I have to apologize in advance if my talk is somewhat fragmentary, because I wasn't sure who my audience would be exactly. I wanted to begin by noting something that was in the program, the final statement about the conference: "Moving into the twenty-first century, public art is emerging as one of the few viable forms of art. It's an art form not isolated within a pristine institutional setting, but one that gains vitality through direct engagement with its environment and its audience." That's probably a common description of public art and a common understanding of where it is located. What is implied in a statement like this is that art typically happens in traditional, conventional settings and that, as such, they are separate and disconnected from what we would call everyday reality, social order, life and people. Public art, in contrast, it implies, is very direct, that there is a relationship to an audience that is immediate and almost organic, and spontaneous. It also implies that public art is distinguished partly because of its siting. That is, it is not in an institution and its relationship to an audience is therefore somewhat freer and more immediate.

I tend to disagree with these conceptions of public art and art. Like all cultural practice, I think, public art is defined, enabled, and mediated by a network of pressures that are institutional, social, political and economic. Therefore, the relationship to the audience is not anymore direct or spontaneous or immediate. It is fully mediated, perhaps even more so than in an art museum or gallery setting. What is difficult is that the public art discourse has rendered itself such that its mediations within the public art field have become obscured so much so that we don't understand the institutional framing of public art. In my view, art and public art aren't clearly distinguishable. I think all art, whether in a museum, a gallery, or a public street is art in the public realm. It participates in a broad discourse. Having said that, when I use the words public art today, I mean a particular type of practice that is pursued and enacted within certain institutional and bureaucratic framings. I'm sure you have been getting a lot of examples of this kind of work, but I want to be clear that my sense of art in the public is a loose one, and I don't presume that public art is more direct and immediate in its engagement with an audience.

I will first introduce what has come to be known as new genre public art, to give some historical context for it, and then try to think through this problematic idea of community, since so much of new genre public art or art in the public interest is predicated on the idea of community collaboration.

In the early morning hours of May 20, 1993, 100 large limestone boulders, each about three feet tall and four feet wide, roughly weighing 1,000 to 1,500 pounds apiece mysteriously appeared on sidewalks, plazas, street corners, and parkways throughout the Loop in the downtown area of Chicago: each adorned with a commemorative plaque honoring a woman from the city, total of 90 living and 10 historical. This odd and spontaneous outcropping of lumpy boulders on the streets of Chicago was masterminded by Suzanne Lacy, a California-based artist best known for her performances and protests in the seventies and eighties. The event simultaneously marked the inauguration of the temporary exhibition program, Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago. Sponsored by the nonprofit public arts organization, Sculpture Chicago, conceived and directed by the independent curator Mary Jane Jacobs, Culture in Action included seven other projects dispersed throughout the city at various locations and neighborhoods, all of which remained "on view" throughout the summer of 1993 from May to September. Proposing a major break from previous models of public art, Culture in Action not only took the entire city of Chicago as its stage, it "focused on the active participation of residents in diverse communities in the creation of the artworks in order to provide a new vision of public art."

This is from the press release of Culture in Action. "Open to the public throughout summer '93, Culture in Action established a new vocabulary within the genre of urban oriented sculpture exhibitions. Culture in Action tested the territory of public interaction and participation, the role of the artist as an active social force, artist-driven educational programming as an essential part of the artwork, and projects that existed over an extended period of time, not just as spectator oriented objects for brief viewing." Explicitly challenging the orthodoxies of public art, which traditionally has mirrored mainstream art world habits, insofar as it elevates the artist as the sole creative force, driven by an object oriented conception of art work, it constructs the audience as a group of passive, often undereducated, spectators and passers by. Against this kind of mainstream understanding, the emphasis of Culture in Action was to test a different model of public art that would be defined by audience participation, non-object oriented artistic production and labor, art as educational programming or, conversely, education as art and artist as an active social agent, not as an isolated or detached aesthetic specialist.

To accomplish these aims, the eight projects included in Culture in Action (some artists did two projects) were structured to be community collaborations, in which, with the help of Sculpture Chicago, an artist or artist group joined with a local community organization to co-produce and sometimes to co-conceptualize an art work. The results of these collaborations were wide-ranging, and hardly the common fare of public art. In addition to Lacy's boulder formations, she organized a Woman Only Dinner Party, that was meant to be symbolic. She also put the call out to all women in Chicago to participate in similar dinners on that night to celebrate women. In addition to Lacy's works, there was a multi-ethnic neighborhood parade, which "cut across racial stereotypes," done by Daniel Martinez and Vensula Corra, with the West Side Three Point Marchers. A New Line of Candy Bar was designed and produced by members of a candy making union, spearheaded by the artist team of Simon Grenin and Christopher Sperandio, whose community partners were the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers International Union of America Local 552. They had an opening in a shop where the candy bars were sold. Now they are collectors items. Another project was an education driven project by Mark Dion, with twelve high school students as his community partners, who were selected by teachers in local high schools. They set up an urban ecology field station and came together as the Chicago Urban Ecology Action Group. The project entailed trips to Beliz, to try to understand environmental issues on a global scale and to do ecologically driven work along the lake in Chicago. Another project was by a collective called Ha Ha, a four-member group from Chicago. They organized an alternative working group called Flood, and occupied a storefront space and started a hydroponic garden for HIV and AIDS patients and coordinated a network of food distribution. Hydroponic gardens are soilless, so the food materials would not have the toxins that normal vegetables have. The space was also used as a kind of community center, with weekly meetings and education on health care and AIDS issues. Another project entailed an organizing of high school students, some of whom were involved with gangs, to form a group called Street Level Video. They were given equipment and instruction on how to make videos, and made videos that were their own representations, counter to mainstream representations of Latino teens in urban settings. It culminated in a street party during the summer that also involved an outdoor video installation in the neighborhood of the students. The two projects that rounded out the exhibition were Kate Ericson and Mel Zeigler's project to create a paint chart in collaboration with residents of a housing project in Chicago (which did not get produced in the way it was meant to) and Robert Peters' complex telephone survey project, which also faltered.

It was a hugely ambitious project, very diverse, with broad-ranging aims, social and political interests, and community collaborations, which were in some cases invented for the projects. There was no one overall narrative that could be given to Culture in Action, except for the fact that it had this ambition to be antithetical to prior public art programs. Initially conceived by Mary Jane Jacob in 1991, Culture in Action was originally titled New Urban Monuments, which is ironic, considering what was produced, and was intended to be a critique of two institutions, Sculpture Chicago, specifically, and public art as a field of production generally. Without question, what could be seen and documented as the outcome of Culture in Action_ a candy bar, a neighborhood parade, a block party, a dinner party, a paint chart, and a hydroponic garden_ set up a stark contrast to Chicago's familiar existing public art, such as Picasso's monumental cubist sculpture on Richard J. Daly's Center Plaza, also known as Chicago Picasso. It was Picasso's first public work and became a model for the early public art sculpture projects the NEA would fund in its Art in Public Places program, in which a sculpture becomes a symbol for a city's identity. For example, Alexander Calder's "La Grand Vitesse," which was the first NEA funded public sculpture, was intended to produce a Grand Rapids Calder, to have a sculpture that would be symbolic of the city. That is the model of Art in Public Places public art, autonomous modernist sculptures placed in public space.

Another model that contextualized Culture in Action was this park designed by Ronald Jones in 1991. I think of this as the dominant second paradigm of public art, where artists are producing public spaces, rather than putting objects into existing spaces. This trend of artists designing public spaces began in the late seventies. I show you these examples as a contrast to Culture in Action, which in its own rhetoric would use this difference to pronounce its own particularity. In its ephemerality, since most of the projects weren't permanent installations, and because of its social engagement, educational perspective, one could say that this is, on a grand scale, what Suzanne Lacy first names in 1991 as new genre public art. She describes it as "dealing with some of the most profound issues of our time: toxic waste, race relations, homelessness, aging, gang warfare and cultural identity. A group of visual artists has developed distinct models for an art whose public strategies of engagement are an important part of its aesthetic language." And she says, "we might describe this as a new genre of public art." Unlike much of what has heretofore been called public art, new genre public art is based on engagement.

Culture in Action also corresponds to what critic Arlene Raven has identified as art in the public interest, which I see as the third paradigm for public art. According to Raven, art in the public interest is neither a heroic statue of a man on a horse, or a large-scale abstract sculpture. It is activist and communitarian in spirit and its modes of expression encompass a variety of traditional media including painting and sculpture, as well as nontraditional media such as street art, guerilla theater, video, page art, billboards, protest actions and demonstrations, oral histories, dances, environments, posters, murals. The list goes on. More important though, beyond broadening the available conventions of artistic expression, art in the public interest forges direct intersections with social issues. Moreover, art in the public interest encouraged community coalition building in pursuit of social justice, and attempts to garner greater institutional empowerment for artists to act as social agents. I am recapitulating their own definitions, but as we go on I will try to unpack where this kind of rhetoric comes from and what it is aiming for, and whether it can accomplish what it says it wants to accomplish.

On the one hand, then, artists engaged in such art practices "aspire to reveal the plight and plea the case of the disenfranchised and disadvantaged, and to embody what they (the artists) view as humanitarian values." On the other hand, they demand "more artist involvement in institutional decision making, representation of minorities and women artists, and use of the influence of museums and funding agencies to change government policies on social issues." It is possible to narrate a parallel story to that shift from art in public places to spaces of public interest in advanced art practice over the last 30 years, known generally as the dematerialization of the art work, the interest of art in engaging social issues, and the shift from the centrality of the artist to a more collaborative and participatory practice. Some critics have described the emergence of support for community-based art like Culture in Action as the development of something fundamental in public art, a rupture from previous models, reflecting sculpture's evolution. Others have talked about it not so much as a break as the reception of something that has been there for a long time. Community-based art practice has, in fact, been around for a long time. But art and public art discourse hasn't paid attention to it before.

I am not particularly concerned with whether it is new or not; what interests me is to try to understand the shift and, to do so, my work has focused on the issue of the site and site specific art. My claim is that new genre public art's self description is predicated on a major rethinking of site specificity, in both aesthetic and political terms. This rethinking does open up new ways of thinking about what public art can and cannot do, and its relationship to the social, to the public, to audience, but it also shuts down avenues as well. Counter to the celebratory tone of a lot of discourses that support this practice, I want to keep a critical eye, keeping track of how the idea of the site has shifted over the past thirty years. To focus on the site might seem like a narrow and arbitrary decision on my part, which it is. Throughout the past thirty years of public art in the United States, the physical and discursive delineation of the site, whether understood as architecture or landscape or institutional framework or theoretical debate or social issue, has determined not only the formal, material and conceptual configurations of the public art work, even those works that would be deemed not site specific, but an implicit understanding of the site has circumscribed the process by which the public in public art would be constituted. In other words, the changes in the art and site relationship over the past three decades has been the primary barometer of the transformations in the extent and manner in which an art work would be proclaimed of public relevance. So the definition of the site has a direct bearing, I believe, to how the public nature of an art work is determined. Consequently, understanding what happens to the site in new genre public art_ it disappears_ remains a fundamental key to unpacking how new public art defines itself as such in the 1990s.

I will first review this changing art/site relationship. During the initial phases of the modern public art movement in the U.S., from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, public art production was dominated by large-scale monumental versions and sometimes replicas of art works that one would typically find in museums and galleries. These art works, usually signature pieces from international artists, in and of themselves, had no distinguishing qualities to render them public, except their size and scale. What legitimated these types of public art works as public was their siting in locations, often designed by high-profile architects, deemed to be public places because of their openness and unrestricted physical access. Most of these sites were parks, university campuses, civic centers, entrance areas to federal buildings, plazas, parking lots, airports and so on. Which is to say the term "public" used as an adjective in this context described the perceived condition of the site rather than the art work itself. This art in public places model of public art also maintained a relatively strict separation between the categories of art and architecture. In most instances, architecture is the site for the work. The need to preserve the autonomous integrity of the work seemed to overshadow the need to "accommodate" the particular conditions posed by the site or architecture. In the artist's perspective, the site served as a neutral ground or pedestal on which the primary figure, the art work, would be positioned. From the architect's perspective, the work was a beneficial visual supplement or contrast, but essentially extraneous to the integrity of the building or the space. Within a relatively short span of time, by the late seventies, the art in public places phenomenon had spread widely across the U.S. There were economic and political reasons for the speed of the spread, which I will not go into now.

The art historian Sam Hunter described the omnipresence of monumental public sculptures in cities across the U.S. as follows: "In the seventies, the triumph of the new public art was firmly secured. Almost any new corporate or municipal plaza worthy of its name deployed an obligatory large-scale sculpture, usually in a severely geometric minimalist style, or, where more conservative tastes prevailed and funds were more generous, one might find a recumbent figure in bronze by Henry Moore or one of Jock Lipschitz's mythical creatures. Today there is scarcely a city of significant size boasting an urban renewal program that lacks one or more large, readily identifiable modern sculptures to relieve the familiar stark vistas of concrete, steel, and glass." Even from the beginning, public art is a kind of confrontation and critique of modernist architecture. The intention of endeavors like the art and architecture program started in 1963 by the General Services Administration (GSA), the Art in Public Places Program initiated by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1967, and the Percent for Art programs of local and state public arts agencies were twofold. In bringing the best of contemporary art to a wider audience, by siting it in public places, such programs wanted to promote not only the aesthetic edification of the American public, but they also wanted to beautify the urban environment. This is to say that public art at this point was conceived as a function of urban architectural design. Art was called upon to play a supplementary role in ameliorating what was perceived to be the negative effects of the repetitive, monotonous and functionalist style of modernist architecture. In the eyes of the urban elite and city managers of the seventies into the eighties, public art was a lure to attract tourism, new businesses and workforces and residential development, and was expected to boost a city's sense of identity. Certainly Calder's piece was intended to do exactly that.

The Livable Cities Program, initiated by the NEA in 1977 as part of its architecture program explicitly sought to find "creativity and imagination, to get it from the artist and apply it to the problems of the built environment," so as to "give the promise of economic and social benefit to the community." This shows very clearly an exclusive understanding of what art and artists do, and what architecture and architects do, as antithetical and oppositional. The later inclusion of artists within architecture design teams for the development of urban spaces, which evolves into the Art as Public Spaces Program, is predicated on the belief that with the artist's humanizing effect, the sense of alienation and disaffection engendered by the inhuman urban landscape of modern architecture could be rectified. Despite the initial enthusiasm, however, the art in public places approach began receiving criticism early on. Some was that rather than functioning to enliven public places, it was an extension of the museum into everyday space, that it was self-congratulatory works, and that it did nothing to engender a greater public engagement with art.

What was perceived to be art work's indifference to its site was reciprocated by the public's indifference to the art work or even hostility to the work. Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" is a well-known example of this hostility. In order to counter some of this criticism, the idea of doing site-specific art entered into the discussion of public art administrative language. It was in reaction to the problems engendered by the glut of ornamental plop art and the monumental object off the pedestal paradigm that the NEA changed in its guidelines in 1974 to stipulate that public art needed to be "appropriate to the immediate site." Whereas, in 1965, the NEA's goals were to support individual artists and make their individual talent more widely available, and to provide the public the opportunity to experience the best in American art. The new mandate at all levels of public art sponsorship and funding was to insist that the work be unique to the conditions of the site. Despite the numerous programmatic and bureaucratic difficulties in commissioning new art works, the support for site-specific approaches to public art favoring the creation of unique and unrepeatable aesthetic responses tailored to specific locations in a city became fairly quickly institutionalized. In the minds of those intimately engaged with the public art industry at the time, including artists and critics, establishing a direct formal link, a physical link between what is art and what is the site, would be a means to make the art work more public. This amounted to making public art more like architecture. In fact, the issue of abstract art's interpreted inaccessibility had been thought of already as a spatial problem.

There was an exhibition called "Urban Encounters: Art, Architecture, Audience" in 1980 in Philadelphia. Curator Janet Cardin would describe the problem of public art and the kind of controversies that often ensued around its inaccessibility and exclusivity, even as it entered the public arena, as because the space of abstract works was antithetical to real space that people occupy in everyday life. It implied that representational works were more accessible. If the public art became a continuous space, the viewer's access would be more fluid and the work would be more publicly responsible. Perhaps because of this understanding of space and site, public art continued to be predicated on an architectural determinism that is endemic to most urban gentrification and beautification efforts. That is, there is a belief that there is a direct correlation between aesthetic design, quality of an environment, and the quality of social conditions. If there are social problems in the city, it is believed, if you fix the urban environment in physical terms through architecture or street furniture, you will deal with the social problems. The type of site specificity stipulated by NEA, the GSA and other public art organizations around this time was for spatial integration, not critical intervention. That is an important distinction that Rosalyn Deutch has elaborated in her work. Artists were asked not only to focus on the condition of the built environment, but to contribute their "humane influence" toward the design of unified and coherent urban spaces. This is partly why, by the end of the seventies, the NEA had adopted a wide range of possibilities for art in public situations. Any permanent media, including earth works, environmental art and nontraditional media, such as artificial lighting, could be accepted as public art.

The integrationist goal of marrying art to the site or architecture in a "harmonious fashion," encroaching art further into the realm of architecture was further reinforced when the NEA guidelines were modified again in 1982, as the visual art and design program of the NEA officially combined their effort to encourage the interaction of visual artists and design professionals through the development of a new collaborative model. This model results in the art as public space paradigm. Public art would no longer be just a sculpture, but would be in some kind of meaningful dialogue or coincident with the surrounding architecture and landscape. In some cases, the public art blends completely with the landscape design. Unsatisfied with the decorative function of public art in the earlier models of art in public places, and excited by the opportunity to pursue their work outside the confines of museums and galleries at an unprecedented scale and complexity, many artists were eager to accept, or at least test, this model of the design team directive, where, ideally, artists would share responsibilities with architects and city planners to make design decisions about urban public spaces. It never worked out so equitably, perhaps because of the ideology of the hierarchies in urban planning fields. Architects always seem to take the helm and direct the process. Many projects were huge headaches for the artists who had to constantly accommodate changing designs for buildings. The collaboration that was envisioned was never fully realized.

This idea of a unified, harmonious space was translated into a harmonious unified community in the new versions of new genre public art. Another element that gets translated, but persists in the new genre field, is the sense of a fundamental universal function for public art. In this kind of model, art is reduced to serve basic physical needs like seating or shading. This serving of physical need is equated with social responsibility. In the words of Rosalyn Deutsche, physical utility was reductively and broadly equated with social benefit. And social activity "was constricted to narrow problem solving, so that the provision of useful objects automatically collapsed into a social good." This thinks of the subject or viewer of public art as a body that requires physical support, not as complex cultural subjects. Artists and critics alike seem to think that the more a work disappeared into the site and was no longer recognizable as art, usually by appropriating the visual iconography of urban street furniture, or by mimicking familiar architectural elements, the greater its social relevance quotient. The more it didn't look like art and did look like architecture and landscape, the more it was seen as serving the public. As art works pursued this, they were often hailed as a progressive, radical gesture in art. In addition to the discursive conflation of utility and art and social benefit, there was a significant misrecognition of the operative social function of architecture and urban design in this utilitarian approach to public art. Just as the social function of public art was conceived in limited terms of physical utility, what might be called Art as Public Spaces model of public art, likewise, imagined the social function of architecture and urban design in similarly reductive terms as the provision of basic physical support or shelter. Consequently, this reductivism, according to Deutsche, results in

It is against this kind of backdrop that new genre public art, community-based work, is forging its own identity as a move away from these kinds of complications and problems. In fact, the self-proclaimed radicality of Culture in Action and by extension, the rhetoric and practice of new genre public art, in general, is dependent on a fundamental redescription of these precedents of site specificity. The reassessment of site specificity manifests in several different ways and represents a fundamental rethinking of how an art work is or should engage with its public. This shift turns on the displacement of the idea of the site with the notion of an audience or a particular social issue or, most commonly, a community. Artist Christopher Sperandio, for instance, who did the candy project for Culture in Action, speaking on behalf of his partner and the union workers, has unequivocally stated that they have abandoned the limited framework of site specific in favor of what they perceive to be a more expansive notion of the community specific. Concurrently, Mary Jane Jacob, the curator, has alternately described the projects in Culture in Action as issue specific and audience specific. According to Jacob, the move away from site specificity is a logical step toward a more intimate and meaningful relationship between the artist and his or her audience, a way of shrinking that distance between traditionally separate poles of production and reception. Again, many critics have talked about what this shift might mean, whether it is developmental or a radical break.

According to Jacob, "the trajectory of modern public art movement is that as public art shifted from monumental objects to physical or conceptually site specific projects to audience specific concerns, that is, work made in response to those who occupy a given site, it moved from an aesthetic function to a design function to a social function. Rather than serving to promote the economic development of American cities, it is now being viewed as a means of stablilizing community development throughout urban centers. In the nineties, the role of public art has shifted from that of renewing the physical environment to that of improving society, from promoting aesthetic quality to contributing to the quality of life, from enriching lives to saving lives." Those are fairly grand terms. It is very significant, I think, that architecture disappears in this discussion. There is no explicit presence of architecture or urban design issues, and there is no longer a sense of faith that good urban design can ameliorate social issues. Instead, it is believed that art and community social interventions will "save lives," save the city. The desire to impact the lives of ordinary, non-art constituencies via public art seems to have lost faith altogether in the power of architecture and urban design to positively affect the quality of life in social terms. Instead of addressing the physical condition of the site, the focus is now on directly engaging the concerns of those who occupy the site. These concerns categorically defined as various social issues: homelessness, urban violence, sexism, homophobia, racism, AIDS, which ostensibly offer a more genuine point of contact, a zone of mutual interest between artists, art, community, and audience. The new formulation of community-based public art takes the partnership between the artist and architect and replaces the artist's partner. The dialogue is now to occur between an artist and a community or audience group that is identified in some relation to a social issue, which is most often associated with marginalized or disenfranchised communities.

In actual practice, though, how does a group of people become identified as a community, as a potential partner in an art collaboration project? Who identifies them as such? Who decides what social issue will be addressed or represented by this community or through this community? Does the partner community pre-exist the art project or is it produced by the project? What is the nature of the collaboration between the artist and the community? What is collaboration in this context? How does the collaboration unfold? What is the role of the artist? Is the partner community coincident with the idea of audience? If new public art engages the audience as active participants in the production of an art work, which to a degree renders them as subjects of the work, then who is the audience for this production? What criteria of success or failure are imposed if the aesthetic terms are no longer the dominant terms by which we might judge a great work of art? Finally, through it all, what are the political implications and consequences of the simultaneous displacement of the architect and the site? What does it mean that this is replaced by community, audience and social issue in new genre public art?

The call for community empowerment, collaborations, self determination are not only found in left-leaning public art or cultural discourse, but also on the right. In fact, new community activism, especially in New York City, is a means to enact far more exclusionary housing and health care policies than it was ever before. The term community is fairly vacant. There is a lot of desire to read it in a particular way in the public art discourse, but to have a sustaining effect, it has to be critically engaged, rather than being embraced. Aspects of new genre public art have been critiqued somewhat, already. There is the ethnographic predicament for many of the artists who are called in to do work in other cities, to engage with a local community as an outsider. Another is the valorization of local artists as having a more authentic relationship to a community. These kinds of problems have been mentioned by a few critics. Hal Foster has discussed the ethnographic predicament. Grant Kester, in the essay, "Aesthetic Evangelism," has talked about the reformist paternalism and fundmentalist logic of much community based art, in which the artist is positioned as the problem solver who will reform the community constituency, and what that means for the figure of the artist as a reconstituted authority figure.

I could go on to try to present the different ways in which the idea of community could be questioned, but are there things people want to discuss at this point?

Question: Where would you locate in the paradigms you define works like "Projections" by Krzysztof Wodiczko and some of the works of Hans Haacke?

Kwon: Wodiczko's work I think of as being engaged more with public interest issues, even though a lot of his work deals with urban space and the conditions of particular location. He's not necessarily interested in creating the spaces, but in intervening and exposing the underlying contradictions of capitalism in those spaces. He doesn't fit into these paradigms, partly because his sense of site specific work is interventionary, and not in terms of creating harmonious pictures. Certainly, these paradigms are just useful guidelines, but everyone's work deviates from the model. Which Hans Haacke project are you thinking about?

Audience: Not any particular one. It just seemed to me that you were talking about works that did not take architecture into consideration, and that would definitely engage the community. It seemed to me that these two artists tried to do both.

Kwon: I think there are certainly ways that artists engage all three models in one project. I think that can happen. These paradigms are a matrix, the terms by which you can start talking about the complexities of a particular project. Hans Haacke is a good example, because it goes back to my opening remarks about how works that are not necessarily public art works are works about the public and in the public, engaging and defining the idea of the public sphere. I think his work does that, even though it is not produced within this kind of institutional bracket.

Audience: You have given a good historical overview. Could you spend a little more time on your critique of the use of the terms of community-based public art?

Question: I was interested in the notion of the movement of public art from aesthetic to design to social issues. It seems to me that when we look at those plop art projects now, we see that although they were aesthetic or design oriented, they always were inscribed with issues of social control or social ideals. Do you agree?

Kwon: I think that is true. And in fact, I don't think art is ever outside of social issues and political concerns, but what is being outlined is the prioritized aspects of public art's own discourse about itself. The Calder project was all about the social reorganization of the civic center, and the art capped the urban redevelopment project. These are deeply implicated in the city's social power relationships, but what is described as the value of the work of art is that it is a great work by a Modernist sculptor. The social issues become obscured.

Question: A related question on New Genre Public Art. It seems there is an implicit utopic vision of improving social order or the positionality of certain marginalized groups. Do you see that utopic vision as reinscribing the social project of Modernism? Or is New Genre Public Art doing something other than that?

Kwon: That requires a complex answer. If you define the Modernist project only in terms of a utopian ideal, this shares a certain utopianism. But the nature of that utopian vision in a reductive understanding of Modernism is to imagine it as a kind of universal civilization and the universality of certain values not recognized as culturally and historically specific. There is a desire to be culturally and historically specific in New Genre Public Art, to accommodate multiple values. That is a strong difference. But the question I would have is whether that kind of multiplicity or multicultural perspective of a social order doesn't abide by a certain universalizing tendency also. That is part of the critique I have tried to start in this project.

So I will read a little more. The starting point of this critique will begin with two different models of community that the critic Grant Kester proposes in his "Aesthetic Evangelist" essay. One is the "politically coherent community," as he calls it, and the other is the "created community," created through a delegate artist, who is positioned as such to fulfill some public art project. In his view, the collaborative dynamic in the latter case, to a large degree represented by most of the Culture in Action projects, tends to be fraught with problems of paternalism, because the participants who make up the community are defined as "socially isolated individuals whose ground of interconnection and identification as a group is provided by an aesthetic ameliative experience administered by the artist." They are perceived as fragmented and alienated people. In contrast, the collaboration of politically coherent communities would yield a more "equitable process of exchange and mutual education, with the artist learning from the community, having his or her presuppositions about the community and issues challenged in the process." This is a more equitable exchange because "unlike communities that are artificially fabricated around the ambitions of the artist, politically coherent communities preexist any such intervention." According to Kester, "self determined identities of politically coherent communities are derived from an ongoing collective process of internal debate and consensus formation around issues of common interest to their members." One, they exist prior to the artist's presence. Two, they organize themselves through internal dynamics directed to common interests. Defined primarily by shared cultural traditions and a shared sense of struggle against different modes of oppression, whether racist, sexist, classist, these communities are resistant to appropriation and abuse by the artist and the art world. In composing this idea of evangelist logic in community-based art or reformist paternalism, Kester recognizes that the victimized, marginalized community engaged in community-based practice are doubly victimized through the art process. They ultimately serve to model a new form of public art that has no extended effect in the social fabric. Within Kester's logic, when a community comes together around an art project, it is assumed that the collaboration begins with uneven power relations and inevitably will lead to untenable paternalism. "Successful collaborations, on the other hand, in which the artist does not overtake the identity or use the identity of the community or infantalize its members, but is in some form of mutual exchange with them, are only possible when the artist engages a politically coherent community."

For me, there are several problems with this formulation, although I think it is an important beginning step to try to unpack this thing called community. First, the one-to-one correspondence between the formation of a community, distinguished in terms of a prior coherence, and the possibility of some sort of productive collaborative exchange discounts the multitude of ways that an artist can engender different types of community formations. I have tried to distinguish different types of communities that emerge through collaborative projects, and my sense is that different communities can emerge out of different processes and interactions. I don't believe that if the community preexists the collaboration it is necessarily more productive. In my study of Culture in Action, it is clear that, contrary to Kester's conclusion, some of the collaborative projects reveal the extent to which the coherent communities are more susceptible to appropriation by the artist and arts institutions, precisely because of the singularly clear definition of what their collective identity represents. That is the case with the candy project, for example, of which I am very critical. In a different way, the alternative paint chart project with an existing tenant group is fraught with contradictions. It is very often the case that certain types of communities are favored for artistic participation and partnership because of an easy correspondence between their identity and particular social issues. The pragmatic benefits of such an approach for some artists, as well as the sponsoring institution, are that it is less ambiguous, there is more control of the process and more predictability, and it facilitates promotion and utilization. This mode of identifying communities in advance of potential collaboration has facilitated and popularized a newly bureaucratized and formulaic version of community-based public art, where an artist plus a community plus a social issue equals public art. In such circumstances, aspects of which are evident in the unfolding of the various projects in Culture in Action, the identity of the community group comes to serve as the thematic content of the art work, representing the social issue in an isolated and reified way. In the process, the community itself can become reified as well. That is one of the objections I have to Kester's model.

Secondly, Kester's argument parallels not just reductivism but the essentialism that undergirds the frequently voiced insistence that only local artists from the community are fit to conduct genuine and meaningful community-based work. While he is rightly critical of such assumptions as the fetishization of authenticity, Kester's privileging of a politically coherent community forecloses the possibility of imagining a legitimate community that is anything other than that which precedes the artist's engagement. Even though Kester insists on the need to understand the unity of a community as "the product of contingent processes of identification" when he categorizes the different types of communities to extrapolate two corresponding collaborative results, one good and one bad in his view, he in effect argues against the authenticity of a community that might be activated within the contingency of a public art process. In so doing, Kester disallows the important ways in which an artistic intervention can productively reinvent or critique the very concept of community. Kester's categorical rejection of communities that might emerge as an outcome of a public art intervention reflects an implicit, albeit complex essentialism of the community that is grounded on two points regarding its fundamental character. One is the belief that a valid community, that is, the politically coherent community, exists prior to the creative act. The objectives and identity of a coherent community are determined by its members before any encounters with individuals or groups from the outside, including community artists. While Kester acknowledges the need to think of community formations in non-monolithic terms, he nonetheless emphasizes the importance of a prior community coherence and claims that it is forged through an exclusively internal process. That is very problematic. He states conclusively that "the existence and operation of community is characterized by an ongoing process of exchange and debate within and among individuals who have similar experiences of exclusion perpetuated by outsiders located in positions of ideological and institutional authority." Community is thus defined in relation to an other with a strict separation between self and other, rather than a more relational or contingent relationship with other.

The second fundamental character of a community for Kester is that it is a politically coherent community primarily defined in opposition to the forces of an oppressive dominant culture. This is typical of the political left, to see community only in terms of its marginalized, victimized position. But the appropriation of the word community by the dominant class to engage in further exclusionary policies on many issues is very endemic today. So the focus on oppositionality as a foundational character of community, while not entirely inaccurate, supports the habitual tendency among artists and art professionals to think of the community as a direct synonym for social groups of the underprivileged. Additionally, the citing of the community in this way validates the presumption that the community is always elsewhere, always in the space of everyday life. Art is automatically seen as elitist and exclusive. This is not to say that art is not elitist or exclusive, or that it does not have a complicitous relationship with the ideology of the dominant culture. Rather, it is to draw attention to the fact that when artists, curators and other arts professionals enthusiastically and sometimes self-righteously proclaim the need to exceed the conventional boundaries of art in order to touch the reality of everyday life, to infuse art with social relevance and meaning, it is based on the presumption that art is outside the social. In contesting art's hermeticism, such proclamations often reassert the division between art and life. In fact, the sense of urgency associated with such egalitarian claims is dependent on the construction and maintenance of this division.

Perhaps the primary issue to discuss in community is the issue of difference in relation to understanding identity formation, collective or otherwise. It is also important to understand the possibilities and limitations of community-based public art. The concept of difference as forwarded in most instances in public art discourse reduces it to the idea of multiplicity of uniquenesses, indicating simply the acknowledgement of the existence of diverse particularities within contemporary society. Whether characterized as inaccessible to anything beyond an exploitative appropriation by an artist or seen as available to genuine collaborations that naturally extend an artist's realm of operation, diverse particularities of communities seem fully formed entities awaiting engagement from the outside. Although such an acknowledgement is not altogether without political and artistic importance, such conception of difference supports the temporal and spatial demarcation of communities as discrete social formations. This is to say, they are thought to coalesce organically among like minded people in opposition to a dominant culture, and are mutable only as a result of internal process, and that their strength and coherence are determined in proportion to their resistance and impermeability to external pressure and influence. What this kind of conception subtly but crucially discounts is the ongoing conditionality of identity formation in general, an understanding of it as a process of articulation, but also simultaneously as disarticulation that is fully mediated by a myriad of internal and external pressures on a continuous basis.

The pluralistic conception of difference as heterogeneity, predetermined identities, the cultural mosaic, assumes that the fabric of society is made of discrete entities. This idea of multiculturalism, of community, is based on what political theorist Chantal Mouffe ??? has called a closed system of differences, wherein difference is understood not as a process of continual identification of misrecognition and recognition, which is intrinsic to self construction and group formation, it is not understood as a relational process, but as fixed entities. In order to hold this mosaic together, what gets introduced are broader unifying ideals, whether of the people or the nation or woman. Even though the picture is multicolored now, what holds it together still is a unifying idea. Difference understood accordingly as a variety of social and cultural categories is but one of the underlying presumptions that dominate community-based public art today, which seeks to become ever more inclusive of this variety at the expense of a rigorous and self-critical examination of the primary driving force that is defining the field, which is an idealized specter of community. When I say idealized specter of community, I am implying that there is no such thing as community, that it is a kind of ghost figure. I borrowed this idea from the work of Bruce Robbins, who has written a lot about the public sphere as an idealized specter. This isn't to say that because it is not "real" or fixed or identifiable that it doesn't have power. In fact, perhaps in its ghost form it has a pervasive power over what we think is possible or worth pursuing. This idealized specter of the community is predicated on the idea of unified subjects, which goes back to Kester's idea of a politically coherent community. That idea implies that subjects within that community are unified subjects, not split, that their sense of who they are and where they are is transparent to themselves, not only to themselves, but to others. This idea of community is as an internally homogeneous group, even if marginalized. This is often the way the public is defined as well.

What I am advocating is to try to think of community-based art not so much as based on the idea that discrete communities exist in the world as disenfrachised and marginalized, but to think of communities in a much more fluid way, so that collaborations can engender new formations of what could be called communities. As such, these communities potentially can disappear and reform. This view is based more on the idea of affinities rather than identities. For a lot of artists who have been engaged with community and collective work, it is a crucial time, because they recognize that there is a tendency towards the rationalization and instrumentalization of collective experience in community-based art. Beyond the difficulty of defining the term community, the problem for artists like the artist collective called Critical Art Ensemble, who have a far more extreme critical position on community-based work than I do, lies in the impossibility of forging collaborative affiliations based on truly non-rational elements of human interaction, such as affinity, friendship, faith or love within the existing models of community-based practice. They put it this way:

Critical Art Ensemble's vision is very pessimistic. They say that art works that depend on bureaucracy in order to come to fruition, like the public art works we are talking about, are too well managed to have any contestational power. In the end, they are acts of compliance that only reaffirm hierarchy and the rational order. Their position is somewhat extreme, with its own brand of avant garde romanticism, but they do give voice to the central complication plaguing community-based art, which is "attempts at participatory models of art practice engaging local concerns and people converting into yet another form of acquiescence to the power of capital and the state." I would recommend that because of these problems, rather than retreating, that the challenge for artists, curators and art professionals, as well as architects, people who are committed to trying to redefine what collaborative work could be_ socially engaged, politically aware, an extrainstitutional mode of practice_ is to imagine beyond and through the impossibility of community. The invitation to imagine beyond and through such an impossibility, however, is not meant to invoke a transcendent plateau from which one will find a new synthetic resolution, free of contraditions. On the contrary, it is meant to suggest the need first for the recognition, then the acceptance of the impossibility of total consolidation, wholeness and unity_ not in an individual nor a collective social body like the community nor an institution nor a discipline. In turn, such an acknowledgement of being ununified, to be full of conflict and contradiction is to have effectivity in realigning what community-based art can be. In turn, such an acknowledgement must be put into play in relation to the ways in which the dominant force of the desire for a fixed, coherent, stable community identity continues to determine the institutional and bureaucratic context within which community-based art is practiced. This is to say, to imagine this impossibility or think beyond it would be to counter that specter of idealized community.

Inheriting the difficult task of redirecting the ideal of community, community-based art practitioners need to stop thinking of the community as an existing social formation that can be described more or less directly through collaborative representation. In other words, community-based art should not be pursued as a descriptive practice in which the community is conceived as a discrete social entity whose identity is immanent to itself. Instead, as cultural theorist Linda Singer has proposed, we could think of the community not as a referential sign, but as a call or appeal to a collective praxis. Community-based art then can be approached as a projective enterprise, rather than a descriptive enterprise wherein a provisional community can be produced within the specific context instigated, either by an artist or a cultural institution, as a kind of projection. That, I think, is utopian and ideal, but in a different way. The resulting community collaboration can be viewed not as an authentic self-description of a community who ostensibly gains self-esteem through such a process, but as a modeling of one possible collective social relation. The degree to which such community-based projects can reveal the various economic, political, ideological or institutional contingencies of this particular social relation, including the effects of spoken and unspoken individual ambition, will determine community-based art's capacity to open up the productive possibility of uncertainty in all collective social formations as noted earlier. This would likely involve the questioning of the exclusions that the community itself performs in order to fortify its own identity. I think whenever there is a struggle to define community, whether as something you belong to or something that you can identify outside yourself, it's always about delineating a line of which you are not a part. Extensive pressures continue to be applied to artists, critics, curators and arts institutions to think and act as if communities exist as coherent social entities awaiting outreach, and to attempt to expand the audience profile for art, which is directly connected to funding dollars. Effects of such an outlook include the reification and colonization of marginal disenfranchised social groups, as well as the concomitant reification and commodification of marginalized spaces. I am sure you know that a lot of public art was involved with real estate development and gentrification projects. Figurations of artistic practice which replaced sites with communities, rather than saving lives, as Mary Jane Jacob claimed, can reduce them to the most banal common denominator, to serve as generic targets for the false fulfillment of goals, such as the legitimation of art as a socially relevant activity, the integration of art into everyday life and the greater democratization of art.

To begin our rethinking about these alternative ways of formulating the community requires a major reorganization of the concept of community in which it can account for itself not as a sociological or essential term but as an existential one. French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has posted some signposts for such an endeavor. He says, "There is no communion. There is no common being. But there is a being in common." This is how I translate the idea of an impossible community. The question should be the community of being, not the being of community. In Nancy's overall project, according to another theorist, community is "neither a community of subjects, nor a promise of immanence, nor a communion of individuals in some higher or greater totality. It is not most specifically a product of any work or project. It is not work or a product or projected labor or an oeuvre, but what is unworked, desoeuvre." If community-based public art can contribute to the effort to rethink the community along these lines, as a non-essential being in common, rather than a common being, if it is to be unwork, then it is not an effort to be abandoned too readily as Critical Art Ensemble's opposition seems to imply. In fact, despite and because of its impossibility, one needs to sustain work on it.

That is the end of the paper I have assembled for today. I realize there is more clarification and work to be done to counter the energy around the much more celebrated notion of community that is persistent in public art discourse, as well as in museums and the rest of the art world.

Question: The philosopher's Audiences you mentioned spurred me to think of communities based on experience, although all our interpretations of experience will be totally different. Perhaps the experience is where it lies. Have you read more on that?

Kwon: I can give you some references about "experience." There is a tendency to have personal experience serve as the final answer point to all reality. As long as the idea of experience is based on understanding that whatever is personal is historically, politically and culturally located, then I can buy that idea about experience. But if it is all about an internalized experience whose authenticity cannot be questioned, I don't accept the discourse.

Audience: Then an artist coming into the community can create an experience that will in turn create a community based on the shared experience.

Kwon: Or, the attempt to engage a community is in and of itself an experience of trying to define a community, rather than already believing you are going to work with one that exists unproblematically.

Question: Are you saying that the ideal of community is a question to examine?

Kwon: Yes, definitely. And, I think, one that artists are compelled to examine through their work. As a critic and historian I can tally many different people's positions and map them out, but if you, as an artist, approach your work as critical cultural practice, then the questioning has to be part of the work. Work that questions the premise of communities will have a hard time within the public art bureaucracy, but I think that is what is necessary, because I sense it has become a rote industry.

Question: If I understand you correctly, you are making a very important distinction that I would define as the difference between collaboration and discourse. I think of collaboration as people coming from different disciplines with established premises, as opposed to discourse, where you come together and the difference emerges without any preconception of what it may be or where it may lie. Is that correct?

Kwon: I am not clear on how you are defining the two terms.

Audience: As an example of collaboration, I am working in a fishing village, and when I went there I presumed I would collaborate with them and their experience was grounded in the fact that they were fishermen, or fisherpeople, and I was an artist. I came to discover that that wasn't where the essential differences lay at all, and it became a discourse.

Kwon: You are more than an artist.

Audience: And they are a hell of a lot more than fisherpeople.

Kwon: I think discourse and collaboration are terms of two different registers. I can't seem to see them comparatively. Collaboration I think of as a process of subjects and identities having to negotiate difference in a particular way toward a project that may or may not be defined in advance. Discourse doesn't necessarily have that sense of collective boundary. Does that make sense?

Question: Could you Audience on the travelling road show of Hispanic art of a few years ago, in terms of who the audience was for that show, the mural works, the physical site pieces, and how it became a public work, even though it was in a museum?

Kwon: I don't know the exhibition you are talking about.

Audience: What happened was an incredible experience for the people who saw this show in terms of the things you just discussed. They weren't site specific art works, but different works by Hispanic artists, which created an entity that was extremely diverse in terms of community. It was probably one of the most powerful things I've seen in the last ten years in terms of intellectual impact. It changed my understanding of what is art. Even though it was curated by a bureaucracy, it had diversity and was somewhat successful in being a public work.

Kwon: Questions about what community the exhibition was for or what community it represented I can't answer because I didn't see the exhibition. But what I am looking for are the kind of projects that don't make you feel comfortable about your sense of who you are and what your relationship is to other cultures. Rather they should raise questions about how such determinations are made and why, and who is served by certain determinations.

Question: I think your willingness and ability to unpack this idea of community and to critique community-based projects is a breath of fresh air in this week in which a lot of artists have presented projects they have done with the marginalized group of the month. Can you point to any artists you think are working in an appropriately critical way?

Kwon: I think Critical Art Ensemble does, even though they abandoned that process in their own rhetoric. Group Material, before they stopped making work, in the later projects when they were engaged by public art organizations to do things, tried to do the kind of questioning I am speaking of. The project I am familiar with is their 1997 Three Rivers Arts Festival piece. They as the artists were provided with options for communities by the arts agency so that they could "collaborate" with them. But Group Material chose not to work with a local community group. Instead they attempted to raise questions about what it is about community-based work that is supporting this summer arts festival, how the terms are defined by different people. To bring together a multiplicity of voices in the focus of questions and doubts, rather than pictures of existing groups, required a complex negotiation process with the organizers, who were upset by this kind of intervention. That is why I say this kind of intervention is hard to do, because the bureaucracy is not looking for unpredictable and uncontrolled doubts. They want self-empowered pictures of marginalized people.

Audience: In other words, the bureaucracy can perpetuate this idea of communities as being empowered when they are really not.

Kwon: The timing of the energy around community-based work is coincident with dramatic cuts in funding for social programs. It may be a conspiratorial imagination that is informing my judgement at the moment, but I think there is a relationship between the desire for institutions, arts or otherwise, to see marginalized groups as empowered when they are in fact not.

Question: Could you Audience further on the ghosted specter of the public sphere that is nonetheless powerful? Have you thought more in that regard, not exclusively from the perspective of community-based work, but other types of interventions?

Kwon: That opens up a whole other side of my interests. I've never presented them together, or thought about them together in my own mind. I have an interest in artists who seem to be retreating into an aesthetic space rather than trying to be relevant to social and political issues. They are trying to expand the space of provisional autonomy and specificity of art, as art that goes into the social and political realms becomes more and more mired in processes of corruption. This is my conspiratorial imagination again, but the more that happens, it seems to me, there is urgency in defending art as a provisional space of autonomy. That is a political project.

Question: Can you think of some examples of that?

Kwon: Everyone always wants artists' names. I am partial to Gabriel Orozco's work, Felix Gonzalez Torres's work, and perhaps even Mathew Barney's. I know his high commercialism makes him seem suspect, but there is something about his work. Also, Paul McCarthy.

Question: In the paradigm shift you are advocating, what is the responsibility of the artist? And, is there room for an artist to function as an instrument of advocacy if the definition of community is constantly evolving?

Kwon: I think so, assuming that the things you would advocate would also be evolving. I think artists have to be very smart about their institutional contextualization all the time. Just because they are in the public realm doesn't mean that they engage the audience more immediately or that it is more direct and has political importance. Ultimately, everyone has to make a living, everyone makes compromises, but the artist has to be alert to seeing their project within social political dynamics, and they have to make ethical decisions. In a community-based project that means asking what it means to collaborate, what it means to function as an artist in relation to non-art groups, to represent the art world and then to represent the "community" back to the art world. It is important to question one's own presumptions all the time. It is not just for artists, but for critics and historians and administrators as well. I think the public art field now is the place where the really hard questions about audience and publicness and what is art and the social responsibility of the artist are being asked. It is easier to ignore those questions in the museum setting.

Synopsis by Maria Alos

Miwon Kwon started her lecture reading a written statement from this seminar’s description of public art. The statement described public art as an emerging art form, that is not isolated within the institutional setting, but… that gains vitality through direct engagement with its environment and its audience. This common definition of public art implies that art in traditional settings is separated from everyday life, reality, social order and people. In contrast, public art is direct, with an immediate relation with its audience, distinguished by its siting—that is, outside an institution. For Kwon, the distinction between art and public art is not that clear. Since public art is also enabled and mediated by art institutions, the reactions to it are not completely direct and instantaneous. These mediations within the public art field have become obscured by its own discourse, so that it is almost impossible to understand the institutional frames of public art. For Kwon, all ‘art’ is art in the public realm.

As a way to give a definition for the term "New Genre Public Art" she described and analyzed all eight projects of "Culture in Action," curated by Mary Jane Jacobs in 1993. In general terms, "Culture in Action" challenged the parameters of public art that had traditionally mirrored mainstream art forms’ habits—object-oriented conception of art, the elevation of the artist as the creating force, the construction of the audience as a group of passive spectators, and so on. On the contrary, "Culture in Action" wanted to test a different model of public art that would be defined by audience participation, a non-object artistic production and labor, artistic educational programming and the positioning of artists as active social agents instead of isolated aesthetic specialists. To accomplish these aims, the projects were structured to be community collaborations that would co-produce and sometimes co-conceptualize the artworks. "Culture in Action" was intended to be a critique of two institutions: the organization of Sculpture Chicago, specifically, and public art as a field of cultural production, in general. Some of the projects were much more successful than others but, at the end, what could be seen as a documentation of them were a candy bar, a neighborhood parade, a block party, a dinner party, a paint chart and a hydroponic garden.

To set the context in which "Culture in Action" pronounced its own singularity, Kwon gave a clear and insightful interpretation of the three paradigms of public art since the mid 1960s. The first one is called "Art in Public Places." This refers to the large scale modernist monuments like Picasso’s first public sculpture, "Head of a Woman" that became a model for the early public art sculptures projects that the NEA would first fund. These autonomous monuments would be placed within "public" spaces with no relation to the site and became an emblem for the city’s identity itself.

The second paradigm is called "Art as Public Spaces," where artists are producing public spaces—usually in conjunction with architects—rather than putting objects into existing places. As a recent example, Kwon mentioned Pritzker Park in Chicago, designed by Ronald Jones in 1991. This type of public work started to be developed in the late 1970s.

""Culture in Action" corresponds to what has been identified as the third paradigm; "Art in the Public Interest." This third paradigm is activist and communitarian in spirit. Its modes of expression encompass a variety of traditional media—painting, sculpture and so on—as well as nontraditional media like street art, billboards, protest actions and murals, just to mention some. But more important is that "Art in the Public Interest" produces a direct intersection with social issues. It encourages community coalition and attempts to make artists act as social agents.

Kwon made very clear, though, that this definition of "Art in the Public Interest" comes from the people working in that realm, and that she intended to uncover what this public art is aiming for and whether it really accomplishes what it says it wishes to accomplish.

Kwon pointed out the interesting parallels between mainstream art practices and those of public art over the past thirty years. The dematerialization of the object, for example, the shift in mainstream art to conceptualism or minimalism, in comparison to the shift in public art from sculptural works to community-based artwork. The interest of art to engage social issues—which is not only present in the public art but also in every art practice_ the shift from the centrality of the artist as the author of the work to a more collaborationist and participatory kind of practice. Some critics define the emergence of this community-based artwork as something fundamentally new, a sort of rupture with previous models. Other critics have said that this is something that has been there for a long time, but has not been paid attention to. It should not concern us whether it is new or not, what is important is to try to understand the shift and to see what it really means.

One thing that has to be considered in the New Genre Public Art description is the major re-thinking of site-specificity in both aesthetic and political terms. The changes in the art/site relationship over the past three decades has been the primary barometer of the transformation in which an artwork would proclaim itself of public relevance. Kwon reviewed this relationship from the 1960s to the 1990s. In short, it started with artworks placed in "public" spaces as an extension of the museum to everyday life. What legitimated these artworks as public was their siting. After that, the creation of site-specific works started to be encouraged and later required. Art became a continuum from architectural spaces. The site-specificity stipulated by NEA and GSA was for a spatial integration, not for a critical intervention. The idea of a unified and harmonious space would be translated in the 1990s New Genre Public Art as a unified and harmonious community. Artists and critics tend to think that the more the artwork disappears into the site—no longer recognized as art—the more it served the public in a more immediate way. The idea of the site was displaced by the idea of community and social issues.

If public artworks are now defined as community-specific or audience-specific, there has to be an understanding of those terms themselves. How does a group of people become identified as a community? Who decides what social issue would be addressed? The artist? The community? The curator? The sponsoring institution? Does the community pre-exist the art project or it is created by the project? What is collaboration in this context? Those were some of questions that Kwon posited.

For Kwon, the term community is a very vague one. She explained two models of community proposed by Grant Kester: the politically coherent community and the created community. The created community is constructed through a delegate artist who is positioned to fulfill a certain public art project. In the created community, the individuals are perceived as fragmented, disenfranchised and alienated people—a condition which the artist seeks to ameliorate through the community-based art project. When a community is created around an artist’s project, it is assumed that the collaboration begins with uneven power relations and would lead to paternalism. In contrast, the politically coherent community yields to a fairer process of exchange in which, both, the artist and the community learn together. This happens because this type of community pre-exists the artist and any artistic intervention. From Kester’s perspective, this type of community is more resistant to appropriation and abuse by the artist/art world. The benefits for such an approach are less ambiguous since they can have more control and predict the outcome. From Kwon’s perspective, this possibility of identifying communities before the collaboration has become a formula where the artist, plus the community, plus a social issue is equal to New Genre Public Art. There is a risk in this process where the identity of the community can become the subject of the artwork.

(1) See Mary Jane Jacobs, Culture in Action, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.

Analysis by Beth Peckman

Miwon Kwon began her talk disputing common definitions of public art which imply or assume that, in contrast to other forms of art, public art is more direct or establishes a more immediate relationship with its audience. Kwon contends that public art is fully mediated, perhaps even more than art in an art museum or gallery setting. She discussed evolving public art politics concerning the use of the site as evident in NEA guidelines for site specificity when awarding public art grants.

Kwon scrutinized underlying assumptions of community by examining these guidelines alongside individual artists rhetoric, such as Suzanne Lacy's naming of "New Genre Public Art." Kwon claims "New Genre Public Art's" self description is predicated on a major rethinking of site specificity, in both aesthetic and political terms.

Kwon provided an extensive and detailed historical analysis of public art's evolution over the last thirty years. This analysis outlined the following three paradigms of public art since the mid-1960s: "art in public places", "art as public spaces" and "art in the public interest". The politics, practices and premises of these three public art paradigms were measured against the example of "Culture in Action: New Public Art In Chicago." "Culture in Action," representing New Genre Public Art, or art in the public interest, delineated public art's explicit move from aesthetic function to social function.

Suzanne Lacy is quoted in her 1991 naming of New Genre Public Art as dealing with some of the most profound issues of our time: toxic waste, race relations, homelessness, aging, gang warfare and cultural identity. A group of visual artists has developed distinct models for an art whose public strategies of engagement are an important part of its aesthetic language. Having established New Genre Public Art's basis in engagement, Kwon questioned the actual practice of identifying a community as a potential partner in an art collaboration project.

Specifically, Kwon asks of the identified community: who identifies them as such? who decides what social issue will be addressed or represented by this community or through this community? does the partner community pre-exist the art project or is it produced by the project? what is the nature of the collaboration between the artist and the community? if new public art engages the audience as active participants in the.production of an artwork, which to a degree renders them as subjects of the work, then who is the audience for this production? what criteria of success or failure are imposed if the aesthetic terms are no longer the dominant terms by which we might judge a work of art? Finally, through it all, what are the political implications and consequences of the simultaneous displacement of the architect and the site? What does it mean that they are replaced by community, audience and social issue in New Genre Public Art?

Miwon Kwon does not work her way down the list answering every question for each public art project discussed. She poses these questions as guidelines for critiquing the present direction of public art funding policies and the practice of making public art.

In conclusion, Kwon affirmed that cultural and social identity is neither singular nor stagnant. Any individual can belong to, or identify with, multiple ethnic, cultural or social subgroups. In attempting to represent the voices of discrete, often marginalized, social groups, New Genre Public Art courts the danger of reducing communities to one-dimensional, sometimes stereotypical, descriptions rather than exposing the complexities of their formation and social positionings.