Quaderni di Venezia Arti

Darkness Visible: The Art of Occupying Public Space as a Space of Appearance

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Abstract

During the twentieth century, art has increasingly dialogued with public space to escape the normative role of institutional exhibiting contexts. However, the first artistic efforts in public spaces mostly failed to reconsider what ‘public’ and ‘space’ could represent, thus implicitly upholding the status quo ruling those spaces. By discussing two case studies – namely, Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967-72), and Krzysztof Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection (1986) – this paper argues for the presence of artistic operations that instead focused on a critical rethinking of ‘public space’ from a site of transit or an extension of the art system to a space of political appearance.


Open access

Submitted: Oct. 28, 2022 | Published Dec. 21, 2022 | Language: en

Keywords Public space • Krzysztof Wodiczko • Visibility • Martha Rosler • Photography

Copyright © 2022 Daniel Borselli. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-675-6/001


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