Stephen Chen
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
BOUNDED NATURE also inquires into the interstitial space between personal and public spheres, providing the spectatorship with an immersive experience that forces such a contamination the inner and the outside: how do you see the relationship between public sphere and the role of art in public space?
I think the public sphere has only existed as an idea and ideal – there has never been a unified and inclusive public sphere, even within art. Instead shared concerns are regulated in a social field, whereby hierarchies exclude certain voices, and dictate the boundaries of what is appropriate to express in public vs. private. I think the prevalence of bad art in public spaces is a function of this social field, whereby art is reduced to anodyne decoration, as repressed stasis, instead of interrogating or pushing those boundaries and hierarchies.
Yet I think it could be so much more. I was inspired to find a way to critique and recover the potential of public space when I was in Frankfurt few years ago. I heard of a statue( the Frankfurter Engel) near St. Peter’ s church dedicated to LGBT persecution during the Nazi regime. I went to look for it and found it was situated in a“ dead” space – between the back wall of a building and the driveway of a Best Western, and frequented by drunks needing a spot. So I did a guerrilla performance piece, GEBROCHENGEL, as a means of reclaiming that space and questioning the sufficiency of“ apologetic” monuments; where over a period of 3 hours on the anniversary of Marlene Dietrich’ s death, I performed her signature song“ Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß”(“ Falling in love again”) twelve times at random intervals, one for each year of the Third Reich.
What has at once captured our attention of your inquiry into urban ritualization is your