One thing we haven't highlighted yet, we talked about the idea of repetition and time, the idea of reoccurence. But it's worth here highlighting the idea that memory is connected to, not just monuments. With memorials, it's obvious, but in general, memory, public memory, is highly associated with monuments and public art. Some artists have decided to address that not by making something that is in a space that we anoint as a space that is remembered, but by repeating, by returning to a particular event. So Jeremy Deller did an amazing project called the Battle of Orgreave, where basically he restaged a famous confrontation in England between police and striking miners. It was a confrontation that became violent, it was iconic for that early neo-liberal age of Thatcher and Reagan. And he worked with people who are alive at the moment. Often we return to past historical events once everybody is too old to remember or has already passed away, right? But Jeremy Deller, as through a public art commission, wanted to do this while people were still alive. And they re-stage the whole thing to the t, right? And it was an amazing kind of public art project. >> It's my favorite public art project. >> Yeah, and an earlier example of that, that probably for Dellar was a source of inspiration, was Ant Farm. Who quite radically, a decade after JFK's assassination, to be exactly, 1975, they basically reenacted as accurately as they could the assassination in Texas, in Dallas. And they did it several times, so it was running on a loop. And a male actor, basically one of the members of Ant Farm, stood for Jackie. Things were clearly wrong, but they also did it so perfectly that it felt right. Over the times that they did it in the day, it grabbed more and more of an audience, and very strange reactions. There's a great documentary that shows people's reactions, and they are just bizarre, like a woman clapping when the shooting happens. Others say, I am with the entire family, they were saying how excited they were to finally have witnessed it. So this idea of repetition and memory is something that we really care about when we talk about- >> And it's fun too, I mean, I have to say, one of the things I love about, clearly we love this particular subject. And what I really love about art in the public sphere too that is of this nature is A, when you go into a museum, you go into an art museum. And like a classic question most people get in art museums is, why is this art, right? But when you just see stuff in the public sphere, you don't have to know it's art or not, it's just weird stuff in space. >> Well so what phrase, I think a good example to show this is Key to the City, right? Can you talk a little bit about, that project is about access and lack of access in the urban space. But we can talk about it as art, but also to some extent, it doesn't matter if it's art. >> Yeah, it doesn't matter, that's what I like. So Key to the City is a project I did with Paul Ramirez Jonas. And it's basically, which I like, it's using, again, a vernacular material, this is a key, basically. Now every city, not every, but I would imagine most have a key to the city where they typically give it to dignitaries. Like the Dali Lama comes to visit, and they're like, hey, Dali Lama, you get a key to the city. And it's actually meant to be, from the Roman period, where you literally had a key to the city. So it's a big deal, but now it's just kind of ceremonial. So Paul Ramirez Jonas' idea was that the key would literally become a key that everyday people could have. And that the key wasn't just a functional keys, so this key would literally be handed out to 26,000 different people. But it's also an award, the key is an award. So you would literally give it to somebody else in the middle of Times Square, people handed to each other. And then this key that you would receive, you could open up doors across the city, so functionally open up places. So you could literally turn on a light in Bryant Park with your key, you could go to a tacoria in Queens and open the back door and go down stairs and make tortillas with folks. You could go to the Brooklyn Museum, and between two paintings you could open up a secret door like you're in a Scooby-Doo cartoon, and there'd be a private exhibition for you. So the key became a sight of access to the city, and in some ways, demonstratively for this, that project Key to the City also is kind of what public art can do for spacial politics. In so much as it shows that there are places that you cannot go, there are places that you can. There are places you can go that you didn't know that you could go, what is public, what is private? >> And in this case, his project focused on the everyday, the immediate, like he located it in one city, right? But there's also artists who have wanted to play with this notion of special politics, but in what we would call the macropolitics, right? Spatial divisions that are either national borders or actual geographic separations, and so on. And I think one of the best artists who's been doing this type of work quite consistently for the last few decades is Francis Alys, a Belgian artist who lives- >> Who everyone agrees is amazing. >> Yeah, and so he did, we will only talk about three projects very quickly that he, because they touch on very different physical, cultural, political borders, right? In the Green Line, basically Francis Alys did this project in Jerusalem in 2004. He walked through the municipality of Jerusalem with many cans of green paint. He would just punch a hole into the can of green paint, and would walk attempting to recreate exactly the green line, the separation line between Palestine and Israel, right. And so this is a very powerful physical embodied enacting of a political division. Political divisions often only exist on maps. The only way you can test them is by going to those geographic areas to really see if they exist. And another project he did that deals with borders is called Bridge Puente. Where he, as a project for the Havana biennial in 2006, he convinced all kinds of fishermen in Cuba, and also fishermen in the US, in Key West, to kind of put their boats in a chain. So that they would attempt to reach each other and create a bridge between the United States and Cuba, right? And many of his projects have money mentality built into it, but also failure. Everybody who was involved knew this was an impossible task, but they still participated, right, because they thought it was a really cool idea. Because you could actually walk from boat to boat and to try to reach and see, are we going to make it, right? Another great product he did later in 2008 is called Don't Cross the Bridge Before you Get to the River. And he did it for Gibraltar, that famous area that connects northern Africa with Europe. And he worked with all kinds of kids from both communities, in southern Spain and northern Morocco. And they basically also, through a chain of human beings of children with little boats they made with shoes and sandals, were trying to reach each other. And it's a beautiful set of not just interactions, but videos and installations that he made. And this type of public art can make us think whether the public is not just the space, but what we call publics, right? With some of these projects, there's a public that is an audience. But in others like in the Francis Alys example, the public are the very people who participated. [CROSSTALK] And then the public of the video that saw in a gallery or something like that >> We can get into different kinds of complexes of audiences. I'd also like to say, too, just on the subject, one of the important things, I think a lot of people think thinking happens in your head. But I think it´s a misleading thing, thinking can happen in space and time. These kind of works often are ways that the civic thinks through the world, other than debate. And politics isn´t just a word thing, politics can be a spatial thing. >> Well, and what better example, and that´s our final case study, Javier Tellez, project that he did for Inside, this really amazing set of exhibitions that happened between Tijuana and San Diego. He did in 2005 a project called One Flew Over the Void. Where he staged this really interesting parade- >> He's so funny, he's are just the hits. You're just getting all the hits, these are amazing projects. >> And in terms of physical embodiment and space and politics, Javier Tellez's piece just captures all of it in one nutshell. And it's basically, he created this parade, he works often with notions of psychiatry, and psychology, and critical psychology. And so he works with inmates of different mental institutions, and in this case, he worked with one in the Tijuana San Diego region. So they created this parade, and then at the end of it, they had a human cannonball. And this man flew over the border, and his body basically crossed international space >> It's so awesome, we should watch it, let's watch it. >> [APPLAUSE] >> [FOREIGN] >> [APPLAUSE]
