No more heroes on horses
(Page 2 of 2)
May/June 1996
Keith Goetzman, Utne Reader
Jacob has responded to this hermeticism with art that aims to engage viewers like no museum show could. In 1992 and 1993, she directed Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago, which turned spectators into participants, and she is curator of the 1996 Olympic Year project for the Arts Festival of Atlanta, which will team international artists with Atlanta-based humanitarian organizations.
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Critics in publications such as Public Art Review are struggling to create a new vocabulary and analytical framework for new genre public art. Museum curators, who see the writing on their hallowed white walls, are reconsidering the role of the museum and branching out into their communities as never before. And artists are adjusting to a climate where, increasingly, to be a funded artist is to be a public artist.
Suzanne Lacy is a driving force in the new genre public art movement--she has created community-based spectacles such as The Crystal Quilt, which in 1987 gathered 430 black-clad elderly women to form a living quilt--but even she acknowledges that the current atmosphere is challenging for the working artist. 'Public art has become a highly competitive alternative gallery system in which artists are thrust in contact with a broad and diversified audience, each group bringing its own contributions to the debate,' she writes.
Competitive and controversial, she might add. Though dissent is often tempered or unspoken, many in the art world are not fond of an atmosphere where artists must act simultaneously as politicians, publicists, educators, and consensus builders, and where audiences are referred to as 'constituencies,' 'stakeholders,' or even 'clients.' In galleries and museums across the land, some art aficionados lament the decline of aesthetic excellence at the expense of populism.
Mary Jane Jacob agrees that community-based art is not always as 'avant-garde' or 'contemporary' as some might wish--but she argues vigorously that maybe this isn't the point. As she told High Performance, 'There are community-based artists who I would say from my experience are not making good art, but are doing a great job of affecting other individuals in positive ways.'
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