…is that it’s very sticky. Once it’s there it has to stay there. So what’s the issue for the citizens of Canberra in relation to this next round of highway artefacts? Simple. That whoever makes the choice knows something about art. NOT the bunch of poets and architects who’ve exercised their taste so far. What are we to do? Let’s compose some letters to the CM which might have some useful political effect – so that we can all enjoy the experience of driving home… And then let’s hope we get something that a Jeffrey Smart wants to paint!

Here’s the letter I’m going to write – I encourage readers to do the same… (If you do, feel free to post it in comments)

The Hon. Jon Stanhope, MLA.

Chief Minister, Legislative Assembly, Canberra, ACT

stanhope@act.gov.au

Dear Mr Stanhope

I am writing in regard to your announcement in the Canberra Times (16th May, 2009) in relation to the decision to commission three gateway sculptures for the highways into Canberra.

The decisions your Government will make will affect the image of Canberra in perpetuity. It follows that the aesthetic decisions we make must stand the test of time, and be the result of the highest level of expert decision-making that it is possible to engage. These sculptures will become the badge by which Canberra is recognised. See, for instance, The Melbourne Gateway. I would like to make the following three observations which may assist you in making these crucial decisions.

1. I do not believe that those entrusted with the recent round of decision-making in relation to public art commissions have the appropriate background or expertise to make these crucial decisions.

2. I suggest you appoint an advisory committee of (say) three persons which draws on the significant pool of visual arts expertise present in Canberra and interstate. Curators with the specific expertise and a track record in the area of sculpture could be drawn, for instance, from the NGA, CMAG, or the AGNSW. These should be people with a wide knowledge of public art elsewhere in Australia and internationally.

3. You are correct in suggesting that the process of commissioning a work of art does not best proceed by applying the same criteria and processes as for (say) a rest stop, or a playground. Works of art, or proposals for the same, should proceed by invitation, adequate payment for concept drawings, and a commissioning process which does not cripple the project by including the costs of landscaping and other amenities, and the costs dealing with the multiple government agencies which result from the commissioning process.

I wish you well in arriving at an appropriate process, and an outcome of which we can all be proud.

Your sincerely

My name

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David Pope in Wednesday’s CT seems to have got the picture. There was potentially another cartoon in this story – the one where you couldn’t see the earless Chief Minister for the smoke from the burning Centenary Monument. A bit like short-listed sculptor Clive Murray-White’s early work, something a politician would understand. But Pope has caught the real issue here: canning the Monument was an excuse to remove the 1% policy to satisfy the interests of developers. Read more…

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you wouldn’t get away with anything like this in downtown Canberra! Far too challenging…

This is a work by Subodh Gupta, Nature Morte/Bose Pacia in Basel, where this summer the Messeplatz, sited directly in front of the buildings hosting the 40th edition of Art Basel, will once again become a stage for art projects in the public space. Eight works by internationally renowned artists Valentin Carron, General Idea, Mark Handforth, Jeppe Hein, Gabriel Kuri, Mathieu Mercier, John McCracken and Ken Price will be installed. Of course the advantage is that a project like this turns the city into a gallery: as we’ve argued before, temporary public art is a lot easier to live with…

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…on the quietest media night of the year. So whispers a politician when he uses a potentially unpopular policy on public art  to scrap both the $1m centenary monument plus the commitment to the 1% for public art policy. It’s the wrong time to be spending $1m on a single work of art, says Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, invoking the global financial meltdown. How different was the story announced on February 3, 2008, when the shortlisting process was in full swing. Since then, the philistines have had him by the ear, and the combination of the backlash against public art in general, plus the underwhelming quality of the contenders for the monument has buried the idea of a arts splurge. How much this will effect ongoing spending (have two policies been killed in the same announcement?) remains to be seen.

Reported tonight on the ABC, the overall budget for public art will also be capped at $1.2m, but you’ll have to wait until someone’s back at work on Tuesday to read the details in a press release. Or rather, that’s where it should be: this is the original release I found when I resorted to Google…

ArtWranglers has long assumed the monument was a dead duck, in a city full of the little blighters. And so we can confirm – ArtWranglers’ nomination in August 2008 for a Readymade Monument (above) which has already been in place for 20 months – is hereby the frontrunner for Heritage Listing. Meanwhile, what opportunities are being lost? Surely all it needs is confidence, good advice, and some good stories to go with it to achieve some really Inspirational Objects.

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This weekend Paul Keating strikes back at last weekend’s puff piece about Director Craddock Morton’s own account of the limitations of the National Museum of Australia. As you might expect, Paul can’t help a bon mot or two, describing John Howard as “possessing the cultural and artistic sensibilities of a filing cabinet”, as he gives his account of the decisions made on his own watch. “The salient point, however, is that having brought forth a lemon, the principal advocates of a museum of Australia are now setting up the apologia for its failure”. For our part, ArtWranglers has been more concerned with the micro than the macro: read back along the thread.

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A wag replied to my last post about highway art by referring to it as highway robbery. Well, we don’t want to characterise all public art as still-born, do we?  So click across to glasscentralcanberra, and see what you see beside Melbourne’s freeway travelling down to the Mornington Peninsula…

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looms over Grange House and Park in downtown Toronto. The break-out staircase, nicknamed “the barnacle”, is on the back wall of the new galleries of the Frank Gehry (re)designed Art Gallery of Ontario. Clearly it was not enough for FG to simply clad the “back” of the building in titanium or stainless steel. No matter how well it might frame the original 1816 building, it seems that even the back wall also has to say something about the interior life of the building. And the view is apparently quite special! We like it just as much as the other more spectacular details of the front and interior of the AGO we’ve posted previously. Add Gehry or AGO to the search box and you’ll see them all. Thanks to Max for the image and info… (For lots more, go to Craig James Whites’ photostream on Flickr).

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Yuri Wiedenhofer, the inspired/inspiring ceramic artist who lives on a mountain behind Tanja, the man who milks death adders for a living, ran into some more mundane challenges when he tried to build his fire sculpture on the beach at Bermagui. This was to be the culmination of Sculpture on the Edge, but the censorious local intelligentsia got in the way. It was planned to be a much more ambitious affair, with bottles, sea grass, and offal, but the locals had apparently had enough of high culture for one week, and so his materials were edited during the night. Even so, the show went on, and thanks to Chris Polglase for the pics…

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See Maryam Rashidi’s post on TransitLane in response to an earlier post on ArtWranglers.

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When a journalist asks you to explain why sculpture festivals like Sculpture on the Edge are worthwhile, you’re put on the spot. Sculpture, like any of the three dimensional media, are harder to appreciate than the pictorial arts. They’re lumpy, and big, and heavy, and you need plinths or hidden bases to put them on. So you need to make special efforts to organise for them to be seen. Otherwise you would never get an idea what’s going on, because you only ever see them one at a time, like bits of jewelery, as decor in our social spaces. Think of the uproar when a sculpture gets plonked beside a freeway…

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