ABSTRACT
Conventional public art, as commissioned through Percent for Art policies, tends to be defined by its relation as aesthetic object to a physical site; in contrast, the emerging practices of public art in the 1990s constitute interventions in a public realm which includes the processes as well as locations of sociation. Patricia Phillips wrote in 1988 that ‘some of the most fruitful investigations of public life and art are occurring in the most private, sequestered site of all-the home’ (Phillips, 1988: 96), drawing attention to the role of the media and new technologies in intersecting the spaces of public events and domesticity; this is more than a blurring of spatial boundaries, in that the public and domestic realms are gendered, and for women artists the transgression of such boundaries is itself a resistance to patriarchy.
