Sustainability and the City by Lauren Curtright Doris Bremm & Doris Bremm

Author:Lauren Curtright,Doris Bremm & Doris Bremm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 8

The Erosion of the Cultural Commons and the Possibilities of Participatory Urbanism

Public Art in New Orleans, Detroit, and Port-au-Prince

Joseph Donica

Public art almost always has to struggle with the contradictions of its own definition. The public is rarely consulted on art built in its name even though the public has to contend with that art’s meaning on a daily basis while moving through the city. Terms like “democracy” and “participation” are thrown around by architects, artists, and designers. But publics are rarely confused regarding the irony of the use of those terms since those publics give consent neither to the space in which it is built nor the design of the art built in their name. The lack of participation by the public in competitions for public art mirrors the lack of representation that many communities have in the urban spaces that they use. Many urban centers have conducted design competitions in which candidates’ submissions are chosen without any information about the designers’ identities being given to the judges. Two of these stand out as extremely contentious in the history of public art in the United States: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., designed by Maya Lin; and the 9/11 Memorial and new World Trade Center site in New York City. A design competition provides a nod to concepts like democracy and participation, but competitions like these serve to reveal the inherent contradictions and complexities of these terms and their interactions with the contemporary urban fabric, made up of powerful agencies and firms and the publics who are left to deal with the built environment that those institutions decide to construct. So, the “public” of public art often acts as a screen to mask private interests. In this essay, I address the challenges that public space has faced—especially after disasters—and what public art in three cities has done to respond to those challenges and reinvigorate the concept of shared public space.

The recent reframing of the idea of a public—as something other than everyone who uses a space—has its roots in urban planning after the destruction that World War II brought on Europe and the reignited interest in cosmopolitan civic values to act as a guard against state violence on its citizens. After World War II, the use of modern sculpture for memorials seemed out of step with the public’s renewed interest in shared civic values. And not until the Vietnam Memorial did the public see a place for modern sculpture for memorials—the reason why Lin’s memorial looms large over any discussion of contemporary memorials.1 Toward the end of the twentieth century, art’s relationship to its own site of creation, as well as to those who interact with it, became more integral to its meaning and importance. Lin’s memorial was important because it stood on the National Mall. Art placed in a museum, in many ways, is art without a context. The physical permanence and connection to public space is what gives public art its particularly strong political and social possibilities.

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