| Public art emerged in the 1980s along with postmodern practices that sought a return to representation and that were concerned with the allegorical disruption of modernist teleology. Developments in public art at this time have been associated with urban redevelopment and a number of writers in the field of critical urban theory have proposed economistic critiques of postmodern art that associate aesthetic forms with late capitalism. As part of a shift to the politics of representation that is also associated with poststructuralism, feminist cultural theory argues that there can be no place from which to securely view the socioeconomic totality and that urban theory can benefit from developments in feminist art history and psychoanalytic theory. Some related debates have been over the concept of the public sphere and the privatization of public services that is associated with neoconservative and neoliberal politics. This thesis makes use of the psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity to explore formulations of public art that emerged in the late 1980s, 90s and 2000s. Among the latter are practices that are now more readily associated with community art, a pluralistic and dematerialized approach to public art. The contradictions of the new community art, I argue, are related not only to the failure to consider the question of sexual difference, but also to the failure to understand the materialist basis of critical art practices like minimalism, performance art, site specificity, institutional critique and allegorical representation. Through a feminist and psychoanalytic reading of social space, and through a review of public sphere theorizing as well as poststructural theories of community formation, the thesis considers the work of three individual artists: Adrian Piper, Andrea Fraser and Bruce Barber. It proposes a theory of critical, or para, public art that takes into account the incompleteness of identity formation and the radical democratic understanding of the hegemonic articulation of social space. While both psychoanalysis and feminism emphasize the question of embodiment in relation to the scopic drive, a critical articulation of visuality links representation to discursive constructions of reality and to the symptomatic inscription of "para-nodal" subjects. |
