Search

This paper investigates the political implications of public art using frameworks of conflict and antagonism. We introduce 'restor(y)ing' as an analytical scaling device for examining public art's potential to destabilise official planning processes and reclaim cities through acts of re-telling (restorying) and re-making (restoring) urban spaces. We probe how commissioned/formal and unsolicited/informal public art practices can concurrently operate as artistic activism – or 'artivism' – to subvert the status quo in urban contexts that encounter rising socio-spatial inequalities. We deploy restor(y)ing both as an epistemic and real-world commitment to challenging hegemonic powers, and thus amplify activist agendas of marginalised communities. Our argument demonstrates how such politics of restor(y)ing works as a device to unpack conflictual interrelations between 'æffects': affects and effects that political public art can invoke simultaneously, yet potentially unevenly. The politics of æffects reveal contestations around public art in urban planning contexts and policies, public communication, and reception. They foreground intended inclusions vs. systemic exclusions (politics of effects) and the emanating impacts on urban belonging vs. alienation (politics of affects). While much public art scholarship accentuates its alleged positive benefits, we attend to the (oft-ambiguous) negative, conflict-attuned æffects of public art. Ultimately, we advocate for an intersectional approach to restor(y)ing urban justice through public artivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article synthesizes original comparative perspectives of visibility, (counter)actions, and legacy regarding queer monuments: public artworks dedicated to, and questioning or queering normativities around, the lives of LGBT+ people. It pursues a dialogic, interdisciplinary, and multisite and intercultural argument, drawing from approaches and preliminary insights from a scholarly project (Queer Memorials) and artist's project (Strange Inheritance) with topical case studies covering North America and Europe. After abductive ethnography, the analysis oscillates between theory/literature and scholarly and creative practice. It attends to the critical roles queer monuments have played in engaging with how sexual "others" have fallen in and out of place through social struggles, radical politics, and collective memory. The peer exchange provides a cross-case taxonomy of queer monuments' roles, navigating between sorrowful, celebratory, provocative, and informative types and values. It advocates both arts-based enquiry and practice as grounded pathways for narrating queer monuments' activist potential to memorialize, and visibilize, sexual and gender minorities and their overlapping rights in/to space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first article to date that employs a knowledge map analysis to provide insights into the landscape of public art research, a multidisciplinary area that is concerned with issues around the geographies of art, space, and community. This study uses bibliometric analysis and knowledge visualization tools provided by CiteSpace mapping software to review scholarly journal output on "public art" since 1964-which is the first occurrence of this term in an article indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database covering English-language journal publications. The analysis reveals the value of bibliometric analysis for engaging data on the growth and popularity of public art as a research landscape-which is perceived as both a research field and research discourse. Accordingly, this study constructs knowledge maps, and thereby trends, of popular topics and networks of authors and institutions that have emerged in the public art research landscape. Such knowledge maps exhibit a "metageography" of cross-disciplinary connections within public art research (where these knowledge maps in themselves can be rendered as artworks, too). This study, as such, provides new reference points for scholars to position themselves in, and further deepen bibliometric investigation into, the landscape of public art research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial provides an introduction to the Journal of Geography in Higher Education Symposium on "Teaching geographies of sexualities: 20 years on". This edited collection revisits the Symposium "Teaching sexualities in geography" (Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Volume 23 [1999], Issue 1) and the earlier Arena Symposium essay series "Teaching sexual geographies" (Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Volume 21 [1997], Issue 3). The contributions to this updated anthology trace the evolvement and provide original critiques of the current state of sexualities (and, in extension, gender and intersectionality) education in geography curricula in transnational context. These interconnecting papers allow for a more in-depth understanding of the diverse possibilities and challenges facing the teaching of sexualities within geography in a contemporary international climate and identify opportunities for expanded provision. This editorial concludes with critical pointers to champion teaching-inflected sexualities scholarship that traverse disciplinary and geographical borders of pedagogical inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes a novel niche by providing an original critical synthesis of the potentials and challenges of using public art to teach about, and "que(e)ry", sexuality, gender and space. The argument vouches for a critical pedagogy that pursues a visual politics for experiential and potentially transformative learning about processes of social inclusion and exclusion, marginalization, and empowerment. It draws from vignettes of first-hand pedagogical methods in class (in the form of collaborative class debates coordinated through creative educative content including an infographic and educational film) and in the field (in the form of a guided walking tour abroad). The vignettes illustrate how a critical pedagogy aims to instigate "awakenings" and deconstructions of norms (e.g. heteronormativity) and privileged positionalities (e.g. cisgendered, white (gay) male). The analysis indicates multi-sited levels of praxes: critical reflections and critical actions that may stretch beyond the teaching space into "real-world" contexts. The paper demonstrates the value of putting personal experience central by interlocking research and teaching practices. It thereby shows the value of collaborative knowledge production for situated, nuanced understandings of self/culture. This study advocates further "first-person" investigation into the ensuing challenges of negotiating topic sensitivity and the disclosure of positionalities (of both educator and learner). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes an original critique at the nexus of public art, activism (i.e. public artivism) and migration alongside the promotion of inclusive change. It pushes at transdisciplinary boundaries by integrating geohumanities scholarship on socially engaged public art whilst adopting a queer theory approach to foreground and interrogate the socially marginalised. The focus is on Schellekens & Peleman's multi-site Inflatable Refugee installation, in response to the topical migration question, and the public performances and discourses that surround the migrant figure. An in-depth critical discourse analysis drawing from an interview with the collective and key documentation critically probes into the uses of public art(ivism) to raise issues particularly around the (mis)represention of this migrant figure. The case study evinces ambiguous modus operandi of public artivist practice. Although it may promote inclusive citizenship through 'queering' identity politics and migrant hyper-visibility, the material and socio-spatial affordances (along with limitations) of public artivism do not necessarily develop its full potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to geography's digital and political turns, this article presents an original critical synthesis of the under-examined niche of networked geographies of public-art practices in today's politicised digital culture. This article advances insights into digital public art as politics, and its role in politicising online public spaces with foci on: how digital technologies have instigated do-it-yourself modes for the co-creation of art content within peer-to-peer contexts; the way art is 'stretched' and experienced in/across the digital public sphere; and how user-(co-)created content has become subject to (mis)uses, simultaneously informed by digital 'artivism' and a new global politics infused with populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship has largely been conducted on publics’ ‘offline’ public art encounters, while public art practice has become increasingly integrated with virtual dimensions. This article aims to fill this gap by focusing on digitally mediated public art engagement. A case study on the travelling Rubber Duck exhibition (2012–present) interrogates how this artwork is appropriated and narrated through digitally networked spaces (mainly social media, forums and news platforms) after its repeated on-site installations. This article argues for the need to expand on ‘virtual relationality’: the communication, (re-)negotiation and (re-)siting of public art’s roles and meanings through (mainly text- and image-based) social mediations within hybrid, online-offline contexts. Public art encounters are examined along fluid cybergeographical understandings of its social and spatial publicness, temporalities and uses, which deconstruct binaries including material/digital space, permanence/ephemerality and human/non-human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions have remained under-addressed in scholarship on public memorial art, particularly with sexuality content. This case study on the Amsterdam-based Homomonument attends to this gap by differentiating emotions according to multi-scalar, multi-temporal and multi-semiotic dimensions of everyday lived experiences of sexual citizenship. Based on discourse analysis of secondary materials and social media coverage, supplemented with auto-ethnographic experience, the study explores how present-day feelings of respect, agitation and celebration around Homomonument are mediated at intersecting levels of the body, local community, broader society and especially emergent virtual community spaces. Such understanding requires critical interfaces with reminiscences, contemporary values and normativities, and future imaginaries. Specifically, this paper puts in perspective how Homomonument operates as queer micropublic: a space for intercultural encounter and 'queerying' sexual difference. This appears to be a multifaceted meaningful process, too: Homomonument ambiguously holds contesting, reconciling, indifferent and empathic sentiments alongside belongings and sexual identity expressions in quotidian life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws a geographical research agenda on public art and accountability. The rationale for doing so lies in what I consider the 'bird's-eye doctrine' that prevails in today's publicly funded urban public-art practice. I argue that the roles and uses of art in urban public space are primarily understood and designed through the chiefly essentialist eye of public art's enablers, being particularly policy-makers, planners, artists and practitioners. Such bird's-eye doctrine scarcely challenges the everyday social realities of public art from the ground level, that is, from the eyes of the very publics for whom public art is and should ideally be intended. On the basis of a literature study and the author's previous empirical research, this article provides pointers for how future research could further geographically disentangle public-art practices at the crossroads of the domains of the publics, politics and art. More particularly, such research should dwell on the extent to which public-art practices account and should account for genuinely involving the publics in the preparation, realization, evaluation and everyday social realities of public art at different yet co-emerging socio-spatial levels of public-art practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses reports within the issue on topics related to public art including the concept of accountability in public-art discourse and practice as well as the critical relationships between art, power, gender, class, ethnicity, and society.

This paper focuses on particularities of indwellers' perceptions of public art and its locale by drawing on the epistemology of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1991, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Women. New York: Routledge) and the notion of ‘geographies of engagement’ (Zebracki, Van Der Vaart and Van Aalst 2010, Geoforum 41(5): 786–795). We employ the case of Paul McCarthy's internationally acclaimed public artwork Santa Claus in Rotterdam to illustrate the sundry outlooks on its spatialities, aesthetics and moralities, and its functionalities in relation to place. Santa Claus's alleged sexual nature is highly disputed among local politicians and the local population. This dispute is narratively covered by media sources and inscribed by its popular renaming as the ‘Butt Plug Gnome’. We empirically situate documented media views within the way indwellers perceive Santa Claus and its experienced locale in interrelation with themselves. We try to open up differential vistas on public-art narration in relation to people, time and space, whereby we elaborate on the reflexive idea of ‘social relationality’ (Massey and Rose 2003, Personal Views: Public Art Research Project. Milton Keynes: The Open University) by revealing how socio-spatial differences in public-art narration are negotiated. As such, we examine how public art is geographically reconstituted through the publics, namely those for whom public art is essentially intended yet who have been neglected actors of analysis in public-art research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural policy has produced divergent intentions underlying the direction of public art since its advent in Western Europe in 1945. Literature has feebly demonstrated the extent to which differentialities in cultural policy have affected the production of public artworks over time and space. This paper fills this gap as regards Amsterdam and Ghent, cities that are situated in different national institutional contexts. It shows dissimilarity—in that one finds a relatively higher number of public artworks, more spatially dispersed and more diversified public artworks in Amsterdam than in Ghent, which is particularly a result of institutional differences—and similarity between these cities, in terms of initiatives by local communities and arts actors, irrespective of the local policy context. These results provide insight into policy concern with public-art production and the everyday practices and cultural traditions that underpin it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper problematises public artopia, in other words the collection of claims in academic literature concerning the allegedly physical-aesthetic, economic, social, and cultural-symbolic roles of art in urban public space. On the basis of interviews with public-art producers (artists, public officials, investors, and participating residents) in a flagship and a community-art project in Amsterdam, we analyse the situatedness of their public-art claims according to actors’ roles, geographical context, and time. The research suggests that public-art theory and policy suffer from three deficiencies. Theoretical claims about public-art and policy discourse feature, first, a failure to recognise different actors’ perspectives: claims fail to locate situated knowledges that are intrinsically (re)constituted by actors’ roles articulating with one another in time and space. Second is the lack of geographical contextuality: claims do not elaborate appropriately on distinct discourses about art projects’ spatial settings. Third is the lack of temporal perspective. Claims neglect the practice of public-art realisation: that is, the evolution of claims and claim coalitions over the time horizon of the art projects: preparation, implementation, and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]