City as an Art-Scape Since prehistoric times, art, understood as a form of human expression, has been used by man as a tool for marking places and providing them with a special meaning. Franz Boas, with his book Primitive Art,1 was a pioneer in introducing the study of art into the field of anthropology and paved the way for many anthropologists to follow him in investigating the development of artistic activities through different civilizations in distinct areas of the planet. Beginning with the rock paintings done in caves during the Upper Paleolithic period some 40,000 years ago, art has served as a tool for marking cultural identity through the history of great civilizations as varied as the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Inca and Maya.
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This need to provide symbolic content for public places fostered the birth of public art, which has historically been understood as an additive operation in charge of incorporating artistic elements onto building façades and into the streets, squares and parks that form public space. At the same time, public art has a strong political dimension because, since it is located in the public domain, it has the virtue of communicating directly with citizens. Although on many occasions urban art has had a merely decorative and beautifying function, other times it has taken on a symbolic role that has been used by power as an educational tool, as a mechanism to extol certain values or as a mere vehicle for spreading ideological propaganda.
Campus of the Herberger Institute for Design and Arts in Arizona. Gathering space in a temporary art-scape intervention.
After the Second World War, many public institutions established permanent programs responsible for commissioning public artwork that did not adhere to the classic concept of monument, but which experimented with new ideas from the artistic avant-garde. In the 1960s, public art based on site-specific works created to interact with a particular place emerged, so that work and context formed an indivisible entity. Simultaneously, the expansion of the term “art� stimulated collaboration between different disciplines as well as experimentation with different formats such as video art, land art or artistic installations. In addition, public art was no longer considered only a permanent work made with long-lasting materials, and experiments began with the concept of temporariness in the form of ephemeral artistic interventions or performances. The emergence of anonymous urban art and new media like graffiti have promoted a phenomenon that we might call the democratization of urban art, leading a new generation of young artists to use public space as a means of expression, without intermediaries like galleries or curators to decide the content to be exhibited. This has facilitated the direct contact between the artist and the citizen-spectator, greatly incrementing the diffusion of the artwork, but at the same time also increasing the variety of messages.