PUBLIC SPACE & 'PUBLIC ART'

HOW THE COUNTRY FUNCTIONS SPATIALLY

This series of articles was occasioned, in part, by certain remarks made by Medb Ruane in response to Dan Shipsides' Bamboo Support , which was installed in front of the old Carlton Cinema in Dublin in 2000 (see The Sunday Times , 15th October 2000). The piece involved bringing scaffolders from Hong Kong to Dublin to erect a wall of bamboo scaffolding, of the type routinely used on building sites in the Far East. Ruane's criticism seemed to centre on the belief that Shipsides' piece was simply not 'spectacular' enough.

In the pages that follow, we have attempted to demonstrate that artists can make interventions in public space without necessarily wanting to make spectacular or monumental 'public art'. The term itself seems to connote project briefs drawn up by local authority committees, or hefty agglomerations of building materials deposited at unwitting housing estates in the name of 'benevolent' art projects.

In these articles, we have attempted to contest the 'monumentalism' of Ruane's approach. We want to suggest that art is here , with us in every aspect of our lives, neither a private activity confined to the middle class home nor something conferred upon 'the people' by funding bodies. Simply attempting to replicate the interactions that 'private' art makes, as if 'outside' was just a bigger gallery, is, we suggest, inadequate and inappropriate. There is a different discipline at work here.

In his analysis of some recent projects in Belfast, Stephen Hackett points to some genuinely underground activity. He wonders whether artists have an 'unhealthy obsession' with placing work outside the gallery. Duncan Campbell and Daniel Jewesbury suggest, through a series of apparent non-sequiturs, that art can exist in something other than a tangible form. Michael Wilson explores the street-centred activity of REPOhistory, a New York-based artists' collective. Superflex , a group based in Denmark, critique public space in their virtual project Karlskrona2 . Karen Vaughan, Mhairi Sutherland and Lucy Byatt discuss the presumption that public art must have a 'mass' audience. Finally, the design of these pages is the work of Keith Connolly .

All these pieces attempt to point toward some understanding of art as a social activity, not just a 'public' one. We should have been aware of that ever since the New York artist David Hammons took a trip uptown to piss on a monumental public sculpture by Richard Serra. His documentation of his subsequent caution by the NYPD inaugurated a new public artform.

Daniel Jewesbury