Eleanor Heartney: Inside Public Art

I will give you a survey and commentary with some personal comments on some of the major trends in public art today. I will also include a section where I talk about photography and public art, which is most pertinent to the seminar participants.

I want to begin with what we might call the bad old public art. Those of you from New York will recognize this statue of General Sherman up in Central Park. It is completely gilded. This is the kind of art that is ubiquitous throughout our cities: men on a horse, women representing faith, hope, and charity. This is what for many years was considered public art.

Here are a few images of what is now considered public art. This is a milk carton by Peggy Diggs, which has information about missing children. This is a parade of trucks by Mierle Ukeles. The question I want to pose here today is how did we get from one to the other, from the bad old public art to the new public art? And what is the significance of this shift? I want to talk about the evolution of public art over the last twenty years during which public art has begun to respond to larger issues in the art world, such as the increased skepticism introduced by post modernism and the notion of the autonomy of art. With that has been a greater interest in the idea of interactivity, a greater focus on art's social mission. This has influenced how public artists have been dealing with art today.

There has also been a redefinition of the notion of public and public space, which has to do with the notion that we are no longer so sure that we can pose universal public values. The old-style public art assumed that the culture shared particular values, that there are certain heroes from the past that we all emulate, that there are certain ideas that we all hold sacred. More and more, in our pluralistic and fractured citizenry, that idea has become suspect.