Temporality of Public Art : its Evocative Function of Space and Time in Everyday Life

Sammanfattning: Starting with an awareness of plain public art which is permanently installed, I begin to pay attention to temporality. As the term “public art” itself carries mutually conflicting concepts, previous researches have mainly focused on issues like “political aestheticization” and “privatization of public space” in terms of development and democracy. From a more socio-aesthetic viewpoint, this thesis will discuss public art noticing the following features; a tendency of contemporary art that appreciates everydayness and a public that actively responds to art and interacts with the space wherein they live. In this context, I will argue that with a limited temporal duration, public art can evoke sense of space and time more efficiently and it renders art more public. This alternative function of temporary public art is examined by discussing examples from Seoul and Malmö.