This issue of Public Art Journal aims to break away from the traditional magazine format where a select number of critics comment on the practice of artists, while the artists themselves remain critically mute or worse still absent. Instead ‘Places Between’ attempts to complexify the ways in which we understand the relation of art and criticism, private and public, practice and theory, by showing how theoretical thinking can be practice and how practitioners can make theory. To this end a diverse range of artists, architects, theorists, historians and critics have been invited to make contributions precisely because their work is not traditionally considered within the terms of ‘public art’. For some this has provided an opportunity to present current work – theory, practice, images, script – as public art. For others this has allowed a chance to comment on current ‘public art’ and to explore different understandings of this ‘practice’ such that it is.

As editor, wherever I look, I find ‘places between’ the various works and ideas, images and words. But how can the reader navigate ‘Places Between’? Being ‘between’ it’s easy to feel lost. How then to chart the territory of ‘Places Between’? Here collaboration has provided some useful orientating devices. As well as sharing the intellectual concerns, the visual design creates a language, creates ‘places between’, which allow various connections and contradictions to be made between each of the contributions. has raised the question of Working with Rex Henry, between editing and designing this issue of Public Art Journal, has meant a constant exchange of the theoretical and the practical.

Publication details: Jane Rendell (ed.), A Place Between, special issue of The Public Art Journal, n.2, (October 1999).