Posts Tagged ‘public art’

Public art and private development: an intoxicating mix

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

Large-scale property developments in Sydney are required to include a high quality public art component. For developers, this can mean enormous creative and financial challenges. At Central Park on Sydney’s Broadway, an $8 million public art program is being integrated into the urban redesign of an old brewery site, writes Michele Ferguson.

A concept visualisation of the sculpture Halo designed by Jennifer Turpin and Michaelie Crawford. Photo courtesy of the artists


By Michele Ferguson

“It’s meant to look a little bit tipsy,” explains artist Jennifer Turpin. “There’s been a lot of thought on positioning it, and hopefully it will provide a heart for the site.”

Turpin is referring to Halo, the sculpture she has designed in collaboration with Michaelie Crawford for Chippendale Green in the new Central Park development on Sydney’s Broadway. The graceful, deceptively simple aerial sculpture celebrates the joy of movement and will be one of the most important artworks in the $2 billion redevelopment of the old Carlton & United Brewery site.

“It’s as much an invention as it is an artwork,” says Turpin, revealing that she and Crawford have spent a year on Halo‘s design and development. A team of 14 specialist engineers and fabricators has worked with the artists on model testing and the structural design of the kinetic wind-driven sculpture. The finished work will comprise a golden ring, 12 metres in diameter, floating off-centre around a 14 metre high silver pole. Gently spinning in the wind, the ring will tilt and turn in a slow, mesmerising motion.

Turpin and Crawford are also the art advisors responsible for Central Park’s ambitious $8 million public art program. The highly regarded duo has collaborated on a number of significant public artworks including Windlines, 2011, for Scouts Australia at Circular Quay; Tied to Tide, 1999, at Pyrmont Point Park; and Well, 1995, created for the New Children’s Hospital at Westmead.

The commitment to public art by the developer, Frasers Property Australia, and the support its art program has received from the City of Sydney are indicative of the changing attitudes of public and private stakeholders toward the value of creativity in large-scale commercial developments.

Promoting high quality public art in private development is one of the principles outlined in the City’s Public Art Policy, adopted in May 2011. It states: “Public art can enrich the public domain and artists can contribute to the shaping and transforming of the urban realm in ways which reflect, accentuate and give meaning to Sydney’s unique environment, history and community.”

As well as satisfying the City’s planning requirements, a site-responsive public art program contributes to the creation of a sense of place. This in turn can enhance a development’s financial and cultural value, boosting its potential for profitability. At Central Park the concept of place is being marketed as much as its apartments. The sales brochure claims the precinct will offer the opportunity to be part of what it describes as “a true urban village for a world city.”

Although public institutions and private development have different priorities and potentially conflicting value systems, the cohesive public art program and the calibre of the artists being commissioned to create works for Central Park have engendered an air of anticipation within the City of Sydney’s Public Art Unit. “It’s a gift to the city”, declares the Public Art Program Manager, Eva Rodriguez-Riestra, who is hoping to use the project as a case study for developers.

The six hectare Central Park site was purchased in 2007 from Carlton & United Breweries. Its redevelopment will be carried out over eight to ten years. There are plans for more than a dozen buildings, shops, offices, restaurants and some 1900 apartments.

One of Central Park’s main selling points is its grand scale eco-strategy which aims to achieve a six-star environmental rating for the precinct and to create a community emitting zero net carbon. Another is its formidable design collaborative which includes two Pritzker Prize-winning architects, Sir Norman Foster of Foster + Partners, London, and Jean Nouvel of Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Paris; and the Australian architectural firms Tzannes Associates, Johnson Pilton Walker and Tonkin Zulaikha Greer.

Turpin and Crawford’s strategy for the commissioning of temporary and permanent public art at Central Park is underpinned by a thematic approach based on a view of the old brewery as an impregnable city within a city. As its high walls gradually come down, they are to be replaced by contemporary architecture and the progressive installation of site-responsive artworks.

The strategy’s contextual framework focuses on individual artistic interpretations of the site’s past and future: its brewing history, past and present links with stories of transformative processes for water and liquid, and sustainable energy initiatives. Several locations have been identified for permanent installations to be created by artists working across a broad spectrum of media.

The lynchpins of the strategy are two creative elements which are embedded in the architectural plans and account for more than half the public art budget. One is a vegetal wall designed by French artist and botanist Patrick Blanc which will grow over the facade of two residential towers. The other is a mirrored lighting design by Yann Kersale, also a French artist. His design will be integrated into a cantilevered light-reflecting structure called a heliostat. It will be located in the top of a residential tower, reflecting sunlight onto the park below and glowing at night.

Brook Andrew's artwork, Local Memory, 2011, on the facade of the old brewery. Courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries. Photo courtesy of Arunas Klupsas

Central Park’s $500,000 temporary public art program, Artists in Residence, was launched in April this year with the installation of Local Memory, a monumental series of 18 portraits by Sydney artist Brook Andrew. Mounted high on the old brewery wall facing Broadway, it celebrates the local community and history of the area. At night the towering work is a dazzling sight as it shimmers with the glow of red neon that frames the photographs.

Artists in Residence is being jointly curated by Turpin, Crawford and Sydney-based curator Anne Loxley. They plan to have three more works installed progressively, remaining in place for three years. Their objective is to transform the character of the old heritage buildings and herald the involvement of contemporary Australian art in the creation of the new urban precinct.

Artist Mikala Dwyer inspects the top of the 52 metre high brewery chimney at Central Park. Photo courtesy of Tom Evangelidis

The second temporary work to be installed was a 15 metre long windsock designed by artist Mikala Dwyer. It was affixed to the top of the 52 metre tall brewery chimney in September. Dwyer describes the whimsical sculpture, entitled Windwatcher, as “simple but profound”, a reminder of the sky and the majestic force of the wind.

One of the first temporary art initiatives at Central Park was the opening in September 2008 of three vacant warehouses called FraserStudios for use by the local creative community. More recently, Frasers has unveiled plans to revitalise the dilapidated Kensington Street alley bordering the site near Central Station into a vibrant laneway precinct. The company is also staging art exhibitions in its on-site display pavilion. Curated by Nicky Ginsberg of neighbouring NG Gallery, they feature the work of predominantly local artists.

The NSW Government has no state-wide policy requiring public art to be provided as part of large private developments. The City of Sydney, however, requires developers to commission and install artwork in private developments where there is significant public space and/or construction costs greater than $10 million.

Developers must submit a Public Art Report to the City’s Public Art Advisory Panel for approval as a condition of consent for an Occupation Certificate. The Public Art Advisory Panel, which comprises leading curators, museum directors and architects, takes an active role in working with developers to create a site-specific public art program early in the planning process.

In Sydney, the process of transforming public spaces through the City’s Public Art Program is well underway. As the public art program for Central Park is unveiled over time, it will be evaluated in terms of the quality of the contribution that a private developer can make to this process. If public authorities and private developers can continue to work collaboratively on integrating public art programs into large private developments, the city and the lives of its residents will be enriched.

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Fiona Foley; Putting her heart in public art

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

By Henrietta Summerhayes

Fiona Foley is a fighter, just like her Badtjala ancestors who, in the early days of colonisation, fought the white invaders from the vantage point of their Fraser Island fortress. Politics runs in the family. Foley is also an artist and, just like her artist forebears, engages in an age-old tradition of public art to tell the stories of her people. However, there have been some changes over the intervening millennia; cultural practice now often relies on cross-cultural subversion, and cave walls have morphed into a modernity not always friendly to those particular stories. Fiona Foley, freedom fighter, finds ways to tell them anyway.

Public art is most generally defined as art that is commissioned by governmental bodies to adorn public spaces. This is art therefore that reaches, and generally needs to satisfy, the tax-paying not necessarily gallery-going public, ultimately responsible for its funding. It needs to feel good all round: the funding bodies, the general public funding the funding bodies, and finally, the funded: the artist. Foley is not interested in the mainstream traditional tales of the Dreamtime; rather she tells tales of living nightmares that for the most part, have been edited out of the teaching and telling of Indigenous history. So how does she navigate the roadblocks she encounters when the truth of her stories affronts the very governmental bodies empowered to commission her art?

Foley’s fascination with public art stems from a deep desire to be heard; to give voice to the silenced generations who came before her, battling in vain for a stake in a land once their own. In 2004 she was commissioned to create Witnessing to Silence, a sculpture that would adorn the Roma Street frontage to the newly erected Brisbane Magistrates Court. It took two years and a strategic silence of her own in order to finally negotiate, complete and install the work.  In her initial artist’s statement she claimed that the sculpture was to memorialise the ravaging fires and floods in 94 Queensland townships. Three months after the ceremonial unveiling, in a letter to The Australian, Foley came clean as to its real meaning.

Foley revealed that those 94 towns, the names of which are etched on pavers integral to the work, had a much more sinister relevance. They are the 94 sites where massacres of Aboriginal people were known to have taken place, as discovered from an analysis of 19th century government records. The columns bearing panels of laminated ash, stainless steel and a water feature that comprise the work represent the ways by which the bodies from those massacres were disposed: by burning and by discarding into the surrounding waterways. Witnessing to Silence struck a chord, suddenly and publicly exposing what Indigenous writer, critic, curator and activist Djon Mundine once described as ‘our paper-thin, narrow, national official view’. (Mundine, 2009, p.52)

Fion Foley Witnessing to Silence 2004, Roma Street Brisbane. Photo courtesy of the artist

Fiona Foley Witnessing to Silence - paver detailing names of massacre sites. Photo courtesy of the artist

Foley says that her art practice is a platform to talk about other things, and she does so with force. The $200 000 she was paid for Witnessing to Silence must have been sweet payment indeed, as she delivered a condemnation of tyranny to the very doors of the hallowed halls of Queensland justice. Foley jokes that had the commissioning committee spent more time researching Fiona Foley the artist and less time worrying she’d ‘get pissed and go walkabout with their money’ (Foley, 2011*), they would have realised she was always going to be trouble.

Foley’s historical research is exhaustive, but it’s been a largely heuristic process of combing government archives for facts not found on library shelves or displayed in bookstore windows. For instance: the facts surrounding John Batman’s purchase of the 600 000 acres of land upon which the city of Melbourne was established. Records reveal that in exchange for the land, Batman offered blankets, flour, looking glasses, tomahawks, knives, beads and scissors, as well as promising to pay an annual fee or rent. This was a cheap deal, particularly when that promise was never honoured. In collaboration with sound artist, Chris Knowles, Foley was commissioned by Melbourne City Council to create a sculpture to coincide with the 1997 National Reconciliation Convention and the thirty-year anniversary since the 1967 referendum granting Aboriginals the vote. It was this land trade the artists chose to remember.

Fiona Foley Lie of the Land, 1997 - On temporary display Swanston Street, Melbourne. Photo courtesy of the artist

For a period of two months, seven three meter high sandstone pillars inscribed with each of the seven commodities Batman traded, stood like tomb-stones before Melbourne Town Hall on Swanston Street. The accompanying soundtrack includes a recitation in seven Indigenous languages of a quote taken from Batman’s diary, enumerating his dirty deal. Foley stated, ‘the history has been written by the victors, it is only now that the silent history of the Indigenous populations are given a voice’ (eMelbourne website) Now permanently housed in the Melbourne Museum, the temporary display of Lie of the Land on a major arterial roadway served, if only briefly, to publicly recognise those Indigenous lives impacted so ruthlessly. Seven simple words represented violence and dispossession on a monumental scale.

What a paradoxical quirk it is that a modern day instrument of government enables a public declaration of its guilt on this scale. This was the same year and at the same 1997 convention that the then Prime Minister, John Howard, in refusing to apologise to the Stolen Generation, referred to past atrocities in the treatment of Aboriginals as ‘blemishes’ on our otherwise happy history. And if, as it is still officially maintained, there ever was justification for a claim of Terra Nullius in Australia, why would Batman have offered anything in the first place? Was he seeing and trading with ghosts?

Historian Rosalind Kidd claims that as Australians, ‘we are ignorant of our historical heritage, we remain vulnerable to manipulation by those who have the most to gain from a truncated and distorted debate’ (Kidd, p.349), and Fiona Foley knows this. But if there is dishonesty about our past, the path to reconciliation must surely be through honesty regarding the present, and this is what Fiona Foley wants to continue to address. In 2009, another opportunity for expression on this debate came from an unlikely quarter: Mackay City Council, in the heart of Queensland’s politically conservative north coast. A beautification project of the ‘ring of activity’ encircling Mackay CBD saw the commissioning of six works by Foley; here was her chance to go to town. Through careful negotiation with a committee more enlightened than that of the Brisbane Magistrates Court, Foley was able to construct a poignant and powerful series of sculptures that showcased aspects of the Indigenous experience more specific to the area of Mackay, delivering ‘a political message with power, cogency and an aesthetic which extends sorrow and empathy over generations of losses’ (Louise Martin-Chew exhibition catalogue 2009).

Four of those sculptures now stand proudly on the 19-kilometre Bluewater Trail, and a further two are located in areas adjacent, but the combined cohesive force of the work is a triumph to Foley’s quest for clarity. Three of the works situated on the trail honour the Yuibera people of the area, but another, the most contentious of the works, is called Sugar Cubes (2009). There’s nothing sweet about the Blackbirder history memorialised by this sculpture. Installed beside the Pioneer River, it comprises seven three metre high stacks of box-formed stainless steel cubes, etched with the names of ships on which the South Sea Islanders were shackled and transported. Rounded up against their will from their homelands, they were captured for the purposes of cheap, indentured labour for the booming sugar industry. They were the ‘Blackbirders’, a workforce only recently acknowledged for their historical importance and contribution to the community.

Fiona Foley Sugar Cubes, 2009 Mackay Bluewater Trail. Photo courtesy of the artist

The ugly truths of the treatment of our Indigenous people constituted cannon fodder for the History Wars, ‘negative facts of history’ (Stanner 1968 p214) that have been artfully avoided by the predominant documenters of our history until relatively recently. But Foley has persisted in her research, ‘she speaks to the persistence of memory, to the burden of history. For her, time does not heal all wounds. Like a boomerang, she springs history in a loop and returns it dangerously to the unsuspecting source.’ (Olu Oguibe, 2004 p118). Her heart and soul is buried deep in the public art she delivers, art that can stand proud on the streets of her country and go some way to redeeming the innumerate losses her people feel so profoundly.

Fiona Foley is on a mission to tell the stories that need to be told, and there could be no better platform than her public art by which to do so. This is because art in the public domain makes a claim, like a stake plunged deep into the soil of conquered country, it demands to be seen and considered, or to be deliberately and belligerently ignored. But its very presence, in a non-commercial context, is testament to a growing awareness and understanding of what it might be to be Aboriginal in a modern context. As Andrew Crocker says, ‘the evolutionary nature of all art is common knowledge’ (Crocker 1986 p.147) and Foley has intelligently, powerfully, immensely and provocatively reinterpreted the age-old Indigenous custom of public art to encompass an evolutionary Aboriginal culture that rather than dying out, has very much found new life.

Bibliography:

Crocker, Andrew. ‘Traditional and Urban Aboriginal contemporary art – 1986’ in McLean, I. How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art. Power Publications, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 2011.

Kidd, Rosalind. The Way We Civilise. University of Queensland Press, 1997.

Perkins, Hetti. One Sun One Moon; Aboriginal Art in Australia. Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007

Macgregor, Elizabeth Ann and Mitzevich, Nick. Fiona Foley: Forbidden. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2010.

Martin-Chew, Louise. Public and Political; Recent Major Sculpture by Fiona Foley. Artlink Indigenous magazine, Volume 31, No 2. 2011.

Martin-Chew, Louise, ‘Fiona Foley’s Black Friday’ Nulla 4 Eva, exhibition catalogue, Niagara Publishing, Melbourne. 2009

McCulloch, Susan & McCulloch Childs, Emily. Contemporary Aboriginal Art; The Complete Guide. McCulloch and McCulloch Australian Art Books, updated edition 2009.

Mundine, Djon. Seeing Black: Degrees of Visibility, Real Time Magazine, issue #94 Dec-Jan 2009.

Oguibe, Olu. The Culture Game. University of Minnesota Press, 2004, p118.

Stanner, W.E.H. White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-1973. pp. 198–248.

http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM02132b.htm

* Foley 2011 – in conversation with the artist, UNSW August, 2011

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Lupin the Phantom Thief in the Arts: Banksy

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Young-Gu Kim

Banksy

Transforming Mona Lisa into a new shape

Date unknown

Spray paint stencil

Dimensions unknown

More of Banksy’s work can be found at http://www.banksy.co.uk

In last August 2009, Bristol, the most populous city in South West England, was packed with a huge crowd. In front of Bristol’s City Museum & Art Gallery, people had to stand in line for up to six hours to see an exhibition of their own world-famous artist, Banksy. Bristol is his hometown and he is an artist who tends to hold a narrative structure and investigate public aspects of the visual art by various methods. He raises diverse contemporary issues through his famous street art, and questions what is the essence of the art, the role of artists and the nature of appreciation behind his insistence. Banksy has concealed himself thoroughly behind a veil of anonymity. He makes his art under an assumed name. People call him a ‘guerrilla artist’ or an ‘art terrorist.’

One of his famous quality vandal performances was to stealthily hang his own work, ‘Early Man Goes to Market’, in the British Museum. It even had a caption that the work was an example of primitive art, which was, of course, a hoax. Besides the British Museum, he secretly exhibited his novel artworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Museum managers never realised that these works were hung inside until the artist revealed their presence. Surprisingly, the British Museum made the decision to add the work to a list of permanent collections. Banksy’s intention to perform these events was that he had a strong desire to ridicule art gallery managers who were not able to draw a line between masterpieces and counterfeit works, and suggest sarcastically what criteria made a great piece at the same time.

Banksy is a public artist and the form his public art takes is what is often described as graffiti art. His subjects are mainly issues such as politics, society, environment, capitalism, anti-war movement and peace. However, his motivation is based on the idea that he would like to change the world to be better and brighter by reporting the irrationalities of society to the public and satirizing absurd stereotypes. He once said ‘Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place’ (2005). The reason why he has managed to maintain complete anonymity and even entrusts an interview to his representative is because under British law, graffiti is considered an act of vandalism. In order to avoid any illegal excuse he remains anonymous which means he enjoys the freedom of outspoken creation.

Parody is one of mechanisms that have had more than enough usage in contemporary art. An issue is that parody in a work can be defined differently amongst other mechanisms such as plagiarism, theft, citation, borrowing and pastiche owing to the direction of intention. Banksy’s strategy is to borrow old master paintings everyone knows and indicate the source clearly so that he cannot be accused of plagiarism or theft. Therefore, no one has objections to the rationality and legitimacy of his works by disclosing the source. Instead his parody seems to be utilized as a tool to bring up universal issues such as environment, religion, war, race and recovering traditional values against authorities. As a parodist, Banksy’s work contains his strong insistence on returning to tradition in the true sense of the term by obviously showing pre-existing issues of our society, and he demonstrates his interest and consideration of historicity and sociality.

One of his outstanding parodied works is based on Edward Hopper and Jack Vettriano. Hopper’s Nighthawks is parodied to criticize British chauvinism in dispatching troops to Iraq for the Iraq War, and he parodied Vettriano’s The Singing Butler to demonstrate opposition to the war. In particular he transformed Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece Mona Lisa into a combatant with a rocket launcher. Also, naughty Mona Lisa lifting her hips is a kind of gesture to take off the masterpiece’s mask of authorities symbolizing the highest masterpiece in history.

Rats and children are his most frequently used images. They are often used as a tool of personification and their roles vary. A rat holds a placard while wearing a ‘peace sign’ around its neck, sometimes they carry a marker or a spray can for graffiti. The implication of using rats seems to be a desire of the artist himself. As rats rummaging through a ditch ask for peace and freedom, they play a role to speak for the minorities who were castrated by the authority.

Children are also one of his favourite subject matters. They are often used in scenes in which they are sacrificed to violence and unfairness. The famous Vietnam Napalm Girl who ran through flames during the Vietnam War now comes out along with Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse, which makes for a bittersweet comment on today’s consumerist society based on money and greed. Apart from these kinds of works, which criticise capitalism dominating the mind indirectly, innocent children in Banksy’s works are constantly suffering from an unjust society. Even though his works make people laugh because of a keen satire on society, they also encourage people to think and question the world around them.

Most of his works comment on the Government and/or authority, which are always depicted in a negative view. He calls himself an anarchist. Uniformed police officers in his works uncover their personal desires. When they get undressed out of their uniforms, they are no longer police officers and reveal insidiousness of authority and power behind uniforms.

His main canvas is the wall itself. Like more established artists such as Barbara Kruger and New York’s Guerrilla Girls he also uses the wall. As well as painting directly on the wall, he sometimes uses more traditional mediums such as paper and canvases. In particular, he loves to use the stencil technique, which allows a graffiti artist a neater and more desired effect. It is a popular technique for many street artists as is allows for a quick departure. Banksy is not tied down by a need for specialised spaces for exhibition such as more typical art gallery and museum settings. Moreover, he attempts to communicate with the public transcending both legality and illegality, which is why his paintings should be included in the realm of public art.

While stenciling on walls around the city, Banksy shows his artistic attitude, which is generally based on urbanism. His main stage is, as everyone knows, the city and his works are quite provocative towards oppression, coercion, hypocrisy and authority for indiscriminate development by people living in the city. In instances where Banksy has hung fake pieces of ‘art’ in world-famous galleries including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Louvre Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, the purpose has always embodied a message of resistance. His principle aim is for an open society escaping an inflexible thinking posture and liberating people’s pressure from uniformed governance in terms of showing interest in minorities and the Third World countries. At this point, Banksy seeks to revive a neglected class of people who do not fit in to the typical high-art scene largely due to elitist nature of the arts.

Banksy says, ‘As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on daytrips with the art departments.’ He casts blame with the modern art galleries who choose to display artworks in the middle of white-painted spaces and announce that it is art just because it is in the art gallery. In one of his particularly famous displays of revolt he sprayed ‘Mind the crap’ on the steps of the Tate Britain before the Turner Prize ceremony, unlike other artists, his works do not need the white wall of art gallery to make a statement. Strong images involving social issues attract people’s attention and can have a lot of influence over their values and opinions. His underlying attitude denies the commercialisation of the art. In the mean time, Banksy paradoxically has become commercialized, as a result of his notoriety, and the fact that his works have now been hung on the white walls of art galleries, he has forever resisted. It could be seen that what people want to get from Banksy’s works is not an earnest discussion over a true value of the art or discussion on social issues which Banksy likes to evoke, but instead a hot issue or easily accessible topic in order to satisfy their curiosity.

It is noteworthy that Banksy has now become a figure of the artistic establishment, despite his best efforts. It will be interesting to keep an eye on his position in the art realm, to see whether he will be remembered just as the Lupin, the phantom thief in the arts, or rather will be seen as a creative pioneer in the evolution of making and displaying public street art.

Bibliography

Banksy, Banksy; Wall and Piece, London, The Random House UK, 2005

Brassett, James, British irony, global justice: a pragmatic reading of Chris Brown, Banksy and Ricky Gervais, Review of International Studies, 35, 219–245, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Weaver, Helen, Banksy Bristo city museum and art gallery, Art in America, Vol. 97 Issue 8, p.157, 2009

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