Reviews for Israeli Planners and Designers

The average rating for Israeli Planners and Designers based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-08-21 00:00:00 Carl Liptscher I work in public art, a discipline that is often sorely ignored by art history and denigrated by urban planning. This leaves public art as an often uncomfortable afterthought in both discussions of cities and of art. Malcolm Miles tries to problematize this relationship in order to propose a public art that actually does what it's meant to and, although I agree with much of his critique, like a lot of academic writing I don't think the solutions he proposes are that compelling or even interesting from a project delivery perspective. I also think I owe it to this book to say that it's almost twenty years old and that academia, like everything else, tends to be a bit trendy. This is really clear in the first three chapters, which are essentially a very 1990s critical theory approach to urban space which all seems to come down to the dialectic relationship between representation and lived experience (a la Lefebvre's Production of Space). The chapter on monuments also gets into a post-structuralist reading of the social creation of meaning. This is all well and good, but is put much better elsewhere and, I think, isn't tied that well into the later discussion on public art that occupy much of the book. The chapters on the 'contradictions of public art' and art in urban development bring up what I think is the most interesting part of the book: its critique of the tension between the white cube of modernism and the messy reality of the public, or publics, in contemporary cities. I hear about this all the time in my work, generally phrased as the tension between accessible art and conceptual rigour. There is also the issue of defining the public in public art, which morphs quickly into questions of the right to the city (Lefebvre again). Finally, as Miles points out, public art is often used to rationalize and normalize change which often does not serve the needs of diverse populations. Or, at the very least, public art can detract from funds that might otherwise go to making the world directly a better place. Claims from within the art community that the indirect benefits of public art justify it are almost never supported by any evidence, as Miles points out. These are all pretty big issues with public art. Unfortunately, the solutions that Miles proposes don't really address these issues. The first is to integrate public art into design processes and, more specifically, design elements. Miles argues that a small scale approach will create a sense of connection with the art in a way that large scale signature pieces do not. I'm not convinced by this argument, as it's just as easy that small scale pieces become practically invisible visual clutter (I think in particular about things like artist decorated utility hole covers), as it is that spatially aggressive signature pieces become beloved. The second, which certainly reflects the time this book was written, is that art should be embedded in social practices. Now, I'm all for social practice art, but I don't think it's always the answer, or even an effective community engagement tool. I guess that Miles wants to propose a clear-cut division between aesthetic decoration and community engagement, because so much traditional public art tries to do both and fails. I'm just not convinced that we should necessarily stop trying. My final critique of this book is that I feel like the discussions of individual artworks are generally not handled well. I guess this is because my training is in art history and Miles clearly comes from a social science background. He often fails to unpack and analyze the form and content of the artworks he discusses. I suppose that's because that could be a seen as a bourgeois affectation of the high modernist sort, and that a responsible sort of criticism only sees art as a vehicle for social and cultural narrative. Yet, what's the point of having art if you're not even going to look at it? And maybe a bit of high modernism is ok once in awhile, or even more than ok. Ultimately, the problem with public art (in every way) is that it's a world dominated by one-offs where every critical question - and every practical planning issue - has to be approached anew in each instance and that takes time and effort to do it right.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-12-07 00:00:00 Nuno Silva sa syudad namin, uranus ang art