The Problem with Sculpture

Today I went to the talk 'The Problem with Sculpture' which was an event held in conjunction with 'The Second Life of Sculpture' exhibition at the Briggait. Unfortunately I only made it to the second half of the talk as my meeting with my 4th year overran...nevertheless, it was fascinating listening to the curator Patricia Fleming talk about her experiences working with artists and commissioning bodies, and then hearing John Calcutt summarise the problems associated with sculpture. The key problem areas he identified centred around the production of sculpture, the identity of sculpture and the issues relating to the exhibition, circulation and reception of sculpture. The discussions that ensued were also very relevant to the thoughts I have been having about my current project, specifically the kind of sculpture I want to make...do I want to make a permanent or temporary work? How will the project be funded? If it is publicly funded then to what extent should I be involving the public in conversation, especially it is a permanent artwork and if I do not do this, how would it be received? I suppose these questions are important but maybe because this is just a pitch for a hypothetical artwork it does not need to explored as fully.

According to Patricia, it seemed that despite Glasgow being a place that has a thriving experimental artistic community, it does not have the best practice model for commissioning public art. She also talked about how artists were losing out to architects in the public art stakes, with an increasing number  of architects getting in on the act. In this tough economic climate, artwork needs to show a 'return on investment' and just perhaps it is a bit easier to reconcile spending money on work undertaken by a professional body than an individual artist, never mind the £5 million public liability insurance that would preclude a lot of artist from being considered anyway.

Despite this slightly depressing note, it did get me thinking about the place of multi-disciplinary practices in art. In this increasingly amorphous world that we live in, surely it makes sense for different disciplines to work together to share expertise, and develop best practise models together. I like the idea of working collaboratively with different disciplines so I am considering how this might be taken forward in my own project and how it possibly might overlap with architecture and software engineers.