Asian Public Art News

The Wall St Bull - great public art photo illustration by Ji Lee

2008-11-16T15:10:00.002+08:00

This illustration by Ji Lee accompanies an article by Michael Lewis in Conde Nast's Portfolio. It's a fine illustration, messing with an iconic piece of art. And it allows me to connect this public art blog and the compulsive reading I've been doing on financial crisis and economic slowdown...

Singapore Biennale in the public art biz - a win-win?

2008-09-08T11:37:00.005+08:00

In 2006, Singapore's Biennale organizers used the pulpit of Singapore's first Biennale to secure a series of public art commissions for VivoCity - major shopping center development. This approach continues, as an article in Friday's Business Times reveals. Relevant bits below:

"In fact, the Singapore Biennale committee is banking on the event to boost the city's public art scene in a way that people can still enjoy the works of some of the Biennale artists long after the event is over. That is why they are working to match artists with prospective 'clients' such as property developers to commission artworks for new buildings that the public can enjoy.

Win-win situation

'Part of the Biennale is to secure public commissions so that the (public art) landscape will change quite dramatically with each edition (of the Biennale),' explains Low Kee Hong, assistant director (visual arts) of the National Arts Council and general manager for the Singapore Biennale.

'Working with developers is a natural fit, since that enables artists to work closely with architects for new buildings. The advantage is that the artwork can interact intimately with the architecture,' he adds.

The win-win situation is that the Biennale gives developers access to different artists, local and international, most of whom are up-and-coming if not already established. These public sculptures and installations will act as landmarks and navigation points for malls, says Mr Low, likening it to Tokyo's Roppongi Hills where one can rely on public art to navigate the area.

'For the commissioned work this year, we're working with two developers: Sino Land which is developing Fullerton Heritage and its sister company Far East Organization, which is building Orchard Central mall,' says Mr Low.

Orchard Central will have the biggest commission to date, budgeting $10 million for 12 artists to come up with at least 12 works. Fullerton Heritage has commissioned two artists for the first phase of its development.

For this Biennale though, only the two works at Fullerton Heritage - by Frenchman Daniel Buren and Danish Jeppe Hein - will be ready for viewing. The pieces for Orchard Central will only be unveiled next April when the mall opens.

In 2006, Mapletree Investments commissioned a collection of 13 art pieces for VivoCity, at a cost of $1.5 million."

Anything to educate property developers on the possibilities of public art would seem like a very good idea. However several questions come to mind.

How does this activity, of matching developers and artists, work with (or against) the curatorial project of the Biennale?
Is this activity meant to make money for the Biennale?
Is the Biennale now competing with the small group of curators and gallerists who work to secure public art commissions in Singapore currently?
And my hobby horse, what is the Biennale's approach to the process of commissioning public works?

Graffiti

2008-05-25T10:13:00.001+08:00

Graffiti
Originally uploaded by melisateo

Melisa Teo is a book editor who's also a very happening photographer. (Just follow the link to her photostream to see what I mean). Here's a shot she did in Singapore. So tagging could be very cool, if we all had Melisa's eyes to see it... Or at least there's one tag out there that in the right light looks just perfect. I'm guessing this is back of Ann Siang Hill.

Singapore at the Cans Festival

2008-05-05T13:55:00.001+08:00

Uniquely Singapore style fascism
Originally uploaded by WowtheWorld

With all the press hype over the appearance of Singapore films at the Cannes Film Festival, it's a bit disappointing that a Singapore-related entry at the Cans Festival didn't merit a mention in the Straits Times. But here it is... nothing subtle about this!

Public sculpture in the way of retail experience? Off with their heads!

2008-04-19T19:15:00.006+08:00

Look what they've done to my sculpture, ma!

How to react to these latest images from Orchard Rd (by MMS from Lucy Davis)? Can they just speak for themselves? (Maybe not, as the figures appear to have been muzzled). Shall I get all pedantic on you and write an entry on the conflict between the needs of privatized retail space and real old-fashioned public space? If I did I could have the pleasure of quoting Daisy Loo, (a fiction writer would get in trouble for giving a character who is the Head of Retail for Jones Lang LaSalle in Singapore a name like that): "Retail is a living system which needs to be constantly refreshed."

No, I shall just sit back and present the pix, and let you enjoy the latest absurdity of Singapore's urban environment...(But I might just email Sun Yuli and ask him what he's going to do... surely this is a violation of his moral rights of authorship (as they call them in the UK)).

portrait of Thomas Woolner

2008-03-29T08:37:00.003+08:00

portrait of Thomas Woolner
Originally uploaded by Katong

Stumbled across this portrait of Thomas Woolner. He's the artist who created the Raffles sculpture that now sits in front of the Victoria Concert Hall in Singapore. This image is in the collection of the National Library of Australia. Follow the link for more info on the image.

Knitting Graffiti

2008-03-16T14:19:00.001+08:00

Am so loving the new possible angles of attack on the idea of "graffiti" - interventions in public space. Check out "knitting graffiti"...(thanks to Glenn Schloss for the reference - he points out that this recently received plenty of publicity in the US - more than many high profile big name commercial projects.

Move this tin can!

2008-02-10T13:08:00.002+08:00

The Art Newspaper does a story on the backlash against tasteless public art in London. Among the data points: an editorial in The Burlington, and an attack by Tim Knox of the Sir John Soane's Museum on the "epidemic of these Frankenstein monster memorials". It strings together some rather good criticisms of recent works, and speaks to a representative of the Westminster City Council, which is responsible for statuary. Worth a read.

"A colossal sculpture by Paul Day of a man and woman embracing (The Meeting Place) at St Pancras Station is described by Mr Shone thus: “As romantic as a couple who have just been refused a mortgage.” Mr Shone argues that Westminster City Council, which is responsible for the statuary of central London, should enforce stricter controls. A council spokeswoman said that it is “now consulting on plans to limit the number of applications for statues”. But Ian Leith, deputy chairman of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, says the problem is that no “government agencies actually audit public art”. This has led to the removal of works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth."

UPDATE: Here's an article in the New Zealand Herald covering the UK controversy, and pointing out the the Nea Zealand WWII War Memorial is attracting notice as one of the worst of the lot.

Not so delightful "Turkish delight"

2007-12-28T12:50:00.001+08:00

Public sculpture of the nude remains a crucial genre for Western public art. And there is still room to innovate this ancient form, as per Antony Gormley or Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper sculpture on the Fourth Plinth in London's Traflagar Square.

But I'm not sure that Olaf Metzel's work can claim to be in the same category. His life sized sculpture (left), displayed in the project space of the Kunsthalle Wien, near the Succession in Vienna Austria, portrays a slouching female nude, wearing only a headscarf. To me, the directness of Mentzel's giving a female nude figure a headscarf, and its crude title, "Turkish Delight", moves it from art to polemic, aimed squarely at the Muslim community of Austria. And there should be little surprise that the work has been vandalized twice.

Gerald Matt, Director of the Kunsthalle, has announced "deep respect" for differences in aesthetic opinion and religious feeling, and according to ArtForum "has said that such debates should not occur through violent means". But I am not sure that the public vandalism of a work which is purposely offensive really qualifies as violence. I'm afraid I'm with the vandals on this one. But they could have chosen a more positive way of making their feelings know, as indeed unnamed art activists did when they dressed Copenhagen's Little Mermaid in a burqa.

The 'mysterious tower' of CBD

2007-12-24T16:02:00.001+08:00

The unveiling of Momentum is beginning ... "Singapore's tallest sculpture" is being revealed, progressively, with the piece being completely unveiled on New Year's Even, "illuminated for the first time by a state-of-the-art lighting system". Says the commissioner:

"We hope the Singapore public will embrace this distinctive sculpture and in the fullness of time we believe it could become as iconic for Singapore's business and financial district as the 'Charging Bull' sculpture is for New York's Wall Street,"

A quick surf turns up no images of the first bits of unveiling...

Roman fountains run red

2007-11-11T13:55:00.001+08:00

In Teheran during the Iran-Iraq war the fountains ran red to symbolize the blood of the martyrs. Neither the Italian Baroque nor the post-modern tourist are into self-sacrifice kitsch, but blood in the water always makes for spectacle. Reminds me somehow of the Goofy Sufi's essay on overcoming tourism. As perhaps the most popular public monument in the world, does the Trevi gain or lose baraka from all these tourists? does it do so when the ~~blood of the martyrs~~ red paint of the futurists runs through it?

Nada Surf - an urban projection

2007-10-22T20:50:00.001+08:00

tip o' the hat to Ben Harrison for this one... Very clever urban projection... and a tune you can sing along to.

Kim Jong Il The Great Architect

2007-10-17T21:08:00.001+08:00

Architecture and authoritarianism, the pointer and the scale model, it's all here. This is how it's done boys and girls!

Courtesy of "We Make Money Not Art"

See also this previous blog entry on North Korean public art.

the bronzes are everywhere... in Singapore and in TV LAND!

2007-10-07T11:14:00.001+08:00

Aesthetic Grounds: has a fine story on a series of realistic lifesize bronze sculptures of television characters that are being placed around the US, as part of a series of donations by a cable tv channel. It's a chance for AG's Weiss to dig into the industry of realistic bronze casts... good fun. And the TV Land series makes Singapore's Tourism Board "pioneers" along the river seem pretty benign (and not without at least a hint of aesthetic merit...).

more from Sao Paulo - city without billboards

2007-08-19T12:20:00.001+08:00

We blogged this move by Sao Paulo (after all the world's fourth largest city) in January. Here's a story from Adbusters: #73 Carbon Neutral Culture / São Paulo: A City Without Ads. The rhetorical move that got this law passed seemed to be to characterise public advertising as visual pollution.

Notes for advertisers and urban designers, in case this measure gains popularity:
- at first, people got lost without billboards to orient themselves, now they find new points of orientation
- corporations are relying on their corporate colors for branding in public, painting their buildings, etc
- sometimes billboards are more about what they hide than what they show - Sao Paulo's slums are more present

And here's an excellent YouTube report that seems to have been the main source of the AdBuster story.

Yankee vodcaster interviews the mayor, anticonsumerist rock bands ("protect me from what I want"), advertising execs and so on. So is was this all a plot against ClearChannel?

an upward spiral? Singapore's "Tallest Sculpture" set for prominent intersection

2007-08-14T00:20:00.001+08:00

On National Day, Keppel Land issued a press release announcing their funding of a major new public art work in the traffic island formed at the meeting point of Raffles Quay, Collyer Quay and
Marina Boulevard. The work by artist David Gerstein is said to be 18.35 metres tall, to have been a technical challenge, and to have cost the developers of the adjacent One Raffles Place some two million Singapore dollars.

The patron's description of the work will have a familiar ring to students of Singapore's public sculpture. Says Mr David Martin, General Manager, One Raffles Quay Pte Ltd, "The sculpture will depict an upward spiral of progress and capture the energy and momentum of the district, Singapore and its people." As Tay Kheng Soon would say, we're getting another "screw-up" sculpture... (For more such "upward spirals" see here, here and, only half a block away from the site of the Gerstein, here.)

No image of the work was included in the press release. I'm going to resist prejudging the piece from what's available on the Internet of Mr Gerstein's work. Most of his work is colorful caricature, certainly populist.

You are not a tourist

2007-08-13T23:10:00.001+08:00

Knocked Down - the press report on Foreign Talents
Originally uploaded by Katong

The Singapore Art Show kicked off at the beginning of August. Should it be called "Singapore: not the Biennale"? Plenty of work in public spaces, including a series orchestrated by Sculpture Square called "You are Not a Tourist". Also a work by two artists known as Vertical Submarine (Joshua Yang and Justin Loke), a rought cement model of a migrant worker confronting the Raffles Statue on Boat Quay. As you can read from the article in Today, or the artists' blog, the piece was knocked over and damaged by a delivery van.

This is not the first time artists have confronted the Raffles statue. An Artists Village project called "Artists Investigating Monuments" performed a confrontation with the work on the same Boat Quay site in 2000 and presented it in a museum setting in 2005. I found these a bit more rewarding.

the fate of the fibreglass animals

2007-07-08T17:06:00.001+08:00

IMG_1272 copy
Originally uploaded by ianbart

Sculpture Project Munster 2007 sounds an intriguing sort of art event, one that focuses on art in public space. The reviewer in the IHT didn't think much of the work shown here, Andreas Siekmann's lampooning the stampedes of fibreglass animals that pass for public art in the minds of so many civic leaders around the world. Said the reviewer, "Cobbled together from remnants of the citywide sculpture campaigns of recent years, the piece amounts to yet another eyesore." (To be fair, this is only one-half of the work, which is presented together with the trash compactor that did the smushing.)

Then Singapore's Today newspaper reported the new "Singapore Season", an extravaganza of works presented overseas, this year in Shanghai, China. Among the works to be included: "the infamous Sing-Art lions. Around 30 life-size fibreglass beasts will be displayed at malls. These include a lion wearing shades, one painted red with Chinese characters, and one that looks like the feline version of Stamford Raffles." Yes, indeed, they're back...I think it would be more impactful to roll them up in Siekmann's ball and show them that way.

Boccioni on public sculpture

2007-07-01T15:49:00.000+08:00

« [how can] thousands of sculptors go on, generation after generation, constructing puppet figures without bothering to ask themselves why the sculpture halls arouse boredom or horror, or are left absolutely deserted; or why monuments are unveiled in squares all over the world to the accompaniment of general mirth or incomprehension.»
- Futurist Manifestoes, ed. Umbro Apollonio, London, 1973, p 51

Boccioni's solution was to reject the old ideals of "calm grandeur", "hieratic immobility" and "antique solemnity" and to seek "a barbaric element in modern life", "lines and outlines [which]... exist as forces bursting forth from the dynamic actions of the bodies".

When in Rome, look above

2007-06-11T22:41:00.001+08:00

Wooster Collective: ABOVE's SIGN LANGUAGE TOUR: ROME, ITALY

Missed this while I was in Rome, but since I've never blogged Above's work before I thought it might be nice to include this particular piece.

Tilted Arc: the aftermath

2007-06-10T12:09:00.001+08:00

This is about as good as I think writing about art gets in the daily papers: Richard Serra at MoMA: Towering sculptures in torqued steel. I'm linking to the IHT version, as it will stay free access longer, but you see better pix at the NYT version. Michael Kimmelman is saying that Tilted Arc is far behind us - that today's audiences can appreciate the lightness and warmth of these "awesome mazes of looming Cor-Ten steel":

«That same vocabulary of curved, giant metal walls, once vilified as art-world arrogance, is now better understood and broadly admired. This is how radical art operates.In Mr. Serra’s case you can also call it democratic art because it sticks to pure form that requires no previous expertise to grasp. There’s no coy narrative, no insider joke or historical allusion or meta-art theme. There’s none of what Mr. Serra disdainfully calls, in the show’s catalog, “post-Pop Surrealism,” by which he lumps together all contemporary art that leans for a crutch on language and Duchamp. »

I think on balance this is right, though I would put less emphasis on Serra's formal vocabulary than on attitudes of reception. Audiences are hungry for place-making, ready for serious and honest attempts to engage them, less likely to immediately escalate such attempts the zero-sum wars of identity politics...

(Well, obviously not all audiences in all contexts. Remember Russian war hero monuments in Estonia and, recently, reactions to Singapore's ersatz graffiti...)

Technorati Tags: public_art

Lapper's tenure on the fourth plinth ending

2007-06-02T22:44:00.001+08:00

Strong article in the Guardian complaining about the Alison Lapper Pregnant piece which has been on the "fourth plinth" in Trafalgar Square for a year-and-a-half. I'm sorry to miss seeing it in person, this is one of those works about which everyone has an opinion without having seen it. One nice thing about this article by Brendan O'Neill is that it attempts to bring its materiality -- size, presence and the color of the Carrera marble -- into the discussion of its meaning and impact.

O'Neill's argument is strong but one-dimensional - the piece celebrates a person for what they were born with, not what they have done, "a 13-tonne celebration of the distortion wrought by nature on a woman's body rather than that woman's contributions to public life and society...[it] celebrates what nature, in all its arbitrariness, does to humans rather than what we do to shape, lead and transform the world around us. In this sense, it captures the deeply conservative nature of the identity agenda".

Living in Southeast Asia, I'm alive to the sad and deeply conservative power of the identity politicians, and I think O'Neill's point is an important one. But it is one-dimensional: there's no historical consciousness. While continuing celebration of the bodies of variously differently distorted humans (and nature distorts all of us no?) on Trafalgar Square really would be a deeply conservative practice, celebrating one, and for a comparatively short time, is clearly not a conservative act, and does achieve some of the "opening" that Alison Lapper says she was looking for in agreeing to pose. As one commenter said, we are marking a moment in our development as a society when we can "bear to look", and celebrate her beauty and power.

And O'Neill just quickly avoids the big question of celebrating individuals in public art: The problem in holding fast to a public that can evaluate or even recognize the contribution of people to society. I mean, Sir Henry Havelock and Sir Charles James Napier? Should the US be building statues to Dick Cheney? (still, my favorite move out of this dilemma was Mostar's decision to build a statue of Bruce Lee - "Out of all the ethnic heroes and those who have a material interest in acting as victims, we have chosen Bruce Lee. Now they can rack their brains trying to decide whether he is Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), Croat, or Serb...")

The Guardian's commentors on this article are a pretty class act - it's a good dialogue. For example I had missed the fact that Trafalgar Square already has a statue of a disabled person on it. The opposition that Artist Marc Quinn's work presents -- boring white war heros vs disabled woman artist -- clearly works to erase Lord Nelson's own disability.

moving monuments

2007-05-27T01:01:00.001+08:00

Della Trasportatione dell'Obelisco Vaticano
Originally uploaded by Pruned

I used to think that Singapore's moving monuments around was some sort of indication of a lack, a lack of a sense of place and history. And then when I got into Tzay Chuen's MIKE project for the Venice Biennale, I realised that their mobility is nearly a defining characteristic of monuments. Venice's "airlion", symbol of the Biennale, was booty from Constantinople, but -- as I learned -- originated somewhere further east, some 1000 years before the famous sack.

And now I've just come back from Rome, where the mobility and reuse of marble bits, obelisks and columns can't help but strike you, round nearly every corner. Nothing is permanent in the Eternal City. (But the graffiti is ancient/)Then "Pruned" puts up these images that explain how the Vatican obelisk was moved... A very cool posting.

The London Gormley's

2007-05-26T10:40:00.001+08:00

Gormley
Originally uploaded by Jonny2005

Earlier this month I blogged the FT's coverage of Antony Gormley's upcoming London installation. Well, the figures are up, and the Flickr crew has some pretty good coverage over at the well-run Gormley group.

Glenn Weiss at Aesthetic Grounds makes some interesting points about how the ability and interest of amateur photographers to create views of Gormley's work helps constitute its monumental character. An analysis of "photographability" is key to understanding the function of public art these days. He also sneaks in a reading that Gormley's works are "a psychological acceptance of depression, loneliness and suicide" in public space.

Antony Gormley's ambitions for public art

2007-05-06T18:16:00.000+08:00

The Financial Times ran a review of Antony Gormley in their weekend edition, a curtain-raiser on an important installation at the Hayward. It's well worth reading, and I was struck in particular by the depth of Gormley's ambition and idealism around public art.

His metal human figures are to him "corpographs", characterless, far from idealised. He uses them "because the body is the basis of everything. It is how we bond with matter and it is the instrument through which all our impressions of being alive arrive, and all our expressions of being alive flow." It is a particularly non-materialist way of describing the importance of the body isn't it? The body as instrument, as vehicle. But the kicker comes at the end, when he's talking about how he'd like to campaign to have some important public art around King's Cross, soon to be the terminus for the Eurostar. He says it should be "a place that says something profound about Britain".

From I quote from the FT in full:

«I ask ... if thinks it is even possible to say something profound artistically about Britain.

"That was the question that 'Angel' asked. And I think that it is. It showed that art can be a force for hope, and the re-establishment of pride, and identity and all those elusive things that have taken a hell of a bashing."

He gives a final damning verdict on the state of the nation. "The way that Britain has become a place that aspires to be, and is, manipulated by financial instrument creators and managers, and has lost its ability to be a nation of makers, is an absolute tragedy".»

Is the belief in the ability of public art to be a force for hope tied to the nostalgia for a manufacturing economy? Or is that the particular nostalgia we allow an artist who works in rusted steel?