project based on a generative system of process and production. In doing so, however, they blur the lines that once separated art practice from sociopolitical work, perhaps advancing their art closer to everyday life. With this example, we have Lowe pushing the boundaries even further than what new genre artists were able to achieve. In this sense Lowe and Cruz are able to redefine the terrain for a new public art. On the other hand, how do we recognize this development without the historical backing by which we can map out movements and shifts? How do we bridge concepts and methods that inform our trajectory, but which we often reconfigure? As I have attempted to show, the value in revealing Cruz and Lowe’s relationship to an ongoing dialogue is to understand their projects’ relationship to a larger artistic enterprise. Because they do not recognize this connection in their talk, Cruz and Lowe tend to broaden their critical intervention, spreading it out across a general category of another attempt at an avant-garde art. I also fear that in continuing their conversation without the mention of “new genre public art,” Cruz and Lowe reproduce many of the same problems that arose from such a community-based art practice. By inserting new genre into the conversation I don’t mean to dissolve Cruz and Lowe’s proposition into this mold, but rather I ask them to define and address their position in relation to the 1990s critique of public art. Notes: 1. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). 2. Ibid, 3. 3. Ibid, 102. 4. See Culture in Action, exh. cat. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995). See also Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995). 5. Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, 6. 6. Ibid, 107. 7. Michael Kimmelman, “In Houston, Art Is Where the Home Is,” New York Times, December 17, 2006.
NEW PUBLIC ART: REDEFINING OR RECONSIDERING COMMUNITY-BASED ART?
37