Running the City: Why Public Art Matters

Felicity Fenner is Director of UNSW Galleries, a member of the City of Sydney Public Art Advisory Panel and a lead researcher on the Curating Cities database of eco-sustainable public art. Her research as a curator focuses on aspects of place-making and inhabitation, encapsulated in exhibitions such as Handle with care: 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Once Removed, Australia’s group exhibition at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Michael Nyman: Cine Opera, staged inside Sydney Park Brickworks in 2011, Running the City, curated for the 2013 International Symposium on Electronic Art, and People Like Us, an international exhibition of new media art developed for tour to 15 venues across Australia (2015–2019).

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Felicity Fenner 2017

First published 2017

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available at the National Library of Australia

ISBN 9781742235332 (paperback)

9781742242835 (ebook)

9781742248318 (ePDF)

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Louise Cornwall

Cover image MAP Office, Runscape – Hong Kong, 2010

Printer Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. The publication was additionally supported by the Australian Research Council and the City of Sydney.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD by Clover Moore

INTRODUCTION

Public art in the city

CHAPTER 1

Running the city

CHAPTER 2

Temporary takeover

CHAPTER 3

On home ground

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

FOREWORD

Some years ago, the Sydney Morning Herald columnist Elizabeth Farrelly asked, ‘Does art, especially public art, still matter? And what etiquette governs its manners in a time of babel?

‘The question it raises is one that drove and bedevilled the modern century. If art must have meaning (not just beauty) where does that meaning originate? With the artist? The viewer? Or in some magical meeting of the two?’

Elizabeth was reflecting on the death of Sol LeWitt, the American conceptual artist who, she observed, insisted on creating works that were ‘inordinately obscure’. Despite this alleged obscurity, his work is enjoyed by hundreds, if not thousands, of Sydneysiders every day. Since 2003 his large brightly coloured mural has enlivened the circular ground floor foyer of Harry Seidler’s Australia Square Tower.

LeWitt’s mural, along with countless other public and semi-public artworks, demonstrates the contribution public art can make to shaping public places.

Felicity Fenner emphatically demonstrates that public art still matters. In Running the City she provides numerous examples of public art that delights, inspires and challenges us. Her focus is artworks that activate public space not by simply being ‘plonked’ but by being integrated with that space and becoming embedded in its communities.

A city’s art can help shape a unique and memorable identity, expressing the spirit of place, and presenting a rich and nuanced picture – sometimes a critique – of the society that produced it. Over the past decade the City of Sydney has acted on this, commissioning many new temporary and permanent public artworks, from small-scale laneway projects to Yininmadyemi: Thou dost fall, the artwork in Hyde Park which acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women who served in the nation’s armed services.

We have incorporated art into the daily life of our city villages with new artworks being strongly featured in our public domain improvements. Public art is being integrated into our Green Square urban renewal project in inner south-west Sydney.

All this is being achieved with the expert guidance of our Public Art Advisory Panel, chaired by Leon Paroissien. Felicity Fenner is a much valued Panel member and her first-hand experience has informed her insights.

Several of the City’s public art projects feature as case studies in this book, including Michael Hill’s Forgotten Songs, which recalls the songs of fifty birds that could be found in central Sydney before European settlement. Initially part of the temporary laneways art program, it captured the public’s imagination and led to many requests that it be made permanent. This response confirmed that public art matters to the public. It can have beauty and meaning, helping us understand what we have now and what we have lost.

Any exploration of the relationship between art, the public domain and its communities is welcome, given there are so few and even fewer exploring the public art of Sydney. Running the City is an important and much-needed contribution to this discourse.

Clover Moore, Lord Mayor, City of Sydney

INTRODUCTION

PUBLIC ART IN THE CITY

On a summer’s day in London the elegant galleries of Tate Britain offer respite from the hustle of the city outside, cool and quiet spaces for culture and contemplation. Visitors during the summer of 2008 may also have been seeking a haven in art from the world’s obsession with the Beijing Olympics and star sprinter Usain Bolt’s record-breaking performances. Imagine their surprise, peacefully strolling through the gracious central gallery and immune from incessant sporting chatter, when an athlete shoots past at Bolt-like speed. Thirty seconds later another athlete thumps through the space at full blast, then another, and another. All hope of escaping into a sport-free zone evaporates as the sound of running soles on polished stone floors and the odour of athletes’ sweat begin to fill the museum spaces.

When bemused visitors to Tate Britain that summer recovered from the viscerally felt collision of art and sport, they discovered that the 100-metre sprinters in the museum belonged to an artwork devised by leading British artist Martin Creed. In discussing the work, Creed refers to running as a life-affirming art form that celebrates the beauty of human movement and of life itself: ‘Running is the opposite of being still. If you think about death as being completely still and movement as a sign of life, then the fastest movement possible is the biggest sign of life. So running fast is like the exact opposite of death – it’s an example of aliveness’.¹

In an urban context, art practice ‘as the exact opposite of death’ is driven by an imperative to reclaim agency over and to re-imagine our use of public space. Working in the present, responding in their practice to current issues and ideas, artists are often at the forefront of social change, their work underpinned by a desire to challenge capitalistic or overly regulatory structures running our cities. Proponents of the traditionally held idea that art and sport inhabit different universes would have us believe that artists and their ilk are cultural connoisseurs somewhat detached from the quotidian world, while sporting types get in amongst it with the hoi polloi, less interested in aesthetics and ideas than they are in scoreboards and beers. Yet at their best art and sport share a capacity for agility and an attitude of urgency, and history shows that the two pursuits have more common ground than is superficially apparent. Societies for millennia have worshipped the ideal human body, both in art and in sport. In ancient Greece, athletic excellence was considered a form of aesthetic beauty. Their athletes performed naked, including in the Olympic Games, the winners commemorated in votive statues crafted by artisans and offered to the gods. Also conflating physical prowess and aesthetic beauty, the Romans created portrait sculptures of strong and youthful, classically proportioned men and women.

In modern times, celebrity status is bestowed on top achievers in art and sport; they are singled out for succeeding in ancient, even heroic pursuits that lie outside dominant cultural paradigms of labour and commerce. Indeed, the two fields of endeavour share many aspects. Both art and sport require their practitioners to make sacrifices, remain motivated and nurture strategic networks to be noticed by curators and collectors, or coaches and selectors. In addition to natural talent and learned skills, artists and athletes must be self-motivated: if they fail to show up one day for work at the studio or for training at the gym, there is no one to notice, let alone care. Theirs can be a very lonely pursuit and only a few will succeed. For the rest, there is the very real likelihood of financial hardship and lack of recognition for the many, often solitary, hours dedicated to their practice. To people living and working outside these disciplines, the commitment of the artist and the athlete is met with both admiration and incredulity. The novelist Haruki Murakami, who is also a marathon runner, articulates the shared ‘never give up’ approach of artists and athletes in his book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: ‘I have no idea whether I can actually keep this cycle of inefficient activities going forever. But I’ve done so persistently over such a long time, and without getting terribly sick of it, that I think I’ll try to keep going as long as I can’.²

Art and sport both occupy a politically neutral territory where supporters with different political views, and from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, can share their enthusiasm for a particular artist or exhibition, athlete or team. Leaders of our cities and countries have long recognised the opportunities offered by both pursuits to engage in soft power, a form of diplomacy that emphasises conversation over conflict. This kind of diplomacy is regularly practised in private boxes at the theatre or the tennis, at exhibition openings and at the footy. Art and sport each provide platforms of shared interest, on which sensitive issues and volatile situations can be discussed, and possibly diffused. Sporting and cultural institutions nurture their respective roles as neutral arenas for debate. The 2016 Biennale of Sydney, for example, was premised on the idea of exhibitions as embassies, as safe spaces for radical ideas and open debate. The most rigorously curated of the six Biennale venues was the Embassy of Disappearance at Carriageworks, where political works of art openly critiqued government strategies. These included a virtual exhibition inside the abandoned area surrounding the radioactive Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant that considered the 2011 disaster from the point of view of the town’s evacuees, and a photo-documentary project from Taiwan that exposed controversial government mismanagement and the consequent dilapidation of public facilities ranging from swimming pools to shopping malls.³

In 2017, the role of the museum as a kind of cultural embassy was the focus of International Museums Day, titled ‘Museums and contested histories: Saying the unspeakable in museums’, during which museums around the world explored their role as a hub for promoting peaceful world and interpersonal relations. The Museo FC Porto in Portugal ran bespoke tours of selected items in the museum that tell stories of contested histories, while Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture created a detective-themed mascot aimed at engaging children in the process of investigating uncomfortable truths behind some museum objects. Other institutions used the 2017 theme as a platform to promote existing projects on difficult subjects, such as Norway’s Vest-Agder Museum’s socially engaged research into the stigma and shame of living in poverty.⁴ In an era of shifting power structures and ‘fake news’, museums and galleries, like golf courses, provide a politically neutral space where difficult and contentious public issues can be considered in a measured