Public art as meditation on public time

From Firenze University Press Journal: Aisthesis

Tereza Hadravova, Charles University in Prague

Sabrina Muchová, Charles University in Prague

In her latest book, Nomi Claire Lazar argues that time, however natural it feels, is always constructed, mediated by marks and measures, and endlessly malleable. All experienced time is, Lazar says, shaped time. There are different ways to construe it: via calendars and clocks, but also by noticing a change of seasons, for example, or patterns of traffic. In Lazar’s view, the latter also qualifies as technology, for «any reasonably regular event series can be used to measure time» (Lazar [2019]: 18).

Time technologies that we experience time through are thus either found (e.g., sunrise), or constructed mechanically (e.g., clocks). In either case, however, time is also shaped conceptually (e.g., via a concept of progress): clocks can be taken to measure the time flying away, or its endless return and repetition. Although time technologies help us to experience the shape of time, they do not, by themselves, impose a shape on it.In this paper, we propose the idea that works of public art often aim to reflect on a shape of time and suggest that, in addition to conceptual re-shaping, time is also malleable aesthetically.

The paper proceeds as follows. We begin by arguing that the debate on public art in aesthetics has been biased towards discussing the spatial, rather than temporal aspects of the artworks in question. We then focus on a primary temporal aspect of public art that is often noted, its temporariness (or ephemerality), and investigate the roles it plays in recent philosophical literature. We argue that temporariness has been given two roles: it has been considered as a somewhat prominent aesthetic feature of contemporary public art, and it has been understood as a standard feature of a newly coined category of contemporary public art. While we defend the former approach, we argue that works of public art have also recruited other temporal properties to pursue their aesthetic aim.

Working with an example of an open-air art exhibition space located in Prague, we explain how a better understanding of the temporality of works of public art may help us to see why these works are valuable as works of public art.«Public art» has been a contested category in recent literature. In practice, the label usually covers works of art displayed, performed, or held in public spaces — memorials and public sculptures as well as outdoor performances and art interventions; in theory, its scope has been disputed and new labels have been coined to designate some out-of-the-museum-door artistic practices as different from a narrower class of «public art».

While we argue against one way of dissecting the scope of public art into discrete units later, we concur with those who have emphasized a critical, or, as we prefer to say, reflective function of public art regarding the idea of the public and the common in a broad sense (Phillips [1989], Hein [1996]), i.e., of what has been in political discourse often called «the common good» and which relates to our «public lives» (Hussain [2018]). In this sense, the aim of public art as public art, in most general terms, is an aesthetic reflection of the public. As we show in the following part, this aim has been mostly understood in terms of public space.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Aisthesis-13447

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/13447