Following and building upon, Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland, three public seminars organised by PAR+RS, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, and Creative Scotland, October 2010, this joint proposal seeks to disseminate some of the insights from those events in respect of salient ethical aspects of public art practice. This is in advance of a more detailed report and publication of findings, which might constructively draw upon the debates to be generated by the Stills event.
This paper focuses on one prominent theme offered to the Mapping discussions by Dutch artist Jeanne Van Heeswjik. For Van Heeswjik a productive ethics can emerge from that form of participatory art practice which facilitates ‘temporary fields of intervention’ which in turn foster the ‘intensification of trivialities’. By these means, the citizen experiences a constructive encounter with their own locale, cajoled by the artist, one which lingers in lore if not in artefact: the encounter might be termed ethical by Van Heeswjik as she encourages the participant to ‘act up’ in their environment and to take ownership of the locale for the duration of the project and beyond.

Questions which emerged from discussion of Van Heeswijk’s practice, especially, and also from the presented work of Graham Fagen, and Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen, relate expressly to the following suggested inquiries:
• What is the role of aesthetics in relation to the ethical and the political?
• Should the artist be subject to the same ethical codes and responsibilities as practitioners from other disciplines?
• Is the viewer’s relationship with an artwork ethically different from our other encounters with objects, knowledge, individuals and communities?

With contextualisation by way of reference to Ranciere’s observations on the paradox of political art, and David Schwartz’s defence of art as dress-rehearsal for democratic politics, the paper speculates in conclusion on the ways in which practices explored at Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland might offer models for thinking further about how to circumvent Ranciere’s identified risk of critical art practice promulgating consensus by hubris or by accident.