Dominique DeVito

Article fleshing out

Pasternak 

Is the audience the primary factor in the success of the artwork?

Finkelpearl 

Yes, you must understand the site where the art will live. For example, in a school the school community is the “public”.

Eccles 

I wanted to move away from thinking about government programs, and put more interest in the work and what artists were doing in their own spaces. Privileging artists over other concerns was radical, but we had to be advocates for artists, because government officials would not be. 

There were two forces that effected how public art was thought about in New York, the Tilted Arc controversy, the removal of Richard Serra’s piece from federal plaza in 1989. 

(Tilted Arc was a site-specific sculpture originally commissioned by the United States General Services Administration Arts-in-Architecture program for the Foley Federal Plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Manhattan, New York City. The post-minimalist artwork was designed by the well-known artist Richard Serra and constructed in 1981. However, after much debate, it was removed in 1989 following a lawsuit. Richard Serra is one of the leading minimalist sculptors and started his notable body of work after his graduation from Yale University where he studied fine art. This work exemplifies his minimalist, conceptual style. Tilted Arc was created when Serra was forty years old and was already a respected artist; thus, there was much attention given to the removal of his work.)

This made people scared of commissioning new work. The second is the predominance of site specificity, artists were more interested in typologies than making work that revealed something about the space. Rachel Whiteread’s Water Tower 1998 is a good example of being interested in site later in the process.  

Shifting away from site as a                                        stating point liberates artists.