seating and shade

seating and shade
seating and shade

i like the way that in the reading this week, the fragment from Miwon Kwon's One Place After Another talks about this idea of site specifity in public art projects and this notion that the artworks installed in the plazas and squares and inbetween spaces of the city are there not just as 'architectural jewelry' but to serve an active purpose that encourages use by the community and hence a vital place within the fabric of the city.
so, pretty much we sit on them.
i don't really know what else you can do with a sculpture to be honest apart from sit on it or look at it.

i mean, who wouldn't want this pointy rusty thing by Richard Serra in their forum, neighbourhood park, community center plaza, backyard etc. i guess with this particular work you can walk into a small, claustrophobic space and hang out. just think what kind of sordid, delinquent activites would take place in there after dark. maybe at nightfall it could convert its inards into a large urinal, and engage with the intoxicated passers by who feel the urge to relieve themselves but find around them only cold exposoed commercial spaces of metal and glass sheets.

i think the mere fact that richard serra's controversial tilted arc provoked such a strong reaction in the public is quite possibly what one could argue makes it a success in that it encouraged, or rather, smacked people out of their torpor and forced them to consider the ideological and psychological class based undercurrents at play within the concreted topographies of the urban landscape.

there's this public arts work in london thats been going on for a couple of years in trafalgar square. theres this so called 'fourth plinth' there, that was designed to hold a statue for a monarch who didnt have enough money after he died for the statue to actually be built. since then (sometime in the 19th century) its been left bare, and since the mid 90s, artists of note have been asked to install temporary works upon it.
rachel whiteread did one.

http://www.london.gov.uk/fourthplinth/


the one pictured was by this guy where people were allowed to go up onto the plinth via cherry picker and yell whatever they wanted down.
its cool and relavent i guess, mainly becuase its a performative based public artwork.
lolol.