Yesterday ArtWranglers paid a lighting visit to Bermagui’s annual Sculpture on the Edge, and here’s the verdict of the drive-home jury: this furry “falling man” detail is from the work Pitch by Chloe Bussenschutt. While it may have been the least “sculptural” work in the show by traditional criteria, somehow its persuasive three dimensional illusionism and unlikely materials (carpet remnants, some branded “Tate Gallery”) has remained in our memory.

Elsewhere the good Burghers of Bermagui paid not the slightest attention to this flash (flesh) event by the installation artist Alice Fresco, who comandeers vacant plinths at events such as this. This work, Les Fillettes Mignons, is characteristic of Alice’s interventionist aesthetic.

In more relaxed mode, Suzie Bell and Berndt Weiss discovered this whimsical work Another famous cast for that Siren! by the photographer Wesley Stacey. If Wes was attempting to lure these water nymphs, clearly he was looking in the wrong direction! More tomorrow!

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Read and watch Turner Prizewinner and Tate Trustee Jeremy Deller’s account of his project at the New Museum in New York. Read also Jonathon Jones commentary on Deller’s similar (previous) proposal for the Fourth Plinth. That was a another car damaged by a bomb. This particular car “was destroyed in an attack on the crowded book market at Al-Mutanabbi street in central Baghdad on March 5, 2007. Thirty eight people were killed and hundreds injured.”  Feel free to use the comments function on this post…

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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…

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See all 66 photographs of the building of this crisp object. Looks like a stealth bomber. Is this the future of Porsche design, or is the architect simply dramatising the slinkyness of the building’s famous contents? The story on ArtDaily doesn’t say who is the architect… For that you need to got to the Museum site, where references to the Viennese architects Delugan Meissl is curiously hard to find…

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Read Christopher Hawthorne in the LA Times on the phenomenon of the crowd: Culture Monster: public space takes center stage. Photograph by Brian Vander Burg/LA Times.

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Some say all contemporary art’s a swiz: here’s an artist who appears to fully embrace the concept! From ArtDaily.org – go there to read the full story… but can we imagine such a work on the streets of Canberra? I suspect we don’t have a category for his sense of humour…

“The idea was simple but good. So effective that he convinced the presidency of the European Council, which this semester is headed by the Czech Republic, to give its blessing and the 500,000 Euros needed to finance it. Czech artist David Cerný promised the following: a collaboration between 27 artists from the European Community who would put forth their vision from their own countries. France was portrayed as a labor strike, Spain as a slab of concrete and Italy into a soccer field. [and jeepers, go to his website above if only to look at his bus stop!]

The only problem is that behind this work of art, which has caused great controversy reducing Greece to a huge fire, Romania into a Dracula castle, there is only one creative mind, that of David Cerný.

Czech Deputy Prime Minister, Alexandr Vondra, has confessed feeling “surprisingly sorry” after discovering that the only author of Entropa is Cerný and not 27 artists, as had been stipulated in the contract with the artist.

“David Cerný is the only person responsible for not fulfilling his commitment”, said Vondra, who added that the Czech presidency is analyzing what to do with the installation, which has already been placed at the Justus Lipsius builiding of the EU Council building and which was supposed to be inaugurated on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Cerný, known for his sculptures such as Freud hanging in the middle of the streets in Prague or for painting a rose on a Soviet tank, has laughed all along and said that he wanted to prove “that Europe could laugh at itself”.

Cerny, who also invented 26 false names of European artists that had supposedly collaborated with him, recognizes that he knew the truth would come out and says that economic restrictions and lack of time motivated him to do the whole work by himself.”

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Go to ArtDaily to read the full story. Seems we might need a new category: “ArtWranglers wishes” or “ArtWranglers misses” (that is, public art like this). And boy, what a photograph (EFE / Hans Klaus Techt).

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If you click across to Craft Australia’s online journal 716, you’ll find a nationwide summary of the state of public art in their October issue. You’ll also find ArtWranglers has contributed our own survey of the particularities of public art in Canberra, why it has become a political football, and we offer a solution! Climb on board, Mr Chief Minister…

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“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…)

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Chris Burden’s Child’s Play, reported in the Art Newspaper, is made (appropriately enough) from a million pieces of Erector Set in the forecourt of the Rockefeller Center.  From this angle Burden’s sculptural analogue of the archetypal skyscraper masks the real thing – an example of how artefacts in the public domain are enjoyed in the Big A. This has been the site of some great installations over the past couple of years. The point (sic) to be noticed in a public art project such as this is its anti-monumental quality: sure, it’s large, but that’s not what makes a monument a monument. What counts in projects like this is that it’s like an exhibition: you see it, you experience it, but if you don’t like it, you can relax in the knowledge it will go away. On the other hand, a public monument (as all Canberrans know) pokes you in the eye every time you encounter it, like an ugly building, or a stupid bit of road engineering: art rage and road rage are two sides of the same medallion. The transitory nature of such artworks is a lesson our local decision makers could well learn from. And speaking of medallions, this is what you see directly behind the Chris Burden…

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