Open Proposal

Over the last few years I have been thinking about a different way of approaching the commissioning of public art. From my perspective, as an artist, the process of open submission, shortlisting and occasional success is a really frustrating, resource consuming process. Although it could be argued that nothing is wasted in the process, ideas are recycled, there is a sense of a missed opportunity. It can feel on occasion that the commission process prevents artists from making work, because they cannot think of any other way of attracting funds to produce the work.

With the current funding position this pursuit of commissioning opportunities is a zero sum game, there is little opportunity so artists, commissioners, art professionals need to think of better ways of working together to make viable public art projects.

With this in mind I have set up DPAP Wiki, http://dpap.wikispaces.com/Proposal, where practitioners are invited to contribute to a core idea, which hopefully they will be able to incorporate into their practice.

Beyond Angels, Elephants, good intentions and red-nose rebellion

I attended the 'Beyond Angels, Elephants, good intentions and red-nose rebellion' conference in Bristol today, as I understood it the reason for the conference was to think about the next step forward, in light of the current political climate. Some fairly well known but interesting work was presented by Sally Tallan from the Serpentine, Mark Ball from LIFT, Andrea Schlieker, chaired by Paul O'Neill. Of real interest was the work, or more importantly the ambition of projects curated by Briggitte van der Sande, who joins an elite club of curators who have designated seemingly successful projects as failures, in spite of the pristine, context free presentation aesthetic of Powerpoint.

Whilst enjoying the conference I also think that it failed to address the malaise which already existed within public arts and which will/has been exacerbated via the current economic and political climate. In fact I would argue that presenting work in this pristine manner is part of the problem, the collaborators upon whom these projects depend are all but absent, which, in part, impacts upon the discipline and rigor of public art practices, further contributing to Public Arts not being taken seriously by the mainstream art establishment; something alluded to by Louise Owen in her talk about publics.

Furthermore, in using the same methodology to present collaborative, socially engaged works, such as you would to present gallery works (yet simultaneously not showing these works in a gallery, as is the case with the Serpentine) much of the discursive nature of public arts is lost.

This position was typified by the breakout session about 'regeneration and planning', where Gillian Fearnyough listed a set of public realm bodies and agency to whom public art practitioners could appeal for funding: yet anyone who has worked in this sector for any amount of time will know, these agency in the main - developers, planners etc - were reluctant to enter into meaningful collaboration when funding was plentiful, now there isn't any funding one is minded to ask what is the point ? It strikes me that one role of a critical public art practice in these so called 'austere' times is to act as critical buffer against all this talk of 'place making' and the 'bespoke' architectural features of developers, not negate the hard won experiences of the last ten years in allowing a co-option by a conservative agenda. We don't need permission from these agencies to make work, especially when there is little being offered by these agencies.

Maybe it's time to adopt a different methodology, perhaps from digital network practices, whereby P2P or collectivism invokes a much less hierarchical model of production than one that's either in hawk to the art market, such as is exhibited at the Folkestone Triennial or one that operates, in the worst case scenario, as a creative contractor within a 'place making' team of professionals.

Public Art DB

Just came across this old posting - kinda relevant:

http://blog.okfn.org/2011/02/01/art-open-data/

Bus Tops - Viziters

Just updating myself with Bus-Tops, the digital public art project being produced by Artists Alfie Dennen and Paula Le Dieu. I have just selected my local bus stop as the site of one of their Viziters.
Reading through their blog entries the artists seem to imagine the screens as an organic network, with each screen having a set of intelligences:

"Each Vizitər will be a totally distinct being. Each will have an artificial intelligence which will let it filter what comes through it’s sensorium (the art people make and send to it) and make, to some extent, it’s own decisions on what it prefers, over time."

mmm not sure about that, is it no enough just to have a network of publicly accessible signs, the new digital public realm and all that ?