Mapping: Future:Public:

Art: Scotland

Ken Neil

Welcome to Ken Neil’s correspondent’s report on the Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland events which took place in Dundee in October 2010, through a partnership between PAR+RS and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee (DJCAD). PAR+RS is Public Art Research + Resource Scotland, Creative Scotland’s national public arts development programme. Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland consisted of three symposia, framed within a programme of artist-led actions and interdisciplinary talks.

Established in 2008 PAR+RS, an informed and impartial programme, aims to further the visibility of public art across Scotland and provide a platform for discussion and critical debate. It is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.  

PAR+RS is entering a new stage of development at a time of considerable change in Scotland and world-wide. The Scottish Government and Creative Scotland are placing high priority on talent and quality, place and audience, economy and equality. PAR+RS has a key role for all those involved in arts in the public realm as a forum for critical debate and a network supporting reflective practice.

PAR+RS events programme creates strategic discursive moments, and Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland was a key platform for artists and academics, policy makers and commissioners, community activists and project managers. Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland placed public art in Scotland in an international context, testing strengths and weaknesses.

Tracy Mackenna, Chair of Contemporary Art Practice at DJCAD, in her introduction to the programme of symposia, highlighted the need to,

“re-articulate the public realm as a context for interaction. Interrogating innovative forms of social involvement to ask how places provide for the needs of people, influences the growth of new types of space.”

Tracy Mackenna went on to frame the ambition for Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland, through collaboration between the art college and the development programme, to provide “...a tool for the development of new thinking through the creative exploration of issues and ideas.” The structure of the symposia reiterated the importance of the relationship between practice and research, providing a platform for the “...evolution of current debates surrounding the contested roles of artists and artworks in regeneration processes.”

Ruth Barker, PAR+RS’ founding producer, documented the events as they occurred, reporting in detail on each presentation and the subsequent discussions.

A correspondent is of course different from a reporter, and Ken Neil fulfils that other role, sharing with us his perspectives on key issues. He recognises that public art in Scotland is fundamentally intertwined with the political, with issues of identity, with what ‘public’ means.

For Ken Neil (drawing on Alan Riach and Sandy Moffat who in turn draw on Hugh McDiarmid) we are striving for a cultural renaissance in Scotland. A cultural renaissance means increasing public interest in culture, increasing art production. According to McDiarmid it also means resisting fossilisation, particularly by academics. It’s really not worth rehearsing the arguments for and against the subsuming of art education into Universities, but it is important to ensure that the voice of the artist is at the heart of critical debate and reflection.

A cultural renaissance is a public ambition, and consequently requires policy makers, communities, artists and art educators to rise to the challenge. A renaissance is a revitalisation, and it is the idea and reality of public that needs attention in Ken Neil’s analysis.

A cultural renaissance is also an ambition for strong creative identity. Ken Neil argues that the complexities of identity, entwined as it is with the local and the transnational, with diversity and economy, need to be understood in relation to the stories of places and communities and their temporalities.

We are very grateful to Ken Neil for his thought and care in putting this report together, as well as to Ruth Barker, founding producer of PAR+RS; Tracy Mackenna, Edwin Janssen and Graham Fagen of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee; and Sarah Smith of the then Scottish Arts Council, now Creative Scotland. We are also very grateful to all the speakers and contributors to Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland.

Suzy Glass (Trigger) and Chris Fremantle

Co-producers

A full list of speakers and detailed programme information http://www.app.dundee.ac.uk/vrc/mapping/

A pdf of Ruth Barker’s blog http://issuu.com/public_art_scotland/docs mapping_the_future_blog Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/ Creative Scotland http://www.creativescotland.com PAR+RS Public Art Scotland http://www.publicartscotland.com

1Introduction

2Public: Art

3Scottish: Public: Art

4 Symposium 1New Perspectives: Inspirational Approaches

5Symposium 2Scotland Now

6Symposium 3Mapping the Future

7Mapping Principles: Future

7.1Increase vital interest

7.2Counter fossilising tendencies

7.3Stimulate actual production

7.4Ecology of public art

1Introduction

This is a selective report on, and a discursive response to, the October 2010 colloquia, Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland; hosted by Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design’s Visual Research Centre, based at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Devised and organised with support from Creative Scotland by PAR+RS and DJCAD, the three symposia took stock of many forms of public art practice; heard from national and international practitioners & administrators; and drew directly from in-confer- ence discussions to set down speculative principles and recom-mendations for the future development of public art in Scotland.

Symposium 1: Tracy Mackenna introduces Chair, Moira Jeffrey, Jeanne Van Heeswjik, and, Tom Van Gestel.

Photo: Ruth Barker

Ruth Barker, Tracy Mackenna, Edwin Janssen, Graham Fagen and Sarah Smith, put together a tremendously stimulating series and many valuable points were made by speakers and attendees about public art practice in all its diversity and also about the ways in which such practices can be sustainably supported locally and nationally. Inasmuch, the symposia successfully met the organisers’ objectives:

Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland comprises three symposia and an additional events programme that will look at the future of public art in Scotland. Artists, designers, planners, commissioners, users and funders will present and debate good practice, and current issues. The outcomes will include the articulation of a way forward and a series of recommen-dations that will inform the development of imaginative and effective approaches to commissioning, policy-making, research and creative practice in Scotland.

My role as correspondent for the three events involved listening, note taking, conversing and, most importantly I think, identifying patterns and possibilities as they emerged across the presentations, questions, observations and debates. I presented an in situ summary of points at issue at the third symposium: that presentation is appended in full, and its principles are elaborated upon in this text and described in the conclusion.

A complete list of speakers and Chairs, with brief biographies, and a list of attendees is available from the website: http://www.app.dundee.ac.uk/vrc/mapping/. Ruth Barker compiled an excellent blog during the events, which is available as a pdf here: http://issuu.com/public_art_scotland/docs/mapping_the_future_blog. The report and critical perspectives offered in this document complement the invaluable detail captured and reported on the PAR+RS website.

Chair of Symposium 2, Alastair Snow, and correspondent, Ken Neil. Photo: Ruth Barker

As both report and response, the intention with this post hoc correspondence is twofold. First, alongside the PAR+RS information, it is designed to help ensure that the contributions made by all participants, including audience members, continue beyond the events and form points of reference for future discussions of what public art is and might be for Scotland. Second, by way of a critical and personal response, the essay will hopefully do some justice to the assembled expertise by contextualising and interconnecting the ideas and questions raised so that the live debates find their place in wider discussions, and that the posited recommendations might be better grounded. Tracy Mackenna, in her introduction to the first conference, used the terms ‘encapsulate’ and ‘forecast’ in describing the purpose of Mapping: this offering is a modest attempt to do a bit more of both on behalf of all participants and interested parties following what was an important milestone for Scotland in thinking about what public art is and could yet be.

2Public: Art

‘Public’, there’s no way round it, it’s a big word. And then there’s ‘art’: but let’s leave that one for now; public presents this report with enough of an opening challenge. Public is a word packed with significance and sentiment, and it is a charged word to be addressing through the sub-public mechanisms of contemporary academia with its attendant constituents and correspondents. Candidly, the colloquia did not face the word down. This was a practical evasion, of course, and forgivable, but it is also evidence, perhaps, of the strength of collective presumptions about that word. In some sense, ‘public’ can quite easily go without saying in discourse on contemporary art practice and policy, especially where public participation is central.

Now, an important point of reference for this document and for future planning work in this area is the erstwhile Scottish Arts Council’s Public Art Plan 2009-10. Creative Scotland will reconfigure that agenda in due course. It is a concise plan, and it too skirts the particularities of ‘public’ and related contemporary attitudes to same. Usefully, however, that document approaches the concept through a set of described spaces which might together encompass the where of the public: ‘living spaces, healing spaces, learning and playing spaces, green spaces and unexpected spaces’. The concluding section of this report returns to the Public Art Plan and the range of spaces it sought to address.

Meantime, in lieu of specific comment to report in respect of what ‘public’ overtly meant during Mapping, I am going to reflect on the significance of the word and on its given status in critical discourse. The press and political chatterati will remind us regularly of our disconnection from the actors and agencies of public life – and rarely to castigate us. Public servants, we might presume, are self-servants, and our sense of the public, our feeling for it, is that it has been taken somewhere by someone, hijacked by motivations which are not grounded on an appropriate service ethic. But any contemporary ennui is to be traced further back than any recent mucky collusion or public scandal.

Richard Sennett in his legendary book, The Fall of Public Man (1974) remarked on the scope of the disconnection between us (leave that word beside art for another time please) and a wider sense of public:

Most citizens approach their dealings with the state in a spirit of resigned acquiescence, but this public ener -vation is in its scope much broader than political affairs. Manners and ritual interchanges with strangers are looked on as at best formal and dry, at worst as phony.

Sennett ventured, and lamented in doing so, that few people could cope with the seeming strangeness and alienation of the modern urban space; the stranger for most is only a threatening character, to encounter one is to be in a public space outside the intimate, cosseting bonds of family: in cosmopolitan domains, in ‘worlds of strangers’;

A res publica stands in general for those bonds of association and mutual commitment which exist between people who are not joined together by ties of family or intimate association; it is the bond of a crowd, of a ‘people’.

And this potentially beneficial res publica matters little, of course, to the falling public man as he seeks instead the comfort of a sense of his private self, most commonly in the familial context, an antidote to the enervating public arena; self-serving and in-bred. Sennett charts the decline of meaningful public engagement using the retreat to the self as symptomatic touchstone. To take that jaded step back from the public is, then, to tend to the self, the psyche, and the modern pursuit of privacy. Sennett registers – with just enough sarcasm – the anti-social and anti-public scenario wherein ‘the psychic life is seen as so precious and so delicate that it will wither if exposed to the harsh realities of the social world’. This diminishing of the relevance of a constructive res publica is potentially disastrous for a civilisation undergoing inexorable urbanisation. As the sociologist, Lyn Lofland repeatedly underlines in her work on the unique intersubjective experiential qualities of urbanness:

…the city provides, on a permanent basis, an environment composed importantly of persons who are personally unknown to one another – composed importantly of strangers.

The worlds of strangers which make up the urban 21st century (and which manifest in the spaces recorded in the Public Art Plan) are the worlds wherein, according to Lofland in agreement with Sennett, the public can find its most fitting expression. This is because the individual is to greater and lesser degrees required to make public in negotiation with strangers their private inclinations and ethics. To that negotiated end, of course, the individual needs to efficaciously balance her burgeoning sense of autonomy with her sense of public virtue. Now, for contrast call to mind at this juncture any of those psyche-orientated artists of the 20th century who constructed introspective practices around the divination of meaningful selfhood. The conceit was that that selfhood can ever only be discovered by inward, autonomous reflection and, in turn, by an appeal to the same on the part of the beholder. The practices of Mapping situated as they are in the where of the Public Art Plan do not agree with the principles of that expressionist programme. Linked to the above acutely felt contemporary malaise, a second important aspect of ‘public’ presumed and not elaborated upon during Mapping was a certain degree of underlying suspicion directed towards the representative institutions of the public domain. This suspicion is not always grounded nor clearly focused, of course, but the suspicion, even if conditioned reflex, is always an intriguingly complex blend of personal, experiential recognition and readymade professional adoption (‘my respected cultural antecedents bequeathed it, thus it is mine’). And with this tacit underpinning the fall of the public moves closer still to the concerns of a great deal of recent practice which can be regarded without too much contention as public art. In other words, art practice which, on the one hand problematises the inwardness of expressionistic selfhood and which, on the other, challenges institutional formations. If Sennett is a useful point of reference in bringing to the fore the topical agonising of the individual over the ‘who, whats and whys?’ of the public on a psychological level, Grant Kester can help us see the creative doubt expressed by

artists and others towards those institutions delegated by nations and governments to serve the cultural wellbeing of the public. As he historicises the countercurrent which influenced so many of our discipline domains, Kester identifies a pervasive institutional critique which sought new forms and new conceptions of public engagement:

community during the 1960s and 1970s referred to sections of the public that were often alienated from the institutions of high art (poor or working class-class people for example). Artists seeking to challenge the hierarchical isolation of fine art, embodied in the conservatism of the museum and the commodification of art by dealers and collectors, felt it necessary to engage audiences in the spaces and routines of their daily lives.

In the United States, where Kester begins, this shift led to, for example, ‘the agitational, protest-based projects of Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG), the Black Mask Group, and Henry Flynt in New York’. These groups established a practice of pressure on public institutions, galleries, museums, banks…that were deemed, presciently, to have failed the interests of the public proper by serving first their own institutional needs.

Drawing on the energies of the antiwar movement and the traditions of fluxus performance and situationism, these groups staged actions outside mainstream cultural institutions…to call attention to the complicity of these institutions with broader forms of social and political domination.

Prime mover of the Black Mask Group, Ben Morea summed up the drive of many of these protagonists: ‘We are neither artists nor anti-artists. We are creative men – revolutionaries. As creative men we are dedicated to building a new society, but we must also destroy the existing travesty’. In the United Kingdom, as Kester goes on to point out, this democratising ‘everyday’ impulse was to be seen, for example, in the town artist schemes of the 1960s, ‘the community arts programs of the Greater London Council in the 1980s, and early projects supported by the Gulbenkian foundation’.

David Harding at Symposium 3, with Chair, Jason Bowman. Photo: Ruth Barker.

David Harding was present for the third Mapping colloquium and shared his unparalleled knowledge of those community practices which are driven in large part by the impulse Kester defines. In an article from 1995, commissioned by The Planning Exchange, Harding wrote about Public Art in the British New Towns, and furnished Kester’s analysis with some details in advance. In that article, reflecting on his time in Glenrothes, Harding pinpointed a particular cooperative project which exemplifies the points at issue here about the disconnect with a res publica which went somewhat unsaid in Dundee. Harding recollected:

On one occasion I contrived, with some necessary subterfuge, a situation in which tenants were able to choose the colours of their own front doors; an unprecedented act at the time.

Couple this scenario with Sennett’s observed self-protecting retreat from the public on a psychological front, and we have in concentrated form the deep foundations on which much contemporary public art practice is based. For here we have a local community, dissatisfied with the conventional public mechanisms for the production of living conditions so material to wellbeing, answered in part by creative and often surreptitious action, which allowed individuality to shine through, against the odds, and despite the formal channels which then governed planning and housing. In terms of negotiating the intimidating thing which is ‘public’, then, Mapping was implicitly orientated around the two perspectives sketched above; to recap: 1) the deep-seated psychological disconnect from the public as a viable concept which results in a tending to the private self, a dangerously significant opportunity cost, and; 2) the critique of the conventional institutions of publicness, and the adoption of counter- strategies in art making to redouble that critique of institutional complacency. Positively, in line with Sennett’s thinking, and in homage to Harding’s optimism, the public which went without saying during Mapping was a public in which the psyche, the self, can be developed and discovered, not at the expense of it, but through community sociality. Far from a stultified public domain where at best there is hosted the genial meeting of predetermined strangers, the public for Mapping was understood over the three symposia as a space of transformational power; one which serves a communal good by being in part good for individual self-creation to boot. Following its own logic of inception, Mapping construc-tively partnered with representative national institutions precisely to express a positive hope for collaborative ventures in respect of future public art initiatives in Scotland. And this was effected by way of an overt res publica in-conference as a method for discussion.

Damien Killeen, Big Things on the Beach, at Symposium 1. Photo: Ruth Barker

In respect of the cooperative nature of Mapping, attendee Damien Killeen (Big Things on the Beach, Portobello) reminded the conference that the virtuous cycle of, for want of a better phrase, creative sociality cannot be obtained without due care and attention paid to the resident citizen’s definition of, and dream for, public art. Future plans need to be informed intelligently and determined in part by the experiences of the audiences of public art, for all of the spaces identified by the Public Art Plan. Much recent topical debate about the impact of budget cuts on cultural activity rightly makes a similar case for the virtuous public potential of the arts. And this potential, of course, is not just found in the production of diverse things which might be showcased in public for the edification of lucky beholders: as Harding and Kester would stress, the potential is for the construction of a viable public in the first place. Francis McKee (Director, CCA Glasgow), in an article for the Herald Scotland, makes this case and reminds us all that the arts are essential to any nation’s sense of, and confidence in, public identity:

The arts, however, are not a luxury and the issue is not money, but cultural identity. The arts reflect who we are and how we live. They also allow us to imagine alternative ways to live. In the long decades after the first failed vote on devolution, the renaissance of arts in Scotland helped people see themselves differently. They bred confidence and created the cultural arena in which politicians could finally act.

McKee gives voice to a widespread lobby and points to highly positive dimensions of public art in a national context. Public art including, of course, contemporary subsets of participatory art, is a component part of that arena in which national expressions of identity can galvanise institutions and their elected agents to serve productively the expressed public need for cultural identity. A healthy public for a healthy nation can be instrumentally (and you must stop reading this as a bad word) supported by the strategic support for public art, and the relationships between citizen, publics and art practices can be improved and extended by virtue of the diversity of form and site of myriad public art. To return to Harding’s example, and to force the analogy in sum: just because it is individually alighted upon, the colour of my door is and is not a private business. That colour, and all that it symbolises in respect of determination of self in the world, is arrived at through a non-hierarchical social negotiation. Each different door is both a strengthening of individual identity

and of a public perse. Creative practice under the banner of public art frequently makes an extremely valuable contribution to the strengthening of both aspects. This was the positive foundational position demonstrated by Mapping: a starting point which chimes again with the earlier Public Art Plan.

We want vibrant, creative environments for the people of Scotland to live and enjoy. Public art can help us achieve this. We will nurture and champion Scotland’s Public Art nationally and internationally; supporting and profiling best practice across the country. We will work with key organisations across Scotland to champion, support and promote the role that Public Art can play in creating imaginative and stimulating places and unexpected spaces.

The contributions which Mapping received can play a role in what happens now with Creative Scotland and Public Art, as new strategies and structures are developed beyond 2010: carrying with them a constituency which might not otherwise engage regularly with creative production: a constituency which can negotiate constructively within a res publica for individual, social and national benefits. These deliberations are, of course, not distant from particular politics, as Sennett, Kester and Harding would tell us. A shift of attention from expressionist individualism to democratic plurality is a political move, although both modes can readily appear as stereotypes. The public art scope of Mapping was broad enough, commendably, to include big monumental public art-making of a conventional kind, but overall the practices cited and championed by Mapping were closer to the politicised New Genre Public Art practices of a Suzanne Lacy. As Lacy famously observed:

What exists in the space between public and art is an unknown relationship between artist and audience, a relationship that may itself be the artwork

For Lacy that relationship succeeds when the artist and the audience show the courage required to meet elsewhere than the conventional terrain of normative art medium or art gallery. And to develop relationships in this way is to practice a particular kind of politics. Miwon Kwon described well the political subtexts and surtexts involved:

Foundational to this rhetoric of new genre public art is a political aspiration toward the greater “democratization” of art (a liberal humanist impulse that has always fueled public art). Qualities such as pluralist inclusivity, multicultural representation, and consensus-building are central to the conception of democracy espoused by the practitioners of and supporters of new genre public art.

Some caution is required to temper this type of thinking, as Claire Doherty’s presentation made clear, but the point still stands that this kind of political inclination fits well in the wider Scottish cultural and political scene. What Mapping could not foresee from October 2010 was the political landscape in Scotland of May 2011. With McKee’s comments still in mind; with the requirement to revise and update the national Public Art Plan pending; and with the majority government now in place with more authority for Scotland than previously imagined, ‘public art in Scotland’ is

a multilayered project very well placed to build on and improve the relationship between artist and public and likewise between nation and public. The new government refreshed its commitment to the cultural life of Scotland in its Manifesto, and adopted much of the ethic of new genre public art in doing so:

With our undoubted talent, world-renowned festivals, rich heritage and linguistic diversity we have strong foundations. And, through the effective use of new technology and with the creation of new ways of supporting culture and artists, I have no doubt that the next five years are years of great potential. Scotland can and will flourish and, as we work to build a better nation, our artistic communities have a central role to play as the cultural champions of our nation, at home and in the world.

Before summarising the salient points offered by each symposium, it might be worth thinking on a bit about a Scottish backdrop to Mapping, while keeping in sight Sennett and Kester, and McKee. How might the ethic of public art practice line up culturally and politically with an ambition that could be in some way characteristically Scottish?

3Scottish: Public: Art

The colloquia constructively addressed, implicitly and explicitly, the above described issues concerning public art and there was a running concern for what national formations might be taken forward given the ‘existing Scottish expertise’ registered by Jeanne van Heeswijk in her opening remarks to the first symposium. With regard to the national dimension for the future of public art, Alan Riach’s and Sandy Moffat’s 2008 book, Arts of Resistance might help us introduce and structure some remarks in respect of a Scottish public sentiment relevant to this context. In a section entitled ‘The Manifesto of the Scottish Renaissance’, Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, considers the importance of Hugh MacDiarmid to the Scottish renaissance movement of the 1920s.The selected words which follow here, chosen by Riach from a 1925 work by MacDiarmid, represent a manifesto for Scottish culture, one which places an onus on any community with any pretensions about claiming and upholding a proud sense of a national publicness. The relevance of MacDiarmid’s words to this context is clear, so too, in turn, Riach and Moffat’s clarion call. The section from Arts of Resistance is worth including at length. Beginning with a quotation from MacDiarmid, Riach’s assessment runs like this:

The Scottish Renaissance movement sets out to do all that it possibly can to increase the number of Scots who are vitally interested in literature and cultural issues; to counter the academic or merely professional tendencies which fossilise the intellectual interests of most well-educated people even; and, above all, to stimulate actual art-production to a maximum. That’s from 1926. Imagine that you have a minister for the Arts, in Scotland, now whose sole directive was those points:

1. Increase the number of Scots who are vitally interested in literature and cultural issues;

2. Counter the academic or merely professional tendencies which fossilise the interests of even well-educated people;

3. And, above all, stimulate actual art-production to a maximum.

Any enervating public formations or practices, such as those identified and critiqued by Sennett, must be revisited and revitalised with the determination of a Ben Morea, to answer MacDiarmid. New structures for tending to the public dimension of a nation’s creative life must be brought into existence, or at the very least, they must be newly imagined. None of these three manifesto elements can be realised if we have a routine aversion for the self-construction (at individual and national level) which comes from an engagement with public sociality, and none of these three manifesto elements can be realised if we are not invested in the institutions charged to carry out these elements. Sennett and Kester would concur, as do Harding and McKee. From these collective foundational thoughts about the public, and with the prospect of reinvigorating public art in Scotland in Scotland’s name, Mapping set about its project. Keep in mind the three elements given by MacDiarmid through Riach and Moffat

through the summaries of the symposia which follow. Notwithstanding the emphasis on literature in MacDiarmid’s challenge, these elements can usefully host and connect the ideas presented in Mapping. The manifesto, as summarised by Riach, returns later to underpin the principles recommended here in the concluding section. The combination of MacDiarmid’s simple and powerful ambition with the specific recommendations from Mapping might help to point forward to a new round of strategic thinking and doing in respect of public art in Scotland.

4Symposium 1New Perspectives: Inspirational Approaches

Symposium 1, chaired by Moira Jeffrey, arts journalist, heard from: Tom van Gestel, SKOR Foundation for Public Art and Public Space, Utrecht; Jeanne van Heeswijk, artist/educator, Utrecht; Judith Rugg, art theorist, University of the Creative Arts, Canterbury; and Graham Fagen, artist/educator, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee.

Speaker, Judith Rugg. Photo: Ruth Barker

Tom van Gestel shared his insight into public art commissioning from his perspective as artistic leader and adjunct director of SKOR Foundation for Art and Public Space. SKOR operates on a national level, providing advice, guidance and financial support for the development of art projects in public spaces. It focuses on the interaction between art, sponsor, location, and the public, and in doing so establishes connections of relevance to new media, architecture, urban development and landscape architecture.

Van Gestel introduced delegates to a wide range of examples from across the Netherlands, and the ambition of the projects undertaken by SKOR was deeply impressive.

One such example was to be seen within a 1999 project commission for Friesland, a province in the North West of the Netherlands. A number of artists including Georgina Starr and Allen Ruppersberg were invited to create works which responded to the culture stories of a small part of Friesland called Ooststellingwerf. Job Koelewijn’s production was a viewing booth which allowed locals to see their familiar landscape within the frame of an epic widescreen.

For van Gestel, Koelewijn’s work effectively represented the intelligent playfulness behind much successful public art, and underlined the important role that such creative intelligence can have in reconnecting a viewing, or interacting, public with the immediate interest of their localities.

Van Gestel’s challenge to Mapping and to Scotland came by way of his praise for a national infrastructure for public art in the

Netherlands which retains enough centrality of administration to accommodate and sponsor risk, but enough devolved regionality to respond to local cultural particularities. Koelewijn’s piece captures that well – Dutch governmental cultural authority leads, through SKOR, to a heightened sense of regional place, and that ‘individual’ or localised ‘seeing-again’ bolsters, in turn, the public faith in the national institutional infrastructure.

Van Gestel was keen to stress the need for national organisations to be flexible enough to trust in longitudinal projects, a recommendation borne out in Harding’s experience in Glenrothes; SKOR takes pride in facilitating commissions which have an increased durational complexity.

Van Gestel made many more stimulating remarks to conference, but one final point will have to do here. He was adamant that SKOR, and any public commissioning body should confidently connect participants to the located interest of specific commu-nities. But commissioners should also strive to connect regions to the open and multifaceted perspectives of international contemporary art.

As well as sharing examples of an expansive practice, artist Jeanne van Heeswijk brought many very useful phrases to the symposia. In keeping with Job Koelewijn, van Heeswijk seeks to uncover local import perhaps overlooked through familiarity, and once discov- ered, she tries to ‘extrapolate and make bigger’ those significant details. This process, which van Heeswijk called ‘condensing trivialities’, is carried out by the cooperation of ‘multiple experts on location’ within ‘temporary fields of interaction’.

‘Amnesia of a Landscape’ Jeanne van Heeswijk icw Brechtje Schoofs, Paul Sixta, Aram Voermans,

Marten Winters, Marcel van der Meijs (area N470 2006-2009) Commissioned by Zuid-Holland and Kunstgebouw as part of Echt Zien,

kunst around the N470 (2009) Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

Photo: Bob Goedewaagen

In keeping with van Gestel, van Heeswijk stressed the importance of duration for public art projects, and with a view to countering tendencies amongst commissioners toward monumentalising, she cautioned attendees not to underestimate the power and permanence of the narratives which might emerge from interactional, creative moments. If artists can encourage citizens to ‘act up’ to take charge of the own surroundings, then new genre public art has continued impact and social effect.

Judith Rugg presented excerpts of her new book, Exploring Site Specific Art. Rugg made clear the culturally contingent nature of artworks which are sited, even temporarily, in public space. Hers was an appeal to the necessarily unstable meanings of such works, and as such, sensibly, it was an appeal which also profaned the artist’s authority over the location of intervention – not that artists are unaware of the limits of their powers.

With reference to the ‘acting up’ interventions of Germaine Koh, specifically the 2003 Sleeping Rough where the artist ‘slept rough’ in a sleeping bag during an event at the Toronto International Art Fair, Rugg made the point that contemporary public art practice carries forward Lacy’s project of leftist politics and social activism. Of course, as Claire Doherty was to observe in Symposium 3, there is a risk that certain contemporary public art activities wear the now-available-off-the-shelf garb of Lacy or GAAG, or the Black Mask Group, without investing in quite the same way.

Doherty warns against the ‘ornamental self-reflexivity’ of some of our current public art. That said, and whatever the force of Koh’s politics, Rugg is right to see public-sited artworks and inter-ventions as important arenas for the identification, discussion and correction of issues around inclusion and exclusion.

Graham Fagen ‘For St Agnes’, 2010.

St Agnes Park, St Pauls, Bristol. Image courtesy of the artist and Foreground.

Photo: Jamie Woodley.

Artist and educator Graham Fagen was the fourth speaker at Symposium 1. Fagen presented a persuasive account of the public art project as potentially a ‘social former’. To be this, public art has to reflect on a community so effectively within what van Heeswijk would call the ‘temporary field of interaction’, that it shapes an attitude or belief on the part of participants.

With reference here to Lacy, the relationship between public and art is the thing, and that relationship is the material which the artist himself forms as part of the process.

Akin to Job Koelewijn, Fagen spoke of an interest in those public-sited artworks which play with the status of art as distinct thing. Fagen experiments with public art objects, or objects produced through temporary fields of interaction, which do not declare their status in public. As the viewers in Koelewijn’s ‘cinema’ see finally that what they always see is actually art, what the residents of Glasgow’s Royston might see following an intervention from Fagen might very well be art too, without the framing of it as such. The everyday is the art and the art can take its place in the everyday.

Fagen’s work was also a useful touchstone for the conference to speak about the ways in which a public art project can enjoy an influential after-life by the dissemination of various products and by-products across multiple platforms and media.

5Symposium 2Scotland Now

Chaired by Alastair Snow, artist, writer and arts adviser, this symposium heard from: Clive Gillman, Director of Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee; Peter McCaughey, artist/educator, The Glasgow School of Art; Diarmaid Lawlor, Head of Urbanism, Art and Design Scotland; and Lucy Byatt, Head of National Programmes, Contemporary Art Society.

Clive Gillman followed Chair Alastair Snow’s lead by remarking that Symposium 2 was an analysis from Scotland, rather than one about Scotland from other perspectives. His opening emphasis was a corroboration of van Heeswijk’s identification of a critical mass in Scotland of practitioners in the area of public art. This critical mass, Gillman noted, is dependent on the multiple roles that many individuals play: commissioner, administrator, artist, policy maker, educator...and he counted himself as someone who wears many hats. Although it is not easy to manage multiple roles, Gillman said, the phenomenon is important to the cross-fertilisation of different fields of cultural endeavour in Scotland.

There was much insight offered about the difficulties artists and arts administrators face in navigating the protocols of funding applications. Correctly-motivated bureaucratic procedures of centralised administration can, as an unfortunate by product of the pursuit of fairness and parity, stifle innovation and risk. Gillman summarised this issue by asserting that there is often a gap between what artists and administrators do and what they are required to do by the surrounding, and supporting, infrastructure.

Another strand of this presentation was the explanation of tension between socially engaged art and public art – for Gillman, prefig-uring Doherty in a way, much public art does not have the ‘critical public service ethic’ which matches the intent of Lacy’s germinal new genre public art exemplars.

A clear concern for Gillman is the inflation which drives many regional and national arts commissions – the ‘Angel of the North effect’. Agencies and artists can fall in to this trap, and one unfortunate upshot is the production of work which resembles an ‘aesthetics of ethics’ but which cannot transmit effect in the constructive way that Fagen, for example, proposed.

A subtext in Gillman’s talk was the possibility that some appropriately-critical public service art might be lacking in terms of art’s capacity to be in itself ‘great’, but that idea didn’t get past Peter McCaughey, as we see shortly.

Clive Gillman, Symposium 2. Photo: Ruth Barker

In a prefiguring of Diarmaid Lawlor’s talk later in the day, Gillman talked delegates through the importance of the concept of placemaking in existing literature and policy on public art and design. A prominent example for Gillman is the US-based organisation ‘Project for Public Spaces’ which is ‘a nonprofit planning, design and educational organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities’. Public art is a key component of that kind of civic strategy, and, in tune with Snow, Gillman noted that Scotland was at an interesting point in its national development and use of public art projects to this strategic end.

Peter McCaughey seconded Gillman’s points about the multiple roles played by artists in the domain of public art practice, and stepped on from there to confirm that public art in Scotland is a very broad kirk, broad enough, positively, to accommodate some of the weaker faux-political pieces which Gillman had invoked, as well as pieces which operate more conventionally as objects of memorial in public space.

Peter McCaughey ‘Cultural Hijack, a reference map’ 2011

Image courtesy of the artist

In response to Gillman’s hint that some ethically sound projects lacked on a ‘greatness’ front, McCaughey persuasively told the conference that, given Snow’s and Gillman’s shared belief that Scotland is at an important juncture with public art, there is now a need to refresh the vocabularies which govern some of our thinking; McCaughey’s recommendation was to dispense with

‘default divisions and overused terms of reference’. The Public Art Plan, in fact, was similarly confident in avoiding unnecessary linguistic problems in its straightforward, broad usage of ‘public art’ in, to add to linguistic complexity, a ‘post-cynical’ manner.

Van Heeswijk was referenced in McCaughey’s thoughts on public art as a means by which the ‘easily missed’ is foregrounded and Fagen was referenced in McCaughey’s appeal to all viewers and artists to ask the question, ‘what is it that might be art that is not art?’

The talk by Diarmaid Lawlor was really the first of the presentations to grapple with the current economic downturn. Lawlor told delegates with no uncertainty that the ‘regeneration paradigm’ is over. Public art cannot survive by piggy-backing the grand-scale redevelopment projects of the last decade. Speaking of aspects of failed developments in Dublin, Lawlor reported that some urbanists are using the term ‘contemporary ruin’ to describe property and regeneration undertakings which have stalled, resulting in empty real estate which presently defies even the most imaginative programme of repurposing.

Impressive about Lawlor’s take was the refusal to be cowed by the economic situation. He asked repeatedly, ‘what is it that we really want to do’ in respect of community developments, and presented this as a question which was perhaps too often neglected in days of plenty.

More enigmatically, but in keeping with van Heeswijk’s tactic of ‘intensifying trivialities’, Lawlor borrowed from the writer Simone Weil in proposing that ‘whatever is most particular is most general’. And here there might well be a connection to the current post-May 2011 political potential of public art practice – as a way to, uncynically, connect heartfelt particularity to what might be called, following Gerry Hassan, a ‘big story’ about Scotland, one which might incorporate a powerful chapter on a new sense of public.

Lucy Byatt underlined Lawlor’s assessment, humorously reporting with a straight face that the days of grants of £250k for giant puppets were over. With van Heeswijk’s ethics as common denominator, Byatt observed that a crucially important part of relational and community practices comprises the preparation and process of the production of any final output.

Byatt raised a very interesting question about how we might newly access the activity of public art. How might the networks and sites of public art be better incorporated into the experience of public art? This rethink, she suggested, would include improved access to the sites of the monument and the ‘temporary field of interaction’, yes, but also the studio and the insight which might come from being closer to the artist’s working processes.

6Symposium 3Mapping the Future

This symposium was chaired by Jason E. Bowman, artist, writer and curator, and heard from: Claire Doherty, Director, Situations, University of the West of England; Venu Dhupa, Director of Creative Development, Creative Scotland; Tracy Mackenna, Chair of Contemporary Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee; and, Ken Neil, Head of the Forum for Critical Inquiry, The Glasgow School of Art.

Jason Bowman opened the closing symposium by referencing the wishes of the organisers to bring about real action in support of public art in Scotland. Bowman described this action as a ‘need’ and asked attendees to ask themselves ‘what they were going to do’ to assist the next steps in seeing public art thrive in Scotland.

Claire Doherty joined the conference by DVD, an augur perhaps of an inevitable increase in tech-mediated discursive sociality, a non-relational contribution. Doherty made reference throughout her talk to two broad categories of public artworks – the monu -mental and the critical. As mentioned above, for Doherty too many so-called public artworks have a complacent heart, they are too ornamental, either in form or in intent. Such works present a mock reflexivity, a phony democracy, and represent a mannered approach to public art practice which would disappoint a Morea or a Lacy for sure.

Citing by contrast the activity and lineage of the Free Art Collective, Doherty praised critical public art which manages to ‘irritate the complacent’, a noble task for artwork endorsed by ‘our own’ MacDiarmid and Geddes for contextual example.

Another warning was issued in respect of the forms of ‘false democracies’ which can emerge through even nobly intended ‘fields of interaction’. Just as Rugg’s theorism might disconnect itself from the material conditions and causations of the practices under theory’s relentless scrutiny, democratically structured interactional art projects might serve to belie actual conditions of oppression or occlusion around the site of public art activity.

With Doherty citing Debord and the dangers of the false togetherness of the spectacle, Anthony Gormley’s ‘One and Other’ 2010, came under fire. In Doherty’s model, this project was an example of false democracy and the unwelcome conceit, on Gormley’s part, of ‘the open field of possibility’.

Doherty had much of interest to say about the economic climate. Her worry was that public art would retreat to a design-build orthodoxy, whereby no risk would be accommodated in project budgets for SKOR-like ambition, and longitudinal commissions would disappear completely. As with Lawlor, the position was not defeatist, it was a call to arms to identify the ‘what is it we want to do?’, coupled with a pragmatic sense of how that might pan out.

Doherty advocated ‘epic adventures in public time’ and, in a generation of scarce resources, it was all the more important to make the interventions and interactions in public space as memorable and as critical as possible.

Venu Dhupa was present on behalf of Creative Scotland and as an individual who has supported art and performance for many years. Acknowledging that although it is still early days for the developing organisation, there was clarity and continuity of approach, however, in respect of the need to increase participation in order to improve the discourse on public art.

Echoing McCaughey, Dhupa was clearly in favour of public art as a broad kirk: it is an arena, she argued, which can be accommodating of a memorial to Brian Clough at the same time as a more poetic installation, such as Kapoor’s ‘Sky Mirror’.

A timely challenge was tabled by Dhupa when she called for greater innovation with regard to the measuring of the efficacy and value of public art projects. Perhaps more of the strategies and tactics used by the public artists who contributed to Mapping could be deployed in the answering of Dhupa’s call.

Core organiser, Tracy Mackenna spoke about both the strategic imperatives for public art in Scotland and about her own work with collaborator, artist and fellow organiser Edwin Janssen.

Importantly Mackenna brought the conference to consider the necessary changes that our institutions of art and design need to address in order to meet the changing landscape, shaped as it has been for decades now by new genre public art practitioners.

She drew attention to a couple of fundamental points about the conception of ‘public’: no artist is working somehow outside of public space, and, secondly, artists themselves exchange and share with each other as a public.

Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen

‘Ed and Ellis in Schiedam’

Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and the streets of Schiedam, the Netherlands, 1998

Photo: Tineke de Lange

The nature of that knowledge generated by public exchange is an interesting consideration in this context, and a driver for change in the art academy.

Given the economic climate intimated by a few speakers and attendees, it seemed appropriate for Mackenna to note that the economy of the artist had not been discussed in detail during Mapping, the sensible implication being that a revised national or strategic approach to public art in Scotland needs to be informed by substantive research into the material conditions of those creative practitioners who embark on complex projects, part-artist, part-manager, part-facilitator.

Acknowledging the ethic of public art - represented here in Kwon’s analysis - and, in turn, the ways in which that ethic compels the student to engage with the ‘intensification of trivialities’ beyond the institution, Mackenna in conclusion presented the conference and the art academy with some forceful rhetoric: ‘when we enter art college, do we step into the world, or out of the world?’.

7Mapping Principles: Future

As Riach proposed, imagine that the three directives from MacDiarmid were the primary drivers of the minister for the arts in Scotland. Those directives would do well as meta-principles for the next tranche of national strategic planning for public art in Scotland.

Towards that, the key points which emerged from the symposia from my vantage point as correspondent might be positioned within MacDiarmid’s framework: increase vital interest; counter fossilising tendencies; and stimulate actual production. If the diverse spaces for public art already identified by SAC strategic planning can be used to a maximum with these meta-principles in mind, then we can look forward with confidence. This can be asserted more readily now that the aspirations of Creative Scotland have been set down, as I mention in conclusion below.

The collective observations which follow can be taken to be a summary of Mapping’s recommendations to those agencies and artists, and everyone else, who are invested in this diverse field and its future contributions.

7.1Increase vital interest– Effective projects see ownership taken by communities

of their localities. – Placemaking of belonging needs to care for contemporary

context of unbelonging.– Artists share and engage with each other as a public. – Concentration on local particularities can lead to efficacy

of influence more generally. – Public art can connect localities to the world of contemporary

art with confidence. – Scotland’s infrastructure for public art is not as developed

as other European countries. – Process and preparation can be as valuable to communities

as material outputs. – Narratives can impact on memory-legacy as powerfully

as a monument might.

7.2Counter fossilising tendencies– Need for all interested parties to combine to create better

brokerage and advocacy for public art in Scotland. – Greater understanding of the centrality of duration is

required to inform new practice and new commissioning. – National discourse on public art needs to be enriched with

new languages of value and persuasion. – Artists and curators working in this field have rich experience

of working with project teams. – Multiple roles and capacities of artists can influence public

art projects on many levels. – Lobby against possible recourse in times of austerity

to design-build orthodoxy. – Normative terms are perhaps now divisive in mapping

public art practice.

7.3Stimulate actual production– Existing policy might already provide enough scope for

doing if we are clear about what we want done. – Old categorical dichotomies should be superseded in

a broad kirk of public art activity. – Innovation and risk can be supported by strong national

infrastructure. – ‘Angel of the North inflation’ is divisive in contemporary

public art commissioning. – Cognisance of cuts must not cripple imaginative project

work and policy making. – New ways of capturing impact and value of outputs can

be written in to new policy making.

7.4Ecology of public art

Summary slide from correspondent’s presentation, Symposium 3

The preceding key points are, then, the product of highly stimulat- ing discussions during Mapping and they can help to inform a national policy infrastructure for public art. The key points do fit into MacDiarmid’s challenging model, but they also attend to the three main components of what the conference called ‘a healthy public art ecology’, namely, good practice in respect of: commissioning, making and discussing.

My summary diagram from Symposium 3, within the appended presentation, is structured around these elements. All three are necessarily contextualised by the cultural history of diverse art practice in this domain, at home and abroad, and by the contem-porary political and economic landscape of Scotland.

In conclusion: Mapping was a landmark project, one which drew from the very best practices in Europe, and which gathered valuable input from artists, curators, administrators, educators and, of course, from viewers and participants.

It is a matter of fact, that there is a dynamic and highly skilled body of people working within this domain in Scotland, one which is looking forward to the future, to a new instantiation of a public art plan for the sector, and for the population at large. In the spirit

of engaged practice towards ‘consensus building’, to borrow one last time from Kwon, Scotland has a pool of expertise which is collectively determined to be an active member of that ‘community of experts’ which might be charged with thinking through the next chapter for public art.

All that the to-be-welcomed grouping of experts in public art in Scotland has to do is answer MacDiarmid’s tenets, for the reasons McKee summarised. This would be to make sure that contemporary public art in Scotland resonates on regional and national and international levels, supported by a structure which shares the same complexion and which shares the same ambition.

Creative Scotland’s recently published Corporate Plan for 2011-2014 forms a key part of the landscape for Mapping. The above recommendations taken together can play a part in seeing Creative Scotland deliver on the eight points of its given role, and, thus, its vision and values. The singular strengths within public art practice are very well placed to meet the intent of the Corporate Plan. As this report has been keen to show, public art has been for years successfully operating within the ‘where’ described in the earlier Public Art Plan, guided by a passionate, critical ethic concerned with access, participation, education and equality. Such a creative community of specialist practice should be a cornerstone in the building of a national answer to Creative Scotland’s commendable ambition.

The Public Art Plan 2009-2010 gave us an excellent guide as to the 'where' of public art, now, following Mapping’s lead, and in line with the aspirations of Creative Scotland’s Corporate Plan 2011-2014, attention can turn with confidence to the 'how' of public art for Scotland at the same time as our cultural history clarifies and reinforces the why.

Ken Neil