Temporal Intervention City Innovation for Public Art in Bangkok

Bangkok, Thailand

TEMPORAL INTERVENTION CITY INNOVATION FOR PUBLIC ART IN BANGKOK

BY KHAISRI PAKSUKCHARERN

INTRODUCTION Public art, art placed in daily used public spaces such as streets, squares, plazas, parks and public buildings, has a major impact and an ideological aspect to enhance urban aesthetics and robustness in a city. Public art aims to promote social interaction in a city. It also helps foster encounters and the coexistence of people, as well as helps them comprehend and appreciate art and urban form and pattern, subsequently leading to urban livability. e aspect of creating a ‘livable city’ was a progressive and liberal idea of urban development at the end of Modernism in the 1980s in European and American cities. is ideology which extensively emerged around the 1990s was supported by a series of discussions on public art and its supporting role to reclaim the ‘public-ness’ of open spaces in several cities. In the context of urban blight and decay due to the fall of industrialization, public art played a crucial role to impose a re-visioning of public spaces and how they should be used and by whom. is concept is geared towards building a more democratic society. It also opposes the dehumanizing of urban spaces of the rational city model of Modernism. Public art

would then play a signi cant part in enhancing an outdoor public life for urban dwellers, stimulating nostalgic notions of urban history and spiritual inspiration through the creation of monuments and public sculptures. e development of public art in relation to urban spaces has been continuously and extensively discussed. It has yielded solutions of how both can be adapted and make use of each other in order to sustain the right balance of intervention. As culture and society can have a direct relationship, re ected through art, urban spaces in a city can be distinctively provided in relation to artistic manifestations that can contribute to the quality of life in the community and inner urban 1

Bangkok, Thailand

Figure 1 Frequency of public art activities in public buildings and spaces in Bangkok.

areas. As art should be integrated at a proper scale of intervention through urban design, rather than scattered around in places, it thus needs an appropriate urban development policy, as well as a unique city innovation plan that can break through obstacles and produce a new solution to place art in the city, for its people.

Bangkok recently introduced the professional practice of urban design. Art in public urban spaces then has never been formally nor systematically planned nor organized with a proper and sensible urban intervention plan 2

by local nor national authorities such as the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) or the Ministry of Cultures (MOC). Art displayed publicly in Bangkok is still largely considered to be an unnecessary commodity to people, it is not a popular attractor in itself nor has there been public art that Thai people can truly identify themselves with. As art in general still means paintings, sculptures, and traditional cra works to the public, it retains an ambiguous status in ai society. It has rather little appeal to curators, dealers and critics. e public accepts the existence

of art, but does not necessarily understand it.

It can be said that the innovation of the ai public art form comes from the concepts of daily life, common routine, and temporal but regular interventions. e idea of temporality and transience is, in fact, the perception of time and space derived from Buddhist teachings. is is similar to what European intellectuals reasoned by the end of the 19th century (the ideas of Duchamp or Malevich). In Asia, space is something between something else, a crossing not a destination.

Bangkok, Thailand

own works as ‘community projects’ instead of looking at it as a solitary piece of artwork, as in the past. is form of art has gained more interest and understanding from local communities as they can relate these art events to or as temple festivals or ‘ngan wat’.

It is a product of linking between worlds and offers gateway to others. ai traditional homes with a series of transitional spaces between private and public realm, for example, are built with that spatial experience.

Art becomes a receptacle for human relations and social engagement. Such a relationship to art seems to be highly contemporary and the right response to today’s society. Temporality and transience in forms of installation art, performance art, and festive art allow audiences who participate to have direct experiences and destroy the conventional rule of touching the art. As material, solid art decreases, art becomes more like a series of events.

From something tangible and permanent to something temporary that exists in a speci c time and place. Having many people involved in art activities brings attention to the concept of community. Artists who participate in public activities refer to their

markets, and commercial areas, as opposed to museums and public plazas, which have no place in the city’s history.

With the long-term problems of economic inequality, the lack of educational tools, the hypocrisy of western museums unwillingness to lend to ai museums, as well as the government’s minimal interest in contemporary art, ai artists should step back from the western approach and be more conscious of their own rich heritage. e government should support more critical thinking through education programs.

With the ai culture of openness, adaptation and especially transience and temporality, there is an extraordinary potential for new art forms.

e innovation of creating physical spaces for public art forms provides more places to hang art pieces and to organize art activities, providing a medium between art and the public. People tend to have more chances to encounter art in their daily life. e temporal intervention or the integration of art in public spaces in forms of installation art, performance art and festive art encourage more understandings about art. It rede nes cognitive space of how people perceive art which is different from what Another crucial step towards they do with art in museums and public acceptance is that artists galleries.

Bangkok, like other major Asian cities, should create art with a strong connection to local communities, as they have no civic culture, as in cities of the West.

Public art has to be more than an ‘object’. Rather, it has to be a total urban intervention closely interrelated to the local community and its particular habitat. It needs a great deal of involvement from the inhabitants to avoid the estrangement of the public. Art should have social signi cances to the local neighborhoods. It should return to the distinctive urban landscapes of Bangkok: streets and alleyways, temples, 3

Bangkok, Thailand

an artist made entirely from a personal narrative and placed in the community nor seen solely as decoration.

should not consider themselves superior to the community. An ego-centric attitude pushes the public away from art movements.

Artists who are mostly concerned about an artwork’s achievement but neglect the process and purpose of the work can negatively affect the community. Art should be based on life, culture, traditions and belief of a particular social community. Public art should reveal the cultural context and discourse existing in that community.

Aer several decades of ambiguity, public art forms in Bangkok could now link the areas of everyday life such as ‘community art’ or ‘outsider art’ once marginalized by the art establishment as lacking aesthetic quality, as opposed to modernist art in white-walled galleries. However, the art contained in Bangkok’s museums and galleries maintains a de nitive form of art. e ambiguity of institutional art should sometimes remain because the creations of some artists tend to be peculiar and controversial. As long as the interest of artists and the public can be contradictory, art institutions still have an important role to create alternative sites for an indoor art type and a place for exchanging ideas.

To bring art outside to public spaces might be more difficult for all parties, but the right participation will bring the public and the artist closer. By introducing art to the street but still linking it back to institutions to exhibit, museum operators have an important part in the creation, exhibition, and the record of art itself. For the public to catch up with contemporary aspects of art, artists need to be both the creators and educators.

Public art in Bangkok today should re ect the social expression of urban dwellers or the local residents who use public spaces. It should connect with and address urban issues and interests. Public art should then be common and become a public phenomenon that remains inside the interest of local communities. Innovation in public art is deIt should be accepted and not ned by the acceptance of art by reduced to a mere object which the public. In ailand where 4

society has been extremely divisive, art can play an important role that allows for expression and challenge the status quo of strategic social and political problems, leaving important and contemporary public messages in daily urban spaces to gain more acceptance and understandings from urban dwellers.

Services and goods generally produced by the state in the West are produced by the private sector in Bangkok, this includes support for contemporary art. erefore, it is the private sector like commercial investors, artists, universities or state enterprises, like Bangkok Mass Transit, who are needed to move public art works forward.

Bangkok, Thailand

In practical terms of urbanism, the heterogeneity and complexity of Bangkok permits the existence of ‘niches’ in the urban economy, which are used by people to make a living. Although the consensus on art support is still fragmented and piecemeal, according to the Ministry of Culture and the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, if there were clear and stable policies, especially to promote public art, this would draw more support from the private sector. e district offices should aim for allocating scal budgets for not only building infrastructure, but supporting community’s projects as they develop.

as, for community art programs.

Community art and a new genre of public art will act as a catalyst for other people’s creativity and imagination and inspire other city innovations.

CONTACT INFORMATION Khaisri Paksukcharern (PhD) DEPARTMENT OF URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING, FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, CHULALONGKORN UNIVERSITY Phayathai Road, Patumwan, Bangkok, 10330, Thailand +66-2-218-4441 +66-2-218-4440 (Fax) http://www.cuurp.org mee2mee@hotmail.com / pkhaisri@chula.ac.th

ere should be more support for artists’ works and urging residencies in social settings, as well With support from