Public (E-Journal, York University)

Davis, Heather

English

Growing Collectives: Haha + Flood

Contributors
Gina Badger is a practicing artist and writer particularly interested in urban ecology and
environmental history. Her recent research production includes radio broadcasts, radioactively-
colored seed bombs, oyster parties, a garden of weeds, and a series of workshops on herbal
gynecology. Badger's commitment to group work and grassroots knowledge production have led
her to initiate curatorial, organizational, and small press projects. Hailing from Western Canada's
prairies, Gina is based in Montreal and at the time of writing, is completing a Master of Visual
Studies through MIT's Program in Arts, Culture + Technology.
Adrian Blackwell is a visual artist and urban designer whose work has been exhibited at
artist-run centers and museums in Canada and at the :4°°5 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanisml
Architecture. He co-edited Unboxed: Engagements in Social Space with Jen Budney. He is currently
designing the public furniture for Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square renovation. He is a member of
the Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry and teaches architecture at the University of Toronto.
Richard Brault is a Toronto based industrial designer and a founding member of the Alex
Wilson Community Garden. He is an active partner at Studio Innova since 1984. His design career
spans several disciplines and sectors: healthcare, emergency rescue, architecture, community
gardens, renewable energy and human powered transportation. He has lectured at the University
of Toronto, Carleton University, York University, the Ontario College of Art and Design, the
Institute Without Boundaries, Politecnico di Milano, and The Design Academy (Eindhoven). In
:40°7, Brault and his partner Dianne Croteau founded Ninutik Maple Sugar where he divides his
time between design and sugarmaking. He remains active in the Alex Wilson Community Garden
and sits on the steering committee of the Historic St. Andrews Farmers' Market.
Sandra Cisneros is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on
Mango Street (1984) and her short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991).
Gilles Clement, ingenieur horticole, paysagiste DPLG, travaille et vit aParis et dans la Creuse
Oll se trouve son jardin experimental. 11 realise des pares, jardins, espaces publics en Europe et
ailleurs dans le monde. Plusieurs expositions en France et a l'etranger ont ete consacrees a
1'expression de trois concepts developpes au cous de ses recherches: le "Jardin en mouvement"
issu d'une pratique sur le terrain, le "Jardin planetaire" issu des voyages et d'une vision ecologique
de la planete, le "Tiers Paysage" issu de l'observation des delaisses. ''L'Homme symbiotique" cons-
titue une quatrieme piste de recherche qui associe ecologie et economie. L' ensemble de ces
notions se trouve consigne dans plusieurs ouvrages publies.
J. Keri Cronin is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Arts Department at Brock University. She
is also a Faculty Affiliate in Brock's Social Justice & Equity Studies Graduate Program, the editor of
The Brock Review and part of the organizing committee for Greenscapes, a biennial conference on
the cultural history of gardens held at Brock University. Her research focuses on the ways in which
visual representations of the nonhuman world have historically shaped, challenged and, at times,
subverted dominant human attitudes towards the species they share the planet with. She is the
author of Manufacturing National Park Nature: Photography, Ecology and the Wilderness Industry
of Jasper National Park, which will be published by UBC Press in :<010.
Heather Davis is a researcher, writer, and community artist based in Montreal. She is inter-
ested in the political potentials of expanded art practice. Her current work, as a Ph.D. student in
the Joint Program of Communication at Concordia University, focuses on relational subjectivity
within collective contemporary artistic practices and community arts. She has written about these
convergences for Studio XX's journal.dpi, for the online publicationpoliticsandculture. org, and for
the upcoming Encyclopedia ofSocial Movements. Before coming to Montreal, she worked in Toronto
as a community artist.
Guy Ernest Debord (1931-1994) was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, and
founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International. He is author
of Society of the Spectacle (1967).
Erin Despard is a doctoral candidate in communication studies at Concordia University. Her
dissertation research focuses on the history, politics and phenomenology of ornamental public
gardens in cities. Other projects concern the manipulation oflandscape for the sake of crime pre-
vention, and the relationship between landscape and other forms of visual media. She recently
completed a term as visiting researcher at the Berkeley College of Environmental Design and the
Berkeley Center for New Media. Throughout her undergraduate studies and between degrees she
worked as a gardener.
~lO CONTRIBUTORS
JiII Didur is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Concordia University, Montreal
where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory. Her book, Unsettling Partition: Literature,
Gender, Memory appeared with the University of Toronto Press in ~oo6. Her current research looks
at the relationship between the history of plant -hunting in South Asia and contemporary South
Asian Literature concerned with alpine landscapes. This research considers the discursive and
material relationships between the plant collecting practices and memoirs of colonial botanists
and horticulturalists in South Asia, contemporary postcolonial writing about the Himalayas, and
alpine and rock gardening culture globally.
Monika Kin Gagnon has published widely on art, media and cultural politics. She is author
of Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (~ooo) and co-author with Toronto video
artist Richard Fung and eleven other artists, 13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics
(~oo~), translated in ~oo6 as Territoires et Trajectoires: 14 dialogues sur 1'art et les constructions
raciales, culturelles et identitaires. She recently produced Charles Gagnon: 4 Films, in collaboration
with her late father, and the database film ArchivingR69.ca, which explores creative archiving,
cultural memory, and experimental film. She is Associate Professor in Communication Studies at
Concordia University.
Susan Herrington teaches theory, history, and studios in the School of Architecture and
Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. She is author of On Landscapes
(~oo9), which is part of Routledge's Thinking InAction series. She is currently writing a book on
modern landscapes and the work of Canadian landscape architect, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.
Jane Hutton is a researcher and landscape architect, currently teaching in the Department of
Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her practice focuses on collab-
orations with activist groups re-thinking constructed urban ecological systems including
FoodCycles' prototype urban agriculture and soil regeneration project at Pare Downsview Park and
Toronto's first community orchard on public land.
Oliver Kellhammer is a land artist working with public sites to highlight and demonstrate
nature's sometimes surprising ability to recover from damage. His work facilitates processes
of regeneration by engaging the botanical and socio-political frameworks that underlie the
landscape, such as small-scale urban eco-forestry, inner-city community agriculture, and the
restoration of eroded railway ravines. He sees his projects as a kind of catalytic model-making,
providing platforms for community empowerment and positive engagement with the global envi-
ronmental crisis. His work has appeared in various literary journals (KNOCK, Vancouver Review)
and art publications such as FUSE, and the more recent "Access all Areas." His work can be viewed
on his blog: http://www.oliverk.org
Justin A. Langlois is an artist working in integrated media and social practice. He has an MFA
in visual arts and a BA (Hons) in communication studies from the University of Windsor. His
major research project is currently situated in Broken City Lab, a creative research group focused
on engaging and interrupting the city, its infrastructure, and its communities. He has been the
recipient of numerous awards including grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts
Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He is currently an instructor
at the University of Windsor and the Executive Director of the Arts Council Windsor & Region.
Kai Wood Mah writes on design and architecture. He has published articles and book chap-
ters on their intersections with the history of education and children. He is currently completing
a book-length project on the architecture of educational reform in the City of Toronto, from 1850
to 1917. He teaches art and architectural history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mike MacDonald (1946-~006)was an artist who exhibited his video installations in Canada,
the U.S. and internationally, and completed numerous garden projects at various Canadian
locations. He won the ~ooo Aboriginal Achievement Award for New Media for Butterfly Garden,
and in 1994, he was awarded the prestigious Jack and Doris Shadbolt Prize from the Vancouver
Institute for Visual Arts. As MacDonald has stated: I am a video installation artist in the US, an
artist/gardener in Canada and an Indian in cyberspace.
Aviva Rahmani, Mfiliate, INSTAAR, University of Colorado at Boulder, received the ~009Arts
and Healing Network ~009 award. Internationally known, exhibited and published for her installa-
tions and ecological art activism, she has over forty years collaborative experience with scientists.
Her project, about the impact of global warming, Gulfto Gulf (~009-), is sponsored by the New York
Foundation for the Arts. Previous projects restored a dumpsite to a flourishing wetland system
(Ghost Nets) and helped catalyze a USDA expenditure of $500,000 to restore twenty-six acres of
critical wetlands habitat (Blue Rocks). Rahmani received her Masters from the California Institute
oftheArts and has taught, lectured, and been in residence at many colleges and universities.
Usa Robertson's books of poetry include XEclogue, Debbie: An Epic (nominated for the
Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1998), The Weather (winner ofthe Relit Award for Poetry
in ~oo~),The Men and Lisa Robertson 's Magenta Soul Whip. Rousseau's Boat is forthcoming in Spring
~01O by University of California Press. She currently teaches at California College of the Arts in
San Francisco, and in Fall ~01O will be writer in residence at Simon Fraser University.
Graham Roumieu has contributed work to Esquire, The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Times,
and many other fine publications. He is also the creator of several books including Bigfoot: I Not
Dead. A significant portion of his childhood was spent weeding vegetable gardens of things like
chickweed.
~l~ AUTHOR
Catharine Parr Trail! (180~-99)was born in England and moved to Upper Canada in 183~.
She is the author over tvventy essays and books, including The Backwoods ofCanada, first published
in 1836.
Usa Uddin is a Smithsonian Research Associate who received her doctorate in ~009 from the
University of Rochester's Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. She has held a
Pembroke Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University and a Quadrant Fellowship in
Environment, Culture and Sustainability at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests
include visual culture studies, urban and architectural history and the environmental humanities.
She is currently writing a cultural history of American zoo design in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Wayward Plant Registry is a collaborative project of social exchange and botanical
desire. The Registry creates pop-up shops or halfway homes for unwanted plants, and has been
included in exhibitions at the Barbican London, The Graham Foundation Chicago, the Canadian
Centre for Architecture in Montreal and the London Festival of Architecture. The Wayward Plant
Registry is an open collective composed of landscape architects, architects, artists and guerrilla
gardeners. http://waywardplants.org
Turner Wigginton is an independent photographer. His work concerns urban landscapes and
post industrialization. More photos can be seen at www.tw.mentalpaint.net.


Contributors

Denommé-Welch, Spy

The Movement Project's How We Forgot Here

Grenzer, Elke

Material Losses

Uddin, Lisa

Panda Gardens and Public Sex at the National Zoological Park

Gagnon, Monika Kin

Living Archives at the First Nations Garden, Montreal

Brault, Richard

The Hidden Value of Allotment Gardens in the Urban Context: The Alex Wilson Community Garden, Toronto

Pope, R. M.

continuation of imperialism through food distribution, Benner's gardens offer a corrective to the
misinformation and hype propagated by the food industry. For instance, Joe Cummins' case study
in this volume, responding to the artists' Translmission: Papaya Vectors (1998), usefully details the
real costs and escalating consequences of introducing genetically-modified papaya. While the
fruit may be more resistant to virus, genetic modification also nullifies its medicinal properties
(making the population more susceptible to intestinal parasites), contaminates surrounding,
non-GM papaya trees (subjecting farmers to lawsuits and economic sanctions), and threatens the
long-term viability of the ecosystem (increasing the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and
fungi). Critiques such as this are a forte of Benner's works, yet there is an affirmative dimension
that is equally significant, as Matthew Teitelbaum notes (35). Parallel to the admonishment the
artworks render against multinationals, there exists an acknowledgment of indigenous peoples'
contribution to the world's nutritional well- being, as well as a championing for their right to share
in the economic benefits that thousands of years of farming has produced. Gardens of a Colonial
Present elucidates the full complexity of Benner's practice and, in particular, its notable balance
between generosity and criticality.
Jim Drobnick
Public Art: The Kitsch and the Subtle
Cher Krause Knight. Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, ~oo8, ~o8 pp.
Public Art in Canada: Critical Perspectives, edited by Annie Gerin and James S. McLean.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ~oo9, 336 pp.
ASSESSING PUBLIC art is a laborious task, inasmuch as it presupposes working definitions of
"public" and"art" in an era witnessing the erosion of public communicability and responsibility,
on the one hand, and the explOSion of hyper-mediated art and design cultures, on the other. It is
thus that Cher Krause Knight, in Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism, proffers several, at times
conflicting, definitions of public art, as that which is physically and intellectually accessible,
immersive and experiential, controversial, and/or simply"fun." Knight admonishes governments
for taking a path of least resistance in commissioning assuredly non-offensive, "bland" works of
art, suggesting that they should instead "welcome discord," which, in the words of Erika Doss, is
both "healthy and hopeful" (~o). But if this seems to invite a controversy-courting definition of
public art, her final, prescriptive example is Chicago's touristy Cloud Gate: "People take pictures,
laugh at their distorted reflections, 'enter' under its l~-foot arch and lie on the ground to marvel
at the view... " (154). On the whole, Knight's response to the problems inherent to (the definition
of) public art tends towards the celebration of whatever is enjoyed by diverse audiences.
While it would be easy to dismiss this as a too easy populism, it seems no less problematic to
merely reverse one's priorities in celebrating works that self-reflexively politicize themselves and
the spaces each inhabits, as, for instance, did Richard Serra's infamous and oft-discussed Tilted
Arc (1981). An interventionist work like this might garner a lot of press and fierce debate, but not
all communication is commendable-particularly when it polarizes and leaves interlocutors at
each other's proverbial necks, suffocating or foreclosing the space and time in which more pro-
ductive dialogue might emerge. In his contribution to Public Art in Canada: Critical Perspectives,
Bruce Barber employs Jurgen Habermas' theory of communicative action to chart the effectivity of
different forms of public art, suggesting that it is at its best when it is open to everyone and where
some form of discussion/debate is openly encouraged "that mayor may not result in a resolution
or construction and promotion of new ideas for further articulation and action" (175). Sometimes,
that which begins in this vein can be diverted into the more problematic, polarizing form of inter-
vention, as happened with the Halifax Begs Your Pardon! tactical media event of :400:4; designed as
"friendly interventions" that might elicit reflections on the "geopsychological" landscape of
Halifax, the inclusion of a few LCD screens with political messages, left in various parts of the city,
ignited a hyperbolic, mass-mediated fear of terrorism that "precipitated the vicious cycle of
provocation-expression" we have come to know only too well, post-9/u. Barber concludes: "In
these times, cultural intervention requires ... an attention to the political dynamics of action and
protest that would minimize the risk of reproducing the very power structures that are being
undermined" (178). So where, then, might we find an art that is neither as facile as Cloud Gate nor
as politicized/politicizable as Halifax... ? Where is this subtle and seductive art?
Barber provides one (non- Canadian) example (WochenKlausur), and the other contributors to
Public Art in Canada provide further clues. Jumping off from Erin Manning's observation that
Canadian cultural politics revolves around the superimposition of identity onto questions of
national territory, Annie Gerin introduces the volume in suggesting that"if public art can be seen
as an attempt to petrify accepted notions of collective identity in a given place.. .it also becomes a
site where the homogeneity or legitimacy of these representations is constantly challenged and
reframed" (8). In a sense, the contemporary crux of public art-the problem of definition(s)-has
always been a problem in Canada, for what Canadians "share," historically, is a lack of shared his-
tory, public, or sense of art's function. If for France or England a monument celebrating victory
over some foreign power was-and to some extent still is-both self-evident and effective in its
space and time-binding function, in Canada few such monuments have gone uncontested or, as
Gerin points out in her expose of a beheaded Montreal bust of King George Ill, unmolested (3). In
his poignant contribution, Jeff Thomas, a photographer and member of the Six Nations Reserve,
muses over the fate of 'the Indian' at the base of the Samuel de Champlain monument in the
nation's capital, originally placed in a subordinate, kneeling position:
Was he intended to appear subservient to Champlain? Was he Champlain's scout? I looked
around the monument for a plaque that would tell me who this Indian was. But there was
nothing to read, just the familiar silence I have come across so many times before (116).
Thomas recounts how the Indian was removed from this spot in response to a protest by the
Assembly of First Nations, who argued that "the Indian man misrepresented the contributions
Aboriginal people have made to the development of Canada." Thomas suggests that "he should
have stayed in place because the monument did in fact symbolize how Canada sees Aboriginal peo-
pIe"; "[b]ut," he sardonically continues, "in hindsight the removal and relocation of the Indian
was a perfect example of how Aboriginals were moved from their homeland" (1:40) (my emphasis).
To dispel the controversy, the Indian was moved, in 1999, across the street; his "familiar silence"
~oo REVIEWS
moved with him as no plaque exists to bear witness to his controversial history. In contrast to a
government deathly afraid of controversy (and, in this case, of effectively memorializing it) and an
organization unable to appreciate subtleties of history and remembrance, Thomas' work reflexively
and carefully expresses the manifold tensions that cut through Canada in space and time. Such
work exemplifies how, in the dispersed and ob-scene era we ex-habit, "public art" can be both
public-addressing some form of collectivity that shares common concerns-and art-expressing/
realizing cultural and socio-political tensions. Whereas Tilted Arc only relates to its environment
through an antagonistic secondary discourse, and Cloud Gate, which could be justifiably labeled as
a gelatinous hunk of kitsch, 1 disavows the conditions of its place and production, Thomas' work-
if not the now disjointed monuments themselves-remains 'rooted' in "Canadian history,"
attempting, in essence, to articulate the antagonisms of this history. Thus, its reflexivity is not "put
on"; it emerges from a profound and, in this sense, genuine consideration of the histories at hand.'
Concluding Public Art in Canada, James S. McLean notes how new meanings accrue, over time,
to any given artistic work: "Avaluable central concern with works of public art... lies in their ability
to indicate the extent of changes to the social formation" (306). At their best, they also index the
lack which cuts through the core of the social (de)formation(s), which is what seems at stake not
only in Barber's, Gerin's, and Thomas' contributions, but also in Joan Coutu's analysis of how
public art in the late 19 th and early ~oth centuries vainly attempted to demonstrate Canadian
domination over nature, Anna Maria Carlevaris' analysis of how different parties came to see their
own struggles and desires reflected in the Montreal monument to John Cabot, and C.S. Ogden's
charting of the "shift away," in the art displayed at Edmonton city hall, "from an artistic sensibility
that relied on a standardized theme for the city... to a focus on works that represent the lived strug-
gles of those who have chosen this place as an adopted home" (154.). Although it remains difficult
to describe and assess "public art," it could-and for this very reason-be provisionally said that it
is at its most impactful when it reflexively and subtly-that is to say, artfully-addresses this diffiCulty
cum impossibility, in dialogue with the spaces, histories, and people it inhabits.
R. M. Pope
Notes
1. The allusion to "hunk of shit" is not unintentional. Is Cloud Gate not a wondrous. shiny gift of shit, in which the city
and its people (and its tourists) are reflected? How else to explain the artist's obsessive insistence that each seam be
rigourously polished and buffed to give the impression the object magically appeared-as though all of a sudden-in
the 'town square'? With its conditions of production rendered invisible, the shiny object takes on the aura of the
commodity fetish and alien gift.
2. This discussion could be transposed into cinema. Serra's cinematic equivalent would be the overly self-reflexive and
distanciating Jean- Luc Godard, while Thomas' would be the more subtle and involving-while still reflexive-
Krzysztof Kieslowski. The equivalent of Cloud Gate, of course, would be the big budget, special effects dominated,
Hollywood event film that lost its storyline by the time it reached the multiplex.
~Ol


Public Art: The Kitsch and the Subtle

McLeod, Erin

Art on Trial: The Performativity of Guilt

Drobnick, Jim

Reviews
Gardens of a Colonial Present
Ron Benner. Gardens ofa Colonial Present.
London: Museum London, ~oo8, 184 pp.
THE HYBRIDITI of Gardens ofa Colonial Present perfectly suits the themes and practices of its sub-
ject' artist/activist Ron Benner. At once a catalogue, monograph and anthology, it gives an
overview of the extensive and impassioned career of an artist who himself crosses media, disci-
plines and cultures. In-depth, interpretive essays by curators and critics, as well as by an anthro-
pologist, geographer and geneticist, centre on a series of the artist's major garden projects from
1984 to the present, while at the same time extending the discussion to environmental politics,
neo-colonialist science, and predatory agribusiness. The hybrid strategy works impressively well
in this publication, for Benner's practice engages composite narratives and a diversity of aesthet-
ic and activist concerns. Legitimation from the artworld is only a partial motivation. Equally
important is the artist's interest in consolidating information about food, plants and their cultur-
al context, and articulating provocations in the public sphere. For Benner, the garden is not only a
medium for his work, it also serves, in Scott Toguri McFarlane's words, as an "historical document
and ethical injunction" (133).
Now that ecological art has become an established genre, it is important to reconsider the work
of its pioneers. Even though he is a generation younger, Benner deserves to be grouped with other
initiators of environmentally-informed activist art, such as Helen and Newton Harrison, Alan
Sonfist and Mierle Ladermen Ukeles. His work exemplifies the role of the artist- researcher long
before it became a fashionable moniker. It is also important to note Benner's position as a pioneer
in installation, intervention and site-specific practices. In terms of the lyricism and romanticism
of recent eco-art, Benner upholds a distinctly refreshing rigour. If conceptual and activist strate-
gies bear the tendency to become didactic, Benner astutely avoids this by (literally) grounding his
work in organisms embedded in the soil. Through the juxtaposition of photography, text and
plants, Benner's work persuasively addresses the issue of industrialized agriculture on several
registers: representation, ideology and matter itself. The natural exuberance of plants that he
carefully selects, arranges and often cultivates over several years intensifies the works' effective-
ness-providing a tangible, living argument about the fragility of the world's botanical heritage.
In interrogating the assumptions of bioengineering, the commercialization of plants and the
continuation of imperialism through food distribution, Benner's gardens offer a corrective to the
misinformation and hype propagated by the food industry. For instance, Joe Cummins' case study
in this volume, responding to the artists' Translmission: Papaya Vectors (1998), usefully details the
real costs and escalating consequences of introducing genetically-modified papaya. While the
fruit may be more resistant to virus, genetic modification also nullifies its medicinal properties
(making the population more susceptible to intestinal parasites), contaminates surrounding,
non-GM papaya trees (subjecting farmers to lawsuits and economic sanctions), and threatens the
long-term viability of the ecosystem (increasing the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and
fungi). Critiques such as this are a forte of Benner's works, yet there is an affirmative dimension
that is equally significant, as Matthew Teitelbaum notes (35). Parallel to the admonishment the
artworks render against multinationals, there exists an acknowledgment of indigenous peoples'
contribution to the world's nutritional well- being, as well as a championing for their right to share
in the economic benefits that thousands of years of farming has produced. Gardens of a Colonial
Present elucidates the full complexity of Benner's practice and, in particular, its notable balance
between generosity and criticality.
Jim Drobnick
Public Art: The Kitsch and the Subtle
Cher Krause Knight. Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, ~oo8, ~o8 pp.
Public Art in Canada: Critical Perspectives, edited by Annie Gerin and James S. McLean.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ~oo9, 336 pp.
ASSESSING PUBLIC art is a laborious task, inasmuch as it presupposes working definitions of
"public" and"art" in an era witnessing the erosion of public communicability and responsibility,
on the one hand, and the explOSion of hyper-mediated art and design cultures, on the other. It is
thus that Cher Krause Knight, in Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism, proffers several, at times
conflicting, definitions of public art, as that which is physically and intellectually accessible,
immersive and experiential, controversial, and/or simply"fun." Knight admonishes governments
for taking a path of least resistance in commissioning assuredly non-offensive, "bland" works of
art, suggesting that they should instead "welcome discord," which, in the words of Erika Doss, is
both "healthy and hopeful" (~o). But if this seems to invite a controversy-courting definition of
public art, her final, prescriptive example is Chicago's touristy Cloud Gate: "People take pictures,
laugh at their distorted reflections, 'enter' under its l~-foot arch and lie on the ground to marvel
at the view... " (154). On the whole, Knight's response to the problems inherent to (the definition
of) public art tends towards the celebration of whatever is enjoyed by diverse audiences.
While it would be easy to dismiss this as a too easy populism, it seems no less problematic to
merely reverse one's priorities in celebrating works that self-reflexively politicize themselves and
the spaces each inhabits, as, for instance, did Richard Serra's infamous and oft-discussed Tilted
Arc (1981). An interventionist work like this might garner a lot of press and fierce debate, but not
all communication is commendable-particularly when it polarizes and leaves interlocutors at


Gardens of a Colonial Present

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