Transcriber: Arthur Manookian Reviewer: Nooshin Neirami
Hello and thank you so much
for inviting me to this very exciting event
in a very exciting city.
I am a curator of art.
and I've been invited to navigate the uncharted waters of a garden
right here in the heart of the city
The NEON Foundation has asked
if I would put together an open-air exhibition
in the National Garden of Athens.
It's a labyrinth of forking paths,
dark thickets of trees
and sunken fountains,
it's a time capsule from the 19th century,
a vestige of monarchy,
steeped in Bavarian romanticism
and populated with plants brought from around the world,
it's a kind of arboreal colony.
It's beautiful,
but even my guidebook tells me
there's an air of benign neglect.
Could this sleeping beauty be woken up?
Could a historic garden be a platform for contemporary art?
What do you think?
And at a time of scarcity
can we justify devoting resources to public art?
Public art. What's it for?
Well, the first answer is of course
time travel.
Public art takes us on a journey into the past, the present and the future.
This cast of an entire house by Rachel Whiteread
is like a concrete photograph,
the ghost of a home demolished to make way for new developments.
Here a group of people stand in a forest in Kassel, Germany.
They are captivated by sound,
the sounds of World War Two allied bombers
who dropped their shells here in 1942.
Blasts and echoes recreated by Janet Cardiff in 2012.
And here in an empty building sight right in the middle of London
Daniel Silver created an underworld of archaeological fragments
that synthesize all lost civilisations.
He makes them into metaphors for the unconscious.
Public art is also about the here and now.
Georg Herold invited viewers to treat the garden
as a spacial poem,
translating the sensations of colour, fragrance and texture
into language.
Placing sound speakers in the drains of Athens
Kostas Ioannidis invites us to sit down, forget the traffic and listen
to the sound of the ocean which rouse up from the gutters.
And of course we must look forward
and public art takes us into the future.
Nikos Navridis transformed this abandoned olive oil factory
into a living field of wheat,
a metaphor for potential growth,
potential nourishment;
or as the taxi driver who took me there described it,
a metaphor for a path for life.
Public art is about participation.
The work of art today embraces its audiences
and recognises each of us
as part of an innate and cultural collectivity.
But it also recognises
that we bring unique and individual sensibilities
that play their part in meaning and in making.
Louis Bourgeois' Maman
stimulates both wonder and dread.
Los Carpinteros' Guiro
stimulates invention.
These artists from Cuba created this beautiful pod
as a place where budding poets, musicians, writers
can put their books on its shelves, or their beers and hang out together
to create and perform new compositions.
This beautiful gourd was luminous
it radiated light,
and so we can see how public art is also a form of communication.
It's a public platform,
it's something that embraces us.
This is in the Sharzah Biennale
Ernesto Neto, an artist from Brazil,
coming to the Middle East and creating a space
for practitioners, the public, to meet.
So, public art is a form of communication.
Juan Munoz inserts these other beings into a social space
to create a parallel world
whose language we can only speculate about.
It's a talking point about silent communication.
Public art is also a form of Media.
In London's Trafalgar Square surrounding Nelson's column
there're 4 plinths.
3 of them
have 19 century military figures,
statues that have been there for a hundred years,
and where the pigeons like to sit.
But the fourth plinth has always been empty.
The mayor of London decided
that this was the perfect opportunity
to give contemporary artists a temporary platform
right in the heart of the city.
Mike Wallenger, Rachel Whiteread Yinka Shonibare, Antony Gormley...
no work.
For his fourth plinth project he gave over this space to the public.
Over 100 days 2400 people
selected from hundreds of thousands of applicants
each spent 1 hour on the plinth,
24 hours a day.
Some shed their clothes
while others sang, danced, looked for jobs
or rebelled against issues such as global warming.
9 people chose nudity for their 1 hour.
Thousands came to the square.
But also, this project
was sponsored and televised by Sky Arts
so that each participant was witnessed online by millions.
These public art projects
are not just giving expression to one individual's vision,
there're also about communicating the values
of a civil society.
They communicate openness to critical reflection,
they communicate new ways of saying and thinking,
they communicate a commitment to imagination and creativity,
a commitment to the art of our time;
they communicate confidence in the future,
they can confirm a city as a world class city
whose reputation rests not just on the past,
but on the art of the present
and the cultural legacy of the future.
Public art creates cultural ecologies.
We've seen through large scale temporary art events, biennales,
outdoor exhibitions, public art commissions,
a thirst for the sensory experience and intellectual journey
that works of art offer.
I don't know if any of you went last year
to Kassel in Germany to see Documenta 13,
possibly the biggest exhibition of contemporary art in the world.
It attracted 860,000 visitors in 100 days.
And Kassel was twinned with Kabul in Afghanistan
where it attracted 27,000 people.
Local school children, students, academics, craftsmen, all got involved.
Local business from hotels and bars to fabrication workshops and editing suit,
all profited.
One of the artists in Documenta 13 was Thomas Schutte.
Artists are good at transcending geopolitical or social barriers.
Young artists like to move around, have conversations,
they absorb knowledge like magpies,
they can pick up threads from science, philosophy and history
and weave them together
to reveal unexpected patterns and possibilities.
Here's a piece that this artist also documented
Giuseppe Penone made for the Whitechapel Gallery
and over a year it was seen by 300,000 people
and now here it is in the Palace of Versailles in Paris.
Artists are looking for creative energy and for opportunities.
To have meaningful sustainable development
we need ideas.
Artists provide the creative spark that leads to innovation.
Public art gives the known and the every day
the excitement,
the unpredictability
and the potential of uncharted waters.
Thank you.
(Applause)