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	(go back) So art is the monument, art is the fa‡ade of a royal palace or of the city hall, it is the battle flags or insignias of a procession, the stories of conquests or images of saints. A primarily public good, which people confront precisely because it rests in open places, in the plazas or on the streets, or in those closed places - but "public" by definition - that were around at the time of the earliest cults and now are Catholic churches. Also, because the identity of a population used to be based, even more than now, on religion (it seperated one group's power from the next). At the same time, it's true that there has always been a "private" art, but in most cases it has been exposed, exhibited to show the prestige and knowledge of the person possessing it. But if we ever succeeded in the most difficult task of passing a day in an Italian city without bumping into antiquity, it would be more difficult to find traces of a recent artistic urban intervention that has not succumbed to the tempation to be completely rhetorical on one part and completely formalistic on the other. When communication is attempted through form alone, we are left facing a bulky monumentalism deprived not only of meaning and aesthetical value, but also of any ethical value: this is the situation of contemporary public Italian art. Once form and content have been seperated (and fortunately this has not happened in every case), we are found in front of an utter void. Most people, accordingly, have detached themselves from art, they "don't understand", and they no longer recognize themselves in those public objects that spring up from time to time most everywhere. Just to make one example of something I unfortunately have before my eyes all day long, the Piazza Diaz in Milan, where the Carabinieri (police) coat-of-arms has been made gigantic, occupying the center of the plaza, as a bulky homage to the army. How should the public identity with this? A slogan realized in metal. That's why it seemed so important to me face this theme in Italy, a territory in which public art has had great importance and a long tradition, but has now become marginal and depressed, in quantity but above all in quality, in its ideals and its reasons to exist. Evidently a thread has has been broken, but the tradition of the monument is still at least considered, and its purpose is thought to be that of building a more public and general art than that of "Art." Even if there's still the need to remember and record events, a kind of concretization of the collective memory, it's obvious that many things have changed and cannot be ignored. The monument (art) is in crisis for various reasons, among which most evident to me seems the lack of a concept of eternity (though the desire to be eternal has not disappeared), and thus the desire to eternalize things. This works along with the crisis of the rational model of reality's linear development. But it seems this is ignored in most cases by those who "purchase" the monuments and by the artists who still maintain that bronze, marble, and rhetoric are the essential ingredients of their work. Without seeing that the consequences are evident inside the "art world" as well, it's enough think about the many works created out of perishable materials, or even performance art (and we're talking about thirty years ago), or to the (mostly American) model of building construction that not only uses wood for houses but also plans for skyscrapers to be replaced after a brief time by other, bigger constructions, simply in conformity with the felt need for renewal (for psychological "recovery" and economic "revival"). To this is united our much greater capacity to make film or or video function like the memory of events; these media are more direct, immediate, nearer to a modern attitude (an attitude they have largely helped to construct). We have passed from the construction of images of events (which requires time, and has become too symbolic and rhetorical), to recreating whole stories, which brings them closer to a potentially lived realities, and not like mythical events. Society's changes have changed the art that comes from it. In a certain sense, art is no longer found in the center, but in the peripheries; it's no longer a means of affirmation, but doubt, taken to its limits. And one notes this even more in public art, when art abandons the protected garden of museums and galleries - made of white spaces and visitors who buy tickets to become audiences - and enters into the public sphere. But after much rhetoric on the loss of the center, often discussed precisely by those who were rooted there and had no desire for others to approach it as well, perhaps it's worth exploiting it for what it is. With regard to this, Vito Acconci writes: "(...) Instead of bemoaning this, public art can use this marginal position to its advantage: public art can present itself as the voice of marginal cultures. As the minority report, as the opposition party. Public art exists to thicken the plot". It has become more and more important in these last years for art to deal with the place of its own intervention. In other words, working site-specifically is a requirement for many of the most interesting figures in this field. Artists try to insert themselves inside of a pre-existing structure in order to modify it enough to make it "different", or to engage another meaning with reality, or simply to try to make us see the most intimate meaning of what's right in front of our eyes. In order to restore some meaning to their work, the artist needs to make it in a particular place, with its history, its problems, its inhabitants. One must act with that. Artists have felt the need to get out of their studios to re-enter in relationship with the world. The separation from society that the artist of the last century conquered, has proven fruitful from the point of view of creative liberty, but at times also sterile; art has become more and more abstract not only in form but also in its concepts, as though the artist finally abdicated him/herself from the role of commentator on the world. But if public art means an art that takes an interest in public welfare, and therefore politics, this will bring the artist back to a dialogue with reality. Facing politics, art has at times fallen into other problems stemming from the adhesion to ideology, which makes art a simple matter of illustration. This returns us somehow to the problem of the monument, of something created to celebrate a power that from time to time finances symbols of itself or, vice versa, opposes them. So being conscious of this danger might help us to cross yet a busier road, socially and ethically, that leads out of the cul de sac, away from the loss of meaning of which everybody complains. Thus I agree with Hans Haacke when he writes that art "represents symbolic power, power that can be put to the service of domination or emancipation, and thus has ideological implications with repercussions in our everyday lives". And naturally this even involves art that doesn't want to occupy itself with these concerns.. It is difficult to take risks in the labyrinth of involvement with the world without the temptation of exiting through the "rhetoric" door. But, as we've already said, perhaps the doubts are more important, and it's impossible to turn onto a new road without risking falling into error. Dialogue and collaboration are some of the central terms in this field, since one of the key elements for public art is, naturally, direct contact with other people. Public participation is of fundamental importance in these interventions, and the public is often much more than the audience, but an active builder of the process and realization of the work, "limiting" the the artist to construct the general direction, as a kind of stimulator of collective intelligence. So the artist descends from hs or her pedestal and, entering in contact with other people, becomes aware that his or her role is no longer that of creating the beautiful, but of "inventor" of aesthetic processes which absorb the experiences, actions, and trials of every participant. Who is the audience for public art? How can public art represent the public when there are many publics? These are the questions at the beginning of Cultures in Action, the book that records the experience of the Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago, of which Mary Jane Jacob was the curator. And it is precisely upon these questions - from which emerges the respect for public property, shared territory - that most of these interventions are based. They are attempts to open discussions and the search for threads of connection in an "evicted community", in which we're forced to live in those non-places that French ethnologist Marc Aug‚ invokes here in this book. Thus public art lies in the crossroads of many interests and becomes a field open for communication not only with the narrow linguistic circle of the "art world", but with the whole community. For these reasons, this volume looks at the interventions of foreign artists and curators next to a section dealing with the interventions of the Italian curators who have most closely dealt with these problems, who have furthered the cause for art in public spaces, interventions in the city. People who have known how take up the challenge of applying art to actual problems, without necessarily transforming them, nor celebrating something, nor taking an ideological position. Individuals who have known how to work in the land of confines, at times entering museums or galleries (or even setting up their own structures), at other times staying in a completely open field and in direct confrontation with the outside. They have often risked disapproval from the world of art because not there addressed directly to him or because it required too much "partecipation" to the spectator and few able to "objects" have dealt. Roberto Pinto and Stefano Arienti