The "People Like You On The Street" Problem

I got a lot of good advice in graduate school. But the critique with the longest shelf life came from Steve Fagin, who watched about a third of a videotape of me doing bad performance art and, visibly agitated, kinda shouted that I should stop the tape. That he had watched enough. That "people have better things to do than deal with people like you on the street!"

That was it.

More useful words have never been spoken to me in a one-on-one context by anyone. Ever. I refer to this critique all the time. It reveals so much truth about how context works, and how arrogant artists are being when they think they can pole-vault over context. I don't just mean artists like you and me. I mean everybody. Serra is a god, but that doesn't change the fact that people had better things to do than deal with Tilted Arc.

I am interested in public art because this criticism infected me--because it is more deeply true than anything anyone else has ever said to me about public art. It wastes no effort on the idea that everyone should want art or that art is inherently good. It firmly declares that the artist hasn't any business acting like a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness.

An artist in public, then, is an artist that engages the street on the street's terms--or the campus on the terms of the campus itself, or the sculpture park as a park and not as a grassy gallery. The best public artists understand and trade on this relationship and actively deploy context.

Of course a painting goes unappreciated on a street

! A painting on the street is an obstacle!

Comments

[Pretty Lady]

Whenever I start thinking about public art, I start thinking about gardens instead. I have almost never seen a piece of public art that was better than a garden with some comfortable benches and a fountain.

Swoons work is possibly an exception to that statement, however. I've been stalking her work with a digital camera for years; I like how they're basically biodegradable, and how the intricacy of the paper is so heedlessly thrown to the harsh elements of the world. That's a non-egoic artist.

[cjagers]

Very true. Another example of this same thing was just written about in the washington post, where they set up an experiment:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html?referrer=digg

Makes you want to cry...