Disrupt, Pivot, Adapt
A vocabulary more familiar to technology now overlays the pandemic experience. Cultural experience has also gone online with organisations ‘pivoting’ to connect with audiences in isolation. Virtual tours of collections and art fairs have surfaced, while artists, galleries and contemporary art spaces are commissioning new works to share across the diverse online platforms that are providing an interim space for culture.
In Australia, this strange turn has seen us move from physical isolation from global peers to arrival in the same place, at home, online. This years edition of the Biennale of Sydney, Nirin directed by Brook Andrew, was the first to adapt is content online and many others have followed suit. In my role as Artistic Program Manager at Kaldor Public Art Projects in Sydney, I worked with philanthropist John Kaldor to shift our program. We moved from fifty years of commissioning international artists to create new works in the public realm to commissions by Australian artists that could be experienced by global audiences at home.
Kaldor Public Art Projects has partnered with Serpentine Gallery, Independent Curators International and Google Arts & Culture for do it (australia) which launched this week with 15 Australian artists, as part of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s wider reprise of the famous do-it-yourself instructional series, timed to connect with his do it (around the world) project. Similar initiatives that have emerged to offer participatory experiences for audiences include Firstsite activity packs and Goldsmiths Social Distancing School, amongst others.
For Kaldor Public Art Projects, this is a particularly dramatic shift from the organisation’s original mission. Founded by the philanthropist in 1969, John Kaldor’s art projects presented the first major international public realm art project of its kind anywhere in the world. Before the start of the land art movement, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped two-and-a-half kilometres of Sydney’s coastline for the first Kaldor Project. The tradition of this kind of public realm art project is something beyond the monumental, it has at its heart an intention of bringing art into everyday lived experience and to engaging with public sites and communities.
In addition to supporting our institutions post Covid-19, commissioning art in the public realm has never been more vital and it provides a pathway to supporting artists directly. In recent weeks, the focus on parklands and public realm spaces has been unprecedented. At the same time, we have been viscerally reminded of the value of the arts to creating the dialogue and ideas that bind and inspire communities.
In both the short and long term, public art commissions can support the arts sector, connect the community with the public realm, promote a return to local tourism and create landmarks, monuments and memories. Hans Ulrich Obrist has advocated for governments to offer a ‘New New Deal’ for the arts, following the model set forth by Roosevelt in the recovery from the Great Depression. The New Deal sustained artists such as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner with major mural projects through the WPA’s Federal Art Project. An iteration of this today could include more diverse artforms, AR and other technologies, and it could offer an opportunity for artists to experiment with new modes of presentation and engagement with audiences.
Supporting the arts through investment in the public realm and public benefit is also an opportunity for forward thinking developers, retail associations and business improvement districts, who seek to bring communities together and shape liveable places. Futurecity’s work in UK, Europe, US and Australia is exemplary for these kinds of strategies and collaborations, including partnership across public and private sectors. From London’s Crossrail strategy to Boston’s Avenue to the Arts, the new Cultural Strategy for Heart of London Business Alliance and, in Australia, the ambitious Southbank by Beulah project in Melbourne. This is a moment for inventive collaborations across sectors that invest in creative public realm and offer new economic models for art and culture.
– Sophie Forbat, Associate, Senior Curator
Image: Installation view of ANRI SALA’s The Last Resort(2017) at the Observatory Hill Rotunda, Sydney, 2017. Photo by Peter Greig. Courtesy the artist and Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney. Image Source