Deconstructing public art: It’s a living thing
Acclaimed poet and author John Kinsella muses about his interactions with public art, recalling his long-ago days of living rough in Perth and the ‘conversations’ between public art and those who live with it.
This year I have been to Perth more often than usual to do a writing residency at the State Library of Western Australia. Between work sessions I have wandered the city in search of its public art.
Straight out the door and into the cultural centre open space (much of which is undergoing “works”), I am among a long-term favourite sculptural edifice, Gate 2: Coalesce (1992) by Akio Makigawa.
It’s not so much an interrogation of built places, but a conversation with them. It is strangely familiar, an embodiment of forms — shapes that represent all our presences among the constructed.
But the city of Perth has not always been a comfortable experience for me, and these hikes have brought back memories of living in an inner-city hotel and also being homeless and sleeping in both the Supreme Court Gardens and Stirling Gardens. Stirling Gardens are still stuck with their colonial name and, indeed, users of the gardens are checkpointed more than greeted by Pietro Giacomo Porcelli’s 1916 statue of explorer-surveyor Alexander Forrest.
That might make you think back across the city to Forrest Place and the historic GPO 6000, between Wellington Street and Murray Street Mall, opposite the railway station. I have walked on past the State Art Gallery from the library, over the pedestrian bridge and through the station and into the open area of Forrest Place. The old GPO building, a “centre” if ever there was one in the colonial city, with its public open area and the word-thread pavers of colonial critiquing by writer Robert Drewe, The Poetry Line, and the vegetal-artificial form of James Angus’s 2011 Grow Your Own, a 6.5m-high sculpture intended to brighten the city-user’s quotidian.
You will be told that locals call this “the cactus”, but ask most people and they won’t have a clue. I do know that not far from where it is located I used to meet a fella who had no legs – he was dying of alcoholism – and wheel him all the way up to Saint Alban’s Anglican Church in Highgate so he could get a free meal.
Speaking of affectionate local nicknames, the famous Ore Obelisk by Paul Ritter that dominated Stirling Gardens from when it was erected in 1971 as a paean of praise to the state’s mining industry was apparently designated “the kebab”. This entity, which haunted my distressed hours during the early ’90s when I habituated the area, is no longer there, removed in September 2020 after two incidents (the first back in 2016) of shedding lumps of stone. One wonders who decides on such namings … none of the people I knew living around those gardens and meeting the Salvos’ van for an early morning feed down near Riverside Drive ever called it that, but maybe they did and kept it to themselves.
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That piece of colonial emphasis gone, the fallow ground has recently been occupied by the carbon-fibre and steel of Brendan Murphy Boonji Spaceman for a 12-month residency, purportedly in celebration of Perth’s John Glenn orbital spaceflight 1962-inspired “City of Lights” moniker. In fact, “city of lights” is pseudo-graffitied whitely (along with “love”) over this startlingly sky-challenging deep-blue piece of supreme kitsch.
It seems to go with the colonial and neo-colonial tenor of the gardens. The reflections in the spaceman’s visor are alluring and rebarbative at once, and the paradox of spatiality is in overload as it seems to try and walk across the grass, the footpath, the road, and out, maybe up among the towers.
On that same north boundary terrace-front of the gardens, a mob of metal kangaroos (they were in place before the Boonji Spaceman started approaching them!) are fixedly pondering the loss of habitat by looking into the gardens, into a shallow pond, into the traffic and across the terrace to Marcus Canning’s and Christian de Vietri’s Saint George and the Dragon good-evil binary Ascalon abstract white statue outside St George’s Cathedral, snuggled in among the glass towers.
Personally, I think the dragon was the good and its slayer the evil. Installed in 2011, it was long after my time of homelessness, but had it been there back then the irony of often seeking refuge in the Cathedral to drink away from cops on the beat and be ‘alone with my thoughts’ would have seemed even more grimly ironic. It had been a place of refuge when I felt I had nowhere else to go.
But Stirling Gardens (Perth’s oldest) boasts a possibly more bewildering colonial motif (the Supreme Court building itself being its epi-centre) of Claire Bailey’s city-commissioned sculptural version of May Gibbs’ Snugglepot and Cuddlepie gumnut babies lurking “innocently” and “naturally” in the greenery. Apparently, one of them was stolen in 2016 but was recovered and the Garden’s equilibrium restored.
What is the purpose of public art? For me, it’s to create a conversation with and between those who live with it, far more than those who visit it and have points of reference to take back home with them.
In this context, another place that was significant to me and others living rough on the streets was the Wesley Church on the corner of William and Hay streets — I often sat next to it, and in an adjacent old building there was a drop-in centre for the homeless where I spent time playing chess and chequers and just being in proximity of others who “got it”.
Opposite, across Hay Street, is Anne Neil’s 1999 People in the City, a sculpture silhouette that seems to represent good colonial citizenry (which is no judgement on the craft skills of this or any other pieces … but, for me, it’s all part of a mosaic that we have to take into consideration regarding what is being stated about a place and its history).
And, as we might now pause next to the church, we are in the umbra of Rod Laws’ Tree of Life, which contains the worthy motif of children for peace. But this motif is ultimately inadequate for me because it comes out of the 2011 Perth-staged Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, with all the contradictions of the colonial residues behind the very notion of the commonwealth. But, okay, yes, it’s a sculpture I visually appreciate and, by rerouting its symbolism, I can turn it into many other things: maybe a peace resonator.
Public art will often (as is intended) seem circumstantial. There’s a parking building mirror that caught my eye just down William Street (I love mirrors) that in turn drew my eye to a mural of the mirror and the reflection it captures alongside. It’s an almost casual piece, but it has something lively and living that works against the mechanical nature of functionality. It seems like a moment, but it’s a planned moment. Why do people accept this and not graffiti (unless it’s a Banksy) that can sometimes, even frequently, overwhelm the commissioned art and say far more about the people who live in a place — homed or un-homed, of whatever background or beliefs. A fear of the spontaneous, the uncontrolled?
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shelter, food and clothing and community empathy is what public art is all about for me
Some public art, frankly, just makes me sick, such as uncritical celebrations of mining and commerce, exploration and royalism. There are plenty of those throughout the city. Maybe if things are cast in bronze or steel, or set in stone, people trust them more? They give security? It’s not a security I want — shelter, food and clothing and community empathy is what public art is all about for me. And you can be involved in such art even when you have nowhere to go.
One positive instance of this is the cast of Gerhard Marcks’s 1967 Berlin statue The Caller outside (and now on top of) the Art Gallery of Western Australia. I actually don’t like the statue as an artwork, but it seems to be getting something about what is going on, issuing either a warning or a consolation.
Heading out of the city along Hay Street up through West Perth, I pass the Voytek welded-iron red-tailed black cockatoos splendidly flying alongside a commercial, building. It’s a commercial prospect, isn’t it … It’s commercial public art wherein metalworking and welding are a key part of the creativity. Just down the road outside a small mining company’s offices, real red-tailed black cockatoos are feeding on fruits in an introduced tree. I photograph them — the living birds.
So the street-aligned flying cockatoos sculpture, whose movement I actually like despite its commercial context, carries me along. It does get something essential about representation, but also sadly parodies the plight of the living birds and their struggle for food and habitat. It’s art, but art at a price. Is it the job of the artist (or maybe designer, in this case?) to reflect on this after the placement? And what of the disjuncture between the natural and artificial?
Apropos of this, from a completely different studio/company, I see a van down near the river sign-written with a dozen or so offerings ranging from “metal fabrication” to “surface treatment” and “window hoods”, that also offers public art. There’s an essential truth in this.
As I move purposely from one piece to another, contemplating their contexts and the ways they are absorbed into people’s lives, or deflected by them — evaded, ignored even – something seems missing from the whole arrangement of art in the city. Maybe I will find answers in Noongar artist Laurel Nannup’s First Contact (2015) on Elizabeth Quay (in conjunction with Urban Arts Projects). I’d never seen it up close until literally the other day, because I avoid visiting the commercial-mining heart of the Elizabeth Quay development (named in honour of the previous monarch).
As part of a reclamation of the sacred Derbal Yerrigan river in the 1930s, the development is essentially on a former wetland that should have been restored in some way as habitat, instead of being forced into being a further extension of the city into the riverside. But the obsession with using every bit of space and more around and into the river seems to ring all the way back to the ceremonial act in 1829 of Mrs Dance striking the first blow with an axe into the tree, for King and the foundation of the Swan River Colony. We have the 1929 George Pitt Morison centennial restaging painting The Foundation of Perth, an icon of WA art, to remind us.
There’s no doubt that the First Contact sculpture powerfully addresses the colonial disruption in its beautiful but tragic symbolism – the terrible truth of the colonists’ purpose as opposed to the integrity and depth of the Noongar belief around what was transpiring – and shifts discourse. But I suspect that many present-day colonialists will bend its meaning to act as reassurance for their own presence.
It’s a false reconciliation in the face of deep concern for country and culture on the sculptor’s part. This is completely separate from the artist’s intention for her people, of course. It’s a dazzling experience to approach the silver bird with outstretched wings perched on a boat on the platform above the river, and both confronting and strangely soothing to stand next to it — the river so close and its “feathers” shimmering under a low Makuru (June/July) sun.
I hope those occupying the towers working to “develop” WA further think it all over. This sculpture is infinitely more generous than the conversion of Boorloo into Perth has been. We can read of the background to the sculpture’s story at the DevelopmentWA website: “In Noongar Dreaming, a person’s spirit becomes a bird when they pass, flying to the next realm. When Noongar people first saw European ships sailing up the Swan River, their white sails looked like giant wings. They believed the ships carried the spirits of their ancestors returning from the sea. At night, the sculpture illuminates, creating a stunning viewing point on the Swan River.”
I will continue my readings of Boorloo’s public art, trying to imagine living with the artworks. If the homeless can relate to these pieces and make use of them in coping with life in the city, then they have purpose no matter what they do or say. It is for the people that public art exists, and it must also tell their stories with respect and dignity while critiquing the wrongs that displace and diminish people and nature.