ABSTRACTS OF PRESENTATIONS

Monday, June 1

SEMINAR WELCOME
Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell and Tom Finkelpearl

SEMINAR INTRODUCTION:
Anna Novakov and Cheryl Younger

LECTURE:
Eleanor Heartney: Inside Public Art

This will be a survey of developments in public art over the last twenty years. Among the issues to be discussed will be the implications of permanence and impermanence, changing meaning of site specificity, questions of controversy and audience, and the difference between "art in public" and "public art."

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Two Works In Progress: The Gates, project for Central Park, New York, and Over The River, project for the Arkansas River, Colorado

The Gates will consist of 15 feet-high steel gates with luminous fabric panels which vary in width from 9 to 28 feet and will involve the entire topography of Central Park.

Over the River proposes to suspend 4 to 6 miles of fabric panels horizontally above the river over a span of 40 miles. The long stream of successive panels will be interrupted by bridges and trees, and allow sunlight to illuminate the river on both sides and through the luminous fabric.

LECTURE:
Rosalyn Deutsche: The Question of "Public Space"

What does it mean for space to be "public?" Since the 1980s, this question has provoked vigorous debates among art, architecture and urban critics. This talk will explore the political issues at stake in these debates, placing them within the context of broader struggles over the definition of democracy.

Implying "accessibility," "participation" and "accountability to the people," public space is invariable linked by defenders to democratic ideals. Yet democracy itself is a highly contested idea, and support of public space has been used increasingly over the last decade to legitimate authoritarian policies—exclusionary urban design, economic privatization, state censorship, surveillance, and attacks on civil rights and the very idea of rights. Rhetoric about the public, with it connotations of unity, has been mobilized by critics on both the left and the right to repress heterogeneity and conflict and to expel "the stranger."

Treating public space as a concept open to diverse uses, this talk will place the term "public" under contest, question the traditional deployment of the term, and consider the possibilities for new more democratic deployments. Rosalyn Deutsche will suggest that for public space to be democratic, it must, in some way, remain a question.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann

Artists who participate in the system of public art contribute to the definition of what is a public. Hence, it is a good idea to illicit artists to talk about their experience with the aim of discussing the guidelines for progressive praxis in the realm of public art. Clegg & Guttmann’s experience in public art was gathered mostly in Europe; there, the problems associated with public art are quite different from the American ones. Public art usually depends on the survival of the federalist spirit. According to federalism, the state has to justify its claims of legitimation through public works in general and the commissioning of ambitious public art is an important element of this strategy. This context of public art is problematic to say the least. However, when the federalist spirit declines, as is the case in the US, the situation is even worse. Potential subversive strategies exist to demonumentalize public art and make it less subservient to the state. (A good example are the photographers of the WPA). But when the state itself does not require artists to provide monuments for the state, a completely different strategy is required.

The talk is based on a sequence of artworks called The Open Public Library. General conclusions will be presented on the reception of public artworks, not necessarily recognized as such, by people of different class and origins.

LECTURE:
Allan Bérubé: On the Gay Waterfront

The talk will deal with issues of gender in defining "public."

Since the days of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, the waterfront has lured "queer" men to the social and sexual edge of the city. Allan Bérubé explores Manhattan’s gay waterfront from the maritime strikes of the Great Depression to the "sex piers" and gay pride celebrations of the post-Stonewall years, and the current crackdown on queer youth.

This presentation is co-sponsored by the NYU Queer Faculty Group and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan: Public Works

This presentation will be a summary of their public projects that include early self-initiated temporary installations of posters on billboards and transit kiosks, and are now focused on permanent architectural works made on commission. The contest for public space has informed the work from the outset. It has been the driving force that has given Mandel and Sultan the commitment to work in order to enlarge the dialogue within the public space. Their role as artists in public is to engage ideas of history, culture, myth, geography, politics and neighborhoods, and translate these intertwined stories into a voice accessible to the community. In all of their work, they attempt to realize this goal by tapping into the power of documentary. Photographs, artifacts and people’s own words can be translated into a public space to dramatically engage the community with instances of history and human experience. The challenge is to come to terms with sometimes uncomfortable truths when the structure of the public commission is caught up in the politics of trying to serve multiple constituencies.

LECTURE:
Anna Novakov: Private Dicks: The Detective in Art and Popular Culture

In the nineteenth-century, the persona of the flaneur was often combined with that of the artist or writer, the distant documentarian of everyday life. These enigmatic artists/writers were witnesses to the changes in modern life. Through their work they were able to document and comment upon contemporary life. The same kind of identity merger can be seen today in the guise of the artist/detective. The interest in the artist/detective has grown considerably in the last twenty-five years. So much so that in 1997 alone there were three major exhibitions in the US that focused on this subject matter: Police Pictures at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Scene of the Crime at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and The Art of Detection: Surveillance in Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. The interest in surveillance by contemporary artists began in the mid to late 1960s. For example, in 1969, Vito Acconci began to explore the role of the artist/detective in Following Piece, "in which [he] followed a different person’s activity every day until the person entered a private sphere. Acconci mailed a record of his pursuits each day to a different member of the art community." This simple early piece paved the way for much later art by Chris Burden, Sophie Calle, Jenny Holzer, Julia Scher and others, that challenges the boundaries of public and private space.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Julia Scher: Always There

Always There is a book exploration of artist Julia Scher’s work. It is a compilation of dialogues and images that will address and expose a culture of containment—a culture of advanced physical and psychological enclosures. For the last 12 years, Scher has critically addressed the rapidly growing cult of surveillance, replicating and parodying its designs and tools of social control.

Always There is conceived as an active structure that investigates how surveillance has developed into an intangible network. Technology has reached such a high level of effectiveness and persuasiveness that there is no sure way of knowing when we are actually being watched. The pervasive assumption that we are being watched at all times eliminates the need for overtly oppressive and coercive mechanisms, making surveillance a self-regulating behavior whose external control has been internalized.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Tony Labat: The Ester Diaries

The Ester Diaries involved going homeless, or nomadic, as Tony Labat prefers (since it did not have anything to do with "homeless issues"), in order to write from experience, from a vulnerable position where the body takes over the head, where the desires are basic and physical. Where the car becomes the portable architecture of containment, paralleled and/or juxtaposed with an on-going relationship via e-mail; where the Internet is the new exile, wandering through it to let go of the body within the stationary frame and parameters of the computer screen.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Dennis Adams: Apertura

In the spring of 1995, Dennis Adams was one of a group of eleven artists invited to Bilbao in the Basque region of Northern Spain to produce a public intervention in relation to the Vizacaya Bridge that connects the Las Arenas and Portugalete districts at the mouth of the Nervion River. Reluctant to directly engaging with the monumentality of this spectacular urban construction, he chose a site adjacent to the backside of the large stone foundation that anchors its structural cable system to the Portugalete side of the river. There, he discovered a set of windows on an indoor pool facility that is regularly pirated by the public for peering in at the swimmers. The elevation of these windows only becomes accessible for "looking through" at one end, by way of their slight intersection with a playground on the upper level of the stepping terrain that surrounds the building. For his project, Adams had an observation station constructed in relation to the pirated windows on the exterior of this indoor public pool facility. Entitled Apertura, it both frames and accommodates the ad hoc use of the windows, operating as an interface between the viewer and the viewed. Its structure is composed of a two-thirds scale model of the existing set of windows, adjoining perpendicular to a viewing podium. The differential between the alignment of the model windows and the existing windows frames a "blind zone" that is filled in with a back-illuminated photographic image.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Laura Kurgan: You Are Here

Laura Kurgan will present a selection of recent work which includes a number of installations as part of an extended research project called You Are Here. The project deals with the encounter between mapping and new technologies, and thus with the confusions of location in the age of information flows. The projects are: Interface: Information Overlay, exhibited as part of Trade Routes at the New Museum of Contemporary Art; a solo show at the StoreFront for Art and Architecture in New York called You Are Here: Information Drift; You are Here: Museu, which was the inaugural show of the Architecture Department of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; and Close up at a Distance which was exhibited as part of the The Art of Detection: Surveillance in Society at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. The installations diverted live information feeds (a Dow Jones financial data service at the New Museum, the output from a Global Positioning System satellite receiver, and newly declassified Corona high-resolution satellite imagery) and used them to think about transformation in the experience of contemporary space.

PANEL DISCUSSION:
Public Penetration: Issues of Voyeurism, Surveillance and Contemporary Public Art
Participants: Anna Novakov (moderator), Dennis Adams, Laura Kurgan , Tony Labat, Julia Scher

Shortly after its invention, photography was embraced by the police for purposes of social control, surveillance and documentation. It provided the perfect medium for the categorization of individuals and social groups. Through the social engineering work of Alphonse Bertillon (anthropometric, physiognomy) and Sir Francis Galton (the composite) in England, a face could be put on the criminal, the mentally ill, the immigrant. The "other" could be systematized and analyzed. In many ways, modernist art and culture was, and is, continually influenced by this early and consistent appropriation of photography by the police.

Surveillance has become an issue again, due to the perceived diminution of private space and its ultimate collapse into the space of the public. Computers and the internet, corporate surveillance and government interventions into the private lives of its citizens are omnipresent. This type of interest in "private" surveillance seems to have resurfaced today, with the mass-market sale of home-based surveillance units, which include personal video cameras, monitors and motion detectors. This interest is also echoed on the internet with a plethora of popular surveillance websites. There are television programs on the air that almost exclusively use surveillance footage as their subject matter. The recent interest in spy equipment, video surveillance footage and eavesdropping should not be viewed as a new phenomenon, but the natural outcome of the nineteenth-century interest in police pictures. The influence of forensic photography on art and culture has been so profound that it forms a kind of tunnel that runs consistently below many aspects of twentieth-century art and life.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Julie Ault: Context Specific

A presentation of variously sited projects made by Ault, by the collaborative Group Material, and other artists and groups, selected to emblematically reflect artist strategies engaging concepts of publicness, civic contexts and public space.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Bob Haozous

Chiricahua Apache artist, Bob Haozous, has worked in a variety of materials, from wood and stone to the metal steel sculptures which characterize his work today. He is concerned with the themes of man’s relationship to the environment and man’s relationship to his fellow man. Native American issues in our twentieth-century world are often portrayed with wit and a biting sarcastic humor. Haozous confronts the passive celebration of history found in many "interior decorator" native works with his massive welded steel depictions of anti-hero conquistadores and fallen madonnas. Modern man’s complicity in the destruction of the environment and our love of convenience is targeted in Haozous’s larger than life portrayals of artificial clouds and vanishing buffalo herds.

The examination of modern American apathy is a continuous theme of Haozous’s work. Issues such as religion, nature, ethnicity and man’s inhumanity to man are examined with rare honesty. The use of irony and humor to illuminate serious social themes characterizes the majority of Haozous’s work. His skill in mastering the fine craft of enticing the viewers to face the truths they prefer to avoid—acceptance of their complicity in the destruction of nature—is demonstrated by his numerous public commissions.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Can the Artist Give You Freedom? Do We Share Anything?

Laderman Ukeles will discuss several projects: some citywide public works with the NYC Department of Sanitation and completely different kinds of public works in the US and elsewhere. She will raise some questions to ponder, such as: Can the artist maintain value in work and life? Can the artist create a path illuminating the possibility of choosing peace beyond hatred of the Other—in strange places all over town in everyday reality? Can the artist give you freedom in a world of constraints? Can the artist create public culture or is that baloney? Can the artist create a domain of the sacred in democracy? Can the artist heal?

PANEL DISCUSSION:
Community as Context
Participants: Julie Ault (moderator), Bob Haozous, Mierle Laderman Ukeles

The term "community" is frequently invoked in public discourses but remains ambiguous unless connected to or embedded in specific contexts. Community is often deployed euphemistically by cultural and funding institutions within vocabularies for framing and describing cultural practices. Yet, clearly, community is not monolithic. Depending through what kind of lens (geographic, group identifications, power relations, etc.) community is perceived, multiple configurations are possible, and often overlapping. Communities are often composed of people with divergent socio-economic specificities, needs and agendas. The panel will consider the term "community" and its contextual status, address and reflect ideas, questions, critiques and experiences of community, and talk about artistic practices so-engaged on both theoretical and practical levels.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles — She will try to imagine how many multiple layers are possible to be created and then maintained in a community, so that the ineffable limitless nature and value of each human individual doesn’t get squished or degraded in this context of community. She will also try to articulate the benefits of being within-community, and seeing within-community.

Bob Haozous — In the western world the concept of the artist as an individual outside of, or apart from their community, often contradicts the multi-generational concept of self found in virtually all of indigenous people’s self-definition. Modern man’s ideas of being self-made, coupled with an intentional divorce with his cultural roots represents the primary conflict with the original inhabitants of this continent.

In taking on the identity of artist by western man’s definition the Native American artist has lost the primary function of the arts. The artwork of the Indian artist is based on the decorative and historic aspects of being Indian and is directed toward economic goals and a non-Indian audience. This outward focus has lost the function of honest self-portraiture for the native community. The direct and equal relationship with nature that the indigenous people of this continent had and still cling to can provide guidance to all of contemporary man’s achievements. A new definition of artist must include responsibility toward the community and provide a place for the artist to function as participant.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Shimon Attie: Sites Unseen

Shimon Attie will present and discuss his public artworks dealing with the history of the second world war. Using slides, photographs and video footage, he will trace five years of his work across the European continent, from 1991 to 1996. From Amsterdam, Cologne, and Copenhagen, to Berlin, Dresden, and Cracow, Shimon Attie will show how his haunting public installations reanimate sites with images of their own lost histories. Using a variety of media, from on location slide projection in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, to underwater light boxes in Copenhagen’s Borsgraven Canal, Attie will show how he uses contemporary media to introduce and contextualize fragments of the past into the visual field of the present. Issues to be addressed will include the problematics of working with personal and collective memory in public places; temporary versus permanent interventions in relation to memorial—and monument— making; and how public art may reinforces or challenge national mythologies. He will end his presentation by briefly discussing his current public project which will take place in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in October 1998.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Esther Shalev-Gerz: Place = Public

Esther Shalev-Gerz will talk about the projects she has worked on with Jochen Gerz spanning from 1984 to today. She will focus mainly on the projects: Monument Against Fascism, Hamburg/Darburg 1986; The 20th Century, Oberhausen, 1996; Reasons for Smiles, 1996; and The Berlin Inquiry, Berlin 1998. These are works that enlarge the connotation and understanding of the public space as our common public knowledge, public communication system, and all systems that are in place to disperse and put in question the public knowledge in order to find a new understanding of the subjects in a society, that the public is in constant change of its perception and knowledge. The work invites the participant to restructure his position towards his public responsibility.

LECTURE:
Leslie King Hammond: The New York African Burial Ground and the Aesthetics of Sacred Space in African American Community

This talk will discuss the nature of sacred space spiritually as defined and physically articulated within the African American Community. Various artists, historical phenomena, burial traditions, and African as well as African American belief systems will be presented in an effort to understand the awesome implications surrounding the discovery of the New York African Burial Ground. Issues surrounding the question of how to commemorate this sacred public space will be reviewed and studies for the monuments will be included for discussion.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Who is the audience?

Who is the audience? Is it still appropriate to talk about audience when the work is participatory? Krzysztof Wodiczko will show examples of his recent work including the instruments and video/audio projections. The instruments are transitory objects that require an operator. To use the instrument requires that the users become creative; this inspires their psychological and cultural development. The operator becomes the artist. Is it still appropriate, then, to talk about an audience? How does this relate to the traditional relationship between artist and work of art?

PANEL DISCUSSION:
The Role of the Audience
Participants: Esther Shalev-Gerz (moderator), Leslie King Hammond, Krzysztof Wodiczko

This discussion will encompass radically shifting attitudes about the audience from a passive observer of a work, to one where the audience becomes the patron defining the parameters and context of the work; one where the work is interactive; one where the audience is a collaborator in the creation, production and reception of the work; one where the piece cannot exist without the audience participation. Are such works any longer art? How does this alter the role of the artist?

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Judith Baca

Will show examples of her recent public installations.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy will show examples of public art installations and performances since 1987. As an artist and writer, Lacy has been interested in issues involving artmaking and society since the early 1970s, helping to frame questions about the audience for public art; the role of art in forming community; popular culture and media intervention as performance; strategies of social change through art; and the representation of social identity through large scale public art. In particular, Lacy will discuss several projects since 1991 with youth in Oakland, California, that explore interventions in systems that impact their lives.

LECTURE:
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Artists Working in Social Space: A Theoretical Approach

Amalia Mesa-Bains’s presentation will look at the relationship between theory and practice in the area of public/social space for the artist. She will be addressing the increasing blurring of boundaries between public and private space and the changing role of the artist in regard to this. Mesa-Bains will look at theorists such as Soja, Wolch, Dear and Lefebre and their construction of memory and everyday life in regard to the development of social/public space. She will develop several cases around public pieces in relation to a cultural community life and the theoretical application.

PANEL DISCUSSION
New Strategies: Education of Public Artists
Participants: Judith Baca, Amalia Mesa-Bain, Suzanne Lacy

The panel will deal with the preparation of artists within a shifting public terrain. Art as a social act, artists engaged with the public agenda and the relationship between theory and practice–looking at the redefinition of a community base for artists. They will discuss new educational forms that respond to the needs of today’s public artists. In particular, the focus will be on the visual and public art program at California State University at Monterey Bay.

LECTURE:
Miwon Kwon: Public Art and Urban Identities

This presentation will first outline three paradigms of public art in the US since the mid-1960s: "art in public places," "art as public spaces," and "art in the public interest." Taking several public art programs as examples, the talk will explore the various relationships between site-specific public art and the production of urban spaces and identities.

LECTURE:
Christopher Phillips: Bookmobile

An informal review of some of the most important or interesting recent publications on photography, electronic media and the visual arts.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Linda Gammell and Sandra Menefee Taylor: Re-picturing Rural Identity/ Spirit/ Politics

As artists who live in the Midwest, Linda Gammell and Sandra Menefee Taylor notice that visual representation of rural people and land are stereotypically rooted. Some of the messages about rural life we receive via the media include nostalgic yearnings for the simplicity of "the good life," the moral imperative for farmers to "feed the world," the unquestionable importance of biotechnology in raising food, and the lack of intellectual sophistication of rural people. A more recent picture since the 1980’s farm crisis is one in "inevitable" decline.

As we know from feminist work of the past twenty years, the disenfranchisement of groups of people robs them of their identity and therefore their power. This project–a collaborative team consisting of a photographer, an artist and a sociologist, began to address and reclaim the images as expressed by rural women. The issues addressed include the depth of intellect and spirit of people who produce our food; eating and living sustainably; the pressure of biotechnology;, and producing environmentally healthy food. In the past three years, Gammell and Menefee Taylor have given nine workshops with rural women in five states to give voice to their stories and experience. These have been incorporated into a videotape, installations, artists’ books, performances, essays and public address. They want to use their skills as artists to transform the wisdom, activism and stories of these rural women and to expand the dialogue with "everyone who eats."

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Maxine Payne-Caufield

Maxine Payne-Caufield will be driving a dilapidated 1930s feed truck with the logo "King Biscuit and Sonny Boy" emblazoned on the sides across the country and into the streets of New York City this summer. Like traveling medicine men and brush arbor revivalists that have traveled into rural areas in the south for years providing country people with outside information, she will provide the outside world a glimpse of her experience with rural southerners today. The truck will be full of mural size portraits, found objects and all kinds of sights and sounds from which she constructs intricate narratives. The viewer will be able to enter the truck and experience the work as a whole, outside the constructs of a traditional gallery space.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Mel Rosenthal: Custodians Of Memory

Mel Rosenthal is drawn to issues and situations that affect people’s lives, even their survival. In particular, he is interested in the relationship between changing social conditions and their influence on individuals. "The deeper I immerse myself in these issues and the people involved with them, the better my pictures will be." Sometimes this leads to trying to make people aware of situations that need to be thought about or even changed.

Rosenthal’s projects are about people being pushed around, about what happens when people are seen as problems rather than as fellow human beings. Photographs are wonderful because they show you a particular people, and suddenly the results of economic and political policies are no longer abstract. You are dealing with universal human moments, struggles and joys. This is his way of participating in history.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Seitu Jones: The Artist As A Community Agent For Change

Jones’s talk will introduce the work of the late folk artist Maurice Carlton as an example of an artist as place maker and agent of transformation. He will then focus on the role of an artist in the process of community collaboration and change.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Francesc Torres: If Art Exists in the Public Arena, What Constitutes Public Art?

Through examples of his public projects in Barcelona, Spain and another being planned for the island of El Hierro in the Canary Islands, Francesc Torres will address the relationship between installation and gardens and their connections with literary narrative. He will also discuss the role of politics and history in his works and the reception for such works.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Joyce Kozloff: Sources and Evolution of Work Over Time

In each of Joyce Kozloff’s public projects, she has woven motifs, patterns and images reflecting that city’s cultural history into a dense visual tapestry (she has found the decorative and popular arts to be particularly rich carriers of tradition). The most recent pieces have utilized maps—antique and contemporary—as structures to contain layers of information. Her goal has been to engage a broad audience, who might experience the work on a daily basis over many years, with details and incidents that can be unraveled and revealed slowly. Additionally, Kozloff will raise some questions about currently fashionable forms of public art that she feels give simplistic answers to complex social issues.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Bill Arnold: Returning Pictures

The process of making pictures is complete when the picture is shown. There are many photographs and few traditional places to show those photographs. Bill Arnold will describe a number of non-traditional places and methods he has used to show photographs including city buses, slide shows in movie theaters, and photos as stationary and birthday calendars. Finding non-traditional ways to show photographs comes by noticing where people look and then putting a photo there.

PANEL DISCUSSION:
Commissioning Art in Public Places
Participants: Charlotte Cohen, Anne Pasternak, Tom Eccles

These directors of public art commissioning agencies will share information about their agencies. They will describe the public art process and discuss strategies that emerging artist can employ to become involved in public art. They will discuss issues including funding and commissioning social and political works, controversial works and address questions such as: Is the system open to emerging artists and how does one present a proposal in such a way to be noticed?