You Need to Start to Listen to Us

According to the majority of online definitions, public art is a creative expression by artists and communities that can take many different shapes and be made of a variety of materials. It can also be installed either permanently or temporarily in a public area. The practice of public art involves a partnership of stakeholders, including the authority, artists or designers, and community members. It can enhance the public sphere, facilitate community building, and foster the growth of social and cultural capital. Public art typically represents the local culture, preserves a city’s identity while establishing history and memory, and reflects the belief system of the said “local culture”.

As unimaginative as the latter part of the above definition may sound, it is one that the “authorities” often go for when commissioning works. Although, dullness isn’t a burden solely on public or private commissioning institutional bodies. Many artists—and young artists at that—share more or less similar ideas of what public art is and what it should or could do. Contemporary public art has long adopted monumental abstraction as its favourable icon; why is that so? Imagine four tall blue cubes of cement in a square that don’t correspond to anything in their surroundings and don’t pose any unsettling questions, who could possibly be offended? Nobody, unless the sculpture ends up blocking their way to work or casting an unwanted shadow on the spot where they have lunch. Formal nuisances they sure can be; intellectually, you are safe though. The “corporate bauble” in the shopping mall or public square, as Kate Linker puts it, “needs no iconic or symbolic relation to the public it serves, the space it occupies, or the figures it reveres.” It’s enough for it to serve as a symbol of aesthetic surplus, a token of “art” producing more gentrifiable neighbourhoods. Many artists have learned by now that even their boldest oppositional movements and gestures can be recuperated and packaged into ornaments for the corporate world, clothes hanging on models walking runways, or Netflix entertainment. So why even try?

With the grim picture painted above, how can we continue the tradition of public art and public sculpture with a utopian vision, a daring imaginary of an inclusive and comprehensive public sphere? Public art has always projected idealized fantasies of an unchanging, homogenous, and pacified public. What do I mean by a daring imaginary? A critical public art that is forthright about the contradictions and violence inscribed in its own circumstances, one that dares to awaken a public arena of resistance, struggle, and dialogue. This is most called for now, and if it is not delivered by artists, it will be delivered by people.

Can the publics reject, dissent, or speak back to imposing forms of public art? In the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, hundreds of monuments to well-known historic figures associated with colonialism, slavery, racism, and imperialism were torn down, toppled, or defaced by outraged people transnationally. In one instance, the Black Lives Matter protestors in the UK ripped down the monument of Edward Colston—a slave trader who is well known through archived documents for enslaving at least one hundred thousand people—and rolled it into the harbour. A symbolically beautiful act of refusal to look at this man as a hero. The message was clear: the governments of this municipality, region, or nation have to start to listen to us, a public consisting of a majority of historically oppressed people, about who we deem fit to be remembered and commemorated in the public space. Someone who stands accused of helping to enslave one hundred thousand people of African descent is not someone we choose to heroize at any moment.

Can the publics create their own uncommissioned spontaneous imaginaries of what they think public art should monumentalize, represent, or reflect on the urgencies of any given historic moment? The very recent 2022 Jin Jian Azadi (Woman Life Freedom) movement in Iran saw a surge of temporary artistic interventions in public sites and performances responding to police brutality and violence imposed on the protestors. Images of women dancing with their veils in hand around fires they had set in the streets, water fountains turned red, women memorializing the movement’s martyrs by reperforming their dance moves in public, and music students of Tehran University coming up with one brilliant revolutionary song after another, they all created rare sites where lines between art, life, and resistance became indistinguishable. When a famous gallery space decided to open its doors to the public with an exhibition opening, it found its doors splashed with red colour as a sign of protest for its failure to show solidarity with the protestors. This opened up conversations in the art workers’ communities about the position and responsibilities that institutionalized public and private art spaces should hold in the desperate circumstances of living in and resisting authoritarian states. Many believed that the art inside confined gallery spaces appeared obsolete in comparison to the power of the public art created in the streets.

What these publics are clearly calling for are monuments of the future reimagined and redefined contemporaneously with shifting social knowledge and generational change, and this is far from a conflict-free zone. We need to think critically about the interventions we make to change the current order. The challenge that stands for our generation is the continued creative engagement with and rethinking of public arts that hold the potential for shifting from commemorating or representing unnuanced and static narratives of the past. In this way, public art acts as a part of the everyday experience and becomes a site for learning how to navigate the line between conflict, contradiction, and dialogue—a monumental challenge in the process.