Art as Public Address System

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

Last Wednesday night Wellington city residents were subject to a practise run for a new tsunami and civil defence warning system. A helicopter carrying loudspeakers baffled some residents with its loud pre-recorded message of "get ready to get through". The temptation for artists to hijack the aircraft later and broadcast their own cryptic messages must have been strong.

In a great stroke of timing, the next day saw The Flood, My Chanting, a performance work by Amy Howden-Chapman commissioned by City Gallery, part of a series of so-called One Day Sculptures nationwide.Howden-Chapman's work consisted of a series of antique ships bells (on loan from the Wellington Museum of City and Sea) installed in a circuit from Frank Kitts Park through the central city and back to the harbour.

At 1pm, numerous workers out on their lunchtime breaks were startled by the sight of runners moving from one bell to another creating an almighty clang, and chased (perhaps just as alarmingly) by a gaggle of art admirers. The circuit followed close to the flood risk line in the inner city (on the reclaimed land where once the sounds of these bells would have been most familiar), and from the alarmed looks on faces, proved not only a melodious sight and sound but an effective re-enactment of a 19th century civil defence warning system.

Timing was a key to the success of this work, both in its scheduling and the pacing of the runners cum musicians between dongs. It fulfilled the temporal ideas behind the One Day Sculpture concept beautifully.

Organised by Massey University's fine arts research initiative Litmus, One Day Sculpture is a New Zealand wide series of temporary public artworks, with 20 New Zealand and international artists invited by different galleries to each produce a work that occurs within a 24-hour period over the course of one year.

The first of these in Wellington 'Perigee #11', commissioned by Litmus, saw Maddie Leach use a long-range weather forecasting system to select a day when a storm could be most expected to besiege Wellington. For the 28 of August she invited the public to a boathouse in Breaker Bay to watch. The day ironically turned out to be a stunner, underlining the work's play on how we always reach as a conversation-starter to the weather. The emptiness of this was emphasised by some people's disappointment, having travelled all the way to Breaker Bay, to find nothing dramatic to see and talk about.

The second in late August, hosted by Enjoy Gallery, was in the backyard of 10 Haining Street, an imagining in the present from Kah Bee Chow's first generation immigrant's perspective of this area's past, and its failed promise as Wellington's Chinatown. The installation was sited across the road from where in 1905 Englishman Lionel Terry shot dead a goldminer Joe Kum Yung in a protest against Chinese immigration.

This year Enjoy have also published Public Good, a smart collection of essays and artists' page-works exploring ideas around what we mean by public space. The book's weakness is its breadth, any discussion to be gleaned about the role of art in the public sphere fragmented.

There are some excellent pieces however, opening with Christina Barton's consideration of the monument's place today. On this subject Barton would have a field day at this year's Scape, Christchurch's biennial of art in public space, to which I paid a whirlwind visit last week.

With the rather unnecessarily intimidating subtitle 'Wandering Lines: Towards a New Culture of Space', and featuring 25 artists from 15 countries, this year's Scape is strong for its curatorial focus around monuments and activity around them. There are new monuments, like James Oram's crowd-pleasing suspension of a small sailing boat (complete with sail) from the end of a mobile crane in Cranmer Square, through to Japan's Tatzu Oozu's impressive construction of a room on hoists around Victoria Square's James Cook statue, allowing the public to get intimate with that usually kept aloft. All around the city the public were given stages and pedestals previously held beyond them - to such an extent (and emphasised by the biennial's marketing material) that whenever I saw scaffolding or keep out banners I wondered if it was an artist's invitation to step over the line.

Scape animates a city in a way an ephemeral, dispersed programme like One Day Sculpture cannot, and it left me musing as to how much public art should be judged by its wider public impact. Scape had its share of bad, thuddingly-obvious works (Petrol Engine Memorial Park by Finland's Tea Makipaa), but it generally demonstrated public art's potential to break down the public's suspicions about the relevance of current contemporary art.

Howden-Chapman's work also achieved this. It played strongly to the time-based nature of the One Day Sculpture programme, whilst also in the bells' placement neatly paralleling the line of permanent public sculpture that already runs through our city.

One Day Sculpture, Amy Howden-Chapman Public Discussion, City Gallery Wellington, 11am, Saturday October 18
Scape 2008 Wandering Lines: Towards a New Culture of Space, until 2 November

See previous Visual Arts columns by Mark Amery

16/10/08