secret/rogue public art.

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Is there anybody out there who is interested in Secret public art? I havent really formed my thoughts on this but recently I went to a conference on Public art in Coleraine Northern Ireland, which keft me feeling pretty sickened and not wanting to have any relationship to people who try to close down the definitions of - art, artist, public, space - even though they have financial power. I have decided to work as a rogue element in ways that need no funding and would welcome comments of any kind.

-- laura carey (robert.rocknroll@mail.cybase.co.uk), April 15, 1999

Answers

I don't know if you are still interested in in art in public. There is a difference between public art and art in public. You may want to check out the work of Nicola-Atkinson Griffith. She works out of Glasgow and did a project through the Irish Museum of Mod. Art and also through Strathclyde Buses in Glasgow. I believe she is also at work on a community based project in Dundee, associated with the new museum there. She acquires her own funding and does quite audacious work outisde of the established institutions. It is not secret by any means but she controls all the project parameters. In the words of US critic Bruce Hainley "Art can be anything, but not everything gets to be art". It is really up to artists to expand that definition by showing the world what it hasn't seen before.

And I think you are quite idealistic about who owns public art (in another thread that you responded to). Jim (the other responder) was right; certainly with public art it is wanted, bought and paid for. Art is a commodity and anyone who thinks otherwise is probably not an artist or a collector or a curator; in other words is an "outsider" or a hobbyist. Art that does not function as an item of value (can be for barter or money but must be wanted at some cost) is the product of a hobby.

-- Barbara McCarren (bmccarren@aol.com), August 30, 1999.


there is prize for rogue art every year in the uk called the turner prize. the parameters of art are now so loose that anything is considered art and the mainstream have accepted this and embraced it into respectability. yesterdays rogue art is todays establishment art.

-- zieghart (crazyongas@hotmail.com), October 20, 1999.

I work on small projects that I fund myself and put out into public spaces, because of this I am seen sometimes as a hobbyist or a Sunday artist by art people. However, the people that come into contact with my work directly, e.g, the finder of my message in a bottle and the finder of my treasure maps, react to my work, not as art, with all of its pre-conceptions, but just as a thing that inspires and makes the world a little more exciting and un-expected. The problem is with the art people not the public, and yet I want to be taken seriously as much as the next art person.

-- littleprojects (littleprojects2001@yahoo.com), December 02, 2000.

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