Water Fountain: a gift to the people

albertoduman.me.uk

Global Performance Studies (GPS) Journal, 2018

The ecological turn of the last decade has strengthened an interest in using the arts as a way of engaging the public in environmental issues. Increasingly, the commissioning of public art that addresses conservation, biodiversity and climate change concerns has expanded to include participatory, hands-on creative forms and processes with the aim to encourage empathy and understanding. Ecological participatory arts can function to meaningfully engage the public in the pressing environmental issues of our time, bringing new ideas and opportunities for change. Nevertheless, a greater understanding is needed to identify how ecological public art affects the relationship of individuals to their urban environment, including how these artworks sit within wider policy and political frameworks. This includes capacities for ecological art to interrupt the expected relationships of individuals and their engagement in public space. This article examines the participatory ecological pubic artwork Refugium and its unexpected outcomes.

Let's Go Outside: Art in Public, 2022

As I write this introduction in October 2021, we are emerging from Melbourne’s latest lockdown, which lasted seventy-seven days. Since the pandemic started, Melbournians have endured more than 250 days in lockdown—the longest period anywhere in the world. Living through this much time governed by necessary but substantial public health restrictions—with access to the outdoors parcelled out into blocks of one to two hours; excursions confined to five, ten or fifteen kilometre radiuses, before curfew at 8pm or 9pm; and activities reduced to exercise or recreation with one other person, grocery shopping, or giving or receiving care— makes your nostalgia for times when going outside was less regulated and policed profoundly acute. With the benefit of hindsight, I think of the Let’s Go Outside symposium as a momentous and auspicious gathering, given that the COVID-19 crisis would profoundly limit our capacity to travel and assemble in person a mere six months later. Consequently, it has been our intention as editors from the outset to retain the spirit of the original symposium and to include a number of perspectives from across the diverse range of public art output in Australia and internationally. Taking up debates from Let’s Go Outside, this edited reader reflects on the growing interest in making and presenting art outside of conventional gallery contexts and explores the opportunities and complexities of realising art in the public realm. Our case studies expand on topics relevant to artists, designers, art consultants, policymakers, commissioners and curators working in this area, including indigenising the public realm; producing memorials to difficult pasts; placemaking and urban renewal; commissioning models; considerations of access, inclusion and diversity; and public art practices that are experimental, temporary and socially engaged. As well as case studies, the publication’s twenty-one contributions include critical essays, artist pages, creative explorations, as well as interviews and features on key practitioners in the field. The book aims to situate and contrast Australia’s unique approaches to public art by featuring essays on public art commissioning and practice internationally, including Hong Kong, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Indonesia, the US and the UK, and features the perspectives of twenty-five scholars, public artists and collectives.

The Journal of Public Space

This ‘Art and Activism in Public Space’ special issue of The Journal of Public Space presents a spectrum of practices and theoretical reflections on creative practices in public space, across a diverse range of public environments including in the Sudan, China, Australia, UK, Mexico, Cuba, Italy and Colombia. Through articles and portfolios, the reader is drawn into both familiar and unfamiliar scenarios.Articles and portfolios in Art and Activism in Public Space issues are not asked to respond to a specific theme. The intention of this publication is to reflect on what emerges at the intersection of art-based research, creative practice, theoretical frameworks around contemporary public practice, and the changing nature of public space.

2020

This multidisciplinary companion offers a comprehensive overview of the global arena of public art. It is organised around four distinct topics: activation, social justice, memory and identity, and ecology, with a final chapter mapping significant works of public and social practice art around the world between 2008 and 2018. The thematic approach brings into view similarities and differences in the recent globalisation of public art practices, while the multidisciplinary emphasis allows for a consideration of the complex outcomes and consequences of such practices, as they engage different disciplines and communities and affect a diversity of audiences beyond the existing 'art world'. The book will highlight an international selection of artist projects that illustrate the themes. This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, art history, urban studies, and museum studies.

2014

Rethinking Urban Inclusion Spaces, Mobilizations, Interventions, 2013

Abstract: To involve citizens in developing the processes of city making is an objective that occupies part of the agenda of political parties in the context of the necessary renewal of representative democracy. This paper aims to provide some answers to the following questions: Is it possible to overcome the participatory processes based exclusively on the consultation? Is it possible to “train” residents to take an active role in decision-making? How can we manage, proactively, the relationship between public actors, technicians and politicians, in a participatory process? We analyse the development of the process of creating the Wall of Remembrance in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Baró de Viver, a work of public art created and produced by its neighbours in the context of a long participatory process focused on improving the image of the neighbourhood and the improvement of public space. This result and this process have been possible in a given context of cooperation among neighbours, local government and the research team (CR-Polis, Art, City, Society at the University of Barcelona). The development of a creative process of citizen participation between 2004 and 2011 made possible the direct management of decision-making by the residents on the design of public space in the neighbourhood. However, the material results of the process should not overshadow the great achievement of the project: the inclusion of a neighbourhood in taking informed decisions because of their empowerment in public space design and management of memory.

Artlink, 2010

Until recently, there have been two prevailing paradigms of art in the public arena. One is exemplified in the thinking of design theorists such as Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City (1960), when he inadvertently provided urban designers and planners with a ready reckoner for understanding the role of public art in the city.1 His chapter on the The City Image and its Elements, introduced concepts of paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks and various interrelationships of these. All were niftily diagramised, photographed and articulated in words readily communicable to urban designers and planners. Using such a lexicon, public art could be written up for civic authorities in instrumentalist policies that put a special value on integrated art and design. Eye-catching pathways, arty seats, colourful murals, identity and place-inspired gateways, and landmark sculptures could now be readily incorporated in new master plans. Public art, it was believed, could help make public spaces memorable.

In this dissertation, I provide a philosophical analysis of public art. I focus on its “publicness,” and draw implications at the level of public art’s ontology, appreciation, and value. I uphold the view that an artwork is public when received within a public sphere rather than within artworld institutions. I further argue that, as a consequence of the peculiar nature of its reception, public art possesses an essential value that is distinctively non-aesthetic: to promote political participation and to encourage tolerance. By examining how public art and its value(s) relate to the public domain in the context of pluralistic democracies, this dissertation also contributes to a fuller understanding of an important aspect of our social world.