Vision, Voice, & Practice: Spot Collaboration: Private and Public Art

Earlier this semester, we talked in class about notions of "public" and "private" art and writing. For public art, we looked at several examples, including Robert Montgomery's language-and-light sculptures; Ted Prescott's The True Vine; Walt Whitman's "America" and Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the New Day"; some of Banksy's incursions into public space; and the Statue of Liberty (including Emma Lazarus's accompanying poem, "The New Colossus": 'Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...').

Turning to the idea of private art, we began by considering Frank O'Hara's stated aim in his mock-serious "Personism: A Manifesto": Making poetry that is "at last between two persons instead of two pages," a result of which, he says, will be the "death of literature"--"Literature," here, being what we might call the institutions and industries that say "this text, and not that one, matters." At any rate, we talked about how, for artists and writers sending work out to curators and editors overwhelmed by visual and alphabetic information, making work for one, particular person--a friend, a loved one--instead of "the public," might feel liberating. We looked at O'Hara's "For Grace, After a Party"; one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's letters from prison written to his best friend, Eberhard Bethge; a work of art made by one friend for another, as a gift (see image below); and a few other examples.

After our discussion about some of the ideas surrounding "public" and "private" art, students were put into collaboration groups and given about an hour to make something using the following instructions:

Collaborate with your group to

1. Make a text piece (Poem? Recipe? Driving directions? Something else?)
OR
2. Make a visual piece (in reality or as proposal/mock-up)
OR
3. Make a visual + text piece (in reality or as proposal/mock-up)

The piece you make should address a person whom all three of you want to address, or whom one of you wants to address (with the other members of the group helping to shape the expression). Or, the piece can be made to serve as memorial to an idea or a people.

If primarily a visual artifact, the piece should be site-specific. If primarily alphabetic, consider the mode of transmission.

Below are some of the pieces the students made. (At least one piece, documented by the students who made it, has not been included because it was so privately intended it felt inappropriate to share here. That's a kind of success, given the aims of the project.)

Irene Paek, Claire Jacobson, Micah Hickerson: