PUBLIC ART AND PUBLIC SPACE

PUBLIC ART AND PUBLIC SPACEAuthor(s): David H. FisherSource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 79, No. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 1996), pp.41-57Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41178737 .

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PUBLIC ART AND PUBLIC SPACE

David H. Fisher

Everyone is an artist. ... I am really convinced that humankind will not survive without having realized the social body, the social order, into an artwork. They will not survive.

Joseph Beuys1

Arguments Against Funding Public Art

HThese are difficult times for advocates of public art. Argu- ments against funding public art come from different points

on the spectrum of contemporary ideological politics, and they include opposition to using public money to acquire, display, or perform established "classical" works of art for publics that lack access to them, as well as support for the production or dissemination of "new" art, either in its contemporary "avant-garde"2 or its "community-based" forms.3 These arguments are voiced by lib- ertarians, populists, and neoconservatives.

Libertarian arguments reject funding for public art on the grounds that governments ought to minimize public expenditure and maximize private discretionary income. Critics of public spending as such see art as an "unnecessary frill" belonging to the realm of private choice in the best of economic times, let alone in times of a growing national deficit. Art for those who choose and can afford it!

Populist arguments take several different forms. Public funding for art is often rejected on majoritarian, preferential grounds: the art that actually gets funded is "elitist," and hence of little or no value to "ordinary people" who neither appreciate nor understand it. Populists also reject public funding on prag- matic grounds. "Ordinary people," those in the middle and lower

David H. Fisher is Professor of Philosophy at North Central College.

Soundings 79.1-2 (Spring/Summer 1996). ISSN 0038-1861.



42 SOUNDINGS David H. Fisher

ends of the socioeconomic scale, whose real interests should be the priority of government, have more pressing needs than access to art. These include equal access to jobs, housing, medical care, and education. Once again, art is a surplus good at best for those who can afford it.

Finally, contemporary neoconservatives like William Bennett adopt a complex version of Plato's argument against the poets. From this perspective, art is neither a mere "frill" nor is its value secondary to that of other institutions legitimately supported by state funds. It is rather seen as a powerful, subversive force with the potential to mislead or delude. A major problem from this point of view is that there is no clear or convincing way, in a pluralistic democracy dominated by interest-group politics, to en- sure the funding of "good" over "bad" art. Looking with jaded eyes at past NEA "excesses," such critics see two types of "bad" art crowding out the good in the funding process. Avant-garde art, such as Serrano's infamous Piss Christ, may unsettle humanistic values among the educated, leading them into either cultural rel- ativism or nihilism, and the subsequent abandonment of their responsibilities for cultural leadership.4 Community-based art, art that emerges from the experience of minority cultures or op- pressed groups or art that calls attention to dimensions of such experience, is also dangerous but for a different reason: it in- creases social divisiveness.

The problem is that the funding of community-based art sim- ply gives voice to diverse subcultures and inhibits the development of a united, strong, and widely shared common culture. Further, funding for "community-based" art inhibits the educa- tional, transformative, culturally cohesive potential of "great" art. The promotion and dissemination of community art encourages disdain among the urban "masses" for great art. Instead, they are offered politicized art of dubious or minimal aesthetic value. Through its easy simplifications of complex social issues and its ability to engage the emotions of fear and anger, community- based art sustains an impoverished sense of self and community. Art, for neoconseivative critics, should be the mandarin of man- darins, never a vehicle for the self-expression or aggrandizement of hen poloil

No single argument can meet all these objections to funding public art. What I offer here instead are explorations of alterna-



Public Art and Public Space 43

tive ways of seeing public space and art within it. I would like to move the conversation about public art beyond the current im- passe by addressing some unexamined assumptions about art itself and its potential cultural or social purposes. The conclusion towards which I believe our exploration must move is that in a divided society a new type of public art might move social aware- ness towards healing the wounds caused by unreconciled difference. This art must be noticeable, demanding public attention rather than serving as an unobtrusive background for other public activities. It should be an art that seeks to represent actual differences within society creatively rather than to depict or cre- ate a common taste. Finally, it should be a type of art not con- sumable as a private experience apart from the social and cultural context of its place.

In her introduction to a recent survey of this emerging art form, Mapping the Terrain, Suzanne Lacy calls this type of art "new genre public art." It is to be distinguished

in both form and intention from what has been called "public art" - a term. . . used to describe sculpture and installations sited in public places. Unlike much of what has heretofore been called public art, new genre public art - visual art that uses both tradition and nontraditional media to communicate and interact with a broad and diversified audience about issues directly relevant to their lives - is based on engagement.5

An Expanded Definition of Public Art

Public art potentially includes all forms of creative expression in public space. Public art may be site-specific, i.e. a product of artistic creativity designed and intended for a specific, publicly owned location like John Hemingway Duncan's granite Soldiers and Sailors' Memorial Arch,6 Richard Serra's Tilted Arc,7 John Ahern's South Bronx bronzes,8 or Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed.9 It may also be place-specific, a creative product resulting from collaboration between artists and a community like the works of the "Culture in Action Project" in Chicago. Place-specific art differs in a significant way from art that is only or primarily site-specific. This point is emphasized by Jeff Kelley in his distinction between site and place. In Kelley's terms,

site is a place for art rather than the art of place. . . a site represents the constituent physical properties of a place - its mass, space, light, duration, location, and material process - [while] a




place represents the practical, vernacular, psychological, social, cultural, ceremonial, ethnic, economic, political, and historical dimensions of a site. Sites are like frameworks. Places are what fill them out and make them work.10

Whether an artwork merely occupies a site or expresses the sense of a place, the act of placing or performing a work of creative expression in public space alters how that space is seen, and how audiences see the work; if sufficiently noticed and engaging, it may also alter the ways in which both artist and audience see themselves and their worlds. Public art and public space are inextricably linked.

Thanks to the work of ethicists like Susan Moller Okin11 and Seyla Benhabib,12 and of critical theorists in the area of cultural studies,13 it is no longer obvious that "space" can be clearly divided into "public" and "private." Writing from the perspective of aesthetics and art criticism, Suzi Gablik summarizes the conse- quences for both art and society of accepting such a strong dichotomy.

If the artist's role has become marginal in modern Western society, it is not because modern art is intrinsically defective; it is because our society has divested art of all but aesthetic value, just as it has deprived us of meaningful spiritual experience. If the disac- cord between the artist and society in modern society is to be seen as a defect, it must be understood as a social problem, due. . . to defects in the value system of modern society.

In The Reenchantment of Art she further develops a notion of a "contextual and connective aesthetic":

Within modern culture, society has been characterized as hostile to rather than a resonant environment for the self-unfolding of the individual; especially within the avant-garde, the radical artist was always "against" society. I have tried to suggest that the politics of a contextual and connective aesthetics is very different. ... A deep dualism between public and private existed within modernism, which severed any connections between them and colored our view of art as basically a "private" affair. . . ,15

If there is an unclear boundary between public and private space, the ambiguity affects the identities not only of artworks but of the artists who produce them and the several audiences that perceive and value them as well. Artists are citizens and members of various communities of reference and place as well as private individuals, and it is not always clear - either to some of the artists engaged in "new genre public art" or to the several audiences created by their work - which identity or identities




are or ought to be in play during the creative process, from initia- tion through reception. Suzanne Lacy16 illustrates these multiple identities for an artist in her diagram of a continuum of positions that highlights the interactive qualities of new genre public art:

PRIVATE PUBLIC о о о о

artist as artist as artist as artist as experiencer reporter analyst activist

In the same essay Lacy offers a diagram of concentric circles expanding outward from an inner point of "origination and responsibility" to an "audience of myth and memory" in order to illustrate the many parallel, flexible, and fluid identities and contexts for the audiences of art works.17

Seen through such lenses public space may be imagined as (1) a dead or neutral zone, (2) as a site of agonistic conflict from which citizen identities emerge and/ or as a protected safety zone sheltering individual rights, and finally, (3) as an endangered commons needed for survival in a world of cultural difference and/or a fluid medium of exchange, in which cultural identities meet, are exchanged, and receive recognition. Access, ownership, and justified purpose are variables of meaning informing these images. We might use these images and

conceptual elements taken together as a background for looking at the transformative functions of public art proposed by advocates of "new genre public art," especially the vision of art as a medium for social healing that informed the work of the

Chicago-based "Culture in Action" project. If, as Murray Edelman has recently suggested, "art is an essential and fundamental element in the shaping of political ideas and

political action," an element which "provides the cognitive and emotional resonances political actions carry, and may play a part in providing details as well,"18 then we need to be clear about the dimensions of spaces - conceptual and physical - in which such actions take place.

Imagining Public Space

From the perspective of possessive individualism19 public space is imagined as a neutral, if not a dead or empty territory. It is at




most a border or boundary, separating protected individual do- mains from each other. The value of this inert area is contingent upon what happens within the privately owned, dynamic centers of value surrounding it. Of itself, public space has no value ex- cept as a possible resource awaiting future private appropriation and development. Political liberalism by contrast has employed a diverse spectrum of images for public space, from the dynamic to the protective.

A dynamic model represents the liberal "civic" or "republican virtue" tradition. This liberal tradition appropriates Hannah Ar- endťs "agonistic" image of public life as a "guarantee against the futility of individual life, the space protected against this futility and reserved for the relative permanence. . . of mortals."20 For Arendt public space is at once an "agonistic" and an "associa- tional" field. In ¿he first sense, it is the space in which individuals compete for recognition and acclaim. In the second sense it is the place where "men act together in concert" and "freedom can appear."21

A more neutral understanding of public space in liberalism de- rives from Kant's political ideal of autonomy. This vision imagines public space as a "kingdom of ends," one in which fair mechanisms of distributive justice are needed to safeguard the interests of citizens. John Rawls's well-known heuristic device of an "original position," developed as a thought experiment to jus- tify fundamental normative beliefs about the relationship between liberty and equality, may serve as a way of imagining public space. Any existing, actual public space that is to be just must be conceptually grounded on an imagined, original public space. This "space" is to be "seen" as an a-temporal, neutral void in which discrete "points of light" co-exist without touching. The "points" are equal, free, desirous but empty individuals, self-inter- ested monads or the pre-existent souls, perhaps, of potential citizens. These "souls" must reach agreement in principle on rules of engagement that will protect their interests and govern subsequent relationships before they can descend into flesh as emer- gent occasions.

Finally, from the perspective of a politics of difference22 or critical mutliculturalism,23 the possibility of establishing clear, non- arbitrary boundaries between public and private space is ques- tioned. Public space is seen as a constantly evolving, changing




site of contested, multiple identities, affiliations, and aims from which no "private" zone can be easily fenced off. This space might be imagined in two ways: as a multicultural value "commons," and/ or a fluid medium of exchange. Like a literal village green, a multicultural "commons" is an open meeting space, one threatened by over-users and the crush of its surroundings. Here, public space is seen as fragile, as an endangered bio-socio-sphere surrounded by technological, economic, cultural, and physical pollutants. At the same time, public space may be seen in multicultural perspective as a dynamic, fluid, constantly changing body of supersaturated liquid, one that allows various "thick" and "thin" identity particles24 to combine, change color and texture for a time, and then separate, retaining their distinctive qualities even as they merge and combine into new shapes. The "commons" image suggests the concern among advocates of normative multiculturalism for a place in which established differences can meet and find recognition while the "fluid" image suggests the hope that through such meeting, rigid identity boundaries may be called into question. It is not a question of either/ or but of both/and.

Ways of Seeing Public Art

These different images for public space suggest some of the contrasting understandings of public art that inform the arguments with which we began. For possessive individualism, public art is an oxymoron, since both the beginning and ends of value are located in private space, and a minimalist, "night watchman" state has no right to appropriate private funds to enhance a mere boundary area. The elitism that often accompanies this perspective assumes that art is somehow both a mere status marker for

superior economic success and the product of "creative genius." In this vision of art as the product of genius, it is one of the few

goods unsoiled by social or economic forces, a good appropriately appreciated only by cultured elites in the privacy of their own homes.

From the liberal, civic-virtue, and Kantian traditions, public art has either a very important or a minimal role to play. For the civic-virtue tradition, the embodiment of civic ideals in visual as well as narrative form can make an important contribution to the formation of strong citizen identities. The sculptural commemo-




ration of civic leaders, for example, of historic victories over freedom's enemies, or the visual representation of central political concepts such as justice, serves to remind all who see them of civic responsibility for the common good and of the possibility of supererogatory heroism in times of trial.

In the more neutral vision of public space associated with Rawls's theory of distributive justice, public art might be justified as a background resource supporting institutional practices that foster citizen liberty and equality. However, there is no mention of art, public or otherwise, in either A Theory of Justice or the more recent Political Liberalism, and access to the time, education, or materials needed for the creation and reception of art is significantly missing from Rawls's several listings of public goods. Pub- lic space is conceptually important for Rawls as the medium in which policies of distributive justice are determined, but it is not a space in which institutions or ideas are decisively shaped by creative works.

Finally, from a perspective that values multiculturalism, public art is an essential medium for representing, placing into opposition, and linking the different persons, communities, and subcultures that form a pluralistic society. The identification and play of these in public space is one of the essential bases upon which mutual recognition - and reconciliation - in a cultural as well as a political sense becomes possible. As Charles Taylor notes,

. * .human life [has a] fundamentally dialogical character. We become fully human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression. ... I take language in a broad sense, covering not only the words we speak, but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves including the "languages" of art, of gesture, of love, and the like. But we learn these modes of expression through exchanges with others. . . . We define our identity always in dialogue with and sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us.25

Contrasting Elements of Public Space: Access, Ownership, or Justified Purpose

Public space is to be defined not in simple, binary opposition to "private" space, for the reasons given by Gablik and others, but as space to which all members of a community have access, or as




space which the community itself awns, or as space set aside for justified public purposes. Each of these "points in space" has both a literal and a figurative sense, and each has implications for defining the roles of public art.

Access implies both public physical presence in and sensory access to locations. In this sense art museums and libraries, the lobby of an office building, the court of a shopping mall, or a public park are all public spaces, since these are (usually) open to sight and movement by the public. But none of these sites is completely free or entirely open; all are subject to regulation in various ways. The homeless, for example, are rarely welcome in office lobbies or in shopping malls. They are often barely toler- ated in art museums and libraries and sometimes evicted or forced to move from public parks. So it is not clear that all members of the public have equal access to these sites. Some spaces are "open" to public view but not all are members of the public are allowed to view them. It is even less clear that creative expres- sions, other than those neutral or decorative items selected by persons in authority over these spaces, are welcomed. Perform- ance art, street theater, or sculpture that offends "community values" have all been subject to attack and prohibition in public spaces. If access means more than the possibility of viewing, if it includes or should include the possibility of placing/siting works/performances, then access is even more restricted in "public spaces."

Ownership, like access, is an ambiguous concept. In the nar- rowest, literal sense it can mean those properties to which the "public" holds title. In an expanded, figurative sense ownership implies those goods for which the public should accept responsibility, as in "owning up" to debts to veterans, to victims of injustice, to the elderly and the poor, or to future generations.26

Both access and ownership are clearly defining marks of public space, but they are subject to multiple interpretations in which the ambiguity is produced by tensions between literal and figurative meanings. The notion of justified public purpose, embodying a functional rather than a physical definition for public space, is even more open to debate. As with the other terms, there is tension between literal and figurative meanings. A minimal, "literal- ist" definition of a "justified public purpose" would be any policy that has received correct, formal legal approval, as through ma-



50 SOUNDINGS David Я. Fisher

jority votes in a city council or state legislature. While versions of this legal majoritarianism have been advocated by some contemporary political theorists, the normative views described here base their claims on more than a procedural definition of justification. Given the images for public space and the different no- tions of access and ownership each implies, whatever a political majority at a given time may decide, a justified public purpose for public space - and any items located within it - ought to be either neutral, positive, or transformative.

If social value is the product of individual, creative action that is allowed maximum liberty, then a justified purpose for public space should be as value-neutral as possible. Public space should be an open ground for as many value perspectives as possible. While minimal public expenditure might be justified to fund landscaping or strictly ornamental decoration of publicly owned land, such elements should seek neither to limit nor to define public perception. If, by contrast, social value is the joint product of active and involved citizens who must learn to balance and define their separate identities as individuals with mutual work for the common good, then public space has a positive, as opposed to a strictly neutral role to play: it must facilitate and en- courage an ongoing, open-ended conversation about appropriately political and/or civic concerns.

From the perspective of advocates of new genre public art the primary justified purposes to be served by public space and the works or performances in it are transformative. These include the mutual recognition of constitutive difference and reconciliation or healing the wounds caused to individuals, communities, and society as a whole from past failures to recognize or value difference.

The genealogy for this ideal of social change through cultural transformation is more complex than can be examined here. Its theoretical basis begins with Hegel's lectures on The Philosophy of Fine Art in 1820, in which art is understood as an expressive vehicle for Geist, one that provides the matter for subsequent philosophical reflection. This idea of the spiritual dimension of art is strongly contested by Marx's analysis of the material basis of culture, but then re-affirmed in different ways in Tolstoy's What is Arti (1898) and Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art (191 1 ) . Both authors are artists preoccupied with art as a medium for the




expression and criticism of contemporary "spirit." Contemporary authors like Suzi Gablik, Suzanne Lacy, and Jeff Kelley inherit this emphasis on art as creative praxis transforming society and as expressive of the depth of spirit. The connecting thread throughout is a notion of art as a vehicle for establishing connections at multiple levels and through varied media between persons and communities, connections believed to have the power to transform and heal. This thread is embodied today in the actual prac- tice of new genre public art.

Practicing Public Art in Public Space: "Culture in Action" as New Genre Public Art

"Culture in Action" is informed by. . . a Beusian belief in the importance of trust, empathy, and ritual, and a Beusian faith in the role of art in survival. In their projects, the artists are determined to use art to heal social ills such as racism, sexism, and many other forms of injustice. . . . Every project. . . fights neglect and indiffer- ence and works for an environment that fosters the kind of respect and trust that makes dialogue and healing possible.27

I claimed earlier that the type of public art required to serve the purposes of healing and reconciliation would be noticeable rather than unobtrusive, representative of community difference rather than a reflection of the myths of unified community, and impossible to consume as a private experience apart from its originating contexts. "New genre public art" seeks to satisfy all of these conditions: it tends to be site- and place-specific, in both a physical and a temporal sense. There is often an immediate and insistent quality in the work of art that blocks its transformation from the "cry of an occasion" (Stevens) into a permanent artifact of culture. Part of the matter of that "cry" usually concerns the articulation of difference and the pain that lack of recognition has caused to those labeled as "Other." There is often a Utopian hope embodied in the arts' dedication to a process of movement beyond a dialectic of opposition toward mutual transformation of identities in the fluid medium of a happening or an event- specific work of art.

It is not easy to represent or discuss works specified as to space and time apart from an experience of the contexts - physical, temporal, collaborative, and ideational - in which they were produced. Mapping the Terrain nevertheless attempts to docu- ment the dynamism of new genre art in an extensive annotated



52 SOUNDINGS David tf. Fisher

list of representative works at various locations throughout the United States. This base attests to the rich variety of this new genre in durability, public purposes, and aesthetic value. The last point is of particular importance, given the contemporary popu- larity of the types of arguments against public art, especially the neoconservative assault on any art or art forms that challenge modernist readings of the canons of Western art. Against the dis- missive tendency of established art critics and aestheticians to ig- nore the aesthetic value of such works, the essays by the art critics collected in Mapping the Terrain provide ample evidence of the ability of movement participants to address questions of aesthetic value linked to socio-cultural value. As Lacy remarks at the end of her introduction, the movement may represent the beginning of a paradigm shift, one in which new genre public art in public space has the potential to transform cultural meanings and experience of art in our society much as earlier avant-garde artists transformed modern understandings of art from the creativity of their private studios:

Whether it operates as symbolic gesture or concrete action, new genre public art must be evaluated in a multifaceted way. . . central to this evaluation is a redefinition that may well challenge the nature of art as we know it, art not primarily as a product but as a process of value finding, a set of philosophies, an ethical action, and an aspect of a larger sociocultural agenda.28

One recent example is suggestive of the social and aesthetic possibilities implicit in this new genre. During 1992-1993 the "Culture in Action"29 project produced a series of experiments in the urban laboratory of Chicago. All of the works or events were seen by their creators as structured, participatory experiences, intended to identify and heal divisions among different communities in the Chicago metropolitan area. Some, like Robert Peters's Naming Others: Manufacturing Yourself, were primarily verbal rather than visual. This project used public telephones at O'Hare airport, interviews, and an 800 number connected to a voice mail system in which

[c] allers were asked at each branch point to categorize themselves ("if you are a person of color, press PC; if you are a person of non- color, press NC"). Interspersed were musing on life and the nature of language and a recitation of terms collected in earlier face-to- face discussions. At the end of this self-directed voice-mail tour that mimicked passing through the social structure, participants




were invited to "name" themselves and comment on the experience of traversing this conceptual maze.30

Others, like the Eminent Domain project of Kate Ericson, Mike Ziegler, and residents at a public housing site,31 attempted to produce a final, visual product, in this case a paint-color chart developed for eventual distribution through a national hardware chain. The colors were given names such as "Home Loan," "Housing Starts," "FHA Gingerbread," and "Hull House Radi- ance" to dispel public misconceptions about public housing and its residents. Yet others involved protracted negotiations between the artist and her collaborators, city officials, property owners, and other citizens that became part of the work-as-process. In the case of Suzanne Lacy' s Full Circle, the product of this process star- tled Chicagoans in the Loop area one May morning when 100 large chunks of limestone, with attached bronze plaques bearing the names of women who had made a significant contribution to the life of the city, were placed overnight on sidewalks throughout the area.

"Culture in Action" no longer functions as an organized coali- tion of projects, although some of the civic initiatives and associa- tions begun during its brief life have continued. Perhaps more significantly, it may have begun to alter the ways in which at least some responsible for public space in Chicago think about the role of art. This is significant in a city where art has, historically, been seen either as a tourist attraction confined to museum space, the private prerogative of those who frequent art galleries and purchase art (having little or no importance for most citizens) , or as a public utility for the conventional, realistic memori- alizing of leaders.

For those who have absorbed the allegedly non-ideological, "mimetic" aesthetic of eighteenth-century salon art, the chiaro- scuro of Romanticism, or the formalist, subjectively projective aesthetic extending from Impressionism and Cubism into Ab- stract Expressionism, projects such as "Culture in Action" will seem aesthetically problematic. Given the current level of hostil- ity in Washington toward funding for the arts, it may be tempting for those who value art in a variety of forms to turn to the de- fense of "safe" art as a justification for public support. Such art is defined by its ability to remain unnoticed as an accepted if un- seen part of the socio-cultural background by satisfying conven-




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tional aesthetic standards of taste. These standards, at the popular end of the spectrum, demand only occasional, large, eye- pleasing, "blockbuster" shows of Impressionists, with didactic material limited to the "aesthetic" as opposed to socio-cultural contexts of the works on view. At the "higher" end of the spectrum of taste stands a private aesthetic of sublime moments, formed and informed by the modernism of Clement Greenberg and other critics, an aesthetic that authorizes a multiplicity of individual- ized "readings" of abstract canvases and sculpture.32 Yet if the priorities for public art implied here are cogent, such a move would be mistaken. It might secure some partial funding for some art, but at the price of continuing the division between public and private life that prevents the healing of wounds in our divided society. Or, as Joseph Beuys once proposed, it may be the case that "humankind will not survive without having realized the social body, the social order, into an artwork."

NOTES

1. The citation from Beuys is from Michael Brenson, "Healing in Time," in Culture in Action: Essays by Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Brenson, and Eva M. Olson, ed. Terry Ann R. Neff (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995) 16.

2. For recent attempts to problematize or re-frame this notion, see David Car- roll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (New York: Methuen, 1987) ; Ros- alind Krauss, "The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodern Repetition," and Hal Foster, "Re:Post," both in Art After Modernism: Re-Think- ing Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contempo- rary Art, 1984).

3. Brenson notes that "Community-based art is shaped by a particular place and particular conditions and a particular political and artistic moment. It is designed to respond to very particular situations. . . . The first require- ment is that the community-based art project benefit the community" (40) . Brenson adds that "in any consideration of art for public places, it is important to make a distinction between projects that result from collaborations between artists and communities and projects conceived by artists to call attention to communities" (40-42).

4. Versions of this belief in the responsibility of culture elites are offered by Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), and Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Nor- ton, 1973).

5. Suzanne Lacy, "Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys," in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Arty ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995) 19.

6. At the entrance of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. 7. Designed for New York's Federal Plaza and subsequently removed in re-

sponse to protests by some of those who worked in an adjacent building.



56 SOUNDINGS David H Fisher

8. Displayed in front of the 44th Police Precinct station house at the intersec- tion of Jerome, Gerard, and 169th Streets in the South Bronx September 25, 1991, and subsequently removed by the artist in response to local public protest.

9. Placed to decompose into the site at Kent State University. 10. Jeff Kelley, "Common Work," in Mapping the Terrain 142. 11. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books,

1989). 12. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in

Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992). 13. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judge-

ment Taste (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodemity (London: Blackwell, 1990); Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991); Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics Between the Mod- ern and the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1995); and the essays in Mul- ticulturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (London: Blackwell, 1994).

14. Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (London: Thames 8c Hudson, 1984) 29. 15. Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991)

169. io. Suzanne Lacy, ueDatea lern tory: lowara A L-nticai Language tor ruoiic

Art," in Mapping the Terrain 174. 17. Lacy, "Debated Territory,

" 177-80. 18. Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Con-

ceptions (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995) 6. 19. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes

to Locke (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962) for a critical account of the early modern philosophical and social origins of the perspective, and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), for a well-known positive account and contemporary exploration of the position.

20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958) 56. 21. Seyla Benhabib, Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tra-

dition, and Jürgen Habermas," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 78. Benhabib criticizes Arendt's definition as flawed by her "phenomenological essentialism" (80 ff).

22. Represented by the work of Judith Buder, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); William Corlett, Commu- nity Without Unity: A Politics of Derridean Extravagance (Durham: Duke UP, 1989); William Connolly, IdentityVHfference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) and Political Theory df Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988; 1993); Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992) and Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Decon- struction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991); Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Late-Capitalist Social Theory (Minneap- olis: U of Minnesota P, 1989); Chantal Mouffe, "American Liberalism and Its Critics: Rawls, Taylor, Sandel, and Walzer," in Praxis International 8 (1988): 193-206, and "Rawls: Political Philosophy Without Politics," in Uni- versalism vs. Communitarianism, ed. David Rasmussen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) 217-36; and Iris Marion Young.

23. See Goldberg, ed., Muliiculturalism: A Critical Reader. 24. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cam-

bridge: Harvard UP, 1989), and Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Ar-




gument at Home and Abroad (South Bend, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1994) for further development of the cultural implications of thick and thin identities.

25. Charles Taylor, Multiculiuralism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. & intro. by Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994) 32-33.

26. For both possessive individualists and adherents of Rawlsian distributive justice this tension between literal and figurative meanings of "ownership" de- marcates their opposition. Possessive individualists seek to protect claims to their private "holdings" while minimizing the extent of properties and mov- ables owned by the public. Rawlsians seek to expand common "ownership" of the need to rectify natural or socially created inequalities. Yet despite these important differences both agree in thinking of public space through the notion of ownership.

27. brenson, "Healing in lime/ m кипите m Action ai. 28. Lacy, "Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys," Mapping the Terrain

46. 29. A project of a local group of artists, local community leaders, and others

founded in 1989, called "Sculpture Chicago." 30. Robert Peters with Mushroom Pickers, Ghosts, and other Others, "Naming

Others: Manufacturing Yourself," in Culture in Actwn 98. 31. Kate Ericson, Mike Ziegler, and A Resident Group of Ogden Court Apart-

ments, "Eminent Domain," in Culture in Action 122-31. 32. The fate that befell the work of abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko is

instructive in this regard. Their creators often situated themselves on the political left but their "sublime" products were appropriated by wealth advocates of right-wing individualism for personal enjoyment!



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PUBLIC ART AND PUBLIC SPACE