Being There: Public Art, Curatorial Practices and the Live Site

This research explores the concept of ‘live-site art’ and its implications for commissioning art in public places. The study advocates for a paradigm shift in commissioning practices, emphasising the dynamic and multifaceted nature of sites. It proposes a new commissioning framework that encourages artists to engage directly with the live site, avoiding predefined site summaries and themes. The thesis draws on case studies of minimalism and contemporary work by Japanese New Zealand artist Kazuhisa Nakagawa as well as Martin Heidegger’s philosophies of place to develop an understanding of live sites as dynamic, complex and essentially ungraspable. When site is understood in this way, current practices for the commissioning of site engaged artworks, which rely on predefined narratives, themes and locations, are revealed as insufficient and potentially detrimental to art’s potential to reveal and engage the live site. These commissioning practices are rooted in historical art theory that represents sites as static, physical environments, social networks, geographical fields, or discursive concepts. None of these definitions accurately capture the live site, and when they are applied in commissioning processes they can replace the live site as the subject for the artist’s engagement and limit the artwork to a representational role - one that is pre-defined by the commissioner and thus fails to engage the artist’s full creative and perceptual capacity. By defining a few small changes to commissioning practices, this thesis ultimately aims to effect a large change in the way commissioners work with artists, releasing our most creative thinkers from unnecessary restraints so that they can work to reveal and help us value the dynamic, intricate ecological, cultural and material richness of the places we dwell in.