Anna Zagala looks at two striking public artworks in Melbourne, Cameron Robbins and Christopher Lansell's The Solar System down at the St Kilda Foreshore and Alexander Knox's kinetic light work Maxims of behaviour on the corner of Bourke and Swanston Sts in the UBD of Melbourne.
Kate Warren examines Melbourne's laneways and the many way artists have used them to re-energise and re-familiarise local audiences with their urban environment. Artists mentioned are Sarah Rodigari and Tim Webster, Troy Innocent, Matt Blackwood, John Alexander Borley, Anthony McInneny, Sue McCauley and Keith Deverell, and QingLan Huang.
Juliette Peers interviews Mary Lou Pavlovic Mary Lou Pavlovic to find out how one becomes a de facto public institution? MLP: Just do it. Don’t worry so much about acceptance into a very institutionalised dysfunctional system...Worry about being creative and alive on your own terms. Put yourself in any exhibition you feel you should be in. You may not get the institutional rewards but lets face it – they ain’t that great here in Aussie land anyway.
Janet Maughan travelled to the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial in September 2009. With Stephanie Britton she interviewed the indefatigable Fram Kitagawa, Director of both the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial [ETAT] and of the new Niigata Water and Land Art Festival in the seaport of Niigata, and wove his words around the experience of seeing outstanding art in the unusual and delightful surroundings of the Japanese countryside.
The notion of public art has been shifting over the years to include hopeful new models for change in a time of uncertainty - festivals, the temporal, the long term developmental and experimental thinking about how art can modify and influence the public realm.