New Public Art: Redefining or Reconsidering Community-Based Art? Elize Mazadiego

I have extracted some passages from an essay by Elize Mazadiego which I found while researching my Critical Journal:

The term “new genre public art” sprang out of the 1991 exhibition program Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago. Following this was an abundance of artworks, projects, exhibits, and texts that defined “new genre public art” as a form that fosters an often temporary collaboration between artist and communities in the making of locally-specific, sociopolitically oriented works. In contrast to traditional public art (that is, a public siting of sculptural forms and installations) the new genre foregrounds community, and its interaction with the artist, as the artwork....

....Miwon Kwon’s 2004 publication One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity is critical to this conversation as it gives a historical framework in which we can place Cruz and Lowe’s talk, but also offers us a language with which we can describe their works. Kwon’s text historicizes and theorizes site-specific art practices to distinguish critical shifts that have taken place within this loosely defined genre. In doing so, Kwon underscores the ways in which the genre itself is a “site of struggle” as various artists and groups call into question the nature of the site and its relationship to artistic practice.[1] In their attempt to rethink how site-specificity operates, these groups also generate new models that reinvigorate the political strategies and aesthetic sensibilities in a site-related art. Over a series of chapters Kwon loosely traces site-specificity’s historical trajectory over three categories: 1) phenomenological/experiential, 2) social/institutional; and 3) discursive.[2] Based on her outline, site specificity moves from the materiality of a specific location to a place that is determined by the specifics of a social network, such as a community.

Actually this whole essay is relevant to my research so I will just post the link http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=26

The essay analyses Miwon Kwon's book One Place After Another: SiteSpecific Art and Locational Identity and particularly the chapter which is a relevant source of my CJ From Site to Community in New Genre Public Art: The Case of ‘Culture in Action'