DEBATED TERRITORY:

TOWARD A CRITICAL LANGUAGE FOR PUBLIC ART

Suzanne Lacy

in: Mapping the Terrain – New Genre Public Art. ed. by Suzanne Lacy

I got a call from Mom and Dad as they sat in front of their television set in Wasco. They
were watching news reports of the obscenity trial of Dennis Barrie, director of the
Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, for displaying Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs.
Was Mapplethorpe an artist or a pornographer? Later they sent me clippings from the
local newspaper on The Umbrellas by the artist Christo, which was located a few miles
from their home in a small fanning community in California's Central Vallec. Judging
from the tone of the articles, the local people, after questions early on, seemed ready to
believe that Christo was indeed an artist, although not one that fit their preconceptions.

What do modern artists do? Mom and Dad have their opinions. The media has made
them armchair connoisseurs in a time of tremendous transition in the role of visual
artists. Whether through studio art (for a specific art world audience) or public art (for a
broader popular audience), artists have achieved a level of public visibility not
experienced in several decades, if ever. This is in part a consequence of an increased
level of personal visibility in the culture at large. From an assumed "right to know"
about the lives of politicians, to the revelation of family secrets, including spouse abuse
and incest, formerly private lives have assumed the character of public property through
the media. Visual artists arc no exception, and many have catapulted into national
prominence overnight by virtue of controversies surrounding their work. What artists do
and what they "ought" to do constitutes a territory of public debate in which we seek a
broadened paradigm for the meaning of art in our times.
The discussion is elaborated. In art schools faculty argue over the place of
craftsmanship, subject matter, exhibition venues, and the relation ship between new
genre public art and more traditional art forms. The art world struggles with
multiculturalism and its implications for different audiences and approaches to making
art. Public art has become a highly competitive alternative gallery system in which
artists are thrust into contact with a broad and diversified audience, each group bringing
its own contributions to the debate.

Clatshes occur - we ask questions that have not, in this country, been asked of visual
artists since the New Deal, when government support for artists evoked a dialogue
about art's service to society. One of the central questions at the heart of the recent
censorship controversies is, in tact, shout public right and private accountability. Should
people fund, through the National Endowment for the Arts, artworks that offend "public
sensibility"? Our curiosity has been stimulated: just what is public art, how does it art
made, by whom, and for whom?

Within art criticism, public art has challenged the illusion of a universal art and
introduced discussions on the nature of public - its frames of reference, its location
within various constructs of society, and its varied cultural identities. The introduction of
multiple contexts for visual art presents a legitimate dilemma for critics: what forms of
evaluation are appropriate when the sites of reception for the work, and the premise of
"audience," have virtually exploded? When artists decided to address Mom and Dad in
Wasco as one potential audience, criticism itself had to change, since the nature of
meaning is perceived so differently by various audiences.

One temporary solution has been to emphasize descriptive writing. Some writers
have assumed a more participatory role with artists in the process of the work, feeling;
that recontextualizing the work within other frames of referene -the larger social
context prescribed by the issue- is to appropriate critical response. (This approach,
however valuable, begs the question of evaluation at the heart of art criticism.) Other
critics simplistically apply criteria inherited from early artist practitioners of new public
art forms to work that is well advanced in concept, intention, and complexity. It is
evident that criticism has not caught up with practice.

In the instances throughout this century when art has moved out side the
confines of traditional exhibition venues, or even remained within them and challenged
the nature and social meaning of art, analysis has been a contested and politicized
terrain. Until a critical approach is realized, this work will remain relegated to outsider
status in the art world, and its ability to transform our understanding of art and artists'
roles will be safely neutralized.
 Misconceptions and confused thinking abound. What is needed at this point is a
more subtle and challenging criticism in which assumptions - both those of the critic and
those of the artist - are examined and grounded within the worlds of both art and social
discourse. Notions of interaction, audience, artists' intentions, and effectiveness are too
freely used, often without sufficient interrogation and almost never within
comprehensive conceptual schemes that differentiate and shed meaning on the practice
of new genre public art. What follows are discussions of these notions, along with
suggestions for expanding our critical approach.

INTERACTION

Current attempts to deal critically with new forms of public art often assume an
unexamined partisanship with the public through a vaguely constituted idea of
interactivity. In a recent article in Art Papers, one writer critiqued the notion of audience
engagement in Culture in Action, a series of art projects in Chicago communities,
because, as she said, if the artists really meant to be interactive, they would have used
interactive video technology! In fact, interaction cannot be measured exclusively by
either the artist's methodology or media, or by other commonly used criteria, such as
audience size.

What might a more complex critical analysis entail? In looking at this one aspect of
new genre public art -the interactive quality that, by definition, is characteristic- a store
comprehensive scheme might incorporate all of the above, along with the artist's
intention and the work's meaning to its constituencies. For example, the diagram below
represents a model in which a continuum of positions is represented. These are not
discrete or fixed roles, but are delineated for the purposes of discussion, allowing us to
more carefully investigate aesthetic strategics. At any given time, an artist may operate
at a different point on the spectrum or may move between them.

Subjectivity and Empathy: Artist as Experiencer

In more traditional art, the artist's experience is thought to be represented in a visual

object; such subjectivity, in fact, is taken to be fundamental to art. Performance and
conceptual art helped to isolate the process of art, sometimes even substituting process
for object. To investigate what interactive skills visual artists might bring to the public
agenda and to assess how these might relate to a larger audience, we could start here,
with one of the most basic elements of art: the experiencing being.

In August 1991, I sat for seven days in an abandoned hospital room at Roswell
Park Cancer Center in upstate New York, charting the private conversations I had with
patients, nurses, doctors, scientists, and administrators. The artwork was located in the
interaction between myself as artist and the members of the community, framed by the
hospital room and fueled by the human need to reflect on the meaning of one's life and
work. In this and countless other works that take place largely within the domain of
experience, the artist, like a subjective anthropologist, enters the territorry of the Other
and presents observations on people and places through a report of her own interiority
In this way the artist becomes a conduit for the experiene of others, and the work a
metaphor for relationship.

Although we tend to pigeonhole subjectivity as nonpolitical, one of the major

contributions of feminist thought in the post two decades is that individual experience
has profound social implications. Experiencing has been manipulated in the service of
advertising and politics, for example, where products and politicians arc linked to desire
and values. Private experience has lost an authenticity in the public sector that art may,
at least symbolically, return to us. To make of oneself a conduit for expression of a
whole social group, can be an act of profound empathy. When there is no quick fix for
some of our most pressing social problems, there may be only our ability to feel and
witness the reality taking place around us. This empathy is a service that artists offer to
the world.

Information Revealed: Artist as Reporter

In the role of reporter, the artist focuses not simply on the experience but on the
recounting of the situation; that is, the artist gathers information to make it available to
others. She calls our attention to something. We might divide this practice of presenting
information along lines of intentionality. Some artists claim simply to "reflect" what
exists without assignment of value; others "report," implying a more conscious, less
random selection of information.

Reporting might be compared to aesthetic framing. Roland Barthes, in commenting

on Diderot, explains with analogies from theater and painting how intentional framing is
inherently political: "In order to tell a story, the painter has only an instant at his
disposal, the instant he is going to immobilize on the canvas, and he must thus choose
it well." What will be seen is what the artist will have seen, and thus the chosen image
is an instant in which the historical meaning and political surround of the reported
information can be read in a single glance. In this way the artist as reporter may be said
to engage with an audience not only to inform but to persuade. Perhaps for this reason,
when artists first enter the sociopolitical arena they often adopt this role.
Reporting implies a conscious selection, though not necessarily an analysis, of
information. In Amazonia, performance artist Rachel Rosenthal dramatizes the
destruction of the South American rain forest and the slaughter of its inhabitants. The
strength of this soliloquy is its inexorable rage, conveyed in a theatrically
choreographed incantation of the names of the native peoples, trees, and animal
species from this rapidly disintegrating environment. No answers are posited (indeed, is
there any appropriate response other than stop?), save the artist's belief that after
experiencing, revealing information is the next compassionate step.

Situations and Solutions: Artist as Analyst

From reporting, or presenting information, to analysis is a short step, but the implied
shift in an artist's role is enormous. In the first two modes of working -experiencer and
reporter- we see an emphasis on the intuitive, receptive, experiential, and observational
skills of the artist. As artists begin to analyze social situations through their art, they
assume fur themselves skills more commonly associated with social scientists,
investigative journalists, and philosophers. Such activities position artists as contribu-
tors to intellectual endeavor and shift our aesthetic attention toward the shape or
meaning of their theoretical constructs.
Reporting is ineviably followed by analysis. In the mid-eighties contemporary
photographers from the United States and other countries found themselves moving
naturally from simple observation of environmental disasters to political theorizing. In
1986 they formed the Atomic Photographers Guild to pursue projects related to
nuclear issues. For example, Richard Misrach's Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American
West presents a tongue-in-check proposal to convert a test bomb site into a national
park.

When an artist adopts the position of analyst, the visual appeal of imagery is often
superseded by the textual properties of the work, thus challenging conventions of
beauty. Their analysis may assume its aesthetic character from the coherence of the
ideas or from their relationship to visual images rather than through the images
themselves. In this way, art of analysis draws on the history of conceptual art during
the sixties, when artists explored the dematerialization of art as object and its
rematerialization in the world of ideas.

Bilding Consensus: Artist as Activist

The last step along the proposed continuum is from analysis to activism, where art
making is contextualized within local, national, and global situations, and the audience
becomes an active participant. Martha Rosler explored New York City as an artist-
analyst, but her work could be said to cross over into activism. If You Lieved Here ...The
City in Art, Theory, and Social Actions, an assemblage of exhibitions, symposiums,
photographs, and writings sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation in New York, amassed
the work of artists and activists dealing with the current crisis in American urban
housing policies. The works considered how artists have found themselves squarely in
the midst of real estate speculation and shortsighted housing policies. An analysis of
housing and homelessness was punctuated by proposed and actual interventions that
served as models for activism.
In seeking to become catalysts for change artists reposition themselves as citizen-
activists. Diametrically opposed to the aesthetic practices of the isolated artist,
consensus building inevitably entails developing a set of skills not commonly associtated
with art making. To take a position with respect to the public agenda, the artist must
act in collaboration with people, and with an understanding of social systems and
institutions. Entirely new strategics must be learned: how to collaborate, how to develop
multilayered and specific audiences, how to cross over with other disciplines, how to
choose sites that resonate with public meaning, and -how to clarify visual and process
symbolism for people who are not educated in art. In other words, artist-activists
question the primacy of separation as an artistic stance and undertake the consensual
production of meaning with the public.

To the preceding scheme (or any other developed by the critic), one would then add a
discussion of such issues as audience size, use of media, and artists' methodology,
contextualizing those evaluations within a more specific analysis of the work's
interactivity.

AUDIENCE

We have traditionally considered the relationship between artwork and audience as a

dyad, with more or less exchange between the two. Sonic would have it that
communication proceeds from the artist, through the artwork, toward a receptive
audience. At various moments in art history the passivity of that audience has been
challenged, for example, during, abstract expressionist "happenings" when the audience
and its movement through the site of the work were considered to be part of the art.
Many public artists today suggest that the communication is two-way, some going so
far as to propose that the space between artist and audience is, in fact, the artwork.
Contemporary critics, following the lead of artistic practice, have begun deconstructing
the audience, most often along the specific identity lines of fender, race, and, less often,
class. But the relationship of the audience to the work process is not clearly articulated.
Of interest is not simply the makeup or identity of the audience but to what degree
audience participation forms and informs the work - how it functions as integral to the
work`s sructure.

One possible evaluative construct might be to see the audience as a series of

concentric circles with permeable membranes that allow continual movement back and
forth. Nonhierarchical in intention, such a description allows us to deconstruct in an
audience-centered model the notion of interactivity that in the previous section was
premised in the artist's role.
If me represent the genesis of the work as a point in the center of the circle,
radiating out-like the waves caused by a rock in a pond-ould he the individuals or groups
of people who assume different degrees of responsibiliy for the work. Genesis and
responsibility are paired in this model, the center equaling the creative impetus. From
this center, the basis of which varies from artwork to artwork, emerge images and
structures (though not necessarily the meaning-that is completed by the audience).
The center of the circle are those without whom the work could not exist. In the case of
Houston Conwill, Estella Conwill Majozo, and Joseph De Pace, for example, their
interactive public works are centrally driven by the creative energy of the three
collaborators.

The next circle out from the center includes the collaborators or codevelopers,
shareholders who have invested time, energy, and identity in the work and who partake
deeply in its ownership. Often these consist of both artists and community members,
and without their contribution the work would not go forward. Nevertheless, at this level
of involvement, the loss of any single member, though perhaps serious in implication for
the work, will not dramatically alter its essential character.

It is important to emphasise here that such divisions are somewhat arbitrary and used
for the sake of clarifying our thinking about audience. In reality, chose in the center and
in the first concentric ring are not always so clearly defined, and, more important, in an
actively functioning participatory work, movement between levels of engagement is
designed into the system. The more responsibility assumed, the more central the
participants' role in the generation of the work. Collaborative partners become more or
less central as the work finds its shape.

The next level of participation would be the volunteers and performers, those about, for,
and with whom the work is created. In Danny Martiner's project for Culture in Action,
this level would be represented by the busloads of community members who paraded
through two neighborhoods in Chicago.
It would include the community members and representatives of various organizations
who volunteered to organize the parade.
Another ring of the circle consists of those who have a direct experience of the artwork.
Traditionally called the audience, these are the people who attend a performance or visit
an installation. Because of the openended invitational properties of a community-based
artwork and the time involved in creating it, those attending the final presentation or
exhibition are often more engaged than, for example, museum-goers. Among those
who visit Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial each year are a large number of
veterans and their families who bring to the wall a deep level of experiential engagement
(and account in large part for the work's success). Among the audience for Sheila
Levrant do Bretteville's Little Tokyo Project will be those who have lived and worked
there and whose words and experiences are memorialized in the concrete beneath their
feet.

The effects of the work often continue beyond the exhibition or performance of
interactive public art, and are magnified in the audience that experiences the work
through reports, documentations, or representation.
This audience includes people who read about the artwork in newspapers, watch it on
television, or attend subsequent documentary exhibitions. They expand the reach of the
work and are depending on the artist's intention, more or less integral to the work's
construction. At least a part of this audience carries the artwork over time as myth and
memory. At this level the artwork becomes, in the literature of art or in the life of the
community, a commonly held possibility.

Fundamental to the above construction of the audience is its flexible and fluid nature. At
no point is the level of participation fixed, and depending on the criteria established
through the work, participants move back and forth between levels. Thus a street
person who observes a performance by the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)
might be inspired to attend a workshop and serve as an "extra" in a performance. By
LAPD's criteria, which include willingness to dedicate time and a certain level of
theatrical ability, someone from the audience could move progressively toward the
center of generation and responsibility. In such large-scalc public artworks, many of
which exist over long periods of time, the reverse movement also takes place, such as
when life circumstances or interests move participants toward an outer circle in which
they may remain engaged and informed audience members. This model charges the
construction of audience with activity rather than simply identity.

These models of audience engagement are of course useful only if they encourage
appropriate complexity when considering the notion of interactiom. But through such
scrutiny an important implication is revealed: the educative function of new genre public
art. Often such art puts forth specific information or content to substantiate its
pedagogical claims, but we may also ask what learning results from the interactive
forms of the work, and whether the very structure, including artist and audience roles,
predicts the success of the educational intention.

INTENTION

If criticism follows artistic practice, though many contemporary examples might show
the reverse to be the case, then particularly when art changes form, critical constructs
must take into account the artist's expression of intention. Arlene Raven underlines the
potential discrepancy between intention and results when she asks, "Does the artist's
intention to do good mean that the work is, in fact, good?" The hitch is that artists'
stated purposes do not express the multiple, including unconscious, levels on which art
operates. Perhaps most dubious when they evaluate the "success" of their work, artists'
expressions of intention are nevertheless signposts for future directions in criticism,
because intention suggests real or potential contexts for the art. Intention portends
criteria for evaluation. Most important, intention establishes the values premised within
the work, and assembled values are the artist's construction of meaning.

Now we enter a familiar terrain for art theory. What questions does the artwork ask of
art itself? How does it enter into or challenge contemporary discourse?
What questions does it ask of life? In this interrogation, we encounter the artist's
philosophical and political biases, what he or she believes to be true about people,
culture, and action. Assuming that we can at the very least comment on belief systems
and meaning within the work, what role does an issue like "depth" play? That is, is the
work a substantive and meaningful addition to cultural or intellectual life? Does it add to
our understanding?

With these questions comes a particular dilemma for new genre public art critics:
can, or how can, a materialized belief system be evaluated? Raven's deliberate use of
"good" underscores our vulnerability in matching our beliefs to the artist's, comparing
and holding as good any mutuality. One critic values contemplation and the other
activity; one espouses leftist politics and the other right fundamentalism. In fact, while
all art represents artists' understandings of meaning, the often culturally interventionist
intentions of some artists threaten the stance of "objectivity" by which criticism attempts
to deify art.

With a candidness born of necessity, critics writing about this work often acknowledge
up front their passionate advocacy of the worldview embodied in the work they
describe. If we choose not to ignore the question of artists' intentions (too risky on the
cusp of change in art practice - artists often lead us in new and unpredictable
directions), then perhaps partisan criticism is the most honest approach. Critics must
inevitably enter the discussion personally and philosophically when approaching work
that intends toward social meaning. Likewise, the audience's beliefs and intentions with
respect to the art and its subjects become part of the total picture.

EFFECTIVENESS

One evaluative criterion heretical to common assumptions about art is effectiveness. Art
is assumed to be effective if it is beautiful, despite differing cultural constructions of
beauty and if it fulfills functions of revelation or transcendence. Once it departs from
this inherited ideology, art criticism flounders before unexamined critical assumptions. Is
public art effective, as Arthur Danto suggests, when it reflects some fundamental
harmony of chape or perspective? Is it effective when the audience takes action or is
changed in some fashion? As forms, intentions, and strategics for making art depart
from tradition and -in public art- as audiences change, multiply, and become more
complex, the critical consideration of effectiveness has remained relatively unexamined.

Routed in vague sociological, or more precisely, sociometric, precepts, critical

response to new genre public art suggests but does not actually deliver measurement.
Scale is sometimes deemed a measure of effectiveness, as is a hypothesized change in
the makeup of the audience. These assumptions actually do lead to provocative
questions that must be answered to develop appropriate criticism for this art. Is, for
example, Mierle Laderman Ukeles's proposed but only partially realized public art
display in a marine transfer station in New York City (Plow City) more or less successful
than Mel Ziegler and Kate Ericson's completed project for Culture in Action? In one case
the work would potentially involve a large public audience; in the other a small handful
of people was actually affected. Is an actualised work more effective than a proposal? Is
the number of people involved a criterion for success? Is a work more effective if a
community is mobilized toward some end? Does it matter what the end is, what the
actions are? What if, as in the case of John Ahearn's sculpture for a plaza in the South
Bronx, the community is mobilized against the work itself? Does shape, eloquence, or
visual appeal take precedence over the work's accessibility to community residents?

Artists themselves participate in a conflation of art and sociology. Unlike

sociologists, however, our measurements are often assumed rather than stated.
Whereas a sociologist might measure the number of times within a given period that
an issue was referred to in the media, in art we guess at the distribution of ideas. We
do not take surveys to determine to what extent art changes its constituencies' beliefs
 or practices. Nor, in fact, do we carefully assess the actions stimulated by a work of
art. We assume a host of causal effects, often on the basis of unexamined political
notions.

We assume, for example, that the LAPD is effective in changing ideas about
homelessness, but how do we evaluate this? Do we accept the subjective reports of
those few homeless company members? Hungry for change and exchange and
impact, artists often grasp at the experience of one or more individuals, recounted in
narratives that attest to the work's effect. We leap from individual experience to much
larger assumptions. If three people's lives, by their own recounting, are affected, if
thirty people's lives are affected after the work, can we draw any conclusions about
either the scale or duration of change? Such evaluations must be taken as one
component of understanding, one piece of a larger puzzle, but must be more carefully
explored.

Perceived notions of change based on political and sociological models and

extrapolated from personal experiential reports are necessary but insufficient in
evaluating new genre public art. This work also functions, as does all art, as a
representation or model. The work might, for example, hypothesize potential
collaboration among people rather than demonstrate actual interaction. It might
suggest possibility for cooperation and exchange that does not currently exist, or it
might be a model for artists themselves, stretching the boundaries, incorponating new
forms, diving permission for invention. It is possible that process-oriented public art is
at its most powerful when, as with most visual art forms, it operates as a symbol. The
relationship of demonstrable effects to the impact of a metaphor must be grappled with
as this work attempts to function simultaneously within both social and aesthetic
traditions.

I got a call from Mom and Dad in Wasco. Although our politics are worlds apart, my
father -a congenial and loving humanist but only slightly to the left of Jesse Helms on
some social issues- believes deeply in the expressive and communicative potential of
art. In fact, Dad is a painter of oil landscapes. Representative of one of many new art
audiences, my workingclass parents serve as a touch point for me as I consider the
conflicts in our values, our profound points of agreement, and the potential role of art in
an examination of meaning. The intersection of "high art" with expanded audiences
demands a rigorous examination of our premises and the development of new skills and
strategies. The introduction of Mom and Dad into a hermetic discourse demands a
change in art criticism.

What do public artists do? Inevitably we must come to understand this work's
relationship to what is called "real life." Art as a profession, taught in art schools and
displayed in museums, has created a paradoxical division between its practice and its
public locus. The confrontational framing that figures prominently in recent art
controversies is in part a product of the modernist model of the artist. Alone in her
studio, the artist creates through a struggle that, at various times, pits the individual
against nature, culture, society, or the art world itself. It could be argued that this
heroic tradition serves the integrity of an intensely private studio practice, which might
still have some value in maintaining the pure, individualist expression that enables
artists to serve society from a vantage point of outside observer. But in the studio of the
public sector, in the culture of visibility, such conventions of artistic practice are
challenged. My dad knows this. The audience for his work -family, neighbors, and
friends- is intimately connected to his communicative and expressive intentions.

The extensive body of artistic work from the past three decades in the compendium of
this hook at the very least expands artists' repertoires to include a more intimate and
engaged relationship with an audience. At the most, it illustrates that the modernist
model is no longer viable in a multicultural and globally interconnected world, that visual
artists are, as theorist Suzi Gablik suggests, struggling to find new roles more
appropriate to our time. The question is, can criticism match the scope of this
endeavor?