Public Art in Critical Perspective

Alex Baker

Nineteen sixty-seven marks a watershed for public art in this country. In that year, the National Endowment for the Arts established the Art in Public Places program whose goal was to give the public access to the best art of our time outside museum walls (Jacob 1995: 53). Subsequently, states and cities followed the federal precedent with percent-for-art-programs. While Art in Public Places signified the first time contemporary art left the museum in full force, it had a limited conception of public. In other words, audience was simply not addressed in selecting works for outside display. Expert panels made these decisions. Public art was conceived along the same lines as modern museum art-as the creation of individual artists. Thus, the personal working method of the artist was stressed over public values. Controversy centered on art style rather than whether art addressed a definable public. Inevitably, the museum experience was replicated outdoors by simply enlarging an artwork and dropping it on particular sites.

Public art was and continues to be an integral part in urban redevelopment strategies. Very few artists or thinkers have even suggested to contextualize public art within a broader urban framework. It is cities where public art is found and public art as it is practiced today came to fruition at a particular moment in time-the urban renewal of the 1960s. Art is seen as a way to revitalize cities by enhancing public spaces and "public" private spaces such as plazas, parks and corporate headquarters at a time when businesses and residents are vacating central business districts for the suburbs. The idea of a "public" private space is on oxymoron only if we idealistically claim discrete and opposing private and public spheres. This is actually a false dichotomy. Since the advent of urban renewal, these distinctions have become increasingly blurry. Little effort has been made to beautify urban areas outside of downtown business districts, the very places where the majority of urban populations now live. At worst, public art is complicit with repressive urban planning strategies, either endorsing irresponsible development and community displacement or serving as a diversion, distracting attention away from a contentious site (Phillips 1995:63-64).

In 1974, the NEA added the stipulation that public art should be appropriate to a given site. Thus, public art began to move away from the monumental "plunk art" that was often seen at odds with its context and adopted any permanent medium including earthworks, environmental art, and non-traditional art like artificial lighting (Lacy 1995:23). Site-specific work appeared poised to engage audiences through more direct means in its increasing attention focused on historical, ecological, and sociological aspects of sites. However, as Suzanne Lacy points out, site specific public art usually only addressed such issues metaphorically, and continued to replicate the museum experience.

Yet, even site-specific public art would still take on the gargantuan proportions of its "plunk art" predecessors, as was the case with Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981). The Titled Arc controversy and its removal in 1989 radically changed the discourse on public art. After Tilted Arc, it was obvious that the people who were to live and work near public art must have some role in the selection of the artist and in the discussion of the evolution of the artwork. Despite Serra's interest in engaging audiences to think critically about the working conditions in and around the federal building and plaza where the artwork was situated, the artist thought little about the reality of the office worker confronting daily a 120 foot long 12 foot tall rusting metal wall.

Thus, public art over the past twenty years has been inherently problematic. It seems contradictory that just as social theorists announce the death of the public sphere, questioning historical models that envision a public as a homogenous, compliant group of engaged, reasonable actors (ala Jürgen Habermas), public art springs forth. But perhaps this is not a contradiction, but more evidence of the crisis: the "public" of public art is an ideological construction, an imagined community conjured into existence in order to satisfy the needs of particular interests. Today, public art is still firmly attached to the apparatus of redevelopment and must be placed within the context of the consumer-service landscape in order to be better understood.

Redevelopment and the Postindustrial City

Redevelopment is certainly not a new phenomenon. Philadelphia, for example, has undergone numerous changes over the past two hundred and fifty years. The alteration of William Penn's grid system to accommodate population increase through the partitioning of residential plots by adding alleys between main streets on the grid; the development of the new city center at Broad and Market streets with the construction of City Hall in the post-Civil War era; and the construction of Benjamin Franklin Parkway in the early 20th century all represent attempts to "overcome the past, remove obsolete structures, and stimulate economic growth" (Adams, et. al. 1991: 101). Still, there are significant differences between redevelopment efforts of pre- and post-World War II Philadelphia, indeed in most any American city. The most obvious difference is that all of the redevelopment projects undertaken before 1945 were driven by the growth and industrialization of the city and those thereafter were undertaken in the absence of industrial growth (Adams, et. al 1991: 103).

David Harvey has been an important figure in arguing how capitalist accumulation affects the production of space. Now that industry as we once knew it is everywhere in decline, Harvey argues that an important shift has taken place: cities are now marked by consumption, not production, thus altering urban space. The crisis conditions of the 1930s, which marked the beginning of the end for the industrial age, shifted the flow of investment to an obsolete urban infrastructure in desperate need of revitalization. Cities once presented as the workshops of industry were transformed into "centers for the artificial stimulation of consumption" (Harvey quoted in Gottdiener 1985: 94). According to Harvey, suburban sprawl, individual modes of consumption, and owner occupancy are all recent phenomena which owe their origins to the need to stimulate consumption in the wake of industrial decline. Yet, before consumption can be "artificially stimulated," the city must be presented as the kind of place attractive to consumers. Redevelopment, in the lexicon of contemporary urban discourse, therefore, is the catalyst for consumption, a means to stimulate economic growth in the absence of industrialization.

As Ernst Mendel has pointed out, advanced capitalism precipitates the marriage of public and private interest at unprecedented levels. This is especially pronounced in urban redevelopment strategies. No matter how large federal, state or local start-up grants may be, it is ultimately investors who determine the success of the project. It is important to stress that both Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey have been instrumental in revealing that space is ultimately the arena in which capitalism plays itself out (Lefebvre 1991; Harvey 1978). Lefebvre argues that space is a productive force that generates economic power, not simply a tool or means of production reflecting the economy. The spatial order controls the inherent contradictions of society for the benefit of those in power. According to Lefebvre, capitalism maintains itself by using space as a reinforcer of the relations necessary for its survival. Like Lefebvre, Harvey argues that capitalism is best understood as a spatial-geographical process. Harvey embeds the city in what Soja calls "the restless geographical landscape of capitalism" (1995:102). Within this restless landscape, the city is part of a complex and contradiction laden space that both "enhances and inhibits, provides new room and imprisons, offers solutions, but soon beckons to be destroyed" (Soja 1995: 102).

The Symbolic Economy and the Landscape of Consumption

However, capitalism itself has greatly changed, as Mandel has argued, and as any person who has lived from the middle of the 20th century to the present can testify. As the economy has shifted from one of production to one of consumption, the commodification of culture takes center stage. Fredric Jameson, following Mandel's conception of late capitalism, argues that culture, from contemporary art to music videos, has become the new arena in which commodity production plays itself out (Jameson 1991). As Sharon Zukin remarks, "the word culture has become an abstraction for any economic activity that does not create material products like steel, cars, or computers" (Zukin 1995: 12). Tourism, museum exhibitions, art, gourmet food, and the notion of "lifestyle," and the marketing and advertising strategies attached to each, play increasingly important roles in the consumer economy.

According to David Harvey, urban spectacle has greatly changed since the 1960s. In that decade, spectacle was equated with protest and riots, or at least boisterous rock concerts in public places. Now, urban spectacle is characterized by consumption in privately controlled settings, like waterfront developments, indoor-outdoor markets, malls and other retail-entertainment spaces (Harvey 1989: 88-92). It appears that even a fairly orthodox Marxist like Harvey is willing to entertain the idea that cultural, lifestyle and other consumer activities (museum going and fine dining, for example) are important drivers of the service economy, and not mere superstructural phenomena. If services have become commodities, so have images. Baudrillard has even argued that Marx's analysis of commodity production is obsolete because capitalism is now concerned with the production of signs, images, and sign systems rather than commodities themselves (Baudrillard 1981). Harvey, of course, does not wish to give up the Marxist project-images may displace goods, but those images are still bought and sold like any other commodity (Harvey 1989: 285-288). Whether one agrees with Baudrillard's unbridled pessimism and fascination with empty spectacle and his assertion regarding the inadequacies of Marxism, one cannot ignore the role the economy of images play in contemporary American cities.

Sharon Zukin, in a sense, uses Baudrillard's idea of capitalist image production and applies it to the postindustrial city, articulating a relationship between images and the production of space. She is interested in two important issues: the differential access social groups have in "real" space as well as symbolic spaces. She writes: "To ask 'Whose City?' suggests more than a politics of occupation; it also asks who has a right to inhabit the dominant image of the city" (Zukin 1996:43). Zukin is highly aware of the importance of Marxist political economy, but willing to engage in issues of representation and cultural production. The material reproduction of society depends on the material reproduction of space; and land, labor and capital are prime factors in this process of reproduction.

Yet, the production of space depends on symbolic considerations: what and who should and should not be visible; concepts of order and disorder; and an interplay between aesthetics and function. As cities have developed service economies, they have "both propagated and been taken hostage by an aesthetic urge" (Zukin 1996: 44). With the disappearance of local manufacturing, culture is increasingly the business of cities. The cultural consumption of art, gourmet food, fashion, and music, and tourism, which often packages them all, are the armature on which the city's symbolic economy rests. Art, or at least an aestheticizing impulse (historic preservation, for example), is a chief player in the postindustrial symbolic economy. That economic redevelopment plans have focused on museums, such as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, or on districts devoted to art, Philadelphia's Avenue of the Arts, underscores the relevance of Zukin's argument. Public art is inextricably tied to redevelopment and both must be linked to Zukin's idea of the urban aestheticizing impulse. It seems increasingly obvious, Zukin maintains, that the symbolic economy of images and representation have real economic power.

According to Zukin, art and artists increasingly serve the interests of a service economy. Artists constitute a labor pool of creative people who want part-time, flexible employment, which will not interfere with their "real" job of making art. Artists play a significant role in announcing the triumph of the new service economy. Zukin writes, "Their visibility in forms of the built environment, in public art, art galleries, museums and studios, emphasizes the moral distance from old, dirty uses of space in a manufacturing economy" (Zukin 1996:44-45). Indeed, artists and bohemians often pave the way for the gentrification of urban space by being the first to move into former industrial areas. The redevelopment of old manufacturing and wholesale districts, and the public art projects that validate those spaces as ascendant, chic, and worthy of visitation, certainly functions within this symbolic-service economy. Thus, "[v]isual representation became a means of financially re-presenting the city" (Zukin 1996:45).

Following the general argument put forth by both Jameson and Baudrillard, Zukin inverts the Marxist idea of base and superstructure: in the postindustrial economy, culture produces goods and services. One of the axioms of Marxism is that only economic surpluses can generate artistic and cultural activities. Today, the presence and marketing strategies of cultural institutions establish competitive advantages over other cities for attracting business.

Confirming Jameson's argument that postmodern art is no longer scandalous, but is one with official public culture, Zukin argues that recent public art projects have aided in precipitating the redevelopment of urban space (Jameson 1991: 4; Zukin 1995: 17-19). In New York City, temporary public art installations along 42nd Street served as interim cultural outposts in vacant peep show and pornographic movie houses vacated by the state's right of eminent domain during the real estate recession of the early 1990s, before Disney moved in. According to Zukin, the installations drew so much favorable attention from both a general and contemporary art audience that major corporate interests took notice. Disney renovated and opened the New Amsterdam Theater and adjacent Disney store in May 1997.

Just as artists served as inadvertent pioneers in the yuppification and redevelopment of the new frontier of the Lower East Side, as Neil Smith has argued, artists did the same for 42nd Street (Smith 1992). But in redeveloped Times Square, the new urban space is not even intended for wealthy residents, but for tourists. While the original New Amsterdam Theater was essentially an escape from business, Herbert Muschamp argues that the "restored New Amsterdam is business itself, a building integral to the economy of tourism and mass media on which New York's economy now largely depends" (Muschamp 1997: 39). Zukin's inversion of Marxism rings true: images and symbols emanating from the imagineers at Disney, generate capital in postindustrial New York. In New York, Disney serves as an important building block of the city's economic base, one increasingly reliant on providing services, in this instance, to tourists.

Theorizing the Public in Public Art

In order to understand public art's role in redevelopment we need to examine how the term "public" is used by those who deploy it. We must understand "public" as it functions ideologically within the discourse of redevelopment. By evoking the public good and concretizing it in the form of art, redevelopment is able to mask and neutralize the interests of social groups that threaten the harmony that goes hand in hand with hegemonic definitions of "public." Thus, we need to come to terms with the fact that "public" is not a real category, but is always contested and fragmented, despite redevelopment's claim that the public is unified. As Craig Owens remarks, "'The public' is a discursive formation susceptible to appropriation by the most diverse--indeed, opposed--ideological interests" (Owens 1987:18). Indeed, the term's biggest pitfall is its claim to unity and harmony in the face of inevitable exclusion.

Conclusion

As a form of advanced capitalist urbanism, redevelopment serves the needs of the professional class who inhabit the postindustrial city. Public spaces such as parks are redeveloped to suit the desires and tastes of upper-tier service economy workers; lower income people are not conceived as part of the design strategy. According to Rosalyn Deutsche, we need to understand the redevelopment of contemporary urban spaces within the context of postindustrial society since redevelopment assists in facilitating the restructuring of the economy from one of production to consumption. Deutsche argues that the redevelopment of the financial sector in major cities such as New York, displaced residents creating homeless people exiled by the service economy. Homeless people and the new public places are not distinct from one another other, but are rather dual products of the contemporary production of urban space (Deutsche 1996:279). Public art, as an aspect of redevelopment, seeks to produce the opposite impression. "Under several unifying banners-historical continuity, preservation of cultural tradition, civic beautification, utilitarianism-official public art collaborated with architecture and urban design to create an image of new urban sites that suppressed their conflictual character" (Deutsche 1996:279). Thus, public art can collaborate with gentrifying planning practices to make places appear more public than they actually are, acting as a kind of public relations agent for redevelopment.

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