Espaço público contemporâneo: híbridos na fronteira entre arte pública e mobiliário urbano

Abstract

Experiments conceived by modern artists and maximized with the advent of contemporary art by polyvalent actors, carried out an exponential process of hybridization of artistic languages. The propagation of hybrid objects in today's society – especially the approximation of artistic production to the daily life of cities – is, therefore, the basis for the development of this research. Thus, some examples of artistic works were selected whose materiality acts in a hybrid field between urban furniture and the contemporary notion of public art, that is, an active creation process in/for public spaces. Unlike the plastic appeal of product design, which brings with it issues and subjectivities related to the appropriation of public spaces, hybrid objects, as we call them, move between an eminently artistic conception (public art) and a technical one (urban furniture), introducing a socially engaged artistic discourse. As an outline, we present the production of five American artists between the 1980s and 2000s whose consistent and lasting production of hybrid objects makes them, recurrently, cited as paradigmatic cases of plural approaches to contemporary public art. This work uses a literature review and a case study. It is concluded that the basic principle of the appropriation of existing furniture or the production of new ones by these artists is the capacity of this product, coming from a hybridization process, to reach a larger audience, transforming users and observers of the public space into a hybrid, immersed audience in the complexities accentuated by the artists.