A meeting of creative minds working around the globe took place Friday in the Student Union Ballroom, as the symposium "Art in the Public Sphere: Singular Works, Plural Possibilities" showed a display of past works and current projects to bring forth the idea of public art to the University of Massachusetts.
The symposium ran all day from 9:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. with breaks only for lunch and refreshments. Seven panelists each conducted a twenty minute presentation addressing their personal work and experience in the public art field. Panelists included landscape artist George Trakas, Creative Time president and artistic director Anne Pasternak, German landscape architect Frank Sleegers and perhaps the most verbose of the bunch, celebrated designer/architect Vito Acconci.
Acconci has been interested in public art from the get go, taking it out of the gallery and straight to the masses. He brings this public mindset to the creation of his visions, choosing a collaborative path as opposed to strictly using his ideas. "If you intend something to be public," Acconci said, "then it can't start private."
Acconci showed slides of his innovative works, including conceived architecture, prototypical buildings and sites, projects for cities and personalized modern conveniences. He spoke on a Tokyo clothing store he designed, with the concept of creating as much surface area as possible in the smallest space possible. The walls and shelves were made of rear screen projection PVC material and pulled taut to hold the weight of the clothing. The store was lit by lights behind the screens, providing a soft, gauzy glow.
"I'm obsessed by the motion of a continuous space," Acconci mused, since the walls and shelving in the Tokyo boutique neither start nor stop. He also showed a park bench he designed, a concept derived from the Mobius Strip. The bench also neither starts nor ends, with its seating curling around itself in a twisted donut shape. Acconci works mainly with places where people can be, as opposed to objects which one can hold in their hand. However, he did design a sphere which rotates and dismantles and serves as a coffee/tea brewer with cream and sugar options.
Acconci has also designed for cities, at times bringing his oddball plans to a completely functional level. He has designed a translucent bus stop which surrounds a tree, creating the illusion of a vase as well as an arboreal aquarium. He was also asked to design streetlights for New York City, opting to provide thin poles, as opposed to thick beams, on which the lights would sit. When weight needed to be held up on the pole as signs and traffic lights were added, more streetlights could be added and braided around each other, creating a very aesthetic, tentacle-like effect.
Another key speaker was Anne Pasternak, current president and artistic director of Creative Time, a nonprofit public art commissioner. She works in New York City with the mindset that "artists should come out of the studio and should have the opportunity to experiment." She uses mass media spaces to convey her artistic vision, including billboards, bus posters, even theater marquees. Working in such an urban environment, her organization's works are exposed to a large volume and array of individuals.
Most recently, Pasternak has been involved with the Sleepwalkers project at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This public exhibit involves large-scale projections on sides of the MoMA depicting living, moving human portraits, an extension of Pasternak's view of "architecture as a living, flowing place."
The term public cannot be expressed fully without incorporating a global level, and German landscape architect Frank Sleegers brought word of his Hamburg, Germany "HAFENSAFARI" project to the symposium. Sleegers, a UMass lecturer, holds the director position of the project, which has been running annually since 2003. The project consists of a guided tour through the old industrial harbor sections of the city, with site-specific art installations at landmarks throughout the area. These temporary installations include sculpture, gardens, even music and DJs, all with a community-minded goal.
Old pieces include a series of sculptures of silhouetted dock workers supposedly on the job, ghosts of hardworking laborers of decades past. Many of the pieces reflect the city's industrial background, taking place on contaminated sites. One site was turned into a labyrinth of living plant materials woven with textiles as "a reference to the site's industrial past." Sleegers is also interested in finding new places in these industrial centers, whether it's a rooftop or a parking lot, for any public place is grounds for the HAFENSAFARI.
Even contaminated spaces are used, as in one installation where a residential area once existed, but was destroyed in favor of factories. In this zone, mailboxes were set up where one could write a letter to a former resident highlighting community ties. The entire project seemed like a sort of creative block party, with all-involved eating and drinking beer at the end of the day, relaxing and enjoying each others company, as well as the art. One of the most interesting past projects was a simple vending machine housing imported Chinese flowers. One could purchase a flower and plant it in a nearby plot of land.
Events like this are necessary to raise awareness, whether they're localized, regional or half way around the world in Hamburg. The concepts of collaboration and sharing prevailed, standing out from any specific work or speaker. Each panelist expressed his ties to this idea of working together and using multiple minds to create a single piece, most prominently Acconci. In one of the afternoon's question and answer sessions, Acconci stressed that his biggest inspiration is group work. He made it seem necessary for "a colliding of ideas" to take place in order to make a work plural as opposed to personal, a sentiment anyone can take to heart and reference in everyday life to succeed with a viable community product.
Ian Nelson can be reached at Inelson@student.umass.edu
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