ONE DAY SCULPTURE: An International Symposium on Art, Place and Time

Convened by Litmus Research Initiative, School of Fine Arts, Massey University, Wellington New Zealand in conjunction with the Museum of New Zealand 

Te Papa Tongarewa

Overview

The ONE DAY SCULPTURE symposium brought together leading international curators, cultural theorists and historians, participating artists, writers and curators to address the principal ideas and contexts that have informed the development of the series. The symposium considered the issues underpinning the commissioning and production of temporary place-responsive artworks in the public domain. In particular it examined:

• The ways in which conventional notions of permanency and monumentality in public sculpture are being challenged;

• How artists are approaching and producing places as unstable, contested sets of relations rather than fixed sites;

• How ephemeral, performative and viral forms of contemporary art are demanding active engagement outside the gallery or museum; and

• What the implications are for emergent curatorial practices in terms of presentation and distribution.

Coinciding with the realisation of three ONE DAY SCULPTURE projects in Wellington, the symposium allowed for a fluid interchange between these ideas and the first-hand experience of commissioned projects. Significantly, the symposium focused on the point of view of participating artists and their responses to the curatorial parameters of the ONE DAY SCULPTURE series.

Programme

> Download the Symposium programme here [PDF, 131KB]

> Download the Symposium brochure here [PDF, 660KB]

The symposium was inaugurated on the evening of Thursday 26th March with a keynote lecture by Professor Jane Rendell. 

The remainder of the symposium was structured through a series of presentations, lectures and discussions, as well as the opportunity to experience three ONE DAY SCULPTURE projects. There were four parallel strands of two-hour sessions that ran concurrently during the morning (from 11am to 1pm) and the afternoon (from 2pm to 4pm) of Friday 27 and Saturday 28 March. Delegates were invited to book a place on one session per time slot, a total of four sessions over the two days.

PROJECT CASE STUDIES

Each of these sessions offered the opportunity to hear from two commissioned artists for the One Day Sculpture series. The artists each presented their One Day Sculpture project within the context of their wider practice and delegates were actively encouraged to participate in the discussion on each project.

TEXT CLOSE READINGS

These sessions offered the opportunity to study and discuss a key text or texts with our international invited speakers and academic guests as a means of navigating the critical issues at the heart of the symposium.

> for Jan Verwoert:

Jean-Luc Nancy, 'Myth Interrupted', in The Inoperative Community, Peter Connor trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 43-70. [PDF, 9.28MB]

> for Jane Rendell:

Rosalind Krauss, 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field', October, Vol. 8, Spring, 1979: 30-44. [PDF, 2.6MB]

Miwon Kwon, 'Genealogy of Site Specificity', in One Place After Another. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002) 11-31. [PDF, 5.04MB]

Jane Rendell, 'Site-Writing: Enigma and Embellishment', in Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser, Mark Dorrian (ed.), Critical Architecture, (London: Routledge, 2007). [PDF, 3.5MB]

>for Mick Wilson:

Mark Hutchinson, ‘Four Stages of Public Art’, Third Text, Vol. 16, Issue 4, 2002: 429-438. [PDF, 164KB]

Invited Speakers

Speakers and workshop leaders included:

• Professor Jane Rendell, (Keynote speaker) Director of Architectural Research, The Bartlett, Faculty of The Built Environment, University College London and author of Art and Architecture: A Place Between (I. B. Tauris, 2006)

• Jan Verwoert is an art critic based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor of Frieze and teaches at the MA Fine Arts course at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam
  

• Mick Wilson is an artist, writer and educator and a graduate of the NCAD and Trinity College Dublin. He is the Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (www.gradcam.ie)

• Claire Doherty, Director of Situations and Senior Research Fellow, University of the West of England, Bristol and Curatorial Director of ONE DAY SCULPTURE

• Bik van der Pol, participating ONE DAY SCULPTURE artists

• Javier Tellez, participating ONE DAY SCULPTURE artist

• Douglas Bagnall, participating ONE DAY SCULPTURE artist

• Natasha Conland, participating ONE DAY SCULPTURE curator

• Melanie Oliver, participating ONE DAY SCULPTURE curator

KeyNote lecture - Jane Rendell 'Critical Spatial Practice'

Thursday 26 March, 6pm

Soundings Theatre, Te Papa

Jane Rendell (Director of Architectural Research at the Bartlett, UCL) examined the concept of 'critical spatial practice' (Rendell, Art and Architecture, 2006) with respect to site-specific art practice, curating and criticism. She looked at definitions of key terms such as site, space and place, as well as dialectical relations of site and non-site/ site and off-site.

Jane Rendell, '(The re-assertion of time into) Critical Spatial Practise', 2009 [PDF, 2.1MB]

ACADEMIC SESSIONS

These sessions are grouped thematically and consisted of four 20-minute academic papers and a moderated discussion. Involving both New Zealand-based and international academics and curators, the sessions offered multiple perspectives on a range of topics such as monumentality and performativity, place, collaboration and temporality.

Academic papers

Chris Braddock, The force of the Moment [PDF, 20.8 MB]

Blair French, Vernon Ah Kee's 'Gloriously Inflammatory' Designation: One response to the Biennale situation 

[PDF, 1.8 MB]

Marcus Moore, Terms of Engagement [PDF, 12.5 MB]

Daniel Palmer Photography in/as Public Sculpture [PDF, 1.8 MB]

Elizabeth Rankin, Cross - cultural (under) currents in South African Sculpture [PDF, 1.8 MB]

Eva Rodriguez- Riestra, Return of the site: Relational Spatiality and the reclamation of public space [PDF, 1.8 MB]

Sandy Sampson, Considering and Aesthetics of generosity: artist in the world [PDF, 1.7 MB]

Zara Stanhope The Risks of Ignoring Curatorial Collaboration. A Case study. [PDF, 1.8 MB]

John Vella, Remote Control, Frangibility and the art of blood letting the permanent [PDF, 5.7 MB]

Caroline Vercoe, [PDF, 1.8 MB]

Marcus Williams, One Day in The Factory [PDF, 12.1MB]

Chris Wright, Place: The future was here [PDF, 20.6 MB]

The remaining papers will be on line shortly.