Ms Porter
Approaches to Public Art September 21st, 2012
Approaches to Public Art September 21st, 2012
(Art)
History/Material-Rebecca Warren
Context
(Site-Specific)/Materials- Rachel Whiteread
Viewer
Participation/Interaction-Franz West
Natural
Environments/Process- Elke Lehman
Natural
Environment/Context/Site Specific- Brian Tolle
Re-Contextualize
(Make your own context)- Andrea Zittel
Materials-Allan
McCollum
***Extra:
Sound as Sculpture
Question:
Reflect
on the various ways that artists approach space, context, natural environments,
viewer participation/interaction, architecture, (art)history, materials, global
issues (politics, sociology, political, anatomical…)
Here
are a some artists/websites that I look at when I need to do research or am
looking for the ways in which artists approach making public art. I would like
to show these artists and their work to you not to give you concrete examples
of artwork to copy, but to give you an idea of different working methods and
the ways in which professional artists generate ideas.
The Public Art Fund
The
Public Art Fund which is based in New York City and which provides a huge
budget and creative support for artists to undertake public art projects that
are installed around the city of New York and its burroughs every year.
The Highline
“The
High Line is a public park built on an historic freight rail line elevated
above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side. It is owned by the City of New
York, and maintained and operated by Friends of the High Line. Founded in 1999
by community residents, Friends of the High Line fought for the High Line’s
preservation and transformation at a time when the historic structure was under
the threat of demolition.”
“Presented
by Friends of the High Line, High Line Art commissions and produces public art
projects on and around the High Line. Founded in 2009, High Line Art presents a
wide array of artwork including site-specific commissions, exhibitions,
performances, video programs, and a series of billboard interventions. Curated
by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Curator & Director of High
Line Art, and produced by Friends of the High Line, High Line Art invites
artists to think of creative ways to engage with the uniqueness of the
architecture, history, and design of the High Line and to foster a productive
dialogue with the surrounding neighborhood and urban landscape. “
I
immediately thought of the Highline art projects when thinking about your
future space because the nature of the greenspace will be multi-functional and
unique in its context/location. The work
exhibited on the Highline is very diverse and responds to the history,
architecture, design and/or users of the space in a way that I predict the work
we make will respond to the school and its occupants.
1 Art History-The Figure-Statuesque (the
figure—the ‘student body’)
The
statue used to be the only form of public art, it appeared in almost every city
that had money to make a public artwork, commissioned by the city to honor a
historical or present member of the community. The public art fund has an
exhibition called Statuesque which explores the ways in which contemporary
artists deal with the human figure and traditional statue-making materials.
When thinking about this project, I like to think about the term used
universally in schools; ‘The student body’. I invite you to brainstorm how we
could represent the student body in the artwork at Hugh McRoberts. What does
that term actually mean and what visual representation denotes its
characteristics? How could we represent ‘student body’ with new context and/or form?
About
the Exhibition
“The
term “statuesque” suggests attributes of classical beauty, elegance, and
proportion. The statue was, at one time, the model of artistic form. But the
classical statue is now a historical style, evoking an earlier era. This
exhibition of recent works by six international artists poses the question of
what it means for a contemporary sculpture to be like a statue. How do today’s
artists draw upon and reinvent this tradition?
Featuring Pawel Althamer (b.1967, Warsaw, Poland), Huma Bhabha (b.1962, Karachi, Pakistan), Aaron Curry (b.1972, San Antonio, TX), Thomas Houseago (b.1972, Leeds, England), Matthew Monahan (b.1972, Eureka, CA), and Rebecca Warren (b.1965, London, England), Statuesque brings these sculptors together as a group for the first time. Despite their highly individual styles, shared characteristics also emerge. The exhibition signals a resurgence of interest in the human figure among young sculptors. At the same time, none of the artists work in a naturalistic style, preferring to reference the figure rather than to replicate it. They often use the materials of monumental sculpture, such as bronze, but in ways that retain a sense of spontaneity and even fragility. Their figurative forms are built or assembled by hand rather than cast from live models or appropriated from popular culture. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, these sculptures embody the realms of myth, dream, and fantasy. Their artistic references range from Ancient Egyptian and African sculpture to works by Michelangelo, Rodin, and Picasso. By turns colossal, complex, dazzling, and confronting, their impact is visceral, charging one of art’s most traditional subjects with a renewed sense of expressive potential and contemporary relevance.”
Featuring Pawel Althamer (b.1967, Warsaw, Poland), Huma Bhabha (b.1962, Karachi, Pakistan), Aaron Curry (b.1972, San Antonio, TX), Thomas Houseago (b.1972, Leeds, England), Matthew Monahan (b.1972, Eureka, CA), and Rebecca Warren (b.1965, London, England), Statuesque brings these sculptors together as a group for the first time. Despite their highly individual styles, shared characteristics also emerge. The exhibition signals a resurgence of interest in the human figure among young sculptors. At the same time, none of the artists work in a naturalistic style, preferring to reference the figure rather than to replicate it. They often use the materials of monumental sculpture, such as bronze, but in ways that retain a sense of spontaneity and even fragility. Their figurative forms are built or assembled by hand rather than cast from live models or appropriated from popular culture. Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, these sculptures embody the realms of myth, dream, and fantasy. Their artistic references range from Ancient Egyptian and African sculpture to works by Michelangelo, Rodin, and Picasso. By turns colossal, complex, dazzling, and confronting, their impact is visceral, charging one of art’s most traditional subjects with a renewed sense of expressive potential and contemporary relevance.”
2 Rachel Whiteread: Water Tower 2006—Monumental in a new way
…Material, Location Specific, Changing form of
a regular object into the irregular and noteworthy
“Water
Tower, a translucent resin cast of
the interior of a 12'2" high by 9' wide wooden water tank, was raised 7
stories to rest upon the steel tower frame of a SoHo rooftop. Water Tower
was visible from street level at the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street.
Situated among two functioning water tanks, it was described by the artist as a
"jewel in the Manhattan skyline." On a cloudy day, the weathered
surface of the original tank's interior was visible, providing a ghostly form.
In bright sunlight the translucent resin became a beacon of refracted light,
and at night the unlit sculpture disappeared against the darkened sky. Poetic
yet incongruous, Whiteread's Water Tower powerfully represented a need
for public sculpture to be physically present yet ephemeral. Water Tower is now in the permanent
collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.”
Given
that the future space will be occupied by bodies more often than not, I looked
to an artist named Franz West who is famous for making work that is
‘touchable’. Not only is it ‘touchable’
but he believes that his work is not actualized until a viewer uses it and
thus, ‘activates’ it. Because of this
his sculpture sits on a border somewhere between three-dimensional objects and
performance. The audience, who ‘utilize’ his art in their own creative manner,
becomes the performer.
3 Franz West—Monumental sculpture that is interactive-touchable, specific to the viewer not the site
“Belonging
to the generation of artists exposed to Actionist and Performance Art of the
1960s and 70s, West instinctively rejected the traditionally passive nature of
the relationship between artwork and viewer. In the seventies, he began making
a series of small, portable, mixed media sculptures called Adaptives
(Passstücke). These “ergonomically inclined” objects become complete as
artworks only when the viewer holds, wears, carries or performs with them. West
has continued to explore sculpture in terms of an ongoing dialogue of actions
and reactions between viewers and objects in any given exhibition space. His amorphous
and highly endearing sculptures transform public spaces into sociable aesthetic
environments while his furniture designs and subversive collages further
challenge the boundaries between art and life.”
The
future artwork could operate in much the same fashion, in either a direct
physical connection or through the manipulation of the architecture in the
space. Architecture is essentially sculpture that we use, functional sculpture,
where the user becomes the performer in any given space through the use of the
space. The people using space--- think of them and their function as a
performance.
***See attached Franz West jpegs.
4 Universality,
Time Specific
Elke Lehmann:
Black and White Tree 2002, Subtle Material, Time Specific, Process
Focused
“For Black
and White Tree, a site-specific project at MetroTech Center, Lehmann has
focused on a single tree, one of the dozens of trees that line the perimeter of
the Commons. Lehmann made black-and-white photographic reproductions of the
tree's leaves, undertaking a meticulous process of cutting the leaves and affixing
a wire stem to each one. In autumn, before the leaves begin to drop, every
natural leaf on the tree will be paired with a black-and white duplicate,
creating leaf clusters that resemble x-ray versions of the real thing. As the
natural leaves fall, the reproductions will become increasingly dominant and,
in the winter months, the tree will be a shadow version of itself, covered only
with colorless leaves.”
5 Context Specific
Brian Tolle, Waylay 2002, Non material
(technology), Ordinary occurrence, draws attention but not in a un-usual way
“Bow
Bridge is the white 19th-century cast iron landmark spanning the Central Park
Lake. There, beneath the bridge, Brian Tolle presented Waylay, a series
of scattered splashes which appeared to be caused by someone skipping a rock
across the water. Created by an invisible underwater system of compressed air
valves, this piece had both a playful and ghostly presence, subtly disrupting
the everyday calm of the lake.
6 Create your own context/re-contextualize
Andrea Zittel- Indy Island
"Indy
Island", commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art for their
"100 Acres" Art and Nature Park, is a fully inhabitable
experimental living structure that examines the daily needs of contemporary
human beings. The island is being occupied over the course of four summers by
commissioned "residents" who adapt and modify it's structure
according to their individual needs, while also serving as "hosts" in
order to facilitate public viewing of the work.
Living
experiments/re-designs/structures
Mobile
compartment units, furniture components that allow an individual to live within
any environment, every new location become site specific.
7 Allan McCollum-take something from another location and
relocate it = new significance and meaning( inside and put it outside)
Allegories
Allan
McCollum. Allégories, 2000.
Stone, polyester resin, pigment. Five new copies of five deteriorated and
mutilated 18th century statues from the grounds of the abandoned Château
Bonnier de la Mosson, Montpellier, France, installed at the site of Le Corum, the city of Montpellier's new cultural center.
For the City of Montpellier.
Ten Thousand Individual Objects
To
produce the Individual Works, hundreds of small shapes are casually
collected from friends' homes, supermarkets, hardware stores, and sidewalks:
bottle caps, jar lids, drawer pulls, salt shakers, flashlights, measuring
spoons, cosmetic containers, yogurt cups, earrings, push buttons, candy molds,
garden hose connectors, paperweights, shade pulls, Chinese teacups, cat toys,
pencil sharpeners, and so on. Rubber
molds are produced from the collection of shapes. The replicas of these shapes
can be cast in large quantities, thus creating a vocabulary of forms that can
be combined to produce new shapes.
8 Sound as Sculpture
Site specific, nature, non-material,
collaborative
Nina Katcadourian: Please, Please, Please to
Meet ‘cha
Nina
Katchadourian's Please, Please, Pleased to Meet'cha is a sound project
inspired by the elusive task of describing birdsong. Originally installed at
Wave Hill in the Bronx in 2006, for the installation at MetroTech, the artist
has placed six sound systems along the park's central corridor. As people pass
through this urban park, they hear recordings of human voices in the trees,
vocalizing birdsong. Because the human attempt to describe birdsong is a kind
of translation problem—from aural to written, from animal to human sound—the
artist asked UN translators and interpreters to interpret the sounds. None of
the people involved in the project had previously heard the particular birds,
so their performances were instantaneous interpretations rather than studied
vocal translations. Suggesting that human communication might have the innate
ability to cross linguistic (even species) boundaries, this work resonates
within the specific urban population of Brooklyn and spreads out to include its
ecological surroundings. The birds in the project are all native to New York
City and include the Chestnut-sided Warbler, White-Throated Sparrow, Grey
Catbird, Red-Winged Blackbird, Black-Capped Chickadee, and Common Grackle.
***For next meeting:
Please
reflect on the above approaches and narrow down the options to 2-3 that really
interest you and that you think are well-suited to the future space at Hugh
McRoberts. Consider time, budget, space restrictions (including the space we
have to construct the artwork).
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