Public Privacy – Research of Nori Fujimura

Biography

Ritsuko Taho is an artist who works in the public arena ranging from
landscape sculpture and earthwork to urban sculptural installations.

Taho is interested in relationships to the Other –for instance,
between nature and people, people and people. She has dealt with
these issues in public art and explored the use of various natural
materials while she has incorporated community participation within
her installations since the early 1980s.

Joy-Farm Shop with Many Orders,Minami-Ashiyahama, Ashiya, Japan,1998

MULTI-CULTURAL DIPLOMATS, City Program, Atlanta Arts Festival, Atlanta, GA,USA1994

Art, space and the city: public art and urban futures, Malcolm Miles, 1997

Preface?

A duality emerges between public art which is bound by the aesthetics of the object, and art as a continuous, participatory process of social criticism.
Two roles for art are suggested:

as decoration within a re-visioned field of urban design in which the needs of users are central,
and as a social process of criticism and engagement, defining the public realm not as public sites but as complex fields of public interest. The tension between these positions is creative.

Evaluation Mentioned

4: The contradictions of Public Art

Page 59:

Selwood, The Benefits of Public Art, 1995
ref 25: A particular problem is the lack of a tested methodology for either qualitative or quantitative evaluation, though this could be developed from the skills of market researchers; more important is the definition of what constitutes a benefit to society.

Page 68:

(first mentioned The Strategy for Public Art in Cardiff Bay,1990) ..we could contrast Visual Dallas (Dallas, 1987), which begins with an evaluation of the city, and the importance for its ‘livability’ of good public space, citing W.H.Whyte (perhaps ‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces’,1980)

Page 76: Evaluation