Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland

Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland

Day 1

by Ruth Barker 11 Oct 2010

Hello,

So last Wednesday was the first of the Mapping the Future symposia, with speakers Tom van Gestel from SKOR; artist Jeanne van Heeswijk; Dr Judith Rugg, who’s Reader in Fine Art Theory at the University for the Creative Arts; and last but not least Graham Fagen – Artist and Senior Lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone. The chair was Moira Jeffrey, who did a brilliant job. We also took the opportunity to launch a new PAR+RS commissioned poster by Sarah Tripp but more on this later

The day was fully booked, and we had a brilliant audience who seemed fully engaged, informed, and invested in the sector.

The first two presentations from Jeanne and Tom were brilliant, and the feedback I got after their presentations was uniformly positive.

After lunch (haggis-balls!) Judith Rugg’s presentation was very different in approach, and responses to it were very divergent – a real love it or hate it situation. Unlike Jeanne and Tom, Judith read from a paper (actually an extract from her new book Exploring Site Specific Art, Issues of Space and Internationalism) and – significantly – she

was not speaking from the perspective of first person generation (as in ‘this is what I made / did / commissioned; this is why’) but instead from the perspective of analysis (as in ‘someone made / did / commissioned this; this is what that might mean, or what it might tell us’). She also suffered I think because, while the other speakers discussed strategies for empowering individuals, with a decided optimism of approach, Judith discussed site-specific (rather than necessarily public) works that were designed to make people uncomfortable or to raise difficult or problematic ideas. The aesthetics of anxiety can never be feel-good. Personally I enjoyed her presentation and felt it gave a dimension to the day that would otherwise have been missing. But I know that for every person who told me that they’d really enjoyed Judith’s paper, there were others who felt that there were decided problems with it. Perhaps this is something we can return to later.

The final presentation was Graham Fagen’s, who – as the only Scotland based speaker, and the only speaker describing projects that took place in the UK – returned us to a more local perspective, and

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brought us back to that on-the-ground voice of process and experience. We closed with a panel discussion that drew out some very relevant questions and cautions from all four contributors.

Tracy Mackenna introduces the day

The presentations were filmed, and I believe that comprehensive documentation will go up on the Mapping the Future website as soon as it’s been processed but I thought in the meantime that it would be useful for me to go through some of my own notes, just to give a sense of some of the topics that were discussed. Apologies in advance for inaccuracies, massive gaps in note taking, and / or reporting bias!

Tom van Gestel.ABSTRACT: Tom van Gestel will present examples of the Foundation for Art and Public Domain’s (SKOR) practice and will elaborate on its history. He will highlight the range of projects they run from a new policy for art and healthcare to the story of a Scottish King’s daughter who wanted to be cured of blindness.

Tom van Gestel

Useful phrases:‘We have an office, but usually we’re out.’

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‘We could give people what they want, but usually we do the opposite.’

Part 1: Discussed ‘public’ in relation to shared experiences (I suppose a shared language of experience? A public experience is one that we’ve all gone through?). As an example he cited the experience of being a patient in a health care system. SKOR has curated / commissioned a long running series of projects that take ‘healthcare’ as a context.

Examples: Aernout Mik – AAP A moving piece about an orang-utan located in centre for disability care. Interactive.

Juan Munoz – Psychiatric Care’s-HertogenboschPermanent public sculpture

Lino Hellings and Yvonne Wendel – the train compartmentNursing home. Trying to find a symbol of total relaxation. Installed seating to recreate a train carriage. Subsequently adopted as ‘treatment’. Relationship to instrumentalism?

Part 2: ‘Urban’. SKOR’s 10 year project series promoting Urbanism.

Examples.Parasite Paradise – various artists The project began by thinking about mapping a freshly constructed New Town by showing all the facilities that were not yet there – eg museum, cinema, bar etc etc. Then SKOR developed a ‘settlement’ made up of a series of artist proposals to fill these perceived gaps in infrastructure. Some were usable, others were more abstract. Artists (list from website): Acconci , Maurer United Architects , Böthlingk , Fishkin en Leiderman , Atelier van Lieshout , Böhm/ Saffer/ Lang , Joosting Bunk , Wapenaar, Oosterhuis/ Lénard/ Rubbens , Winter , Hörbelt , Bergen , Deleu , Ansiau , Architekten, 2012- , Bik van der Pol in cooperation with Korteknie Stuhlmacher , HAP , Braak , Exilhäuser Architekten , Atelier Kempe Thill architects and planners , Lancel , Vrijen , Milohnic & Paschke i.s.m. Resonatorcoop , Roseboom/ Weemen , Tsivopoulos

‘Function’ in these projects seems sometimes intended, sometimes not intended. Different kinds of function (practical function vs symbolic function) (function vs usefulness).Who is the audience for these works?Art as advocacy?Art as catalyst?

Sculpture Park for the Twenty First Century.

Fernando Sanchez Castillo – brilliant barricade sculpture. Cast bronze, life size barricade of crashed cars. At the opening, Tom threw a Molotov cocktail at it!

Part 3: Rural

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Importance of storytelling. “Eight artists were invited for the ‘In Verbelinge, art based on stories in Stellingwerfs’ event in 1999. Ooststellingwerf is a thinly populated area in South-West Friesland. The landscape there is determined by old peat moors, sand drifts and the basins of the rivers Kuunder (Tjonger) and Linde.”

Images of the below projects here

Georgina Starr – Popping up in Ooststellingwerf Talent show street performance.

Job Koelewijn – cinema with permanent showing of a film made in the local area. Relationship between real and projected space. Epic soundtrack.

St Oda projects

Cilia Erens – In the footsteps of Saint Oda

Dinie Bedans“How can one return the legend of Saint Oda and the founding of Sint-Oedenrode with its famous castles to the collective consciousness by means of a contemporary design?”

Part 4: Global

Allan Sekula and Noel Burch – The Forgotten SpaceRequest for a monument to record the fact that a community were against the building of a rail link. Produced a film, which was ten years in development, but which this year won the Orrizonti jury prize at the 67th Venice Film Festival 2010.

Nice phrase from the film ‘upstream, the hinterland’

Jeanne van Heeswijk.ABSTRACT: On temporary territories to play with, confront and discuss Jeanne van Heeswijk will talk on the problematic position of the public domain in our present day society. In parallel she will present cases she has worked on in the Netherlands; to reflect upon the problematic situations she encounters and the need to work closely with communities to try to establish connections not only within the community but also from the community to the outside world and back.

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Jeanne van Heeswijk

Opening remarks: ‘We have to talk about inclusive practice; practice that includes people.’‘Participation in public space’.Mention of Gediminas Urbonas – associate professor at MIT – art culture and technology

‘Daily trivialities are important. By bringing them to the fore you see the power of life.’

Because of the way the site is laid out, I can’t link to Jeanne’s projects individually. But you can browse them all here.

Bus station project, Lithuania. Catalysed by an email sent to Jeanne from the town, which resulted in a one day performance that was documented in a film. This was a ‘no-budget’ project done with a very light touch. Very quick and apparently simple gestures in the public space of the bus station (which was due for demolition, against the wishes of the townspeople). The film was then projected in the town.

‘Who decides the future of a city?’Who decides what the city is for?’

Notion of expertise. Artists working with communities are working with experts in their own place. Temporary fields of interaction are collaborations and conjunctions between experts.

Jeanne’s work ‘Reveals the image that is already seen by the people who live there.’

Act.Act up.Act out.

‘The question is not about this single bus station. It’s about the principle of decision making.’

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Talking Trash 2010.Recycling project in Australia, resulted in a (surprisingly traditional?) ‘educational exhibition.’ Commission for Centre for Contemporary Art Sydney and the garbage transport company.

‘In that sense it is performative, but not in the sense of performances.’

Next Project [title?]Disappearing landscapes, buildings etc tied to memories. Commission from local province. Made 120 movies of people charting personal lost places / landmarks related to the building of a new road. The videos were installed as an emotional map, tracing the line of the road.

Art and UseArt and Influence.

‘Practice as portraiture rather than master planning.’

QuestionsEdwin Janssen – Question about context of infrastructural framework supporting projects like SKOR. V. different to Scotland.

Jean Cameron – Question about choices of practitioner – about relationship between practice and context.Jeanne – individuals as co-editors.Tom – scale of duration in relation to changing contexts.

Gosh! Only half way through! This is going to be massive. Sorry everyone… Luckily, I think I took fewer notes as the day wore on and my writing-hand got tired…

Judith Rugg.ABSTRACT: Judith Rugg will discuss issues of visibility, cultural identity and belonging, displacement, marginalisation and the environment which are raised in some temporarily sited international artworks in Santa Fe, Paris, Toronto and China. These site-specific artworks, she will argue, provoke critical readings of the relationships between contemporary art and space which contest assumptions of public space as spatially coherent, free from conflict and exempt from its social geographies.

Book title: Exploring Site-Specific Art: Issues of Space and Internationalism

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Judith Rugg

Anxiety linked to Cultural Identity as a concern. Nb, link back to Tom talking about public experience as ones that we’ve all gone through.

Carl Michael von Hausswolff – Red Night 1999.Light installation at Our Lady of Guadalupe Cemetery, Santa Fe. The cemetery was illuminated in red light. The work had to be removed after 2 nights following complaints.

Barrier between real and imaginary – references to the cinematic – horror movie.

Death / loss of identity = loss of cultural identity.

Day of the Dead as marker or cultural identity. Collective expression of national identity. Ref to Romero’s Day of the Dead movie.

‘focus points around which cultural identities coalesce’.Performing identity. Link back to Jeanne’s discussion of acting in public space. Pivotal position of rituals in self identity. Our Lady of Guadalupe – combination of cultures: Cult of the Virgin = great Mother, dreadful and nurturing, life and death = images of death and rebirth = adopted as a language to make sense of the past and come to terms with cultural loss. ‘Apocalyptic and benign’.

Lacanian ritual of performance as a repetition of the known = comfort, consistency. Red Night exposed neglect and revealed a loss of ritual (lack of upkeep of the cemetery suggests a neglect of ritualised public mourning). ‘A trick of the light can expose the neglect of belief systems’ and this exposure can be acutely uncomfortable. The myth is dependant on the rituals that contain it. Illusions maintain cultural identities?

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Next example – [I have the title of the work down as ‘Forest Surprise’ and the artist as some variation of ‘Bunetti’ (no first name). However, I’ve googled any and every variation of both title and description and found nothing! Can anyone shed any light?]

Sited in a park near Paris, trees were painted with burnt sienna up to a point about half way up their trunks.Nature / CultureFamiliar / Strange‘Double simulation of the real.’ Both ominous and playful. Estrangement. References to how our contemporary view of nature is mediated. Creeping toxicity. Unseen pollutants. Articulates a sense of anxiety. The difficulty (our difficulty) in ‘seeing’ nature without cultural and/or economic lenses. Nature as a visual construct. Ref to Guattari – environmental, social relations and subjectivity. Nature not separate from culture – links environmental pollution with the pollution of consciousness.Global urgency to re-examine ways of living and to find antidotes.Making strange – nature as an idea that is culturally positioned. Our ways of seeing are provisional.

Minaret – Wong Hoy Cheong.

Produced for the Second Guangzhou Triennial (titled ‘Beyond: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for Modernization’) and sited on top of the Guangdong Museum of Art, which is itself in the Pearl River Delta – a group of southern Chinese cities (including Shenzhen and Guangzhou), which have experienced massive urban development and associated problems. A full scale minaret was built on the museum’s roof, but constructed of just green netting and bamboo. It was illuminated (presumably only at night?) and looked a bit like it was under construction. It also resembled a three dimensional drawing, or an architect’s proposal made visible. As an image of a structure, Minaret looks ‘speculative’, somehow, even though it was luminous and visible from a good distance away. The artist, a non-Muslim Malaysian, identified with Muslim workers in the Pearl River Delta’s cities, seeing them as a marginalised group within society. Position of Muslims within Chinese culture – living outside Confucianism equated with being outside culture and therefore outside ‘civilisation’.

Relationship between contemporary art museum and capitalism. Migrant workers implementing the urban economic development of a culture from which they are marginalised.Structure’s fragile armature suggesting armies of peripheral workers? Suggesting a city formed by fragile yet interconnecting social cultural processes. Human infrastructure is glowing and impertinent: making visible a symbol for what is otherwise ignored.

Final example – Sleeping Rough performance.[again – I can’t find the artist’s name, or the correct title for this work. Can anyone help?]

Performance work in which an artist ‘slept’ in a sleeping bag on the floor during a party at an artfair. People stepped over and around her, but eventually she was asked to leave.Rational / irrationalInclusion / exclusionSocial networks as systems based on exclusions. Gentrification – building of studios etc in run

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down areas – can polarise the city further, and introduces polarisation into very poor areas.Displacement.Homeless people as outsiders to the planning and use of the city. Transgression to reveal a ‘truth’. Boundaries between self and others made visible. Moral boundaries used to reinforce physical boundaries. Homelessness as discrepant. Performance as a way to reveal the non-performed.Emphasises that all space, including the gallery, is a site of social and cultural politics: that public space is unstable and precarious.

QuestionsNeil Mulholland – Noting a shift towards the symbolic (in contrast to previous presentations). Question about who built the Minaret?

Graham FagenABSTRACT: Graham Fagen will describe the practice and process of the commissions to produce public works of art for two particular places in Britain.Where the Heart Is was developed and made for two new pocket parks and homes in the Royston area of Glasgow and took the form of a hybrid tea rose.For St Agnes consists of four bronze plaques set into the footpaths at the thresholds of the four entrances to the park of the same name in St Paul’s Bristol.Both commissions explore the appropriation of meaning — through a recognized artwork — by individuals, groups and nations and how such symbols can transcend cultural boundaries to become new signifiers for both the history and future of communities.

Graham Fagen

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Introduced idea of ‘form and former’ – mould making in a cultural, metaphorical sense. The relationship between a form and its former is symbiotic (and contradictory). Image of a wooden box held together with clamps, with a cement block, cast in the box, sitting next to it. To make the form (the block) you need a former (the box). But to make the former (the box) you need to know the form (the block).

Royston Project: Where the Heart is

Thinking about ways of behaving – investment in pocket parks at the same time as there was neglect of housing.Tree as an art object. People were able to plant a tree and name it in honour of someone. Became a strategic way of encouraging the council to cut the grass in areas that weren’t strictly speaking part of their remit – eg grass in residential areas.The rose project evolved from knowledge of a local (already existing) rose growing competition. When the rose had been named (again through competition – question of who got to sit on the judging panel) anyone who wanted one could have one. Inclusive notional community.

Bristol Project

Sited in Park in St Agnes / St Paul’s area. Similar social make-up to Royston, but with different racial dynamic – Royston mostly white with Catholic / Protestant sectarian divide; St Agnes – larger Black population with Afro Caribbean / Islamic Somalian divide.Thinking about Victorian public sculpture (because of the existing aesthetic of the park) combined with an equatorial aesthetic. Thinking about local names for the park, which illuminate local histories and territories. Thinking about use of the park as a through route or corridor.

Production of small text works for the two smallest entrances / exits to the park combining ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ references; and two larger bronze floor plaques for the larger exists. One says ‘Where the Heart is’ and shows a rose. The other ‘For I and I’ and a palm tree.

Cultural forming in specificity. At the same time as the Grahm was involved in the Royston Project, the Imperial War Museum invited him to be UK War Artist for Kosovo. Led to two questions: The first (perhaps asked during an interview) was ‘How can artists influence war?’ Graham answered by describing another interview – this time with the Sex Pistols. The questioner asks what, at a time of massive social deprivation, the band are going to do? The answer comes: “We’ll make it worse.”

The second was asked during a community meeting in Royston, when Graham said that he’d be away for a while as he had to go to Kosovo. Someone living in Royston asked him “Where do you feel safest? Here or there?”

Phrase: Meaningful Conversation. Producing meaningful things is not the same as solving problems. Perhaps it’s more important.

QuestionsDamian Killeen – question to Judith Rugg about why she had involved no discussion of public

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reception of the works she’d described. How does Judith know how the public responded to the works? If she doesn’t know this, how can she legitimately discuss the works?

Damian Killeen

Judith – stressed that this was not what she was interested in, and clarified that public responses had not been part of her research.

Reiko Goto – questioned ideas of use and morality. Talked about blind-spots, and urged caution.

Panel DiscussionThis is not exhaustive!

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Rocca Gutteridge: Question about Public Legacies – what are the legacies of some of the projects discussed? Return to the idea of the importance of the public voice of commentary.

Tom: There are always a variety of values at stake, and this will be reflected in the variety of public responses.

Jeanne: Example of a legacy being the introduction – by public demand- of a public art education via a formally taught public art course.

Phrase – Narrative Monuments: a retold story can become monumental.Falsity of permanence and the difficulty of promises.Avoid Formulae.

Graham Fagen, Judith Rugg, Moira Jeffrey

Wendy McMurdo: Mentions the legacy of artists – great to see the number of artists that SKOR have been able to commission. Question: What would you like to see most in the future of commissioning?

Tom: Managing failure: risk-taking in commissioning, and understanding one’s own capacity to take risks.

Katie Nicoll: Question about Jeanne’s project where a partnership funder didn’t like the outcome of the work, and pulled out. How did she deal with that?

Jeanne: By the time the partner pulled out, the community network was already established and this was the most important relationship. Everything else is added on to this, so if an external partner is lost, it’s not the end of the world. Or the end of the work. ‘You can’t grow roses without some shit’. ‘Working in this way, is going to get your hands dirty. I can’t work in isolation. We need to be

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involved in networks and some of those networks might be problematic. We can’t pretend that that isn’t so.’

Ross Sinclair: Question about extending that sentiment to the issue of responsibility. Back to Tom’s phrase about not always giving people what they want.

Ross Sinclair

Graham: The value of having a curator to work with as well as a client, combined with the importance of the artist being able to walk away from a process that isn’t appropriate.

Jeanne: ‘We can’t be naive. MoMA (for example) is as much of a logo – as much of a brand – as anything else.’

Graham: ‘Yes, but as a brand, MoMA means something different to, say, Coke.’ [Nb, I don’t think ‘coke’ was actually the brand used as an example. Did anyone pick up on what was actually suggested?]

Ben Spencer: Question about the importance of duration.

Damian Killeen: Question about democratisation. Why are there no members of the public on the panel?

Jeanne: Beware of dichotomies.

Phew! Apologies for the massive post! I’ll be taking notes again this Wednesday, and will post them here as soon as I can – certainly before the final symposium on the 20th. I hope these are useful to people although do remember that this is very much a record of one person’s impressions of the day. Please feel free to give a more rounded account by using the comment space below

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to continue the conversation, or to put me right on anything you feel I’ve mis- or under-represented.

More later.R.

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Day 2

by Ruth Barker 16 Oct 2010

Hello,

This is going to be another whopper. Apologies for the length. I do think it’s useful though, and I’ve had some good feedback, which has convinced me to carry on.

The day was again good, with a broad range of presentations. My only real disappointment was that we lost the time for questions in the morning. We had an extended Q&A in the afternoon, but sometimes it’s really good to be able to put that immediate point right after a speaker has finished. Ah well, you can’t have everything!

Our chair for the day, Alastair Snow had a totally different style to Moira on Day One, and was far quicker to get involved in the debate himself, which was interesting to see.

Anyway, lots of notes to post, so I’ll just get on with it. As always, apologies for any bias, misunderstandings, errors, omissions or typos. Any mistakes are my own rather than the speakers.

Chair: Alastair Snow Director Alastair Snow Associates + ProjectsSpeakers:Clive Gillman Director of DCAPeter McCaughey ArtistDiarmaid Lawlor Head of Urbanism at Architecture + Design ScotlandLucy Byatt Head of National Programmes at the Contemporary Art Society.

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Chair Alastair Snow in discussion with correspondent Ken Neil

Introduction by Alastair Snow: We are speaking from Scotland, not always about Scotland. Context – Scottish Arts Council changeover to Creative Scotland. Creative Scotland aspires to be a leader in the field. To be so, must therefore endeavour to commission, test, advise, support new work. Are structures in place for it to do so?Wittgenstein – a limit to what can be said. Therefore, instead we must show, and do, and feel. Pavel Buchler (paraphrased) – ‘artists don’t make art, they make artworks. Artists make things in the world, and we call those things art.’ Emphasised the breadth of the audience for the day, reminding us that in the room were housing specialists, planners, architects and urbanists, as well as artists, designers, commissioners and local authority officers. Ambitious mix! All of whom hoped to participate in the day. Housing officers in particular mentioned as being experts in public space who might be rising to the challenges of the recession by focussing on investments in places, rather than new buildings.

Clive GillmanABSTRACTClive Gillman has worked as an artist producing artworks for the public domain as well as being professionally engaged with cultural policy in both a local and national context. For this presentation Clive will explore some ideas and some illustrations of what the factors might be that contribute to the success (or otherwise) of art projects in the public domain. He will look at current cultural policy in Scotland and, drawing on personal and institutional experiences of specific projects in Scotland and England, he will address the many, often conflicting, elements that contribute to making art happen successfully in public places and spaces.

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Clive Gillman

Clive positions himself as an artist, even though he sometimes feels like (and has to act like) a chief executive. But important to hold onto self-definition as an artist -why? Because being an artist might be a privilege? Because it might be a vanity?! Allows to “Refresh my soul”.

Ref to PAR+RS Feature: Ray McKenzie: How Not To Commission.

Nice phrase: “I do have notes, but usually I prefer to busk”

Image of Russian Futurist’s Manifesto. “A Slap in the Face for Public Taste.”

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Difficulty inherent in received ideas of public taste “a taste that is usually assumed to be conservative and unambitious. We may feel instinctively that such assumptions are incorrect but we still have to navigate the fact that some people see themselves as the (usually unelected) guardians or protectors of that public taste.”

Projects from FACT . Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s Body Movies Relational Architecture.Public spectacle. Spotlight on 20m high screen. When people stood between the light and the screen they cast a shadow. A computer programme then projected images of other people into the shape of this shadow (the images were selected based solely on shape-matching. Trace of your own self, filled by someone else. It’s you, but not-you. It’s a “hair on the back of your neck” piece.

Tenant Spin 1999.Oldest tower block in Liverpool was scheduled for demolition. The tenants had established their own space in which to hold self-devised projects, events and activities “ some of which might be ‘cultural’ while other were practical, or social. Artists’ group Superflex facilitated a series of regular 1 hour internet broadcasts, through which tenants could converse, soapbox, play music, act, speak, etc. Architects spoke about future plans, also artists projects, Will Self, David Puttnam, new music etc. Became very popular. When the tower block was demolished (interestingly, still discussed as a success even though it did not prevent the demolition. Is this a difference between art and activism?) The residents took the project with them, Took ownership over it. The project has become viral and has kept going. Landlords now build the infrastructure needed for the broadcasts into their buildings. The principle of self-broadcast has become integrated into social housing. Significantly, many of the residents were aged 50+, and other cultural projects had focussed on their age, or on the tenants pasts or memories. Superflex encouraged looking towards / commenting on / shaping the future. But the project must keep rejuvenating, because previous participants / contributors have now died.Note that Glasgow artist Allan Dunn was involved. Ex Environmental Art Dept. at GSA.[OK, so artists catalyse an action that others adopt and then claim as their own. (Where) do we cease defining that action as part of the artist’s artwork? Is this important?]

Metroscopes. Work by Clive. New media as a medium opens a space and offers a notion there’s a new domain to be explored. The two main challenges of that new domain might be: 1) how we can link it to the public realm, coupled with 2) the practical fragility of the technology itself.Five masts were installed in a public square. They were linked to a computer that searches the internet for phrases that begin with the words “Liverpool is …”; “Odessa is…”, “Shanghai is…”,� � “Köln is…”. “Dublin is…” The sourced phrase, from ‘Liverpool is’ up until the next full stop, is then displayed on the mast. Becomes a changing social map, social expectation. Was built in hope rather than in expectation that the work could be sustained, but it is still functioning. Problems may arise later because the original technology was not top end, and so it will (at some future point) fail. Specifically, the computer’s memory is getting full of all the sourced sentences.Ideas of permanence.

“In discussing public art we must remain clear that there are (and have been) two distinct approaches. It is sometimes assumed that an idea of morality and a public service ethic underpins

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all public art practice, and that there is a fundamental difference between public art practice and gallery practice – the latter of which does not share these ethical concerns; while the former is divorced from the art canon. This perceived difference was legitimised by Nicholas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics (1998), which emphasised the relational quality of artworks in the public realm Community art, which was once cursed, was now gilded. Relational Aesthetics was searching for a rationale through which we could discuss public work, but deeper analysis does not support it. There are deep contradictions. There is, in much of the post Relational Aesthetics discourse surrounding public art an assumed truth that public artworks share notions of morality and ethics. But there is a raft of practice that should not be ignored or passed over, which shares an aesthetic with some relational projects yet does not share these projects’ values.”

Many works fail both as acts of empowerment, and as acts of art.

“We (artists, the artworld) eat things up and turn them into art. But sometimes we eat and eat and do not appreciate the very fragile and subtle nature of the things we consume.”

Suzanne Lacy, “ there is no quick fix to the big problems.”

Tramway Conference’s Common Work 2007. At this conference it was possible to see the divergence between two kinds of practices distinctly different, but discussed in the same terms on the same platform. Some artists were generating community engagement processes and were invested in them for their own sake. Other artists were using community engagement as a texture for their work. This kind of work described as “medium-based practices that are not providing values, but are firmly rooted in art”.

This is not a value based distinction, but we need to be clear about which type of practice we are talking about, in which case. “Not all public art is a response to engagement. Public art can happen without a community, and without the ethic of partnership.”

2005 DCA commissions. Our Surroundings.Meeting Place In The Garden, after Partick Geddes. Apolonija SuSterSic. (Interesting review here)On a patch of empty ground near the waterfront in Dundee, land was turfed and a greenhouse erected. The work was conversation-based, focussing around facilitating discussion about proposals for waterfront redevelopment plans. Despite fears, the greenhouse (quite an exposed site) was not destroyed, perhaps because of engagement processes that had been implemented. The work engaged with those who used the space and only existed (as art) once people began to participate. A document of people’s contributions was drawn up and given to the waterfront scheme’s Director of Planning “a profound gesture”. (Whether this document has been influential may be doubted).

Project funded by Scottish Arts council Lottery fund. Other recent SAC funds Public Art Fund, Inspire Fund, Inspiring Communities – also influential support for projects in the public realm. Many of the projects funded reflect the presence of the interventionist ethic described above. Example of projects funded in 2009 through the Public Art Fund: Dudendance; NVA Cardross; The Common Guild’s collaboration with the Lighthouse to develop a public pavilion in a Glasgow park; Project BluePrint; North Edinburgh Arts Public Art Project; The Glasgow Womens’ Library’s Making Space for Women project; Deveron Arts; and Big Things on the Beach.

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Many of these seem to be informed by notions of “the community” as much as (if not more than) notions of art. Is there, in these projects, a desire to create great art?

Recent workshop in Stornaway discussed the future of lottery funding. Example of Inspire fund, a recent scheme to support the development arts projects that met ideals for public engagement. There was very high take up of the funds: projects like Stirling Empower, Big Man Walking, Starcatchers, Arts Extreme in Aberdeen, Central Station in Glasgow, Mirrie Dancers in Shetland, etc etc. Projects informed by a desire for community engagement that is pursued with commitment and integrity but not informed by a vision of/for art. Article in The Scotsman newspaper questioning awards made through Inspire fund called the fund an example of “capricious decision-making”.

But it’s difficult to argue against the principles of engagement. The different parts of this set of relationships are not reconciled however, and because of this we can and should continue to unpick them. Comment that one result of these processes is that investments are made in projects that don’t have the infrastructure to deliver. Funders then have to invest in systems of bureaucracy to ensure that these projects get off the ground.

Strategic document public art as a solution to a perceived problem with a planning process.

Rhetoric of Placemaking a phrase too often used and too seldom understood. Misplaced intention. Andrew Dixon, new head of Creative Scotland has a background in placemaking from his previous role in Newcastle [Nb as previous head of NewcastleGateshead Initiative. Prediction that Creative Scotland will increasingly prioritise placemaking as a strategy. “We’re still looking for a rhetoric that will allow us to deliver an ethic.”

Project for Public Spaces, US based initiative that is generating (or popularising) the quasi-religious language of placemaking. “This is the new creed” an unpromblematised set of slogans which is itself problematic. [see: Public Art an Introduction]

Example of a tender invitation released for the delivery of Routes and Clusters’ operational plan. The requirements were in a language of procurement, not a language of art. Gulf of expectations. The process removes momentum. Becomes bathetic. Anticlimax.

Rochdale’s Drake Street Observatory.Clive invited to develop a new media work for a street that a new tram-line was being routed down. Discovered that there was no public consultation process, and, when tried to talk to residents, found that the best approach was to say he was an artist - was quickly welcomed. Produced a website that put people at the centre of their world. A temporary project that was supporting people’s voices. The commissioners were also happy with the outcomes.

Eg also of Neville Rae’s website about Public Art of Cumbernauld. Long term durational involvement in a place. Contrasted with: Andy Scott, Arria. Dubbed “The Angel of the Nauld”“The prism of the spectacle.” Media significance of the Angel of the North has become a benchmark also in the literal sense of measuring. Size as a measure of significance.

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Eg of people misunderstanding public works, acquisition above sensitivity or understanding. Holocaust memorial in Harrisburg, US. Stainless steel core representing the Star of David with, spiralling around it, core 10 steel spikes representing Nazism. The core 10 steel would rust and decay, leaving the stainless steel shiny and intact. But people didn’t like the rust. So the commissioners had the core 10 steel removed and replaced with stainless. The artist is now suing the commissioners.

Eg of Robert Markey sneakers: huge painted sneakers sited on the street, celebrating the city’s links with dance. Artist had painted a pole dancer on the sole of the sneaker acknowledging the fact that the pole dancers were the city’s only professional dancers. But the commissioners didn’t like it so they painted it over. Artist was very philosophical about it “leaving the sole black as a reminder.”Difficulty of “what the community want.”

Eg “Villa Victoria, Liverpool.” Terrifying reminder of the conflicts between engaged practice and ideas of morality.

Peter McCaugheyABSTRACT: Peter McCaughey will draw upon his various roles as artist, lecturer in Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art and the Director of Wave, a nano arts organisation working in the field of art and public realm. One of his current positions through Wave is as Creative Advisor to Glasgow Housing Association (GHA). This appointment was described as an invitation to assist the GHA to think differently about itself.McCaughey, working with arts consultant Ben Spencer, is encouraging GHA to support a network of art commissions that address the variety of site typologies and a significant range of the tactical and strategic approaches taken by GHA in its day to day work. Peter will talk about the challenges

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of engaging with a large organisation which has no specific arts remit but which has a clear aspiration to be an active partner within the regeneration of the city.He is interested in how artists can re route and re-invent the way that things operate within functioning systems. The talk is a double challenge: to organisations to foster new relationships to art; and to artists to develop new tools to deal with and value these opportunities.

Peter McCaughey

Starts by putting a bell on the table “ Know your own strengths and weaknesses! Ring when I’m out of time.”

“Importance of work that is not invited, not asked for. Work that invited itself in.” Art as Top Cat manipulating the city.

You have to know your audience. Who’s here? Show of hands for:ArtistsArts WorkersPolicy MakersEducatorsManagers

Mark Lombardi drawing about mapping systems and the relationships between things. But the problem with conferences and consultations is that often the scintillating colours of people’s opinions and ideas are stirred together, only to end up as a muddy-coloured mix. Our conversation has to be built around this moment, this present.

Image of Economic Value of Public Art is the Increase the Value of Private Property.

Notes about practice: maintains many different roles:

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- Artist in residence at Glasgow Housing Association with Ben Spencer, Artists Placement Group model of the incidental person, being paid to be present (within a system, amongst other people in that system); Also- part time tutor in sculpture / environmental art dept at Glasgow School of Art.And- runs Wave, small public art company. Wave generates income, which funds Particle. Peter’s more personal projects. Wave also employs / involves other artists / specialists at times. Note that while arts in the public realm usually work alone, all other specialists work in teams.

Sculpture and Environmental art: Mapping Project. Introductory project to get students to engage with (or just see) the city in a different way. Students throw a dart at a map of Glasgow, and then go the point selected by the dart, and work from there.Turn specifics into ambiguities.Begin in the middle.Don’t be dominated by what you think you know.Ethics, points of intersection between people: very difficult to negotiate with all the subtleness needed. Maybe we shouldn’t bother! There’s a temptation to retreat to the studio. But we’re here to speak about the rise and rise of public art and so we should resist that urge.“I am an acolyte and an advocate for public art; because I think it’s so important.”

Looking at the city as a space, reference to Mark Boyle’s work.

Every year sets the students an exercise where they sit in a garage studio-space, with the roller shutter down. Peter raises the roller shutter, and the students watch the city through the revealed view for a set amount of time. Then the shutter comes down again.One year ‘out of boredom’, Peter went round to the front of the street, removed his clothes, ran naked across the point where the students were viewing, then put his clothes back on and came back round nonchalantly, to where the students were still watching. When asked to describe what they had seen, out of a group of 15 only 2 accurately saw what had happened; that Peter had run past naked. Others failed to see or mis-saw what had happened to the extent of one student believing that they had seen a car accident.

Reference to the symposium States of Play: Art and Culture in Scotland Today (took place in Gilmorehill Centre, Glasgow on 09/10/10). During the time for questions, Peter asked Christine Borland, who had been presenting, what might be the value of relational engagements. Christine answered that the value lies in helping others (medical specialists, in her case) to tolerate ambiguity. Value of retaining doubt. Peter argues that we need a society that can tolerate doubt and ambiguity.

Thought experiments. In its broadest sense, thought experimentation is the process of employing imaginary situations to help us understand the way things really are. Used in lots of other fields, but not used in art. Not taught in art schools. Why? Munster Sculpture Park: Gabriel Orozco proposal for a working Ferris wheel half buried under the ground. Proposal refused, as too dangerous. Maurizio Cattelan responded by hiring a children’s book illustrator and a writer to write the fiction of the Ferris wheel to write the Ferris wheel into the past. ‘The Wheel of Misfortune.’

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Phrase “the web of the room” referring to the interconnectedness of all the people present. Brokering the spaces between us. We need better tools.

Problem with Clive’s call for ‘great art’. This is a default position. There is no fixed criteria for great art. Perhaps there is no great art? What might great art be, or not be? There is nothing to chase.“I’m a relational creature. I cannot separate art from its relational structures, from its stories, and its people.”

Discovered that GHA is an aspirational place. Many officers come from GHA homes. There is an honourable investment in making places better. Aim to map out different ways in which artists might become part of GHA’s processes. Multiple spaces / opportunities for artists.

George Kelly, in 1964ish promoted the ‘as if’ position as a way to move towards knowledge. Constructive alternativism. Loosen our constructions.

Artists are often not interested enough in what artwork does. John Cage - meaning lies in meaninglessness. We need to think more about what work does.

Liam Gillick – “The middle ground, the compromise, is what interests me most.” Peter’s 1993 work at the Queen Elizabeth Square flats [see slide 85.] was outrageous in its difficulty. Lots of compromises had to be made, there were lots of quick revisions and changes that had to be made. There was a death onsite and there were huge decisions that had to be taken. But we imagine that great art comes from control. That control equals integrity. But this is just a convention. It’s a

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wonderful cornerstone but there are other models. Maybe we should think about models in which the word ‘art’ might disappear. Partnerships. Compromise. Ref to the naming of art row between Grant Kester and Clare Bishop. We could make ourselves free by loosening some terms, and asking how do we attribute value. Kosuth quote “What is it that might be art, that is not art?” Some processes that we go through as artists are not themselves artworks, they remain just processes. But they are still valuable because they are still processes.

Placemaking will happen whether we like it or not. We have an invitation to be there and we should take up that invitation. These meetings are full of people (usually men) who are making decisions about our spaces. Who gave them the right? Who decided that those people would be the ones to take the decisions? Where are all the other people who might have an opinion? The poets, the writers, the anthropologists, the others?

If you identify a convention, ask it a question. Take nothing for granted. For example instrumentalism is often assumed to be negative. Why? Aren’t instruments important? And can’t they shape things? “These are nascent thoughts. These are questions that are happening right now because of the projects I’ve involved in right at this moment.” Fighting with ideas of existing critique. Don’t trust your instincts. We should be more disinterested. But the downside is that when one remains in doubt, it can depoliticise us. We can find it hard to take sides with certainty. We become adaptors. So there has to be a balance. But still we cannot take things for granted. Dialectics is useful but it is based on logic, which in only a tiny part of the world.

Alastair Snow: Ken Walpole has stated that mixed use economies are the most successful type of public realm economy because of the fact of the mixture of different people doing different things. Something intangible is gained from proximity.

Diarmaid Lawlor.ABSTRACT: Policy planning, places, public artThis presentation will explore the concept of public-ness in Scottish placemaking, particularly in the context of the reform of the planning system. Using case studies, the presentation will look at the role of public art in the context of physical planning policies which seek to promote the creation of “places where people want to be”. This exploration will look at processes of re-imagining and managing existing public spaces, processes of temporarily using derelict space as a public resource and processes of promoting cultural entrepreneurship to inform organic processes of regeneration in a city neighbourhood. Using these observations, the presentation will conclude with a discussion as to the possible opportunities of public art in physical place policy, and how these policies might enable or inhibit the commissioning of public art.

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Complexity of the public sector. Many conflicting and complex relationships. The story of the boom; example of personal experience in Dublin. In 1994 much of the city was in a state of dereliction, but within 7 years there was a massive upsurge in building, and within 10 years there was a radical reinvention of the city - expansion in finance, construction, waterfront development, and a wholesale change in people’s relationships to the city. And now it’s all gone. We’re at the finish. That massive expansion won’t happen again. Art and design in Scotland is now looking at itself at a moment of finish. That paradigm of expansion is gone. We must scenario the future. The finish is relative: finishes are also beginnings.

The economies of Urbanism. Eg: learning traditionally happens in a building: a school. But is the school necessary? The outcome should not be the building of a school, the outcome should be learning. The building is incidental. After all, places teach. If we spend time in the city itself, we can see the ways that people do things. We can learn from the city. Are we too stuck on process? Do we emphasis outcomes enough? Is it right to build buildings and expect (or hope) that they will be filled by processes and people?

Public artPublic policyThe interesting thing is public.No one ever owns the public good. We are only ever custodians of it.

In all this talk of cuts and spending review and the big society, we have to ask what is the public outcome? 1943:Simone Weil in The Need For Roots, asked “What kind of place shall we have?”“What is required if men and women are to feel at home in society and recover their full society?”

“What is most particular, is most general.” Who said that?The everyday public domain.

Policy should know that you cannot divorce professional responsibility from human responsibility.The relations that make people have changed since Victorian times. But have we acknowledged

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that?’I disagree with beautification as an outcome.’What are the contradictions?CABE talks about “great architecture”. Where is the greatness? We have images of ‘great’ buildings but where are the people?‘Place’ as relational. ‘Place’ as locally constituted. People participate in multiple places simultaneously.

Indy Johar Everyday as an aim. Scotland has many small places: the everyday is important.Marc Auge – Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity Places are about stories, histories, identities, relations. Photo of Whitby, a group of people at the top of a hill, looking back out over the town. One man is looking down on the houses, the buildings. But one man is on his back, looking at the sky, looking out. He’s utterly relaxed, comfortable in ordinariness. Whatever this feeling is, it’s desirable.

Globally connected, locally situated. Diverse contemporary relations. Victoria Station, London’s public dancing that started and stopped apparently spontaneously. What is the publicness of this action? What is the connectedness? Is publicness a kind of connectedness?Ecologies of tolerance: we need to think about ecosystems rather than answers. Tolerance allows extraordinary things to happen in simple ways (at simple moments). Communities of interest in the twenty first century these communities have speeded up.

Three keys ideas / qualities:Authenticity: (of stories, of leadership): It’s important that authenticity can be ugly and difficult.

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It’s about noticing, recognising part of the world.Public Space: democratic exchange. Ethics and knowledge: public knowledge / private knowledge. We shouldn’t be dependant on one nor the other exclusively. Democratic knowledge combines both.Distinctiveness: physical, functional, and intangible distinctiveness. Functional distinctiveness is not dependant on architecture. Intangible distinctiveness arises from the capability of people.

Council of Economic AdvisersDecember 2008.Recommendation 14.“Too much development in Scotland is a missed opportunity and of mediocre or indifferent quality […] the ultimate test of an effective planning system is the maintenance and creation of places where people want to be. We need to rise to that challenge.”These are territories to be taken on by people. By us.

The Climate Change Act of 2009 is a sustainable economic growth strategy. But we must always ask the why. For what outcomes? When someone says that we must reduce emissions we have to ask: to enable what?

Place and scale. Purpose: Place and Policy contexts.Dundee local plan is currently being developed. There’s enough policy already – it’s about what we do with it. The Scottish Government’s spending is set to fall dramatically over the next 15 years. But we can ask “what is the money this being spent, being spent for?” We should stop thinking about what is not (the cuts). We must think instead about what is, and about what we want. We have to focus on outcomes. Make it happen. “We have to stop thinking about schools, and start thinking about learning.”

Lucy ByattABSTRACT: There is a sort of art that emerges from public art policies and strategies, from the

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availability of funds through section 106’s, from marketing plans and audience development agendas. It is a sort of art that is pushed and pulled, ‘briefed’ out of shape by committees of stakeholders, and funders, of ‘user groups’ and health and safety experts. These sorts of processes, more often than not, produces art of considerable physical size and cost yet of very little consequence. Yet policies and strategies are an inevitability; required to ensure legitimacy and momentum? Public art policies though, seem to live in a world of their own, unconnected to the other pressing matters of developing healthy cultural ecologies within our towns and cities, connected more to the limitations of planning regulations or linked to the confines of community development initiatives. There has never been a more important moment to act in partnership and in a more joined up strategic way. Byatt has been a commissioner and a consultant and has also been on the ‘other side’ the client – she finds that, in all these roles she would always prefer to work with artists who are not just engaged with production of certainty or spectacularity; resorting to formulas to avoid risk is never the solution. We can rest assured that what we regard as success now, will have been someone’s great and considerable risk at some stage. To illustrate this presentation she will use examples of projects that she has commissioned and more recent projects that are being initiated through the Contemporary Art Society.

What are the public benefits of public art? Eg of Banksy exhibition in Bristol which raised revenue for the council through all the parking fine collected from visitors who underestimated the length of the queues to get in.

Policy makers are guilty because of promises they made in the boom time: connection to the very idea (principle) of regeneration. Big money is a thing of the past.

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’I’m going to start my presentation from the end, and then go back to the beginning.’

“The Contemporary Art Society’:http://www.contemporaryartsociety.org/ is an old organisation. Legacy of 100 years. Membership of 64 public collections. Idea of patronage. One new commission (funded by a patron) for Graves Art Gallery: Museums Sheffield: Katerina Sed, Czech artist who only works with her own community. Trust. Artist has said that her way of working is ‘like a criminal investigation.’Action as an act.Actors. Sed speaks about character traits ‘I can recognise other Czechs in the street.’ The bus stop story (catalyst for Sed’s practice): waiting for a bus with a group of people she didn’t know. The weather turned bad and a scarf was blown by the wind. At the same moment a branch snapped and a man coughed. At that moment of synchronicity somehow these two separate happenings became conflated in a miraculous link or joining into the image of a profile in the landscape. The people of the place; people became lodged in the landscape.BUT story is fraught with fantasy; romantic idea of where we came from.

1994 worked with Julia Radcliffe on Visual Arts Project in Glasgow. introduced to the world of public art. People making big decisions about public space. The projects undertaken by VAP came from a very particular social, economic, cultural context:- Gallery of Modern Art was being run by Julian Spalding.- Culture of international exchange- Bunch of very successful recent graduates from GSA.- Inspirational talk by John Latham; introduced idea of the incidental person.- And there were a lot of empty buildings - towerblocks coming down.

‘The situation was porous. One was able to inhabit it.’

Ref to local activists who held hands in front of bulldozers. How to introduce them to artists?1999 Year of Architecture and Design. Started with slow processes followed by a rush to the finish

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line. Power relationships change during the course of a project.Got artists involved with housing association. Established a space. Residency based structure. Brokering relationships between artists and other specialists. Not a showing / exhibiting space, but a talking, kitchen space. Non-office. Non-bureaucratic. Did not start with the intention of becoming a public art agency (but perhaps it did?)

In architecture, arguably function is more important than aesthetics.

‘we have to pursue endless negotiation to ensure that we’re not being overly romantic.’

‘The Millenium Hut’, designed by Studio Kap Architects in collaboration with Claire Barclay. Was it naive? Was a product of the boom time. Intention to provide a community store for equipment for gardening etc.

Royston Road. Project provided room to tackle something that hadn’t been able to tackle in 1999. Architects had looked at plans, not at the place. This meant that that they couldn’t look at use. more info

Jenny Brownrigg project, worked with women reading romantic fiction. Book club. Writing project seven years on it’s still running.

Importance of event. Importance of the moment. Moments of celebration. Human moments. Meals, performances, coming together. Interactions punctuated by theatre. Hosting. Roots interactions into places, and roots memories into places.Projects ‘driven from the place’.Royston is still very deprived. ‘Without the community’s pushing for it, we wouldn’t have gone in.’ It had to be something rooted. Relationship of call and response, where the artist is responding to an exchange.

The company was in need of funds, so took on a more corporate project, for which the client wanted an Angel of the North type outcome. Loch Lomond Shores project 2001. Worked with Jenny Crowe to develop Bird Station by Mary Redmond. Mary needed a lot of persuading to take the project on, but the end result was successful. Many artists daunted by the prospect of undertaking work in the public realm. They find the processes combative, and it doesn’t appeal. Example of missed opportunities where artists who might produce fantastic work never engage with the possibility. [Press coverage ]

Project in The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney. Hannah Rickards, Thunder 2004.Complex soundwork in which an audio recording of a clap of thunder was stretched out, and a group of 6 musicians was invited to score and then play the resulting sound. This musical version was then compressed back to the duration of the original clap of thunder. Rickards is clear that the work is the resulting sound, but the complex series of relationships that surround that single outcome are also important to consider. Issues of trust, specialism, expertise, and event. The performative cycle that was involved in making the work happen expands and enriches the work.

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Why are public art policies always about adding stuff to places? We have to change the way we think. There’s no money left. We have to think about Section 106s, and patronage, both individual and corporate. We are the brokers of our cultural ecologies. We need to think strategically about what is public. Studio and street are part of the same economic network, and we have to understand better the ways in which they are related. We cannot think about public art in isolation doing so will ghettoise it. Thinking about public art in the broadest terms possible will lead to different kinds of people being able to become involved in it. In the last few years artists roles have continued to expand they now become project managers etc. Roles change. We must be flexible.

Spike Island example of an arts centre becoming part of a city’s ecology. 600 people now have a front door key far more than ever before. Example from Warsaw of Edward Krasinskia’s studio, in a flat on the 11th floor of an apartment block. Place of exchange and debate, hosting, and meeting. Very vibrant, important part of the art community’s ecology. After the artist’s death, complex conversation about whether (and how) to keep or preserve the flat. As a functional space? As a monument? etc. Decided to preserve the core of the space exactly as it had been left, but to use the balconies around the flat to continue to exhibit, and so allow the place to stay alive and evolving. Artists can still stay there, and so the ecology of hosting continues. The apartment block is still otherwise residential. Lucy had to ask the neighbours where to go, when she first visited. The flat is not part of any masterplan instead it’s part of life. This is important. It retains meaning. Contrasted with eg Bilbao, a kind of non-place, divorced from place, ‘where culture spins away from us.’ Some works (image of figurative sculpture of a guy on the street) create agonies of questions. They can only exist because they are deeply rooted locally. Idea of trust.

Anecdote about Douglas Gordon’s Empire sign. Originally a VAP commission for the wall outside the Mitre Bar in Glasgow, but subsequently had to be relocated just around the corner to Tontine Lane [Nb. I think because the building whose wall it was attached to was sold]. Has become a Glasgow art-landmark. But when the work was first proposed it was turned down for planning permission. Then by sheer chance Lucy sat next to a relevant planner on a plane. They talked for the whole flight, but never mentioned Empire. And when the planning application was resubmitted, it passed. Proximity is important. Exposure to ideas, even in a gentle way, is important, and can change people’s minds.

Eg of Royston Rd project. One of the trees planted by Graham (see Dundee Day 1 entry) was claimed by some members of the community as a memorial to an individual who was associated with one of Glasgow’s football clubs. The tree was festooned with scarves, flags etc and became a target for opposing members of the community. The tree was attacked and even chopped down, but it was then replanted again by the community and has since grown and flourished. Realities of public work: friction; meaning; eruption.

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Panel DiscussionApologies if I’ve missed any contributions, and for the missing names.

Panel Discussion

The question framing Day 2 was put to each of the panellists in turn by chair Alastair Snow: Is public policy fit for the purpose of commissioning public art?

Diarmaid: Yes it is. Policy already enables us to do what we need, it isn’t the fault of policy is we don’t already do that. Move towards having less policy, not more. In the current climate we’re unlikely to have any new policies brought in, apart from ones dealing explicitly with eg climate change. Think about policy that’s already there. We need to be proactive in constructing our own contexts.

Clive: I don’t know. Policies are about management of resources. People can subvert policies. If policy is confused, then it becomes a problem. But it’s always the people on the ground who actually do things. Put trust in people, rather than policies.

Lucy: If we are to have policies for public art, those policies must be flexible, specific, and reinvented for every context. We need to couple broad principles with the capacity for reinvention. If we think in terms of brokership we have to ask two fundamental questions: who is the broker? and who are the partners being brokered?

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Peter: We have to be inventive. We have to take the bones of what already exists and build up from there. As an example, when commissions are developed, why is not enough allocated to the maintenance of permanent work? Maintenance is a work’s life; it’s everything that happens once it’s out in the world. What if we took the budget for a work’s production as £X, and then its maintenance as 5 x £X ? That £5X could pay for an artist to stick around once the work was finished, and to keep thinking about the work to adapt, change, or decommission it.

Jacqueline Donachie

Jackie Donachie: Arts Strategies are often not tied to arts budgets. Recently worked on a project when an existing strategy had led to nothing but paper. The money that had been spent on that paper document could have been better spent on paying for an artist’s presence; a bum on a seat during meetings. Because artists are good at asking Why? And they’re very skilled.

Alastair: Arts Officer can be conduit. Are there any Arts Officers here?

Liz Conacher: There’s not much integration between the parties.

Alastair: What would help that?

Liz: we need better communication across departments. More partnership working. We need more ways to educate people who’ve not got an arts background as to what art is able to achieve.

Alastair: how easy is it for you to be proactive and commission?

Liz: budgets are small, and the arts budget is a tiny fraction of the overall budget. Small team with small resources. There’s a recognition that art is needed, but it’s still being inserted at the very end of a process.

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Sally Thompson: Works for Aberdeenshire Council and NHS Grampian. Mentioned BREEAM environmental assessment method. There’s a public perception of art as a luxury, public bodies have to be seen to be careful about how they’re spending money. Have to balance responsibilities and priorities. Importance of remembering that art doesn’t have to be things.

Sally Thompson

Diarmaid: have to balance people’s desire to be involved with the value of their involvement. Not enough just to want to be involved, there has to be a value form that involvement. Every project must involve magic and logic. We need to see as well as measure.

Jackie: But there are good examples of successful projects where you can trace added value. Example of employee absenteeism decreasing when people have a nice building to go to work in.

Sally: Capital budgets vs. revenue budgets. The two are not integrated.

Peter: Jackie is an active citizen within her community. Expand the language of the remit that we give ourselves. We are transdisciplinary. Use knowledge in different ways; use different languages. GHA use a statistical analysis tool to qualify the unquantifiable, for example to put a worth to voluntary work.

Damien Killeen: Big Things on the beach has given people confidence to say what they want.

Alastair: Idea of citizenship?

Damien: Education is influential. Trust. Empowering.

Alastair: Deveron Arts: The Town in the Venue.

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Merlyn Riggs: In many Deveron projects, the work done leading up to (and around) an event = highly important. The processes as important as the outcome.

Merlyn Riggs

Alastair: Deveron Arts town rebranding project Room to Roam.

Sally: was so successful because Room to Roam was chosen by and now adopted by the community.

Graham Fagen: Are Spike Island, or DCA, public art projects?

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Graham Fagen

Lucy: Yes. Spike in the City programme. Source of activity within the city. Had previously been a sense of powerlessness.

Rocca Gutteridge (to Lucy): But there wasn’t a wholly positive response to the changes you introduced at Spike. Could you talk about that?

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Rocca Gutteridge

Lucy: People have a sense of nostalgia - have sympathy with that. Individuals move on, but sometimes still want to maintain a connection to an organisation they were involved in previously. You can’t keep things the same forever. Contexts change, and organisations have to change with them.

Clive: No. DCA is not a public art project. Because there’s no such thing as public art. There’s just art that happens in different places. There’s no such thing as public either. Hugely interlocking systems of communities. DCA move in and out of those communities as it’s appropriate.

Ross Sinclair (to Peter): As an artist I think of myself as a responsible individual, but I’m stil pissed off when you talk about artists ‘retreating to the studio.’ Why shouldn’t I go to my studio and make work? Why should I spend my time going to meetings?

Clive: Art that comes out of policies is not always good art. I long for direct action.

Ross: But we’re still only talking about one model. I can’t work for free any more. I’ve got responsibilities, a family.

Lucy: Not all the time spent in engagement is a chore - some experiences are great.

Peter: Ross would be a great presence at those tables that he doesn’t want to be at, with people who don’t want him to be there.

Diarmaid: But it’s a crucial point. We shouldn’t feel obliged to take on every role that there is. We need to think about ecologies of people, who have different skills and who might be acting in different ways.

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Juliet Dean: from PACE. Many projects emerge in an ad hoc way through change conversations and contacts. There is no infrastructure, no formalised communication.

Juliet Dean

Peter: Sometimes ad hoc is good. Sometimes it’s all we’ve got. Chance conversations can lead to a ripple effect. But how can we get the right people to come to these events (like Mapping the Future) so that they have the chance to see great projects?

Sally: example of CABE project at Peterhead sans façon. Often due to one person in the right place at the right time. Serendipity. We have to educate the most senior people who will actually be taking the decisions. I’m an advocate. Every day.

Jonathon Baxter: Are we interested in accessing or in challenging policy?

Clive: Policy balances direct action. Without policy we would have anarchy, which is not productive. Policy has to understand what’s going on in the field, but perhaps it also has to lag behind a little. The policy can’t lead. Problems come when the policy actually blocks things from happening.

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Peter: Different methodologies at different times. Inconsistent. Is this good or not? I’ve become more political, and that’s surprised me. Deftly working within a system. Richard Wentworth: Artists and con-men both wilfully disrupt systems. Importance of raising consciousness. But Variant magazine’s criticisms of Creative Scotland are making it hard for Creative Scotland to progress. Old question - do you work within the system, or do you challenge it from the outside?

Jonathan: I don’t know enough about Creative Scotland to be able to answer that.

Peter: That’s deadly.

Lucy: we are all wincing with uncertainty because of the spending review. But knowing is always better than not knowing. It’s hard to develop leadership in a climate of uncertainty. Vision should not be tied to funding. We should be vigorous and firey! The tail of funding must not wag the dog of art. We must not be funding led.

Diarmaid: Why try to map the cosmos when you can say clearly who you are, instead? Policy follows trends on the ground. When you formalise activity, sometimes you freeze or inhibit it.

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Day 3

by Ruth Barker 22 Oct 2010

Hello again,

And I’ve a feeling that this post may be the most monstrous of the lot! We’ll see how it goes. Thanks to everyone who made it along to the events - it was great to meet some new people and make some new friends, as well as catching up with some folk that I haven’t seen in ages. And it was a pleasure as always to know that there are so many people who are so informed, so passionate, and so insightful about the past, present and future of public art practice. Hurray!

So, the final day of Mapping the Future was ably chaired by the brilliant Jason E Bowman and the speakers were Claire Doherty (Director of Situations, Bristol); Venu Dhupa (Director of Creative Development); Professor Tracy Mackenna (Artist and Chair of Contemporary Art Practice DJCAD); and Dr Ken Neil (writer, academic, and Director of the Forum for Critical Enquiry at Glasgow School of Art).

The day began with an apology as Claire Doherty was prevented from joining us in person, although she did provide a DVD version of her presentation, which was coupled with a PowerPoint of images. Actually the presentation itself worked very well; the only shame being that of course Claire couldn’t answer questions, which meant that her experience was missing from the later discussion. This couldn’t be helped though, as the reasons for her absence were totally unavoidable.

The only other regret I had was that speaker Venu Dhupa was unable to attend some of the other speakers’ presentations, and that she also had to leave before the end of the day. It was great that Venu was able to join us at the event at all of course, but as her new position as Creative Scotland’s Director of Creative Development means that she is now much an important figure in the sector, I’ll

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try to ensure that she gets a copy of correspondent Ken Neil’s final report, as well as the rest of the documentation from the series. It’s the least we can offer, I think!

OK, deep breath; and I’ll delve into my notebook. I’m quite glad that this is the last time I’ll have to do this for a while!

Jason E Bowman

Jason Bowman began with a restatement of the questions for the previous two events, focussing on the question framing this final event: What do we need to do now to shape the future of public art? He drew our attention to the presence of Necessity (what do we need) and Immediacy (to do now).

Quote “Necessity creates powerful impulses. Once you feel that something is necessary, it creates an impulse to do it or not to do it, whatever it may be. It may be very strong and you feel compelled, propelled. Necessity is one of the most powerful forces, it overrides all instincts eventually. If people feel something is necessary they’ll even go against the instinct of self-preservation.”On Dialogue, David Bohm, Lee Nichol

Need as a mechanism to prioritise.

Claire Doherty. ABSTRACT. Time to go Slow. The countdown to the London 2012 Olympic Games has begun, polarising the UK art sector between the monumental gesture and utopian subversion, media-driven event culture and grass roots slow movement. Claire Doherty considers how, under the cloud of an imminent public funding storm, a fundamental shift in the consideration of public time is characterising emergent art practices and curatorial endeavours. A series of open-ended durational projects offer a fresh perspective on the seemingly exhausted arguments over participation and critical legitimacy, whilst the orthodoxy of the artistic action is being remade through quiet interruptions which unsettle

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place memory. Concurrently critical and spectacular engagements are colliding through epic acts which enter the social imagination through cumulative or nomadic projects.

Claire Doherty’s presentation in absentia

Poised between the spending review and the Olympic games; between a climate of gloom and of anticipation. But polarisation masks complexity.Recent change in public art commissioning where artists who wouldn’t previously have been considered as practitioners who would make work for public contexts, have begun to produce works sited within the public realm. At the same time there’s been a shift from the production of monuments to the production of events.There’s a polarity that’s been assumed where the monument is positioned in opposition to the critical gesture. Will examine this perceived polarisation.

Situations is a base from which to produce projects. You can read Situations’ curatorial statement here. Honesty of approach.

Example of Olympic Park. Anish Kapoor – Arcelor Mittal Orbit commission. Costs £19 million criticised by both a tabloid hysteria that’s descried the imposition of public art, and a broadsheet scepticism of the choice of artist. [Nb. Cathedral of Shit had something to say about it, too.]

Image of planning proposal for Arcelor Mittal Orbit tied to lamppost. A nod towards public consultation and to public engagement. Contrasted with tactical work by Hilary Powell The Games, a series of performative actions that included using the inner ring road as a running circuit, and claiming a discarded mattress as a trampoline. Also Lara Almarcegui Guide to the Wastelands of the Lea Valley, small bookwork that agitates the idea that there was nothing present in the Olympic sites previously. Also Free billboard projects installed text work that says THE FUNCTION OF PUBLIC ART FOR REGENERATION IS TO SEX UP THE CONTROL OF THE UNDERCLASSES .

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But the Olympic Delivery Authority does have an artist in residence. Artists are seen as part of the regeneration process in a more subtle way that simple the Anish Kapoor example. Compare with Bristol Neville Gabie’s work at Cabot Circus development site. Click here for online presentation of Neville Talking about his work. Please ignore awful intro from me!

An image was shown that I’m sure stuck in everyone’s mind, but I can’t find a link to it, so I’ll have to try and describe it to you: The work was (I think) part of the series of interventions that have happened at Cabot Circus in Bristol, and was by Richard Wentworth. The work was very slight, a polystyrene coffee cup wedged in the small gap between two buildings. The photograph showed, at either side of the frame, the walls of two buildings rising up out of shot. The squashed cup was in the centre of the frame, bridging the gap between the two walls, and also holding them apart. I’ll keep looking for the reference and will add it here if / when I find it. If anyone else has the correct details, stick them in a comment below.

BUT. Are these frail interventions (by artists such as Wentworth, Powell, Almarcegui etc) simply empty gestures? Dancing on the edge of regeneration. Ornamental self reflexivity. What are we to make of a constant practice of questioning, when artists could (and should?) be producing change through inspiration?

Alternative counter culture has changed the terms of engagement. Example of the silent disco held at Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth. Publicness has changed. Mobilisation of publics. Shared events are diffusing the polarity between the large scale and the ephemeral.

Reference to Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle. Spectacle (as a negative term) occurs when shared experiences are atomised, leading to a sense of false togetherness. Example of Antony Gormley’s One and Other in which 2,400 people occupied the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for sixty minutes each, picked at random from nearly 35,000 who applied.“Whether you see the plinth as a protest or pole-dance platform; studio or stocks; playpen or pulpit; as a frame for interrogation or for meditation, it has provided an open space of possibility for many to test their sense of self and how they might communicate this to a wider world.” But this is false democracy at its worst it’s like an excruciating episode of Big Brother. The project’s physical paraphernalia (lights, nets, cameras etc) dwarfed the personal testimonies themselves. The plinth became a platform of public mockery a ref to comments on much online media etc. Mediated. Passive consumption.

Two pivotal questions to consider as we consider the future of public art commissioning.1) Problematic polarisation between the monumental and the critical.2) The changing nature of publicness.

Public art has benefited from public and private investment in regeneration initiatives. IXIA (among others) has suggested that the spending review will mean a decrease in regeneration projects nationally. Eg of the shelving of the Building Schools for the Future programme, which will mean that a significant number of public works which may otherwise have been developed as part of these schools, now simply won’t now happen. Local authorities place wide initiatives have huge implications for the future of commissioning (eg. 106s).

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If public art is to be evaluated through the benefits it provides to public life, we risk developing a climate that is increasingly risk averse, where there are fewer radical practices, and fewer experimental, challenging, and dispersed outcomes.

One possible solution may be to think about time, not space, we need to persuade commissioners, clients, stakeholders that artists need time. Time to make false starts, to change their minds, to dream, and to think.

Why is value always attached to endurance? Why should the objects of public art not have time limits? Places are not static sites onto which public art may be grafted. Contexts change. One helpful way of thinking about this may be the example of the Slow Movement, which prioritises local resources, and hospitality. Resonance with ideas of publicness. Structure through which to think about the life span of public art projects. Ref to Carl Honore. Examples of a groundswell of support for the ethos of Slow: The Big Lunch at The Eden Project; Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie’s work; NVA Glasgow Harvest; ongoing projects at Grizedale Arts.

Social change through challenging the norms of food production. Public time, slowness and sociability. Shared cultural experiences not offered through building projects or gallery works. More examples can be found in the upsurge of pavilion projects: Serpentine Pavillions; Portavillion projects (images of ROSY : the Ballarina); "Heather and Ivan Morison’:http://www.morison.info/index.html I’m So Sorry, Goodbye.

Slow thinking: Ranciere “participation does not guarantee critical legitimacy.” Characteristics of Slow Time projects include: critical legitimacy; social change; long lasting legacy.

Also: Duration. Eg of Locating the Producers. Places are always in a state of becoming. International projects across series of events over time. A coalescence of temporary constituencies that come together over time. Centre for Possible Studies – Edgware Road, London; Liverpool Biennial How to Design a Happy City. Importance of connecting projects. Grizedale Arts, base at Lawson Park, moves beyond worthiness to challenge place identity, eg of Pablo Bronstein’s chicken house.But we have to be mindful that durational projects need a certain kind of support, and a particular kind of commissioning. Can be challenging.

Value of Interruption: the need to arrest attention. Heather and Ivan Morison: I Lost Her Near Fantasy Island. Crashed lorry present for one day only, with a slew of jettisoned flowers: no interpretation, no signage, no explanation. Monumental sculpture and a participatory gesture as, at the end of the day, queues of people formed and the flowers were given away. Not conceived of as a gift, but became one. This commission lead to the idea for One Day Sculpture (took place in New Zealand 2008/2009) resulted in 20 new commissions, where each work was present in completed form for 24 hours. Took place in many different sites, contexts, locations across a broad geographic area. Some artists were international, others local. Each work was autonomous, with the implicit question of what happens when lots of brief, unconnected commissions happen is series? Strategy to agitate the public mind about what public sculpture might be. Mobilising public. Examples of projects: Javier Tellez; Thomas Hirshorn; Liz Allen; Heather and Ivan Morison’s Journee des Barricades.

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One Day Sculpture showed how artists might respond to temporal and spatial parameters. The potential of projects to gather constituents.Heather and Ivan Morison – The Black Cloud. Sculpture and host for events about sustainable futures. Wide range of events. Duration over seasons. Read the PAR+RS article hereA desire for the epic. Examples: Wonders of Weston. Oslo Harbour: Slow Time, 5-10 year project to develop a non-commercial waterfront and shared community feeling.

For the Cultural Olympiad, Situations are working with Alex Hartley on Nowhere Island. ‘Imagine standing on a stony beach at the southern tip of the British Isles, looking out towards France. An island spears, seeming alien, pulled by a tug boat.’Antarctic island that was revealed through melting ice, which has been ‘discovered’ by Alex and then sailed into international waters (Nb. How do you sail an island?), to become a micronation. Epic intervention in public time, to capture the imagination and suggest possible futures.

Jason Bowman: As Claire isn’t here to answer questions, will open the floor to discussion about her presentation. Begin by questioning Claire’s presupposition of a contradiction between notions of monumentality and notions of criticality. Sometimes monuments are both critical and important. Point of privilege marking in time. Example of the importance of producing a monument to mark the Armenian Genocide which internationally is still not recognised as a genocide. Is it not important to permanently raise a marker to that atrocity?Secondly, problematics of Slowas a movement. Slowness of production or consumption? Seems as though consumption happens at the same rate, and only production is slowed. Also, regarding Interruption reminder of Irit Rogoff’s characterisation of interruption as ‘the dynamic of looking away’. Ought we to be looking away?Danger of profiling projects that return to failed political systems, eg slow movement as a gesture towards communism. Slow movement is also a kind of conservatism by prioritising localism and belonging, where is the space for unbelonging?

Neil Mulholland: The dichotomy between the monumental and the temporary is a false dichotomy, the distinction doesn’t hold water. ‘It’s odd to pursue that as meaningful.’ Also, regarding time as essentially fast and slow simultaneously. The Slow movement is ‘middle-class death.’ Slowness is highly privileged.The notion of monumentalism must think about the long now. Ancient monuments must be included in any discourse of permanence. They’re how we know about what has gone before. Lack of engagement with material culture in Claire’s presentation. Too trapped. She’s not asking the big questions. We have to look deep into the past and the future, not just get hung up on the now. Trapped in a cultural paradigm. Can’t see out of it.

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Neil Mulholland

Venu Dhupa.ABSTRACT: Having recently moved to Scotland, rather than addressing specifically the way forward for public art in Scotland, Venu will draw on her experience of engaging with public art as a participant, theorist and commissioner. She will share some ideas on the value of art in the public space in the current context.

Venu Dhupa

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Background of 20 years in the sector. “I am an activist” there are values I believe in and I want to stand up for those values, and take them with me wherever I go.Values: Leadership; Innovation; Creative Entrepreneurship.

Those responsible for making things happen investing the energy and the time and the commitment; rarely have enough time for reflection, for beauty.

Anecdote: wrote an article about the use of screened projections of live events where (for example) you may have a live event taking place in a venue or arena, and a screened feed being shown elsewhere. Article questioned whether the screened version was the real thing or whether it was a kind of second hand live. The article was published to no great response. But then wrote another piece about noticing that it is typically women who have to carry heavy shopping bags around. To her surprise, on publication, this second piece received far greater response from the public. Why might this be?

Public art helps us make sense of public space. Many of the questions revolve around issues of power. Marking time. Eg of Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror (Nottingham). Part of a team that initiated a 1 year process of public engagement before the work’s installation. Engaged with many different publics and many different stakeholders. The engagement process is still ongoing. There’s been no vandalism and the work has been voted the most loved landmark in the city. Also in the city is a sculpture of Brian Clough - proud that the public love both.

Sky mirror London wrong context? Very different work.

Micro / Macro:Simon Tegala artist working with bio data. stanza artist whose work is located in the virtual sphere - online context means that it’s for a very particular audience.

When invited to participate in Mapping the Future, was provided with a lot of background material on SAC supported projects. Lots of factual data, but far less discourse about feeling and opinion in relation to works.

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Venu Dhupa

Context is important. Art should encourage empowerment. We are a species unlike any other. We can see to the ends of the universe, and into the tiny hearts of atoms. But we’re facing crises. The crises of climate change; of threats to our supplies of water and food; of our creaking institutions. We are a small nation in a new global context. We have to find our voice. Rapacious flow of finance means that we’re valued as units rather than as individual people. Naomi Klein – Shock doctrine. Free market economies; widening UK gap between the rich and the poor; slavery; demographic change; economic crisis. Could knowledge -industry be our saviour? But this raises questions: 1) How do we involve new and diverse talent?2) How do we measure the impact of art?

Cultural war over who is allowed to use / own what. Scientists are developing synthetic neural networks; we may eventually become just interfaces.

Painted (above) a picture of an ever evolving global social context that demonstrates both the beauty and the fragility of man. But what is the place of art within all of this? Thinking about a Darwinian idea of public art’s possible function. “In scrutiny there is hope.” Public art is crucial in shaping individuals’ responses to the issues outlined. Public art can fight the demise of the species!Dynamic played out in many media. Art institutions talk about playing a part but in the past they have failed. Public art has a great many dimensions. Some artists are able to capture the zeitgeist in a powerful way. We have to encourage questioning, and reflection. Examine our position in the

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world from different perspectives. When individuals are engaged by art, they are acknowledged. By being acknowledged they are validated and so empowered.

Creative Scotland needs to find and to champion iterative models. We need artists to provoke and to comfort us during that process. Brokering national relationships. There are so many opportunities for public art in locations from the coastline to the virtual world. Public art is just one response to the challenges we face and one that bears relationships to a particular history of practice. We must also think about Creativity as a notion: it is much harder to discuss, but it is just as important.

Jason: Can you expand on the notion of micro and macro relationships?

Venu: We’re stuck in a hierarchy. We need to engage with both. Need to be inclusive; we can’t just talk to ourselves. I don’t like midrange responses in which people are divorced from immediacy example of X Factor voting. Proposal of an experiment in choices. Example of asking members of the public to think about priorities in the health service, eg should money be spent on cancer drug or kidney dialysis machine? Perhaps a citizen’s jury model could be set up to look at public art.

Jason: Horizontalising models?

Venu: There’s a lot on insincerity about what goes on. Refers back to Claire’s example of Gormley. Inclusion is not the same as consultation. And experimentation is expensive.

Jason: Interested in the mention of your quest for information following your invitation to attend the day. Is there a lack of a methodological framework that can communicate worth at policy level?

Venu Dhupa

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Venu: Have to ask ‘what is the added value of Creative Scotland’ Historically there’s a tension between an arts council as a method of representing arts to government; and an arts council as a mechanism to dish out government funds. Need to bring the arguments to a government (of whatever party political makeup) that is obsessed with figures. This is what adds value. ‘We either value art or we don’t’ with implication that if we do, then we should do something about it?

Jason: Thinking about the non-linearity of time and space in public art (ref back to Neil Mulholland’s comment regarding Claire Doherty’s presentation). How could this be fitted into a value framework?

Venu: Current frameworks don’t function well. Example of Artichoke’s elephant puppet in London. Public endorsement for that work came through provocation as a strategy for engagement. Agitation (through asking for what was apparently impossible) led to problem solving, which in turn led to a sense of ownership over the work. There has been a petition against the cuts. Why have so few people signed it? We need to work outside traditional boundaries. Example of small project ran in the West Midlands, which taught good business practice through using examples from the arts.

Mike Collier: You talk about empowerment, and yet at this time of cuts more and more power is being taken away from artists. Artists are having to fit their work around or between very demanding pressures, the Olympic games for example, which may deny funding to any artist who can’t incorporate the theme of sport into their work. To be empowered, we need to be able to take direct action. What can we do practically to take back control?

Mike Collier

Venu: Empowerment has to be an internal thing.

Mike: That’s easy to say when you have power.

Venu: But no-one else can make you empowered. It has to be a process that you go through yourself. Empowerment is a state of being. In terms of direct action and what can you do, you can protest. The reality is that it’s a difficult situation. It wouldn’t be so bad if we felt that we were all in it together, that we were all sharing in the pain, but it doesn’t seem that that’s so. Reference to recent Dispatches TV programme How the Rich Beat The Taxman.

Jackie Donachie: But if you say that everyone’s already empowered, that’s surely an argument for doing nothing at all?

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Jacqueline Donachie

Venu: No, the question is how do we enable empowerment in those who don’t feel empowered already. But that empowerment has to happen from within the individual.

Jackie: Through lobbying and advocacy as well as grant-giving.

Ross Sinclair: By adding empowerment to all those other ideas like beauty, public benefit, enjoyment, and so on, you’re making an impossible list of things that you want art to do.

Ross Sinclair

Venu: I do believe that art can be a means to empower. But it’s not the only thing that empowers people there are lots of other things that can empower and what works will depend on the individual involved. I’ve given a personal perspective. My presentation was about what I believe to be important. I do think that the public discussion around art has been diminished and reduced. Discussion used to be more holistic. Now value is seen in strictly financial terms, so we’re not seeing public discourse enriched by culture. Example of how, during Indian Independence, huge emphasis was put on the importance of culture: richness of discourse around cultural importance. By losing this public presence of cultural discourse, we’ve become less of a human / humane society now. This is why

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I’m trying to mention beauty and humanity in contexts where we might not otherwise expect to hear those terms.

Ross: Thinking about that reference to the importance of culture at the time of Indian Independence, is that part of a discussion about Scottish independence?

Venu: I don’t know.

Chris Fremantle: a statistic that was mentioned at the recent Temporary Services event in Chicago suggested that the general public agree that art is important, but do not rate artists as being important. Could you comment?

Venu: Why does that matter? Surely everybody like to feel important, but other than that, what’s the difficulty with that split?

Jason: I think Chris is raising that idea because of your previous comment about raising the level of public discourse surrounding art. The split he’s referring to suggests that people aren’t making the connection between the culture that they find important, and the people who are producing it. There’s a divorce between the product and the production. Even though art is acknowledged as important, the creative individual is not valued as a public intellectual.

Venu: But that’s not a cause and effect relationship.

Chris: The point is, is you want a creative economy, you need to value the people who are actually the ones producing the work. Or, to perhaps to look at it a different way, what question should your citizen’s jury ask? And who will be contributing to the answer?

Venu: Is a creative economy really built on artists? Or on creativity? Creativity can manifest in different ways. In economic terms for example, the success of a TV might be measured in advertising revenue. In the example of a citizen’s jury, I’d say that the discourse is more valuable than the question. We could also think about having experimental control groups, for example one group made up of artists and curators, and another of other citizens.Creative people do sometimes need support. Shift between income need / generation.

Jean Cameron: In your presentation you mentioned Steve Tanza’s work, and said that it was only for a very particular audience. Relationship to Creative Scotland not being about art for all?

Venu: I only said that about Steve Tanza’s work because it exists online and so not everyone has access to it. The Arts Council England’s strapline used to be Great Art For Everyone [Nb you can download ACE’s 2009 consultation document ‘Achieving Great Art For All’, here . It’s difficult because we’re forced into having straplines and in an effort to sound inclusive you can end up sounding clichéd. There is a genuine impetus for Creative Scotland to reach the largest group possible, and to at least indicate that there are opportunities for investment. The tension of course is between those who are already regularly funded, and those who have not yet been funded.

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Graham Fagen: Going back to the kind of information you were given about public art, as background to attending this symposium event. What should be measured, and for what reasons?

Venu: Example of NESTA saying that they wanted to empower individuals because increasing people’s skills will lead to other benefits. But increasing pressures on achieving social outcomes developed over time. Because there was too much to measure, nothing was measured appropriately, and the overall story was diluted. A lot of money had been spent, but it was hard to give a clear sense of what it had achieved, and also what the potential was. We need fewer measureables and more powerful discourse.

Jason: I have one final question before we break for lunch. Venu, what do we need to do now to shape the future of public art?

Venu: We need to know why we’re doing it.

Tracy MackennaABSTRACT: ‘The studio as a public site for learning’. Tracy Mackenna is an artist who has worked in higher education as a lecturer and in leadership roles for over two decades and who contributes to the development of cultural organisations nationally and internationally. From the perspective of the rapidly shifting pedagogic and funding climates within which art education now sits, she will propose a model for the integration of teaching and learning, practice and research that takes as its starting point the potential of art as a critical agent in the debates about society and its public sites. Central to this proposition is the collaborative practice she shares with Edwin Janssen that is a discursive site for art making, presentation and exchange. Together they assume the roles of producer, facilitator, educator and researcher and broker interdisciplinary relationships to debate and reflect on social, political and cultural issues.

Tracy Mackenna

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Though takes on a range of different perspectives through her various roles as an artist, educator, etc, sees her central position as one of being an artist who constantly commitment to partnerships; a role which is sustained even with the pressures of teaching.

Title for the talk has evolved, and has been rethought (with input from Edwin) as:TomTom Practice: Empowering Art Students to Navigate Public Spheres.

Michael Lingner: “There is no art that exists outside of public space, only the choice between different types of public forums, each involving its own conditions of communication.” From Art as a System Within Society Van Eyck Academie PPPP : Place, Position, Presentation, Public, Ine Gevers (Ed.) (currently out of print).

Clarification of terms: Participation used roughly in the sense it’s had from circa 1990s, although still contested language. Engagement both in the sense of an artist engaging with others, and in the sense of artists engaging with each other. Public various suggested meanings including: the states in which we are (Scotland as a country? Or as a UK region?); the things that must be shared because they don’t belong to an individual; the things that are outside the household.

Knowledge as communicative exchange. Not fixed. Exchanges occur.Labels are not that important.Site / place / context as different structures.Importance of social issues.Significantly, functioning as artists gives shape to our own identities. That’s important when based within a college: value of individual.Own projects (as Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen) “extend our investigation of the issues we’re interested in.” Don’t necessarily frame own practice as Public Art. Still an idea that public art practice leads to compromise and deep unhappiness.

Key phrases: Negotiation; critical engagement; competition; taking control; resistance; resisting the brief; subversion; failure; self doubt.

As educators, paid to be brokers or mediators standing between the students and the outside world. But this is a very old fashioned idea of what an art school could be. Art schools are in a difficult position. Their future is not shiny. As institutions, art schools are slow and entrenched. They’re too big, too hierarchical, too structured.

Jan Verwoert 2006. Open Academy as new model.“no longer institutions for art, but places where art is received, produced, presented collected, distributed. Idea of Open Academy has consequences for art, the practice of exhibition-making, and for art education itself.”But we’re very far away from this. The art school platforms are those of studio; gallery; public sphere; and academia (this last in particular as Duncan of Jordanstone is housed within the University of Dundee, the art school here is between two worlds.

Approach to education is to retain teaching as an element within the mix of other roles and responsibilities. Allow students to expand boundaries. Done within a context of highly regulated

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structures and heavy and abstract monitoring systems. Measured by students’ results. Comment that one student has suggested that Mapping the Future might become a model for future education?

The European League of Institutes of the Arts emphasises shifts in the pedagogical model, an aspiration to inform future European legislation, and an intention to develop stimulating environments. Manifesto here Very relevant. Look at mismatches between labour and skills. Value systems - not enough value placed on the systems that make art happen.In terms of artistic research in the institution, there’s a pressure for artists to become researchers. And, more than that, to become good researchers in order to generate money for the institution; money that, incidentally, the institution apportions internally in any way they see fit. But research can be defined as a process of investigation leading to new insights that can be shared. Very vague and open to challenge. What could research be? This emphasis on research does have an impact though as people are forced to adapt their artistic practices in order to meet criteria.

Unpacking a Collaborative practice: Bar Chat.This beer mat project brought together a number of different strategies, but was significant because it stressed how important it was to be in control of the whole project budget.

Edwin originally studied Social Sciences at University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and Tracy studied sculpture at Glasgow School of Art. Collaborative practice began after meeting after meeting as participants in Manifesta 1 (1997). Edwin was looking at relationships between local and international systems.

Example of 1998 exhibition Ed and Ellis in Toyko, (you can even buy a sticker) produced as part of P3 Art and Environment, a Tokyo based project that describes itself as investigating ’a dynamic interactive formative process between people and the environment, as well as people and society (more info here). To develop the work spent time in Tokyo, researching, navigating. Highly visual strategies to communicate with a predominantly Japanese audience. Questions of both translation and participation. Project grew exponentially, participation from other organisations (but the artists were at the time often unaware of these other links and connections). Spent a lot of time out on the streets. Collected a group of hard core volunteers who became both audience and participants. At the time, living in Netherlands question of investment: how much can you invest in a place that you will leave again?Tour of motorways, which were built for the Olympics, and constructed over the top of the canals, which were previously public spaces. Sustained relationship with the city. Project culminated in a closing event, which was devised to relate to the volunteers’ existing passion for dance. Became a dance based event, which broke down some of the existing hierarchies.

Example of project in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam: Ed and Ellis in Schiedam. Old museum with an existing collection, but the city itself had lost its identity. Critical aspects were: access to local government; and time. The project was a long time in development and there were lots of changes. Importance of keeping open the possibility for failure. Developed a fake political party to campaign in the local election, but without standing a candidate. In a strange development, they were then asked to run for real! But declined. Were a number of ‘crunch moments’ at which the work rubbed up abrasively against the real example of other

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candidates complaining that Ed and Ellis had more funding, more visible campaign. What are the implications of this politically etc?

Example Merchants House Garden project, Kirkcaldy. Artists found this project dissatisfying. Relationships were not sustained by partners, despite previously made commitments. Ambitions proved to be larger than the project’s scope. Project was connected to the desired regeneration of Kirkcaldy, although how much regeneration actually took place is debateable. The garden was developed as a performance space, a space for group activity, for allotments, etc. The project was part of the international network Changing Habitats, linking projects in urban spaces from different European regions, and was held up as a showcase, even though Tracy and Edwin feel that the project was a failure.

Resisting the Brief: project with Stedelijk Amsterdam to look at artists’ studios in a high density urban area. The expectation was that the work would expose the multicultural issues of the place. But this was felt to be very problematic. Instead decided to make a private portrait of one person from within that community. Arguments about funding, legacy etc. In the end, a one night event was agreed, where different groups, including the communities of funders, artists etc, were present. [Nb this layering of communities is important; community / group not defined by geographic location, but through a kind of self definition that encompasses ideas like social position, social role, etc]

Tracy Mackenna

Recontextualising practice through the context of art school.

Edwin’s father died through assisted suicide. Important to find ways to deal with this. ways to talk about, and question it. Difficulty in how ideas are discussed culturally, also difference between UK and Netherlands. In addition, recognition that students are also often dealing with very serious personal situations while they are studying.

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Produced LIFE IS OVER ! If you want it exhibition sited within the art school, this was a strategic decision that took account of the fact that in the terms of institutional research credit, an art school based exhibition was worth less than an externally hosted one.Combination of borrowed and new work. 4 week presence in the space, generation process incorporating text, discussion, all centred around the exploration of end of life issues. Students were involved - worked in groups, and discussion took place that was not distinguished from the exhibition itself.The art school context enabled the work to address a particular audience of students and staff from across departments, as well as individuals from other arts organisations (mostly local).

Desire for a model that doesn’t attach itself to (or become bound by) current financial systems. Open spaces where anything can happen. Example of a question raised by Jonathon Baxter (then a student who was engaged with the project): “when you decide to go to art school, are you stepping into the world, or stepping out of it?”Argument that art education is increasingly moving away from the real world. Focus on practice led research; the ability to understand research; and combined learning and teaching models. We should be thinking about how we can teach (and learn) outside of the art school building itself. Do we need art schools in the traditional sense any more? [Nb. Compare this with Diarmaid Lawlor’s presentation on Day 2, where he began by asking us to think about outcomes (eg the facilitation of learning) rather than traditional methods (eg building a school)].

We should be thinking about moving teaching outside of the limiting parameters of a single architectural space that has been almost arbitrarily designated as a space in which to learn about art. We need to think about a flux of teachers, a multidisciplinary approach that spans across a variety of partnership organisations and models. Rooted and many spaces, not one. We need to teach skills, not art. And we need to keep the student experience at the heart of what we do.

Jason: Thinking about the Bologna Process that foregrounds horizontalising as a structure. Also about that list of crucial phrases resistance etc. Those phrases clearly relate to classic avant garde strategies, so how do those two things go together?

Tracy: They don’t! Crux point. With current models, they can’t be reconciled. Staff are not well discussed in the Bologna model. There’s a very real danger in the fact that it is not difficult to be informal or even to be outside with students.

Holly (sorry, didn’t catch your surname): Your manifesto seems good but my own course - the APCP course at Duncan of Jordanstone – is currently in difficulty. How could you apply the thoughts you’ve offered in your presentation in that context?

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Holly

Tracy (contextualising for the rest of audience): APCP stands for Art, Philosophy, and Contemporary Practice. This is a BA Hons. programme that sits within Fine Art.There are massive cuts coming to education. I can’t shape things enough to change the system. The situation as it is, is such that you’d have to start from scratch. But one problem is that students themselves are often too passive. In the case of APC however, the students have been vocal about the proposed changes and that’s a good thing. It’s not easy. Fundamental change can never be a quick process. At the moment changes are finance led and that’s the wrong way round.

Holly: Can positive changes happen?

Tracy: If it is to happen, the first step is to engage with like-minded people.

Edwin Janssen: Subversive strategies are often key. Perhaps the kind of changes you want to see could be tackled through a public art project? Think about ideas of placemaking in art, and that might relate to the current situation. Don’t be submissive. We may often feel as though we are pushed into a situation about which we can do nothing but we did choose to come into this art school context, and there is significance in that choice. Change starts with the ability to affect one’s immediate environment. It’s not always about trying to empower people that you don’t even know.

Neil Mulholland: Duncan of Jordanstone used to have a Public Art degree. What happened to that? How do art schools engage with the public now? After all, Bill Gates has said that the university is dead, that its been replaced with ideas like open source, and so on. Look at MIT .

Tracy: That was the Master of Public Art course, and it became what is now the MFA course.

Other Contributor (sorry, I don’t know your name): The change from one to the other reflects trends in teaching, and in art.

David Harding: It just evolved into a more general course.

Tracy: But why should art schools be in particular buildings? Importance of building meaningful partnerships with other organisations. It would be better for art schools to have less students and more partners. That way we could actually move through a changing terrain. At the moment, old architecture is prescribing new ideas.

Neil: The public are currently invisible within the education system.

Tracy: This is a very current issue, because there have recently been massive discussions taking place due to the refurbishment of Duncan of Jordanstone. Discussions of use and usership. We have had to argue the value of our exhibitions department, when its clear that it’s vital that the art school still has a gallery and a strong exhibitions team. There are of course many publics involved in an art school in many different ways, but we haven’t yet fully identified who they are and how they interact. There are multiple specialist audiences for example.

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David Butler: I’m based at the fine art department at Newcastle University, and actually I think that art school buildings are hugely important. The art school as a space becomes a home. It builds a family for the students. Following on from that, it’s important to think about our recent graduates as an important community. We’ve talked about the physical limits of the art school building, but we can also ask when as well as where, does an art school stop? We have to fracture the idea that art school stops as soon as you’ve got your degree.

David Butler

Tracy: yes, there are systems in place to look at graduate destinations, but it’s also important to plot the duration of the relationships that are begun at art school. For example, we have successful students who have chosen to stay in Dundee, and often those are the students that we have strong relationships with. It isn’t to say that they choose to stay because of those relationships, but of course it is vital to the cultural life of the city that they do stay.

Edwin: Back to the idea of empowering. Art schools don’t just educate artists, they educate all kinds of people. Where and when does the education of artists actually happen? Need to develop the conditions of the area you want to work in. This is why we need to develop the potential of public art. Often people don’t know that potential. Artists are part of the reception of art.

Jason: Are art schools actually better at educating audiences than artists?

Ken NeilABSTRACT. Correspondent Ken Neil has attended all three symposia. He will summarise and

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contextualise the discussions that have taken place over the three events. His final report will be published online with the aim of influencing public art advocacy and policy.

Ken Neil

Been in ‘receiving mode’ (Moira Jeffrey’s comment) for most of the three days, trying to absorb the conversations in preparation for the production of his report / response. If anyone wishes to contact Ken to add thoughts / questions etc his email is k.neil [at] gsa.ac.uk

Mention of this blog as a useful source. Thanks Ken! I hope you’ve found it useful too, readers.

Image of Graham’s rose as an image of optimism that must (and does) flourish despite the difficulties of the present situation. A sensible optimism. Used this optimism to think about the first question that was asked by Diarmaid in his presentation: What is it that we want to do? We still just have to try to achieve the things we want to achieve, despite the fact that we will have a bit less money to do that with.

Then in a moment of writer’s stupor began to think about the dongles protruding from the backs of the laptops and project on the presenter’s table at the front of the room. Described the importance of identifying the dongles that connect the different people and roles within the sector, as well as being able to identity the connections that haven’t yet been noticed, or made. Finding new links, and new constituencies, become even more crucial in times of adversity.

Neil then gave a stunning, incisive and efficient summary of all the presentations so far, including those from today. At least one member of the audience was wondering whether he was going to summarise his own presentation, and thus open a black hole in the universe. He finished with a diagram showing the kinds of interrelationships that he had begin to chart. I’ll try to re-present it here, bearing in mind that I can’t draw boxes on the blog.

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3 interrelated ideas:- Good guidance in terms of discourse- Good guidance in terms of public art projects- Good guidance in terms of public art commissioningall wrapped up in: Good sense.

Sorry Ken. It’s not nearly so clear as yours, but basically those three ideas are not supposed to be in a hierarchy, and they’re also all connected to each other (both informing and responding to each other). And all of them are surrounded by a frame of Good Sense. As all things should be.

All three ideas should also be refined through reference to what has already happened in the sector. We should be able to learn from our successes and our failures. There are other questions that come out of this analysis including (but not limited too - I didn’t get a chance to get them all down!):- what roles are there for institutions?- How best can we engage with the perceptions of the public without falling into the trap of thinking in dichotomies (as pointed out by Jeanne on Day 1).- Peter on Day 2 spoke about the need for aimlessness but how can this be reconciled with other demands for quality, efficacy, coherence etc?

Good public art can influence policies to inform exciting temporary fields of intervention.

Act up!

Legacies that connect particularities to broad concerns – policy framework that can be central yet particular.

Jason then explained the task for the last session. Before breaking for coffee, everyone was given a single Post It note (no expense spared!). On this they were to write one question, which they felt was the most important and most urgent. They were to wear their Post It during coffee (actually,

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very few people actually wore theirs, as they didn’t want to look silly). During the break our (brilliant) administrator Annette McTavish and I arranged the seating into six small groups. Each group would be moderated by a member of the team who had co-ordinated the symposium. After coffee we were given 15 minutes to establish what each group member’s question was, and then to synthesise all of these down to one answer (per group) to the day’s question of: What do we need to do now to shape the future of public art? Again Jason drew our attention to the qualities of singularity (we should identify one thing); to necessity, and to immediacy.

Fifteen minutes wasn’t very long (!) and so by necessity each group presented a fairly rough perspective. It was a very useful exercise in prioritising however, and there was a high level of participation: everyone was engaged in the conversation, and able to push and pull their own priorities in relation to the group whole. When the groups reported back to the room at the end of 15 minutes, the concerns were familiar, often focussing around the themes of support for artists practices, the value of the artistic process or presence, the desire for quality, and the need for advocacy and understanding.

Jason then expanded the conversation in order to pick up on some of these points. I will try to summarise the discussion below, but as always be aware that I may miss, or misrepresent key points. Please, please get in touch if you’d like to add or correct anything.

Jason identifies some key ideas for the final discussion: Languages; reassessment of the policy; questioning if the relationship of practitioners to policy intervention. In addition: artists as a sector are understood to be individualists. How do we create a critical mass?

David Harding: Can I ask a difficult question? What do we do about bad public art?

Jason: Do you feel that that’s related to policy?

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David Harding: No. It’s just down to uninformed judgements and assessments. We need to talk about practicalities. The same questions have been asked for decades. How does bad public art come about? Because there are good examples of public art commissioning. Look at Seattle. With good curation, a broad group of specialists on the panel, and good critical work, good public art can be commissioned. But it’s not happening in Scotland. Why don’t we think about how commissioners could be funded to support artists’ initiatives? Artists often actively want to work in particular areas, why isn’t this more supported?

David Harding

Edwin: But that’s already happening. Artists have been able to apply for funding from the Scottish Arts Council to fund their own projects. Why is the situation in Scotland different to that in Seattle? These questions, even thought they may be the same questions, are useful as a way to provide insight into what is already there. We have to know where we are in order to move things on.

David Harding: So why are we in this situation? How can we change the political attitude to culture generally? We can compare what’s happening today with the spending review with what happened in Sweden in the 1980s. There, even though they were in a situation of financial poverty, it would have been politically untenable to cut arts budgets. It was seen as a time to increase funding for the arts. That could not happen here.

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David Harding

Edwin: Do artists have a new role to take on, as politicians? After all, the role of the artist shifts as culture as a whole shifts.

Jason: We need to think about ways to store knowledge. What is the role of the curator in public art commissioning? After all, there are very different kinds of expertise involved, as well as multiple stakeholders, who have to come together around a fantasy of something that does not yet exist.

David Harding: I think that the Royston Road project with Lucy Byatt (see Lucy’s presentation from Day 2 in posting below), is a good example of best practice.

David Watt: How was that project funded?

Graham Fagen: It received European Regeneration funding.

David Harding: Ah, because of the poisoned soil sites and so on [Nb. Please see David’s Comment below, for details of this].

Jenny Crowe: Actually the European Regeneration money went into the physical infrastructure work on site in Royston. The artists’ residencies were funded by the Scottish Arts Council.

Susan Christie: I think it’s important to come back to that idea of bad public art. We skirt around it, and avoid talking about the bad examples in enough depth to learn from them. Until we do, we’re missing a big part of the picture.

Jason: It’s interesting that Scotland is vanguarded for its artists, but it seems to fail in the public art sector. Why does anyone think this might be?

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Neil: Scotland is such a small country. Instead of lobbying, we should just get involved directly in politics. We can’t be atomised. There is currently an assault on Scottish culture by a Tory government in Westminster. We should be asking the big questions about what is public life? What is public property? What is public policy?

Jason: Policies comes and go in cycles, and those cycles are determined by Government, They are party political.

Neil: We need independent people in government to represent us.

Chris Fremantle: I’ve noticed that most public art projects we hold up as good examples are ones initiated by artists - Royston Road is a notable exception. I’m aware that we’re in danger on conflating lots of different kinds of practice under one public art heading. We need to expand our lexicon. We need to be aware that the possibilities for a project are different depending on who you are. We need to develop the specificity of our lexicon to be able to better describe and convey those possibilities.

Unknown Contributor (let me know who you were!): I’m not convinced we should concentrate on bad examples. There is an invisibility of excellence, an unawareness of the best projects. When I came into public art, from a background in gallery curating where I had far more control, I thought of my role as being one of damage limitation.We will never get rid of bad public art because we will never get rid of bad art. The idea of public juries [as proposed by Venu] is frightening! We know what that kind of X Factor process creates. We need to lobby for excellence so that we don’t lose what we already have - a legacy of good practice that extends back to the 70s. We need to raise the level. We can’t have a hierarchical system even if artists are at the top of that hierarchy. We can’t have artists commissioning architects for example, we have to find models for experts to work together. We have a responsibility to raise the general level of understanding around public art so that people can demand excellence from projects.

David Harding: Look at some of the projects in Gateshead as an example.

Judith (sorry, I don’t know your surname): In the northeast [of England] there are many great examples of projects, partly because there are a great many engaged and talented people, but there is also Locus+, which has been very influential.

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Ross: Going back to the importance of the political landscape, we can see exactly how important art is seen to be by the way that the position of culture minister is just a revolving door that people pass through on their way down.

Ross Sinclair

David Butler: When you’re talking about the northeast as an example, you should recognise that Gateshead has a very rare legacy of a post war left wing council who saw culture as a product of the people. The area is still reaping the benefits of that uncommon heritage.

Not Sure Who: The language of public benefit is significant. How do we articulate what we’re doing in the language of public benefit?

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Hilary Nicol (I think? Apologies if this wasn’t you): I get asked about public benefit all the time You have to talk about histories. The projects that survive in our memories, and in our histories of practice, are the ones that are excellent.

David Butler: Do people feel confident in saying that? Or are we, to a degree, atomised?

David Butler

Jason: But I’m not only interested in knowledge transfer. I also want to know about knowledge generation. We’re not even close to talking about wisdom yet!

David Harding: Is that question of public benefit asked in the Netherlands as well?

Edwin: Yes, but it’s asked in a different way. Language is important because you do need to know the language of the people you’re dealing with. That’s why we need an agency, and research, and data. We have to be more savvy. But artists have better things to do than to spend their time learning these languages – they need to be making their work. That’s why it’s the role of an agency to learn these languages instead.

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