The term 'public art' has become widely used in the last thirty-odd years to describe a certain art practice, the results of which are to be found mainly in external urban spaces used freely by the general public. To put it another way, public art is found in the streets, squares, parks and 'nooks and crannies' of towns and cities. The term is used to embrace, among other things, the notion of a general publicness of 'location', as distinct from, the more limited publicness of institutions such as art galleries and contemporary art museums. However the location, where an artwork is to be found, is not the limit of what the term attempts to define. In moving art out of the gallery and museum it often occupies non-art-specific, unregulated public open space and engages the attention of vastly increased and diverse publics. As Janet Kardon has said, "Public art is the major arena in which democratic ideas and aesthetic elitism attempt to come to terms with each other." (1) It is these issues that public art practices attempt to address.

It is difficult to determine exactly when the term 'public art' superseded the term 'public sculpture', but it would be safe to suggest that it begins to appear, with some frequency, from around the end of the sixties. In the catalogue of the exhibition 'Sculpture in the Environment', in New York city in 1967, one finds Irving Sandler writing, "If enough artists are enabled to work in public places, a new aesthetic tradition may develop, a tradition of a modern public art, different from that of studio art." (2) In another outdoor exhibition 'Nine Spaces/Nine Artists', in Minneapolis in 1970, the project director, Richard Koshalek entitles his catalogue essay, "A New Idiom of Public Art" and writes, "In America and abroad many artists are evolving a new idiom of public art whose orientation is outside the gallery/museum context." (3) These and other references constitute a significant shift away from the tradition of the sculptural object as the main means of artistic practice in public urban space to a broader range of practices.

In the UK, encouraged by the successful integration of art in the Festival of Britain in 1951, several outdoor exhibitions of sculpture were organised in parks and other city locations. In 1968 alone there were exhibitions in Bristol, Coventry, London and Nottingham. The sculptures exhibited were, in the main, drawn from existing stocks of work from artists' studios or existing maquettes turned into full-scale works. Few of these works were made specifically for the sites they were intended to occupy. In a review of these exhibitions Jeremy Rees identified some of the problems that they had created: "Very few of the works exhibited had been specifically made for the sites on which they were shown and in almost all cases the scale was insignificant.. É.. Unless one has actually had experience of the matter, it is very difficult to fully appreciate the extent of the problems brought about by showing work outdoors (as opposed to a gallery) and exposed to the unpredictable reactions of a puzzled and often, superficially, hostile public.. ÉÉ Artists are unaware of the realities of the situation and fail to realise that conditions encountered in showing work in public, outdoors, bears no relation to exhibitions in galleries. This by no means invalidates the concept of city sculpture but it does create a situation with which the sculptor must be prepared to come to terms at the outset." (4) Rees is pointing out that the works in these exhibitions needed to be related to their sites, that scale needed to be addressed, that attention had to be given to the audiences and that the settings were very different to the accepted ones for showing art. These observations demonstrate the 'worrying away' at a problem that gives rise to another term, which is related to public art, that is the notion of the 'site-specific.'

Organisers and curators of these temporary exhibitions began to raise funds to allow them to commission new work for specific sites but artists, in the early seventies, still seemed unable or unwilling to adjust their practice to the demands that these new opportunities presented. One such exhibition, the 'City Sculpture Project' in 1972, funded by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, was an ambitious one. Sixteen sculptures were commissioned for specific sites in a number of English cities. It was hoped by the organisers that, allowing the works to be on site for six months would, "give the public sufficient time to come to a reasoned evaluation of these sculptures in their environment," and that the works would then be acquired by the relevant city authorities. In the event only one or two were acquired and the rest refused. Some were very badly vandalised. Some comments by participating artists shed light on the way they viewed the opportunity. One said that "the problem with public sculpture lies with the public, not with sculpture." (5) Another said, "the idea of designing a sculpture for a particular site, even if chosen by oneself, seems to me to be a gross limitation on the sculptor's freedom of action." (6) It was in the aftermath of this exhibition that Lawrence Alloway wrote an article entitled, 'The Public Sculpture Problem.' (7) In it he confronts, head-on, the problems artists have to deal with in making public art in a way seldom seen in the plethora of articles and essays which have been written on the subject. It was obvious that artists faced real problems in making work that would engage the general public's sympathy, understanding and respect and would survive, even for the limited period of a temporary exhibition. Memorial sculptures, statues and monuments exist in all cities and these are, in the main, accepted as part of the fabric of these places. In these exhibitions no person or event was being memorialised. In keeping with the times what was being presented was 'art about art'. For Alloway this was not sufficient to legitimate these works as 'public works.' If the word 'public' is placed before the word 'art' (or sculpture) then, by definition, something other than art about art is being suggested. It is this that has caused artists, critics and curators to fulminate about there being no such thing as 'public art' only the more general term 'art in public places'.