Question

Temporality and Public Art -By Patricia C. Phillips

mmutability is valued by society. There is a desire for a steadfast art that expresses permanence through its own perpetualness. Simultaneously, society has a conflicting predilection for an art that is contemporary and timely, that responds to and reflects its tempo- ral and circumstantial context. And then there is a self-contradicting longing that this fresh spontaneity be protected, made invulnerable to time, in order to assume its place as historical artifact and as concrete evidence of a period's passions and priorities. For the Venice Biennale in 1986, Krzysztof Wodiczko projected a collaged photographic image of a 35mm camera, a gun belt with a grenade, and a large tank for several hours onto the base of the 600-year-old campanile in the Piazza San Marco. Besides providing a critique of tourism and politics, Wodiczko's project offered a potent dialectic on the ambivalent requirements for stability and preserva- tion, and change and temporality. To make these points, it required both the unyielding permanence of the campa- nile and the ephemerality of projected light. Public art is about such dynamic issues; public life embodies such contradictions.

The late twentieth century has thrown these questions of time and expectation, change and value into high relief. It is an accelerated, acquisitive, and acquiescent age in which the pres- ence of enduring objects has become as quixotic as time itself. What is substan- tial-what is coveted and depended on with some certainty, what endures across generations-is often no longer expressed or communicated by the same symbols. The visual environment trans- poses as rapidly as the actions of the mind and the eye. In both private and public life the phenomenological dimensions of indeterminacy, change, and the temporary require aggressive assimila- tion, not because they are grim, una- voidable forces but because they suggest potential ideas and freedoms.

Coming to grips with the temporary does not require a fast, desperate embrace of absolute relativity; both strong lessons and substantial ideas can be discovered in the synapses, the alter- natives that occur between, and concep- tually connect, discrete phenomena. The reality of ephemerality is perhaps most persuasively and unmistakably felt in the vast public landscape. The private can offer some quiet refuge, some con- stancy of routine, but public life has become emblematic not of what is shared by a constituency but of the restless, shifting differences that com- pose and enrich it. Public life is both startlingly predictable and constantly surprising. As Richard Sennett and others have suggested,2 the private is a human con- dition, but the public is invented-and re-created by each generation. In retro- spect, there has been a discernible public life in most societies throughout time, but the idea of public is mutable and flexible. The notion of public may, indeed, be the most quixotic idea encountered in contemporary culture. It is redefined not just by the conspicuous adjustments of political transition and civic thought but by the conceptions of private that serve as its foil, its comple- ment, and, ultimately, its texture. The challenge for each person is to uphold this dynamic interplay of personal and public identity, to embrace the often stimulating and always difficult nature of this important dialogue, and to be as fully engaged in the world as with one's own psychic territory.

These developmental ideas about the public frequently run parallel to the current enthusiasms for public art that have overrun most cities and towns in the United States. It is as if the literature and legacy of the public process and the interest in public art production were separate entities, spontaneous eruptions uninformed by, and perhaps unaware of, the other. Discussions of public art frequently consider specific communities but rarely the public at large. There seems to be an implicit assumption that everybody knows what "public" means, and concerns turn to more observable, more easily calculable issues. Much has been said about the failures or successes of public art, but very little about the philosophical ques- tions a public art may raise or illu- minate, or even about whether the idea of a public art requires significant intel- lectual inquiry and justification in the first place. I think that the problem is that public art has sought to define itself without assembling all of the data and before entertaining all of the complex and potent variables it must accept and can express. Public art has been too often applied as a modest antidote or a grand solution, rather than perceived as a forum for investigation, articulation, and constructive reappraisal. Although it is at an exploratory stage, public art is treated as if it were a production of fixed strategies and principles.

One way that artists and agencies can continue to generate public art and remain analytical about its purpose, its composition, and how it is to be distinguished (or not) from other crea- tive enterprises is to support more short- lived experiments in which variables can be changed and results intelligently and sensitively examined. Public art requires a more passionate commitment to the temporary-to the information culled from the short-lived project. This pro- posal is offered not as an indictment of or indifference to permanent public art, but rather as an endorsement of alterna- tives. The temporary not only has a certain philosophical currency, but it permits art production to simulate the idea of the research laboratory. This proposal is conservative: a suggestion to take time, to study, to try more modest projects, to express what is known about the contemporary condition. It requires a comprehension of value based on ideas and content rather than on lasting forms, a flexibility of procedures for making and placing art, and a more inventive and attentive critical process. In his book on geological time, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle,3 Stephen Jay Gould explores the dual nature of time in Western thought: temporality is experienced both cyclically and consecu- tively. The Western mind relies on con- ceptions of time that explain both the security of constancy and continuity and the stimulation of progress and change. The public is shaped by similar coinci- dental and contradictory ideas. People return cyclically to annual public events even when these seem empty and reflex- ive; they provide a fixed point of refer- ence. But public life must also accom- modate the actions of progress; on this depends the enhancement of democratic values and the enrichment of life. Linearity enables the public to rally its strength and vision to work for improvement and revision. These opposing conceptions of temporality are intrinsically connected to public life-to expectations that guide actions, to the events and occurrences that constantly define and transform experience. And these potent, problematic ideas are what art has traditionally addressed through its formal and temporal manifestations. Public art is like other art, but it is potentially enriched and amended by a multiplicity of philosophical, political, and civic issues. It need not seek some common denominator or express some common good to be public, but it can provide a visual language to express and explore the dynamic, temporal condi- tions of the collective. Clearly, public art is not public just because it is out of doors, or in some identifiable civic space, or because it is something that almost everyone canapprehend; it is public because it is a manifestation of art activities and strategies that take the idea of public as the genesis and subject for analysis. It is public because of the kinds of questions it chooses to ask or address, and not because of its accessibility or volume of viewers. This is, of course, a far more difficult and obscure definition of public art, and the methods and intentions of production and criticism are less pre- dictable, more unruly. It requires a com- mitment to experimentation-to the belief that public art and public life are not fixed. There are many variables; time is perhaps the most crucial and the least frequently addressed.

If the "public" in public art is construed not as the audience for the art but as the body of ideas and subjects that artists choose to concentrate on, then public art cannot be examined for its broadness of communication, for its popular reception, for its sensitive siting. A temporal public art may not offer broad proclamations; it may stir controversy and rage; it may cause confusion; it may occur in nontraditional, marginal, and private places. In such an art the conceptual takes precedence over the more obvious circumstantial. Public art is about the idea of the commons-the physical configuration and mental landscape of American public life. The commons was frequently a planned but sometimes a spontaneously arranged open space in American towns, but its lasting significance in cultural history is not so much the place it once held in the morphology of the city as the idea it became for the enactment and refreshment of public life-its dynamic, often conflicting expressions.

Summarize the article in your own terms. DO NOT PLAGIARIZE.  

Critique the article. This is where you can state your opinion on what you have read- what did you agree with? What did you dislike about what you read?

Lastly, reflect upon the article.

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) Summary – Patricia Phillips begins with talking about a certain contrast within the art community. She talks about how perpetual art is equally in demand as a piece that might be considered modern and contemporary.

Phillips goes on to talk about how this duality in demand comes from the duality in life itself. She talks about how today there is both permanence and mutation in life. She further compares it to private life which doesn’t change as much and as quickly as public life. Phillips believes that the kind of art that is demanded is reminiscent of the time we live in and the kind of life that we need to represent.

In other words, she says that even though popular art forms are changing, it is still that an artist is expected to passionately express what life in the current times is like. This is something unchanging in the ever-changing art world.

Critique – The points that Patricia Phillips has put across are indeed valid. Since the time of the Italian Renaissance in Florence, Da Vinci and his contemporaries painted scenes of trade docks, life in the upper class. Also, the everyday life of the common folk was the subject of paintings, stories etc.

At the time of Picasso, the World Wars were a popular subject. The artists at the time focused on the distress of common life. Soon after these wars, the works of artists like Andy Warhol, Dali etc became popular. These were pieces based on finding beauty in ordinary, beauty in the surreal etc. Basically, these were the artists who belonged to a generation that was fed up with war. They would rather frame a picture of a soup can, than an army of troops on a battlefield. Art is changing because the times are continuously changing. This consistent thing about art is that it is consistently changing with the times.

Reflection – Since time is a consistent construct that is ever changing and non-recurring, it is so that art is like time. Art is constantly a representation of the time, art constantly changes according to the time and art even though vintage, will have some essence of the time that it is in. That is a dichotomy of mutability and constancy all in one medium.