Editor's Foreword

Davina Thackara Editor

This symposium addresses a question of increasing urgency for public art. Although a degree of consensus has evolved in recent years over the issue of good practice, this has largely focused on the role of process; an agreed definition of quality for the products of art outside the gallery, however, has remained more elusive. Art world values have seldom been useful to this objective, and in many cases have proved counterproductive. As Jos Boys argues, these are frequently self referential and fail to take into account the other modes of interaction people might seek from objects. And despite the numerous strategies that have been explored for promoting greater ownership and engagement amongst audiences, such practices are only partially understood, and in terms of outcomes, have tended to generate as many questions as they have solved. 

It is a measure of the current level of concern over quality that the issue is increasingly framed as one of benefit. When concepts of quality are broadly recognised and acknowledged, discussion of benefits rarely arises. Lack of consensus over quality however, strengthens the call for justification. This in itself can pose a risk; when in the past art has been assessed by some external criterion of usefulness, quality has often suffered. Socialist Realism or Victorian didacticism are among the more obvious examples. But preoccupation with benefits is also a reflection of funding systems. As Fred Manson says, art funded through the public purse demands accountability, and when the state pays, it is reasonable that the artist should deliver something in return. Since local authorities are currently the principal clients for public art, it is their social and economic imperatives which are now most likely to determine its form and purpose.

The extraordinary diversity of contemporary public art is another factor adding to the difficulty of evaluation. Different forms of contemporary practice and the discourses which shape them, have produced hugely varied definitions of quality. Not all are necessarily appropriate for the public realm. But this diversity is also a source of strength. The range of benefits which good art in all its many contemporary guises is capable of delivering, is almost certainly considerable. If these can be effectively identified and demonstrated, then benefits should be attainable without compromise in quality.

What is striking about this symposium is the number of positive, practical and significant benefits cited - developing a sense of self worth, stimulating social interaction, encouraging healthier life styles, reducing vandalism and cost, promoting ecology, nurturing grass roots cultures, expanding learning and awareness, healing the social fabric, exploring risk and making lateral connections. The majority of these are not new - they have been reiterated repeatedly over the years. 

A recurrent theme, however, particularly within the seminars, was that the public art world has been slow to develop effective mechanisms for gathering the range of evidence available and feeding findings back into the system. Methodology of research and advocacy are just as vital to establishing the benefits that art can offer as the quality of work itself. They will also be essential if public art is to avoid the tendency it has so often suffered from in the past, of making unsubstantiated claims.

There is much useful work yet to be done in the public art field in terms of auditing current forms of practice, establishing reliable and consistent methods for collecting evidence, examining the impact of projects at regular intervals rather than immediately after completion, and ensuring that results obtained inform future commissioning practice and contribute to an ongoing programme of development. Equally, there may be circumstances where the role of decommissioning needs to be considered. 

Necessary and desirable as all this is, it would nevertheless be a mistake if demand for benefits and accountability was designed to eliminate the possibility of failure. There can be little benefit or value in an art practice that has been rendered tame and predictable. Random, experimental and even provocative acts may occasionally have their place (and their benefits), as much outside the gallery as within it. 

Welcome

Lorraine Cox , Public Art Forum

Good morning and welcome to The Benefits of Public Art Conference.Before we start, I would like to say a few things about my own experience of setting up and managing projects in which the public and communities engage with artists. Putting together this seminar has made me reflect on projects over the last ten years or more. We’ve all done a lot of work in this field but it’s very hard to capture or prove the benefits, value and worth of our work to others. I hope today is going to draw out arguments and interrogation of those kinds of ideas so that we can move towards greater clarity of how to work effectively with artists and the public.

It made me think of an experience in ’96 when Public Art Forum gave evidence to the National Heritage Select Committee into the funding of the Arts. One of the MPs asked us about Glenrothes which is a housing estate in Scotland. He said that he’d been to Glenrothes and seen the town artiststhere in the early 80’s.Some of it had involved a sculpture trail through housing estates which had severe social problems. He said that public art there had quite significantly reduced crime and asked what we thought about this.I said that I’ve seen local people’s attitudes change when they engage with artists. I’ve seen people develop a much more considered, critical opinion for why they do or don’t like art. It seems to me that local people are engaged in some kind of positive and meaningful debate about change and the nature of creativity.Whether or not it significantly reduces the crime rate can never be proved, but it is probably a factor. Even after ten years, you can see that I’m still trying to demonstrate positive value - it’s a struggle.

However, we canlook at some of the models of practice that have taken place over the last ten or so years in this country, and formulate patterns that seem to have worked to some degree. There’s a struggle in these issues, but there’s also a great deal of experience to be captured and laid down in some kind ofagreed-upon measure of value and benefit for public art.

Introduction

Simon Grennan , Public Art Forum

Today’s symposium aims to do a number of things. Firstly, it aims to take an overview of the ways in which the benefit of including art and artists are currently considered by those involved in commissioning, producing and evaluating public art. Secondly, itaims to explore other potential ways of conceiving and evaluating benefit, and to look at the relationship between concepts of benefit, and the separate, maybe different, concept of quality.

The symposium will form the background to a national research and publishing projectbeginning this year, which will aim to benchmark concepts of the benefit of public art. The research will describe clear ways of evaluating benefit and compare examples of public art across Britain. The research will be widely disseminated, particularly to local authorities.

The debate today will interrogate the notion of an agreed-upon measure of quality and benefit in the field of public art. If we are clearer as a community about the ways in which we can evaluate public art, we will be able to harness all of the information that is currently available from commissioning and developing, and point unequivocally to the benefits of including art and artists in the changing and developing environment. There’s a lot of experience and information available which needs to be brought together.

Recent attempts, however, to research, identify and establish methodologies for evaluating the benefits of public art are widely thought to have been unsatisfactory, or at best incomplete. There appear to be a number of reasons for this. The first is an underlying assumption that art criticism will reveal the benefit of including art and artists. The second is a reliance on primary judgements of taste. And the third is the lack of a broad audit of different concepts of what benefit might be. None of the research already in existence attempts to establish any type of methodology for evaluating benefit, or for the way in which benefit might be conceived and benchmarked. 

The intention of this symposium today is to look at the concept of benefit from three points of view-theory, policy and practice. These three areas are represented by our main speakers. Jos Boys is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Centre for Educational Technology and Development. She will speak about cultural theory as an aid to visioning the benefits of public art. Fred Manson, Director of Regeneration and Environment at Southwark Borough Council will present a view of the ways in which art can become part of a value chain in the development of the environment within a practical planning scenario. The artist Gavin Jones of Jones Environmental will present a case study of an artist’s work which has proved to be a key benefit in the development of the environment.

In the last year or so, I have spoken about the idea of benefit with a very wide range of professionals involved in different aspects of the cultural and practical planning and development of the environment. These people have included local authority officers in culture and leisure, planning, housing and education; housing associations; RTPI members; architects and landscape architects; and artists and academics from around Britain. The scope of the experience of these people covers at least the last 20 years. In speaking to them, I have found that the current models of thinking about the benefits of including artists are widely considered to be insufficient. It seems impossible to separate thinking about the benefits of including artists from thinking about the quality of art. Most of the people that I have spoken to, however, feel that relying on judgements of taste or art criticism to deliver benchmarks or point to models, is insufficient to the task of establishing how and why including art might be beneficial.

Planners, commissioners and artists want to be able to point to specific instances of measurable benefit in a wide variety of different circumstances, and to feel able to say that including art brings added value. My research begs a number of related questions which I hope this symposium will consider. First,is there a need to distinguish between quality and benefit? Is it really possible to evaluate the benefit of including art without referring to taste or art theory, and if so how might this be done? Are there examples where inclusion of art has been a provable benefit beyond the aesthetic or the theoretical? And finally if examples do exist, what can we learn from them? Is benchmarking benefit truly possible and useful?

Keynote Speaker (Theory)

Jos Boys Lecturer in Architecture, Centre for Educational Technology and Development

I want to concentrate on the initial areas that Simon highlighted- art criticism and taste, the problems of evaluating what constitutes quality or value in public art. I want to do that by looking at the shape of public art practice because I feel there is a problem, a reason why we find it difficult to move beyond that model.My background is in architecture, but my work is really about investigating how different groups in society look at the environment in which they live, and how they articulate its value to themselves. In this, I don’t differentiate between architecture, urban design or public art, and perhaps there is a discussion to be had about whether those things are different.

There is a kind of agreement about public art, that public art is for the expression of social meaning. That may be about expressing shared values in society, or it may be about some sort of comment or criticism about those dominant values, but it does concentrate on the notion of meaning. I want to talk about the concept of meaning and why we’ve come to think of meaning as being so important.I’m really making two points. One is that public art has to stop centring social meaning on expressive representation - as the key to the main objective it has and as the key to how it judges itself . Second, we have to disengage concepts of the expression of social meaning from concepts of value.

So this raises some basic questions. Who exactly is this social meaning for? What are these qualities that we’re trying to express? How do we see meaning embodied in objects or spaces? What is the connection between these meanings, the qualities, the ideas and the social - in what way do they reflect something about society, whether as a whole or as a grouping within it? 
’m going to start by looking in a very generalised way at artists themselves and at public art practice. There’s a ‘common senseof understanding public art practice and a lot of cross‑over with how architectural practice and urban design is understood which limits the way we think about the world. It catches us in an internal loop. You feel that there are many aspects that I’m ignoring here, and I agree; however I believe the sense of this ‘common sensestill ties us in.

For public artists, meaning is about the public, that’s its whole basis. But that conceptis caught up in a long history with its own cultural baggage, and that’s the baggage of art itself.Debates within art and architecture over time have developed particular understandings of what meaning is and how it’s embedded into objects, and that dates back to all those people in this country -Pugin, Morris, Letherby - who were very concerned to generate a public art and architecture which expressed good things about society.

This move towards material form as the expression of society represents a shift from earlier notions of what art and architecture was.When culture is perceived as external to society, when the legitimisation of artistic work is either in relationship to the ancients or to God, then what you make refers to that wider universal non social realm - to abstract concepts of beauty. Of course, the stuff that was built pre-nineteenth century was entirely related to the society in which was made, but the creation of it was articulated in relation to transcendental values. Once you start thinking of culture as being an integral part of society, as intertwined with its lived experience as a way of life, then it creates problems- we began to want the objects and spaces themselves to express that relationship in some way. What we see is a move from the 19th century onwards, in artistic, decorative, and architectural practice, in trying to develop an authentic language of association that expresses society. If Arts and Crafts aimed for a figurative and associative language,modernism wanted to express the social through the inherent qualities of the media itself - revealing social order through the formal, structural and material elements of the objects. This is associative reflection ata second order - linking not to figurative elements but to the underlying formal properties of space and materials (grids, transparency, whiteness).

I’m not suggesting that there’s something wrong with this. Anybody who is involved in the creative or artistic production of objects, things, or places, is concerned also with the internal debates of that subject and the expressive potential of the medium itself. Those things are not wrong but we have to be much clearer about how we are positioned by our own subjects, just as we need to be much clearer about how people are positioned — for example as commissioners, patrons of public art or members of the public. What I am suggesting is a set of ways in which to problematise the notion of meaning - to throw it open for debate on how public art expresses meaning and has a value -that the public should be involved in the process of articulating those terms (or alternatives) in some way. And it means being clear that public artists are positioned in a particular way which contains its own inherent tensions in simultaneously wanting to improve the quality of the public realm, and to partake creatively in the concerns of artistic practice itself. This is not an either/or, popular/high culture opposition. It is not about integrating both. It is about exploring (with artists and non artists) the spaces in-between. We should be interested in the media that we’re using and what qualities it has, and in using those creatively. We should be interested in the history of our own subjects, and in second order competencies. And we should be interested in creatively bridging the gaps between those understandings and other (public and popular) interpretations.

Some of you may have read Bordieu’s book on taste called Distinction.(1) He suggests that there are basically three levels of artistic competency. Firstly, there is an immediacy in your perception and understanding of objects connected to your own experience. The second level is based on a certain amount of knowledge about the object. You might know the name of the person who made it, or that it’s of a certain genre. His third level is when you know a lot about the history of art, and you can put a piece of work into context. I would suggest that he misses a key element which involves understanding not just a work’s content but an appreciation of its formal qualities - its proportions and the relationships of its elements, how it is made and how it reflects its materiality. This is what I mean here by second order competencies. 
Public art then, must explicitly deal with relationships (gaps, invisibilities, contradictions) between those different levels.

I’m going to suggest that there are three main ways that public art practice currently operates - and I think architects fit into this framework too. I also want to suggest that these are linked into a system of ideas which prevent us from exploring those gaps between more effectively. The first is that traditional notion of formal composition expressing beauty and taste which is to do with the contemplative pleasure that people get out of objects. The second element is art as the expression of shared social values. The third, more recent one, involves trying to challenge through critique, using art either to comment on aspects of society which are seen as inequitable, or commenting on the role of art itself in that process.

I suggest that we’re caught in a cycle of oppositions, between an understanding of culture as high art, between art as a unifying force in society, and something which is a subversive force in society. The dominant terms are public art and united society. One is linked to the other. That’s what public art is about. These two terms as an equal and reflective pair, are set against binary opposites. There aren’t in-betweens, there aren’t complexities - there are minuses and pluses. Public art perceives itself as being positive against the negative of a kind of elitist, gallery-based, formal, formalist and taste-oriented art. It sets itself against culture as high art. It sees itself absolutely in the realm of culture as a way of life, and it therefore perceives itself as being popularist or popular.

What you get then is a string of associative terms in the horizontal dimension and oppositional terms in the vertical dimension. In response to that you get another pair of terms which perceives the public-art-equals-social-values pair, as being negative. And in response to that, you get a radical notion of art which sees itself as in opposition to these other modes -commenting on society as a subversive subculture of that society. That subversive activity may be either in the quality of the product, in the way it expresses meaning, or it may be in the process, particularly through participatory processes.

There is a problem to the overall pattern which lies, first of all, in the notion that one thing reflects another. Part of my work has been to look at that idea that architecture, art, and design reflect society, and how endemic it is even in the contemporary post-modern period when we like to think we’ve got rid of all that. We think we don’t use those sorts of assumptions any more but actually we do, they’re embedded in a huge amount of common sense ideas we think with, although not necessarily in the critical work we do.

And that notion of reflection -what Homi Bhabha in his book The Location of Culture calls a mode of translation -is a way conceptually of linking an idea to a form, or an idea to society. (2) Reflection is very common within the creative fields because of the historical baggage we have. We need to start looking at it critically and understand it as a mode of translation. 

The second point is that this pattern of binary oppositions and associative links is an entirely internalised system. It’s a cycle of evidence that proves itself. You argue your case against some other key term in the process, you argue for a radical approach because of what you think is wrong with a mainstream approach. You believe in a mainstream approach because you argue against gallery art and its problems, and it forms a loop. You go backwards and forwards. You can go somewhere else and we do. But going somewhere else often peters out - we are easily caught up again in this conceptual framework.

That internalised cycle of evidence is one of the reasons why we have a problem with value - we don’t have external proof. We’re building a system that’s self-contained. That means that when we look at objects - public art objects or public spaces - the mode we have of interpreting those spaces is by projective interpretation. We dump our view onto the thing, that’s how we explain it, and that itself also produces problems of evidence because all the evidence comes out of our own interpretation, and the interpretation of critics who have the same model.

There are two other points to that, one of which is to do with concepts of value, and the other, concepts of meaning. First, we are caught in trying to understand value, or benefit or quality within this framework. It’s an impossible thing to do because this model is about a common sense view of the world,it’s not actually a very accurate description of how the world works. And it means that we mix up meaning and value, because if we believe intuitively that art should express some aspect of social meaning through reflective representation, then wejudge value on that basis, and value becomes caught up in the positives and negatives of the model. These positives and negatives appear to give us value, but they don’t.

Second , because we have that framework, when there’s a problem with it,when it doesn’t seem to describe how other people are articulating the world - they don’t seem to understand objects like that, they don’t appreciate the social meanings they contain, they don’t seem to get the point of this expressive representation - then we have two solutions and those two solutions are both based on returning to and reinforcing this model, and simultaneously using it to exclude and make invisible other frameworks for interpretation and appreciation of designed objects and spaces.

One of those solutions is education. If you can understand better how meanings are embedded in objects, then things will improve. The other possibility is participation. If people are involved in the process, then that will enable them to be part of negotiation over these relationships. But that participatory mode still usually works within this framework, it continues to prioritise meaning as reflective representation, thus emphasising the gulf between first and second order competencies rather than enabling negotiations within and across them.

So having said we’re caught in this loop, how do we get out of it? I would suggest briefly two sets of things:

One is to look at different positions people come from, different audiences and the modes of translation they use. This is not to say that these modes of translation, these ways of understanding what meaning is for and how it is embedded in things, are better or more authentic. We need a better theoretical model, however simplistic. To do that we need a much clearer set of ways of understanding the relationship between art and society. What’s happening in that relationship? And we need to do that by looking at people who are not trained and not caught up in artistic practice.

So for example, although we know there are plenty of public art commissioners interested in using art as a way of expressing shared values, there are also many patrons who look at these things as scarcity objects. They don’t care very much about the content. The best example of that for me was a television programme recently about Daniel Liebeskind’s new extension to the V&A Museum. What was clear was that he is obsessed with trying to express contemporary society through form. It’s a second order expression because it’s all angle planes, chaotically organised in an extremely sophisticated post-modern structural system, and he argues that case very well. His client clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but they know they’ve got a landmark, and it wouldn’t matter if he’d done it or another famous architect. It doesn’t matter if it’s puppy dog outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. It’s just an emblematic representation,a scarcity object - it’s using art in that mode. If people just want something unusual, there’s lots of opportunities to play to that market.

We also know that clients use art as a kind of identity marker in terms of the sort of setting it makes and the functions it provides. There is a sense in patrons expressing public-ness - it’s an investment in public education, in improving the public realm. Some of them may value art, some of them may not. And there is equally a range of competencies among patrons along the lines analysed by Bordieu. What we have here is a whole set of understandings around concepts of economic as well as cultural capital,around issues of resources, added value and profit-making which can be related back to the diagrams. Here, though, that little equals sign (the mode of translations) isn’t about reflection, it’s about instrumental realisation. It’s aboutgaining something, and that’s quite different, although it may include ideas about reflection simultaneously.

And finally, the public. Take for instance that Paolozzi statue at Euston Station – I have a particular personal loathing for this - which is being given a very good use here. These tourists are using it as a windbreak to look at their map and it fits very well. The map fitted into a little hollow so that they could hide from the wind and lay the map out flat. And they seemed very satisfied with that. This is not public art as contemplative beauty or shared values or societal comment. It is public art as a purposeful (if here accidental) ‘found space for an instrumental action. This suggests a move in the direction I would like to make. I want to suggest that if we are looking at the relationship between art, architecture and society,we’re looking at a whole set of modes of translation around two things: surviving in and making sense of this world. We’re all doing that, we’re all the public in that way, but we are using different modes of translation - and reflection as a dominant mode within artistic practice hardly begins to touch on these other ways of engaging with the world, conceptually, socially and materially.

I’m not sure it’s possible to come to an agreed set of methodologies for understanding benefit or value. I think that these things are contested - always in a tension which cannot be resolved. They will go on being contested, and actually what we have to do is make difficult choices and judge priorities, and have the persuasive arguments to support that. I want finally to propose an outline of the context in which these arguments need to be framed.

First,if you’re operating in the public realm, you’re operating in an environment where the audience is distracted. They’re not there to enjoy or contemplate the quality of the environment, they’re doing something else - they’re walking the dog or going to the shops. And when we do that, we don’t take that much notice of our environment unless it kicks up and bites us.So there are limits to the notion of the contemplation of public art, about how important it is to love or value art.

I do think there’s a lack of public interest in public art as social comment, andmaybe it’s a misplaced understanding of the role of creative practice. There is a very clear mismatch in competencies between a more public, immediate and associative understanding, and other levels of knowledge and interpretation. That’s not to say that one is better than the other, but that all sorts of space are opened up there for negotiation in and between and across those things. 

Finally, there is a problem about shared values. That means there is also a problem about what constitutes benefit. Arguments about what constitutes benefit sit as much outside the making of the piece itself as within it. They are about resources, survival and the pragmatics of everyday life. Value connects not to meaning, but the explicit articulation of these other modes of translation already outlined - surviving in and making sense of the world. 

Throughout this talk, I have used the expression ‘weenable the assumption that my experiences of creative theory and practice connect with, and make sense to, those of the audience. This may not be true. Finally though - from the position of an outsider, of an architectural critic operating outside of public art - I throw out a challenge to the audience, which concerns how I value the public qualities of public art, of an art which needs to accept the distracted nature of its audience; which should give something back to its public, and which prefers participation to contemplation. My original subtitle for this talk was “Good public art is something you can lock your bicycle to”.I had this subtitle in my head. Luckily, I can end with a - stumbled upon - example – again at Euston Station: the sculpture by Sue Ridge with a bicycle chained to it.

Notes
1.Bourdieu, P.,Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Routledge, 1984
2.Bhabha, H. K.,The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994

Questions

You mentioned the notion of cultural capital several times.Could you expand on that?

It’s stolen directly from Pierre Bordieu and particularly from his book called Distinction. It’s a very thorough study of patterns of taste. He interviews huge numbers of people in France about the papers they read, the theatres they go to, the pictures they like,and his argument is that the makers of culture in the broadest sense, perpetuate and legitimate their position by gaining cultural capital, by being valued for their knowledge in those areas, and that knowledge is very deliberately distanced from the knowledge of culture that ordinary people have. There are all sorts of techniques in the way that we make, produce and consume cultural objects which place us differently.We also need the status, value and power that come from economic capital because it funds us. We need to persuade the funders that we’re worthwhile, and on the whole that’s accepted because we’re good at selling the notion of culture as important

You used an expression like ‘distracteddescribing how people normally exist. I know of people who have come to the conclusion that working class people are being disenfranchised because their responses are much more emotional, and that these have been suppressed as a form of cultural expression because others have deemed them unsuitable. So you then take away cultural expression for a whole group.

The problem in Bordieu’s work is that he quite often suggests that the associative and immediate pleasures ordinary people get from things are a more authentic way of seeing, and that anybody who works as a cultural producer is automatically, what we used to call in the old days, an ideological tool of capitalism. Whatever piece of work you do, it will always be interpreted by Bordieu as elitist and distancing from that more ordinary associative pleasure. However for me, there is more at stake here; there are three things that don’t often get talked about together. One is about resources and resource distribution - survival, function and pragmatics. The second is about social-spatial relationships. Our relationship to the physical world is a bit like choreography - there’s a kind of dynamic relationship between things and bodies. 
But the third thing is pleasure which we all deserve to have. There is a whole tradition within Marxism that sees pleasure as problematic and diversionary. What’s interesting about working in the public art area is that there are inherent - and difficult - relationships between those different understandings in operation. It’s not either /or. It’s not either that we must work directly with people and their associative and immediate understandings, or that we should perpetuate formal distancing. There are gaps between those and possible models for working inside them. Fashion is a model where people’s immediate associative pleasure connects to, and works backwards and forwards across, high fashion. Yet outside the ‘commercialworld we don’t exploit those relationships. We keep saying it’s one or the other. 

Second Speaker (Policy)

Fred Manson of Regeneration and Environment, Southwark Borough Council

I work for the public sector - I am the Director of Regeneration and Environment for Southwark Borough Council. The range of tasks covered by that job is extensive.My department looks after public health, leisure, cemeteries, public conveniences and planning, as well as large contracts. Among these responsibilities is maintaining the public realm. This involves cleaning over 350 kilometres of roads and collecting over 117.000 tons of rubbish from, what we call,  100,000 heriditiments. We do this reasonably well. Consider that we collect from about 50,000 wheely bins each week. Our reported non- collections range between 1 and 17 per day which is a .08 failure in the weekly collection of rubbish.This is a major achievement and one which, entirely reasonably, the public expects us to perform without incident. 

Unfortunately not everything about the public realm carries such a degree of consensus. Take the street environment. All of us have experienced the impact of digging up the roads. Last year Southwark had over 20,000 openings by statutory authorities. Isn't the way language is used amazing? Openings are what we would normally call holes. Remember when there was one telephone company, now there are at least four. They are all out there laying new lines and repairing the ones they have already laid. Competition has driven telephone companies to guarantee resumption of services within hour, but never mind the upset and disruption to the public realm which is the consequence. 

If we are ableto resolve that, then our attention is directed to the surface of roads. First we need to resolve the modal shift- another bit of infrastructure slang. This simply means shifting the amount of space in the road from one mode of transport to another, such as that used by cars to cyclists, pedestrians and public transport.
Once we have our road not being dug up and our modal shift established, we can then turn to the design of the public realm - that is, the physical appearance. This is certainly more subjective than some of the other aspects of the highway we have just been considering. Even when the functional aspects are resolved we have a new set of questions. What will the public like? What do they wish to see? At points expected or surprising, would everyone enjoy encountering something amazing? These are questions which public art explores. I believe people can become as interested in these questions as they can about complaining to me about openings every year. It is also an infinitely more creative discussion.

I do not need to make the case for public art to this audience.All of you are familiar with the sales pitch. But I am coming at it from the practical angle of a Local Authority, and dealing with issues that involve public art serving a purpose. Art in the public realm does have some significant characteristics and I mention three. 

The piece (art jargon this time) is available to everyone 
The piece is in a open context 
The piece needs to communicate to people directly 

These issues are fortunately of interest to many artists now.In a sense these art projects need to establish a narrative which engages. The artists and the observer each need tobring something to the experience. 

I want to consider an example from Southwark which brings together the design and management of the public realm with art. I do this partly because the promotion literature for this event places me between theory and practice in the new non-Marxist category of policy, although I am not sure whether I have got a policy or just some gut reactions. 

In June 1996 Southwark held an exhibition for designs of streets and places in Bankside. Michael Craig Martin agreed to paint one of his wonderful objects on the outside wall. In this case it was an anglepoise on a background of bright pink. It needed tolast only for the time of the exhibition and then the wall was painted white again. Afew years later the wall was demolished. Even now many local residents mention "that exhibition with the pink wall”. Its impact lasted much longer than the piece. This is great and seems to justify all our efforts and money. 

But my main interest today is to consider the economic and cultural implications of the public procurement of art. I am talking entirely about the public sector.Somebody needs to pay for the art - usually individuals or organisations. How much they pay is no doubt a hot issue for the artist and the commissioner. (Alas, it is also a measure for audiences who grasp the significance of a million pounds quicker than they can grasp any art concept). All of this between paying adults is good fun. 

But when the state pays, the picture changes. First the money needs to be found usually from taxes (in economic jargon it becomes a transference payment -collected from one place, repackaged and sent out to someone else). One of my responsibilities is to spend your tax contributions for the benefit of the public. Don't expect consensus on this. Nor can I possibly go into the remarkable shift that has occurred in London to a multicultural society, and the diversity of expectations and opinions that introduces.  Let's just stick to the allocation of money. How can a local authority balance financial demands for education, investment, social services, and immediate financial requirements, with projects for art? For example, this coming year there will be a 10% reduction in expenditure on highway maintenance. This is not because councillors do not consider road maintenance important, but in the context of other demands it can be put off another year. We have to make an economic case for why we might be putting forward proposals. What are the kind of economic arguments for art that might be made, what are the grounds for looking at the kind of artistic intervention that we are all interested in?Art products need to be directly related to social and financial objectives. 

Let’s start with promotion. We are trying to establish Southwark as a new tourist location. The Tate opens in one month. That will change Bankside absolutely. In the case of the exhibition I talked about earlier,the proposal was for eight schemes forartistic interventions in the public realm. One was a Portland stone monument at a jaunty 19 degree slope. Another was a black bench . Lots of the projects explored text in the pavement. They certainly improved the appearance of the area. But Southwark also used these environmental projects to demonstrate change, and to make connections between local residents who were engagedin the process, and tourists coming into the areaseeing these objects for the first time. They need to get it easily. 

To take another example. We are also interested in establishing Peckham as a location for leisure use. The state has built a library and a healthy living centre. The private sector is contemplatinga cinema and a pub. Note how in one case we use a new title for a leisure centre - a ‘healthy living centre’-  to differentiate it from previous establishments. At the same time we use a good old fashioned term - ‘library’- when describing a building which is very different from any other sort of library. Both of these have used high quality design and artist interventions to establish new roles and functions, and to facilitate understanding of what that was.

Related to this is the question of generating wider involvement in projects. The project is not the art object but something else. The almost standard template now is to approach a local school or group of children and ask them to produce images for use on construction hoarding. For example,when Southwark launched its successful campaign to locate. the Greater London Authority building in the area, we invited children to draw images of the site,the area and themselves. Some of these were charming and were put on the wall when we had our promotion campaign. Some were dark and alarming and are locked away in my office. 

Now let’s consider an even more stretching example of new areas for artistic participation: Social exclusion. This is a national and local priority and forces us to look at the factors which exclude individuals from full participation in society. As far as I am concerned any analysis of exclusion should lead to an understanding of actions which can be taken to re-engage people. This is where art comes in. If, as I believe, a startingpoint for getting people out of exclusion is engagement in some form, stimulating an interest in overcomingimpediments to inclusion - lack of self worth or inability to communicate with others - then activities such as art can begin this process. Probably performing art and music are the most obvious ways of making connections. A Group calledMusic based in Southwark which works with young people, has had some stunning successes in bringing people out of exclusion into inclusion.This is invaluable. Of course for different people different routes will work. Some will find the initial spark in sport, or from a good teacher or a social worker because for the first time someone has valued them. I don’t know how you make this start.I do know that the initial impulse on its own is not enough. The follow up both personally and by the person or group is vital. . But don’t ever underestimate the importance of that initial spark, and the things which make a person change. Imention thistoday to suggest another example of future areas for artists to work in. 

We are looking here at programmes which, put rather grandly, change the individual's relation to the state. In the case of the Healthy Living Centre, the aim is to show anddemonstrate that exercise and other physical pursuits make very important personal contributions to health, and are ones which the individual chooses to do.Our artistic intervention in that casewas to commission artists to create some sound pieces, which provided sounds associated with lakes and seas. The main artistic intervention at the library is a sign saying ‘Library’ which is written at the top of the building and glows at night so you see it against the sky. And when you go into that building, people are behaving as they should in a library - well.

Perhaps I have said enough to convey my view that Southwark uses art as a means of achieving other ends. I make no apology for this. Most impressively, it can allow people to consider situations and circumstances in a different way. We need more of that. 

Let us return to economics. I am very keen that if we commission artists we should pay. But I am putting these transactions in the same realm as most other transactions - a business deal negotiated by both parties to deliver something. That something I suggest is much wider than often considered. At present we can find artists who have extremely interesting ideas about working in the public realm.But have artists adopted this approach because there is money to be made in this sector? Or is it just a happy coincidence? I don’t know.I realise this is not all of art. You (artists) can play the gallery game and generate an audience through that means. You can also choose the traditional route of getting a job to finance your art. If, however, you are looking for the state to pay for that, that is a bigger issue. The state does not have an obligation to pay. Public art, especially in the wider fields, which I am proposing, requires a new role from the artist of serving as much as creating. 

In all of this I see a chain where the value added by the producer establishes the worth of the contribution. It is part of the value chain of economics.I am unconvinced about the state providing subsidy direct orindirect, forartist support. (For example, providing discounted artists studios. If individuals such as the wonderful Delfina who is a person as well as a block of studios, decides to do this, that’s great, but she is deciding what to do with her own money.) The transaction should be about a product. 

This is already happening. Is it any wonder that art schools are now offering business training and advice? 1 think this is a good step. The rigour of assessing work against standards, external as well as internal, is valuable - they are those of the market. There is a strong imperative in being part of the competitive world. It will not suit all artists, but what would? 

To finish, let me suggest a new way of creating a greater range for art. 
Earlier I mentioned that part of my job in Southwark is responsibility for street cleansing. We spend over £3meach year in the unending task of picking up rubbish.
Our ultimate street cleaning day was 1st January 2000. We did three sweeps along the riverside collecting the champagne bottles, paper hats and rubbish left over from a great party. The place was spotless by 12 o’clock.The public realm was spotless, the private companies had done nothing about sorting out their’s. 

But the rest of the year there is the ‘drift’, a vehiclewhich goes around and collects bagged sweepings. And of course there is a category system for street cleanliness, inventively called A B C D. A is great and you don’t need to worry about it. D is terrible and you don't want to know about it. When you have a scoring system you have league tables. Tidy Britain campaignsweeps through Southwark once a year to grade our roads and pavements. We do well but not great. 

I thought it would be interesting for a photographer who is currently working with Southwark children to go out with one of our street inspectors to record street litter. Here are the results: 

These photographs were taken by an artist photographer working with us in our schools. To my view they are very beautiful in their own right.I think they begin to show us something about art in general and public art in particular. Here is someone who has looked at things in the street, and put theminto gorgeous photographs. What she was doing was making us look at the world without suggesting how we might change it. But we could do more. Several years ago Southwark ran an exhibition on rubbish where local kids built a horse out of old packaging and detritus. The show had a very serious intent of showing how recycling could reduce the amount of rubbish we generate. I regret it doesn’t appear to have had any significant impact - yet.

But there is a real challenge here. If we commissioned an artist- or group of artists - to make the rubbish in the streets beautiful,so that the heaps were done as a real artistic intervention, could we raise peoples’ awareness of it so much that the public desisted from adding to the litter? Think about interesting, artistically arranged mounds, strategically placed to surprise and delight passers-by. Could this be a way of decorating the public realm? 

And remember since Southwark alone spends over £3 million each year on rubbish collection, there is a lot of money available for artists. If an artist came forward and made a bid for £2.9m for making the streets of Southwark beautiful for the entire year, we’d probably take you on.

Questions

Can you say something more about the value chain.

Value chain means each time you add value to something, you can identify it, that is what it is worth and what other people are prepared to pay for it. If you look at art and see where it adds to the value chain, it creates an extremely well established route for a transaction.

What was the name of the photographer?

Sarah Hannind

Are these photographs also part of the promotion and tourism chain?

I am not sure they would do a great deal for tourism. But I think it would be interesting to have a rubbish view, to go round the borough identifying points of rubbish. Collecting rubbish has great potential. So for example, if you had discarded white products piled up in an interesting way, then you could go and see all the white goods disposed of in the area. Eric Bainbridge did a fantastic exhibition of things which he had picked up in the streets of Southwark So we could have fifty wardrobes on the corner of a street, and instead of having to send round ten different vans to collect them, we could have them there for a month, and then take them all away.

Are you saying that the value system should be based entirely on hard nosed economics? 

I am, and it’s because we’re using public money. Because we have objectives like social exclusion, like trying to get people to understand the impact of their own actions in dropping sweet wrappers and banana skins onto the public highway. 

How much impact does the concept of ‘best value?

Best value is a complicated concept to do with the best way of spending public money. It isn’t about the lowest value, but about trying to find out what you want to do, and the most economic way of doing it. The objective is to deal with big issues, such as whether people feel proud of their area, and one of the things which certainly brings down an area, is rubbish in the street. There is absolutely no point in putting in public art and then not being able to maintain the street. The interesting thing about my range of responsibilities is that I am both responsible for thinking about the appearance of the environment, putting in planning applications and promoting the conceptof regeneration, and then maintaining it. I am very aware of the importance of maintaining the public realm,and I’m saying it could become an artistic project in its own right. 

Surely you are looking for the greatest benefit at the lowest cost. You are trying to create a balance between costs and benefits?

You are absolutely right. The tough point is that if the objective is to enable individuals to achieve their potential, how do you achieve that? If the term ‘the greatest benefit is about narrowing things down - getting the streets clean at the lowest possible price - we are missing the point. I’m trying to make people feel engaged with society, and if that means making people feel that we value the area they live in,then street cleanliness is higher up in that chain than we thought.

Your are putting public art into the category of hard nosed economics and yet we are also talking about the social and cultural benefits of art. Why do you see a distinction?

One of the things I am negotiating at present is what we get out of libraries - and there is surprising consensus about the impact libraries have on the diversion of crime amongst kids and the support and enjoyment they have for the elderly - and then looking at alternative choices for those. In pure bold economic terms, a person goes to their doctor and says they’re feeling unhappy, they are given some pills and sent home. The pills may not work and are expensive. But if instead the doctor gives them a prescription to go to a fitness course, they have something to look forward to every afternoon and people to meet. It gives them social interaction which might have been part of the reason they were depressed.

So if you encourage artists, you encourage the cultural life of an area?

Not necessarily

How do you measure benefits so that they can be used?

Whoever is making an economic decision, has to measure what the economic benefit is. With the introduction of Ecommerce, the question of how people measure economic benefit is becoming more engaging. I think all of us are learning there isn’t an absolute measure for it, different people will make different decisions, and the ones which over time prove to be effective will be in the ascendant. I don’t have an answer for it. We won’t know about social exclusion for another thirty years.

You have given examples which fall into two categories, one of which is activity based - whether music or libraries - and has aclear added value. It engages people more directly. But your examples around rubbish are all to do with the representation of rubbish. I find that an extraordinary slippage, and I have a similar problem with much of the work going on in Southwark generally in terms of street art. Could you say more about that?

That isn’t representation of rubbish, that’s the real stuff. I am trying to take ideas of intervention by artists, put it into mainstream services and link it in with questions about why people value living in a particular area. I’m suggesting that if you look at the extraordinarily large sums of money that we spend on services, a tiny shift in that could unlock a lot of money for something else to happen, create a change of perception. So instead of being disconcerted in seeing all the discarded white ware, people would say,“I’ve got an old washing machine that I can add to the collection down the street”. It’s shifting the way people talk about things and getting people to be engaged with how we dispose of commodities, rather than sweeping it away at great expense. 

Third Speaker (Practice)

Gavin Jones Environmental

I’d like to explore the idea of a potential of opposites, the idea that folly, sensibility and vulnerability can have a restorative effect when placed into its opposite environment. It has to be the worst kind of environment to emphasise that for me. I’m a painter and sculptor but I was never happy with the impositions that public art put on the kind of art I like, art that has an intimate nature. It is difficult to be intimate in public art.So I got involved in gardening which is a fine art, and I subvert that to some degree, because I use lorry loads of clay, living trees to make armatures and so on. I am still playing the games of a sculptor but on a bigger scale - the flowers are the palettes.My first project was a garden in Tower Hamlets called Cameron Gardens . I have been working on this for fifteen years. It’s now getting complex and beginning to mature. Along the way I had to learn some new skills I wasn’t familiar with as an artist, like politics, dealing with the public, moving earth, dealing with vandalism, andsoil contamination.I wanted to introduce surprise. Its like walking through the worst Council estate you can imagine and you come across the Queen of the Nightsoprano aria -a full stage production of the Magic Flute with a stage made of sugar. You are surprised, the ambition was to enchant. 

I knew the Cameron Garden experiment was a success from the following indicators: 

fruits 
The local people - mainly Bengali - were eager for growing space allocation. This 
has continued and we hold a steady waiting list. A lot of ethnic speciality organic food is grown. 

folly 
There was a lot of vandalism originally, cars were burned out nightly; but it no longer affects the garden now. We upturned a trawler to make a thatched shed - ten years later it is still intact. The act of putting a very vulnerable structure in a violent environment appeals to people and can have the effect of cancelling violence. The principal of opposites has worked, and I’ve continued to experiment with that notion.

fire
This involves kindling existing cultural values in an area .We assume that an artist going in will inject culture. But by coming out into this garden, the residents not only started to mix with people from other origins, they brought their culture into the open. Giving them an arena in which to express their culture allowed them to be proud of it . It is very fundamental to Bengali women to have a garden. 

function 
This is what makes the project tick. The air quality is noticeably better within the garden, particularly at the back where it is giving off oxygen and the view is much improved.It also became a very economic garden. Gardens take a lot of money to maintain, but I can employ a high standard gardener for 30 days of the year for the same price it was costing the Local Authority to cut the low maintenance grass areas. There was also a litter picking factor and a weeds spraying factor. I added all that in and negotiated with Tower Hamlets to give us that money every year. This arrangementhas carried on for 15 years. Required low maintenance costs for garden schemes are usually a prime factor working against gardens of quality. The situation is further complicated by the landscaping budget which is often used as a contingency fund for the main building scheme.

frogs 
The most rewarding indicator for me was the increase in wildlife the garden brought. Before it was barren, now it has a diverse ecology.First insects appeared including lots of butterflies, then blue tits and bats. In the spring we will start beekeeping. 

fanfare
The garden has attracted much publicity, and opportunities like this one enable the project to explain its evolution. 

fractality
This means the ability to repeat itself. A good project should be repeated. Increased exposure and subsequent demand for similar gardens has led to the formation of our design business whose specialisation is community landscape design. We are developing a particular set of products based on the principles developed at Cameron Gardens. We aim to refine and test ideas and procedures in the field, and if proven to work, include them in a modular portfolio of eco-tools. The expansion of good ideas in a modular way is attractive as costs are reduced radically by repetition. There is also a constant need for new ideas. The language of gardening has been in stagnation for almost a century. Procedures for implementing quality control and management of the gardens by residents are also considered keys to the success of the project.

The Wapping Garden 
As a 1940’s site, it was very decrepit - a 99% Bengali ghetto with drug problems.
Iwas asked by the then Chief Executive of Tower Hamlets Sivi Pearce to work with a Bengali women’s group, and I identified a group that was in need of a garden and wouldsupport its development. 

The initial moneys available were small, but with help from G capital Bank, £9000 was made available for phase 1. Employees from G Bank also contributed physically to the work. With this it was possible to deliver the infrastructure of 30 small gardens, but no further funding was guaranteed. 

We marked out the site using oval shapes arranged around existing trees to suggest flowers. We then added 100 cubic metres of clay. The main problem was soil contamination, particularly as food growing was the main interest of the group. Nospecific contamination had been identified, but it was safe to assume that levels of lead, as in most London soils, were high. Effective testing is very expensive and rarely carried out. Hence the usual option of removing local soil and replacing it with an ‘onion field' - supposedly clean farm soil - would have been over our budget. Also farmland soil can be as corrupted as that in London. 

Iknew lead transfer into the food chain was not possible in a slightly alkaline environment. We had been using cockle shell (a by -product of the food processing industry) as a mulch and gravel in other gardens as a cheap and effective solution. As cockle shells are made of lime, they can also be used to counteract lead. 
The shell is quite a dirty when it arrives, but it gets quickly bleached by the sun and becomes a very aesthetic gravelthat has a great light reflecting ability. It warms the whole garden up and throws light around the buildings.

By putting a layer of cockle shells, then a layer of deeply dug clay, then more shells, drainage is created. Clay walls are then built to retain and make the raised beds. These are low cost and avoid the use of cladding type materials, such as wood or railway sleepers which can look very shanty town, and mean a shortened shelf life for the garden. I like my gardens to last for centuries - old mature gardens have a quality we all respond to and recognise as special.Clay also helps hold down contaminants and tends to be used for land fill sites and rubbish pits.

When we arrived at this site there was a lot of garbage coming out of the windows on a daily basis which included used hypodermic needles and crack pipes. This problem, apart from the odd crack pipe, stopped once the women started to use the garden in spring, and is an important value indicator. Also, as the women claim the litter picking money which is quite high, we increase the value of that by employing a freelance gardener rather than a contractor, who gets to know the project.
. 
We are looking for further sites to experiment with. I am currently doing seven different gardens including one in Brixton. Doing something like this means dealing with a lot of technical problems -it becomes easier to do it again. 

Questions

Can you say more about your relationship with Local Authorities?

I had an opportunity through Sylvia Pierce, the chief executive of Tower Hamlets who was a forward thinker and was willing to work with me. Forward thinkers are unusual and tend to be people at the top. I have also worked with Housing Associations which are similar. 

Your role as an artist in relation to what Fred was saying about value chains, should be valued. It seems to me that you weren’t paid very well. You were introducing a new idea.Why can’t institutions recognise this enough to pay you?

This idea is now getting exposure through magazines- it’ll probably be adopted by the industry, but I won’t get any money from that. But that’s life,my pleasure is to create seven very interesting experiments. Peopleusually want you to work on low budgets and that gives you the opportunity to experiment. I am not going to do anything I don’twant to do for very little money. But if I can do exactly what I want, I’ll do it cheap. 

What are the people in red hats doing, and why were the Bengali women not involved once the garden was established?

They are city bankers from G Capital doing something called ‘Make a Difference Day’.Thereason the Bengali women are not involved is because there is a Muslim rule that women are not allowed to be shown working in front of men. The ladies have done quite a lot to their gardens and have adopted it for themselves, but this is heavy work, so it is not appropriate perhaps. 

Were the women involved in the design of the garden? Did you facilitate the designing of the garden, and their interpretation of how they might like the garden to be?

I want to do what I want. But there is both an elitist approach as well as a point where I involve my client. I had been messing around witheggs on a piece of paper marked out like an estate, trying to make a pretty pattern, and couldn’t come up with one. One of the ladies suggested putting them into flower shapes, and it immediately clicked, so we got pieces of paper, and stuck them on the map aroundthe existing trees - about 8 mature silver birches which I hadn’t wanted to cut down. They fitted around the trees with just enough centres for the flowers, making three or four petal groups. Seeing how they fitted in so well I thought was great. 

What about the afterlife of the garden? Do your freelance gardeners stay with the project?

No, if I do seven projects, I keep a close eye on them while I’m around. I was happy to work with the Bengali women because I knew they would look after their own garden. You also set up garden development groups and teach people how to garden. People need to be given the skills and infrastructure to manage their own garden. There are organisations that help as well, the British Trust of Conservation Volunteers. That all comes as part of the job. 

What do you see as your measure of success? 

When I come back, I like to see that all the trees have not been broken, that the place is nice and tidy, there’s no litter, the people look happy, the children are not being abusive to me. Those kinds of things are immediate indicators that it is working.

A lot of what you are talking about is relationship based, isn’t it?

Yes, but that must carry on.Before we start we have to define the rules and the perimeters of what is tasteful. It’s also a question of what is acceptable to the Local Authority.
Can you expand on the idea of taste. Does your sense of taste change?

You mean do I have to make compromises? I try not to take on projects where I will have to compromise myself. But I know this job so well, I know when a compromise is necessary. I know the difference between what is going to fail and what isn’t, but initially it is done on a hunch. You have to take risks, but it’s mainly done on the basis of intuition, as well as on the experience of having dealt with allot of local authority estate environments and knowing how they work. 

So your sense of taste does shift then?

Yes, slightly. 

Seminar Sessions

One

1. What is the difference, if any, between conceptions of ‘benefitconceptions of ‘qualitythe field of public art?

Participants:
Liz Smith				Public Art Officer, Southampton City Council
Antoinette Newman		Artist
Caroline Rackham		Visual Arts Co-ordinator Eastleigh B. Council
Huw Meredydd Owen		DRWS Architects
Anne Marie Pereira De Mello	Student, Chelsea College of Art
Carolyn Primett			Public Art Officer, Lancashire County Council
Helen Acton			Panning & Cultural Services, Derby City Council
Liz Wilson				Arts Officer, Lincoln City Council
Chinks Grylls			Artist
Clare Hudson			Principal Arts Officer, Warwickshire C. Council
Justine Ennion			Arts Development Officer
Celia Yeoman			Public Arts Unit Manager, Swindon B. Council

The session began by asking: is it possible to have one without the other -they are intrinsically linked. However, there is a need to distinguish between quality of work 
and quality of process, and there may be conflicts in perceptions and definitions of quality. Equally, there is an issue of fitness of purpose. Education was also felt to be important. There can be no benefit if the work is not understood. Agendas, priorities and expected outcomes need to be established by all partners, and the brief should make clear who is responsible for what.

Debates surrounding quality was seen as a subjective area and therefore problematic.
Quality implies improvement of the public area, whereas benefits can be seen through factors such as increased use and safety.  Who is quality for - the client, audience, or artist (often more than one)?Is there a way of weighting what people think? The commissioner will have a better basis for judging quality, but with partners involved, will they have priority? Is there then a hierarchy between planners, developers, funders and local communities?

It was noted that temporary and permanent work may engender different criteria. With temporary work there is greater room for experimentation and whimsy; with permanent, there may be more pressure for lasting quality. Quality however, is not static. People’s perceptions of quality and benefit will change over time, as will style and fashion. There are also economic factors, and the environment surrounding a work may change.

The issue of ‘best value’ was raised. How will this impact on questions of quality and benefit?Best value is primarily an issue of quality as well as price, and provides an opportunity to ensure arts and creativity. Benefit however was different -there was felt to be little understanding of the benefits of working with artists. Notions of creativity don’t always fit in with the monitoring process. Steering groups and multi- disciplinary teams involve different mind sets. Artists have their own criteria for assessing quality. How should this assessment be used?

There was a need to establish best practice standards. A number of criteria were felt to be relevant. These included:of fabricationof processof the brief and matching of the work to the brief (although it was noted that a good brief should not be too prescriptive to avoid stifling creativity)
appropriateness of the work for the environment and its audience 
was further agreed that all these factors delivered separate criteria which may be in conflict and undergo change, and that the overriding factor in any given situation may be economics.

Seminar Sessions

Two

2.Most professions have agreed ways of evaluating standards and benchmarks against which these can be tested. Is this possible in the field of public art?

Participants:
Anna Pepperall			Gateshead Borough Council
Maurice McCuire 			Arts Consultant
Emma Larkinson 			Commissions Officer, West Midlands Arts
Jane Fawns Watt 			Artist 
Sara Black 				Arts Consultant 
William Tayleur 			M.D., Marketing& Management Consultancy 
Guy Eades 				Isle of Wight Healthcare Trust 
Vandana Patel 			Public Arts Admin. Officer, Leicester C. Council
Hugh Clarke			Jersey Public Sculpture Trust 	
Linda Salway 			Arts Manager, Waverley Borough Council 

The session opened with the question: Did anyone have past experience of undertaking evaluation of a public art project? It was stated that Artranspennine had been evaluated in relationship to planning management and visitor attendance, i.e. in terms of operational issues. The group discussed how this process should be undertaken in the light of funding, and provided quantitative information. The question was raised as to whether clear methodology had been set early in the project, and measures of success agreed on. They had not. The group felt that performance indicators often wanted by funders could be provided for, but the qualitative approach was more difficult. 

Concerns were raised as to why we were we undertaking evaluation - was it just to justify activity, and if so, for whom. We should not necessarily allow ourselves to be dictated to by others’ agendas. However, there was a strong feeling that evaluation was both necessary and valuable - a feeling that reflected participantsand professional interests. There was also acknowledgement that ‘best value’ provided a framework we would need to work within, but concern was expressed over jargon and fads. 

The group was drawn into a discussion regarding the definition of ‘public art' which reflected the mixture of the group in terms of their greater or lesser experience of commissioning practice. It was pointed out that Westminster have undertaken an audit - a millennial project documenting public art, which included qualitative research focus groups and quantitative questionnaires. This had produced very positive feedback in terms of public support for commissioning. 

The group then attempted to draw together issues which could be used to benchmark public projects. 

One might be the levels of interaction with a piece. It was reported that there had been unexpected levels of physical interaction with The Angel - people having their photos taken and so on. Participation can be passive as well as participatory. Issues of good practice were also discussed. Anecdotal evidence suggests artists are still not valued for their contributions in terms of pay, as had been illustrated by Gavin Jones’s presentation. Maintenance and decommissioning were also felt to be issues which affect commissions and relate to wider questions of good practice. The briefing process was discussed in relationship to other forms of professional practice, such as architects, where clear outputs are specified. A clear brief could help the evaluation process, and have an impact on issues of good practice. The usefulness of anecdotal evidence was raised (particularly in relation to healthcare projects), and the group discussed the need to establish a range of methodologies which provides a variety of evidence. 

The following conclusions were drawn: 
·	evaluation was valuable but should be carried out to a clear agenda set by participants 
·	evaluation should be appropriate to the project 
·	it is possible to benchmark parts of the process, but not the product 

Seminar Sessions

Three

3.Fred Manson talked about artists as ‘contentproviders’. How can artists establish their credentials for working ‘beyond the frame’ - across specialist disciplines, within everyday life?

Participants:
Mathew Jarrett			Commissions Advisor, Northern Arts
Sam Wilkinson			Visual Arts Consultant
Hazel Colquhoun			Arts Consultant
John Barry 				Public Arts Officer, Salford City Council
Clare Beck 				Director of Trading, Crafts Council
Stephen Carter			Senior lecturer, University of North London
Pat Kaufman			Artist
Sarah Malone			Development Officer, Commissions East
Morag Morrison			Consultant, Hawkins Brown
Julie Seddon Jones 		Artmatters
Veronica Wilton			Marketing and Arts Programming, Studio Fish 
Christine Kervin			Conservation Officer, Bradford MD. Council

Collaboration
The session opened by asking how we can communicate thecredentials of artists to other design professionals, and what are the roles of artists in the design team.

It was thought that artists are still being brought into projects are too late and that often they are expected to solve‘insoluble- making the position of the artist very difficult if theycan’t succeed.No major developments have been made in addressing the split between disciplines. However, the earlier the relationship is established, the sooner hidden and unspecified agendas can emerge and be addressed. It was also noted that in Local Authorities a perception still exists that the involvement of artists results in missed deadlines

Temporary work 
It was suggested that an important process to build understanding and commitment to multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary working was through temporary projects that bring together engineers, architect and artists.In a temporary project the roles can be shifted successfully and the participants will / may relish the opportunity to engage in the process again permanent projects will emerge. Such projects allow confidence in artists to be built amongst other disciplines. But artists need to learn to negotiate their own place as part of a team to collaborate successfully.

Artists' role
Is there a misunderstanding about what art is and what it can contribute, from professional practice to general design solutions? Is there any difference between design solutions and art solutions?

An example was mentioned of 12 metro stations being built in Newcastle where a pool of artists have already been identified as part of the design team. Artists are selected from this pool as opportunities arise. It was also suggested that the role of the artist is that of ‘healer’- healing the wounds of the city. Can artists say things that others can’t? A comment was made that artists should acknowledge their own responsibilities to make opportunities happen; that they should use their initiative and demonstrate commitment to artist led initiatives.

It was felt that public art is becoming institutionalised through taught courses at universities, but there was no comment as to whether this was a good or bad thing.

Public art projects do not necessarily have to end in a product, but a period of time spent in a community can lead to empowerment of the group or individual.

Best Value
It was asked whether Best Value will lead to greater control, to less opportunity for risk and innovation, particularly amongst local authorities. How will quality be affected, and will Best Value lead to lowest common denominator work? 

It was felt that Best Value will not affect public art if the authority has a good arts policy. The potential client base for commissioned work is broad, not just local authority, and there is also the private sector. There is a range of agendas.
Best Value is also unlikely to be a problem if the project is developed through the acknowledged procedure of good practice, including a well-written brief, effective education, advocacy, budgetary control and evaluation. Outcomes should be measured against objectives.

A recommendation was made that PAF should try to shape the criteria within Best Value to support public art.

Decommissioning 
A suggestion was made to hold referendums on whether public works of art should be removed.It was commented that if this were the case, the artist might engage with communities quite differently 

Seminar Sessions

Four

4.Can artistsbe useful? If so, how might this ‘usedemonstrated, evaluated or proved?

Participants: 	
Sally Williams			Freelance Researcher
Maggie Bolt				Director, Public Art South West
Nancy Stedman 			Public Arts Wakefield 
John Holland 			Principal Architect, Lincoln City Council
Fran Cottell 			Artist
Victoria Pomeroy 			Exhibitions Manager, Tate Gallery Liverpool
Rex Henry 				Senior Lecturer in Architecture, U.N.L.

It was agreed that the simple answer to the question was ‘yes’.The group discussed breadth of artistsvis-à-vis validity; differences in artistic approaches, including interdisciplinary and collaborative practice; and what might constitute the difference of an artist’s approach as distinct from that of other design professionals.As to demonstrating, evaluating and proving the validity of the artist’s contribution, issues raised included the need to find other/new lines of communicating this for those not already on board.Currently what is proffered to demonstrate the usefulness of the artist’s contribution — examples of past successes as models of good practice, or demonstration of social and/or economic benefitsget overruled or bypassed too easily. 

It was proposed that in order to change the local authority culture as regards public art, the PAF research should focus on getting the case for involving artists into the Planning Policy Guidelines, and indeed the DETR, so that a local authority would have a mandatory obligation to follow these guidelines.In this way the justification they would need to be making would be for not using artists, rather than the current state of affairs where there is a continual struggle of advocating the use of artists time andagain.

Specific points which emerged from the discussion are as follows:
The breadth of artists’ contributions which could be deemed useful ranged from participatory (community) approach, through collaboration with other disciplines and/or communities, to stand-alone artworks.It was pointed out that there appears to be a greater allowance for aesthetic notions in the thinking of the current government.The separation of ‘public artother spending on art (by public bodies) is not productive, indeed is counter-productive.

Notions of ‘usediscussed - the importance of social benefits beyond economic benefits. The use of the artist’s contribution can be seen as inspirational, as well as practical.It was agreed that ‘validity’ was a better term in this discussion than ‘usefulness’. One of the benefits which might derive from the difference of an artist’s approach to that of other design practitioners was that artists were likely to bring a more personal, as well as a more independent (risk-taking) approach.This may enable people -the public or audience - to expect and/or tolerate change more easily, expectation levels for what could be achieved may be raised. MUF was cited as an example here.

The issue of education was raised but it was inconclusive as to whether the greater proliferation of public art courses or components on architecture/design courses was bridging a gap of understanding between the disciplines. 

The main focus of discussion around demonstrating the validity of the artist’s contribution was the relationship with local authorities. Current evaluation models .g. visitor perception surveys – are only useful as part of the argument, but their results can be/have been ignored.Using well-documented case studies is important but not sufficient. We have failed to imbed good practice into thinking and now need to approach it in a different way; other indices need to be found/used. For example, a suggestion was made to link benefit to the issue of maintenance, i.e. using an artist could reduce maintenance problems through greater community ownership and involvement.Other angles to look at were long-term value from the outset; to assess potential for social change, and to align the argument for art with the wider issue of the health of society.

Seminar Sessions

Five

5.In the last ten years, the inclusion of art in all types of environmental developments has become increasingly accepted, despite the fact that there is little documentary evaluation of its benefits. Why has this been the case?

Participants:
Simon Grennan 	Director, Public Art Forum
Kath Brogan		Asst. Director Architecture, Preston Borough Council
Sara Trentham		Freelance public art consultant
Jos Boys			De Montfort University
Lorraine Leeson		Co-Director, The Art of Change
Gavin Jones		Jones Environmental

It was agreed that there is now much greater acceptance of art in the public realm.Cultural issues are beginning to replace notions of social and economic value within regeneration, and there is a growing community of artists interested in environmental practice.However, much of this activity is not being documented or discussed. There is also insufficient consideration of local distinctiveness, or of the views of local people.

Issues of quality have arisen, particularly the problem of bad art as a result of the commissioning process. Success often depends on the quality of the brief.There are also difficulties within local authorities as to how funding can be spent. Departmental issues and views can be very problematic. Cultural regeneration can also be a guise for gentrification. An example of this is Manchester where gentrification has pushed out original small businesses, as well as artists and art organisations. 

It was pointed out that funding for regeneration may dry up in future years. There is a need to ensure that this area of discussion does not disappear. The next important issue affecting regeneration will be sustainability. Agenda 21 which contains criteria for sustainability, including cultural sustainability, has been very useful in this respect. 

There was felt to be an issue about whether the need in future is for more art, or formore opportunities for artists.The artist is the fulcrum between culture and creativity. The answer may be to create greater mechanisms for feedback so that we can learn from our experience and move on. The relationship of public art to the artworld also needs to be addressed as this affects issues of value.There is a need for documentation and critique based on evidence.

The main points were summarised as follows:

1.There is a need to establish what cultural regeneration is and to examine issues of acceptance (i.e.. what is acceptable to who)

2.The emerging community of artists is a different field to the high art community with a different set of priorities and values. These need to be taken into account.

Seminar Sessions

Six

6.Artists are often involved in planning for cultural needs of towns and cities. How can cultural planning inform the specialist disciplines involved in the overall planning of the environment?

Participants:
Cathy Newbery			Projects Officer, Irwell Sculpture Trail
Zuleika Dobson			Executive Curator, Hampshire Sculpture Trust
Claire Slattery			Principal Officer, Leeds Metropolitan University
Julia Robins			Heartlands Hospital
Mary Hooper			Hastings & Rother NHS Trust
Mathew Miller			
Michael Trainor			Artistic Director, The Art Department
Rachel Sharman			Project Co-ordinator, Oldham Cultural Quarter
Susannah Silver			Freelance Public Arts Researcher
Lucy McMenemy			Art Project Management
Jasia McArdle			Public Art Officer, Leicester City Council

The session began by asking participants for a definition of cultural planning. These involved:
·	Social engineering - responding to a wider brief - problem solving 
Development of cultural industries 
·	Reflecting the culture of the location and social issues. 
Is it related to community planning? 
Vision for a place/position. 

Cathy Newbery then gave a definition of Cultural Planning by Franco Bianchini: 

Cultural planning connects cultural policy with other areas of municipal policy making. It helps a city identify its cultural resources and encourages cultural entities to think strategically about their applications to achieve key objectives: 
Physical planning, townscape design, tourism, industrial development, retailing, place marketing, community development, education and training, 

The group felt that developing a cultural plan requires specialist expertise and an equal representative from each sector, whether the visual arts, tourism or planning.
However, there will be dilemmas at the social and geographical levels involving conflicts between individual vision and the borough strategy which aims for shared vision and objectives. There also needs to be a separation between legal and cultural planning. Cultural planners are not concerned with legal process but with the effective structuring of a way of life.

Aplanning team should be both multi- and inter-disciplinary. Working relationships and roles must be defined and negotiated, but artists should be able to cross disciplines and not be brought into the team simply as producers of objects. The group also felt that training was important to enable integration, as people from different specialisms may not know the language or role of others in the group. 

A discussion followed about evaluation and long term benefits. There is a need to involve professionals from outside the arts world, such as sociologists, to work with defined community groups and to ensure that intentions have been achieved. Cultural planning leads to sustainability, but the need for communication and respect for individual roles is essential. There is also a danger of tick-box culture; impacting on an organisation is a gradual process we must allow time for. 

Two key points emerged: 
·	Clear objectives which everybody subscribes to, need to be established at the beginning. A common goal provides an aid to communication. 

·	The artist’s role can be compared to that of a reagent (scientific term for something that detects a substances presence similar to a litmus paper). Since it operates without the constraints of other specialisms, its creative value consists in making lateral connections. However, the set of relationships needs to be equal based on interdependency between members of team.