Carousel Slide Swing

Upon reading Miwon Kwon's chapter 'Sitings of Public Art: Integration vs Intervention' and his descriptions of "leftover urban spaces", "small piece[s] of no-man's land" and "empty sites", I was reminded of the work "Carousel Slide Swing" by Polish artist, Kamila Szejnoch. These public artworks are not just site-specific but "empty" site-specific. Similar to Federal Plaza receiving a "complete makeover," Szejnoch redesigns monuments in Warsaw from Polland's Communist era.

Whilst these monuments have not been removed (unlike the sculptures of John Ahearn and Richard Serra), these sites are "empty" in the sense that they have lost all purpose and meaning: outdated, unfamiliar, 'dead'. Kwon's discussion of the 1970s critique of the art-in-public-places approach can be similarly applied to these Communist monuments: their indifference to contemporary life that surrounds them is reciprocated by the public's indifference towards them. Like the rehabilitation of the art-in-public-places program in the 1970s, Szejnoch's works were part of a nation-wide movement to re-organize public spaces to reflect the changing times.

Szejnoch's works were dualistic in function. Firstly she wanted to parody their current stance as imposing archaic oddities, by transforming them into even more overt 'exhibits' of the past. Secondly she wanted to recontextualise them in today's culture; to absorb new meanings in new times. The way she achieves both these aims is through playing with the area immediately surrounding these monuments, creating a frame around them, or as she describes, "leaving them as quotations from history and simply putting quotation marks around them." Without altering the existing shape of the monument al all she designs spaces of recreation that mould to its contours.

Her designs included hanging a swing from the Berlin Army movement monument, installing a slide onto the monument to the Red Cross Army, and wrapping a carousel around the Brotherhood in Arms monument. The 'swing' was the only one of the three that was actually realized, but the other two were translated into posters which she stuck up around the city. I see her work fitting under the heading of "new genre public art." Transforming these 'empty' monuments into open invitations to the public, these works literally demonstrate the shift in public art from art-in-public-places to art-in-the-public-interest.