ABSTRACT
Although there has been a massive increase in the number and diversity of works of public art in recent years, this has not been met with a concomitant intensity of thought over what might constitute the “public” aspects of this “public” art, and in particular its dialectical relation to the “private.” Here we offer some new operative and interpretive strategies as to how works of public art represent, or might represent, the collective nature of the city and its residents. In doing so, we consider the urban and public nature of the artist, the site, the audience, and the critic. Strategies and tactics considered include the everyday life of the metropolis, public art as fragment, the dialectical image, the detail, displacement and montage, thought-images, the experiencing subject, use values, and the gift economy. In this we are particularly concerned with the notions of time and memory in public art, and how these conditions may be addressed through such concepts as frozen time, erased time, discontinuous time, collective memory, the event, motility, narrativity, and spatial stories.
