Public: Art: Space

Gooding, Mel and Gillett, John , Roberts, Sara (ed.) (1998) Public: Art: Space , Merrel Holberton, 112pp.

Abstract

Public:Art:Space documents the rich diversity of public art undertaken over the last ten years by artists and architects such as Antony Gormley, Patrick Heron, Sir Anthony Caro, Susanna Heron, David Ward, Wendy Ramshaw, Pierre d'Avoine, Julian Fear, Jochen Gerz, Nicholas Grimshaw and Richard MacCormac, and with the involvement of Public Art Commissions Agency. Case studies of projects by more than fifty artists and artist/architects for over twenty different sites are illustrated (both realised and unrealised): they are described wherever possible in the artists' own words in extracts from their original proposals.
Public art, or art for a public space, is specifically commissioned, and its audience is the general public.
It presents a challenge. As this book explains, public art involves collaboration, often between artist, architect and public, as well as patron, and sensitivity to site and context. There has been a shift from the plinth sculpture and monument to public art as 'place making' More than that, as Mel Gooding concludes in his introductory essay, the 'new' public art "is neither authoritative nor comfortably affirmative: it is catalytic".
The projects illustrated here range from major civic and governmental commissions to artists' residencies, temporary interventions, speculative projects, schemes initially accepted but eventually, owing to changes of circumstances, shelved, and a commission taking this very publication as its site. Mirroring current attitudes in patronage as much as the ingenuity of creative practitioners, this book sets out to provide important evidence of the significant increase in dialogue and collaboration between artists, architects and commissioning authorities.

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