ABSTRACT
In order to understand "public" it is necessary to place it in dialectical relation to private, to see how one informs the other. In public art discourse, "public" refers to "site" both in its physical state, as it is represented, and as it is understood conceptually as a terrain for interventions. Alternatively, public art may bridge the private worlds of those who create it and the private lives of those who view it, or it may render public themes into matters of personal concern. An urban fragment, in Walter Benjamin's work, can be a dialectical image, that is, at once material and ideational. At its crudest, dialectical imagery can mean rendering pairs of images, out of juxtaposed material in the city, or it can mean the placing of the work of art in the city in such a way that the site and meaning are recontextualized.
