When I arrived at the labyrinthine Cape Technikon in District Six for Public Eye’s symposium on public art, I found that the organisers had put the arrowed directions sign on a revolving door. It seemed an apt metaphor for a certain kind of public art: it must have an ostensibly utilitarian purpose, it must serve an educational end, but because it’s a work of art, it also needs to make the public think a little. And after wandering around lost for half an hour, I felt that I got the point.
But my metaphor is a crude definition of public art and there were far more nuanced and intelligent ones on parade at the symposium. I use the words “on parade” advisedly. There were only three conventionally academic papers presented (I missed Ahmedy Vawda and Melvin Minnaar’s papers, though, which might have upped this tally) and the rest of the presentations smacked a little of show-and-tell.
Artist after artist described projects past and present, without paying much attention to analysing them in any depth. A typical offender was Swiss artist Sabine Lang. As beautiful as her work was, there was no explanation of why designs for gyms and office blocks should count as art or be classified as public.
Initially, I imagined that everyone would share my opinion, and see this endless pictorial narration as a flaw, but then I learned a simple truth, one I learn afresh on a daily basis: the public are seldom whom you think they are. And the public are certainly not a homogeneous entity.
The young artist whom I spoke to loved what they’d experienced. So let’s concentrate on the highlights, of which there were many. Witwatersrand University Professor Jane Taylor launched the conference with a dazzling keynote speech that looked at the question of defining the audience for public art. With the sort of stylistic tour de force that separates the media philosopher from the mere academic, she ended up defining our first democratic elections in 1994, as well as our constitution, as public art.
As attractive an image as this is, it seems to lead to a definition of public art as being “art about the public”. It also suggests that public art is defined by the way you look at it, rather than by any generating principle. Other papers, as you can imagine, ran counter to this viewpoint.
The Ivory Coast’s Professor Yacouba Konate, talking on “Short Adventures in Public Art in Black Africa”, ended his spirited and funny stories about the struggle of artists for recognition with this naive injunction: “By putting up art in public, we are taking a part of the sun belonging to the population, so we have to take care to have a sunny artwork”.
Australian/British art duo Art at Work, in their paper about their Blue Hand project, saw art as a way of sensitising the public to environmental and racist issues. Their project invited people to keep their hand s painted blue for 24 hours, to feel what it was like to be different. A sweetly laudable ambition, you may think, but a member of the audience pointed out the absurdity of this gesture in a South Africa where everyone is already different and live with that fact every day.
This was typical of the sometimes heated discussions that took place on the difficult questions of what constitutes “the public”, public space or public art.
Virginia McKenny presented a superbly sympathetic paper on Steven Cohen’s recent Chandelier Project and his 1999 Crawling, Flying, Voting.
Her paper, one of the few that successfully grappled with the theoretical underpinnings of public art, raised some uncomfortable issues. Cohen’s work, rather than being a negotiated affirmation of public space, is more a slap in the public’s face with a wet penis. He aggressively stakes his place in the public universe and continually tests the public’s tolerance of his access rights to that space. It’s a far cry from Konate’s “sunny artworks”, unless we make the obligatory arsehole joke. It also poses the question: do some public artists forget that they are part of the public? And is their work affected negatively by their need constantly to adopt the role of the external observer of their own products?
Personally, I’d say this strengthens their work, but others would differ.
Did the symposium teach us what public art is? Of course not. We learned that there are many kinds of public art, that it is always a contested arena, and that the very act of that contestation sometimes informs the aesthetics and meanings of the artworks. We also learned to want more — more debate, more interaction among the art communities, and more public art. And we were left with the crucial question: Can art still do its work if someone besides the artist owns it?
For more information e-mail the convenor at [email protected]