But the history of art in the nightclub isn’t the only absence exposed by the VideoWall. Birnbaum’s work also speaks to the changing role of public art in the United States more broadly. In order to better understand this aspect of its history, it is critical to understand how public art’s role in a neighborhood has national implications. Public art does not occur within a vacuum, but is the nexus of the interconnecting factors shaping new ideas about civic engagement. As such, the study of public art can help illuminate social and cultural relationships to the natural landscape, urban development, and the role of public space. Indeed, public art has performed a significant role in creative placemaking, or how art creates a sense of community identity.[i] Creative placemaking both provides a service to community members, and seeks to increase the importance of art in people’s everyday lives. While there are always particular functions that administrators, developers, and artists plan for art to perform in a chosen environment, the way public art actually informs neighborhood identity is always contingent on the changing needs and desires of the specific individuals and communities engaging with it on a daily basis. As Michel de Certeau argues in The Practice of Everyday Life, these unique engagements are everyday “tactics,” enabling individuals to actively shape their cultural activity and relationship to places and media alike. For De Certeau, moreover, these everyday activities have political potential.[ii] The images that were used by Birnbaum for the VideoWall—the site’s original landscape, the CNN live-stream, and shoppers’ silhouettes—similarly sought to engage with this political potential. At the same time, the VideoWall was repurposed by the mall’s managers and by visitors for their own needs. Most notably, the VideoWall was often used to show BET or live sporting events. In other words, Birbaum’s critique of immediacy, locale, commerce, and development was short circuited by actual use. As Anna McCarthy, one of the few scholars to have written on the VideoWall, explains, “The success of the video’s critique of commerce depended, in other words, on the success of the commerce around it. In the absence of shoppers the critique could not be performed and the screen became nothing more than video wallpaper.”[iii] This paradox opens up to two additional discussions: the first being the rights of the artist over their images and technology, and the second being the community tactics that reshaped and formed around the VideoWall.
[i] Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa, Creative Placemaking white paper for The Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation (Markusen Economic Research Services and Metris Arts Consulting, 2010). Available at: https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/CreativePlacemaking-Paper.pdf
[ii] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 3rd ed., Steven F. Rendall, trans. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 29-32.
[iii] Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 246-247.