Public art has come a long way. What was an occasional event and called public sculpture is now ubiquitous and called public art. It was the recognition of the crucial role of context that gave rise to the change from ‘public sculpture’ to ‘public art’. Artists struggled to understand context in terms of making art for public places. ‘Site specific’ was one of the first useful terms coined to define the work. That is until it began to be questioned and Jeff Kelley came up with ‘place specific’. That term never caught on but it was helpful. Kelley argued that a site was only physical and formal whereas a place held social, historical and cultural meaning. In the meantime Robert Irwin was struggling with even more precise attempts at defining and grading sites. Adding to ‘site specific’, he also suggested that art works could be ‘site dominant’, ‘site adjusted’ and ‘site conditioned/determined’. Some well-known sculptors of the time in the UK totally rejected the notion that a site should affect their work in any way whatsoever and regarded public sculpture as too limiting for their practice.

Public art seems now to inhabit a strange hybrid world that crosses many boundaries in the art, the civic and the social worlds in a way that could not have been conceivable forty years ago. Artists are happy to make it and towns, cities and even people want it. Part of this is to do with the post-modern world that art finds itself in where flexibility doesn’t now seem to be the ‘crime’ it once was. Artists have no problem moving from exhibiting, curating, socially engaging and making work for public sites in urban and rural settings. What this flexibility is doing to the art itself only time and reflection will tell but for now public art benefits from this condition in that, what was once regarded as hardly fit for a ‘serious’ artist’s attention, is now perceived by artists of the highest standing as something worth doing – making works for settings outwith the gallery/museum nexus. However there are problems. Public art is so ubiquitous that cvic authorities, developers and other agencies are often misguided in commissioning public art when what they really need is good design. But even more concerning is the present government insistence that arts funding, particularly lottery streams, be used ‘instrumentally’. Public art has been seen as one of the ways that arts councils and other arts funding bodies can meet the government’s demands.

How we have come to this point is of real interest to me and, I should think, others who are interested in visual art in general and public art in particular. I began thinking about the trajectory that public art has taken and thought it would be worthwhile to go back a little in time to see how others thought of public art and to try to ascertain how we got to where we are now. There is now of course a massive literature on public art where 40 years ago there was little or nothing. However I’m going to use only two examples – an art historian and an artist ruminating about public sculpture in the eightiess and the nineties and then I will attempt to offer some thoughts for the ‘noughties’. Readers might not concur and could offer their own thoughts.

I recalled a lecture in Dublin in 1988 by Albert Elsen, an art historian from Stanford University. It was at an international conference on sculpture and what he had to say was very well received by his audience. I looked back also at a personal manifesto on public sculpture by Siah Armajani, a well-known and respected artist in the USA. He had begun to compile his manifesto in the sixties and he revised it in the nineties – a very useful time frame for my purposes here.

It is significant that both of these texts are from the USA, as are my other references above. I have always regarded the USA as being somehow ‘ahead’ of the UK in the embracing and developing of public art and in the amount of work produced. Apart from the obvious difference in size between the UK and the USA, there was more money available through the early acceptance, implementation and enforcement of percent for art policies at federal, state and city levels. Artists were keen to make public art and writers and critics wrote extensively about it in articles and books. I have always said that with all this work being produced it gave US artists the opportunity to fail and to reflect and rethink, leading to a move from large abstract metal object sculpture to the more extended field of public art. In looking at my bookshelves and into my filing boxes I am again reminded, and then astonished, at the number of books, articles and conference reports that exist on the issues of public art ( and that is only one person’s collection). One might then wonder why I should choose to concentrate on two particular responses to the practice. I suppose the reason is the form that Elsen and Armijani have adopted. Both have attempted to distil their thinking into pared down statements. I thought that a similar form might be attempted for today.

Albert Elsen

Ten propositions concerning ‘What we have learned about public sculpture in America since Rodin’¹.

1. Beginning with Rodin, most modern public sculpture has derived from the artist’s deeply held private values that have often conflicted with those of the public which he has chosen not to celebrate. The modern sculptor has enacted rather than depicted values important to enlightened societies such as making disciplined and constructive use of freedom of expression.
2. By contrast with tradition, and beginning with Rodin, modern public sculpture has celebrated art and life, rather than the dead and dying for one’s country. Modern sculptors have preferred to seek the monumental without the monument.
3. Recent developments in modern public sculpture have shown, however, that there remains the need for memorials by which the community may publicly express private grief.
4. Recent history has shown also that modern public sculpture can again serve the traditional needs of communities to have pride of place by means of a civic symbol.
5. One of the great purposes served by modern public sculpture has been to humanise the urban environment through wit and mystery and by means of beauty to counter bad architecture.
6. Another and growing recent development has been the rejection of ‘the public be damned’ attitude of certain modern artists and the deliberate creation of ‘viewer friendly’ public art in which the artist collaborates with other professionals and the community.
7. ‘How exposed are works of art to all madness?’ The permanence of public sculpture has always been problematic.
8. In certain countries the modern sculptor has won unprecedented rights to protect and protest public sculpture.
9. Recent history has shown that in America the public is also exerting, increasingly, its rights to protect and protest public sculpture.
10. Public acceptance of modern sculpture, even of the highest quality, has always involved risk for the artists, but recent history has taught that the public’s education, including that by commissioners and artists, helps to reduce those risks.

Elsen elaborated on each point using slide images of various works It was an interesting, instructive and humorous talk, and prepared after the controversy and eventual removal of Richard Serra’s ‘Tilted Arc’ from Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. While there is a hint that the artist might collaborate with other professionals and /or local people in evolving works, Elsen’s perceptions are still however rooted in the notion of the object sculpture and the artist as the single donor of meaning. There is little concession to the role that the context of a work is of any significance.

Siah Armajani

Manifesto

Public Sculpture in the context of American democracy².

1. Public sculpture attempts to demystify art.
2. Public sculpture is less about self-expression and the myth of the maker and more about its civicness. It is not based on a philosophy which seeks to separate itself from the ‘everydayness’ of everyday life.
3. Public sculpture is a search for a cultural history which calls for structural unity between the object and its social and spatial setting. It should be open, available, useful and common.
4. Public sculpture opens up a perspective through which we may comprehend the social construction of art.
5. Public sculpture attempts to fill the gap that comes about between art and public to make art public and artists citizens again.
6. Generally speaking public sculpture is not a particular style or idealogy. It is through the action in concrete situations that public sculpture will become a certain character.
7. Public sculpture has some kind of social function. It has moved from large scale, outdoor, site-specific sculpture into sculpture with social content. In the process it has annexed a new territory for sculpture that extends the field for social experience.
8. Public sculpture is not artistic creation alone but rather social and cultural productions based upon concrete needs.
9. Public sculpture is a cooperative production. There are others besides the artist who are responsible for the work. To give all the credit to the individual artist is misleading and untrue.
10. The ethical dimension of art is mostly gone and only in newly formed relationships with non-art audiences may the ethical dimension come back to art.
11. Public sculpture depends on some interplay with the public based on some shared assumptions.
12. Public sculpture rejects the idea of the universality of art.

Armajani’s original Manifesto contains 26 points, which of itself indicates the impossibility of defining public art. Some of the points attempt to define it in terms of what it is not. I have taken the liberty of excluding some because of what I perceived as repetition and others as less relevant to my needs in this discourse.

Public sculpture in Armajani’s experience and thinking has moved on and it is significant that he felt he needed to revise it in 1993. Some of the points he has made are provocative and need to be questioned. I have a feeling that he intended this. In his own exploration of what he was doing as an artist he compiled his manifesto partly as justification but also I think to question what he was doing and to provoke discussion.

David Harding
What have we learned about public art?

That work which is intended to be permanent/long term remains the most difficult in terms of criticality, of sustained (or changing) meaning and of its physical survival, intact. It remains a target for casual attack.
That art and the urbs/city offers more possibilities to the artist than art and architecture.
That monuments continue to generate wide acceptability
That monuments can be counter monuments
That artists as members of design teams may end up making no evident or specific visual contribution.
That it is not part of the art market in that it cannot be bought and sold.
That commissioning briefs for it can actually be seen as offering a greater challenge to the creativity and inventiveness of artists.
That conceptual public art can say more about the city and its people than the fixed object.
That it has increased the opportunity for socially engaged practice.
That the demands of government for social inclusion have been dangerous for the quality of work produced.
That some of the claims made for it in terms of social and environmental change are fraudulent.

All of these are attempts at trying to define what public art is.

Then I got to thinking about something I wrote a long time ago and it is this – artists get on and make work – others write about it, worrying about what it is and trying to make sense of it.

¹ Albert Elsen
International Conference on Sculpture, Trinity College 1988 – Conference Report.
Sculptors’ Society of Ireland

² Siah Armajani – Compiled: 1968 – 1978. Revised: 1993
Included in exhibition catalogue: ‘Siah Armajani – Anarchistic Contributions 1962 – 1994, Villa Arson, Nice 1994.

Notes

Albert Elsen
International Conference on Sculpture, Trinity College 1988 – Conference Report.
Sculptors’ Society of Ireland

Siah Armajani – Compiled: 1968 – 1978. Revised: 1993
Included in exhibition catalogue: ‘Siah Armajani – Anarchistic Contributions 1962 – 1994, Villa Arson, Nice 1994.