Image of a City
The Urban Playground Project
Street artists around the world often challenge their environments in unique ways. Not to put out any political message or satire, but to instead ask the viewrs just to stop and view the world a little differently.
Over the years the context of public art around the world has transformed from permanent murals and outdoor sculpture to include any temporary works, in any media, visible to the general public. This includes dance and music performances, processions, street art and theatre, lighting effects, poetry readings, flash mobs, interactive projections, etc. Citizens of Philadelphia understand, and have adopted the point of view Patricia Phillips endorses in her paper, Temporality and Public Art. In it she states, “One way that artists and agencies can continue to generate public art and remain analytical about its purpose, its composition, and how it is to be distinguished (or not) from other creative enterprises is to support more shortlived experiments in which variables can be changed and results intelligently and sensitively examined. Public art requires a more passionate commitment to the temporary-to the information culled from the short-lived project (Phillips, 1989). “
Temporal public art closely relates to the public itself because it’s: ever changing, spontaneous, rapid and unpredictable. “A temporal public art may not offer broad proclamations; it may stir controversy and rage; it may cause confusion; it may occur in nontraditional, marginal, and private places. In such an art the conceptual takes precedence over the more obvious circumstantial (Phillips, 1989).” Public art that is temporary affords things that permanent art could never. Because the work is part of the urban fabric for short periods of time, there is freedom to try new ideas, new forms, and new methods of production (Phillips, 1989). It challenges public art and artists, explores the relationship between current events and traditional values, and enables new means for self and community evaluation.
Phillips also declares that,
“Public art does not have to last forever; it does not have to cast its message to some unmistakable but platitudinous theme that absolutely everyone will get; it does not have to make a common ground. As the texture and context of public life changes over the years, public art must reach for new articulations and new expectations (Phillips, 1989).”