The Uses of Art in Public Space

This book links two fields of interest which are too seldom considered
together: the production and critique of art in public space and social
behaviour in the public realm. Whereas most writing about public art has
focused on the aesthetic, cultural and political intentions and processes that
shape its production, this edited collection examines a variety of public
artworks from the perspective of their actual everyday use. Contributors are
interested in the rich diversity of people’s engagements with public
artworks across various spatial and temporal scales; encounters which do
not limit themselves to the representational aspects of the art, and which are
not necessarily as the artist, curator or sponsor intended. Case studies
consider a broad range of public art, including commissioned and unofficial
artworks, memorials, street art, street furniture, performance art, sound art
and media installations.

Julia Lossau is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Bremen,

Germany.

Quentin Stevens is Associate Professor of Urban Design and Director of

the Centre for Design and Society at RMIT University, Melbourne,
Australia.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

1 Ethics and Images of Pain

 Edited by Asbjørn Grønstad & Henrik Gustafsson

2 Meanings of Abstract Art

Between Nature and Theory
Edited by Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche

3 Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image and its Digital Future
John Lechte

4 Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture

Edited by Maria Pia Di Bella and James Elkins

5 Manga’s Cultural Crossroads

Edited by Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

6 Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture

Edited by Lewis Johnson

7 Spiritual Art and Art Education

Janis Lander

8 Art in the Asia-Pacific

Intimate Publics
Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Natalie King, and Mami Kataoka

9 Performing Beauty in Participatory Art and Culture

Falk Heinrich

10 The Uses of Art in Public Space

Edited by Julia Lossau and Quentin Stevens
The Uses of Art in Public Space

Edited by
Julia Lossau and Quentin Stevens
First published 2015
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The uses of art in public space / edited by Julia Lossau and Quentin Stevens.
pages cm — (Routledge advances in art and visual studies ; 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Art and society. 2. Public art. I. Lossau, Julia, editor. II. Stevens,
Quentin, 1969– editor.
N72.S6U84 2014
701’.03—dc23
2014032572

ISBN: 978-1-138-79760-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-75701-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

1 Framing Art and Its Uses in Public Space

QUENTIN STEVENS AND JULIA LOSSAU

PART I: Perception

2 The Ergonomics of Public Art

QUENTIN STEVENS

3 Graffiti, Street Art and Theories of Stigmergy

LACHLAN MACDOWALL

PART II: Interaction

4 Media Architecture: Engaging Urban Experiences in Public Space

MARTIN BRYNSKOV, PETER DALSGAARD AND KIM HALSKOV

5 Trafalgar Square: Of Play, Plinths, Publics, Pigeons and Participation

NICOLAS WHYBROW

PART III: Participation

6 Tree Planting: The Use of Public Art as Social Practice

JULIA LOSSAU

7 Sound Response: The Public Reception of Audio Walks

ANGHARAD SAUNDERS AND KATE MOLES

PART IV: Appropriation

8 The Non-use, Re-use, Mis-use and Counter-use of Public Art in the
Vilakazi Street Precinct, Soweto, South Africa
PAULINE GUINARD

9 ‘You Aren’t an Aussie if You Don’t Come’: National Identity and

Visitors’ Practices at the Australian National Memorial, Villers-
Bretonneux
SHANTI SUMARTOJO

PART V: Reception

10 The Social Life of Artworks in Public Spaces: A Study of the Publics

in the Quartier International de Montréal
LAURENT VERNET

11 Art Engagers: What Does Public Art Do to Its Publics? The Case of
the ‘Butt Plug Gnome’
MARTIN ZEBRACKI

12 As Prop and Symbol: Engaging with Works of Art in Public Space

KAREN A. FRANCK

List of Contributors
Index
Figures

2.1 The Arrival (Frank Meisler, 2006), Liverpool Street Station, London
2.2 Cloud Gate (Anish Kapoor, 2006), Grant Park, Chicago
2.3 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Peter Eisenman, 2005),
Berlin
3.1 Door with stickers, Degraves St subway, Melbourne
3.2 Love locks on Ponte Milvio, Rome
3.3 Love lock attached to rubbish bin outside the Pantheon, Rome
3.4 Love locks attached to the Southbank Footbridge, Melbourne
3.5 Stall selling padlocks and engraving services, Ponte Milvio, Rome
4.1 Audience interacting with Aarhus by Light (CAVI, 2009)
4.2 A luminous creature from Aarhus by Light (CAVI, 2009)
4.3 The CO2nfession/CO2mmitment booth (Martin Brynskov, 2009)
4.4 City Bug Report, media façade on the city hall tower in Aarhus,
connected to mobile devices, websites and open government data (CAVI,
2009)
5.1 Nelson with union flag bicorn: curated guerrilla intervention by
milliners Treacy and Stephen Jones during London Olympics, July 30,
2012
5.2 Mark Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, Trafalgar, Trafalgar Square,
London
5.3 Anthony Gormley’s One and Other, Trafalgar Square, London
6.1 A tree being planted
6.2 One of the trees being officially dedicated. The name of the person the
tree is dedicated to is marked on a stone at the foot of the tree
6.3 Flowers and presents decorate a tree dedicated to an adolescent who lost
his life in an accident
7.1 Participants losing and finding their way on the Grangetown History
and Change audio walk
7.2 Participants actively listening to and investing in Grangetown
8.1 The Vilakazi Street Precinct: a tourist and commemorative township
8.2 The first letter of the Vilakazi hand signs sculpture
8.3 The 1976 uprisings sculpture, an artwork meaningless for the local
publics?
8.4 Targeted vandalism to make public and commemorative artworks
unusable?
8.5 The informal 1976 uprisings murals: a different use of art?
9.1 The Australian National Memorial, Villers-Bretonneux
9.2 The Cross of Sacrifice
9.3 The War Stone
9.4 Standard headstones for soldiers identified as Australian
9.5 The rural setting of the Australian National Memorial, looking from the
tower to the adjoining cemetery
10.1 Location of artworks in the Quartier International de Montréal
10.2 Workers sitting and eating lunch on the low wall around the Monument
to Queen Victoria
10.3 A teenager skateboarding around the works by Ju Ming on the public
art platform, with a child imitating the sculpture’s pose in the background
10.4 Workers sitting and eating lunch on the benches and steps surrounding
La Joute
10.5 The monument covered with signs during Occupons Montréal
10.6 All kinds of objects were stacked on Ju Ming’s Taichi Shadow Boxing
and Taichi Single Whip during the occupation
11.1 S anta Claus (2001), a 6-metre-high bronze sculpture by Paul
McCarthy in Eendrachtsplein, Rotterdam
11.2 On the occasion of Santa Claus’s placement in Eendrachtsplein in
2008, Sculpture International Rotterdam published a one-shot newspaper
edition titled ‘Free Santa’, which gives a clear impression of the heated
public debate about Santa Claus
11.3 In 2010, the local entrepreneurs’ association initiated the emancipatory
project ‘A yellow jersey for Santa Claus’, entailing a group of female
residents knitting pieces that were assembled into one jersey
12.1 Visitors explore Shibboleth (Doris Salcedo), Turbine Hall, Tate
Modern, London
12.2 Posing and performing in Bread Line (George Segal) at Memorial to
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Washington, D.C.
12.3 Displaying US flag and tributes on statue of George Washington
(Henry Kirke Brown), Union Square Park, New York immediately after
September 11, 2001
12.4 Studying tributes, Veterans Day 2012, Vietnam Veterans Memorial
(Maya Lin), Washington
12.5 Occupy Wall Street participants occupying Joie de Vivre (Mark Di
Suvero) in Zuccotti Park, New York
12.6 Pulling Down Statue of King George III at Bowling Green, New York
12.7 Participants join designers Lauren Crahan and John Hartmann in
lifting Lighthearted, Times Square, New York
Acknowledgements

This book developed out of two events. The first was a pair of themed
sessions of the 32nd International Geographical Congress in Cologne,
Germany, in August 2012. The second was a public symposium hosted by
RMIT University’s Design Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, in
March 2013. For financial and organisational support for those events, we
wish to thank the Geography Institute at the University of Cologne, the
research committee of the RMIT School of Architecture and Design, the
RMIT Design Research Institute, the Art in Public Space program and the
Art, Cities and Transformation Research Group of the RMIT School of Art,
and the RMIT Foundation for providing Julia with an International
Research Exchange Fellowship. Quentin’s work on this project was
supported by a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council.
Portions of Nicolas Whybrow’s chapter appeared in an earlier form in his
book Art and the City (2011). An earlier version of Martin Zebracki’s
chapter appeared in Social & Cultural Geography, volume 13, number 7
(2012). All translations of quotations and terminology from other languages
are the contributors’ own unless otherwise specified.
We would like to thank many scholars and artists who either gave or
proposed presentations for the two events, which helped inform and enrich
the material presented in this book, in particular Charlotte Bagger-Brandt,
Ruth Fazakerley, Mirko Guaralda, Anton Hasell, Matthew Lamb, Bettina
Lamm, Kate MacNeill, Anthony McInneny, Christopher Rawlinson, Jane
Rendell, Skate Sculpture and Ruth Woods. We would also like to thank
Clare McCracken for help with background research and Lea Willeke for
assistance with the book’s production. Thanks also to Felisa Salvago-Keyes
and Andrew Weckenmann at Routledge and, last but not least, to our
authors for splendid cooperation.
Julia Lossau (Bremen) and
Quentin Stevens (Melbourne)
1
Framing Art and Its Uses in Public
Space

Quentin Stevens and Julia Lossau

This book examines the everyday use of artworks in public settings. The
forms and means of art, and of public art specifically, vary considerably
between different national and regional contexts, having followed different
development trajectories. As a consequence, the geographically widespread
studies collected here consider art in public spaces from a perspective much
broader than the ‘plop art’ of large abstract sculptures in corporate plazas
and wider, too, than that defined by many official programs of ‘public art’,
which often determine or imply particular forms, sites, production
processes, audiences, kinds of interaction, and particular preconceptions
about ownership and value (Cartiere 2008). The book examines a diversity
of commissioned and unofficial artworks, including sculptures, memorials,
landscaping works, street art, street furniture, performance art, sound art,
media installations and other hybrid and emerging forms of creative
expression in the public realm. Public engagement with such works varies
greatly. The book’s contributors show that people’s encounters with art are
not limited to passive reception, and they are not necessarily as the artist,
curator or sponsor intended. People seem to make use of art in public
spaces on their own terms. These varied uses reflect the disparate, often
unanticipated audiences that the art is exposed to and the freedoms of
feeling and action that public settings often allow. We feel that an
examination of the varied perceptions of ‘users’ and actions around art in
the public realm can provide fresh insight into art’s purposes, benefits and
reception. The diverse formal and experiential qualities of art, and the
distinctive uses these enable, also shed new light on the design, use and
meaning of public space more broadly.

The ‘Function’ of Art

There is something paradoxical in examining the function of art. Avant-
gardist notions of an autonomous ‘art for art’s sake’ that developed during
the twentieth century defined art in opposition to practical utility. The
modernist idea of art as the medium of a self-determined and autonomous
subject stands in contrast to earlier understandings. In previous centuries,
artworks were quintessentially useful in that they naturally served the needs
of those who paid for them, be it the clergy trying to strengthen believers’
faith by installing ornate altars in churches, or the gentry trying to impress
the common folk by installing statues and monuments on the streets. Under
such circumstances, artists felt rather like suppliers and less like
autonomous individuals who produce independent objects with no practical
purpose (Warnke 1989).
When ‘public art’ emerged as a distinct form of art practice in the late
1960s, it posed a threat to the avant-gardist notion of art as the expression
of an independent genius. From the outset, and by definition, public art was
invested with a social or communal focus that included processes of
communication with the public. In contrast to a modernist notion of ‘fine’
art set apart from the world and its everyday needs, art in public locations
that was intended for broad public consumption has often been expected to
be ‘site specific’ and socially relevant and offer practical benefits. Such
accountability explains why public art was often denigrated by the official
art world. It also explains why the idea of art being functional seems far less
disquieting when it is applied to art in public space. Public artworks may be
understood as useful in terms of their properties as material objects, sensory
experiences, spatial contexts or representational discourses.
Most writing about art in the public realm comes from art critics and art
historians, and focuses on the aesthetic, cultural and political intentions and
processes that shape its production (Lacy 1994, Kwon 2004, Rendell 2006,
Cartiere and Willis 2008). Artworks are often analysed in terms of their
instrumental or symbolic roles within a particular ideologically driven
activity, such as developing community identity; communicating history;
attracting new visitors, residents and businesses; or enhancing property
values. The leading critiques of public art focus on the question of
publicness, highlighting the passive, depoliticised role of citizens as
consumers (Phillips 1988). A key ‘politically correct’ implication of these
critiques is that good public art involves the public directly in its meaning
and its making (Bishop 2006:181, Sharp et al. 2005). Our primary focus on
uses and practices rather than on artworks differentiates this book from the
substantial recent literature that has examined the public’s participatory or
‘relational’ engagement in the production, reception and evaluation of art,
for example Bourriaud (2002), Kester (2011), and Bishop (2012). That
literature mostly presents artists and curators defining the means and terms
of public action. Situating the art in gallery spaces facilitates this control. At
one ‘utopian’ extreme, Bourriard’s relational aesthetics involves
participatory art practices where the artist completely circumscribe both the
art’s publics and its uses; the art is conceived ‘without […] “usefulness” in
the world outside of the social environment created by the work’ (Lacy
2008:23). Participa-tory art also often tends toward clear functional
intentions, as installations or performances are consciously designed to
enable, invite or even provoke people to engage with them in certain ways
(Bishop 2004). The title of Bishop’s 2012 book, Artificial Hells, implies a
trenchant critique of the strictures of public engagement within
participatory art. But more affirmatively, she suggests her title also ‘appeals
for more bold, affective and troubling forms of participatory art and
criticism’ (Bishop 2012:6–7). We suggest our book illustrates some such
possibilities, if perhaps in indirect and unexpected ways. Beyond art
scholars’ political and aesthetic critiques of formal collaborations between
publics and artists, our book emphasises the scope that the context of the
public realm offers for disconnection or outright antagonism between
artists’ intended outcomes and the public’s actions in relation to them.
The contributions gathered in this book show how people respond to
artworks after they have been released into the public realm. In some of the
cases explored here, there is no original guiding artist, curator or sponsor;
aesthetic and experiential outcomes develop through the cumulative actions
of many members of the public. This book thus explores forms of public
agency that are largely independent of the art world and its ideas. In doing
so, we aim to challenge the oppositions between ‘active’ and ‘passive’
spectatorship and singular and collective authorship that are wrapped up in
the trope of ‘the spectacle’ (Bishop 2012). We agree with Lacy’s assertion
(2008:24) that ‘It is time for critical unpacking of the stereotype use + art =
bad art’. The research reported in this book decouples any specific value
relations between art and its use. But we suggest Lacy’s ambition can be
pursued further than Kester’s (2004; 2011) and Bishop’s (2006; 2012) re-
theorisations of public participation in the creation of art. Our contributors
focus on the actual uses of art and the effects of those uses on what
precisely is done or achieved. In this context, rather than abandoning the
spectacle as a framework for interpreting the relationship between artwork
and audience, this book explores the possibilities of Situationist
détournement of the spectacle and of its implication of passive audience
reception, a ‘reversal of perspective’ through which audiences find new
uses for received images and other aesthetic forms (Vaneigem 1983:137,
quoted in Plant 1992:86).

Functions of Art in Public Space

Even the most critical studies of public art typically accept that such art is
an inherently worthy investment, affirming its multiple cultural, social,
aesthetic and investment benefits (Mitchell 1992; Miles 1997). But existing
research generally lacks evaluation of such claims, and rarely even suggests
a critical framework for doing so (Hall and Robertson 2001). What has
remained relatively understudied is the ways the public responds to
artworks once they are installed and what kinds of amenity, functional or
otherwise, public art contributes to public spaces. Very few publicly funded
artworks are actually evaluated after installation, and there is thus little
evidence about the reception and impacts, positive or negative, that public
art has (Senie 2003; Cartiere and Willis 2008). Several contributions in this
book question the basic presumption that public art even provides aesthetic
enhancement to public spaces.
Following the emergence of public art in the 1960s as a distinct form of
art practice, and the subsequent explosion in its varieties of medium, form
and location, social scientists began examining the complex aspects of
public art’s conception, production and reception, and in particular its
relation to the wider social uses of the public realm. The theoretical and
empirical link most commonly made between art, functionality and the
public realm sees artworks as almost inevitably being instrumentally
deployed or appropriated—that is, made use of—to serve agendas of
economic, physical and social transformation of urban areas (Deutsche
1996; Miles 1997; Hall and Robertson 2001; Ley 2003). Artists are, in
Smith’s (1996:195) classic formulation, the ‘shock troops’ of urban
gentrification, and public art is one of their most penetrating weapons.
Deutsche (1988:15), writing about ‘Public Art and Its Uses’ in relation to
the controversy over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, notes that
proposing aesthetic uses for the space, isolated from its social function in specific circumstances
[…] ignores questions recently posed in a number of disciplines about differences among users
and about the user as producer of the environment […] discussions about the work, despite the
prominence they accorded to questions of use, remained aloof from critical public issues about
the uses of space in New York today: oppositions between social groups about spatial uses, the
social division of the city, and the question of which residents are forcibly excluded from using
the city.

In contrast to utopian approaches to art, where social engagement is

hermetically confined within the process of its making, Lacy (2008:23)
points to ‘those who are building a case for art’s usefulness in regeneration’,
for whom ‘functionalism is […] prioritized’. Public artworks are often
commissioned to meet functional needs of open space users ‘that in the past
were the domain of landscape architecture or city planning’ (Senie
1992:245). Like many concepts in public art, this continuum of engagement
with functionality can be unfolded in other dimensions. ‘Functional’ art
interventions can be seen as unsatisfactory compromises because they
constrain artistic freedom and quality, because they do not function as well
as ordinary street furniture but cost significantly more, or because the
‘functions’ they serve in fact constrain the potential social uses of their site
(Deutsche 1988). The commissioning of functional public art can be seen as
instrumental: an ambition by governments to justify their public
expenditures and management controls on public space and an ambition by
artists to access budgets allocated to public space development.
A partial counter to the materialist critique of public art sees social
inclusion in the making of public art as a prospective antidote to the
alienation of economically and culturally deprived social groups (Sharp et
al. 2005). Critiques of gentrification and praise of community art both draw
on another important thematic link between public art and social science
research, looking at how artworks in public might connect to memory and
sense of place (Hayden 1995; Kwon 2004). This, too, is under-researched
from the perspective of actual uses. This book seeks to go beyond the
prevailing reading of public art in urban gentrification and to open a range
of other ways of understanding art and its value by exploring a range of
uses of art that are in many cases more immediate, tangible and individual
and which go beyond prescriptive ideas of function.
Accepting that art has one or another function typically involves
presuppositions about the wants, needs and capacities of particular publics.
In a keynote speech to one of the symposia that generated this book, Jane
Rendell notes an important distinction between the idea of ‘function’ and
that of ‘use’: use, with its connotations of ‘being used’, ‘manipulating’ and
‘taking advantage of’ something, implies power relations among people and
objects. Focusing on use involves a shift in power dynamics away from an
artwork’s sponsors and makers, who intend specific ‘functions’, and
manipulate audiences so that they will perform what the artwork prescribes.
‘Use’ moves the locus of attention and power to the public, who find their
own purposes in the aesthetic objects and experiences presented to them.
Rendell draws on Winnicott (1971:108) to argue that ‘use’ thus suggests a
‘potential space’ beyond ‘function’, and beyond the control of the maker,
offering the individual ‘an opportunity […] to move from dependence to
autonomy’. Rendell notes that while a public artwork may quite
conventionally be seen as a transitional object, something that ‘helps us
adjust to the mismatch between inner and outer worlds’ (following
Winnicott 1953; 1967), Winnicott later emphasised that ‘usage implies that
the object is part of external reality’, beyond the projective desires and
omnipotent control of its maker or its audience (Winnicott 1969:716).
Using an object requires that the subject ‘must have developed a capacity to
use objects’ (Winnicott 1969:713). Rendell notes a range of artist-architects,
including muf, Apolonija Šušteršič, Transparadiso and atelier d’architecture
d’autogérée, who explore art’s potential use value by critically engaging the
public in wider processes of social and urban development. Rather than
producing objects, what these art practices produce is ‘radical subjects’.
The contributions in this book highlight that even within the scope of
overtly strategic applications of public art, different actors can have very
different goals. The many unanticipated uses of art by members of the
public challenge implied understandings of what effects such art is
supposed to have, who the audiences for such artworks are, and how people
should respond to them. Unsanctioned, unofficial artworks and non-object
forms of art often resist alignment between art’s economic and social capital
and property values.
In her analysis of the role of public art in gentrification in Glasgow,
Sharp (2007:282) notes a fundamental difference between art criticism and
urban studies scholarship in terms of how they interpret art in public spaces.
She highlights within public and expert discussion of public artworks ‘the
tendency to concentrate on the works as “art” in the moment of their
creation or opening rather than seeing them, more mundanely, as artefacts
in the urban landscape’. Her own finding is that public artworks ‘gain
meaning through use, or just by being there, whether or not this can be
articulated (verbally) by those who interact with them’. She notes that most
analyses ignore the public’s ‘unreflective, prediscursive, bodily responses’
to public art, which were ‘perhaps never anticipated by the architects, artists
and designers.’ Beyond Lacy’s (2008:22) conception of new genre public
art as supporting ‘multivocal criticism’, we are interested in public use as a
kind of unconscious criticism or testing of art through action.

Uses and Users of Art in Public Space

This book’s focus on the uses of art in public settings contributes to
interdisciplinary knowledge about the design of public space, in terms of its
meanings and everyday uses for a variety of publics. There is a growing
trans-disciplinary literature exploring the rich diversity of informal,
unplanned public activities that occur in urban spaces, examining the
diversity of actors and their actions, and how these change the meaning,
history, function and form of the urban settings that they occupy (Chase et
al. 1999; Mitchell 2003; Franck and Stevens 2007; Hou 2010). This work
explores the opportunities for use that are presented by particular types of
urban sites and specific physical features. Much of this work tends to
emphasise users’ interventionist roles in physically transforming public
spaces to better suit their needs. Our book, by contrast, concentrates on
people’s behavioural and social responses to urban settings and their artistic
contents as they already are. The studies presented here complement a
growing body of research into specific individual activities and groups that
make use of public spaces in a range of new and unanticipated ways, many
of which engage with artworks encountered in those settings. These
activities include skate-boarding (Borden 2001), parkour (Lamb 2014),
cycling (Spinney 2010), yarn-bombing (Moor and Prain 2009), guerrilla
gardening (Reynolds 2008), dancing (Chen 2010), and vandalism (Gamboni
2007).
What unites many of the studies mentioned above is that understanding
of users and of uses develop oppositionally or dialectically in relation to the
intended, programmed ‘functions’ of public spaces (Stevens 2007; Franck
and Stevens 2007). In both theory and practice, the ‘use’ of objects or
environments is often examined in opposition to some other, more
privileged category of engagement with them, such as ‘reception’,
‘function’, or ‘investment’. Notions of use and of the user are ‘historically
constructed’ through ‘changing market forces, government interventions,
new technologies, different fields of knowledge and expertise, and
unexpected social or cultural dynamics’ (Cupers 2013:2). This analytical
lens can thus be turned around to view actual uses of art and of public
spaces as indices of these changing contexts and processes. Doucet (2013),
for example, looks at urban space users who were ‘traumatised’ in the
1960s by the wholesale “modernisation” of the historic, lived urban realm
of the European city, a process dating back to Haussmann. The urban
renewal programs of the 1960s and 1970s spurred numerous efforts to
enhance user participation in urban planning and development decision-
making (Goodman 1972). In the same spirit, Henri Lefebvre’s work in the
1960s had presented a progressive conceptualisation of users and use value
as political claims to people’s self-identification and self-management of
their own needs. But by the late 1970s, Lefebvre felt the concept of ‘use’
was at risk of ‘depoliticization […] functionalization (by reducing “use” to
services) and normalization (that is to say the definition of the “users”
according to the average within a “target group”)’ (Stanek 2013:151).
Referencing users and engaging them in decision-making were,
increasingly, means to enforce consensus with bureaucratic decisions. In the
weakest forms of citizen participation, users were encouraged to feel good
that decisions were being made by experts, or were consulted in a tokenistic
way without their needs, activities, and views necessarily shaping policy
and design outcomes (Arnstein 1969). Although some contemporary
designers do focus on engagement with users of the built environment
(Awan et al. 2011; Charlesworth et al. 2012), and despite shifts toward
‘communicative planning’ (Healey 1996) and participatory strategies in
urban development, urban environments are still often managed for their
users rather than by them.
Several scholars of public art have mentioned the importance of looking
at the actual uses of artworks in public settings, and the causes and
consequences of those uses (Selwood 1995; Miles 1997), but this has
scarcely been pursued either empirically or critically. The public uses of art
that have drawn the most attention from art scholars are those that clearly
illustrate public opposition to particular artworks. Often this arises from
conflicts between the art and everyday uses of public space. Stalker and
Glymour (1982:5) argued early on that ‘publicly displayed contemporary
sculpture causes significant offense and harm, and does so in a way that
intrudes repeatedly into peoples’ normal living routines’. They use Richard
Serra’s Tilted Arc, then newly installed on New York’s Federal Plaza, as an
illustration. It has been argued that Serra’s intention to physically critique
Federal Plaza’s poor decorative and functional quality means that he was
effectively using his sculpture ‘to hold its site hostage’ (Gamboni 1997:157
quoting Crimp 1986:53). Some experts’ analyses of Tilted Arc conversely
saw the artwork itself as a security hazard, supporting pro-terrorist graffiti,
concealing drug dealing, and intensifying damage from bomb attacks
(Gamboni 1997). Authorities had similarly noted that the 1978 George
Sugarman sculpture Baltimore Federal could be used by protest groups as a
speaking platform and a place to hide bombs (Senie 1992). Considering
Serra’s intention that Tilted Arc should be a ‘semantically open’ artwork that
would confront and engage the plaza’s users, it is surprising to see the
strength of his opposition to ‘all “instrumental” appropriation of his work’
and how much contempt he had for the many negative perceptions and
actions that the sculpture aroused (Gamboni 1997:163). Only four blocks
away from Federal Plaza, a then recently installed temporary work by Serra,
T.W.U. (1980), had been covered in graffiti, pasted flyers and rubbish.
Another artist, David Hammond, urinated on T.W.U. and slung 25 pairs of
laced shoes over the top of it (Gamboni 1997). Selwood (1995) notes that
another formally similar work by Serra in London’s Broadgate
development, Fulcrum (1987), was also used as a public urinal.
Other documented public responses to public art suggest people engaging
critically with the artworks’ meanings. The German anthology
Unerwünschte Monumente [Unwanted Monuments] contains a collection of
essays that discuss and contextualise ‘the notorious and mostly intensive
conflicts which accompany the public installation of contemporary
sculptures’ (Grasskamp 2000:6). In the English-speaking context, Miles
(1997:205) observes that vandalism of numerous new public artworks
introduced as part of urban gentrification can be seen not as general
antisocial behaviour, but as ‘a voice of dissent against the imposition of
bourgeois taste’. Minty (2006:430) concurs that damage to one public
artwork in Cape Town could be seen as ‘an act of engagement or “co-
authorship” rather than vandalism’, because those who did it may have been
expressing their feelings of frustration and anger about the historical events
that the artwork was addressing. Cordess and Turcan (1993) provide some
insight from outside the art world as to why artworks are vandalised. As
criminologists, they focus on the types of works likely to be attacked and
the psychology of perpetrators. According to their research, public abuses
of artworks are not always conscious critiques of their aesthetics or
symbolic meanings. Their findings also emphasise the spectacular role of
art as something designed to capture the attention of audiences. Individuals
often use artworks as a platform for gaining people’s attention. Miles
(2008) notes damage done to two recent public artworks by Anthony
Gormley. Graffiti and vandalism on one work in Northern Ireland reflected
the site’s sectarian tensions—a theme that also arises in Julia Lossau’s
individual contribution to this book. Damage to another artwork in Norway
was caused by accidental collisions from vehicles in the school car park
where it stood. Ignoring an artwork is an unexpected use. In an
‘unchoreographed performance’ responding to Kristy Edmund’s Perusal, a
temporary performance installation as part of Portland, Oregon’s Percent-
for-Art program, ‘many people […] did not understand they were intended
to be an audience observing something rather than freely wandering
through [it] during the performance’, and some members of the public used
crowbars to smash open the ice blocks comprising the work to retrieve
valuable items frozen within them (Calhoun and Kendellen 2008:163–164).
As Calhoun and Kendellen go on to note, ‘audience reaction is an
uncontrollable element of putting (indeed, imposing) work in the public
realm’.
While there is a wide variety of ways that art is actually used, we find it
useful to make an analytical distinction between symbolic uses and
performative uses. The notion of symbolic usefulness refers to the
representational capacities of artworks, which in many cases serve as
markers of meaning, identity and difference. Much of the existing writing
about public art focuses on theoretical discussion of the potential
representational capacities of artworks as texts. For example, the section of
Senie and Webster (1992) examining ‘Public Art and Public Response’ is
mostly limited to analysing opinions about the aesthetics and meanings of
various artworks. Some chapters in this book are primarily concerned with
everyday practices around social identification and interpretation, for
example commemoration. Other chapters focus instead on the tangibility of
artworks, interested in questions of embodiment and sensuality. This work
shares with Bishop (2012) her concern that art, especially in its
participatory aspects, needs to go beyond hermeneutic visual analysis. We
also share Bishop’s focus on performance as a lens for examining the
participatory aspects of art, but we would like to broaden the perspective,
highlighting the fact that art in the public realm can inspire performance by
offering a broad array of bodily encounters. Artworks can be more than
representational, but also less than representational, in spite of the
communicative expectations of artists and their sponsors.

Contexts of Art in Public Space

This book’s chapters are united by sensitivity to the situatedness of public
art; that is, for artworks being appropriated and used in particular times and
spaces. Experiencing a sculpture or watching a piece of performance art on
a leisurely Sunday afternoon is different from noticing it (or not noticing it)
on your way to work, and while one person might welcome a new artwork
because it makes a suitable table for working on, another might see it as just
another obstacle on their journey through the city. Other forms of creative
expression such as street art, sound art, live performances and Internet blog
entries each have their own distinctive ways of appearing in and resonating
with spaces and publics. This book has a strong focus on experiences of art
in the here-and-now of everyday life, a focus which both addresses and
transcends the recent attention to ‘the local’ that has been fuelled by
Lippard’s (1997) book. The ‘lure of the local’ is, after all, the reason why
art in public is so fundamentally different to art in a gallery, where the
reception and use of art are carefully conditioned by label, boundaries,
rules, admission fees and acculturated expectations (Benjamin 1968).
The studies presented here also show the importance of zooming out
from artworks and their immediate sites to examine their wider physical
contexts. Many forms of reception and response to artworks in the public
realm do not involve bodily co-presence with a solid object; the artwork
may be intangible or experience of it may be mediated, and this offers new
kinds of engagement and meaning. Although many of our contributors
emphasise embodiment and physical engagement, uses that lack bodily
engagement, or that respond to an artwork’s inaccessibility, are also
important. The book explores the role of different media in terms of
reception and use. It draws the reader’s attention both to the different media
used in the production of the artworks under scrutiny (ranging from
traditional marble and bronze to graffiti, sound, light projections and
internet art) and to the diverse media employed by the book’s contributors
in undertaking and presenting their research. Laurent Vernet’s chapter
shows one particular strength of video as a method of data collection: that
the alleged banality of everyday use is also recorded. Between the
exceptional highlights of use, the video camera also captures ‘nothing’
happening. Without it, the researcher might not bother reporting that
‘people just sat there on the artwork’.
Several chapters in the book examine illustrate temporal variations in the
uses of art, for example transgressions after dark, or distinctive uses during
particular public events. Attention is also given to changes in use that occur
across the life span of an art object or performance, from its
commissioning, production and use to its eventual modification, removal,
archiving or repetition. The issue of duration is significant in terms both of
people’s experience and actions and of the nature of an artwork itself. Some
artworks only exist, or can only be perceived, in a frozen moment; others
are boring in the ‘real time’ of urban life and may be more engaging when
‘sped up’ through other media; still other artworks anticipate people having
ongoing engagement with them as they play out, grow, and evolve.
Examining these temporal dimensions of art in public spaces helps to
highlight the active roles that users play in the ongoing development of
artworks in the public realm and of their significance both before and after
the artworks’ official unveiling. This book’s focus on use draws attention to
the changing reception of any given artwork within the ongoing flows of
city life. Accordingly, the illustrations of artworks in this book do not show
them as new and pristine but as used and in use.
The contributors’ varied theoretical, empirical and contextual frames for
analysing the uses of artworks are cut across by a critical examination of
notions of the public and, as Rosalyn Deutsche (1996) and Jane Rendell
(2013) had both intimated, sensitivity to unequal power relations in the
context of using art. We take it that public art is not simply received by a
public but also that uses of art and the judgments that other people make of
them vary according to specific social factors such as gender, age, race,
cultural background and class, as well as intellectual and physical
competencies. Artworks are engaged by many kinds of ‘publics’ or ‘users’
in public spaces—and, as Whybrow, Sumartojo and MacDowall emphasise,
in the ‘public realm’ more broadly. Artworks may engender new publics,
helping to characterise and develop affinities, even if oppositionally. The
different uses of art in public refract differences in the identities, interests
and social contexts of particular users, and provide a new lens to examine
how artworks and their uses might relate to forms of social fragmentation
and the inclusion or exclusion of specific social groups from public space
and public discourse. Art mediates relationships between people. Through
their uses of art, people can actively shape these relationships. In terms of
power relations, we are particularly interested in the tensions that emerge
between everyday practices around art in public and the expectations of
artists, sponsors, site managers and onlookers. Attention to social context
does not necessarily imply ‘a shift […] away from the visual and sensory
[…] toward discursive exchange and negotiation’ (Bishop 2006:181).
People’s sensory experiences, actions and emotions around artworks are
also socially conditioned.

The Book’s Structure

The aim of this book is to examine both the symbolic and material aspects
of public artworks from the perspective of their everyday use. Focusing on
different aspects of the use of public artworks, the book’s chapters are
organised into five main sections: perception, interaction, participation,
appropriation and reception. These five shed light on key aspects of the use
of public art. The boundaries between the sections and the scope of
concerns of individual chapters do, however, overlap, and we would like to
tease out some of the cross-cutting concerns that provide other kinds of
links between the ten contributions assembled in the five sections.
The first section is concerned with perception, dealing with material
aspects of the use of artworks and focusing on user’s behaviour. Both
chapters in this section draw on theories that are rooted in a materialistic
paradigm which is rarely applied to the context of art in public space. The
first contribution by Quentin Stevens explores how well the material forms
of public sculptures fit to the human body’s actions. Stevens identifies how
particular dimensions, materials, surfaces and shapes support specific
actions. Based on field observations of unexpected, often impractical uses
of various artworks, his analysis is framed around key concepts drawn from
the scientific analysis of people’s perceptions, postures and movements
around objects (affordances and ergonomics) and their extension to
examine ‘higher’ needs for cognitive and aesthetic pleasure and exploration
(‘hedonomics’). These bodily uses of art go beyond task efficiency to
suggest broader concepts of user satisfaction. Following this, Lachlan
MacDowall explores how graffiti and street art function in public space by
considering their relationship to the notion of stigmergy, a theory derived
from insect behaviour that explains how the actions of individual agents
within populations are coordinated without direct communication. The
application of stigmergy highlights a number of neglected aspects of street
art, namely its spatial clustering, its incitement of interactions, the active
audiences it produces and its existence as a ‘cultural scene,’ based not on
fixed art objects but on forms which elicit ongoing, collective contributions.
Focusing less on material but rather on temporal aspects, the second part
provides empirical insights into the use of temporary, ephemeral
interventions in public space. Under the headline of interaction, Martin
Brynskov, Peter Dalsgaard and Kim Halskov, on one hand, and Nicolas
Whybrow, on the other, provide nuanced accounts of how people engage
with forms of art that have a performative character. Brynskov et al. are
concerned with the domain of media architecture which, as an emergent
field between interactive media and architecture, plays an increasingly
important role in shaping the urban environment. Their chapter discusses
three media architecture installations and the capacities these have to invite
public engagement and interaction. The installations form the basis for a
discussion of what media architecture can contribute to the understanding
of the uses of art in public spaces, especially pertaining to aesthetics,
meaning, participation and space. In his chapter on London’s Trafalgar
Square, Whybrow considers a range of recent creative uses of the square by
a ‘participating public’. Against a backdrop of the square’s historical and
institutional composition—featuring, among other elements, nineteenth-
century monuments to British imperialist and colonialist power—he aims to
draw out the significance of sanctioned and unsanctioned engagements with
Trafalgar’s mise en scène. These engagements include the recent series of
sculptural installations on the square’s ‘fourth plinth’ in its north-west
corner, as well as impromptu interventions—in this case a freeze mob—
involving large numbers of participants.
The book’s third part elaborates on the spatial aspects of both making
and using art in public spaces. The two chapters in this section share an
interest in the public engagement of ordinary people, exploring how
questions of participation are negotiated in the social practices of both art
makers and users in particular places. Julia Lossau’s chapter examines
public art as a medium of social practices. It takes as its case study an
intervention by Scottish artist Graham Fagen who planted 17 trees in
inconspicuous locations within an urban renewal area in Glasgow. To
understand how ‘ordinary people’ made use of Fagen’s project, this chapter
draws on de Certeau’s conceptualisation of everyday practices as forms of
use. Against such a background, the practices observed in the case study are
interpreted as uses of the art project and as operations performed on it. It is
suggested that the practices have realising, appropriating, allocutive and
temporalizing dimensions. In their chapter, Angharad Saunders and Kate
Moles explore the production and subsequent use of two audio walks in a
public engagement project involving a group of young men in Grangetown,
an inner-city neighbourhood of Cardiff, Wales. Their focus is on the ‘other’
side of these walks—on their consumption by certain groups of walkers—
and they examine how, as instances of sound art, these walks affect and
alter how people come to know, understand and comprehend Grangetown.
 Appropriation is paramount in the fourth part. Both Pauline Guinard and
Shanti Sumartojo focus on the users’ identity, and both are interested in
questions of power and memory. Based on a qualitative study of the
Vilakazi Street Precinct Public Art Program in the Orlando West neigh-
bourhood of Soweto, Johannesburg, Guinard differentiates between several
types of uses of public artworks. From indifference to re-appropriation,
from rejection to reinvention and counterproposal, her research
demonstrates how public art can highlight power struggles over the uses of
art and public space. Ultimately, she argues that looking at the uses of
public artworks both synchronically and diachronically allows us to
understand how and to what extent artworks and spaces become publicly
appropriated over time. In her chapter, Sumartojo analyses the appropriation
of the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in northern
France as the foremost official Australian World War I commemorative site
on the Western Front. She discusses how the memorial helps to shape
expressions of Australian national identity by examining its symbolism and
ritual use during Anzac Day commemorative ceremonies and the practices
of visitors to the memorial at other times. She argues that visitors’
interactions with the memorial help to define Australian national identity in
narrow and exclusive terms and demonstrates this by detailing how people
use the site and the narratives that accompany this use.
Part V sheds light on the sociality of art users by analysing how artworks
are used by different publics with different modes of reception. Laurent
Vernet explores how analysis of the uses of artworks in public spaces can
lead to the identification of publics, understood as social entities that
engage with these objects in distinctive ways. His chapter is based on
filmed observation of artworks in the Quartier international de Montréal.
His descriptions of the publics’ uses of the artworks highlight the specificity
of the relationships that each artwork may entertain with its respective
publics. Martin Zebracki’s chapter is based on a detailed case study of Paul
McCarthy’s controversial sculpture Santa Claus (‘Butt Plug Gnome’ in
popular speech). Drawing on media analysis, field observations, expert
panels, focus groups and interviews, he elaborates the notion of ‘art
engager’ across a spectrum of publics’ bodily, socio-material and mental
appropriations of public art. Zebracki suggests that Santa Claus provides an
open, more-than-human sphere in which people express and share
experiences, discourses and critiques, and he calls for further critical
research on public art’s socio-spatial inclusiveness.
The book is closed by a chapter by Karen A. Franck which cuts across
several of our central categories. Dealing with the materiality and
temporality of artworks and the identities of their users, Franck explores the
ways that visitors, passersby, artists and other groups engage with works of
art in urban public space. Applying the concept of ‘loose space’ to the uses
of art in public, she distinguishes two overarching modes of use. People use
a work as a physical prop—making use of its location and features to
pursue an activity without connection to its symbolism. Or, alternatively,
people engage with the work expressly for its symbolism. Her observations
show that people’s activities may be independent of the intended meanings
of the works, affirm or extend those meanings, or intentionally resist them.
By its nature, art stimulates questions. While our contributors’ analyses
offer explanations of why and how the public ‘use’ art, they also identify
and stimulate a range of new questions; questions about forms and aims of
use, about the nature and the value of art in the public realm and about how
it can be evaluated. Are opportunities for engagement with art in public
fairly distributed among different demographic groups? Are there ‘good’
and ‘bad’ uses of art? What uses are critical of an artwork and its meanings,
and which ones are merely incidental? The book presents challenges to
researchers and practitioners interested in the future of art and public space,
by illustrating that between what an artist states or implies in a work, and
what the users actually do, there can be shortfalls, and also superfluity. We
hope that this book’s conceptualisations and empirical studies of use will
help artists, policymakers and audiences to rethink what art in public space
is and what it could be.

References
Arnstein, S. (1969) ‘A Ladder Of Citizen Participation,’ Journal of the
American Planning Association, 35(4): 216–224.
Awan, N., Schneider, T. and Till, J. (2011) Spatial Agency: Other Ways of
Doing Architecture, Abingdon: Routledge.
Benjamin, W. (1968) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,’ in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, New York: Schocken
Books.
Bishop, C. (2004) ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,’ October, 110:
51–80.
Bishop, C. (2006) Participation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of
Spectatorship, London: Verso.
Borden, I. (2001) Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the
Body, Oxford: Berg.
Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Les presses du réel.
Calhoun, K. and Kendellen, P. (2008) ‘Here and Gone: Making It Happen,’
in C. Cartiere, and S. Willis (eds.) The Practice of Public Art, New
York: Routledge.
Cartiere, C. (2008) ‘Coming in from the Cold: A Public Art History,’ in C.
Cartiere and S. Willis (eds.) The Practice of Public Art, New York:
Routledge.
Cartiere, C. and Willis S. (eds.) (2008) The Practice of Public Art, New
York: Routledge.
Charlesworth, E., Dodd, M. and Harrisson, F. (eds.) (2012) Live Projects:
Designing with People, Melbourne: RMIT University Press.
Chase, J., Crawford, M. and Kaliski, J. (eds.) (1999) Everyday Urbanism,
New York: Monacelli.
Chen, C. (2010) ‘Dancing in the Streets of Beijing: Improvised Uses within
the Urban System,’ in J. Hou (ed.), Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla
Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities, New York:
Routledge.
Cordess, C. and Turcan, M. (1993) ‘Art Vandalism,’ British Journal of
Criminology, 33(1): 95–102.
Crimp, D. (1986) ‘Serra’s Public Sculpture: Redefining Site Specificity,’ in
R. Krauss (ed.) Richard Serra/Sculpture, New York: Museum of
Modern Art.
Cupers, K. (2013) ‘Introduction,’ in K. Cupers (ed.) Use Matters: An
Alternative History of Architecture, New York: Routledge.
Deutsche, R. (1988) ‘Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City,’
October, 47: 3–52.
Deutsche, R. (1996) Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Cambridge MA:
MIT Press.
Doucet, I. (2013) ‘Counter-projects and the Postmodern User,’ in K. Cupers
(ed.) Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture, New York:
Routledge.
Franck, K. and Stevens, Q. (eds.) (2007) Loose Space: Possibility and
Diversity in Urban Life, New York: Routledge.
Gamboni, D. (1997) The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism
since the French Revolution, London: Reaktion Books.
Goodman, R. (1972) After the Planners, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Grasskamp, W. (2000) ‘Einleitung,’ in W. Grasskamp (ed.) Unerwünschte
Monumente. Moderne Kunst im Stadtraum, Munich: Schreiber.
Hall, T. and Robertson, I. (2001) ‘Public Art and Urban Regeneration:
Advocacy, Claims and Critical Debates,’ Landscape Research, 26(1): 5–
26.
Hayden, D. (1995) The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public
History, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Healey, P. (1996) ‘The Communicative Turn in Planning Theory and its
Implications for Spatial Strategy Formations,’ Environment and
Planning B, 23(2): 217–234.
Hou, J. (ed) (2010) Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the
Remaking of Contemporary Cities, New York: Routledge.
Kester, G. (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in
Modern Art, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kester, G. (2011) The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art
in a Global Context, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kwon, M. (2004) One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational
Identity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lacy, S. (ed.) (1994) Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle:
Bay Press.
Lacy, S. (2008) ‘Time in Place: New Genre Public Art a Decade Later,’ in
C. Cartiere and S. Willis (eds.) The Practice of Public Art, New York:
Routledge.
Lamb, M. (2014) ‘Misuse of The Monument: The Art of Parkour and the
Discursive Limits of a Disciplinary Architecture,’ Journal of Urban
Cultural Studies, 1(1): 107–126.
Ley, D. (2003) ‘Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification,’
Urban Studies, 40(12): 2527–2544.
Lippard, L. (1997) The Lure of the Local. Senses of Place in a
Multicentered Society, New York: The New Press.
Miles, M. (1997) Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures,
London: Routledge.
Miles, M. (2008) ‘Critical Spaces: Monuments and Changes,’ in C. Cartiere
and S. Willis (eds.) The Practice of Public Art, New York: Routledge.
Minty, Z. (2006) ‘Post-apartheid Public Art in Cape Town: Symbolic
Reparations and Public Space,’ Urban Studies, 43: 421–440.
Mitchell, D. (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for
Public Space, New York: Guilford.
Mitchell, W.J.T. (ed.) (1992) Art and the Public Sphere, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Moore, M. and Prain, L. (2009) Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit
Graffiti, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Phillips, P. (1988) ‘Out of Order: The Public Art machine,’ Artforum,
December: 93–96.
Plant, S. (1992) The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in
a Post-modern Age, London: Routledge.
Rendell, J. (2006) Art and Architecture, A Place Between, London: I.B.
Tauris.
Rendell, J. (2013) “Notes on The Use of An Object”, unpublished Skype
lecture, RMIT University, Melbourne, 12 March.
Reynolds, R. (2008) On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening
without Boundaries, London: Bloomsbury.
Selwood, S. (1995) The Benefits of Public Art, London: PSI Publishing.
Senie, H. (1992) ‘Baboons, Pet Rocks and Bomb Threats: Public Art and
Public Perception,’ in H. Senie and S. Webster (eds.), Critical Issues in
Public Art: Content, Context and Controversy, New York: Harper
Collins.
Senie, H. (2003) ‘Responsible Criticism: Evaluating Public Art,’ Sculpture,
22(10), no pagination.
Senie, H. and Webster, S. (eds.) (1992) Critical Issues in Public Art:
Content, Context and Controversy, New York, Harper Collins.
Sharp, J. (2007) ‘The Life and Death of Five Spaces: Public Art and
Community Regeneration in Glasgow,’ Cultural Geographies, 14: 274–
 292.
Sharp, J., Pollock, V. and Paddison, R. (2005) ‘Just Art for a Just City:
Public Art and Social Inclusion in Urban Regeneration,’ Urban Studies,
42(5/6): 1001–1023.
Smith, N. (1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the
Revanchist City, New York: Routledge.
Spinney, J. (2010) ‘Performing Resistance? Re-reading Practices of Urban
Cycling on London’s South Bank,’ Environment and Planning A, 42:
2914–2937.
Stalker, D. and Glymour, C. (1982) ‘The Malignant Object: Thoughts on
Public Sculpture,’ Public Interest, 66: 3–21.
Stanek, L. (2013) ‘Henri Lefebvre: For and Against the “User”,’ in K.
Cupers (ed.) Use Matters: an Alternative History of Architecture, New
York: Routledge.
Stevens, Q. (2007) The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public
Spaces, Abingdon: Routledge.
Vaneigem, R. (1983) The Revolution of Everyday Life trans. D. Nicholson-
Smith, London: Rebel Press.
Warnke, M. (1989) ‘Kunst unter Verweigerungspflicht,’ in V. Plagemann
(ed.), Kunst im öffentlichen Raum: Anstöße der 80er Jahre, Cologne:
DuMont.
Winnicott, D. W. (1953) ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena
—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession,’ International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 34: 89–97.
Winnicott, D. W. (1967) ‘The Location of Cultural Experience,’ The
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 48: 368–372.
Winnicott, D. W. (1969) ‘The Use of an Object,’ The International Journal
of Psycho-Analysis, 50: 711–716.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971) Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock.
Part I
Perception
2
The Ergonomics of Public Art

Quentin Stevens

Sculpture is one of the most pervasive forms of public art. In this chapter, I
explore how well the material forms of public sculptures fit to the
dimensions and movements of the human body. This analysis draws on the
concepts of affordances and ergonomics, which relate to the technical
measurement and functional analysis of people’s perceptions, postures and
movements when they are using objects and moving through environments.
These concepts are reconsidered in light of Maslow’s (1943) characterization
of the broad spectrum of different needs that people seek to fulfil through
their actions, and the further development of Maslow’s thinking to evaluate
how objects serve ‘higher’ needs for social encounter, cognitive and
aesthetic pleasure and exploration, in the theory of ‘hedonomics’. These
bodily uses of art go beyond the conventional focus of technical analyses on
task efficiency, to suggest a much broader understanding of the satisfactions
that may be derived through the physical ‘use’ of an object. Drawing on field
observations of people’s behaviour, the chapter analyses a range of different
postures and movements that occur on and around a range of public
artworks, to identify particular characteristics of scale, material, surface and
form that appear to allow, support or encourage specific actions.

Public Art
It is important in the context of this study to have a working definition of
public art. Drawing upon Bataille (1985), art objects can be characterised
broadly in terms of their non-functionality. We are not talking about practical
objects that are well designed or beautiful; what makes something art is its
transcendence of utility. The analysis presented here draws primarily on
observation of large sculptures in public spaces, and it may not apply to all
forms of art that can be found in public settings. Although the forms of
public art continue to diversify, many public spaces are dominated by large,
centrally placed abstract sculptures. My finding is that many of these public
artworks are very functional, in the sense of supporting actions by the human
body, even though they were not conceived to be. Having been denied the
traditional representational role of art, what can be recognised in these
abstract objects are a set of physical attributes that are more or less well
dimensioned in relation to human postures and movements. Particularly
useful for understanding abstract public artworks is Fried’s (1967)
discussion of the theatricality of minimalist sculpture. Fried noted that the
human scale of minimalist artworks and their placement at ground level in
the middle of a gallery space where visitors could move around them
emphasised the prospects for physical interaction with them. When such
sculptures were placed in urban open spaces, they became accessible to a
much broader public. The engagements that can occur between public
sculptures and the manifold users of public spaces are often unanticipated
and unintended by the designers of those artworks, as well as by the
planners, designers and managers of the public spaces they stand in.

Ergonomics and Affordances

My use of the term ergonomic to characterise the relations between public
artworks and their ‘users’ is ironic, a polemical way to explore the idea that
art can be ‘used’, by focusing on the most pragmatic way of interpreting
human actions in relation to objects and spaces. I deliberately avoid the term
viewers or audience in describing the people who engage with public
artworks because of the presumptions these terms imply about spatial
relations, perceptions and actions. The term ergonomics is derived from the
ancient Greek ergon, meaning work, and nomoi, meaning natural laws.
Andre and Segal (1994:6) define it as the study of ‘the functional interaction
between people and work’ and, by extension, how the design of settings and
tools optimises these interactions. The discipline of Ergonomics is linked to
task specialisation (Taylorization) and the time-and-motion studies that
preceded it, and grew especially during and after World War II because of
the need to optimise labour resources (Pheasant and Haslegrave 2006). Ergo-
nomics relates specifically to workplaces, to the optimisation of narrowly
defined work-related functions by identifying efficient working postures and
movements which minimises strain and accidents and to designing
equipment that helps in conducting those activities efficiently, safely and
comfortably (Liu 2003). This field bridges many disciplines that study
human movement, including anthropology, medicine, philosophy, dance and
performing arts, sport, biology and anatomy (Larssen et al. 2007). Hancock
et al. (2005:10) highlight the negative foundation of Ergonomics, as the
study of how design can remediate or prevent problems such as
‘[f]rustration, pain, stress, fatigue, overload, injury, and death’, with the
primary aim being the enhancement of task efficiency rather than user
satisfaction.
Ergonomics has a large, very practical and highly empirical literature.
Almost none of it talks about art or aesthetics, except in terms of how
particular aesthetic features of everyday objects are or are not ergonomic, for
example whether the design of displays communicates information
effectively or whether aesthetically pleasing controls on objects are easy to
use (Norman 1998). From the opposite perspective, there is a thread of arts
scholarship that explores how public art consciously serves ergonomic ends.
Knight (2008) discusses Scott Burton’s minimalist works that are designed
to provide amenity as street furniture. Ansted (2009:7) is critical of the
frequent instrumentalisation of public art in ‘percent for art’ programs,
where artists’ briefs often require them to ‘complete an architectural function
or mend an architectural dysfunction’, such as providing seating or shade. As
Deutsche (1988) notes, the intended ‘usefulness’ of public artworks is also
often founded on moralistic views about who should use them, how and
why, which assigns artists a role in facilitating the gentrification of urban
spaces. Two things that make the ergonomic performance of the artworks
considered in this chapter of particular interest are that none of them was
designed to be useful in supporting human action and that the observed uses
of them are not necessarily practical. This examination thus goes beyond
how an art object is intended to be used—its functions—to explore the much
broader subject of how it can be used—its ‘affordances’.
Psychologist James Gibson (1979) suggests that animals, including
people, perceive affordances in their environment. These are ways in which
the environment supports or facilitates an animal’s desired activities. These
affordances are not absolute properties of the environment but are forms,
dimensions and qualities suited to the specific animal’s particular needs and
its capacities. Animals seek out these affordances to meet their needs
effectively. I suggest the same thinking can be extended to examine the
opportunities that the physical environment, and in particular public
sculptures, might provide for a range of human perceptions and desired
actions. Where my study goes beyond an analogy with Gibson’s thinking is
that the needs that people might meet through their engagements with public
art go well beyond Gibson’s relatively narrow focus on animal’s functional
survival needs.
Benjamin (1979) noted that children do not limit themselves to specific,
preconceived functional engagements with objects. Children are also less
likely than adults to be acculturated to categorising certain objects as ‘art’, or
to recognising in artworks the auratic qualities that inhibit adults from
exploring artworks’ physical affordances (Benjamin [1936] 1968).
Unconstrained by instrumental, rational needs or by prohibitions and
inhibitions, children playfully explore a range of possible relations to the
things they encounter, by focusing on their formal properties (Gilloch 1996).
Lang and Moleski (2010:106) highlight that ‘children perceive the
affordances for play and self-testing everywhere’ in the urban environment.
They also note that adults are equally aware of these affordances but are
often more inhibited about taking advantage of them. It is noteworthy that
Lang and Moleski use the word perceive rather than see. Gibson’s (1979)
most famous work focused on visual perception of affordances. Vision
allows rapid and distant recognition of many important affordances offered
by various features of the environment. However, Gibson’s own examples of
affordances, such as the firmness and load-bearing capacity of the ground,
demonstrate that affordances for use can also be perceived in other ways, up
close with the body (Gibson 1966).
In understanding the active processes through which people perceive
objects, Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz (2004) distinguish between functional,
aesthetic and symbolic reception. They note that practitioners and
researchers in different disciplines tend to focus on one or another of these
dimensions and neglect the others: Ergonomics favours functional
performance, design favours aesthetics and marketing emphasises
symbolism. Within the scope of functional performance, they also
differentiate between ergonomics as narrow mechanical performance and as
social ecology, the ways that the design of work environments contributes to
interpersonal interactions by framing different arrangements and distances
between people (Wener 1985). Objects have usefulness in social terms; this
may be ignored by designers who focus chiefly on ‘practical’ function or on
aesthetics. Users may discover that the physical properties of objects and
settings provide affordances for social engagement that were not recognised
or intended by their designers. Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz also found that the
creators of objects often focus on one specific reading of the objects’
function, beauty or meaning without considering other potential readings.
There are thus often mismatches between designers’ preconceptions about
the objects they create and a range of unexpected ways that other people
perceive and use those objects. This is just as true for primarily aesthetic
objects such as public artworks as it is for practical equipment. As Rafaeli
and Vilnai-Yavetz note, ‘chairs and desks have aesthetic properties and
pictures have functional properties’ (Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz 2004:94,
citing Strati 1992).

The Hierarchy of Human Needs and ‘Hedonomics’

In considering the wide range of affordances that people might perceive in
objects, and the focus of ergonomics on eliminating deficiencies in safety
and functionality, Hancock et al. (2005) highlight that these matters are low
in Maslow’s (1943) theorised hierarchy of human needs. Maslow’s central
principle is that everybody has basic physiological needs such as safety
which cannot easily be deferred. These needs are relatively uniform among
different individuals, they are quantifiable, and they can clearly be addressed
through design. Once we have met these ‘base needs’, ‘at once other (and
“higher”) needs emerge, and these dominate the organism’ and so on up the
hierarchy through the needs for affiliation, esteem, self-actualisation,
cognitive and aesthetic needs and self-transcendence (Maslow 1943:375;
1970). With these higher order needs, ‘gratification becomes as important a
concept as deprivation’ (Maslow 1943:375), and choice comes to dominate
necessity. People’s higher-order needs (or ‘desires’) are more subjective,
more varied between cultures and individuals and more difficult to analyse
and respond to (Lynch 1981). The higher needs are less well understood
empirically because of their sheer diversity and because the behaviour
associated with these needs is in large part exploratory and indefinite.
Maslow’s hierarchical conception of needs has received many critiques,
and it lacks empirical verification. One particular shortcoming of Maslow’s
thinking for an examination of how people make use of public spaces is that
it focuses on individuals meeting innate needs, largely ignoring ‘the role of
learning, perception, and environment’ in shaping human action (Wahba and
Bridwell 1976:214). People’s actions are guided not only by inherent
motivations or by the practical affordances of their environment but also by
cultural contexts and understandings of their situation and their social selves
and by the stimulations of the environment itself. These other stimuli do not
necessarily encourage instrumental responses (Bourdieu 1984; Trigg 2004).
Maslow’s theory of motivations ignores ‘ample evidence that people seek
objects and engage in behaviour that are in no way related to the satisfaction
of needs’ (Wahba and Bridwell 1976:234). Several points can however be
usefully drawn from Maslow’s theory, its past applications and its critiques
to guide an evaluation of how and why people ‘use’ public sculpture in
unexpected ways. People have a range of psychological and physiological
motivations to action. They are not only driven by innate, practical needs.
People’s actions are also shaped by their perceptions of how the environment
around them might serve their various needs. People’s needs and actions in a
particular situation are conditioned by the attitudes and actions of other
people around them. And people constantly learn about new ways of
recognising and satisfying their needs. The non-functional nature of art and
the diverse ways that other people respond to artworks thus open up a range
of possibilities, in terms of what needs an individual might meet by
responding to an artwork in various ways.
The concept of hedonomics (Helander 2002; Hancock et al. 2005) moves
beyond the practical empiricism of Ergonomics to explore how objects serve
different kinds of needs within Maslow’s hierarchy, and to recognise that
different actors perceive different affordances in their environment.
Hedonomics is an extension of the discipline of Ergonomics to consider
‘positive and pleasurable’ aspects of interactions between humans and their
artefacts and environments, through the study of ‘improvements in all
physical and cognitive environments, thus serving to enhance the overall
quality of life’ (Hancock et al. 2005:8). Hancock et al. (2005) note that
hedonomic design would include encouraging challenge and exploration, as
these are among the sources of pleasure. Hedonomics emphasises users’
‘higher’ needs, which are relatively individuated, fragile and changeable.
Hedonomics emphasises people’s different uses of objects and environments
according to their individual needs and interests, including differences in
what individuals find pleasurable. Hancock et al. note that hedonomics must
engage with social and cultural variations, which can extend to quite basic
functional performance dimensions such as sitting at a table; knowledge in
this area dates back at least to the work of Rapoport and Watson (1972).
Hedonomics emphasises user autonomy, where interactions with objects are
not directed to single narrow actions, emotional responses and
interpretations of meaning. It focuses on highly dynamic and varied
relationships, as ‘users bring their own cognitive appraisals, past
experiences, traits, and mood states to the interaction and as these users
change their views of the situation and themselves over time’ (Hancock et al.
2005:12).

Observations
The following analysis of the ergonomics of public artworks draws upon my
own field observations of people’s varied bodily postures and actions on and
around 14 different sculptures. One public artwork, the Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (Peter Eisenman, 2005), hereafter
MMJE, provided a particularly rich range of data, because of its high number
of visitors, its large scale (which encourages prolonged, exploratory
engagement), the varied dimensions of its constituent elements, and a
prolonged period of observation on 30 dates, totalling 50 hours.
Complementing this is an opportunistic sample drawn from behaviour
discretely observed and photographed around 13 other large-scale
sculptures, four figurative and nine abstract, in public spaces in Europe,
North America, Australia and China. This sample provides a basis for
identifying particular characteristics of scale, material, surface and form that
appear to allow or encourage specific postures and actions, in line with
Gibson’s (1979) concept of environmental affordances. In most cases,
visitors’ actions observed at these artworks seem to not have been
specifically intended or encouraged by the works’ designers. Analysis
illustrates the ergonomic functionality that these public artworks have not
only for simple tasks but also for giving sensory pleasure, developing new
bodily skills and supporting social interaction.

Resting on Top of Artworks

Perhaps the most common practical use of artworks in public is for sitting
on. People often sit on the plinth of The Arrival (Frank Meisler, 2006; Figure
2.1), which is located directly outside an entrance to London’s Liverpool
Street Station. This is the city’s busiest railway terminal, but only two
benches have been provided for the waiting public. This historical memorial
depicts Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany who stand waiting with
their luggage for transportation to foster families throughout Britain. Today’s
passengers sit and wait right next to the sculptural figures. Along two sides
of the plinth, raised metal plates listing the names of German cities that the
children arrived from seem intended to pre-empt sitting. They make sitting
less likely and less comfortable, but they do not prevent it. People sit on
artworks even when it is not obvious or easy to do so, because of their
excessive height, uneven surface or uncomfortably hot or cold temperature.
The frequency of sitting as a use of public art thus suggests more about the
high demand for sitting and the shortage of planned seating than it does
about the particular suitability or comfort of an artwork as a seat (Whyte
1980). In some cases people lie down on top of public artworks. This
requires a reasonably large, flat or gently curved surface. The extreme
hardness of most public artworks does not appear to deter this use.
Figure 2.1 The Arrival (Frank Meisler, 2006), Liverpool Street Station, London
Photo by Quentin Stevens (July 2012).

Some public artworks, such as statues of horses, suggest the act of sitting
and lend it a certain symbolic significance, although the ergonomics of
mounting these animals greatly influences how likely people are to climb up
and sit on them. Some artworks include representational chairs. These are
the most obvious illustrations that public sculpture is ‘more than
representational’ (Thrift 1997): sculpture does not just illustrate a place for
sitting; it also supports the action. Abstract, non-representational sculptures
can also be good for sitting, even though they do not advertise the fact. The
minimalist MMJE is composed of numerous low, horizontal concrete blocks
of varying heights, which thus suit well the different heights and postures of
the many people who sit on them. But for many public artworks, it is the
supporting stone base of an artwork that provides the seating opportunity,
rather than the sculpture itself. In democratic countries today, large-scale
heroic sculpture is generally out of favour, and plinths on artworks in public
spaces are seldom too high for sitting. The functionality that the plinths of
contemporary public artworks provide for sitting appears to be a somewhat
inadvertent consequence of two other practical intentions—to raise artworks
to the eye level of standing people and to prevent people and other objects
from bumping into them.
A related functionality of plinths and low horizontal artworks is the
potential they offer for resting objects, in particular for people to place their
bags and other possessions while they sit or rummage through them. Some
of visitors’ possessions—in particular cups and bottles—require a very flat,
hard, horizontal surface. Abstract sculptures tend to be the most practical,
because they often have planar surfaces, and they lack three-dimensional
figurative elements that tend to obstruct use. An extensive flat surface which
allows objects to be moved around can also be used as a practical work
surface, for reading books and maps, playing cards, writing or drawing while
either sitting on or standing next to the artwork.
One curious consequence of the use of public artworks for sitting, lying
and resting objects is that all three kinds of actions generally lead to people
obscuring the artwork with their body or other objects. Sitting on an artwork
also typically means facing away from it. Reduced to its functional, material
property of being a support, such artworks become unnoticed and invisible
to those who sit on them.

Standing Relations to Artworks

The shapes and materials of public artworks frame possibilities for people to
stand in particular spatial relations to them. Cloud Gate (Anish Kapoor,
2006) in Chicago (Figure 2.2) has a continuous, curved mirror surface that
encourages people to stand close in front of it, move around and touch it, to
explore and play with their own reflections and that of the city skyline. At
this close scale, the artwork itself is effectively invisible. This and many
other large artworks also serve the practical function of providing protection
from sun, wind and rain, because people can stand beneath or inside them.
Although it does not form a roof, the MMJE in Berlin also has an ‘interior’.
It is composed of a large undulating field of rectangular concrete stelae
which start low at the site perimeter. Toward the centre of the site, the rows
of stelae become taller, and the ground surface slopes downward. Therefore,
as a visitor moves into the site, the stelae gradually increase in height until
the visitor is ‘swallowed up’ between them and their view is constricted.
Visitors often explore this condition, stopping at the point where the tops of
the stelae reach their eye level, to look around, to pose for photographs or to
change direction so that they do not walk any deeper into the field (Stevens
2009). Although these actions are not in themselves serving functional
needs, they illustrate people’s keen, detailed awareness of the perceptual
affordances and constraints of the artwork, with which they also identify a
wide range of other ergonomic possibilities. Numerous other kinds of
standing spatial relations between visitors’ bodies and public artworks are
possible, including hiding from other people ‘behind’ an artwork, resting
elbows on it and slouching or pushing against it.

Figure 2.2 Cloud Gate (Anish Kapoor, 2006), Grant Park, Chicago
Photo by Quentin Stevens (July 2008).
Moving over Artworks

The simple stationary postures and spatial relations to artworks described

previously are in many cases serving quite practical needs, such as resting
the legs and body, freeing up the hands to manipulate objects and sheltering
from weather. But numerous other kinds of bodily movements around and
over artworks are playful and have no direct practical function.
Public artworks that provide flat, firm surfaces low to the ground, or a
series of such surfaces, afford people the opportunity to step up onto them.
So do artworks’ plinths. Determining possible and ideal relations between
the height and length of steps is a standard problem of study in Ergonomics,
to prevent accidents, minimise effort, optimise accessibility and use space
efficiently (Warren 1984). The low heights of the perimeter stelae at the
MMJE allow people of all ages to easily manage the crucial first step up
from the ground level. When visitors to the MMJE are engrossed in viewing
and photographing the field of stelae, they often step up onto very low stelae
near the perimeter. Many people walk up to the top of the taller stelae to
have a panoptic view of the entire memorial and the other people using it
and to be seen and be photographed. The minimalist artwork has become a
vacant pedestal, and also vice versa (Springer 2009). In many cases, visitors
do not even seem aware that they are standing on top of part of a memorial
and that walking on top of the stelae is not permitted. The numerous rows
and aisles of the MMJE stelae offer diverse options for walking up across the
top of the stelae field (Figure 2.3): reasonably regular upward gradations of
steps, of differing steepness, as well as more varied and difficult shifts, all
giving eventual access to stelae more than 4 metres in height. The uniform
900mm horizontal separation between stelae is manageable even by quite
young children. Diagonal movement across the field offers greater
challenges, as does jumping quickly across the gaps, which is also forbidden.
Figure 2.3 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Peter Eisenman, 2005), Berlin
Photomontage by Quentin Stevens (May 2006).

People do not only climb artworks because it is easy to do so. Sometimes

the challenge of climbing provides a special attraction. Visitors to the MMJE
do not always choose the easiest set of steps to move over the artwork.
People often pull themselves up on top of it with their hands, or take a
running jump to get up, or are pushed or pulled up by other people. They
edge their way upwards, pressing their hands, feet and backs against the
opposing surfaces of two of the MMJE’s concrete masses, a move referred to
in rock climbing as a ‘chimney’. People also climb artworks by rolling onto
them on skateboards, inline skates and bicycles. This is facilitated when the
surface of an artwork meets the ground at a low angle, although people can
also roll and then jump onto higher ledges. Many other kinds of contact
movement with public artworks are possible, depending on a work’s size and
materials. People may put their arms around it or hit it to see how hard it is
and to test its mechanical and audible reverberation. These actions show that
not all ‘uses’ of an artwork meet an independently, previously determined
practical ‘need’. They are, rather, illustrations of artworks themselves
inspiring curiosity and exploratory ‘use’; in Maslow’s terms, meeting higher-
level needs. These observations highlight the particular constraints and
preconceptions of Ergonomics as an analysis of person–environment
relations, and they suggest some of the scope of hedonomics as a broader
conception of use.

Conclusion
The actions described here emphasise the materiality of public artworks and
touching of them, rather than their representational aspects and distant
viewing of them. Abstract public sculptures lack figurative details that can
maintain interest for onlookers. The reflective surface of Cloud Gate in
Chicago directs attention back on the users and the surrounding context; the
artwork itself resists close visual attention. People sitting, standing or lying
on public sculptures are facing away from the art. Sometimes they
inadvertently obscure the artwork from view by draping their own bodies
and their bags, clothes and newspapers over it. All the playful uses of public
art described in this chapter rely on the artworks’ accessibility. They are
placed close to ground level in public spaces, without a high plinth, and are
not protected from close encounter by intervening fountains, moats,
shrubbery or fences.
It would be possible to design public artworks so they were
unapproachable and dysfunctional. To minimise problems of terrorism,
cleaning and ‘loitering’, the top surfaces of many other urban furnishings,
from bus-stop benches and postboxes to window ledges, have been designed
to be ‘anti-ergonomic’, either sloped or fitted with sharp projections, so that
people and objects do not occupy them or climb on them. Artworks and their
plinths are rarely intentionally configured in these ways. Nevertheless, with
many large-scale abstract public sculptures, either the faces that meet the
ground are sufficiently perpendicular and long to inhibit climbing, or the
artwork is elevated high on smooth ‘legs’. At Ottawa’s peacekeeping
monument Reconciliation (Jack Harman, 1992), where three statues stand
atop the apex of several high walls, potentially inviting imitation, the top
edges of all the walls have been bevelled on an angle so that they are
difficult to grasp and climb. In such cases, artistic expression conceals a
more or less conscious awareness of ‘target hardening’ and other crime-
preventing design principles which limit people’s access and use (Clarke
1983; Flusty 1997). It would, alternatively, be possible to design public
sculptures hedonomically, ‘[d]esigning […] to aid the users in the need to
live up to their fullest and unique potential’ (Hancock et al. 2005:11). Some
art in public spaces is, of course, intentionally designed to encourage people
to interact with it, or even to contribute to its creation.
But many of the observable unexpected, inventive uses of public sculpture
arise because of the loose, underdetermined relation between physical form
and visitors’ perceptions, interests and actions. Most of public artworks
examined here, and people’s discoveries and enactments of their possible
uses, confirm Gibson’s (1979:127–128) theory of affordances:
If a […] surface is […] nearly horizontal […] nearly flat […] and sufficiently extended (relative to
the size of the animal) and if its substance is rigid […]. It is stand-on-able, […] walk-on-able and
run-over-able. [These] are not just abstract physical qualities. They have unity relative to the
posture and behaviour of the animal […] surfaces, of course, are also climb-on-able or fall-off-able
or get-underneath-able or bump-intoable relative to the animal […]. The human species in some
cultures has the habit of sitting […] if a surface of support with the four properties is also knee-
high above the ground, it affords sitting on […]. It may have various shapes, as long as its
functional layout is that of a seat.

The fit between public artworks’ forms and their uses is not perfect.
Public artworks do not often serve needs for use efficiently, and the actions
performed with and around them are not always easy or comfortable. Rather
than optimising human actions, public sculptures typically seem to meet
minimum thresholds for usefulness. People adapt to perceived opportunities,
and they seek out the best affordances that public space provides. If an
artwork does fit well to users’ behaviours, it is often because it offers such a
variety of heights and widths and slopes that individual users can seek out
dimensions that suit them best.
The range of observed uses of public sculptures suggest that such
artworks can meet a wide range of needs, from simple or ‘lower-order’
functional needs for shelter and rest, up to pleasurable, self-affirming and
exploratory actions. The range of use depends on the ‘intentional repertoire’
of the people who encounter the works (Heft 1988): the range of things they
might be seeking to do. The briefing and design of public art rarely considers
this range with any thoroughness. However, the uses of public art are not
always mechanistically determined by the practical needs of public space
users. Sometimes the object stimulates the action, as when a sculpture of a
horse or a cow prompts the desire to sit on it.
 Sitting is probably the most common use of public art. This use confirms
Whyte’s (1980) profound finding that people sit wherever there are places to
sit. The tall pedestals of historic, heroic statuary make them unavailable for
public use. The pedestals of contemporary public art are often about the right
height for sitting, at 600mm to 900mm above the pavement. Artworks might
not be intended as remedial seating, but they often get used that way if a
plaza has limited seating, and that is generally the fault of landscape
designers and their clients rather than artists. Sitting meets a wide range of
social needs: not just the basic need to rest but also people’s higher-order
desires to spend time in public, seeing and being seen and interacting with
strangers (Gehl 1987; Lofland 1998). The use of hard horizontal surfaces of
public artworks for resting objects suggests that public spaces need more
tables as well as more seats. In terms of higher-order needs for playful
exploration, public artworks offer a range of challenges for climbing and
jumping as well as slopes for rolling. Such uses of public art involve risk.
Observation highlights two groups whose bodily encounters with public art
are particularly varied and exploratory: young children who are just starting
to explore the world and young men who are approaching the height of their
physical prowess.
Because of their formal variety and their lack of particular ergonomic
constraints, public artworks often provide a greater range of affordances that
can be discovered and tested than more practically conceived street
furnishings do. It is precisely because public artworks do not have a
function, and are not designed ergonomically, that they remain so open to the
discovery of various potential uses. If public artworks were funded, designed
and regulated to meet defined practical needs (see Ansted 2009), their
usefulness would probably be more limited.

References
Andre, A. and Segal, L. (1994) ‘Design Functions,’ Ergonomics in Design,
October: 6–8.
Ansted, D. (2009) ‘Awkward Politeness: Public Artwork in Western
Australia and Critical Discourse,’ in R. Woodrow (ed.), ACUADS 2009
 Conference: Interventions in the Public Domain, Brisbane: Griffith
University.
Bataille, G. (1985) ‘The Notion of Expenditure,’ in Visions of Excess,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Benjamin, W. ([1936] 1968) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,’ in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, New York: Schocken
Books.
Benjamin, W. (1979) One Way Street and Other Writings, London: New Left
Books.
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,
London: Routledge.
Clarke, R. V. (1983) ‘Situational Crime Prevention: Its Theoretical Basis and
Practical Scope,’ Crime and Justice, 4: 225–256.
Deutsche, R. (1988) ‘Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City,’
October, 47: 3–52.
Flusty, S. (1997) ‘Building Paranoia,’ in N. Ellin (ed.) Architecture of Fear,
New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Fried, M. (1967) ‘Art and Objecthood,’ Artforum, June: 12–22.
Gehl, J. (1987) Life between Buildings, New York: Van Nostrand-Reinhold.
Gibson, J. (1966) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Gibson, J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Gilloch, G. (1996) Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hancock, P., Pepe, A. and Murphy, L. (2005) ‘Hedonomics: The Power of
Positive and Pleasurable Ergonomics,’ Ergonomics in Design, 13(8): 8–
14.
Heft, H. (1988) ‘Affordances of Children’s Environments: A Functional
Approach to Environmental Description,’ Children’s Environments
Quarterly, 5(3): 29–37.
Helander, M. (2002) ‘Hedonomics—Affective Human Factors Design,’
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual
Meeting, 46: 978–982.
Knight, C. K. (2008) Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism, Malden:
Blackwell.
Lang, J. and Moleski, W. (2010) Functionalism Revisited: Architectural
Theory and Practice and the Behavioral Sciences, Farnham: Ashgate.
Larssen, A., Robertson, T. and Edwards, J. (2007) ‘Experiential Bodily
Knowing as a Design (Sens)-ability in Interaction Design,’ 3rd European
Conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement
(DeSForM), Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
Liu, Y. (2003) ‘Engineering Aesthetics and Aesthetic Ergonomics:
Theoretical Foundations and a Dual-Process Research Methodology,’
Ergonomics, 46(13–14): 1273–1292.
Lofland, L. (1998) The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential
Social Territory, New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Lynch, K. (1981) Good City Form, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Maslow, A. (1943) ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review,
50: 370–396.
Maslow, A. (1970) Motivation and personality, 2nd ed. New York: Harper
and Row.
Norman, D. (1998) The Design of Everyday Things, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Pheasant, S. and Haslegrave, C. (2006) Bodyspace: Anthropometry,
Ergonomics and the Design of Work, 3rd Ed., Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Rafaeli, A. and Vilnai-Yavetz, I. (2004) ‘Instrumentality, Aesthetics and
Symbolism of Physical Artifacts as Triggers of Emotion,’ Theoretical
Issues in Ergonomics Science, 5(1): 91–112.
Rapoport, A. and Watson, N. (1972) ‘Cultural Variability in Physical
Standards,’ in R. Gutman (ed.), People and Buildings, New York: Basic
Books.
Springer, P. (2009) ‘Rhetorik der Standhaftigkeit: Monument und Sockel
nach dem Ende des traditionellen Denkmals,’ in Denkmal und
Gegendenkmal, Bremen: Aschenbeck.
Stevens, Q. (2009) ‘Nothing More than Feelings: Abstract Memorials,’
Architectural Theory Review, 14(2): 156–172.
Strati, A. (1992) ‘Aesthetic Understanding of Organizational Life,’ Academy
of Management Review, 17: 568–581.
Thrift, N. (1997) ‘The Still Point: Resistance, Expressive Embodiment and
Dance,’ in S. Pile and M. Keith (eds.) Geographies of Resistance,
London: Routledge.
Trigg, A. (2004) ‘Deriving the Engel Curve: Pierre Bourdieu and the Social
Critique of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs,’ Review of Social Economy,
62(3): 393–406.
Wahba, A. and Bridwell, L. (1976) ‘Maslow Reconsidered: A Review of
Research on the Need Hierarchy Theory,’ Organizational Behavior and
Human Performance, 15: 212–240.
Warren, W. H. (1984) ‘Perceiving Affordances: Visual Guidance of Stair
Climbing,’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance, 10(5): 683–703.
Wener, R. E. (1985) “The Environmental Psychology of Service
Encounters,’ in J. Czepiel, M. Solomon, and C. Surprenant (eds.), The
Service Encounter, New York: Lexington Books.
Whyte, W. H. (1980) The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Washington
DC: Conservation Foundation.
3
Graffiti, Street Art and Theories of
Stigmergy

Lachlan MacDowall

Introduction
Just over 50 years ago, in the process of studying termite behaviour in North
Africa, French zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé developed a theory to explain
the mechanisms through which termite nests were constructed. Grassé’s
theory of stigmergy held that the shape of a termite nest develops without
central coordination or direct communication between the termites (Grassé
1959). Instead, the nest is produced by a series of indirect interactions
between single termites and the nest’s structure. In general terms, the theory
of stigmergy means ‘an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs
that it and other agents sense and that determine their subsequent actions’
(Parunak 2005:2).
The theory of stigmergy allowed individual and collective levels of
behaviour to be considered together, providing an explanation for an
apparent ‘coordination paradox’ observable in social insects: Individual
insects work as if they are alone, yet the total behaviour of the group appears
to correspond to a pattern. In the case of termites and other insects, the
theory of stigmergy was useful in explaining how ‘colonies of a given
species produce qualitatively similar patterns, be they nest architectures or
networks of foraging trails and galleries’ (Theraulaz and Bonabeau
1999:102).
 The theory of stigmergy suggests that insects respond to the material and
spatial qualities of their environment, for example the number of sides of the
cells of a bee colony or the distance between a food source and a nest. The
theory of stigmergy views the design of the completed nest as a logical
extension of an original set of material gestures, built on by a relatively
simple set of activities ‘according to behavioural rules bearing only upon
local cues’ (Theraulaz and Bonabeau 1999). That is ‘as a consequence of the
medium used, physical and geometrical constraints influence subsequent
choices of the colony’ (Theraulaz and Bonabeau 1999).
In the years following the publication of Grassé’s research, stigmergy has
been applied to other social insects and animals and more recently has been
taken up to describe human activities, for example the formation of walking
paths or patterns of rubbish dumping (Parunak 2005; Elliott 2007). The
models of self-organisation and ‘swarm intelligence’ described by theories of
stigmergy have also informed research into the rise of social movements, the
efficient operation of factories, artificial intelligence, robotics and the
aggregated decisions made by users of large-scale distributed computing
systems such as the Internet (Theraulaz and Bonabeau 1999, Theraulaz et al.
1999; Parunak 2005; Elliott 2007). Parunak (2005, cited in Elliott 2007:81)
notes that stigmergy can be identified in so many forms of human and
animal behaviour that it is nearly ubiquitous.
This chapter assesses the implications of the concept of stigmergy and
related ideas for understandings of how forms of street art are produced and
consumed in public space. Street art is a broad and contested category that
generally refers to small-scale artworks installed in public places
anonymously and without authorisation, but it can include a range of objects
and practices (Ganz 2004, Schacter 2013, MacDowall, 2014).
The chapter proceeds in three steps. First, it examines the forms of
interactions that produce street art objects, particularly the relationship
between the complex forms of authorship that produce street art and the
active audience which consume it. In this context, street art is understood as
a stigmergic site, drawing on the dynamism of indirect human-to-human
interactions that can occur through small changes to a shared environment.
Second, the advantages and limitations of deploying theories of stigmergy
are examined in relation to graffiti and the development of anti-graffiti
strategies. Finally, stigmergy’s attention to detailed spatial aspects is
explored in a specific example of a semi-authorised street art activity
engaged in by broad publics of non-artists worldwide: the practice of
attaching engraved locks to bridges.
Stigmergy does not offer a complete explanation of how street art is
produced or used in public space. As Levine (1995:241) notes, while the
application of ideas from the biological sciences to describe human
behaviour is very common, this must be done critically, for while it is
‘literally correct to say that human individuals are animals and that human
populations are animal populations […] it is metaphorical to say that human
society is a biological organism’. However, drawing on a theory developed
to explain the behaviour of social insects does provide new perspectives on
specific aspects of street art. These include the patterns in which street art
clusters in urban space and the ways in which street art can incite interaction,
both in a general sense and through the design elements of specific works.
Stigmergy also helps to displace the dominant notion of street art as a set of
art objects produced by individual artists, instead highlighting the forms of
collective effort that contribute to street art as a ‘cultural scene’ and to the
objects not as fixed entities but as forms which elicit ongoing contributions
(MacDowall 2012). This focus on the uses of street art has implications not
just for how street art itself is theorised and valued but also for how other
kinds of art in public space are understood.

The Emergence of Street Art

Although art in the streets has a long history, the formal category of street art
emerges in the late 1990s in the nexus between the aesthetic exhaustion of
modern graffiti, activism associated with the anti-globalisation and anti-war
movements and the revival of art forms such as spray-painted stencils, paper
paste-ups and ephemeral sculptures, made newly available via the nascent
public Internet (Ganz 2004; MacDowall 2013; Schacter 2013; Young 2014).
Street art emerges from a collection of similar terms— urban art, un-
commissioned art, guerrilla art, culture jamming—to become a global
category by the early twenty-first century (Ganz 2004; Schacter 2013).
Publications such as Nicholas Ganz’s Graffiti World: Street Art from Five
Continents (2004) showcase a range of indigenous traditions of street art
mixed with local styles adapted from an already globalised hip-hop graffiti.
By linking images of street art from cities once considered peripheral such as
São Paolo with familiar centres such as New York and Berlin, books such as
Graffiti World constructed street art as a universal impulse and a global
practice.
Although street art covers a diversity of practitioners, political impulses
and materials, it typically involves colourful, figurative, two and three-
dimensional additions and alterations to city spaces, often produced
informally or without authorisation using everyday materials and ranging in
scale and complexity from micro-sculptures to enormous murals. Despite the
seeming simplicity of its two components, the term street art is filled with
definitional complexity, including the level to which the activity is
formalised or authorised, how and by whom it is produced and appreciated
and its widely different contexts: from pixaçao tagging in Brazil and stencils
in the Arab Spring to post-conflict murals in East Timor (Parkinson 2010).
As Saskia Sassen (2011:574) argues, the idea of the street now has a global
resonance as a space ‘where new forms of the social and the political can be
made’, transcending the earlier model of streets as places for ‘enacting
ritualized routines’, based on the classic European model of the piazza or
boulevard. Although it is always becoming more specialised, formalised and
commodified, in its democratic aspects of participation and reception, street
art still presents challenges to more specialised, formalised or commodified
notions of art making and viewing (Boriello and Ruggiero 2013; MacDowall
2008; 2014). Finally, street art has a complex relationship to related practices
such as graffiti, which has many shared materials and methods but also
distinct aesthetic frames and motivations. In definitional terms, graffiti can
either be subsumed under the larger category of street art or graffiti itself
becomes the primary category (MacDowall 2013; Schacter 2013; Young
2014).
The global practice and profile of artists such as Banksy, Shepard Fairey
and Invader demonstrate how street art now circulates within a semi-
formalised global economy, a network of interconnected artists, galleries,
events, brands, agents, websites and products (Schacter 2013). The trend of
street artists selling works and exhibiting in galleries has emphasised this
one aspect of their practice: the ability to produce mobile (sellable) objects
with a clearly defined, singular creator or author. However, many forms of
street art do not fit this model and are more accurately conceived in terms of
a more complex model of objects, authorships and audiences (CDH 2013).
Authorship and Audiences
Three aspects of street art’s production are important in considering how it is
created and how it functions in urban contexts. First, the most striking aspect
of street art is that artworks do not necessarily represent the work of any
individual artist but, rather, the cumulative effect of a range of practices over
time. While it is possible to identify particular street artists whose work is
highly prominent or highly prized, street art is more usefully considered as
the result of collective authorship, a series of practices and artworks with a
number of artists, a ‘cultural scene’ or ‘cultural ecosystem’ (MacDowall
2012). Under this framing, the creativity of street art is understood not
simply as the skills or innovations of particular individuals but, rather, as the
product of a range of interactions: skill sharing, mentoring, collaboration,
imitation, theft and competition.
A second feature of street art, particularly art produced using stencils or
digital printing, is their serial nature. The artwork is produced through a
repetitive process derived from the industrial technology of stencilling, often
with various versions, additions and iterations both before and after it has
been installed in public, without a clear singular, original or fixed artwork
(MacDowall 2008). Indeed, a second striking aspect of this process is that it
removes the need for specialist skills at the moment the artwork is installed
on the streets. A single series of artworks can be produced by a range of
individuals, contributing to the difficulty of attributing singular authorship.
For example, this is the case with Shepard Fairey’s Obey series of stickers,
which are available for other artists and fans to stick up. The anonymity of
the installer of specific stickers or posters and Fairey’s own global travels
mean that it is not possible to distinguish between a work stuck up by the
artist and one placed in public by a second party.
A third feature of how production functions within street art is the
dynamism created by the ways in which street art responds to and interacts
with the urban environment and other street art. Public art is often
conceptualised to be produced and consumed in two distinct phases: formal
creation of a work by an artist followed by its passive encounter by non-
artists. The combination of street art’s complex authorship and multiple
interactions with various audiences complicates the notion of its production
in public space. The street artwork appears as an unstable and permanently
unfinished object, subject both to material decay and erasure and to semantic
refashioning, as the artworks and the urban fabric change and digital images
taken at various stages of its evolution continue to circulate after it has
disappeared, perhaps to be replicated in the future.
One example of this is the many ‘sticker sites’ around Melbourne, such as
an unused doorway at the northern exit of the Degraves St subway, which
houses the Platform Contemporary Art Spaces. The door itself is plastered
with many dozens of stickers built up over years (Figure 3.1). It has no
single author, and singling out any one sticker as of particular value would
obscure the more complex patterns of authorship and interaction, which
include drawing on, ripping and removing the stickers. Attributing singular
authorship can act as a form of reification, producing the appearance of an
isolated object by removing it from a particular context or web of
relationships. Many landmark street-art sites exhibit all three features of
authorship described here: collectivity, seriality and interactivity.
Figure 3.1 Door with stickers, Degraves St subway, Melbourne
Photo by Lachlan MacDowall (October 2011).

Alongside these complex forms of authorship, street art depends on and

produces particular types of audiences that consume the work and sometimes
become implicated in its documentation and (re)making. Alongside artists,
curators and promoters, the street audience is an often-neglected element in
the rise of street art. One form of street art audience is the ideal viewers
implied by the artwork’s semiotic modes of address, which is most obvious
in forms of text such as a stencil by Australian artist Dlux, which reads
‘Don’t be scared, it’s only street art’. Street art audiences also exist as
photographers and documenters of street art; as the subjects of formalised
viewing opportunities in galleries, street art tours, tourist programs and
staged events; as buyers and collectors of street art; as empirical data of
surveys and studies; and, increasingly, as active makers of the work.
Alongside fans, many of these audiences will also include those who are
employed to paint over or remove the artworks, such as property owners and
cleaning contractors (MacDowall 2008). The category of street art is shaped
by feedback loops created by these types of audiences and the differing ways
in which these audiences interact with, and in many cases, create the object
of street art, making distinctions between street art’s authors and audiences
unstable and questionable.
A particularly common mode of interaction or way of using the artworks
is photography, which includes the reframing of the image through staged
photographs, posting, reposting and using hashtags and the addition of
comments on social media. Street artworks are also photographed, archived
and reframed by artists themselves and by specialist street-art photographers
and bloggers who can exert significant influence. These trends have led to
street art, while still dependent on local spatial contexts and materials,
becoming increasingly dematerialised, with direct encounters with street art
often outstripped by digital viewing (MacDowall 2008).
Beyond the fact of its eager solicitation of the viewer’s gaze via common
motifs of eyes and faces the textual address of short slogans or the flash of
recognition generated by appropriated imagery, street art also advocates,
implicitly or explicitly, a direct, unauthorised engagement in the city’s
fabric. The result is a form of public art often subject to its own ethic:
constantly copied, collected, defaced and erased. Some forms of street art
explicitly encourage interaction, for instance by posing questions to viewers,
or including empty thought or speech bubbles. However, by highlighting the
ways in which it is possible to transgress the laws of the city and install
artwork in public, all street art implicitly encourages interaction. To put it
another way: unauthorised use creates the conditions for its own
interactivity, ‘authorising’ further unauthorised use.
This model of street art shifts the usual focus on singular and static forms
of authorship, object-hood and public reception to more complex and
evolving forms in which artworks exist on a larger scale (a series of walls, a
precinct, a train line) and in a different temporality, as a product of ongoing
alterations and additions. It is exactly these ongoing, unplanned and
uncoordinated aggregate actions that are made visible by theories of
stigmergy, in part because the theories originate outside of the usual models
of aesthetic production. As a consequence, the production and reception of
artworks is reduced to a series of ‘stimulus-response sequences’ in which
‘each animal’s activity is organizing the environment in such a way that
stimulating structures are created; these structures can in turn direct and
trigger a specific action from any other individual from the same species that
comes into contact with them’ (Theraulaz and Bonabeau 1999).
The detailed attention paid to the material environment in stigmergy
studies is useful in considering how varying materials and spatial
configurations of street art may provoke different responses. That is,
alongside the many strategies of address used by street art to solicit viewers’
attention and interaction, it is useful to consider how the material and spatial
properties aid or constrain how people respond. For example, a feature of
spray paint is its ability to be applied to surfaces of varying textures and to
accommodate uneven surfaces. Certain types of spray paint, however, have a
sheen and a chemical composition that is difficult to cover over with
additional spray paint and calls for the application of a thick undercoat in a
time-consuming process.

Stigmergy, Graffiti and the Broken Windows

Theory

Mark Elliott (2007) has used the concept of stigmergy to analyse graffiti. In
his survey of stigmergic mechanisms in human behaviour Elliott (2007:81–
82) shows how graffiti can be understood through both quantitative and
qualitative forms of stigmergy:
while graffiti might on the outset appear qualitative to those who engage in the art (a good work’s
techniques and or subject matter inspiring a response) from outside the graffiti community it
would seem to be an activity governed more by quantitative means (the more works existing on
one particular wall, regardless of merit, the more likely it is that more will be attracted). Of course,
both are correct.
 Although not referenced directly, the notion of stigmergy also seems to
underpin the ‘Broken Windows Theory’, an influential account of the
relationship between urban disorder, crime and policing (Wilson and Kelling
1982). The theory argues that small instances of disorder left unchecked,
such as broken windows, lead to ‘the breakdown of community control’ and
crime (Wilson and Kelling 1982). For Wilson and Kelling, broken windows
communicate to the public that a building is uncared for and that further
vandalism is unlikely to be repaired and policed, in that other criminal
activities will be tolerated. According to the authors, their assumption is
‘giving voice to a bit of folk wisdom that happens to be a correct
generalization— namely, that serious street crime flourishes in areas in
which disorderly behaviour goes unchecked’ (Wilson and Kelling 1982).
Despite a range of criticisms, the Broken Windows Theory continues to
shape zero-tolerance policing in general and policy responses to graffiti in
particular (Thacher 2004). Following the publication of the Broken Windows
article in 1982, criminologist George Kelling was hired as a consultant to the
New York City Transit Authority in 1985, in the lead-up to the complete
cleaning of graffiti from New York subway carriages (Kelling 1991). New
York is seen as the birthplace of subway graffiti in the early 1970s, but by
the 1980s, graffiti was being framed as a significant social and political
problem (Austin 2001). Given this context, graffiti played a prominent role
in Wilson and Kelling’s (1982) linking of urban disorder to crime:
As Nathan Glazer has written, the proliferation of graffiti, even when not obscene, confronts the
subway rider with the “inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure for an hour or
more a day is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and that anyone can invade it to do whatever
damage and mischief the mind suggests.” (n.p.)

From the late 1980s, the New York City Transit Authority enacted a new
method of cleaning, which saw all carriages with graffiti taken out of
commission and cleaned immediately (Austin 2001). Kelling (1991:n.p.)
took the success of these train-cleaning policies as further evidence of the
‘Broken Windows Theory’:
Officials knew they were winning when graffitists who managed to penetrate yards tagged graffiti-
covered cars rather than clean ones. Graffitists were learning the rules, rules which I believe had
some moral force over and above the incentive effect of never letting the graffitists show their
work. A clean train is a clear sign that the rules forbid graffiti and the rules are being enforced. A
graffiti-covered train signals that the rules against graffiti are not very serious, that the custom of
the country allows for tagging trains.
 Like theories of human-to-human stigmergy, the Broken Windows Theory
regards the urban environment as a rich semiotic space in which subjects
communicate indirectly via small changes to the urban fabric. In the absence
of direct communication through the physical presence of police officers, the
policing of graffiti become an exercise in indirect communication, through
the maintenance of ‘signs’ that signify ‘rules’ and a broader ‘moral force’,
shaping the behaviour of the population in a similar way to the ‘stimuli’ and
‘stimulating structures’ of stigmergy (Theraulaz and Bonabeau 1999).
Similarly, the slide to disorder seems to be infused with ideas of stigmergic
interactions. Rather being seen as the result of direct coordination or
planning, crime is regarded as the product of material decay which triggers
further, and likely escalating, decay: ‘if the windows are not repaired, the
tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows […] even break into
the building […] perhaps light fires inside’ (Wilson and Kelling 1982).
While the Broken Windows Theory reflects both the qualitative and
quantitative aspects of stigmergy (referencing both the kinds of disorder and
the sheer amount), it also points to some of the limitations of the application
of stigmergy to human behaviour. Unlike the mechanisms through which
insects indirectly communicate, the Broken Windows Theory also requires a
level of interpretation and value judgment in explaining how humans
understand and respond to cues. That is, the process through which graffiti
or a broken window comes to signify disorder and prompts a response of
apathy or crime is a complex one. In contrast to its necessary association
with deviance and disorder in the case of Kelling and Wilson, graffiti
signifies, in other contexts and for other viewers, more positive social
attributes, such as a sign of creativity and engagement and interaction with
urban spaces. Many cities have districts in which graffiti and street art are
celebrated, such as Brick Lane in London, Hosier Lane in Melbourne or
parts of SoHo in New York. The different ways in which graffiti can signify
—from neglect and social disorder to artisanal advertising or cultural
vibrancy—reflects the varied contexts globally in which graffiti is produced
and consumed. In many of these contexts graffiti does not generally signify
disorder—as the Broken Windows Theory would have it—but is integrated
into the urban fabric as part of the everyday patina of the city or, more
positively, as an element of a lively culture.
Love Locks
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, notions of graffiti and street art
have been extended to include any kind of creative intervention in public
space, often under the rubric of ‘urban creativity’ (Boriello and Ruggiero
2013). This category extends the notions of graffiti and street art to include
almost any form of civic engagement in public space and might include
ephemeral sculptures or performances, such as laser projections or flash
mobs, public gatherings coordinated by social media (Schacter 2013). Urban
creativity also includes more prosaic interventions, everyday gestures which
do not have the aesthetic or political force of much graffiti and street art,
such as the shoe trees prevalent across the US, in which old footwear is
strung up in trees by the hundreds; chewing gum walls; or the practice of
attaching padlocks to street fixtures (e.g. see Griswold 2009; Enulescu 2007;
Powers 2011). These three examples provide excellent illustrations of a
blunt, quantitative form of stigmergy and the ways in which certain urban
practices cluster spatially, without direct coordination. These examples also
occur globally, respond to particular local spaces and are produced by what
Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn terms a ‘non-exclusive audience’, people
who do not work or identify as artists (Birrell 2009/10).
The practice of attaching padlocks, which is discussed here in more detail,
has a long history that predates the emergence of street art as a global
category. The most popular examples involve couples marking or engraving
their names on a padlock and attaching it to a city bridge. The keys to the
love padlocks are often thrown into the water. The most publicised sites at
which love locks appear are the Pont des Arts in Paris and Ponte Milvio in
Rome (Figure 3.2), although popular journalism and Internet sites record
dozens of cities where this occurs, including Cologne; Dublin; Montevideo;
Algiers; Fengyuan, Taiwan; and the Yellow Mountain and Mt. Emei World
Heritage Sites in China (Breidenbach and Nyíri 2007; Enulescu 2007;
Leadbeater 2012).
Figure 3.2 Love locks on Ponte Milvio, Rome
Photo by Lachlan MacDowall (July 2011).

In Rome, this practice has been revived by the publication of two novels
(and a subsequent film adaptation) by Federico Moccia in which a young
couple attaches a padlock with their names written on it to a particular lamp
post on Ponte Milvio. Ponte Milvio is now the primary site of the locks in
Rome and contains thousands of locks and small street stalls selling
padlocks and offering to engrave names or messages. In a 2011 survey, the
names showed a significant diversity of nationalities and languages, for
example ‘Irene + Gerry’, ‘Maria + Estebah’ and ‘Cris Y Harold’.
Handwritten inscriptions often complement the engraved brand names of the
padlocks, which are designed to communicate the strength and security of
the device but take on another meaning when used to represent enduring
love. Much of the news reporting of love locks centres on new sites or
controversies associated with the appearance of the locks and subsequent
municipal responses, including removal on aesthetic or structural grounds
(Enulescu 2007; Leadbeater 2012; Wells 2013). The 2011 survey in inner-
city Rome identified locks attached to all bridges across the Tiber and all
major tourist spots, particular those connected to romantic narratives, such as
the Trevi Fountain or the Spanish Steps, which have been popularised
through international films such as Roman Holiday (1953) or Fellini’s La
Dolce Vita (1960). Locks are also visible outside the Pantheon, though with
street infrastructure redesigned or removed to discourage people from
adding locks, they are now attached to metal loops on the lids of rubbish
bins (Figure 3.3).
Figure 3.3 Love lock attached to rubbish bin outside the Pantheon, Rome
Photo by Lachlan MacDowall (July 2011).
Figure 3.4 Love locks attached to the Southbank Footbridge, Melbourne
Photo by Lachlan MacDowall (October 2013).

Aside from the specific origins of the practice, which remain vague but
are attributed to either oral accounts of a specific pair of lovers or the
mention of the practice in a novel, film or news reporting, theories of
stigmergy can help explain the clustering, coordination and physical
arrangements of the padlocks (Enulescu 2007). Once a site is established, the
padlock (or discarded shoes, chewing gum, etc.) acts as a sign that stimulates
further actions. The physical structure of the padlock encourages stigmergic
behaviour since, in their varying sizes, each attached padlock usually allows
for an additional padlock to be attached, even where the original street
fixture is inaccessible. The physical structure of the initial street fixture
seems to play a significant role in how the stigmergic behaviour unfolds. In
Melbourne, locks are absent from Princes Bridge, the main thoroughfare
over the Yarra River, because of an absence of available fixture, but on the
Southbank Footbridge there are hundreds of lock attached to the six lines of
wire railings that run the length of the bridge (Figure 3.4). However, because
of the number of locks, the large amount of available space, and the fact that
the locks can slide along the railings mean that this bridge does not achieve
the kind of density seen on other bridges such as in Cologne or Paris. In
Melbourne, locks are attached almost solely to the bridge and rarely to other
locks. In contrast, on Ponte Milvio in Rome where the bridge fixtures have
been altered to limit the available space, the locks are clustered together in
huge clumps of over a thousand locks. As in many cities, in Rome the love
locks became a civic issue, with the sheer amount and weight of the locks
posing problems for the structural integrity of the bridge and successive
mayors embroiled in disputes about how to resolve the issue (Enulescu
2007; Leadbeater 2012). In Paris, the collapse of a section of the railing of
Pont Des Arts due to the love locks have strengthened calls for the practice
to be banned (Willsher 2014).

Figure 3.5 Stall selling padlocks and engraving services, Ponte Milvio, Rome
Photo by Lachlan MacDowall (July 2011).
 The practice of attached padlocks is also stigmergic in the way its
supports or encourages further action by members of the public, and in the
way the means of acting are obvious and easily available to onlookers.
Particularly on Ponte Milvio, where a vendor sells padlocks from a
temporary stall and offers an engraving service, the installation is immediate
and cheap and does not require further skills or equipment on the part of the
participants (Figure 3.5).
In Melbourne, in contrast, there are no vendors on the Southbank
Footbridge: A couple who installed a lock reported travelling to a discount
store to purchase one (Wells 2013). In both cases, the presence and
increasing number of the locks acts as evidence that the practice is
permissible, or at least tolerated, even though fines have been imposed for
installing locks in some cities, such as Rome (Enulescu 2007).

Conclusion
The interrelated categories and practices of street art, graffiti and urban
creativity are the product of complex feedback loops between practitioners
and audiences. The global popularity of street art is tied to its modes of
engagement with the public, and the active audiences it generates. Street
art’s implicit or explicit advocating of a direct, unauthorised engagement in
the city’s fabric can lead to audiences themselves crossing over into the
terrain of creators and to the further circulation, renovation or destruction of
street artworks.
By adapting a theory derived from studies of social insects to the
behaviour of graffiti writers, street artists or members of the public who
engage informally with urban artworks, the notion of graffiti as a primal,
territory-marking activity, instinctive, self-unconscious and without aesthetic
or cultural complexity or value can be reinforced. However, theories of
stigmergy are useful in (temporarily) displacing the notion of the singular
artist as the author of a discrete work and in opening questions about the
relationship between individual expressive acts and collective creativity.
Thus, concepts of interactivity and stigmergy are helpful in explaining street
art’s complex forms of authorship and object-hood. They are usefully
suggestive of collective habits and patterns and, thus, of the behaviours of
cultural scenes or ecologies or ‘alternative art systems’ (MacDowall 2012;
CDH 2013; Young 2014).
Empirically, theories of stigmergy may also shed light on the impact of
specific materials and ways in which graffiti and street art cluster into dense
‘junctions, dens or zones’, to use Theraulaz et al.’s (1999) descriptions of
scent marking and chemically signalling. Theories of stigmergy are already
deployed to some extent in explaining the spatial patterns and seeming
coordinated spread of graffiti, though this is largely within the context of the
Broken Windows Theory, which overstates the causal relationship between
disorder and crime and is unable to account for contexts in which forms of
graffiti and street art signify more positive values, such as cultural vitality,
civic participation, artistic-run precincts and forms of tourism.
Theories of stigmergy are enjoying a revival in areas of artificial
intelligence and studies of large-scale human systems, such as military
deployments and the Internet (Parunak 2005). In this context, they can draw
attention to the conceptual and practical convergences between digital
systems and practices of graffiti and street art, in which tagging is combined
with hash-tagging, following Miller’s (2002:142) observation that ‘the Web
is really an extension of graffiti’. As such, the idea of ‘digital stigmergy’
provides a further way of understanding street art as an interactive activity
that takes place in urban spaces increasingly understood through digital
platforms (McQuire 2008; Rice 2012). While digital media play an obvious
role in archiving and extending the consumption of graffiti and street art
(MacDowall 2008; 2014), the practices of viewers of street art may also be
shaped by their expectations of digital platforms. That is expectations about
being able to interact in predictable and anonymous ways via a digital screen
may lead to similar expectations about being able to interact physically with
the fabric of the city, helping produce the active audiences of street art.
In his mapping of human-to-human stigmergy, Parunak (2005) updates the
language of Grassé’s original formulation to evoke this connection between
the unlimited scope of virtual spaces and the specific locales of the city,
describing ‘the essence of stigmergy’ as ‘the coordination of bounded agents
embedded in a (potentially unbounded) environment, whose state they both
sense (to guide their actions) and modify (as a result of their actions)’. In
contemporary cities, forms of graffiti, street art and urban creativity are best
understood in the context of this modernised version of stigmergy, as both
signs of and opportunities for interaction in public.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Dr. Mark Elliott for introducing me to the concept of stigmery.
See Mark Elliott, Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for
Mass Collaboration, unpublished PhD thesis, Centre for Ideas, Victorian
College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2007, available at http://mark-
elliott.net/blog/?page_id=24 (accessed December 17, 2013).

References
Austin, J. (2001) Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban
Crisis in New York City, New York: Columbia University Press.
Birrell, R. (2009/10) ‘The Headless Artist: An Interview with Thomas
Hirschhorn on the Friendship between Art and Philosophy, Precarious
Theatre and the Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival,’ Art & Research, 3(Winter): 1.
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v3n1/hirschhorn2.html (accessed April
29, 2014).
Boriello, L. and Ruggiero, C. (eds.) (2013) Inopinatum: Graffiti and Urban
Creativity, Rome: INWARD/Study Centre on Urban Creativity, Sapienza
University and Arti Grafiche Boccia.
Breidenbach, J. and Nyíri, P. (2007) ‘“Our Common Heritage”: New Tourist
Nations, Post-“Socialist” Pedagogy and the Globalisation of Nature,’
Current Anthropology, 48(2): 322–330.
CDH (2013) ‘Notes on the Commodification of Street Art,’ Art Monthly
Australia, 263(September): 42–44.
Elliott, M. (2007) Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for
Mass Collaboration, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Melbourne.
http://mark-elliott.net/blog/?page_id=24 (accessed December 17, 2013).
Enulescu, D. (2007) ‘Rome Mayor in “Love Padlock: Row,’ BBC World
News Online, March 1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6408635.stm
(accessed Dec 17, 2013).
Ganz, N. (2004). Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents, New York:
Harry N. Abrams.
Grassé, P. (1959) ‘La Reconstruction du Nid et les Coordinations Inter-
individuelles chez Bellicositermes natalensis et Cubitermes sp. La
Théorie de la Stigmergie: Essai d’Interprétation du Comportement des
Termites Constructeurs,’ Insectes Sociaux 6: 41–81.
Griswold, J. (2009) ‘Seattle Gum Wall Ranks in Top 5 “Germiest
Attractions”,’ MyNorthWest.Com website, June 11.
http://mynorthwest.com/?nid=11&sid=177556 (accessed April 28, 2014).
Kelling, G. (1991) ‘Reclaiming the Subway,’ City Journal (The Manhattan
Institute), Winter. http://www.city-journal.org/article01.php?aid=1614
(accessed August 5, 2014).
Leadbeater, C. (2012). ‘“Love Padlocks” Inspired by Romantic Novel Are
Cut from Rome’s Ponte Milvio Bridge,’ Daily Mail Online website,
September 11. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-
2201477/Romes-Ponte-Milvio-bridge-Love-padlocks-removed-ancient-
crossing-point.html (accessed April 28, 2014).
Levine, D. (1995) ‘The Organism Metaphor in Sociology,’ Social Research,
62(2): 239–265.
MacDowall, L. (2008) ‘The Graffiti Archive and the Digital City,’ in D. Butt,
J Bywater and N. Paul (eds.), PLACE: Location and Belonging in New
Media Contexts, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.
MacDowall, L. (2012) ‘Keith Haring and Melbourne’s Street Art Scene,’ in
H. Mathews (ed.), Caterpillars & Computers: Keith Haring in Australia,
Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
MacDowall, L. (2013) ‘The End of Graffiti,’ in L. Borriello and C. Ruggiero
(eds.), Inopinatum: Graffiti and Urban Creativity, Rome:
INWARD/Study Centre on Urban Creativity, Sapienza University and
Arti Grafiche Boccia.
MacDowall, L. (2014) ‘GRAFFITIDOWNUNDERGROUND,’ Artlink,
34(1): 16–19.
McQuire, S. (2008) The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Spaces,
London: Sage.
Miller, I. (2002) Aerosol Kingdom: Subway Painters of New York City,
Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
Parkinson, C. (2010) Peace of Wall: Street Art from East Timor, Melbourne:
Affirm Press.
Parunak, H. V. D. (2005) Expert Assessment of Human-Human Stigmergy,
Ottawa: Altarum Institute/Defence Research and Development Canada.
 www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a440006.pdf (accessed August 5, 2014).
Powers, A. (2011) ‘End of the Road for the Shoe Tree,’ Los Angeles Times,
February 16. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/16/nation/la-na-shoe-
tree-20110217 (accessed April 28, 2014).
Rice, J. (2012) Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the
Network, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Sassen, S. (2001) ‘The Global Street: Making the Political,’ Globalizations
8(5): 573–579.
Schacter, R. (ed.) (2013) The World Atlas of Graffiti and Street Art, Sydney:
New-South Press.
Thacher, D. (2004) ‘Order Maintenance Reconsidered: Moving Beyond
Strong Causal Reasoning,’ The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology,
94(2): 381–414.
Theraulaz, G. and Bonabeau, E. (1999) ‘A Brief History of Stigmergy,’
Artificial Life, 5(2): 97–116.
Theraulaz, G., Dorigo, M and Bonabeau, E. (1999) Swarm Intelligence:
From Natural to Artificial Systems, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wells, R. (2013) ‘The Lock of Love Secures Romance,’ The Age, July 16.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/the-lock-of-love-secures-romance-
20130716-2q14g.html (accessed April 28, 2014).
Willsher, K. (2014) ‘Oh l’Amour: Paris Bridge Rail Collapses under Weight
of too Much Love,’ The Guardian Online, June 9.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/09/paris-bridge-railing-
collapses-weight-love-locks (accessed June 13, 2014).
Wilson, J. and Kelling, G. (1982) ‘Broken Windows: The Police and
Neighborhood Safety,’ The Atlantic Monthly (March 1).
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-
windows/304465/(accessed December 17, 2013).
Young, A. (2014) Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban
Imagination, London: Routledge.
Part II
Interaction
4
Media Architecture
Engaging Urban Experiences in Public Space

Martin Brynskov, Peter Dalsgaard and Kim Halskov

Introduction
Media architecture can be understood as the convergence of interactive
media and architecture, and of digital and physical spaces (Brynskov et al.
2012). One form of media architecture that has increasing prominence in
cityscapes across the globe is media façades: buildings whose exterior skins
act as digital displays, a concept that was until recently just science fiction
imagery, an extrapolation of electronic billboards. But these massive
installations are by no means the only form of media architecture. Digital
and physical space co-exist, converge and co-evolve in many ways:
interactive urban furniture responds to citizens in inviting or provoking
ways, mobile devices offer us non-stop read–write access to geo-localised
information, social media transform the practices of public spaces, data logs
of inhabitants’ movement patterns inform urban planning, QR codes link
physical spaces and urban furniture with online spaces, augmented reality
systems and interactive soundscapes present us with extra layers of
perception of the city, be they functional or fictional. Media architecture thus
presents us with a range of new challenges and opportunities when it comes
to understanding and shaping urban experiences in public space. Although
still an emergent field, media architecture is playing an increasingly
important role in shaping the urban environment and in how people perceive
and interact with it. For the past eight years, our research group has been
exploring and developing public, interactive installations that invite people
to interpret, engage and interact, both with the installations and with other
people in public spaces (Halskov 2011).
In this chapter, we draw on insights from three of our installations and
discuss how media architecture can foster engaging experiences in public
space. We draw out characteristics of this work that are salient when relating
media architecture to the uses of art in public spaces, namely the roles of
aesthetics, interaction, meaning, participation and space.
We should make it clear that we do not conceive our field as art, but rather
as interaction design, which we believe provides insights relevant for the
field of art and urban visual culture. Nevertheless, we often involve artists in
the development process (for instance we worked with visual artists, dancers
and a composer in the Aarhus by Light case discussed in this chapter), and
we see a clear convergence between urban public art and the types of
installations we present and discuss here. It can be difficult to draw a clear
line, and indeed media architecture installations are often perceived to be
works of public art by the public.
We present and discuss three cases of media architecture: Aarhus by Light,
CO2nfession/CO2mmitment and City Bug Report. We selected these cases
because they represent three distinctly different ways of engaging the public
in the same urban setting, a central part of the city of Aarhus in Denmark. In
order to frame and scaffold our discussion of these cases, we first outline
five aspects that we have found salient for creating engaging media
architecture in public spaces, namely aesthetics, interaction, meaning,
participation and space. We then present each case in relation to these
aspects and finally offer a comparative discussion of the cases.

Salient Aspects of Media Architecture in Public

Space: Aesthetics, Interaction, Meaning,
Participation and Space
Considering our past work in relation to public art, five aspects have proved
particularly pertinent in our work, both when designing the installation and
in our subsequent studies of their public reception and use (Dalsgaard et al.
2011). These are the roles that aesthetics, interaction, meaning, participation
and space play in the development, use and perception of public media
architecture. While we present these aspects separately in the following
sections, we consider them to be intertwined and reciprocal. For instance, the
aesthetics of a media architecture installation is tied to its interactive
properties; the participation of the public affects the meaning of an
installation; the space in which an installation is located affects how the
installation is perceived and, in turn, affects people’s uses of the space.

The Role of Aesthetics

Our understanding of the aesthetics of media architecture is highly

influenced by the pragmatist aesthetics of John Dewey (1934). In this
perspective, aesthetic experiences are not confined to institutionalised
settings such as museums, and they do not necessarily require learned
insights. Everyday life holds the potential for aesthetic experiences to
emerge when we encounter something that stands out from our regular
routines and gives people cause to wonder, reflect, engage and explore.
Aesthetic experiences arise in meetings and exchanges, often involving
active engagement from the person or persons involved: ‘A work of art no
matter how old and classic, is actually, not just potentially, a work of art only
when it lives in some individualized experience [… It] is recreated every
time it is aesthetically experienced’ (Dewey 1934:212). Aesthetic
experiences often involve aspects that are challenging or puzzling, inviting
people to explore a situation, which in turn can potentially lead to new
insights through our active inquiry. As will be clear from the three cases,
these understandings form the aesthetic departure point for our work in
media architecture.

The Role of Interaction

Interaction is a fundamental part of media architecture. On the technical

side, the expression of an interactive installation is an output resulting from
some type of input and algorithmic processes. While the output must always
be manifested in a physical form, be it video on a display, projected imagery
on a wall or audio waves from speakers, there are in the case of media
architecture always underlying digital processes that generate these
expressions.
To communicate the different levels of interactivity that media
architecture (and interactive systems in general) can exhibit, we have found
it useful to apply a simple scale: static, dynamic, reactive, interactive and
communicative (Fritsch and Brynskov 2012). This scale allows us to make
simple but important distinctions among interactive systems, including
works of urban art. Static denotes the non-changing, or at least something
that is perceived as stable. An example would be a wooden sign or a mural.
It does change over time due to wear, and someone may take it down or
deface it, but that is not within its core properties. A dynamic system or
interface, on the other hand, is meant to change. An urban digital advertising
screen is dynamic. Its changes are programmed by an editor somewhere, not
for the public to immediately interact with. Again, if you are the editor, then
the screen is dynamic, but for the ordinary passer-by, it is inexorably
dynamic. A reactive system reacts to input without any direct or intentional
human involvement. A façade that slowly changes colour to reflect the time
of day or the level of CO 2 in the surroundings is reactive. People can
influence the CO2 level if they really want to modify the façade, but it is not
the intended functioning of the system. Interactive systems require direct and
intentional human engagement. An ATM or a gaming console is interactive.
The individual or collective human action directed towards the system is
intentional and creates an immediate response or series of responses forming
an interactive situation. There is a goal that requires one or more reciprocal
human-machine interaction steps. The systems we present in this chapter
range between reactive and interactive.
The final level in this scale is communicative systems. This is when the
interchange between humans and systems approaches that of a language.
There are not many systems of this kind, but voice-controlled services and
intimate use of sensor-actuator-based control systems provide examples.
Communication does not necessarily have to be verbal. Movements similar
to dance have been used to describe interactions in semi-communicative
terms using an adapted Labanotation (Loke 2005).
The Role of Meaning

As argued by Dalsgaard and Halskov (2010), media architecture can be seen

as a new medium, which in turn requires new means and modes of
expression. In public, urban spaces, media architecture potentially
communicates to and with a multitude of recipients in different situations. In
our work, we explore how media architecture in different scales and forms
can be developed to take on meaning in such shifting circumstances. Given
the changing situations around media architecture installations, an ongoing
challenge is to strike a balance between framing and open-endedness, in the
sense that an installation can evoke a number of different interpretations and
interactions. Looking broadly at the state of media architecture across the
globe (Haeusler et al. 2012) there appears to be an inverse correlation
between the complexity of content and the scale of the installation in
contemporary media architecture, such that (physically) large-scale
installations often present rather simple information, whereas smaller and
more local installations often offer more complex and interactive content.
This may be due in part to the perception of the installation, as people often
perceive of large-scale installations as something that communicates to a
wider group of recipients, rather than to them as individuals, whereas small-
scale installations, such as interactive billboards, appear to communicate to
them more directly. It may also be due to the technical aspects of interaction,
because it is easier to get more detailed input from users of small-scale
installations, for example through the use of cameras, sensors and touch
input, than is the case for large-scale installations, which often present pre-
programmed visuals or patterns of data from multiple users or sources, rather
than input from a single user. The three cases discussed in the following
represent three different approaches to how media architecture as a new
medium can offer new ways of communicating and inviting interpretations
of meaning in urban spaces.

The Role of Participation

Public spaces are potential arenas of participation. These spaces are often
‘scripted’ to invite certain types of behaviour, sometimes prompting
participation and socialisation, sometimes hindering it (Andersen and Pold
2011). Media architecture can not only reinforce existing scripts but also
transform them or bring about new ones. Our background is in the
Scandinavian tradition of designing interactive systems, in which end users
are often involved in shaping future technologies through participatory
design activities (see for instance Greenbaum and Kyng 1991). In our work
on media architecture, we seek to further strengthen the potentials of
participating, by designing installations that rely on the public’s active
participation, either in a very direct manner, such as tracking and responding
to physical movement, or in a symbolic manner, such as displaying
visualisations that are a result of many people’s inputs. While media
architecture can consist of displays with static or dynamic imagery and audio
(as is the case with many forms of advertising on media façades), we find
that there is a huge and thus far relatively unexplored potential in developing
architecture and installations that scaffold public participation. Participation
in this sense would require interactivity at least at the reactive level.

The Role of Space

Space is a key concern for the development of media architecture since it

must be integrated into existing physical surroundings. This includes both
the landscape and the architecture, such as buildings and shared spaces.
Since media architecture can be a very drastic intervention in the city and its
architecture, it requires attention not only to the architecture of individual
buildings but also to adjoining structures, plazas and streets. While all forms
of architecture rely on insights into the role of space, media architecture
prompts specific considerations since it has the potential to change over the
course of time and respond to different situations that arise within the same
physical space, as is often the case in the city. As an example, a public
square may be a transit area in early morning traffic, a place for dining and
drinking when café owners put out chairs and tables and a place of gathering
for concerts in the evening. Media architecture must respect and respond to
such shifting social landscapes. In addition to this, media architecture
addresses and combines physical and virtual spaces; indeed, one of the key
challenges of developing and understanding media architecture lies in
exploring the links and relations between the virtual and the physical.
Aarhus by Light
Aarhus by Light was an interactive media façade installation developed to
engage citizens in new kinds of behaviour in public, urban spaces, in this
case closely related to a specific venue (Brynskov et al. 2009). The purpose
of Aarhus by Light was to create a media façade, which was engaging both
the people passing by as well as contributing to the visual qualities of the
architecture and surrounding urban space. Therefore, the façade can be seen
as an experiment in both visual expression and experience through
interaction.
The centrepiece of the installation consisted of wrapping the 700-square-
metre glass façade of the Musikhuset, the city concert hall of Aarhus, with
180 square metres of semi-transparent LED screen, distributed in a non-
rectangular pattern behind the façade of the Musikhuset (Figure 4.1). The
façade faces onto a public park, and visitors to the park were met with a
view of animated creatures crawling around the structure of the glass façade,
along with a constantly moving outline of the Aarhus skyline. When visitors
walked through the park, they passed through three interactive zones marked
with coloured carpets. Once someone walked onto a carpet, a camera,
together with custom-designed software, identified the outline of the
person’s body, thereby creating a silhouette on the screen. This silhouette
encouraged a curious and playful investigation of the façade among the
users, while enabling them to interact with the creatures, by pushing, lifting
and dropping them.
Figure 4.1 Audience interacting with Aarhus by Light (CAVI, 2009)

Aarhus by Light ran constantly for roughly two months. As discussed in

detail by Brynskov et al. (2009) the interaction was monitored using a time-
laps camera as well as through logging of activations in the interaction
zones. Moreover, we carried out observations as well as 25 structured
interviews focusing on the interactive experience, the transformation of
public space and effect on social relation to strangers as well as
accompanying friend or family members.
One of the main objectives of Aarhus by Light was to engage and attract a
heterogeneous group of potential users—people passing by and glancing at
the façade more than 150 metres away; others using the paths through the
park past the concert hall as a transit area; others yet heading to the park to
hang out or to attend a performance in the concert hall, some of whom
observed the façade from the inside. These spatial concerns led us to design
the façade to be clearly visible from any distance, whether people were on
the carpets interacting with the creatures (or each other) or not. If no people
were around, the creatures would go about their lives and the skyline would
rise and fall. Another important design decision was to place two of the three
interaction zones on the path most frequently used by visitors. In this way,
we forced the audience to engage with the façade. This had the effect that no
excuse was needed to ‘break the ice’ and overcome your shyness to see your
silhouette on the façade, thus prompting participation. It would show up as
you passed each of the three zones as long as you took the most direct path
to the entry.
The ambitious objectives of Aarhus by Light were to create an installation
that would appeal to a large and diverse audience, fit into a distinct, high-
profile building in the public space and encourage interaction and
participation. Regarding the visual aesthetics, the imagery on the façade was
inspired by 8-bit video games from the 1980s, most obviously in the shape
of the luminous creatures that inhabited the façade (Figure 4.2). Although
they were designed with the low resolution of the display in mind, they each
had a range of pre-programmed behaviours that were dependent on other
creatures (e.g. two creatures might meet and kiss) and the silhouettes of the
audience (e.g. creatures would wave at silhouettes and crawl onto them).
While these behaviours were very simple, each creature operated
independently, which led to a form of emergent and not fully predictable
system.
Figure 4.2 A luminous creature from Aarhus by Light (CAVI, 2009)

In addition to establishing a relationship with the creatures, we also sought

to establish relations between the people who had shared experiences with
the façade. The interaction zones had the function of small stages where
visitors performed simple acts and were observed and joined by others. The
silhouettes from the three zones were, by design, shown in three separate
areas on the façade, and there was no direct interaction between silhouettes
from different zones. But each individual zone could attract whole families
or flocks of people who would come and go as they explored and showed
off. The public responded well to three aspects in particular, namely the
embodied interaction made possible in the interaction zones, the interaction
with and between the luminous creatures in the façade, and the social
interaction prompted by the installation.
The observations and interviews revealed that some people knew others,
some just began talking and interacting. Sometimes it was goofy and
sometimes it was concentrated, but when more than one person was present
on a carpet or observing the action there, it was most often a socially rich
situation. People would take turns, or fight or test each other’s hypotheses
about the creatures. First-time visitors would exchange their perceptions, and
often the conversations would become intertwined with other conversations
they had before they engaged with the façade.
The interviews also disclosed that the audience often created their own
interpretations and meanings from this emergent system. For example, some
people would tell us how certain creatures were friends or enemies or how
they preferred interacting with certain user silhouettes rather than others.
The audience, children in particular, were intrigued by this. This was in no
way programmed into the system. It has been an important insight for us that
this open-ended nature of the system led to interesting and meaningful
interpretations. Part of the success of the installation hinges on this
successful engagement prompted by the openness of the system. In addition
to the open-ended nature of the visuals of the façade, an important main
insight from our studies of the installation was that these modes of
interaction offered the audience a flexible way of easing into and out of
interaction with the installation and with each other.

CO2nfession/CO2mmitment
CO2nfession/CO2mmitment was an urban video installation that offered the
citizens of Aarhus a voice about environmental sustainability to be heard—
and seen—throughout the city (Leong and Brynskov 2009; Dalsgaard and
Halskov 2010). The installation was part of the Municipality of Aarhus’
campaign CO2030, dedicated to engage citizens in the efforts to achieve
carbon neutrality by the year 2030.
The installation was in two parts, one being within a four-day exhibition
held in the city of Aarhus in conjunction with the international climate
conference ‘Beyond Kyoto’ and another distributed throughout Aarhus’s
public realm. Visitors to the exhibition could enter a booth with a camera
that provide them the opportunity to record a short statement about climate
change (Figure 4.3), for instance confessing that she or he is taking long and
hot showers every morning and thereby contributing to excessive CO2
omissions. The video statements were subsequently edited and distributed to
displays integrated into bus shelters and information stands at four locations
in the city. The displays were equipped with a ‘Press for sound’ button and
hence offered only very limited interaction.

Figure 4.3 The CO2nfession/CO2mmitment booth (Martin Brynskov, 2009)

In terms of spatial setting, CO2nfession/CO2mmitment was distributed

across two quite diverse locations. The booth itself was part of an exhibition
space. Here it blended in smoothly, by relating directly to the theme of the
CO2030 exhibition. But it also stood out as a challenging encounter, which
broke away from the conventions of the exhibition space by offering
exhibition visitors an opportunity to participate through active engagement
as part of an aesthetic experience. This demarcated zone, which allowed
visitors to sit down in front of the camera and convey a personal message
about climate change, was a challenge to the social conventions of a public
exhibition. The installation gave the user a high level of control over how
they presented themselves to others.
The displays integrated into bus shelters and information stands were part
of a different kind of scripted space, where the video recording of climate
confessions broke away from what people would normally encounter. In
both locations, the design intention was to transform the two kinds of
scripted spaces and bring about new ones. In particular, the intention was to
encourage reflexivity for people using the installation and to engage people
in public conversations about climate change and sustainability through a
new mode of expression. As discussed by Leong and Brynskov (2009), with
reference to Bruce and Yearley (2006), reflexivity points to the ability to
think about things and to monitor oneself as part of an immediate and
continuous self-awareness. People could participate without constraints in
the framing of reflections on their lived experiences with respect to
sustainable living and could share their reflections with other citizens in
public space.
The video statements were between 10 seconds and 3 minutes in length.
Analysis of the 68 participant-generated videos reveals a variety of main
positions taken by the participants (Andersen and Nielsen 2011). The
confession booth serves as a space for the construction of the climate
conscious selves and serves as a transformative space for reflection and self-
construction, as illustrated by the following quote: ‘I confess. I have been a
climate-idiot. And I don’t want to be him anymore’. Here, the confessor
illustrates his personal transformation by holding in his hand a lemon with a
grumpy face on one side and a happy face on the other. Another prevalent
theme is an ethical urge to do good and expressing ideas about how to do so,
for instance as articulated in the following way: ‘I usually have my computer
and my TV set turned on, and I know that I ought to unplug electronic
devices while I don’t use them’. Several participants transform the booth
into a stage for image performances, for instance by singing or dancing,
which are disconnected from the sustainability issue and which in some
instances overshadow a concern for the climate.
Observation of displays integrated into bus shelters and information
stands revealed that it was difficult to engage people in exploring the video
content. Only 13 per cent of all people waiting in the relevant bus shelters
during periods of observation activated the sound (Leong and Brynskov
2009:214). However, interviews with people waiting at the bus shelters
reveal that some individuals were able to relate to the personal stories being
told, which led them to make sense of their own practices. Apart from the
specific insights into the practices forming around the installation, it helped
shape appropriate methods of evaluation for urban interventions where
engagement is relatively low compared to for example work or home
settings, with a combination of observations and questionnaires (Leong and
Brynskov 2009).
City Bug Report
City Bug Report (Figure 4.4) was an installation that combined media
architecture, open data, mobile phones and web communication to illustrate
the possibilities and challenges for city government to be open, accountable
and responsive to citizens. The installation ran for approximately one month
in November–December 2012 and consisted of a media facade on the city
hall tower in Aarhus that showed an abstract representation of the official
communication between the municipality and citizens. Dots on the tower
corresponded to issues (‘bugs’) reported by

Figure 4.4 City Bug Report, media façade on the city hall tower in Aarhus, connected to mobile
devices, websites and open government data (CAVI, 2009)
citizens (red dots) or requests to citizens initiated by the municipality (blue
dots). These dots were animated along four horizontal bands, with the higher
bands representing greater volumes of messages going back and forth
between the city and the citizen. The higher the dots, the more
communication. Ideally, municipal problems should be resolved as swiftly as
possible, creating less hassle for the citizen and less resource consumption
by the city administration. So, lots of communication back and forth on the
same matter would represent inefficiency in handling a ‘bug’. The raw data
on issues were mined directly from the public records of communication in
the municipal administration anonymised. No individual cases were directly
identifiable on the media facade on the tower. The mobile interface allowed
citizens to report a bug about anything, from a hole in the street to bad
teaching in a public school. The ambition was to provide an easy to use,
transparent one-stop interface for reporting issues to the city. When a citizen
reported a bug, a link was provided that they could use to follow its status
online. The link could also be shared, for example on Facebook or Twitter, to
facilitate public or semi-public dialogue around the issue. The data
represented on the tower were mainly historical, for reasons of privacy, but
the installation exhibited many of the challenges related to opening closed
pools of data and making them available for public use and debate,
essentially facilitating the creation of a digital common space, or digital
commons.
City Bug Report is an attempt to investigate how a future open
government in hybrid physical/digital space could actually be implemented.
While the media facade on the city-hall tower in itself could be taken for a
piece of digital art, in its conception it much more closely resembled a
barometer showing the current temperature, or a traffic system overview. In
other words, the aesthetics are important from a functional perspective but
not so much so from an artistic one. Operating continuously and installed on
one of the most visible and architecturally celebrated structures in the city,
the visual impression of the media facade should not completely eclipse its
context. The dots are an attempt to provide a low-key, slightly dynamic,
ambient expression that looks interesting to the visitor while not annoying
the resident.
The town-hall tower is only one element within a larger system of
interfaces, including mobile telephones, the internet and the city’s actual
administrative system. The tower thus does not have to convey all the
system’s meanings in full detail. In fact, the tower only represents
aggregated meaning. The full, specific circumstances of each city bug are
communicated and accessed through other interfaces. But because an overall
symbol of the city’s intention to be transparent and invite visitors and
residents to participate in running the city, the mere fact that the tower
exposes these communication patterns carries a lot of meaning, in the sense
that data is turned into action potential for citizens, instead of being hidden
away.
The city of Aarhus has subsequently passed a decision to develop a ‘track-
and-trace’ functionality which allows citizens to track the local governments
processing of a submitted case or request, almost like you can when you
order a book on Amazon. While this system does not necessarily have a
permanent urban media façade component, the City Bug Report project has
made both city officials and citizen advocates aware of the possibility.
Being only a temporary installation, it is difficult to get the attention of the
public. Such a system would require a longer time to be noticed, in order for
a communal set of uses to develop. The light design itself was intentionally
not spectacular, to indicate a vernacular attitude towards communicating on
city architecture. More noticeable expressions could have been chosen which
may have generated more responses, but trade-offs had to be made during
the design process to accommodate stakeholder concerns: The installation
could not interfere with the basic architectural expression of the building, a
modernist exemplar, and had to limit light pollution. In this respect, City Bug
Report has clear limitations as a measure of potential use, but it can be seen
as a way of exploring the design space for citizen services, informing new
initiatives, such as the track-and-trace system now being developed.
The system as such is interactive, through the various interfaces that are
mobile and detailed, but the tower itself is not. It is reactive, reflecting
transactions at a slower rate. But as a strong political signal of participation,
the tower must be seen in relation to the other parts of the system which, as a
whole, encompasses high levels of participation and interaction, from the
scale of the individual citizen to the large urban scale, both in terms of
physical space (the tower), digitally (the website, mobile) and
organizationally (the municipal administration).
Discussion: Comparing the Three Media
Architecture Cases
Looking at the roles of aesthetics, interaction, meaning, participation and
space across the three cases, we can identify a number of interesting
variations in the potential of media architecture, in terms of how engaging
urban experiences in public space are enabled and unfold. These variations
differences are not categorical (either/or), but rather seem to constitute
continua.

Aesthetics

If we look at the installations’ potential for aesthetics experiences they share

the quality of standing out from what people normally encounter in an urban
setting. They each in their own way challenged people to act in new ways in
a public setting, though there clearly were differences. Aarhus by Light was
unique in inviting people to perform and explore in public space, not only
for strangers but also together with people they have not met before.
CO2nfession/CO2mmitment demonstrated similar qualities but differently,
mainly due to the confined space offered by the confession booth itself,
which invited people to perform in public space, but mediated by the
displays in the city.
If we look at the installations as narratives or performative pieces, people
explored the individual installations in a diversity of ways. In the case of
Aarhus by Light people engaged in bodily exploration of the installation with
their silhouette in real time, tied to the interaction zones.
CO2nfession/CO2mmitment was framed by the theme of ‘climate change’
but allowed the person in front of the camera to control the narrative, for
example by introducing props. City Bug Report is more complex, because it
has several interfaces, ranging from very closed to very open. The media
facade on the tower is a very closed representation, being reactive only. But
the system accepts any text-based input, and by providing a link to the bug
that was submitted, it offers up the system to be freely shared or repurposed.
Interaction

Looking at the kinds of actual user interactions with the installations, the
three examples range from entirely bodily (Aarhus by Light) to linguistic-
bodily (CO2nfession/CO2mmitment) to more traditionally information
technology–mediated interaction, via mobile and web interfaces (City Bug
Report). While the modes of interaction differ, a general challenge is to
convey to the public that they can in fact influence the installations. With
Aarhus by Light, passers-by are involuntarily interacting, through the
medium of their captured/displayed silhouettes. In terms of prompting
interaction, this can be considered a viable strategy, but it also raises
questions as to whether it is acceptable to make all passers-by part of a large
spectacle without their consent. We deemed that in this case the silhouettes
offered a representation that did not excessively expose the audience, but we
also feel that it is advisable to choose a different strategy for installations
that more clearly represent users, such as CO2nfession/CO2mmitment. City
Bug Report represents a move away from stand-alone installations such as
Aarhus by Light towards networked, distributed installations. It is likely that
media architecture will connect to the increasing diversity of digital devices
that permeate public space.

Meaning

The forms of interaction outlined above support very different levels of

complexity, in the way that meaning is conveyed or constructed in the
situation and through the interfaces. Aarhus by Light is merely playful, and
no precise messages are exchanged. In contrast, CO2nfession/CO2mmitment
allows for a much more precise communication, since the person can say
directly to the camera what he or she thinks and the editor can introduce an
angle to the raw footage. City Bug Report provides a different level of detail
and complexity, allowing anything to be reported by anyone and extending
the dialogue and description infinitely and indefinitely on the internet. Thus,
the meanings conveyed through media façades can be complex; the user’s
relation to the space and to other people and the building may develop in
profound ways.
Participation

The three installations offer people the opportunity to participate and shape
their own lived experience in fundamentally different ways. Indeed, the
installations directly rely on participation to function. City Bug Report is
unique in the sense that the installation offers people a powerful opportunity
to act and thereby change part of their own city community. CO2nfession
/CO2mmitment serves as a participatory platform for people reflecting own
their own lives to share those reflections with other people. Aarhus by Light
was both intended and received as a playful, exploratory and participatory
here-and-now experience for citizens.

Space

The spatial organisations of the three installations illustrate how media

architecture can address audiences of varying sizes. Aarhus by Light is an
interface that a number of users can share at the same location. CO2nfession/
CO2mmitment can involve what can be characterised as ‘few to some’, since
one part of the system, the confession booth, is only used by a few and select
group of users, whereas the outputs, on the video screens, are seen by more
people throughout the city. City Bug Report accommodates the spectrum
from ‘some to many’. The tower can be seen from afar, thus reaching many
in physical public space, but online, through mobile applications and the
web, the system scales up to reach people everywhere, thus constituting a
vast hybrid digital-physical place.

Conclusion and Future Work

Digital systems and devices increasingly affect and shape public spaces.
While smartphones are the most widespread example of this trend, the
design of the built environment itself is starting to contribute to the digital
collection, processing and display of information. We have examined and
discussed this convergence of digital and physical space through three cases
of media architecture. Each of these cases has been driven by a participatory
research agenda, as we seek to examine the potentials for public engagement
and interaction. This agenda can be seen as a move to counter or challenge
the use of media architecture as a medium for passive consumption. As
technologies evolve and the costs associated with developing media
architecture go down, it is inevitable that media architecture will come to
play an increasingly important role in the life of the city. We hope to have
shown some of the potentials for media architecture to enrich the experience
of public spaces through active participation and engagement.
In the introduction to this chapter, we stated that we see a clear
convergence between urban public art and the forms of media architecture
we present. By being openly visible and accessible, many works of media
architecture share traits with public art. Indeed, some media architecture
installations are developed, presented and perceived by their audiences as
works of art, for example Spine (Kollision et al. 2012) and Platform 5
(Bruges 2010). A number of media architecture projects occupy a border
zone between architecture, art and advertisement or civic communication.
Until recently, the costs of developing large-scale media architecture have
been very high, giving rise to the term money architecture to denote
installations that are developed for corporate entities. Media architecture is a
nascent field, and in our studies of the three installations presented in this
chapter, we have found that people are still somewhat unsure what to make
of them. One trait that these installations share with many works of public
art is that the audiences desire to decipher their meaning; to find out what is
being communicated, why and to whom. While few people have explicitly
stated that they consider these installations to be art, the public have
nevertheless engaged with them in ways similar to their engagements with
more traditional, more tangible public artworks.
We see the works presented in this chapter as an exploration of artistic and
aesthetic perspectives on the new kinds of media expressions and interfaces
that are emerging in urban public space. We see a need to encourage critical
dialog between the functional and the aesthetic components of media
architecture, particularly because visions for digital cities and networked
societies sometimes abstract away aesthetics in pursuit of the optimal and
the efficient. Media architecture presents new possibilities and new
challenges for public space and for public communication. Art plays an
essential role in formulating new alternatives and it provides starting points
for dialog. In the creation of large-scale urban interventions that involve and
engage many different stakeholders, we see such a dialog emerging both
about and through digital art in public space.

References
Andersen, S.E. and Nielsen, A. E. (2011) ‘Climate Conscious Citizenship in
a Digital Urban Setting,’ MedieKultur, 50: 119–142.
Andersen, C. U. and Pold, S. (2011) “The Scripted Spaces of Urban
Ubiquitous Computing: The Experience, Poetics, and Politics of Public
Scripted Space,” Fibreculture Journal, 19: 110–125.
Bruce, S. and Yearley, S. (2006) The SAGE Dictionary of Sociology,
London: Sage Publications.
Bruges, J. (2010) Platform 5. http://www.jasonbruges.com/projects/uk-
projects/platform-5 (accessed February 20, 2014).
Brynskov, M., Dalsgaard, P., Ebsen, T., Fritsch, J. Halskov, K. and Nielsen,
R. (2009) ‘Staging Urban Interactions with Media Facades,’ in
Proceedings of Interact 2009, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
Brynskov, M., Dalsgaard, P. and Fatah, A. (eds.) (2012) Proceedings of the
2012 Media Architecture Biennale, New York: ACM.
Dalsgaard, P., Dindler, C. and Halskov, K. (2011) ‘Understanding the
Dynamics of Engaging Interaction in Public Spaces,’ in Proceedings of
Interact 2009, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
Dalsgaard, P. and Halskov, K. (2010) ‘Designing Urban Media Façades –
Cases and Challenges,’ in Proceedings of CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia.
Dewey, J. ([1934] 2005) Art as Experience, New York: Perigee.
Fritsch, J. and Brynskov, M. (2012) “Between Experience, Affect and
Information,” in M. Foth, L. Forlano, C. Satchell and M. Gibbs (eds.),
From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Greenbaum, J and Kyng, M. (eds.) (1991) Design at Work: Cooperative
Design of Computer Systems, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Halskov, K. (2011) “CAVI—An Interaction Design Research Lab,”
interactions, 18(4): 92–95.
Haeusler, M., Tomitsch, M. and Tscherteu, G (2012) Media Facades – A
Global Survey, Ludwigsburg: avedition.
Kollision, CAVI, Wahlberg, M. and Munch, H. (2012) Spine.
http://kollision.dk/en/spine (accessed February 20, 2014).
Loke, L., Larssen, A. T. and Robertson, T. (2005) ‘Labanotation for Design
of Movement-based Interaction,’ in Proceedings Interactive
Entertainment 2005, New York: ACM.
Leong, T. W. and Brynskov, M. (2009) ‘CO2nfession: Engaging with Values
through Urban Conversations,’ in Proceedings of OZCHI 2009, New
York: ACM.
5
Trafalgar Square
Of Play, Plinths, Publics, Pigeons and
Participation

Nicolas Whybrow

Taking one of central London’s most well-known and frequented sites,

Trafalgar Square, as its point of departure, this chapter considers a range of
creative uses to which it has been put recently by a participating public.
Against a backdrop of the square’s historical and institutional composition—
featuring, among other elements, nineteenth century monuments to British
imperialist and colonialist power, of which Nelson’s Column is evidently the
most renowned—the chapter aims to draw out the significance of sanctioned
and unsanctioned engagements with Trafalgar’s implicit mise en scène.
These include sculptural installations, specifically the rotating artworks of
the square’s fourth plinth in its north-west corner, which are presented under
the formal auspices of the arts establishment, and impromptu interventions—
in this case a freeze mob—involving large numbers of participants. Both
official and unofficial forms represent attempts to take into account
Trafalgar’s specificity as a site of multilayered narratives and inscriptions,
and both reveal a desire to engage a broader participating public in playful
yet productive ways.

Freeze Mob
It’s a crisp, sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-February 2008, Trafalgar
Square, London, and a noticeably large, diverse crowd is gathering in small,
chatty clusters. More garden party perhaps in its mood than political protest,
the air of expectation is nevertheless palpable and is cut at 3.30 p.m. when a
lone trumpeter strikes up briefly on the steps at the base of Admiral Lord
Nelson’s Column: a last post that is met promptly with a collective freeze.
The throng in this sun-kissed but chilly square simply stops moving.
Wherever your gaze might fall there are stock-still tableaux or dramatic
vignettes. Some are self-consciously struck poses—hugs and lingering
kisses, a sword fight, even a staged bike crash as protest against motorised
traffic in this crowded city—others are merely action paused in mid-flow.
Living statues against an eerie, amplified sound-drop of splashing, gushing
water from the two prominent fountains in the square. In amongst this
immobile mob, the odd ripple after all of activity: unwitting bystanders who
haven’t read the script, some tourists perhaps, and pigeons, who find
themselves literally frozen out. It is a whole five minutes before the lone
trumpeter intervenes once more and is greeted with an explosion of cheering
and clapping by the thousand or so folk that have gathered: a kind of relief,
but also a sense of exhilaration that eventually breaks into full-blown
partying mode as a conga catches on and proceeds to snake its way round the
square.
The event corresponds to what you might call a variant of flash mob
culture. Arguably it is its anti-thesis, however, in terms of watery analogies:
not flash (as in flash floods) but freeze mobbing. It has been replicated in
cities around the globe in recent years, as a visit to YouTube swiftly testifies,
though the Trafalgar event, which may not in fact have been the first of its
kind, has been particularly widely documented on this site and watched: The
2-minute 36-second, edited film Great Trafalgar Square Freeze had attracted
more than three million hits within a year of the event, one among several
records of the intervention. That in itself not being a guarantee of anything,
it serves nevertheless as a good example of how such impromptu grass-roots
interventions potentially hit the mark, and one explanation for this
occurrence may be that the event succeeds in positioning itself within what
could be called a rich matrix of urban-cultural existence, proving highly
pertinent to that place at that moment in time. In other words, when it can be
said to become performance or site-specific art.
 But what exactly is it that contributes to this sense of a successful
intervention in public space? In my view there are two main features in play
here. First, the spontaneous, independent organisation of the event via
various electronic networking and communications mechanisms, with the
resulting participation of a cross section of the London populace, as a casual
evaluation of various YouTube films suggests. So, it effectively begins and
ends life on the Net, although ‘endlessly continues life’ may be a more
accurate way of putting it. That is it is instigated typically as an informal,
word-of-mouth, social networking event and subsequently reflected on via
blogs and documented for posterity on YouTube, drawing in ever more
participants at various points along the way. But its potency doubtless lies in
the execution of the actual event, as a short, sharp, surprise incursion into a
public arena, involving the coordination of a large number of people in real
time and space. In doing so, moreover, it does not seek permission in
advance from any formal authority, and while one might argue that it takes
place in public space and so would have no need of that, it is surely common
knowledge by now that few, if any, civic authorities are pleased to permit
such large gatherings of its citizens in public locations without prior warning
and the resulting implementation of formal security precautions (if not
outright banning of the event). The fact that the event is not sanctioned yet
takes place without incident arguably adds to its force. As I have pointed out
elsewhere, the true skill of mob actions often lies precisely in having the
appearance of transgression by causing a logistical problem through the
sheer force of numbers, yet not strictly offending against any laws relating to
public disorder (Whybrow 2011:100).
Second, there is the sheer creativity of the intervention, one that is playful
and fun, but has a serious purpose and layered complexity. In general terms
this would amount to the assertion of the democratic right of urban citizens
to occupy and make creative use of public space as they see fit. This
assertion relates more specifically—although perhaps only implicitly
inasmuch as many participants may not in fact be immediately conscious of
it—to the twin traumas experienced in recent years by Central London of the
tube and bus bombings in July 2005 and—to a lesser extent—the failed
Piccadilly nightclub bombings of June 2007. Combined, these created a
continuing undertow of apprehension on the streets of the metropolis. So the
surprise, unauthorised guerrilla form of the freeze mob is not incidental here.
Revealing perhaps a related degree of meticulous, secret and strategic event
planning, it effectively turns the destructive premise of the terrorist attack on
its head and into something that has been aptly described by the writer Geoff
Dyer (2006:30) as a ‘detonation of joy’. Dyer is referring, in fact, to a
prolonged silent rave or mobile clubbing event that took place at London’s
Liverpool Street railway station and that was coordinated to occur
simultaneously with similar raves in other global cities afflicted at that time
by terrorist attacks, namely Madrid, Paris and New York.
Consciously or not, then, the Trafalgar mob performs an act of land
reclamation that is less to do with urban territory or a specific location per se
than the general everyday social climate in the public spaces of the city. It
makes a vital contribution to both this specific constituency of mob
participants and its wider audience—in situ witnesses and those dependent
on post-event hearsay— regaining confidence in their day-to-day usage of
public space in the capital. ‘London is ours again’ this event declares,
thereby making an implicit gesture towards restoring an atmosphere of trust
and safety for its citizens. I should add, when I say ‘trust and safety’, I mean
in the sense of citizens feeling they have the freedom and right to make use
of public space in a way that accommodates differences, rather than in the
sense of complying with a set of fixed, catch-all behavioural regulations. In
other words, trust in your fellow citizen to permit your difference to assert
itself without violent recriminations.
Trafalgar Square itself is significant, then, because it occupies such a
high-profile position in Central London and, therefore, in the public
imagination. It thus acts as a form of synecdoche for the whole city:
Trafalgar is London when it comes to reclaiming the right to the capital.
However, as a further feature of its complex creativity, the freeze mob event
also interacted with the square in a site-specific way. Trafalgar is nothing if
not overdetermined urban space, and if London has a centre, and that is
highly questionable, of course, this is certainly a candidate with its
conglomeration of key national establishments. These represent, amongst
other things: high culture, in the form of the National Gallery; the colonialist
Commonwealth, via the high commissions of Canada and South Africa; and
the church, with St. Martin-in-the-Fields on its northeastern flank. Moreover,
Whitehall’s political stage (Houses of Parliament, Westminster Palace,
Downing Street) is a few paces down one street, while royal Buckingham
Palace and all its attendant monarchical institutions are but a few minutes
down another. With its various statues and plaques and bronze panel reliefs,
commemorating imperialist power and victory in war, it is here that official
Britain (or should that actually be just England?) is presented in its most
concentrated and assertive form. As the writer Will Self drolly puts it, ‘it’s
not so much a place to hang out as somewhere you feel constantly in danger
of being hung for treason, such is its discourse of power enshrined in its
leonine and general-studded plinths and its admiral-spiked column’ (2012:6).

Figure 5.1 Nelson with union flag bicorn: curated guerrilla intervention by milliners Treacy and
Stephen Jones during London Olympics, July 30, 2012
Photo by Nicolas Whybrow (August 2012).

At the same time, however, the square has become subject to other kinds
of inscription or use, not least in its functioning as a rallying point for all
manner of anti-government/anti-state protests from those, in more recent
times, against the siting of US cruise missiles at Greenham Common in the
1980s, the introduction of the Poll Tax in the early 1990s (that effectively
brought down Margaret Thatcher as prime minister), to the allied invasion of
Iraq in the twenty-first century. Identifying the square as a raked stage rising
southwest to north-east, Self continues thus in characteristically witty vein:
What usually happens on it is that organs of the state corral one group of malcontents or other
before hitting them with sticks, riding over them on horseback, and on one or two notable
 occasions—such as the original Bloody Sunday of 1887—render some of them appropriately
stone-dead. (2012:6)

In fact, it would not be exaggerating the matter to say that when Trafalgar
Square surfaces in the consciousness of the broader British public, it is not
merely in association with his nibs, Admiral Lord Nelson, up there atop his
imposing central column, but as much as with just such mass political
protest, which derives its potency precisely from seeking to perform its
message peacefully in this theatre to the memory of war. Jane Rendell points
out in her montage-piece ‘Trafalgar Square: Détournements’ that the square
has in fact ‘been the site of rebellion since its construction’. In 1848, just
five years after the completion of Nelson’s Column,
One hundred thousand Chartists occupied Trafalgar Square arguing for Universal suffrage for all
men over the age of twenty-one, equal-size electoral districts, voting by secret ballot, an end to the
need for a property qualification for Parliament, pay for members of Parliament and the annual
election of Parliament (Rendell 2011:227).

The freeze mob event in February 2008 suggested, then, a site-specific

critique and public co-opting of the square’s formality and official, staged
narratives eulogising empire and victory in battle. Instead, the rigid pomp of
representational statues—the admiral and all those generals and lions—
celebrating, in the name of the British Empire, the animal might and courage
displayed at Trafalgar’s and others’ killing fields (or seas), were subject to
playful parody with a spontaneous social sculpture of five-minute frozen
vignettes of everyday actions by ordinary folk: Trafalgar instead as a
participatory theatre of colourful, vibrant, living mortality—London’s
playing fields, or a temporary neighbourhood in which the social body, in its
spontaneous collective action, momentarily is place.
To emphasise the point I would draw attention to the freeze mob’s
effective détournement of another form of colonisation or occupation,
namely that of the modern-day, ubiquitous syndrome of tourists-and-
pigeons. This also amounted to an act of local reclamation: tourists and
pigeons were the main groups not in the loop when it came to the
spontaneous event, so a form of unwitting exposure or othering materialised
via their awkward, out-of-place movements when all around them were
freezing. Momentarily they had no capacity to commandeer Trafalgar Square
with their presence. ‘Tourists and pigeons’ was in fact precisely the theme of
a playful piece of contemporary sculpture sited on an empty plinth in the
north-west corner of the square by the German artist Thomas Schütte in
2007: a purpose-built Hotel for Birds, as it was titled, which drew attention
to the predominance of and, indeed, behavioural parallels between tourists
and pigeons by offering the latter an official place to lodge. And this brings
me neatly to …

The Fourth Plinth

The emerging picture of Trafalgar Square is then one of a staged
environment that can be said to host the potential for a range of subsidiary
stages— or plinths. One of the most intriguing of these is in the north-west
corner and has come to be known in recent years as the fourth plinth. Since
1999 a number of contemporary artists have been commissioned to site
works on this plinth for differing periods, arguably providing a form of
rolling counterpoint to the figurative, militaristic monuments adorning the
rest of the square in their heavy-duty, immovable way. In a sense, though,
the fourth plinth has been performing that kind of grit-in-the-oyster role for
more than a century and a half. Created way back in 1841, it was, as Rendell
explains, ‘intended to hold a statue of William IV, but owing to insufficient
funds it initially remained empty, and later agreement could not be reached
over which monarch or military hero to place there’ (2011:235). As a result it
continued to remain unoccupied into the twentieth century and, very nearly,
the twenty-first: a form of perennial void that can be read, in its relation to
the square’s other monumental celebrations of British history, both as
inadvertently suggestive of suppressed historical narratives and as
continuously begging questions about the coming shape of future history.
As functional object or mechanism, the occupied, presentational plinth in
general—that is, aside from the fourth plinth specifically—is emblematic of
that which might be termed sanctioned history (or knowledge). Here, in
Trafalgar Square, it is suggestive of that which is officially valued,
authorised and held to be securely representative of an idea of nationhood
since the late eighteenth century, which is largely a story of colonialism and
empire. The heroic figure of Admiral Lord Nelson—standing 5.5 metres tall
and unreachable on his near-50-metre column—embodies such a narrative:
an instance, one might say, of the idealised sculptural body as object. The
theorisation of minimalist practice by Rosalind Krauss famously bequeathed
us with the notion of ‘sculpture in the expanded field’ in which she accounts
for the ‘fading of the logic of the monument’ in the late nineteenth century
(1986:279–280) and the advent of sculpture as ‘only one term on the
periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured
possibilities’ (1986:284). Pursuing the idea, Hal Foster sums up as follows:
‘In short, with minimalism sculpture no longer stands apart, on a pedestal or
as pure art, but is repositioned among objects and redefined in terms of
place’ (1996:38): Donald Judd’s (1975) renowned minimalist mantra of ‘one
thing after another’ paving the way for Miwon Kwon’s (2004) site-specific
mantra of ‘one place after another’. Nelson’s Column itself is, of course, not
an exemplar of minimalist sculpture, but, armed with an understanding of
this notion of the ‘expanded field’, an experience of it becomes less a matter
of viewing the monument in separation, as that for which it stands or stood
—or even contemplating it as part of an ensemble of nineteenth-century
statues that combine to form a collective Trafalgar plinth—than as part of a
continuously changing complex of phenomena that ultimately incorporates,
as I show, the position of the viewer as situated participant or user.
The various fourth plinth artworks sited in Trafalgar Square since 1999 on
their own begin to undo notions of the objectified representational body and
the sanctity of the pedestal or plinth (or of plinth-ness). For example, Rachel
Whiteread’s inverted plinth of 2001, a translucent cast of the fourth plinth
positioned upside down on the original and titled simply Monument, calls
into question the representational function of plinths per se by making the
plinth itself the object of enquiry, thereby drawing attention also to the
potent provocation of the void(ed) plinth in history. The plinth itself is
mirrored, but in being both rendered see-through and upended it is quietly
being subverted, even disarmed, as plinth. Mark Quinn’s Alison Lapper
Pregnant (Figure 5.2), meanwhile, not only presents the tragically
incomplete body as heroic-yet-uncelebrated counterpoint to Nelson, harking
back, with irony, to the idealised body of classical Greek sculpture, but
Quinn also implicitly provides a relational positioning for the spectator,
inasmuch as his artwork cannot really be grasped other than in critical
conjunction with the other statues and, indeed, the context of the square as a
whole. Foster, again, sums up what is at stake in such a transformation:
[T]he viewer, refused the safe, sovereign space of formal art, is cast back on the here and now; and
rather than scan the surface of a work for a topographical mapping of the properties of its medium,
 he or she is prompted to explore the perceptual consequences of a particular intervention in a given
site.
(1996:38)

Figure 5.2 Mark Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, Trafalgar Square, London
Photo by Nicolas Whybrow (April 2007).

Making deliberate associative use of the smooth, perfect, peppermint-

white material feel of classical marble sculpture, which also contrasted
markedly with the heavy black, bronze and granite of the various Trafalgar
statues, Quinn presented a much larger-than-life nude—3.55 metres in height
and weighing 13 tonnes—of the pregnant and profoundly disabled artist
Alison Lapper. Sited in the autumn of 2005 and surviving for close on two
years, it appeared in some ways to be rather an obvious work, graphically
posing questions around hierarchies of sculptural representation,
marginalisation and the idealised (male) body. But it also introduced perhaps
more easily overlooked nuances of potential meaning such as the fact that
the great national military hero Nelson was similarly disabled, albeit as a
consequence of wounds acquired in battle, with one arm missing rather than
the two that Lapper’s condition, phocomilia, had imposed on her from birth.
Acquired in battle, Nelson’s disability appears fitting, heroising him and
confirming his manhood up there atop his phallic column, where Lapper’s
may well render her above all a problem for society. Arguably, then, her
choice to soldier on with life against all the odds, not only generating new
life by becoming pregnant but also prepared to live with the consequences of
raising a baby with her physical disadvantages, should also—or even rather
—be worthy of idealisation. Some, of course, would condemn the choice on
moral grounds. At the same time the notion of ‘disarming’, used figuratively
in relation to Whiteread’s Monument, here finds a literal as well as
metaphorical application in the relationship between Lapper and Nelson, the
former’s inverse one-upmanship—missing the use of two as against one arm
—ironically taking the latter down a peg or two. For Self, moreover, Quinn’s
Trafalgar intervention went some way
towards bending the square’s rectilinear rigidity. With its subversion of the conventionally
standardised representations of the body the square specialises in, and its bright white marble—the
albedo of which attracted a good proportion of flying rats—Quinn’s statue made a stab at the flinty
hearts of the Brit establishment.
(2012:6)

In a sense I am not too interested here in mining Quinn’s installation for

further possible meanings (valid—and amusing—as that may be as an
exercise). What is more pertinent for my purposes is how the artwork has
effectively instigated—or continued, in fact—an evolving trend of
positioning the public to view Trafalgar Square as a whole as a space of
contesting narratives. Arguably, then, the supposed readability of Alison
Lapper Pregnant is entirely apposite for a piece of public sculpture that will
be experienced by most people—whether visitors or London commuters—in
passing. Echoing the architect Rem Koolhaas, Self suggests that the square
is ‘a corridor that was a destination’ (2012:6). The sculpture’s
instantaneousness as a resonant counterpoint to Nelson and company is,
therefore, exactly its strength, giving the busy pedestrian perhaps momentary
pause for thought around the themes I have touched on above, in the same
way as Schütte’s Hotel for Birds, which followed it, patently attempted to
say something about the ‘tourists and pigeons’ syndrome associated with the
square. Alison Lapper Pregnant’s specific critique of the place of statues in
London’s performance of the story of itself as a city could also be said to be
the lingering trace within the space of the public imagination—or perhaps it
was the public unconscious—that prompted the time-based Trafalgar Square
freeze mob: a theatre of mortal statues.

One and Other

Anthony Gormley’s 2009 fourth plinth installation, titled One and Other,
promised to continue the ongoing conversation among the square, its
monuments to individual war heroes and ‘ordinary city folk’. In a
staggeringly ambitious project 2,400 people were preselected—from an
initial nationwide application pool of more than 34,000, and with a
deliberate eye towards representative diversity—to spend one hour each on
top of the plinth, doing whatsoever they wished in a non-stop 24-hour
regime, beginning on 6 July and lasting 100 days (see Gormley 2009; 2010).
As such, the fourth plinth acquired the function of a popular living stage, one
which embodied and played out the discursive tensions of Trafalgar Square
itself as theatre. There is, moreover, a continuing reciprocity to be detected
in the London public’s implicit collective assimilation and re-presentation of
Quinn’s fourth plinth motif, as evidenced by the performing statues of the
February 2008 flash freeze, and, in a further echoing action, the improvised
public participation underpinning the latter is effectively re-incorporated into
the ‘people’s plinth’ that is Gormley’s performing artwork. Thus, implicit
conversations between artworks and/or performance events—of both high
and popular art—begin to reveal themselves as part of a complex of
interactions that also encompasses the site in question in its historical and
sociocultural layering and specificity, and users of the square in all their
constituent diversity.
As against the sculptural body as object, Gormley’s One and Other
opened the possibility of presenting not only plural, dispersed bodies—
ephemeral and mobile living ones at that—but also ordinary ones who, in
their somewhat ramshackle diversity, constituted the artwork and therefore
the everyday portrayal of a nation. In his own words, Gormley is
‘continually revising how one might treat the body as a place rather than a
thing’ (Barkham 2008:25). Two intriguing modernist sculptural precedents
come to mind as potential points of reference and departure for Gormley. On
one hand Giacometti’s preoccupation with groupings of figures in urban
space (The City Square, 1948, or City Square [Three Figures, One Head],
1950), which Paul Carter has interpreted thus:
His figures are co-extensive with the pedestal […] It is the pedestal that secures their separateness
and difference from each other. The pedestal is the manifold of potential meeting-ways projected
between them. It extends an invitation to statues to climb down from their pedestals and begin to
walk. (2002:197)

As a consequence, Carter adds, ‘towards the end of his life, Giacometti

did indeed entertain the idea of creating “a double of reality in real space, a
sculpture in a city square peopled by living men and women”’ (Carter
2002:200, citing Hohl 1972:143).
Louise Bourgeois’s similarly named artwork One and Others (from 1955),
moreover, presents a multicellular sculpture in painted wood (approximately
50 cm in height). Premised on the artist’s own declaration that ‘my body is
my sculpture’, Mieke Bal explains this piece as an instance of Bourgeois
‘giving over her body to public access, [thus] her body merges with,
becomes, her viewer’s’ (2001:61). According to Bal, biologically ‘cells
contain complete life; in that sense they are autonomous. Yet they are not.
The multi-cellular organism— One and Others—can only develop, grow, if
each cell continues to function within the organism’ (2001:63). Proceeding
to apply this biological paradigm to art, Bal concludes that ‘[i]f art as
process […] is such a cellular community—where, as in an organism,
differentiation happens—then each cell requires the willingness of its
environment (its viewers) to be absorbed into its ever-extending multiplicity’
(2001:63).
Gormley’s people’s plinth was then a form of durational patchwork quilt
(dimensions variable) that sought to extend the terms of its contingency not
only to the live and living human sculpture but also to the organism of the
participating public as sculpture. In a way—and only in a way—it was a
formalised, controlled version of the 2008 freeze mob, inviting the public to
take part and assert its voice and place in relation to the ongoing story of
Trafalgar Square: a living plinth that, importantly, was also documented and
presented on the internet as both continuous live stream and in the form of
edited and archived highlights. That, of course, introduces the question of
another whole kind of participation, namely that of the supposed audience
for this work. Clearly this was twofold: those encountering the work in situ
and those at one remove, logging on to the website delivered by broadcaster
Sky Arts, who also presented aspects on TV. These experiences were very
different from, and arguably the inverse of, the freeze mob event, which may
have similarly begun and ended on the internet but primarily had an
intervention in real space and time as its objective in which performer and
spectator were, for the most part, effectively one and the same.
The context of the fourth plinth, by contrast, struggled to work for the
Trafalgar Square spectator of One and Other, arguably being directed more
rewardingly at the website visitor who had multiple options to log on and out
at their leisure, to choose between streamed, highlighted and archived action
or, indeed, to contribute to the blog commentary. The in situ spectator on the
other hand was bound by the hourly changing-of-the-guard regime of the
installation. At its most extreme this would have entailed witnessing one
whole hour’s worth of one performer: fine up to a point, if the performer
happened to be stimulating and succeeded in sustaining his or her chosen
performance strategy, but otherwise dull and tedious. Unfortunately, the
latter predominated—at least in my several extended experiences of the
piece at different points during that summer of 2009—and so spectators
quickly moved on, thus missing out on anything remotely resembling a
living portrait of diverse Britain.
Figure 5.3 Anthony Gormley’s One and Other, Trafalgar Square, London
Photo by Nicolas Whybrow (July 2009).

The durational aspect of the installation actually served more to try the
patience of the hapless visitor. Being largely unused to performing, let alone
appearing in such extraordinary, highly exposed public circumstances, the
experience of many plinthers, as they came to be known, was quickly to run
out of material and effectively freeze—a different kind of freezing in this
case—repeat actions, or simply capitulate voluntarily. An unkind media
came to dub this the 20-minute syndrome. Many, possibly Gormley himself
— unless, as some sincerely believe, there was a degree of deliberateness
about it—simply miscalculated the sheer scale of the plinth, with the result
that individuals were dwarfed and drowned out, struggling to make their
performances register, their voices heard, their messages seen and so on. The
tendency, on one hand, then, was for the larger-than-life, the spectacular and
the daft to make their mark: big, silly gestures—a lot of animal or cartoon
character costumes, for instance as witnessed annually in their droves at the
London Marathon—that provided fodder for lowest-common-denominator
televisual broadcast. As a result, one high-profile art critic was led, quite
legitimately, to draw analogies with the populist reality television style of
Big Brother or Britain’s Got Talent. This was also the commentator who was
led to ponder whether Gormley’s tactic all along had been not only to give
his participants enough rope by which to hang themselves but also, in a way,
to show up mediatised public life in Britain in all its cloying, attention-
seeking futility:
Could Antony Gormley be a much darker, more disturbing artist than we think? Warhol was not
celebrating modern life when he said everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes: he was
delivering a cynical prophesy of a diffuse, shiftless world. For me this is a monument to that
prophesy’s fulfilment. […] If One and Other is an image of British democratic life, it is a
pessimistic one. It is a portrait of a society in which people will try anything to get their voices
heard, even stand on a plinth, but where no-one can hear what they’re saying. (Jones 2011:79)

The hanging-rope analogy rather aptly invokes the one-time public

spectacle of executions or, on a lesser scale, the pillory and (laughing)
stocks. More in keeping perhaps with the time of Trafalgar Square’s
founding, the implied exploitation of deranged behaviours is reminiscent of
the nineteenth century London crowds that would visit the mental institution
of Bedlam for their entertainment. These events traded scandalously—and,
certainly by today’s standards, unethically—in the performativity of death
and mental health, but it is conceivable to see where their appeal may have
lain. Any deaths that occurred in relation to One and Other are more likely
to have stemmed from tedium. Jones, again, states, ‘Even the webcam
coverage is channel-flicking stuff […] Its final message may be that we have
become boring to one and other’ (2011:79). Another poignant analogy that
was used to describe the work was ‘Twitter art’, which was also levelled at
the tendency for the utterly vapid to prevail and to do so in the name of free
speech and democracy (Higgins 2009). As Claire Bishop puts it, ‘[i]n a
world where everyone can air their views to everyone we are faced not with
mass empowerment but with an endless stream of egos levelled to banality.
Far from being oppositional to spectacle, participation has now entirely
merged with it’ (2012:277).

Conclusion
As far as users of artworks are concerned, I hope to have shown that the
Trafalgar freeze mob, in its playful, improvised and short-lived engagement
with a highly defined, culturally and historically inscribed public site
actually presented a form of critique or, indeed, grass-roots, even guerrilla,
subversion that was far more resonant and effective in affording a
meaningful participatory role to ordinary citizens of London than Gormley’s
complex, drawn-out national project turned out to be. The key lies in the
term participation: In the freeze mob the emphasis was on performer and
spectator becoming one and the same in a kind of spontaneous, self-
organising social event without apparent authorship. Gormley’s One and
Other, on the other hand, sought self-consciously to enshrine the public in a
form of participation corresponding perhaps to the Beuysian notion of social
sculpture— folding society into art; everyone as artist; sculpture as event
(Beuys [1973] 1990: 21–23). But in actuality it threatened to make the
participatory one on the democratic plinth appear highly vulnerable,
individualised and exposed. As Jones puts it, ‘Far from being a Chaucerian
gathering of larger-than-life British citizens, this is a diminishing, isolating
image of the individual [that] removes the performers from the social world.
It is not a stage. It is a hermit’s platform’ (2011:79). As a consequence, the
participatory other that was the spectator became alienated.

References
Bal, M. (2001) Louise Bourgeois’ Spider : The Architecture of Art-Writing,
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Barkham, P. (2008) ‘Wanted: 8,760 Living Statues,’ Guardian (G2), January
10: 23–25.
Beuys, J. ([1973] 1990) ‘I am Searching for Field Character,’ in C. Kuoni
(ed.) Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America, New
York: Four Walls Eight Windows.
Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of
Spectator-ship, London and New York: Verso.
Carter, P. (2002) Repressed Spaces: the Poetics of Agoraphobia, London:
Reaktion Books.
Dyer, G. (2006) ‘An Explosion of Delight,’ Guardian, October 14: 30.
Foster, H. (1996) The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the
Century, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press.
Gormley, A. (2009) One and Other. www.oneandother.co.uk (accessed July
9, 2009).
Gormley, A. (ed) (2010) One and Other, London: Jonathan Cape.
Higgins, C. (2009) ‘The Birth of Twitter Art,’ Guardian, July 8.
www.guardian.co.uk (accessed November 3, 2012).
Hohl, R. (1972) Alberto Giacometti, London: Thames and Hudson.
Jones, J. (2011) ‘The Fourth Plinth: It Was Just Big Brother all Over Again,’
in L. Keidan, C. J. Mitchell and A. Mitchelson (eds.) The Live Art
Almanac Vol. 2, London: Live Art Development Agency.
Judd, D. (1975) Complete Writings, New York and Halifax: The Press of the
Nova Scotia School of Art and Design.
Krauss, R. E. (1986) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kwon, M. (2004) One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational
Identity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rendell, J. (2011) Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, London
and New York: I.B. Tauris.
Self, W. (2012) ‘London Pride?,’ Guardian (Travel), January 21: 6.
Whybrow, N. (2011) Art and the City, London and New York: I.B. Tauris.
Part III
Participation
6
Tree Planting
The Use of Public Art as Social Practice

Julia Lossau

Contemporary public art has become an important component of urban

development strategies. In recent years, more and more artists have been
invited to participate in processes of place making, community regeneration
and urban restructuring (Goodey 1994; Carey and Sutton 2004; Lees and
Melhuish 2013). The notion of culture-led development which reflects ‘the
rise to prominence of the cultural sphere in the contemporary (urban)
economy’ (Miles and Paddison 2005:834) often includes the idea that art
can be employed as a driver for urban change. Epitomising a city that has
witnessed its so-called cultural renaissance, the Scottish metropolis of
Glasgow made an effort to shake off its image as a grey industrial town.
Several big initiatives—from the legendary campaign ‘Glasgow’s Miles
Better’ to the year as European Capital of Cultural in 1990 and the year as
UK City of Architecture and Design in 1999—paved the way for a brighter
and more colourful representation of the city. The new image as a ‘city of
culture’ has been complemented by a series of smaller urban renewal
projects that rely on artistic intervention (García 2005; Lossau 2006b; Sharp
et al. 2005; Thompson-Fawcett 2004). One of these projects was carried out
in the years 1998 to 2001 in the East End, and its aim was to upgrade the
area along Royston Road north-east of the city centre. In this context,
Scottish artist Graham Fagen planted 17 trees in inconspicuous locations
within the renewal area. With his project Tree Planting he wanted to
engender in local residents a more positive attitude towards their immediate
surroundings.
The aim of this chapter is to examine how the people of the area dealt
with this artistic intervention and how they made use of Tree Planting in
their everyday practices. The examination aims to shed light on artistic
intervention as a ‘showplace’, an ‘arena’ or indeed a ‘medium’ of social
practices. Scholars of cultural studies and the social sciences have recently
intensified pleas to shift social practices more into the centre of attention.
The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al. 2001) is
probably the best-known expression of this trend. That book’s title
appropriately sums up a debate that has been going on for some decades in
various disciplines (Werlen 1987; Thrift 1996; Reckwitz 2003). For all the
complexity of the discussion, the so-called practice turn is connected with
the hope of recovering a form of theoretical relevance and immediacy
perceived to have been lost in the wake of earlier theory digressions—
namely the ‘linguistic’ and ‘discursive’ turns. The inquiry into what
‘ordinary people’ do on a ‘normal day’ appears to offer researchers more-
than-representational approaches that reach beyond the potentials of post-
structuralist theories of culture, which are all too often accused for being
obsessed with the textual world of signs (cf. Lossau and Lippuner
2010:112).
To understand how people in Glasgow’s East End made use of Fagen’s
project in their everyday practices, this chapter draws on Michel de
Certeau’s (1988:33) conceptualisation of everyday practices as forms of
‘use, or consumption’. Methodologically, the reconstruction of everyday
practices in Tree Planting is based an archival data analysis, as well as on
narrative interviews with Graham Fagen conducted as part of a research
project titled Rebuilding the Living City that the author carried out at the
University of Glasgow.

Providing Context: Public Art and the Planting of

Trees
Any study in the field of public art is faced with the initial problem of
arriving at a common denominator for the disparate forms of art involved.
Today, ‘public art’ is to be understood as a collective term, encompassing
monumental sculptures as well as procedural happenings, performances or
short-lived graffiti. The spectrum of persons who produce public art is also
wide. The artists involved differ on account of their training, the artistic
traditions they belong to and their interpretations of the effects their artistic
works should have on others. A further criterion of differentiation is the way
their artistic production is financed. Three forms of funding can be
distinguished heuristically: first, public art financed by the artists
themselves; second, work commissioned by private financiers; and third,
public art whose production and maintenance is publically financed.
In the case of the latter, which is often perceived of as public art in the
narrower sense, national funding practices and preconceptions play an
important role. In Germany, for example, the current regulations can be
seen as a further development of traditional art-in-architecture rules. These
rules prescribed that a small part (between one and two percent) of the
construction costs of (especially public) buildings had to be spent on in-
architecture art (Mielsch 1989; Plagemann 1989). Compared with the art-
in-architecture practice, the regulations applying to public art are much
more open and flexible. For example, they allow for pooled solutions by
means of which the obligation to decorate each and every public building
with art, frequently perceived as an unwanted ‘alibi action’, can be dropped
(Brodil 1998:207).
Nevertheless, it would be too simple to derive the current constitution of
public art solely from the criticism of in-architecture art. The art historian
and cultural politician Achim Könneke suggests that contemporary public
art is to be seen ‘above all else as a consequence of how art developed in
the 60s and 70s with its diverse attempts to break through a modernity
frozen in convention by means of “different concepts of matter” and
“expanded concepts of art”’ (Könneke 1997a:19–20).
As a consequence of this development, there has been criticism of the
idea that a work of art has to be a tangible object which has been created by
‘a great, exemplary subject’ (Schmidt-Wulffen 2002:97), an artist-as-genius
opposed to people like you and me, and which can be admiringly looked
upon. Whereas classical art—simply put—entails self-sufficient
autonomous works, contemporary art stands for the transition from an
‘object-ness’ to a ‘process-ness’ that additionally involves the beholder. In
this way the ‘beholding’ of art is turned into the ‘use’ of art: ‘The beholders
[…] of public art […] are no longer passive recipients; rather, together with
the art work they become part of a communicative process that impacts on
their lives’ (Schmidt-Wulffen 2002:97). Thus, contemporary public art
represents a web of practices and relations; as in the case of so-called new
genre public art (Lacy 1995), the emphasis is less on the artistic product
itself but ‘on collaboration, and the collective dimension of social
experience’ (Bishop 2006:10).
One of the results of this development is that ordinary, not artistically
trained people can become actively involved in art projects and that
ordinary, and formerly ‘non-artistic’, practices—such as tree planting—can
become practices of public art. Several earlier artistic tree-planting actions
that rely on the participation of ordinary people provide a context for
Fagen’s Glasgow project, establishing new understandings of what counts
as artistic practice and new kinds of social engagement with public art. The
most famous one is probably Joseph Beuys’s ‘7000 Oak Trees’ as part of
the documenta 7 exhibition in Kassel. This project not only epitomises
Beuys’s notion of the ‘social sculpture’ (Adams 1992:28) but also illustrates
his idea that ‘everyone is an artist’ (Adams 1992:30). Under the motto
‘urban forestation instead of urban administration’, the intention Beuys
pursued was ‘to promote sustainable thinking and action through art’ (Kuni
2010:4–5). Anyone in Kassel who was able to summon up the amount of
500 Deutsch-marks was invited to plant one of 7,000 oak trees. The trees
were placed in the city’s public spaces between 1982 and 1987. At the start
of the project, 7,000 basalt stelae were deposited on Friedrichsplatz square
in the centre of Kassel, waiting to be successively placed next to the trees in
order to mark the latter’s involvement in the art project. Although 7000 Oak
Trees began as a contribution to Germany’s most prestigious exhibition of
contemporary art—and was thus institutionally considered as belonging to
the world of so-called gallery art—it generated a web of communication
encompassing disparate actors and perspectives.
In trying to bring about a sustainable change to urban space, the project
exhibited not only an ecological dimension but also a social one. In keeping
with Beuys’s expanded concept of art, the act of planting can be interpreted
as social practice which, in turn, ‘includes the assumption of responsibility
and the negotiation of conflict’ (Kuni 2010:5). In a similar vein, the art
project ‘Berlin-Birkenau’, in which tree planting also played a crucial role,
entailed social responsibility. Within the context of the 7th Berlin Biennale
for contemporary art, the Polish artist Łukasz Surowiec brought 320 birch
trees to Berlin from the surroundings of the former concentration camp
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Accompanied by commemorative plaques, the trees
were replanted at selected places around Berlin, including schoolyards,
public parks, and places especially associated with the Nazi past such as the
deportation memorial Gleis 17 in Berlin Grunewald. Visitors to the Bien-
nale were invited to view the trees at their respective locations. In addition,
thousands of seedlings were cultivated especially for the exhibition and put
on display for visitors to take home.
Artur Żmijewski, curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale, describes
Surowiec’s project as a symbolic gesture in the frame of which national
heritage was being returned to Germany by means of the birches: ‘These
trees, taken from soil that contains the traces of countless deaths, become a
“living archive” that shifts something growing and breathing to Berlin’
(Żmijewski and Bajović 2012:n.p.). In the same way as Beuys’s oaks,
Surowiec’s birches also have a decidedly social and political dimension. It
can hardly be seen as a coincidence that Surowiec chose to plant his trees in
open public environments, and not solely in the compound of the Kunst-
Werke, the Biennale’s central exhibition venue, or in the private gardens of
art collectors. Like Beuys’s oak trees, the trees of ‘Berlin-Birkenau’ were
planted within the context of an art exhibition and thus also belong to the
world of gallery art. These two examples, however, offer good illustrations
of how permeable and blurred the border between gallery art and art in
public space has become. While gallery art has moved out of the confined
spaces of galleries and museums, contemporary public art is no longer
restricted to street corners, squares and public buildings (Lossau 2006a).
Rather, it can be found anywhere and everywhere: in industrial parks, in
private homes, in hospital wards and on roof gardens. Even the protected
interior spaces of the art world—the ‘white cubes’ of the museum and art
gallery—are no longer safe from public art. ‘The topographic definition of
“public art” is a thing of the past, a museum is just as much a public space
as the Internet, and perhaps even more so than the street’ (Könneke
1997b:18).
The Royston Road Project as the Institutional
Framing of Tree Planting
Tree Planting by Graham Fagen developed as part of a larger scheme of
urban renewal, the so-called Royston Road Project. This project
encompassed several urban development measures carried out in the years
1998 to 2001 along Royston Road in Glasgow, Scotland (for a
documentation of the project, see Royston Road Project, s.a.). The aim of
the project was to upgrade an urban area north-east of the Glasgow city
centre. The idea to do so was born in 1997 when the dilapidated Townhead
and Blochairn Parish Church was torn down (Royston Road Project 2002).
At the time, committed residents joined in protest and at the last minute
prevented demolition of the church spire. Under the name ‘Spire and Park
Group’ they pressed the authorities into refurbishing the spire and
establishing a park around it. After the group joined forces with
representatives of the neighbouring Molendinar Community Council, it was
decided not to limit their activities to the church spire and park but to
launch a project of urban renewal that would include the different,
fragmented and disconnected communities along Royston Road. At first it
was not possible to find money for the project because potential funding
agencies were deterred by the high incidence of vandalism in the area: ‘We
were told that we were wasting our time bothering to plan or even dream of
building beautiful parks in Provanmill, Blackhill or Royston—“they would
only be destroyed”’ (McLarty 2002:10). Nevertheless, the Royston Road
Project group did not give up and compiled a catalogue of measures that
was eventually funded by the European Union, the National Lottery
Charities Board, the Scottish Arts Council and other institutions.
The project proposal was characterised by ambitious efforts to include
public art in the process of urban revitalisation. In an attempt to raise the
self-esteem and the community spirit of the residents, the image of the
neigh-bourhoods was to be transformed by means of six artist-in-residence
projects involving selected artists working over lengthy periods with
different institutions in the district (Royston Road Project 2002). In addition
to these soft aspects, the project entailed preservation of the church spire
and the provision of two parks. Besides the Spire Park at the western end of
Royston Road, the project proposal included the creation of an additional
park at the eastern end of the road. The two parks were to act like
parentheses, joining the neighbour-hoods more closely together and lending
them a more positive identity. The planned construction work would also
give employment to the residents and, it was hoped, would provide social
and economic development in the district.
Two artists were involved in the development of the new parks, working
in the so-called design team. While Toby Paterson was commissioned to
take care of the parks’ aesthetic design, their construction and furnishings,
Graham Fagen had more freedom. For inspiration, he first took the time to
inquire into the residents’ concerns, anxieties and future expectations. His
constant presence in the project group broke down any initial anti-artist
resentments; the outsider artist, often perceived as aloof and out of touch
with the world, was soon regarded as a partner:
I am sure that they [the members of the community group] thought at the beginning, the last thing
we need is an artist. But when I left, I was a partner in the community group.
(Graham Fagen, Interview I, 2002)

Of his own admission, Graham Fagen was not happy having to

concentrate his artistic skills on the two relatively small park areas.
Furthermore, he was disturbed by the dichotomy between the parks and
their deprived surroundings. In one of the interviews he noted:
My frustration was that the parks were very small […] and that a lot of money was going to be
concentrated in these small areas. As a user to the park, you would have a certain emotional
attitude to your surroundings, but if you cross the road, five metres, you are in a very different
environment, with a very different attitude to your surroundings. And I thought this would be
something that I as an artist could address.
(Graham Fagen, Interview I, 2002)

Fagen wanted, then, to address the barrier that divided the artistically
designed—if not artificial—parks from their less beautiful surroundings. He
wanted the emotional attitude people would assume in the park to linger on
once they left the park’s boundaries, in other words, that they would
perceive their district as worth living in. He subsequently developed the
idea of including species of trees in his project which are usually only found
in gardens and parks. Under the project title Tree Planting, he decided to
plant seventeen trees of differing rare species in public spaces around the
residential estate (Figure 6.1). The trees, he said, were a sign that the people
would discern and recognise:
So I thought quite hard about how to spread the attitude people are having towards the parks. My
first thought was trees, to put the same trees as in the parks round about the estate. The trees
would then always be a sign that people could recognise.
(Graham Fagen, Interview I, 2002)

The idea of ‘spreading the attitude’ by means of valuable trees was taken
up by the members of the project group and developed further. They
suggested dedicating the trees to individuals who had earned reputations in
the area in the past or had in some other way achieved local fame. At so-
called tree meetings they discussed the persons who should be remembered
by a tree. The selection committee had no easy task since there were more
nominations than trees available. After a stone was placed at the foot of
each tree with a plaque bearing the name of the person to be remembered,
the trees became quite personal objects of remembrance. As a consequence,
the walk that took place on the day the trees were officially dedicated was
like a procession during which the 17 locations were charged with a new
and memorable relevance (Figure 6.2).
The positive response generated by the project is highlighted by the fact
that the newly planted trees were left to stand undamaged. In the first two
years only one tree fell victim to an act of vandalism. However, it seems
Figure 6.1 A tree being planted
Photo by Graham Fagen (2001).
Figure 6.2 One of the trees being officially dedicated. The name of the person the tree is dedicated to
is marked on a stone at the foot of the tree
Photo by Graham Fagen (2002).
Figure 6.3 Flowers and presents decorate a tree dedicated to an adolescent who lost his life in an
accident
Photo by Graham Fagen (2001).

that damage was not chiefly attributable to the general ‘destructiveness’ for
which the district is notorious. According to Graham Fagen, the reason lay
in the ever-present sectarian tension between the Catholics and Protestants
in the area. This tension is particularly apparent in local football matches,
which frequently end in violence between fans of the two major local clubs,
Celtic Glasgow and Glasgow Rangers. The tree that was destroyed was
dedicated to a teenager who had lost his life in an accident (Figure 6.3). He
had been a fan of one of the football teams, and his friends had tied a scarf
in the team’s colours around the tree. According to Graham Fagen this was
reason enough for some supporters of the other team to damage the tree,
much to the distress of the dead boy’s mother:
The mother was in a very bad state when we were working with her for the tree. She was still
grieving very badly. She said that this tree had become her son. The tree almost became like a
shrine area; it was photographed, there were always flowers, there were football colours. […] The
football colours of his tree were from one side of the sectarian divide. […] And one night, some
people from the other side of the sectarian divide took offense to this tree and cut it down. For
this woman, it was like losing her son again.
(Graham Fagen, Interview I, 2002)

Everyday Practices as Practices of the ‘Use’ of Art

The preceding discussions of public art and the planting of trees confirm
that today, public art is found anywhere and everywhere, and it is there to
be ‘used’. In order to reconstruct the everyday practices linked with Tree
Planting, it is appropriate, therefore, to draw on a theory of practice that
explicitly addresses the question of how something is used. In his major
work ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’, sociologist Michel de Certeau
(1988:86) criticises approaches that only take into account ‘what is used,
not the ways of using’. Claiming that use ‘must be analyzed in itself’ (de
Certeau 1988:32), he sketches out a systematic model of use. In his search
of guidelines for analysing usage as such, de Certeau turns to the work of
Gilbert Ryle (1968), who borrows ‘Saussure’s distinction between “langue”
(a system) and “parole” (an act)’ (de Certeau 1988:32), and for whom a
speech act is only possible as an operation within a linguistic system.
Although de Certeau develops his model in the context of language, and not
in the frame of material practices, one can, as he puts it, ‘attempt to apply
this model to many non-linguistic operations’ (de Certeau 1988:33)—for
example social operations relating to (public) art. In order to do so, it has to
be assumed that art, like language, represents as a system of meaning, and
that all sorts of social practices, such as tree planting, can become
dependent on that system in that they derive their meaning only within the
dominion of that system.
 As de Certeau explains (1988:33) by reference to Ryle, the relationship
between language as a system, on one hand, and a concrete act of speech or
a verbal statement, on the other, is characterised by four aspects. The first
aspect is characterised as ‘realising’ because it entails ‘a realization of the
linguistic system through a speech act that actualises some of its potential
(language is only real in the act of speaking)’. The second aspect takes into
account processes of appropriation, or put more precisely: ‘an
appropriation of language by the speaker who uses it’. The third aspect is
of allocutive kind: it addresses somebody. This aspect concerns ‘the
postulation of an interlocutor (real or fictive) and thus the constitution of a
relational contract or allocution (one speaks to someone)’. The fourth and
final aspect focuses on temporal relations. On one hand, this entails ‘the
establishment of a present through the act of the “I” who speaks’, and on
the other ‘the organisation of a temporality (the present creates a before and
an after) and the existence of a “now” which is the presence in the world’.
Hence, the relation between a practice and the system that makes the very
practice possible can be described as (1) realising, (2) appropriating, (3)
allocutive and (4) temporalising. In the following, these four aspects are
reconstructed in the practices of the Glasgow case study in order to
illustrate how the local population ‘used’ the art project. Just as ‘the speech
act is at the same time a use of language and an operation performed on it’
(de Certeau 1988:33), the everyday practices that can be identified in the
Glasgow case study, it is argued, can be interpreted as use of art and a way
of performing on art. Such an interpretation involves the idea that a parallel
can be made between a concrete language, for example Scots, and the
concrete art project, that is Tree Planting.
The first aspect, realisation, is described by de Certeau as a realisation of
the linguistic system through the act of speech. In other words, the language
system only becomes real by means of speaking. If this idea is transferred
onto the case study, it is possible to say that the art project first becomes
real in that the local residents actually make use of it in a specific form or in
a particular manner; the art was not merely appropriated in a passive way
but rather actively—by means of participation in its constitution. In so
doing, neither the individual trees nor other concrete objects were
constituted as works of art; the peculiar absence of an artwork is perfectly
consistent with the self-conception of the ‘new genre public art’ described
above, which defines itself not via objects but rather via processes. With
this backdrop it becomes possible to consider all the practices that arose
from Tree Planting—from the negotiations in the project group, through the
actual planting of the trees, and continuing with their upkeep—as practices
essential to making the art project real.
The same applies to the second aspect. As outlined earlier, the aspect of
appropriation entails for de Certeau (1988:33) ‘an appropriation of
language by the speaker who uses it’. Just as language is appropriated
through the act of speech, the artwork is appropriated via the various ways
it is ‘used’. By and through the practices of the users, the artist ultimately
becomes their artist, the trees become their trees, the locations become their
locations and the project becomes their project.
The allocutive aspect of the relationship between the system language
and the concrete act of speaking is characterised by the introduction of a
listening partner or ‘interlocutor’ and the ‘constitution of a relational
contract’ (de Certeau 1988:33). What this means is that communication
generally takes place between several participants (a notion already
captured in simple transmitter–receiver models). Although this seldom
involves the establishment of a formal contract, speech acts usually entail at
least two persons who, through speaking with each other, mutually realise
and appropriate the system language—even though they may
misunderstand what is said. In the example of Tree Planting, this allocative
dimension is expressed in the network of relationships generated in the
course of the art project. It encompasses the relationships between the
project group and Graham Fagen as well as those between the project group
and the funding agencies and the relationships amongst the residents
themselves. From the perspective of certain object theories, such as actor-
network theory, this would also have to include the relationships between
‘objects’, such as the trees and memorial stones, and ‘subjects’ such as the
residents, the funding agencies and the artist. Parallel to the instance of
misunderstanding in the case of language, the ‘use’ of the art project does
not necessarily entail only successful, positive-constructive allocations as
they came into being in the course of the planting of the trees or in the
opening walk. It also encompasses the practice-related relations that
followed from negative or even destructive forms of use. In the Tree
Planting, this is most clearly illustrated by the tree that fell victim to an act
of vandalism. The practices of the boy’s family and friends who decorated
the tree and turned it into a public shrine and the hostile attack from the
supporters of the other football team who accepted the communicative offer
and reacted to it in a destructive way can both be interpreted as allocutive
actions in de Certeau’s sense.
The fourth and last aspect of temporality, or better: temporalisation, has
two dimensions for de Certeau. First, he refers to ‘the establishment of a
present through the act of the “I” who speaks’ (de Certeau 1988:33). Every
act of speech incorporates a kairological dimension—a dimension arising
from the actual time of speaking—which grants the speaker ‘the existence
of a ‘now’ which is the presence in the world’. Second, this coincides with a
chronological dimension: Insofar as ‘the present creates a before and an
after’, the individual points in time can be arranged sequentially and in
historical succession (de Certeau 1988:33).
In the case of Tree Planting, the kairological dimension is constituted in
the countless number of times the project was ‘used’ by the different actors
involved. Be it Graham Fagen’s presence at one of the many project
meetings or at one of the ‘tree meetings’, be it one of the actual acts of
planting, the walk or ‘procession’ during which the trees were dedicated or
the moment when the boy’s tree was vandalised—all these moments
resulted in the creation of a (particular) presence. At the same time,
precisely due to the creation of different ‘presences’, the ‘use’ of the project
meant that a chronology was created for the course of the project which,
without claiming to be exhaustive, can be narrated as follows: First,
Graham Fagen was invited to participate, then he attended the project
meetings, then the idea to plant trees was born, then the tree meetings were
held, then the trees were planted, then the group walk took place and so on.
Due to the specific content of the project, a third dimension of
temporalisation can be identified in the case of Tree Planting. The decision
to dedicate the trees to special persons resulted in the development of a
transhistorical, time-less or eternal temporality characterised by a strong
religious connotation. From this perspective, the memory stones that were
placed next to the trees seem like gravestones, the flowers and presents that
decorated the boy’s tree seem like devotional objects and the opening walk
seems like a solemn procession. In the context of death and
commemoration in particular, this timeless temporality corresponds with
the imagery of the project’s central object—the tree—which often stands as
a symbol of life. This symbolism, however, is specific to the content of this
chapter’s case study—or at least specific to art projects concerned with
living, growing natural objects like trees. Tree projects can indeed, as Kuni
(2010:4) argues with a view to Beuys’s ‘7000 Oak Trees’, entail a vision of
ars longa, of sustainable or, rather, enduring art. Nevertheless, the third
dimension of temporality is outside of de Certeau’s model and cannot
necessarily be reconstructed in other examples of the use of art in public
spaces.

Conclusion
This chapter has dealt with the use made of public art by everyday people.
Based on the example of the art project Tree Planting, it investigated the
question of how public art is used in the everyday practices of the people
exposed to it. Tree Planting was embedded in a larger urban development
project within the frame of which the Scottish artist Graham Fagen planted
seventeen trees north-east of the city centre in Glasgow. Drawing on the
work of de Certeau, a theoretical framework was provided that
conceptualises social practices as practices of use. Against such a
background, the everyday social practices observable in the case study have
been interpreted as practices of use—and of operationalisation—of the art
project.
Exploring the practices of use as practices of realisation, appropriation,
allocution and temporalisation, it has become clear that the four aspects of
de Certeau’s model are not so useful in ontological terms, but more so
epistemologically. That is, it makes little sense to conceptualise individual
practices as entailing either realisation, appropriation and allocution or
temporalisation. Rather, these aspects constitute perspectives that make it
possible to analyse one and the same action as being realising as well as
appropriating, allocutive or temporalising. It can further be argued that the
model says little about a dimension that is usually regarded as the Other of
time, namely space. There is indeed a peculiar silencing of the spatialising
aspects of social practices which, like the temporalising ones, consist of two
dimensions, both space and place. On one hand, it can be argued that the
use of public art in social practices entails the establishment of concrete
places (as the ‘counterparts’ of the kairological dimensions of speaking
referred to by de Certeau). On the other hand, practical uses of public art
lead to the establishment of a spatiality which can be understood as the grid
within which the individual places are located or embedded.
The value of transferring de Certeau’s model—complemented by spatial
aspects—to the use of public art is most apparent in the field of urban
studies. Much urban studies research is shaped by its subject matter around
neoliberal urban politics, the concomitant structural strains on public
budgets and the increasing interlocking of economics and culture (Mattissek
2008). As a consequence, research in urban studies is itself in many ways
characterised by a top-down perspective that focuses primarily on how
urban spaces are structurally and strategically produced by powerful actors
and discourses. Viewed from this perspective, public art is seen as an
instrument that can help to improve the image of urban spaces and that can
therefore be employed in the contexts of city marketing, urban management
and neighbourhood development (Lossau 2008).
Scholars have varied assessments of the strategic exploitation of art
within policies of urban development. Some authors perceive positive
aspects in the growing importance of art in urban spaces, as it can
supposedly strengthen the local identity of disadvantaged neighbourhoods,
improve life quality, promote cultural diversity, and help to integrate
marginalised groups (Hall and Robertson 2001; Quinn 2005; Sharp et al.
2005; McCarthy 2006,). In contrast, authors such as David Harvey (1989a;
1989b) and Sharon Zukin (1995; 1998) have pointed out that the
employment of art and culture in the context of urban development leads to
an intensification of social polarisation and social exclusion. They have
argued that the magic formula of aestheticisation via urban development
projects can work like a mask, covering the underlying problems which
then remain neglected:
The formula smacks of a constructed fetishism, in which every aesthetic power of illusion and
image is mobilised to mask the intensifying class, racial and ethnic polarisations going on
underneath.
(Harvey 1989b:21)

As disparate as these two positions may be, they share a common focus
on the strategic effects of deploying art in public spaces. In de Certeau’s
terms, both positions are primarily interested in the potential of what is
used. This chapter adopted a fundamentally different focus of analysis on
the way something is used. Instead of looking at the either positive or
negative effects of public art, this perspective is primarily interested in how
art is used, conceptualising the use of art in public spaces as a social
practice.

Acknowledgements
The empirical part of this chapter is based research that has been funded by
a Marie Curie Fellowship of the European Commission. I would like to
thank Chris Philo and the other geographers at the Department of
Geography and Topographic Science (today the School of Geographical and
Earth Sciences) at Glasgow University where I carried out my research in
the years 2001–2003.

References

Adams, D. (1992) ‘Joseph Beuys. Pioneer of a Radical Ecology,’ Art

Journal, 51(2): 26–34.
Bishop, C. (ed.) (2006) Participation, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Brodil, L. (1998) ‘Der Stand der Dinge. Kunst am Bau in Bund und
Ländern,’ in M. Wailand and V. H. Weh (eds.) Zur Sache. Kunst am
Bau. Ein Handbuch, Wien: Triton.
Carey, P. and Sutton, S. (2004) ‘Community Development Through
Participatory Arts: Lessons Learned from a Community Arts and
Regeneration Project in South Liverpool,’ Community Development
Journal, 39(2): 123–134.
de Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven F. Rendall
(trans.), Berkeley: University of California Press.
García, B. (2004) ‘Deconstructing the City of Culture: The Long-term
Cultural Legacies of Glasgow 1990,’ Urban Studies, 42(5/6): 841–868.
Goodey, B. (1994) ‘Art-full Places: Public Art to Sell Public Places?,’ in J.
R. Gold and W. V. Ward (eds.) Place Promotion. The Use of Publicity
and Marketing to Sell Towns and Regions, Chichester: Wiley.
Hall, T. and Robertson, I. (2001) ‘Public Art and Urban Regeneration:
Advocacy, Claims and Critical Debates,’ Landscape Research, 26(1): 5–
26.
Harvey, D. (1989a) ‘Down Towns,’ Marxism Today, 33(1): 21.
Harvey, D. (1989b) The Urban Experience, Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.
Könneke, A. (1997a) ‘Wege aus der Erstarrung. Entwicklung und
Perspektiven der Kunst im öffentlichen Bau als Programm,’ in
Kulturamt der Stadt Jena (ed.) Kunst—Raum—Perspektiven. Ansichten
zur Kunst in öffentlichen Räumen, Jena: Kulturamt.
Könneke, A. (1997b) ‘Weitergehen,’ in C. P. Müller (ed.) Kunst auf Schritt
und Tritt, Hamburg: Kellner.
Kuni, V. (2010) ‘Nachhaltigkeit—(k)eine Kunst? Bäume pflanzen, Bienen
züchten: ars longa als Gemeinschaftsprojekt,’ Forschung Frankfurt,
3(2010): 4–9.
Lacy, S. (ed.) (1995), Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle:
Bay Press.
Lees, L. and Melhuish, C. (2013) ‘Arts-Led Regeneration in the UK: The
Rhetoric and the Evidence on Urban Social Inclusion,’ European Urban
and Regional Studies, DOI 10.1177/0969776412467474.
Lossau, J. (2006a) ‘Kunst im Haus, Kunst am Bau, Kunst im öffentlichen
Raum,’ in E. Forster (ed.) Architektur:Kunst:Bildung. “Kunst am Bau
“in Transformation, Wien and Münster: LIT Verlag.
Lossau, J. (2006b) ‘The Gatekeeper. Urban Landcape and Public Art,’ in R.
Warwick (ed.) Arcade. Artists and Place-making, London: Black Dog
Publishing.
Lossau, J. (2008) ‘Kulturgeographie als Perspektive. Zur Debatte um den
cultural turn in der Humangeographie—eine Zwischenbilanz,’ Berichte
zur Deutschen Landeskunde, 82(4): 317–334.
Lossau, J. and Lippuner, R. (2010) ‘Kritik der Raumfallen,’ in S. Günzel
(ed.) Handbuch Raum. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Stuttgart,
Weimar: Metzler.
Mattissek, A. (2008) Die neoliberale Stadt. Diskursive Repräsentationen im
Stadt-marketing deutscher Großstädte, Bielefeld: transcript.
McCarthy, J. (2006) ‘Regeneration of Cultural Quarters: Public Art for
Place Image or Place Identity?,’ Journal of Urban Design, 11(2): 243–
262.
McLarty, R. (2002) ‘The Royston Road Project,’ in, Royston Road Parks,
Glasgow: Royston Road Project.
Mielsch, B. (1989) ‘Die historischen Hintergründe der “Kunst-am-Bau”-
Regelung,’ in V. Plagemann (ed.) Kunst im öffentlichen Raum. Anstöße
der 80er Jahre, Köln: DuMont.
Miles, S. and Paddison, R. (2005) ‘Introduction: The Rise and Rise of
Culture-led Urban Regeneration,’ Urban Studies, 42(5/6): 833–839.
Plagemann, V. (1989) ‘Kunst außerhalb der Museen,’ in V. Plagemann (ed.)
Kunst im öffentlichen Raum. Anstöße der 80er Jahre, Köln: DuMont-
Verlag.
Quinn, B. (2005) ‘Arts Festivals and the City,’ Urban Studies, 42(5/6): 927–
943.
Reckwitz, A. (2003) ‘Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken. Eine
sozialtheoretische Perspektive,’ Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 32(4): 282–
301.
Royston Road Project (2002) Royston Road Parks, Glasgow.
Royston Road Project (s.a.). www.roystonroadproject.org (accessed July 30,
2014). Ryle, G. (1968) ‘Use, Usage and Meaning,’ in G. H. R.
Parkinson (ed.) The Theory of Meaning, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Schatzki, T., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) (2001) The
Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London: Routledge.
Schmidt-Wulffen, S. (2002) ‘Kunst im öffentlichen Raum—eine Revision,’
in A. Könneke and S. Schmidt-Wulffen (eds.) AUSSENDIENST.
Kunstprojekte in öffentlichen Räumen Hamburgs, Freiburg im Breisgau:
Modo.
Sharp, J., Pollock, V. and Paddison, R. (2005) ‘Just Art for a Just City:
Public Art and Social Inclusion in Urban Regeneration,’ Urban Studies,
42(5/6): 1001–1023.
Thrift, N. (1996) ‘“Strange Country”. Meaning, Use and Style in Non-
Representational Theories,’ in Spatial Formations, London: Sage.
Thompson-Fawcett, M. (2004) ‘Reinventing the Tenement: Transformation
of Crown Street in the Gorbals, Glasgow,’ Journal of Urban Design 9
(2): 177–203.
Werlen, B. (1987) Gesellschaft, Handlung und Raum. Grundlagen
handlungstheoretischer Sozialgeographie, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
Żmijewski, A. and Bajović, Z. (2012) ‘Berlin-Birkenau’ by Łukasz
Surowiec. www.berlinbiennale.de (accessed November 27, 2013).
Zukin, S. (1995) The Cultures of Cities, Cambridge, MA, and Oxford:
Blackwell.
Zukin, S. (1998) ‘Städte und die Ökonomie der Symbole,’ in A. Göschel
and V. Kirchberg (eds.) Kultur in der Stadt. Stadtsoziologische Analysen
zur Kultur, Opladen: Leske + Budrich.
7
Sound Response
The Public Reception of Audio Walks

Angharad Saunders and Kate Moles

The relationship between art and public space has long been an important
one within urban studies (Miles 1997; Hall 2007; Hawkins 2013). Whether it
is the grand imperialistic monuments of the nineteenth century, the
commemorative memorials of the early twentieth century, the emergence of
bohemian neighbourhoods or the co-opting of art into regeneration and
development strategies more broadly, art is, in one guise or another, a very
permanent and powerful fixture within the urban landscape. What is notable
about recent interventions in this area, however, is a concern with the
everyday nature of art practice. This may, in part, be a counterpoint to the
widespread appropriation of art works and art practices for the neo-liberal
inspired regeneration projects of successive governments (Matthew 2010).
At the same time, it may owe to the rise of new genre public art, with its
stress on art as process, not product; art working, not artwork; and dialogue,
not direction (Lacy 1995; Bourriaud 2002). In such a context, Bourriaud’s
assertion that ‘artwork is a dot in a line’ (2002:21) seems particularly
instructive, for it suggests that art is continually being made, both materially
and meaningfully, through social relationships and social agencies.
To date, interest in art practice has tended to focus more on one side of the
dot than another, concerned more with those social agencies and actions that
come before the dot—those that are bound up with its material creation—
rather than with those that are involved in its reception in the world (Miles
1997; Sharp et al. 2005; Minty 2006). This is not to suggest that the audience
has been wholly absent from considerations of art practice, for the idea of
the audience has long haunted debates over the publicness, intentionality and
iconography of artworks (Deutsche 1996; Kwon 2002). Work on site-
specific art has sought to reveal the social and political fissures that arise
between an artist, an artwork and the audience (Kwon 2002), while Massey
and Rose (2003) have done much to theorise public art as an active insertion
into place. That said, our understanding of the audience remains somewhat
partial, for, as the work on site-specific art demonstrates, concern has tended
to coalesce around the politics and pressures of reception. Exceptions are
evident in the work of Hall (2007) and Zebracki (2012), who press for
reception as something lived rather than something that is merely explained
through political or social difference. Yet, it is still fair to say that the
audience as an active agency in the making of place and meaning remains
more implied than real. Our chapter, therefore, takes as its case study two
audio walks created as part of a public engagement project that worked with
a group of young men in Grangetown, an inner-city neighbourhood of
Cardiff, Wales. In doing so, we focus on the ‘other side’ of these walks—on
their consumption by the people who walked them and we explore how, as
instances of sound art, these walks live within the area, affecting and altering
how people come to know, understand and comprehend Grangetown. Before
we do so, we elaborate on audio walks as instances and exemplars of sound
art.

Audio Walks and Sound Art

Interest in audio walks has grown in recent years as different groups
recognise the form’s potential for revealing and forging place in different
ways. In essence, audio walks are audio guided routes through place.
Sometimes they can take form through the provision of quite factual
information, and at others they can proffer new worlds and experiences for
the participants. They can be accompanied by a map, or not, and they can be
narrated by single individuals or multiple voices and characters. As an art
form, audio walks emerged from a disgruntlement with the visual
predominance and institutional traditions of the art world (Butler 2006); they
were a means of moving beyond and outside the gallery and the concert hall,
they emphasised art as something mobile not situated, and they drew
attention to art as an everyday, relational forging rather than an absolute
object. Not all audio walks are art, although they are all processes of creation
and construction. The content and nature of the walk places it somewhere
along a spectrum of art to information, which can be negotiated by the place,
time and participant as well, perhaps, as the intention of the constructor. In
more recent years audio walks have been appropriated for more touristic
ends, for they are seen to offer a powerful way of introducing people to, and
taking them through, the historical, cultural and social landscapes of towns
and cities (Footnotes 2009). They provide not only an opportunity to share
social knowledges and heighten spatial literacy, but they can convey an
insider’s view of place that reveals its difference, its quirkier and grittier side
through the multilayering of media and the construction of multiple realities
in each meander. Consequently, audio walks give the impression of offering
a city experience that is off-the-beaten-track and therefore more in-depth and
engaged with the social and physical worlds they traverse.
One result of this commercial and touristic exploitation is that we have
become accustomed to understand audio walks through very established
conventions: They present place as a series of interesting sites; they are
linear and coherent in nature; they identify aspects of place that need to be
discovered and made visible; they reduce the complexity of place to a
singular narrative and they narrate it by pausing its flow and eddy. Audio
walks, therefore, seemingly code the spatial imaginaries and aesthetic
experiences of their creators and consumers in particular ways. They pivot
on and create what Ingold (2005) might term point-to-point connections,
wherein knowledge is assembled not developed, a route is given not made
and we become passengers not wayfarers. Where wayfarers accrue
understanding through their inhabitation and movement through place,
passengers consume a pre-prepared route that moves them across but not
through place. Thus under the guise of the quirky and the different, audio
walks are often highly determined happenings. This, however, is to
understand audio walks purely as objects, or containers of action, and not as
lived practices of doing, for it is in the ‘very movement of [the]
accomplishment’ (Bourdieu 1977:3) that we make the world. Thus, when we
turn to the actual practice of doing we must not assume that audio walks are
linear constructs or conceptions, nor must we assume that being a passenger
is passive or that it commits us to linear and destination orientated ways of
moving or knowing. Instead, we must be open to the possibilities,
interventions and creations that happen as we go, for the multiplicity, fluidity
and intuition of our being in the world escapes and resists authorship and
control.
When we consider audio walks as lived practices, or aesthetic
experiences, what becomes most apparent, Lavery (2005) argues, is the way
they collapse the traditional boundaries between author and audience, by
demanding that both perform place. Instead of offering a product for
observation, audio walks function through a nomadic metaphysics that
depend on the embodied movement of both the creator and the consumer.
They are shared accomplishments, and as such they are always pregnant
with possibilities, as each encounter mingles and brings forth different
experiences, memories and imaginaries. Thus, an audio walk is always far
more than a material route, for it plays host to the meeting of lifeworlds of
its creators and consumers, and with each encounter the audio walk happens
for ‘another first time’ (Garfinkel 1967:9): new lifeworlds emerge from the
mix. And as this process occurs and the resulting spatial imaginaries unfold,
we move further towards the artistic side of the spectrum, offering a creative
and emerging process of knowing, being and doing place.
What is more, recent work on the agency of place presses for place as
something more than a staging post for, or backdrop to, action (Anderson et
al. 2010). It regards place as having a voice, which speaks to us in ways we
can rarely predict. Thus, while an audio walk will have a route and a story,
the voice of place—the sounds of the area, the traffic, real and imagined
obstacles, road layout and so forth—inadvertently shapes how we do and
understand the world. Consequently, audio walks can be material givens and
they can order the world and direct our experience of it, but at the same time,
they are never rigid or unforgiving routes through the world. They are
always concatenations of histories and stories of and about place, they are
records and registers of lifeworlds and they are replete with possible new
worlds and new worldviews, as new inscriptions are made on and within
them.

Positioning the Project

The two audio walks created within Grangetown were part of a Beacon for
Wales–funded public engagement project titled Sounding the Way. Beacon
for Wales was a funding stream that sought to establish collaborative
partnerships between Welsh universities and local communities through a
range of capacity-building projects. In the beginning, the audio walk project
was conceived as a way of giving voice to a geographical area and to a
particular social group that had been relatively marginalised, both
economically and socially, within broader citywide regeneration and tourism
discourses. We worked with a group of six young men over the course of a
year. The young men, aged between 14 and 16 years, were recruited through
a youth club in the area and were able to conduct this project as part of their
Duke of Edinburgh Award (an initiative to get young people active, engaged
and developing relevant skills for employment and beyond). Contact with
the boys included workshops, informal meet-ups, wanders around the
vicinity, activities with community groups and technical skills development.
We conducted most of these ourselves, although we drafted in people who
had greater skills or alternative knowledge when needed. We met with the
boys at least once a fortnight, often more than once a week, and explored
with them the process of audio walk making. They were responsible for
choosing the topics of the walks, the routes of the walks, the narratives and
the foci. They decided who to talk to, and how those interactions would go,
while we helped them set up meetings and arrange consultations with
community groups and individuals.
The young men were quite clear on the topics that were significant to
them—one group selected the history of a street in Grangetown after a short
time spent looking at the history of the whole area; the second group felt
they could convey something meaningful about sport in the area, something
significant in their own lives and interactions with the place. Once they had
these points of departures in terms of ideas, we needed to get them thinking
not just about the content but also about the routes they would navigate and
communicate. This proved difficult for them, reducing their interests in the
area to a series of points—something which we discuss in greater detail later.
The process was engaged with enthusiastically though we had to negotiate
time with the boys that fitted with their personal, social and educational
lives. Flexibility proved to be the key in keeping them engaged, in terms of
time, in terms of what we were asking them to do and in terms of what they
could do as part of it. We realised early on that engagement had to be on
their terms, and that our role was to facilitate this as best we could in order
to develop their active engagement with the place, project and process.
The final part of the project was to explore how people responded to the
audio walks. Massey and Rose (2003) alert us to the potentialities of art
works to engage an audience, and in this case the audio walks’ use of sound,
their formation through community based interviews and their audio
presentation invited very active forms of engagement. Those interviewed
were very keen to listen to the walks, as were members of the communities
in which the walks took placed. We wanted, however, to move away from
the responses of those Zebracki (2012) calls ‘indwellers’ and the way such a
focus tends to frame responses to art in terms of the extent to which it fosters
community inclusions and exclusions. Instead, we wanted to explore what
Massey and Rose term the ‘external relationality’ (2003:11) of the artworks
—how the walks engaged people from outside the area and how this
engagement made the area in new ways. Unlike indwellers to the project and
to Grangetown, outdwellers may well identify and respond to different
potentialities within the audio walks. We conducted a day of research with
one such group of young women who all had links to the area but were not
from there themselves; some were community workers in a neighbouring
area, others worked with community groups in different parts of the area,
one was a civil servant in the city and one was an academic. Some of the
women knew one another; others did not. This group of six women was
recruited as a convenient sample—we knew them and invited them as
interested, although external, participants who had time to give to the
project, so we could walk the walks with them and then sit and talk to them
in a group interview afterwards. The dialogue continued as these women
recommended the walks to their friends and colleagues, and so we had
comments coming back through them from others who had done the walks.
Their gender was coincidental; they were the people who turned up on that
day.
As they had time to give to the project, we walked with them as they
undertook the walk and spoke with them afterwards in a group interview
about their experiences of doing the walks and about the ways the walks
functioned as tools of place making within Grangetown. What became
apparent was that their perceptions of the area were heavily influenced by
the wider urban narratives of Grangetown, while the practice of audio
walking—of moving through the place of Grangetown in new ways (on foot
rather than by car, as interested observers and attentive walkers rather than
as people passing through or frustrated by traffic problems) produced new
ways of understanding, negotiating and positioning this very place. It is to
these practices of reception—to that which happens after the dot—which this
chapter now turns (for discussion of practices of making see Saunders and
Moles, 2013). In doing so, it analyses both the spatial and the temporal
aspects of sound art consumption.

Making Grangetown: Spatial Aspects of Sound Art

Consumption

Grangetown is a neighbourhood that is squashed between Cardiff city centre

and the redeveloped area of Cardiff Bay. As such, it is more a conduit for
travelling between these areas than it is a destination in its own right. The
Red Bus Tour, a guided tour around the city on an open-top red bus similar
to the ones many cities and tourist destinations have, goes close by but does
not enter; there are no buildings of note that would feature in Cardiff tourism
leaflets, and within the city it is often referred to as ‘strangetown’, reflective
perhaps of its long history as a very cosmopolitan and diverse
neighbourhood. Cardiff City Council (2012), for instance, registers the area
as
a traditional, largely residential neighbourhood on the fringe of the city centre of Cardiff. The area
is characterised by terraced housing and there is little open space, few street trees, poor quality
pavement surfaces and poor street lighting. The area is dominated by the car, with issues regarding
speeding and parking. The residents have identified graffiti, rubbish, youth annoyance and dog
fouling as being problematic.

The perspective of the people who live there is obviously different to

those that look in on it, and the various accounts of the area available to the
public (both internally and externally) represent it in multiple ways. In the
audio walks project, the intention was to step beyond regeneration
discourses and the local government understandings, beyond the police
statistics and housing benefit descriptions, through the ethnic classifications
and past the shopfronts and the groups gathered on the street corners to an
embedded, embodied engagement with the place through the social worlds
of the young participants.
Audio walks are inherently tied up with place making. In creating two
walks the young men involved in the project were able to articulate what
Grangetown meant to them. This was not a coherent or smooth articulation.
It did not create a seamless or authoritative narrative of place, similar to the
‘official’ telling of Grangetown that arose from those situated outside it.
Instead, it was highly localised and personal; at times, it was disorientating
and fragmented; and it moved awkwardly and hesitantly through the area.
What is more, it was replete with pauses, laughter and the daily chatter of the
area. In many respects it was a piece of everyday art that emerged from the
everyday ways of being and the practices of its creators:
I’ve lived in Grangetown, grew up here. Grangetown is a brilliant place [door banging in
background], erm as a whole. It’s very multicultural. Just walking round Grangetown you will find
people from different cultures, different nationalities, you know, there’s a variety of languages
spoken in Grangetown, a really good mix.
(Sounding the Way 2012)

As such, de Certeau (1984) might term these audio walks ‘tactical’

artworks, for they both made and opened up the area in a manner that was
different to, resisted and subverted its ‘official’ narration and they challenged
the accepted form of an audio walk. The walks told Grangetown not only in
a different tenor—one that was local and colloquial, but in a different texture
too—one that was a little rough and ragged around the edges. Transforming
the telling of Grangetown, however, is quite different to transforming its
perception. If we are to get at the other side of the dot, at the practice of
consumption, we need to ask, like Crang (2000), how the opening of new
and tactical trajectories through Grangetown change it and perhaps even
remake it.
One suggestion is to follow Hawkins (2010) and explore how artworks, in
opening new trajectories into place, simultaneously open a politics of
possibility; these trajectories suggest that life might be different to what our
accepted frameworks of understanding tell us it is. There was a real sense of
this in the responses to the Grangetown audio walks:
I know someone […] who said ‘I was in Grangetown and I had my laptop on me and I was holding
it close to me cos I was scared’, and I mean having done the walk now that’s properly crazy to us
now that they would think that and so it’s good for that […] in allaying people’s fears [about] an
area.
 (Women’s Group Interview, 17 July 2012)

In some respects, however, this is the outcome of change. We know that

the sound art transformed our participants’ perceptions of the area, but
through what potentialities did this transformation arise? Most obviously
perhaps, the audio walks pivoted upon the act of walking, which as Ingold
(2010) reminds us, is a process of becoming knowledgeable. As our
participants walked along listening to the audio walks, their knowledge grew
in relation to the paths they took and, perhaps more significantly, the ways
they engaged with them. It is this wayfaring—a concern with moving, rather
than with reaching a destination—that Ingold regards as most enriching, for
this is the organic unfolding of life and knowing. Yet this type of walking, as
already noted, does not fit easily with more formal, structured, didactic audio
walks, for the audio walk prescribes both route and rhythm (Saunders and
Moles 2013). Instead, this form of audio walk works through a form of
walking that Ingold terms ‘transport’. Herein, the walker is a passenger who
engages in a pre-prepared movement from one location to the next. This
description is too passive for the engagement our walkers described, as a
shared encounter among place, participant and the walk that required an
active negotiation of the route. All our participants got lost at some point
because the directions were not straightforward and the audio was often
difficult to match to the physical landscape (Figure 7.1). This was an
unfolding, becoming movement through the place, which required an active
engagement with the movement through the place and its negotiation
thereof.
Figure 7.1 Participants losing and finding their way on the Grangetown History and Change audio
walk
Photo by Kate Moles (2012).

Audio walks, in Myer’s (2010:62) view, are best seen as practices of

‘conversive wayfaring’ rather than passive travels within, or a ‘cosy
visitation’ to, place. That is, they do not just show place, but are rather
relational activities that invite convivial, conversational and active
interactions between place and participant. In part this arises because the
audio walk is always a co-walk, albeit one distanced in space and time. The
walker is never alone. They are guided by multiple voices, they are
welcomed into a temporary community among listener–narrator–place and
they are made to bear witness to the lived world of Grangetown. Within this
process the memories, imagination and senses of the walker mingle with
those of the place and its inhabitants, carving new worlds that are both real
and imagined. This is evident in the way the walks took the participants
behind the public facade of Grangetown. At various points in the audio walk
we hear from local residents past and present who tell us much about life in
the community, revealing the area as a social world as well as a material one:
It made you interested in, like, erm who the people were […] I was walking past doors and rather
than usual you just sort of push on and don’t really think, it made you think about the people who
were living behind the doors. There were people drinking on the curb as we went past and I
thought it would be quite cool to stop and talk to them, which is something that’d never occur to
me before.
(Women’s Group Interview, 17 July 2012)

The audio walk and audio walker, the memories and the materiality of
place coincide in the creation of a new imagining of Grangetown. It is an
imagining, in this instance, which moves into the private sphere and begins
to conceptualise Grangetown as something more than a way through; it is
lived space replete with a variety of social relationships. What results from
the doing of an audio walk, therefore, is not merely a change in perception
but a more subtle activation and alteration of the self as new worlds and new
opportunities open to it, developing its spatial confidence and imaginative
reach.
This also reveals another potentiality of the audio walk as an aesthetic
form: it invites us to listen. Although this may seem a little axiomatic, it rests
on a distinction between hearing as something passive and listening as
something active. We are constantly hearing, for we are persistently attuned
to the sounds of the world; listening in contrast requires skill and focus for it
is an active, responsive and willing engagement with the world (Shotter
2009). There is a type of audio walk that depends more on the former than
the latter: They convey place in a smooth, regular and measured manner that
requires little work from its participants. The Grangetown audio walks are
not so easy or straightforward. As we noted earlier, they are hesitant, ragged
and, at times, disorientating as narrative and route get out of kilter, moving
them beyond the descriptive and linear and into the realm of art and
creativity. Consequently, the ability to work, or do, the audio walks depends
on the walker’s active intervention and responsiveness; participants have to
listen carefully in order to navigate and know place. Thus, as our participant
records above, the walk and its narrative ‘made you think’. This suggests
that the Grangetown they were hearing (and simultaneously seeing and
experiencing) was not what they expected; the place was being told in ways
different to the norm. Listening, then, to borrow from Bickford is always ‘a
movement towards another’s activity’ (1996:145); it is a path builder
between indwellers and outdwellers and, more broadly, between different
social worlds. As one of our participants neatly put it, ‘you become more
comfortable in your surroundings just by hearing more about the place, I
guess’ (Women’s Group Interview, 17 July 2012). In this sense, audio walks
are important not only for their narrative content—the story they tell us
about the world—but, more precisely, for the way they invite us to come in
and partake of it. The narrative itself potentially fails, according to the
conventions generally underpinning this mode of interaction: a beginning, a
middle, an end and a connection between these points and the substance of
the story; but despite, and maybe even because of this, it engages them with
another vision of place; and it ultimately involves them in the place making
process that it is trying to achieve. Consequently, audio walking as a method
of conversive wayfaring has the potentiality to emancipate the area by
altering the cultural frameworks through which the area is heard, positioned
and understood by those outside it.

Performing Grangetown: Temporal Aspects of

Sound Art Consumption

Time is ineffably bound up with art. According to Phillips (1989), we expect

art to express permanence, to hold time in place and, at the same time, to
reflect the time or moment of contemporary society. The idea of time is
similarly often part of an artwork’s aesthetic, for instance, capturing and
expressing the fragmentary or ceaseless nature of time. Yet one aspect of
time that seems somewhat underplayed in the interface between art and
public is the temporality of the experiencing of art in public. Massey and
Rose (2003) comment on the often fleeting and inadvertent nature of
engagement with art in public. This is particularly so, they argue, where
public art is ‘weak’, in that it has been designed as a passive backdrop to
urban life, making it incapable of challenging and intruding upon urban life.
Strong public art, in contrast, is testing. It does not ostensibly seek
integrative social ends, but rather wishes to be critically affective and
reflective. As such, strong public art often depends on time; it invites
contemplation, active engagement and its effects and affects can live with
the participant long after the initial encounter (Figure 7.2).
 Audio walks demand a temporal (and spatial) investment by the
participant. They are not something that can be merely looked at, then turned
away from. Instead, they have to be picked up, plugged in, turned on and
followed either physically or imaginatively. As such, they demand a form of
walking that Wunderlich (2008) refers to as conceptual, in that it is a
conscious and often unhurried way of getting to know place. This form of
walking draws us into place, it requires us to spend time within it and it turns
us into co-performers of it as we engage with the durée of the route. In this
way, audio walks produce, what Lee and Ingold (2006) term, very grounded
and detailed forms of knowledge. Our participants, for instance, knew of
Grangetown before they walked there, but as they observed, ‘you know the
area because you drive through it, but you don’t know it’ (Women’s Group
Interview, 17 July 2012). It was walking through the area that ‘made you
look […] even at the things that weren’t on the tour, it made you look at the
world around you in quite a different way, like a different level of detail’
(Women’s Group Interview, 17 July 2012). Walking allowed our participants
time to inhabit place and to attend to life beneath its surface, ‘having people
talk about living in Grangetown […] and about […] all the different layers
of it and that made you think ahh I’m not just walking down a street, there’s
something here, there’s more going on here’ (Women’s Group Interview, 17
July 2012).
Figure 7.2 Participants actively listening to and investing in Grangetown
Photo by Kate Moles (2012).

As a participant on one of these audio walks, your engagement with place

is not head down, moving through to get somewhere else, instead you move
in it, head up; you are actively navigating the route, engaged with various
multi-sensory calls for attention and you are given the time to appreciate the
nuances and specificities of the place you are being in. The ways you are
being can alter depending on lots of things; the weather, the time of day, how
good a time you are having, what else you have planned for that day. They
key thing is that these walks open up spaces of engagement where there is
room to feel these things, to experience them as you navigate Grangetown,
to think, and be and do the place in a creative, constructive spatial imaginary.
Walking makes for a slower engagement with place and this change in
tempo is something Pink (2008) draws attention to in her study of the
Cittàslow movement. Moving slowly, Pink argues, allows us to become
attuned to place; to its rhythms, pathways and people, so much so that place
is not represented to us but, rather, is mediated to us as an embodied
experience. It is recognised that audio walks do this through the way in
which they direct the gaze and shape the pace and tempo of the walk; the
participant sees and experiences place through the mind and in the footsteps
of the narrator or narrators (Pinder 2001; Saunders and Moles 2013). Yet
something different was occurring as our participants walked in
Grangetown, for at times they found the tempo of the walk too fast for them:
We had to pause it [the audio walk] quite a lot and go to the next [stop] it wasn’t one long [audio
clip], so we paused it for a while and caught up with each another and during that time, when you
had like free time almost, you’d look around and the eye would look at it [the place] in a
completely different way to normal.
(Women’s Group Interview, 17 July 2012)

Although audio walks can slow down our engagement with place they can
also offer an experience of place which in its vividness and richness is also
overwhelming and disorientating, for there is so much to see, feel, hear,
touch and smell. This disjuncture between walk and walker, art and audience
is, however, also full of promise, for it throws up what Iser (1980) terms a
space of indeterminacy; a moment when the narration may become quite
ragged, where narrative and setting may become uncoupled or where the
narrative voice becomes uncertain or hesitant, all of which create
opportunities for the interpretative and creative agencies of the participant.
Audio walks as works of art have the potentiality for participant
intervention. We tend to conceptualise place as a series of interconnected
points, yet as Ingold (2005) argues, it is more useful to think of place as a
meshwork of lines; place is not the coincidence of points but arises where
lines become entangled. Thus, walking out of kilter with the walk’s
narration, pausing, replaying or fast-forwarding the narrative is to entangle
or mesh one’s own trail or line of action with those of the people who figure
in, help create or press on the walks. It is this mesh that is the place that the
participants negotiate, and through it they uncover temporally hidden traces
and peer inside those aspects of the social world that would have fallen
outside a singular trail of action. As our focus group described,
There’s a lot more history to it than you’d think, [where the walk is] pointing out stuff that’s been
newly built and what was there before and actually there’s a lot of quite rich history.
I’d never have even thought about inside the houses; it makes you think about the people in the
houses rather than the way to Ikea, which is what I know it as.
(Women’s Group Interview, 17 July 2012)

Conclusion
Since the birth, or recognition, of new genre public art in the mid-1990s
much attention has been directed to the everyday practices of art. We are
now more aware of the social politics, the spatial conflicts and the semantic
wranglings that are frequently part of the artistic process. Yet our
understanding of this practice is somewhat one-sided, for we tend to know
much about what goes on ‘before the dot’, that is before the artist leaves and
the public is left alone with the artwork, but comparatively little about that
which goes on after it. To put it bluntly, we know quite a bit about the
practice of creation (art’s making) but far less about the practice of
consumption (art’s reception). Taking inspiration from Bourriaud’s idea of
relational aesthetics, wherein the art work is always a dot in a line of social
relationships and agencies, this chapter has explored the lived practices that
come after the dot, or put another way, after the material art work has arrived
in public space. Central to this chapter is the idea that art lives in the world
and has affects beyond its creation, and by understanding art practice as
something that persists beyond the dot, it suggests that art in public helps not
only indwellers, but outdwellers, to see, engage and, most important, ‘create’
the area anew. By taking two audio walks, which had been created by young
men in Grangetown, as our case study and thinking about the potentialities
of these audio walks and the ways they engaged participants in the place
through particular practices of knowing, being and doing, we have presented
some reflection on what happened after the dot.
 A reflection on the particular form and ambition of the young men’s audio
walks played a particular role in this, for they demand quite embodied
interactions on the part of the consumer. It was not enough to see, the
participants were required to listen, touch, smell and hear the areas that they
walked through. It was this embodied and mobile consumption of place, and
the very being-in-the-world that this called forth that enabled our
participants to be not merely consumers, but agents in the making of place.
The audio walk was simultaneously a line of action and a pause in place—it
offered a way through place but one that was fixed in time and space—yet
the consumption of this line brought new trails of action, enmeshing it in
multiple lifeworlds and creating multiple Grangetowns.

Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank all those who gave their time and energy to the
project, in particular, the young men who made these walks and the groups
who took these walks and talked with us about their experiences of ‘doing’
the Sounding the Way audio walks.

References

Anderson, J., Adey, P. and Bevan, P. (2010) ‘Positioning Place: Polylogic

Approaches to Research Methodology,’ Qualitative Research, 10: 589–
604.
Bickford, S. (1996) The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and
Citizenship, London: Cornell University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1977) O utline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Les presses du réel.
Butler, T. (2006), ‘A Walk of Art: The Potential of the Audio Walk as
Practice in Cultural Geography,’ Social and Cultural Geography, 7: 889–
908.
Cardiff City Council (2012) North Grangetown Renewal Area.
http://www.cardiff.gov.uk/content.asp?
nav=2867%2C3477%2C3484%2C3596&parent_directory_id=2865&id=
4298 (accessed September 18, 2012).
Crang, M. (2000) ‘Relics, Places and Unwritten Geographies in the Work of
Michel de Certeau (1925–1986),’ in M. Crang and N. Thrift (eds.)
Thinking Space, London: Routledge.
de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Deutsche, R. (1996) Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Cambridge MA:
MIT Press.
Footnotes (2009) Footnotes Audio Walks.
http://www.footnotesaudiowalks.co.uk/ (accessed September 15, 2012).
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, New York: Prentice Hall.
Hall, T. (2007) ‘Artful Cities,’ Geography Compass, 1: 1376–1392.
Hawkins, H. (2010) ‘“Turn Your Trash into … Rubbish, Art and Politics”.
Richard Wentworth’s geographical imagination,’ Social and Cultural
Geography, 11: 805–827.
Hawkins, H. (2013) ‘Geography and Art. An Expanding Field: Site, the
Body and Practice,’ Progress in Human Geography, 37: 52–71.
Ingold, T. (2005) Up, Across and Along, Creativity and Research Papers,
Creativity and Practice Group, Dundee.
Ingold, T. (2010) ‘Footprints through the Weather-world: Walking,
Breathing, Knowing,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16:
121–139.
Iser, W. (1980) The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response,
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Kwon, M. (2002) One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational
Identity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lacy, S. (1995) Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle: Bay
Press.
Lavery, C. (2005) ‘The Pepys of London E11: Graeme Miller and the
politics of Linked,’ New Theatre Quarterly, 21: 148–160.
Lee, J. and Ingold, T. (2006) ‘Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing,
Socialising,’ in S.M. Coleman and R. Collins (eds.) Locating the Field:
Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg.
Massey, D. and Rose, G. (2003) Personal Views: Public Art Research
Project. Milton Keynes: Open University.
http://www.artpointtrust.org.uk/projects/Final%20Report%20complete%
2025.07.03.doc (accessed November 13, 2012).
Matthews, V. (2010) ‘Aestheticizing Space: Art, Gentrification and the City,’
Geography Compass, 4(6): 660–675.
Minty, Z. (2006) ‘Post-apartheid Public Art in Cape Town: Symbolic
Reparations and Public Space,’ Urban Studies, 43: 421–440.
Miles, M. (1997) Art, Space and the City, London: Routledge.
Myers, M. (2010) ‘“Walk with Me, Talk with Me”: The Art of Conversive
Wayfaring’, Visual Studies, 25: 59–68.
Phillips, P. (1989) ‘Temporality and Public Art,’ Art Journal, 48: 331–335.
Pinder, D. (2001) ‘Ghostly Footsteps: Voices, Memories and Walks in the
City,’ Cultural Geographies, 8: 1–19.
Pink, S. (2008) ‘An Urban Tour: The Sensory Sociality of Ethnographic
Place-making’ Ethnography, 9: 175–192.
Saunders, A. and Moles, K. (2013) ‘The Spatial Practice of Public
Engagement: “Doing” Geography in the South Wales Valleys,’ Social
and Cultural Geography, 14: 23–40.
Sharp, J. Pollack, V. and Paddison, R. (2005) ‘Just Art for a Just City: Public
Art and Social Inclusion in Urban regeneration,’ Urban Studies, 42:
1001–1023.
Shotter, J. (2009) ‘Listening in a Way that Recognises/Realises the World of
“the Other”,’ The International Journal of Listening, 23: 1–23.
Sounding the Way (2012) Grangetown History and Change Audio Walk.
http://www.techniquest.org/STW/ (accessed November 1, 2012).
Wunderlich, F. M. (2008) ‘Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space,’
Journal of Urban Design, 13: 125–139.
Zebracki, M. (2012) ‘Engaging Geographies of Public Art: Indwellers, the
Butt Plug Gnome and their Locale,’ Social and Cultural Geography, 13:
735–758.
Part IV
Appropriation
8
The Non-use, Re-use, Mis-use and
Counter-use of Public Art in the
Vilakazi Street Precinct, Soweto, South
Africa

Pauline Guinard

Introduction
Most research into public art—defined in its wider sense as art in public
spaces (Miles 1997)—looks at cases in the global North and considers the
roles and interests of its producers, be it sponsors or artists. This chapter
looks instead at art and public spaces in Johannesburg, the economic hub of
South Africa. By studying a city of the global South such as Johannesburg
and by taking into account the publics for the art in its public spaces, it
addresses significant knowledge gaps. Tim Hall (2003) was one of the first
geographers to note the need for a more careful examination of the reception
of public art by the publics for whom it was supposedly designed. Since
then, calls to tackle this issue have continued (e.g. Zebracki 2012), but there
are methodological difficulties in addressing it. How to grasp the ways
passers-by receive an artwork? How to capture their aesthetic feelings and
the potential impacts of these emotions on public spaces? In this regard, the
idea that artworks are ‘used’ by their publics suggests various ways public
artworks might be received by different publics, not only symbolically but
also physically. Dealing with the issue of the reception of public art through
practices could thus be a practical way forward. Uses can then be understood
as physical manifestations of symbolical perceptions, as well as material
appropriations of the artworks that have to be considered in their own right,
independently of any symbolical interpretations. Furthermore, the relative
plasticity of the notion of use provides scope to consider the uses of public
art by its publics both after the art is installed and while it is being produced.
Examining public art through the lens of its uses can deepen our
comprehension of the reception of art in public spaces, ultimately allowing
us to better understand how art can help make spaces public.
The Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Project, and more especially
the Public Art Program attached to it, presents a particularly good
opportunity to explore these multiple and sometimes conflicting uses of
public art from the art’s conception until after its implementation. The
Vilakazi Street Precinct is located in Orlando West, one of the oldest
townships of Soweto (SOuth WEst TOwnships) in the Greater Johannesburg
area. This is one of the previously deprived areas assigned to people
classified as ‘blacks’ during the apartheid era (1948–1994). Part of a wider
public art strategy implemented in the 2000s by the City of Johannesburg
Metropolitan Municipality, the Vilakazi Street Precinct Public Art Program
was conceived as both a tourist and a heritage program. Regarding its
potential publics, it was intended for both tourists and the residents of the
neighbourhood. It aimed, on one hand, to support urban development by
attracting tourists to a place neglected by the previous regimes, culture and
art being increasingly considered in Johannesburg as in other big cities
around the world as integral parts of urban economies (Zukin 1995). On the
other hand, it also sought to address the imbalances in South Africa’s
commemorative landscape, which is still dominated by a biased and partial
vision of history endorsed by the apartheid regime (Minty 2006; Houssay-
Holzschuch 2010; Marschall 2010), by commemorating the heroes, the
martyrs and the ordinary residents of this black neighbourhood. Ostensibly
pursuing a participative approach to heritage, this program was supposed to
be achieved not only for the tourists and the local residents but also by or at
least with those residents. But the Public Art Program and the Vilakazi Street
Precinct Development Project as a whole had trouble involving the residents
in its decision-making processes, reducing the possibilities for them to use
art in its conception phase. This lack of resident participation in the project
also potentially compromised the ability of these publics to use the artworks
once they were installed in their neighbourhood. Who then are the actual
users of these public artworks? Are they only tourists? Or are there
alternative, unanti cipated uses of art in the Vilakazi Street Precinct by other
publics?
Based on participant observation and interviews with different users of the
neighbourhood during several months in 2010 and 2011, this chapter
explores several different types of uses of the public artworks in the Vilakazi
Street Precinct, according to three main criteria: the phases of the project (its
conception, its implementation and after its implementation); the publics
considered (tourists and residents, children and adults and so forth); and the
relationships between the actual uses of the artworks and the uses expected
by their producers. From indifference to re-appropriation, from rejection to
reinvention and counterproposal, this project helps to understand the
different uses, re-uses, mis-uses or counter-uses that public art might initiate.
These uses are explored here in relation to the successive phases of the
project’s development.

The Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Project:

Which Project with which Publics, and how to use
Art before the Artworks Exist?

The Vilakazi Street Precinct: A Site of Public History

It was no accident that the area around Vilakazi Street in Orlando West was
chosen for a development project that included one of Soweto’s first public
art programs. Vilakazi Street is a very well-known street, not only in
Johannesburg, but throughout South Africa and even beyond. First, the street
is famous as the current or former address of both Nelson Mandela and
Desmond Tutu, two prominent figures in the struggle against apart-heid and
the construction of a democratic South Africa. Second, it is also remembered
as the scene of the so-called uprisings in 1976. These uprisings were actually
peaceful demonstrations of high school students from various townships in
Soweto who intended to challenge the attempt of the apart-heid regime to
impose Afrikaans—the language of the minority in power— as the only
language of instruction. More generally, these demonstrations were also a
way to denounce the poor teaching conditions suffered by the black
population (Gervais-Lambony 2004). Despite the non-violent nature of these
demonstrations, they were brutally suppressed by the police. Several
teenagers, including Hector Pieterson, a twelve-year-old boy, were shot
dead. These events lead to protests all around the country and provoked the
disapproval of the international community. As such, the 1976 uprisings are
often presented as a turning point in the struggle against the apartheid
regime, and constitute a major symbolic event for the new democratic South
Africa. In 1995, the day of the uprisings—16 June—was declared a national
public holiday.
The public authorities wanted to make these important events in the
history of Johannesburg and South Africa visible for everyone, including
former participants in the 1976 uprisings, local residents and tourists. This
was a way to complement and contextualise the history already inscribed in
the South African landscape and to recognise the struggles and the suffering
of those who were silenced by the previous regime. The first
commemorative project implemented in the area was a memorial (2001) and
a museum (2002) dedicated to Hector Pieterson, and, through him, to all the
participants and victims of the 1976 uprisings (Marschall 2006; 2010).
Launched as a private initiative, this project was completed by the national
government and to a lesser extent by the city of Johannesburg. Following the
logic of this first project, the City of Johannesburg, through its development
agency (JDA), has undertaken to extend this initiative in both space and
content, to embrace a wider precinct and a history broader than the 1976
uprisings. The initial idea for this wider project was to commemorate the
great events and great men of the area which mark the history of the struggle
against apartheid and to celebrate the ‘ordinary’ residents of Orlando West
and their daily life. Within that framework, the Public Art Program of the
Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Project was conceived as a means to
give place and shape to the memories of those previously marginalised.

The Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Project: The Who

and the How of a Participatory Project
In line with the JDA’s aim to give a voice to the ‘ordinary’ residents of the
area, the Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Project was planned to be
participative. The apparent aim of the agency was to involve ‘the local
community’ in the project, and especially in the production of public and
commemorative artworks. But who was considered by the JDA to be part of
this community, felt that they were, and consequently participated in the
project? Does ‘the local community’ only refer to the people who live in the
Vilakazi Street Precinct and who are directly affected by the JDA project? Or
does it also include the residents of Orlando West, of Ward 39—the
municipal electorate within which Vilakazi Street sits—or more broadly of
Soweto?
Several consultation and participation forums were created at the local
scale in 2009 and 2010, each of which seemed to have a different definition
and delimitation of ‘the local community’, and therefore of the public who
were to be involved in the production of the project. As for any project of
this scale in South Africa, the ward councillor—the local elected leader—
periodically held public meetings in the local recreation centre. During these
meetings, representatives of the various organisations running the project
were supposed to present the project and its progress to the ward residents
and to collect their comments, requests or complaints to guide possible
amendments to the project. In addition to these public meetings, a special-
purpose committee was also established for the project. The Vilakazi Street
Precinct Steering Committee was composed of residents of Orlando West,
chosen during public meetings to represent various local interests in areas
such as business, sport and religion. This committee was tasked with
ensuring the smooth running of the project and with guaranteeing respect for
the interests of local people. Finally, a workshop of one hundred and twenty
artists was set up by Trinity Session—the art company appointed by the JDA
to coordinate the Public Art Program. To promote local talent, all of these
artists were drawn from Soweto, although few were from the immediate
Orlando West area. For these artists to be brought close to the daily life of
the neighbourhood, a studio was created on the premises of the Umbuyisa
School of Arts and Culture in Vilakazi Street (Figure 8.1).
The various consultative and participative forums were supposed to give
the floor to the local public, whether they lived in Orlando West, Ward 39, or
Soweto generally, and to involve them in the project so that it would become
theirs. However, the mere existence of such forums did not ensure a high
level of local resident involvement, nor that residents made any tangible
contributions to the commemorative process. As shown by Claire Bénit-
Gbaffou (2008), local participation forums in Johannesburg usually neither
enables community members to express themselves nor facilitates their
being listened to. Because consultation and participation forums such as
public meetings are generally very formal and largely dominated by the
African National Congress (ANC)—the party that grew through struggle
against the apartheid regime and that has been the ruling party in South
Africa and in Johannesburg since 1994—community members often have to
find other channels to be heard. In the case of the Vilakazi Street Precinct
Development Project, some residents used a range of strategies to try to have
their say in the project and to use this public art project to empower
themselves.
Strategy 1: requesting a new forum for a new use of the public art program by the residents—a
collective and commemorative use of art?

Figure 8.1 The Vilakazi Street Precinct: a tourist and commemorative township Map by Pauline
Guinard (2013).
 Several weeks after the project started, an oral history workshop was
added to its program at the request of some Orlando West residents to collect
the stories of the people from the township. This workshop was entrusted to
Professor Noor Nieftagodien, from the history department of the University
of the Witwatersrand, who had already supervised this kind of workshops in
other Johannesburg townships (Bonner and Nieftagodien 2008). In addition
to its properly historic objectives, this project was also supposed to inform
and nourish the work of the artists of the Public Art Program.
The residents’ request for such a workshop can be understood as a strategy
to circumvent the public authorities, to allow all the people from the Vilakazi
Street Precinct and Orlando West in general to be heard, whether or not they
were actively involved in the struggle against apartheid, and whether or not
they were ANC members. Thanks to this workshop, the stories of about
twenty people living in Orlando West were collected and recorded. A DVD
was produced and given to the workshop participants, and a book was
published (Nieftagodien and Gaule 2012). If some community voices were
brought into the public sphere in this way, they were not able to properly
inform the public art program, and thus, these identities were ultimately not
made visible in the neighbourhood’s public spaces.
When one walks around Vilakazi Street Precinct today, it seems that only
certain types of stories and memories have been promoted and made visible
in the landscape: those related to major events (including the 1976 uprisings)
and great men (particularly Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu), with little
attention to the histories and the daily lives of ordinary residents. The
importance of celebrating the extraordinary events and men of the township
is reflected not only by the large number of artworks (Figure 8.1) but also by
their higher visibility. They are located in the precinct’s busiest streets
(Vilakazi and Moema Streets), at crossroads, or near public places such as
restaurants and museums. Conversely, the artworks referring to more
ordinary practices and events are less monumental, relegated to quiet streets
(such as Ngakane Street) or even obscured by other urban furnishings. This
staging overemphasises the extraordinary and overshadows the ordinary. The
ordinary residents, the ‘publics’ consulted for the project to give their side of
the story, ultimately remain invisible in the public streets and in public
history.
Strategy 2: obstructing the decision-making process in order to be heard—a personal and political use
of art?
 Instead of pursuing new modes of public engagement like the oral history
workshop, other individuals sought to put their views forward through the
formal public forums, even at the risk of paralyzing these forums. The
attitude of local resident Khulani Vilakazi towards the Vilakazi Street
Precinct Public Art Program is particularly relevant in that regard. Khulani
Vilakazi is a very influent man in Orlando West. Grandson of Dr. Vilakazi,
the poet and novelist after whom the street is named, Khulani is also the
owner of the upmarket Nambitha restaurant (Figure 8.1). His reputation in
the neighbourhood probably explains why he was chosen to be a member of
the Vilakazi Street Precinct Steering Committee. Although he was in
principle in favour of the Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Program, his
attitude changed after the first artwork was installed in the precinct. This
sculpture was supposed to spell out the name of the street, and therefore the
name of his family, in sign language (Figure 8.2).
According to Khulani Vilakazi, this artwork ‘was a mistake, I said to
them: “You are doing the Vilakazi gateway, and are putting signs, and you
haven’t consulted the families”. I was also a victim of it’ (interview, April
2010). Khulani Vilakazi here bemoans the fact that he was not properly
consulted, which led to the creation of an artwork that in his view offends
his name and the name of his grandfather. While this statement undoubtedly
expresses a true feeling of offense at the artwork, it is also a way that
Khulani Vilakazi can establish himself as a leader within the community. His
behaviour suggests a desire to influence the decision-making process and to
claim himself as the only guardian of his grandfather’s memory. What is at
stake is not only symbolism but also power.
Figure 8.2 The first letter of the Vilakazi hand signs sculpture
Photo by Pauline Guinard (April 2010).

From the moment this artwork was put in place, Khulani Vilakazi has
continually tried to promote and reinforce his leadership in the neighbour-
hood. He asked the JDA to pull down the Vilakazi hand signs sculpture. He
encouraged other families, especially the family of slain youth Hector
Pieterson, to veto the artworks planned to commemorate their relatives.
While the Vilakazi hand signs sculpture still stands, the artwork intended to
mark where Hector Pieterson was shot never saw the light of day.
From both inside and outside the JDA’s initial program of consultation
and participation forums, some individuals attempted to influence the
decision-making processes that shaped the production of the public artworks.
These attempts are more than a marginal ‘use’ of art by some local people to
promote their own views; they are also a sign that the Vilakazi Street
Precinct Development Project’s forums were not able to really include all the
members of the ‘local community’, however it is defined. The common
feeling about this project is that it lacked adequate consultation. Does this
perception diminish the prospects for these local publics to appropriate this
project, and especially the public artworks, once they are implemented? Now
that the artworks have been produced, who uses them?

The Uses of Public Artworks in the Vilakazi Street

Precinct after their Installation

The Use and Non-use of Public Artworks: Residents’ Versus

Tourists’ Uses of Art

Observations and interviews with passers-by in the Vilakazi Street Precinct

in 2010 and 2011 tended to highlight two main attitudes towards public
artworks, which match two kinds of publics. On one side, there is a more or
less active use of the artworks by tourists who look at them, read the heritage
panels next to them (which are written only in English) and sometimes
photograph the artworks. On the other side, there is a conspicuous non-use
of the artworks by the precinct’s residents, who barely pay attention to them.
The residents’ lack of attention to the artworks could at first glance be
thought to result from their familiarity with them. But the residents’ common
feeling towards the artworks seems to be incomprehension rather than
familiarity. At best, they seem indifferent to artworks that they may not
understand. In some cases it is far worse: they actually despise them.
Residents’ comments on the 1976 uprisings sculpture (Figure 8.3) are
symptomatic of this incomprehension.
Most of the local people interviewed about this sculpture were unable to
say what it was really about. For some, it represented a jubilant crowd. For
others, it could be just about any street march. A 40-year-old man from the
precinct interviewed in Moema Street even suggested, half seriously, that it
stood for the presidents of South Africa: Mandela, Mbeki und Zuma
(interview, February 2011). Even when residents were able to identify this
sculpture’s reference to the 1976 uprisings, their attitudes to the artwork
were often sceptical or even critical. For example, several residents
questioned the material used, which looked to them like barbed wire, which
was ironic considering these events were supposedly synonymous with
freedom. A 30-year-old resident and street vendor criticised the fact that the
students looked as if they were naked, whereas they should have been
wearing school uniforms (interview, March 2011). This comment suggests
the sculpture shows irreverence and disrespect towards these young people
who fought against the apartheid regime. Ultimately, this artwork appears
incomprehensible to most neighbourhood residents. In general the Vilakazi
Street Precinct artworks do not seem to match the way these people see their
own history, even though the project was supposed to give shape to the
history of this area and its residents.
Figure 8.3 The 1976 uprisings sculpture, an artwork meaningless for the local publics?
Photo by Pauline Guinard (May 2010).

The inability of the JDA to involve the local residents and make them care
about the Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Project and its Public Art
Program brings into question what public they were targeting with this
project. Indeed, the Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Project was not
only planned as a heritage project but also as a tourist project. Although
there is not necessarily a contradiction between a heritage and a tourist
project, because many tourist projects focus on local heritage, what is
problematic in this case is that tourism objectives seem to eclipse heritage
ones. The reason the artworks fail to speak to the local people perhaps lies in
the fact that they were primarily intended to please tourists and visitors. In
this context, it is particularly interesting to look at the aesthetics of the
artworks. The majority of the works are sculptures, but they differ from the
realistic, monumental bronze statues that were promoted during the
apartheid era and which remain very popular in South Africa today
(Marschall 2010). The style of the Vilakazi Street Precinct artworks is rather
less monumental, less realistic, and sometimes even allegorical, as in the
case of a sculpture dedicated to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.
Inspired by the popular Zulu proverb that there cannot be two bulls in a herd,
this sculpture represents the two men in the form of bulls, both to celebrate
the conjoined power of these charismatic individuals and to highlight the
richness of the area in terms of leaders.
In terms of materials, most artworks recently produced in Johannesburg
are made of steel, wood or mosaic tile, and not of bronze, which is a metal of
high intrinsic value. Generally, these choices of materials are motivated by
the public authorities’ desire to prevent vandalism. But, in the Vilakazi Street
Precinct, there might be other reasons. These artistic choices also reflect
artists’ ambitions to break with past aesthetic codes and pursue more
contemporary approaches. This can be seen as an attempt by the artists and
the public authorities to reach international publics such as tourists and to
attract the South African intellectual and artistic elite to the area. The publics
being sought for these artworks are probably not in the area itself, but
beyond it.
The issue about the reception and the use of public artworks that arises
here relates to the artistic language used and the possibility of its being
understood and shared by all publics, both locals and visitors. Moreover, the
language dilemma extends beyond the artworks themselves. It also affects
the heritage panels installed in the Vilakazi Street Precinct to provide
information about the history of the township and the significance of the
artworks. A focus group held with 10-year-old children from the
neighbourhood in March 2011 revealed that these public artworks were
beyond them in two senses. They did not always understand what the
artworks represented. The metaphor of the two bulls, for example, was
particularly difficult for them to follow. Additionally, they could not
understand the information on the panels, because it was only written in
English, which most children in the precinct cannot read. Even for the adults
in the neighbourhood, who can usually read English, it remains a second
language, mainly used to speak to outsiders.
The implementation of the Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Project
seems to lead to a rather paradoxical situation: the past of the neighbourhood
and its residents inform a tourist-oriented project which symbolically
excludes these people. Because the public artworks and the heritage panels
do not really make sense to the Vilakazi Street Precinct residents, they tend
to form a kind of barrier between the residents and their own neighbour-
hood. They distance people from their own living space. Are these public
and commemorative artworks likely to remain completely meaningless for
the residents? Or are there ways that they can re-appropriate these artworks
through the figure of the tourist?
Because some artworks represent widely-shared and unifying images,
such as the ones celebrating Nelson Mandela, they manage to bring together
in a same public space very diverse publics (Marschall 2010; Guinard 2014).
But the Vilakazi Street Precinct public artworks fail to encourage interaction
or exchange between different publics, particularly not between residents
and tourists. The interactions between these two publics are mostly limited
to merchant exchanges: the tourists buy souvenirs from street vendors; they
give money to tour guides and children who sing the national anthem for
them. Tourists treat the residents just as part of the urban setting, and the
residents see tourists merely as a source of income. This limits the
encounters between the different publics. But the economic outcomes
generated by tourism can be a way for local people to reclaim the artworks
installed in their neighbourhood, if not through their symbolic values at least
through their economic ones. Many people, like one eighteen-year-old
interviewee, say that they love the Vilakazi Street Precinct artworks because
they ‘attract people, even tourists’ (interview, June 2010). In that view, the
artworks are not valued for themselves, but as tourist attractions, and
consequently as resources. But this indirect economic use of art is not the
only way for the residents to use these artworks.
The Mis-use and Re-use of Public Art by Children: A Specific
Public for a Ludic Use of Art

While for the adults residents of the neighbourhood the main use of artworks
relates to their economic values, for the children the use of these artworks is
more straightforward. The children may not always understand what the
artworks represent, but that does not prevent them from using them. For
children, physical and playful uses of the artworks predominate over
symbolical ones; the children mainly use them as playgrounds (Figures 8.2
and 8.3).
The children’s interactions with the artworks are physical: they touch
them; they sit on them; they climb on them. The artworks give the children,
especially the youngest ones, an opportunity to explore the world and to
experiment with their own abilities and limits (Stevens 2007). In this regard,
the Vilakazi hand signs sculpture and the 1976 uprisings sculpture are
particularly attractive for children. Because of their height and shape, the
children can challenge gravity by climbing and jumping on them. In doing
so, they invent new ways of using the artworks. Through their bodies, the
children explore and reinvent the artworks.
Of course, these ludic uses of art can conflict with other uses that may be
more symbolic and meditative. They can even be seen as misuses of the
artworks because of their destructive consequences for the artworks, which
were not meant to be used as jungle gyms. Indeed, the Vilakazi hand signs
sculpture had to be reinforced in 2011 because one of its elements was
leaning. However, these uses do not seem to prevent any other uses of the
artworks, because the rest of the residents hardly use them, and the tourists
enjoy seeing the children’s play. The tourists tend to smile at the children
when they are playing, and even to photograph them. These kinds of micro-
interactions are noteworthy because they indicate that the artworks can
potentially frame a non-commercial relation between the tourists and the
residents. Furthermore, the appropriation of the artworks by the children
underlines the fact that different uses of the artworks are not only linked to
the places that people come from but also to their age.
In order to understand the uses of the Vilakazi Street Precinct’s public
artworks in a wider context, it is important to consider another factor: time.
Some authors including Christian Ruby (2002) have noted that public
artworks often tend to become unnoticed and unused over time. Is this also
borne out in the Vilakazi Street Precinct case? Or are there ongoing
reinventions of the use of these public artworks, for example in connection
with the annual 1976 uprisings commemorations every 16 June?

Time, a Catalyst for Inventing New Uses of the

Vilakazi Street Precinct Public Artworks?

From Mis-use to Tangible Rejection of Public Art: Vandalism to

Make the Artworks Unusable?

A return visit to examine the Vilakazi Street Precinct in September 2011,

approximately one year after the completion of the Public Art Program,
revealed several acts of vandalism against the artworks and the heritage
panels installed in the area, especially against the ones commemorating the
great events and great men of the neighbourhood, such as the 1976 uprisings
and Desmond Tutu (Figure 8.4).
Sabine Marschall (2010) argued that in the South African situation,
vandalism against artworks and memorials can convey several meanings,
depending on the context. It can of course be a sign of rejection of the
artworks and memorials proposed, but it can also be a way to reclaim them,
or a result of mere negligence by people who do not see their value.
In the Vilakazi Street Precinct case however, the type of vandalism
observed looks quite targeted. For example, on one of the precinct’s heritage
panels (Figure 8.4) Desmond Tutu’s head has clearly been targeted by the
vandals, whereas the other characters’ faces around him have been left
untouched. Additionally, it is more likely that the vandals acted during the
night, and were thus probably locals rather than tourists. During the day,
volunteers patrol the neighbourhood specifically to prevent such occur-
rences. And tourists rarely spend the night in Orlando West, or in Soweto in
general. These degradations can be seen as a way for the vandals to reject
how the public authorities tell the history of the precinct and of the struggle
against apartheid. But because these acts of vandalism carry no explicit
message, it is difficult to say whether the vandals wanted to denounce this
particular art project, or to more broadly contest the public authorities by
defacing public property. In any case, the implicit message is a clear
rejection of the artworks and the panels. The objective of such acts is not just
to publicly signify opposition to the art project but also to damage the
artworks and the panels to prevent others using them. While this vandalism
contested the Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Project and its Public Art
Program by destroying the existing artworks, other anonymous locals
conveyed their dissent by creating new ones.

Figure 8.4 Targeted vandalism to make public and commemorative artworks unusable?
Photo by Pauline Guinard (September 2011).

Alternative Public Art for Other Uses of Art?

Concurrent with the acts of vandalism presented above, alternative public art
initiatives were also undertaken sometime between June and September
2011. Facing the official sculpture and heritage panels in Moema Street
depicting the 1976 uprisings (see Figures 8.1 and 8.3), unknown persons
painted several unofficial murals about the uprisings, presumably as part of
the annual 16 June celebrations (Figure 8.5). It is rumoured the artists were
young men from the neighbourhood.
The creation of these murals, and their location opposite the artwork and
panels produced by the public authorities to commemorate the same events,
can be seen as an attempt by community members to offer an alternative
vision of their local history, one which is more in line with local
representations. Indeed, most of the people from the area interviewed about
these murals were able to explain what they stood for, whereas they were not
able to do so for the official sculpture. This confirms the difficulty that the
official Vilakazi Street Precinct public artworks have in speaking to the
residents, even though these artworks were intended to commemorate events
the residents are familiar with.
Figure 8.5 The informal 1976 uprisings murals: a different use of art?
Photo by Pauline Guinard (September 2011).

The anonymous local artists’ need to re-represent the 1976 uprisings in

another artistic language can be seen as a way for these artists, and their
community as a whole, to take back their history and those of their elders.
The 16 June celebrations seem to have acted as a catalyst for this process.
These murals should then be seen as reflecting the locals’ will to give a
physical and symbolic place to their own representations of these events.
The muralists do not only act in their own name but in the name of their
community as well. The fact that the murals are anonymous helps reinforce
this wider identification, since not signing an artwork leaves open the
possibility that others can claim or re-appropriate it. These murals can thus
become collective. By making art by themselves, the residents—whoever
they are—are no longer a passive public, spectators of artworks installed in
their neighbourhood by and for outsiders. Instead, they act upon their art,
their history and their space. They use art to provide the local public with
their own vision of their past, at the same time pointing out the limits of the
official Public Art Program, in terms of its potential uses.

Conclusion
The Vilakazi Street Precinct Development Project, and especially its Public
Art Program, is a project that has had trouble finding its publics and its uses.
Conceived as both a heritage and a tourist project, or more precisely a
tourist-oriented heritage project, the Vilakazi Street Precinct Development
Project was assumed to be capable of addressing different publics, both local
and international; people who know the history of the place as well as others
who do not. Given the publics that were targeted and the objectives that were
set for this project, it seems unlikely that a common verbal and artistic
language could be found. The question that arises is whether the different
logics of such a project—heritage and tourism—are actually compatible.
Does the transformation of the residents’ memories into a tourist product
inevitably lead to a simplification and distortion of the community’s past, in
order to make it meet tourist expectations and to make it immediately
appropriable and consumable by tourists? Whether such a project focuses on
the recognition of previously deprived populations or the creation of a tourist
site will almost certainly lead to the development of different publics and
different commemorative artworks.
Because the public artworks and heritage panels installed in the Vilakazi
Street Precinct by the public authorities are not able to speak directly to local
residents, they are not used by them—at least, not for their artistic and
symbolic values, but only for their economic or ‘ergonomic’ values (see
Stevens, this volume). To protest against the project, some people decided to
damage the artworks and the panels to make them unusable, even by tourists.
Others chose instead to address the shortcomings of this project by offering
an alternative vision of their own history. They used art to tell themselves
their own stories in their own ways. From non-use to counter-use, from mis-
use to re-use, public art in the Vilakazi Street Precinct is a valuable tool to
highlight power struggles over the uses of art and over the uses of public
spaces. Looking at the uses of public artworks both synchronically and
diachronically allows us to understand how and to what extent artworks and
spaces become public over time. What is ultimately of interest is the
capacities of public artworks to publicise spaces, both socially and
politically, their capacity to promote social diversity and interaction, on one
hand, and to foster public debate, on the other (Mitchell and Staeheli 2007).
While the official public artworks in the Vilakazi Street Precinct do
encourage social diversity by attracting tourists into the neighbourhood, they
are of limited use in prompting ordinary interactions between tourists and
residents and have been even less successful in arousing public debate about
the history of the place. In response to this last failure, alternative public
artworks can be seen as an attempt to make different visions of history
visible and, by doing so, to bring controversy back into public spaces.
Ultimately, official and alternative public arts may be complementary tools
for ‘publicising’ spaces.

References
Bénit-Gbaffou, C. (2008) ‘Démocratisation et participation locale à
Johannesburg: la voix et les voies de la société civile face à des
institutions participatives dysfonctionnelles,’ Tiers Monde, 196(4): 759–
778.
Bonner, P. and Nieftagodien, N. (2008) Alexandra: A History, Johannesburg:
Wits University Press.
Gervais-Lambony, P. (2004) ‘L’Afrique du Sud est-elle anglophone?
Entretien avec Philippe Gervais-Lambony,’ Hérodote, 115(4): 119–123.
Guinard, P. (2014) Johannesburg: L’art d’inventer une ville, Rennes: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes.
Hall, T. (2003) ‘Art and Urban Change: Public Art in Urban Regeneration,’
in A. Blunt (ed.) Cultural Geography in Practice, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Houssay-Holzschuch, M. (2010) Crossing Boundaries — Tome 3: Vivre
ensemble dans l’Afrique du Sud post-apartheid, Habilitation à Diriger les
Recherches, Paris: Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.
Marschall, S. (2006) ‘Visualizing Memories: The Hector Pieterson Memorial
in Soweto,’ Visual Anthropology, 19(2): 145–169.
Marschall, S. (2010) Landscape of Memory: Commemorative Monuments,
Memorials and Public Statuary in Post-apartheid South-Africa, Leiden:
Brill Academic Publishers.
Miles, M. (1997) Art, Space and the City, London and New York:
Routledge.
Minty, Z. (2006) ‘Post-apartheid public art in Cape Town: Symbolic
reparations and public space,’ Urban Studies, 43(2): 421–440.
Mitchell, D. and Staeheli, L. (2007) The People’s Property? Power, Politics,
and the Public, New York: Routledge.
Nieftagodien, N. and Gaule, S. (2012) Orlando West Soweto: An Illustrated
History, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
Ruby, C. (2002) ‘L’art public dans la ville.’
http://www.espacestemps.net/document282.html (accessed August 20,
2010).
Stevens, Q. (2007) The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces,
London: Routledge.
Zebracki, M. (2012) ‘Spacing the Arts: Exploring Geographies of Public Art
from Within,’ unpublished conference presentation, Annual Meeting of
the Association of American Geographers, New York.
Zukin, S. (1995) The Cultures of Cities, Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers.
9
‘You Aren’t an Aussie if You Don’t
Come
National Identity and Visitors’ Practices at the
Australian National Memorial, Villers-
Bretonneux

Shanti Sumartojo

Introduction
The centenary period of World War I will see an intensification of
commemorative activity within Europe and around the world. In Australia,
this is likely to peak on 25 April 2015, the one hundredth anniversary of the
date when the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (short: Anzac)
attacked Turkish forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula; more than 8,000
Australian soldiers were killed in an action that was to stretch to eight
months before the remaining troops were evacuated. This episode is a central
generative myth of contemporary Australian nationalism—the event is
recognised with a public holiday and memorial ceremonies across Australia
and around the world at important Anzac sites.
However, Australia also sent around 290,000 members of the Australian
Imperial Force to fight on the Western Front. Between 1916 and 1918, more
than 46,000 Australians were killed or died of wounds in France and
Belgium. This loss has been memorialised in many places: on small
monuments across Australian cities and towns, in Canberra at the Australian
War Memorial, on the Menin Gate in Ypres, and at the Australian National
Memorial outside the village of Villers-Bretonneux, east of Amiens in the
Somme region of northern France. This last monument is engraved with the
names of the 11,000 Australian soldiers who died in France but have no
known grave and completes an earlier cemetery at the site containing almost
eight hundred bodies. The memorial is part of a much larger landscape of
remembrance in the area, with many Allied cemeteries, mostly British and
Commonwealth, interspersed with French and the occasional German site.
As an instance of public art, the Australian National Memorial was part of
an explosion of memorial construction following the First World War. Ken
Inglis (1998) documents the ubiquity of such memorials in cities and towns
around Australia, as well as at sites in France, Belgium and Turkey. In
Australia, many of the new memorials erected following the war included
figurative depictions of an Anzac ‘digger’, a ‘statue on its pedestal [that
stood] for each man whose body […] had not been returned’ (Inglis
1998:11). These statues and other monuments were a common form of
public art after the war. By extension, when it was initially proposed, the site
at Villers-Bretonneux was described at the end of the First World War by
Australian prime minister Billy Hughes as a necessary aesthetic depiction of
‘our great soldiers, their sacrifice, heroism [and] endurance’ (quoted in Inglis
1998:264). Its elegant monumental form was created by the skilled architect
Edwin Lutyens, who had made dozens of memorials by the time he was
asked to take on the Australian one at Villers-Bretonneux (Figure 9.1).
The memorial is also an instance of public art inasmuch as it is based on
the premise that there will be an audience, or a relationship between the
artist, the idea or the concept and the viewer of the work: ‘One of the
distinguishing characteristics [of public art] […] is the factoring of the
audience into the actual construction of the work. This work activates the
viewer— creating a participant, even a collaborator’ (Lacy 1995: 37). The
memorial depends on its users to make it meaningful and to maintain its
relevance almost 100 years after the events that it commemorates.
Furthermore, the individual practices of remembrance on the part of visitors,
particularly on Anzac Day, demonstrate its role as a site of national memory.
Figure 9.1 The Australian National Memorial, Villers-Bretonneux
Photo by Shanti Sumartojo (August 2012).

This chapter discusses how the Australian National Memorial helps to

shape expressions of Australian national identity from the ‘top down’ by
examining its symbolism and official uses during Anzac Day (25 April)
ceremonies. It also explores the practices of visitors to the Memorial,
showing how their ‘from-below’ responses to and interactions with the
memorial help to construct a particular version of Australian identity. The
chapter begins with a brief history and description of Villers-Bretonneux and
its surrounds, including visitor practices observed by the author during site
visits in August 2012. The memorial, however, is most ‘active’ on Anzac
Day, so the ritual uses of the site during the national ceremony on 25 April
are the main focus. Finally, the chapter explores how these ritual uses
involve and generate affects that both augment the experience of the
ceremony and transform the practices of visitors from individual experiences
to ones of national and collective commemorative significance.

The Australian National Memorial at Villers-

Bretonneux
For Britain and Commonwealth authorities during World War I, the issue of
how to cope with the numbers of dead, assist grieving families and keep
proper records of burial sites was a pressing issue. Early cemeteries were
somewhat ad hoc, with many men buried close to where they died. There
was no systematic method of marking such sites, which often made it
difficult for mourners to find graves. By 1915, Sir Fabian Ware had
established a Graves Registration Commission (renamed the Imperial War
Graves Commission in 1917) to mark, register and maintain gravesites
(Ziino 2007:39). One of the commission’s early responsibilities was to
construct so-called concentration cemeteries which contained killed soldiers’
bodies that had been exhumed and re-buried from smaller groups of graves
in one larger site. By the end of the war, Ware’s organisation had recorded
‘410,000 identified and 152,000 non-identified graves in 2,316 cemeteries
on the western front’ (Geurst 2010:14). While these numbers do not include
those for whom no remains were ever found, they give a sense of the scale of
fatalities on the Western Front, as well as the impact on a landscape that was
undoubtedly transformed by such a large number of new cemeteries.
This intervention in the landscape of the Somme region is still evident,
with about 1,000 cemeteries dotting the countryside as well as a large
number of memorials (Winter 2011). Many of these share a similar visual
vocabulary thanks to a set of basic principles agreed by the team of
architects commissioned to design the sites (Geurst 2010:67). These include
the head-stones of a uniform shape, size and material; an east-facing
orientation of the graves; and grassy lawns with flowers, trees and a ‘wall or
hedge around the cemeteries transform[ing] them into enclosed English
gardens abroad, a place where the surviving relatives can find peace in
trusted surroundings’ (Geurst 2010:67). The overall effect was meant to
distinguish the sites from other nationalities’ cemeteries and create
identifiably ‘English’ places, even when the dead were Imperial or non-
English British troops.
The design principles and systematic record keeping of war graves was
more than a response to the pleas of bereaved relatives. While families and
communities mourned loss privately, official recognition allowed the state to
link individual sacrifice to a sense of higher national purpose and helped
frame the relationship between the missing, their families and the nation (see
Ziino 2007 and Inglis 1998). In the case of the British forces, this was
complicated by the presence of many different Imperial soldiers in their
ranks and the various nations to which the British dead might belong. In
addition, many bodies could not be recovered or few or no physical remains
were left to mark with a gravestone. The Imperial War Graves Commission
addressed both these problems by erecting national memorials specific to the
different Imperial forces that served on the Western Front.
The Australian National Memorial was initially designed by a Melbourne
architect, William Lucas, whose son had been killed in the war. However,
delays in the approval process and the withdrawal of funds from the project
in 1930 meant that his design was never constructed. Instead, with funding
forthcoming from a new Australian government, Edwin Lutyens was asked
to design the memorial. Lutyens had extensive experience in designing
World War I memorials, including the Cenotaph in London, the British
memorial at Thiepval and the cemetery that shared the memorial site at
Villers-Bretonneux (Inglis 1998:266–268). Dedicated in 1938, the Australian
National Memorial shared visual elements with the architect’s other World
War I cemetery designs, such as the War Stone and a Cross of Sacrifice with
an inset, downward-pointing sword (Figures 9.2 and 9.3).
Figure 9.2 The Cross of Sacrifice
Photo by Shanti Sumartojo (August 2012).
Figure 9.3 The War Stone
Photo by Shanti Sumartojo (August 2012).

Edwin Lutyens advocated an ‘abstract monumental design’ or ‘open-air

cathedral’ that used the sky as a dome (Geurst 2010:26, 69). This stance is
exemplified by the inclusion in his designs of the War Stone (its name was
later changed to the Stone of Remembrance), a semi-religious element that
recalls an altar and that ‘offers a non-normative universal architectural
expression of an imperishable mass, which perpetuates commemoration in
all eternity’ (Geurst 2010:22). Like the memorials, the cemeteries also
demonstrate an Imperial system that organised death and grief uniformly; the
site at Villers-Bretonneux is an example. When the identity or the nationality
of the dead individual was known, some elements of the headstones, such as
a national or religious symbolism, varied. However, the rows of headstones
of standardised shape, size and material were meant to represent the equality
of soldiers and officers in death, creating commonality amongst those who
were killed (see Figure 9.4).
 Sir Frederic Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, was commissioned
by the Imperial War Graves Commission to develop a set of overall
guidelines for how cemeteries would be constructed that could guide
architects after the war. In his 1918 report to the commission titled ‘How the
Cemeteries Abroad Will Be Designed’, Kenyon explicitly linked the design
of the proposed cemeteries with collective sacrifice and remembrance:
The sacrifice of the individual is a great idea and worthy of commemoration; but the community of
sacrifice, the service of a common cause, the comradeship of arms which has brought together
men of all ranks and grades—these are greater ideas, which should be commemorated in those
cemeteries where they lie together, the representatives of their country in the lands in which they
served.
(1918:6)

Figure 9.4 Standard headstones for soldiers identified as Australian

Photo by Shanti Sumartojo (2012).

This emphasis on equality amongst the ‘community’ of the dead is an apt

context for Anzac ceremonies, events that coalesce a particular version of
Australian national identity. To some degree this can be understood as an
‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992), the outlines of which can
be traced throughout the twentieth century. More recently, there is evidence
that the Anzac narrative has been re-imagined for contemporary political
purposes: Australian historian Mark McKenna has linked a ‘revolution’ in
the use of Anzac to frame Australian identity with Prime Minister John
Howard, who was elected in 1997 (McKenna 2010). Although the ‘top-
down’ encouragement of the Anzac narrative as an important part of
Australian identity in the late twentieth century has been documented from a
range of perspectives (Inglis 1998; Reynolds and Lake 2010), this has not
simply been a case of official imposition of a national story. The Anzac
narrative appears to resonate with a growing number of Australians, and the
story is as vernacular in observance as it is official. Memorial sites,
including the one at Villers-Bretonneux, are part of this cultural process.
Next, I discuss how visitors’ use of the site helps to reinforce the Anzac
narrative.

Activating the Site: Visitors’ Practices and

Reactions

The memorial is on top of a rise, and gradually becomes visible as visitors

walk up from the road. The cemetery that fronts the memorial contains
symmetrical rows of identical headstones in the standard style of Imperial
sites and extends up the hill for around 250 metres, with a Cross of Sacrifice
interrupting the central axis halfway along its length. Visitors often pause as
they walk, moving slowly through the rows, reading or photographing the
headstones. Some leave tokens, such as artificial poppies or small Australian
flags, which relieve the uniformity of the graves (see Figure 9.4). Perhaps
most notably, there do not appear to be large numbers of visitors to the
Memorial. There was a handful of other visitors at the memorial when the
author was there, for example, during the August school holidays in 2012;
Winter (2012) reports a similar lack of people.
Furthermore, while there are no signs that specifically prohibit certain
activities, the few visitors that the author observed appeared to conform to
the spatial logic of the site, just as she and her family did, by moving up the
hill to the tower, quietly and slowly, often taking photos as they went; the
only exception were a pair of school-aged children who ran on the grass and
shouted to each other. There was no one exploring around the sides or rear of
the Memorial, and the author did not feel drawn to these areas herself. There
were two or three gardeners doing maintenance during the site visit, driving
a small buggy quickly across the front of the tower, a jarring movement
against the slower movement of pedestrians (Figure 9.5).

Figure 9.5 The rural setting of the Australian National Memorial, looking from the tower to the
adjoining cemetery
Photo by Shanti Sumartojo (2012).

The memorial itself, with columns of names extending up its surface, is

composed of a tower flanked by two extending walls that stretch out from
the tower and turn towards the cemetery at right angles. These arms seem to
reach out to and draw in visitors, pulling them the length of the cemetery up
to the memorial walls. There is a stone pavilion at each end of the extended
arms, and a similar pavilion at the top of the tower. Visitors can climb the
central tower, and the open pavilion at the top contains a diagram with
arrows indicating the names and directions of nearby battle sites, as well as
the direction of the Australian capital, Canberra. People who climb to the top
can get a clear view of the surrounding countryside as they gaze out over the
cemetery. Apart from gardeners or maintenance personnel, the way that
visitors use the site from day to day appears to parallel the site’s use during
commemorative ceremonies, with a strong orientation towards the central
tower, the names inscribed on the walls of the Memorial, and the headstones
that stretch out in front of it.
 The Memorial is the focal point of both official Australian government
commemorative activity, and also a place for individual ‘pilgrims’, many of
whom are seeking the names of individuals who died fighting in France.
Caroline Winter’s research at Villers-Bretonneux shows that 62 per cent of
visitors had family members who had served in World War I, and almost 44
per cent were seeking the name of either their own or someone else’s relative
(Winter 2012:225). In addition to individual or small groups of ‘pilgrims’,
tours and school groups also visit the sites. An example is a group of schools
from regional South Australia that has taken students to the Western Front
every two years since 2008, through a project called Connecting Spirits.
Before embarking, the students research individual soldiers whose graves
they then seek out, for whom they then perform graveside commemorative
ceremonies. Some of ‘their’ soldiers are actual relatives (see Connecting
Spirits [s.a.] and Fathi 2012). One student explained her physical experience
of the Memorial and the effect it had on her: ‘Walking up to the Villers-
Bretonneux Memorial for the first time and walking through the rows and
rows of graves was so sad. Then seeing the big memorial and starting to
realise actually how big this war was and how many names were carved into
the stone there was breathtaking’ (Connecting Spirits, s.a.:n.p.). Thus, the
scale and form of the Memorial helped generate her personal response to the
commemorative experience.
While these students travelled in the European winter, the memorial is
busiest by far in the early spring. Since 2008, on the 90th anniversary of the
World War I battle that took place there, the Australian government has held
a commemorative service at the site every Anzac Day. The first service
attracted around 3,000 people, and by 2011, this had increased to almost
4,000 people, a number that is expected to continue to grow, especially in the
lead up to the World War I centenary period from 2014 to 2018. Johnson
(1995:57) argues that ‘the production and consumption of public monuments
is more firmly part of a collective process’ than of an elite cultural
expression of the nation less accessible to a wide audience such as painting
or literature. The growing number of visitors suggests that the memorial is
more than the imposition of an official narrative told through a monument.
Instead, since its construction, visitors who have been able to travel to
Villers-Bretonneux have engaged in a collective process that helps to
construct Australian national identity in terms of their individual practices.
In particular, the Anzac Day ceremony and participants’ reactions to it are an
important part of how the memorial is used by visitors and crucial to
understanding how its meanings are made. Connerton (1989:45) argues that
the connections between rituals and the individuals who undertake them ‘are
held to be meaningful because rites have significance with respect to a set of
further non-ritual actions, to the whole life of a community. Rites have the
capacity to give value and meaning to the life of those who perform them’.
The way that visitors use the material elements of the memorial during
Anzac ceremonies, both official and vernacular, help to create collective
national meanings as well as individual ones.

Emotional Reactions and Technologies of Affect

Visitors’ engagement in national rituals is also enhanced and intensified by
their emotional responses and the inter-relational affect that is generated by
the ceremonies, the large number of attendees, and the expectations that
visitors bring with them to the site. In analysing examples of this process, I
draw on definitions of affect that stress embodied responses to the
experience of place. Cultural geographers such as Ben Anderson and Nigel
Thrift, for example, describe affects as ‘unformed and unstructured
intensities that […] correspond to the passage from one bodily state to
another’ (Anderson 2009:9) or ‘a set of embodied practices that produce
visible conduct’ (Thrift 2004:60). In other words, affect can be understood
by the observable impact it has on people’s bodies, and faces. Such
intensities are ‘always a part of an encounter’ that includes interactions with
all kinds of human and non-human things, including ‘artifacts and
architecture’ (Seyfert 2012:31). Because of the fleetingness and the often
unconscious and interactive qualities of affect, it is also understood as
unpredictable, excessive and difficult to capture, based on ‘capacities
through interaction in a world which is constantly becoming’ (Thrift
2004:61).
The intersubjective and bodily nature of affect helps to explain reactions
to the Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in two respects. The first is the
intensity of the experience that many visitors report at such sites. The
Connecting Spirits school group members, for example, engage in
commemoration rituals that their group has established to ‘honour’ World
War I soldiers, usually from their families or communities. Such ceremonies
include the students speaking about their connection to the particular soldier,
leaving mementos such as Australian flags and singing or reading poetry.
The blog of their 2012 visit to France contains repeated reports of their
feelings couched in terms of bodily reactions: they get a ‘lump in [the]
throat’ or ‘shed a tear’; the experience is ‘chilling’, ‘moving’ or
‘breathtaking’ (Connecting Spirits, s.a.).
McKenna and Ward (2007:142) take up what they call the
‘sentimentalism’ they identify in mostly young Australian pilgrims’ reactions
to visiting Gallipoli, pointing to ‘their profound emotional investment in the
Anzac legend’. They suggest that visitors are primed to be ‘moved’ by the
experience as a result of prior exposure to conventional ways the media
constructs this event in Australia: ‘[the] montage of mournful soundtrack,
waving flags and quietly weeping diggers on parade’. Similar media
constructions of the Anzac Day ceremony at Villers-Bretonneux include
images of sombre and attentive attendees, an Australian school choir
performing hymns and national anthems, and the symbolic presentation of a
lone bugler playing the Last Post. Furthermore, as discussed earlier, recent
research (see Winter 2012 and Fathi 2012) suggests that at least some people
who visit Villers-Bretonneux do so because of a family connection. This
means that certain responses—solemnity, reflection, sadness—often
accompany a visit and that these are made more intense by the family
histories that people bring with them and which are not solely generated as a
response to media constructs of the event.
The second way in which affect helps to understand visitors’ reactions to
and uses of the site concerns the link between spatialised politics of meaning
and the individual. Thrift (2004:67–68) offers a concept of affect in which a
‘top-down’ process determines how the built environment is shaped or
manipulated to produce a reaction in people who experience it, including
through ‘design, lighting, event management logistics, music, performance’.
He argues that ‘affect has always been a key element of politics and the
subject of numerous powerful political technologies which have knotted
thinking, technique and affect together in various potent combinations’
(Thrift 2004:64). This notion of ‘engineered affect’ has a long history of
being used to reinforce identification with, for example, national or
metropolitan identities. Dovey’s (2008:75) analysis of Hitler and Speer’s
remodelling of Berlin, for example, hinges on the power of architecture to
silence its audience, to ‘convince without debate’ and to awe or intimidate
both supporters and critics. Thrift explains that
affective response can be designed into spaces, often out of what seems like very little at all […].
It is a form of landscape engineering that is gradually pulling itself into existence, producing new
forms of power as it goes.
(2004:68)

At Villers-Bretonneux, this is especially evident during Anzac Day

ceremonies that turn the memorial into a theatrical set on which the rituals of
national identity are performed, an occasion when it is subject to the
‘landscape engineering’ that Thrift describes. For example, the memorial is
one of several sites covered during the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation’s live broadcast of Anzac Day ceremonies around the world. As
such, it is transformed by the presence of camera teams, special lighting and
music. These broadcasts reach large numbers of people. According to its
own press release in 2012, ‘ABC News 24’s Anzac Day coverage reached
2.4 million viewers’ (ABC Online, s.a.:n.p.), or about 10% of the Australian
population. The rituals displayed in this broadcast conform to a recognisable
pattern that is repeated in ceremonies across Australia and the world at other
Anzac sites. It includes a rhythm of religious readings, hymn-singing,
official speeches, a minute’s silence and a bugler who brings the silence to
an end. These are well-known elements of this Australian state ritual,
familiar to many contemporary viewers, even as they have gradually
changed over time (see Seal 2011). Anzac Day at Villers-Bretonneux is
linked through these practices to other sites at other times on Anzac Day
across the world.
Newspaper descriptions of the event in France have often focused on the
affective or emotional aspects of the ceremony, picking out a few choice
phrases from officials’ speeches, or have emphasised the individual
experiences of either soldiers who fought in the First World War or people
who had come to ‘honour’ these experiences. Such reports also use the
individual practices and experiences of visitors to contextualise the
ceremony. For example coverage in The Australian newspaper of the 2009
Dawn Service focused on visitors with a family history of military service.
In the same newspaper, coverage of the 2010 ceremony conflated the official
and the personal by focusing on the family history of Australian foreign
minister Stephen Smith, who had two great uncles who died on the Western
Front. The report underlined the merging of the national and the personal by
quoting a line from Smith’s speech: ‘[T]here was hardly an Australian family
that wasn’t touched by the tragedy’ (The Australian, 2010).
Again, however, the Memorial offers more than a ‘top-down’ imposition
of a national narrative, as evidenced by the stories of personal connection
that are common in media reporting on the experience of being there. For
example, in 2009, one commemorant at the Villers-Bretonneux Dawn
Service told a journalist, ‘My dad was in the services so I feel a big
affiliation with [the Diggers]. We go to a dawn service every Anzac Day.
You aren’t an Aussie if you don’t come’ (Tasker 2009). Till (2005:8) reminds
us that ‘places are never merely backdrops for action or containers for the
past. They are fluid mosaics and moments of memory, matter, metaphor,
scene and experience that create and mediate social spaces and
temporalities.’ Thus, place meaning is shaped by the activities that occur in
them, the practices that they engender and the relationships that they
accommodate. In the case of the memorial, personal connections also appear
to generate intensities of affiliation, pride, grief or sadness that heighten the
experience of the site, with visitors activating their own personal histories to
construct national identity.

National Identity and the use of the Memorial

The preceding examples hint at a selective process in which personal
memory is appropriated as national remembrance through visitors’
experience of the memorial’s built elements and ritual use. This strongly
suggests that the collective remembrance of those people who travel to the
memorial is crucial in determining how all Australians are encouraged to
react to the site. Furthermore, these experiences, as well as visitors’
interpretations of the history represented at the memorial, are reshaped
through official channels—such as government speeches or the national
media—to form the national history of all Australians. What gives this
process particular power is the emotional resonance of stories of wartime
death, constructed as sacrifice and heroism, and this is where the affectual
experience of visitors is so important. It is their uses of and responses to the
site, informed by family stories, which are so often mobilised to tell a more
general Australian story. The Anzac narrative is therefore constructed at the
Memorial by a limited ‘core minority’ of users that is shaping the meaning
of Villers-Bretonneux through their practices in the site, augmented by the
attendant geographies of affect. This group is bound together by their
common act of remembrance, sometimes due to a family history of military
service, with accompanying stories of heroism or grief.
The design of the memorial is central to these rituals, acting as a set for
the performance of Anzac Day; broadcast television footage of the service
makes its military and religious flavour evident. The guard of honour (or
‘catafalque party’) from the Australian Defence Force forms up in the central
axis of the site, between the rows of seated visitors, and marches slowly up
to the steps leading to the entrance of the tower. These steps comprise a
stage on which they adopt their positions with heavily stylised body
movements, bow their heads and remain standing during the ceremony, part
of the visual backdrop of the ritual. After the speeches and singing, wreathes
are first laid by the most senior officials, with soldiers handing them the
flowers before marching off to the side. Family members are then invited to
lay wreaths on the steps, which by this point are mostly covered. The service
also has a Christian inflection with its hymns, the involvement of members
of the clergy, and its themes of sacrifice and thanksgiving. The use of
elements of the site—the tower, the extending walls and the steps—
contribute to this effect. The common mention of names of dead soldiers is
reinforced by the lists of ‘the fallen’ that form a background to the speakers,
and the religious iconography of the Cross of Sacrifice and the altar-like War
Stone further reinforce this atmosphere.
Even when not animated by Anzac Day ceremonies, the solemn and
almost religious atmosphere of reverent commemoration is evident at other
times of the year. The formal rows of headstones, the meticulously
maintained grounds and the common bodily practices of visitors—slow
movement from the road to the tower, examination of headstones and of the
names on the extending walls, photographs and quiet voices—form a sharp
contrast to the surrounding farmland. The formal, ritualised space of the
memorial, with its boxy pavilions guarding the entrance and main monument
on a ‘superhuman scale’ (Geurst 2010:428) demarcate a distinct space which
disconnects visitors from their French surroundings and connects them to
other Australians and to one version of the national past.
 The evidence in this chapter suggests that visitors go to the memorial to
visit graves, reflect on Anzac sacrifice and try to understand the history of
World War I a bit better. There does not appear to be an indication of other
ways of using the site that might complicate its meanings. As discussed
earlier, even visitors who are not there for ceremonial purposes conform to
similar patterns of using the site, moving slowly along the rows of
headstones to the tower and its flanking arms. The mood is solemn and
contemplative. Rather than opening up the possibility of narrative and
performative complexity, as others have argued public national sites can do
(Inglis 1998:246; see also Edensor 2002; Sumartojo 2013), the memorial
appears to be used only in formalised ways. This limited range of uses of the
site suggests important implications for Australian national identity more
generally. Most significantly, the ways that visitors use the memorial appears
to diminish the possibility of flexible narratives of Anzac, creating a
singular, monolithic version of national identity.

Conclusion
The designers of World War I cemeteries during and after the conflict sought
to control how soldiers killed during the war were remembered, with men
such as Ware, Kenyon and Lutyens imprinting their views of the nature of
sacrifice and the importance of the nation and Empire onto the location,
design and architecture of these memorials. These built environments have
come to symbolise the official version of how World War I, and indeed
Australian national identity, should be remembered and defined. This aligns
with Dovey’s (2008:75) claim that ‘all architecture represents some social
order’.
This official narrative of solemn commemoration is evident in many of
the bodily responses to the site, including practices of contemplation,
remembrance or sadness, and is reinforced by reports from visiting groups
and the author’s own site visit (see Connecting Spirits, s.a.). These uses
include reflective strolling, moving slowly up the logic of the central axis,
reading a few of the headstones, a brief detour to the information boards,
examination of the names inscribed on the memorial’s wall, perhaps
ascending the tower. With the site subject to these repeated expressions and
with very few other uses in evidence, it is quiet and depopulated outside
times of intense memorial interest. Is there much variation in this implicit
script? There certainly is potential on Anzac Day, when the site is animated
by crowds. However, this ceremony is a repeated and regular ritual, with
strict protocols of condoned practices.
The effect is that the way the site is used narrows the framework of
national identity to the interests and experiences of the ‘core minority’ who
visit Villers-Bretonneux in very particular ways. This group generally
excludes the large number of Australians without a personal connection to
the Anzac narrative. Given the ethnic and cultural diversity of contemporary
Australia, ongoing reference to the nation during World War I by way of a
focus on Anzac privileges a martial, masculine and predominantly Anglo
version of Australia. If a public ‘exists by virtue of being addressed’ (Warner
2002:50), then the national public addressed by the Australian National
Memorial is strongly shaped by a group whose uses of the site are
transmitted to the rest of Australia through broadcast coverage of Anzac Day
ceremonies. The challenge that ‘you aren’t an Aussie if you don’t come’
establishes a visit to the site as crucial for the articulation of genuine
Australian national identity, but defines that identity in narrow and exclusive
terms.

References
ABC Online (s.a.) ‘ABC News 24 the One to Watch.’
http://about.abc.net.au/2012/04/abc-news-24-the-one-to-watch/ (accessed
November 13, 2012).
The Australian (2010) ‘Villers-Bretonneux Personally Poignant.’ August 26.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/anzac-day/villers-bretonneux-
personally-poignant/story-e6frgdaf-1225858137047 (accessed April 10,
2012).
Anderson, B. (2009) ‘Affect,’ in Dictionary of Human Geography,
Chichester: Blackwell.
Connecting Spirits (s.a.). Connecting Sprits. http://connectingspirits.com.au/
(accessed August 7, 2013).
Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dovey, K. (2008) Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form, London:
Routledge.
Edensor, T. (2002) National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life,
Oxford: Berg.
Fathi, R. (2014) ‘“A Piece of Australia in France”: Australian Authorities
and the Commemoration of Anzac Day at Villers-Bretonneux in the Last
Decade,’ in S. Sumartojo and B. Wellings (eds.) Nation, Memory, and
Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia
and New Zealand, Oxford: Peter Lang.
Geurst, J. (2010) Cemeteries of the Great War by Sir Edwin Lutyens,
Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.
Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (1992) The Invention of Tradition,
Cambridge: Canto.
Inglis, K (1998) Sacred Places. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Johnson, N. (1995) ‘Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography and
Nationalism,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13: 51–
65.
Kenyon, F. (1918) ‘War Graves: How the Cemeteries Abroad Will Be
Designed, Report to the Imperial War Graves Commission by Sir
Frederic Kenyon,’ London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office.
http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/doview/nla.gen-vn4704308-p.pdf (accessed
November 13, 2012).
Lacy, S. (1995) ‘Introduction: Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric
Journeys,’ in S. Lacy (ed.) Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art,
Seattle: Bay Press.
McKenna, M. (2010) “How Did it Become Australia’s National Day?” in H.
Reynolds and M. Lake (eds.) What’s Wrong with Anzac? The
Militarisation of Australian History, Sydney: New South.
McKenna, M. and Ward, S. (2007) ‘“It Was Really Moving, Mate”: The
Gallipoli Pilgrimage and Sentimental Nationalism in Australia,’
Australian Historical Studies, 38(129): 141–151.
Seal, G. (2011) ‘“… and in the Morning …”: Adapting and Adopting the
Dawn Service,” Journal of Australian Studies, 35(1): 49–63.
Seyfert, R. (2012) ‘Beyond Personal Feelings and Collective Emotions:
Toward a Theory of Social Affect,’ Theory, Culture & Society, 29(6): 27–
 46.
Sumartojo, S. (2013) Trafalgar Square and the Narration of Britishness,
1900 – 2012: Imagining the Nation, Oxford: Peter Lang.
Tasker, B. (2009) ‘Thousands Attend Anzac Service in Villers-Bretonneux,
France,’ The Herald Sun, April 25.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/thousands-attend-
anzac-service-in-france/story-e6frf7jx-1225703889035 (accessed April
16, 2012).
Thrift, N. (2004) ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of
Affect,’ Geografiska Annaler, 86B(1): 57–78.
Till, K. (2005) The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Space, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Warner, M. (2002) ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’ Public Culture 14(1): 49–
90.
Winter, C. (2011) ‘First World War Cemeteries: Insights from Visitor
Books,’ Tourism Geographies 13(3): 462–479.
Winter, C. (2012) ‘Commemoration of the Great War on the Somme:
Exploring Personal Connections,’ Journal of Tourism and Cultural
Change 10(3): 248–263.
Young, J. (1992) ‘The Counter-monument: Memory against Itself in
Germany Today,’ Critical Inquiry 18(20): 267–296.
Ziino, B. (2007) A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great
War, Crawley: University of Western Australia Press.
Part V
Reception
10
The Social Life of Artworks in Public
Spaces
A Study of the Publics in the Quartier
International de Montréal

Laurent Vernet

How can we evaluate the impact of an artwork in the urban environment?

How can we describe its role in and contribution to a given community? The
ways that the presence of an artwork affects an urban public space are often
postulated or mentioned in visual arts discourse, but they are rarely
empirically studied and analysed, especially with regard to their social
consequences. For instance, artists and public art professionals commonly
assert that artworks installed directly in the city space reach out to the
population, the community or the public. Such statements suggest an attempt
to mark a clear break from art found inside the white cube that is the gallery
or museum space by affirming the social specificity of such art practices—
but they do not fully realise such a distinction because their definition of the
notion of public is too vague. Far from being an isolated phenomenon or
exclusive to public art practitioners, this sort of position is symptomatic of
what Zebracki et al. (2012:22) have called ‘public artopia’, which they
describe as ‘the loose collection of claims in academic literature about the
allegedly physical-aesthetic, economic, social and cultural-symbolic roles of
art in public space’.
 In this chapter, I explore the notion of publics—social entities engaged
with artworks in public spaces—not as postulated rhetorical figures but as
embodied research subjects that can help us to better understand the effects
of art in public spaces by focusing primarily on the uses of such objects.
Following a review of the notion of publics in the art-historical discourse, I
introduce the idea of looking at art in public spaces through an urban
sociology perspective. The interdisciplinary discourse that I present not only
supports a new definition of the site of artworks as a physical and social
context but opens empirical possibilities for observing a variety of publics. I
then discuss four artworks that can be found in the two squares in the
Quartier International de Montréal, Montreal’s international district.
Following the methodology used by William H. Whyte in his 1988
documentary The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, I identify varieties of
publics using filmed observation as a research method. Finally, I look at a
particular case: the Occupy movement that took over some of the public
space in the district.

Art for whom? Uses as the Entry Point to

Embodied Publics

In academic discussions dealing with definitions of publics for artworks in

public spaces, there is general agreement that ‘publics’ is still an ill-defined,
little-understood notion. Although authors present varied views, they all put
forward either inclusive or exclusive social models that do not take account
of the complexity and multiplicity of everyday realities.
On one hand, inclusivity is a durable concept because it is rooted in
history, more precisely in the genres of the monument and statuary. Working
on the idea of an all-encompassing public, such artworks share a didactic
mission: They tend to produce both a community and a history by
celebrating and materialising a nation’s great moments and figures (Debray
1999). The weight of this type of representation comes into play in light of
the controversies that have arisen since the institutional establishment of
public art in the late 1960s. Such controversies have been of great interest to
researchers because they reveal some aspects of the usually obscure
relationship between artworks and the public. Indeed, the public debate
provoked by the removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981–1989) from
New York City’s Federal Plaza (see, among many others, Kwon 2002), the
creation of Daniel Buren’s Les deux plateaux (1986) at the Palais-Royal in
Paris (Heinich 1997) and the temporary withdrawal of Gilbert Boyer’s
Mémoire ardente (1994) from Place Jacques-Cartier in Old Montréal in 1997
(Rodriguez 2009) all invoked a so-called public without establishing its
referent. On this matter, Jean-Philippe Uzel (2010) notes that one effect of
controversies is indeed to consider the public an entity that does not need to
be defined, as if it were unlimited: During debates, both the public and the
content of public opinion are, in Uzel’s view, generalised and
instrumentalised.
From another perspective, inclusivity can be seen in public art models
such as Suzanne Lacy’s (1995) ‘new genre public art’ and Arlene Raven’s
(1989) ‘art in the public interest’, which integrate a community into the
process of creating the artwork. Developed as a reaction to ‘official’ public
art practice—and specifically to the fact that it has proved to be controversial
— artists have put forward alternative practices that are, according to their
proponents, based on inclusiveness and representativeness. However, as
Miwon Kwon (2002:138–155) explains, models such as Lacy’s and Raven’s
are ambiguous. They are based on the participation of individuals selected
from within a social group that they are supposed to represent as a coherent
whole: This supposes that the communities that they are representing existed
prior to instigation of the public art project, and that consensus can emerge
from projects because communities are coherent and transparent entities.
In opposition to these synecdochical propositions, the public has been
described from an exclusive point of view, using its most simple expression:
the viewer or spectator. For instance, Johanne Lamoureux (1994) developed
a communication model based on the dialectic that takes place between the
public artwork and each individual viewer. New forms of unofficial public
art, such as artistic interventions, have particularly lent themselves to this
kind of reading of the public as individuals: On the margins of public art,
interventions (and forms of this genre) cannot be dedicated to the general
public. Such practices flourished in the Montréal visual arts scene at the turn
of the twenty-first century, and they were supported by a discourse on the
specificity of how the works in question are experienced in the urban
environment (Fraser 1999; Loubier and Ninacs 2001; Loubier 2003).
 These interpretations, both inclusive and exclusive, limit our
understanding of the social contribution of an artwork in public space to the
first moments of its life, before its creation or immediately after it is
installed. Although some authors rightly insist on the unique relationship
between viewer and artwork, they have yet to translate such propositions
into empirical research or convey them in embodied, detailed and plural
descriptions of publics. Therefore, in order to approach the publics for such
artworks differently, I will argue that a disciplinary shift needs to be made
from art-historical research, in which the focus is the reaction of publics to
artworks, to the physical and social context in which artworks exist—that is,
public spaces. Here it is important to distance the definition of publicness
from Jürgen Habermas’s (1974) public sphere, a realm of social and political
debate referred to by Rosalyn Deutsche in ‘Agoraphobia’ (1966), in which
her use of the terms public space and public art cause confusion because
they embrace both physical and purely discursive sites. In the view of
sociologist Annick Germain (2010:76), public spaces designate concrete, not
abstract, objects. Instead of being considered as abstract bodies, publics in
public spaces are grounded in a setting and a timeframe in which they
coexist with artworks.
Archetypal public spaces include parks, streets, plazas and squares (Carr
et al. 1992). From an urban planning point of view, they are publicly owned
and dedicated to public use. From a sociological perspective, as geographer
Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin (2001) has explained, they have historically had a
double function for individuals, as both sites of identity construction and
places where individuals learn to live together. This describes the dialectic
that takes place between individuals and the community. On one hand, these
are ordinary people who, as Michel de Certeau (1990) would say, are
anonymously and obscurely consuming the urban environment—a setting in
which artworks will eventually be found. On the other hand, they mingle
with other people in a process identified as urban sociability—weak and
ephemeral social interactions that take place in public spaces (Grafmeyer
and Authier 2008). Inseparable from this social activity is the physical space
in which it occurs. As representations, public spaces are not neutral: In the
last two decades, researchers have argued that access to them is controlled
and regulated, sometimes to exclude specific groups such as youths and
homeless people (Mitchell 1995; Malone 2002; Atkinson 2003).
 Drawing on these ideas, publics for artworks can be observed among the
users who experience these social processes. Publics here are defined as the
individuals who consciously or unconsciously use an artwork, under specific
circumstances and according to the possibilities that the work offers, as a
physical element in the public space. Ultimately, this activity may allow
these publics to interact with other individuals. In my hypothesis, the
specificities of the physical elements—public spaces and artworks—inform
these publics’ behaviours and their interactions.

Setting the Stage: Research Method and case

Study

The case selected for a study of publics, the Quartier International de

Montréal (QIM), showcases a wide range of artworks that offer various
experiences—experiences that are also affected by the design of the
subsections of the squares into which they are integrated (Figure 10.1).
Three artworks are situated in historic Victoria Square: the 1869 Monument
to Queen Victoria by Marshall Wood, which has always been in the square,
and Taichi Shadow Boxing (1983) and Taichi Single Whip (1985) by
Taiwanese artist Ju Ming, which were on loan to the city by a private
collector and temporarily installed on the site. The fourth artwork, La Joute
(1974) by Jean-Paul Riopelle, is found one block away in a new square that
was designed especially for the piece a decade ago and named after the
internationally renowned Canadian artist.
QIM, as a district, was created at the turn of the twenty-first century as a
linchpin for redevelopment of a downtown area that had become a waste-
land. In the 1960s, numerous infrastructure projects, including a below-grade
expressway, subway stations and the monumental Tour de la Bourse (stock
exchange), had left their mark on the neighbourhood, and particularly on
Victoria Square (Choko 1990). Although the redevelopment aimed to create
a hub of businesses, financial institutions and international organ-isations,
Victoria Square had actually been playing this role since the mid-nineteenth
century (Poitras 2003). Thus, the much-needed project—which saw the
covering of a large section of the expressway, the creation of Place Jean-
Paul-Riopelle and a major transformation of the public domain—was
building on a historical dynamic while repairing modern mistakes. As will be
discussed, economic activity around the square attracts two main types of
publics: workers (white-collar employees and professionals) and tourists.

Figure 10.1 Location of artworks in the Quartier International de Montréal

Image by Nathalie Vachon (August 2013).

Data were collected for this case using filmed observation. With his 1988
documentary film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, sociologist and
urban planner William H. Whyte established this type of observation as a
valuable way to document and analyse how people act and interact in public
spaces, using the context of New York City. Asked to establish criteria for
the design of small urban spaces, such as the plazas that surround new
buildings, Whyte filmed the social life that occurs in one iconic case, the
Seagram Building plaza, in order to discover the factors that encourage their
uses and stimulate their social life. Reflecting on his research process,
Whyte realised that it should be based on a description of flows of people,
and on specific uses—which can be easily seen and shown when captured on
film. Of great interest is a sequence lasting less than two minutes in which
Whyte demonstrates how this method can be applied to the study of artworks
installed in urban public spaces. The camera shows how artworks can be part
of social life: a work can initiate a conversation or an argument with a
companion, or even with a stranger; an artwork’s monumentality can
structure pedestrian traffic, in the sense that it attracts people to walk under
it; or people may be intrigued by a sculpture’s materiality, which makes
them want to touch it as they pass.
In the present study, each of the three areas that contain one or two
artworks was filmed for between three and five 45-minute periods, at various
times of day and week, between June and October of 2011 and 2012. The
number of observation periods was determined according to a principle of
saturation; that is, a site was no longer filmed when research did not yield
new information. For each area, a spot was found for the camera distant
enough from the artwork that it would not interfere directly with everyday
activities. The camera angle also needed to be wide enough to see how
actions evolved within each site. That said, both camera and observer were
visible on-site, and information was provided about the research project on
request. The requests of people who did not want their image used were
acceded to. This happened extremely rarely. It should also be noted that the
authorities were not asked for permission to film, as filming for information
purposes in public spaces is permitted. Nevertheless, individuals have to be
unrecognisable in the footage that is shown from this research project.
Concretely, I identified publics by analysing and coding raw footage with
the help of field notes taken by the on-site observer/camerawoman. Publics
were recognised as such when there was evidence that they engaged with an
artwork. Examples of such uses are taking a photograph of or with the
artwork, touching it and looking at it while passing. The socio-economic
profiles of the publics (as workers or tourists, for instance) were established
from their physical appearance, including their clothes. As imprecise as such
indicators may be, they can facilitate the establishment of general trends
among the observed individuals, if used with diligence (Bélanger 2010).
Moreover, actions performed by publics tended to validate their profile: an
individual wearing casual clothing such as shorts and running shoes, holding
a guidebook and taking pictures of the city environment appears to be a
tourist, whereas someone in more formal attire, such as trousers or skirt and
shirt, and carrying a lunch bag is more likely to be a worker. In the context
of the QIM, typecasting publics was a relatively easy task, mainly because it
is not a residential neighbourhood. Indeed, people find themselves in the
area because of their relationship with the adjacent land uses, which are
offices, hotels and a convention centre. Filming is not a substitute for
interviewing people, and therefore, it was impossible to confirm their profile
or to establish their place of origin; they may have been either international
travellers or tourists in their own city. For my primary research project,
which aimed to establish that publics could be identified using filmed
observation, the collected data provided sufficient information.

On Location: Filming the Publics

From a Distance: Monument to Queen Victoria

Marshall Wood’s Monument to Queen Victoria symbolises the former

prestige of the area. The monument was installed in 1872, when the square
was landscaped in Victorian style, a decade after its having being named
after the sovereign, because the district was gaining importance within the
city. The artwork is simple in design: Installed on a pedestal, it depicts the
queen acceding to the throne at age eighteen, wearing a crown and carrying a
sceptre and an oak wreath. During the twentieth century, the square
underwent many transformations—and, consequently, a symbolic decline—
including one of its sections being turned into a parking lot in the 1950s.
This directly affected the monument, which had to be moved several times:
Currently in its fourth location, its role and significance have diminished
over time.
The current design of Victoria Square returned the monument to its
original position in the southern section of the square. The team responsible
for the landscaping of the QIM, under the direction of Daoust Lestage,
placed it near an intersection, in the centre of a garden bed. Facing the street,
it seems more exposed to car and pedestrian traffic than placed to be seen
from within the space of the square: Because the only benches in this area
are east of the statue, it is impossible to sit and look at it directly. In other
words, the current condition of the monument is to be seen while passing.
Physically, the statue of the queen, a superior being, is very high in the air:
The role of the plinth is to elevate the monarch, to detach her from everyday
life, on both the spatial and symbolic levels. The garden bed also helps to
create a distance from publics. As we will see, these considerations have a
direct impact on the uses of the monument, by shaping the types of
relationships that it can entertain with its publics.
During a weekday lunch-hour observation period in late summer, the low
wall defining the edge of the Monument to Queen Victoria proved to be a
popular destination for groups of two or three workers looking for a place to
sit and eat lunch. At most, there were about 15 people sitting near the
monument at any one time. They sat in the sunny section; the portion
bordering the street was in shadow and probably too chilly at this point in
the season. A later, complementary observation period conducted in
midsummer showed the opposite distribution (Figure 10.2). Because the
workers were seen arriving in groups, the monument was not a meeting
place for them, but a destination that they had consciously chosen together.
No relationships or conflicts developed among the different groups, as
conversations were limited to within the respective gatherings. That said,
could these workers, with regard to this specific use, be seen as a public of
the monument? One could say that they could not, because the low wall is
not part of the artwork but included in the design of the square. However, the
fact that this socio-economically homogeneous group of individuals chose to
sit around a landmark in the urban environment for 15 to 20 minutes makes
them a public—even if this public seems to be completely detached from the
meaning of the artwork.
While the workers were eating, other groups of people tended to stay
away. Only one tourist couple, who needed to sit down and look at a travel
guide and a map, ventured to the edge of the monument, but they sat for 8
minutes in the section in shadow, keeping their distance from the workers.
Figure 10.2 Workers sitting and eating lunch on the low wall around the Monument to Queen Victoria
Photo by Denise Caron (July 2012).

The dynamic was quite different during two observations that took place
around 5 p.m. on a weekday and during a weekend afternoon. The role of the
low wall around the monument as urban furniture was confirmed, as
different individuals sat on it for various periods. In a different perspective,
the monument’s role as a unique photogenic element was observed on many
occasions. Tourists, mainly in couples or groups, took pictures of the
monument; these photographs might later have formed a trace, a document
of the place they had visited. They also photographed each other in front of
the artwork, possibly as proof that they had visited the area. On three
occasions, children, accompanied by one or more adults, were seen walking
and running on the low wall around the monument, and even in the garden
bed. Not bound by the social rules that govern other people’s behaviours in
public, they were attracted by the different ground levels and textures around
the artwork, which formed an environment at their scale, offering a playful
topography or simply a different experience of the city. On rare occasions,
people were seen looking furtively at the artwork as they passed it. Finally,
traces seen on the low wall around the monument suggest that they are
popular among skateboarders, although no skateboarders were actually seen
on site. Quentin Stevens (2007:148) has observed that ‘[s]katers tend to
choose marginal locations which are not in use by pedestrians […]. Skaters
tend to frequent steps of office buildings in the city’s business precinct
outside of the normal rush and lunch hours’. Because the low wall around
the monument is in direct relation to the sidewalks and paths that surround it,
skateboarders must come to ‘grind’ there outside of office hours, when there
is no potential conflict of use with pedestrians.

Up Close: Two Works by Ju Ming

In the autumn of 2006, the two works by Ju Ming were installed in the
northern section of the Victoria Square, where the architects had created a
public art platform for the exhibition of artworks. In this location, they were
visible by pedestrians, cyclists and motorists, so they could signal an entry
point to the square. Ming’s works were not designed for this space, nor was
the space configured to receive them; the sculptures had been on display in
different cities around the world, including Brussels, Paris and Hong Kong,
before being brought to Montreal by their owner (Martin 2007; Seleanu
2007). They sit on a black granite surface that complements their aesthetic:
the design of the platform and the artworks share simple, clean lines and
dark colours that make the sculptures look like they were always intended to
be integrated into the square. Both sculptures are interpretations of notions
from tai chi. Taichi Single Whip is an oversized representation of an
individual in an active posture; the smaller piece, Taichi Shadow Boxing,
which is no longer on public display because it was reclaimed by its owner
in the summer of 2012, is an abstraction of the notion of balance through
transition. Although the sculptures are made of bronze, their rough texture,
when seen close up, resembles sculpted stone.
The observations show that the siting of the works was successful in terms
of generating uses, because it fostered a relationship of proximity. Placed at
either end of what is called the agora, a plaza that is slightly elevated above
the surrounding sidewalks, the works frame a pedestrian thoroughfare but do
not obstruct it. Individuals frequently cross the agora as a shortcut, and so
they can come into contact with the sculptures. Moreover, a series of
benches and the steps leading to the platform make it possible to sit next to
the artworks.
 Although the same general types of uses were observed for both the
Monument to Queen Victoria and Ming’s works, dialogue with the latter
works was more open, physical and creative. During lunchtime, the
observations were similar. An observation period done in the summer, during
a heat wave, revealed that the agora becomes a heat island, and individuals
were seen on the plaza’s perimeter, in the shade, and thus not in any direct
relation to the works. In the autumn, individuals sat on the benches and the
steps to eat lunch with their colleagues. As publics, they were detached from
the artworks. Although there were a large number of people around the
sculptures, they were still physically accessible, and some individuals were
seen approaching them. Strolling workers were seen stopping and looking at
them for a few seconds; tourists were able to walk next to them and touch
them. Five tourists, all of them in couples or groups, were seen taking
pictures, mainly of Taichi Single Whip: Because of the presence of the
workers, they generally stayed out of the agora and performed their activities
hastily.
Three other observation periods at various times of day and week proved
that these artworks have great potential for uses. Pedestrians, mainly tourists,
evidenced a great diversity of ways of looking at the sculptures when in their
proximity. They might look as they pass by, interest in one (or both) of the
sculptures might cause them to slow without stopping or they might be
encouraged to walk around it to appreciate it from all sides. People in
couples or groups were seen separating from each other to walk on different
sides of the artworks and join up again afterward. Touching the artworks,
mainly while passing, also proved to be a popular activity. For children, both
artworks could be perceived as structures to be touched and climbed:
Because of its smaller scale, Taichi Shadow Boxing was used as play
equipment, sometimes for several minutes, depending on whether the
children’s guardians decided to sit or keep walking.
Taking photographs was also a common activity for tourists, either of the
sculptures or together with them, especially on a Sunday afternoon. By far
the more engaging of the two sculptures was Taichi Single Whip. For young
people and tourists taking pictures, its anthropomorphic qualities offered an
incentive for imitation. Many groups of people were seen taking the tai chi
position portrayed in the work, showing a great sense of humour—although
their poses were not as original as they may have thought.
 Because it is made of granite and has a smooth surface, this section of the
square was also very popular among skateboarders, who were spotted during
almost every observation period outside the usual lunch hour. The agora,
which acts as a stage from where skateboarders can be seen, was generally
used as a space to practise tricks (Figure 10.3). In terms of uses of the
sculptures, Taichi Single Whip offered a challenging obstacle for teenagers
who wanted to defy gravity (as Stevens [2007] has noted, skateboarding is
driven by the ‘thrill of vertigo’). Indeed, one skateboarder was observed
jumping repeatedly on the figure’s leg. Skaters are looking for surfaces such
as ‘raised edges where movements on wheels involve sudden, thrilling
exposure to shifts in height and speed’ (Stevens, 2007:144). They can see
this potential for action in the long, smooth, slightly angled leg of Taichi
Single Whip, which offers controlled risk.

Figure 10.3 A teenager skateboarding around the works by Ju Ming on the public art platform, with a
child imitating the sculpture’s pose in the background (on the left)
Photo by Denise Caron (July 2012).

Distant Proximity: La Joute

The covering of the expressway made it possible to develop a second square

in the QIM, Place Jean-Paul Riopelle, a block east of Victoria Square. In this
location is a work titled La Joute (1974) by Jean-Paul Riopelle. Inspired by
Canadian Aboriginal mythology, this work is a sculptural group of 29 bronze
pieces within a fountain; it portrays animals playing a flag game around a
central tower. It was donated by a group of individuals and installed at the
Montreal Olympic Stadium prior to 1976; it was moved to its current
location, which was created especially for it, in 2002–2003. The relocation
gave rise to significant citizen protest, because people in Hochelaga-
Maisonneuve, the working-class neighbourhood where it was originally
located, felt that they were being robbed by the downtown business
community (Keable 2009). Facing the Palais des Congrès convention centre
and the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec office tower, the fountain
projects an international image of Montréal that matches the artist’s
reputation (Paquet 2008). The relocation also made it possible to integrate
technological devices into the fountain: in addition to the water, fire and fog
are used to create a scenario that the designers describe as an urban clock.
La Joute is used more than the other artworks in the district. Its successful
integration into the space and its spectacular nature make the fountain
sculpture an attractive object for contemplation. Its relationship with its
potential publics is expressed through tension: Its basin distances the viewer
even though it is visually close and its scale is not overpowering. Set in the
middle of a granite surface, it is highly visible in the space. Bordered by
streets and sidewalks, it encourages people, including cyclists, to look at it as
they pass and to converge toward it. In fact, the animated aspect of La Joute
literally reaches out to its publics: The water coming out of the tower at the
centre of the composition catches the attention of passers-by, as do the fog
and the circle of fire.
Observation reveals that the main form of public engagement with the
fountain is looking at it while passing. During lunch hours, the hot
temperatures discouraged people from sitting on the benches or steps around
the work, but workers and people attending conferences often turned their
heads to look at it. Figure 10.4 shows how people gather around the fountain
when the temperatures are comfortable. The fountain’s role as a meeting
point was observed once, when one worker joined another who was waiting
for him next to the artwork. A few tourists were seen taking pictures:
Someone travelling alone took a picture of himself by turning his camera on
himself. The water alone proved to be an attraction: Construction workers
combating the heat were seen touching it.
 On a weekday afternoon, many tourists were seen looking at the fountain
sculpture and photographing it. Sometimes these encounters had a multiplier
effect: For instance, when one couple started taking pictures and stayed on
site for a couple of minutes, groups of tourists started taking pictures of the
artwork as other passers-by watched.

Figure 10.4 Workers sitting and eating lunch on the benches and steps surrounding La Joute
Photo by Denise Caron (July 2012).

Children were seen around La Joute on a weekend afternoon, performing

actions that engaged not so much with the work itself but with elements of
its integration into the square. One was seen touching the water in the basin.
Later, two children started chasing each other around the basin, its circular
shape providing a stimulus to their play. During the same period, the
diversity of tourists increased, ranging from young adults to families and
older people. Teenagers were also seen spending time in the square: they
pointed and looked at the artwork, took pictures of themselves with it and
walked around it.
Occupons Montréal: An Exceptional, Revealing
Public
The preceding descriptions demonstrate that publics use artworks differently,
partly depending on their individual characteristics and their role in public
spaces, and partly due to the specificity of the artwork and the space into
which it is integrated. Because uses are determined based on actions by
individuals, types of publics emerge through analysis of individuals’
overlapping, frequent uses. But publics may also emerge from the
coexistence of similar individual uses. The occupation of Victoria Square by
the recent anti-capitalist Occupy movement corroborates this idea. As a
unique case, even though it was not filmed first-hand, it is a vibrant
illustration of uses, and it helps us understand that publics also respond to
the meanings and values embodied in an artwork.
On 15 October 2011, les indignés (the indignant ones) pitched tents in
Victoria Square to form a temporary city. On a symbolic level, the
landowners adjacent to the square embodied the capitalist and corporate
values that les indignés stood against. The occupation lasted six weeks, until
25 November. It did not take long for les indignés to make Victoria Square
their own. Almost immediately, they renamed the square La Place du Peuple
(the People’s Square; Bélair-Cirino 2011; Myles 2011a). With this gesture,
not only did they give the square a French-language name, but they also
suggested a democratic shift by erasing the Victorian and colonial heritage
associated with its original name. In addition, the Monument to Queen
Victoria was physically transformed. The sovereign was supplied with new
and ironic props: Someone placed Patriote flags in her hand. The Patriote
Rebellion led to armed conflict in 1837–1838, early in Victoria’s reign, when
French-speaking inhabitants of Lower Canada fought against the British
military occupier. This historical tension still exists today: On every Monday
preceding 25 May, Canadians celebrate Victoria Day, which is now officially
the Journée Nationale des Patriotes (National Patriots’ Day) in Québec. In
addition, the statue was adorned with a Guy Fawkes mask—the mask worn
by V, the anarchist comic-book character—and a sign saying ‘Aller de
l’avant/Zeitgeist/Moving Forward’ was hung around its neck.
Most important, as was observed at two different moments during the
occupation, the Monument to Queen Victoria was given a double function.
First, it became a support for informally produced and installed signs with
statements in both French and English, such as ‘Arrêtons le saccage’ (Let’s
stop the pillaging), ‘Nous bâtissons un monde meilleur’ (We’re building a
better world), ‘Do you feel it trickle down’ and ‘Can you really knead that
much dough?’ as well as demands to close a local animal shelter (‘Fermez le
berger blanc’; Figure 10.5). Through these gestures, the signs replaced the
sociopolitical order embodied by the monument with a new kind of order
that was explicitly democratic in nature. The only coherent thing about these
messages was that they were all demands; their bilingualism and diverse
content, however, reflected the heterogeneity of this microcosm of society
assembled by anti-capitalist values.
Second, Occupons Montréal restored one of the monument’s roles as a
place and a reason for gathering, derived from its function during
commemorative rituals. Régis Debray has described this kind of object as a
‘monument-message’: ‘Its sole use is symbolic: expressing a ceremony,
underpinning a ritual, calling upon posterity’ (Debray 1999:31). An example
of this is the ceremonies that take place on 11 November every year at
monuments and memorials to the end of the First World War (see Sumartojo,
this volume). Closer to our case is the march that takes place on the Journée
Nationale des Patriotes, during which people demonstrate in front of the
Monument to Queen Victoria and other symbols of the British Empire.
During the occupation, les indignés gathered at the base of the Victoria
monument to hold their regular assemblies, offering a concrete example of
participatory democracy that contrasts sharply with the constitutional
monarchy instituted in Canada by Queen Victoria in 1867.
Figure 10.5 The monument covered with signs during Occupons Montréal
Photo by Denise Caron (2011).

Occupons Montréal made it possible to identify a public unique to the

Monument to Queen Victoria: protesters. In this case, protesters were seen
rarely and only at specific times, but they were consciously and directly
engaged with the monument. They recognised this object’s meeting-place
function, as well as its social significance as a representation or embodiment
of values that may be celebrated or contested. Looking at how other
artworks in Victoria Square were treated by the protestors validates this: Les
indignés used the sculptures by Ju Ming, located in the northern section of
the square, only for stacking up objects (Figure 10.6). Moreover, protesters
have used the Monument to Queen Victoria on numerous occasions since the
1960s, which shows how significant a symbol it has been and continues to
be. For instance, in 1963, a bomb detonated by members of the Front de
Libération du Québec damaged the statue of the Queen (Choko 1990:107).
As their diverse signs showed, les indignés were far from being a
homogeneous group, although there was clearly a strong presence of
students and anti-capitalists. It was noted at the time that they had no
common or clear demand. Here, inclusivity was defined by a concurrent
presence in the square and by the fact that the individuals looked beyond
their own demands and welcomed everybody, including homeless people,
people with substance abuse problems and people with mental illness issues
(Myles 2011b). Protesters, as observed, defied comprehensive
representations of defined social groups as publics. At the same time, over
the course of the fieldwork done for this case, this was the only time that an
artwork became the trace of one public’s attempt to interact with another
public and the symbol of their efforts to live together.

Figure 10.6 All kinds of objects were stacked on Ju Ming’s Taichi Shadow Boxing and Taichi Single
Whip during the occupation
Photo by Denise Caron (November 2011).

Uses and Publics

The publics identified for the artworks in the QIM—workers, tourists,
protesters, pedestrians, children, teenagers and skateboarders—fluctuated in
intensity and frequency. So did their activities—looking, sitting,
photographing, posing, touching, climbing, skating and imitating. In this
project, filmed observation of everyday activities proved to be an effective
research method for identifying publics. Through data analysis, varieties of
publics were discerned by carefully observing repetitions of individual
gestures, and an understanding of these publics in relation to the specificity
of the respective artworks was gained. From a general point of view, this
research has offered a counterpoint to the public artopia mentioned in the
introduction: The common intentions and assertions frequently attributed to
the effects and benefits of artworks in public spaces have been replaced by
observations that may seem trivial, but are actually important.
Finally, the perspective of uses confirms that artworks in public spaces
can be an active part of the urban experience. As the recent rehabilitation of
the QIM indicates, it seems that every artwork—old or recent, site specific
or not, temporary or permanent, figurative or abstract—has the potential to
engage publics, even when the landscape design and the work’s materiality
may seem to keep people away. This can be explained by the fact that uses,
as observed during fieldwork, are a reaction to a potential for action that
publics perceive in artworks. The Monument to Queen Victoria is set back
from everyday life, because of the design of the square and the composition
of the pedestal; its uses are generally detached from the statue of the queen,
which is read as an element of the site. During exceptional events, however,
protesters reacted not to its physicality, but to its symbolic value. The works
by Ju Ming clearly have a strong presence in the site and attract a diversity
of uses. Although different in content, these works are placed in proximity to
their potential publics, and their uses confirm that they are material elements
in the site offering many possibilities. La Joute is a highly visible yet
inaccessible object in the centre of a unique space, and it becomes animated
when fog, water and fire effects are activated. When this fountain sculpture
becomes a spectacle, it has a multiplier effect: The artwork and the fountain
attract people who attract people, and so on.
Different artworks offer different levels, kinds and qualities of potential
for action. As the case of the QIM suggests, a diversity of artworks seems to
encourage a plurality of uses, which, by extension, seems to contribute to the
richness of the social life in urban public spaces, and that is particularly
interesting for socially homogeneous areas such as this one.

Acknowledgments
Research assistant Cecilia de la Mora and photographer Denise Caron made
invaluable contributions to the fieldwork for this study.

References

Atkinson, R. (2003) ‘Domestication by Cappuccino or Revenge on Urban

Space? Control and Empowerment in the Management of Public Spaces,’
Urban Studies, 40(9): 1829–1843.
Bélair-Cirino, M. (2011) ‘Occupons Montréal—La “place du Peuple”
s’organise,’ Le Devoir, October 19.
Bélanger, H. (2010) ‘Pour qui et à qui ce parc? Gentrification et
appropriation de l’espace public dans l’arrondissement du Sud-Ouest de
Montréal (Canada),’ Lien social et Politiques (63): 143–154.
Carr, S., Francis, M., Rivlin, L. and Stone, A. (1992) Public Space,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Choko, M. (1990) The Major Squares of Montreal, trans. Käthe Roth,
Montréal: Meridian Press.
Debray R. (1999) ‘Trace, forme ou message?,’ Les cahiers de médiologie, 7:
27–44.
de Certeau, M. (1990) L’ invention du quotidien 1. Arts de faire, Paris:
Gallimard.
Deutsche, R. (1996) ‘Agoraphobia,’ in R. Deutsche (ed.) Evictions: Art and
Spatial Politics, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 269–327.
Fraser, M. (1999) ‘Sur l’expérience de la ville,’ in M. Fraser, D. Gougeon
and M. Perrault (eds) Sur l’ expérience de la ville. Interventions en
milieu urbain, Montréal: Optica.
Germain, A. (2010) ‘Grandeurs et misères de la notion d’espace public,’ in
J.-P. Augustin and M. Favory (eds) 50 questions à la ville: comment
 penser et agir sur la ville (autour de Jean Dumas), Pessac: Maison des
Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine.
Ghorra-Gobin, C. (2001) ‘Réinvestir la dimension symbolique des espaces
publics,’ in C. Ghorra-Gobin (ed.) Réinventer le sens de la ville. Les
espaces publics à l’ heure globale. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Grafmeyer, Y. and J.-Y. Authier. (2008) Sociologie urbaine. 2nd Ed. Paris:
Armand Colin.
Habermas, J. (1974) ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),’
New German Critique, 3: 49–55.
Heinich, N. (1997) L’art contemporain exposé aux rejets. Études de cas,
Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon.
Keable, J. (2009) Les folles vies de La Joute de Riopelle. Les mésaventures
de l’art public, Montréal: Lux éditeur.
Kwon, M. (2002) One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational
Identity, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lacy, S. (1995) ‘Introduction: Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric
Journeys,’ in S. Lacy (ed) Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art,
Seattle: Bay Press.
Lamoureux, J. (1994) “Questioning the Public: Addressing the Response,” in
G. Baird and M. Lewis (eds) Queues, Riots and Rendez-vous:
Questioning the Public, Banff: Banff Arts Centre, Walter Phillips
Gallery.
Loubier, P. (2003) ‘De l’anonymat contemporain, entre banalité et forme
réticulaire,’ Parachute, 109: 60–71.
Loubier, P. and A.-M. Ninacs (eds) (2001) Les commensaux. Quand l’ art se
fait circonstance s, Montréal: Centre des arts actuels Skol.
Malone, K. (2002) ‘Street Life: Youth, Culture and Competing Uses of
Public Space,’ Environment & Urbanization, 14(2): 157–168.
Martin, P. (2007) ‘Ju Ming: dix-neuf sculptures chinoises à Montréal,’
Espace Sculpture, 81: 44–5.
Mitchell, D. (1995) ‘The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of
the Public, and Democracy,’ Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 85(1): 108–133.
Myles, B. (2011a) ‘Occupons Montréal—Les réfugiés du système financier,’
Le Devoir, October 29.
Myles, B. (2011b) ‘Montréal se joint au mouvement mondial des
“indignés”— Démocratie dans la rue à la “place du Peuple”,’ Le Devoir,
 October 17.
Paquet, S. (2008) ‘Usage, présence ou résistance: l’art et les artistes dans
l’espace public urbain,’ in Arts et territoires: vers une nouvelle économie
culturelle? 76th Congrès de l’ACFAS, Québec City, May 6–7.
http://chaire_fernand_dumont.ucs.inrs.ca/Mai2008/Paquet.pdf (accessed
June 9, 2009).
Poitras, C. (2003) ‘Tertiairisation et transformation de l’espace urbain: la rue
McGill à Montréal (1842–1934),’ Urban History Review/Revue d’
histoire urbaine, 31(2): 3–17.
Raven, A. (1989.) ‘Introduction,’ in A. Raven (ed) Art in the Public Interest,
London and Ann Arbor: UMI Press.
Rodriguez, V. (2009) ‘Mémoire ardente by Gilbert Boyer, or When Politics
Penetrates Contemporary Art,’ in A. Gérin and J. S. McLean (eds) Public
Art in Canada: Critical Perspectives, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Seleanu, A. (2007) ‘Ju Ming: sculptures calligraphiques,’ Vie des arts,
51(208): 50–51.
Stevens, Q. (2007) The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces,
London: Routledge.
Uzel, J.-P. (2010) ‘Quel est le public de l’art public?,’ in A. Gérin, Y.
Bergeron, D. Hardy and G. Lapointe (eds) Œuvres à la rue: pratiques et
discours émergents en art public, Montréal: Galerie de l’UQAM and
Département d’histoire de l’art de l’Université du Québec à Montréal.
Whyte, W. H. (1988) The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (videotape),
New York: Municipal Art Society of New York.
Zebracki, M., van der Vaart, R. and van Aalst, I. (2012) ‘Deconstructing
Public Artopia: Situating Public-art Claims within Practice,’ in M.
Zebracki (ed.), Public Artopia: Art in Public Space in Question,
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
11
Art Engagers
What Does Public Art Do to Its Publics? The
Case of the ‘Butt Plug Gnome’

Martin Zebracki

Introduction
Little is known about public-art perception and engagement in terms of the
publics, those for whom public art is fundamentally intended (cf. Hall 2003,
Zebracki et al. 2010). These publics can be virtually anyone: residents,
passers-by, workers, visitors and we academics, who may empirically
reflect on public art in situ or articulate it in the public sphere. Whilst taking
multidisciplinary bodies of literature on public art into account, this study
provides insight into what I term the art engager: the human subject, as part
of public art’s publics; a subject who is, either consciously or
unconsciously, in a constant, iterative interplay with the object of art, with
space (which is multi-scalar), with himself or herself (performative by
nature) and with time. From a human geographical perspective, this chapter
analyses publics’ bodily, socio-material as well as mental engagements with
public art, based on a detailed empirical study of Paul McCarthy’s Santa
Claus. In 2002 the Dutch city of Rotterdam, the second largest city in the
Netherlands and host to one of the largest ports in the world, introduced to
its publics this controversial sculpture, which in popular speech is called the
‘Butt Plug Gnome’ (Figure 11.1). After a long sociopolitical tug of war over
its location within the city, the artwork entered Eendrachtsplein, a city-
centre public space, in 2008. This site is located at the eventful crossroads
of the contemplated consumer and cultural axes of the city of Rotterdam.
This precise location, or rather confrontation, has a powerful meaning in
that the artist’s rationale is to pass ironic criticism on consumer society by
this work of art (cf. Sculpture International Rotterdam 2006).
In 2010–2012, I carried out media analysis, in situ observations
(including visual fieldwork), expert panels, focus groups and ethnographic
interviews regarding the publics’ engagement with Santa Claus, to provide
a better understanding of their responses to art in public space. This chapter
addresses passive, active and interventionist behaviours of the publics in
relation to Santa Claus from the moment of its installation onwards (2008–
present). These behaviours highlight the area of tension between the
publics’ everyday practices and the expectations of the planners and
policymakers who have enabled the purchase and placement of the artwork.
Moreover, the publics’ engagements and the associated uses and misuses of
Santa Claus convey rich empiricisms. The chapter concludes with an
agenda for further research on publics’ engagements with public art.

Figure 11.1 Santa Claus (2001), a 6-metre-high bronze sculpture by Paul McCarthy in
Eendrachtsplein, Rotterdam
Photo by Maria Şalaru (June 2011).

Art Engagers and Embodying Geographies of

Public Art
From the earliest times art has been integral to human culture [… P]erhaps the central question
for such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle concerned our involvement with art: the response we
have to beautiful things, the moral and salubrious powers of art, and perhaps most of all, the
power of art to transform and transcend, leading us into a condition of enhanced perception that
may be wondrous, dangerous, and at times overwhelming. (Berleant [1932] 1991:9)

Public art may be seen as an intermediating agency in social culture and

thus as a powerful yet elusive player in spatial politics (Deutsche 1996;
Kester 1998). Its existence is often linked to institutional and policy
contexts that enable public-art initiatives, particularly percent–for–art
regulations (Cartiere and Willis 2008; Fazakerley 2008; Zebracki 2011).
These contexts usually do not straightforwardly offer free reign to artists
working in the public realm. Here, artists generally do not enjoy much
artistic liberty or acknowledgement, and cannot easily defend their artworks
once these are placed or performed in public space; think of heated public
debates about ‘dreadful’ artworks and vandalism.
Public art is geographically peculiar in that it integrates space and people
as part of the content, and as such, public art is situated in the public sphere.
That is, it manifests itself within public space that can constitute a common
ground but can also be open to conflicting responses, which means that
public art is situated within publicness (cf. Mitchell 1992; Hein 2006).
Hence, public art ontologically embodies a rich human geographical
complexity; in line with this complexity, in the words of Krauss (1986:37),
‘the specificity of the site[/space] is not the subject [matter] of the work, but
—in its articulation of the movement of the viewer’s body-in-destination—
its medium’.
Some studies on the shift from art in the art world to art in the public
world have recently been developed at the intersections between the
humanities and the social sciences (Senie 2003; Kwon 2004; Hein 2006;
Knight 2008), as have studies on how cities have started to promote the
opening up of public spaces to art (Hayden 1995; Finkelpearl 2001; Hall
2003; Miles and Hall 2005; Sharp et al. 2005; Pollock and Paddison 2010).
Nevertheless, a geographical approach to public art and the role of the
publics—more particularly the socio-spatial and socio-temporal
complexities that are tied up with their in situ engagements—is notably
lacking in analyses, as also acknowledged by Hall and Smith (2005) and
Zebracki et al. (2010).
Works of public art involve preparation, realisation, potential evaluation
and the everyday reality thereof. Apart from public space, it is therefore
important to acknowledge that public art also involves public time. Both the
artwork and the space are in interplay with the art engager (i.e. the subject),
and hence there is a subject–object–space–time nexus. This nexus implies
that elements of subject, object, space and time exist by the grace of each
other. Such a nexus is thus more-than-just-human, although it rests in the
eye of the art engager—see also Harvey’s (2009) discussion of the nature of
space, which, according to him, lies in the eyes and practices of human
beings.
The art engagers’ behaviours and experiences are socially relational,
because they are negotiated amongst each other. The negotiation process,
being part and parcel of the sphere of the ‘publicness’ of public art, is
consequently manifested in spaces that obviously epitomise social
differences; think of streets, parks, markets, squares and stations (Massey
and Rose 2003). The art engager is situated within a continuum between
passive mental involvement, on one hand, and active, socio-physical, tactile
and interventionist involvement, on the other. In Lefebvrian terms, the
former corresponds largely to the notion of mental space and the latter to
material as well as lived space (Lefebvre 1991). Through mental and
material/lived engagements, the art engagers intrinsically embody and
specify the subject–object–space–time nexus.
Public-art studies have generally nourished rather than challenged
ostensibly ‘critical’ public-art practices. Many axioms have been developed
over time regarding the ‘unique’ specificities of what public art ‘does’ to
places and people over time (Phillips 1988; Miles 1997; Kwon 2004)—
think of public art for the embellishment of promenades, social cohesion in
neigh-bourhoods, the economic regeneration of city-centre flagship sites
and the cultural empowerment of local residents (Roberts and Marsh 1995;
Hall and Robertson 2001; Zebracki et al. 2010). These axioms are not seen
as problematic within the current neoliberal context of ‘selling’ city spaces.
The relevance of this place promotion context in understanding art and
urban development is stressed by Cameron and Coaffee (2005), Deutsche
(1996) and Sharp (2007), amongst others. The Santa Claus sculpture can be
contemplated precisely as a critique of such commodification of urban
public space and of neoliberal consumer society in general.
Both the academic literature and art practice have primarily accepted
perspectives about public art that originate with its experts. These include
cultural professionals, policymakers, planners, administrators and pubic
art’s individual or collective producers. Moreover, there are experts
involved in cultivating public art’s institutional, professional and cultural
policy contexts, such as commissioning and funding public agencies.
However, both research and practice should also take into account voices
and actions from public art’s engagers, as public art is theoretically meant
for them (Doezema and Hargrove 1977; Zebracki 2013). This is the
problematic background against which I attempt to empirically situate
geographical articulations of the art engager, who differentially embodies
the subject–object–space–time nexus of public art.

‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’

In synch with contemporary trends in the international art world, in the year
2000 Sculpture International Rotterdam advised Rotterdam city council to
purchase Santa Claus by the American sculptor Paul McCarthy: ‘This is
Holland’ [meaning that the Dutch tolerate a lot], the argument went (Jan
van Adrichem, quoted in Schoonenboom 2005). In the purview of cities’
contemporary general concern with flagship art (Fleming 2007; Miles
2007), the council took the proffered advice, and in 2002 bought Santa
Claus for 280,000 euros, even though the artist feared that his sculpture
would be too shocking for public space (Schoonenboom 2005). That said,
McCarthy abstained from making any further comment about his sculpture
and was not involved in its placement.
The 6-metre-tall figure holds two objects: a bell and a very ambiguous
Christmas tree that resembles phallic folkloric symbolism or, rather, an anal
sex toy, hence its epithet ‘Butt Plug Gnome’. Sculpture International
Rotterdam considers Santa Claus ‘the bronze king of instant satisfaction,
symbol of consumer enjoyment’ (Sculpture International Rotterdam
2006:91). The Rotterdam-based cultural sociologist Ton Bevers construes
Santa Claus as ‘a still from the performance art of Paul McCarthy, which
has been placed in the real world by cut and paste’ (Bevers 2008:n.p.).
Santa Claus is, as reflected by its media coverage, one of the most
spectacular, talked about and controversial public artworks in the
Netherlands, and hence, it is data rich.
Considering the Dutch ‘Thorbecke principle’, which argues that the state
should not judge science and the arts (Zebracki 2011), local politicians
talked about this artwork but refrained from attempting to explain it. In
2005—three years after the public purchase of Santa Claus—the city’s
alderman for culture unveiled the sculpture in the inner courtyard of
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, heralded by the words ‘Santa Claus is
coming to town’ (AD 2005).
This semi-open place was not the location proposed by Sculpture
International Rotterdam. Since its purchase, the sculpture, which to some is
controversial because of its sexual association, had been subject to a
sociopolitical conflict about its location in the city, in which the work’s
critique of consumer society served as a guiding argument. Eventually, in
2008, after years of lobbying by a local entrepreneurs’ association, the
council ‘released’ Santa Claus from the courtyard and moved it to its
current location in Eendrachtsplein (Figure 11.2).
Figure 11.2 On the occasion of Santa Claus’s placement in Eendrachtsplein in 2008, Sculpture
International Rotterdam published a one-shot newspaper edition titled ‘Free Santa’, which gives a
clear impression of the heated public debate about Santa Claus
Photo by Martin Zebracki (April 2013). Newspaper courtesy of Sculpture International Rotterdam.
Researching the Subject–Object–Space–Time
Nexus: Understanding Santa Claus from the
Perspectives of its Engagers
To understand the reception of this artwork, in 2010–2012, I carried out
media analysis based on approximately 100 media items: mainly newspaper
articles but also radio broadcasts, television reports and social media. I
undertook photographic fieldwork and in situ visual observations. I also ran
two expert panel discussions with a diverse range of public-art experts and
local representatives and three focus group discussions at local universities
(two with participants from a geography background and one with
participants from a cultural studies background, all of whom in the context
of this study can be considered indirect art engagers); and I undertook 21
ethnographic, in-depth interviews with people who either lived or worked
near the artwork (who can be regarded as direct art engagers).
The purpose of the focus group dialogues was to present, clarify and
elaborate the range of thoughts found in the media material and expert
panel discussions. With the help of mental mapping exercises (Hayden
1995), topics were generated for the in-depth interviews—an empowering
method to gain narrative knowledge of what is emotionally sensed as
relevant to the informants’ life courses and behaviours (Silverman 2010).
The insights also provided anchor points for the in situ visual observations
of the art engagers’ responses towards the artwork.
The interactive social context of my research endeavours was conducive
to gaining reflexive insights into the art engagers’ responses towards Santa
Claus, as seen within the subject–object–space–time nexus. On this the
overall methodological purpose was to reveal and provide a better
understanding of the art engagers’ passive, active and interventionist
behaviours regarding art in public space.
This community-engaged research approach captured a complexity of
events, structures and processes, as well as the behaviours, opinions and
experiences of the art engagers and me. My research focus on an anecdotal,
single-case study draws from the epistemological, grounded approach of
‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1991). This conceptual framing
mechanism provides what Haraway (1991:195) calls a ‘partial perspective’
on the art engagers’ embodying geographies of public art. Such partiality is
not ‘“[from] above, from nowhere, from simplicity”, but from ground level,
from somewhere and from complexity’. In this sense, situated knowledge is
embodied, because ‘it is grounded in the physicality of specific human
bodies and their artefacts’ (Barnes 2000:743). Thus, situated knowledge is
also grounded in public art and engagers’ relational experience, sense and
perception of, and hence response to art in its public place: the concrete,
meaningful and haptic space as opposed to an impalpable and tacit socio-
spatial context (Tuan 1977).
Although this study offers partial perspectives inherent in situated
knowledges, the case of Santa Claus also acts as a window onto the current
academic and professional discourse about the socio-spatial and socio-
temporal roles of art in urban public space. As such, this study provides
empirical details about the engagers’ ‘lived through’ spatial dimensions of
public art.

Santa Claus and Art Engagers

Social Dimensions

I observed a socially diverse composition of Santa Claus’s engagers in

Eendrachtsplein. This was also something highlighted by many
respondents. As revealed by my observations, individual and group
interviews, mental mapping exercises and media analysis, such social
diversity instigates a negotiation of the roles, uses, misuses and meanings of
the artwork in relation to its particular place. This is why some believed that
the behaviours in the kaleidoscopic Eendrachtsplein and the sculpture,
which is meant to communicate with society at large, match well:
Eendrachtsplein is in some respects an innocuous locality, a place much frequented by all sorts of
people—public transport passengers, hipsters, residents, businessmen, students, clubbers, and so
on, both young and old … Many strata of society have a chance to dwell upon this sculpture,
about which presumably everyone holds an opinion.
(Respondent 13, focus group, female, cultural studies student)
 Thus, this respondent argued that the sculpture fits in well with its
socially dynamic setting. Some immediate residents dwelled further on the
sculpture’s social match. For example, one respondent (Respondent 32,
male, local worker) noted, ‘I think the city council thought, like: “Oh gee,
what are we going to do now?” So let’s put it here. Thus, on sympathetic
grounds the artwork doesn’t fit in here at best, but people have basically
accepted the confluence of events’. Another respondent conveyed such
social common ground in a different way: ‘Many residents are negative, but
I believe this general negative attitude actually binds people together’
(Respondent 39, male dorm student, immediate resident).
Furthermore, some respondents regarded Santa Claus as a massive
sculpture in a too small-scale and object-rich, hence full place. On a more
positive note, a few people, mainly local workers and residents, considered
the artwork’s scale the identity marker of the place:
I have to say I really like this sculpture; it’s so big, it strikes me. I also like the idea that so many
people make a song and dance about it. The Butt Plug Gnome is exactly the identity of this
square; it’s the boss of this place.
(Respondent 32, male, local worker)

Over time, in the observed reciprocities between the art engagers, the
Santa Claus sculpture and place, there was a wide range of socio-spatial
appropriations, including photo-taking and tactile engagements with the
sculpture, a phenomenon that a few residents continually experienced:
The sculpture practically produces a kind of Petrus effect [referring to pilgrims who touch and
kiss the foot of the statue of St. Peter at St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City], which I really like
about the work in this place. It’s not that people actually kiss the gnome’s feet, but they,
especially children, often sit on them, particularly on sunny days. And people are always taking
snapshots … I also often see little children waving their hands to the sculpture … The gnome
becomes a pampered child.
(Respondent 33, female, long-term resident)

The observations show that taking photos of Santa Claus, especially

among visitors, is an extremely popular social activity: ‘It seems like many
are taking a snap in the outskirts of Efteling [a famous Dutch amusement
park, comparable in reputation to Disneyland]’ (Respondent 47, male, long-
term resident). Yet, some respondents try to look beyond such inattentive
behaviour:
 This work holds a great attraction for many. Everyday people, often youngsters, are sitting on the
gnome’s foot, while others are pointing at and taking photos of the work, and in so doing you
hope that they give a moment’s thought to why that sculpture is here and what it means. Such
behaviour that is only about having fun reminds me of pictures taken of people who are standing
straddle-legged over a war canon, because that is seen as funny. I acknowledge that Santa Claus
can elicit similar funny responses, but they should be understood in a different, profound way.
Come on people, raise the bar a bit!
(Respondent 37, female, long-term resident)

The social behaviours of many people in the square can be understood in

the context of the dynamic flux of urban signs, that is the bigger, complex
picture of the urban landscape, as illustrated by one interviewee: ‘The long
and the short of this artwork and place are the visual stimuli that evoke very
instant, impulsive, primitive responses’ (Respondent 47, male, long-term
resident). One immediate resident acknowledged that she finds such
intuitive behaviour very intriguing:
Each day groups of people, even the most macho men, pose in front of the sculpture, while they
cannot see me looking down on them through my window. This can really hold my attention, also
to see passers-by in the distance who, while carrying suitcases, are pointing at the sculpture in a
surprising reflex.
(Respondent 48, female, resident)

These ad hoc social conducts of passers-by can be seen in the context of

the art site as situated within the infrastructural fabric of the city. The site is
located close to the central train station and directly next to a metro and bus
stop, and acts as the main hub of both the shopping and the museum area.
Many behaviours and voices indicated that the piece of art is therefore
conspicuous among users of public space.

Political Dimensions

I perceived that the respondents’ appropriations of Santa Claus generally

did not enact on political critiques of capitalist society and consumerism
which were intended by the artwork, as also emphasised by a long-term
resident:
I believe this sculpture represents the emptiness of consumer society and its insanity, but I’ve
never heard any person on site really pondering ‘well, what a world is this!’ Rather, people are
 often standing in a large group in front of the statue and then rush through towards the shop to
buy a wide-screen TV [laughter].
(Respondent 46, male, long-term resident)

Furthermore, the observed experiential dimensions foregrounded a

plethora of ambiguous physical and symbolic interpretations of Santa Claus
in relation to its place and its engagers, notably, ugly/beautiful,
decent/offensive, risqué/conservative, religious/secular, Christmas tree/butt
plug, illusion/reality and elite/mass culture. These ambiguities of Santa
Claus have regularly been used, or misused, as ground for promotional,
sociopolitical interventions: ‘They decorate this sculpture during various
frivolous campaigns and demonstrations’ (Respondent 33, female, long-
term resident), including health campaigns regarding safe-sex practice and
malaria prevention, and the promotion of democratic parties, sporting
events, and female empowerment. In regards to the latter: ‘One day some
ladies covered the sculpture with a yellow tricot jersey that had a
spectacular knitted size. Really, this work brings this place to life’ (ibid.;
Figure 11.3).
Some respondents indicated that certain ‘insiders’ had explicitly used, or
rather misused, Santa Claus as a negotiating object for latent political
agendas in the urban public sphere: ‘These kinds of matters immediately
become part of the infighting in this city between the populists, shall we
say, and the traditional city government’ (Respondent 47, male, long-term
resident). As conveyed by the ‘captain’ of the local entrepreneurs’
association, the so-called Butt Plug Gnome lobbyist (Respondent 50,
female), the local populist parties were in favour of Santa Claus to
symbolically stress invigorating policies, whereas the traditional, rather
more conservative parties held this work in cultural abomination.
Several residents, moreover, strongly experienced the exchange of
feelings and opinions about Santa Claus, which overall shaped a
predominantly local acceptance of the sculpture in this place. Nonetheless,
one long-term resident stated that Santa Claus ‘made a vicious attack’ on
her and strongly disapproved of the city council’s rationales for situating the
sculpture in Rotterdam’s public space:
Rotterdam believes that it lends credit to its contemplated importance by purchasing and placing
this controversial statue. I think this is an egocentric policy decision, instead of a more spiritually
informed one that gives you food for thought about humanity and what people do here every day
… This sculpture and the related decisions are definitely minuses.
 (Respondent 37, female, long-term resident)

Figure 11.3 In 2010, the local entrepreneurs’ association initiated the emancipatory project ‘A yellow
jersey for Santa Claus’, entailing a group of female residents knitting pieces that were assembled into
one jersey. The photograph shows a booklet that visually documents this project, which is an
illustration of one of the many sociopolitical appropriations of Santa Claus
Photo by Martin Zebracki (April 2013). Booklet courtesy of Jeanne Hogenboom and Anke Griffioen.

The media sources particularly highlighted one sociopolitical attitude

towards the artwork, in particular its size and its alleged representation of
an anal plug: offence. For example, Leonard Geluk, chairman of the
Christian Democratic Appeal party, argued, ‘It should just be the most
natural thing in the world to walk with your children across a square
without encountering such an obscene work of art’ (Rotterdams Dagblad
2003). This narrow focus of the media was also noticed by the ‘Butt Plug
Gnome lobbyist’: ‘I find the media quite superficial in that they only
addressed the ‘butt plug’ and its alleged scabrous contents, and argued that
children on site would take serious umbrage over this work’ (Respondent
50, female). In this sense, the media were not that much engaged with the
deeper political realities of the capitalist consumer practices that Santa
Claus critiques.
Economic Dimensions

There were also some playful commercial engagements with Santa Claus
prior to its placement in Eendrachtsplein. The local entrepreneurs’
association contemplated using Santa Claus as a marketing tool for the
shopping area. One respondent noted the associations’ lobbying activities:
Many local shopkeepers were really keen on bringing the sculpture to the neighbourhood, and
they expressed this enthusiasm by placing small garden gnomes behind their shop windows.
These gnomes would definitely draw attention and be a wink at the local authority that had to
decide on the sculpture’s destination.
(Respondent 39, male, resident)

The often positive, light-hearted responses to the artwork from visitors

had prompted some locals to take a more affirmative attitude towards it. For
some retailers in the neighbourhood, this sculpture has also become a
business tool: ‘Many tourists get a map from the information office which
shows the statue, and they may well think, “Okay, let’s see that artwork”.
And when they get here, they might also think: “Oh, look, a dress shop.
Let’s go inside”’ (Respondent 38, male, shopkeeper). On this many voices
conveyed that Santa Claus serves as a tourist draw—the artwork even
draws people from outside the city: ‘Particularly in summertime curious
tourists come in bunches … In that respect this sculpture is a positive
magnet and yields positive interest’ (Respondent 42, male, long-term
resident)— ‘The attention is tremendous, you should sit by my window for
a day and encounter this yourself!’ (Respondent 43, female, long-term
resident).
In my field observations and based on conversations, I noticed that many
residents experienced Santa Claus as having a landmark function and hence
its place as an eye-catching venue in the everyday consumption of public
space: ‘The sculpture really attracts attention if you’ve never been here
before. Of course, you can’t miss it, certainly not when you walk from the
station. It almost looks you straight in the eye’ (Respondent 49, female,
immediate resident). One resident commented that the artwork’s
conspicuousness, and hence its marker function, is perceived to a rather
greater extent by ‘outsiders’:
A tourist [visitor] wanders the city totally differently, much more consciously I think, whereas
someone who’s familiar with the city no longer sees some of the ‘obvious’ things. You recognise
 and know them, but you no longer really see them.
(Respondent 49, female, immediate resident)

A respondent conveyed that Santa Claus was in a sense a waste of

money, and she mockingly added,
It was really a sort of getting used to such a huge mastodon; even my dog was frightened by it.
But in the end this intimidating hugeness turned out better than expected. I really don’t see it
anymore, but my dog does in a way; well, he even cheerfully pees against it [laughter].
(Respondent 34, female, long-term resident)

Furthermore, a respondent (Respondent 47, male, long-term resident)

argued that, in winter, the oliebollenkraam (doughnut stall) that appears
next to Santa Claus capitalises on the popularity, or rather notoriety, of this
sculpture by selling oliebollen (doughnuts) in the shape of a butt plug.
Moreover, according to a resident, now and then, the artwork is also used as
background for musical performances:
A while ago there was a combo from abroad which just started to play, right in front of the
sculpture. They took this work as a kind of stage; perhaps they had a deeper meaning in doing so.
Well, after a couple of gigs the police blew the whistle on them and they had to go.
(Respondent 49, female)\

Santa Claus can also be a trigger for locals and visitors to valorise their
everyday consumption of space, even in pedagogical settings:
Time and again I notice pupils in school classes around this sculpture, who are holding sheets in
their hands. These are probably assignments, and in a very playful way the pupils do these
assignments, while touching the work and talking about it with each other and even with some
passers-by.
(Respondent 33, female, long-term resident)

Some immediate residents, moreover, experienced guided tour groups

where the guide was explaining the (supposed) meaning of the work to the
group. This activity was also observed directly in the research.

Reflections and Concluding Thoughts

The empirical analyses—classified under social, political and economic
dimensions—have tried to provide insight into the art engagers’ passive,
active and interventionist behaviours towards art in public space. To
understand engagers’ responses to a piece of public art, here it is useful to
recognise the many ways that people have engaged with the particularities
of Santa Claus and its place. Generally, striking elements in this respect
were that Santa Claus was used as a marketing and entrepreneurial tool for
the neighbourhood, a city symbol and a tourist magnet. Moreover, Santa
Claus incited social and tactile engagements within urban public space and
a public bench for photo opportunities. Saliently, some shopkeepers noted
the paradoxical functionality of Santa Claus in its place, in that it is
concurrently an indictment of commercialism and a touristic and hence
commercial attraction. Santa Claus actually draws tourists who are
primarily using the artwork as a backdrop for photo taking.
This study indicates that the bodily, mental and reified elements of public
art reveal configurations of knowledges of those who produce public art and
those for whom public art is produced within urban development. In this
sense, public art should be mainly regarded not as a product as such but as
Lacy (1995) suggests, as a process of value finding, a set of philosophies
and an ethical pact embedded within broader sociocultural agendas and
within the art engagement in particular.
Art engagers interacted within both the negotiation of the place and the
negotiation of the artwork. I sensed that the experiences they expressed
during the synergetic focus group discussions and the interview dialogues
were generally not just standing on their own. The respondents related
negative, neutral and positive experiences to each other. This relational
process created a public platform involving rather more mediation than
sheer conflict of opinions. The engagers’ voices suggest that Santa Claus
serves not so much to embellish urban space or convey meanings but more
to provide an open social sphere where people express and share
experiences, thoughts and critiques.
As such, this study offers a hands-on, reflexive, idiosyncratic perspective
from the art engagers. The engagers’ socio-spatial embodiments of public
art imply various interrelations to space, time and culture, which is
particularly sensed from the ground rather than from above within public
art’s stipulating institutional and productionist conditions.
 The nature of this research, which was based on the epistemic principle
of situated knowledges (Haraway 1991), shows that public art is a domain
of contested experiences, discourses and responses which are all situated in
the subject–object–space–time nexus. Accordingly, the engagers’ attitudes
towards art in public space are too complex to be simply generalised.
Nonetheless, this study’s implied inductive approach set out and contributed
to the ‘state of the public art’ by obtaining idiosyncratic data that allow the
theorisation of art in public place on the basis of engagers’ in situ responses
to it. This, in turn, might provide insights into learning moments within
other public-art case studies, such as in Ragin’s (1994) ‘retroductive’
approach. Thus, the particularities of this study served as ‘opportunities to
learn’ (Stake 2000) about the subject–object–space–time nexus more
generally, and in this way theory may be built beyond one particular
situation, as an ‘analytic generalisation’ (Yin 2008).
The different engaging geographies of Santa Claus accentuated a variety
of ‘body-in-destinations’ of this artwork (Krauss 1986). Future research
may further elaborate on how the subject–object–space–time nexus is
bodily constructed and reconstructed. Further research could draw on a
grounded and bodily sensuous approach to critically engage with topical
issues of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion of urban communities through
the windows of public art. Such research could further examine the extent
to which diverse publics are involved in the preparation, realisation,
potential evaluation and mundane realities of public art. What kinds of
everyday socio-spatial inclusiveness should be pursued through art in the
city? What might be desirable uses of public art, in these terms, and misuses
that should be avoided and according to whom?

Acknowledgements
This chapter is a reworked version of Zebracki (2012): ‘Engaging
Geographies of Public Art: Indwellers, the “Butt Plug Gnome” and Their
Locale,’ Social & Cultural Geography, 13(7): 735–758. The current
analysis was produced in the Cultural Geography Group at Wageningen
University and in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds in
2013–2014.
References
AD (2005) ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,’ AD, September 26.
Barnes, T. (2000) ‘Situated Knowledge,’ in R. Johnston, D. Gregory, G.
Pratt and M. Watts (eds) The Dictionary of Human Geography, Oxford:
Blackwell. Berleant, A. ([1932] 1991) Art and Engagement,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Bevers, T. (2008) ‘Lezing Ton Bevers: Santa Claus op Zijn Bestemming?,’
http://www.sculptureinternationalrotterdam.nl/column/081128_lezing_T
on_Bevers.php (accessed April 14, 2011).
Cameron, S. and Coaffee, J. (2005) ‘Art, Gentrification and Regeneration—
From Artist as Pioneer to Public Arts,’ International Journal of Housing
Policy, 5(1): 39–58.
Cartiere, C. and Willis, S. (eds) (2008) The Practice of Public Art, New
York: Routledge.
Deutsche, R. (1996) Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Doezema, M. and Hargrove, J. (1977) The Public Monument and its
Audience, Kent: The Kent State University Press.
Fazakerley, R. (2008) Negotiating Public Space: Discourses of Public Art,
Adelaide: University of South Australia.
Finkelpearl, T. (2001) Dialogues in Public Art, Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Fleming, R. (2007) The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community
through Public Art and Urban Design, London: Merrell.
Hall, T. (2003) ‘Opening up Public Art’s Spaces: Art, Regeneration and
Audience,’ in M. Miles (ed) Cultures and Settlements: Advances in Art
and Urban Futures, Bristol: Intellect Press.
Hall, T. and Robertson, I. (2001) ‘Public Art and Urban Regeneration:
Advocacy, Claims and Critical Debates,’ Landscape Research, 26(1): 5–
26.
Hall, T. and Smith, S. (2005) “Public Art in the City: Meanings, Values,
Attitudes and Roles,” in M. Miles and T. Hall (eds) Interventions:
Advances in Art and Urban Futures Vol. IV, Bristol: Intellect.
Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Women, New York: Routledge.
Harvey, D. (2009) Social Justice and the City, Athens: The University of
Georgia Press.
Hayden, D. (1995) The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public
History, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hein, H. (2006) Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently, Lanham:
AltaMira.
Kester, G. (ed.) (1998) Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from
Afterimage, Durham: Duke University Press.
Knight, C. (2008) Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Krauss, R. (1986) Richard Serra: Sculpture, New York: Museum of Modern
Art.
Kwon, M. (2004) One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational
Identity, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lacy, S. (ed) (1995) Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle:
Bay Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell.
Massey, D. and Rose, G. (2003) Personal Views: Public Art Research
Project, Milton Keynes: The Open University.
Miles, M. (1997) Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures,
London: Routledge.
Miles, M. (2007) Cities and Cultures, London: Routledge.
Miles, M. and Hall, T. (2005) Interventions: Advances in Art and Urban
Futures Vol. IV, Bristol: Intellect.
Mitchell, W. (ed) (1992) Art and the Public Sphere, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Phillips, P. (1988) ‘Out of Order: The Public Art Machine,’ Artforum, 23(4):
92–97.
Pollock, V. and Paddison, R. (2010) ‘Embedding Public Art: Practice,
Policy and Problems,’ Journal of Urban Design, 15(3): 335–356.
Ragin, C. (1994) Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of
Method, Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press.
Roberts, M. and Marsh, C. (1995) ‘For Art’s Sake: Public Art, Planning
Policies and the Benefits for Commercial Property,’ Planning Practice
and Research, 10(2): 189–198.
Rotterdams Dagblad (2003) ‘“Aanstootgevende Kabouter” in Stadscentrum
Ongewenst,’ March 5.
Schoonenboom, M. (2005) ‘De Affaire Buttplug,’ de Volkskrant, September
22.
Sculpture International Rotterdam (2006) From Zadkine to McCarthy: A
Guide to the Rotterdam International Sculpture Collection, Rotterdam:
Stichting Centrum Beeldende Kunst.
Senie, H. (2003) ‘Reframing Public Art: Audience Use, Interpretation, and
Appreciation,’ in A. McClellan (ed) Art and Its Publics: Museum
Studies at the Millennium, Oxford: Blackwell.
Sharp, J. (2007) ‘The Life and Death of Five Spaces: Public Art and
Community Regeneration in Glasgow,’ Cultural Geographies, 14(2):
274–292.
Sharp, J., Pollock, V. and Paddison, R. (2005) ‘Just Art for a Just City:
Public Art and Social Inclusion in Urban Regeneration,’ Urban Studies,
42(5/6): 1001–1023.
Silverman, D. (2010) Doing Qualitative Research, Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Stake, R. (2000) “Case Studies,” in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds) The
Handbook of Qualitative Research, Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Yin, R. (2008) Case Study Research: Design and Methods, Thousand Oaks:
Sage.
Zebracki, M. (2011) ‘Does Cultural Policy Matter in Public-Art
Production? The Netherlands and Flanders Compared, 1945–Present,’
Environment and Planning A, 43(12): 2953–2970.
Zebracki, M. (2012) ‘Engaging Geographies of Public Art: Indwellers, the
“Butt Plug Gnome” and Their Locale,’ Social & Cultural Geography,
13(7): 735–758.
Zebracki, M. (2013) ‘Beyond Public Artopia: Public Art as Perceived by Its
Publics,’ GeoJournal, 78(2), 303–317.
Zebracki, M., Van Der Vaart, R. and Van Aalst, I. (2010) ‘Deconstructing
Public Artopia: Situating Public-Art Claims within Practice,’ Geoforum,
41(5): 786–795.
12
As Prop and Symbol
Engaging with Works of Art in Public Space

Karen A. Franck

I have entered Brooklyn’s Prospect Park from Grand Army Plaza a great
many times. Yet only rarely have I glimpsed the bronze statue of a man atop
a marble and granite pedestal that sits on a lawn near the entrance to the
park. Nor, until very recently, have I observed it closely, noticed the children
climbing the steps at the foot of the pedestal or determined its history. To my
surprise, I discovered that the sculptor is Frederick MacMonnies and the
architect Stanford White, both well-revered artists of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, and that the subject is James S. T. Stranahan who, as
president of the Brooklyn Park Commission, is recognised as the chief
founder of Prospect Park.
And so it is for many monuments: They merge with the background of
daily urban life, at best just seen at a glance in passing. If they represent a
particular person or event, often the connection between the work and its
subject has long become obscure. This near invisibility of monuments is
frequently decried with commentators quoting the Austrian author Robert
Musil who wrote in the 1920s: ‘There is nothing as invisible in this world as
a monument’ (1957:61). Indeed, his comment captures my experience
exactly. Frequently, however (although it is hard to know how often),
monuments do draw people’s attention and become sites they occupy and
modify, both in relation to and independent of the monument’s intended
meaning. Musil himself noted one such use of monuments: The pedestal of a
statue monument may become ‘a haven for rest’, as when children, tired of
climbing up and down the steps at the foot of the monument to James
Stranahan simply sit on them.
Sitting on the steps of pedestal, with a statue above them, is just one albeit
very popular way people make practical use of a work of art. Once one starts
noticing, it becomes quickly apparent that people engage physically with
various kinds of art works in public urban space including those with no
commemorative purpose. We can envision the urban landscape as a complex
field of sites and conditions that offer various possibilities for engagement,
offering opportunities for practical and expressive activities. Within this field
are objects and spaces that seem to act as strong magnets, drawing attention
and actions to them, becoming smaller force fields within the larger realm,
both regularly and sporadically. Works of art, including monuments and
memorials, often serve as such magnets. The activities they invite,
particularly those that are acts of commemoration or grieving, are consistent
not only with the symbolism of the work but also with its intended use.
Other activities may fall outside the expected and the planned, revealing
imaginative and possibly transgressive kinds of appropriation as people,
through their interactions with the urban landscape and its discrete elements,
create ‘loose space’ (Franck and Stevens 2007). In developing the concept of
loose space and exploring how it is manifest in the actions of urbanites, we
pointed out various features of public space that allow for, and sometimes,
invite acts of appropriation such as wide expanses of flat, open space, ledges
and stairs, walls and fences, and construction materials, but we did not
attend directly to the possibilities for appropriation offered by works of art
(Franck and Paxson 2007; Franck and Stevens 2007).
Drawing on the concept of loose space and the related recognition that
urbanites are active, creative and determined agents of their own experiences
in public space, this essay addresses the following question: In what ways do
visitors, passers-by, artists and other groups engage with works of art in
urban public space and for what purposes? Two ways are distinguished
relative to the role that the intended symbolism of the work plays. People
may use the work purely as a prop—making good use of its location and its
particular physical features to pursue an activity, such as resting or playing,
that bears little if any connection to its symbolism. Or, alternatively, people
may engage with the work expressly for its symbolism; then it may serve as
both symbol, for enabling the expression of a message or communication
and as a prop, for providing a physical location and features that serve as the
object of that expression.
This chapter focuses on these two kinds of engagement with works of
public art at the sites of their installation as pursued by members of the
public generally and by artists. The examples, largely contemporary, are
drawn primarily from cities in Europe and the US. Many of the examples are
either free-standing monuments or spatial memorials since such works are
most likely to be appropriated both for their many physical features that
invite engagement and for their rich symbolic meanings that serve as a
means of expression. Observations suggest that people’s uses of public
artworks are completely or partially independent of the work’s intended
meaning, affirm or extend the meaning or intentionally resist it.

As Prop
Conveniently located in urban public space and possessing various
appropriate design features, works of art in public space often become
magnets for activities that have little connection to their intended meanings.
For instance one often sees people sitting on the stepped base of the 72-foot-
high monument to Christopher Columbus (Gaetano Russo, 1892) in the
centre of New York’s Columbus Circle. A fence that once encircled the base
was not only removed but the area around the monument was extended and
furnished with benches, making the steps even more inviting as a space to
relax and view the passing scene. Indeed, today sitting on any ledge or
sufficiently high surface is a very common spatial practice in cities as so
trenchantly observed by William Whyte (1980). When works of art possess
such surfaces, they will be appropriated as well for sitting for stretching out
—to rest, to have a snack, to read, to find a bit of respite from the city and
possibly to sleep.
The easy accessibility of many contemporary artworks in public space,
given their placement directly on the ground plane and immediately adjacent
to or within routes of pedestrian circulation, as well as particular design
features not only allow but seem to encourage this kind of informal activity
and other forms of engagement. Immediately adjacent to the Friedrichstraße
station in Berlin, on a well-travelled route to and from the station, a woman
sits on the pedestal of the Trains to Life, Trains to Death statue, a memorial
to the Kindertransport, to put a plaster on a blister. On the generously sized
base of the Royal Artillery Memorial in London, at Hyde Park Corner, two
construction workers find backrests, enough open surface area to stretch out
their legs and some separation from the surrounding hustle and bustle to eat
their lunch. A homeless man sits on the low steps of the Animals in War
Memorial in London, the curved wall serving both as a backrest and as a
partial visual barrier to the nearby street. Many of the stelae at the Memorial
to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin very close to the bordering
sidewalks are just the right height for sitting on and offer enough surface for
spreading out a lunch, for laying out papers or for stretching out full length.
In each case, it is purely for their location and functional features, and not
for any symbolic or aesthetic value, that these works are appropriated and
treated much like furniture. They not only are convenient for the chosen
activity but also provide additional features that a bench might not.
Not so much location as particular physical features of an artwork can
invite far more active and rigorous forms of bodily engagement taking the
form of exploration, play and athletic feats. In 2007 in the very large
accessible Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, to which visitors have
free access, a ragged chasm was created in the concrete floor, sometimes a
metre deep and wide enough to insert a limb (Figure 12.1). This intervention
not only attracted and held visitors’ rapt attention; it also engaged their
bodily participation, inviting exploration, play and risky gymnastics.
Children and adults followed its jagged path to the end; they peered into it,
sometimes from a kneeling position, sometimes lying down on the floor and
reaching their arms inside. They jumped over the crack, sometimes back and
forth; they balanced at its edge and even lay down across it. They posed in
playful positions for photographs. According to the Tate’s brochure, this
project by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, titled Shibboleth, was
intended to draw attention to the history of racism and colonialism. The
crack symbolised this fissure in modernity. At the same time it stimulated an
amazing array of imaginative, physical responses from both adults and
children, temporarily making the floor of the Turbine Hall a kind of
playground. It is hard to know if these visitors grasped its intended
symbolism, but certainly their playful, exploratory actions suggested they
were responding directly and spontaneously to its physical features.
Figure 12.1 Visitors explore Shibboleth (Doris Salcedo), Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
Photo by Quentin Stevens (2007).

Playful activities also occur in spatial memorials, which people can enter
and move through. The expanse of hard surfaces and the height and depth of
the ledges surrounding the fountain at the Bali Memorial in Melbourne is
perfect for skateboarding and so attracts large groups of practitioners day
and night. In Berlin the several diverse components of the Levetzowstraße
Deportation Memorial create all kinds of possibilities for children to climb,
to crawl, to hide, activities they engage in with great zeal over extended
periods. This memorial, with its many invitations for challenging exploration
and risk taking and its hidden niches for hiding, is far more attractive to
children than the adjacent playground with its standard play equipment. The
slanted inclined planes of the Canadian Memorial in Hyde Park are also
attractive for climbing. Indeed, climbing may be the most frequent
exploratory and playful activity stimulated by these works. In the
Museumplein behind the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam the 2-metre-high
letters that spell the now iconic marketing slogan for the city, ‘I Amsterdam,’
are extremely popular among both children and adults who climb up onto the
letters and into the openings within them. Like sitting, playful activities are
common in urban spaces (Stevens 2007) and art works that offer
opportunities for play and risk taking are readily recognised and pursued by
both adults and children.
As with resting, while people may recognise the symbolism of the piece, it
is not the symbolism of the work that stimulates playful actions but rather
the possibilities that the objects and spaces offer for climbing, sitting, posing
and mimicking either the figures the work depicts or the actions of others.
And, while the actions may be seen by onlookers to be undermining the
symbolism of the work or showing disrespect, this is most likely not the
intention of those engaging in the activity. This is true of both resting and
playing, particularly at memorials. Those responsible for managing
memorials may well see such activities as out of keeping with the
commemorative purpose of the site and post signs to rule out such actions—
both those that seem disrespectful and those that are risky. For instance
sitting on steps, widely acceptable in urban public space and at many
memorials, is not acceptable on the long flights of steps at the ANZAC
Memorial in Sydney where one has a good view of the wide promenade
running the length of the park. However, the penchant to sit wherever one
can is strong: the sign on the steps ‘No sitting on the steps’ is frequently
ignored.
A different kind of playful activity also occurs: treating the public artwork
as a set and performing on it, becoming oneself a display to be seen and
photographed by others, a pursuit frequently observed at Shibboleth. Such
performing may involve a sequence of physically challenging actions such
as clambering up and onto or into the letters of I Amsterdam before
remaining still for a photograph. Performing, however, does not depend on
such exertion: People can simply enter the work and pose within it,
sometimes becoming a living figure next to or among sculpted figures, as in
the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington when visitors sit on
President Roosevelt’s lap in the sculpture of him sitting in a wheelchair or
join the figures standing in the bread line. These sculptures, by Robert
Graham and George Segal, respectively, are life size, are placed directly on
the ground surface and are easily appropriated in this manner, and the
participants enjoy doing so, smiling as friends or family take their pictures.
As importantly, the playful engagement with the works is not seen as
showing disrespect; no signs restrict it, and no staff discourages it. While the
meaning of the figural sculptures is not undermined, the ‘acting out’ they
stimulate seems only partially related to what they represent. That it is a
bread line, representing the very difficult times of the Great Depression,
seems far less important to visitors than the opportunity it offers to pose
within a sculpture and to become one of the figures in it (Figure 12.2).
Symbolism is also of little, if any, significance when the artworks provide
convenient props for displaying additional, newer works of art or other kinds
of objects. In 2012 the artist Tatzu Nishi created a work he called
Discovering Columbus: a full-scale, furnished living room atop the 70-foot-
tall column of the Christopher Columbus Monument in New York that
enclosed the statue. Visitors could reach the living room by climbing up
stairs in the scaffolding built to surround the column. In searching for a
monument to enclose, the artist Tatzu Nishi chose this monument not for its
subject but for its height:
I noticed a lot of public sculptures in New York City are set on a low base or even without a base
compared to the ones in Europe. And I noticed that Columbus is in a really high position. That’s
what attracted me […]. I never thought about the historical thing. It’s purely visual.
(Lasky 2012:D2)
Figure 12.2 Posing and performing in Bread Line (George Segal) at Memorial to Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, Washington D.C.
Photo by Karen Franck (2010)

Both the physical features of sculptures and their convenient locations

make them good props for the display of commemorative tributes unrelated
to the subject of the work. Immediately after the attack on the World Trade
Center members of the public created informal memorials in a great many
and widely different public spaces in New York City. Union Square Park was
particularly popular for gathering and for leaving tributes. At the front of the
park, facing a wide terrace stepping down to 14th Street is a bronze
equestrian statue of George Washington (Henry Kirke Brown, 1865)
standing high on a stone pedestal, flanked by a light stanchion. These parts
of the monument became a display stand for missing person signs,
handwritten notes, small American flags and paper cranes. In addition, the
legs of Washington’s horse and the upper part of the stanchion were wrapped
with American flags, and the word love was written several times in chalk on
the pedestal (Figure 12.3).
Figure 12.3 Displaying US flag and tributes on statue of George Washington (Henry Kirke Brown),
Union Square Park, New York immediately after September 11, 2001
Photo by Karen Franck (2001).

The steps below the statue became dense with teddy bears, flowers,
candles, more writings and other tributes. While the fact that the statue was
of George Washington was appropriate for the occasion, as a powerful
American icon, it is very likely that whatever statue had been there would
have become a focal point for the display by virtue of its precise location at
the front of the park facing a wide, open terrace, the very place where most
of the gathering took place, and its physical features of height and flat
vertical surfaces.

As Symbol and Prop

As described, works of art in public space may serve exclusively, or mainly,
as props, that is as supporting or enabling activities of rest, play or display
independently of their intended meanings. In other cases, it is precisely their
symbolism that matters and that stimulates people’s engagement with them.
At the same time, however, their location and particular design features play
a role as well, albeit secondary: The works serve as both symbol and prop.
Two kinds of engagement can be distinguished: those that affirm or extend
the work’s symbolism and those that resist it. With only one exception the
examples identified here are monuments or memorials—possibly because
these are the kinds of public art whose meanings are most widely and easily
recognised and, accordingly, most likely to be affirmed or resisted.

Affirming and Extending

Memorials and monuments are popular destinations for tourists and for those
people who have a personal connection to the events or persons being
commemorated. As part of their pilgrimage, people often occupy the setting
in very distinctive ways, ways not only consistent with the memorial’s
intended meaning but also actively affirming that meaning through acts of
grieving and commemorating. A classic example is the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington, where visitors may seek out the names of US
soldiers they know who died, trace the letters with their fingers, take pictures
of the names and make rubbings of them. They are not only in the memorial
but also of it as they engage closely with it physically. As importantly,
starting before it was even finished, veterans, family members and others
have left innumerable tributes at the memorial, tributes that other visitors
may then scrutinise with great care. These include flags, flowers,
photographs, letters, notes, military insignia and items related to the
preferences of the individual soldier being remembered such as his favourite
brand of beer or cigarettes (Allen 1995; Hass 1998; Figure 12.4). Many
notes are addressed to individual soldiers by name and other items left seem
to be gifts for them. In this way, the wall of names offers a place to ‘speak’
to the dead and the way people do so both affirms and personalizes the
memorial’s meaning.

Figure 12.4 Studying tributes, Veterans Day 2012, Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Maya Lin),
Washington
Photo by Karen Franck (2012).

The practice of leaving flowers and messages to the dead at public

memorials dates at least to the period after World War I, where the
memorials were not always accommodating of such gestures, requiring
visitors to reach over a fence to place flowers at the foot of a monument
(Winter 1995). In contrast, memorials are more likely to be placed on the
ground plane without fences, allowing visitors to come very close to the
memorial. For instance they can come right up to the wall of names at the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, touch its surface and easily place tributes at its
base. Similarly at the National September 11 Memorial in New York, visitors
come to the edge of the parapets that surround the two pools, touch the
names engraved in their surface and leave small tributes next to a name or
flowers in the trough of water below.
People also appropriate monuments and other works of art in ways that
extend the work’s meaning to embrace other, additional subjects that are
seen to be compatible with the work’s original meaning. Either by intention
and with foresight or by chance and because of its convenient location, the
symbolism of the work becomes a medium for making a public critique
regarding political or social conditions, and possibly for gathering support to
a cause. For instance by using the object for display participants in political
demonstrations as well as artists appropriate and extend what they recognise
as the work’s meaning. What may have started simply as a convenient prop
or backdrop can becomes an integral part of the resistance activities. Or the
work may have been chosen, from the beginning, both for its
appropriateness as a physical means for display and for its symbolism.
One example of chance appropriation of a work of public art that is not a
monument or a memorial occurred in Zuccotti Park in New York in the fall
of 2011. While occupying the park Occupy Wall Street (OWS)
demonstrators held rallies, assemblies, concerts and meetings there,
underneath or adjacent to Mark di Suvero’s towering red sculpture, which
stands at the edge of the park on a spacious sidewalk (Franck and Huang
2012). The sculpture became a visual and, for some, a symbolic participant
in their endeavours. Early on, it figured prominently on maps of the park
drawn by demonstrators, serving as an orientation point for understanding
the locations of other activities (general assembly, media, kitchen, sign
making). After a man, slightly deranged, climbed up the sculpture and was
then rescued, the New York City Police Department erected barricades
around the work preventing any activities at all from taking place beneath it.
The importance of the sculpture to the demonstrators and then the
symbolism of the barricades led the Arts and Culture Committee of OWS to
write a letter to Di Suvero asking him to pressure New York City
government to remove the barricades. They attempted to make the work a
symbol of the OWS movement by extending its meaning, which they saw as
expressed in its name: ‘Joie de Vivre is especially poignant as this movement
actively fights to empower people of marginalized economic status. Indeed,
that struggle is the joy of life’ (artfcity 2011:n.p.; Figure 12.5).
A monument, located at a different site of resistance, in a different
country, played a more pivotal and more powerful symbolic role. In
February 2011 demonstrators, demanding the ouster of Bahrain’s monarch,
occupied a grassy traffic circle in Manama’s downtown. Pearl Square was
both a large, open space and centrally located and, as importantly, with
iconic status as the site of the Pearl Monument. The monument was built in
1982 to honour the first summit meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC) held in Bahrain. The towering work was composed of six curved
beams representing the six members of the council; these held at the top a
large cement ball, symbolising the country’s history of cultivating pearls.
The monument became a symbol of Bahrain, appearing on its half-dinar
coins (Reisz 2011). Because the monument both towered and hovered over
the square, both demonstrating and living occurred beneath it; demonstrators
climbed onto it; and sometimes signs and writing were posted on it. Quickly
it became a useful prop as well as, eventually, a potent symbol of the
resistance movement, much as the way OWS wished Joie de Vivre could
have been. Its power as a symbol of the movement is amply demonstrated by
its destruction. In March 2011 the Bahrain Defence Forces and military
forces from the GCC and Saudi Arabia not only evacuated and bulldozed the
encampment but also razed the monument and removed the traffic circle,
replacing it with traffic lights, eliminating any space for gathering or for
further demonstrations. The space was renamed Al Farooq Junction (Al
Jazeera English 2011; Mitchell 2011), but the monument as a symbol of
resistance to the regime lived on. In subsequent demonstrations in 2011 and
2012, participants carried placards with images of the monument and a
model of it.
Figure 12.5 Occupy Wall Street participants occupying Joie de Vivre (Mark Di Suvero) in Zuccotti
Park, New York
Photo by Karen Franck (2011).

As pointed out earlier, artist Tatzu Nishi chose the Christopher Columbus
monument as a prop for his installation purely for its physical properties, not
for its symbolism. In sharp contrast, artist and activist Krzysztof Wodiczko
draws on both the physical features of the monuments he appropriates and
the meanings they convey for his video projections intended to draw
citizens’ attention to political and social issues—war, homelessness, violence
and, most recently, the experiences of veterans. Starting in the early 1980s,
sometimes his slides and then his video and audio projections have been
shown exclusively as gallery exhibits, but more often he has been able to
project his images onto actual monuments in urban public spaces. Some
works give voice to those who are both silent and as invisible in public life
as the monuments Wodiczko appropriates. In Homeless Projections, shown
at the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto in 1986, he
exhibited four slides, each a montage showing particular features of
homeless individuals projected onto the four existing statues in Union
Square Park in New York, including those of Abraham Lincoln and George
Washington. The work was a way of drawing critical attention to the plight
of those ignored and victimised by the surrounding urban redevelopment.
‘[T]he Homeless Projection does not simply interrupt the monument’s
speech. It does so precisely by extending, deepening, and radicalizing the
statues’ own messages’ (Deutsche 1996:39).
For Abraham Lincoln: War Veterans Project, Wodiczko interviewed 14
US veterans and their families, asking about their war experiences and the
impact on their lives. He then projected these videos on to the 1870 bronze
statue of Abraham Lincoln in Union Square Park, every night over the
course of a month in 2012. When, as in this project, Wodiczko’s projects are
shown in urban public space, they attract the attention of passers-by,
conveying messages people might not otherwise encounter and possibly
generating conversations between onlookers. In appropriating monuments in
the urban landscape, Wodiczko makes good use of a medium the city already
provides. Moreover, this medium contributes a richness of meaning to his
projections that a blank surface never could and, at the same time, the
projections bring new life to statues that may, in Musil’s terms, have become
invisible. Indeed, for those who see the Wodiczko’s projections, the meaning
of the monument itself may be forever changed.

Resisting

In contrast to sitting, standing or playing on monuments and memorials, acts

of commemoration affirm the site’s intended meaning and other actions may
well extend its meaning. Quite the opposite is the case when people make
use of a monument to express their opposition to the person, event or belief
that it represents. In this manner, both historically as well as in recent times,
memorials and monuments serve as physically available and highly visible
means for citizens to demonstrate their opposition to political leaders and
political ideologies. Such acts of resistance express quite the opposite of
what Musil described as the invisibility of monuments.
The manner of expressing resistance may be quite brutal: destroying the
monument, taking down parts of it or removing it intact from public view.
Sometimes referred to as iconoclasm, or the purposeful destruction of art
(Gamboni 1997), such interventions in the symbolic landscape of the city are
undertaken by members of the public at large without official sanction or
direction as well as by official groups, sometimes under the duress of public
pressure and after some degree of planning and coordination (Dwyer 2004).
Through their own interventions in the symbolic landscape of the city,
citizens can publicly and vigorously express particular, often highly political
points of view. Authorities can support such interventions or take the
initiative in making them, often to demonstrate a change in political regimes.
Examples of the latter include the US military’s removal of the very large
statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, an action well publicised around the
world, and the dismantling of memorials throughout Eastern Europe after the
fall of communism (Forest and Johnson 2002). Subsequently, artists and
other groups may depict the action of destruction through images or artefacts
so that the event itself becomes symbolic and possibly itself iconic.
The saga of two statues in Lower Manhattan illustrate how citizens as well
as soldiers’ express feelings of opposition through the destruction of
monuments and how these acts live on through other kinds of representation.
In 1776 the area around the equestrian statue of King George III became a
favoured site for protesting British rule. On 9 July, immediately after the
Declaration of Liberty had been read aloud, assembled troops and citizens in
favour of independence tore the statue down. Subsequently when British
soldiers occupied Manhattan, they removed the head and arms from the
nearby pedestrian statue of the Honourable William Pitt, erected in gratitude
for his championing the American cause in British Parliament and
supporting the repeal of the Stamp Act. Both works, symbolising two
opposing positions, were created by sculptor Joseph Walton, erected in 1770,
and torn down or vandalised in 1776 (Wall 1920).
 Yet both works live on, albeit in different forms, making the acts of their
destruction symbols in themselves. With the successful outcome of the
American Revolution, images of the demolition of the stature of King
George II (Figure 12.6)—an act of rebellion that symbolised the overthrow
of a tyrant and the beginning of a free nation—served to inspire others
(Marks 1981). The act has been depicted in several paintings and many
lithograph prints, the first published in 1777 (Marks 1981). The tail of King
George’s horse hangs in the New York Historical Society along with
Johannes Oertel’s 1848 painting depicting the statue’s destruction. Nearby
stands the headless, armless statue of William Pitt.
Monuments are destroyed, altered or vandalised for a variety of reasons
related to the meanings they have. One reason is certainly to demonstrate
one’s opposition to what the work represents beyond its literal depiction of a
person (i.e. George III was both the king and a tyrant, responsible for
oppressive British rule). Indeed, having this kind of effigy on which to enact
opposition and to demonstrate that opposition to the world in a very visible
fashion is a clear advantage of the presence of such works in public space.

Figure 12.6 Pulling Down Statue of King George III at Bowling Green, New York
Lithograph print, statue by Joseph Wilton (1770).
 In seeking some immediate means of responding to the Declaration of Independence or, more
properly, to the outrages perpetrated by His Majesty’s government […] New Yorkers were more
fortunate than most […] New Yorkers were able to vent their feelings of rage on what was perhaps
the most grandiose artistic salute yet erected to their reigning monarch.
(Marks 1981:65)

People also deform or destroy a monument to demonstrate their

opposition not to its subject matter—that is to the people, cause or belief it
represents—but to the manner in which in which it does so. The main
purpose for the Soldiers Monument erected in 1868 in the plaza in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, was to honour the Union soldiers who died in the Civil War
battles of Glorieta and on the Santa Fe Trail. The monument’s inscription
refers to the Confederate soldiers as ‘rebels’ and recognises ‘the brave
victims who have perished in various wars with the savage Indians.’ The use
of the word rebel to characterise Confederate soldiers and the word savage
to characterise Indians is offensive to many. Not surprisingly in 1974 a
young man neatly removed savage with a chisel (Staeheli and Mitchell
2008). This excising remains visible, evidence of at least one person’s
resistance to how the memorial represents its subject matter. In response to
requests to take the monument down, authorities decided not to remove it
but to add an explanatory plaque that places the memorial’s message in its
historical context. This example illustrates one way that groups with a
particular connection to a monument resist the manner in which a memorial
depicts its subject and, similarly, how authorities respond to that resistance,
not by removing the work but by qualifying its implicit message, thus further
modifying both the monument and its message.

Engaging and Participating: Constrained and

Invited

Historically, particularly in the nineteenth century in Europe and the US,

works of art in public space were often free-standing sculptures, such as the
statue to Stranahan or those that Musil seems to be referring to. Frequently
they were monuments placed on pedestals and possibly were enclosed by
fences, both removed and protected from urban life and the urban populace.
Today it is common practice for urban artworks, whether figural or abstract,
to be placed directly on the ground or very close to it, making them more
easily accessible and easily amenable to touching as well as seeing. They are
also extremely varied in temporal, formal and spatial characteristics. They
may be temporary or long-term installations of abstract or figurative objects
as well as objects that create spaces one can enter so one is both within the
work of art and viewing it, as in Richard Serra’s Berlin Junction (1987)
composed of two curved steel plates that create a passageway between them.
With the clear invitation to enter and occupy the work, the range of
possibilities for bodily and sensory engagement increases. The absence of
pedestals and fences, the advent of spatial memorials that are intended to be
occupied along with the modern acceptance of informal conduct and
postures in urban public space create ample opportunities for engagement.
As this chapter illustrates, people engage actively and bodily with works
of art in urban public space in ways that are both independent of and closely
related to their meanings and that affirm, resist or extend those meanings.
While many artworks are routinely ignored and so become ‘invisible’ as
Musil noted with respect to monuments, at other times and in other cases
visitors, passers-by and artists make them visible by the various ways they
physically engage with them. The art works offer material for practical uses
and expressive communication, and so contribute to the liveliness of urban
public space. When they are used for these purposes, they not only become
visible but also take on new lives and possibly new meanings. Such
trajectories suggest that works that now appear forgotten or are deemed
obsolete may in the future be rediscovered and become the object of
renewed interest. The urban landscapes of monuments, memorials and other
works of art are rich with possibilities for engagement, many of them as yet
undiscovered or unexploited.
Some forms of engagement are acceptable to authorities while others are
not, causing tensions, if not outright conflict, with the police and other
authorities whether the actions may damage the work and whether they are
acts of political resistance. The latter, however, and resulting possibilities of
damage do generate more direct interventions by the police— including
erecting barricades in 2011 around Joie de Vivre and around the sculpture
Charging Bull (Arturo Di Modica 1987) on Wall Street during the Occupy
Wall Street activities in Zuccotti Park. With respect to other artworks, such
as memorials, authorities may be concerned about risk from accidents and
appropriate decorum in addition to possible damage to the work.
Nonetheless, bodily engagement with works of art in public space (of both a
very active and a more passive nature such as sitting or lying down) often
occur without any interference from authorities. When the police are not
protecting Charging Bull, tourists regularly climb on it and pose for pictures.
People are quick to use urban public space for their own purposes,
sometimes ingeniously, whether or not the spaces and objects were designed
for such use. They are eager to respond to physical stimuli and to participate
in urban activities beyond the quotidian—both in solemn ones (as
commemorative actions indicate) and in joyful ones (as playfulness
demonstrates). People’s enthusiasm for occupying public space in active and
often creative ways (Franck 2013) extends to creative engagement with
works of art, as this essay has demonstrated, revealing an advantage that
such works possess, whether intended or not.
Increasingly, in short and long term projects, artists and architects are
designing works that encourage this participation. On the 10th anniversary
of 11 September, in New York artists designed a wide range of temporary,
interactive memorials that invited specific kinds of contributions from the
public. At the Memorial to the Victims of Violence in Mexico City designed
by Gaeta-Springall Arquitectos (2013) relevant quotations are stenciled onto
some of the towering steel slabs that make up the memorial. On the other
blank surfaces visitors are invited to write or draw: ‘Paint what you feel […].
Express what you think’. And so people do—in chalk, or scratching with
keys; guards report that people sometimes weep as they do so (Cave 2013).
For their month-long installation in Times Square, a celebration of
Valentine’s Day 2011, Lauren Crahan and John Hartmann of the firm
Freecell designed a lightweight red heart with wings that folded up when
people lifted the heart into the air (Figure 12.7). The designers advertised the
event on posters and on line, inviting people to join them in lifting the heart:
‘Imagine a heart in Times Square lifted and held up by the communal spirit
of people. Volunteer to hold up the heart.’ Would-be participants signed up in
advance and waited patiently in the cold winter weather for their turn. So
eager to participate and to have their pictures taken, they were willing to sign
a legal document waiving their right to sue the city government for any
injury that might result.
Figure 12.7 Participants join designers Lauren Crahan and John Hartmann in lifting Lighthearted,
Times Square, New York
Photo by Karen Franck (2011).

References
Al Jazeera English (2011). ‘Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark.’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmg1N1AKfFc (accessed August 4,
2011).
Allen, T. B. (1995) Offerings at the Wall: Artifacts from the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial Collection, Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing
artfcity (2011) ‘#OWS Arts and Culture Group Asks Mark Di Suvero to
Speak against Barricades in Liberty Park.’ artfcity.com/2011/11/08/ows-
 arts-and-culture-group-calls-on-artist-mark-di-suvero-to-speak-against-
the-barricades-in-liberty-park/(accessed April 21, 2014).
Cave, D. (2013) ‘These Walls Speak, Recalling Victims of Violence,’ New
York Times, August 23: A4.
Deutsche, R. (1996) Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Dwyer, O. J. (2004) ‘Symbolic Accretion and Commemoration,’ Social &
Cultural Geography, 5(3): 419–435
Forest, B. and Johnson, J. (2002) ‘Unraveling the Threads of History:
Soviet-era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow,’
Annals of Association of American Geographers, 92(3): 524–547.
Franck, K. A. (2013) ‘Isn’t all Public Space Terrain Vague?,’ in P. Barron
and M. Mariani (eds) Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale,
New York: Routledge.
Franck, K. A. and Huang, T. (2012) ‘Occupying Public Space: From Tahrir
Square to Zuccotti Park,’ in R. Shiffman, R. Bell and L. J. Brown (eds)
Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of
Public Space, Oakland, CA: New Village Press.
Franck, K. A. and Paxson, L. (2007) ‘Transforming Public Space into Sites
of Mourning and Free Expression,’ in K. A. Franck and Q. Stevens (eds)
Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, New York:
Routledge.
Gamboni, D. (1997) The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism
since the French Revolution, London: Reaktion Books.
Hass, K. A. (1998) Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lasky, J. (2012) ‘Giving Columbus a Chance to Stretch,’ New York Times,
September 20: D2.
Marks, A. S. (1981) ‘The Statue of George III in New York and the
Iconography of Regicide,’ The American Art Journal, 13(3): 61–82.
Mitchell, T. (2011). ‘Part 1: The Roundabout Clearance.’
http://tonydmitchell.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/hello-world/ (accessed
December 4, 2011).
Musil, R. (1957). Robert Musil: Posthumous Papers of a Living Author,
Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press.
Reisz, T. (2011). Bahrain: A Roundabout Way to Signifying Nothing, April
5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-reisz/bahrain-
 roundabout_b_844276.html (accessed January 12, 2012).
Staeheli, L. and Mitchell, D. (2008) People’s Property? Power, Politics and
the Public, New York: Routledge.
Stevens, Q. (2007) The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces,
London: Routledge.
Wall, A. J. (1920) ‘The Equestrian Statue of George III and the Pedestrian
Statue of William Pitt Erected in the City of New York 1770,’ The New
York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin of the New York Historical
Society IV (Summer).
http://archive.org/stream/equestrianstatue01wall/equestrianstatue01wall_
djvu.txt (accessed May 5, 2014).
Whyte, W. (1980) The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Washington DC:
Conservation Foundation.
Winter, J. (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in
European Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Contributors

Martin Brynskov, Ph.D., is an associate professor in Interaction

Technologies; director of Digital Design Lab at Aarhus University,
Denmark; general chair of the Media Architecture Biennale 2012 and
2014; and member of Media Architecture Institute. He has lead large-
scale urban interaction design projects with artists and cities since 2007
as part of Center for Advanced Visualization and Interaction, Digital
Urban Living and Participatory IT Centre. He also holds a degree in
Classical Greek.

Peter Dalsgaard is an associate professor of Interaction Design at Aarhus

University, Denmark, where he has spent the past ten years exploring
the intersections between digital and physical environments at CAVI,
the Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction. His research
focuses on theories of design and the nature of design processes. A
crucial component of this work is orchestrating and participating in real-
life design projects, including the development of a number of large-
scale urban interactive installations.

Karen A. Franck is a professor in the College of Architecture and Design

at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, where she also
serves as the director of the Joint Ph.D Program in Urban Systems. Over
the years she has written about design that responds to social change
and people’s needs, the concept and use of types in architecture and
people’s appropriation of public space. She is co-editor of New
Households, New Housing (1989), Ordering Space (1994) and Loose
Space (2007) and is co-author of Architecture from the Inside Out (
2007), Design through Dialogue (2010) and Memorials as Spaces of
Engagement (2015).
Pauline Guinard is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the Ecole
normale supérieure in Paris, France. Her research focuses on the
relationships between art and public spaces, especially in the South
African context. She is the author of Johannesburg: l’art d’inventer une
ville (2014).

Kim Halskov is Professor of Interaction Design at Aarhus University,

Denmark, where he is director of the Centre for Advanced Visualization
and Interaction (CAVI.au.dk) and co-director of the Centre for
Participatory Information Technology (PIT.au.dk). In 2007 Kim
Halskov established media architecture as research area at Aarhus
University. From a background in participatory design Kim Halskov’s
research areas includes innovation processes, design processes and
experience design.

Julia Lossau is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Bremen,

Germany. Her research examines the symbolic production of places and
spaces, focusing particularly on postcolonial and, more recently, on
aesthetic discourses. Presently she is working on the symbolic economy
of cities, examining different forms of public art practices and their
spatial effects. She is author of Die Politik der Verortung. Eine
postkoloniale Reise zu einer anderen Geographie der Welt (2002). Her
co-edited books include Themenorte (2005) and Schlüsselbegriffe der
Kultur-und Sozialgeographie (2014).

Lachlan MacDowall is the head of the Centre for Cultural Partnerships in

the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and Melbourne
Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, Australia, a hub for
research and teaching on community-based arts practice. He has
published widely on the history and aesthetics of graffiti and street art,
including as a contributor to King’s Way: The Beginnings of Australian
Graffiti (2009). His research also investigates practices of evaluation in
the arts. He is a co-editor of Making Culture Count: The Politics of
Cultural Measurement (2015).

Kate Moles is a lecturer in Sociology at Cardiff University, UK. Her

research is focused around the interaction among policy, history and
place making and explores how people come to know place, how place
 is constructed through different discourses and the ways people who
live in these places, move through them and visit them are positioned.

Angharad Saunders is a senior lecturer in Human Geography at the

University of South Wales, UK. Her research focuses around the
relationship among place, creative practices and history. It examines, in
particular, the everyday, small-scale moments of creativity and the
different ways in which these produce place.

Quentin Stevens is an associate professor in the School of Architecture and

Design, director of the Centre for Design and Society at RMIT
University in Melbourne, Australia, and a reader in Urban Design at
University College London. His research focuses on the unplanned uses
of public spaces, especially memorials and waterfronts. He has been
awarded a Future Fellowship by the Australian Research Council and a
senior research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation. He is the author of The Ludic City (2007), a joint author of
Memorials as Spaces of Engagement (forthcoming 2015) and a co-
editor of Loose Space (2007) and Transforming Urban Waterfronts
(2010).

Shanti Sumartojo is a research fellow in the School of Architecture and

Design at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author
of Trafalgar Square and the Narration of Britishness, 1900 – 2012:
Imagining the Nation and co-editor of Remembering the Great War:
Memory, Nation, Commemoration. Her research interests include the
role of public art in shaping urban experience; the design and impact of
memorials in national capitals; and the constitution of affective
atmospheres, particularly at commemorative sites.

Laurent Vernet is a Ph.D candidate in urban studies at the Centre

Urbanisation Culture Société of the Institut national de la recherche
scientifique (Montréal, Canada). His research is focused on publics for
artworks installed in Montréal public spaces. He holds a master’s degree
in art history from Concordia University. As an art writer, he has
contributed to specialized magazines, including Espace sculpture. Since
2009, he has been working at the Public Art Bureau of the Ville de
Montréal, where he now holds the position of commissioner.
Nicolas Whybrow is an associate professor (reader) and is head of
department in the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy
Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. His most recent books are
Art and the City (2011) and, as editor, Performing Cities (2014), with
chapter contributions from an international line-up of artists and
scholars, and Performance and the Contemporary City: an
Interdisciplinary Reader (2010). He also co-edited the ‘On Foot’ issue
of the journal Performance Research (2012).

Martin Zebracki is a lecturer/assistant professor in Critical Human

Geography in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK.
He employs discursive and visual methodologies to examine his
particular research interests in public art, sexual citizenship and social
inclusiveness in the empirical context of contemporary Western city
spaces. On these topics, Zebracki has published various academic and
professional articles and organized special sessions at several
international conferences. Together with Cameron Cartiere, he is
currently preparing the edited volume The Everyday Practice of Public
Art, to be published by Routledge.
Index

Aarhus 52, 56, 58, 62

Aarhus by Light, Aarhus (CAVI) 52, 55–7, 63–4
Abraham Lincoln: War Veterans Project, New York (Krzysztof Wodiczko) 194
Admiral Lord Nelson 71–2
aesthetics 52, 62, 110; see also relational aesthetics
affect 139, 140, 142
affordances 21–4, 30
Alison Lapper Pregnant, London (Marc
Quinn) 73–5
Anzac 136, 142–4
ANZAC Memorial, Sydney (Bruce Dellit) 187
appropriation 13, 92, 115, 126, 174–6, 184, 192
architecture 140, 143
Arrival, The, London (Frank Meisler) 24–5
art engager 167, 169, 170, 172, 178–9
art-in-architecture 84
audience 34, 38, 41, 45, 57, 65, 98–9, 100
audio walks 99, 100, 102–9
Australia 131, 141, 144
Australian Broadcasting Corporation 141
Australian National Memorial, Villers-Bretonneux (Edwin Lutyens) 13, 131–4, 137, 144

Bal, Mieke 76
Bali Memorial, Melbourne (Melbourne City Council) 187
Banksy 35
Beacon for Wales 101
behaviour 23; animal 33–4; art engager’s 167, 169, 172–5, 178; in public 156; stigmeric 40–1, 44
Bénit-Gbaffou, Claire 118
Berlin Biennale 86 Berlin-Birkenau, Berlin (Łukasz Surowiec) 86
Beuys, Joseph 79, 85–6, 94
Bickford, Susan 106
bodily movement 27
body 19, 27, 56, 73–4, 76
Bourgeois, Louise 76
Bourriaud, Nicolas 2, 98, 110
Bread Line, Washington DC (Georg Segal) 188
Brown, Henry Kirke 189
Broken Windows Theory 39, 40–1, 46
Brynskov, Martin 56, 58
Butt Plug Gnome, Rotterdam (Paul McCarthy) 13, 167, 170, 173, 175–6

Cardiff 103
Carter, Paul 75–6
cemetery 131, 137–8
Certeau, Michel de 12, 84, 91–5, 104, 151
Charging Bull, New York (Arturo Di Modica) 198
children 21
Christopher Columbus Monument, Barcelona 188, 193
city 4, 51, 55, 61, 83, 170; European 7; marketing 95, 187; symbolic landscape of 195
City Bug Report, Aarhus, (CAVI) 52, 60–5
City Square (Three Figures, One Head) 75
Cloud Gate, Chicago (Anish Kapoor) 26–7, 29
commemoration 139, 184
Connerton, Paul 139
consultation 101, 118, 122
consumption 46, 65, 84, 104, 110, 138, 178
conversive wayfaring 105, 107 CO2nfession/CO2mmitment, Aarhus (CAVI) 52, 58–9, 63–4
Crahan, Lauren 198
Cross of Sacrifice 134, 137
culture 30, 84

Dalsgaard, Peter 54
Daoust Lestage 155
death 78, 94, 135; see also graves
design 20, 22, 30, 65, 133, 153, 185; see also participatory design
Deutsche, Rosalyn 4, 10, 21, 151, 170
Dewey, John 52
Di Modica, Arturo 198
Discovering Columbus, New York (Tatzu Nishi) 188
Dlux 38
Dovey, Kim 140, 143
duration 77, 10

Eendrachtsplein 173, 177

Elliott, Mark 39
emotion 139, 141
ergonomics 20, 22–3; see also anti-ergonomic
ethnographic interviews 167
expanded concept of art 85
experience 9, 77, 85, 139, 179; aesthetic 52–3, 59, 63, 100; affectual 142; commemorative 138;
embodied 109; lived 64; sensory 11

Fagen, Graham 12, 83–9, 90–4

family 140–2
filmed observation 153–4
Foster, Hal 72–3
Fourth Plinth 71–2, 75–6
France 131
freeze mob 67–9, 71, 76–9
Fried, Michael 20
functionality 4, 22, 26
functional needs 30

gallery art 85–6

Giacometti, Alberto 75–6
Gibson, James 21–2, 24, 30
Glasgow 83, 94
Gormley, Antony 8, 75–9
graffiti 35, 39, 40–1, 46
Graham, Robert 187
Grangetown 99, 101–6
Grassé, Pierre-Paul 33, 46
graves 133–8, 143

Hall, Tim 98, 115, 169

Halskov, Kim 54
Haraway, Donna 172
Hartmann, John 198–9
Hawkins, Harriet 104
Hector Pieterson 117, 121
hedonomics 11, 19, 23–4
heritage 116, 124
Hirschhorn, Thomas 41
Homeless Projections, New York (Krzysztof Wodiczko) 194
Hotel for the Birds (later Model for a Hotel), London (Thomas Schütte) 71

iconoclasm 194
identity 173, see also national identity
Inglis, Ken 131
Ingold, Tim 100, 104, 107, 109
in situ observations 172
interaction 34, 38, 53–4; with artefacts/objects 23–4; with audiences 36–9; (of children) with
artworks 125–6; modes of 63–4; physical 20; with place 101, 105, 107; in public spaces 152;
stigmeric 49; zones 56–8
intervention 41, 60, 66, 68, 73, 83, 151, 195
interviews 58 84, 172; see also ethnographic interviews
Invader 35
Iser, Wolfgang 109

Johannesburg 115
Johnson, Nuala 138
Joie de Vivre, New York (Mark Di Suvero) 192–3, 198
Jones, Jonathan 78–9
Judd, Donald 72

Kelling, George L. 39, 40–1

Kenyon, Frederic 135, 143
Krauss, Rosalind 72, 169
Kwon, Miwon 72, 150

Lacy, Suzanne 3, 4, 6, 150, 179

landscape 55, 120, 133, 174, 195
La Joute, Montréal (Jean-Paul-Riopelle) 152, 159, 160, 164
Lavery, Carl 100
Lee, Jo 107
Lefebvre, Henri 7
Leong, Tuck 59
Levetzowstraße Deportation Memorial, Berlin 187
life 68, 94, 104; new 74, 194; social 153
Lighthearted, New York (Lauren Crahan and John Hartmann) 199
Lin, Maya 191
listening 106
Liverpool Street Station 24–5
London 67, 69
loose space 184
love locks 41–5
Lutyens, Edwin 132, 134–5, 143

MacMonnies, Frederick 183

Marschall, Sabine 126
Maslow, Abraham 19, 22–3, 29
Massey, Doreen 98, 102, 107
McKenna, Mark 136
meaning 6, 64, 139–40, 191–2, 194; of the artwork 8, 155; intended 183–4, 190; system of 91; in
urban spaces 54
media analysis 172–3
media architecture 51–5, 63–5
memorial 98, 131–2, 136, 141, 186–7, 189–90, 194
Memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Washington D.C. (landscape architect Lawrence Halprin;
sculptors Leonard Baskin, Neil Estern, Robert Graham, Thomas Hardy, George Segal) 188
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin (Peter Eisenman) 24, 28, 185
Memorial to the Victims of Violence, Mexico City (Gaeta-Springall Arquitectos) 198
Miles, Malcolm 8
Ming, Ju 152, 157–8, 162–4
Minty, Zayd 8, 98
Moccia, Federico 42
Montréal 151
monument 72, 139, 155, 161, 183–4, 190, 194–6
Monument to Queen Victoria, Montréal (Marshall Wood) 152, 154–7, 161–2, 164
motivation 23
movement 19, 20, 28, 71, 100, 105, 192; see also bodily movement
mural 35, 128–9
Musikhuset 55
Musil, Robert 183, 194, 197

national identity 136, 139, 142–4

National September 11 Memorial, New York 191
neighbourhood 87, 95, 103, 116, 125
Netherlands, The 170
new genre public art 85, 92, 98, 110, 150
Nieftagodien, Noor 119
1976 Uprisings Sculpture (Student Confrontation), Soweto (Stone Mabunda) 119, 122–3, 125
Nishi, Tatzu 188, 193

Obey series (Shepard Fairey) 160–2

observation 24, 184; see also filmed observation and in situ observations
Occupy Wall Street 192
Oertel, Johannes 195
One and Other, New York (Antony Gormley) 75–9
Orlando West 115–16, 119

participation 54–5, 64, 76–9; bodily 185; citizen 7; forums 118, 122; resident 116
participatory design 54
Parunak, H. V. D. 34, 46
Pearl Monument, Manama 192
pedestal 28, 30, 72, 75–6, 183
pedestrians 137, 156–7
percent for art program 21
perception 11, 20–1, 23, 30, 51, 102–3, 167–8
Phillips, Patricia 107
pilgrims 138, 140, 174
Pink, Sarah 109
place 65, 71–2, 75, 94, 98–9, 103–9, 141, 172; and identity 173; doing 100; experience of 139; sense
of 5; see also place making
Place Jean-Paul Riopelle 152, 159
place making 81, 103, 107
Platform 5, Sunderland (Jason Bruges) 65
play 21, 65, 67, 160, 187
plinth 24–5, 27, 29, 67, 71–3, 75–9, 155
Ponte Milvio 42, 44–5
posture 19–20, 24–5, 27, 29, 157
potentiality 106–7, 109
power 5, 10–1, 67, 70, 121, 130, 140
practice 12, 44, 84–5, 91–5, 110, 150; see also social practice
practice turn 83–4
prop 25, 63, 161, 183–4, 190, 192
Prospect Park 183
protesters 162–4
public, the 3, 5, 122, 149–51, 154, 167; different 115, 125, 129; international 124; potential 116, 159,
164; types of 160; varieties of 163
public art 1–9, 36, 84–6, 107, 126, 176–9; embodiments of 179; forms of 17, 19, 30, 38, 132, 151,
190; instrumentalisation of 21, 95; materiality of 29; new genre 6, 85, 98, 110, 150; studies of 3,
169, 179; urban 65
public space 4, 51–2, 54, 86, 151–2, 169, 184; urban 153, 164, 170, 178, 187, 194, 197, 198

Quartier International de Montréal 149, 152–3

Quinn, Mark 73–5
reception 3, 19, 98, 110, 172
Reconciliation, Ottawa (Jack Harman) 29
relational aesthetics 2, 110
Rendell, Jane 5, 10, 71–2
residents 62, 125–6, 173; committed 87; local 83, 92–3, 105, 116–20, 123, 129
Riopelle, Jean-Paul 152, 159
ritual 133, 139, 141–2, 161
Rome 42–5
Rose, Gillian 98, 102, 107
Rotterdam 167–8, 170–1, 176
Royston 83, 86–7
Russo, Gaetano 185

Salcedo, Doris 185–6

Santa Claus, Rotterdam (Paul McCarthy) 13, 167–8, 170–9
Schütte, Thomas 71, 74
sculpture 19–21, 25–6, 29–30, 72, 76, 173–8, 188; see also social sculpture
Segal, George 20, 187–8
sentimentalism 140
September 11 189, 191
7000 Oak Trees, Kassel (Joseph Beuys) 85, 94
Sharp, Joanne 6, 170
Shepard Fairey 35–6
Shibboleth, London (Doris Salcedo) 185–7
site-specific art 63, 98
sitting 25–6, 29–31, 183, 185, 187
situated knowledge 172, 179
skateboarders 156, 158
social practice 12, 83, 86, 91, 94–5
social sculpture 71, 79, 85
Somme 131, 133–4
sound art 99, 102–3, 107
Sounding the Way 101, 111
Southbank Footbridge 44–5
Soweto 115–18
space 35, 55, 64, 73, 94, 169, 184; see also public space
spatial 102–3, 155
Spine, Aarhus (Kollision, CAVI, M. Wahlberg, H. Munch) 65
statuary 30, 150
Statue of King George III, New York (Joseph Wilton) 195–6
statues 25, 67, 132
Stevens, Quentin 156, 158
stigmergy 12, 33–4, 39–41, 46–7
street art 12, 33–6, 38–9, 41, 45–7
street furniture 1, 4, 21
street furnishings 31
subject-object-space-time nexus 169–70, 172, 179
Surowiec, Łukasz 86
Suvero, Mark di 192–3
symbol 62, 94, 190
symbolism 14, 121, 184, 187–8, 190–1

Taichi shadow boxing, Montreal (Ju Ming) 152, 157–8, 163

Taichi single whip, Montreal (Ju Ming) 152, 157–8, 163
target hardening 29
Tate Modern 185–6
teenagers 117, 158, 160, 163
temporality 91, 93, 107
termites 33
Thrift, Nigel 139–41
tourists 154, 156–60, 177, 190, 198; and pigeons 71, 75; and residents 116, 122, 124–6, 129–30
Trafalgar Square 67–9, 71–8
Tree Planting, Glasgow (Graham Fagen) 83–4, 86, 88, 91–4
trees 84, 86, 88, 92–4
Trains to Life, Trains to Death, Berlin (Frank Meisler) 185
Two Bulls Sculpture (The Nobel Laureates), Soweto (Mboyo Moroa) 119

Union Square Park 189, 194

urban creativity 41, 45, 47
urban development 5, 7, 83, 86, 94–5, 116, 170, 179
urban sociability 151
urban sociology 149
urban studies 94–5, 98
use 85, 115, 122, 125, 154, 183; and consumption 84, 91–4; and function 3–6; intended 184; physical
19; and publics 160; 163–4; and users 6–9; 23, 30, 142

vandalism 39, 126

Victoria Square 152, 155, 157, 159–62
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington (Maya Lin) 190–1
Vilakazi hand signs sculpture (Hands), Soweto (Sinomzi Sishuba and Mlungisi Mzingi) 119, 121,
125–6
Vilakazi Street 13, 115–20, 122–9
Villers-Bretonneux 131–6, 138–42, 144
visual fieldwork 167; see also filmed observation

Wales 99, 101

walking 104, 107, 109
Ward, Stuart 140
War Stone 134–5, 142
western front 13, 131, 133–4, 138, 141
White, Stanford 183
Whiteread, Rachel 72, 74
Whyte, William H. 30, 149, 153, 185
Wilson, James Q. 39, 40–1
Wilton, Joseph 196
Winter, Caroline 137–8
Wodiczko, Krzysztof 193–4
Wood, Marshall 152, 154
workers 152, 155, 159
World War I 132–3, 139, 143, 161
Wunderlich, Filipa 107

Zebracki, Martin 98, 102, 149, 169

Ziino, Bart 133
Zuccotti Park 192–3, 198