Tradition in crisis

Public art - is it feasible today and do people really want it? There is, at the moment, a strong current in its favour and a great deal of debate about it, yet there appears to be no unanimity at all about what form it should take. The current situation is rather an anything-goes one - which often means that nothing very much is going nowhere in particular.

Recently in Dublin we have had slogans affixed to public buildings, a rather innocuous activity which soon becomes like neon ads - you stop seeing them and they don't really say much anyway (in any case, they are usually temporary fixtures, which on the whole is fortunate). Like so many things which appear innovatory here, this has been done elsewhere for nearly two decades and is almost old hat by now.

We have had all sorts of installational art in parks and along quays and public places, most of it ephemeral and forgettable, though generally well-intentioned. We have had sculpture trails, generally mediocre. You might even include events such as the Macnas pageants which have been among the most genuine and inventive public creations of the past decade but surely we need something more permanent than that?

Art in private galleries is now relatively healthy again after the late 1980s recession but public art is now an anomalous, ill-thought-out area and the artists who engage in it are rarely the best ones available. Genuine, hard, long-term thinking seems in short supply; short-term views, facile Pop imagery and "instant", once-off effects appear to dominate. In short, it is a muddled and unpromising situation in which most of the better artists do not appear anxious to get involved (for a discussion of some of these issues, I recommend the book Art, Space And The City by Malcolm Miles, published recently by Routledge). A whole tradition is seemingly in crisis, one which was an accepted part of European society for centuries, in fact for two millennia. Classical Rome and Athens are unthinkable without their statuary and their public buildings, not to mention their solemn public rites. The Middle Ages had their cathedrals, their religious festivals and morality plays and a magnificent tradition of Gothic stone-carving; the Renaissance had its mural painters and its bronzes, its public orations and pageantry - which might cover anything from processions under flower-covered triumphal arches to jousting on horseback. Even the Counter-Reformation had its pulpit performers, its ornate churches, its Baroque spectacle (extending into theatre and opera) and its military pomp.

The absolute monarchs who succeeded these were careful to maintain their prestige - their "image", we should say - through imposing buildings and artistic commissions which ranged from triumphalist, life-size bronzes of themselves and their ancestors on horseback to great indoor decorative schemes. They also understood the value of pageantry and mass public entertainment to keep their subjects happy, or at least amused and diverted. The French Revolution was equally inventive in the great pageants it staged, though it tended to melt down the bronze statues to make guns and it also vandalised some of Europe's finest churches. But it did not underrate the value of art, in fact it was quite prepared to pillage Europe for it and bring the artistic loot back to Paris.

The 19th century is often described as the age of Romantic individualism, in which the quality of communal life declined, but that is only half the story. It was also the age of public philanthropy and mass education, in which museums were built and former royal collections opened to the public, great public buildings created, public parks and squares laid out, mural art encouraged, public statuary erected everywhere (a lot of it bad or boring, alas). The annual opening of the Royal Academy exhibition was a huge social event as well as (sometimes) an artistic one.

Promotional events such as world fairs and international exhibitions became established customs and were backed by burgeoning industrial interests who saw in them a forum for self-display and advertisement. It is true that public pageantry in the old sense declined but the surviving monarchies maintained their coronation and other ceremonies, and in Catholic countries (including Ireland), the church festivals and religious processions gave the common people something to look at, or even to join in. Unfortunately, most of the art publicly patronised by the churches was bad and some of it was the merest kitsch.

Today's industrial democracies naturally do not care for royal pomp and religious processions and rituals have receded in recent years, except in a few Latin countries. Probably the puritan-mercantile spirit has downgraded these activities as a waste of money and working time; the vacuum is now largely filled by public sport or, more recently, by big pop-music concerts, both of which are essentially money-making functions. Communal cultural life, in short, has been impoverished, though in today's mass societies exactly the reverse should be true (even dictators like Hitler and Mussolini understood the appeal of public festivals and displays, and built their popularity upon them). The Olympic Games have an in-built element of public spectacle but few people will maintain that it is an artistic one, except incidentally.

So what has gone wrong? Is it another manifestation of the much-lamented gulf between modern art and the masses? Hardly; the Chagall ceiling in the Paris Opera House is now a tourist attraction and certain public sculptures such as Zadkine's great bronze in Rotterdam have become an integral part of the city and its character. Even Nikki de Saint-Phalle's big fountain near the Pompidou Centre has merged into the everyday texture of Parisian life, though it scarcely ranks high as a work of art. In the US, the public works created by major sculptors such as Calder, Gabo, Noguchi, Beverley Pepper, David Smith etc not only look better and better as time passes but have become an organic part of their settings. Even the massive open-air creations of Christo have caused enormous stir and interest, though not everybody shares his apparent love of grey or white plastic. At least he engages the public seriously and the man can even draw skilfully as well as thinking big.

In the 1980s there was a very widespread and interesting surge of mural art - not on inner walls but on the gable-ends of buildings and even on street facades. It was not high art and didn't aim to be but it was fresh, topical and unpretentious; it really did add to the look and texture of things - especially in the often run-down urban areas where it flourished. Of course, the weather in this part of the world being what it is, such things are hard to maintain, even if graffiti seem to linger on for years (by the way, some graffiti have been quite valid art, in their own field). Mural art, after all, has a long and noble tradition in public life but few contemporary artists seem to bother with it and it also calls for special techniques and know-how. Yet - thanks largely to the Mexican mural school - in the 1930s it enjoyed a major revival, particularly in the US and there seems no reason why it should not come back again.

As for public sculpture, it is always relevant and even essential but it is generally agreed that it has to be done by people who (a) have genuine talent and (b) know what they are at. Quite a surprising number of recent art-school products don't seem to; for them, a public commission or installation is either "fun" or a "challenge". If the result is going to be even semi-permanent, it must be a good deal more than that. "Fun" has its place and a very essential one too but unfortunately, almost the only kind of visual art (outside cartoons) which makes us laugh is bad art (the now-vanished Crampton Memorial in Dublin was an obvious example and in that sense is badly missed).

Dublin, to be frank, has not a very distinguished record in public sculpture since the last war. There have been some good - though scarcely major - pieces by Oisin Kelly, even if his Children of Lir in Parnell Square is a near-disaster. The few Henry Moore works erected around the city have dated badly and Moore's reputation has fallen to pieces since his death. Edward Delaney's Thomas Davis statue and his Famine group in St Stephen's Green are mediocre and the crop of outdoor sculpture which went up in the late 1980s already looks very ordinary. Public commissions demand a special talent, and sculptors who are capable of producing admirable small or intimately scaled pieces may be at sea when it comes to creating something on a monumental scale.

The Molly Malone statue at the bottom of Grafton Street, Dublin, is a piece of touristic vulgarity, while the Anna Livia in O'Connell Street has few admirers that I know of. So, before any public body or business interest goes adding to what some would term "these major or minor visual sins", it should think hard and its plans should be scrutinised pretty sharply by those who can visualise the end result clearly. Dublin is already handicapped by a plethora of poor or mediocre modern buildings and adding bad sculpture to it is rubbing salt or even vitriol into an open wound.

Perhaps architecture is at the heart of it; after all, it is the most public of the arts and, once a new building goes up in a city, thousands of people have to see it and live with it on a daily basis. Today the accountants - as in so many other fields - seem to be calling the tune in this area more than they should, so that cutting costs may become the dominant factor. In the past decade, the overdue reaction against the glass-and-concrete-cube school (in effect, a rundown echo of the Bauhaus aesthetic) has led to what might be called Computer Neo-Georgian, a banal and hybrid style which is already on its way to rivalling the drugs problem as a source of urban dereliction. Ugly streets, banal buildings and poor or uncertain civic planning will scarcely inspire good art, or even respect for good materials. Nor does the answer lie in massive, "brutalist" sculptures like those of Serra, which seem intended to overpower and dominate their surrounding spaces rather than harmonise with them.

The problems go too deep and are too endemic to be exorcised by that modern conjuror's wand, the art seminar. Neither will they be solved by Arts Council reports, however serious-minded and well-intentioned they may be. In my own judgment, any long-term policy should not be left in the hands of either academic theorists or commercial opportunists - two extremes which, in effect, cancel each other out.

Perhaps it can only be reached by bringing together the best - and the most practical and experienced - brains in several professions and disciplines, who should be thinking and planning over a long span of time, not merely applying short-term poultices or reacting to ephemeral fashions and cliques, whether reactionary or avant-garde. We now have a new minister for the arts: perhaps she would care to set the ball rolling? It has a long way to roll and it needs a firm push to start it - or perhaps even a good, firm kick.