Meanwhile some artists, particularly in the USA, were pushing ahead on their own. Siah Armajani, Alice Aycock, Scott Burton, Nancy Holt and Robert Irwin, among others had, by the mid 1980's, created a large body of work that attracted the attention of the art critic of the 'New Yorker', Calvin Tomkins. In two articles in 1983 and 1984 he gave serious critical attention to these developments in public art in the USA and suggested that it, "....... is generally now thought of as an established good .... something that governments feel obliged to support and many citizens feel they ought to have." He concluded: "To make significant public art today, they believe, it is necessary to take the public into consideration. In our century this is a revolutionary idea." (16)

In his essay in 'Studio International' Lawrence Alloway drew attention to the fact that there are different levels in the regulation of public space. Some are less regulated than others and public art resides more naturally in those spaces which are more freely accessible. Barrie Greenbie in 'Dimensions of the Human Landscape,' (16) suggests that within these less regulated public spaces there are also differing characteristics. To describe two of these he created two new words, 'proxemic"'and 'distemic'. Proxemic spaces are those which can claim a very defined community or group, such as one might find in the residential areas of cities where people feel a strong territorial claim to their front street and surrounding area. Distemic spaces are those major shared spaces in the centres of towns and cities used by all citizens and visitors. He says of the latter, "They are the domain of the individual which accommodate a degree of non-conformity which few proxemic spaces will allow." The implication of this is that different processes and attitudes must be adopted in different settings in creating works of public art. In all cases of course the very best, in terms of ideas, imagination and skill, must be brought to every work. The works must challenge as well as delight and inform.

Artists have always contributed in one way or another to the external fabric of cities. Only during the twentieth century did this diminish to almost zero. In the past the work of artists in cities has been, in the main, concerned with notions of permanence or at least the long-term. This is still a vital task for artists today to continue to address. The development of the fabric of towns and cities cannot be left only to architects, engineers and planners. Artists must still bring their own particular skills to the enrichment of the complexity, 'the warp and weft' of urban development for the long term. To paraphrase a preface to Michel de Certeau's essay, 'Walking in the City,' public art gives to walking that extra meaning and makes it different to the official, from the business of life, in the way that poetry is different from a planning manual. It slows down the pace and increases perception. It grants to the twentieth century urban experience a kind of drifting and the glamour that Walter Benjamin found in the nineteenth century "leisured observer." Everyday life has a special value when it takes place in the gaps of the larger power structures. (18)

However, much important contemporary art practice has been transient and temporary. Public art also embraces the temporary. The power of an image or idea that is seen or experienced for a limited period can remain embedded in memory. The residue remains as documentation which can be called upon to reinforce the work in the collective memory. The art of ideas, conceptualism, may have more to say about art and the city than the art of objects as Esther and Joachen Gerz have shown in their invisible monuments.

In the USA in 1995 a group of artists and critics came together to examine a range of social activist public art practices which have developed and thrived in recent years. These practices were so far removed from public art as object that they felt moved to describe their work as 'new genre public art.' (19) Notwithstanding the problems attached to anything described as "new", this is a very helpful term. It distinguishes between the static object as public art from a more fluid and broad range of practices which aim at social change and the raising of consciousness. Artists share their practice in collaboration with groups of non-artists (or non-professional artists) in such a way as to provide, among other things, a transformative experience. If one cares to look back before going forward, as Berthold Brecht advises, one would find that these were the very attitudes which informed community art practices from the sixties onwards. New genre public art is evolved community art practice. While the development of these practices has been artist-led they have been assisted by the serious, critical attention of writers and critics such as Lucy Lippard and Suzi Gablik. This has not been the experience in the UK where there is no equivalent body of critical writing on the subject.

Conversely, unlike the USA, the art schools in the UK, over the last twenty years, have responded by setting up full-time, part-time, undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as options within existing courses, to educate artists in these developing public art practices. If it has been found necessary to set up these courses and research projects, it seems to confirm that other skills and attitudes have to be learned and other layers of creative challenge confronted when artists move their practice into the wider public domain. Public art is a useful term for the art that results from this shift.