• Preface: What it is and how we did it
• Introduction
• Open Engagement: Making Things. Making Things Better. Making Things Worse.
• A Tracing, Socially
• Draft of a manifesto written in defense of a group of people that did not ask for my defense, using words they would not use and engaging people they ignore
• This is the End: Death and other Sensory Thresholds
• On the Discourse of Ethics in Socially Engaged Art Practice
• Are You Lonely? Make Art For Your Friends
• Interaction! Participation! Engagement! Production
• On Collaborating Within the M.O.S.T. (2003-2008)
• The Politics of Friendship, Or, Who Your Friends Should Be. An Interview with Matthew David Rana and Rick Butler
• On Multi-Tasking
• Making Things Better
• Me, Her and Us: Mapping Displacement with Anna Martine and Mary Anne Brooks at Open Engagement
• You Need To Have That Feeling That Anything's Possible
• Social Practice Art and Tech-Nihilism
• The Persistent Complicity of Heterogeneity
• Squirming
• Don't Just Invite Me To Dinner
• Open Engagement: A Toast to Access and Inclusion
• Thoughts On Social Practice Art
• Before, During, and After
• What is Public Art and Who is Your Public?
• From Every Angle
• What I remember about the video of John Paul II Marina Abramovic showed @ Reed in 2006
• What is there to dance about?
• Global Yawning Manifesto
• Interview: Musician, Movement Artist, Designer
• Clothing Musicians
• No Art But Class War
• Mirror Neurons to the Mona Lisa
• Fragments and Tangents
• Before
• Texts: What we are thinking about when we're thinking about Open Engagement
• After
• Contributors
• Appendix: The Back Channel
• Bibliography

What is Public Art and Who is Your Public?

Portland, Oregon.

Making art in the open, you open up and express yourself. This is form: your body, your speech. It is something done in public, for people. Art is a communion with an audience. It can be specific or universal. It is easier to enter on the individual level. It is easier to be me than someone else. I am only an actor out of necessity. It is by chance you meet a mask of myself worn indefinitely until I can really know you... as a friend. Trust. Open. Trust. Openness. I am optimistic. And careful. I want to trust. But the world... Do you trust everyone?

"Everyone" is not the public. (Or at least, I'm not interested in everyone.) The public are the people who pay attention. So it says something about them that they express interest.

"Ah!," I say. "People pay attention when they understand! You can listen when you understand."

"Some people pay attention only when they do not understand. They're curious. Something becomes interesting as opposed to understandable. Eff the ineffable!"

Mystery. The artwork acts as a symbol. A transformation of matter to represent knowledge, to convey understanding. Art requires sensual experience to be understood. It must be consumed, it must be seen, heard, used. It is impossible to speak a language to everyone.  That's why Chaplin's silent film was so popular, because it transcended the language barrier. Music can approach this transcendence, a universal language. A symbol open to interpretation... Image. Sound. Movement. The repetition of phrases in ideation of reality to convey a deeper understanding – a connection through the ritual of theater, dance, music, song and storytelling.

We can create objects, clothes, and ideas that bring distinction and differentiation. There is a hope that obtaining acceptance through social position will remove us from the problems we face as human beings. We all know any number of dire predictions for our future. But we escape through art, through imagined realities. Artwork can be a denial of reality, an attempt to escape from responsibility, and it can co-create reality.

Can we create a compelling and promising view of the future?

How do we maintain civilization in an age of population pressure, resource scarcity, and unlimited information?

Who are we on this earth? and what are we doing here? Are we providing ourselves with role models of maturity? ...that could help us manage our predicament?

Are we giving ourselves a hard look in the mirror as a human family?

Our story of sustainability so far is largely one of engineering and economics. Get a fuel efficient car and some good light bulbs. Our faith in technology is well-founded, although it is unlikely that we will solve our problems with machines. How we respond to mortality determines how we live. Fear, insecurity, and greed are problems. Science and technology won't solve our problems. It requires a transformation of the way we relate to one another.

Who are we?

The story of all of us is yet to be written.

***

But it is the artists who are first to see it. Now, that others see it -- science, politicians and even WalMart shoppers. Will something be done? The arts are always first -- the canaries in the coal mine. What happens when the canary starves to death? Who will warn of what is impending? Who will cultivate change and social response, activism? Who will say, "turn away from your TV, your Facebook, your iPhone -- your myriad of glowing screens and walk out into the streets, engage in your world face to face, to face our issues."

As I type this on a screen, in this virtual room filled with people I have never met, I choke on the irony of my call to put down these same sickly screens and feel the sun on your skin -- and yet, still I am compelled. Ironic or not -- I must say this. Who will sound the alarm? Who will have the courage but the emaciated, little yellow bird, to sing his song and drift to sleep never to wake again. Poisoned by what he has seen and smelled and knows.

Where, where will we find new birds if they've all gone off to bars to "talk" about how life is art, or if they have to give up the act of art to fill their bellies or their children's bellies using money from corporations because "the benefactor" is elusively, extinct. As our funding dies and our industries fade what will happen to the early indicators, those trilling alarms that once warned all mankind of our own spiritual demise?