Increasingly, local governments at the cutting edge are recognising the need to carefully define their role in public art and more broadly cultural development.
Recently there has been a surge of vigorous and challenging public art produced in Tasmania. As well as creating their own opportunities, Tasmanian artists have participated in a wide range of projects facilitated by local and State Governments, festival organisers, corporate entities and private benefactors...engaging with diverse audiences, specific times and particular places.
Public Art, the Art for Public Places (APP) program, models for commissions and the matter of percent for art in South Australia. "Processes of development can be as important as the final products when trying to stimulate the field of public art."
RMIT project 'City Provoked' asked questions about the nature of public art emphasising 'new genre public art' - flexibility and responsiveness, specificity and topicality, innovation, challenge, engagement, unregulated encounter. collaboration, temporality and process rather than closure.
Challenging work, work that made some form of investigative observation about where we stand at this point in time was virtually not appearing anymore....In Adelaide and other cities, decorative design work, which is often very literal and subservient to conservative briefs, commercial interests, political agendas and restrictive models has appeared everywhere under the name of sculpture.
Book review Public Art Practical Guidelines
Authors Pip Sawyer, Malcolm McGregor, Robyn Taylor
Published by the Ministry for Culture and the Arts
September 1997
$40.00 + $5.00 p&h from the
Artists Foundation of WA
The Percent for Art Scheme in Western Australia uses an allocation of a percentage of the construction cost, usually one percent, of State Capital Works projects to commission artworks. The artist's role is to create works that are integrated with the building or the landscape.
Isn't it about time we showed artists and our public artworks a little more respect? We coaxed artists out of their studios to put their creative souls on public display, and now many of those life enhancing objects are looking unloved, forlorn and neglected.
The 'Art on Line' project initially conceived by Craig Walsh, involved the work of three Brisbane based artists - Wendy Mills, Keith Armstrong and Craig Walsh - who are perhaps better known as working along the experimental edge of fine art, rather than as 'community artists'.