Are we there yet?

Lesley Perkes is the CEO of AAW Art Project Management, and has been behind much of the art appearing all over Jo’burg.

She spends her days talking, negotiating and arguing with corporate sponsors, city officials, artists and engineers. Why?

We asked her about her role, and the role art has to play in making people think about the spaces they share.

First things first: Introduce yourself. What is your role?

Ok. Well, I am an actor which is how I am able to leave my bedroom in the morning, and how I’m able to earn a living doing anything, except acting (so few people in South Africa can say they act for a living), and it is what enabled me to impersonate my way into all sorts of jobs (when I could not find a way to eat off the arts when i was a young adult). That journey eventually led me to the world of the arts in public space which is where i am now as an activist, CEO of a specialist management company, AAW Art Project Managemen, since 2005.
 
What is the definition of public art? Does any art that appears in an open space, out of a gallery, public art?

It’s interesting how obsessed everyone is with definition. I suppose it is a way of trying to understand and review something. If it fits here then you can think of it in a certain way, judge it…
Public art is, I think, not rigidly definable. The borders keep changing.
For one thing public space is up for debate. As you know, public libraries have a lot of public space inside them, as do museums and places like that. But, often, because of fascist architecture and separateness, even contemporary places like that in South Africa (and I’m sure elsewhere too), where everyone can go freely, are not frequented by everyone, they don’t know they’re allowed to go in, or the door is on the back side of the building whose walls on the front side are high and imposing. I mean, it’s not like thousands of Hillbrowites are hanging out at Constitution Hill, are they? And why is that? It is interesting.

And then there’s the modern world and the need for security, and property developers have taken advantage of that, and of people’s fear, and the inheritance of keeping us apart and in control, and this results in corporatised public space. Which is often quite nice, actually. I mean, if you go for lunch and you don’t want the begging classes to bother you, or the working classes to remind you that you have money to eat lunch, and you want to sit in an enclave of “clean and safe” and everything aesthetically pleasing, then you can be ‘public’ that enjoys that space and the property developer’s assets in the area can increase in value as a result… but security is making sure that anyone who does not look and smell the part, anyone who can’t pay to play is not allowed anywhere near, creating a sometimes visibly, often invisibly, boomed area.

And malls? Are they public space? I mean, let’s face it, that’s where most of the public are. Shopping is really the control mechanism that works best. It pulls millions of people into managed space where they buy and buy. 

So going back to your question: yes, any work of art, in any discipline of the arts or some hybrid that has not yet been imagined, would indeed qualify (for me) as public art. 
 
What is the point? Why does it have to appear in the public, where people might not know what they are looking at and why?

Oh God. So many reasons. Here’s a few: 
To live while you are alive, to have fun, to provoke debate, to create experience that reminds people that they are the public, that they are deserving, that the streets and the skies and the sidewalks are really poems that belong to them … that they own what they want. Different artists have different reasons for using public space as a canvas so I can’t talk for everyone. Sometime. mostly, actually, it’s because the artist got a commission which they are fulfilling. The point might be regeneration, or branding, or even imagination… it depends on where both the artist and the money is coming from.

It’s a huge question. It might be political, it might just be because someone wants to be generous. It might be indeed to question what is public space, to push the boundary of that or to create a landmark so that people know they should meet somewhere. Making a beautiful land-art work recently was like a moment of the sea come to town; We have no places here that make you take a breath like that, to gasp and say, “Mom! Are we there yet?”. And the people who don’t care, the people who take the Top Star Drive-In away without asking us, the people who use our city’s skyline as a canvas for ugly and unimaginative branding eyesores, have to be countered. There has to be an alternative to the great fascist men-on-horses monuments, there have to be other references so that people get what they deserve…. oy vey. So the reasons are many and mine might be quite different to the sculptor accepting a commission to make a lifesize bronze cheetah for the managed space outside the shopping centre. You know.

Who puts up public art? Can any artist who has an idea do it? What are the rules and regulations regarding it?

I think it was a public relations company that drove the extremely fast fabrication and installation of the famous work in Nelson Mandela Square. And our City Parks department commission pots and all sorts of other decorative objets… silk flower embankments, you name it. Yeah. That’s the point. It is public space after all. But no, not anyone who has an idea can do it, actually, though they might … and then what? Well we have to live with it, that’s what. A lot of quite well-known artists don’t make their own work; They manage the making of it, they draw and design, and then other people laser cut and weld and truck and sweat and all that stuff. I think what you mean is: are there policies, and yes, there are policies developing. The City of Jo’burg has an interesting Public Art Policy, and what’s good about it is that it developed in response to work we were already doing and it has subsequently been revised in response to experience that was real, not just an attempt to copy international best practice and stuff like that.

And yes there’s an abundance of rules and regulations, some of which actually apply to Outdoor Advertising but have to be complied with by us (more than they are by branders who have more money to sidestep the law). I mean basically, if you have respect, you have to get permission. And that can sometimes lead to a public art project that only exists in the public mind of the group that have been asked because it is constantly in a state of committee meetings.

Who gets/gives funding?

Complex questions. Artists and arts management companies get funding. From the public and private purse. Mostly, all over the world, as part of neighbourhood/district upgrade or as part of a branding campaign like the Cell C project we did in Jo’burg, Cape Town and Durban in 2002. Very rarely for the sake of imagination, which is the case of Joburg Art City’s current show on the skyline,Mary Sibande’s exhibition Long Live the Dead Queen on 19 building sites around the city, which is fully funded by the National Lotteries Distribution Trust Fund who so generously gave the project over R5.8 million… for ART! Fantastic. It took eight years from the first proposal to the money … you have to have stamina to work in the world of dreams. 

You differentiate between art funding and art
investment. Elaborate?

In South Africa, where the mantra “creative entrepreunership” is fixated on trying to create an anchor industry around the craft sector (nothing wrong with this except if you are an artist in a rural area and have no access to skills or materials), we seem to be missing the big global boat which is in the area of serious creative properties, merchandising and narrative.

Look at the value of concepts like Bart Simpson and how much he is worth per annum in licensing… it’s billions for the right to use his face on your production line of pencil cases, t-shirts, cups, linen, t-shirts, caps… this is what makes the arts and entertainment Sector in the USA their biggest export industry. Their biggest! And this is not gold or platinum that runs out or destroys the underground water system… these are ideas that don’t run out at all.

Even if you try to repress the imagination you actually can’t stop artists from working, you can’t stop imaginative people from having ideas… and so what you want is a sector that focuses on nurturing people’s brains so that they develop concepts that you can market around the world.

Even a nought comma nothing percentage of what this industry is worth globally would quantum leap the funding for the arts sector in South Africa, and investors and the artists who make these works would reap ridiculous profit. So you want to be talking about this in an environment where people think the arts are a luxury, a nice-to-have. 

Where is the line drawn? Surely you can put things in a gallery that you could never put on the street?

Of course. You’re not exactly going to hang oil paintings on the walls. Public art needs to be robust or transient. It can’t be fully intended as a work for indoors that is just plonked outside. It won’t work. Having said that there are works in galleries that can work outside and there’s a lot of evidence for that. 

Are there lessons to be learnt from history (and overseas), where public art has been important or enduring?

Yes. Making public art is a constant lesson and what the lessons are is revealed over time. Some of which, unfortunately, you only find out after the fact, but there’s a beauty in that… a degrading work in public space is often more beautiful than what was intended, though often it is also is not. It’s quite hard.

All over the world the permanent works that have endured the best are made of stone and bronze which can weather almost anything except theft or very well-planned vandalism. But even sometimes making things out of glass can work, if you look at the sandblasted work on the armoured glass on the BRT works that Trinity managed, but you do have to be very careful and go through pain and suffering.

Concrete, hard metals, bronze are obvious materials to work with when you are working permanently, but we could argue that what is more enduring is the memories that people have of transient performative or installation works that came and went very fast, but are alive in people’s brains and of course in the online environment. They are like oral histories … and they change as people forget and make up new meanings about the images that roam around their minds. 

And speaking of the online world: this is the new frontier perhaps for public art, the new public space that is WiFi… the other day I saw a video of a projection in New York. The artist was projecting a line drawing of a figure, a man, walking along the wall next to a sidewalk. The man had a speechbubble, also a line drawing, following him around and the passersby were smsing the artist their thoughts, their thoughts about what the figure might be thinking, and the texts the artist received (the ones he liked I presume) were instantly inserted from cellphone to laptop to projector to wall, so the figure was thinking what the audience was thinking… remarkable, brilliant. There’s a lot of this happening. Jenny Holzer, the famous American projection-text artist, is using Twitter as a “projector” for her famous one-liners.

What does public art do for feelings of community and environmental upliftment?

Sometimes a lot of good. If you have the budget to do a great thing within a space that is neglected you can really work with the arts to engage communities in so many ways. The recent Tree Wrapping project we did with Strijdom van der Merwe along the road in the city towards Eastgate saw whole suburbs that rarely see public art enaging with the teams who installed the work… there was so much excitement and interaction.

Sometimes the development of a permanent work will inspire a community to clean up, or the municipality to upgrade, or the President to come and unveil (which inspires the government to clean up quickly before gets there….). When you work in public space you do provoke public opinion, people hate and love the work, they always have something to say, you should have done this, can I do that, i wish we could also do … and so on.

There are so many examples of how artists have inspired change. Diego Riviera’s work in Mexico set off a lot of community recreation of lives in visible ways that meant people used their own homes as canvases.
Tell me a bit about performance. What is its aim, seeing that it is so transient?

The disciplines in the arts are converging. Many visual artists using performative media in installation. Many performers are using visual art… it’s difficult to separate everything now, although, of course, if you just have a great performer on the streets, a muso or a clown or someone behaving like a postman, posting poems at mobile spazas and taking off her clothes in the Village Walk fountain to remind us we all have great dreams inside us… then the work is like other public art. It’s aim is manifold. It makes you take a deep breath, or laugh… or wail. Or ignore, get a surprise, or remember that life is not just a deadline, and that there is something hidden, something generous, that is not available on the stock exchange.