In 1987, Krzysztof Wodiczko provided one of the most succinct critiques of “art in public places” as a form of political legitimation. Public art, he wrote, should engage in strategic challenges to the psychopolitical and economic operations of the city.1 Describing the work of the new avant-garde as critical intelligence, he proposed critical collaboration with institutions of mass media in order to win time and space and raise consciousness.
Around that time, some of the most successful models of city-wide public art were Chambres d’amis, organised in Ghent in 1986 and bringing together more than 50 artists, Skulptur Projekte of 1987, a project comprised of more than 70 interventions in the city of Münster, and Places with a Past, a series of site-specific works organized for Charleston’s Spoleto Festival in 1991. According to Johanne Lamoureux, part of what defined such projects was a shift away from site specificity towards the time of the event and the time it took for the spectator to travel from one place to another.2 Further defining the type of consumption involved in these city-wide arts festivals, Lamoureux explained how the motifs of the eighteenth-century picturesque and nineteenth-century flânerie were enlisted as features of the museologization of the city.3 Miwon Kwon explained this new work as part of a shift in site-specific practice away from phenomenological concerns and institutional critique and towards a discursive understanding of site. Discursively determined, the site becomes a “fragmentary sequence of events and actions through space ... a nomadic narrative whose path is articulated by the passage of the artist.”4
The recuperation of the external form of such projects became something of a commonplace in the ’90s. One such project was developed by the Montreal-based group ATSA, a non-profit organisation founded in 1997 and dedicated to “urban interventions in the form of installations, performances and realistic displays that are witness to social, environmental and nationalist aberrations.” ATSA, which stands for Action Terroriste Socialement Acceptable, has as its mandate a questioning of urbanism that restores the citizen’s place in the public realm depicting it as a political space open to social debate and discussion. ATSA proposes a non-hermetic art activism that allows for “sustainable social development.”5 The group’s most well-known project to date is called FRAG on the Main (2002) a series of 32 graphic displays installed at various addresses along Montreal’s Saint-Laurent Boulevard, a.k.a. “the Main.” This visual walking tour functions as witness to the social, cultural and economic history of the street and some of the personalities that are associated with its locus geni.
A similar project was organized more recently by Ephemeral Landscapes, a temporary urban art project for Montreal’s Mont-Royal Avenue. Ephemeral Landscapes also describes its projects as “urban interventions,” in this case designed to “surprise and amuse citizens.”6 The only successful piece among the winners of the 2007 contest was 21 visages en tête, created by the team of architects, Brière, Gilbert + associés. Imitating the new stencil graffiti tactic of using streets as paint surfaces, the project features sidewalk images of 21 historical personalities that have given their names to the streets along Mont-Royal Avenue: Berri, Mentana, Fabre, Marquette, Papineau, DeLorimier...(extrait)

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