By
Graig Uhlin
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Art, to put it simply, is pretty.
A beautiful painting is nice to look at, and this aesthetic appeal has largely contributed to its popularity. The relationship of the viewer to the work thus has been organized along these lines - that is, looking at art provides voyeuristic pleasure.
But art is more than that.
It contains a subversive quality. Accompanying all those pretty colors often is a challenge to the basic assumptions of society.
And before everyone went about breaking their spring, University of Arizona students got a little taste of this subversive potential. Several art students producing works of public art were promptly told by Facilities Management that their pieces were obstructions, considered to be litter, and they would have to be taken down.
I am not writing to villainize the facilties managers. Rather, I am interested in exploring why art, beside the practical reasons of safety hazards, is deemed inappropriate for a public forum. The artwork of these students seems to have disturbed our society's strict separation of public and private space, and that which we designate as suitable for each venue.
Why does art, according to the dominant discourse, not belong in a public space? What threat does it pose?
First, it is important to understand that, historically, our society has not always been structured around "public" and "private" spaces. Privacy in fact is a modern construction, created by a capitalist society as a means of differentiating between upper and lower classes. Poorer people, whether one is talking about the working class men packed into tenement houses in turn of the century New York City or 14th century peasantry sharing a bed between six people, have generally, because of their economic limitations been denied privacy - so much so that they didn't even have a conception of it.
So how does this relate to art? When society as a whole began to distinguish between public and private spaces, it assigned a value system along with it. Simply, the public arena became marked as superior and important while the private arena was thus inferior and insubstantial. To privatize something, like the work of women in the domestic sphere, is to reduce and trivialize it.
So then how are we to think about art's relegation to the private spaces of museums and galleries? I would argue that its confinement to these venues is a means by which the subversive nature of art is rendered as nonthreatening and ineffectual, in favor of a focus on the aesthetic appeal. A museum is a place, after all, where one goes to admire, to appreciate - not question the tenets of the dominant society.
And what happens when art does venture into the public sphere, besides the inevitable censorship by managers of facilitiles? Public art is not even considered art - it's considered advertising. And despite the reality of it, art is not thought of as commercialized - the artistic integrity of the work is supposed to be held in superior favor to its monetary status. So public art not only collapses the binary of public and private but also commerce and art, making it an even more threatening innovation.
I suggest we turn the campus into a huge gallery. Let's paint murals. Let's turn building into sculptures. Let's disrupt convention and make the campus a canvas. At least it will beautiful to look at again.
