Art + the Public Realm

Art practice is cited as a reference for many of our actions; it has the ability to set clear agendas and conceptual frameworks without the distractions of program or function. It thus can (and should) ask the pointed questions, such as how or why we might operate as designers. The artist assumes full authorship in this process, with the responsibility it entails. There is little shelter in bureaucracy and regulation, client and budget – only an unmediated relationship with the public realm.

Making is a necessary counterpoint to the abstractions of much of our practice: the distanced view, the instructions to others, and the flickering screen. We believe in a first-hand knowledge of our sites of engagement, a material presence, whether that be by crafting by hand, by ‘being there’, or by including others in the process of design. Art practice offers us valuable methods for close observation, analysis, speculation, participation and production. The gallery offers us a distinct scale of operation and engagement, a laboratory of sorts, to complement other sites of experimentation, discourse and dissemination: the design studio, the academy, the polemical project and the built work. printed text.

Charles Anderson and Simone LeAmon [n+1 equals] with Patterson and Pettus Landscape Architects. Crossing House, City of Maribyrnong. 1999 – 2001

Pursuing notions of mythopoesis and eido-kinesis, the Crossing House project sought to develop a practice of configuring place-making stories rather than making places tell stories. Such a practice conceives place as truly discursive: non-didactic, non-representational but a performative and interpretive field of play and discovery. Consequently, Crossing House was inspired by the site’s name – ‘Saltwater Crossing’ – and explored how place could indeed be seen to emerge from the narrative of its naming. In this way, Crossing House considered place, ground and architecture as generated by the history and dynamics of crossing and proposed a performative and choreographed remembering of place.

Consequently, Crossing House endeavoured to rediscover the human proportions of the Saltwater Crossing site to suggest a place where ‘home’ and ‘homecoming’ are bound up with the everyday experience of crossing.

Sand Helsel + K. C. Bee. Taipei Operations Exhibition

Taipei City has been used as a laboratory to examine contemporary urban design issues. The question of mobility generated a range of responses – from the physical to the virtual and ephemeral. The agendas of the contributors from RMIT University, Melbourne and Tamkang University, Taipei, could be read linearly through the individual projects, which were described in a flyer and arranged on an examination table. There was also another way to experience the city (and this exhibition). The richness of the phenomena we have found in Taipei revealed a series of associations, adjacencies, and juxtapositions when read as a whole. By providing a context to reconfigure the work, multiple narratives – stories and moments – can exist simultaneously, one of the marks of a good city. This is not without contradictions: at times, similar observations can be variously interpreted as strengths or weaknesses, opportunities or threats.

We invited exhibition visitors  to curate their city, to be a participant rather than a visitor. Trust that the experience will result in new adjacencies to produce unexpected findings, conceptual maps, and additional readings of Taipei.

Mel Bright and Shelly Freeman  [make architecture]. 100 HOUSES. 2004

100 people were asked to donate their recycling bin half full with recyclable materials, a plant or cutting from their garden and a story. The result was a one day installation at the Hamer Hall Undercroft in Melbourne as part of Architects for Peace inaugural public forum ‘Intencity’. The usually dark and cold space was brought to life with 100 numbered and stacked crates planted with a variety of plants and boasting colourful ‘tags’ identifying their place of origin – in this case a house somewhere in Melbourne. The crates were available to the public to take away on the day at no cost with red dots marking the ‘sold’ pieces, just like in an art gallery. This cross pollination encouraged the widening of our community and greening of our city.

Lynda Roberts [public assembly]. The Interventionist Guide to Melbourne. 2009

During the month of October 2009,  Platform Gallery at Flinders St Station was transformed into a virtual map of Melbourne. Showcasing ten artists whose practice interrogated the urban fabric, the exhibition revealed sites for individuals and groups to creatively and temporarily intervene with the city.  The project worked on a range of scales – from the broad context of mapping, to the interpretation of the city within the subterranean display cabinets at Platform Gallery to A5 sized self-published zines, to 1:1 emersive and experiential interventions within the city fabric itself.

For more detailed information go to the project website: www.interventionistguide.org

Charles Anderson, DCG Design  in collaboration with Aspect Studios. National Emergency Services Memorial. National Capital Authority, Canberra. 2004

This projects intent was “to produce a memorial that embodied in a single, powerful gesture the spirit of the Emergency Services personnel.” This is expressed through a folding wall which, responding to the landscape, wraps around and configures a ceremonial plaza in a motion intended to convey a sense of a large protecting blanket, a characteristic item of the Emergency Services.

This undulating wall animates and is animated by a ‘four dimensional’ frieze or tableau. This tableau curates images of the emergency services at work to ‘pose’ a narrative of our human experience of, and response to, catastrophic change. This tableau, performing somewhat like a holographic surface, generates a coherent image in the interplay of light across its textured and abstracted surface. The varied degree of surface detail affords various degrees of legibility at different proximities and at different times of the day and night.

This memorial, is ‘a wall’ which, instead of instituting division, gathers and opens place through the dynamics of movement, and in so doing facilitates an encounter with time and the dynamics of its passing.

SueAnne Ware.  The Road-as-Shrine: A Garden of Remembrance to Road Fatalities. 2003-

The Road-as-Shrine is an ongoing project involving the research, construction, management and monitoring of a native flower memorial garden to the victims of rural road accidents, initially planted in November 2003. It is located on a 500-metre section of Hazelwood Road, a rural road near Churchill in the La Trobe Valley, Victoria.

The project investigates public expression and informed awareness of personal tragedy as part of concerned community engagement. It privileges process and dynamic forces as a catalyst for reconsideration of the idea of memorialisation itself. It considers site specific landscape systems as central to a memorial’s design, stressing ephemeral elements (seasonal flowering, species succession) and forces (fire, rain) whose effects are manifested through a series of evolving roadside gardens.

Sand Helsel, Les Kossatz, Augustine Dall’Ava, David Bullpitt. Australian National Korean War Memorial. 1998-2000

The Korean War Memorial was designed in contrast to the object-centric early memorials along Anzac Parade in Canberra. On a small (15x30m) site there are several distinct special experiences. A memorial landscape with a field of 339 stainless steel poles to commemorate the fallen frames the Korean government’s gift of granite boulders from the key battlefield. A ceremonial plinth provides the venue for formal events and a small interior contemplative space contains an upright boulder for the private laying of a wreath.

The memorial, though undeniably permanent, highlights the soldiers’ experience of the ephemera of heat and cold through the touch of the stainless steel poles at body-width spacing and the whistle of the wind through the field.

 IMAGE : A House for Hermes #05. Generative processes. Charles Anderson

Charles Anderson: A House for Hermes #05,   2010 – 2012

Homelessness, displacement, exile, accelerated mobility, flux; all seem to define the contemporary condition. If routes really do proceed roots, if the overwhelming experience of contemporary life is one of fluidity, if we are all vulnerable strangers, what of the house? What constitutes home and place? Where are we to dwell? How are we to make our home in the world? How is place to be made?

These questions of home, house, dwelling and place are the basis of the House for Hermes Project. A House for Hermes #05 attempts to create a contemporary dwelling via an open-ended re-collection of spatial experience.

Each member of the X-Field group has been asked to draw from memory a floor plan of a house which has played a significant role in their lives. From these combined drawings a new collective ‘house’ will be generated and configured within the exhibition space.

As the project moves from country to country, new floor plans drawn by the participants from each new city will be added and the collective house consequently progressively transformed and reconfigured. Over time an evolving morphology of global dwelling may emerge from this ongoing conversation performed at a local level.

Perhaps this is an intuition of dwelling not as a house which becomes to our former selves what the corpse is to the living body, but a house which spatialises a different thinking of time, memory and the dynamic of recollection.

 

Mel Dodd (muf_aus). Diorama Bench, 2010

The Diorama Bench is an installation that moves between the scale of the architectural model, and the scale of the gallery; between the 1:100 and the 1:1.  It both refers to design proposals for a small public reserve, as well as speculating on broader and more difficult ideas about the values of un-designed space, feral land and the rural urban fringe: a world of transgressions, making cubbies, having fires and behaving badly.

Taking its cue from the ‘diorama’ which are three-dimensional miniature models, sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase and often used for museums, the installation is in part a microcosmic representation of all the messy details of everyday life – an antidote to the formal models of architects and designers.

The installation includes fragments from the life of the West Park Housing Estate in Hastings, and is set out on a plinth constructed as an outdoor hybrid ‘bench’ – 400mm high and approximately 2 m x 4 m.  In fact, because of its construction –  a welded steel sub frame and reclaimed timber planks – this installation will operate largely as a distorted and odd shape bench, reminiscent of those found in national parks and on nature walks. In operating between these two scales the installation is both a piece of public furniture, and an opportunity for insights into what public space might be.

“the Kings Creek river just runs down the back down there…for people to just chuck stuff in the backtracks. That’s where people go motorbike riding, lizard hunting, snake hunting. They take the trailers in, coz they can’t in the bush. Coz, it costs money to dump it and all that. Um, they just go, and they drive in just there coz there’s a big entrance. And they drive in and they just dump it where ever. Yeah, and then um, people like take that stuff and make cubbies out of it.”