Call for Papers
Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)
New York, February 24–28, 2012
Session:
Spacing the Arts: Exploring Geographies of Public Art from Within
Convenor: Martin Zebracki (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)
Session abstract:
Since time immemorial, urban patrimonies have embodied public art, and vice versa. Public art may be seen as permanent or temporary artworks, either physical or immaterial, on sites that have open public access and are located outside museums and galleries.
The multifaceted nature of public art has induced a multidisciplinary debate about its oxymoronic nature and the socio-spatial features of its publicness and artfulness. Public art is peculiar in that it integrates the site as part of the content, which makes
the ontological nature of public art geographically complex and polemic.
Cultural policy has produced divergent intentions underlying the direction of public art since its advent in the Western world in the second half of the 20th century. Since the ‘renaissance’ of public art in the 1980s, geographers have critically analysed
creative practices as drivers of urban development and regeneration. Urban planners assume that public art and creative environments attract people as integral spheres of experience. Public art may be seen as a conceptual domain and practice of various underresearched
claims about what art ‘does’ to people and places.
Academics have commonly framed epistemologies of art in urban public space from the perspectives of its planners and creators. Yet, the fundamental purpose of public art is intrinsically shaped by its publics. They comprise a multifarious audience that
embodies differential repertoires of public art in relation to culture, time, place and space. This session explicitly addresses the knowledge gap concerned by inviting contributions with empirical foundations built throughout the publics of public art. In
so doing, this session provides insight into how both academics and practitioners could make an allowance for the publics in all their diversities by engaging them with the geographical situatedness of public art. To boot, such insight finds societal importance
in terms of socio-spatial legitimisation of public art as current budgetary cuts in the culture and arts sectors have increasingly made topical the raison d’etre of art in public space. Space- and time-specific awareness of the sundry publics is essential
to public art, as the publics, site as well as the time frame are of paramount importance to the content of public art.
This session invites scholars from across all disciplines to critically analyse the socio-spatial and temporal contexts of public art in interrelation to its publics in particular. Suggested topics this session attempts to explore include, but are not
restricted to, the following:
· Genealogies, ontologies, ontogeneses and epistemologies of public art
· The dynamic interrelationships between different classes of public art, patrons, planners, creators, publics, place, space and time
· Reflexive and performative methodologies of public-art research
· Public art as methodic device in geographical research
· New genre public art (cf. Lacy, 1995)
· Spatial politics of public art (cf. Deutsche, 1996)
· Critical geographies of public art (cf. Senie and Webster, 1998; Lees, 2001)
· Symbiotic relationships between public art and queer spaces
· Spatial poetics of public art (cf. Bachelard, 1958)
· The relationships between public art and the public sphere (cf. Mitchell, 1992)
· Deconstruction of public-art claims (cf. Hall and Robertson, 2001; ‘public artopia’ in Zebracki et al., 2010).
· Site-specificity of public art (cf. Kwon, 2004)
· Relational aesthetics of public art (cf. Bourriaud, 2002)
· Engaging geographies of public art
· Mental representations of public art
· Visceral engagements with public art
· Non-representational geographies of public art
· Geographical legitimisation of public art (cf. Selwood, 1995; Sharp et al., 2005)
· The relationships between imagined and reified dimensions of public art
· Social negotiations of public art and its site
· Public art as time-space / Time-space as public art
· The discipline of geography and geographical research as public art
If you are interested in participating in this session, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to Martin Zebracki (
[log in to unmask]) by September 21, 2011. Please feel free to ask any questions related to this intended session.
Martin Zebracki
Urban and Regional research centre Utrecht
Department of Human Geography and Planning, Faculty of Geosciences
Utrecht University
2 Heidelberglaan
3584 CS, Utrecht
The Netherlands
T. +31(0)30 253 2040