Commissioner Adelaide City Council
CuratorBarbara Flynn, Art Advisor
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The history of the city’s neighbourhoods and how they have developed to the present day, and plans for how the central city can be reframed in the next 20 years, are important considerations for a curator and artists who are commissioned for the project. Just as important is considering and recognising the significant contributions of First Nations people to the City of Adelaide, the larger South Australian region, and Australia as a whole. Art addresses real conditions and issues of particular importance to people today while remaining inclusive of everyone. It’s a delicate balance that can be achieved.
Benefit to the public is paramount. How can art, architecture and landscape architecture make all members of the community feel welcome in the central city? It isn’t expedient or callow to seize on an issue that people care about and ask artists to consider it in the art they make for a city. Ideally, the City of Adelaide will continue to commission resonant art for years to come. Subsequent additions will centre on the things people care most about in 2030, 2040 and beyond, adding layers and depth to the experience of walking the city and seeing its art.
Short- and long-term goals
Public spaces in the city can be better defined by asking questions with both short-term and long-term goals in mind. In the short term, it’s important to ask about the cultural microclimate of a space. Why commission art for that place over any other, and how would you describe that place – is it a forecourt, a lane, a building façade? Thinking ambitiously long term, are we designing a whole new part of the city or making surgical interventions? How long do we want these artworks to last? Will they lose their relevance to people and, if so, when – does art have a use-by date? Above all, the experience of art can’t be separated from the experience of being in the city. They need to be one and the same.
It’s time to chop and change
Looking at Adelaide as Flynn has done – by walking the city – art should be removed from Rundle Mall to allow the mall to do what a mall does best: encourage people to gather, to shop and to be entertained. Shopping, entertainment and art don’t mix very well. Instead, new dedicated spaces for art can be created very near the mall but away from the hubbub and commercial focus of the mall.
If the recommendation to remove art from the mall is too sweeping, then let’s remove everything except The Spheres (1977), the seminal work by Bert Flugelman (b. 1923 Vienna, d. 2013 Bowral, New South Wales) that stands in the mall now. It can remain and be expanded on by commissioning additional Flugelman works and concentrating them in the mall. (Artists’ estates have provisions regulating them that can vary. Flynn’s understanding is that the terms of Flugelman’s estate allow such commissioning.) In that way, art in the mall will have unity and a purpose: as the world’s showcase of the art of this great Australian sculptor.
Flugelman lectured at the South Australian School of Art from 1972 to 1983. The Spheres, arguably the sculpture by the artist that is best known and has been seen more often than any other work of his, was commissioned for Rundle Mall by Adelaide City Council and largely funded by the Hindmarsh Building Society to mark the company’s centenary. The two spheres that make up the work were created in halves before being welded together and panelbeaten. Adelaide company Brister & Co fabricated the work and re-polished it in 2014.
Reconceiving Rundle Mall in this way opens possibilities for the rest of the city. Not an infinite number of possibilities, however; any new public art initiative will benefit from having a clear focus. What we have in mind is this: in the central city of Adelaide there are a significant number of dead-end spaces – what Flynn is calling ‘stub’ spaces – that can be reclaimed and redesigned through landscape and art. Currently they can be described as throwaway places, with a few rubbish bins and typically one parked car. The City of Adelaide can commission suitable artists to look at each of these spaces and come up with a brilliant plan for reinventing them. The stub spaces will start to form a network of newly cool, formerly unloved spaces very close to all the action. Landscaping and seating will do their best to make them comfortable places to be, shaded from the sun and cooler in temperature. They can be mapped, and people will enjoy discovering them. Once discovered, people will tell their friends, and get in the habit of meeting in them and returning.
Text by Barbara Flynn, December 2024