Publications

Architectural dialogues

By: Jes Fernie

Jes Fernie reveals the process of enquiry that challenges collaborations between artists and architects.

Art is now anything you want it to be – a limited company, a shack between council houses, an oil painting, a pair of acoustic ears or a hoax planning application. It has leapt way beyond the gallery walls into the mess that forms our public space. After thirty years of flailing around in the dark (when art in the public domain was hijacked and used by politicians, administrators and bad artists as a pawn in the regeneration game) it seems that a growing number of artists are now sliding very adeptly between the two worlds of the gallery and public domain. To these artists, the term 'public art' as opposed to 'gallery art' is a non-starter; their work is situated where it needs to be, and for those artists there is no physical or psychological barrier between the two spaces. An area of this activity that has burgeoned in the last five years is collaboration between artists and architects. Where once the word 'collaboration' meant big-boy architects allowing the work of artists to be placed in their hallowed architectural spaces (Mies van de Rohe and Alexander Calder or Richard Meier and Frank Stella), now we see artists and architects forming dialogues which result in...

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