Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund

Plop: Recent projects of the Public Art Fund features projects by forty-six internationally acclaimed artists whose temporary installations were made possible by the Public Art Fund, one of the most innovative presenters of contemporary art in America. Through an in-depth account of each of these memorable projects, it examines the ways in which artists as diverse as Rachel Whiteread and Takashi Murakami, Christian Boltanski and Pipilotti Rist, and Andrea Zittel and Vik Muniz have created a dynamic experience of contemporary art. From Paul Pfeiffer's Orpheus Descending, a video work documenting the brief life-cycle of a flock of chickens, shown in the World Trade Center and World Financial Center, to Josiah McElheny's The Metal Party, an elaborate reconstruction of an event held at the Bauhaus in 1929, these projects address a multitude of issues related to urban living, site-specificity, and the impact of public art on both casual passersby and local communities.
For artists, creating work outside the museum or gallery's white box is both a challenging and a rewarding experience, an opportunity to use the public realm for an evolution of their studio practice. This book sheds new light on a key aspect of contemporary art, while also creating a lasting pictorial record of installations on view for perhaps only a few weeks or months. Plop documents the vitality of a changing city and the evolution of what it means for art to be "public," providing a key reference work for everyone interested in public art and the international contemporary art scene.