Like many international cities, Auckland has a lot of public art - some good, some bad, some very very bad. The city's public art programmes are administered by the Auckland City Council which proudly proclaims: "Throughout central Auckland city there is an extensive collection of public art works including sculptures, statues, monuments, fountains, water features, mosaics and murals." Not a very promising start. Nor is there much comfort to be gained from other aspects of the ACC's public art positioning statement on its growing collection of over 200 works "reflecting the city's unique identity, its cultural heritage, telling its stories."
Storytelling about place, culture and identity is now associated with Te Papa The Museum of New Zealand and the privileging of social history exhibitions over contemporary art, so the art world gets jumpy whenever it encounters this kind of Te Papa-ish rhetoric. However there is a new broom in the Council's public art locker and things are about to change. Recently Pontus Kyander took up the position of Manager of Public Art for the city, supported by an advisory committee of artists and independent curators/writers chaired by art consultant Trish Clark. Kyander's background as an art critic, independent curator, editor of FORMAT (a contemporary arts programme for Swedish Television) and guest professor at EWHA University, Seoul suggests we can look forward to a less pedestrian art commissioning programme in the future. We'll keep an eye out for Kyander's public art interventions, but in the meantime Neil Dawson's Echo at the Christchurch Arts Centre continues to provide a great benchmark for NZ artists and commissioners working in the public art arena.
Images: Neil Dawson, Echo, 1982, installation views, Christchurch Arts Centre
