Urban public art

RESEARCH QUESTION How can the built environment be mutated into powerful urban magnets by implementing ‘engaging’ public art?

INTRODUCTION Urban public art is very well known to be a powerful tool in manipulating the experience of the urban environment, creating active engagement of urbanites with the environment, and aids in re-socialising public spaces. Involvement of the societal structure with public art within the everydayness creates social interstices, paving ways of perceiving and looking into a new world encompassed by art. This creates an extended loop between the viewer and the artist, art being the medium.

In an argument in justification of urban street art as a social and artistic movement, it is imperative that it has already been established that street art in any form has the power in repurposing negative and bland spaces into purposeful public engaging spaces through experimental interventions of public art.

Today, public art is a multidimensional hybrid of street art, graffiti and fine art, adapting methods of graffiti, as well as the street in which it is exposed, framed within conceptual ideas. The emergence of urban street art as a cultural practice has its origins in graffiti from the late 1960s in New York, developing throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s as a form of tagging. Urban public art not only involves creativity, longevity and ephemerality, but also elements of performance, gentrification, social activism and place making. It is a multidisciplinary practice of art that engages the viewer, weaving it and the art into the public realm.

This paper would thus focus on the exploration of how engagement of urban public art incites engagement of urbanites with their environment or the built space.

Environmentalism through Art The world is going through a rapid and exponential growth of population and hence urbanization. With this increasing urban population, which is a result of decreasing mortality rates and a rural-tourban migration, people are becoming disconnected both socially and culturally from nature. Though the increasing coercion between nature and urban population is dying a steadfast death the vital bond between nature and urban population with natural resources is the only thing that remains constant. This demand for all natural resources is necessitating

the domestication of nature. But what is left today is an unforeseen demand of such natural resources with over exploitation of the resources available on earth. As the world continues to rapidly urbanize, what would happen once it reaches its carrying capacity? It is imperative to realize that nature, society and culture are interdependent. It cannot function in isolation. The social realm or everyday life in the urban setting is made up of socio - natural entanglements. To ignore their relation with each another is to ignore the very basics of an ever-growing urban society. Urban political ecology, the study of tangibles and intangible interactions, serves to create an understanding of how urban environments are produced and socially constructed, acting as an entry point for investigating the urban metabolism. By revealing these dynamics, a more reflective understanding of our environment emerges.

Karl Marx argued that to ignore the mutual co evolution of nature and society was to neglect the key element of both analysis and critique of modern urban societies. So the question emerges of a new socio spatial dimension where act of environmentalism can be an everyday phenomenon, which acknowledges the socio natural dimensions of the built environment. The current need is to disentangle the individual from mass consumerism. Henri Lefebvre envisaged a radical reorganization of the everyday through the encouragement of creative desire, “a critique of everyday life encompasses a critique of art by the everyday and a critique of the everyday by art. It encompasses a critique of the political realms by everyday social practice and vice versa” (Lefebvre, 2014).

Alex Loftus describes that if a piece of art reached a universal entreaty (which is often not the case in many scenarios), it is due to, “the way in which it captures what appears latent and unnoticed in the world" (Loftus, 2012). Public art and its practice can be extended to the socionatural complexities of the urban setting, seeing through the routine of everyday life regulated by consumerism (Capitalism).

Co relation of Everyday life and Art The urban space of the street is a place for talk, given over as much to the exchange of words and signs as it is to the exchange of things. A place where speech becomes writing and the public is free to add, change, and interact with their culture; it is shared from one person to another person. Similarly, art does not take place in obscurity; it requires reaction, consciously or unconsciously, of both the artist’s and viewer’s past, present and future experiences and hopes. But in the age of consumerism and fast production the public absorbs what is given and put forward but does not interact with its culture, and instead lives “a culture experienced through the act of consumption”. However, a Read Only Culture is not enough. Read/Write Culture has a reciprocal relationship between the producer and the consumer, nurturing

individual creativity to produce and in confluence with their culture, continually remixing and producing new material, and in this way the culture becomes richer, inclusive and strengthened.

Three basic aspects of art, public space, and audience, are interlinked by inquiries of socio-spatial scale. These scales are taken on board with particular regard to issues of artistic production, the consumption of public space, community or group driven public art and audience involvement respectively.

Considering the scale of public space as an assemblage and dialogical dimension of public space and people, it is interesting to see how both are mediated through idiosyncrasies of artistic manifestation.

Here, reasoned from a Lefebvrian school of thought, the production of public space and hence public art concerns a social relational process (cf. also Massey and Rose, 2003). It is where public art intrinsically inhabits a socio-spatial reality beyond its intangible dimension, which is material reality. In such re-imagined sphere or “third space” (Edward Soja, 1996) – the creators and consumers, i.e. experts, of public art endeavor to convey newly interpreted social spaces that may but not necessarily fit in with the everyday use and experience of public space among other experts as well as diverse audiences of public art.

That is to say that public art, can become a critical apparatus that might have the fundamental potential to let people rethink and hence rescale the consumption of public spaces within material, social and symbolic dimensions.

Particularly in the case of the later, art is occasionally instilled from the design table into public space with very less sometimes even without engagement with the immediate everyday users of that space (Hall and Robertson, 2001; Zebracki et al., 2010). Such circumstances evidently have detrimental implications with the volume of social engagement and participation.

In the context of public art in historical manifestation, street art and public art gives a sense and idea of statutory victory, authority and power. The commemoration of victory over Gujarat by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the form of Buland darwaza is arguably an example of public art, for people engaging directly with its intricacies of artistic connotation and attachment of memories of awe, victory and power.

Whereas in many examples, one of which Michaelangelo’s David statue placed in the town square, a public demonstration of individual expression. These stances of public art become an implication of independence of a particular societal value system and a community.

As pointed out by Teresa Caldeiras, the diverse range of socio cultural practices and artistic interventions of indigenous street art including graffiti and pixação (tagging), rap, street dance are substantial demonstrations by minority movements and religious groups. Various cultural practices of poetry readings, skateboarding, street art, parkour, and motorcycling, are transforming the cities and their public spaces around the world. They enunciate the profound social inequalities that have always marked these cities and create new modes of using the city. Based on many years of Teresa Caldeiras’s ethnographic research in São Paulo, she argues that these practices, both as an artistic production and urban implementations, not only give the subaltern classes a new visibility in the city but also transform the character of public spaces and also expresses highly contradictory practices of political action. They paves a path of rights to the city while rupturing the public with aggressiveness and expose discrimination while refusing integration. Thus they require new conceptualizations of democratic public space and of the role of citizens in producing the city.

This situation of social involvement expressed through public art, which is the outcome of social relationships with the spaces around a neighbourhood level can be brought into light by taking up the case of Khirki Village, New Delhi. There has been many initiatives by national and international art organisations that has come up with street art, graffitis and paintings around the Khirki village’s mostly along the major spine connecting the main road to the inner parts of the area. Of much such organization, Khirkee collective has recently fostered community participation, initiating street art on walls that spread messages about what the community wanted to speak about. This eventually paved the path of gender unbiased and democratic public spaces that usually were under utilized and discriminated.

Sanjeev at his shop says the paintings has become a part of his shop and many locals and tourists pause by to admire the wall art and later in the evening becomes a gathering place of the locals, both women and men. “This place has become livelier and we get lot of customers, also many new food stalls have come up around to cater the growing crowd.” _Sanjeev (shopkeeper).

Conclusion: The multi disciplinary and oppositional views of public art’s roles and uses and connected socio-political power projections got the reasoning of public art in terms of a public “disorder” – as divulged in the inconveniences of multi functional governance and policy and within the different everyday social practices of the users of public space. Such reasoning do not give a clear-cut, straight principle of logic. It might rather disturb day-to-day realities that pursue such principle. Public art concerns a macro public treasure house or rather a challenge of multi functional social encounters in ordinary but meaningful built spaces.

Public art, therefore, acts as critical pedagogical window (cf. Ranciére, 2009) on the community driven production of public space through culture and social art movements (public art), more broadly and the role of the engaging public as well as new audience in equilibrating the “third place” with artscapes thereof. If the “interstices” i.e. “between-being” amongst the art and the spectator of public art genuinely steps into the limelight and becomes the byproduct of transparency, public spaces advances to be more permanent and viable.

The potential future of public art and the mutation of negative space into active urban space seamlessly engaging in urbanism create a new investigation and paradigm. This proclaims that new models of public art practice have a public participation and not only consumers or spectators. In the process of transmuting urban public space, art is composed in multiple parallels creating a plurality of publics. Urban art therefore becomes negotiations, which are tactics of public appropriation, ways of intervention and a new direction towards designing public spaces in the every day life.

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