Public Art is art around us, focusing on the untrained viewer and stimulating our communication with the space around – streets, offices, parks, and any public space. According to Wikipedia, “Public Art is art in any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process”. It defines and distinguishes our indoor and outdoor spaces. Public art projects are excellent for discussing hot and pressing issues. Its openness and accessibility makes public art a truly democratic form of art – to enjoy a piece of art, we don’t have to buy a ticket to a museum and create some special mood. Moreover, the more art takes a person by surprise, the better.
Makoto Tojiki, Solidarity and Collaboration (2021), created for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games © 2021 / IOC / Yuichi Yamazaki
A contemporary artist cannot ignore the world around, people, and their problems, simply working on abstract themes. One of the tasks of both art and creativity is to be able to activate emotions in people as much as possible and stimulate their feelings and experience through art. These gifts of artists are vital to help people to live and realize the art.
Public art as a direction of contemporary art that transforms the familiar world, working with even the most complex and at the same time the most open to understanding audience – working with children. For example, multiple art projects in children’s hospitals all over the world have radically changed the degree of the atmosphere there.
CT/PET Scan Suite at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. by Takashi Murakami
In a children’s hospital, the whole space is shared by such contrasting and conflicting concepts as children’s joy of life and suffering associated with ongoing illnesses. The energy of denial most often extinguishes the energy of joy, forcing children to “freeze” in front of negative reality. There, art objects primarily serve one therapeutic goal pooling the child out of the state of isolation and suppression by own experiences. Art engages a kid in exploring new environment. As a result, an artistic link appears between the child and the illness, in any way diminishing the artistic value of the object of art itself.
According to statistics, in an exhibition hall a viewer spends an average of 2 minutes on “communication” with a piece of art. In public spaces, we often find ourselves among the works of contemporary art for several hours, or even days. In our minds, art objects and paintings become multi-layered and their meaning gets gradually revealed with integration to our reality.
Public art changes our mindset and our attitude to ourselves, surrounding space, and art as a phenomenon. We get used to brightness, openness, the opportunity to unexpectedly meet something interesting. And this is a great alternative to the routine perception of reality. Because art does not exist without people, going out into a street or into any public space, we actually become its objects. Our era is the epoch of metamodernism with its view of the world, the expression of emotions in art, cross-genre communications and, most importantly, the return to human art!