Interesting Creators at Work

Here are some creators who are doing interesting to further the public realm using art, culture and design and the creative process in an out of the box way:

• Public artist of the public works Michael Singer
• Temporary Museum of Permanent Change http://www.museumofchange.org/
• Art in Ruins
  http://www.artinruins.com
• In some European cities, public listening posts or stations of cultural experience are distributed throughout the city where creators tell stories of the city about interesting experiences and events of the past. A citizen can walk up to the listening post, push a button and then hear the story.  The aim is to reveal the cultural layers of a city. A soul of a city is experiences through the layers of memory that are on display.
• In Providence and Pawtucket at: The Plant, Firehouse 13, Grants, AS220, and the Steelyard are all the creative output of artist as commercial developer.   

Citizen as Artist:

James Hillman is an archetypal psychologist who works is as a “therapist of ideas…a therapist of our culture.” This is an excerpt from a paper “Imagining Buffalo,” written in 1973.  It is from City and Soul, Editor Robert Leaver in Volume II of The Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman. For the full article and others from City and Soul, go to New Commons (Link) and for more on Hillman go to http://www.springpublications.com/ 

“If artists are like the City’s watchdogs, the barking guardians of immediate un-anesthetized noticing, then a first priority of any city is to increase participation of its artists and to make life for them more possible – not easy or recognized or successful, merely possible.

By artists please, do not hear me to mean those with professional art skills.  No. The artist that the city needs to favor is anyone whose perception and action embodies subversive, discomforting or aesthetic noticing – preacher, journalist, humorist, thinker, investor.  Any citizen is an artist when he or she cuts through cant, demands quality, and refuses to be anesthetized.

Artists are not those who have taste, but those who do taste and see the world. They do not have special senses, sensibilities, sensitivities; they simply sense as men and women of senses, sensing what goes on, and responding 100% to the city, to its discomforts and outrages by being equally discomforting and outrageous.

The artist furthermore – and you are beginning to see that what I am calling artists others might call citizens – is always altogether engaged in work time and free time, functional, aesthetic, practical and ideal. What happens in the street, what he or she smells and touches has no less importance than major policies and great ideas. The citizen as artist leaves nothing to George and nothing to Sam.  He or she is the eternal busy body.”

Some Questions from Robert Leaver: