the four different seasons with anextreme winter and summer, and the way toview the seasons as an ever-recycling circleall reflect the continuous transformation ofthe country. This character is also influencedby the Buddhist philosophy based on thetransformation of the world.

We can see the idea of using the sameplace for different functions in some pointsof the Japanese culture.

Tachikawa city is used for business andcommerce during the week and for restingand playing during the weekend.

We can see it in the daily Japanese life intheir traditional and new houses. The Japa-nese house is based on one or two roomsdivided by sliding doors. The same room isused for sleeping, cooking and resting sim-ply by changing the furniture. This lifestyleis still used at the present time because ofhigh land costs which makes it impossibleto sell large houses.

The project is unique and successful butthere are some problems. The public may notsee total harmony between the art objectsthemselves, the architecture and the environ-ment, possibly because not all artists mayhave completely understood the site for theirartwork in relation to other nearby sculp-tures or because some artists’ creativity didnot quite meet the requirements of such alarge project. Another problem is that someof the works of art are difficult to maintain.

The art producer said that people haveto wait at least 25 years for the final evalua-tion of the project because all the objects usedfor the project are contemporary art. But theydo not know how long these art works willlast at the site. The solution to these prob-lems occurring both in Japan and in othercountries is to carry out interdisciplinarywork where artists and architects work inconsonance with each other, to provide asmuch information as possible about all theaspects of the project, and to constantly re-member the cultural aspects of the project’splacement so as not to give a wrong impres-sion.

This way of working could be initiatedat a student level by organising work ingroups with the different professorships.

NOTESNOTESNOTESNOTESNOTES

Ikko, Tanaka, The Four Seasons in Design.

The Japan of Today, International Society forEducational Information of Japan.

Casabella, no. 608-609.

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URBAN REGENERATION

courage in an attempt to transmit this real-ity as it is, without rhetorical flourishes oracademic pretence.

Sant Boi de Llobregat is an urban areaon the outskirts of ”Barcelona, a victim ofthe land speculation and chaotic growth thatcharacterized the 60s and 70s. Since the ad-vent of democracy the city council has goneto enormous lengths to rationalize the urbanmap, and has achieved palpable results.These efforts continue to be a priority issue.This is not the place for a detailed examina-tion of this process; we would only stress thatthe attitude of the authorities and their re-ceptiveness towards art is an active compo-nent in the regeneration of the area. This is arecent development in which Sant Boi hasestablished itself as a pioneer among the so-called «second cities» of Catalonia in terms ofthe precepts and the scope of the project thatit has undertaken.

Public art in Sant Boi has seen a fusionof two essential elements: political will - inthe form of legislation (albeit rather timid)that decreed that 1% of the budget for pub-lic works must be allocated to activities of acultural nature - and professional consul-tancy.

This political will is independent of theleanings of the party in power; what is vitalis the harnessing of this interest to the ex-pertise of a team coordinating the project. In

I should confess that the receipt of aninvitation to participate in this bookon public art led me to the conclu-

sion that I should adopt a less conjecturalrole than is my custom.

It is true, although this is not always rec-ognised, that the act of reflecting on issuesin art merely serves to strengthen the impen-etrable walls with which we protect our-selves from the world. This can occur evenas we contemplate art that is basically com-mitted to issues whose scope is muchbroader than the simply aesthetic; it is de-rived from the element of strangeness, thedislocation taken on by any aesthetic objectwhen placed among all other objects. In theparticular situation which has given rise tothis article, although I feel neither the con-viction nor the courage to modify this per-spective, I do think that this is an opportu-nity to play the part of a simple yet sharp-eyed spectator, assigned a job which is closerto that of a chronicler than that of an analystdiagnosing ailments. My reasoning is notwithout some foundation. The only act ofmoralising that may be found in this text isthat which protects me from the regret nur-tured by the growing sense of isolation en-countered in our daily lives. Beyond thisthere is no desire to idealize anything. Thecase described here is not a model, rather areality explored with great ambition and

A place for strangeness.Chronicle of a journeythrough thepublic art of Sant Boi deLlobregat

M. Peran

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Sant Boi this expertise, above and beyondthe technical support, has been provided byJosep Maria Martín, a young ast who livesin the city and who has combined his inter-ests in artistic research with the social andpublic dimension of the projects conceivedand carried out under his guidance.

Public art carries with it an inevitableelement of risk, an element which confers in-terest on the project and is our reason forrecounting it here.

Our journey through the public art ofSant Boi takes us into ”threeareas of the city: the districtsof Camps Blanc and RieraGasulla and the carrerJoventut. The art in each ofthese areas has a specific con-ceptual profile, realised atvarious levels, and even a dif-ferent spirit depending onwhether it is located in ne-glected areas or areas of re-cent construction. In spite ofthese differences, a generalfeature is clearly visible: thepresence of young artistsfully committed to producingcontemporary art.

This phenomenon, vis-ible in each of the three areas, is the one thatwe would stress above all, as it representsan attempt to bring together the public do-main and the production of a kind of art thatinvolves risk, often sustained by a highlypersonalized poetics, and effectively con-demned to develop in minority contexts.

One more point should be made beforeundertaking our journey. In our discussionof the regeneration of Sant Boi, there is oneemblematic project that we cannot ignore:the urbanization of the Parc de laMuntanyeta, a project entrusted to ArataIsozaki. This project, recently begun andscheduled to be terminated in eight years,is, due to its size, and the importance Isozakiattaches to it within the context of his ownwork, the largest and most ambitious projectin the area. The Parc de la Muntanyeta is anarea on a large hill at the centre of the town,and until now has been largely neglected,with very poor service provision of any kind.It is planned that the new park will convertthe north side of the hill into a recreationalarea with a series of pathways; the other sidewill contain the city’s most important cul-tural and sports installations (the Audito-rium, Roman Theatre, sports fields and theAgriculture ”Square). The project is obvi-

ously of great importance, but it falls out-side the range of our immediate concerns,because of both its size and the fact that it iswhat we might call a conventional urbandevelopment. It is not without examples ofpublic art - for instance, some thirty sculp-tures will be dotted around the recreationalarea - but they cannot really be consideredto be representative of the project itself. With-out wishing to pass any kind of judgmenton the aesthetic or social value of ArataIsozaki’s work in Sant Boi, his work would

seem to represent some-thing which we are basi-cally trying to avoid here:the recourse to figures ofinternational prestige,whose previous work isunanimously acclaimed,to help in the task of regen-erating neglected urbanareas.

The district of CampsBlancs hite fields») -thusnamed because it wasbuilt in an area wherethere used to be fields ofalmond trees - is, in spiteof its poetic name, a

marginalized area, the product of the demo-lition of the shanty towns which sprang uparound Montjuic.

Its residents are mainly gypsies. In 1994the city council decided to intervene to haltthe process of deterioration, and, on the ad-vice of Josep Maria Martín, entrusted theproject to Mirko Meyetta, a young Italianarchitect resident in Barcelona. The projectsought not only to renovate the communalpatios (small interior squares), but set as oneof its priorities the creation of a number ofsymbols of identity through the installationof «Five easy pieces» - five simple artistic crea-tions which would convert these patios intoeducational settings and also give them acertain symbolic character.

The project was based on the experi-ences of the Nova Torreta collective, linkedto the Italian Communist Party, on the out-skirts of Milan. It focuses on five central ar-eas of the district adjacent to the few exist-ing services - the school, the community cen-tre and the parish church. The project wasconceived as multidisciplinary, involving thewriter José Carlos Català, the artist YamandóCanosa and Mirko Meyetta himself, and iscentred on a simple yet laborious pedagogicexperience. The structure and general direc-

Mirko Meyetta/ Yamandú CanosaClock Square, 1995

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URBAN REGENERATION

(60x40m) and recreates a characteristic andconstructive painting by Joaquim TorresGarcía, which, due to its size, can only berebuilt in the mind.

A labyrinthine and undefined area ulti-mately represents a meditated reality. TorresGarcía’s work is a reference point for artistsand becomes also a symbol of the role of themodel and the teacher in any pedagogic ex-perience.

The last sculpture - the one which mosteasily admits such

definition - is the «Pentagram», strategi-cally located in the patio that leads directlyto the school. It has two metallic structuresthat support five steel cables on which arange of visual motifs drawn by children willbe placed, like musical notes.

This, then, is a public art project, con-ceived by young artists who have not re-nounced their usual lines of work, but projectthem in an explicit and committed mannerwithin a problematic area. The participativedimension of these works is undeniable notonly in the primary conception of each piece,but also in the call to the residents to over-see a process which will streng-then theirrelationship with their surroundings. Per-haps we should stress above all as far as thecreative strategy is concerned the ease withwhich the «Five easy pieces» invert the con-ventional order: they do not teach the sin-gularity of the aesthetic object, but rather be-

tion of each of the five works were defined,but the works were only completed when arange of iconographic figures were added bypupils at the local school after hearing a storytold by the artists in the classroom.

Our journey through the project beginsin the patios which hold the «Oval Fish» andthe «Leaf» , two figures that emerged fromstories told at the school. These two worksrepresent the most functional aspect of theproject. The aim is to turn the space into aleisure area by paving the patios so as to forma full stage and a raised platform, respec-tively.

The third «easy piece», the «ClockSquare», is the most prodigious of all, andalso the one which requires the most exact-ing level of participation. In this patio thereis a circular metallic panel on which chil-dren’s drawings appear and which is sup-ported by 12 pillars, each 9.06 metres high.Its gigantic proportions in comparison withthe houses which surround it convert thestructure into a celestial watchtower, draw-ing the gaze of the observer to the stark con-trast with the clear sky.

The shadows cast by the twelve pillarsindicate the time ”throughout the day. Thepillars themselves will soon provide a lessfleeting record of time, as next to them a treewill be planted each year.

The «Maze», in another patio, in spite ofits primary significance as a simple decora-tive definition of a leisure space, hides someunconventional reflections. The maze cov-ers almost all the paved area in the patio

Carles GuerraLe regard fait le paysage (J.L. Godard), 1995

35


come a monumental echo of humble anec-dotes.

The district of Riera Gasulla, unlike that of Camps Blancs, is currently beingurbanised and, thus, public art has no regen-erative function here. Perhaps because of thisthe installation of these works has only hadto meet with the usual bureaucratic obsta-cles, and has not had to overcome public

opinion, as the pieces will form part of thelandscape from the outset; although thisdoes not guarantee automatic acceptance onthe part of the residents, it does mean thattheir reaction is unlikely to be openly hos-tile. The area, a terrain vague between newhomes and two buildings of great symbol-ism the cemetery and the psychiatric hospi-tal will house sculptures by Juan de Andrés,Carles Guerra, Jordi Colomer, Pep Dardanyàand Víctor Ochoa.

Without detracting from the value of anyof these works, it is fair to say that they fallinto two groups.

The works of Juan de Andrés and VíctorOchoa bear witness to the desire to includepieces which respect traditional expectationsof sculpture in urban spaces. «Confluences»by Juan de Andrés, an obelisk in the verycentre of the Plaça de Pallars Jussà, com-memorates the notion of the monument. Inturn, in «The Savage», by Víctor Ochoa, anexpressive nude in the style of Rodin, thefigurative nature reduces its impact to apurely decorative role. These two pieces con-form to the concept of sculptures as objectsto be enjoyed passively, requiring frompassersby only a respectful contemplation.

The other group represents a quite dif-ferent set of values.

Three artists of the same generation - all

born at the beginning of the sixties - whousually present their work in the reducedcircles of contemporary art, have respondedto the highly unusual task of intervening inan urban setting with a series of ambitious,daring works. As in their private creations,their work calls into question the notion ofthe author, heightening the role of the spec-tator as the builder of meaning while break-ing down the frontier between the prosaicand poetic realms.

At the two ends of the walkway in thecarrer Girona, Carles Guerra’s «le regard faitle paysage (J. L. Godard)» two structuresmade up of modules, of 550x665cm and780x540cm respectively, are divided intotransparent vertical frames which bear agraphic motif. Guerra’s creation suggests thepossibility that urban art need not dependwholly on the installation of the work of artitself. In the artist’s own words, the aim is tooffer spectators the conditions, creating thescreens, on which they can resolve their vi-sion with their surroundings: «The point isnot, though, to capture the spectator’s attention,but to suggest that the landscape is there to beseen. In fact, the houses, cars, trees, streets, thesky and the clouds suffice as a monument. The

monument is already present. Its function is notto embellish the surroundings, but to reconcilethe spectator to them.» The graphic motifs -figures recovered from the artist’s earlierworks - that partially block the view throughthe screens, act in this way not as a tradi-tional signature of the work, but to indicatethe conditioned, personal nature of the actof looking.

Jordi ColomerThe dual panorama of Sant Boi, 1995

Pep DardanyàTranshumances, 1995

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URBAN REGENERATION

In the third setting, in carrer Joventut,the project is not yet underway, although it has received official approval andis clearly defined. In the street’s central walk-way, built over wasteland which used tohold an itinerant amusement fair fifteen cy-lindrical structures some 800 cm high and12 cm in diameter will be raised, each ofwhich will be assigned to a different artist.A number of points are worth making.

First of all, the most ambitious aspect ofthis entire project is to bring together youngartists who work in an unequivocally con-temporary register and in an urban environ-ment.

So while the group of artists invited totake part can primarily be defined by aes-thetic criteria, the group is also made up of anumber of young local artists (Nati Comas,Hinojosa and Albert Llobet), artists from thecentres most committed to supporting youngcontemporary art in Catalonia (Jordi Alfonsofrom Lleida, Octavi Camerón i Domènecfrom Mataró), representatives of the nucleusof foreign artists resident in the country(Erich Weiss, Louise Sudell, Mirta Tocci) anda more personal list of artists (Manuel Saiz,Francesca Llopis, Lluís Hortalà, Ester

Baulida, Tere Recasens,Elisabet Mabres).

Although this project isnot yet underway, an exhibi-tion held at the Antonio deBarnola Gallery in Barcelonaprovides a vision of the formit will take. The exhibitionBase 800x12 represents an-other way in which the dia-logue between the public do-main and young contempo-rary art might be formulated,inverting the direction thatwe have described thus far:now are the projects them-selves that are moved to thesphere of a commercial gal-lery, a gallery well known forits interest in the work of this

generation of artists. The potential distancebetween the two contexts, the gallery whichpresents works of art to minority spectatorsand the urban context in which the artistsproduce their work , is broken down in anatural way. It is precisely this conjunctionwhich the exhibition seeks to further so eachof the St. Boi projects is accompanied by

The dual panorama of Sant Boi, by JordiColomer, is sited on the land which standsempty between carrer Benito Meni behindthe psychiatric hospital. It is a circular struc-ture held up as if haphazardly by lead sup-ports which appear to be ordinary objects.The piece provides a vantage point fromwhich part of the city can be observed, com-manding a privileged view, and yet it is onlythe presence of the work that determines theplace.

The initially inhospitable area is definedby the alien object.

This is the basis of the duality of the ti-tle the circular structure peopled by visitors,defines the site as a recreational area, as areceptacle of everyday situations.

Pep Dardanyà’s work, Transhumances,transforms the urban setting into a literaryone. At fixed intervals along carrer BenitoMeni there are eleven metallic suitcaseshaped objects, each with small balconiesfrom which one can observe strange under-ground perforations by means of a mirror.Each of the eleven objects has a title to helpthe visitor to understand its literary refer-ences (the story of the invisible immigrant,the story of the tropical tourist, the story ofa pop singer). The work turnsthe long street into a narrativecomprising successive chap-ters which the visitor is in-vited to enter.

With unconventionalworks such as these therearises the question of their re-ception by a public which isunaccustomed to tasks whichrequire them to both interpretand participate. Other works,more respectful of traditionalorder, also face this problem,though it is hidden beneaththe decorative function of themonument.

We applaud the attemptsin St. Boi to solve the prob-lem. Near each work there isa sign with a recognizable logo showing apicture of the work, a short explanation writ-ten by the author, and a map of the area thatsituates the work in relation to others. Morecomplete information regarding the artistsand their work can be obtained from the ar-ea’s community centres and library, wherethere is a wide range of explanatory mate-rial.

Manuel SainzProject for carrer Joventut

37


View of the exhibition "Base 800 x 12"Antonio Barnola Gallery, 1995

other works by the same artists. The exhibi-tion also presents work conceived for thecarrer Joventut that, however, will not con-stitute part of the final project (by Josep M.Martín, Akanó, Carles Guerra).

Without being overly rigorous, wemight conclude that the project remainsfaithful to its guiding principle of grantingeach artist not only a specific environmentin which to work but also the support of a

set of factors which is implicit in creating abond between the artist and the project. Thisis what provides the common thread be-tween all the projects, with one simple dis-tinction: either the cylindrical structure be-comes a base that sustains elements of dif-ferent allegoric dimensions, or the structureitself is modified to reconvert it into a deco-rative, organic or poetic form.

38

URBAN REGENERATION

Outdoor products exists in thezone between architecture andenvironment; between infra-

structure and landscape. Artists and archi-tects create site specific works and often de-mand or exercise influence in integratingtheir artefacts into the outscape; product de-signers rarely do. Their methodologies andthe demands of production deny involve-ment with site specificity beyond generalintentions. The presence of the utility orproduct is mediated by others: planners, thecommunity, the public, architects and engi-neers.

Designed objects inhabit a peculiar voidwhere they may maintain, shift or loose con-tact with the intention or ideology impliedin their creation. They depend for their ex-istence on tenuous links with the virtues offunction, or message, which determinedtheir origination. Their visual or expressivepurpose changes congruence by change,through the care or lack of it, with which theyare sited; conditioning their greater degreeof relevance to the community.

I wish to examine and contrast the ideasand intentions of the community which de-termines this design. The action and reac-tion of the public and the professionals whoshape our environment. Is there hope ofconsensus in the confusion and shallownessof our times? What confidence exists in de-

sign quality found in our natural and syn-thetic landscape?

L O C Á L E

We inhabit an increasingly synthetic en-vironment, the natural world recedes underthe pressure we all exert, at microcosmic andmacrocosmic levels, as we push it to serveour needs at an ever increasing pace. Thenatural and organic world is threatened withmodification in all but the wildest and mostinhospitable places, even though there is insome quarters an enlightened acceptancethat there must be finite limits to our exploitsand endeavours. Human kind set out totame and civilise our planet with every in-stinct and application of intelligence, but alsoto exploit it and our fellow creatures withall the faculties at out disposal.

Higher instincts towards socio-politicaland economic organisation reduce the planetto a state akin to a global game of ‘monopoly’where the responsibility for structural orvisual details are delegated to engineers, ar-chitects or planners. To a lesser extent itseems designers and artists are permitted‘cameo’ opportunities to define the culturewe inhabit.

Designers and artists have during thetwentieth century been increasinglymarginalised to particular areas of special-

Product Design in thePublic Domain :the Paradox betweenIntentions andPerceptions

Mike Stevenson

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techniques is huge and local materials andcrafts either no longer exist or are too expen-sive for common use. With the resulting riotof form and finish there can be little harmony- or sense of belonging to place or region.Now many people do not want to build astheir fathers did, but as they do on tv or inthe magazines1.

Escaping the locále means our identityis now expressed in new ways and materialculture is intertwined with our clan, clique,gang, profession or obsession. We canthrough various media consume and empa-thise globally with our ilk and separate our-selves locally from those in our communitywho hold different beliefs.

The direction of our industrialised andpost industrialised society has been un-swerving in bringing about such conditions.It is also clear that however liberating ac-cess to global culture may be to individuals,that ecological an environmental issuesshould see needs and wants being harmo-nised. We cannot fill each day with a newtoy.

Creating the spaces one inhabits,whether private or public, requires the us-ers consent to the expression given to theplace by designers, if it is going to have cul-tural value. Specialists may create appliedart or design in the environment through theelements they use, whether they are raw inthe sense of pigments or pieces of timber, orrefined, in the sense of being prescribed byothers as components or systems, whateverthe appropriate media, but to succeed cul-turally the artefact requires adoption by theuser for reasons beyond mere utility.

RELATING TO DESIGN

Let us say then that the functionality ofthe object is not concluded in the bare beautyof its form but implemented in its use, so thethings around us are not just a backcloth orscene any more they are conditions of a posi-tive familiar coexistence between the houseand the person living in it.2

Argan’s suggestion is that the experienceof use and the ritual supposed to emergefrom the users relationship with the objectis sufficient to form a cultural relationship.

Le Corbusier indicates that the magicwhich is cultural, possessed by some de-signed objects and environments, is a finitecondition possessed in some design situa-tions.

You employ stone, wood and concreteand with these materials you build houses

ist activity. It seems also that in urban com-munities, the inhabitants have exercised adiminishing level of control and participa-tion in defining their environment. In a rushtowards globalism, our society has eschewedlocalism in a geographical sense, to replaceit with a nodal sense of locále, where thosewith common interest focus attention. In-creasingly such a location is at the intersec-tion of communication matrices, be theyphysical or electronic.

The technology used may bring peopletogether and facilitate greater cerebral andcultural interaction but there is the dangerof forgetting that people physically inhabitthe place they are at. Previously our mate-rial culture has been a consensural significa-tion of the values and aspirations of its in-habitants. In the synthetic world of the spe-cialist, ‘designers’ become the conduit of val-ues and aspirations. Individuals; peoplehave autonomy to exercise some culturalcontrol over their own backyard if they arefortunate. In the ‘designer’ world, materialculture is expressed through outlets such ashomestyle, dress and leisure activities.

Most of the visual domain is prescribedby professionals and commercial interests.Increasingly culture is consumed like anyother product. Designers share responsibil-ity for exploiting the opportunity to sell cul-ture and its artefacts to people who delegateor abdicate their needs to them. Furthermorethe route to increasing sophistication in de-sign, has been though centralisation, stand-ardisation and globalisation.

Peter Buchanan contrasts the pressuresof globalisation with a reflection on region-alism in architectural design.

Much of the Earth’s surface has beenshaped by human hand. Yet everywhere theresults are different. Exploiting local re-sources, responding to local climate, vegeta-tion and topography, and guided by localcultural traditions these interventions,though all by the same biological species,tended not to uniformity but highlightedlocal flavour by exaggerating differences andparticularities.

The building materials and craft tech-niques available in any area were, until re-cently, limited. This, and cultural norms, setstrict limits to built form and detail.

A certain uniformity and so harmonybetween buildings was inevitable. But theharmony went deeper than just betweenbuildings - it was also present between build-ing and setting.

How different things are now. In manyparts of the world the choice of materials and

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URBAN REGENERATION

won with their remarkable post tensionedcable design - a daring structure with its tall,cigar shaped aluminium clad body sus-pended almost invisibly by only three cables.

The Dome of Discovery and the Skyloncould have survived - the site has not beenbuilt on since their demolition after elevenmonths.

The Conservatives came into power in1952 and could not see the back of the Festi-val fast enough. For them there was a realdanger that the populus might seize thespirit of the times and force onward the so-cial progress realised since the years of theSecond World War.

The paradox between the potential ofmonuments and visual events to encapsu-late strongly held public values or alterna-tively be manipulated with crass shallow-ness of intention is illustrated in the millen-nium case.

A fortnight ago Private Eye published aspoof list of «imaginative ways in which Brit-ain can mark the year 2000»; these included«the making of the world’s biggest ball ofstring, to be erected in the Pennines and vis-ible from space», «covering Snowdonia witha huge pizza designed by Damien Hirst» and«a free Hob Nob biscuit to be issued to everyold pensioner on 1 January 2000». Thesesuggestions are no more silly than some ofthose said to have been put forward for mil-lennium funding, such as the giant Ferriswheel for London’s South Bank.

Better that we should forget heroic cul-tural monuments. Our finest monumentshave rarely been forced out of the ground tomeet a specific date or occasion (those thatwere - like Blenheim Palace - ended up be-ing too big, to expensive and very late).Rather, they have grown organically over anumber of decades, or even centuries; thinkof the great age of British churchbuilding,the Georgian country house and its land-scaped garden, Victorian railway bridges,Frank Pick’s London Transport (in the 1930’sthis was the finest public transport systemin the world ) or the Hertfordshire primaryschools of the 1950’s.4

Jonathan Glancy suggests that shallowmotives, political imperative or big moneydoes not create meaningful monuments, artor design in the public domain. He suggestthat there is consensus about satisfying needswith design quality, through consultation onissues pertinent to communities.

Nearly everyone, however, would de-light in the rehabilitation of our landscapes,townscapes and waterways. Over the past

and palaces; that is construction. Ingenuityis at work.

But suddenly you touch my heart, youdo me good, I am happy and I say : «This isbeautiful.» That is Architecture. Art entersin.

My house is practical. I thank you, as Imight thank Railway engineers or the Tel-ephone service. You have not touched myheart.

But suppose that walls rise towardsheaven in such a way that I am moved. Iperceive your intentions. Your mood hasbeen gentle, brutal, charming or noble. Thestones you have erected tell me so. You fixme to the place and my eyes regard it. Theybehold something which expresses athought. A thought which reveals itself with-out word or sound, but solely by means ofshapes which stand in a certain relationshipto one another. These shapes are such thatthey are clearly revealed in light. The rela-tionships between them have not necessar-ily any reference to what is practical or de-scriptive. They are a mathematical creationof your mind. They are the language of Ar-chitecture. By the use of inert materials andstarting from conditions more or less utili-tarian, you have established certain relation-ships which have aroused my emotions.This is Architecture.3

Whilst Corbusier was striving for uni-versality of truth and beauty in architectureand design, there is plenty of evidence thatin the public sphere his modernist ideals didnot universally connect. Whereas in the pri-vate sphere, clearly the work of Corbusierand other modernist designers is acclaimedby many enthusiasts.

In order to understand the context ofdesign in the public sphere we might lookat some examples being planned to signifyimportant places relevant to the end of themillennium. Time enters into the ego of ourexistence and demands a material statement.

The Eiffel Tower marked 1889 and wasextremely unpopular when built. Now itdefines a culture and place. By contrast inLondon the Skylon was constructed in 1951as part of ‘The Festival of Britain’ exhibition.It and the Dome of Discovery marked aplace; encapsulated the spirit of the age. Theexhibits, were populist and popular, createdby a socialist government initiative.

The Skylon was simply a monumentwith no functional purpose beyond housingan anemometer at the tip of its three hun-dred feet spire. In response to a competitionasking for a vertical feature Powell and Moya

41


A sustainable society for the future re-quires us not to pollute or waste and have anon conflict resolution for sustainability weneed reasons for living without accumulat-ing unnecessary wealth and an economy thatserves and supports life on earth, rather thanbeing run as an end in itself, for speculativegain it could be advocated that an environ-ment that satisfies psycho/social needs re-duces material needs consumption has be-come our way of life, so we are eulogised tocontinue to buy, to sustain growth we haveevolved a high consuming production soci-ety, how else do we create new jobs? (worldadvertising revenues just go on up and up)big business is our obedient slave; we tell itwhat we want and it drowns us in it, we areall guilty, we buy the stuff!

Our society encourages us to fill everymoment with a new toy but as global con-sumption increases our expectations andwants increase in a graph of consumptionincrease, over production efficiency it is ob-served that at forty degree scope of stand-ard of living increase is shown but our hap-piness or life fulfilment actually drops off atan inverse rate in a creative society, happi-ness is the forty degree ascending slope,where as the standard of living stays con-stant and horizontal: a high qualify of life issustained through creativity, with a moder-ate standard of living pertaining satisfyingour needs is dependent on controlling ourwants.

DESIGN CONTEXTS

A consequence of these realisations is anacknowledgement that future limits on glo-bal capacity to withstand further uncon-trolled exploitation by industrial society, iscausing designers to currently question thelegitimacy of their approach to design. Thereare fundamental issues being addressed in-crementally in the way design solutions arederived by many practitioners.

But in general industrial art, if that iswhat design is, has been merely speculativethroughout the twentieth century, exploitinggreedily an opportunity to engrandise itselfby exploiting the ‘toys for life’ approachrather than providing for real need. The mar-ket came first and more recently artificialcultural hypotheses have driven research.The later approach is typified in Cranbrook.

A leading US designer told a conferencethat it was ‘the most dangerous designschool in the world’.

decade our concern for the environment hasgrown. The old as well as the young arewilling to lay down their lives to stop fur-ther despoliation of our countryside. Theyrepresent an ever-growing part of the popu-lation for whom the consumer society hasgot out of hand; they want markets notsuperstores, railways not roads, animals notannihilation, common sense not politicaldogma, misty mornings over green fields,rather than monuments to shopping andcultural fads.

Politicians and millennium commission-ers ignore them at their peril. Investment ina beautiful and sustainable infrastructure isa way to lay popular and beautiful founda-tion stones for the Britain of the third mil-lennium.4

There is in this a recognition that mate-rial progress and cultural values are centralto making a collective place to inhabit com-mensurate with the needs of our times.

It does, I think, have the underlying con-cern for the ecological environment, whichis of course global and demands this be ex-ercised at project or local level that belongsspecifically to the community locally orregionally. This connects with Buchanan’sobservations.

And according to physicists studyingthe behaviour of ‘dissipative creatures’.open-systems such as eco-systems and hu-man cultures generate large amounts of en-tropy just prior to establishing a higher levelof synthetic order. Perhaps (and hopefully)what we are witnessing is the traumatic pe-riod prior to the birth of a viable global civi-lisation in which networks of communica-tion and trade will no longer just be homog-enising and destructive agents but will havesuch abundant capacity as to allow regionalparticularities to survive and be savoured.A truly universal civilisation will not onlyenvelop the world and give its citizens thebreadth of experience so offered. It will alsoencourage that depth of experience thatcomes from being rooted in, and caring for,local issues and which is another dimensionto the idea of being universal.1

GLOBAL CONCERNS

Ecologists concern with global, eco-nomic tendencies offer the following obser-vations in design, as with ecology we arefaced up to having to define:

• what kind of future do we want?• what kind of environment?

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URBAN REGENERATION

Applied since the 1950’s to the stream ofproducts from Braun, the German consumerdurable manufacturer, Rams has proved tobe both pragmatically and idealistically suc-cessful. This is endorsed in the market andthe design museums worldwide.

In a late 1980’s version on Brauns’ de-sign philosophy, Rams outlines these prin-ciples:

• Good design means innovation. The op-portunities offered by modern technology, andthat includes industrial design, are far from be-ing exhausted.

• Good design means usefulness. People buyproducts for specific purposes. Good designmeans maximising their functional practicality.

• Good design means aesthetic design. Theaesthetics of a product and thus its fascinationare intrinsic parts of its function and utility.

• Good design explains a product and itsfunctions. It shows the structure of a product ina logical way. It lets the product speak for itself.It may in some instances eliminate the need forconfusing use instructions.

• Good design means honesty. Design mustnot be used to make a product appear more inno-vative, more effective and more expensive than itreally is.

• Good design means durability. It is timeto reject the attitudes of the throw-away society.Our natural resources are not unlimited. Thereis no justification for short-lived, trivial products.

• Good design means consistency down tothe last detail. Superficiality and inaccuracy re-veal the lack of respect towards products and us-ers.

• Good design means respect for the envi-ronment. Designers must contribute to the con-servation of natural resources. And visual pol-lution is just as detrimental as physical pollu-tion.

• Good design means as little design as pos-sible. Back to purism and simplicity.6

Paradoxically and probelmatically theapplication of modernist design principleshave not been delivered the universal suc-cess implicit in their definition. Yet every-where there are examples of some successes.

Also at a fundamental level, these prin-ciples underline less dogmatic approaches,which are seemingly more progressive andmore culturally attuned to local situations.But it remains a fact that in the field of in-dustrial design, with reference to outdoorproducts, more generally these principlesgive us bland and uniform objects. Solutionswhich may seem fine in the studio, be politein the environment, often bring nothing or

But then the design department run byKatherine and Michael McCoy at CranbrookAcademy of Art is like no other designcourse. The way the McCoys work is to in-corporate a programme of humanities read-ing into studio design projects in order tocombine theory and practice in a more seam-less way. Through this approach, theCranbrook couple were inspired in the mid-eighties by the writings of the French post-Structuralist philosophers to develop a newdesign language for objects, which has beentermed ‘product semantics’.

The McCoys took the science of seman-tics and linguistic meaning and worked onthe basis that, as in linguistic responses,metaphors and symbols can engender a re-sponse in design making it possible to ‘read’objects. Of course this was not entirely origi-nal in as much as objects have always hadsemantic meanings. Le Corbusier’s reclinersuggested a reclining figure just as surely asa reading of Harley Earl’s auto tailfins sug-gested speed. In deed the American indus-trial designer Niels Diffrient, who studiedat Cranbrook in the fifties, has argued that‘design infused with meaning has beenaround for centuries. The decorative artshave long been saturated with visual cuesto enhance themes.’

But what was genuinely new aboutCranbrook design in the eighties was the useof product semantics as a self-conscious,methodological approach to designing.

‘After you reject the utopianism of earlyModernism and deconstruct it, the parts arelying on the garage floor. Now what do youdo? You don’t build another utopian vision,’says McCoy. ‘You put the parts back to-gether, taking each idea and assessing itsworth. That’s what we do at Cranbrook.

Their message that cultural meaningsand messages can be integrated into physi-cal products to make them more accessible,understandable and obvious to people is rel-evant.5

Semantic approaches to design are con-troversial and of course challenge the rulesof engagement in industrial design, whichhave advanced little since being prescribedby the modernists.

Beyond Corbusier, needs are addressedseriously as functionalism, through Modern-ism (in the private domain and at a smallscale) through the work of idealistic design-ers like Dieter Rams. Rams’ developmentof a design philosophy which marries art asculture with technology, is a significant con-tribution to thinking in the industrial sphere.

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As a reflection of the wider crisis in ourindustrialised culture I will turn again to ar-chitecture for it is there that design mostclosely shares ideology, technology and pur-pose. Despite the fact that buildings arenearly always site specific projects, there isequal dissatisfaction in the profession withan ability to be tough with real values perti-nent to the creation of meaningful architec-ture for the late twentieth century.

Through the medium of the R.I.B.A.’sHerman Miller lecture Juhani Pallasma ar-gued about the state of architecture. To para-phrase brutally, in order to align the concernsI’ve mentioned with this condition I quote:

«There’s is a widely shared sense that West-ern ways of seeing, knowing and representinghave irreversibly altered in recent times; but thereis little consensus over what this might mean orwhat direction Western culture is now taking.»writes Jon R. Snyder in his introduction toGianni Vattimo’s seminal philosophical in-vestigation of our age, entitled ‘The End ofModernity.’

David Harvey uses the notion ‘time-space compression’ in his book ‘The Condi-tion of Postmodernity’ in reference to thefundamental changes in the qualities ofspace and time, and he argues that we areforced to alter in quite radical ways our rep-resentation of the world. In Harvey’s view«the experience of time-space compression is chal-lenging, exciting, stressful, and sometimes deeplytroubling, capable of sparking, therefore, a diver-sity of social, cultural and political responses. Wehave been experiencing, these last two decades,an intense phase of time-space compression thathas had a disorientating and disruptive impactupon political-economic practices, the balance ofclass power, as well as upon cultural and sociallife.»

In the post-historical experience, truthbecomes replaced by the aesthetic and rheto-ric experience. As the ground of truth is lost,aesthetics takes over, and everything turnsinto pure aesthetics; technology, economics,politics, as well as war.

The surprising success of high-tech ar-chitecture in our eclectic and revisionist agecan be understood through its capacity todetermine its own criteria of quality andgoals within its self-defined realm throughreplacing the issues of representation by theinner logic of technological rationality.

Pallasma is inspired by Italo Calvino’sdefence of literary quality and uses it as amodel for the defence of architectural qual-ity, which he trusts will ensure the culturalrenascence of architecture into the next cen-tury.

owe nothing to the site in which they even-tually are planted. (Examples of systema-tised telephone booths, bus shelters, lampstandards etc may be drawn from most west-ern industrialised nations, as a tribute to thisfact). It is then often graphic identity whichis used to give significance to objects whichcould be imbued with positive design fea-tures.

Neither indeed do they bring anythingto the community - nor are they adopted byit. Is it any wonder that they are reviled anddefaced in our cities.

The failure of modernist principles inarchitecture and elsewhere still does not uni-versally impact on the visions of plannerswho still patronise us in the decisions theymake and the non places they create or al-low to be created.

Whatever the utility of these objects, ‘arthas not entered’ into their creation at a per-ceivable level.

Is this to be the language of commercein the service of mankind?

Engineeringly orientated design oftenhas denigrated the quality of life it seeks toenhance.

We were warned by Ian Nairn in the mid1950’s to guard our urban areas and land-scape against the army of utilities, informa-tion systems and ill conceived buildings - henoted their onward march from towns intorelatively raw countryside.

He sought methods and codes to pre-vent what is all too prevalent today.

He succeeded, through his innovativecolumn in Architectural Review, to height-ening sensitivities to the issues. He may,through the ‘outrage’ columns, have wonsome battles, but the war was lost. 7 The col-umn still runs today, as you know, but itsimpact is reserved for exemplars, particulari-ties and details of design; these don’t fullyrepresent the coherent strategy he advo-cated.

He required us to have a universalawareness necessary to create an environ-ment owned by our communities rather thanone dictated to us by government or regionaldepartments. What chance of enlightenmentnow? We have moved so far materialisti-cally and culturally since those times, in the1950’s, but have we progressed?

Quantity of consumption and the wantshave increased - but needs have not been sat-isfied. Purpose is lost, social reality ignored,production and industrialisation discredited.Commercial factors predominate.

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URBAN REGENERATION

4. AUTHETICITY

I am aware of the philosophical difficul-ties of distinguishing between essence andappearance, and the consequent ambiguityof the notion of authenticity. Regardless ofthat, and the somewhat fashionable tone ofthe term itself, I want to argue for the possi-bility and significance of authenticity in ar-chitecture. Authenticity is frequently iden-tified with the ideas of artistic autonomy andoriginality. But I understand authenticitymore as the quality of deep rootedness in thestratifications of culture.

5. IDEALISATION

I do not believe that we can expect orbuild an Arcadia through architecture in ourtroubled time. But we can create works ofarchitectural art that confirm human value,reveal the poetic dimensions of everydaylife and, consequently, serve as cores of hopein a world that seems to lose its coherenceand meaning. As the continuity of architec-tural culture is lost, the world of architec-ture becomes fragmented into detached andisolated works, an archipelago of architec-ture. But the patron saint of the archipelagoof architecture is hope.

6. SILENCE

Following Calvino’s scheme, I couldleave my sixth theme as a mere title, particu-larly since I have earlier written extensivelyabout an architecture of silence.8

CONCLUSION

Designers, like architects, can only pro-duce appropriate solutions to needs withinthe public domain, if they are to remain intouch with longstanding values. Especiallyso, those which have demonstrably achievedconcensus and progression during this cen-tury.

Using the framework of the design proc-ess, in three progressive stages, a translationof Pallasma’s themes is facilitated in a waywhich equates with the direction of designprojects. Broadly my proposition is that de-signers need to address the fundamentalgenerators of qualities in design if their workis to advance beyond engineering or produc-tion and achieve a cultural status. This is

«In his literary testament entitled ‘SixMemos for the Next Millennium’ Italo Calvino,the writer of ‘The Invisible Cities’ acknowledgesthe confusion and shallownesss of our time. Buthe expresses an emphatic confidence in literature.«My confidence in the future of literature con-sists in the knowledge that there are things thatonly literature can give us, by means specific toit,» he writes.

DEFENCE OF ARCHITECTURALQ U A L I T Y

It is evident that the current cultural con-dition renders the emergence of profound ar-chitecture as difficult as of profound litera-ture. The post-historical condition tends toerase the very foundations of architecturalmanifestation by uprooting ideas and experi-ments before they have had time to take rootin societal soil. It turns them into instanta-neous commodities in the market of images,into a harmless entertainment devoid of ex-istential sincerity.

Pallasma debates six themes pertinentto his field to advance the case:

1. SLOWNESS

«Architecture is not only about domesti-cating space», writes Karsten Harries, «it isalso a deep defence against the terror of time. Thelanguage of beauty is essentially the language oftimeless reality».

2. PLASTICITY

Architecture has become an art of theprinted image fixed by the hurried eye of thecamera. As buildings loose their plasticityand their connection with the language ofthe body, they become isolated in the dis-tant and cool realm of vision.

3. SENSUOUSNESS

Architecture is inherently an artform ofthe body and of all the senses. But the in-stantaneity of the ‘rainfall of images’, asCalvino calls it, has detached architecturefrom other sensory realms and turned itsolely into an art of the eye. But even visionimplies an unconscious ingredient of touch;we stroke the edges, surfaces and details ofbuildings with our eyes.

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equally the case whether the project is commercial, aimed at private con-sumption or intended for the public arena.

FUNCTIONALITY

SERVING NEED & ESTABLISHING ACONCEPT DEFINITION OF REAL PURPOSE.

THIS IS APPOSITE & FINITE DESIGN.

VISION/IDEALISATION

INNOVATION WHEN APPROPRIATE

EXACTITUDE

THROUGH APPROPRIATE ‘ENGINEERING,CO-ORDINATION PROCESS AND MATERIALS: FORM GIVING

TO AN IDEA IN THE TIME FRAME, HENCE:

FORM

APPROPRIATE TO THE CULTURE THEDESIGN INHABITS.

SENSIBILITY

A SENSE OF BEING A THING OR A TYPE.EXISTENCE AND CO-EXISTENCESIGNIFICATION & IDENTITY

CONSOLIDATION

ACCESSABILITY

TO INGRESS AND UNDERSTANDING BYHUMANITY

I believe that designers need to transcend and translate Ram’s criteria(which were conceived in the context of industrial goods, destined for aworld of private domesticity). We are then left with values more funda-mental to human experience; a broader culture, where the expediences ofindustrialisation are not a loaded factor in the determination of design. Iam seeking to propose criteria which translate into meaningful parallelsbetween culture, design and architecture in the public domain. I suggestthis approach will create the following parallels:

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URBAN REGENERATION

RAMS PALLASMA

Functionality Usefulness‘As little’ design

Vision/Idealisation Innovation Idealisation

Exactitude Durability SlownessHonesty

Formgiving Aesthetic design PlasticityDetail design

Sensibility Explanatory design Sensuousness

Accessibility Environmental AuthenticitySilence:- at the stage ofdesign consolidation

Returning to Buchanan, he concludesthat imagination should triumph over eco-nomics.

Scared of exercising their imaginations (of-ten trained not to), embarrassed lest their designsbe dismissed as parochial or arbitrary, too manyarchitects instead of attempting some synthesisbetween tradition and contemporary potentialand between the man-made and its natural set-ting -continue to design buildings shaped solelyby economics, regulations, catalogue componentsand construction.

Now architects play down the role of theimagination and their role as artists. They optout to let buildings and cities be created by theseemingly ‘natural’ and inevitable processes ofeconomics, assess, technology and so on; and sothey lose control.

Architects should again try to create realorder - that is, variety, complexity, continuity andcoherence - in our environment. This can onlybe done by making connections with and enhanc-ing the specifics of culture and location in sensi-tive, disciplined yet wilful acts of the imagina-tion. 1

I am arguing too for designers to recog-nise design quality in the context of a sensi-bility to culture and place, beyond mere func-tion. There needs to be an end to the elitismand indifference that can be exhibited to-wards the condition of the user. Designersneed more often to get away from the officeor the factory and touch base with the com-munity. Design can continue to be broadlyrelevant and achieve optimisation but notthrough the expedience of ignoring depth ata local level. Much product design is overprescriptive and hence culturally unsuccess-

ful in its final context. The measure of de-sign in the public domain should not merelybe focused toward rarefied qualities of ex-cellence on the drawing board, slanted to-wards achieving excellence in a museumcontext. Nor is it sufficient for projects justto economise efficiently in production anduse.

The ultimate criteria for implementationneeds to question whether design connectsin the real world it inhabits, with the com-munity it serves?

REFERENCES

1. Buchanan, P. ‘Only Connect’, London,Architectural Review, October 1984

2. Argan, G. C. Ed Romanelli, M. ‘A Miscellanyon the Concept of Furniture Design’, Italy, Domus,October 1994

3. Le Corbusier, ‘Towards a New Architecture’,1927

4. Glancy, J. ‘For 2000 Let’s Repair our LovelyLand’, London, Independent on Sunday, 4February 1995

5. Williams, G. ‘Special Report - the Real McCoys’,London, Design Magazine, July 1993

6. Rams, D. ‘Braun Design Department’s DesignPhilosophy’, Germany, 1987

7. Pallasmaa, J. ‘Six Themes for the NextMillennium’, London, Architectural Review, July1994

47


For anInteractive Art

Ian Rawlinson

In this paper I want to concentrateon a form of public art practicewhich takes as its point of departure

the social interactions involved in its proc-esses and production. I would like to ap-proach this principal concern by way of someinitial and very brief observations of the situ-ation here in Barcelona, as compared to thatin Britain.

In June 1994 I was awarded an arts inthe community travel fellowship which Iused to visit Barcelona to study and reporton the impact of public and/or communityarts in the regeneration of urban areas. Atthat time in Manchester we were seeking tofind ways in which art might be integratedinto a programme of urban renewal thatwould involve the collaboration of artists,architects and community members, withthe City Council and housing associationsin control of the redevelopment.

Whilst Barcelona can boast a greatwealth of public art I could find no evidenceof any practice which in Britain would beunderstood as community art, characterisedas it is by the participation of communitygroups in particular projects. In searchingout these kinds of interactions I found noindividual projects which might serve as amodel but rather an entire campaign.

Barcelona Posa’t Guapa (make yourselfbeautiful) has arguably involved almost eve-

ryone resident in the city, and whilst the cam-paign title suggests something cosmetic, theprogramme has been constituted at a deeperlevel. It seems to me that the scheme is notjust about making the city beautiful, butabout rethinking and rejuvenating its entirefabric and cultural life.

The emphasis placed on the participa-tion of groups and individual citizens, mightenable an outsider to consider Posa’t Guapa,at least in this participatory sense, as a com-munity arts project and certainly it providesa model of collaboration.

The conclusion I drew at that time wasthat community art in Britain is an impover-ished and isolated discipline by comparisonto such a broad and integrated model. True,an overall scheme of urban renewal is a dif-ferent entity from community art. However,if ‘community’ is concerned with group re-sponsibility and commitment and ‘art’ witha dialogue between the form of a thing andits content, then I hope this comparison hasnot been stretched too far.

By way of reservation, it is a generalisa-tion to reduce community art as practised inBritain, simply to the participation of com-munity members in a given project. Never-theless it is generally characterised by anemphasis on process and facilitation, provid-ing the means of making but concerning it-self only with form and not with content. In

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tutes a critique of the monument. In differ-ent ways each artist has begun to addressthe complex range of contingencies involvedin the existence of a work in public space.Avoidance of an overbearingly ‘intervention-ist’ monumentalism has allowed the emer-gence of fresh interpretive, critical, poeticand expressive possibilities.

In terms of critical public reception(which in this example I am not in a posi-tion to assess/quantify) - that it would bedifficult to actively dislike some of theseworks due to their comparative invisibilitycan hardly be used as a criteria for assess-ment. Yet if, as I believe is the case, they ex-amine some of our habitual notions of pub-lic sculpture and its functions, is it really sobad that public expectations have been con-founded, at least questioned?

However this said, I find myself unableto resolve the complex of educational preju-dice which might involve such a positivejudgement on my part.

The movement away from the monu-ment might be said to have fostered anotherpossibility for public art pre-figured in Rus-sian Constructivism and Dada and by someof the practices of Conceptual Art andSituationism, taking an impetus from thedesire to dissolve the barriers between artand everyday life. The general pull of thishistorical configuration has resulted in recentyears in a number of attempts to research anddevelop a public art practice which seeks notso much ‘integration’ into a site but rather aform of social ‘participation’. The site of theartwork is still at issue but is rather more in-formed by the context of present community.

By this approach other public spaces areopened up where art may be encounteredin rather more incidental contexts, and theresults, unlike ‘Urban Configurations’, aremost often temporary in nature.

With reference to this I want to considerthe work of two teams of artists who I be-lieve successfully challenge what public artis and can be, whilst effectively negotiatingthe social relations involved in public artpractice.

The first of these teams is FAT (FashionArchitecture Taste) a collaborative group ofartists and architects based in London whoinvite the active participation of people froma variety of disciplines in their projects.

Most recently realised was the project‘Outpost’, an event staged at multiple sitesthroughout Edinburgh during the interna-

a word it is therapeutic. The objects gener-ated by this process, if they enter into publicspace at all, do so only as a form of cosmeticdecoration, entirely unconcerned with theideologies of making or expression nor thoseof site and context.

Can Posa’t Guapa be said to have func-tioned any differently, or for that matter is itcomparable at all. In the final analysis, I amnot sure.

However, while in the larger scheme ofthings Posa’t Guapa remains hugely impres-sive, there are still many individual exam-ples (as glaring as any other in the world) ofthe numerous kinds of foreign objects (af-fectionately known as ‘plop art’) which passfor a monumental, that is ‘significant’ pub-lic art.

Clearly monuments signify orcommemorate events or peopleand should be legible to us the

public and express in clear terms concernswhich are collective. Much of recent publicsculpture has the scale and form of themonument but lacks the significant reasonto be, even as landmark, that would give re-course to ‘a clear and brief interpretation’.

It would be fair to say that the monu-ment was ever the measure of public art. Inrecent years the ideology of the monumenthas become for some artists the focus of acritique that has given rise to a range of otherpossibilities.

One project here in Barcelona, whichbegins to explore these possibilities, is ‘Ur-ban Configurations’ curated for the CulturalOlympiad by Gloria Moure in 1992. ‘UrbanConfigurations’ is, I think, unique in that anindividual curator has been given the free-dom to select a group of artists (with broadlycompatible views on art) to work in andacross a particular district, with a view tocreating permanent artworks. The ‘site-spe-cific’ has become the predominant techniquefor overcoming the shortfalls of an irrel-evance summed up in the phrase ‘the turdin the plaza’.

The works which comprise ‘Urban Con-figurations’ can be squarely regarded as site-specific and as such are integrated into theurban fabric. In fact, in some cases, the art-ists have chosen an approach so formallyintegrated as to be comparatively invisible.However, it would be a mistake to reducethese works to a simple response to the for-mal dynamics of the site, we might begin bysaying that ‘Urban Configurations’ consti-

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tional festival. The Outpost event has sincebeen staged for the Venice Biennale XXX andincluded contributions from over 1000 par-ticipating artists. “The complex relationshipstruck between the triad of the patron (Gal-lery, Museum), the artist (Artwork) and thespectator acts as a point of departure for thisexhibition”1. Some 200 participants (by opensubmission) each produced 100businesscard-sized artworks together withan equal number of signature cards. Thecards were dispensed free of charge fromvending boxes located at various sites rang-ing from festival venues to fast food restau-rants. The spectator collects the cards and isinvited to purchase the corresponding sig-nature card from a central desk where theywere also able to obtain (at the minimal costof £2.50) a collectors album containing blankpages in which to stick cards and ‘curate’their own show. Thereby Outpost examinesthe relation of the site of the artwork to theterms of its consumption. If the gallery siteis ‘displaced’ by such a process, so too is thetraditional site of the public artwork, BurgerKing or a doctor’s waiting room being someof the least likely places one might expect toencounter an artwork.

If we take seriously the contention thatthe spectator actively participates bycurating what amount to ‘fragments of mul-tiples’, we should equally not underestimateor denigrate the value of fun entailed in thisengagement. To be sure, the extent to whichthe individual contributors to this event haveworked through these issues varies by de-gree but then FAT have never acted to cen-sure any contribution. If, as the catalogueclaims,”the site of art has been one of theleast pressing problems for the contempo-rary artist” 2, the structure of Outpost goesfurther than this issue alone to address cen-tral Modernist notions of authorship andoriginality and the privileged set of valuesinvested in these concepts and the artwork.

The large number of participants (art-ists, institutions, proprietors of venues, ac-tive curator/spectators) and the wide dis-semination of this event across these vari-ous contexts, indicate a project conducted ona big scale. Yet the artworks themselves fitinto your pocket, ‘auratic’ to some (the Vic-toria and Albert Museum, London, valued afull collector’s album, which holds up to 50of the possible 200 cards, at around £500 onlytwo days after the event) disposable ephem-era to others. Outpost along with Adsite, an-other of their projects which developedposter designs for bus shelters, attempt to

mark out new possibilities for art practice‘beyond the gallery’ in the public arena. Andagain, while it is true there is a dependenceon the discourse more commonly associatedwith ‘high’ art, the familiar and everydayformat, here a collector’s album and busi-ness card, there a bus shelter design, furtherstrengthens these possibilities.

The second team of artists I wantto consider is the collaborativepairing of Simon Grennan based

in Manchester and Christopher Sperandiobased in New York. Their work specificallyinvolves the active participation of others asan integral part of its realisation. This in-volves bringing into interaction those insti-tutions who commission their services witha diverse range of communities and indi-viduals from Civic, commercial and sociallife. They have developed a practice whichis engaged directly in the network of socialrelations which can be said to bind peopleinto communities. In this sense the work isa form of social-scientific research aimed atquestioning how we constitute communityidentity and the meanings we invest in it.

However, as has recently been suggestedby Hafthor Yngvason, such a “program is aresponse to social conditions rather than toa scientific goal, and the approach is a pub-lic exchange rather than a scientific method.The research is better seen, then, as an ac-knowledgement of the fact that the complex-ity of public issues cannot be avoided - notonly are there no simple solutions availableto public art: there are no simple problems.If loss of community characterizes city life,it is not clear what is to be unified or whatwill count as community in a pluralist soci-ety”. 3

Different projects by Grennan andSperandio conducted over the last four yearsin Britain and America have approachedthese issues in a variety of ways. Their tech-nique involves devising projects which,whilst initial parameters and final conditionsof display are controlled and structured byGrennan and Sperandio, at a certain pointrelinquish creative control to the partici-pants. This strategy is comparable to someof those practices developed throughoutModernism (and specifically sinceDuchamp) that aimed to subtract the aes-thetic of the artist from production by seek-ing to derive the artwork from a pre-struc-tured system. Rather than the perceivedbeauty of an image, a success is measured

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by the extent to which this mechanism func-tions independently and of itself once set inmotion. Grennan and Sperandio make a con-scious effort to focus on the ordinary, thecommonplace. Participation is employed asa device, allowing the contingency of appar-ently mundane life to enunciate itself. In‘Maintenance’ workers at the College ofDupage, Illinois, were given cameras andinvited to document their working lives, cre-ating an exhibition which was later shownat the college and at Laurre Genillard Gal-lery, London.

In ‘Six Eastbourne Dentists’ Grennanand Sperandio invited dental practices inEastbourne, a small town on the south coastof England, to visit the Towner Art Galleryand Local Museum and select paintings fromthe permanent collection with the aim ofmaking a portrait photograph in each prac-tice that would use the chosen image as amodel. The photographs were exhibitednext to the respective paintings at the mu-seum and now hang in the waiting rooms ofthe dentists who participated as a constantreminder.

Whilst ‘Six Eastbourne Dentists’ wasengaged with a specific cross section of thecommunity, the museum, the dental prac-tices and their patients, the project ‘Every-one in Farnham’ took on an entire commu-nity. In May 1994 all 12,000 in the Farnhampostal district were mailed with an invita-tion for all to be photographed on the streetsof Farnham town centre between 5.45 and6.15 pm on June 4th 1994. Most of the pho-tographs were taken by students on the pho-tography course at the local college.

In these images the traditional distinc-tion between ‘subject’ and ‘background’ isblurred. The people of Farnham who cameout onto the streets for that ” hour partici-pated in the creation of images, the contentof which was in effect determined by them.The project raised as many questions as itanswered about what might constitute thecommunity of a small market town. Thatthe participants share the same postcode ei-ther at work or at home, is one way of desig-nating a group and approaching the issues.

The event itself was not ‘stage managed’yet involved the negotiation of an intricateweb of social relations in its organisation, notleast of these halting the ordinary flow ofpeople and traffic through the town. In morerecent projects they have come to recognisethat the modus operandi of their practicemay be more accurately described as one ofexpropriation rather than participation. The

artist as thief, who in the context of mutu-ally consenting adults, effectively steals thelife histories of willing accomplices. “Life inPrison” 4 details the time stories of three (ex-)convicts. Presented in a comic book format,the focus is very much on the individual andtheir experience, their own story. This con-centration on the individual subject (accom-plice) may, paradoxically, reveal more of theissues facing the wider community than anyapproach Grennan and Sperandio have thusfar explored.

Taken as a whole, their methodologyinvolves an essentially questioning approachto art practice both within and outside ofthose institutions who sponsor it.

Artists generally, whose practice is con-cerned with the critique of the institutionsof power within which they themselves areconstituted, are marginal in number. Such apractice need not claim to be in a position totranscend such parameters but perhaps onlyto bring about small shifts in our habitualpatterns of behaviour. In the work ofGrennan and Sperandio and of FAT, theirstatus as artists, the site, and terms of theconsumption and production of artworks, isconstantly called into question in a directlypublic forum. The recognition of their ownmutually institutionalised nature may addfurther force to their arguments.

The role of the artist is in tandemthat of practitioner, facilitator andat times spectator. In fact, the

characteristic social relations involved can beunderstood in these triadic terms, entailingartists, institutions and communities in re-ciprocally productive and facilitative inter-actions. In brief, these roles are continuallyshifted, turned over and worked through.

Practices such as those described above,traverse the private and public spaces inwhich we live and interact. They do not re-sult in some ornament to be praised, de-spised, promoted or destroyed, but then donot seek to avoid one. Rather, they create aspace in peoples lives which allows creativepossibilities to flow through the interactionof a diverse range of participants. They arepart of a growing number of artists who havein recent years recognised that art in publicspace offers the opportunity for art practicegenerally to become more socially meaning-ful.

Granted that most often, claims to so-cial relevance on behalf of these artists mayremain questionable, it is also clear that they

51


depend upon the discourses and institutionsthey may be said to critique. But in arguingthe case for an interactive approach, the par-ticipatory strategy does begin to explorepossibilities outside of those institutionswhere the divisions between art and every-day life begin to break down and it is herethat the artist becomes directly accountableto the public.

In the midst of city wide redevelopment,my home town of Manchester remains rela-tively devoid of a significant public arts pro-gramme.

Barcelona, however, through the imple-mentation of programmes, such as ‘Posa’tGruapa’ and the ‘Monumentalisation of thePeriphery’, has led the way, in terms not justof a commitment to public art but also theacknowledgement of the role it can play inurban regeneration and the development ofcommunity identity. ‘Urban Configurations’in its internationalism responded to the cli-mate in Barcelona during the OlympicGames and has offered further solutions tothese problems.

In writing this paper then, my intentionhas not been to develop a polemic for what Ihave termed an Interactive Art against amore traditional monumental or specificobject based approach (arguably the oneadopted by the city of Barcelona). Rather, Ihave simply wanted to draw attention to aform of practice which in Europe is rarelyseen or considered in terms of the discourseof the ‘sites of public art’.

It is tempting to make sweeping andnoble claims for an Interactive Art. However,it is almost impossible to legislate for theassumed social responsibility of any form ofart practice and it is questionable if drawingup a blueprint for such a thing is even desir-able. In the context of the current debate theproblem seems to be that this art cannot takeaccount of city planning. Business cards andchocolate bars 3 cannot physically transformurban space.

On the other hand, the form of publicart practice which predominates in Europetoday, the insignificant monument or theobject which pays lip service to site-specifityruns a dangerous risk. That is, it tends to treaturban space as a blank canvas, the city astabula rasa - a playground for the artist. Bydefinition, no site is a blank page. It is a spacealready occupied by history and by the cul-ture of communities of people.

The value then of the interactive ap-proach I have discussed, with its emphasison social research and participation, is that

it continues to shed light on what might bemeant by terms, such as ‘community’, ‘iden-tity’, ‘public art’ and the kinds of presuppo-sitions we may be making when we employthese terms.

I have been pressed as to which ap-proach I would favour but as I have statedmine is not a polemic. The practices I haveidentified do different things, one is staticthe other dynamic and yet crucially sharesimilar cultural histories and provide manypossibilities for the overlap and integrationof their respective strategies.

In the end the most compelling argu-ment allows room (and crucially funding) forboth the site-specific/integrational and theparticipatory/interactive approaches, entail-ing both ephemeral and permanent results.

Whilst the processes and products ofinteractive art practice may be addressedfrom a variety of perspectives (I have in mindparticularly the debate surrounding thework of Grennan and Sperandio as photog-raphy), it seems cogent to discuss them interms of the sites and discourses of a publicart proper.

NOTESNOTESNOTESNOTESNOTES

1. Clive Sall and Emma Davis. “Author to Galleryto Audience” in the Outpost Exhibition Catalogue.Edinburgh Festival 1994.

2. Ibid.

3. Hafthor Yngvason. “The New Public Art, AsOpposed To What?” discussing ‘Culture in Action’curated by Mary Jane Jacob for SculptureChicago 1993. Grennan and Sperandioparticipated in this exhibition collaborating withworkers and management on the design of acandy bar.

4. ‘Life in Prison’ was produced as an artwork for“Prison Sentences: The Prison as Site/The Prisonas Subject”, an exhibition of site-specific artworksat the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia,Pennsylvania. Published by Fantagraphic Books,Seattle1995.

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The interrelation between public worksand public art has not been excessively stud-ied. However the aesthetic relationships be-tween the public works and the art couldexpound some important aspects in a theoryof public art.

In my doctoral dissertation I have ex-plored the relationships between the bridgeand the sculpture. Along thew work I triedto expose the relationships I found betweenthese two subjects:

a) at a formal level between the sculp-ture and the bridgeb) in a more utilitarian level trying toanalyse the implicit aspects in the sculp-tural processes and the work of genera-tion c) respect to the level of their implica-tion in the construction of the territoryd) at level of the possible parallelismbetween the engineering project andthat of sculpture.

If we analyse the corpus I presented , wecan set a first analogical look that allows toexplain the relationships between the bridgeand the sculptures.

THE DE-CONSTRUCTIVEAPPROACH

Diverse works mentioned along thework, (Pino Pascali , Herman de Vries, JoelShapiro, Richard Serra, Julian Opie) andsome other not mentioned, how it is the workof Angeles Marco or Miquel Navarro, all theyare characterized by some constituent ele-ments of the landscape that are ordered bymeans of the contrast, the de-installation, thechange of the scale; in definitive, what wecan call the de-construction of the landscape.These works suppose a revision of the lan-guage and object of the sculpture, at the sametime that they take all their sense startingfrom the narrative system of the art gallery,this space system implicit to the logics of themuseum.

The de-construction of the languagesample in order to establish the interactions,the dialogue with the spectator, in a certaincontext and from scope of a traditional dis-course.

These sculptures to which we are refer-ring , they are originated from different po-etics, using constructive elements in theirconfiguration, that are ordered through thebuilding of an sculptural language .

Public SculptureInteraction betweendisciplinary fields

Ascen García

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THE CONSTRUCTIVE APPROACH

We found a completely different situa-tion the second block of our corpus. Worksas those of Bruni and Babarit, Richard Nonas,George Trakas and Patricia Johanson, andeven the gardens of Isamu Noguchi or thebridges (roads in three levels) carried out byDominique Arel, they possess a link that weshould locate in the will of the constructionand not in the scope of the de-constructionof the language.

In these cases, the group of the propos-als supposes the step from the static ap-proach to the landscape- appropriate for itsexhibition in the system museum-gallery -to the approach to the landscape consideredin a dynamic way.

All these works suppose an order in theterritory and the non talked emergency of anecessary individual agent that goes act onthe territory. These works suppose the tran-sit from a policy of the sight to a policy ofthe . To be in and the move around, theybecome the live motives of these perform-ances and, in order to maintain and preservenecessary mobility for the meaning of thework, some drawbacks appear in the land-scape which are cause of the apparition anddevelopment of bridge-sculptures linkedwith an incipient assumption of functionaland utilitarian approaches implicit in the thedevelopment of this type of works

THE RE-CONSTRUCTIVEAPPROACH

A third level of sculpture that was stud-ied is this research is the one that relates theconstruction of the territory with a superiorscale to that expressed in the previous box.

In this case proposals as those byRichard Fleischner and Herbert Bayer, are agood example of use of the figure of thebridge in the re-construction of the micro-territory. These are interventions that fortheir magnitude, approach to the works ofcivil engineering. Aspects such as environ-mental impact, scale, the split of the terri-tory in diverse pieces, gardening, etc.; in fewwords, a whole re-ordination of the land-scape, make necessary the use of the bridgeas a language resource.

Related to this type of proposals wecould locate the sculptures linked to thebridge that expounds the sculptor ClaesOldenburg in two of his projects. Oldenburgprojects bridges that, in the case of their

materialization will suppose, as it is habitualin their sculpture, an inversion of the scaleof the object. One of their proposals, thebridge on the Rhine, is explained by meansof the drawing and doesn’t pass to material-ize neither just in scale model, but the projectof Rotterdam, with the topic of the screw, itis one of their more elaborated works, towhich the sculptor dedicated several years,maturing the idea, improving it, until a clearproposal , although that doesn’t come tomaterialize further of the scale model.

In both cases, his projects approach so-lutions not belonging to the field of the sculp-ture or of the architecture of the landscape,but near to the normal concerns that shouldpay those who operate on infrastructuresand urban planning, since these works arelocated in the urban space and it is therewhere they complete their function. For thisreason his proposals approach to the crite-ria used by the engineer.

POSTMODERN SCULPTURE

If we located us in a temporary perspec-tive, we could see like the transition fromsome proposals to the other ones, take placebetween the seventies and the eighties. It isvery well-known that this period has sup-posed the transit from the fordist societiesto the post-fordist ones, transit that in thecultural sphere has supposed the crisis of themodern movement and the vanguards andthe emergency of the postmodern attitudes,moods and ideologies .

The postmodernism appears like therevelation of a deep crisis and like a refugethat preserves a reflection on neworientations. It is, essentially, the negation ofthe precedent period without being an affir-mation of a new space, as soon as it has cen-tred their acting in de-constructive aspectsand it has not been able to re-do the histori-cal project through a re-constructive ap-proach.

Along the senventies they proliferateattitudes that claim for specific approachesto the different artistic manifestations. S.Marchán thinks that what can be considereda disciplinary recuperation, begins in the ar-chitecture and it is expanded to the remain-ing arts. The decline of the artistic vanguardslead to meditate on the post-modern condi-tion, that shows a deeper and less gratuitousfeeling on certain versions of the moder-nity and that impels a review of the aesthetic

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thought in order to try to find a new iden-tity.

Possibly we have to locate the sculpturalmanifestations - those to which we referredpreviously- in this context , we mean thosethat, carried out during the seventies andeighties, they ride between the sculpture ofGallery and the interventions in the territory.

PUBLIC ART

We approach to an specific expressionof the sculpture that, is developed in thespace, takes part in the construction and re-construction of the territory, and too on theurban planning, and it has a clearing com-ponent of public utility . This kind of sculp-ture can be fitted on the concept expressedby Siah Armajani who considers him self asan sculptor for public spaces.

What differentiates the work ofArmajani is, following Jean-ChristopheAmmann “the idea of placing a work in anoverlapped context that confers to it an aesthetic,social, communicative and functional meaning”1

The work of Armajani, that sandal em-brace bridges that goes further from thescale model and that they are materialized ,how it is the bridge of Minneapolis, in Min-nesota (USA), and their projects of bridgesthat Armajani solves to the level of scalemodels. His works in the public space , theyimply the construction and re-constructionof the spaces where the bridges are placed.Furthermore, because of the magnitude ofthe works (in the case of the built bridges),they expound new questions linked theproblem of professional skills, the signature, orcivil responsibility

The manifesto in which Armajani basestheir interventions, it is quite clarifier respectto their restlessness and positioning in frontof his work:

“. ..the public sculpture attempts to de-myththe art. In the public sculpture the auto-expres-sion and the myth of the creator is less importantthan a civic sense . The public sculpture is notbased in this philosophy , that which aims to sepa-rate art from everyday life. The artist offers his/her competence in the public sculpture and is inthis way, like creator, that finds his/her place inthe society. It is necessary that the social and thecultural they support the artistic practice. Thepublic sculpture represents the search of a cul-tural history that requires the structural unit ofthe object and of its social and space environment.The public sculpture has to be open, useful andcommon. The public sculpture opens a perspec-

tive that allows us to understand the social con-struction of the art. The public sculpture has acertain social function. It has been displaced fromthe sculpture to great scale, external and specificto the site, towards the sculpture of social mean-ing. In the course of this process, it has annexeda new territory for the sculpture in which thefield for the social experience is wider. The publicsculpture believes that the culture should pos-sess a geographical identity and that the conceptof region has to be understood as a value term .This is the case in politics. Why not in the cul-ture? The public sculpture is a production incollaboration. Other people in addition to the art-ist share the responsibility of the work. Attribut-ing the whole worth to the artist is dishonest andfalse. Art in the public art is not a refined art buta missionary art. We are not related with publicsculpture like an object located between four wallsin a spatial sense , but like an instrument for theactivity. The location in its self has a value butwe should limit the minimum our concerns forthe location. The public sculpture doesn’t existin order to enhance the architecture from insideof or from out, like neither the architecture existsin order to integrate the interior or external pub-lic sculpture . They should begin a mere relation-ship of vicinity. The public environment is aconcept of reference to the field in which the ac-tivity is developed. The public environment is anecessary implication for being part of the com-munity. The public sculpture depends on a cer-tain interaction with the public, based on someshared postulates. Upon putting the utility onrelief the public sculpture becomes an instrumentof activity. So, we reject the Kant’s metaphysicsand the idea that the art lacks utility. The publicsculpture rejects the idea of the universality ofthe art” 2

These are some of the 26 points in whichArmajani structures his manifesto, and thatare useful for us in order to describe as “pub-lic” this modality of the sculpture, and atthe same time allow us to question what isexactly the meaning of the concept sculp-ture.

Just now, when the sculpture is tryingto recover it self from the crisis suffered sincethe Modern Movement; when the sculpturalinterventions in the cities distanced them-selves from what previously meant a con-tinuation of the museum activity : sculpturelike monument.

On this conflict, J. Maderuelo comments:“ From mid seventies there is the idea, every timemore and more consistent, of generating a newcategory, that of public art, of recognizing a typespecific art whose addressee is the group of thecitizens and not specialists in contemporary art

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and whose place is the public open space. Thisnew category is not a style and is developed in-dependently of the forms, of the materials and ofthe scales” 3

MONUMENTS ANDINTERDISCIPLINARITY

The word monument indicates an objectconceived so that it have the maximum sym-bolic efficacy in order to communicate to thecontemporaneity much in order to transmitto the posterity the memory or the image ofa divinity, of a character or of making wor-thy of being known. The Monumenta theywere, or very commemorative, or really me-m o r i a l s .

If we remembered the ethimology,monumentum is a Latin noun that meansmemory, or, solemn testimony. This nouncomes from the verb monere, that has twomeanings: the first remember, make think;the second warn, reclaim our attention.

From the first historical periods, themonument has developed at the same timethat the architecture and frequently(dolmens, pyramids], etc.) is confused withthe memorial architecture.

In the classical ancient times the topicof the monument is managed in very diverseways, from the architectural group to thestatuary group, from the victorious arch, tothe column, from the fountain to the mortu-ary trails.

The conception of the monument passesin the Middle Age, from the sphere of thesacred art to the civilian, where we onlyknow the deliberate monuments with di-dactic or narrative purposes . In the Renais-sance and in the Baroque the monument isaccustomed to be a symbol of greatness; also,in the Renaissance and Neoclassical archi-tecture the concept of monument extendsto good part of the civil works (factories,bridges, etc.).

Along the XIX century it goes into amore positive conception , as far as they builtmonuments to the progress and to the pro-ductivity (the first mechanical engines, thebig Universal Exhibitions, the Eiffel Tower,etc.); on the other hand, many events becomepretext in order to lift commemorativemonuments of any kind. But in the field ofsculpture, at the end of the century, we ap-preciated a gradual de-vanishment of thelogic of the monument and a bet by recon-sidering its typology. We attended a nega-tion of the elements of the language charac-

teristic of the commemorative monument:the basement, the inscription, the statue.

This negation is studied by Maderuelo(1992). He attributes this phenomenon totwo factors: “One of them inherent to the Sculp-ture that, feeling the reject by the modern archi-tecture, that resigns its services for the sake ofthe architectural purism and constructive, returnthe eyes toward the painting that during themodernity harvest the biggest success from theBaroque. (.) The second problem is unaware ofthe Sculpture. The way taken by the architec-ture and the urbanism of the Modern Movement,and of the new characteristics that ,within them, took the public space” 4

Indeed, there are a series of factors that,acting from a different discipline, how it isthe architecture, they are going to conditionthe sculpture in the public space ; they are:

• the development of urbanism inwhich the real state is qualified in zoneson which to place blocks of housing andinfrastructures• the abolition of the close perimeterfor housing• the renouncement to carry out an sty-listic architecture , with the use of a solemodel based on the structure of pillarsand lintels, that produces a periodlonger than 30 years centred in the de-velopment of an international style andin the rising effects of de-personaliza-tion and de-installation concerning theterritories on which it is acting on.

The fading of the logic of the monument ,starting from Rodin, the Sculpture will en-ter in what Rosalind Krauss has called thenegative condition : “I will say that in (the Doorsof the Hell and in Balzac)- states Krauss refer-ring to the work of Rodin- we cross the thresh-old of the logic of the monument and we enter inthe space that we can denominate its negative aspace of lacking of place or lack of home, an abso-lute loss of place, which is as much as saying thatwe enter in the modernism, since it is the mod-ernist period for sculptural production, the onethat operates in relationship with this loss of place,producing the monument like an abstraction, themonument like sheer signal or base, functionallydisplaced and in great way auto-referential.

“ These are the two main characteristics ofthe modern Sculpture, those who declare its con-dition and, in consequence, its meaning andfunction, as a nomadic essentially one Throughits fetichism of the basement, the sculpture goesdown in order to absorb the pedestal in its selfand far from the true place and to through therepresentation of their own materials or the proc-

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ess of its construction , the Sculpture shows theirown autonomy”. 5

Auto-referenciality, autonomy, abstrac-tion, all them concepts that indicate the con-quest of a negative freedom that, in certainway, is also a liberation: freedom in front ofthe classic precepts that assigned a place, afunction and a precise symbol, but , too, free-dom in front of any possible content or, whatis the same, an aesthetic conquest of the in-definite.

At the present time, the public spacethat generates the modern architecture, be-cause of its non-personality, not only doesn’trequire of monuments but rather rejectsthem; isolated monuments are no longerbuilt if they don’t insert in an urban frameordered previously . With the evolution ofthe media domination, the propagandistcharacter of the monumental groups is goneweakening and it is re-instaured thependular momentum of non-specialization,of the necessity of cooperation, of the instinctof projecting respect to some clear objectivesto complete that, in turn, are perfectly an-chored in the concrete context of the localreality and not in the utopia of the neuterspace of an aesthetic globality

If now, we contemplated the bridge fromto the field of the civil engineering, the his-toric development that we have carried out, shows to us as the structural changes tookplace in parallel to the innovations in thefield of the materials.

A constant stays along the whole jour-ney, and it is the debate around if it existsornament in the bridges. As it has alreadybeen said , the bridge is a functional struc-ture whose mission consists of save a physi-cal gap in order to permit the continuity ofthe road. If this structure permits or not somekind of ornament is going to depend on thehistorical moment in which the bridge isdeveloped.

From the postulates of the modern Func-tionalism, “ that pulls up with the rationalismof the s. XVIII with Lodoli, Laugier, Milizia,Blondel, Durand and the engineers of Ponts etChaussées , in the training of the civil engineersit rests ingrained the idea that Durand intro-duced valuing what he called the natural or-nament , I mean, an application of the materialsrespect to their qualities and purpose. His ap-proach is based on the utility and the minimumcost. From his Chair at the School of Architec-ture of the Polytechnics School of Pairs, Durandspread his ideas, that valued construction andeconomy with a radical sense of the utility, germof the functionalism that grew-up in the XX cen-

tury, after the Romantic period” 6

Along our research, we found in thebridges of all the epochs some degree of or-namental work, well as external to the struc-ture, we mean applied in the complemen-tary elements, how they could be railings,beacons, etc. or as decoration, implicit inthe structure, with a big capacity to conformthe form of the bridge, how it is the case ofthe engineer Santiago Calatrava.

I find important to consider here theideas of Fernández Ordóñez as for the pos-sible relationship between the bridge andthe monument. His reflection comes formanalysing the second meaning of the Latinword monumentum: calling the attention;this makes reference to the image. “ ...theimage is manipulated not only for the politiciansnot but for the own engineers in the face of themedia, trying a priory of presenting a bridge asif- ex nihilo- it was already a monument” 7

On the other hand, it is very differentwhat the time becomes monument, like inthe case of the Bridge of Alcántara or of theBridge of Brooklyn in New York. It is the stepof the time who has given them the categoryof monument; since the monumental it wasnot deliberate there. “ The witnesses of themonumental and of the beauty- goes onFernández Ordóñez-, possess the character ofthe enigma and no code neither statement will beable to contain their truth. Seeking the opposite,the only thing that we will get is the deceit in thename of these concepts . The beauty is a high andchancy word that should not be used in vain. Theyhave never fit in this field neither the dogmatismsneither the doctrinarisms” And he continuesaffirming : “ It is not possible, then, to rational-ize the perceptions or the feelings, neither to ob-jective the subjective. The mysterious quality ofthe beauty allows it to cross all the epochs and allthe spaces, and remain intact” 8

Indeed, we coincide with the author inwhich the consideration of the object into asuperior status that places it in the art sphere,it does not depend on the desire of whomthey carried out it but of what the cominggenerations will think.

But the statements of FernándezOrdóñez go far away: “ If before it was, amongthe engineers of bridges, a contempt of the form,I mean, the conviction that the beauty of a workof engineering depends only on the adaptationto their aim, what gave rise to in many cases tothe destruction of aesthetics, now the dangercould come from the contrary side, I mean, of thecontempt of the function, what leads to exaggera-tions and waste unacceptables” 9

The author is warning on a current ten-

57


dency that goes toward a pretentiousaesthetization, trying to transform thebridges in a show. This way of configuringthe bridges, is based on a rethoric exaltationof the constructive language , with a com-plete lack of meaning

The carried out statements up open therestart the polemics about the social expense.It suits to clarify that, the engineers in theirquality of officials for Public Works, theyhave assumed the social paper, with all thatthis implies of responsibility, as for the aus-terity that should characterize their interven-tions, in the measure in which those dependon the public budget . “ Nothing is so danger-ous that a pretentious and diffuse aestheticismthat tries to transform the bridges into a showand that so many times confuse the Public Ad-ministration; that makes homogeneous the rigorand the banality, exalting a rethoric substanceand the absence of their meaning. What can beconsidered as art in a bridge - they know it or nottheir manufacturers, they attempt it or not- couldnever be something ephemeral and ornamental,but an as true value as the purely technical ones,the quantitative and objectives that permit thebridge to express through its beauty the connec-tion between life and form” 10

The expressed words by FernándezOrdóñez alerts on the threat of the “all isvalid” that began some year ago in the ar-tistic field and that , in the engineering field,rebounds during the eighties with a prolif-eration of forms in the bridges that they arenot justified for their function, but as a con-sequence of an ornamental boast .

CONCLUSIONS

The development of this work has sup-posed, in the moment of their conclusion, thediscovery of unexplored addresses thatcould be approached in next researches.

I would like to highlight some of thepoints that I consider more important in thisopening of the work toward the future.

1. From my modest point of view, I con-sider unavoidable to deep diverse in theparallelism of the historical series comingfrom different disciplinary fields how it hasbeen the case of the current: the bridge inthe landscape of the art, and the sculpture ofbridges.

2. The model of formal analysissketched here, requires of systematic andextensive developments, to could be , by

means of the establishment of programs ofinterdisciplinary cooperation that permitsto focus the problems from diverse perspec-tives.

3. This work has ended in the territoryof the Public. The investigation and devel-opment of this notion, linked to the environ-ment that they create the bridge and thesculptures, it is another of the amplificationsthat require the interdisciplinary cooperationagain.

4. Like direct consequence of the beforeexpressed, the necessity opens up of ap-proaching empiric studies of impact, analys-ing the valuation and positioning of the pub-lic in front of the aesthetic interest of a bridge

5. Lastly, a new possibility that opensup to the educational environment in whichI am located. It is necessary to approach thecomparison of the creative process that con-tinues the engineer in the design of a bridge,with the creative process of the sculptor inthe face of his/her work. For many years theartist has denied creative value to the projectmethodology of the engineer. Also for manyyears the engineer there is forgetfulness theaesthetic and creative necessary implicationsin the development of the project. It is possi-ble that a review of the educational frame-works linked both disciplines , discover usthe necessity of approaching the project de-vice in the context of the teaching of thesculpture , at the same time that the neces-sity of approaching the aesthetic device inthe project teaching of the engineer.

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NOTES

1. Armajani, Siah . Espacios de lectura.p.56, 1995

2. Armajani, op.cit., pp 35-37

3. Maderuelo (1990), p.164

4. Maderuelo (1994),p.130-131

5. Krauss (1979), pp 64-65

6. Fernández Ordoñez (1989), pp 14-16

7. Fernández Ordóñez (1994) p.1



10.Fernández Ordóñez (1994) p.1

REFERENCES

Armajani, SiahEspacios de Lectura. Barcelona. MACBA, 1995

Fernández Ordoñez, JAcerca de los ingenieros y la naturaleza. OP. Elimpacto ambiental,11,6-15.

Fernández Ordoñez, JEl puente ¿ monumento u obra funcional? .Conferencia pronunciada el 16-11-1994

García, AscensiónEl puente y la escultura. Un diálogo entrefuncionalidad y estética. Ph. Dissertation.Department of Sculputre. University of Barcelona,1996

Krauss, RosalindLa escultura en el campo expandido, in H. Foster(ed) La postmodernidad, Barcelona, Kairós,1985 (1979)

Maderuelo, JEl espacio raptado. Madrid. Mondadori, 1990

Maderuelo, JLa pérdida del pedestal.Madrid, Circulo de BellasArtes, 1994

Marchan Fiz, SLa estética de la cultura moderna. Madrid.Alianza, 1987


59

Forms andRepresentations of

Public Art/ PublicSpace

The Producer/ User dilemma

Dr. Chaké MatossianDr.in Philosophy and Theory ofCommunicationAcademie Royal des Beaux Arts.Bruxelles

Dr. Enric PolPsychologist and SociologistDepartment of Social PsychologyUniversity of Barcelona

Dr. Sergi ValeraPsychologistDepartment of Social PsychologyUniversity of Barcelona

Núria FrancoPsychologistDepartment of Social PsychologyUniversity of Barcelona

Dr. Fernando HernándezPsychologistDepartment of DrawingUniversity of Barcelona

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61

Discussing a theme such as public art in public space requirestrying to define at the outset

what is meant by the word «public». Whatdifference is there between the public, themasses, the crowd, everyone, anyone, no-body...? Are there art forms and artistic con-ceptions elaborated for a public understoodas a coherent group, and other art forms,which on the contrary refuse the idea of anunderlying group consensus and prefer en-visaging artistic activity according to theegalitarian mode which leads to the merg-ing of the notions of art and public fromwhich results a vague entity (everyone is anartist)? Other art forms can also approachartistic production according to the mode ofproduction of consumer goods, consideringthe public as an equivalent to the mass ofreal or potential consumers.

The different definitions of the adjectiveand substantive forms of the word «public»found in dictionaries clearly reveal these di-vergences. In French, the Petit Robert definesthe adjective form of «public» as «that whichconcerns people taken as a whole; that whichbelongs to the social collectivity» and thenoun form reflects social evolution in theevolution of language: in its old meaning,«public» signifies «the state, the collectivity»and in its modern meaning, «people, themasses». The Petit Larousse defines the ad-

jective form as «that which concerns an en-tire people, a collectivity, a social group» andthe noun form as «everyone indistinctly, thepopulation». In English, the Concise OxfordDictionary defines the adjective «public» as«concerning the people as a whole» and thenoun as «the [members of the] communityin general»; the public space par excellencebeing the «pub» - the abbreviated form ofpublic house. We are thus confronted, by thedefinitions given in each of the various dic-tionaries, with a gap between adjective andnoun, which is the gap separating the peo-ple or community from the mass or vagueand formless entity.

The different ways of thinking «public»will thus inevitably lead us to different vi-sions of public space, which needs circum-scribing before being able to demarcate thepossible role of art in it.

I. WHAT IS THE PUBLIC?

As expressed by Craig Owens, the con-cept of «public» is a malleable one which cangive backing to widely contradictory activi-ties. Protectionism, that privileged camou-flage of power, affirms itself in the field ofart by taking the «public good» as object andproject. Both the public and private sectorsdefend themselves by this argument and, in

Public Art /Public Space

Chaké Matossian

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who laugh for «a trifle», functions accord-ing to convulsive mimesis and regresses toan infantile phase (ten people become achild). Artists then, those who see «clearly»are entrusted «to impose silence on thecrowd». The crowd is under the control offear, fear of newness, of the unknown. Butthe crowd for Zola is not fundamentally ob-tuse. As a child, it possesses a quality, that ofending up by accepting those who imposethemselves. Ultimately, it is the crowd whohas the last word of the story, giving the art-ist his place in History. But there must becomprehension there, the public needs in-struction because it is a child. The principalerror to be made by an artist according toZola, consists of following - instead of guid-ing - the crowd, which gives way to the di-vision of the domain of art which he con-ceives as the image of political space, that ofthe «grand kingdom» now fragmented into«small republics» in which artists have be-come confectioners-decorators who, alongwith art critics, do no more than make noise.4Utilisation of the social hierarchy indicatesthat for Zola art is the domain of nobility,opposed to the people and the bourgeoisie:«this people of petty and bourgeois decora-tors makes a devil of a noise». Zola too, thuscritically looks at the relationship betweentaste and habits based on the hierarchicalstructure of social classes in which E. H.Gombrich found the origin of the metaphori-cal meaning of «noble».5 In its agitation, thecrowd, lost, laughs and its judgement oftaste, inexistent («it has neither method norbroad perspective») is merely the affirmationof a subjective opinion: «a work eitherpleases it or displeases it, that is all» and thatwhich pleases it, is what it knows, what it isused to seeing.6 The encounter with authen-tic art is then «a mere matter of education»,to which Zola, the «passer-by» willing «toexplain» to the crowd its fear, hoped to con-tribute. It is noteworthy that the work ofpedagogy is founded upon the very base ofrefusing newness, habit in another word. Theeducation transmutes the desire for reassur-ing banality into conscience habit of newnessand singular force.7

C. ART IN THE FACE OF COMSUMERSOCIETY STRATEGIES: FORM ANDFUNCTION

Distinguishing authentic art, linked torefinement and a level of competence, fromeasily accessible art common to the con-sumer society, Luigi Pareyson, far from op-

any event, museums today operate accord-ing to market laws: they resemble shoppingmalls and form alliances with private com-panies, e. g. that of Philip Morris and theWhitney Museum. For the public not to suf-fer for the sake of its own good, it becomesnecessary to identify: «the question of whois to define, manipulate and profit from ‘thepublic’ [which] is, I believe, the central issueof any discussion of the public function ofart today». 1

A. THE PUBLIC AS PRETEXT: CRITIQUEOF PUBLIC ART

Proposing an analysis of the strategiesof public art, considered as a new form ofbureaucracy, in light of past avant-gardistpractices, Krzysztof Wodiczko affirms hisdistancing of himself from «art in publicplaces». The domain of public art provides,at best, urban decoration: «To attempt to ‘en-rich’ this powerful, dynamic art gallery (thecity public art domain) with ‘artistic art’ col-lections or commissions - all in the name ofthe public - is to decorate the city with apseudo creativity irrelevant to urban spaceand experience alike».2

Choosing the way opened up by the«situationist» project which he re-evaluatescritically, Krzysztof Wodiczko defines theobjective of what he calls «critical public art»as «an engagement in strategic challenges tothe city structures and mediums that medi-ate our everyday perception of the world:an engagement through aesthetic-critical in-terruptions, infiltrations and appropriationsthat question the symbolic, psychopoliticaland economic operations of the city». 3

B. TRANSFORMING THE MASS INTO APUBLIC: THE COMPETENCE OF THEART IST

In the reflection of relations between art-ist and public, one option consists of con-sidering the artists as a former of public, forhim to assign the task of educating taste andart. It is a vocation with a Socratic tendencyas the artist, by creating something new, sur-prises and even scandalises and is conse-quently forced to struggle alone to prove theveracity of his discourse: (Socrates died toprove that he spoke the truth). This is simi-lar to the role Zola attributed to Manet. Zolaestablished a public/crowd dichotomyequivalent to the group/large number op-position, the crowd, (or large number) be-ing composed of «blind people who laugh»,


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posing art and society, seeks on the contraryto define and to defend their intimate andnecessary relationship: «the very develop-ment of social life presupposes creative actswhich invent the figures and produce themanifestations of it».8 If society is a «life offorms» art in turn testifies to a social charac-ter through popular legends, architecture,styles... The question of art’s role in publicspace raises that of the finality of art beyondutility. In other words, once we give art asocial role, a public function, we run the riskof subjugating it to a social, economic, po-litical finality, meaning making it disappearas art. The delicate question of the art/pub-lic relationship - a question towards whichPareyson is inclined - is thus: how can artplay a role in public space without exhaust-ing itself in this function? Pareyson offers aresponse based on the concept of intention:«Art can propose itself a social aim and as-pire towards the propagation of certain reli-gious, political, philosophical ideas in cer-tain milieux, exclusive like cenacles of initi-ates or vast like a social class, a people, a na-tion; which is not incompatible with the na-ture of art, providing that these intentionsand these functions do not restrict them-selves to being exterior limits, but transformthemselves into operative possibilities. Inthis case, the point is not aims which needto be followed by art but aims which needto be attained in art».9 Pareyson gives theartist the role of former of public by the per-sonality of his art (the innovative artist) whoalso forms taste and a community throughthe conviviality with the works. Lastly,Pareyson takes position concerning contem-porary society by distancing himself fromthe communicational criterion as a criterionpermitting the judgement of a work’s artis-tic value: «If communication was an exhaus-tive quality of art, we would have to admitthat a popularly acclaimed film or a simplesong is more artistic than a beautiful poemor a magnificent painting because it enjoysthe favour of the popular masses, much morenumerous than the milieux, necessarily ratherrestricted, of critics, amateurs and cultivatedindividuals».10 There is an «exceptional»character of art which is the guarantee of itsuniversality and its eternity and which theconsumer society eliminates by taking re-course to «art available to everyone», art ex-posed to wear and incomprehension in thelong term. Appealing to contemplation op-posed to consumption, Luigi Pareyson con-cludes by defending the ontological value ofart. Pareyson can be reproached for his ide-

alistic or even elitist vision: he can be op-posed to, for example, Bourdieu when heconsiders the perception and creation of artas a social fact having no other necessity thana «socio-logical» one. 11

Two points of his analysis could be use-ful in our reflection: communicability can notserve as an absolute criterion for the artisticvalue of a work, which to be art, must offer«operative possibilities».

D. PUBLIC RESIGNATION

A public can affirm itself by its inexist-ence, by its flight, its retreat. To a certain ex-tent, this is what Martha Rosler demon-strates, pointing out the disappearance of apolitically aware and cultivated public andthe crisis of legitimacy for political power ac-companying that of art: «I am reminded ofthe crisis of acceptance of ‘public art’ (theflop over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc is the bestexample), in which the passing audiencerefuses to constitute itself as its public, thebody implicated in its discourse. Certainlyin the absence of a political public - of eventhe conception of that space in which politi-cal dialogue and decision-making occurs -government-sponsored art can only be per-ceived as government-imposed art. Since itdoesn’t have a public - since there can hardlybe said to be a public - this art cannot be ac-cepted as work chosen by a designated gov-ernmental commission that stands for, thatrepresents, the public, the public at large».12

The resigning public is, for M. Rosler,that of consumers to whom bread and gamesare given and that which she does not call«public» but «audience». The public, to be apublic and not an audience, must be politi-cally aware, that is, it must be active and ca-pable of distinguishing the private spherefrom that of the public one.13

II. SPACE

A. THE QUESTION OF SITE

The question of art in public space is alsothe question of site, a question which doesnot fail to give attention to contemporaryartistic productions, particularly sculpture,which invokes the notion of «in situ». Thierryde Duve has analysed the way in which con-temporary works render evident the crisisof site, by attempting to reconstitute it. Mu-seums - especially the sculpture in museums- testify to the crisis of site: «modern society

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debate (end of ideals) as well as the way oflife which will aspire at imposing itself inthe coming years, i. e. «burrowing» which isthe follow up of cocooning16 both reveal thefragility, if not the disappearance, of thatwhich could be called a social space definedas a space of social «consensus». The mostelementary public space, the outside whichis the street, risks becoming a deserted space,one abandoned to those on the social fringe,social outsiders, as observed by MarthaRosler: «I am thinking also of the billboardsa number of us are now favouring as a formof ‘public address’, or the insertion of videointo some broadcast television slots (a nodhere to the problem of paying for these). Bill-boards and television represent items orevents in the transitional spaces... But atpresent the out-of-doors neither symbolisesnor necessitates a collectivity, not even thecollectivity of the mob. The streets may be-long to the people, but it doesn’t at presentwant them. They have been ceded to thehomeless, to the representatives of the stateand, one guesses, to the ‘criminal under-world’».17

A reflection on contemporary space alsopasses through a reflection on the form ofcontemporary social «consensus». In termsof space we are confronted by a reversal ofthe inside/outside opposition. Until nowsocial space has opposed itself to domesticintimacy, whereas the new space of encoun-ter, of discussion, of exchange which surgesforward is that of the screen of interactivemedia, the «highway of communications»etc.... The trail is blazed towards the inside.Public art can thus also be thought on thisnew public space which is the screen unit-ing many people around a desire, an idea ora common project. Public space becomes inthe case of interactive media a virtual space,it is tantamount to the sham in which Plato,and Rousseau in his footsteps, saw a loss ofliberty/vitality, a sign of the disappearanceof individual and social liberty, cut into bythis first system of representation, thegraphic sign, emanating essentially from thesham system of painting.18

These new media will not fail to influ-ence artistic production as well. That whichEdgar Wind demonstrated about photogra-phy can be applied for telecommunicationnetworks: a new technique related to visiondoes influence the taste of the public, the re-ception and creation of art works in suchfields as painting and scuptlure.19

• Scale: if scale has heretofore been de-fined in relation to the size of a man, to his

has substituted the space of social consen-sus where public art should exist, with apocket or an artificial replacement of insti-tutionalised space, the museum. Sculptureis never at home there» (p. 49). Thierry deDuve defines the site as being harmony ofplace (cultural attachment to the ground, tothe territory, to identity), of space (culturalconsensus on the perceptive grid of refer-ence) and of scale (the human body as meas-ure of all things).14 The art of today, art «insitu» sacrifices one of the parameters in or-der to preserve the other two and to try andregain the lost site. De Duve examines thesesacrifices in the light of constructions suchas architecture and sculpture:

• Sacrifice of place, link between spaceand scale: the Athens Charter, LeCorbusier and cosmopolitan art.• Sacrifice of space, link between placeand scale: Barnett Newman’s (transcen-dental) sculptures or Tony Smith (blackcube = a thing absorbed unto itself,«disabused affirmation of the anthropo-morphism of sculpture» (p. 46).• Sacrifice of scale, link between spaceand place: Brancusi and variations ofscale (endless columns, work on photog-raphy) the importance of place (the stu-dio) to which space finally identifies it-self. Carl André for whom roads are themeans of intensifying the perception ofsuburban zoning; Robert Smithson whohas theorised the non-site linked to ur-ban entropy better than anyone else.

These three parameters utilised by deDuve effectively enable examining the rela-tionship between public art and public space,but it could perhaps be interesting to exam-ine these very parameters in relation to thatwhich seems to emerge in social space:

• The place: will the recrudescence ofminorities’ narcissism, to borrow fromFreud, not engender a hypertrophy of place?The restoration of sites and monuments,when dictated by nationalistic or tourist in-terests, can create that which is false, thatwhich is false-true, historic simulation, whileany addition or restoration should be indi-cated as being such. Françoise Choay hasdenounced these artifices by using a fewexamples found in Canada, Germany andFrance.15

• Space: the devalorisation of the politi-cal class (widespread corruption, political«house-cleaning» all over) and the political


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format, it must be understood that the con-temporary way of life alters, more or less sur-reptitiously, the format, the proportions ofman. Man today, as emphasised by PaulVirilio, is an artificial body, the model of thesuperman having become an over-equippedinvalid. Artificial bodies, no longer use theirlegs, enclosed in automobiles, perched onescalators, waiting for (slouched on thecouch) the arrival of «telepi-zza », while thefingers, from now on grafted to the remotecontrol device, zap the narcotic programmeson the new and only window unto the world.On the inside, man changes as technologi-cal parts of which the ancestor is the pace-maker, are also grafted to him.20 Finally, foodalso gives way to morphological modifica-tions which will contribute to disturbing thereference of the notion of scale: junk food en-genders monsters and on the contrary, fit-ness freaks end up by loosing their humanformat, transforming themselves into sculp-tures, or sometimes, into anatomical figuresfor study.

B. THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST

Trying to think the role of the artist inpublic space recalls two other points raisedamong the programme’s themes: that of thecurriculum followed by art students and thatof the link between art and politics, or moreappropriately, the political sphere. The art-ist has always had a role to play in the pub-lic domain, since Antiquity he has been con-tributing in giving an image of power by cre-ating the image of a city, of a town, he hasbeen fashioning the space of power, the spaceof the political sphere, of the polis.

The question of public art is one of de-fining the means of achieving art and notpropaganda (tourist, political, nationalist).Thus, what does he do so that we are facedwith art, how can art be defined? As empha-sised by Françoise Choay, the problem ofcontemporary art, which seems to be thesource of creativity’s bankruptcy, resides inthe absence of criteria of refusal, in the ac-ceptability/acceptation of everything: «Thisaesthetic availability, the openness to a uni-versality of art which is celebrated as an ac-complishment and as the access to a supe-rior level of sensibility, could only be no morethan a sign of impotence... The triumphanteclecticism of our museums, like that of ourmajor art exhibitions, also reveals a hardpressed Kunstwollen whose creative forcesare petering out and whose pleasure is be-coming insipid».21

If contemporary art lobbies are to becriticised, the elitist-initiatic aspect on whichthese lobbies play, the opposite aspect mustalso be criticised, that of a democratisation,not so much of art, but of artistic genius orof judgement or taste. Everyone is an artist,everything is art; that is the danger of cer-tain remarks made by certain artists such asJoseph Beuys from whom we keep only whatis suitable. It is what gives place to the«popular aesthetic» theorised by RichardShusterman, conferring to rap and to tag thesame artistic value as other forms of musicand plastic art, where the vulgar/noble hi-erarchy has no further meaning and wherethe praxis becomes a legitimised art (Beuysalso said that «art is life»).22

There is thus a double contemporaryfailure: firstly, the narcissism of a strata ofartists mirroring themselves in the values putinto place by lobbies, and secondly, the re-fusal, engendered by the hypertrophy of theidea of democracy as «medio-cracy», of thedifficulty of art, both in its creation and inits reception, refusal of the difficulty whichcomes down to, in the last place, the refusalof abstraction and the refusal of the shock ofthe image, meaning that which it disturbsand slams into the real while revealing it asimaginary.

On these two preceding lines, it mustnonetheless be observed that everythingdoes not lead to failure. Artists promoted bylobbies (Buren for example) intervene inpublic space, and can meaningfully (i.e. bear-ing meaning) contribute to the urban land-scape. Moreover, a good number of artistshave worked in the shadows for many yearsand have only been adopted lately by lob-bies. Belonging to an art lobby should thusnot function as a negative criterion in itself.

Refusal by the public can also have posi-tive aspects, permitting limiting the exag-geration of lobbies, disturbing intellectual (orpseudo-intellectual) authoritarianism of cer-tain groups affirming themselves only by therecovery of concepts used as magic words.The reaction of the public can also bring tolight the exaggerated spending in times ofcrisis on works which could easily be con-fused with a heap of rubbish, a heap of wastemetal or consumer goods found in super-markets. It is thus incumbent on the artist toknow how to defend himself, which JosephBeuys did, for example in Bale, when hemingled in an anti-Beuys demonstrationaimed at criticising the purchase by the cityfor its museum, a work by Beuys («Foyer I»)at a cost of 300,000 Swiss francs. At the heart

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‘you have put me in poor position by mak-ing me odious to the inhabitants of the coun-try’», the term odious here being a less foulsmelling translation of the word «stinking».For Kant, smell (be it good or bad) is a fetterto liberty, an invasion of space. Tellenbachalso recalls that the envelope is primarilycorporal, then that of the family, than that ofgroups to which the family belongs. It is insmell that the German psychiatrist sees thesource of our aesthetic relationship with theworld, taste giving place to good taste, sa-vour to savoir. This reminder, in the frame-work of our seminar, is not aimed at affirm-ing that public art should have smell, but thatit could be atmospheric, meaning enhancethe envelope, take into account that whichappears insignificant, indistinguishable yetplays, nonetheless, an essential role, whichhad been brought to light by the Seducer ofKierkegaard.25

In the framework of art history, we couldapply the atmospheric dimension to one ofthe important themes of the Italian Renais-sance, that of aria, a theme intimately linkedto the act of creation. Aria, as analysed byAndré Chastel26, designates both the air thatwe breath and the atmosphere of the city. Atthe time of the Renaissance, aria was associ-ated with the question of genius and ex-plained why certain artists, brilliant in Flor-ence for example, became incapable of pro-ducing a work in Rome.27 The genius of theartist was related to genius loci which resultedfrom the weight of history, from all that art-ists, throughout history, were able to createin that place. The cultural atmosphere of acity thus becomes the air we breath, its natu-ral air.

Recourse to the atmosphere proves to bea way for us to try to define that which, inpublic space, can appear as art and can con-tribute to the creation of public space. A workpossessing an atmospheric dimension, en-genders an image which goes beyond thedimension of the real and the daily, an im-age which is not flat. Public art can thus bedefined as that which enables giving publicspace a dimension other than the dimensionsdelimited in daily space and time, a dimen-sion which succeeds in giving form to thereal and the daily. Or, moreover, that whichRichard Sennett refers to as «narrativespace»: «another form for time in space...capable of guiding more humane urban de-sign. Spaces can become full of time whenthey permit certain properties of narrativesto operate in everyday life».28 This particu-lar space which needs to be created is for

of the demonstration, Beuys succeeded inreversing the situation through a show ofcommunicational magic. He distributed leaf-lets against himself and signed the felt jack-ets of certain demonstrators, who departingwith «a Beuys», no longer dared to discardthem. At the finish, Beuys was left with allof the accessories of the demonstration andmade an installation with them which hegave to the museum, accomplishing thatwhich had been announced in the demon-strators’ leaflets: «we are making a ‘Foyer II’which doesn’t cost anything» (video cassette,ARTE programme).

Faced with an art and a judgement oftaste which no longer dare to affirm andfaced with the implantation of mega-struc-tures by the industrial economic powers, thatwhich has disappeared is, according toFrançoise Choay, the competence to edify, oronce again, the arts which «belongs to cor-poral poiesis». Proposing to think edificationin the interstices of a mosaic of spaces, Choaydefines it as a «competence to enchant» andemphasises that it requires, in order to exist,legal and institutional structures.23

III. THE ATMOSPHERIC: AHYPOTHESIS

The delicate but fundamental questionthus consists of trying to trace the criteriawhich enable us to judge that we are facedwith public art. As far as I am concerned, Ibelieve that we can move forward by sum-moning a dimension not raised by de Duve,but one that englobes the ones he did raise.I’ll call it the atmospheric dimension, refer-ring to the German psychiatrist HubertusTellenbach.24

Tellenbach demonstrates the influenceof the atmosphere on the psychic constitu-tion of a «normal» individual in his relationto the world. Taste and smell are the mostarchaic senses through which we apprehendthe world and perceive space. The olfactoryexperience attaches itself to our position inspace, it is the most animalistic way of situ-ating one’s self in the world. The atmos-pheric category can be brought to the aura,to the envelope or sound of the voice. Smellsituates us in the world and in relation toothers, it is the limit of being. He who smellsbad is isolated, stench is connotated morally,he who smells is rejected outside of publicspace: «Jacob said to Simeon and to Levy:


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Sennett that where displacement operates[«Time begins to do the work of giving placescharacter when the places are not used asthey were meant to be» (p.196] that wherethe surprise and discovery happen: «linearspaces may be defined as those spaces inwhich form follows function. Narrativespaces are, instead, spaces like playgrounds,places of displacement» (p. 194). In thesespaces the urbanist should privilege «weakborders rather than strong walls» (p. 196),without however allowing for unlimitedchanges which exhaust the sense of construc-tion.

From the point of view of the city, thedifficulty of public art consists in servingpractical ends (tourist, economic) whileavoiding propaganda, the platitude of jux-taposition between a «to show» and a «tosay» which gives place to stereotype andconfuses the space of the community withinthe common places of discourse (verbal andimage). Art consists then in operating dis-tortions in time and space, in order to createa public space in relation to that of the citywhile being other. This is basically what ElGreco did in Vista de Toledo and Vista y planode Toledo. He responded to the economic andpolitical imperatives of his adopted citywhich needed to be saved, to which the func-tion of heart of the kingdom needed to bereinstated. Art is thus there to boast the ad-vantages of the city, in order for the nobilityand the monarchy, settled in Madrid, to re-invest Toledo and enable by their presence,economic resuscitation. El Greco introducesdistortions, he treats the space of the city likehe treats his bodies; he inverses the positionsof the cathedral and the Alcazar in one ofthe paintings and in the other, places theTavera hospital on a cloud: he alters thescales, raising certain places to give greatervalue to the cathedral, palace or hospital. Asemphasised by J. Brown and R. L. Kagen, ElGreco manipulates reality adjusting it to hisown ends, that is to say, the idealisation ofthe city aimed at making it attractive, but -and it is for this reason that we have art andnot propaganda - he succeeds, by theinventivity of his distortions, in giving thecity an image of a unique and special place.29

Public space punctuated by public art,atmospheric space, would be equivalent toa space where people find themselves andfind themselves «there», while finding some-thing else. Public space where public art in-tervenes would become a meeting space,meeting with and image/an object (whichno longer needs being distinguished in this

dimension because it is to a certain extentthe fringe of the real, putting into place thereality of the image and the object as imagi-nary). This meeting with familiar strange-ness or strange familiarity also engenders themeeting between «passers-by», to reiterateZola’s expression, around points which formthe image of the city, a network which goesbeyond the practical finality of markers andsignals. Gillo Dorflès examined the resem-blance between the psycho-physiologicalstructure of the individual and that of thearchitecture which puts into place the cat-egories of Inne and Aussen. If architecture isfirstly shelter (a uterus) the history of mod-ern architecture reveals, with glass and steel,a tendency to exteriorise the interior subse-quently counterbalanced by the «necessityof isolating one’s self» - a return to the niche.Architecture would thus not only send usback to the body, but also to the psychicstructure, to this interiorisation /exteriori-sation movement which is also found infeminine (houses, churches) and masculine(obelisks, minarets, menhirs) symbols. Archi-tecture opting for exteriority (openness,transparency) perceived as emancipationfrom the shell ends up by disrupting the pri-vate/public distinction and by engendering,for the inhabitants, problems stemming fromthis refusal of the psychically essentialinteriority. Dorflès writes further: «I esteemthat in a prospective acceptance of architec-tural practice, it is very important to empha-sise the opportunity of not neglectinginteriority in favour of spatial exteriority, butto firmly demand the simultaneous partici-pation and presence of the two elements. (...)it is a fact that ... in the case of architecture, itis the very interiority of the work which be-comes active. For this reason, the Innen/Aussen dialectic finds a double manifestationin architecture: in the Inside/Outside of man,and in the Inside/Outside of an edifice, andfinally in the simultaneous action and the‘interaction’ of these two interiorities».30

Public art would be the punctuation andintonation of public space. In this sense, nota single detail is insignificant. In this sense,design can become a part of public art, be-cause the markers and signals, informationpoints (screens in cities, Automatic Teller Ma-chines) could serve as backing for artisticresearch. But this work on details only makessense in relation to a project and in relationto a context (including that of decontex-tualisation) in which the object is a part.

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9 Luigi Pareyson, Conversazioni di estetica,Milano, Ugo Mursia, 1966. French translation,Conversations sur l’esthétique, Paris, Gallimard,1992, chap. 4, pp. 47-59: «L’oeuvre d’art et sonpublic», p. 49.

10 Ibid., p. 51.

11 Ibid., p. 57.

12 Pierre Bourdieu, «Sociologie de la perceptionesthétique» in Les Sciences humaines et l’oeuvred’art, Bruxelles, La Connaissance: «But theperception and appreciation of art also dependon the intention of the viewer which is itself aconsequence of conventional norms guiding therelation to art in a specific historic and socialsituation...»(p. 162), «...the process which leadsto the constitution of art as art is correlative of atransformation of the relationship which artistsmaintain with non artists and thus with otherartists, a transformation which leds to theconstitution of an intellectual and artistic fieldrelatively autonomous and to a correlativeelaboration of a new definition of the function ofthe artist and his art... Thus the conquest ofprimacy of form over function is the most specificexpression of artists’ autonomy and its pretentionto detain and impose the principals of strictlyaesthetic legitimacy» (pp. 164-165)...

13 Martha Rosler, «The Birth and Death of theViewer: On the Public Function of Art», in Foster,op. cit., p. 13.

14 Martha Rosler, ibid., p. 14, thus distinguishes«audience», «by which [she means] roughlyconsumers of spectacles», from «public», «whichrefers rather to the space of decision-making».

15 Thierry de Duve, «Ex Situ», Cahiers du MuséeNational d’Art Moderne, n°27, Paris, CentrePompidou, 1989, pp. 39-55.

16 Françoise Choay, L’allégorie du patrimoine,Paris, Seuil, 1992, pp. 165-166.

17 Faith Popcorn, who named and predicted therise of Cocooning, sees it transformed into«burrowing» in the 1990s, linked to pollution,increased crime, recession and AIDS:«Cocooning has moved into a newer, darkerphase - breaking down into what we are identifyingas three new Trend Evolutions: the ArmoredCocoon, the Wandering Cocoon and theSocialized Cocoon. Cocooning is no longerexclusively about a place, the home, but about astate of mind - self-preservation». The PopcornReport, New York, Harper Business, 1992, pp.27-29.

18 Martha Rosler, op. cit., p. 14.

19 Plato, Phaedra, 274c-276a, Plato’s critique ofwriting could be considered as a starting point forthe critique of the artificial body as it was

NOTES

1 Craig Owens, «The Birth and Death of theViewer: On the Public Function of Art», inDiscussions in Contemporary Culture, Edited byHal Foster, Dia Art Foundation, n°1, Seattle, BayPress, 1987, pp. 16-23. Also, see FrançoiseChoay, op. cit., below, p. 245, footnote 19: «thesirens of culture deploy a mercantile ingenuityinsensitive to the ridiculous: in Paris, the shop atthe Bagatelle garden sells artificial flowers andthat of the National Library, towels».

2 C. Owens, ibid., p. 23.

3 Krzysztof Wodiczko, «Strategies of PublicAddress: Which Media, Which Publics?», inFoster, op. cit., p. 41.

4 Ibid., p. 42.

5 Emile Zola, Ecrits sur l’art, «Edouard Manet,étude bibliographique et critique», [1867], (III. Lepublic), Paris, Gallimard, 1991, pp. 163-169. «Butno one leads the crowd, and what do you want itto do in the great uproar of contemporaryopinions? Art has, so to speak, broken itself up:the grand kingdom, fragmenting itself, has formeda crowd of small republics. Each artist has drawnthe crowd towards himself, flattering it, giving itthe toys it likes, decorated and ornamented withpink favours. Art has thus become amongst us avast candy store, where there are sweets to suiteach taste. Painters have not been more thanmean decorators who work at ornamenting ourhorrible modern apartments...» (p.167.)

6 «...the characteristic circumspection of ‘noble’does not only apply itself simply to behaviour. Itpertains...to a moral constraint, a control ofpassions, a mastery of basic reactions...; andwhen Nietzsche, in a dithyrambic eulogy of ‘noble’,designates, as an admirable characteristic of thearistocracy, ‘the slowness of gesture and pauseof gaze’, he thus depicts a personality with perfectself-control whose capacities for mobility andvision are in no way dependant on spontaneousimpulses». See, «Métaphores de valeurs traduitesvisuellement par l’art», in Méditations sur uncheval de bois, Mâcon, Editions W, 1986, pp. 42-43. (English title, «Symbols and Values, an InitialStudy: XIII Symposium of the Conference onScience, Philosophy and Religion to theDemocratic Way of Life», edited by Lyman Brysonet al., New York, 1954.)

7 Zola, op. cit., p. 168: «that which pleases it isalways that which is the most common, that whichit is used to seeing each year».

8 Ibid., p. 166: «It is just a question of habit. Bymeans of seeing the obstacle, fright and defiancediminish. Then there is always some complacentpasser-by who makes us ashamed of our angerand is willing to explain to us our fear. I merelywish to play the role of this modest passer-by...»


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developed by Paul Virilio (see footnote 18). In fact,writing atrophies the memory and thus kills theliving, technique replaces a living faculty andsubjugates man, the system of representationwhich is writing is deadly and alienating. Writingraises the question of public: while the oraldiscourse addresses itself to a certain public, thetext, as a dead discourse, becomes a prey for all,meaning anyone, those who know nothing, thinkthey know and deform it through falseinterpretation.Death and deformity linked to writing andconcerning public life and public space findthemselves in the critique elaborated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The loss of liberty manifestsitself by the shuttering of public debate, the lossof oral discourse is indicated by the return towriting through posters, and the forum disappearsto the benefit of drawing rooms, the voice of theorator is metamorphosed into a murmur. Thesetransformations are indicative of the force andviolence, whose motor is money, which arecontrary to liberty and which annihilate theexistence of public space. See, Essai sur l’originedes langues, Bibliothèque du Graphe, chapter XX,pp. 542-543: «Societies have adopted their lastform: nothing more can be changed in themexcept with canon and gold; and as there isnothing more to be said to the people other thangive money, it is said by posters on street corners,or by soldiers in houses. People do not need tobe brought together for that: on the contrary, theymust be kept isolated, which is the first rule ofmodern politics».

20 Edgar Wind, «La mécanisation de l’art» in Artet Anarchie, Paris, Gallimard, 1988, pp. 94-110.Original Title; Art and Anarchy, 1963.

21 Paul Virilio, Du surhomme à l’homme surexcité»,in L’Art du moteur, Paris, Galilée, 1993: «...if the‘superman’ of tomorrow is the over-equipped able-bodied man who controls his environment withoutphysically moving, as does the prosthesis-equipped invalid who, today already, acts andmoves about without really exerting muscularforce, evolution is moving into a techno-scientificphase...».«If there thus exists pressures directed by thenatural environment - the biosphere - which leadsto natural selection according to Darwin, there alsoexists pressures exerted by the artificialenvironment - the technosphere - behaviouralinertia of the sedentary urbanite is no longerwithout consequences». Raising the question ofthe control of the environment and the body, oreven that of the liberty of the individual, Viriliopoints out his link to «design»: «the questionremains intact, but we can at least consider thatit directly concerns design, the meta-design ofcustoms and behaviours because it introduceshumanity to the nature-size experimentation of areally meta-physical body, of a meta-bodyindependent of environmental conditions, to theextent where real space, the expanse of the worlditself but also the thickness of the body itself ofthe individual will progressively lose its importance

to the benefit of the real time of impulses, of nano-technological over-excitations which will succeedvital rhythms» (pp. 151-153).

22 Françoise Choay, op. cit., p. 192.

23 Richard Shusterman, L’Art à l’état vif - la penséepragmatiste et l’esthétique populaire, Paris,Minuit, 1991. Original American title: PragmatistAesthetics - Living Beauty, Rethinking Art.

24 Françoise Choay, op. cit., p. 193.

25 Françoise Choay, ibid., p. 196: «Other thanperiodical exceptions in countries like Germanyor Italy with strong aedilitary tradition, or like Japantraditionally attentive to the symbolism of micro-environments, these interstitial spaces have falleninto disuse and have become, amongst generalindifference, the sewage farm of the ugly. Theyare nonetheless, for our competence to edify, thepossible field of reconquest, reconquest of theexiled beauty which our practitioners have erasedfrom our minds. The vigorous art of technicalworks, still little known, because ill aware of selfand unfettered by memory, will thus becounterpointed by an art of close space, forgetfulof its erstwhile enchantments, but faithful to itscompetence to enchant... Legal and institutionalstructures are necessary, but political in theantique sense of the word. They will only beefficient if diversified and demultiplied and if, inplace of tolerating them, everyone consciouslyand actively contributes to their being put inplace».

26 Hubertus Tellenbach, Goût et Atmosphère,Paris, P.U.F., 1983. Original edition: Geschmackund Atmosphäre, Salzburg, 1968.

27 All of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic, that of theSeducer, is based on the atmospheric (theUnheimliche); it works on space throughapparently insignificant details. The Seduceroperates minute displacements of objects or partsof the body, he awakens memories to create astrange sensation of déjà vu, he accords greaterimportance to punctuation and intonation than tothe written or oral message.

28 André Chastel, Fables, Formes, Figures, Paris,Flammarion, vol. I. 1978, pp. 393-395. Chastelreveals the presence of the aria theme in Vasari’swork which reports, for example, thatMichelangelo left Florence for Rome «per laqualita dell’aria» and that inversely, Rosso, inRome, painted «the worst work of his entire life».

29 Vasari wrote about Vincenzo da San Gimignano:«Experience shows that often the same man doesnot have the same style all over and does notproduce the same works all over, but better orworse ones depending on the quality of theplace», Giorgio Vasari, Les vies des meilleurspeintres, sculpteurs et architectes, Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1983, vol. V., p. 298.

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30 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye -The Design and Social Life of Cites, London/Boston, Faber and Faber, 1990, p. 190.

31 Jonathan Brown and Richard L. Kagan, «La‘Vista de Toledo’», in Visiones del pensamiento -Estudios sobre El Greco, Madrid, Alianza, 1984,(original title: Figures of Thought: El Greco asInterpreter of History: Tradition and Ideas,Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art): Alcrear esta vision inolvidable de su ciudadadoptive, El Greco garantizo que Toledo,cualesquiera que fuesen las vicisitudes de lahistoria, seria siempre considerada como un lugarespecial».

32 Gillo Dorflès, «‘Innen’ et ‘Aussen’ en Architectureet en Psychanalyse», Nouvele Revue dePsychanalyse, n°9, Paris, Gallimard, 1974, p. 237-238. The predominance of Innen is found in ArtNouveau (La Pedrera, Gaudi’s Colon Güell ...)whereas the predominance of Aussen is to befound in the work of Le Corbusier, Mies, Gropius,etc.


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STARTING ASSUMPTIONS

WHAT DO WE UNDERSTAND BYSYMBOLISM ‘A PRIORI’

When ever an organism of the socialstructure is able to promote or propose thecreation or change of an environment, witha specific intention, it is wielding power.

This action aims at endowing space withshape, structure, elements and name tryingto highlight some values, aesthetics and factsto stand in the group mind or to removeother facts, memories and experiences con-sidered not desirable, from the collective. Itis intended to create a symbolic space with aprefixed meaning that can or cannot be as-similated by the population as a referenceand become or not a shared symbolic ele-ment.

Most of the big urban actions and artis-tic interventions in public space, have thesecharacteristics. For instance, building amonument or a public space more or lessmonumental, is intended to evoke a memory,a fact, a person or to put a political, artisticor social moment on record. Moreover, thepower structure, from its own office, givesnames to streets, squares and parks with theintention to endow them with a specific sym-bolic value.

Most of the theoretical proposals aimed at explaining symbolization processes -how

specific objects or places become significantto human experience- differ in processes orfunctions. However, different approacheshave a common point, they share a part ofthe explanation focused on social agreementon individual experience of the objects orplaces as the origin of symbolization. His-torically, there is a double origin of the crea-tion of collective spaces: social and sponta-neous creation of new places by the users,and planning or intentional action of thosepeople with the power to change the envi-ronment. Our proposal of talking about ‘apriory’ and ‘a posteriori’ symbolism arisesfrom this double origin.

Symbolisma priori •Symbolisma posteriori

Enric Pol

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ritories as their own, in order to build theirpersonality, to structure their cognition andsocial relationships and to satisfy their iden-tity and belongingness needs. Some authors,such as Lefebvre, refers as ‘social construc-tion of the space’ to how life spaces -the city-are traditionally built from a social agree-ment and with a certain level of citizens’participation. This is to the advantage of astrong identification of people with theircreation, and regardless of its structure spacehas a strong significance for their users. Someexamples of this are the spontaneous meet-ing points in towns or the surprising andmarginal corners used by teenagers or ur-ban bands as a common place. (eg: same barsas a social center that evoke the origin ofmigrant people)

Nevertheless, this phenomenon can alsooccur in spaces preconceived with an ‘apriory’ significance. In this case, time is re-quired, a longer or shorter time dependingon the situation. Hence, the structural as-pects of the intervention, together with thefunctional virtues of the space, are crucial.(eg: Colombus monument)

ART IN THE CITY

Art in public space is ‘par excellence’located between the ‘a priory’ and the ‘aposteriori’ symbolism. This is because anyartistic intervention intends to become ashared referent and a plastic expression ofcollective values or even to adjust to thesevalues from its own aesthetics.

Art in public spaces is mainly an urbanphenomenon, or one of rural civilizations butwith a very complex social plot. Throughhistory, one can find different controllingfunctions of art which are always present butwith prominent aspects in different stages.

In some periods art is used as a powerdemonstration in front of the enemy and asa threat and strength demonstration in frontof their own people. This is the case of theEgyptian and Aztec temples and pyramids.

In other times, there is a predominanceof art as monument which reinforces proc-esses of exaltation of celebrities, of deifica-tion and of idolatry, such as in the case ofthe Roman Empire and the Roman-CatholicChurch.

Art is always communication, amongother things, but in some specific momentsthe function of transmission of an articu-lated message is pre-eminent, like in Roman-esque painting or in modern comics.

The actions can have different conse-quences:

1.- The intervention could suit theshared values, aesthetics, culture and tradi-tion of the population. In this case, it willeasily be integrated to the shared referentsas a social joint element of the collective re-inforcing its identity.

2.- The intervention could not suit thepopulation’s sensitivity, breaking its courseof action and tradition. There are three pos-sible results of this:

a) The population feels assaulted and itactively rejects the intervention. How-ever, due to its severity, the interven-tion could still become inevitable refer-ent of the collective.b) The population feels estranged to theintervention and to the symbolic valuegiven. Thus, the intervention does notreinforce the collective identity and itis not a collective referent. (e.g.: al-though it’s a powerful structure, themonument to Jose Antonio Primo deRivera that has been in the presentAvinguda Josep Tarradellas for thirtysomething years, it is unknown by thecitizens and it is not socially significant)c) Although the intervention disregardsthe population’s sensitivity, it bringsabout new elements, values and sym-bols (eg: modernity, dynamism, status,wealth) which are positively evaluatedby the group. The intervention is easilyassimilated as an identifying referentand joint element of the group. (eg: thenew Olympic Marina area)

WHAT DO WE UNDERSTAND BYSYMBOLISM ‘A POSTERIORI’

We refer as ‘a posteriori’ symbolism tothose objects and places which obtain ameaning for every individual and for thesocial group as a whole through time anduse. Therefore, they play an active role in thereference world of a collective. Those spaceswhich become common places, are loadedwith meaning from social interaction andwhich represent joint elements of the com-munity.

‘A posteriori’ symbolic spaces do notrequire any powerful or notable formal struc-ture. Thus, they can be structurally insignifi-cant but terribly relevant for a specific groupof a population.

Actually in our cities there are plenty ofspaces with these characteristics. People, in-dividually or in group, need to identify ter-


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SOME EXISTENTIAL PROCESSESRELATED TO URBAN SYMBOLICSPACE

Urban space symbolism is not a super-fluous anecdote. It seems to be a basic anddeterminant component of social well-being.Studies about quality of life in Barcelona (Poli Dominguez 1986; Pol, Guardia i col. 1990)have confirmed the tendency that if there isa good identification with the city, a strongplace identity, the global satisfaction level ofcitizens is higher. This is true, in spite of citi-zens’ strong criticisms to services or particu-lar aspects of their daily reality.

An old and well known proposition toexplain that is from Lynch in The Image ofthe City. According to Lynch, an element orurban space requires three characteristics tobecome symbolic for people andcollectivities:

a) Identity, it can be distinguished fromother elements, it has its own entity,apart from the rest, which enables it tobe perceived as a whole, independentlyof its context.b) Structure which points a guided re-lationship between the element and theobserver or other objects.c) Meaning, understood as an emotiveand functional implication by the sub-ject.

However, these aspects are not enoughto explain the process, since it needs a theo-retical explanation regarding the social di-mension, which we will try to tackle.

People and groups need to identifythemselves with their own physical spaceand with a group which gives them keys tocreate and share their way of life. That is tosay, people need reference models. What isknown by culture, shared ethical, aestheticand relational values are in the deepest ofthe psychological processes.

The feelings of attachment,belongingness, ownership and managing,through legal property, regular use or iden-tification has been called appropriation of space(Korosec 1976). This concept and the stillvalid concept of alienation are both sides ofthe same question. It takes time for a newcollective identity to appear but it is sup-ported by the organization of urban environ-ment (action-transformation component inappropriation of space). At the same time,the same appropriated environment sup-

Art as commemoration and as drama-tization can be found in the preparation andproperties accompanying the Prince in theRenaissance, as well as in the Nazism and,in contemporary time, in such big sport cel-ebrations as the Olympics Games.

Art as abstraction can be considered themost representative art of this century, in-tending to be pure art, a simple expressionof the artist’s feelings or the aesthetic expe-rience of the observer.

Never before the XXth century, man wasso aware of the will of ‘making’ art, insteadof letting daily life become art. This impliesinexorably the will of creating significance,or at least the contribution or the reflectionof shared social values or values that can po-tentially be shared. Abstraction inevitablyloses then its pure art dimension of feelingor aesthetic experience and becomes a valueof social interaction and communication,provided it is integrated in the collective ex-perience.

These five aspects approached, whichare not exhaustive -power demonstration,exaltation of celebrities, commemoration offacts, dramatization, transmission of an ar-ticulated message and abstraction as a feel-ing and a aesthetic experience- show thefunction of art in urban space. Furthermore,they are functions of art in urban space re-gardless of the artistic intention of its crea-tion. In other words, they summarize thequalities and virtues of a space which be-came symbolic for a collective. This arguesabout the need of public art as somethingapart from the own conception of publicspace. It also links its meaning to the qualityof space understood as a whole.

Modern world’s overspecialization hasbrought about a separation of creative func-tions which detaches the actions of inhabit-ing, organizing, structuring, building anddecorating, and makes the social symboli-zation process difficult.

Again we find the distinction between‘a priory’ and ‘a posteriori’ symbolism. Weshould ask when, why and which aspects aspace must hold in order to become symbolicfor a community.

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URBAN REGENERATION

scribed time ago. Therefore, changing to dif-ferent shapes demands an effort that peopleare reluctant to make. ‘Good shapes’ are ref-erents which allow us to identify objects,functions, preferences and the group or classwe belong to. Changing these references is along cultural process linked to the experi-ence people have with the space or object.Thus, it is a coherent and logical situationthat citizens prefer innovative objects -urbanfurniture, objects of art- but only partiallyinnovative, allowing them to identify theirfunction and use them confidently. A beau-tiful and decorative fountain which cannotbe clearly identified as a sculpture, a dogtoilet or a drinking fountain, although itcould manage to comply with functionality,aesthetics or emotivity, fails to communicatetrust and identification.

Confusion between innovation and ex-travagance (often discomfort) is causingsome distrust in design, which is risky.Progress in art, through history, has usedsome resources as innovation, extravaganceand perversion of ‘good shapes’, which isgood. However, if we apply them to cityobjects at random (or selected in the wrongway), this could reinforce a modern andpost-modern tendency in urban life: the city,public spaces, streets and their objects areseen as aggressive for citizens and have theperverse effects mentioned in the paragraphabove. This is due to structural problems ofthe social model we are immersed in and notdue to design, which could also be of helpto it. Urban life elements, i.e.: quick rhythmof life, quick changes, stimulus saturation,different ways in which values and educa-tion are transmitted and distance betweendecision centres and the street, turn the cityinto aggressive centers that stands againstmore and more defensive and inhibited citi-zens. Design and its good use can make en-vironment either kinder or more stressful.

Design has always existed in a more orless limited way by selected fields. Populari-zation, or maybe generalization, of design isa consequence of fashion. Furthermore,popularization results from economy, pro-duction methods and market becoming in-ternational. Some factors such as distancebetween production and consumption, at-tributing desirable status symbols to whathas been designed, massive and concen-trated production for a broad market endedwith productive autarky, which is not nec-essarily bad. Nevertheless, this has alsoended with form and aesthetic diversity inour communities. There is an increasing ten-

ports the created identity (symbolic identi-fication component) (Pol 1994, Pol & Moreno1992).

Social identity is supported by placeidentity (Proshansky, Fabian & Kaminoff1983; Lally 1988; Hunter 1987). As Valera(1993) has shown, this is an independentprocess of the aesthetic and monumentalquality. Meanings of city spaces suggestedfrom its town-planning treatment, buildingmonuments or taxonomy (what we called ‘apriory’ symbolism) will not be successfulunless there is a recreation-approval-appro-priation process by the group (Valera, Pol etal. 1988).

When the collective sees the interventionas gratuitous, against its referents or notbringing new desirable entity and identityelements, the intervention results in feelingsof alienation and inhibition instead of iden-tification. Since public properties are per-ceived as something alien and not common,apart from inhibition, people show aggres-siveness.

SOME UNEXPECTED EFFECTS OFDESIGN AND SPACE STRUCTURE

In discussions about design, controversybetween functionality and aesthetics, ration-ality and emotivity, always arises, with pro-fessionals wanting to reduce it to a questionbetween good and bad designs. Market laws-regardless we like them or not- promotes‘natural selection’. Since objects designed tenyears ago are sold more easily now, fashionis a relative phenomenon.

But what happen with urban furnitureor public space art that are not directly pur-chased by users. In this case discussions arebetween designers and public agents whochoose, buy and locate these elements in thestreet.

As we have already mentioned, Barce-lona modern image is excellently approvedas a whole by citizens. In spite citizens arestill critical with specific places and havetheir own preferences.

In spite of the fact, pointed out by socialsciences, that some people can have prefer-ences towards innovation, there is a real be-haviour preferring what is known. Morethan a period when reactionaries have agood name, this is a ‘natural’ human reac-tion to save efforts.

People is used to perceiving ‘goodshape’ forms, as the Gestalt movement de-


75

dency to ‘designed homogenization’ whichmakes us react against what is unknown anddifferent. This is also related to other socialproblems like repulse to social, cultural andethnic diversity.

Getting use to a formal rhythm and toan aesthetic outlook of a ‘well done’ prod-uct, has deeply changed our environmentmaking us dependent and inhibited. In tenor fifteen years we have changed from su-premacy of popular and craft aesthetic out-look to aesthetic of industrial design of qual-ity (or bad imitations with ‘vulgar’ appear-ance). Nowadays, a craft or popular sign isnot a popular fact. However, changes go fur-ther than a mere aesthetic accommodation.Designed environment do no allow users’spontaneous intervention, which is not de-signed and looks vulgar. Therefore, keepingaesthetic looking of quality implies citizens’inhibition. Citizens feel assaulted, unauthor-ized and unable to act over their own envi-ronment reacting with aggressiveness, van-dalism and destruction. We can find goodexamples of this in modern parks in our city.

Designed environment does not allowdirect reuse of materials for different func-tions, as it used to happen in pre-modernculture. It does not allow such creative ac-tions as to make a poster or repair a fencewith a fruit box when it is necessary. Al-though past times were obviously worse, thisshould not prevent us from a critical ap-proach of present reality. This is the reasonwhy it is necessary to point out contradic-tory messages in design culture now that wewant to promote the culture of recycling andreusing of materials.

The necessary criticism to design shouldavoid sublimating critical reflection on oursociety, of which it is only a part.

CONCLUSION

Finally, we could conclude that thephysical structure of space -art in publicspace- does not determine people well-be-ing, but it could prevent it. Space symboli-zation is a central element of well-being,depending on individual and social experi-ence. Aspects related to place structure asmuch as physical and social aspects not di-rectly related to space but inseparable, takepart in symbolization. In spite of high adap-tation capacity of human beings, adaptationalways has a physiological and psychologi-cal cost. Quick changes at the end of this cen-tury makes adaptation more difficult, as

bers of a group or community on the basis ofa sense of belonging to a concrete social spa-tial category. In general, we can consider ur-ban categories as one kind of social catego-ries which individuals use to define their so-cial identity. The fact of considering oneselflinked to a concrete urban setting presup-poses a set of socially elaborated and sharedattributions (self attributions) or widely rec-ognised by the members of other categories.From our perspective, individuals or groupscan define themselves on the basis of an iden-tification with an urban surrounding on adefinite level of abstraction: «neighborhood»,«area» and «city», demostrating theintercategorial similarities and the differencesbetween the individuals of otherneighborhoods, areas or cities according togiven definite dimensions of the categorywhich acts as reference. Taking as examplethe neighborhood category, these dimensionsare:

• Territorial dimension, if the inhabitantsof the neighborhood are capable of establish-ing some boundaries for this, and in this way,delimit a geographical area identified as«their neighborhood».

• Behavioral dimension, if the individualswho make up the population of theneighborhood are capable of identifyingthemselves as such through some behavioralspecific manifestation or through definite so-cial practises characteristic of theneighborhood.

• Social dimension, if the composition orsocial structure of the neighborhood is, up toa certain point, perceived by its inhabitantsas widespread within the wholeneighborhood and different from otherneighborhoods.

• Psychosocial dimension, if the individu-als consider that, because of the fact of beingfrom this neighborhood, they can be attrib-uted with a special character, personality oridiosyncracy, or well determined psychologi-cal features which allow them to differenti-ate themselves from other neighborhoods.

• Temporal dimension, if the inhabitantsof the neighborhood are conscious of a com-mon past which identifies them or, in otherterms, if they are capable of perceiving a tem-porary continuity as a neighborhood throughtheir historical evolution.

• Ideological dimension, in which case itis considered that the neighborhood is de-fined through definite ideological values,politics or culture shared by its inhabitants.

They appear as axes from which socialurban identity are formed, as a substructure

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URBAN REGENERATION

Simmel, Park, Wirthand other authors diag-nosed at the beginning of the century, but itseems that we have not learnt the lesson

REFERENCES

Castells, M. (1987) Reestructuración económica,revolución tecnológica y organización delterritorio. Documentación social n 67 pp 43-68

Hunter, A., (1987), «The Simbolic Ecology ofSuburbia», in Altman and Wandersman (ed.),Neighborhood and community environments,Human Behavior and Environment, vol 9,Plenum Press, New York.

Korosec, P., (1976), The appropriation of space,Louvain-la-Neuve, CIACO.

Lalli, M., (1988), « Urban identity», in Canter,D.(ed) Environmental Social Psychology.NATO ASI Series, Behavioural and socialsciences, The Netherlands.

Pol, E. (1993a) Environmental Psychology inEurope. From Architectural psychology toGreen Environmental Psychology. LondonAbevury-Ashgate Pub.Ltd

Pol, E. (1993b) Desequilibrio Ecológico,Desequilibrio demográfico, xenofobia yracismo. Conferencia pronunciada el 8 de mayoen la Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Pol, E. (1993c) Més enllà del disseny (Más alládel diseño). Presentación del catalogo de laexposición I Nosaltres què? El que els usuarispensen dels elements urbans (Lo que losusuarios piensan de los elementos urbanos) Doc.013 Documents de Medi Ambient, Diputació deBarcelona.

Pol, E., (1994), «La apropiación del espacio»,Familia y Sociedad. nº1, Octubre. pp 233-249

Pol, E y Dominguez, M (1987) QualitatAmbiental, Salut Mental i Qualitat de Vida aBarcelona. Investigación para la Unidad delMedio Ambiente de Barcelona. Síntesis en‘Calidad de Vida en la Ciudad: Claves para sucomprensión contextual’. Documentación Socialnº 67, Abril-Junio 1987 pp 231-242

Pol, E.; Guardia, J.; Moreno, E.; Valera, S. y otros(1990) Qualitat de vida a Ciutat Vella.Investigación para el Consell de Districte CiutatVella, Ajuntament de Barcelona

Pol, E. & Moreno, M. (1992) ‘Gentrification andDegradation of a Neighborhood. Social andEnvironmental Factors’ In A. Mazis & C.Karaletsou (Eds) (1992) Socio-EnvironmentalMetamorphoses 12th IAPS. Aristotle University.Vol. 4 pp 400-405

Proshansky, H.M., Fabian & Kaminoff (1983).Place-identity: physical world socialization of theself. Journal of Environmental psychology, 3,57-83

Sennett, R (1975) Vida urbana e identidadpersonal, Barcelona, Peninsula

Valera, S. (1993) El simbolisme a la ciutat.Funcions de l’espai simbòlic urbà. Tesisdoctoral Departamento de Psicologia Social.Universitat de Barcelona

Valera, S.; Freixes, J; Juanola, M.; Molleví, J, &Pol, E. (1988) ‘The Barcelona Districts LooK’. InHoogdalem, Prak, Woordt & Wegen (Eds)Looking Back to the Future Deft UniversityPress. Vol II pp344-350


77

As the presentation of this Semi-nar emphasizes, public art caninvolve a variety of public

places (parks, streets, public buildings) an itcan means sculptures, buildings, street fur-niture, fontains, bridges and so on. Some ofthese artistic features can be consideredmonuments, not so the other ones. As Bohigassaid, the monument is the expression of anidentity and not a large and rethoric vacuumconstructed to hide problematic facts(Bohigas, 1985).

But, what it means the expression of anidentity?, who can decide the type of iden-tity?, or, which is the role of the urban spacesin relation to this identity?

This paper presents some reflectionsabout these questions on the basis of the sym-bolic urban space concept as a way to gener-ate or consolidate social identities in relationto the environment. An empirical researchcarried out in a neighborhood of Barcelonaand implications for urban art and designwill be also presented as derived form thetheoretical framework.

Public Space andSocial Identity

Sergi Valera

URBAN SOCIAL IDENTITY

We can to begin with an example takenfrom the daily experience. We are in a partyand someone introcuces a person completelyunknowed for us. Inmediatly, we will try toknow something about this person. There isa need to identify him to settle common fea-tures and to establish a social interaction. So,probably, one of the firts questions we ask himwill be: Where are you from? or Where do youlive? that’s to say, we will try to identify thisperson on the basis of a spatial categories.

As such, even though from the social psy-chology discipline there exists an extensivetheoretical work on the subject of social iden-tity, seldom social psychologist have concen-trated so much attention on environmentalaspects and the role of physical surroundingsin the genesis, development or maintenanceof the social identity.

First, it seems necessary to take into ac-count the generally accepted idea that socialidentity is basically derieved from the belong-ing to or affiliation to precise categories suchas social groups, socio-professional catego-ries, ethnic groups, religions, nationals, etc.with which individuals identify themselvesand which generate a group of internal attri-butions and external attributions that definethe make up of this identity. However, indi-viduals can also identify themselves as mem-

78

URBAN REGENERATION

which it is identified and defined a preciseurban surrounding, and definite placeswhich, because their peculiar characteristics,are recognized as representative of this urbancategory, at the same time that simbolize somerelevant dimensions for such a categoriza-tion. These elements are the symbolic urbanspaces.

URBAN SYMBOLIC SPACES

On the basis of this approach, a symbolicurban space would be that element of an ur-ban structure, understood as a social cat-egory, which identifies a social group linkedwith this environment, capable of symboliz-ing one or quiet a few of the relevant dimen-sions to this category, and which permits in-dividuals who make up the group perceivethemselves as equals in as much as they iden-tify themselves with that space and differentfrom other groups on the basis of the spaceitself or the categorial dimensions symbolizedby this. Thus, some spaces can have the prop-erty to facilitate urban social identificationprocesses and can manage to be convertedinto symbols of identity for the group associ-ated with a definite urban environment. The«environmental imageability» or capacity toelicit a clear and relevant cognitive image(Lynch, 1960) thus as the «social

of social identity.Futhermore, this mechanism of spatial

categorial identification develops as aessentialy dinamic process. Individuals areable to identify on the basis of different levelsof categorial abstraction, depending on defi-nite conditions where the interaction occurs.So, social spatial identity will depend onwhat both internal attributions and externalwhich define a categorization were at thesame level of abstraction and on salient cat-egories to each other. For example, we are ableto identify as an inhabitant of a neighborhoodand, on the basis of this category, differ usfrom the other ones: a) who don’t belong toour neighborhood, b) who know somethingabout it, and c) who are capable to identifythem with their neighborhood too.

Instead, if we would identify us usingthis urban categorization in the presence of astanger who doesn’t know our neighborhood,we must use the more inclusive category«city», so that he will be able to define himwith belong to his city. Both, however, needto have any previous knovledge about thecategorial dimensions used in the interaction.This knovledge about the most salient dimen-sions are not necessary an «in situ» one abouta definite neighborhood, area or city.

Two elements can, outstandingly, be con-verted into representative symbols of a socialurban identity of a group or a community: thename of the social urban category under

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79

imageability» or characteristics of the set ofmeanings socially created and spacial at-tributes (Stokols, 1981) are two of the basiccharacteristics to define a symbolic urbanspace. These meanings -or «perceived socialfield» in Stokols and Shumaker terminology(1981)- can be analised according to their con-tent, clarity, complexity, heterogeneity (homo-geneity), distorsions or contradictions(op.cit.). On the other hand, the great impor-tance is recognised which spacial appropria-tion has (Pol, 1994; Korosec, 1976) throughwhich individuals are already capable of cre-ating or receiving symbolic meanings inspace and incorporating them into their ownidentity. The conceptual relationships estab-lished untill now is reflected in FIGURE 1.

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

The field which has been chosen for theempirical investigation is the Poblenouneighborhood of the city of Barcelona. Thisneighborhood, borned around 1850, locatednear the sea and the city center, was knowedas «The Catalonian Manchester» becausethere was numerous factories, industries andwarehouses. Recently, it has been subjectedto an important urbanistic remodelation, em-phasizing a large residential area builded onthe ocasion of the Olympic Games in 1992which is called Olympic Village.

METHODOLMETHODOLMETHODOLMETHODOLMETHODOLOGICALOGICALOGICALOGICALOGICAL PROCEDUREPROCEDUREPROCEDUREPROCEDUREPROCEDURE

To carry out the investigation, we haveopted for a methodological proposal whichestablishes a triple approach to the object ofstudy: a socio-historical approach based onan investigation and documental analysis, aquantitative approach based on a poll as ameans of collecting information and ananalysis of this information throughstadistical methods and, finally, a qualitativeapproach based on the method of group dis-cussion and on an analysis of the contents ofthe obtained information. The main variablesregarded were:

(N) Name of the neighborhood(L) Boundaries of the neighborhood(D) Differences with respect to other

neighborhoods(R) Most representative places of the

neighborhood (R)(P) Places most representatives of the

past(F) Places most representatives of the

future

(FR) Most frequented places

RESULTS

Considering the first of these variables,it is fitting to emphasise that 70% of the indi-viduals polled identified their neighborhoodas «Poblenou», while 11,6% identified it as«Sant Martí de Provençals». This is the nameof the district as such as it was the name ofthe old town before it was annexed to Barce-lona in 1897.

On the other hand, all the discussiongroups opted for the first option and all theparticipants called their neighborhood as«Poblenou». When a groupal agreement wasseeked, the other options was removed.

In the second place, the characteristicswhich define the people of the neighborhoodare, basically, a communally identified geo-graphical area (territorial dimension), a work-ing class social composition (social dimen-sion), the perception of sharing a commonpast which identified them (temporal dimen-sion) in addition to some practical socialcharacteristics (behavioral dimension), aradical and liberal ideological tradition (ideo-logical dimension) and, the most marked, aparticular way-of-life similar to that found ina village or reduced community (psychoso-cial dimension). Both the data obtainedthrough the poll (see FIGURE 2) and the in-formation provided by the dicussion groupsagrees with these ideas.

Especially, we wanted to mention theimportance attributed to the psychosocial di-mension as a configurating factor to the so-cial urban identity. The fact of perceiving alifestyle similar to a village appears as a cat-egory of particular note in the quantitative ap-proach (see FIGURE 2, category 2). For its part,the analysis of the discussion groups allowsto observe how this dimension («thisneighborhood is like a little town within Bar-celona») is translated into a feeling of famili-arity between the residents of theneighborhood («we all know each other»,«we are like a family») thus as security andsupport («You never find yourself alone»,«you feel like you are in your own home»).This type of expressions related to the groupof the neighborhood, even though surprisingto find it in a metropolis like Barcelona, is inkeeping with the conferred importance of theneighborhood as an urban environment fa-cilitating social identity (Milgram, 1984; Reidand Aguilar, 1991) or of characteristic lifestyles (Jacobs, 1961).

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URBAN REGENERATION

SYMBOLIC URBAN SPACES.

In the third place it has been possible todetect and analyse definite spaces of theneighborhood which, due to their character-istics, can be defined as symbolic urbanspaces, clearly related with the feeling of iden-tity of their inhabitants, specially with respectto temporal dimensions, behavioral and psy-chosocial. Among those, Rambla delPoblenou Avenue clearly stands out as themost prototypical place (preponderantly rec-ognised as the most representative place ofthe neighborhood), that which sets out somestructural physical characteristics which fa-cilitate a clear cognitive and identificable im-age (the structure of avenue itself confersthese qualities) and as such atributes a greatrichness and quantity of meanings clearlyestablished and socially shared related ingreat part with the categorial dimensions pre-viously indicated. (see FIGURE 3).

On the other hand, it has been possibleto detect and analyse other places which basetheir symbolic value on the preservation ofthe history of the neighborhood, as in the caseof Prim Square, the factories (represented byCan Girona and the Water Tower) or the Ca-sino of Poblenou, as a symbol of the associ-ated life of the neighborhood. Finally, placesappear whose meaning is associated with thefuture of the district, especially the OlympicVillage, the Sea Park (Marbella beach), Diago-nal Avenue or the Sea Front. In general, thesymbolic relation with these places is basedon a sense of threat perceived about the iden-tity of the neighborhood, since they can gen-erate the arrival of new groups and socialclasses which provoke a split in the structure,social characteristics and current lifestyles ofthe people of the neighborhood, generatingurban gentrification processes.

In fact, we want to emphasise 3 placeswhich in our analysis have turned out to bespecially relevant since they appear, to agreater or lesser extent, in the replies to all themain items (variables R, P, F, FR, D). In thefirst of these, Rambla del Poblenou Avenuecan be considered as the symbolic urbanspace most important to Poblenou or, in otherterms, the most prototypical space of the so-cial urban category «Poblenouneighborhood» since it accumulates thegreater percentage of incidence in 3 out of the5 variables: as a characteristic or representa-tive place in the district (55,7%), as a placerepresentative of the past (22,6%) and as theplace most frequented by the residents of theneighborhood (38,7%). On the other hand, the

Olympic Village has an important role as adistinguishing element from the rest of thedistricts (13,8%) but its most accentuated vir-tue centers on it being the most representa-tive place for the future of the neighborhood(48,5%), even though from the analysis of thecontents it is deduced that this future couldthreaten the social identity of theneighborhood.

For its part, and even though with fewerpercentages, the Marbella Beach also appearsin the five variables, specially as a representa-tive element of the future through its recentremodelling (13,4%), with more positiveconotations than the Olympic Village.

Finally, in the phase of quantitativeanalysis we have studied the relationship be-tween the items of the questionnaire and per-sonal variables of the individuals through t-test proofs, analysis of the variance and chi-square test (see TABLE 1). The obtained dataallows the observation of the related items torepresentative places of the district (R) andrepresentative of the past (P) are shown spe-cially useful for detecting symbolic urbanspaces. So, we have observed that these arethe only items which do not demostrate sig-nificant stadistical relationships with any ofthe personal variables, that is to say, the an-swers given by the individuals in these itemscan be considered as independent to how theindividuals are. This one leads us to infer thatthis stadistical effect can hold a narrow rela-tionship with the possible clarity andhomogenousness of the underlying meaningsto these spaces. The qualitative phase ofanalysis has allowed a reinforcing of thisidea. So, excluding the representative placesto the future, the contents of the rest of placesregarded by the groups are highly agreed.

CONCLCONCLCONCLCONCLCONCLUSIONSUSIONSUSIONSUSIONSUSIONS

The investigation carried out on theneighborhood of Poblenou shows three im-portant conclusions for our proposals:

a) a sense of social identity in relation tothe neighborhood has been observed, it is tosay, the social urban category «neighbor-hood» appears as a relevant category for thesocial identity of the inhabitants. So, aboundaries commontly defined (territorialdimension), the consciousness of a commonpast (temporal dimension), the belonginessto a working class (social dimension), a set of

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81

FIGURE 3. The main ideas obtained in the discusion groups referred to «Rambla del Poblenou».

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82

URBAN REGENERATION

specific social practices (behavioral dimension) and, specially, a particular way-of-life similar toa little town (psychosocial dimension) are the main dimensions which define the social urbanidentity of the inhabitants of Poblenou.

b) a set of particular places has been regarded as symbolic urban spaces. Strongly, the Rambladel Poblenou Avenue appears as the most important symbolic place. People referred it as a rel-evant place which symbolize the past of the neighborhood, the present one and the expectationson the future. Futhermore, its perceived social field (set of meanings referred to it) has a relevantcontent with an important complexity, clarity and homogeneity as well. This homogeneity hascould be confirmed throught the analysis among the main variables and personal variables;results show the strength of social constructed meanings related to urban spaces. On the otherhand, the Olympic Village and Marbella Beach are other symbolic places, specially in relation tothe future of the neighborhhod.

c) the methodological procedure which has been choosed to carry out this investigation canbe regarded as a valid procedure to investigate the subject of social identity from the social cre-ated meanings in relation to the urban space. So, the triple approach planed -sociohistorical,quantitative and qualitative- as well as the triangulation of the results obtained from each onehas been very useful for our proposals.

Sharing the idea of Amos Rapoport that every time a major disonance is given between ur-ban design and the universal symbolic meanings shared by the users of that space or, in thewords of Pol, the introduction of spaces with an «a priori» meaning on the part of instances ofpower, we believe that an approximation of the type that is proposed here can contribute inter-esting elements on reflection for those professionals who, with their design actions on urbanplanning or art in public spaces, try to bring their objectives closer to the ground of individualstowards which these actions are orientated, and in this way, convert the city into somethingmore accesable and human.


83

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Hunter, A., (1987), «The Simbolic Ecology ofSuburbia», in Altman and Wandersman (ed.),Neighborhood and community environments,Human Behavior and Environment, vol 9,Plenum Press, New York.

Korosec, P., (1976), The appropiation of space,Louvain-la-Neuve, CIACO.

Lalli, M., (1988), « Urban identity», in Canter,D.(ed) Environmental Social Psychology. NATOASI Series, Behavioural and social sciences, TheNetherlands.

Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city.Cambridge: MIT Press.

Milgram, S. (1984). Cities as SocialRepresentations. En Moscovici, S. & Farr, R.(eds.). Social Representations. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Pol, E., (1994), «La apropiación del espacio»,Familia y Sociedad. nº1, Octubre. pp 233-249

Proshansky, H.M., Fabian & Kaminoff (1983).Place-identity: physical world socialization of theself. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3, 57-83

Reid, A. y Aguilar, M.A. (1991). Barrio y vidacotidiana: una experiencia de trabajo en lareconstrucción de la vivienda. In Massolo, A.et.al. Procesos rurales y urbanos en el Méxicoactual. México: Universidad AutónomaMetropolitana.

Stokols, D. (1981). Group x Place Transactions:Some Neglected Issues in PsychologicalResearch. En Magnusson, D. (ed.) Toward aPsychology of Situations: An InteractionalPerspective, Hillsdale, New Jersey.: LawrenceErlbaum.

Stokols, D. (1990). Instrumental and SpiritualViews of People-Environment Relations,American Psychologist, 45 (5), 641-646.

Stokols, D. & Jacobi, M. (1984). Traditional,Present Oriented, and Futuristic Modes of Group-Environment Relations. En Gergen, K.J. &Gergen, M.M. Historical Social Psychology.Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Stokols, D. & Shumaker, S.A. (1981). People inPlaces: A Transactional View of Settings. EnHarvey, J.H. (ed.) Cognition, Social Behavior, andthe Environment. Hillsdale, New Jersey:

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Valera, S. (1993) El simbolisme a la ciutat.Funcions de l’espai simbòlic urbà. Phd.dissertation. Unpublished.

Valera, S y Pol, E. (1994) El concepto deidentidad social urbana. Una aproximación entrela Psicología Social y la Psicología Ambiental,Anuario de Psicología, 62 (3), 5-24.

84

UR

BA

N RE

GE

NE

RA

TION

Age Leghth Work Level Study Occupation Assoc.Member. Gender

N .032 .878 .55040 .00285 .01065 .71384 .64860

D .023 .0005 .47729 .54462 .01344 .79643 .42306

FR .0001 .0028 .49160 .10243 .49269 .95205 .01922

F .0000 .0001 .58613 .00934 .32573 .62132 .64326

R .34581 .3768 .93207 .58213 .42032 .91196 .19097

P .2153 .6128 .43745 .15274 .54374 .76517 .65732

TABLE 1. Levels of significance among the main variables and the personal variables regarded on theinvestigation (age of the individuals, lenght of residence, working in the neigborhood Y/N, level of studies,occupation, membership of any association in the neigborhood Y/N, and gender). SIG.= p< 0.05.


85

1. INTRODUCTION

Along the seminar we join these dayscalled «Sites of Public Art», we present thefollowing research to offer another elementof reflection: the opinion of citizens about theelements of art situated in the public spacesof their cities. This opinion has been tradi-tionally forgotten; thus, it is our intention toinsist on this point.

0BJECTIVES

The research faces two general objec-tives: one conceptual and the other one in-strumental.

1/ On the conceptual level

•To know the citizen’s attitude towards theworks of art which are in public spaces. The re-search took place in the city of Barcelona.

Therefore, we describe the general inter-est of the residents for the art and for the ar-tistic elements of public spaces in their cit-ies. We also include their opinions and feel-ings regarding them.

• To detect possible relationships betweensubject variables (age, sex, studies, profession,district and years of residence) and attitude.

2/ On the intrumental level

• To prepare a reliable and not very exten-sive scale of attitudes towards art in public spacein a city.

For this purpose we selected the itemsproposed in the questionnaire, those whichbetter discriminate among subjects and weeliminated the rest in order to improve thedegree of reliability and reduce the scale.

• To know which opinions and feelings ex-plained significantly the interest a person mayhad towards the art in public space of the city, inorder to finally promote and increase that inter-est.

Therefore, we established a predictiveequation which would indicate us the rel-evant questions and the specific weight inthe determination of this interest.

CONCEPT OF ATTITUDE

Before we started with the developmentof the research, we tried to define the con-cept of «attitude». Most authors agree withhe statement that attitude implies what peo-ple feel about an object or a situation. Otherspropose to include, as well, what peoplethink about the object or the situation, apartfrom the behavior towards them. But feel-ings and opinions do not always match;

The Citizen's Attitudetowards works of Art inPublic Space: The case ofBarcelona

Núria Franco

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somebody may have a particular opinionabout something without being very inter-ested on it (Holahan, 1991).

There is a constant and reciprocal influ-ence among people and the environment,meaning a strong interrelationship. The vari-ation of an element causes the change of theother. Likely as knowledge influences on at-titudes and viceversa, or both in the behaviorof people (nowadays, we still are theorizingabout this relationship).

Thus, from all definitions on attitude wechoose that from Berkowitz (1975) based onfavourable or unfavourable feelings an ob-ject or a situation may inspire. On an otherway, to have a predisposition towards some-thing.

The classic theories conceptualize thestruture of attitude based on three compo-nents. First of all, the cognitive or evaluativedimension which refers to the grade ofknowledge, perception, opinion and think-ing the person has towards the object of hisattitude; that is to say the information wehave from the object or situation. The sec-ond component is the affective, refering tofeelings for or against an object or a situa-tion; it’s the most characteristic component.Last but not least, the behavioral componentwhich will be a tendency to react towardsthe objects in a special way, being the activecomponent of the attitude.

2. METHODOLOGY

ITEMS AND PROCEDURES

The data collection has been realizedstarting with a questionnaire of the typeLikert, composed of some initial questionsof identification, 2 of personal interest in art(one in general and another one regardingthe public space of their city) and 33 itemswhich refer to the attitude towards artisticelements present in public space of the cityof Barcelona. The answer of these 33 itemswere categorized in alternatives graduatedin intensity (1:in total disagreement, 2:indisagreement, 3:indifferent, 4:in agreementand 5:in total agreement).

The task of each person polled was toput a «X» in the box he considered fitted bet-ter or defined his position in respect to thedescription or item.

The sampling consists of 148 residentsin the city of Barcelona and was obtained byempiric sampling by quotes and accidental

selection. By this, we controlled the variable«resident in Barcelona» and nobody waspolled who lived outside the city. On theother hand, the variable «district of resi-dence» was systematized to guarantee thebalanced presence of the 10 districts of Bar-celona in the sample (aprox. 17 subjects perdistrict) and, at the same time, to avoid animportant bias.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SAMPLE

Regarding the characteristics of the sub-jects that configured the sample, we stated awide range with regard to the years the peo-ple had resided in the city (mean=19.6,SD=14.5, max=67 y min=1). That means thatthe sample was composed by people withconsolidated residence in the city and oth-ers who arrived recently. The average was33.65 years (min=9 and max=81), 41.9% weremen and 58.1% were women, so that bothsexes were represented. Regarding the levelof education, 6.1% did not have studies atall, 21.6% basic studies, 37.8% had bachelorstudies and 34.5% superior studies. Regard-ing professions, we stated a great diversity,10% were self employed, 8.8% were commer-cials, 4% were officials, 9.5% were admi-nistratives, 4% were blue collar, 35.8% werestudents, 10.8% were housewives and 12.8%others.

3. RESULTS

The analysis have been carried out withthe statistical package SPSS/PC+. Wepresent the results obtained as follows.

A PROPOSAL OF ATTITUDE SCALE

We realized a Reliability Analysis - Scala(Alpha) with the proposal to obtain an atti-tude scale for future researches as reducedas possible and with the highest reliability.The results show a reliability cofficient ofá=.7827 for 13 items choosen previously. Thisvalue was considerably high for being thefirst intent to construct an attitude scale ofthis type. The items we enclosed are the fol-lowing:

V21Evaluate at 1 to 10 your personalinterest in general artV22Evaluate at 1 to 10 your personal interest inartistic elements of public spaces in your city


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interest (r=-.1414) nor the specific interest inthe city (r=-.1030). Same thing happens withthe variable sex. There is no relationshipgrade of interest for art in general (F ratio=.9071 F prob= .3425), nor concrete art in pub-lic spaces of the city (F ratio=.4300 Fprob=.5130). Neither regarding professions,significative statistical differences could befound.

On the other hand, where a significativedifference of interest appeared was in thelevel of studies (F Ratio= 6.4235 FProb=.0004), as well as in interest in art ingeneral. Here, the interest was significantlyincreased with higher studies than with ba-sic ones. The same could be said for the spe-cific interest in art in one’s city (F Ra-tio=3.6683 F Prob=.0138).

Continuing with the personal interest inart in general, we stated statistically signifi-cant differences which depend on the dis-trict of residence (F Ratio=2.1687 FProb=.0334). The comparison of the mediashowed two groups or districts with agreater interest in art in general than in theother districts (á=.05) as follows: Dist.1:Ciutat Vella and Dist. 6: Gràcia; and belowthere was the Dist. 8: Sant Andreu with thelowest interest.

We also found significative statisticaldifferences between districts with regard topersonal interest in artistic elements in pub-lic space of their city (F Ratio= 2.2782 FProb=.0254). This would mean that the in-terest in specific art in the city is greater inthe districts of Ciutat Vella, Les Corts andGràcia and significantly less in the Eixampleand Sant Andreu.

OTHER DIFFERENCES BETWEENDISTRICTS

We detected significative statistical dif-ferences among districts in some considera-tions. We point up three of them:

• Considering the fact that the numberof art elements in public space seems poorand unworthy (F Ratio=7.5266 F Prob=.0000). This means that the residents in theDistricts 4 and 9: Les Corts and Sant Martí,respectively, consider that this is true in theirdistricts. On the contraty, the Districts 1, 2and 3: Ciutat Vella, Eixample and Sants-Montjuïc (specially the last one) which disa-gree with the statement that the number ofart sampling in their quarter is poor andunworthy.

V28It is an important point for me to know thetitle and the author of a work of artV29It seems to me that insufficient money isassigned for the conservation and diffusionof art in the public space of the cityV31I would like more murals and mosaics in thepublic space of BarcelonaV39The alive statues, paintings on the ground,graffitis, etc. are a new fair of art in thepublic space of a cityV40Some kinds of graffitis decorate funnily wallsof our citiesV41I would like that the portraits, caricatures,prints, paintings on the ground, alivestatues, etc. you see in Las Ramblas, alsocould be seen in the Rambla or another placeof my quarterV42The administration does not make sufficienteffort to approach art to thecitizenV50I would like more art fairs in the streetsV51I consider the citizen should be takenmore into account to choose which artisticelements are exposed in the public spaces ofthe cityV52I consider that taking care of public spacesin the city is something more than installbenches, litter bins and green areasV54I would like reflected in my quarter the newartistic tendencies

These items are the most discriminating(with the highest Standard Desviations), sothat asking for only these 13 items, we aregoing to know the attitude towards said con-cept with 78% of realibility. In consequence,the initial scale is reduced considerably.

REFERED TO THEIR INTEREST IN ART

There exists a positive significative sta-tistical correlation (r=8057 á=.001), betweenthe personal interest of a citizen in generalart and the personal interest for artistic ele-ments in public spaces of his city. So, for ex-ample, a great interest in general art, repre-sents major interest in concrete art in his sur-rounding urban ambient.

There is no significant correlation be-tween years of residence in the city and theinterest for artistic elements in its publicspace (r=-.0838). Neither the age makes asignificative difference in regard to general

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• The districts of Les Corts and Sarrià-Sant Gervasi feel significantly more identi-fied with the emblematic artistic elements ofBarcelona than with those of their own quar-ter or district. On the other hand, the dis-tricts of Ciutat Vella and Sants-Montjuïc disa-gree significantly comparising them with therest (F Ratio=3.5190 F Prob=.0010).

• The Districts 6 and 8: Gràcia and SantAndreu, respectively, disagree significantlywith the fact that the artistic elements of theirquarter are the most suitable ones. Instead,the Districts 2 and 3: Eixample and Sants-Montjuïc agree significantly in comparisonwith the rest of the districts with this state-ment (F Ratio=4.4408 F Prob=.0001).

DESCRIBING OPINIONS AND FEELINGS

We carried out several Factor Analyseson the concept attitude of the citizen facedwith art in public space of their city. In gen-eral, we can confirm the existence of the threecomponents mentioned at the beginning.

Regarding the first component, the cog-nitive one, the citizens consider that:

FUNCTIONS :• to place monuments and sculpturesin the streets of their city increases itsaesthetic quality (89.2%)• to place monuments and sculpturesin the streets of their city increases itsidentity (81.1%)• the monuments and sculptures inpublic space revalue a quarter (82.4%)• some elements of art in public spacesof Barcelona are well- known, beingpoints of acquaintance (58.1%)• it is false that artistic elements are ofno use at all (83.1%)• in quarters with social-economicproblems, 50.7% do not consider art inthe street an important point while38.6% consider it of great importance.

CONTENTS:• it is important to know the title andthe author of a work of art (44%)• art in public spaces is something morethan emblematic dwellings andconmemorative sculptures (84.5%)• the alive statues, paintings on theground, graffitis, etc. are a kind of newart fair in public space of their city(58.8%)• monuments are not only for tourists(74.4%)

MANAGEMENT:• the money inverted in conservationand diffusion of art in public space inthe city is not enough (36%), although44.6% feel indifferent or have no ideahow much money is invested for thispurpose.• monuments which are important inBarcelona are too much concentrated inthe center of the city (47.3%)• they don’t agree that sculpturesshould rest in museums instead of inthe public road (78.3%)• to take care of the public space of acity means something else than onlyinstalling benches, litter bins and greenareas (89.2%)• a lot of monuments and sculptures aresituated in places of the city for otherreasons than the aesthetic ones(politicians, nationalism, contacts, etc.)(66.2%)

Regarding the second one of the com-ponents of attitudes, the affective one, the citi-zens consider that:

STYLE AND QUALITY:• they disagree (57.5%) with the state-ment that abstract sculptures distorb theurban scenary of the city• some types of graffitis decore in afunny way the walls of their city (62.8%)• 29.7% do not like conmemorative stat-ues. On the other hand, 37.5% like themand the others feel indifferent• 56.7% disagree with the statementthat the sculpture on public space intheir city is of low artistic quality

NEW PROPOSALS:• they would like that portraits, carica-tures, prints, paintings on the ground,alive statues, etc. you see in TheRamblas, could be seen, too, in therambla or some places of their quarters(43.8%)• some sculptures could be movingfrom neighbourhood to neighbourhoodof the city (39.2%, although 32.4% feelsindifferent)• they would like to see in their neigh-bourhood the new artistic tendenciesreflected (62.2%)

IDENTITY:• they feel more identified with the em-blematic artistic elements of Barcelonathan those of their own neighbourhoodor district (50.7%)


89

We obtained a R Square or total deter-minant coefficient of R2=.75034. This valuesupplies information about the part weknow from v22, meaning that a 75% of vari-ance of said variable is explained by the 6items mentioned. The predictive equation,non standarized, has the following expres-sion:

v22 = -2.7330 + .6267 x v21 + .4135 xv31 + .3235 x v32 + .2470 x v29 + .2270x v36 + .2511 x v53 + E

With this equation starting from directscoring in each one of these 6 items, we willbe able to predict a 75% of the evaluationmade by a citizen with regard to personalinterest in artistic elements in public spaceof his city.

4. CONCLUSION

These results have practical implica-tions. One of them, it is if we want to increasepersonal interest in the artistic elements ofpublic spaces. Firstly, we have to increase thenumber of mosaics and murals in the publicspaces of the city. Secondly, we should as-sign more money to preserve and diffuse it.Thirdly, we have to favour people’s visitsand it should be understood that art in pub-lic spaces is more than emblematic buildingsand commemorative scultures. This is whatroad users think.

The scale of attitude obtained is the firsttest, which could increase its reliability in-cluding new indicators, specially from thebehavioral factor.

Surprisingly, the citizen’s attitude ofBarcelona about art in public spaces is sig-nificant. They have quite unanimous opin-ions and feelings, although we found somedifferences among districts. Besides, the ar-eas of great concentration of art in publicspaces don’t always coincide with the great-est interest of their residents (for example,District 2: Eixample).

There are important percentages ofagreement and disagreement. For example,in the cognitive factor about functions of artin public spaces, its contents and its man-agement. The same happens to the secondone, the affective factor, about style and qual-ity, new proposals, identity of place andquantity. And, the last one, the most active,points out to the improvement citizens’ par-ticipation.

QUANTITY:• they would like more art fairs in thestreet (69.6%)• people would prefer more murals andmosaics in public space of the city ofBarcelona (58.8%)

The third factor, the behavioral one, wasnot represented enough. The citizen considerthat:

BEHAVIOUR:• in general, they pay attention whenthey go through for the first time, infront of some monument o art fair inthe streets of their city (54.7%)• they would like to spend part of theirfree time visiting works of art of theircity (50.7%)

TAKING PART:• the Administration doesn’t make suf-ficient efforts to approach art to the citi-zen (48%)• the citizen himself has to be takenmore into account when decisions re-garding the instalment of artistic ele-ments in the public spaces of their city(71.6%) are concerned

PREDICTING THE INTEREST INART OF PUBLIC SPACES

Finally, we made a multiple regressionanalysis with the objective to see how so farthe dependent variable, v22 «personal inter-est for the artistic elements of public spacein your city», is predicted or explained bythe remainder of independent variables con-cerning attitude. For the evaluation of regres-sion equation we used the stepwise methodor regression step by step with the follow-ing varibles:

v21: Evaluate from 1 to 10 your personalinterest in art in generalv31: I would like more murals and mo-saics in public spaces of the city of Bar-celonav32: I like to spend some of my free timevisiting works or art in my cityv29: In my opinion insufficient moneyis spent in conservation and diffusionof art in public spaces in the cityv36: the abstract sculptures disturb theurban scenaryv53: art in public spaces is somethingelse than emblematic buildings andconmemorative sculptures

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SUMMARY

This paper will introduce the problematic of therepresentation of the environment with apedagogic purpose and using cognitivereferences derived from studies of mental mapsconsidered in a non-reactive way. This proposalshows the possibility of introducing different levelsof complexity in the organization of representationbased on the subjects participation in the processand in the evaluation results .

Approaches to knowledge and representation ofthe environment.

Cognitive maps have been presented as metaphorical andanalogical models of the repre-

sentation of a reality (Stea and Downs, 1977;Riba, 1985). The adaptation between repre-sentation (mental and depicted) and realityis an intervening variable in the constructionof a map. Consequently, in the predictiveand evaluative use of the map, knowledge,skills and previous experience of the indi-vidual in the environment have an impor-tant influence on this variable. In the rela-tionship between representation and reality,several adjustments and adaptations mustbe made in order to establish the connec-tion among factors such as : the structuringitself of the environment, individual’s men-tal images, resources and depictive skills ofeach subject; and the researchers’ appraisalof the map.

The proposals in order to approach thiscomplex framework, since the first studiesof Lynch (1960), have been generally ap-plied under a reductionist character, andthey don’t always guarantee the connectionof the representation and its evaluation withthe lifestyles of the individuals (Ladd, 1985).The studies on cognitive maps have failedto take into account the value of the repre-sentational skills used by the subjects, orexplore cooperative ways of analyzing theresults or consider the map not as an end in

Cognitive Maps and thePictorial Representationof the Environment

F. Hernández


91

emphasized the change that can take placebetween perception and the individuals’account of the environment.

(c) Analytical strategies. In this stagethe individual character of the previous ex-periences is incorporated into a specific pro-posal, reflected in the following instruction:«approach and depict an object, an element of theenvironment, through your analysis, using allof those methods of representation you are capa-ble of.»

At this moment of the experience we fol-low some of the ideas presented in thecourses «Frontdoor Project» and «Art andthe Built Environment Project» by Adams(1985).

WHATWHATWHATWHATWHAT DODODODODO STUDENTSSTUDENTSSTUDENTSSTUDENTSSTUDENTS DODODODODO?????

In the diagnostic stage, the characteris-tics of the representations worked out by thesubjects had certain traits in common. Thisis how a walk through the village was car-ried out, organized according to an accumu-lation of images. In this way, the drawingserved the intentional function of acting asa photographic copy of reality; a copy thatin addition had a frontal character in rela-tion to the individual and in representationalform. Nevertheless, through these commoncharacteristics, it was possible to capturesome organizational ... and levels of presen-tation that offered the alternative to typesgroupings (table 1).

The parallel articulation of thesetypologies permits the predominant style ofrepresentation to be recognized with greaterfacility. The environment is organized ac-cording to signals that appear in it, levels thatmay not only have the function of nodes (church, bridge, tower), but that can configurecomplexities (the topographic levels of thevillage) or circumstantially (arches, roads,rocks). Students depart from a route of rec-ognition that closely follows the orientationlineability which Kaplan (1973) makes ref-erence to, and which is necessary in orderto adapt oneself to the environment. Thesecharacteristics would form the participants’style-type of organizing an interpretation ofan environment that was new to them. Itdenotes a formative contamination, the cap-turing of the frontal of the environment andthe objects, which is the most common sys-tem used in university studies on represen-tation. On the other hand, it denotes that theenvironment is organized by itineraries andindication elements, specifically of histori-cal and architectonic significance.

itself but as a result of a longitudinal and bio-graphical process.

METHODOLOGYMETHODOLOGYMETHODOLOGYMETHODOLOGYMETHODOLOGY OFOFOFOFOF THETHETHETHETHE STUDYSTUDYSTUDYSTUDYSTUDY

Our work intends to make a contribu-tion within the framework previously de-scribed. In this context, a group of 30 sec-ond-year students of the Faculty of Fine Artsof Barcelona were situated in a village of theAmpurdán (Girona, Spain) previously un-familiar to them. There, over the course of aweekend, they were told to confront differ-ent ways of seeing and represent the envi-ronment with the specification that it notbe reduced to a mere spatial and cognitivecategory. In the task, it was possible to takein other aspects, such as epistemological,personal, cultural, aesthetic and symbolicfacets, that together with the spatial, wouldform a framework to understand environ-mental interrelations (Teymur 1982;Hernández, 1986, 1990). The technical skillsused on the resources of representation wasa factor taken into account in presenting analternative proposal to cognitive maps tostudy and organize the environment.

PHASESPHASESPHASESPHASESPHASES OFOFOFOFOF THETHETHETHETHE APPROACHAPPROACHAPPROACHAPPROACHAPPROACH

During the process of this study eachone of its different moments were integratedaccording to the results obtained in the pre-vious one. The group of the students carriedout the evaluation of each intervention alongwith two participating observers. During theexperience, the results were being organizedand categorized according to the decision-making process that the students have madewith the researcher in three phases or stages:

(a) Diagnostic strategies. In this firststage the subjects followed the instruction:«express, graphically, your route through thevillage, your way of recognizing it .»

The implicit content of this proposal wasto reflect and capture the ways of seeing, theways of reading and representing the envi-ronment made by the subjects.

(b) Differential strategies. The proposalof this stage departed from the results of theprevious one, which had given a photo-graphic view on representation of the envi-ronment and achieved a suggestion of indi-vidualization capturing the specific relation-ship of each student with the village. Thistime, the assignment was: «reflect the life ex-perience that is derived from the walk», which

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WHAT DO STUDENTS MEAN?

In the differential phase, the intentionwas to go beyond the previous level, onceassumed that the subjects had an image ofthe village. For this experience, they weretold to create a plan, without a necessaryaesthetic finality, that would capture thesense of individualized relationship thateach one had with the village. The notionpresented for this phase was: «to see is not torecognize, to represent is not to know». The aimof this proposal was to expose the partici-pants to the complexity of planning in envi-ronmental design.

Nevertheless, the meaning of the initia-tive was contaminated by a series of ele-ments not foreseen in its planning. So, formany it was their first experience in surpass-ing the level of reproduction of reality, some-thing which gave evidence to the lack of tech-nical resources available for approaching it.This brought along with it a series of subjec-tive situations that in the beginning exceededthe guidelines of the proposal. Confusion,mental block, inhibition, tension and a cer-tain anxiety appeared in the discourse of theparticipants’ explications.

Nevertheless, the individualizing final-ity of the proposal was completed, now thatit redounded in some realizations in whichthe sense of frontal to the entire village wasamplified, but within configuration variants(shadows, contours, levels). Diverse plasticlanguages were used (collages, models, pan-els), orientation reference markers weremade (the center of the village as a conflu-ence of meetings, forms and representations)

and most importantly, the role of interactionbetween environment and individual as anecessity for capturing one’s subjective re-lationship with the village was reinforced.The contents of this and the other sectionsappear in Hernández (1986a; 1988).

All of the previous experiences are in-corporated into the analytical phase, and analternative to the life experiences that havebeen generated is proposed, maintaining theindividual character of the educational pro-posal. In this way, taking on an object, an el-ement of the environment through the sub-ject’s analysis, implied underlining the sub-jective character of the representation onceagain. Situating oneself before the villagefrom different points of perspective (includ-ing interpretative ones) required learning totake object distance as the methodology ofappropriation, as well as manipulative andrepresentational distance.

Some characteristics arise in the stu-dents’ representations of the environmentcarried out which reinforce the value of theobject discomposure for a better understand-ing of the environment. These characteris-tics also underline the social role of design,the almost unlimited possibilities that cometo light due to the consideration of diversepoints of view toward an object, and aboveall the value of the spatial-geometrical rep-resentation as the base of a greater extensionin the analysis.

Organization Nr of Subjects(%) Results Tipology Nr. of SubjectsTipology (%)

Elements 13 (43) Route perspective 20 (67)

Open view 9 (31) Details 4 (13)

Environmentalrelations 4 (13) Transformations 3 (10)

Others 4 (13) Others 3 (10)

Total 30 (100) Totals 30 (100)

Table 1: Tipologies in diagnostic stage


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TO GO BEYOND

All of this brings us to the convergenceof a series of evaluative contributions thatare also the result of the different forms ofapproximation and the experience of thisstudy. Here it is pointed out that it is neces-sary to incorporate into the design a balancebetween the subjective life experience andrepresentational organization. On thispremise, individuality forms part of the proc-ess of design, whose depiction doesn’t haveto be seen as its objective and aesthetic fi-nality, but as the process of realization/con-struction of the reality that is approached.But in some way it must construct its ownvalue criteria. All of this comes from a nec-essary strategy: the approach to the envi-ronment from an articulation of steps of in-terpretation could be a positive strategy torepresent and to access subject ‘s knowledgeand to improve their cognitive and practicalskills for a better understanding. How thisprocess is developed could be the objectiveof a new series of studies.

REFERENCESREFERENCESREFERENCESREFERENCESREFERENCES

ADAMS, E. (1985).A British Experience in EnvironmentalEducation. Diálegs sobre educació i mediambient. Barcelona.: Centre Cultural de la Caixade Pensions.

HERNANDEZ, F. (1986).La definición del entorno: claves para unaaproximación de sentido. Imatge i entorn, 1, 11-22.

HERNANDEZ, F. (1986a). Lectura plástica del entorno. Barcelona.:Facultad de Bellas Artes.

HERNANDEZ, F. (1988).Modos de ver: el conocimiento y la representacióndel entorno. En J. Aragonés & J.A. Corraliza(Eds.). Comportamiento y Medio Ambiente.Madrid.: Comunidad de Madrid. (pp. 629-634).

HERNANDEZ, F. (1990)Aprendiendo a ver, para aprender arepresentar. School Project. Institute ofEducation of Barcelona University (mimeo).LADD, F. (1985).An interview with Kevin Lynch. Children’sEnvironments Quarterly, 2,3,4-7.

LINCH, K. (1960).The Image of the City. Cambridge, Mass.: TheM.I.T. Press.

RIBA.C (1985).Conocimiento y conducta en el entorno. inF.Hernández, A. Remesar & C. Riba. En torno alentorno. Barcelona.: Laertes.

STEA, D. & DOWN, R. (1977).Maps in Mind. London.: Harper & Row.

TEYMUR , N. (1982).Environmental Discourse. London.: BlackwellPress.


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Public Art /Cities in

Competition

Strategies, bridges andgateways

F. ÁlvarezPort Authority of Barcelona

J. HyattArtist.Head of the Department of Fine ArtsManchester Metropolitan University

J. GingellArtistHead of the M.A. Courses.Cardiff Institute. University of Wales

A. BovairdResearch DirectorPublic Sector ManagementResearch Centre, Aston BusinessSchoolAston University. Birmingham

Dr. A. RemesarDepartment of SculptureResearch DirectorPublic Sculpture Course LeaderUniversity of Barcelona

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PUBLIC WATERFRONTS

The place for Public Art is obviously (?)Public Space1. This affirmation, contained in thevery definition of P.A.2, may appear to be un-necessary; however, it takes on relevance whenit becomes impossible to ignore the fatigue andconsequent saturation of public spaces, espe-cially in urban areas. The limits of the territo-ries occupied by cities are, in most cases, thevery factors which made those particular geo-graphic locations ideal as the sites of inhab-ited centres: they were easy to defend, had fer-tile land and/or abundant natural resourcesand good land, river or sea communications,etc. In the cases where this has occurred, theconditioning of the structure of the city to themorphology of the physical space it occupieshas been much more evident, and port citiesare perhaps the most representative caseswhen addressing the question of recoveringP.S. (Public Space) in areas which are run-down or partially or completely unusable fortheir original purpose3.

Port areas have been traditionallymarginalized from city life for social and la-bour reasons and have been brought back intothe urban framework through rehabilitationprogrammes, which are currently some of themost ambitious and innovative projects for thecreation of areas of commercial activity, urbancentres, improved quality of life in adjoining

neighbourhoods4, what are known as UrbanCoasts (Waterfronts, Urban Seas, Seafronts,Cités de l’eau, Cities on Water, Città d’acqua,etc.).

Dublin and the Temple Bar PropertiesProject; London and its Docklands; and Barce-lona with its Port Vell are some5 of the citieswhich have started or have finished large-scaleprojects. These projects have a number ofpoints in common in terms of the solutions ap-plied:

• specific weight of the artistic/architectural components• interdisciplinary strategies andconnections• effect of the projects on thequality of life• concern about the preservation ofthe cultural and environmentalheritage• incorporation (includingexperimentation) of the latesttechnological innovations

These points in common are not coinci-dental if we consider the Plans for Local andRegional Development6 of the different Admin-istrations involved, which have been follow-ing the guidelines agreed on by the EuropeanUnion7 with regard to priority projects and rec-ommendations for economic development

Waterfronts of ArtTechnologies ofInformation, Interactivityand Public Art

Fernado Álvarez

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and the improvement of the quality of life. Bar-celona8 is a clear example of this point.

The Strategic Plan 20009, a local develop-ment project, involves a number of aspectsdesigned to promote the economic develop-ment of the city within the overall plans of Eu-ropean macroregions, the final purpose ofwhich is qualitative and quantitative socialprogress on both the economic and environ-mental level10. In the specific case of Barcelona,one of the points having a direct relationshipwith Public Art11 is the promotion of tourismand trade by improving what is currently onoffer, not only in terms of business opportu-nities, but also with regard to the city’s cul-tural offerings. In this sense, the offerings gen-erated by the Port of Barcelona12 are focussedon two main areas: the Logistics Activities Zone13

and the Port Vell.The Port Vell is one of the most ambitious

urban projects in all of Europe. It covers anarea of approximately 55 ha14, creating a pleas-ure and commercial centre with extensive ar-eas for strolling and recreation, an underwa-ter aquarium, a multi-screen cinema complex,an Omnimax cinema, a shopping centre, a busi-ness centre associated with the World TradeCenter Association chain, a walkway which isan extension of the popular Ramblas, the re-modelling of the passenger sea terminal, theextension and improvement of the infrastruc-ture of the marina, the remodelling of the fishexchange, three underground parking garagesand a sports centre for the Barceloneta neigh-bourhood15.

This project, currently in the developmentphase16, should not only be included in whatis called Public Art because it fits into the poli-cies of local development and the recovery ofpublic spaces; nor because of the aesthetic, ar-tistic and architectural value of works whichare as charismatic and popular in the city asthe Moll de la Fusta17 and the Rambla de Mar18;nor because of the fact that these areas con-tain more than eighteen sculptures/monu-ments, including the Columbus monument;nor because of the recovery of the concept ofthe project as conceived in the Renaissance.No; it should not be included for only one ofthese reasons, but for all of them taken to-gether, which forces us to immediately rede-fine the term Public Art.

PUBLIC ART

During the development of one of theprojects begun in the Intermedia-TSIT Lab at theUniversity of Barcelona19—one of the prelimi-nary tasks of which was to create a completedata base20 which includes the public sculp-tures in Barcelona—as the data obtained fromdifferent sources21 was entered and studied, itbecame evident that, if it were continued inthe same way, the DB would be nothing morethan a mere inventory of “fixtures”, a cata-logue of sculptures with a minimum chrono-logical listing and a number of formal specifi-cations. It was not enough to add more his-torical data or aesthetic evaluations and bib-liographic references. From our perspective itwas necessary to abandon the classificationsystem used until that time by those interestedin public art22 from the point of view of sculp-ture, because it mixed different criteria tosomehow be able to include those objects con-sidered to be “public sculptures”. A functionalclassification could include in the same levela group labelled according to the morphologyof the object or to create a macrogroup of Ur-ban Fixtures which indiscriminately includesrubbish bins, traffic lights and street lamps,but which, curiously, does not include objectscreated by the architect Gaudí, which broughtus into aesthetic evaluations at the same time.

Independently of the fact that most of theauthors took for granted that P.A. was beingdefined as the cataloguing and classificationtook place, the stance was maintained of lim-iting the scope of P.A. to the mere object, tothe work of art placed in the public thorough-fare, with the minimum amount of extra-ar-tistic listings necessary for comprehension.

In a city like Barcelona, this is not possi-ble.

The redefinition of Public Art is not clearand limited. At present, P.A. is the interrela-tionship of a number of factors which cometogether in a public area23; but the most im-portant thing is that these factors are not in-herent to Art, but are elements of the city it-self, so that Public Art24 is not splashes of Artin public spaces, but part of something morecomplex, as is the urban setting25.

Thus, to continue with our Data Base, wecan see that a study of this type should morelogically use a GIS26, with different levels ofinformation and relationships between its ob-jects27, including not only objects traditionallyconsidered to be Public Art, but also the activeand passive elements of the urban environ-ment.


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lead to direct applications in our society. Inthis sense, the report stipulated ten priorities:

• home-based computer links• distance learning• Network of Universities and researchcentres• computerized services for smallbusinesses• motorway traffic management• air traffic control• health care networks• electronic bidding• trans-European network of publicadministrations• urban information highways

These ten points have a direct connectionin one way or another with the guidelines forlocal and regional development mentionedabove. This connection is not surprising giventhat the technological element was alreadypresent in the basic outline of these strategiesand because their aims were identical.

Thus, given the components• Local Development• Public Art• New Technologies

and the intricate relationship already men-tioned, especially considering P.A. and N.T.,is the connection between both elements pos-sible, above and beyond incidental intersec-tions, or are they parallel lines? Must we in-vestigate the simple generation of objects/products or move toward integration in a spe-cific context?

Besides the most obvious manifestations39,which are the result of new business opportu-nities and the accessibility of new media andtheir potential, the connection between the el-ements indicated in the area of local develop-ment and the public space will tend to be morecomplex and subtle as their integration in-creases, with P.A. being the most favoured asits scope of activity expands. In this symbioticrelationship, it is easy to imagine mutuallybeneficial forms of collaboration, of which Iwould draw attention to four key points ofagreement with the foregoing, while avoidingthe product/object-as-an-end-in-itself andreevaluating the project. These points are:

• integration of data systems,referential elements and the urbanmake-up• consideration of cyberspace, virtualreality and urban and interurbancommunication highways as publicspace• more importance placed on joint

This re-placement, if not redefinition, ofP.A. in the context of the city, would make thefact much more explicit that the concept ofPublic Art has more to do with Public Spacethat with the artistic objects placed in thesespaces28. The case of Port Vell29 is a clear ex-ample of how a public space can be organizedwith interdisciplinary solutions in the frame-work of an overall project, converting each ofthe elements30 in a significant part of thewhole31. These activities are generally wellaccepted and assimilated by the people of thecity when they see that they have more spacefor public use, unlike what happens in manycases when monuments/sculptures are in-serted in the public thoroughfare using crite-ria which is not transparent and not in keep-ing with P.A.

When speaking of interdisciplinary solu-tions, we should make an effort to go beyondthe simple32 acceptance of elements of urbanfixtures or other objects which are tradition-ally not included in P.A. That is, if we acceptthat, because of its design, the physical me-dium of an informative traffic sign is part ofP.A.33, why can’t we consider the underlyingtechnological system of these signs to be partof P.A. as well, based on the city as a complexwhole?34 Can’t traffic restriction and accesscontrol35 devices be considered temporary ur-ban Artistic Installations? Doesn’t an engineeror traffic control technician work at the samelevel as an artist or a sculptor?36

THE PUBLIC STATE OF THE ART... OR

THE STATE OF PUBLIC ART

Although the relationship between Water-fronts as a specification of public space is clearin the context of local development pro-grammes and P.A., why is there an insistenceon the technological factor—specifically onnew data technologies and interactive sys-tems?37

In December 1993, the European Unionpassed the White Book for Growth, Competitive-ness and Employment, highlighting the need foradapting to the new Information Society. In thesame report, the new technologies to be im-plemented for building the groundwork of thisemerging society were clearly indicated: theIntegrated Services Digital Network (ISDN),wideband infrastructure (ATM), the GlobalSystem of Mobile Communications (GSM), geo-graphic coverage by satellite and new BasicServices38. The implementation of this technol-ogy should not be an end in itself, but should

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strategies than self-sufficient projects• self-critical reflections onovergenerous evaluations and excesswith regard to P.A. and N.T.

With regard to the integration of data sys-tems, referential elements and the urban make-up, not only the formal aspects are includedin the solution of volumetric and visual prob-lems, which can be structural or related to in-terface, or the demarcational/referential/or-ganizational function in its context, but alsothe implicit derived sublevel in the use of elec-tronic urban guides, in-route navigation sys-tems, leisure programs, etc., which representan effort in the P.A./City connection.

Besides the literature from the fields of fic-tion40 and rigorous study41, it is important tosee how the second point can relate to the first,both on the technical and psychological lev-els, raising serious questions on ubiquity,interac-tionism and conduct42. On anotherlevel, we could begin to speculate on the or-ganization and exploitation of cyberspace, withthe curious observation that space terminol-ogy is easily being adopted to describe andidentify non-existent spaces which are actu-ally made up of servers, linking nodes, physi-cal connections, satellites and all types of pro-grams.

With regard to the third point, the cost ofthe necessary investment and the need to havea preliminary project with an overall vision ofthe operation, among other things, are someof the aspects which will be imposed by theneed to unify activities in joint strategies whichwill clearly define the goals to be undertaken,given that all initiative in other terms will runthe serious risk of failure. This means thatwithout eliminating isolated projects, the peo-ple responsible for a part or a complete projectwill finally have to commit themselves and toget involved in all the levels43 of the work.

The final key point is the synthesis of theprevious three, which generates a critical re-flection44 on the use and real needs of P.A. and/or N.T. The case of the Port Vell is once again aclear example of putting global criteria beforethe temptation of populating an area withsculptures/monuments, multimedia audio-visual shows, interactive information points,vending machines and other gadgets.

PUBLIC ART?

Aware that many questions have been leftunanswered, would it be possible to state thatat present Public Art is nothing more than abunch of questions45 outlining various ele-ments?

NOTES

1 Public Space, whether indoor or outdoor, urbanor rural, permanent or temporary, real or virtual, etc.

2 P.A. is Public Art.

3 Unusable and insufficiently prepared for threereasons:* changes in the characteristics of ships, which needlarger and more specialized docks for loading anddischarging.* changes in the logistics chain of intermodaltransport, a concept linked to containerized cargo,making it possible to create new areas which areideal for activities that generate added value.* old ports are physically limited when it comes toadapting to the needs of the above points and toonear the urban fabric for certain port activities.

4 Without losing sight of the maritime nature of thearea.

5 Boston, Montreal, San Francisco, Baltimore, NewYork, Hong Kong, Dakar, Bordeaux, Belfast,Marseilles, Bilbao, Santander, Ghent, Rotterdam,Plymouth, Cardiff, etc. are some others.

6 Obviously also common.

7 Whether because of legal regulations or to applyfor financial aid for E.U. priority projects.

8 To use the city where this seminar is being heldas an example.

9 Pla Estratègic Econòmic i Social Barcelona 2000;Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1990.

10 Making use of resources, pollution and wasteelimination.

11 Another point is the management andimprovement of public transport and roads. We willexamine this relationship below.

12 One of the organizations signing/collaboratingwith the Strategic Plan 2000.

13 The Logistics Activities Zone, LAZ, is an areawhere logistics operators (importers/exporters) canperform activities which generate added value onthe goods handled, making it possible to reducedelivery times and customs procedures and toconcentrate services, etc. It also has facilities formultimodal transport links for optimum connectionsby sea, rail, air and road. Although the Port Vell isthe project which has most to do with Public Art, itis necessary to mention the LAZ because of theoverall context and joint strategies to benefit theurban environment, quality of life, etc.

14 Including Moll Nou, Moll de Balears i Pescadors,Moll del Rellotge, Plaça de Mar, Passeig Joan deBorbó, Moll de la Barceloneta, Moll del Dipòsit, Moll


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30 Buildings, pavements, lighting, signage,monumental sculptures, etc.31 And doing away with aesthetic and evenergonomic analysis.

32 Simple and not at all new: Various Authors,Entorno al entorno: Barcelona, 1985.

33 For example, the gantry signs designed by theengineer Calatrava, installed on Diagonal Avenuein Barcelona.

34 In Barcelona there are eight different systems forcitizens based on new data system technologiesrelating to urban mobility: a Cultural InformationSystem, Information on the Occupancy of AreaParking Garages, Indicators of the reversibility oflanes on incoming/outgoing roads, a Variable RoadInformation System, an Interactive InformationSystem of the Industrial Estate of the Zona Francain Barcelona, the Vereda Information andManagement System; an intelligent Traffic LightingSystem and an Information System on city bus lines.

35 Poble Sec Experience within the framework ofthe Gaudí Project inside the Polis Programme.Barcelona 1992.

36 Perhaps this is going too far. It could beunderstood to mean that any element placed in orrelated to Public Space is Public Art; or that thescope of activity of the artist is being limited. This isnot my intention.

37 Interactivity. See Remesar, A., Interactivos,Instrucciones de Uso and Manzini, Ezio, Artefactos.Hacia una nueva ecología.

38 E-mail and data transfer.

39 During the First International Symposium on theComic held in 1985 at the Fine Arts Department ofthe University of Barcelona, Dr. A. Remesar andJ.M. Padulles presented the paper La historieta enla era del chip (The Comic in the Age of the Chip),which discussed the extent of the use of computersin the world of comics, highlighting two key aspectswhich led to the creation of the project ArtCom andthe formalization of the research team of theLaboratory of Treatment and Synthesis of Imageand Text.

“... we believe that the future of the use ofcomputers in the field of comics will not be limitedto the development of the expressive quality offigurative aspects, an element which is somewhatforeseeable, but rather, that research into the comic-computer relationship will lead to other advances,fundamentally in two directions:a. the complete creation of the storyb. new forms of distribution of the finishedproducts...”

Since then, although the areas of activity ofthis research group have been expanded andtechnological development in the field of computerscalls for constant revision of the outlined resources,

d’Espanya, Moll Bosch i Alsina and Moll deBarcelona.

15 For a complete list of the activities in the Port Vellof Barcelona, see El Vigía-Barcelona desde elPuerto, Barcelona 1992.

16 In the summer of 1995, 80% will be completedand open to the public.

17 Officially called the Moll Bosch i Alsina.

18 ...despite having been inaugurated only fivemonths ago.

19 The research unit I am attached to.

20 Created by E. Cofiné under the direction of Dr. A.Remesar.

21 Mainly from the office of the Barcelona CityCouncil.

22 García Martín, Manuel; Barili, Renato; et al.

23 see the Port Vell example.

24 The repetition of the term “Public Art” is notgratuitous. In a gallery or in any other non-publicspace, there are other influencing factors. It isimportant to separate P.A. from artistic circles, whichhave little to do with P.A.

25 A city with its own urban shape, which isdetermined by the organization of its space and theelements it is comprised of. These elements fall intotwo categories: active and passive elements. Theactive elements are the different networks whichguarantee the city’s operation; networks which donot define the objects they are comprised of, sincethey are functional systems which can sharecomponents with other networks at the same time.There are four networks we could differentiate:information network, mobility network, servicesnetwork and connection network. The passiveelements are non-connective elements which canform part of a network or subnetwork, but whichusually do not.

26 Computer-based Geographic InformationSystem.

27 This vry text should be in a similar medium,organized in the form of an interactive hypertext.

28 I know; this is not a new concept. From theclassical cities to the present day this relationshiphas been maintained; however, a good number ofcontemporary artists and sculptors seem to haveforgotten it. Perhaps it would be a good idea todebate and clarify concepts such as the image ofthe Sculptor, the concept of the Project and thevalidity of some pedagogic programmes in artistictraining.

29 And most other similar waterfront projects.

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the validity of both points has been clearlydemonstrated through both the projects executedand the research tasks necessary for these projects.Such was the anticipation that what is now calledthe Multimedia market is nothing more than a labelfor a set of tools and conglomerate materials undera single data processing unit which makes thefollowing possible:a. the complete creation of the storyb. new forms of distribution of the finished product.

40 The already excessively cited Neuromancer byW. Gibson, Tron by Walt Disney Productions, etc.

41 Rheingold, Howard, The Virtual Community andTaylor & Saarinen, Imagologies.

42 Various Authors, Entorno al entorno.

43 not only the creative levels

44 As has occurred throughout history with anymedium and technology; e.g., writing, the printingpress, the television, videogames, etc.

45 And is it necessary to provide an answer to them?

REFERENCES

AA.VV;El Vigía.Barcelona desde el Puerto. PEVSA.Barcelona, 1992 / D.L: B-26403-92

AA.VV;Europa y la Sociedad Global de la Información.Informe de la Comisión Europea. Corfú, Junio 1994

AA.VV;Plan Estratégico económico y Social Barcelona2000. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Barcelona, 1990 /

Alemany, Joan;El Puerto de Barcelona. Historia y actualidad.L’Aveç, S.A. Barcelona, 1984

Manzini, Ezio;Artefactos. Hacia una nueva ecología del ambienteartificial. Celeste Ediciones y ExperimentaEdiciones de Diseño. Madrid, 1993

McLuhan, Marshall & Powers, Bruce R;La Aldea Global. El Mamífero Parlante (SerieMayor), Editorial Gedisa, S.A. Barcelona, 1993

Postman, Neil;Tecnòpoli. Ed. Llibres de l’ÍndexBarcelona 1994 / ISBN 84-87561-20-0

Remesar, Antonio;• Interactivos: instrucciones de uso. BarcelonaMedia, S.A. Barcelona, 1993• Memòria del Projecte Art-Com. Dept. de Estructurade la Imagen y del Entorno de la Universitat deBarcelona. Barcelona, 1986

Remesar, Antonio & Padulles, J.M;La Historieta en la Era del Chip en Actas del 1erSimposium Internacional sobre la Historieta.Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidad de BarcelonaBarcelona, 1985

Rheingold, Howard;The Virtual Comunity. Homesteading on theelectronic frontier. Addison Wesley. Reading, 1993

Taylor, Mark & Saarinen, Esa;Imagologies. Media Philosophy. Ed. Routledge.London, 1994


103

OtherNormalNormalNormalNormalNormalI would like, first, to remind you of an in-

door example of public art, the mural paintedby Ambrogio Lorenzetti for the Palazzo Pub-lico in Siena between 1338 and 1340. For yearsit was known as the Allegory of Good andBad Government but it has been more recentlydemonstrated (convincingly) to be an allegoryof Siena’s status as a Republic and a demon-stration of a competitive city state declaringits belief in itself as a “new Jerusalem” andthe political preference for a system of the“common good” over tyranny. Through artand culture, Siena was declaring itself as oneof the first “modern” cities and a trade centre:a gateway for commerce with the world.

The belief in the subject being an Allegoryof Good and Bad Government is an interest-ing one which persisted as the dominant read-ing of the work for many years. The reasonsfor it reside in a rhyming across the walls ofthe palace between a city of ordered, calm,prosperity on one wall of the mural to a cityravaged by militarism, rape and disorder onthe other side.

In this, the mural apparently representedan interface of city life: the fear/pride contra-diction. It, seemingly, presented us with a feltrepresentation of the city as a shifting sea ofcontradictions - a city that speaks with manyaccents.

Subsequent hard research has shifted themural to be an expression of civic pride. Pride

Bernadette (Ralph):

“It’s funny, we all sit around mindlesslyslagging off that vile stink-hole of a city.But, in some strange way, it takes careof us. I don’t know if that ugly wall ofsuburbia has been put there to stopthem getting in or us getting out.Come on, don’t let it drag you down.Let it toughen you up. I can only fightbecause I’ve learnt to. Being a manone day and a woman the next isn’tan easy thing to do.” (1)

And how would this city be in words?What grammar the city?

Well, this city, like us all, was born swim-ming.

Natatal.

Grown as half man and half womanwith drifting two-faced gazes andregular on/off binary strokes. In andout. In and out. In and out of focus.The dark tunnels. The flash of neon. The“How the fuck?”. Mute and marvellousit whispers and gossips and declaims.

Scratch City

Trhough which are represented the diversenests of contradiction which characterise the

sites of public art

John Hyatt

GATEWAYS OF FEAR BRIDGES OF PRIDE

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Other

Spaghetti city. Cling-film.

One day, (from a swimming pool ofoverripe peaches) I will declare mydream escape-to-be... successful.Harry Houdini.

Not ready.

The falls of desire.

Born neither of man nor woman, drag-ging the loveboat up the street. Thefree hand holds the shotgun. The cityof the suicidal poet.

And always the music.

And always the destination whatever.

And the words intermingling like themating dance of long necked birdsfrom the North which is their South.

The shadow of a large cloud veryslowly and the skin pricks up to meetit. And the city is the teeth of the world.The ball of the foot on the hard pathacross the skull. Pull back the lips ofthe sky.

Gash city.

The clown fish services in and out. Inand out. In and out the city streetswhere the sun refused to shine... di-rectly. The Animals polishing name-plates. Licking windows through thenight.

Through the fence, spot-lit, the whitetree, finally.

And do you remember those guardsfifteen years ago in Rome with theirrifles pointing and the smell of petrolburning and the dead girl draggedand handcuffed through the Fiat win-dow and the motorcycle sliding?Submachine gun. The scatter.

Ass-ass-ini. Ass-ass-ini. Ass-ass-ini.

NormalNormalNormalNormalNormal

in Siena as a paradigm of “good government”.We have moved on in time. We have

moved forward in time. We have moved back-ward in time. We have shimmied, we haveshammied, and we have squirmed in time.

I write in disdain of a certain type of his-torical writing which I, along with my wife-to-be, critiqued in 1986 (1), this is built up fromseparate historical events, ordered and stackedlike house bricks. This type of history is aTower of Babel built by a certain type of mind.It is, most often boring old twaddle.

As a neo-Mancunian, I had, recently, readan eyeful of what these dullards have trottedout in the name of historical research, becausethere is no historical era more likely to ‘inspire’an old twaddle to twaddle than that which en-compasses the evolution of Manchester (andLiverpool) as modern cities. ‘By 1844, the firstindustrial revolution had established Man-chester as the world paradigm modern manu-facturing town and Liverpool as the gatewayto the world market...’ etc... etc. Super-Siena,in fact. It is an interesting subject for a story. Ithas as much action as Accione Mutantes, moreplot than my life, and lashings of black, blackhumour. However, the story is usually told bya bore, whose reason for writing is parked inhis garage. It is read by an audience of thosewith even less imagination, who require a po-lite and ordered picture of the past - because asafe past infers a safe present. The consumerof such a polished product needs to support amyth of the present which he or she has inter-nally constructed. The consumer needs themyth because, as it was in 1844, the externalworld is, again, a crazy, chaotic and uncertainfield of conflicting stimuli.

Those of us who do not require this mythof the present as a fixed and safe structure,must look elsewhere for our history. We mustlook to our cities like a stranger, hair stiff downthe nape of the neck, has to look:

“Newly arrived and totally ignorant of theLevantine languages, Marco Polo could ex-press himself only with gestures, leaps, criesof wonder and of horror, animal barkings orhootings, or with objects he took from hisknapsacks - ostrich plumes, pea-shooters,quartzes - which he arranged in front of himlike chessmen. Returning from the missionson which Kublai sent him, the ingenious for-eigner improvised pantomimes that the sov-ereign had to interpret: one city was depictedby the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’sbeak to fall into a net; another city by a nakedman running through fire unscorched; a thirdby a skull, its teeth green with mould, clench-


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Other

Put up your bright swords, gentlemen.

You, like Fra Angelico amongst thebeggars.

In the newspaper, though no-one readItalian, we pieced it all together. Thedrugs. The bagsnatching. The pre-meditation. The history. The stop signdisobeyed. The pistol’s death sen-tence understood. Riddling the Fiat.

Metal and blood whilst you ate,Sphinx-like at the pavement table.

All there in black and white and redall over. Snapper. Fish Supper.

Handcuffed-after-death city.

The rifles. Submachine. Walk on thewild side. Walking is a city taught thing.A safety device. The Ripper.

Look ahead to the escape at theedge of the city. Backwards walkinglike Plennie L. Wingo (2). Walkingstraight into that swimming pool.Peaches to slow me down. Drag net.Fast fish.

That Ha Ha Ha Burt Lancaster with hisbig gig trunks travelling cross-ways! Hehad a smile as wide as a cityscapeand teeth like skyscrapers in a lake.

His face, a Mausoleum, hung over thecity like a golden cloud of aphids.

The litter police wear brown uniformsand give instant fines before the sungoes down in the park. Cleanest cityever seen before dark. Then, Alice inPornoland. The sound of a lappingblue. Astroturf. Knives and lychees andtassels on the end of a dress. Both kindsof music - Country and Western.

Germany - shoe shops

NormalNormalNormalNormalNormal

ing a round, white pearl. The Great Khan de-ciphered the signs, but the connection betweenthem and the places visited remained uncer-tain; he never knew whether Marco wishedto enact an adventure that had befallen himon his journey, an exploit of the city’s founder,the prophecy of an astrologer, a rebus or a cha-rade to indicate a name. But, obscure or obvi-ous as it might be, everything Marco displayedhad the power of emblems, which, once seen,can not be forgotten or confused. In the Khan’smind the empire was reflected in a desert oflabile and interchangeable data, like grains ofsand, from which there appeared, for each cityand province, the figures evoked by theVenetian’s logogriphs. As the seasons passedand his missions continued, Marco masteredthe Tartar language and the national idiomsand tribal dialects. Now his accounts were themost precise and detailed that the Great Khancould wish and there was no question or curi-osity which they did not satisfy. And yet eachpiece of information about a place recalled tothe emperor’s mind that first gesture or ob-ject with which Marco had designated theplace. The new fact received a meaning fromthat emblem and also added to the emblem anew meaning. Perhaps, Kublai thought, theempire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’sphantasms. “On the day when I know all theemblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able topossess my empire at last?”

And the Venetian answered: “Sire do notbelieve it. On that day you will be an emblemamong emblems.” (2)

One must look again at the cultural inher-itance and rescue the meaning of the past fromthe grip of the twaddler. Often it is the artistwho gives us our first glimpse of a differenthistory, especially the most urban and publicof public artists: the cartoonist or satirist.

In France, in 1860, Daumier drew the car-toon illustrated here. It shows a peasant cou-ple standing, ungainly, by their rude cottageand contemplating. Paris on the horizon. Itparallels what Charles Dickens’ traveller inThe Old Curiosity Shop, observed to be “aninvading army of bricks and mortar”: the ex-pansion of the modern city. “Dire que nousv’la Parisiens!...’, “Oh, and to think that nowwe are Parisians!”), the solid fat peasantwoman is saying to her ridiculous, cloggedand smocked husband as he grins inanely be-neath his pixie hat.

Paris was spreading across the country-side at such a rate that soon these, even these,

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NormalNormalNormalNormalNormal Other

country bumpkins will be part of its cintizenry.The city is still represented from the outside.Later artists like Van Gogh would be drawingthe edges of the city as its tentacles grew, bitby bit, into the surrounding landscape. Laterstill, European Marcel Duchamp was to putthe city, in the form of plumbing - the urinalof R. Mutt´s Fountain- into the art gallery inwhat was soon to be the New York of Walkon the Wild Side.

However, let's stick with Daumier's printfor a while longer.

It was for a purpose, a use, inside the cityitself. It was to be seen by the Parisian bour-geoisie at a particular moment in its history.

It was drawn by a satirist, Daumier, so onemust ask how it functioned a satire, where isthe biting edge of this initially simple draw-ing which describes the growth of Paris? Onemust examine Daumier's audience, the Paris-ian bourgeoisie, in order to see how the printmight have done its job.

In a city that was vastly expanding, a largeproportion of the population were compara-tively recent immigrants from the countrysidesurrounding it. The Parisian bourgeois was noexception. Having made vast profits in thecountryside he moved into the capital and waseager to establish an identity in this new worldof strangers. Part of this re-orientation was thenecessary construction of a rural myth, animage of the countryside as a pastoral heavenand the peasant as an innocent, simple, idlerin Arcadia. We have all seen the pictures ofpeasant folk leaning, lying, drinking but neverat work, with cheeks so red that one wouldthink they ate nothing but strawberries. Themyth was necessary because, in truth, it wasrecognised that the peasantry was very capa-ble of extreme social violence and revolution,especially the vast number of dispossessedpeasants. They had been forced to sell theirland to the rural bourgeois, in order to buyfood to live, during the restructuring of thecountryside to the capitalist mode of produc-tion. These dispossessed were also filling thestreets of Paris in search of work, becomingthe urban poor.

They were one group, as we see fromDaumier’s print, which added to the growthof Paris. They were bitter and they were liv-ing alongside that other group which had re-cently caused their bitterness, the ex-rural Pa-risian bourgeoisie. In this light, Daumier’sprint becomes a hot poker at the nerve-centreof his audience’s perception of their own lives.It functions at the interface between fear andpride. It ‘means’ in a context, in an area of dy-namic, shifting public life where:

Italy - funny mask shops.

Budapest - shop windows only.

Gateways and Bridges for commerce.In and out.

In Athens. That rain came down. Likea weapon. "Jack Kerouac..don'tmove!. Blam! The air clears for a whileafterwards.

Steaming Street No.1.

Steaming Street No.2.

Steaming Street on film.

Steaming Street in a comic.

Inside the hallway, there is a pram andthe letterboxes where the video youwill post will not get or will be stolenfrom. The hallway is as wide as a street.Big enough for a horse led by a manin armour. The hallway is cool like metalto the touch. Outside is the blood andthe guts. The outside's in and the in-side's out.

Climbing up five spiralling floors, tenspiralling red-tiled curves of stair, innu-merable single steps, with the legsgone to jelly and the back gone torubber mixing with the shirt, surely nomore and onto the roof.

Dizzy.

Its all patched up with concrete andplaster and metal sheet. Look up at thethousand TV aerials of all shapes andsizes and angles and, my god, the sizeof that gull vanishes into the satelliteroof of the General Post Office. Stayaway from the edge. What if there wasa fire? And on the roof opposite. Theone with a fence around it (on it?). Theone with a high fence as a perimeter.The one with a six foot high. The onewith an eight foot, at least, high fencewhich that football struck from the in-side some seconds ago is a schoolplayground and the sound of the chil-


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“ ‘Public’ thus came to mean a life passed out-side the life of family and close friends; in the pub-lic region diverse, complex social groups were tobe brought into ineluctable contact.. the attempt tocreate a social order in the midst of confusing andchaotic social conditions at one and the same timebrought the contradictions of the ancien regime toa point of crisis and created positive opportunitiesfor group life which have yet to be understood.”(3)

Besides the similarity of this toCyberguru-speak, so prevalent in Manchesterat the moment, what has this Paris got to dowith Manchester?

Consider an architectural feature of Man-chester noted by a twenty-four year old fac-tory owner’s son in 1844. Frederick Engels, inhis book The Condition of The Working Classin England, looked at a Manchester and he ob-served the particular nature of urban planningindulged in by our bourgeois ancestors. If onefollows the wind that carried the black smokeof the factories (so black that the pepperedmoth was forced to change colour for camou-flage - and, indeed, gained its name! (4)) tothe poorer areas of the city, one travels fromthe villas of the nineteenth century bourgeoi-sie to the central business area and, if one sticksto the major arterial roads of the city, it is pos-sible to miss the areas of the city in which theworking people live. The long avenues, suchas Market Street, obscure the slums of Man-chester from the monied classes with the safefacades of the small shopkeeper. The hiddencramped courts, squealing pigs, and heaps ofputrescent dung were hidden from view - outof sight out of mind. However, the threat wasalways there. The threat of crime, vice, pesti-lence and riot. The great manufacturing townsof northern England, no less than Paris, suf-fered their fair share of the pride/fear contra-diction. The fear of pestilence lead to the prideof the Victorian sewer system which is cur-rently collapsing.

For the international contemporary artist,one hundred and something years later, therepresentation of the city is not sited in theavant-garde of an advancing “army of bricksand mortar” — the invasion of the country-side has been completed long ago. The prob-lem of representation demands a differentanswer.

The growth had stopped in the 80s. Thenoble plans of international modernist archi-tecture had borne unexpected results, and thecity showed a tendency toward decay. We hadinherited a punk city. It was still a city of itin-erant rich and asbestos-breathing poor.

It was a black and burnt-out city which

dren has been there all along hasn’tit?

Life of stammer.

The heat has a buzz to it - a beehiveof possibility with your inside out - thatsizzles like the promise of decent TV.Like need. Like praying. Thousands ofaerials. Thousands silently buzzing.Thousands silently sucking the sky. Acat moving in and out. In and outamongst them.

Below. Beds, showers, environmentallyfriendly shampoo and five channels ofunmitigated shift - just the way I like it.In another language. In a capitalisttongue.

Jesus. The heat. Rivers of Tarmac. Kneedeep in steaming Tarmac and all thebuildings are burning.

However, in the privacy of the gardenit is a pleasant sizzling. Retsina Bar B.The birds. The bees. The yellow planesat the top of the tree are Elderflower.Thought the sky had sucked the col-our out of the topmost leaves. A lazythought. Enjoyable, short-sighted, self-teaser. Is that a “runner”? A pseudotree?

The Kinks.

And then the flesh, as a man, beginsto move the body. Not the muscles,the flesh, I swear, moves the arms andthe fingers when the horror, the hor-ror, is discovered. The repercussive hor-ror. The jungle. The concentrateddrum. The silent sucking of the farm:the ants’ aphid farm.

(Yesterday, whilst ringing for flowersfrom an office in the 1960s book reposi-tory some weeks before it closed as aBritish Art School, I glanced up to thewindow ledge (long, metal, industrial).Just before, a magpie on the barbedwire fence - blacky blue and mattedwith shift watching/ looking/ bored/new magic was going on/ stared sym-bolically as an icon of post-industrialdespair and bad luck or sorrow. On thewindow ledge. All along.

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created the opportunity for clearance and theopening up of inner city spaces to be filledwith... what? With art, “useless” and inoffen-sive art.

The work Mariscal has produced for thiscity of Barcelona owes as much to the tradi-tion of the cartoon and the comic book as itdoes to fine art. The works function in wayscomparable to Daumier’s cartoon. They jug-gle razor-blades of humour and seriousnessand totter on the brink of entropy, illustrat-ing a playful, dynamic tension in our innercities. Style struggles for space. Sometimes itsucceeds, often it disappears, and the contentis often situated at the point where contra-dictions meet (fear and pride, freedom andrepression/necessity). In its disposable kitsch,it represents a world that is dramaticallychanging, Baudelaire’s idea of the transient,cities which even now, so long after Daum-ier’s time, are not firmly formed - but are con-tinually bubbling away in the boiling pot ofconflicting interests. In no corner of this worldis this violent transformation not visible.

These works seem to express a mischie-vous delight in living and especially livingright in the thick of chaos. Certainly, there isa pessimism of the intellect, but also an opti-mism of the will evident in the struggle ofstyle in the flood of conflicting urban stimuli.

Beneath the giant cartoon lobster abovethe street, the bag-thief and the Tueur sansGages wander and Baudelaire's flanneur con-tinues his drifting derive - cosmopolites stillrub waxen, polished, automobilised, ar-moured shoulders with Daumier's peasants.The faces of both offer nothing- for the eyesare obscured. The content is purposefully lim-ited.

The twadlers wither on the vine.As I have said in EARI, the year of 1989

proved to be a watershed year for the world(5). The demolition of the Berlin's Wall hap-pened in every city in the West and in everyconsciousness. It had stood as a mental ironcurtain through my head since my birth in1958. Its destruction presented a massivedisontinuation of context- a burning of themental map.

We are now journeying in time as well asspace. The ghosts of history are erasing thetape of progress. Back to the future. From1989, it was a brave new world and a sea-change was indeed underway but it was alsoan old world too which was pushing upthrough the cracks in the folding surface ofthe Modernist cultural Tarmacadam. All thatwas solid was melting into air and, rather thanbeing transcended or overturned, Modernity

They are here.

Flying ant day. A thousand in oneroom. Gathered to do their business.)

Well, that was nothing compared tothe aphid farm. The sucking. The farm-ing. The itching.

Look up the aphid in... I’ll do it for youin the kids Encyclopedia:

APHIDS, also called Plant Lice(Aphididae) are very small (1/10 to 1/50 of an inch)... In the autumn they re-turn to the original host plant and pro-duce both males and females. Aftermating, females lay eggs on stems ofplants, and the eggs do not hatch untilspring. Adults normally die in winter.Aphids feed only on plant juices thatthey suck out through their beaks in-serted in the plants. Heavy infestationsmay injure a plant’s growth or deformit, or the aphids may transmit variousplant diseases. They secrete from theend of their abdomen a sweet, stickyfluid called honeydew, which collecton the plant stem. Honeydew is eatenby flies, bees and ants. About 1000species of aphids occur in temperateregions around the world. They arerare in the tropics. Some have smoothbodies, others hairy. Green is a com-mon colour, but others are black,brown, white, red or orange. Some areduotoned (3)

Ants herd these aphids like... whatever.They guard them. The aphids are notgreen, they are grey, matt- not shinylike an armoured ant- shaped likeFuckswagen Beetles. They suck theplant.

The ant sucks their "honeydew". Brief,simple, erotic and grotesque.


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was dissipating before our eyes, becomingtransparent, and its ghosts were returning.

The irruption into continuity precipitatedby the trumbling Wall was reinforced by the1989 Global Forum to assess the state of theplanet. The verdict was not good. The dreamof Science seemed like a nightmare and "fact"was starkly underlined as contextual opinion,ideological and political. Also, the ecologicalrevolution, which had been thought andtalked about, was starting to land as junk mailthrough the letterboxes. The world just didn'tknow what size it was that year.

Theoretical chaos represented the water-shed of (possibly/ ironically to a Marxist) thereturn to history. Add all these together andthe situation for newly "liberated" cities of theex-Eastern Bloc in a global technological revo-lutionary economic speed/time machine was.Has been a phenomenal rate of change. Cata-pulted into a global forum, all cities of what-ever pasts are competing for attention and im-age. They are competing for a stake in the fu-ture, redesigning themselves at the point ofpotential historical disappearance. In whatway will we soon require the continuation ofcities at all? In a different way, to be sure. In-terestingly, in this regard, the proliferation ofcities describing themselves, uncertainly, as thegateway or the bridge to elsewhere, rather thana centre in themselves is extraordinarily apt.The city as a centre for information switching.Cities as city states in increasingly fluid andborderless nations require legitimation and acorporate image.

Just like Siena at the times of theLorenzettis, they are buying in legitimationthrough an international clique of artists-of-hire: cultural mercenaries complicit with com-merce.

In the midst of this world shift, the artistwho sites work in a social city space hasthrived. What we are witnessing is a renais-sance (I use the word deliberately) in publicart. Competitive city states vie for internationalsignificance by the wholesale purchase of acultural profile. More than the artist prospersthrough his/her endeavours.

The most significant growth in the localinternational art/city/ garden has been thatof the middlemen. They that advise a city topretend to gatewayness or bridgiosity: theconsultants and the report writers.

The suckers of the honeydew.

You will not notice them.

They are tiny, piled on the stem. But, ifyou look for them and find them, youwill know the horror.

The lead character of this aphid farmin Manchester is called HaarlonMondo. He is an artist who placessculptures in a social space. A publicsphere. His reputation an income re-lies upon him not offending the suck-ers.

Haarlon has proposed a sculpture ofan enormous aphid to be placed inthe jugular of the sap city.

He has compromised and made itgreen and neon rather than its morefactual grey and dull.

It has been picked over by commit-tee after committee going about theirbusiness.

Haarlon has had his sap sucked.

The proposal was successful. After in-stallation in St. Furnace Platz, withinthree years, the ants neglected it andHaarlon (now a lecturer at the Univer-sity of Fourth-Building- on- the- Left-Past-the-Rusting-Civic- Heavy-Metal-Crap-Sculpture) said...

But the batteries to the recordingWalkman had been stolen again bySuper Barrio and the Dirty Man. All ofthe substance of Professor Mondo'sthesis was lost in time.

The batteries? They were inserted upthe wrinkled arses of old age pension-ers in Amsterdam to keep them warmthrough the winter- as defined by theMaastricht Treaty.

Manchester? A heart of Gold in a bathof fun fur.

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NO T E S

(1) Rodgers, E and Hyatt,J. Connections. TheTwadlers of Scare City, Cornehouse, Open Eyes,1986

(2) Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities, pp21-23,Harvest, 1972

(3) Sennett, R The fall of the Public Man, pp 17-18

(4) I'm not aware of any current peppered mothresearch- I wonder if it is changing back to a whitemoth now than Manchester has become a smoke-free Silicon Valley? Or a digital/virtual moth?

(5) Hyatt, J (Editor/Author). EARI: The OrangeCircle Edition.Vol 1, No 2, St. Jerome'sDisappearing Cat and Other Apocrypha,Department of Fine Arts, Manchester MetropolitanUniversity, p. 18, 1995

NO T E S

(1) Dir. Terence Stamp The Adventures of PriscillaQueen of the Desert. Australian Film FinanceGroup. Polygram Film Production, Gmbh. LatentImage Productions. PTV Ltd. New South Wales Filmand Television Office, 1994

(2) Plennie L. Wingo was world record holder forwalking backwards.

(3) The Children's Animal World Encyclopediain Colour pp. 31-32, Paul Hamlyn, 1967



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ARTIST AS A VISIONARY

Things are not as they seem.We live in a multi-layered construction of

TIME & SPACE.The ENVIRONMENT - the place where

things happen."EVENT-UALITY"Everything moves-shifts-drifts-changes,

transforms, emerges, decays.MOST OF WHAT WE SEE IS, TO USE

DUCHAMP'S TERM - (IN DELAY)- our lives- the time span of objects in coherency- even (Sartres) TREE - placed in Nauseabefore ROQUETIN

The Artist in this, is faced with a play-ground - the geography of her/his imagina-tion.

We do not all have to be Blakes to readour position, to know our places - to see theSIGNS, to understand the living forces of theCOMPOST heap - re-composing.

Those involved in PUBLIC ART as Art-ists are, if commissioned, paid to have VI-SION, to build, oppose, comment upon, thisterrifying realm of urbes - the conurbation.

The artist acts, makes, lives her dreamsout on the field of Enna - "The Oracle ofDelphus" - (now engulfed by industrial sites

Visionsof new CityPlaces

John Gingell

near Athens). Make no mistake: if we, (andwe all will) live here in these exciting, pulsat-ing, choking, terrifying places, we can see ifgiven a chance, visions of how it can be otherthan it is. We must be in delay - dwelling, andgently with love weave our past into the com-ing destiny if that is not to be all clamour, com-merce and pain of loneliness.

As Sartre said (of the visonary) *Placingan institution in a framework of judgement itbecomes a PHENOMENON.

ENVIRONMEWNT - A LIFE SPACE

That which is around us - THE 'IS' withinwhich we 'live' our lives - the water to ourgoldfishness - a place for action, happeningand happenstance - our surroundings.

• psychological and physical• the cultural and the economic• the parameters of love and hate• fear and security• shelter and abandonment• society and solitude

All artists are involved in 'environment'Why ART at all? Million dollar questionTo refuse (in Beckett's phrase)The refusal of the Universe'To scratch our significance on the glassy

granite of time passing

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"the world is in an inadequate state - the indi-vidual 'acts' and brings via language the construc-tion (a world) into being".

Art is a phenomenon - part of human ac-tivity (all art is public).

Art is a necessity for health, a vital prod-uct of the human mind, heart & sensibility.

Art exists - yes as part of European herit-age - exported like democracy to the world -part of human freedom - it does confronthabitude & order.

Plato wished to ban the artists to the mar-gins - to be in fact expelled from the Ideal Re-public.

Artists challenge, do not fit - are danger-ous - have a role to challenge cultural conform-ity, banality and boredom. They have in his-tory, led the opposition to oppression - Czechartists, German artists, Spanish and Catalanartists.

Art is a private activity engaged in by con-senting adults - with a patron, public or pri-vate, as the active agent between the parties.Such activity in Public as we have discussedis another matter likely to cause offence, in asociety, frozen in banality and mediocrity.

• for art in Galleries• so for prayer in chapels• so for football in football pitches and stadiaI have some sympathy with the notion

that open spaces/spaces/odd spaces are of-ten best left alone.

Art & PleasureArt about lightness

THE CITY

REALITY • KINESIS

The City as a Reality - "A huge novel welive in" A.C. Ballard - "in a drugged state, need-ing sensation; and violence" provides it .fictionallives suspended by technology.

The City of power and politics - of con-trol and surveillance.

The City of Kafka and the alienation ofself from self.

Joyce, who lived his life suspended in theCities of Europe - fled from the Dublin of hisUlysses, acknowledged his debt to the writ-ings of Eduard Dujardin - particularly hisfilmic direction compounding time and spaceto the virtual reality of his book "The Bays areSere". In the opening pages, we are drawn intothe city of Paris viewed as a place of a millionseparate incidents played out in the arena

To record our humanness, in terms of theimaginary - that 'it' should be other - our de-sires our yearning and our pain to return home- our nostalgia.

"When I consider life, I am appalled to find ita shapeless mass.....the landscape of my days ap-pear to be composed, like mountainous regions, ofvaried materials heaped up pell-mell. There I seemy nature, itself composite, made up of equal partsof instinct and training. Here and there protrudethe granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about isrubble from the landslips of chance" - Memoirs ofHadrian:M.Yourcenaar.

"Most artists in the Western World, inheritthe late 19th Century tradition of Romantic andRealist protest".

PUBLIC ART - PRIVATE THOUGHTS

The Problem is: The relation between pri-vate thoughts and public art in places ouvertes- open for all.

When art - the 'will and wish child' of themaker, is placed, given, commissioned - therearise in all those individual hearts and mindswhich throng in endless carousel around the"city - body - the audience - the consumers,those who appropriate, dispose to meaning" -a thousand debates.

In simpler times - a simpler more formalstructure - the artist/craftsman in his time,knew and had his place - all was as it shouldbe and all was said and done and known tobe - 'other' was inconceivable.

NOW - it is the GLOBAL TOWN in whichwe all live - "Communications City".

Transported as the hymns would say - in-stantly by the time warp machine - the car/the place, the antigravity machine - the floor,the lift.

Everything is debatable - and complex.Sophisticated, loving care must be taken to 'dothe right thing'. What is right? Whose rights- the viewer? the artists? the commissioner?the payer? the passer-by? of those who stay,of those who go?

Art in Public Places has a sad blandnessrecord - (the Commissioning Committees ofbutchers and bakers on chairs) Compromise -Public Ornamental Design, MawkishMythical Municipal Symbols.

Commissioned in 1981 then in 1985 - re-moved from the plaza in front of Jacob K. JavitsBuilding in Foley Square, Lower Manhattan.

For Serra the prime attraction was "thevery difficulty the site offered him", for the pub-lic who used the square, it represented a mon-strosity.


113

1890 and completed in 1932!. At this momenta 'new' Cardiff is being built - a commercialregeneration as in so many European Cities.Here, an economic company, Cardiff Bay De-velopment Corporation is re-structuring theBay Docks area, with a modern mix of leisurecomplexes, up-market housing 'condomi-nions', shopping malls and a new OperaHouse, with a heavy dose of public art com-missions - all done for the public good.

It involves difficult environmental issues- a destruction of a mudflat wild bird breed-ing area to create a lagoon behind a barrageinvolving delicate water table problems. Asimilar exersise is planned for Croydon, Southof London. This motorway sliced connubationalmost buries the remnants of the former mar-ket town. It is viewed now as an Alphavillewaiting for Godard - an empty landscape ofpsychosis. Envisaged are 'parking blocks' totake the mordaunt cars - and a dramatic sink-ing of the central divisive motorway under-ground, to be roofed over like a great valley.'We will have Manhattan' they cry - a place of'dreadful grim spaces - disconnected fromground'. To offset this, a great tower - a spireof light is planned to mark the city of new tech-nology - a city jazz in Warehouseville. It seemsthat architects are deeply conservative. Citiesare not machines - but dynamic heaps need-ing fundamental re-structuring.

WALKING IN THE CITY

All cities generate a constant cycle of spa-tial practice - walks - walking creates our ex-perience as citizens. Each family, each indi-vidual comes out of essential solitude and theprivacy of room, flat or house to go some-where, to connect or merely to 'be outside' - toglide anonymously in the presence of 'others'- and to sense presence within engagement - akind of mute togetherness - 'being' alone withthe 'rest'.

In his book 'Practice of Everyday Life'Michael de Certeau speaks of two kinds of City- the Concept City of urban planners and ad-ministrators - a 'panorama city - theoretical,simulacral´, which misunderstands spatialpractice. He speaks of the 'official discourse'which is up there, aloof in office tower whilst'down below' live ordinary practioners of thecity - who walk, "Wanders manner" whose bod-ies follow the thicks and thins of an urban"text" (which) they write without being ableto read it.

Certeau suggests that the artist - bothMedieval and of the Renaissance 'provided'

called 'Paris'. Dujardin's text runs like a view-ing camera, tracing the weave of incident likemoves in a film. We become the inhabitantsof the scene. It becomes 'Kinematagraphic'.Later in his poetry - Joyce explores the senseof being in the city - particularly the walker inthe city.

The City has changed its rythym, sincethese early 20th Century tracts. The automo-bile has deepened the crisis. Speed, the es-sence of the Futurist vision of the city asmegapolis, now dominates our urban lives.

We still live largely in cities laid out fromthe Middle Ages as to road pattern. The time- mechanism, the car individually transport-ing us in from home to business, in and out ofthe city, compounds its restless, poisonous cla-mour. Ridley Scott's apocalyptic vision of acity state in the film 'Blade Runner' - a supraLos Angelean construction of the future su-per city extending outwards to encompass the'paysage' and upwards into a stinking, drip-ping entanglement of decaying town, creak-ing antique technology and multinational eco-nomic political consumerism shot with legiti-mised 'state' violence.

We lie somewhere inbetween this, not yettotally economically driven, held in some wayby a notion of the city virtues that the Greeks& Romans held to personify the city.

We still have City Councils - to whom anincreasingly smaller role is given for 'virtuous'enactments - education, drains, leisure andplanning.

THE CITY

From Renaissance times, the Europeancity developed fundamentally to provide or-der - order in which trade, exchange and com-munication could function within a realm ofprotection. All relations, in architectural termsspecifically were seen as "real relations - a worldof visible or intelligible traces of harmony (giving)access to the cosmic order".

The city and its objects (buildings, sculp-tures, monuments) were there to "sensitize thesubject to knowledge, to create paths for the con-nection between spirit, intellect and experience" -an object lesson. In some sense the modernnotion of art - as public art in the city - hassubscribed to this neo-platonic episteme - do-nated largely by public bodies - usually quan-gos seeking to 'elevate' the public - largely ig-noring the Descartesian/Lockeian notions ofrelativity of perception and displacement ofan individuated comprehension of meaning.

There is still much of Rome in miniaturein the 'City' of Cardiff - but it was started in

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the way of seeing the city in a God-like waylong before the World Trade Centre providedthe means to stand above the city to 'see it' asa god would.

They created predictively the perspectivecity in painted fictions 'pictures' - and literallypaved the way for the concept two-dimension-ally maintained by the city authorities - in anall seeing - all pervading system of authority,subjecting the turmoil of bustling individualand subversive life practices with its opaqueprojections.

"A migrational or metaphorical city thus slipsinto the clear text of the planned and readablecity.....they (the city authorities) augurate thetransformation of the urban fact into the conceptof a city. Long before the concept of self gives riseto a particular figure of history, it assumes thatthis fact can be dealt with as a unity determined byan urbanistic ratio linking the city to the conceptnever makes them identical but is plays on theirprogressive symbiosis: to plan a city is both to thinkthe very physicality of the real and to make thatway of thinking the plural effective; it is to knowhow to articulate it and to be able to do it".

Artists, and those who design(plan), take their place in thepower pronouncement and

struggle of the city organism.Artists as producers of 'public art', place

their objects - sculptures, cultural transforma-tions etc., in the framework of the concept city.

Art is conceptual - and city artworks standoutside the unlegislated 'ordinary lives' towalk the ideologised discourse of the domi-nant power - the patrons - be they economicor legislative.

This accounts for so much art which is at-tacked (rejected as in the case of Serra's workor graffitied - they and their objects have tosubmit to the Dis-ease of those outside 'thePanoptic power' - the disaffected people.

It is salutory, that at the end of each year,we see in TV reviews of past annual events,newsreel shots of citizens smashing the "artobjects" and monuments of previous over-thrown powers - political figures who havetheir theatre of power play in the city.

Artists and designers have to find a wayto fill the gap which Certeau describes be-tween the concept and power regulated cityof order (the local authority) and theindividuated 'walking city of people - a dis-course unsubjuagated to the system, yetwithin it.

All local power - the techno-economicstructure - reduces the mythic qualities whichthe populace seeks and creates - the dream

space. Certeau quotes the woman from Rouenwho stated "here" there isn't any place specialexcept for my home, that's all .... there isn'tanything "Nothing" special", nothing that ismarked, opened up by memory or a story,signed by something or someone else.

Only the cave of home remains believable,still open for a certain time to legends, still fullof shadows. Except for that, according to an-other city dweller, there are only "places inwhich we can no longer believe in anything" -the artist - and I'm a working artist - must en-hance, rescue 'make-believe' spaces in the citywhich allow of appropriation to the dream-time of the traveller, the walker of the streets -to act as a shaman to the obscurity of mythand 'old-time' within which all seek to be com-fortable. "Here there used to be a bakery" -"That's where old lady Dupuis used to live"."Memories tie us to place".

We must insert in the modern erasure ofplace and its shadows "a childhood experiencethat determines spatial poetics and later de-velops its effects, proliferates, floods privateand public spaces, and under their readablesurfaces creates within the planned city a"metaphorical" or mobile city, like the oneKandinsky dreamed of 'a great city built ac-cording to all the rules of architecture and thensuddenly shaken by a force which defies allcalculation.

In the Hague, there is a group calledStorm, operating as "a cooperative forinbalanced feasibility", in France, a call inL'Orient for 'Paysages-les noveaux territoires- un social-paysagisme' - the Ruhr in Germany,a vast conubation declares itself after 'inde-pendent study' No 1 in Europe for Quality ofLife - with high standards of living, excellenthealth care, a clean environment and efficientinfrastructure, life and business.

New groupings are emerging - designers, artists, planners andthinkers, seeking to place a new

thesis of sensitive interaction within the beastof the city - a new 'Jurassic Park' of perhapspossibility.

If life is to be sustainable at all, a societyin city - then high imagination, sustained in-vestment and poetic vision must go hand inhand.

"In time the truth is not that the artist requiresa document of licence from the householders enti-tling him to proceed in this or that fashion but thatevery age must look for its sanction to its poetsand philosophers. The poet is the intense centre ofthe life of his age to which he stands in a relation


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than which none can be more vital. He alone iscapable of absorbing in himself the life that sur-rounds him and of flinging it abroad again amidplanetary music.......it is time for them (the critics)to verify their calculations in accordance with it.It is time for them to acknowledge that here theimagination has contemplated intensely the truthof the being of the visible world and that beauty,the splendour of truth, has been born. The age,though it bury itself fathoms deep in formulas andmachinery, has need of these realities which alonegive and sustain life and it must await from thosechosen centres of vivification the force to live, thesecurity for life which can come to it only fromthem. Thus the spirit of man makes a continualaffirmation' - James Joyce - Stephen Hero - TheRole of the Poet.

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The economic role of public art in urban regeneration is a difficult issue,principally because it is both com-

plex and nebulous. It is complex because itinvolves the inter-relationship between theaesthetic values, the social identity and theeconomic behaviour of a city’s population - aheady mix! It is nebulous because these threedomains of aesthetic, social and economic lifetend to use separate, almost unconnected, lan-guages for their discourse. While the inter-re-lationship between the three domains has al-ways been recognised as important, and haseven been central to some intellectual move-ments (e.g. the Arts and Crafts movement inBritain), there have rarely been opportunitiesfor specialists in each domain to engage witheach other in close debate and collaborativework. The promise of postmodernism is thatthis interaction is now acceptable in intellec-tual terms. The reality of postmodernism maybe that there is such a loss of confidence byactivists in each of the domains that they feelthey have little to contribute to each other.

This paper starts with an analysis of theobjectives of urban regeneration, seeking toidentify those aspirations of differentstakeholders which may justify the use of pub-lic art for their achievement and locating theseaspirations within different models of politi-cal economy and current concerns with qual-ity management. It then focuses on the possi-

Public Art in UrbanRegeneration :An Economic Assessment

Tony BovairdTony BovairdTony BovairdTony BovairdTony Bovaird

ble use of public art in order to enhance thequality of life for city residents, visitors andworkers; the main issue here is whether theachievement of the aspirations of these keystakeholders, by means of public art initia-tives, can be measured in any practical way.The following section considers the potentialof public art as an attractor to inward invest-ment. The a alytical basis for extrapolatingfrom the micro-effects of individual public artinitiatives to the wider effects in the wholeurban economy is considered in the follow-ing section on the arts multiplier. Finally, thepaper offers some conclusions on therole ofpublic art - and its limitations.

OBJECTIVES OF URBAN REGENERATION

The objectives of urban regenerationclearly vary from place to place, from time totime and between the major stakeholders con-cerned. We can distinguish four main strandsin the types of objectives normally proposedfor urban regeneration programmes: eco-nomic, social, political and cultural. Thesestrands in turn can be analysed to find anumber of contributory sub-objectives.

One such formulation is proposed in Fig-ure 1, to illustrate the way in which each ofthese higher level objectives might be «de-


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composed» into a hierarchy of objectives. Thisapproach has been used in many different con-texts to demonstrate the inter-relationship be-tween objectives at different levels and to in-crease the transparency of performance man-agement (Bovaird, 1995).

Of course, the picture presented by thishierarchy of objectives is highly contestable.Indeed, that is one of its major purposes - tostimulate and shape discussion about the un-derlying aspirations in the field of urban re-generation. Some people might feel very con-fident of the hierarchy of objectives which theyconstruct - but I think this is likely to be unu-sual ( and they are likey to find that their col-leagues do not share their confidence!). Associal scientists, we can regard each hierarchyof objectives as a set of hypotheses. Each linkin the hierarchy embodies the hypothesis thatvariations in the level of achievement of anobjective can be explained by variations in theachievement of the sub-objectives which con-tribute to it.

Seen in these terms, a hierarchy of objec-tives just begs to be tested by reference toempirical studies.

However, this way of setting out objec-tives is linear - and the real world which weare trying to understand through our modelsclearly is non-linear. Consequently, such mod-els must be treated with caution. Two compli-cating factors which must be brought in

straight away are: the likelihood that somesub-objectives are logically prerequisites,while others are simply valuable but not nec-essary contributors to the higher level objec-tive; the likelihood that the achievement ofsome high level objectives is impacted uponby some of the objectives and sub-objectivesin other parts of the picture, i.e. there are somevery important cross-cutting and indirect re-lationships between the objectives which cannot be clearly modelled in such a hierarchy ofobjectives.

This latter issue, the indirect relationshipsbetween objectives, is probably of critical im-portance in understanding the role of publicart in urban revitalisation. It is conventionalwisdom to suggest that the cultural assets ofan area will be an important factor in attract-ing inward investment from the private sec-tor, especially in the case of international in-vestment. Again the achievement of high-quality social interactions in the city may bedependent upon a set of cultural facilitieswhich are «inclusive» in their appeal ratherthan «exclusive», i.e. welcoming to differentethnic groups, to different social classes, topeople of different educational backgrounds.Each of these relationships cuts across themain relationships modelled in the figure.

This illustrates the difficulty in coming toan understanding of how public art functions,when viewed in terms of the normal catego-

Figure 1. Objectives for Urban Regeneration

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ries of urban management. We will constantlybe dealing with relationships which are seenas of secondary rather than primary impor-tance, and which will often require the jointworking of artists, planners, economic devel-opment professionals, managers and politi-cians - groups and individuals who, in mostcases, have not previously needed to workclosely together in the «mainstream» parts oftheir jobs.

THE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF ARTS

POLICY

The economic analysis of arts policycomes from three main standpoints: the wel-fare economics justification of public sectorintervention in arts provision because of mar-ket failures; the critique of «government fail-ures» arising from public choice theory, whichsuggests that the self-interest of politicians andbureaucrats over-rides the interests of widergroups in society and in the economy; the neo-Marxist critique of how arts policy serves theinterests of the dominant factions within capi-talism.

WELFARE ECONOMICS JUSTIFICATION

The welfare economics justification ofpublic art points to the inefficient allocationof resources in the market system, leading tosystematic under-provision of public art, aris-ing from market failures. The following cat-egorisation is not an exhaustive list, as it omitssuch categories of market failure such as im-perfect competition, discrimination,disequilibrium and ‘merit goods’ - but it in-cludes the categories of market failure mostoften used to justify arts policy:

• the impossibility of excluding peoplefrom «consuming» the experience pro-vided by many forms of public art (non-excludability of consumption), making itunprofitable to provide such art, since itis not possible to charge for its consump-tion• the fact that the amount of public artavailable to be consumed does not de-crease when it is experienced (non-rivalness in consumption), so that itwould be socially inefficient to charge forsuch consumption (since there is no mar-ginal resource cost associated with con-suming it) and consequently its efficientsupply depends necessarily on publicsubsidy

• external benefits which public artbrings to third parties who do not recom-pense the organisation which providesthe public art• lack of information, so that many po-tential providers and consumers of pub-lic art do not appreciate its potential toimprove their welfare• uncertainty, so that providers system-atically under-provide public art, sincthey all take over-pessimistic views ofhow much benefit will accrue to themfrom provision of the public art (and simi-larly, in some cases, systematic over-pro-vision arising from over-optimism).

While the welfare economics approach isvery useful in providinga framework whichenables such a list of market failures tobecompiled, it is not very operational in sug-gesting ways in whichthe importance of thesefailures (and their rectification) can be meas-ured. (Nevertheless, the recent Treasury guid-ance on how to evaluate urban regenerationprojects asks that all evaluations should in-clude descriptions of the progress in achiev-ing objectives such as correcting market fail-ures (Treasury, 1995)). In the discussion below,the main influence of this analysis will be inthe consideration of how to measure the ex-ternal benefits to residents, visitors and work-ers of a city, which arise from the public artprovision of firms with which they do not di-rectly interact - and which therefore do not di-rectly gain from providing these «third-party»benefits.

PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY: CRITIQUE OF

«GOVERNMENT FAILURES»

Public choice theory takes a very differ-ent stance from welfare economics - and typi-cally leads to very different conclusions. Itsuggests that the self-interest of politicians andbureaucrats over-rides the interests of widergroups in society and in the economy. Bureau-crats are assumed to be expenditure-maxim-ising empire-builders. Politicians are assumedto act in order to get themselves elected - thiscan best be assured by pandering to the «me-dian voter», without paying attention to theintensity of preferences of voters or to the over-all distribution of preferences amongst voters.Thus both bureaucrats and politicians espousepublic programmes which harm the publicinterest, rather than furthering it.

In respect of public art, this critique wouldsuggest that excessive subsidies would be paidfor some categories of provision of public art,either because some politicians wish to sway


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be a low-priority way of reflating the economygiven the higher social acceptability of hous-ing, health, education, and other social pro-grammes. Again, most governments, at na-tional and local level, find themselves oftenin the position of having to «buy off» opposi-tion from local groups - but few such groupsput public art high on their slate of demands,and few would be content to be «fobbed off»with such offers. Indeed, quite on the contrary,many cities are heavily attacked by local in-terests, especially representing the disadvan-taged groups in society, for so much ostenta-tious waste of public money on public artprojects (for example, in relation to the majorCentenary Square project in Birmingham,funded by over £50m of European Commis-sion grants, there has been a widely reported- and widely supported - attack by Loftman,1991) .

This suggests that the first element of theneo-Marxist framework above must carrymost of the weight of showing why public arthas always had, and still retains, such a promi-nent role in prosperous liberal democracies,Third World dictatorships and most state so-cialist countries. We can develop this strandof argument in two directions: the post-struc-turalist critique and the regulationist critique.

A central theme in the post-structuralistcritique of urban development has been thecommodification of the past through thegrowth of the heritage industry. «Culture, onceseen as the superstructural icing on the Marx-ist cake, is now accepted as central to the proc-ess of urban transformation» (Jacobs, 1992, p.195). Jacobs presents the case-history of the re-development proposals for Spitalfields Mar-ket in London as a process of conflict of dif-ferently empowered «pasts» (or «histories»)and discourses, during which those pasts lesschallenging to redevelopment objectives areprivileged. «Pasts» with more deeplyoppositional potential can only be incorpo-rated into urban capital reinvestment if de-radicalised, which is precisely what happensto them when they are embodied as sanitised,restored artefacts in the capital projects of tour-ism or retailing, simultaneously losing theirability to inform on-going oppositional prac-tices (Bovaird, 1993). In the spirit of this analy-sis, public art can be viewed as the creation ofstory-telling devices which re-interpret thepast and suggest an interpretation of thepresent in such a way as to legitimate the re-production of past relations of production andexchange within the dominant mode of accu-mulation and regulation. The control over themessage is all the easier as public art is so of-

certain key interests (e.g. voters in marginalconstituencies or critically-important opinion-formers in certain occupations or organisa-tions) or because some bureaucrats wish tobuy favour from certain groups (particularlyamong the political ruling group) in order toinfluence their budget allocations. (This is aright-wing equivalent of the argument byBooth and Boyle (1993) that the promotion ofspecific cultural activities is a reward for up-per and middle class commitment to the city).

Of course, exactly the same set of argu-ments indicates that subsidies for public artprovision are likely to be severely deficient inrespect of those projects favoured by groupswhich are of interest neither to ruling politi-cians nor to major bureaucrats. On balance, Iwould suspect that provision of public artwould be more likely to fall into this latter cat-egory (i.e. to experience a chronic tendencytowards under-provision) rather than theformer.

From the point of view of this paper, anextra dimension is the possibility that the artsworld plays an important part in influencingpublic opinion, and thus it may be courted bypoliticians or top managers (through commis-sions) in order to buy support or ward off hos-tile treatment at the hands of influential art-ists. While this may occasionally be important,for example in respect of the very high profileadopted by Sir Ian McKellen and Sir SimonRattle in campaigning against certain aspectsof government policy, I would suggest that,in general, this has not been a major factor inpopulist politics in Britain.

NEO-MARXIST ANALYSIS

In a neo-Marxist framework, arts policyis considered to serve the interests of the domi-nant factions within capitalism by:

• sustaining and providing legitimationfor belief systems which are consistentwith the reproduction of capitalist rela-tions of production and exchange;• providing an acceptable outlet for pub-lic expenditure which combats under-consumption tendencies in the macro-economy;• reducing the vigour of oppositional ten-dencies within the political structure ofsociety, by providing arts facilities andservices which «buy off» the complaintsof disaffected groups.

The second and third categories of expla-nation seem unconvincing to me when appliedto public art. Public expenditure on major artsprojects may combat deficient demand in re-cession-hit economies - but it often seems to

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ten embedded within «flagship» property de-velopments.

Neo-Marxists writing in the post-moderntradition emphasise the symbolic value for acity of activities such as publicly-subsidisedpublic art, providing as it does an attractivesymbol to «disorganised capitalists» (Lash andUrry, 1987) that the state has established a re-gime of regulation in which non-utilitariancriteria will be used in deciding upon supportfor future development. Furthermore, subsi-dised public art signals that a «new culturalpetite bourgeoisie» has become established,comprising occupations involving presenta-tion and representation and working in all in-stitutions providing symbolic goods and serv-ices, whose role is one of major importance inthe postmodern economy - the production ofimages that legitimate the lifestyle of the new-bourgeois «ethical avant guarde of the domi-nant class» (Bourdieu, cited in Lash and Urry,1987, pp. 295-96). The growth of these ‘newcultural intermediaries’ in certain favouredcity centres has in turn created an influentialpressure group for policy change, which hasplayed an important role in the launching ofthe new cultural strategies by city govern-ments (Bassett, 1993). This has led Bassett tosuggest that «perhaps future cultural strate-gies should start with the assumption thatculture is a site for class struggle rather than asite for alliance building, and as a result be-come more rather than less political» (Bassett,1993, p. 1786).

The regulationist critique, deriving mainlyfrom the work of French neo-Marxists such asAglietta and Lipietz) is not necessarily at oddswith such an analysis, but would rather placeemphasis on the value of arts provision to thesupport of the «economic base» in ways whichdo not disturb the delicate balance of interna-tional economic relations. Lipietz puts thisvery nicely: «A regime of accumulation focus-ing on the growth of leisure is much less sub-ject to international constraints than a regimebased on consumption. ... Investing in thequality of life, and having time available forsport, art and public debate or private conver-sation, does not draw in imports. It is a veryquiet and unprovocative protectionism, a wayof returning spontaneously to a regime whichis more self-focussed, more amenable to thekind of regulation organised by democraticsocieties (Lipietz, 1992, pp. 87-88). However,this approach also emphasises the contradic-tions which emerge when a city becomes so«successful» in its provision of highly-re-garded leisure opportunities, that it becomesa focus of the ‘tourist gaze’: «International

tourism is a process by which the affluentcountries, having mined their own environ-ments, now scavenge the earth to consumethose of other people» (Lash and Urry, 1987,p. 303).

TQM OF PUBLIC ART?

The issue of who benefits from public artis a central one in most of these economics-based approaches. However, there is an in-creasing interest in managerialist approachesto arts and leisure policy, which takes less in-terest in who gains the most and gives moreattention to how to increase the gain of each‘customer’, through pay-offs which are of in-terest to that customer. This is the kernel ofquality management approaches which seekto assure satisfaction of customer expectations.

So we might ask: is there a TQM of publicart? In other words, is it possible to design andplan public art, to create it and to manage itslasting «use» or «consumption» in the city insuch a way as to maximise the payoffs to keycustomers and to meet the expectations of allcustomers?

From the outset, it is necessary to say thatsome of the claims of TQM, that the expecta-tions of all stakeholders can be met, are likelyto be entirely unrealistic. Conflicts of interestbetween stakeholder are an integral part ofsocial relations and therefore if we wish to helpsome stakeholders very positively, we mustbe prepared to say that other stakeholders arenot of interest to us. At the heart of TQM isthe need to choose which stakeholders are tobe regarded as the ‘customers’ in the analysis.

However, there may well be a case forsuggesting that much public art has paid in-sufficient attention to customer analysis. Whileit is of course the case that the artist must havethe right to create within her/his own vision,the commissioner of a piece of art also has theright to specify a brief and expect it to be met.This brief should be specific about who thecustomers are and what their expectations are.In some cases, these customer expectationsmight be quite specific («A large sculpturedepicting the city fathers leading the city for-ward to a future prosperity»), while in othercases there will be much more latitude in thebrief for the artist to choose how the thememight be handled («A monument expressinga spirit of elegance and prosperity») and insome cases (perhaps rare!) the customers ex-pectations might actually be «Something thatwill surprise the observer - and therefore thecommissioners also!»).


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The neo-Marxist critique, while in partcategorising quality management as simplyanother tool for the deepening of surplus valueextraction in the process of capital accumula-tion, recognises that it may empower somestakeholders in the struggle for higher pay-offs. As such, it may intensify the contradic-tions implicit within the current regime of ac-cumulation and undermine the negotiatedsettlements implicit within the mode of regu-lation. Thus in public art, if wider groups ofthe public were to be involved in setting thebrief for commissions, and in judging betweentenders for competitions, then not only wouldthe dominant classes lose some control overimages of the city but also the legitimacy oftheir overall role in image creation and prom-ulgation would be significantly undermined.Of course, in practice the introduction of aquality management approach in public artwould only ever empower a strictly limitednumber of stakeholders - but this does notmean that the damage which it might do tothe legitimacy of current dominant groups andto their control over the image-making proc-esses could be easily limited.

PUBLIC ART AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE

FOR RESIDENTS, WORKERS AND

VISITORS TO THE CITY

So what does public art do for the qualityof life of residents, workers or visitors, in theirrole as «consumers» of the city? (In the nextsection, we will also find some potential ben-efits to workers arising from public art,through the mechanism of increased inwardinvestment).

We can conceptualise the possible benefitsunder three headings, corresponding to threeof the objectives identified in the hierarchy ofobjectives:

• enhancing social interactions in the city;• enhancing the city’s image as a centreof culture;• enhancing the city’s image as a nationalcentre of dynamic change.

The assessment of how well these benefitsare achieved in practice is problematic. Kotler,Haider and Rein (1993), in their «cookbook»on how to market places (which ignores pub-lic art almost completely), do not attempt into discuss how alternative place marketingstrategies or initiatives might be evaluated(other than measuring the results of an adver-tising campaign).

Before the customers’ expectations can beset out in a brief, a decision must be made onhow these expectations should be discerned.If the general public is to be involved, as op-posed to the involvement of just «experts» and«representatives», the commissioning processmight centre around public consultation oreven a public competition at the design stage.This is in line with Bianchini’s observationsthat in the 1980s «many city governments triedto make the cultural policy making processmore responsive to the demands, aspirationsand ideas of citizens, community groups andlocal business, with a new emphasis on part-nerships between the public, private and vol-untary sectors» (Bianchini, 1993: p. 205). Oneof the key issues in the design stage would behow the «piece» would impact upon and betreated by its observers - and this might in-volve simulations with some groups of poten-tial observers and some «second-guessing» onbehalf of those potential observers who are noteasy to identify or communicate with - e.g.industrialists in other parts of the country whomay, at some stage in the future, become po-tential inward investors.

This quality management approach al-lows us to transcend at least some of the criti-cisms from the public choice school. By bring-ing a variety of stakeholders more centrallyinto the picture, both at the stage of decidingthe brief and in setting the criteria by whichthe successful execution of the brief will bejudged, there is less room for bureaucratic andpolitical determination of the outcomes basedon pure self-interest. However, it is clear thatthe process of public involvement will never-theless be subject to some degree of manipu-lation. Those stakeholders who have thepower to define which stakeholders are to beregarded as ‘customers’ are likely to be actingfrom motives of self-interest, so that the pub-lic choice critique will not be entirely satisfied.

The «customer focus» of quality manage-ment appears at first sight to be closely alignedwith the axioms of welfare economics. How-ever, the market failures which are identifiedin welfare economics may be entirely ignoredin quality management if the definition of ‘cus-tomer’ is too narrow to encompass the widergroups who experience some benefits from apiece of public art but are not directly visibleor involved in its «use» or «consumption» -e.g. such ‘third parties’ might include firmswhich use the public art as part of their logoor as images of the desirability of their busi-ness ambience in businesses prospectuses, orvisitors to the city who send images of it onpostcards to their friends.

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However, we can make some progress inthis assessment by means of a set of questions:

• How much do residents, workers orvisitors care about these benefits?• How much value added does public artbring to the city in respect of these benefits?• Does the city have a competitiveadvantage relative to other cities in respectof the benefits brought to it by its publicart?• Which residents, workers or visitorsbenefit most from the contribution ofpublic art ?

It seems likely that in the short term atleast it will be the contribution of public art tosocial interactions in the city which will mat-ter most to residents; and that even in thelonger term, few residents would be willingto pay much money, as individuals, for thebenefits brought to the city by virtue of itsenhanced image, either as a centre of cultureor as a centre of dynamic change. Indeed, it isthis myopia towards external benefits on thepart of economic actors which is the basis ofthe welfare economics justification of thepublicy-subsidised provision of «publicgoods» which are non-excludable and/or non-rival in consumption.

However, city ‘consumers’ are directlyengaged with the city at the consumptionlevel. «One element of consumerism is aheightened reflexivity about the places and en-vironments, the goods and services that are‘consumed’, literally, through a social encoun-ter, or through visual consumption. ... As peo-ple reflect upon such consumptions, ... theydevelop ... the belief that people are entitledto certain qualities of the environment, of air,water and scenery, and that these extend intothe future and to other populations» (Lash andUrry, 1994, p. 297). Thus the process of con-sumption is a learning process, which involvesnot just learning about the individual benefitsarising from any given object of consumption,but also involves learning about the impor-tance of context in the consumption experi-ence and about the desirability of preservingand enhancing the choices available in rela-tion to the context of consumption. In otherwords, as citizens have increased their reper-toire of consumptions, viewed as object + con-text, they have become more sensitive to thecontextual element of that experience andmore demanding of a better set of choices inthis sphere. The element of context which con-cerns us in this paper is mainly the spatial con-text of the consumption experience (although

public art also engages to some extent withthe social context and the time context of con-sumption experiences). Public art has the twincharacteristics of being an object of consump-tion in itself and also a contextual element inthe consumption of other objects.

So can we find ways to assess how muchthe city’s consumers care about the benefitsbrought about by means of public art to thechanging social interactions and consumptionexperiences in the city - what would, in thewelfare economics paradigm be called thewillingness to pay (WTP) of city residents forthe improvements to social interactions andvisual consumptions which are brought aboutby public art?

This question has long been asked in thegeneral context of leisure and recreation pro-vision. The most conventional answer hasbeen to attempt to charge for some or all ofthe facilities concerned, i.e. to gauge WTP fromthe direct customers of the good or service.By its very nature, public art cannot be evalu-ated in this way, since it is normally, and some-times necessarily, provided free of charge.

An alternative answer has been availablefor 30 years - the Clawson technique, by meansof which the willingness of consumers totravel to a facility can be used to calculate theactual willingness to pay for use of the (free)facility itself (Bovaird, 1988). The basic princi-ple of this approach is that the longer the av-erage distance travelled by visitors in order tovisit the leisure facility, the more value thatfacility must have in their eyes. While this hasa certain rationale for such facilities as swim-ming pools (in relation to average distancetravelled by local residents) or art galleries (forregional visitors) or major world heritage sites(in relation to international tourists), it is pat-ently not directly usable for most public art,which does not act as a major attractor in it-self for any visit, but rather simply enhancesa visit or journey made for other reasons. Themost that can be rescued from the Clawsonapproach is an analysis of diversion of travelpatterns after the opening of public artschemes: and this will only work where theopening of the public art is quite separate fromthe opening of other major land uses whichwould similarly affect travel patterns, so thatthe specific amount of extra visits associatedwith the public art can be estimated.

Is there then a practical assessmentmethod to indicate the value to «public art con-sumers» of specific items of public art?

Clearly, no single approach is likely to beconvincing, given these difficulties with thetraditional approaches. However, there are


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use of that space, and the extent to which itwas regarded by them as significant in theirdecision to use that space. One approach tosuch an analysis has recently been recom-mended in Britain (Comedia, 1993).

So far, we have discussed the direct ‘con-sumption’ benefits of public art to the ‘users’of the city. In the longer term, there are un-doubtedly some benefits to users of the cityarising from those competitive advantageswhich the city gains through its investment inpublic art. Such competitive advantage maybe experienced in the long-term struggle forresources on the part of cities:

• against other metropolitan areas• against surrounding towns and villages• against their own suburbs

These benefits broadly fall into three cat-egories - those arising from the attraction ofinward investment (which is considered in thenext section), those arising from the enhancedinfluence of the city in national decision mak-ing, and those arising from the enhanced im-age of the city. Each of these benefits needs tomeasured in a different way. The benefits ofthe enhanced influence of the city are bestmeasured by the increased resources which itachieves - admittedly a very problematic pro-cedure. A proxy for the actual resource in-crease achieved could be the improvement inthe city’s image among major decision mak-ers. The use of city image surveys, particularlyin respect of the image held by national andinternational business-people, can only be apoor proxy for the resulting resourcereallocations, but it is nevertheless influential,since local politicians are concerned that thecity does well as against competitors in the«image stakes».

There are, in addition to the resource con-sequences, some extra benefits to city consum-ers arising from an enhanced image for the city- essentially in terms of «city pride». Howmuch would the consumers of the city be will-ing to pay for these benefits - and how muchof enhanced «city pride» might properly beattributed to the contribution of public art inraising the competitive advantages of the city?These are particularly nebulous areas, as sug-gested at the beginning of this paper. Suchbenefits are likely to be experienced by a largenumber of people, but on such a small scaleas to be almost indiscernible by each of them.In these circumstances we meet the classicproblem of the «threshold effect» at which peo-ple become conscious of an increase in theirwelfare. It is no use turning to market feed-back to gauge such effects if the actors in the

some ways to tackle such an assessment, if itis considered important enough. Specifically,it is necessary to ask what particular benefitsare being sought from the public art? Whatspecific objectives are being pursued? In otherwords, there is a need to go further down intothe hierarchy of objectives. An attempt to dothis is shown in Figure 2. These objectives areat a more operational level of detail than infigure 1, which was for urban regeneration ingeneral. On the left hand side of the pictureare objectives in respect of increasing thenumber of social interactions. It is shown thatprovision of public art might contribute to thishigh level objective (as indeed will other pub-lic sector interventions) and that the principalmechanism by which this might operate is thatpublic art might hope to provide more inter-esting encounters for informal encounters inthe city.

If this is indeed an objective, how mightwe know when it has happened and been suc-cessful? The kind of «interest» which is ofimportance here is the ability of a place to actas a pleasant passive background to everydayactivities, such as shopping, strolling, eatinglunch in the open air, waiting at bus-stops, etc.One marker of the extent to which pieces ofpublic art have achieved this level of intrusioninto people’s consciousness is the extent towhich people use them as «labels» of a placewhen describing where to meet or where anincident occurred. This could be investigatedby conventional market research surveys, butwould normally be much more successfullyexplored in qualitative market research, suchas focus group discussions. A further marker,particularly in relation to how much particu-lar examples of public art impact upon visi-tors to the city, is how often they are mentionedin guide books of the city, or pointed out incity sightseeing tours, or how many postcardsof them are printed (and sold!).

On the right hand side of the picture aresome detailed sub-objectives relating to im-proving the quality of social interactions. Vir-tually all of these sub-objectives might be im-pacted upon to some extent by any specificexample of public art. Assessing the extent towhich the public art was important in achiev-ing any of them would essentially entail sur-veys or focus group work with city residents,workers and visitors. This feedback wouldconcentrate upon establishing the extent towhich public art had encroached upon theconsciousness of users of particular spaces:this would include probing of the extent towhich they mentioned the public art in theirunprompted description of the space and their

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market are only dimly aware that they are ex-periencing any of these phenomena. The at-tempt to estimate willingness-to-pay values ofthe national population for such phenomenaas the damage done to Norman churches bylocation of the Third London Airport was,rightly, castigated as «nonsense on stilts» byPeter Self. However, this throws us back onthe use of valuations on behalf of but not di-rectly by the community - either by experts orby politicians. While this is nowadays recog-nised to be highly undesirable - it is greatly atodds with the philosophy of quality manage-ment - we need to preserve the right to haveevaluations done in this way when customer-oriented approaches would actually be mean-ingless.

PUBLIC ART AND THE ATTRACTION OF INWARD

INVESTMENT

A key aspect of all cultural provision in acity, including its public art, is its effect on in-ward investment. A set of questions immedi-ately arises:

• How much do key decision makerscare about the quality of cultural facili-

ties in a city when making their invest-ment decisions?• How much value added does public artbring to the city in respect of the image itcreates in the mind of these decision mak-ers?• Does the city have a competitive ad-vantage relative to other cities in respectof the public art benefits which it gleans?• Which residents gain most from theeconomic benefits resulting from the in-ward investment stimulated by the pub-lic art contributions?

On the first point, there is a great body ofempirical evidencefrom location research tosuggest that cultural facilities are indeed im-portant in influencing inward investment(Port Authority of NY and NJ, 1983; Hummeland Berger, 1988; Myerscough, 1988) and,probably even more importantly, in retainingexisting (but potentially mobile) firms. AsHarvey observes «the less important the spa-tial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of capi-tal to the variations of place within space, andthe greater the incentive for places to be dif-ferentiated in ways attractive to capital»(Harvey, 1990, pp. 295-6).

Figure 2. Objectives for the Public Art contibuition to Urban Quality of Life


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This empirical research generally investi-gates the effect of culture upon the perceivedcompetitive advantage of cities:

• to key decision makers and theirfamilies• to key workers• to local key professionals andmanagers who might otherwise migratefrom the city.

It is usually the first and third of thesecategories who appear to be most «arts andculture» sensitive in their location decisions.

However, there is much less evidence onthe added value from public art as a specificfactor in industrial investment. Once again, werun up against the «threshold» effect: eachitem of public art may make an impact toosmall to be discerned by an individual deci-sion maker who is considering in which cityto relocate. And public art as a whole in thecity may be only be a relatively small part ofthe overall cultural assets of the city whichimpact upon decision makers.

Perhaps the most practical way of gaug-ing business valuations of public art is the levelof sponsorship which they are willing to make(which is, of course, 100% in the case of thosebusinesses which erect their own public artexhibits). This valuation only covers how ex-isting businesses in a city feel about a particu-lar piece of public art - but their valuationsmay be expected to have quite a close correla-tion to those of potential inward investors,unless there are very special circumstancesattaching to a particular site, artist or themewhich an external firm would not appreciate.Of course, if it transpires that most public artis regarded by business as very appropriatefor funding (or part-funding along with pub-lic money), it re-inforces the neo-Marxist ar-gument that the oppositional potential of ur-ban cultural policy is being neutered andcounter-cultures are successfully being incor-porated into the dominant culture (Bassett,1993). On the other hand, if it transpires thatbusiness is highly relunctant to be involvedin sponsorship of public art in general, then itis unlikely to be a credible argument that pub-lic monies should go towards public art in or-der to influence future industrial location.

This does not mean, however, that indi-vidual public art commissions should alwaysbe expected to command some contributionfrom private sponsorship - indeed, it is thosevery pieces which challenge dominant images,ideologies and interests which are most likelyto need full funding from the public sector andpublic or political fundraising. In other words,that section of public art which is not explic-

itly anti-capitalist may bring significant ben-efits to users of the city, which business maybe happy to fund in part, in return for expro-priating some of the benefits, and which in-ward investors interpret in a favourable light.Public art which fundamentally seeks to chal-lenge the capitalist system should not seekcapitalist funding and would not seek to jus-tify itself by reference to its favourable effecton inward investment.

Is it possible to gauge if the city has a com-petitive advantage relative to other cities inrespect of the public art benefits which itgleans? One way of judging this would be toconduct a selective trawl of the literature pro-duced for publicity purposes by the firms in acity. How many images of public art in the cityare to be seen in the company’s annual report,its advertisements, its communications toshareholders or to the general public? Clearlysuch research can only be qualitative, since itwill be impossible to add up the various piecesof evidence. However, a relatively clear pic-ture may be expected to emerge in some cases,particularly where the public art has caughtthe corporate imagination - and these are thecases upon which such research would prob-ably wish to focus.

Finally, we must ask which residents gainmost from the economic benefits resultingfrom the inward investment stimulated by thepublic art contributions? This is perhaps themost contentious of all areas. On the face of it,the firms which are likely to be most influ-enced by the «soft» location factors such asquality of urban life, and in particular qualityof arts and aesthetic quality of the environ-ment, are the firms most l kely to provideemployment benefits to the urban elite ratherthan a wider urban workforce - they are likelyto be employers of high-status, high-incomeprofessionals and managers, and to have rela-tively low demands for locally-provided in-puts of raw materials, components, equip-ment, or clerical or manual staff.

However, such firms may be inprecisely those sectors targetedby the city’s economic develop-

ment strategy. Here we are caught on the hornsof the oldx dilemma - «modern» industry isunlikely in the short-term to be well-integratedinto the rest of the urban economy or to em-ploy the workers for whom the city authorityis most keen to find employment; but it mayoffer the best long-term hope for economictransformation. The strength of the «trickle-down» effects from the elite to other groups isdebatable but is unlikely to be very strong, atleast in the early years (Loftman, 1991)

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proposed to address the shortcomings of thefree market - the value of diversity, the valueof innovation, the value of art in the environ-ment, the value of social pleasure, the valueof creative expression and the economic valueof art. This hierarchy of objectives demon-strated ways in which more detailed analysisof the specific effects of public art might becarried out.

This framework was used to explore thevariety of benefits which public art mightbring to «consumers» of the city - residents,workers and visitors. It highlighted the poten-tial for conflict between stakeholders in suchanalysis. It also suggested that thesestakeholders themselves might have an in-creased role in the commissioning of publicart, in order to democratise the process, andin line with the precepts of quality manage-ment.

In spite of the major emphasis in manycities upon public art as a mechanism for in-ducing inward investment, there remain ma-jor difficulties in assessing the contribution ofpublic art to such initiatives. Yet the potentialvalue of public art in the eyes of corporatedecision makers can be easily seen from themajor commissions which are frequentlyfunded and the private sector sponsorshipswhich are achieved for city government- pro-vided public art. The key lesson is that the keyinfluence on inward investment seems to bethe overall impact of cultural assets and fa-cilities, rather than any single component ofthe cultural heritage. This implies the need toplan, deliver and promote an overall packageof cultural benefits and images; it is within thecontext of such a package that public art canmost convincingly play a role.

Finally, public art is not for everyone. Itbrings benefits to particular groups and indi-viduals. The attempt to make it seem a con-sensus policy is doomed to failure. Public art,more than any other form of fine art, is likelyto excite public controversy and debate. Thisis the dimension of public art which shouldbe exploited more thoroughly. Public artshould not be for «the public» but for specificgroups which wish to make a statement andto claim a public place for their taste and theirstories.

The empowering of stakeholders is a po-litical process; public art is a visible outcomeof the political struggle between stakeholdersand should be expected to arouse strong reac-tions.

The welfare economics celebration of will-ingness-to-pay has a lot in common with thepostmodern emphasis on spectacle and en-

THE MULTIPLIER EFFECTS OF THE ARTS AND

MEDIA SECTOR

The benefits of public art, as discussedabove, must be seen in the context of the widerand longer term consequences which theyhave for the city. At this stage, it is possible tobe either pessimistic or optimistic. On the onehand, there are indications that the investmentmultiplier effects of benefits induced by pub-lic art initiatives may be lower than for othertypes of regeneration benefits since linkageswith the local economy are likely to be small,in terms of the production of the public art,the kinds of firms attracted and the consump-tion patterns of the key staff attracted.

However, public art is likely in some cir-cumstances to trigger an «accelerator» effectin dynamic terms, since an injection of publicart expenditure may have significant symboliceffects for a city which has acquired a badimage in the eyes of investors.

Indeed, it could even be argued that in thefield of city image creation, arts-based strate-gies are especially likely to generate benefitswhich are non-linear in their inception andgrowth, so that they might be best modelledas chaotic or complex adaptive systems(Bovaird and Sharifi, 1995). A major part ofthe non-linearity may be a substantial «thresh-old» of credibility, over which it is necessaryto climb in order that the negative reinforce-ment of a low-quality city image can be trans-formed into the positive reinforcement of a cityseeking to change its past and succeeding inattracting top-quality facilities as part of thatprocess. Climbing over such thresholds re-quires bravery and steadfastness. One corol-lary of this argument is that, even when theexpected value of public art initiatives is ex-ceptionally high, the probability distributionof possible pay-offs is likely to be highly un-attractive to a risk-averse city government -but highly attractive to a city governmentwhich is committed to breaking through itsconstraints and reaching the high pay-offs.

CONCLUSIONS

Public art has provided a dramatic sym-bol for the regeneration initiatives of severalUS and European cities. However, it is not easyto analyse the role and success of public art inthese initiatives. This paper has attempted toprovide a framework for such an analysis.

The paper has proposed a hierarchy ofobjectives for art in urban regeneration, whichincludes, in a structured way, the six broadareas of «cultural value» which Lewis (1990)


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gagement - the final assessment of public artmust be in terms of how much people careabout it. Ironically, the managerialist approachof quality management may offer some majoradvances in designing and implementing pub-lic art inititiatives in such a way that they em-power specific stakeholders, particularly thosewho are most often excluded from the deci-sion-making process - both by giving them agreater voice in the assessment of ‘finished’public art commissions but, more importantly,by giving them a role in the design and im-plementation process itself. This potential wid-ening-out of the stakeholders involved in pub-lic art has not been sufficiently attempted inempirical terms; this paper has attempted tomake a start by constructing a frameworkwhich allows these questions to be exploredin greater detail.

REFERENCES

Bassett, K. (1993),Urban cultural strategies and urban regeneration:a case study and critique», Environment andPlanning A, Vol. 25, pp. 1773-1788.

Bianchini, F. (1993),Culture, conflict and cities: issues and prospectsfor the 1990s» in

Bianchini, F. and Parkinson, M. (eds),Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration: the WestEuropean Experience, Manchester, ManchesterUniversity Press.

Booth, P. and Boyle, R. (1993),See Glasgow, see culture», in Bianchini, F. andParkinson, M. (eds), Cultural Policy and UrbanRegeneration: the West European Experience,Manchester, Manchester University Press.

Bovaird, T. (1988),Evaluation in Leisure: A Review of MajorApproaches» in A Question of Balance: ILAMNational Seminar Report, Institute of Leisure andAmenity Management, December1988

Bovaird, T. (1993),Analysing urban economic development», UrbanStudies, Vol. 30, Nos. 4/5, pp. 631-658.

Bovaird, T. (1995),Monitoring and review of programmes», inCommunities and their Countryside, Proceedingsof Countryside Recreation Network AnnualConference, September 1994, University of York.

Bovaird, T. and Sudi Sharifi (1995b)Partnerships and the networks as self-organisingsystems: a case study of rural action for theEnvironment. Second International Workshop onMulti-Organisational Partnership: Working togetheracross organisational boundaries , University ofStrathclyde, Glasgow, 23-25 June 1995.

Comedia (1993)Social Impact of the Arts, Stroud: Comedia.

Harvey, D. (1990)The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell.

Hummel, M. and Berger, M. (1988)Die volkswirtschaftliche Bedeutung von Kunst undKultur, Berlin-Muehchen: Dunker und Humblot.

Jacobs, J. (1992) «Cultures of the past and urban transformation:the Spitalfields Market redevelopment in EastLondon», in Anderson, K. and Gale, F. (eds),Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography,pp. 194-211. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.

Kotler, P., Haider, D.H. and Rein, I. (1993)Marketing Places: Attracting Investment, Industryand Tourism to Cities, States, and Nations, NewYork: Free Press.

Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1987)The End of Organised Capitalism, Cambridge:Polity Press.

Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994)Economies of Signs and Spaces, London: Sage.

Lewis, J. (1990) Art, Culture and Enterprise: the Politics ofArt andthe Cultural Industries, London, Routledge.

Lipietz, A. (1992)Towards a New Economic Order: Postfordism,Ecology and Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Loftman, P. (1991)A tale of two cities: Birmingham the conventioncentre and unequal city - the InternationalConvention Centre and disadvantaged groups, BuiltEnvironment Development Centre Research Paper6, Birmingham: Birmingham Polytechnic.

Myerscough, J. (1988)The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain,London: Policy Studies Institute.

Port Authority of NY and NJ (1983),The Arts as an Industry. New York: Port Authority ofNew York and New Jersey.

Treasury (1995) A Framework for the Evaluation of RegenerationProjects and Programmes, London: H M Treasury.

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Public Art:Towards atheoreticalframework

Antoni Remesar

A non-critical approximation to thetopic can tarnish the vision that we possess ofthe History of Art- this History, as any otherhistory, is not the result of the story telling longof the time, but a still picture framed from agiven position. In this sense the Art story isonly one of the possible stories to narrate aboutthe set of the creative activities that they havecarried out many men, in different places anderas . If the story is real or untruthful is not alogic issue but an epistemological one. The pro-duction of the modern knowledge has beenbased and is based already, in given powerstrategies that they have permitted the produc-tion and consolidation of this stories and notof others.

It is evident that a revision of the produc-tion catalogued as History of the Art willpresent us a great quantity of works, by not tosay most of them, that they have been outlined,or well by the relevant public instances, or wellto occupy a place in the public area that wedesignate as market. In this sense is certain thatall the History of the Art is the History of thepublic art, especially when our lived approachto the it is made in the context of the show-sys-tem of the museums and galleries, or in mostcases, by the reproductions that occupy itsplace in the context of the public sphere of themedia.

In any case what is certain is that in anyera and place is given a minimal transactional

Throughout this book the authors havespoken about public art and urban regenera-tion. The different authors have attempted toshow and to justify their different conceptionsabout both concepts. In any case and with in-dependence of the readings that the texts cross-ing could provide, as editor of the present book,I have reserved to myself the final writing, thesame as I did by requirements of the script inthe presentation writing, the introduction tothe discussion that we have shown here.

1.- ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF PUBLIC ART

In other forums in those which is in-tended to analyse the force of the public art con-cept, appear always two problems that, gener-ally, they distort the environment and hindera discussion in depth about of the topic.

The first issue makes reference to the factof defending that all art is public art, weaken-ing thus the possible development of the con-cept and including it in the swampy dimen-sion of the art definition.

The second, bounded in good measureto the first, makes reference to the rejection ofthe "public art" term and to the recovery of theconcept "art for public spaces".1.1.- THE MONUMENTAL CONFUSION


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structure that permits the set-into-being of thework. Structure that at the same time bases theown and necessary symbolic exchange of eachsociety. But it is not less certain that of thisstructure can not be derived a Nature, in themetaphysical and absolute sense of the term,of the Art; an essence that, transcending erasand places, is expanded in the being of theworld and it is narrated as the materializationof the History of the Art.

It has existed, it exist and will exist artisticproduction, but it is not lawful to establish thelinear sequence of a linear history that it hasnot existed, less when we apply the adjectivepublic to this history .

A Tibetan mandala of the XV th century itis not, from the look of a person of the XXth cen-tury, the same device that worked as mediat-ing vehicle to the medieval monk. Thismandala is a monument, something that wewish to preserve in the future and the presentand that, therefore, we preserve outside of itscontext, in the sacrosanct enclosure of the mu-seum. Continuing with the story we can at-tempt to establish the statement of the monu-mental art, of that which, by the motives thatthey will be, we wish to preserve of the step ofthe time at the same time that we attributed toit determined aesthetic, stylistic, social, sym-bolic securities, etc.

In the context of the art and of its teaching,the monument concept is a damned one. Someauthors make to relapse in the break with thelogic of the monument the development possi-bility of the contemporary sculpture. To largefeatures the argumentation is as continues.Thanks to the break with the representativeparadigm of the mimesis that permits to releasethe mind from the figurative procedures, andof all what the gender of the statuary sculp-ture means, the sculpture has found an ownroad that it has evolved from the formal abstrac-tion towards the re-encounter or, as saysMaderuelo, the kidnapping of the space. In thissense the public art would be identified withthe set of artistic productions- not monumen-tal by definition- that take the public space asstage for its writing.

However the logic of the monument doesnot make reference, solely, to the narrative strat-egies (memorial, commemoration, brief) neitherto the representative tactics (statuary, groups,base, registration). The logic of the monumentis a patrimonial logic, as good has indicatedrecently Choay (1996), answering, perhaps, tothe first paragraphs of the famous book by Riegl(1909). As patrimonial logic, in our context, itcan not be separated of the strategies of thecapitalistic accumulation processes, includedthe logic of accumulating symbolic capital. The

empire gets its density through the existenceof the symbols of its performance capacity.

In this sense one must to read this logic somuch in terms of the preservation of the past -the construction of this statement that permitsus to soar us culturally to the Greeks, to offer toourselves a given history and memory-through the historical monuments, how muchto the projection of the present in the futurethrough the determination of the artistic monu-mentality.

The famous sculpture by Picasso in theChicago Civic Center does not possess none ofthe characteristic features of the monumentalsculpture. However it can be considered somonumental as the Lincoln's Memorial inWashington. Picasso, continuing the tracedroad by Apollinaire, in this "Poete Assassinée",it did not escape the challenge of the monumentthrough the formal denial. As he made in hisGuernica, he produced a work though thiswould be the sculpture of the empty.

The logic of the monument, in howmuch derives from the patrimoniallogic, has extended its sponsorship

to the Nature -this great invention of the En-lightenment century -through the regulatorymechanism of its protection (Protected Natu-ral Spaces), what in certain manner would ex-plain the not solution of continuity that existsamong the works known as Land-Art and thecurrent public art.

In fact and in summary, continuing the ter-minology of Bourdieu the field of the art is notlocated in a continuum that answers to the for-malization of the beauty idea or of the truth.The field of the art is determined, both histori-cally and anthropologically, and because ofthis it is impossible to maintain the affirmationof the fact that the History of the Art can be iden-tified with the history of the public art.

In any case, located from the present, wecan agree a certain history of the monumentalart, and in how much that good part of this artis found in the public space (buildings, squares,sculptures, tapestries, temples. etc) we can es-tablish an analogy among the monumental artand the public art. Both take the public spaceas writing stage. Both are written through someprocedures that we can catalogue generically.Both presuppose, near the artistic premedita-tion, other premeditation of a symbolic qual-ity and shared use.

However even accepting this analogy, theconsideration mistake persists.

2.2.- ART FOR THE PUBLIC SPACE

When Leon B. Alberti wrote his Re

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Aedificatoria and described in an itemized waythe spaces for public use, he was not thinkingthe space in the same way that Brancusi did inthe moment of accomplishing his sculpturalgroup in Tirgu-Jiu.

Approximately, four hundred years sepa-rate to both authors; four hundred years inthose which the evolutionary process of thewestern humanity has evolved to a surprisingpace. Four hundred years that separate pre-in-dustrial a society from mass-society. Four hun-dred years that not permit us, beyond the lim-its imposed to a consistent plot, to establishparallelism among the proposals and consid-eration about the space in one and other artist.

Did not exist skyscrapers in the Universeof Alberti . In any case it existed a neo-platonistthought context that permitted a constant flu-ency among the expression of the form and itsformalization through mathematical and geo-metric procedures. Brancusi had lived in theParis of Haussman and visited New York,plenty of skyscrapers and the Washington ofLe Notre. Tirgu-Jiu it is a staunch exponent ofthe impact of the capitality on the periphery.The space of Alberti was a space that just wasin train of be invented. The space of Brancusianswered to the existing spaces. The imitationof one and other deferred substantially.

While Alberti it followed the principles byPlotino, Brancusi ran out of to receive the bru-tal shock from the mass-society in its purerform: the EE.UU.

In her work in this book and in other of re-cent publication, Ch. Matossian (1996) hasdemonstrated the need of anchoring the con-cept of the public and of public space in somegiven coordinates that, for our environment,would be located toward final of the XVIIIthcentury. It is in the context of the industrial so-cieties in those which should approach thestudy of the public space.

Though some authors (Benevolo o Arganfor example) soar the origin of the modern ur-ban science to Alberti, I believe indispensableto recover the figure of Ildefons Cerdà, the en-gineer that defined the future project for Barce-lona, at the same time that built the first for-malisation of the theory of the urbanization ofthe cities.

Cerdà's outlines suggest a theory based onthe development of two double concepts: route-inter-route/ urbanization -ruralization. Theroute is the space for the traffic, for the mobil-ity, for the contact, for the market, of the public.The inter-route is the space of the rest, of thereproduction, of the training, of the work, of thebalance among the private space and the pub-lic space. The route, given its connectiveness,permits to extend the urbanization beyond the

limits of the city. To humanize the city, to an-chor it with the remote past of the Nature, theroute is, also, the auspicious space for the ru-ralization through the construction of gardens, squares and parks. The city, the urban form, itmust be a wise balance among these factors.

Cerdà introduces, furthermore, a series ofmechanisms of executive and legal type thatpermit the development of the urbanizationplan, maintaining the balance among the pri-vate property of the soil and the public use ofthe same. All city must be endowed of sufficientpublic space as to guarantee its balanced de-velopment. This space will serve at the end asruralization of the city and as junction for itsmobility. Evidently, this public space must besufficiently endowed of the public proprietyelements that permit an improvement of theurban landscape (fountains, clocks, kiosks,bridges, sculptures, etc). With independence ofother considerations, Cerdà announces a pub-lic art program bound to the general urbaniza-tion process of the city. A program in the onewhich the urban form must be carried of a cer-tain aesthetics function.

Continuing to Choay (1996b) weshould recognize that the theory of Cerdà isbased in a biological paradigm , according tothe one which the urban form must answer toa certain policy of the body. To give mansionto healthy bodies in a healthy environment, per-mits the development of the sufficient socialcohesion mechanisms that make possible thedevelopment of the individual and of the city.

Though paradoxical, this paradigm isused subsequently by some other theories ofurban form (T.Garnier, Le Corbusier, etc) andpersists until half of this century.

Obviously, it is used this paradigm as of amuch more global idea which is the blind faithin the economic and technological progress. Inspite of the cyclical crisis the development ofthe industrial capitalism permitted to think ina endless continuum to which had to beadapted the urban form and the life conditionsof the citizens. In any case the public space, inspite of the different approximations, it is con-sidered as the territorial reservation devoted tothe mobility, to the social contact and to theenjoyment of the environment. Of this is de-rived the necessary policy for endowment, con-ditioning and propriety of the public spaces inthose which the art can fulfil a substantial role.

I believe that it is from this optics that wecan begin the discussion about the second greatissue: art for/ in public spaces.

The same formulation of the issue outlinesus the existence of two realities: the art andthe public space. I will not enter, in this work,


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development and investigation on the self, onthe capacities of the own body . They will bethe advances in Ethnology, in Physics and inPsychoanalysis those which will discover thefragility of this concept/ percept, I mean the Ibased on the image of the body. The body al-ready it can not be considered solely as resextensa, but as a complex field of energeticmovements and pulsions that are recognizedin Other considerate, to date , primitive bod-ies, little evolved, ancestral.

The ways art shown itself, gradually aban-don the model of the machine man, of the mi-mesis understood as imitatio. In fact, in theontological plan, the artist is faced to the needof be differentiated of the other, from crumblingof the idea of the body as palace of the soul. Allthis creates an ontological contradiction thatis going to mark in the epistemological area themodernity's program .

G.C. Argán (1970s) outlines that this epis-temological program , in spite of the differences,of the nuances, with the political scope moreor less progressive or advanced, will becomecoordinates shaft to share by several artist gen-erations.

If the relationships of the writing, of thepainting, of the sculpture, they are not relation-ships of similarity with the object to represent,but relationships of meaning among the signsthat are used, it is easy to understand that, thesame as happens with the Language, these re-lationships of meaning will be diverse withina same language, they will be dense.

The poet, the sculptor, the painter shouldbe able of making to flow these relationshipsthrough their work and, for this, they have ofrelinquishing the initiative to the signs andmaterial that they use.

What it is important to draw is the plot ofrelationships that exists among the objects andthe signs and this plot possesses a conceptualcharacter. The assumption of the temporalityand of the movement compel the space to beforced in the challenge of assuming the multi-ple synchronous plans of manifestation. Thelight and the stain, object of the impressionistart, disappear as such. The fragmentation thatsupposed a certain variable geometric structureis rationalized in simpler structures , moreperfect, more platonic.

The object of the art, of the arts?, it is goingcollecting thickness, while the frontiers amongthem disappear.

Though at present, so much the ontologi-cal situation of the artist as her/his epistemo-logical paradigm , they have assorted respectto the described previously, the system of theart stay alive these principles though it will be

on quintessential considerations about the art.I would like, however, to indicate that this state-ment corresponds to the clear formulation ofthe autonomy of the art.

Long of the XIXth century, this recovery ofthe autonomy statute, of the art by the art, pro-duces in the ontological area the need of differ-entiation among the artist and the rest of thesociety, especially when, on a gradual way, theartist begins to integrate in his/her Languagethe elements of the Otherness.

We can also to soar the emergency of theproblems of the other around the end of XVIIIthcentury, with the proposals of Diderot, Swift,Goethe; but the XIXth century, from a perspec-tive of social ontology, is characterized by the

A LIST FOR THE DISSENT OR

BRILLIANCY AND DEATH? OF

PUBLIC ART

• Art-in-architecture• Sculpture in the open air• Environmental art• Contemporary Public Sculpture• Monumental Art• Site-specific Art• Packet art• Plop Art• Parachuted Art• Multimedia• Community art• Earth works...and beyond• The turd in the plaza• Art& Therapy• Heritage Art• Political Art• Critic Public Art• Anti-monumental Art• Landscape Art• Townscape Art• Performance Art• Public Space• Civic Art• Ornamental Art• Statuary• Memorial Art• Design for Public Space• Public Sphere• Architecture• Mural Art• Art in Public Interest• Urban art• New Genre Public Art

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WHAT CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AS PUBLIC ART?

• Public Art can mean a wide range of different things, acts and events • Some manifestations of popular art could be consider

• They are expressive activities, so we can label them as art• They are popular and happen in the public scene, so they are public• Some of them are funded by public sources; some others by privateones, but with a clear objective to be present in the public sphere

• We can stretch this approach to: • happenings • performances • actions • any manifestation of performance arts • any manifestation of music

• and too... to all creative or expressive activity • But, usually when we talk about PA we refer to OBJECTS placed

on a permanent way, in a public space

MAIN CATEGORIES FOR PERMANENT PUBLIC ART (PPA)

• Historical MonumentsAny Building ,Painting ,Object able to be used to re-make the history of the city

• Special BuildingsThose which because of (1)The scale (skycrapers) (2)The uniqueness or(3)An assigned aesthetic value appear as different to the rest of the buildings

• Memorials Statues, Constructions, Fountains that remember facts, images, symbols or peopleimportant for the city

• Sculptures and other ornamental artefactsStatues , monoliths, plates, fountains placed in order to improve the townscape

• Urban Furniture ElementsThe general role of UF is to improve our ability to navigate by the city

• setting the permitted or forbidden actions and territories (fences, signals,etc) • ordering mobility (pavements, signalling systems, lights, urban tolls, etc) • lighting the path (street lamps) • helping the urbanite to feel better and comfortable (lavatories, clocks, benches,

fountains, kiosks, Waste disposal containers ...) • Ordered Elements of Landscape Architecture: Plants, trees, grass (rural signs of a

natural life)• Public Space

The filled emptiness between buildings, The arena of our urbanite navigation, theplace for public encounters. Filled up with:

• Ordered Elements of Landscape Architecture • Urban Furniture Elements • Sculptures and other ornamental artefacts • Memorials • Special Buildings Historical monuments ....PETS, PEOPLE and CARS


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in the area of the mythology and social behav-iour of the artist.

To recover the concept of the public art asart for/ in the public spaces, supposes themaintenance of this paradigmatic situation inthe one which, to real effects, the artist acts asdemiurge among the space, the citizen and theart.

The continued rejection on the partof citizens to given public art proposals (we re-call the episode of R. Serra with his famousTilted Arch in New York), in spite of the riseand formal recovery of the appropriateness ofthe work in relationship to the place, they canbe easily interpreted from this perspective.

To my to understand, Cerdà he outlinedin a way quite clear the relationship amongPlan and Project, one of the considerations thatit has made famous to Barcelona in its policyof spaces and public sculpture. The plan wouldgive the general performance framework, thedirector plans, would regulate the constructionof the infrastructures (the considerate generi-cally as such, as well as the new derivativesfrom the use of the information technologies )and would establish the continuity (ruraliza-tion/ urbanization) with the rest of the terri-tory.

The project would operate at a smallerscale, specific and with own instruments, dis-playing the constructive system of the inter-road, ordering the route (included its publicspaces) and handling what, continuing toLash& Urry (1994), could designate as soft in-frastructures , in those which the public artcould play an outstanding role.

The here outlined operations possess acomplexity such that to attempt to maintain theautonomous figure of the artist is presented usas in certain ridiculous manner. It is known therejection to the public art concept that is givenin the Anglo-Saxon area. The reconstructionprocesses of the cities after the IInd WW, at thesame time that the processes of implementationfor redesign the territory with the creation ofnew cities, the certain principles disappear-ance "anti-other-arts" of the architectural mod-ern movement and the Labour empowermentof civic participation in the Commissions, pro-duced a public art that it has been come desig-nated as "plop art".URBAN REGENERATION: A CHALLENGE FOR

PUBLIC ART

GENERAL IDEAS

We would have to understand this prob-lems in its extreme complexity, above all in

some moments in which the neo-liberalism in-tends to make to disappear it through the me-chanics from the market.

This problems is lived as a crisis of the so-ciety model. As instance that makes possiblethe social reality, the public agglutinates a setof specific problems referred to the culture, theart, the education, the policy, the economy, theenvironment; the same society.

In the countries designated as developedones, this problem is confused, often, with thetransfer of an organization of the modern pro-duction to another one -post-modern?- charac-terized by the increase of the services sector,especially those intended for the finances, theinformation and the leisure .

The cultural connection is the step of themodern culture to a new model of organizationthat puts in judgement the concepts of narra-tive, of progress and of teleology own of that.

Meanwhile... good part of the planet re-cently begins to recover the need of the devel-opment as route of the most minimal planetaryequity, without forgetting that this process cannot be drawn on the models of the western so-ciety, but on sustainable growth standardsadapted to the maintenance in life of the Planetthat all gives us.

We are faced to a planetary scale imbal-ance. Imbalance North/ South, north-south inthe own North; of resources, of wealth, of cul-ture.... Imbalance among the action of the mar-ket and the regulatory role of the State. Imbal-ance among the public and.... the other part ofthis double conceptual that it is not, precisely,the private.

Precisely in a moment of acute question-ing of the public the manifestations of this in-stance are each day most next to the citizen,its concretion is palpable in soil that we tread:the public space.

The study of the territory, of its standardsof organization and functionality-understoodeven from the symbolic dimension-, of the pos-sibilities of acting creatively from a personaldimension, they are should be the subject of thePublic Art.

If we watch at the various manifestationsof the public art, we will realize the existenceof two large approximation strategies to thepublic art, that punctuate the set of policies ofnecessary urban regeneration to palliate thestructural crisis of the city.

The competition among the States/ Coun-tries is beginning to change , in the last times,toward the competition among the regions/cities. In this context and, precisely, of face toface the competition, it is being outlining a newinternational style that it does not has its show

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URBAN REGENERATION

IS IT POSSIBLE TO EVALUATE PUBLIC ART?

• Most of the artists and people related with the arts sector will not admit anappraisal process on Public Art (Principle of Autonomy of Art)•But consider this statement by G.C. Argan «Aesthetics is not a questions of beautynor ugliness, but of meaning»•We know quite well that meaning can be measured or analysed, and so we can attemptan evaluation of Public Art

Parameters to evaluate Indicators

• IDENTITY • Distinctiveness • Entity• Wholeness• Independence from the context

• STRUCTURE • Colour• Shape• Scale• Form• Materials

• MEANING • Functionality• Recognizability• Codificability• Usefulness• Coherencebility• Fitness to the context

PPA WORK-IN- PLACE

• Public space is not a gallery or a museum• The rules put on to evaluate public art-in-place are quite different fromthose needed by the modern exhibition place for art• To succeed a work of public art-in-place has to suffer a process of

RECREATION - APPROVAL - APPROPRIATION

from the part of the user of these place• If the codes used to construct the work (identity, structure, meaning) arenot recreated, approved and appropiated by user we can find :

• misunderstanding of the work• depreciation of possible meanings (What is it)• confusion between innovation and extravagance• “TYPE” codification of the work (art in the worse meaning)• Unexpected uses of the work

• Aggressive behaviour• littering• vandalism


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space in the museum. The street, the square,the park, in fact the public space, they havebeen converted in the arena in which variouscities compete to possess the copyright of thedemiurgs , of the better architects, sculptors,engineers, designers, etc.

It is not possible to compete in the variouscity leagues without the only voucher of givenauthor works. It seems as if the urban spacewould be an immaculate, immense and end-less autographs book in the one which the col-lector cities preserve and produce their value.

On the other hand each city-in reason ofits history and morphology-requires approxi-mations/ interventions executed from the loveto everyday life, without nominalist tracks ofthe ranking; from the next position to the citi-zens.

Modest approximation that, possibly, itimproves the quality of life of the residents butthat it is not able of competing in this strangeshaker that rules the interest by the investmentand the international competitive growth.

A dialectical among the locality and theglobality, a strange plait in the artistic and po-litical thought; an excessive dominance of theparadigm to think global, to act local.

If, day to day, the frontiers among thestates-nation are melting down, due to the elas-ticity and dynamism of the markets, it is not ofmissing that the frontiers among the disciplinestend to vanish, to be stumped. Some disciplinesinvade the field of the others, almost alwaysfrom a wrong position that has more thanmaintenance of the power quotas that of inter-est in producing a better knowledge anddeeper.

The space/ public art can be the stage ofthe battle among various disciplines, or... as isproposed here, the auspicious territory to thecommon understanding. The reality of thepublic space is so complex that nobody, from agiven disciplinary position , is able of ap-proaching it and of answering of effective man-ner. The route of the dialogue and the coopera-tion remains opened to all those who are inter-ested in producing space/ public art.

URBAN REGENERATION & PUBLIC ART

Why urban regeneration? Why the title ofthe book centres so much their/its/your/hisattention in the challenge situation that the ur-ban regeneration supposes for the public art?

I believe, sincerely, that an attentive read-ing of the presented works; an attentive read-ing, able of linking the absences with the pres-

THE NEW URBANISM

(J. BORJA, 1983)

OBJECTIVES

1.-To increase the work opportunities, ina not keynessian way, through:

• to maintain and to develop the economicactivity based on the small and mediancompanies , integrated in the urban fab-ric• to multiply the public works (of aver-age and small size) with the objective fromobtaining better equipment and socialservices• to increase the urban efficiency as baseof the productive processes, through theselective investment, the infrastructuresand the pilot activities• to transform the city in an informationand coordination center for the greaternumber of possible activity• to create and to increase the social rolessystem bound to the municipal manage-ment and to the social economy in orderto substitute partially the traditional sala-ried work2.-To think the city as a place of life for

everybody, fighting against the social in-equality, in a context of sustentability, bymeans of:

• to rehabilitate and to improve the ur-ban fabric• to increase and to improve the publicspace and the infrastructures• to cause that the city will be accessibleto everybody• to re-qualify and to equip peripheralneighbourhoods giving them some cen-tral functions (decentralization/ new cen-trality areas)• to integrate the rural activities, the for-est parks, the waterfronts and the no manlands of the city and its surroundings, inthe urban life• to protect and to improve the environ-ment• to recover the heritage• to improve the quality of life throughthe overpass of the social inequalities3.-To urbanize the national and regional

territory in order to even the rural zones• to permit that the rural areas enjoy theinfrastructures and freedom of the city• to improve the communications system• to optimize the balance among differ-ent parts of the territory

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URBAN REGENERATION

THE HOUSTON/HARRIS COUNTY MODEL

Have you ever thought about public art?Imagine a city where, through the hand of the artist, ordinary everyday objects are

transformed into something extraordinary. Imagine a city bench or a bus stop whichare unique and colourful. Manhole covers and treeguards which while functional, arealso whimsical works of art. Public art is a way to enhance our city, strengthen ourneighbourhoods and provide colour and character to our public spaces.

Recent years have seen public art constantly redefined as artists tackle the chal-lenges afforded by projects in an unprecedented variety of public places. Communi-ties have commissioned artists to create new works in connection with projects as di-verse as historic districts, sports facilities, theatres, bus stations and transit systems,power substations, airports, city streets and roadways, as well as public buildings, parksand plazas.

Artists bring a sense of identity to communities. They provide a means of expres-sion, a way to focus and build neighbourhood pride. Through a public art programand the resulting interaction, a community can begin to realize its own creative poten-tial as a means of addressing the issues it confronts.

Cachh’s new public art program offers a variety of consultation and facilitatingservices to assist you in identifying your project and goals. By exploring a range ofapproaches to public art cachh can help you structure processes for community in-volvement and artist selection.

Cachh’s experienced public art director, Jessica Cusick, can also advise you on con-tracting practices and how to implement projects.

HOUSTON FRAMEWORKMISSION, GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

MISSION:To improve Houston’s visual environment through art and design, thereby en-

hancing overall quality of life and the city’s image and appeal for residents and visi-tors alike.

GOALS:•To create an integrating vision for public art and design of the highest quality

within the urban context of Houston/Harris County•To develop a communication tool that facilitates community dialogue•To establish a framework plan for coordinated action and a structure for imple-

mentation in an open and inclusive process•To leverage public and private investment in infrastructure projects.

OBJECTIVES:Through an open and inclusive planning process that interprets public art andurban design opportunities as broadly as possible:•Survey existing conditions, inventory plans, assess existing research and investi-gate functional entities•Develop the framework plan as a synthesis of existing initiatives•Formulate a limited number of catalysts, including pilot projects, funding mecha-nisms and legislative options.•Propose a structure for coordinated implementation.•Create a language module, utilizing an interactive computer format, that canserve as an effective tool for community-based planning.


137

ences, will admit with me that the title and theoutlined topic suppose a real challenge for theart and the current society.

From approximately a decade, many criti-cal, many studious, they have begun to discussabout the convenience, or not, of approachingthe topic of the public art. The results, to myshort to understand, have not been so satisfac-tory as, in principle, could be supposed.

In his excellent work, A. Bovaird ( seepages 117-127 in this book) has defined theurban regeneration through the definition ofsome given objectives. The principal objectiveof the urban regeneration would be "the increasein the welfare of the residents and workers of thecity" and could be made effective through de-veloping the following partial objectives:

1-To increase the total income generatedin the city2-To improve the social cohesion3-To increase the influence of the city innational decision-making4-To improve the city's image as a centerof culture

As can be proven of a rapid analysis thedefinition that Bovaird provides has as basisthe Welfare State model survival. The publicaction must promote, through the classicmechanisms of the keynesian model, orthrough the new cooperation formulationswith the private sector, the necessary instru-ments at economic, social, political and culturallevel that permit the development of the city. Infact, the proposed model supposes to endowto the city of some development mechanismsthat permit to fix its spatial form (Castells,

1987)Though, in the model of Bovaird, the topic

of the public art is located as one of the possi-ble improvement mechanisms of the social co-hesion, we will see below that the considera-tion of the public art in its double sense, per-manent and temporary, object and process, per-mits us to widen its activity field to the fourobjectives proposed. Public art, in the urban re-

generation processes, would be converted in adevice that would cross the four dimensions.

In fact, Public art, by its characteristicswould share space in the area of the publicworks and public economy (partial or total fi-nancing on the part of State); in the public do-main (operation in the set of public instances);in the public space (as support of its develop-ment or as form generated by its performance);in the cooperative and social action (due to thenecessary active participation of the citizens inits design and effort. In this sense would be Artin the public interest ) and, finally, in the pub-lic sphere (due fundamentally to the promotionstrategies of the city that in good part woulduse the images of the public art to generate op-erations of capital attraction, tourism, decisionmaking,etc).

As good will be recalled, these problemsdefine some of the recent approximations to thetopical of the public art (Milles, Arlen, Mitchell)

M. Castells (1989:351) itemizes very wellthis situation upon making the analysis of thenew model of the informational society . " Lo-calities-cities and regions-must be able to find theirspecific role in the new informational economy. Thisis possibly the most difficult dimension to integrateinto a new strategy of place-based social control,since a precise and major characteristic of the new

For Mitchell (1992) public art can be defined as that art «commissioned, paid for andowned by the State».

For Miles (1989) public art must fulfil a landmark function in the landscape and thelandmarks «are somewhat more that statues» or, as outlines A.Raven (1989), the public art"isn’t a hero riding a horse anymore "

The importance of the art in the public space is indicated by Miles, because:

1.- it gives a sensation of place2.-it engages the people who use this place3.-it gives a model of imaginative work4.-it assists in urban regeneration

As far as she is concerned, Raven makes her the following statement by Susan Lacy«works of public art enter a preexisting physical and social organization. How the work relates to,reinforces or contends with the forms of expression of that community is a question that contrib-utes to the critical dialogue»

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URBAN REGENERATION

REFLECTIONS ON PUBLIC ART

DANI KARAVAN

Commission + Time + Place + Objective + Budget = Artwork

1. The commission is made by a public or private institution2.- The precise location may be either in an urban area or on anatural site3.- Once the time has been set, it must be determined whetherthe work is to have a limited duration - i.e., linked to a specificevent- or if it is to be permanent. Also to be established is howmuch time the artist has to prepare and realize his work4.- The purpose of the work: for what purpose was the commis-sion made and what is its most appropriate use?5.- What financial means will the client put at the artist’s dis-posal?

This equations yields the art form known as environmental art, aterm which, however, is not adequate to explain the nature of my work.My artworks exist in relation to the environment, of course, but they arenot landscaped or architectural creations, nor they are purely sculpturalcreations. They involve all of these features, but there is an undeniableemphasis on sculpture and concept. The point is to dispense with mov-able objects and to concentrate on a work created for a given site, thegenesis, development, and very existence of which are linked to thissite, and which ceases to exist as soon as it is detached from it. To dis-pense with movable objects means to work in a new direction and con-trary to the habits of contemporary art.

I strive to begin at the source, at the roots, and I scrupulously fol-low all the stages of the work from the beginning to the end. This is whymost of my works exist only through and for the place where they werecreated. In undertaking the work, I try to begin with the existing envi-ronment, without preconceptions, either to forms or materials. In myview, no forms or materials are better than any others. The choice de-pends upon the values given to the “equation” ( Commission + Time +Place + Objective + Budget = Artwork). Work on the site involves thevisible and the invisible, actual materials, but also intangibles such asmemory, and personal and historical consciousness. I have always triedto begin at the beginning, by sowing the seed first, and the by watchingthe stages of its growth. It is a strange and complex creative process, forthe artist is at the same time the one who directs and is directed by thework; he orients and is oriented by it in turn.

The work which I do is financed by people, by society, and its pur-pose is to serve people and society as a whole. This entails a great re-sponsibility toward society and toward art. My goal is to create for peo-ple, and to bring all their senses into action, sight as well as hearing,touch, and smell, and to act on their movements. I work for people inorder to invite them to communicate with the environment, materials,memory and themselves.


139

economy is its functional articulation in the spaceof flows. However, localities can become indispen-sable elements in the new economic geography be-cause of the specific nature of informationaleconomy. In such an economy, the main source ofproductivity is the capacity to generate and processnew information, itself dependent upon the symbolicmanipulating ability of labour. This informationalpotential of labour is a function of its general liv-ing conditions, not only in terms of education, butin terms of the overall social milieu that constantlyproduces and stimulates its intellectual develop-ment. In a fundamental sense, social reproductionbecomes a direct productive force. Production in theinformational economy becomes organized in thespace of flows, but social reproduction continues tobe locally specific.

(...) Local governments must develop a centralrole in organizing the social control of places overthe functional logic of the space of flows. It is onlythrough the reinforcement of this role that locali-ties will be able to put pressure on economic andpolitical organizations to restore the meaning oflocal society in the new functional logic"

Castells continues outlining that to obtainthese objectives, the local government shouldincrease its organizational capacity and to re-inforce its power in two different ways:

1.- Encouraging the participation of thecitizens in the definition of the collectivestrategies that permit to reconstruct themeaning of the locality2.- Connecting the locality with other lo-calities (local networking)

Recently, M.A. Martínez Castells (1996:56)indicated in a work about the principle of thesubsidiarity, and in a way akin to that ofCastells. "It seems evident that in this displacementto which are attending of the economic and politi-cal powers toward supranational bodies, the leftforces can have a decisive intervention therefore isreferred to the resources assignment if they are ableof decreasing the gravity center- decision making-toward the levels of governments more next to thecitizens. If is procured this objective, it is evidentthat also the left would be contributing to empty ofcontent the attributions that up until now were con-sidered almost exclusive patrimony of the State. Butwould make it in the opposite sense of the EU: be-cause the result would impinge in the reinforcementof the democratic action and control, a better stand-ard of living for the citizens and an approxima-tion, in fact, of the decision bodies to the impliedpeoples. In fact, what is intended with the democraticrecovery of the principle of subsidiarity and its ex-ercise, it is that the citizens recover a part of this

sovereignty that now is relinquished, by the dis-placement of the economic and political power to-ward the new economic macro-areas in the currentprocess of internationalization of the economy, to asupranational organization not much controlledand basically non-democratic"

Franco Bianchini (1990) he was asked him-self " ... is there an alternative to the pessimisticnotion, all too well documented by recent assess-ments of arts-led regeneration projects, of the < cityof the spectacle>,-term used by Harvey (1987)-where the arts only contribute to increasing culturalstandardization and commodification, social in-equality and spatial segregation?".

Drawn an answer in the up indicatedwork, few years after (Bianchini, 1996), out-lined an answer to his own question: culturalplanning.

Cultural planning, it is defined as a com-plex process that it must take part in widerstrategies . Has to connect with the planningof the territory and the planning of the city;must be related to the industrial and economicdevelopment, to the justice initiatives and to theplanning of the recreation. It must form inte-gral part of other planning processes and, notonly to be an appendix to them.

Some years back, G.Carlo Argán (1984), itindicated the fact that the planning of the pub-lic space and by consequence of the public art,"did not have to be made for the citizens, but by thecitizens". The thought of Argan presupposedthat the aesthetic operators -architects, artists,psychologists, sociologists, etc,-had as missionthe organization of the spaces to permit the citi-zens the creation of places.

It is made evident, as of these observations,that the problem of the public art is a problemthat belongs to the field of the culture. But, atthe same time, patent curfew the fact that wecan not approximate the topic from a concep-tion of the culture with C, but we are obligatedto envisage it from the widest optics of the jointof processes guided to the improvement of qual-ity of life of the citizens.

So, from my own point of view, Public Art/Public Space are Hypothetical constructs , andmay be, I am not quite sure right now, they areconcepts that link with the heiddegerian con-cepts of Ortschaft and Gegend. Vattimo, theitalian philosopher, concludes from these con-cepts that the old distinction between Monu-ment and Ornament is not a valid one. I quote“ The ornamental art becomes the central phenom-enon of aesthetics”.'

Or may be the approach will be mappingthe terrain. As Susan Lazy (1995) wrote" Whether it operates as symbolic gesture or con-

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URBAN REGENERATION

crete action, new genre public art must be evaluatedin a multifaceted way to account for its impact notonly on action but on consciousness, not only onothers but on the artists themselves, and not onlyon the artists' practices but on the definition of art.Central to this evaluation is a redefinition that maywell challenge the nature of art as we know it, artnot primarily as a product but as a process of valuefinding, a set of philosophies, an ethical action, andan aspect of a larger sociocultural agenda"

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