ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the challenges of practices associated with socially engaged public art, based on the experiences as co-founders of Broken City Lab. Socially engaged public art is often challenged with having to operate in two rhetorical registers simultaneously: first, for a general public and second, for a group of artists, peers or critics. For a group of artist peers or critics, socially engaged public art is often circulated with expectations for it to constructively engage in critical discourses around power, access and art history. In socially engaged public art, the translation of critical rhetoric from scaffolding for performance to script for a market logic means that the work not only limits the capacity of the criticality embedded in it but also turns it into an identifiable boundary. Art projects that can be positioned and communicated as being built on the complexities and awkwardness of antagonism as form are more readily aligned to their political capacities.
