ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

well as potential for fluid communication and interaction with a general nonart audience.
According to Linker, “To the absence of a shared iconography, it suggests the
shareable presence of space. ... Just as use insures relevance, so the appeal to
space as a social experience, communal scope, individual response, may insure a
larger measure of support.” 22 In these critics’ writings of the early 1980s, physical
access or entry into an art work is imagined to be equivalent to hermeneutic ac-
cess for the viewer.
The various agencies’ programmatic enforcement of a continuity between
the art work and its site, however, was predicated on a kind of architectural determinism
endemic to most urban beautification efforts. Implicit in such thinking was
the belief in an unmediated causal relationship between the aesthetic quality of the
built environment and the quality of social conditions it supported. Consequently,
the type of site specificity stipulated by the NEA, GSA, and other public art agencies
was directed toward spatial integration and harmonious design. 23 By now,
artists were asked not only to focus on the conditions of the built environment but to
contribute toward the design of unified and coherent urban spaces. This is partly
why, by the end of the 1970s, the NEA endorsed a “wide range of possibilities for
art in public situations”—“any permanent media, including earthworks, environmental
art, and non-traditional media, such as artificial lighting.” 24 The aim was not
only to accommodate the changing artistic trends of the period but to align public
art more with the production of public amenities and site-oriented projects. What
this amounted to in essence was a mandate for public art to be more like architecture
and environmental design.
This integrationist goal was further strengthened when the NEA guidelines
were modified once again in 1982, with the Visual Art and Design programs of the
NEA officially combining their efforts to encourage the collaboration of visual
artists and design professionals. Public art would no longer be just an autonomous
sculpture but would be in some kind of meaningful dialogue with, maybe even coincident
with, the surrounding architecture and/or landscape. This approach to sitespecific
public art was readily adopted by a group of artists, including Athena
Tacha, Ned Smyth, Andrea Blum, Siah Armajani, Elyn Zimmerman, and Scott Bur-
67
SITINGS OF PUBLIC ART: INTEGRATION VERSUS INTERVENTION