ABSTRACT

Artists and critics who were dissatisfied with public art’s legitimating role and committed to art as a critical social practice tried to unmask the politics of conservative definitions of public space and to redefine public art. The vehicle of the disavowal, the tool that generates the rigid inside/outside or public/private division, is an unexamined notion of the political as a realm of unified struggle, a notion that might be called phallocentric in its orientation toward completion. Space is not an entity but a relationship. And if a space is something that has been made room for, “namely within a boundary,” then in laying down the boundaries that mark off a space something is cast outside. Paying attention to the boundaries and exclusions which produce spaces can help people chip away at some of the most calcified ideas about what it means to attach the adjective “public” to the word “space.”.