ABSTRACT
Public art has seen a renaissance in the last fifteen years in Great Britain (Arts Council, 1989). The definition of public art is contested (Selwood, 1992) but Malcolm Miles (1996) offers some useful explanations. He suggests that public art in urban spaces can take the form of art placed outdoors as a monument, as in, say, the traditional figure of a man on a horse. Alternatively, it is sometimes conceived as works which might normally be shown in an art gallery ‘expanding’ onto the street and sometimes this idea is used for temporary shows in an urban area. Sometimes the term is used to describe the integration of works of art and craft in urban design and this might take the form of artist-designed benches, lighting and other street furniture, art works applied to buildings as in gates, murals, friezes and stained glass, or a more integrated conception of landscaping, buildings and art. Finally, the term is also applied to artists who wish to make interventions in public issues. An example of this was the American artist Jenny Holzer’s collection of one-line aphorisms, such as ‘Housing is a Human Right’, which were printed as commercial fliers and pasted up around Manhattan in 1976 (Steinman, 1995).
