(Re)Making Public Campus Art: Connecting the University, Publics and the City

Public campus art in the U.K. is predominantly a postwar phenomenon and can be interpreted as artworks situated in university spaces with free access to its audience: any public users — where the multiplicity of such audience defines them as “publics”: communities of interest. Public art’s ontology of “publicness” is complex: what is “public” and who are the “publics”? The local, theme and form of art in “public” space is contested along dualist conceptions of public/private, indoor/outdoor, closed/open, permanent/temporary, decorative/interactive, past/future, space/place, online/offline, and so on and so forth. It may moreover span any material, digital, performative and socially engaged, practice-based work and multimedia beyond more traditional sculptural artworks. This article analyses how public campus art has traditionally related to historic university agendas and campus communities, but has recently provided a platform for far-reaching public engagement beyond the campus, thus reaching new audiences

Leon Golub

Kuspit's article places Golub's political realism in the context of historic, primitive and heroic figure painting, using Adler's concept of "masculine protest" to steer the argument into the domain of the allegorical power struggles which Golub's paintings represent. Works from 1980 to 1986 are reproduced. Biographical notes. 42 bibl. ref

Ilan Averbuch

Noting the literary sources of Averbuch's images, Kuspit evokes the "archae-symbols" in relation to the artist's rock, wood and lead sculptures. Biographical notes. 39 bibl. ref

Brian Wood

Kuspit investigates the tensions in Wood's pairing of painterly gestures and photography and the resulting crossovers between subjectivity and objectivity. An interview reveals the artist's striving to express desire with a degree of complexity appropriate to the multifaceted nature of the psyche. Biographical notes. 22 bibl. ref

Paul Fenniak

Kuspit describes Fenniak as a psychosocial realist who transposes the tradition of North European painting to North American middle-class life. He claims the artist achieves the traditional ideal of portraiture — the realisation of an emotionally living presence — through his skillful composition and empathic insight. Biographical notes. 24 bibl. ref