Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art

Rating:
Summary: Raising questions about the purpose of public art.
Review: In Suzanne Lacy's Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, authors espouse continuity and responsibility through community-based public art works, collaborative practices among artists and their audiences, and the engagement of multiple audiences through empathy and appreciation. Their sense of new genre public art builds on exposure, deconstruction, and rejection of modernism's constructs and myths. Throughout these essays terms such as "community", "consensus", "truth", "good", and "multiple voices" are used to propagate a genre of public art that is dematerialized and progressive. Yet, it is not realistic to assume that consensus and community will always be progressive forces. This book raises more questions than it answers. Such as; can an artist go too far in the direction of consensus and community? Isn't there danger in not recognizing the tensions and conflicts within any group interaction (small community) for the sense of consensus (common good). Do the multiple voices include those that do not label the project "art?" Do these, and other public art projects have the potential to fall back into the modernist trap of being seen as a fraud, a hoax, or a loss of craft, in which audiences are insulted? Are these projects art because an artist was involved, and what happens to that role if the artist is simply a conduit for other voices? Can the artist speak for communities from which the artist does not belong (is it better to utilize local artists from within the communities)?