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‘An Aera in Public Feeling’

William St. Clair

in Lord Elgin and the Marbles

Lord Elgin's collection which is now officially referred to as the Elgin Marbles, was given in August 1816 to the British Museum. A temporary building was made by January 1817 wherein the British ... More

Lord Elgin's collection which is now officially referred to as the Elgin Marbles, was given in August 1816 to the British Museum. A temporary building was made by January 1817 wherein the British public was allowed to view the collection. As such, Lord Elgin felt that his original aim which concerned improving manufacturing and art in Great Britain had been achieved. It was this cause that persuaded the Select Committee to use British taxpayers's money to buy the collection. In general, England — the term which citizens used to refer to the entire United Kingdom — was believed to have triumphed in spite of all challenges and wars, and it was also ready for celebrating achievements and improvements in public art and literature.Less

Visualizing Christ Our Redeemer, Man Our Brother

Kymberly N. Pinder

in Painting the Gospel: Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago

This book explores the visualization of religious imagery in public art for African Americans in Chicago between 1904 and the present. It examines a number of case studies of black churches whose ... More

This book explores the visualization of religious imagery in public art for African Americans in Chicago between 1904 and the present. It examines a number of case studies of black churches whose pastors have consciously nurtured a strong visual culture within their congregation. It features examples of religious art associated with some of Chicago's most historically significant black churches and art in their neighborhoods. It considers how the arts interact with each other in the performance of black belief, explains how empathetic realism structures these interactions for a variety of publics, and situates public art within a larger history of mural histories. It also highlights the centrality of the visual in the formation of Black Liberation Theology and its role alongside gospel music and broadcasted sermons in the black public sphere. Finally, the book discusses various representations of black Christ and other black biblical figures, often imaged alongside black historical figures or portraits of everyday black people from the community.Less

Encountering public art: monumental breasts and the Skywhale

Alison Bartlett

in Social Experiences of Breastfeeding: Building Bridges between Research, Policy and Practice

This chapter is grounded in the idea that more visual imagery of breastfeeding will contribute to its normalisation, and counter the commercial sexualisation of breasts. It suggests, however, that ... More

This chapter is grounded in the idea that more visual imagery of breastfeeding will contribute to its normalisation, and counter the commercial sexualisation of breasts. It suggests, however, that this strategy is not just about seeing but also about feeling. To demonstrate this the chapter turns to a controversial piece of public art — Patricia Piccinini's Skywhale — which was launched in Australia in 2013 and has been touring internationally. The Skywhale is a hot-air balloon in the shape of a fantastical creature of the imagination, which features five giant breasts on each side. This unexpected flying mammal provokes responses wherever it goes, and arguably provides productive ways of engaging public responses to breastfeeding and maternity. This chapter examines responses to Skywhale through broadsheet and social media, and then analyses its affective domain through psychoanalytic concepts and its materiality through the tradition of public art and monuments. The extremes of intimacy and monumentality configured through Skywhale offer an object par excellence for seeing breastfeeding writ large in the public domain, and for feeling the return of the maternal. The chapter argues that this is fundamental to a shift in perceiving breasts as maternal, and breastfeeding as normative.Less

Installing a world city

Jenny Lin

in Above Sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai

Chapter Four considers worlding, or the city’s positioning as a cosmopolitan center on an international stage, as a philosophical construct and tangible phenomenon tied to the development and ... More

Chapter Four considers worlding, or the city’s positioning as a cosmopolitan center on an international stage, as a philosophical construct and tangible phenomenon tied to the development and promotion of present-day Shanghai and contemporary Chinese art. The chapter presents three Shanghai-based installations by transnational art stars Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, and Cai Guoqiang. Disrupting the East-meets-West soundbites surrounding discussions of these works, this chapter interrogates the artists’ privileged subject positions, arguing that such artworks function as branding campaigns that world Shanghai. The chapter also discusses the loaded cultural geographies of these installations’ shared sites: the Bund, once the heart of Shanghai’s British and US-controlled International Settlement, and the Pudong Skyline, considered the shining jewel of China’s post-socialist economic rise. The chapter concludes by discussing a more critical recent project by Cai Guoqiang that acknowledged the migrant labor fuelling Shanghai’s urbanization in the face of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, and a related urban intervention by artist Ai Weiwei.Less

Revisiting the creative city: culture and regeneration in post-industrial Glasgow

Venda Louise Pollock

in Transforming Glasgow: Beyond the Post-Industrial City

Responding to calls for the real, rather than rhetorical, ‘creative city’, this chapter revisits cultural regeneration in Glasgow during the post-industrial period when Glasgow was vaunted as an ... More

Responding to calls for the real, rather than rhetorical, ‘creative city’, this chapter revisits cultural regeneration in Glasgow during the post-industrial period when Glasgow was vaunted as an exemplar of how culture could reorientate the economy and identity of a city. Taking as its point of departure the typology of culture and regeneration put forward by Evans and Shaw in their comprehensive review of the evidence relating to The Contribution of Culture to Regeneration in the UK (2004): culture-led regeneration; cultural regeneration; and, culture and regeneration, it draws on specific examples to complicate these narratives and posit that a reconceptualization of the ‘creative city’ during the post-industrial era is necessary to fully understand the ‘post-creative’ city which, Malcolm Miles (2103) suggests, might arise from new alliances between art work and everyday cultures.Less

Reclaiming the City: Street Art of the Revolution

Heba Salem and Kantaro Taira

in Translating Egypt's Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (A Tahrir Studies Edition)

Draws on the concepts of striated and smooth space in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus to translate the politics of street art of the revolution as “a performance and product ... More

Draws on the concepts of striated and smooth space in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus to translate the politics of street art of the revolution as “a performance and product of aesthetic smoothing that resists the dominant striated narratives of the state.” As the author argues, street art becomes a way for Egyptians to reclaim and re-appropriate urban space. From the first tags that called for the downfall of the regime, to the rock formations made from crumbles of broken pavement in Tahrir, and the elaborate murals memorializing the martyrs, street artists have challenged the state's instruments of monopolizing public space and homogenizing Egyptian life and identity. Over the past months, Egypt's Military Council has mounted a “war on graffiti” targeting political artwork that is now widespread in Egyptian cities. Graffiti works inciting protest, or critiquing the military junta and the state security forces, or articulating the demands of the revolution, have systematically been painted over, dismantled, or “cleaned up” and several artists have been harassed and arrested by the Military Council for bringing art to the street in a clear show-down and contest over both public space and the space of visual consumption.Less

Black Inside/Out: Public Interiority and Black Aesthetics

Margo Natalie Crawford

in Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics

The sixth chapter examines the role of inner and outer space in cultural productions of black post-blackness. Crawford develops a theory of black public interiority (a theory of black cultural ... More

The sixth chapter examines the role of inner and outer space in cultural productions of black post-blackness. Crawford develops a theory of black public interiority (a theory of black cultural movements’ ability to create a sense of shared interiority within the public space of the collective). She argues that the Black Arts Movement was aspiring for public art that could be experienced as both a black interior and an open space created by a collective. This chapter analyzes a range of installation art and other visual art, film, and letter writing that dramatize the black interior being experienced as the black outdoors. Crawford demonstrates that the BAM set in motion a vital process (that black aesthetics continue to engage) of refusing to allow black interiority to be defined as the province of the black bourgeoisie. The art examined includes installation art created by Kara Walker, outdoor murals, the film Night Catches Us, the letter writing of Carolyn Rodgers and Hoyt Fuller, and more.Less

2012: City in the World

Loren Kruger

in Imagining the Edgy City: Writing, Performing, and Building Johannesburg

Twenty-first-century Johannesburg juxtaposes post-metropolitan suburban sprawl in gated estates, informal settlements, privately funded simulations of public city space (Melrose Arch), and heritage ... More

Twenty-first-century Johannesburg juxtaposes post-metropolitan suburban sprawl in gated estates, informal settlements, privately funded simulations of public city space (Melrose Arch), and heritage monuments (Freedom Square Kliptown) with art and urban renewal projects embedded in the urban fabric. These include new structures like Constitution Hill, renovated buildings like Drill Hall, revived districts such as Maboneng and Sophiatown, and informally reanimated derelict sites such as the former Albert Street pass office and squatter encampments, which highlight ongoing wealth disparity and inequality of rights and access amid the real estate boom. Key players in urban planning and artistic reanimation include the Johannesburg Development Agency, Joubert Park Project, Trinity Session, Centre for Historical Re-enactments, William Kentridge, Lael Bethlehem, Stephen Hobbs, Maja Marx, and Gabi Ngcobo.Less

Sensō Sakusen Kirokuga: Seeing Japan’s War Documentary Painting as a Public Monument

Mayu Tsuruya

in Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868-2000

This chapter examines sensō sakusen kirokuga, or war campaign documentary painting, a genre of painting that emerged as state-sponsored public art during the second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific ... More

This chapter examines sensō sakusen kirokuga, or war campaign documentary painting, a genre of painting that emerged as state-sponsored public art during the second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War between 1937 and 1945. It first provides a background on how war documentary painting as a genre was born before discussing the ways in which official war documentary paintings are displayed, including military art exhibitions. It then considers developments that were important in the creative transition yōga painters made as part of the evolution of war documentary painting as public art, focusing on panorama painting, kaijō geijutsu (exhibition hall art), mural painting, and proletarian art. It also describes the Meiji Picture Gallery, along with war propaganda painting and the ideal of “self-effacement.” The chapter argues that war painting evolved from Japanese art of preceding periods in an environment where the importance of the general public had grown rapidly for both art production and the politics of war.Less

Deep Time, Dark Time: Anarchaeologies of Blackness and Brownness

Tavia Nyong'o

in Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

By engaging interventionist art by women of color at two different scales—ephemeral body/earth art and monumental public art—this chapter supplements post-humanist theories of “deep time”—in ... More

By engaging interventionist art by women of color at two different scales—ephemeral body/earth art and monumental public art—this chapter supplements post-humanist theories of “deep time”—in particular, the temporality of the Anthropocene—with a concept of “dark time.” The intensive, alchemical, and obscure temporality of “dark time” is crucial to understanding black and brown feminist performance interventions against the violence of expropriative capitalism in the Americas. The chapter reads the art work of Kara Walker and Regina José Galindo through the poetry of Harryette Mullen and philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.Less

Reading the Watts Towers, Teaching Los Angeles: Storytelling and Public Art

Monica Barra

in Sabato Rodia's Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development

This chapter examines the Towers within a convergence of several disparate, yet interconnected, discourses about cities, history, monumentality, and public art in order to demonstrate how Simon ... More

This chapter examines the Towers within a convergence of several disparate, yet interconnected, discourses about cities, history, monumentality, and public art in order to demonstrate how Simon Rodia's artwork gestures toward a particular production of space that is distinctly of a place, in general, and particularly Los Angeles. It first considers how narratives about cities and art circulate and interact in a fluid process of becoming within space and through time. Drawing on Italian writer Italo Calvino's work Invisible Cities, it uses the dialogic conversations about cities between the two main characters to begin to open up the possibility of reimagining how a place is collaboratively created through the stories told about it. From here it considers how storytelling as a form of history making is a salient way to think about how we teach and engage the politics of place. Finally, it looks into how embracing a more collaborative and processual approach to understanding urban environments based on narratives and storytelling interfaces with more specific theoretical engagements with the question of urban space.Less

An Introduction

Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams

in Screen Ecologies: Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region

Each chapter in this book takes a different angle on the intersections between art, media, and environment. Chapter 1 functions as an introduction to the key debates informing art, media, and ... More

Each chapter in this book takes a different angle on the intersections between art, media, and environment. Chapter 1 functions as an introduction to the key debates informing art, media, and environment intersections. In this chapter we locate our motivations for this book and how overlays of art, media, and environment allow us to reimagine the region. In particular, we highlight the role of artists in exploring alternative ways in which to visualize, practice, and represent the environment.Less

Major Famine Memorials

Emily Mark-Fitzgerald

in Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument

Although the majority of Famine monuments in Ireland and the diaspora have been privately conceived and funded by grassroots community groups, a small number of major commemorative efforts built ... More

Although the majority of Famine monuments in Ireland and the diaspora have been privately conceived and funded by grassroots community groups, a small number of major commemorative efforts built since 1990 have achieved widespread recognition and/or acclaim. This chapter offers six in-depth accounts of major Famine monuments in Mayo, Philadelphia, Boston, Dublin, Sydney and New York City. Each represent significant public art commissions approaching or exceeding $1 million in cost, as highly visible public engagements with Famine memory that have defined the careers of the artists charged with their execution. The political agency of their construction and the pressures evinced through patronage have made an indelible impact on their formal approaches and subsequent public reception. These memorials are the products of sustained, well-funded, and organised commemorative efforts and present an embodiment of Famine memory intended for significantly wider viewership. As a consequence, many bear the scars of protracted civic negotiation and politicised appropriation, of artistic vision and compromise, and of struggles between competing versions of Irish history and identity.Less

Staging

Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien

in Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit

This chapter follows Massasoit through eighty years of unveilings and dedication ceremonies across diverse locations to interrogate how the national narrative originally imagined by the Improved ... More

This chapter follows Massasoit through eighty years of unveilings and dedication ceremonies across diverse locations to interrogate how the national narrative originally imagined by the Improved Order of Red Men was staged and how audiences received it in Plymouth and locations far away from New England. The interplay between the intended narrative of national belonging and regional/local ramifications of the statue's installation is noted, and indigenous perspectives are included. Even after the unveiling ceremonies in each locale and era (Plymouth in 1921, Salt Lake City in 1922 and 1959, and Evergreen Park, Kansas City, Spokane, and Provo in late 1970s), the statue continued to accumulate meaning for viewers. This chapter argues that Massasoit served as a stage (or staging ground) for public discussions over cultural appropriation and the place of Native people in national and local historical consciousness.Less

Remembering Right, Remembering White: Public Art, Colonial Memory, and Gentrification in Toronto’s Parkdale Neighborhood

Griffin Epstein

in Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and Forgetting

This chapter interrogates the racial, spatial, and colonial implications of two pieces of public art in a gentrifying Toronto neighborhood, looking for the ways that emotional memory, colonial ... More

This chapter interrogates the racial, spatial, and colonial implications of two pieces of public art in a gentrifying Toronto neighborhood, looking for the ways that emotional memory, colonial nostalgia, and fear shape both the built and discursive public domain. Using anti-colonial and anti-racist theories, this chapter also seeks to uncover the author's personal implications in re-ordering space as a white settler, social service worker, and former arts facilitator in the neighborhood.Less

Exodus

in Defending National Treasures: French Art and Heritage Under Vichy

This chapter examines the massive evacuation of public art collections to makeshift storage depots in chateaux throughout France, involving several hundred thousand objects from more than two hundred ... More

This chapter examines the massive evacuation of public art collections to makeshift storage depots in chateaux throughout France, involving several hundred thousand objects from more than two hundred museums. This highly organized artistic exodus illustrates the central government's control over the preservation of French national treasures, initiated during the final months of the Third Republic and reinforced under the Vichy regime. Arts officials also considered privately owned objects part of the national patrimony and evacuated several collections from private homes and galleries. The most prestigious private collections were owned by Jews who had voluntarily entrusted their assets to the public museum administration, an act of faith that led to continual conflicts between French and German officials.Less

Art, Critique, and Climate Change

Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams

in Screen Ecologies: Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region

Chapter 6 examines how contemporary cultural and local debates have engaged in effective environmental critique. It focuses in the strengths and limitations of art and social media as an effective ... More

Chapter 6 examines how contemporary cultural and local debates have engaged in effective environmental critique. It focuses in the strengths and limitations of art and social media as an effective method for rethinking climate change. In particular, this chapter considers how regional art responds to the theme of water, such as in the Australian-based Spatial Dialogues public art project, the Touchmedia—Eco Art project, Chen Qiulin’s River, River project in China, and Japanese projects such as the BOAT PEOPLE Association (BPA) and the Green Island Project.Less

Urban Street Faith: Murals, T-shirts, and Devout Graffiti

Kymberly N. Pinder

in Painting the Gospel: Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago

This chapter examines contemporary black public art in Chicago, including Bernard Williams's black biblical figures in the apse of Saint Edmund's Episcopal Church. As a principal artist in the ... More

This chapter examines contemporary black public art in Chicago, including Bernard Williams's black biblical figures in the apse of Saint Edmund's Episcopal Church. As a principal artist in the Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG), Williams has been the lead restorer for most of murals by William Walker. The Saint Edmund's committee directed the content of Williams's mural at the church in relation to the newly installed stained glass program of important black heroes. Father Richard Tolliver considered murals and stained glass an integral part of his revitalization of Saint Edmund's. Williams also helped restore Frederick D. Jones's mural at the First Church of Deliverance (FCOD) and created a number of local community murals. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Damon Lamar Reed's mural ministry consisting of murals, graffiti, rap music, and T-shirts. Like the conflations of the black Christ with the pastor at Pilgrim Baptist Church and FCOD, Reed's work merges the painted image of Jesus with that of a real black body, the one within the T-shirt.Less