29 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2021
  2. Feb 2021
    1. The city

      This also feels like it would create some sort of comradely between the people who live in "the city." A shared sense of belonging brings people together and makes them feel like they are a part of something greater.

    1. forced him to develop trust in someone

      This trust is so incredibly important in community. Trust between people living in proximity to each other provides a space of safety. It opens the heart to the possibility of deeper relationships. How do we build trust? What activities can we engage in to nurture this care for each other?

    1. universal isolation

      This idea is so fascinating! It's true! Cars are a way of carrying the private sphere wherever we go. It restricts our encounters with the other and with the public realm. They're too comfortable? And yet I do love being able to hid away in a car in the city — to come back to a safe place wherever I am. I do believe that it plays into (and is in a direct parallel with) social hierarchy. The less you have to appear in the public space, the higher you are. How can we move around this? Even the playing field?

    2. psychogeography

      I love this idea conceptually, but it seems difficult to put into practice. In creating an art installation, how do you cater to all the people who move through that space? How do you make the piece in line with the existing psychogeography of the space?

    1. has agreed to be a public

      I love this idea. The space bonds the community through a social contract. It is something that the people have created intentionally, and therefore declared themselves (as individuals) a part of something greater (the community).

    2. in the form of a watch

      This feels like a fairly direct reference to the individualization of communities. I had never thought of time and the rhythms of a community as being so central to holding a place together. But it's true — as we move away from placing ourselves in time by noticing the pulse of our neighborhood, we lose track of that community. It separates us.

    3. " Public space is the refusal of monogamous relationships and the acceptance of sex that has no bonds and knows no bounds

      Hopefully there are no Christians in this neighborhood...

    4. The budget for architecture is a hundred times the budget for public art because a building provides jobs and products and services that augment the finances of a city.

      could it be true that public art through architecture is a way to sort of get around the system that prioritizes functionality and infiltrate those spaces?

    5. But the choice of inside or outside, of private or public, is outdated now. In an electronic age, you have all the informa- tion of the city-the information of one city after another, of one city piled upon another city-at your fingertips, on a computer terminal, in the privacy of your own home.

      so by this logic, does it matter if a space is inside or outside in the modern era? in the age zoom, does it even matter if a public space exists in the physical realm at all?

    6. A person might come here specifically for a service that, as a by-product, inserts that person into a group of people seeking the same service; or the person might come here primarily to be part of a group,

      interesting to think about this intersection between capitalism and community; the desire to consume can be used to form a sense of community

    7. Private space becomes public when the public wants it; public space becomes private when the public that has it won't give it

      who counts as the public? anyone who wants to? peoole that were born and raised there? people who have just moved there? people who's family has been there for centuries? people who just like the area?

    8. right-a place made public by force

      As a result of the changes to our societal structure, there must be a decisive effort on behalf of other people (and others?)

    9. the quartz watch that was no trouble to make and no worry to wear, the cheap wristwatch you could buy for two or three dollars off-the-shelf and on-the-street. The wristwatch was no longer an expensive graduation present, no longer a reward for a lifetime of service to the corporation. Time came cheap now; you picked up a watch like a pack of matches as you walked down Canal Street. Watches were instant fashion, you chose one to suit your every mood.

      this appears to be a comment on the era of mass consumption of material goods, some of the same themes that various art movements such as pop art have picked up on. This can even be paired with the concept of individualism and subsequent lack of community that has been increased by the consumption based, capitalist society we live in.

    10. Each bit of information is controlled, but the mix of information is accidental and can't be organized

      I don't think this is true anymore. Algorithms personalize and control everyone's internet, which asserts the point of the last paragraph, that the internet is a composite of private, self-sufficient and self-serving cities. If public can be a composite of privates, as Acconci states, then 2021 internet would still qualify as a public space, but the increased difference between individual experiences online intuitively seems like it should make it a less public space.

    11. Each person becomes too infected, either with information or with disease, to be with another.

      this is topical

    12. public space-in the form of an actual place with bound- aries-is a slowing-down process, an attempt to stop time and go back in history and revert to an earlier age.

      How does this relate to how we look at public monuments, which tend to memorialize moments from the past? What is the relationship between time and space in those situations, and how might it be thought differently?

    13. You pay to belong to the community, and the class, that is accustomed to use the place. You pay for the fabrication of a past or of a future, for the idea that this is how the place should be and not merely how it is.

      Is Acconci right about this? He's using the metaphor of the bar, where you have to pay a cover fee or for your drink? But are there forms of place-making that are free from such economic exchange?

    14. Going to a "historical" cluster-place is the equivalent of going home, except that this is the home not only of the family but of the tribe;

      But home for who? And what if you are not a member of the tribe, but an outsider or a visitor?

    15. where all the people are gathered together as a public, it needs a gathering point

      What are some possibilities for this "point" that Acconci mentions? He's talking about a catalyst that brings a public together and helps to give it an identity. How does this happen?

    16. the second is a space that is made public

      What are some of the ways that we make spaces public? Acconci mentions it happening "by force," and so this calls to mind protests and other forms of occupation. But are there other ways of turning what was non-public space into a space of publicity? Are there ways that performative bodies in space start to more carefully insinuate themselves into spaces of privacy and change the nature of that space? In short, how might performance function critically here? And is there something potent about the temporary nature of making that place public for just a period of time and then moving on?

    17. the rest of the city isn't public.

      We should pause here. What does Acconci mean? How is it that open spaces in the city are not public?

    18. It used to be, you could walk down the streets of a city and always know what time it wa

      In what ways do we experience time in the neighborhood together? Could the "socializing of time" act as a mechanism for connectivity, solidarity? One way I see this is through the group of Latinx men, women, and children who play soccer most nights during the summer in the field on the NW corner of Powderhorn Park. On warms days I can clock the order of my days with their activities in parallel to mine. Knowing how they will be playing together, the children running around, is a marker on a social clock of the neighborhood and, however abstract, provides a sense of time to the social landscape we share.

    1. a short description of the protest is available on the spot in the English, German, Hebrew, Russian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Hungarian languages. This explains why the anti-monument is on the route of guided tours and visited by individual travellers as well (Photo 9)

      this brings the question of "who is a monument for?" into play; does it have to be successful for the people it serves, and who inhabit the place where the monument exists? or in this age of globalism, does it also have to appeal to everyone else (certainly American / Western centric)?

    2. memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument’ (Y

      this kind of reminds me of the John F. Kennedy Art Center in DC, which is intended to be a lively, constantly changing and growing cultural and artistic mecca rather than a static monument

    3. I argue that a memorial site’s public acceptance and success is correlated with its capacity to e

      and this is definitely something that changes over time

    4. organised by artists, philosophers, sociologists, curators, and civic activists

      I find the collective aspect of the anti-monument's creation to be important. Though after this, the author mentions some of the creators of the work, the fact that the impetus for the work was broad-based and not singular is crucial. The idea of a from-below way of memorializing is something I want to hold on to.

    5. public acceptance

      See above -- is "public acceptance" a necessary precondition for its "success"? Is it not possible to have a successful monument (or any work of art) that is rejected by some portion of the public?

    6. why a monument becomes unsuccessful or rejected?

      Flagging this with a question here. The author may get to this, but I am very curious how one would gauge "success" with respect to a public monument? Successful FOR WHOM? One person's success will be another's failure, and how are we to evaluate this or prioritize one voice over another?