Director's Statement

What is "public" in the space of cities?

If the city is a process, is public space also always in process?

The fascination with the city (and/or the urban condition) as a spatial and temporal platform for the development of curatorial strategies, exhibition frameworks, "public" art works, and context-driven artistic practices is certainly not a new historical phenomenon. In the contemporary period, there has been a proliferation of exhibition platforms and curatorial strategies that have sought to re-activate urban social space.

The Master of Public Art Studies Program Program (Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere) proposes the notion—and pragmatic model—of the public curator as an agent involved in developing new symbolic and material platforms and situations through which to engage broader publics, counter-publics, citizens, constituencies and communities—with the possibility of reactivating discourse within public (cultural) spheres.

In cities characterized by density, dispersal (or both), there are frictions between open and closed spaces, between private and public interests, between access and inaccessibility, and amidst individuals of distinct subjectivities, suggesting that "public space" (and, distinctly, the discursive/political field of "the public sphere"), is constituted through a matrix of conflicting and unifying social and ideological interests. At times, we have considered urban public space as an increasingly controlled or hyper-functionalized zone, and imagined that art and curatorial practices might generate symbolic and/or material resistances to these imaginary and real controls.

In this program, we inquire about the task of art—and the curator, critic, theorist, organizer or scholar—in relation to public space, the private realm, and the broader public sphere, and seek to examine what is at stake in utilizing public space as a platform for innovative projects. We focus on the conceptual and organizational challenges facing artists, curators, and organizers from various generational and ideological perspectives, and from distinct global locations, who have sought to expand normative definitions of curatorial practice in relation to urban publics, public space—in terms of the possibilities of new social modes of collaboration & participation, and a rethinking of context-specificity.

Questions emerge:

What does it mean—on aesthetic and political terms—to utilize the city as a platform for curatorial experimentation?

How do curators, in collaboration with artists, audiences, institutions, citizens and communities, potentially re-activate so-called "public" urban spaces?

Whose interests are being served in the development of large-scale, city-based exhibition projects (such as the proliferating biennials)? Are these projects merely an engine for the redevelopment of cities, for the official re-branding of urban identities, and the making of new forms of cultural tourism? And if so, why not?

As curators, what do we want to accomplish with such ambitious exhibition projects? What are our expectations—in terms of social "effectiveness"—in relation to artistic infiltrations, interventions or interruptions that claim to have a socially responsive dynamic of engagement- to generate new modes of aesthetic experience or political engagement? Or, is the engineering of a distinct social experience, a slightly altered social interaction, sufficient?

If artistic, architectural and other types of cultural interventions into public city-spaces constitute a kind of urban acupuncture, is there an underlying social condition that requires treatment? Or, is "public space" an imaginary (ideological) construction?

What actually happens when space is claimed in the public realm for a mode of cultural production that seeks to produce some kind of transformative ideological, political, perceptual, or psychological effect (temporary or enduring), for—or in collaboration with—"publics" or "citizens"?

Are urban territories actually re-activated through the transitory agencies and situational engagements of artists, curators, writers, organizers, architects, and other cultural producers? How do we track the effectiveness or reverberations of such practices—particularly in relation to more ephemeral artistic and curatorial interventions?

Have we reached a new phase in the development of art projects that operate on liminal levels, like the production of critical shadows, rumors, distinct urban mythologies, silent resistances? Have we entered the realm of the work of art in the age of appearances and disappearances, between visibility and invisibility, re-surfacing and de-surfacing at tactical moments of engagement... and disengagement?

Are such artistic engagements and cultural interventions a means of promoting another kind of citizenship, wherein there is an interface between cultural producers and other publics that generate enhanced forms of cultural and political responsibility?

Joshua Decter
Director of the Program and Assistant Professor