’Art in Public Space’ brings art to the people
Güncelleme Tarihi:
by Caroline Stern
Oluşturulma Tarihi: Mart 10, 2009 00:00
ISTANBUL - As part of the My City program, which is a new British Council initiative in collaboration with Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, international panelists discussed the issue of ’Art in the Public Space’ at a lecture held at GarajIstanbul in Beyoğlu.
Curators of public-art festivals around Europe met in Istanbul on Friday afternoon to discuss methods of installing art outside the confines of museums in a way that integrates local communities into the art world.
Art in public spaces is a growing trend and an important catalyst of social change, six international panelists said at the "Art in the Public Space" lecture held at GarajIstanbul in Beyoğlu. The projects they described ranged from quirky Ğ like the "Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit" that appeared in curator Andrea Schlieker’s Folkstone Triennial in the United Kingdom Ğ to informative Ğ such as Canadian artist Ken Lam’s "Pi" that projected world statistics onto the walls of Vienna’s Metro system Ğ to more classically monumental Ğ like the enormous white square that was propped up on Münster University grounds as part of the city’s 4th Skulpture Projeckt, held once every 10 years since 1977.
Debate among panelists
There was much debate among the panelists over what constitutes Ğ and what should constitute Ğ art in the public realm. Sebastian Cichocki, curator of the under-construction Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, immediately questioned the validity of adding to public spaces in the name of art. Instead, he spoke of the work of 20th-century American artist Robert Smithson, who suggested art should not create new points of focus, but highlight already-existing ones in our everyday worlds.
"Art should be a magnifying glass to focus on reality," Cichocki said as he showed pictures of a bare, white gallery room where a hole cut into the wall led to a forest, far away from the audience’s expectations.
Mika Hannula from Finland took an even more divergent stance, saying that art in public spaces should not aim to produce objects at all, nor use existing elements, as Cichocki had suggested, but be predominantly socially grounded. He spoke of the work he did with police departments and churches in Helsinki to try and reduce acts of violence in the city’s so-called "rape park."
The discussion following the presentations centered around whether placing art in public spaces was essentially elitist Ğ as it seeks to impose outside objects upon a community Ğ or rather inherently social, because it attempts to include and entice members of those same communities. With the noticeable exception of the glitzy Münster Skulpture Projeckt, the art discussed was generally installed in poor neighborhoods or in towns with histories of violence and social strife and infrastructure falling into disrepair, as a way of encouraging local communities to interact with a type of art they had never been exposed to before.
Oğuz Tatari
A particularly vocal member of the audience, Oğuz Tatari, was displeased with the way many of the projects discussed focused on the quantifiable. The young Turkish artist, who is based in Germany, described a piece, not mentioned by the Münster curator, as the kind of project the art world should gear itself toward: "Path," by Polish artist Pawel Althamer, a country way that wound around the city, only to end abruptly in a field of barley.
The presentation was part of the My City program, a new British Council initiative that Ruth Ur, the council’s director of creativity, said should supply a "richer and more complex" picture of Turkey’s artistic and cultural world. In conjunction with Istanbul’s 2010 tenure as a European Capital of Culture, the program will provide grants to five Turkish artists in residency programs throughout Europe and support European artists in five public-art projects around Turkey.
Art in public spaces is a growing trend and an important catalyst of social change, six international panelists said at the "Art in the Public Space" lecture held at GarajIstanbul in Beyoğlu. The projects they described ranged from quirky Ğ like the "Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit" that appeared in curator Andrea Schlieker’s Folkstone Triennial in the United Kingdom Ğ to informative Ğ such as Canadian artist Ken Lam’s "Pi" that projected world statistics onto the walls of Vienna’s Metro system Ğ to more classically monumental Ğ like the enormous white square that was propped up on Münster University grounds as part of the city’s 4th Skulpture Projeckt, held once every 10 years since 1977.
Debate among panelists
There was much debate among the panelists over what constitutes Ğ and what should constitute Ğ art in the public realm. Sebastian Cichocki, curator of the under-construction Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, immediately questioned the validity of adding to public spaces in the name of art. Instead, he spoke of the work of 20th-century American artist Robert Smithson, who suggested art should not create new points of focus, but highlight already-existing ones in our everyday worlds.
"Art should be a magnifying glass to focus on reality," Cichocki said as he showed pictures of a bare, white gallery room where a hole cut into the wall led to a forest, far away from the audience’s expectations.
Mika Hannula from Finland took an even more divergent stance, saying that art in public spaces should not aim to produce objects at all, nor use existing elements, as Cichocki had suggested, but be predominantly socially grounded. He spoke of the work he did with police departments and churches in Helsinki to try and reduce acts of violence in the city’s so-called "rape park."
The discussion following the presentations centered around whether placing art in public spaces was essentially elitist Ğ as it seeks to impose outside objects upon a community Ğ or rather inherently social, because it attempts to include and entice members of those same communities. With the noticeable exception of the glitzy Münster Skulpture Projeckt, the art discussed was generally installed in poor neighborhoods or in towns with histories of violence and social strife and infrastructure falling into disrepair, as a way of encouraging local communities to interact with a type of art they had never been exposed to before.
Oğuz Tatari
A particularly vocal member of the audience, Oğuz Tatari, was displeased with the way many of the projects discussed focused on the quantifiable. The young Turkish artist, who is based in Germany, described a piece, not mentioned by the Münster curator, as the kind of project the art world should gear itself toward: "Path," by Polish artist Pawel Althamer, a country way that wound around the city, only to end abruptly in a field of barley.
The presentation was part of the My City program, a new British Council initiative that Ruth Ur, the council’s director of creativity, said should supply a "richer and more complex" picture of Turkey’s artistic and cultural world. In conjunction with Istanbul’s 2010 tenure as a European Capital of Culture, the program will provide grants to five Turkish artists in residency programs throughout Europe and support European artists in five public-art projects around Turkey.