ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

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addresses such urban issues as low-income housing, HIV/AIDS research and care,
workers’ rights, minority youth leadership, ecology, and women’s achievements.
Such temporal, issue-specific artworks are a form of artmaking that grows out of the
desire of artists to reach audiences in ways that are more direct and unexpected
than is possible in a museum or gallery setting.” 37
Critics involved in the current public art debate have offered various conjectures
on the nature of these changes. Dan Cameron, for example, has described
the shift primarily as a stage in the development of a particular artistic genre. For
Cameron, “Culture in Action” and other public art programs like it exemplify the
general transformation of sculpture away from site specificity toward “post-site
sculpture,” toward an increasing dissipation of art as a cultural category.
“Culture in Action” falls into the category of those sculpture exhibitions
which have followed the logical progression from the model of
site-specificity toward the apparent next stage: the dissolution of the
language of “art” altogether, in favor of activities and interventions
which take place directly in the community, away from the museum’s
watchful eye. ... The work in “Culture in Action” set out to navigate
that murky zone where social activism and post-site sculpture have
begun to intersect. 38
In contrast, Eleanor Heartney has characterized the current trend not so much as a
logical progression in the development of sculpture but as a dramatic reversal in
approaches to public art. Her argument positions the Tilted Arc controversy of the
1980s as a counterpoint to “the [recent] discussion [which] shift[s] away from the
notion of site-specificity as a response to the formal dynamics of the site toward a
concern with community as context.” As she put it: “Before the construction of Tilted
Arc, Serra announced that ‘after the piece is built, the space will be understood pri-
marily as a function of the sculpture.’ Today, more often than not, the reverse seems
to be true. Sculpture is seen as a function of the space or the context. Public artists