The Cooler King (part 2)

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.

I have decided to write a series of short scenarios:

OK I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll do a sketch with the suggested alterations. I won’t do a large scale fully worked up design yet, and see if the steering group OK the sketch before doing the final design. You should get something by the middle/end of next week is that OK?

and

your representative visited my workshop yesterday to see the works in construction and seemed very pleased with way things have progressed so I am attaching my invoice for payment as agreed in the contract. I have also attached images of the most recently completed work in the series.

but

‘half a dozen designs and none of them seem quite right and oh you want a seventh version with a few alterations.

actually…. I’ve had enough of this….and you can have your payment back. I’m not quite clear on the internal politics going on here, but they make a never ending circle’.

and

as the work will be adopted by us after a year we also need to agree things are going OK and will send a representative out to see the work soon on the suggested date.

and

No thats right, sometimes the only way to get the right colour is to blend the tiles optically, in a pontalist kind of way, to create a colour not manufactured.

but

thank you for the update, but please delete me from your file as I will not submit a proposal as I would be unable to work within the time schedules.

or

Thank you for you application for the residency you will hear from us shorty.

and

I don’t usually have a problem with colour, but I can send you examples of projects with the designs on paper compared to photos of the finished work to show the slight variations that do happen. Oh…. you would like to visit soon after work has started to see if the colours were OK….Yeh your very welcome.

and finally:

The magpie refused to enter the ark with Noah.