“…and the place of artists will have been reclaimed.”

…and I said: “I paint so I’ll have something to look at.” And sometimes I said: “I write so I will have something to read.” One thing that I am involved in about painting is that the painting should give man a sense of place: that he knows he’s there, so he’s aware of himself. In that sense he relates to me when I made the painting because in that sense I was there.

– Barnett Newman: ‘Interview with David Sylvester (1965), in ‘Selected Writings and Interviews’, University of California Press, 1992, p257

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[Barnett Newman: ‘Ohio, 1949’]

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…and the place of artists will have been reclaimed.

A place comes into art loaded with content. An artist comes to a place in one of two ways: either loaded with content or, like a clean slate, ready to receive, interpret and represent what is already there. If the former, an artist will displace the resident meanings of a place with his preconceptions about art. If the latter, she will make those meanings visible as if for the first time. In so doing she may also make something that bears little resemblance to art; it may look like beach furniture, feel like a walking tour, read like an ethnic community library, sound like oral history, pass by like a parade or be organised like a photography competition. Having being made by an artist, however, it will be none of those things alone.

To borrow a phrase once again from Allan Kaprow “It will be art without necessarily being “art-like”. It will be art “like” something else: like architecture, like street life, urban design, like social research, like outdoor advertising, like memorials, like graffiti, like archival photography, like turn-of-the-century graveyards for the stillborn infants of unwed mothers. What this means is that a place will be both the content and the context of an art of place: it will have a kind of double life. In place artists engage meanings that may have nothing to do with art, but which are framed, proposed or clarified in the engagement. Like archaeologists, contemporary artists of place excavate the accumulated history and character of a place; like anthropologists, they study the institutions, myths and customs that characterise a place; like psychotherapists, they unlock the unconscious assumptions and forgotten secrets that keep a place’s histories and intentions hidden from public view; like witches or magicians, they invoke the rhythms and spirits of a place; like sociologists, they measure the social systems that give a place its power; and like social activists, artists of place confront the rhetorics of exclusion and power that keep certain places off limits to dissenting voices, which means that the thresholds now before us are fundamentally political: metaphors for access and belonging, for empowerment and remembering.

– Jeff Kelley: Keynote Address, ‘Public Art — The New Agenda’ (conference), The University of Westminster, 18 November 1993