New Genre Public Art

New Genre Public Art started to emerge in the 70s-80s. Suzanne Lacy was one of its most well-known practitioners and she popularized the term in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, an anthology of critical writings she edited in 1995. The definition in that book boils down to "socially-engaged, interactive art for diverse audiences... about issues directly relevant to their lives." "Public strategies of engagement are an important part of its aesthetic language." (To my ear, this is the same as what we are now calling "social practice," and I look forward to understanding better as we go along in this class how New Genres has evolved or shifted into the current field.)

She identified two main lineages for this form of art. One is the lineage of institutionally-supported public art and art criticism. The other lineage is a lineage of progressive-to-radical public action and pedagogy linked to leftist social movements--most prominently Civil Rights, Women's Liberation, GLBT Liberation, and other movements for racial, ethnic and economic justice.

Institutionally-supported public art lineage

Until the late 80s, art critics mostly ignored or dismissed artmaking of this kind. They were steeped in a history of public art that began with white-men-on-horses or other monumental images that reinforced the power of the state and powerful individuals.

In the mid-60s, percent-for-art funding programs replaced men-on-horses with "plunk art", Modernist sculptures often taken straight from the museum, blown up in size and dropped in a generic park with the goal of bringing High Culture to the culture-deprived, non-museum-going public.



In the mid-70s funding shifted to support what was being called "site-specific art", which was designed for a specific place but still operated within the Modernist framework which valued the artist's individual vision, innovation and permanence over any consideration of impact or audience. This framework hit roadblocks in the late 80s, most famously in the Tilted Arc controversy, when an outraged public forced removal of Richard Serra's giant steel sculpture because it blocked customary pathways and sunshine in a popular square.

In the 80s and 90s, entire bureaucracies evolved to manage funding, feedback and decision-making processes between public art proposals and the communities that would host them longterm. A public art project might typically involve designers, architects and landscape architects, a museum outreach and education program, etc etc.

Activist Lineage

Meanwhile, artists with one or both feet in leftist and identity-based movements were beginning to create ambitious public projects on their own, often with indifference or hostility from Art World institutions. Art critics often dismissed these projects as "community art." These artists used emerging technologies, radical media and performance, and street protest strategies. They often primarily directed their work towards a shared gender and/or racial identity. Instead of individual genius, formal innovation and a pretense to "universality", unifying concerns were:

Audience

Relationship

Communication

Political Intention. 

Feminist artists on the West Coast created their own art education programs, formulating their own aesthetic strategies and criteria for evaluation in absence of traditional critical support. 

Judy Chicago is one of the most well-known artists who emerged from all this manic political and aesthetic activity. In the late 70s she worked with a multitude of "low-arts" textile and ceramic artists to create the Dinner Party, a collaborative anti-monument that used a giant triangular dinner table, place settings and floor tiles to uplift the stories of mythical and historical famous women. The piece had an explicit purpose: to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record."^[2]

Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo was founded in 1984 by a USA/Mexico binational group of artists, activists, journalists and scholars including performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Many of the BAW/TAF artists were linked to San Diego's Centro Cultural de la Raza, a Chicano arts center founded in 1970. Many of the group's projects were carried out in Tijuana and at the border wall. From the beginning, the group addressed "the social tensions the Mexican-American border creates, while asking us to imagine a world in which this international boundary has been erased." (Prieto, Antonio. Border Art as a Political Strategy, http://isla.igc.org/Features/Border/mex6.html)

The following images come from border actions which commemorated those who were dying attempting to cross into the US, many from dehydration. Border Arts Workshop placed a water jug along the wall for each individual. 

Adrian Piper is an artist and philosopher whose works addressed "ostracism, otherness, and attitudes around racism.^[8]"   She navigated the world as a light-skinned Black person whose racial identify was often invisible in the white circles she often found herself inhabiting. "In Berger's Critique of Pure Racism interview, Piper asserted that while she finds analysis of racism praiseworthy, she wants her artwork to help people confront their racist views.^[8]"

Summary from Wikipedia:

In the 1970s, Piper began a series of street performances under the collective title Catalysis, which included actions such as painting her clothes with white paint and wearing a sign that read "WET PAINT" and going to the Macy's department store to shop for gloves and sunglasses; stuffing a huge white towel into her mouth and riding the bus, subway and Empire State Building Elevator; and dousing herself in a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk, and cod liver oil and then spending a week moving around New York's subway and bookstores.^[15][16] Catalysis VII involved Piper visiting a museum, chewing gum loudly, and holding a purse full of ketchup. The Catalysis performances were meant to be a catalyst that challenged what constitutes the order of the social field, "at the level of dress, sanity and the distinction between public and private acts."^[15]. Piper's Mythic Being series, started in 1973, saw the artist dress in a wig and mustache and perform publicly as a "third world, working class, overly hostile male."^[15]

New Genre Public Art started getting more support from art institutions when more established arts organizations and federal arts funding came under attack from Neoconservatives starting in the mid-80s. Also many people in the institutional art world were impacted by the advent of the AIDS Crisis and the ensuing hostile neglect of the Reagan and Bush administrations. These events politicized a wider swath of the arts world and legitimized the more confrontational and impact-oriented tactics of New Genre artists.