The Public Art Debate
A couple of weeks ago I went to The Public Art Debate at Turner in Margate……..I have just found a video of it on the internet and it was so uninspiring then…… and even more so when I watched the video (actually bits of the video).
Why was it so bad?
It took 20 minutes to describe really painfully what public art was, followed by some average to poor examples, then there were practically no questions from the floor. Defiantly no interesting ones!
I felt the panel thought public art to be a narrow particular kind of art that adapts industrial process to make colourful and shiny things that involved nothing you could recognise. Imagery was often disregarded and praise for art which I thought were gimmicks, which have high impact where interest lasts about 15-20 seconds and then the novelty wears away.
Art that involved working with the people was regarded as a little naff and some of what they championed I felt alienated people from art, as up itself and intellectual. Do artists have to be so clever and Avant- Garde?
I came away feeling I was not avant-garde or critical and was definitely not a public artist in the way the facilitators, course directors, programme managers, architects and curators expected their artists to be.
Craft I don’t think I heard that word at any point.
I heard the word commodity and I think it was regarded badly. I heard lots of democratics, notions, frameworks, values, spaces and facilities. Yet failed to understand what anyone really meant with them in relation to art.
I came out thinking actually I believe the rub of the whole topic was missed out altogether, never mentioned. That is ‘commissioner and stakeholder agendas’. The panel described public art like the artists could do what they wanted on a blank page…….well may be a small number of projects or organisations do allow this. This is not where the majority of public art comes from. They spoke as if it was. But I can tell you the reality is you have dance to the pipers tune. In this respect I feel very much more closely aligned with The Renaissance than contemporary art. Patrons, funders or commissioners what ever you want to call them; want the art they buy to serve some kind purpose, that’s why they are buying it.
Their ‘notion’ of art in the public realm implies artists can do what they want! ………………er hello.
