Public Art Summer School - Guest Blog by Shona MacNaughton

by Geraldine Heaney, 2 Aug 2011

On the first day of the Public Art Summer School we learned about the most traditional of public art forms – the commemorative monument.

Meeting in the Broughton High School art department, the base of the Public Art Summer School, surrounded by the remnants of secondary education, mood boards and still life parts, unit indicators and disembodied dolls, the participants met each other and were introduced to the project. Likes and dislikes of public art were shared; figures standing in water, giraffes, defunct funnels, marble steps and shopping mall turds. Issues of participation, popularity and the successful life of a public art work were raised.

Then Ray McKenzie gave a brief overview of his research in public art before taking us on a tour of Edinburgh’s New Town examples. He laid down the facets of narrative context making for a cultural object; the urban, the political and the visual, making the point that their existence was never neutral, it was always a political act. Idealogically driven, the end result is an outcome of power struggles and subject to competing factors. And as was actually emphasised by the bank removing us from this grating, “public” art is forever entwined and restricted by private ownership.

The case of Sandy Stoddart ‘s statue (2008) of physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) seemed to encapsulate several ideas surrounding the manipulation of history and the responsibility that inccurs. There seemed to be a number of contradictions in the commemoration of someone from a certain time who was not formerly commemorated, in the style of that time as if they were commemorated. So essentially this could be seen as a fake monument which seeks to fool the public, by re-writing history as it should have been. Is it then by that logic a thoroughly accidental post-modern act? In seeking to be anti-gaudy does Stoddart in fact create something which has more in common with the replications of antiquity available in Las Vegas, adding a pretender to Edinburgh’s historical theme park. In the context of the frequently corrupt history of these statues does it not, instead of elevating that figure to its rightful place, situate it within those values of power, and therein position itself in the defiance of a craft, with the emulation of the values it represents. As one of us asked when contemplating the immortalised swaggering playboy himself George IV, “why are they still here?” Perhaps because as markers of history, a fascinating history as told by an eloquent enthusiast such as McKenzie which cannot be reset lest it be forgotten, they are the result of a specific set of circumstances which tell of that time. Messing with the timeline of these markers either adds a new post-modern layer of reality or is an arrogant act in line with the dominant power elite which righteously plonked in the first place.

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