A Round Table on Art in the Open

During Frieze Week in London, Frieze and Sloane Street convened a conversation at the Belmond Cadogan on Sloane Street on ‘Art in the Open’, a discussion on art in the public realm. Guided by Jayden Ali, the speakers were artists Céline Condorelli, Shezad Dawood and Conrad Shawcross, and the Serpentine Galleries’ Lizzie Carey-Thomas.

Underscoring Chelsea’s role as a crucible of culture and creativity – home to artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, J.M.W. Turner and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, writers such as Oscar Wilde, and architectural projects such Arne Jacobsen’s Danish Embassy – the conversation also celebrated the nearing completion of a major transformation of Sloane Street, bringing its central gardens along the street to create an elegant green boulevard from Knightsbridge to Sloane Square, with further plans to host new installations and art over the coming year.

Jayden Ali: When we were discussing this conversation, we decided we would make it enlightening. So I asked the speakers to come along with an answer to a question as to the title of the conversation. The question is: What is a single key consideration for commissioning, creating or experiencing art in the open?

Lizzie Carey-Thomas: It was really hard to think of one thing, except maybe the word that embraces all of that is ‘context’. Understanding a shifting, changing context.

In a gallery, there’s a code of behaviour: people are reverent, talk quietly. That doesn’t happen in the open. 

Lizzie Carey-Thomas

I pass Henry Moore’s Arch [1979–80] in Kensington Gardens every day. It’s become this amazing touchstone. I see it in all weathers, all seasons, all times of the day. I can’t stop photographing it. I also see how people and wildlife interact with it: squirrels, parakeets, maybe a rabbit or two. It’s part of the park.

If you’re making an exhibition in a gallery context, the artist is setting the conditions, and you are maintaining those conditions as accurately as possible. There’s a code of behaviour that comes with that. People are reverent, talk quietly, are often slightly passive. That doesn’t happen in the open. People approach sculptures in different ways: they might be making a pilgrimage to see it or they might be chancing upon it. That brings a different way of viewing.

In 2018 we did a project on the Serpentine Lake with Christo. It was his first public sculpture in the UK and, sadly, his last. It was called the Mastaba, and it was more than 6,000 metal barrels that had been fabricated to a standard size, which were stacked into this form on a floating platform in the Serpentine Lake.

If I’m honest, I had some misgivings. I think everyone felt very protective of the Serpentine Lake. People swim there. It’s a space that people have a lot of personal and emotional associations with.

But once the sculpture arrived, I was so surprised by how light it felt. It continued to look like a 2D render even when it was physically on the lake. It was bizarre. It also completely shifted according to changing light. At the end of the day, it would just look gold. We positioned it so it caught the evening sun and almost disappeared.

Viewpoint is really important. With Mastaba, you could see it from a different perspective. You could get a pedalo and paddle around it. You could see it from the bridge.

To this day, I walk over the bridge on the lake and feel like there’s an absence there.

Céline Condorelli: Gardens have been sculpture gardens for as long as they have been formally designed. The Boboli, for example, was designed around a series of sculptures so that it choreographs a promenade. Whether it’s indoors or outdoors, an exhibition is always a walk punctuated by objects that might lead to a conversation: that idea really interests me.

Plants have a history in exhibitions. For example, until the 1970s, MoMA decorated painting exhibitions with subtropical plants. That seems unthinkable now, because there’s no insurance policy that would allow you to put an alocasia next to a Rothko. The plants are not artworks even though they share their lives with artworks, but they do make the space in some ways more habitable.

In the same way that you would have plants in your home, it makes the space of the exhibition and the space of the museum less intimidating, and more welcoming because there is someone there already when you enter. That relationship for me [relates] to the history of plants and how they’re taken from particular colonial histories to populate the museum. Then I used them to develop this series called ‘Zanzibar’ after the cultural centre and music venue designed by Lina Bo Bardi in Salvador in Bahia in the north of Brazil, and that’s where the construction technique literally comes from.

I’m working on artworks that are anti-monuments dedicated to women.

Céline Condorelli

Another thing that I’m working on right now is making artworks that are anti-monuments dedicated to women. It started with a commission for Geneva, where there’s only one monument to a woman, as far as I know. When I was commissioned to make the work for a park by the lake, I decided to make what I would call an ‘anti-monument’, meaning it’s an object that is very anti-monumental both in scale and function. It supports a 150-year-old pine that was leaning dangerously. I worked with the gardeners to make a structure that allows this tree to continue, and it is dedicated to Donna Haraway, who wrote about ‘companion species’. It’s also a structure that can be climbed on by small humans (or maybe not-so-small humans), and it is exactly the right size and scale for dogs. It’s a structure that has these different functions.

Shezad Dawood: I don’t see working in public space as different from working in an institution, because for me, it’s always about a kind of archaeological process, but an archaeological process that goes into the past, the present and the future.

It’s thinking about how humans and their environment negotiate with each other. It’s about co-habitation. Here’s a sneak preview of what will hopefully be on the King’s Road next summer on The Gaumont, all being well.

You’re picking through the layers of every project. A couple of people very kindly said, in a complimentary way, ‘No two projects of yours look the same.’ For me, it’s always about trying to start a conversation that is somehow relevant to that place or site.

I try and look for what I call hooks, so little lightbulbs or little connection points that give me a way. The King’s Road, it’s Charles II’s road: the person who basically funded the Royal Observatory because he was a huge devotee of astronomy. Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker lived in the neighbourhood, and there’s a strong presence of moons in their work.

Len Lye, the pioneering experimental filmmaker, lived on the King’s Road for a time. I thought about his use of patented colour and that idea of changing time.

Basically, what we came to, was an arc of the moon. Each one of these I think is going to be 75 individually hand-sculpted, hand-painted and hand-fired ceramic relief bricks. It’s also a play on Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold [1875]: he had his studio in Chelsea, too.

Conrad Shawcross: I think there’s a lot of hanging up of your ego when you’re working in the public realm. A really good analogy is that of a tree. A tree is always unique because it’s a responsive thing. It’s always beautiful, but it is responsive to its environment: the earth, the soil, the direction of the sunset and the sunrise, temperature, the objects around it. Its atmosphere is key to what it becomes. I think when I take on a commission, those are the primary questions.

Three Perpetual Chords was an interesting commission from about 10 years ago. They replaced a Barbara Hepworth piece that was stolen for scrap metal. It was just hacked off with an angle grinder.

There’s a lot of hanging up of your ego when you’re working in the public realm.

Conrad Shawcross

I wanted to pay homage to Hepworth’s work. They’re toroidal knots, which are basically musical chords that rotate around. They have this nod to her in terms of being essentially a hole, which is obviously key to her work, but the main demographic of this was not the vanguard of the art world. My key demographic was actually four- to nine-year-olds, because I went to the park and I saw that there was actually a lack of a playground.

My young son saw it, stopped dead in his tracks and just wanted to run towards it and climb on it. The scale, the size of it, the geometry was all about play and tactility, immersion. Kids climb all over them, the ground around them is being worn out with people running through them and over them. In the summer, people hang hammocks on them. Our family would have a picnic and take one of them as their base and have 20 people around it. That’s a really different approach.

Jayden: When you are dealing with an emotional loss, like this Hepworth work, how is that informing your response to fill that void?

Conrad: Obviously, there’s a genuine need to acknowledge that that person’s extraordinary work, and that was in my mind the whole time. In my work, I use a lot of mathematics and ‘tried and tested’ phenomena in geometry and sequencing and pattern as my formulas. But I’m a real believer in what I call ‘psycho geometry’: the power of number or pattern to trigger things in ourselves.

What’s beautiful about seeing something unique like the Henry Moore, anyone who walks past that based on their gender, their education, their politics, their sexuality, their love, their trauma will trigger something in their neural pathways that’s unique to that person. It’s not just about the objects, it’s about the object and the person having this almost like this whole multiverse.

No one will have the same neural response that you do: there’s a completely level playing field, from a four-year-old to a 90-year-old. There’s a total democracy and it will trigger a really genuine emotional response that’s powerful and positive but based on your identity, not the work.

One of the most amazing privileges is to seek out things I find fascinating and bring them to other people.

Shezad Dawood

Jayden: We’re talking about openness, voids and gaps. Céline, you’ve obviously seen a gap in public art with regards to women. Why did you think a dedication to women needed to be an ‘anti-monument’? Anti to what?

Céline: There’s something that I would call the corrections, or the thing that you want to contribute to change the world. Which I think we all do as cultural practitioners. You are effectively creating a micro-utopia, no matter how humble, for something that was not there before. In my case, for example, the dedication is a way of not making a monument but thanking, being grateful, for the contribution of somebody who came way before me and how they, in some way, changed the world, that makes it a better place for me to inhabit.

It’s both about continuity and bringing the work of someone like Haraway into the future. I describe myself as the continuation rather than the invention of something. Also, I do think it’s wrong. I do think that there should be more women in the public realm. I do think that it’s not the same for me to look at a Henry Moore again. I don't think there’s democracy there. I think there’s only democracy when you are able to create a space for a larger inhabitation.

Jayden: Do you think there are qualities that are inherent to an anti-monument?

Céline: There is a reductiveness to the idea of the ‘monument’, where you feel small in relationship to the thing because of its scale. Perhaps not just because of its formal scale, it might also be a scale of importance that you are told in however many ways that it is more important than you, and more important than other things.

The other scale is the scale of intimacy, that you’re supposed to be touched by something that often you cannot touch. That is the cultural relationship which many of the works that we’ve discussed today in a way try to rectify. What if you can touch it, climb over it, play with it? In some ways, the reductiveness of that in terms of scale, which is a much more equal scale, allows you to develop a relationship that is reciprocal.

Jayden: Shezad, where you’re oscillating between different times, how do you strike a balance between honouring the past and being held hostage by it?

Shezad: Each project should run through you as an artist. Sometimes for me that’s the experience when something transformative happens, whether an artwork or something in our lives that shakes the ground underneath us. Those moments where I will never see the world in the same way again. I guess it’s trying to share that moment, that, ‘another world is possible, another way of looking, another door, we can step through that door and the whole world changes’.

One of the most amazing privileges is to seek out things that I find really fascinating and think about ways to bring them to other people. At the moment, I’m looking at the conceptual fields of shrimp and newts.

Jayden: I wasn’t expecting that.

Shezad: How would they see public art? Some shrimp can rotate their eyeballs, and that would also help with parenting as well as public art, but they blink to avoid predators. If they keep their eyes open, their reflective eyeballs will lure predators. How does that relate to humans, how it’s adapted over time in terms of social interaction? I go down crazy rabbit holes.

Jayden: I love that you’re in this messiness of the world, wallowing in it. I love this word shaking the ground underneath us, and I think all of your answers and your responses this morning have emphasized a collective endeavour that exists as part of making the art in the open. What do you all see as the most important aspect of developing new ways for us to gather collectively?

Shezad: In some ways, it’s not always going forward in time. It’s sometimes thinking of the civic compacts that have somehow been eroded. I’m thinking about what is public space, as a space for gathering interaction. I miss benches. I remember there were benches everywhere and you could rest and start a conversation with somebody and they might prove totally insane or inspiring or both.

Jayden: They can talk to you about newts and shrimp.

Shezad: They probably think, ‘That guy’s really insane.’

Céline: You could also lie down.

Shezad: That space of rest is missing, and I think: Where’s the care in that? That’s very basic because if you’re not rested, would you care about public art? Would you care about all the things we’re talking about if the city is not supportive of you?

Jayden: When I read into ideas of rest, it often is more acute in communities that have historically been on the periphery of society. You are not necessarily afforded the space to rest.

Lizzie: I think a park is a slightly different because of the British. People naturally behave differently in France: people strip off their clothes in the sun.

People behave differently in the heat than in the cold and walking their dogs or running. Also, this summer Yayoi Kusama pumpkin’s been really interesting because it’s suddenly become this locus. There’s people doing yoga. They’ve just gravitated to the pumpkin.

Conrad: The meeting point is the key. Before we had compasses and maps, you would use something seen from a distance, a place-finding mechanism. The object becomes a destination or meeting: at this time, at this place. Big Ben is not particularly good for this because it’s symmetrical on every side, whereas the Twin Towers in New York or London’s Westminster Abbey are very good because you can orientate yourself in relation to the object. You know where you are in relation to it in the city.

Céline: Maybe one appropriate last word is to quote John Latham: ‘Context is half the work.’ There is perhaps no answer, but a set of specific answers according to where and when you are in the world.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity by Frieze Studios editors.

‘Art in the Open: Navigating Commissions for Public Spaces’ took place 11 October 2024 at The Cadogan, A Belmond Hotel, 75 Sloane St, London, SW1X 9SG. 

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^{Main image: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The London Mastaba, Serpentine Lake, Hyde Park, 2016–18. © 2018 Christo. Photo: Wolfgang Volz}