For whom do site-specific art structures provide territorial services? The case of European peripheral areas

ABSTRACT

What type of site-specific outdoor art structure is more likely to induce and catalyze artistic territorial services and for whom are these services intended for? Answering this question will help the understanding of territorial impacts of such art projects in European peripheric areas. This article is based on the analysis of a European database on 128 site-specific outdoor visual art structures informed by 36 distinct criteria like accessibility, location, institutional statuses and funding, initiator and audiences, site-specificness criteria, etc. A typology, produced by the statistical analysis of this database, shows that three main intelligible categories dominate site-specific art initiatives: ‘art-washing sculpture parks’, ‘territorial art of peripheries’ and ‘eco-artistic front of art projects’. They all have different kinds of specific interactions, sometimes critical, with the local territory. They act differently as artistic territorial services (ATS) providers. ATS in Spain (Cesar Manrique artworks in Lanzarote Island) show how art is transformed into mass-tourism attraction; in France the Forêt d’ Art Contemporain in Nouvelle-Aquitaine and in Greece, the Vovousa Festival in Epirus, show how art can reinforce territorial identity and environmental commitment, but with very mixed benefits to the local economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Site-specific art
• visual art
• peripheral areas
• ATS artistic territorial services
• Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Data availability https://analytics.huma-num.fr/Gregoire.LeCampion/donnees_adona/#section-base-de-donn%C3%A9es

2 For the maps at the world scale, see anonymous link.

3 The criteria dictionary is available in French here : http://artnature.humanum.fr/ressources/dictionnaire_variables_adona.pdf

4 See note 5 below.

5 César Manrique Cabrera (Arrecife, 24 April 1919- Teguise, 25 September 1992) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and landscape artist from the island of Lanzarote. He balanced his art with the protection of environmental values on the Canary Islands. He sought harmony between art and nature creatively. He was awarded the Global Ecology and Tourism Award (1978) and the Europa Nostra Award, among others, for his art and environmental work in Lanzarote (1985). He displayed a range of art forms (paint, sculpture, urban-planning and public art, among others) with an underlying willingness to integrate his natural surroundings. An all-encompassing syncretism (total art, in his words) plain to see in his public space designs. Making an effort to find harmony, not only showing his passion for beauty, but also for life. More information: http://www.fcmanrique.org/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Institut Universitaire de France, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, UMR 5319 Passages CNRS.

Notes on contributors

Sylvain Guyot

Sylvain Guyot is full professor at University of Bordeaux Montaigne, Research Lab Passages, UMR 5319. He is a specialist in the field of art and geography. He looks at territorial impacts and political challenges of site-specific art in peripheral areas (South Africa, US, southern Europe). He shares the coordination of the EXARMAS art and science exhibition hall of the Passages CNRS Research Laboratory in Bordeaux (France). URL: https://exarmas.org/. He has also an active artistic practice https://peinturesylvainguyot.wordpress.com/

Grégoire Le Campion

Grégoire Le Campion is a statistician / data scientist at the CNRS, Research Lab Passages, UMR 5319, Data Analysis and Representation (DAR) unit. For the past 10 years, he has been working and accompanying social science researchers on issues of data analysis and data representation.

Pablo Salinas-Kraljevich

Pablo Salinas-Kraljevich (PhD in Geography) is an Engineer in Geographic Information Sciences at the DAR unit of UMR 5319. He has a long career in action research partnership, particularly in the management, representation and analysis of territorial data. He is interested in the links between art and science, not only for the ‘creation-production’ aspects but also as a reflection. He shares the coordination of EXARMAS art and sciences exhibition hall of the Passages CNRS Research Laboratory in Bordeaux (France). He has an active artistic practice as painter interested mostly in colours.