Seeking a Definition of Public Space
Part I of the series 'Profundity in Public Art'
by Matt Morris
The summer months are an ideal time not only to keep up with the exhibitions and programming that our active network of art museums, galleries, and organizations continue to offer, but to appreciate artworks that can be seen all over our city in outdoor settings and other public spaces. Amidst the ongoing assault to our senses that large-scale advertising and ill-considered design inflicts, there are sculptures and public works that are visual with intent, aiming to step bravely out of the conceptual safety of an institutional setting and to risk exposure and a much larger public response of misunderstanding, all for the sake of presenting a considered view at our urban core.
For the past several decades, Cincinnati has experienced an increase of nuance in its visual topography. On any walking route through the downtown area alone, it would be hard to avoid encountering some kind of public artwork, be they large-scale outdoor sculptures or the rashes of wall-painting projects executed by ArtWorks, such as the MuralWorks projects of the last few years. What in the 1950s and 1960s began as an embattled discourse to reassert humanism, creativity, and a pre-/post-modern sensibility in the urban experience is now compulsive. If buildings and architecture mediate between mankind and the environment as shelter and a structure within which cultural identities may be shaped and practiced, what can be articulated concretely as the role of large, outdoor public artworks in the city?
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Pfaff: Next to Nature, Art
The exuberance of Judy Pfaff's constructed paper at Solway gallery fed into the show's opening with the kick of champagne. "Drop-dead gorgeous " I wrote in my notebook, in less than art-crit fashion. Later, back to look again before reviewing, the intimacy of seeing the work as the only person in the gallery made for a different experience. Gorgeous, yes, but not just a pretty face.
