NAN

Close proximity speaker, David Cotterrell gives his view of the pitfalls and advantages of work in the public realm.

When I elected to study painting at art school, I felt that I was making a conscious decision to choose autonomy and sole authorship at the expense of reaching a broader audience. I had mused over a future as a glamorous film-maker or a romantic fine artist. I felt that artists and film-makers had in common a desire to provide a commentary on the world they inhabit. Analysis, narrative and reflection inform a personal and perhaps idiosyncratic view of their context.

As a fledgling painter, I was confident that I had made a heroic choice to abandon the rewards and temptations of mass-communication for the philosophical and intellectual purity of the garret-based artist. Unfortunately, by 1995, after several years of happy melancholia, my momentum had begun to falter. The problem came to a head when I accompanied an Australian artist on a February adventure to the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the Canadian Pacific coast. Hopelessly naïve and ill-equipped, we camped, hitch-hiked, trekked and forded north along the islands through storms, rivers, forests and snow. We saw the Northern Lights, suffered frozen boots and experienced incredible kindness from strangers as we stumbled across remote survivalists and hippies. My problem was that confronted with one of the most moving and inspiring experiences of my life to date, I was ill-equipped to respond. Laden down with fuels and waterproofs, I couldn’t physically carry my canvases, oils and brushes with me. For the first time my vocabulary seemed limited and I felt that my language failed me. I wrote notes, drew pictures with numbed fingers on scraps of paper, photographed with 35mm, filmed with Super8 until the cameras succumbed to the cold and I was left with my thoughts and memories. Aside from being technically challenged, I realised that I had not developed the vocabulary or articulacy to respond to the experiences and issues that I felt warranted commentary.

Returning to Vancouver I had time to contemplate this experience. I resolved to allow myself to adopt a more flexible approach and to allow my work to venture beyond the studio and gallery. I eventually returned to my painting degree having left my paints behind and intending to dictate the nature of my future work by the demands of the conceptual agendas that I might choose to engage with, rather than my aspirations to fluency within a medium or language.

I found the public realm liberating. Perhaps through my own ignorance of this new territory, I felt unrestricted and inventive. I began to see the potential of the public realm as the intermediary between my early competing interests of filmmaking and fine art. Public art appeared to have the potential to contribute to a public debate – to reach out from the studio and gallery and to engage with society, while retaining an acceptable level of autonomy and independence. It was interesting to me that through my own personal angst-ridden search for a set of tools to facilitate a continuing engagement with fine art, I found myself inadvertently wandering into the unfamiliar genre of public art. I had seen public art as monumental but my experiments were increasingly not object-based. Public art had appeared to me and some of my peers as a compromised artform, closer to craft than the intellectual explorations of gallery-based work. Public art was, in my opinion, compromised by client, funding mechanism, conservative media and uncontroversial bland attempts to crowd-please. I was in an odd position of being attracted by the liberation, infinite variation and challenges of the public realm, while having no desire to be classified by the term ‘public art’. A perception (which I think has changed radically since my introduction to art education) that seemed common, saw public art along with community arts, art therapy and educational projects as a second tier of art-practice. In my mind, public art was frequently distinct from fine art. It involved different practitioners, aside from a few omnipresent stars, who were unknown to me. There appeared to be a tacit understanding that public art was frequently not subject to the same rigorous intellectual peer review and criticism as gallery work. Public art was made of steel, stone and concrete. It was the decorative sculptural distractions on roundabouts, attractive railings, mosaic and glass-brick schools projects and the odd mural. For those of us who might accidentally find ourselves in receipt of a public art commission, there was a worry that, rather like rugby players who were refused re-admittance to the Union after submitting to the commercial rewards of the League, public artists might never be allowed to return untainted to the coveted intellectual laboratory of the gallery.

Ten years later, the ‘artworld’ (or my perception of it) has moved on and my initial snobbery and ignorance has been contradicted many times. Public projects are as likely to be discussed within specialist art journals as within local papers and bewildered tabloids. Established artists have successfully retained respect within the commercial art market, while undertaking public projects which are integral to their practice. The Angel of the North has become a clichéd case study for regeneration and, despite initial press hostility, is now recognised as an object of desire for local councils throughout the UK. Organisations that were underground and alternative have been embraced by the art market and the artificial boundaries between public, museum and gallery artwork are increasingly blurred.

So it has all ended happily ever after. Critical discourse chugs along nicely, disciplinary boundaries are appearing ephemeral, ‘new media’ artists, as well as sculptors, are winning public commissions. Development agencies are queuing up to project video onto buildings and local councils are busy fund-raising to invest in the next transformational artwork to act as a catalyst for economic growth. Artists are seen as a magic ingredient in regenerating our decayed inner cities as vast sums of money are invested in the revamp of Britain’s tired and derelict urban centres. Masterplans are being developed, industrial ruins are being converted to art-centres, and art consultants are working overtime to help developers comply with the requirements of culturally philanthropic clients. In this context, it might be reasonable to suppose that the UK’s civic public realm is now a curated arena representing the best of contemporary art practice. Outstanding examples do exist of visionary temporary projects and seminal permanent works, however, consistently high standards are not evident, and bland, unchallenging and mundane solutions still contribute to the common vocabulary of public art.

So what are the causes for failure?

There are a number of recurring problems that can cause the widely varying quality of public art projects. Clients with limited experience of commissioning art, and a small number of art consultants dominating commissioning opportunities while promoting finite stables of well-tried artists both damage the potential for innovative, successful work. Clients want the elusive prestige, awards and rewards from a successful art project but are still essentially nervous about the ability of artists to deliver. Many significant commission competitions require artists to submit proposals for consideration at initial selection stage. While this is reasonable on one level as the client is considering a substantial investment in the artist’s work, the proposal process does mean that many public works are defined before the artist has had the opportunity to fully explore the project’s context, understand the audience and develop a first hand response to the site. The difficulty is that while local councils and private developers frequently want to replicate the success of excellent public projects, they are often under great pressure to be risk-averse.

There are dual obligations to ensure that art in the public realm is neither an empty gravy train for artists nor a tokenistic exercise for nervous developers.

At times I wonder if I have lost the autonomy I sought as I entered art education. The temptations of scale, financial backing, audience recognition and political debate can be associated with public commissions. The potential for corruption of our agendas is in every arena of art production from the international biennales to the collective artists’ open studios, but within the public realm the mediation of ideas from the artist’s vision to the practical landscape of clients, contractors, and user groups can be a challenge. Artists must be constantly vigilant to ensure that they attempt to assess the integrity of their own practice. In the face of increased opportunity and support, artists must exercise discretion and rigorously enforce a critical evaluation of every aspect of their work. Developers, clients, politicians and planners must refuse to accept mediocre, standard and tested cultural components to their schemes. Stock solutions, predictable shortlists and unchallenging briefs should never be the product of a consultant’s advice.

It is no longer reasonable to be congratulated simply for incorporating artists into design teams for the embedding of artwork within master-planned developments or for the commissioning of artists to develop process-based work. The caution necessary to coax the development community into cultural investment in the 1980s and 1990s is no longer justified. Powerful precedents now exist and cultural investment is often cited as a pre-requisite for economic growth.

Pre-Angel of the North, public audiences may have sometimes been assumed to be sceptical and media hostility was expected. Elected members were anxious about the possibility of the permanent criticism of wasting public money and felt ill-equipped or unmotivated to argue the validity of cultural spending. The result has often been not an abstinence from commissioning, but an apologetic muting of identity. Town centres are offered decorative advertising stands, derivative fountains or decorative railings to prevent cyclists abusing footpaths. Art projects, where they exist, are neutralised from criticism by denying the authorship of an artist. They compensate for their intellectual agendas by serving another simultaneous function. In a way this offers a position of retreat for the commissioner to a less contentious endeavour. Mosaic murals, glass bricks and shopping centre entrances become the new clichés of art practice. Decorative benches, ornamental lamp-standards and the odd up-lit building can be explained away by the argument ‘we had to replace the (insert street furniture here) anyway and this involved local schools’. The problem is that a good schools project could be just as well achieved in relation to a challenging public commission as in association with a functional one. The quality of the educational component and the level of community involvement is not dependent on the genre of artwork but on the combined talents and skills of the school-teachers, arts officers and artists. The quality of the artwork and its validity for the continual development of the artist’s career on the other hand can be significantly compromised by its necessity to be multifunctional. We don’t ask publishers to choose the weight of paper in their novel to allow for easy levelling of table-legs or playwrights to write plays which can also be used for management training exercises. The public realm as a legitimate arena for the exploration and advancement of culture must facilitate real intellectual searching. The pluralistic nature of Britain’s artistic community allows for diversity, sensitivity, engagement and stimulation within public projects.

Billions of pounds are currently being invested in attempts to redress some of the failures in the urban fabric of our post-industrial conurbations, the shortage of housing and the renewal of decaying infrastructure. The dedication of individual consultants, planners, artists and community groups has resulted in a situation where art and culture will be included in some of the economic plans tabled and consolidated over the next few years. In a sense, although not universally welcomed or adopted, many of the pre-requisite arguments that art has a role in the public realm have been won. The issue now is not to waste the money and opportunity. Town, city and regional councils now have the potential to act as some the most powerful patrons of British art. Rather than an apologetic and derivative approach to engaging with this challenge by understaffed cultural services teams, councils need to accept the responsibility and opportunity which accompanies this cultural role.

My short journey from painting to public realm has been fascinating and rewarding. In recent years, I have had the opportunity to begin to view first-hand the policy formulation and strategic planning that is necessitated by development and growth. I feel passionately that artwork has a legitimate role to play within the urban environment and that an aspiration to integrate cultural activity within the fabric of our towns and cities is not only a philanthropic gesture, but is a practical and necessary component in creating and supporting the soul and identity of our urban environments. I believe that whether privately commissioned, publicly commissioned, grant-funded, sold to a collector or made independently, artworks can be bland as well as strong. There will always be the potential for mundane, prescriptive work – in this, the public realm is no different to the gallery – but the abundance of new artists working across a range of media to realise communicative work is making this harder to justify. There now exist more opportunities within what was previously perceived as a ‘compromised’ arena to construct art work and projects of an uncompromised nature. The obligation is collective to facilitate a continuing meaningful role for this broad genre. New models of and frameworks for commissioning, a questioning and confident artists’ community and a respect for the society which recognises our continued significance, should be rewarded with an innovative and intelligent chapter in the history of the UK’s public fine art.

This article is part of a specially commissioned set of writing resulting from Close proximity, a NAN event devised by Jonathan Swain and Helen Sloan that took place at New Greenham Arts in Berkshire, 21-22 May 2005.

NAN facilitates exchange, dialogue, and collaboration amongst visual artists, whatever their practice and location. It offers a focus for critical exchange and feedback and through research and mapping seeks to develop greater awareness of the value of artists’ initiatives and of their changing professional needs. For more information about NAN go to Networking networks or contact emilia.telese@a-n.co.uk

This article was also also published in the November 2006 Good Practice publication Negotiating your practice.

David E Cotterrell

First published: a-n.co.uk September 2005