Two things come to mind: was it absolutely necessary to paint this building in emergency orange? And why, when sculptures in the public domain attract such controversy and opinion-venting, why is it that such garish examples of poke-in-the-eye ornamentation pass without comment? Surely both are public artefacts, both exist in public space, both have equal capacity to attract or repel? Where are the architecture critics when we need them? Talking to their lawyers? P.S. Trying to track who were the architects, we came across this little Photoshop “Toy-ota” gem… pity about the lawn…

“We don’t need no Monumenta, we don’t need no art control, [there's] no dark sarcasm in this city…” So sang Pink Floyd on their last visit to Canberra, to coincide with the infelicitously named Floriade Festival. Floriade was closed yesterday for Health and Safety reasons, and today we understand why. Among the half-repaired sparkly lights, the Custodians of Aesthetic Health have gazumped the yet-to-be announced Anniversary Monument, with their own monument to high kitsch. Take a detour. Go underground! Anywhere but! (At least it’s temporary…)

Photo: Volker Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images

The toilets at the Rosenmeer restaurant in Moenchengladbach, German, on Monday. The urinals, created by Dutch designer Meike van Schijndel, have been criticized as being offensive to women. Much of Rose Selavy’s oeuvre (R Mutt’s better half) might be equally vulnerable to this kind of critique, were she not a woman, n’est-ce pas? Disorientated? R Mutt’s (oral) history has just been given a new twist, although functionality adds an unforeseen dimension…

We now realise that this diminutive “monument” has been in the centre of Canberra for nearly a year. Would you believe we first posted this as a Public Artefact in August last year! This Ode to Marcel Duchamp is the clearly the readymade solution to the Monument dilemma. ArtWranglers has nominated it for heritage listing, and no doubt it will be registered on the National Estate as THE Northbourne Monument. See our previous Open Letter to the Chief Minister on the issue…

Well, actually, it’s a small miracle nobody has tripped on it and sued the A.C.T. Government for enough $$$ to build the big one… But as we’ve often noted, it’s a no-man’s land between the Melbourne and Sydney buildings.

In relation to the missing Million Dollar Monument, our spies in the corridors of power tell us the short-list has been reduced to three, there’s a miniscule additional fee provided for resubmission of the contenders’ proposals, and guess what? The new due date is October 1st. So we’re unlikely to hear anything before the election! No controversies in October, please!

They make carpets in three dimensions in Kabul – but I didn’t stop to ask about the rental. Narcomansions is the term coined to describe these… Damn! I’ve run out of adjectives…

Who said blogs didn’t have impact? Illumicube (see previous post) has now been moved to align with the axis, and it looks a lot better, don’t you think?

Here’s a candidate for ArtWranglers Design Aesthetics Index category, wherein we will notice examples of Architectural and Urban Design, and provide a ranking system to provoke critical debate amongst our readers.

In instances like this example of a new apartment complex in Lyneham, we begin in negative territory. This is the least meritorious example we have seen of the architectural solution to global warming, here expressed as a feature by placing both the heat exchangers and the hotwater system on the front balcony. But clearly the design decision process in this case was more like “hell, let’s really compromise the amenity and appearance of the north-facing balconies, and put the hot water system there as well!”

This follows a number of prior design decisions: 1. design a building that needs airconditioning. 2. provide a non-solar electrical hot water system, and 3. avoid the cost of a designed solution to where to put them. Imagine the pride of the new owners in the appearance of their investment, and the way it advertises design integrity issues facing all 21st century buildings. Imagine the pleasure of sitting outside on a hot summer evening, made hotter and noisier by your neighbour’s heat exchangers. Imagine.

A ranking below 5/10 also qualifies for the Avert your Eyes! category on ArtWranglers. With this first example we establish the 0/10 benchmark.

Some city-planning genius has just placed this popular public sculpture – the infelicituosly named “Illumicube”, 1988, by Kerry Simpson – in a nicely asymmetrical relation to the super-symmetrical eastern facade of the Canberra Centre. And, with even greater vulgarity, it’s about five meters from the WBG sacred geometry of the Ainslie Avenue land axis.

While we’re not an advocate of the aesthetic merits of the work itself, or the architecture it adorns, it now has a longish history in the Canberra landscape, and more people seem to like it than dislike it. And it’s the most unlikely memorial in this city of dismal memorials. At least nobody died to provide the excuse for its commission. Its sound-responsive lighting innards now interact sweetly with the pedestrian crossing buttons. For better or worse (for richer or poorer, adding insult to injury) whatever we thought of its aesthetics, how offensive to the eye is its placement? Minus 9 to the planning person concerned…

On Sunday I was sweeping around the Barton Highway cloverleaf and I got the second fright of the day! This “sculpture” (it must a sculpture because it has a title: “Rhizome”) nearly caused me to lose control. It transpires this design object is one fifth of a five part commission won by the high profile “artist/architect” Professor Richard Goodwin (CoFA, UNSW), who specialises in highway art, and has won many similar commissions in Sydney. I’m told (yet to be confirmed) that the O’Connor Ridge Gungahlin Drive Extension commission cost us $750,000.

Well it’s not popular, if the letters pages of the Chronicle are any measure.

But must public art be “popular”? It depends on its status as art. But this series of commissions fails in both senses. It aspires to the status of art, but isn’t, and therein lies the source of its failure. If it’s highway decoration, (a “sculptural marker”) and maybe that’s all it is and we can all relax, and bear the expense. But when it gives art a bad name, in that sense we’re all a little worse off.

Why are such objects not art? Let’s begin with “Rhizome”. The ambiguous status claims of this particular object as a work of art is an interesting topic of speculation. It’s claimed that it is inspired by a bunch of native grasses. But it is made out of bent steel RSJs and other steel sections. This choice of materials invokes a very specific art historical heritage, and it has to be judged against the standards of its own genre. Those who have been following the course of 20th century sculpture would be well aware of the downs and ups of the Caroesque school of formalist (usually steel, usually coloured) sculpture since the 1960s.

This is the charismatic school which evolved worldwide following the influential style of Anthony Caro’s early work, annointed by critic Clement Greenberg as the most painterly form of abstract sculpture, and therefore the best. This particular style remains the primary source of corporate and public bling and is enjoying a resurgence in this country. You can follow its influence in art schools in Australia through four or five generations in the wake of the local guru Ron Robertson-Swan. It is a style characterised by assemblage and the articulation of abstract coloured forms in space. Often the off-cuts of industrial and construction industries provided the raw materials. Earlier generations tended to use found steel forms, later generations tend to design their elements to approximate their antecedents, forming their elements from new steel construction materials. As in this case we’re even denied the simple pleasures of nostalgia – that primary motivation of so much of contemporary art.

Why does Rhizome fail as art? To begin with, its sheer size and location poses particular challenges for the artist. Scaling up for public art settings, while at the same time preserving the sanctity of the object as a work of art, has always posed problems for this kind of artist. Within true formalist aesthetics, this kind of sculpture should be an art of distanced appreciation. In this case, glimpsed from behind a car windscreen at high speed, is not a conducive context for contemplative engagement! Adherents to this mode of sculpture eschewed the plinth in favour of the floor plane. But this time! Yikes! the earth has tipped 45 degrees!!! It would be an art historical joke if it were not for the scale of the commission and the claims made of it.

As highway art, the most logical reactions to the piece are: has there been an accident, or, will it fall over and crush my Daewoo as I drive past it? No Willa, it won’t fall over, because as we nervously asked this question at 80km/hour, we also sighted the millions of bolts holding it to its 45 degree slab. Which may be its most innovative claim to the the status of art. Now this would not be relevant if it weren’t for the perennial sculptor’s question of “how does the piece sit?”. Sculptors always worry about the interface between their work and the space around it, how gravity works on the forms, how the object sits or floats or otherwise challenges the laws of its place in the world. We do, after all, relate to sculptural objects on a body-to-body basis. It’s the same with painters when they “read” the edge of a painting, or its frame, to learn about the artist’s methods and intentions… So these bolts also tell us something… Something rather mundane.

With highway art, we relate to the work in quite a different way. We have become mechanised bodies hurtling through space, we see the world through windows, in our own special time-space continuum. That’s why we found the millions of bolts so reassuring – it signifies that the artist/designer/architect person has realised we might be nervous, and has gone out of his way to reassure us. Relax! it says – this is not art, which might challenge your equilibrium (as good art should), it’s bolted down.

But, Professor Richard would argue, it evokes grass, and that grows on the sides of hills. So we must re-assess the work as semi-abstract, with a nod towards representation. In which case the choice of materials is an aesthetic bet each way. For us, you can’t have it both ways. Either you read it as an ode to post-industrial abstraction, or it’s a sensitive evocation of the local ecology. It’s a hoot, you’ve got to see it! But keep both hands on the wheel!

And later, when you search on the net you find a press release published by the Orwellian Community Engagement Unit of the ACT Government, and you learn a lot more. This chillingly cautiously worded document informs us that Rhizome is in fact one of five parts, it’s based on native grasses (like our front lawn) and that it’s (wait for it) a “sculptural marker”! And it’s there “to enhance the driving experience and better integrate the road with its natural setting”. So its aspirations to the higher order values we expect of art are shot down in its own clumsy press release!

Down the track (as it were) we’ll review the next elements of this “suite of public artworks” along the highway/fire break. But first let’s see if we can find out who commissioned it, whose decision it was, shall we? And stand by for the million dollar commission for the gateway sculpture (another “sculptural marker”) at the south end of Northbourne Avenue. In the meantime, this sad neglected little “sculptural marker” has been sitting in Northbourne Avenue ever since we first drew your attention to it in the centrophobia post some months ago…

And here are the images which go with Penleigh’s comments below…