towards a concept note

In democratic practices ‘public’ stands for all that is ‘good’; embracing the semiotic spaces of ‘democracy’, ‘accessibility’, ‘participation’ and ‘egality’. The political tradition also eulogies the ‘private’ as a site of ‘seclusion’, ‘intimacy’, ‘individual reflection’ and most importantly as a site of resistance against cohesive majoritarian power groups.

However, from the location of ‘Public art’ practices the relationship between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is one of hierarchical binaries. ‘Public Art’ is acted out in the realm of the public, any engagement in/with it necessarily extends to a series of overlapping issues ranging from the diversity of publics and cultures, the engendering of such spaces, the operations of power…including assertions of culture and political hierarchies. It is only through such engagements can public art transcend being an authoritarian populist agenda and evolve as a site of struggle over the meaning of ‘free space’.

Art is traveling a long journey transversing terrains of the public and the private. In our times ‘Public Art’ has emerged as a project oriented towards making ‘art’ (re)claimable to the public sphere. Definitely ‘Public Art’ is also a project fro the artist to be able to (re)claim the public sphere......a sphere that was denied to her during the hey days of the bourgeois orthodoxy.

There is also a question of being able to critically engage with the questions of ‘aesthetic value’ of ‘public art’. These questions are caught up in the ‘contextual’ versus ‘formal’ debate that is bringing about some kind of a crisis in critical theory. It also needs to negotiate key questions around (e)vauling ‘authorship’ and ‘intentionality’ in public art projects.