However, some members of the Harvard arts community find the idea of “public art” unappealing and even repugnant, lacking a loyalty to the ideal spirit of art. Professor Stephen Prina, a member of the Visual and Environmental Studies department, renounces the principles that underlie more formal public art displays.
“Usually, by public art we mean subsidized large projects, requiring confirmation from an institution or advisory board,” he said. “That mainly serves to reinforce normative values in art. It’s a product of consensus culture.”
Prina thus suggests that the public’s tendency to prize the more prosaic elements of art often constrain other forms of creativity. For the groups who organize happenings, his comments underscore the necessity that their events remain spontaneous and work free of college bureaucracy. However, the defiant nature of the work—working in public space without the direct consent of College officials—leads to conflict with the Arts Collective’s, Present!’s and other groups’ use of University resources.
One group works within the structure of the University administration to bring art to developing countries. Using institutional grants, one Leverite has brought public art to Mussorie, India: Amar C. Bakshi ’05 is the founder and leader of Aina Arts, an organization devoted to the promotion of art in developing countries. “We see art not as a luxury, but as a necessity, and seek to provide its benefits in places where it is not encouraged,” said Bakshi.
The key concept behind Aina Arts is its method of operations: Bakshi’s organization works with a group of children for several weeks, observing the ways in which the group could supplement the students’ everyday lives with art. He said, “We looked for the use of arts in religious practices, in daily practices, in special ceremonies and celebrations striving to see art in its broadest conception.” Then the group teaches the children to see the same beauty and art that they have observed. According to Bakshi, “Our goal was never to be a technical school, but rather a place in which the children could address dilemmas within their culture using the tools arts gives them.”
In their work showing the children of India how to find art in the everyday, the participants of Aina Arts derive a greater understanding of the role of public art themselves. “We seek to show students here [at Harvard] the ways in which art-making takes place outside the gallery walls of New York or show-rooms in London, in the lives of millions of people,” commented Bakshi, who is expanding the organization’s frontiers from Mussoorie to an AIDS orphanage in Zimbabwe and eventually locations in Latin America.
Of public works of art in general, Bakshi said, “I think all art must be public and socially engaged. The arts are primarily a means of communication between individuals and communities, and I feel that for years art has been systematically divorced from daily life in an effort to enshrine its products and ignore the essence of its process.”
The intrepid artists of Harvard are constantly looking towards the future. “We’re hoping to have a Silent Dance at the Harvard-Yale game,” Mahfouda said enthusiastically. “We’re hoping to get a lot of small radios and headphones—WHRB [Harvard’s radio show] will be involved—and have everyone tune in to the show and dance. That way there’s no noise, but the music’s everywhere.”
“It’s really about people being involved in one thing,” Mahfouda said of happenings and public art in general. “They’re united in one purpose.” Present!’s self-description speaks to this unity, saying, “We’re devoted to letting the world speak, and talking back too.”