If a sculpture is commissioned for a special building, how does the artist make his effort to let his work just for this building? The style? The meaning? The material? Or,...

-- Yong Chen (yong_c@hotmail.com), October 19, 1998

Answers

Anyone who can answer this is an internationally renowned sculptor, I presume, who knows all the answers! Less flippantly, this is surely the preserve of the artist at the site, where every condition will be different to the last commission. One cannot make rules for how an artwork will be. Maybe by actually commissioning a certain person, the decision has already been partially made, because their style fits 'meaning' or 'material' etc. Yet, how is meaning taken away from the physical reality....? As usual, bogged down in problematics......

-- Jeremy (j.beach@pemail.net), October 26, 1998.

Sometimes, public art becomes one with the building. For example, the Galleria at BCE Place in Toronto is a public art commission designed by Santiago Calatrava and commissioned under the City's "percent for art" policy for private development. In other cases concerning free standing sculpture, the artist will usually develop the concept based on an examination of the site, the social and physical context of the are and perhaps, the history of the area. I'm working on a project now where the artists is designing an entire park (walkways, planting beds, recreation areas etc.) as an artwork which reads both at street/user level and which appears to be a drawing when viewed from the surrounding tall buildings.

-- Karen Mills, Public Art Mgmt. (dmills@attcanada.net), November 25, 1998.