什么是“好的公共艺术”作品，这个问题在学界一直没有明确的定论，但在利物浦双年展主席路易斯·比格斯看来，“好的公共艺术”应该是“天时、地利、人和”的作品——既要能与当地的居民建立起良好的联系，又能激发起该地区的历史和人文情怀。优秀的公共艺术项目会为这个地区的将来提供新的希望，还能增强当地居民和普通观众的信心。文中，作者以公共艺术的“公共性”问题为开篇，以四个实例说明了“好的公共艺术”的价值判断、选择过程，以及公众参与对于公共艺术建设的重要性问题。最后，路易斯总结了三条使公共艺术“成功”或变得更好的建议。

　　Thank you for inviting me to contribute to this seminar about public art,focusing on the qualities that make for success in public art. Of course one of the difficulties in defining success in public art comes from the difficulty in defining ‘what is public art?’ at all! But that means that we have to look at the individual qualities that make artworks successful in their context, rather than hoping to find qualities characterizing good practice regardless of context.

　　The examples I am about to show you were made for different ‘publics’. It is the ‘public’ aspect of ‘public art’ (rather than the ‘art’ aspect) that I want to emphasise.

　　If we ask ‘at which public is this artwork aimed?’, then we immediately become aware that art speaks in different languages to different people. The best art will speak in many languages at the same time, becoming widely accessible. Other examples may not mean much to most people, but may still mean a lot to a particular group of people.

　　The language used by art is part form, part content. Form speaks to the senses, and this makes it possible to reach a universal audience, since all humans share the same senses. Content is much more specific: every person carries different concepts in their head. If an artwork can relate to several different concepts, then it will mean something to more people.

　　Our understanding of ‘places’ (just like artworks) is also influenced by both their material presence and by the stories and memories that are embedded in the physical environment.

　　Art in public space must be understood as interacting with the specifics of the place in which it is found, as well as with the people who see it. The slogan of Liverpool Biennial – ‘engaging art, people and place’ – reminds us of the complexity of this tri-partite environment of every artwork.

　　The first example I want to show you was a temporary artwork in the City Centre of Liverpool, where we knew it would be seen by visitors to the city as well as by residents of the city.

　　The artist, Rigo23, from Portugal, noticed these four lions in the most symbolically active space in Liverpool - outside the civic centre St Georges Hall and opposite the main railway station. The lions date from the period when Liverpool was most wealthy, in the 19th Century, and relate to Britain’s imperial power – St George is the patron saint of England, and the logo of the UK rugby football team is composed of four lions.

　　Rigo designed cages to fit around the lions, for the ten weeks of the Biennial Festival.

　　To some people, the meaning of this gesture was to signal the fact that Britain no longer has an Empire. The lion has been tamed.

　　A second meaning comes from the fact that tourism has become a major industry for the UK, and Liverpool in particular: the city and its people are objects to be looked at by tourists, like animals in the zoo.

　　Another meaning is related to the war in Iraq – the UK’s military involvement, and the controversial incarceration – putting behind bars - by the United States of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

　　And another meaning is about barriers in society: rich people put themselves in secure ghettos (like prisons) so that they do not have to see or meet poor people. And cities all over the world are selling off their ‘public spaces’ to private developers so that the responsibility of maintaining these spaces is undertaken by business and not on behalf of the people.

　　The artwork was enjoyed by the people of Liverpool, for its humour and for its political meaning. During the later stages of the Festival, we noticed that someone was bringing tins of cat food to place inside the cage of this lion. Liverpool is a city with a strong history of political activism, with many trade union members having been put in prison at one time or another. The pubacross the road from Rigo’s artwork printed T-shirts to sell with the slogan:Free the St George’s Four!

　　My second example was also temporary, but was designed as a dynamic ‘viral’ project, spreading all over the city centre and out into the neighbourhoods. What you could see was slogans written on walls, sometimes very large, at thirty sites around the city. But there was also a website, and a weighing machine in a shopping mall in the centre of town. The project was by Swedish artists AAPE, and was aimed at schoolchildren in particular, but also residents and visitors. It used statistical analysis to get people to think about their environment and lifestyle.

　　The artists started by visiting schools to find out what issues were important to the teachers and pupils. Then they related these to national statistics – how long do people live? How many people live alone? How many people believe in a god? The slogans invite people to consider their own attitudes as compared with ‘national’ statistics: helping people become more self-aware, and aware of the tendencies in society at large. The slogans invited a visit to the website, where participants could provide their own responses to the questions, so creating a new set of statistics particular to the group of people who voted (mostly local residents). Another point of access to the project was through the weighing machine in the shopping mall: instead of reading your weight in abstract, it provided a comparison between your weight and a statistical quantity – something like ‘the average person uses 56 bars of soap a year’, or ‘eats so many pounds of meat’ etc etc.

　　Franck Scurti is a French artist who has worked a lot in public space. We invited him to produce a project that would be visible in three different neighbourhoods outside the city centre at the same time. We worked with him to create a ‘steering group’ of local residents in each neighbourhood, who could guide the project. When he talked to them he realised how interested they were in gambling, so he designed a replica ‘fruit machine’ using neon lights – randomly activated images (vegetables, an eye, a nose) in three groups of three panels each. One neon, however, was a slogan (not an image). The slogans were selected by the working groups from headlines inlocal newspapers.

　　The images and form imitated the language of gambling, which people found easy to understand. But the slogans related to non-monetary values: ‘Power to the People’; ‘Ideas Cannot be Killed’; ‘Hold your Nerve and Think Big’. Even this last was not about money, but about the hope of a new school.

　　The artwork was understood by the people living in these poor areas as a reflection on how their aspirations, hopes, and values are dependent on money for their realisation, and how the political processes that determine their future seem like pure chance (a gamble – the expression Postcode Lottery has become current in political discussion, meaning that ‘fairness’ across different areas has been sidelined, to the benefit of people who live inwealthy areas).

　　Finally, we arranged for the steering groups in each area to go on a coach visit to the other two areas, to see the whole series of three artworks. This may not seem very important, but in fact the residents of these neighbourhoods very rarely visit other areas, or the city centre, and so their world has shrunk sometimes to a few streets. In this way, the artwork could contribute to restoring an awareness of the larger community and a sense ofthe city’s wholeness.

　　The next example involved the regeneration of a piece of waste ground in front of Rotunda Community College in North Liverpool. The waste ground was formerly housing, which had been demolished. The Biennial arranged for the College to have a licence to use this area for a period of one year. The we invited 5 different international artists / agencies to meet the steering group of local residents and College members. The steering group chose one artist and briefed them. Gross Max came up with a project to build a contemporary Folly (vertical garden) and alongside to create a garden of strips of land to be maintained by the community (a horizontal garden).

　　The project became a symbol of the neighbourhood, a sign of hope that the community might influence the future development of their environment. Although it was built under a temporary licence in May 2008, it is still on site at this moment three years later. The police and fire services say that they receive a much smaller number of emergency calls from this neighbourhood since the project was on site.

　　My final example is a permanent artwork, in a former coal mining community just outside Liverpool, St Helens. It is located on an artificial hill, a spoil heap from Sutton Manor coal mine, and the hill is right beside the M62 Motorway connecting Liverpool and Manchester. So although this artwork is ‘for’ and located within a small community, it also functions as a ‘gateway’ image to show drivers on the highway where they are.

　　We started by creating a ‘steering group’ of former miners, and spent some time showing them examples of public artworks, and discussing what the possibilities for public art might be. When they met the artist, Jaume Plensa, they told him what they wanted from the artwork: to respect the memory of the coalmine – the people who had worked and sometimes died there - and to bea symbol for the community.

　　Plensa’s proposal was a huge miner’s lamp, to sit on the hilltop and light up at night. The steering group rejected this proposal: they said that it was too nostalgic for the past. His second proposal was an elongated eight year old girl’s head, to be called Dream. The steering group was happy with this: they felt that it respected the history of the mine (could act as a memorial – the dream of the past - for local people who knew the history) but for the younger generation and for people from outside the community it would speak about hopes for the future.

　　As you can see from these images, the sculpture is very popular with local people, and has even been adopted by the local beer company as the image on its labels.

　　So do these examples suggest some criteria for what might be ‘success’ for public art – or one kind of public art, at least? I would say that a successful artwork will

　　● engage people with the context, histories of the ‘place’, possibly in several different ways at the same time (depth)

　　● give people a new perspective on the locality (change)

　　● gain power if people learn something new / get confidence from it And it doesn’t really matter whether it is temporary, or permanent (or immaterial), because art is the same as education, it’s in people’s hearts andminds (not in objects).

　　Thank you for listening, and if you want to know more about Liverpool Biennial and our work commissioning art in public spaces, please visit www.biennial.com.