Exhibitions in the Public Domain

Agnes Denes was one of the early pioneers of conceptual and environmentalist art. In 1982 Denes carries out one of the most widely publicised and well-known environmental art projects with Wheatfield: A Confrontation. Agnes Denes planted a two-acre field of wheat in Battery Park landfill in New York, situated between the World Trade Centre and the Statue of Liberty. Wheatfield: A Confrontation addressed both human values and misplaced priorities.

In 1980 Mierle Laderman Ukeles performed a large-scale performance, Touch Sanitation, a handshake ritual involving more than 8,500 workers in the New York City Department of Sanitation. The performance itself lasted eleven months. Her intention was to face and shake hands with each one of the sanitation workers while saying the words: "Thank you for keeping New York City alive." As a performance artist, she wanted to emphasize the basically human side of the operation; the activity of picking up trash was essentially no different than the disposing of it, the process was, in fact, one cycle. By shaking hands with a sanitation worker she was demystifying another stereotype. There is a necessary task to be done and a necessary separation to be made between the task and those who perform it. Waste products are not created by "garbage men," but by individuals who designate leftovers as trash.

From late Autumn to mid Winter the small Austrian town of Rattenberg gets no Sunlight at all. Bartenbach Light Laboratory in the Austrian Tyrol plans to install giant rotating mirrors known as Heliostats. “The idea is not just to light the village, the idea is to give them the impression they have sun.” - Silvia Pezzana. 

All three of these ideas are fantastic in the sense they aim to help and add to the lives of the public. Proposing an exhibition in the public domain that aims to enhance the surroundings of an area would, in most cases, need to be on a larger scale than what I can personally afford for this elective. However, if there was a way to create something that would impact the general public in a positive way without having to spend over £30 that would be excellent.