Political Identities
What about the Public?: The Role of Government and the Public in the Creation of Public Art in Berlin from the Third Reich to Today
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jessica DeShazo
This work examines the changes in government and civic involvement in public art beginning with the Third Reich through present day. It includes various types of public art that range from monuments and memorials to propaganda and murals. The work is the result of a series of open-ended interviews with art professionals in the government and non profit sectors in Berlin. The information from the interviews is supplemented by research about public art and government involvement in Berlin. The work highlights different transitions in the content and form of the public art as well as government and civic involvement in public art. The work finds a dramatic shift in roles for the government and the public. Government has gone from the primary controller and provider of public art to a lesser, secondary role of funder with artists and the public playing the more dominant role.
Local Government and the Arts: Building Identity through Collaboration with Creative Industries and the Arts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Susan Savage
In many parts of the world, local government is grappling with a transition - from managing the development and maintenance of local infrastructure, delivery of essential services and economic governance - to responding to the cultural and social needs expressed by their community that impact on how they identify themselves. Residents want the opportunity to discuss inspirational needs including living in a place that offers cultural engagement that is "liveable" and is attractive/interactive offering public art and cultural amenity. This presentation considers the specific contributions encompassed within the broader role of local government that enable local government practitioners to justify to their communities their role and contributions to creative industries and, more important still, maximise benefit both for the community and the creative industries sector itself.
Embedding Temporary Public Art in Civic Works: A Critical Reflection on the Treatment Public Art Project in Melbourne, Australia
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Cross
Slavoj Žižek in his study of the event begins by describing it as an act of re-framing. While going on to examine the event from a diversity of perspectives including the idea that an event is an effect that exceeds its causes, this idea of re-framing is a useful one in considering place-responsive temporary public art. In creating an event whereby audience members are drawn to a specific place to consider it in dialogue with a series of artworks, a juxtaposition is established between the specificity of a place, its geographical features, use value, culture, and the ways in which artists have chosen to re-frame these contexts. For the artists in the ongoing socially-engaged art project Treatment based in Melbourne, Australia’s Western Sewerage Treatment Plant, Žižek’s rhetorical question, is an event a change in the way reality appears to us, or, is it a shattering transformation of reality itself? could be seen as a useful provocation. This paper will examine how Treatment has sought to establish new understandings of embedded socially engaged practice over successive iterations. In seeking to respond to the Western Treatment Plant, an extraordinary 11,000 hectare civic works, engineering and world listed wildlife site, while re-framing its assorted contexts for an audience mostly unaware of any of the sites features, the artists sought to build a new accord between capturing the lived stories of the people that built and maintained the site and their interest in eliding narratives and conjunctions that speak to present day concerns.
