Presentation
A cycle of debates about the concepts and proposals of public art starts in January 2007 due to the visit to Sao Paulo of the British artist Anish Kapoor, to inaugurate his exhibition at the Centro Cultural São Paulo (Sao Paulo Cultural Centre).
Specialists, artists, thinkers, urban architects, scientists, flanêurs, poets and passers-by amongst others will get together periodically during three months to discuss, agree or disagree about what public art is today.
Is public art a distinct dimension of contemporary art? Or is it simply art installed in public places? Is the pavilion that Anish Kapoor will install in Anhangabaú Valley an example of public art? Would an event, a performance or live-art (the expression of the human body as a form of art) right in the middle of a downtown square be public art as well? Would an urban intervention by a collective (a group of artists) in strategic places of the city be it as well? Wouldn’t an action that gets closer to the social than to the artistic correspond more specifically to what is today understood by public art? An art that wishes to intervene directly in the social reality as proposed by the French theoretician Jacques Rancière?
Or still: something that goes beyond the questioning or the affirmation of new and traditional artistic paradigms (as suggested by Carla Zaccagnini); a place that should work as a forum (as proposed by Nelson Brissac when he talked about the work of Vito Acconci at the Arte Cidade (City Art) 2003); or a decisively urban space for socialisation, as mentioned by the same Acconci? Or – in an extreme situation - public art does not exist since art is a phenomenological experience and thus, an individual, subjective experience; or in opposition: all the art is public since it only happens when it is socialised.
It may be that, as suggested by another great contemporary artist, Daniel Buren, what attracts us in relation to public art is the fact that it is something practically impossible, since once in the urban context, it is bound to disappear, such is the competition with the other elements that constitute the urban context of a city of the size of Sao Paulo: the crowd, the media, the architecture and so many other offers made simultaneously and chaotically available.
Martin Grossmann
