While we’re on the subject of public art…here’s something called the Big Art Project in the UK.
It’s a several-city public art project organized by a television station. (In the US, we fought the American Revolution so that we could break away from crappy stuff like this in order to watch “The Cougar.”)
In The Guardian this weekend, Arts Council of England strategy director Andrew Nairne called the Big Art Project a cliche-breaker, an assumption-destroyer—an experiment with surprising results.
This process of involving communities has thrown up lots of interesting perspectives and results. Unlike some of the other projects around, those local people have shown us that in their view public art doesn’t have to be big: St Helens is the only “traditional” project in this sense. It doesn’t have to be permanent: Greyworld’s murals in Burnley will eventually fade and can only be seen when a UV light is switched on. It doesn’t even have to be “art”: the project under way in Beckton, East London, has been a community-based intervention led by arts and architectural collaborative Muf, which includes a plan to make an old industrial waste heap itself the public art; And it doesn’t have to be by a well-known, established artist — none of the artists chosen are major UK names.
Nairne tells of how the miners in St Helens convinced artist Jaume Plensa not to make the great big miner’s headlamp he’d originally proposed, and instead to come up with this. It would be easy to dismiss Plensa’s gleaming white head of a girl with closed eyes as old-fashioned and sentimental. But isn’t there something to be said about an artwork that got better (which this inarguably did—a giant headlamp??) because a bunch of miners told an artist what they thought.
Very open-source, this project. On the flip side, it reminds me of Komar & Melamid’s Most Wanted Painting series, in which polls determined what the citizens of various countries wanted from their art (pictured: USA’s painting, selected to be the size of a dishwasher). Democracy in paint: can it work?
