| Description |
From the Hewitt & Jordan website
"This is the first time the three text works that form the Three Functions have been presented together.
We have been working on the Three Functions for over a year.We did not set out to make this a long-term project; in fact the first function felt like a culmination of a previous project rather than the beginning of a new one. The project began as the second phase of a commission for Public Art Forum’s (now ixia) annual conference in April 2003. The first part of the commission, a work called I won an artist in a raffle, was concerned with initiating a debate about the commissioning of public art; conference delegates were entered into a raffle in which they might win the opportunity to commission us to make a new work within their home or work place. The winner was Allia Ali, who after some discussion on how we might collaborate, said “just make a work for me, you can make what you like”. We went on to write and display The Economic Function of Public Art. The text became a billboard poster, sited in Sheffield, and a contribution to the book Desirable Places: The Contribution of Artists to Creating Spaces for Public Life. The subject of the Three Functions is public art. The aim of the work is to examine the tensions and contradictions that exist within public art practice; to explore how public art is integral to our culture and therefore how it functions in support of the dominant ideology. In order to reveal the hegemony within culture, we chose to describe how public art functions in the broadest of cultural contexts: economic, social and aesthetic. The Three Functions state - in the direct and reductive manner of a one line slogan - ideas of public and private, social responsibility and expected good behaviour as well as divisive forms of knowledge, like taste. The Three Functions attempt to initiate a discourse around how art maintains cultural division." |