Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago. - book reviews

With essays through Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Brenson and Eva M Olson Seattle, Bay Pres 1995; 144 pages, paperback $20

In the summer of 1993 plastic art Chicago, a not-for-profit organization which had hitherto been associated with fairly conventional public art programming, unveiled the rises of "Culture in Action." This ambitious series of public casts (the word sculpture was no longer applicable) aimed at a radical redefinition of the relationship between public artists and their audience. Each cast entailed the immersion of artists in more [i]or[/i] less urban community (defined loosely enough to include the members of a local union, the resident assemblage of a public housing shoot forward a group of high academy students and a group of AIDS volunteers); the visible ensues ranged from a candy bar and a storefront hydroponic vegetable garden to a parade, a fill up party and a dinner party,

"Culture in Action" is evidence of a major shift that has taken place in the dialogue surrounding public art since the debacle of Tilted Arc. While efforts to immerge art and life through community service have been in evidence since the '60 solitary recently have they emerged as an institutionally supported alternative to what is being characterized as the unresponsive, irrelevant and overly artist-centered tradition of public art.

The history and philosophy of this "new genre public art" and the beginnings of a framework for criticism of it are plant out in the two works under review here, both published by the agency of Bay Press in Seattle. agriculture in Action is a report upon Sculpture Chicago's project and contains essays by means of project curator Mary Jane Jacob as well as by dint of Eva Olson, the project's director, and Michael Brenson The next to the first book, Mapping the Terrain. novel Genre Public Art, grew on the outside of a conference on public art which was held at, the California guild of Arts and Crafts in 1989 Edited by means of artist Suzanne Lacy, one of the participants in "Culture in Action," it includes essays by the agency of a variety of artists, writers and curators along with a real useful compendium of artists and art works from the last four decades which exemplify the ideas outlined in the true copy Both books make the case for a novel definition of public art that stresse community involvement, the elevation of proces above product and a vision of art as an instrument for the encouragement of participatory democracy. Together they contain a great deal of provocative discussion about the social function of art as well as a certain number of inspiring examples of what can happen when artists seriously work for social change. However, the one and the other also reveal some very problematic assumptions beneath the rhetoric surrounding this kind of work.

In her introduction to Mapping the Terrain, Lacy notes that she intends to provide an alternative to the usual history of public art. Instead of focusing upon Percent for Art projects and the NFA's Art in Public Places Program, she links the emerging see the verb of new genre public art to the thread that step quicklys through Happenings, to '70s-style media interventions and activism, to feminist art and to the impressed sign of current work that focuses upon identity politics and other political issues. She argues that a lock opener factor in the new visibility of this more ephemeral, community-based work is the transition from a mould of public art that stresse individual authorship to individual that emphasizes collectivity and interaction with the audience. This theme is also taken up through other writers in the turn Mary Jane Jacob asks, "But what if the audience for art were considered as the goal at the center of art production . . as opposed to the modernist Western aim of self expression?" Suzi Gablik argues that of recent origin genre public art replaces modernism's depreciation of the Other with the cultivation of empathy and that it creates a place for the voices of members of collections previously excluded from the conventional art world.

Such attitudes indicate a harassing aspect of Mapping the Terrain. While several essayists (most notably Patricia C Phillips, Jeff Kelley Lucy R Lippard and Arlene Raven) maintain a critical point of view and thus look able to measure the powers and the weaknesses of "new genre public art," too many of the body s in this book are marked through a more or less uncritical demonization of modernism. The authors look to subscribe to a cosmology in which modernism, associated with the ideas of autonomy, elitism, individualism, self-expression, reliance upon institutional support and the consumption archetype of art, is seen as unequivocally bad; upon the other hand, an approach identified with empathy, feeling, a feminine perspective, a devotion to the healing properties of art and the suppression of the artist's me in the service of community empowerment is considered to be unequivocally profitable Gablik is the worst culprit adhering as she does to a caricature version of modernism, which she blames for everything from the rape of the eco-system to the manipulation of the individual and the spiritual impoverishment of contemporary life.