I received in the mail my copy of the comic book Invisible City by the artists Grennan and Sperandio. It illustrates tales of people who work at night in the city. The stories are gritty—a young woman works as a stripper to pay her bills while she pursues her art, a man complains of lack of sleep and being under appreciated as a night security guard, a woman who cleans the bathrooms of office buildings begs us all to flush. The comic, produced in collaboration with the Public Art Fund, reminded me of that old quote from Robert Rauschenberg. Remarking on his incorporation of everyday objects into his art, he said, "I work in the gap between art and life." Comic book in hand, an argument formed in my mind: numerous artists working in a variety of disciplines—often working between disciplines—follow just the opposite path, bridging the gap between art and life. Unlike Rauschenberg, who turned multiple media back into painting and sculpture, these artists take their inspiration from the Cabaret Voltaire and sixties Happenings. Their work turns various media back to face the world. They aren’t making objects that exist in the gap between art and life; they engage life head on, incorporating their audiences into their work. This is a brief survey of a few artists, young and old, whose work cuts across disciplines by reaching out to the public.

Standard and Poor, the collaborative alias of artists David Henry Brown Jr. and Dominic McGill, has strong ties to the public—but the public usually doesn’t know it. Urban guerilla artists, they inflict their work on an unsuspecting audience. They describe their most recent project, Carpet Rollers, as "Our most advanced project. Carpet Rollers is a real company which rolls out the red carpet for $99—complimentary video included. The people that we interact with in our video documentation are not artists but rather regular Americans whose ideas about the world and behavior are totally different than the homogeneous ones that exist in the arts. We present the red carpet service as a commercial enterprise because Americans view commerce as real. There is never any mention of art because once you tell Americans that something is art it wholly ceases to be real to them."

David Merkel is a sculptor living in Rochester, NY. He recently participated in the creation of a public park in his neighborhood there. Working under the auspices of the City of Rochester as the project artist, he helped guide an organization of his neighbors in designing and building the park. His goal was to help people become involved with developing the area in which they live. Merkel sees it as another way to approach art, "living it on a day to day basis." This is the advantage to community based projects over holing himself up in his studio and working alone. The park was dedicated on April 30th of this year.

Kim Jones has worked in the public sphere for decades, presenting his genre crossing art since the seventies. Covering himself in mud and rickety stick sculptures, Jones began walking the boardwalks of Venice and Santa Monica California as the Mud Man. He said he took to the streets due to a lack of other venues. The origins of the Mud Man lie in Jones’ experiences in the Vietnam War and with his own handicapped youth. These influences remain intact in his new work, though recently Jones has taken his art into the galleries. When asked about his recent performance at the John Weber gallery in New York City, he said his work has not fundamentally changed. He points out that his work had always been performed in a variety of venues and that it moves easily from inside to outside, from gallery or museum to the street.

Judith Barry is a post-studio artist—in other words, she doesn’t have one. Originally trained as an architect, she has been working with video and other multi-media forms since the 1970s. In her works Barry creates digital alternative realities. Barry recently exhibited Speed Flesh (1997-1998) in the exhibition Body Mécanique at the Wexner Center for the Art in Columbus, Ohio. Speed Flesh, done in collaboration with artist Brad Miskell, features a three-channel video installation on a 360-degree screen which tells the story of a five different cyborgs living a future world overrun with disposable resources. The artists describe the piece as "point-of-view theater." Filmed with live actors, the story they tell unfolds differently for each viewer depending on how they move through the gallery space.

Dread Scott engages the public with politics. He is perhaps best known for the work What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? which encourages the viewer to stand on the American flag. This work was shown in Chicago where Scott was a student and also a few years ago in Arizona. Each time the show has engendered a strong response. Protests, vitriolic newspaper columns, harsh words from Senators, as well as support from a variety of sources have followed. Scott has continued his inflammatory work with a poster he designed for activist group Refuse and Resist protesting the police brutality committed against Abner Loima.

Margo Mensing is a fiber artist who uses cloth to explore history. She turns textile display on its head, creating installations that force her audience to question the truth behind museum practice. In Red Bibs: Playing Baby (1998), Mensing builds a perfect replica of a traditional museum display. Her installation includes knitted red bibs framed behind protective Plexiglas and extensive wall text documenting the many uses of bibs throughout history. There was also a series of projected slides featuring the red bibs in action on babies, Buddhist Monks and bikers. Only upon second or third look does it become apparent that Mensing has literally fabricated all the pieces in the exhibition, inventing the histories of the bibs which she has created herself.

Artists Bill and Mary Buchen create multi-disciplinary work that comes from yet another direction. They are musicians who, since 1972, have created interactive public sculpture they call Sonic Architecture. Their projects are large-scale public works designed for urban and natural environments, including a series of science playgrounds, "sound parks" and a series of environmental works that generate sounds when played like musical instruments. A playground they designed for P.S. 244 in Brooklyn includes groupings of bronze drums surrounded by parabolic dishes connected to a large underground chamber. The children's drumming reverberates back to them through the center of the dishes. In their gallery piece Wave Magnet (1992), sound are triggered by motion sensors surrounding a short-wave radio. The "viewer" (listener would be a better way to describe it) dons the supplied headphones which play back the audio generated by their movement around the sculpture.

Kristen Lucas combines video installation, performance, and the World Wide Web in her art. In response to a question about what makes a work successful for her she says, "sometimes the best art audience doesn't know they are looking at art. I think that if the audience is confused about motivation, it can be more exciting. They begin to ask new questions." She continues, "my more successful art projects have been collaborations and usually within the university or art academy setting. I recently worked collaboratively on a performance, Drag and Drop (1998), in Troy, New York at Rensselaer Polytechnic's iEar Studio. The idea for the performance was for me to play a set of tennis against a TV studio." The game was performed against the studio wall with a video projection as an opponent. It was then broadcast live to a room down the hall that had been converted into a simulated sports bar. A spy camera was hidden in the bar, recording the patrons reactions to her game and broadcasting their image back into the images projected on the studio wall. Lucas describes that "the game became intriguing as the people in the bar noticed that they were being monitored by the spy camera. They began to make signs commenting on my playing which they held up to the camera, commenting like sports announcers.