Contemporary artist

Contemporary artists must deal on a regular basis on the intention and message behind their art, and increasingly, issues such as site-specificity and choice of materials are becoming more and more relevant in the broadcasting of both their message and the physical aesthetic of their artwork. Art is put to the service of generating a sense of authenticity and uniqueness of place for quasi-promotional agendas, one of the fundamental ideas behind the artwork is to create a dialogue between artists, the locality and the public, to encourage the artists to create projects that dealt with conditions in the town, its architecture, urban planning, its history and the social structure of society in the town, a place for a natural confrontation between history and contemporary art. If there is a clash between choice of materials and a site for their artwork, the very meaning of that artwork can change or deviate from the intended message or significance, thus exaction is required in order for the intended audience to perceive the intended message.

The appropriate decisions regarding choice of materials and site has resulted in many new areas of public art, subsections or categories of this artform, each of which convey different messages. One recent sub-genre of public art is `art in the public interest', often city-based programs focusing on social issues rather than the built environment that involve collaborations with marginalised social groups such as the homeless, battered women, urban youths, AIDS patients, prisoners, and which strives towards the development of politically-conscious community events or programs.

An example of the `art in the public interest' theory, Janet Laurence's site-specific installation, `Edge of the Trees' is experiential language of art, involving the viewer not just optically, but through the whole body's sensory system. The artwork primarily deals with Australia in its earliest stages of colonialism; the effect of western culture on the original inhabitants of inner-city Sydney, the Eora tribe or aboriginals, and it comes as no coincidence that this is where the installation is located. It is through this use of site-specificity that the artwork itself is given added depth and significance. Her choice of materials is also equally valuable; she has selected certain essences of history, the names of the first fleet, a visual representation of the environment, an audio tape of the aboriginal language. It is through these sensible decisions that Laurence had earned the credibility of creating a sensory artwork that has the significance and relevance of many dimensions, fulfilling each of them respectively.

Another subsection of public art is `art as public spaces', less object-oriented and more site-conscious art that sought greater integration between art, architecture, and the landscape through artists' collaboration with members of the urban managerial class (such as architects, landscape architects, city planners, urban designers, and city administrators), in the designing of permanent urban development projects such as parks, buildings, promenades, tourist centres. Another common example of this diversifying of public art is the rapid occurrence of `art in public places', typically a modernist abstract sculpture placed out-doors to "decorate' or 'enrich" urban spaces, especially areas fronting federal buildings or corporate office towers or business districts.

Site specificity and public art in this context find new importance because they can supply distinction of place and uniqueness of locational identity, highly seductive qualities in the promotion of towns and cities within the competitive restructuring of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, site-specific art remains inexorably tied to a process that renders particularity and identity of various cities a matter of product differentiation. Under the pretext of their articulation or resuscitation, site-specific public art can be mobilised to expedite the erasure of differences via the commodification and serialisation of places.