all about public

Here are some random drawings from Kankhowa's Notebook: on and around the idea of PUBLIC and PUBLIC art. Some of them are subversive cartoons, some are nonsense scribbling.

The definition of Public Art is ambiguous since sometimes it is a genre, sometimes an inclination and sometimes an subversive effort in the disciplinary paradigms. "The term public art properly refers to works of art in any media that has been planned and executed with the specific intention of being sited or staged in the physical public domain, usually outside and accessible to all."(Wikipedia).

This definition raises three distinctive issues around the Public art:

1. It has specific intentions,

2. It is sited or staged in the public domain,

3. It is accessible to all.

The matter of being intentional makes it more political. At the same time it addresses the essential questions of 'purpose' or 'aim' of the Art with capital A. Second level of questions emerge around the mapping of public domain itself. Is not the gallery space a public space as well? The third point, of being "accessible to all" makes a more autocratic statement in itself. It means art as a whole were never accessible to all, and more profoundly were never meant to be so. In those terms we remember Gary Tartakov:

“What is important for the bourgeois aesthetic is that its object be rare and that only the most powerful have access to them. That is, that is fixes upon the art we cannot have or effect. Indeed its major value, even beyond its supposed esthetic power, is its rarity……….not only can the majority not own it, they cannot even understand why it is valuable or that it is valuable”.

Gary Tartakov, “Dalits, Art and the Imagery of Everyday Life”, (Art and Activism in India- Tulika Books, New Delhi)