Contemporary Canadian Glass

The opening presentation  at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for the 2010 GAAC conference was given by the Maritime  artist Peter Powning, …he has lived and worked for the last 35 years in Markhamville, New Brunswick. So, what could better for a first ‘maritime’ article than an excerpt from his talk “Going Public”  unfortunately it will be minus most of the slides.

His opening talk was predominantly about Public commissions hence… “GOING PUBLIC” The following is a segment that I chose from the talk that I thought would be of interest to artists and GAAC members alike. “Lynne”

“I will show and discuss some of the public commissions I am involved with in the context of my mixed media practice. I’m particularly interested in the context of public art and the ways in which it engages the public. As well, I’m interested in the commissioning process and its effects on creative thinking.

I work principally in glass, clay and bronze. They all involve transformation by fire.

A good deal of the work I have been engaged in over the last few years deals with metaphor based on ideas concerning balance, fragmentation and transformation: of the body, heart, mind, spirit, nature, language & culture. The work is meant to have the feel of the artifact: an emotional artifact made solid, cultural artifacts for our times. I’ve also been making photographic images over the years and these have recently become an important element of my artistic production as well.

I’ve lived and worked for 35 years in Markhamville, New Brunswick in a high hill valley surrounded by boreal forest. My work and life are informed by a rural existence and my long connection with place. This may sound romantic, at times it feels that way, but mostly it just is the way things are, sometimes pleasant and easy but often enough challenging and difficult. What I’m attempting with my work is to produce objects that excite me and that connect with other people. It’s really as simple as that. I also like the thought of the work started here in my studio going out into the world.

Being an artist is a perilous and peculiar occupation that has many and varied rewards as well as many and varied insecurities and pitfalls. I live a ying yang existence with periods of secluded creation bamboozled by periodic public exposure when I venture beyond the hills of home to see if the work really works and hasn’t just become a delusory obsession.

Glass found it’s way into my work gradually during the 1980’s. I spent a winter in Providence RI where I had a studio next to Howard Ben Tre before he was well known. I helped him with some mold making and he has helped me over the years with my interest in glass.

I have always needed to address a market of some sort with most of what I produce. Public art is another market. Unlike most of what I’ve done, which has been sold to individuals, public art becomes part of the public commons. All artists enter a market place whether it’s a close circle of like-minded artists and academics, public museums, artist run spaces, or through galleries. Getting our work out there in some way is part of what being an artist is about. We communicate. We all need a “public”. With public art our “market” is determined by location and visibility and the ability of public art to connect, to create engagement. The transaction is supported by money one way or another but it’s not about money.

Why go big? Well first of all it’s a creative challenge, a technical and organizational challenge and I enjoy challenges. I also have to admit that it’s fun. I get to play. I think play is an essential ingredient in what we all do. Play is a serious element of creativity. Public art also allows me to move out of the gallery space and onto the street, park or public building site. The work has a public identity rather than a private one. It’s a less sheltered, more exposed place to be as an artist. The artist who makes public art becomes a public artist, and has to deal with the expectations, understanding of, and interpretation by what Annie Gerin in the book Public Art in Canada calls, “ … non-specialized publics outside the gallery space”       a polite way of saying your average bozo. I don’t say this meaning to denigrate your average bozo but to point out that we spend much of our professional lives sheltered from public opinions of the sort that come from people uninterested in art, even antagonistic to art in general, or who at least have had little conscious exposure to contemporary art

The public doesn’t get to choose what it is confronted with in terms of public art (or architecture or much else of the landscape, urban, town or country for that matter). In the case of art however, the question of value often comes up. An ugly light standard at least has the value of lighting something. A hideous condo building does house people however badly. The case for art is more difficult and not as readily apparent.

Citizens see the work whether they want to or not, and those offended by art in general, or the tax money spent on art or the content of the art can be bluntly expressive about what they think. It can be quite a jolt coming out of our comfortable circle of support to encounter opinions expressed in letters to the editor regarding our precious endeavors, especially as stated in the wild west of anonymous comments made in on-line blogs in reaction to media coverage of a public unveiling. That being said public dialogue is an important element attached to public art. It can take years for a public sculpture to settle into its environment and become a part of  “place”, a “local” rather than an intruder. Public art can form part of a community’s identity. I think it’s a hopeful pursuit, in the sense that with public art we are engaged in the notion that we can improve and evolve, that there can be positive change amidst all the negative and difficult complexities of life in the 21^st century. Making permanent, site specific objects one at a time, by hand says we think we’ll carry on, that it’s worth the effort.  It’s an act of direct unmediated public engagement.

Artistic and cultural value is a can of worms but in a sense value is predetermined by the very fact that public sculpture happens. Cultural forces have made a case for the inclusion of public art in construction budgets, and various levels of government, most notably municipal, have bought the argument. The idea of “creative cities” is in ascendency. Public art is perceived to have value as an indicator of enlightened policy and as an attractant to the sorts of people and activities that make a city a desirable place to live.

At least part of the value of public art is similar to the value of art and the individually made object in general. A public sculpture distinguishes its locale as being differentiated from the increasingly homogenized big box mass culture we swim in. It is site specific. Architecture and parks can help humanize where we live, public art goes further by not only making connections with people and place but by having something to say. It can become part of the connective cultural tissue of a specific place. Public art is a kind of cultural eruption or focal point. Even poorly conceived public art becomes a record of cultural decisions made, a reflection of the community from which it springs. Value accrues to public art over time.

In my case a public art commission starts with the personal and builds from my reaction to the site and proposal guidelines. It will have visual references as clues to meaning, it will involve the careful use of materials in ways meant to evoke response, it will be in a context that gives further meaning and it will gather associations as the process goes along. It might attempt to be bold, beautiful, serene, humorous, provocative or all of these things together: serenely, provocative perhaps. My work is intended to engage not instruct.

I respond to a site. By necessity I respond to the thematic requirements of the request for proposals and try to make those considerations work for me. Underlying the impulse to engage in public art making is the same basic creative urge that makes object-making an imperative in my life. It is a need to engage the world and understand the world through the production of objects inspired by creative observation. Seeing what is there to be seen, internalizing it, then physically manifesting a response. The process is a visual, tactile interpretation of experience that comes from that zone beyond word-thought, that deep well that word analysis can only skim the surface of. That holy place of creative imagining that analysis flattens. This is true whether the source of inspiration is an ancient artifact, a beautiful cup or a rock formation. I try to trust my instincts.

I often have to overcome an initial irritation with the thematic expectations set out in the request for proposals for public art competitions. It’s rare to be given a free hand. The sculpture has to satisfy a jury that it meets requirements. This can mean dealing with very specific historical facts, or something about the purpose of the building it is associated with, or a grab bag of art jargon fluff.

Public Sculpture can have many limitations and restrictions. It has to be virtually vandal proof, weather proof, building code compatible, engineered, liability proof, not invite invasion by or habitation by birds, beasts or the homeless, be skate board proof, cleanable if tagged with paint, and still be culturally viable, at least to the satisfaction of a jury of unknown composition.

In canvassing several artist friends who have at one point or another been involved in percentage for the arts programs it is clear that none of them find the process satisfactory. In fact as soon as an artist can ditch the process and find commissions that forgo the lottery aspects of trying to get sculpture commissions through percentage for the arts programs they move on. This is a problem. It leaves the field open to the less accomplished, the desperate, or the amateur with credentials, or artists who have a big enough practice that they have the cash flow to hire people to work on proposals allowing them not to be too distracted from their creative work by the time sink of making endless proposals. The only solution I can see to this is for municipalities that commission public art to have the courage to have some of the larger commissions done on the basis of a pre-determined short list rather then the easy out of calls for Expressions of Interest or Requests for Proposals. That would mean that mixed juries would at least be supporting active professionals without being distracted by large numbers of essentially poorly or unqualified applicants.

I’ve been researching the winning proposals for some of the percentage for the arts commissions lately and there are quite a few absolutely inexplicable choices being made. In following up on how the winners were selected made it is clear that the juries were dominated by people without arts backgrounds and I have to say it shows. So more varied approaches to commissioning public art are essential to continue to engage the most accomplished artists to participate in the process. There is a need for jury education through workshops and broad exposure to some of the great public art in the world. I hate to see large amounts of money being squandered on mediocre “safe” art. I have to admit though that the process doesn’t encourage me to risk making the bolder, wilder proposals that I might if I felt confident about the jury mix. The chance to work on large public commissions still drives me to engage in the process though with considerable more selectivity than in the past.