It was public, and it was art, but was it public art? In 1995, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude finally succeeded in their 25-year quest to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin and, over the course of the two weeks that the building remained swathed in silver fabric, an estimated five million people came to see - and touch - it. You cannot get much more public than that. In an important sense, though, it was an entirely private project. No public person or body had asked them to do it.
Quite the reverse. Nor was there any financial support. As with all of their work, it was entirely their idea, and they designed, organised and paid for it - even renting the Reichstag and the ground around it from the German government.
A more conventional notion of public art would probably be a piece of sculpture commissioned by a civic authority and sited in an open urban setting. You could say that the gap between these two conceptions is a hotly contested space from which new definitions of public art are emerging. It's the space between a conventional statue on a plinth and Dan Shipsides' bamboo scaffolding, temporarily adorning the facade of the Carlton building in O'Connell Street.
That contested conceptual space was the subject of discussion at this week's extremely successful "Public Art: Making It Happen" seminar organised by the National Sculpture Factory and held at the RHA Gallagher Gallery in Dublin. It was a timely and pertinent event, and both the level of attendance and the thrust of the debate supported the view that Ireland is lagging behind - but has plenty of scope for catching up.
There were several good visiting speakers, including Guy Tortosa, who can claim to have actively contributed to the debate on public art in Ireland when he curated EVA 1996, which followed on from Jan Hoet's ground-breaking EVA 1994 in contentiously bringing art out into the city. Ian Ritchie, the architect who designed the Spire of Dublin to replace Nelson's Pillar in O'Connell Street, gave an account of this and other projects he has been involved in, along the way revealing himself to be a frustrated poet. He defers making drawings, he said, and opts to write down his ideas. He then went on to provide a commentary on his work in what sounded like blank verse.
Massimiliano Fuksas, architect and director of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, also spoke, together with Dublin city manager John FitzGerald. The real surprise was probably Slovenian academic and artist Marjetica Potrc, who was an outstanding advocate for the redefinition of public art and public space in a rapidly changing world. But there was little question that Christo and Jeanne-Claude made up the star turn, on the basis not just of their fame but of their extraordinary achievements in the field of public art, stretching back over the last 30 years.
Besides wrapping the Reichstag - they are acutely sensitive about the term "wrapping", pointing out that they always use fabric but don't always wrap things up - they have wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris and a sizeable stretch of the Australian coastline. They have also surrounded several islands off Florida with collars of buoyant fabric, and distributed over 6,000 giant umbrellas across the landscape in California and Japan simultaneously. Locally, of course, they are known for their 1970s proposal - quickly shot down by the city - to wrap the paths running through St Stephen's Green. Christo, now an American, is Bulgarian by birth. In his 60s, he has the air of an absent-minded academic. Jeanne-Claude, born in Casablanca on the same day as her husband, has a dramatic mop of red hair and an agreeably decisive manner.
They met in Paris when he moved there in 1958. He was then making wrapped objects, but in 1961 came up with the prototypical Project for the Wrapping of a Public Building. Since 1964, the pair have lived in Manhattan. Since their first collaboration, in 1961, they've completed 18 projects but, they point out, another 22 haven't made it to fruition.
If it was a case of simply proposing something and failing to get the desired response, that would be one thing, but their work requires a level of application, expenditure and commitment that beggars belief. Nor do they try to make things easier for themselves. "We never do commissions and we never accept sponsorship. If we are invited to do something somewhere, we say `no thanks' ".
They work at a level of expenditure that would leave most artists gasping. The budget for the 1991 Umbrellas project, for example, was $26 million. But the process of finding their way through the bureaucratic labyrinths, of making their impact on the world on myriad levels - political, legal, technical, industrial and social - is part and parcel of the work itself, not just a messy prelude to it.
"The struggle gives soul to the projects," says Christo. "All the energy it takes to get agreement, to do the research, develop the idea and so on . . . All this energy is accumulated in the soul of the work of art." The struggle is incredible. Just one aspect of the Reichstag project was the 180 days spent visiting the constituencies of the parliamentarians who had to vote for or against it, addressing groups of voters in gymnasiums and halls, explaining why their public representative should support them. Interestingly, while they have amassed a huge, impressive knowledge of getting things done - everything from dealing with government departments to manufacturing and transportation - it doesn't, they observe, get any easier.
The Umbrellas project was "a diptych", entailing thousands of six-metre-high umbrellas stretching over the landscape at Iabraki in Japan and in California. The cultural differences were instructive. They found the Californian authorities relatively straightforward to deal with - "because they had dealt with us before" - and the Japanese authorities extremely difficult. When it came to the individual landowners, however, the people with whom they had to negotiate to rent the land, the reverse was the case.
"The ranchers," Jeanne-Claude recalls, didn't really want to know. "They would look at the drawings and say: `This ain't no art, honey, art is something you hang on the wall there.' "
Dealing with 459 rice farmers in Japan, over 6,000 or so cups of green tea, was easy. "Because, in Japan, there is an acceptance of the attitude that everything can be art: flower-arranging, making tea, archery. So umbrellas, why not?"
Their art is public not alone for its eventual public presence, but also because it entails such intricacies, which resonate through society. It also seizes the initiative from what one delegate termed "the usual authorising agencies", putting the establish to puzzle out the ramifications of what the artists have in mind. Jacques Chirac, for example, stalled on the wrapping of the Pont Neuf on the basis that he couldn't support anything endorsed by Mitterand.
The focus on the Pont Neuf as a highly charged public space is germane to a recurring theme of the seminar, one forcefully identified by Potrc, among others. Time and again during the proceedings, the discussion gravitated from art per se to the wider, related issue of public space. "Public space is the battleground," as architect Sean O Laoire put it bluntly. Fintan O'Toole, in his keynote address, asked why the Irish State has failed to achieve a culture in which the streets and public buildings can be considered as an arena for citizenship.
Potrc spoke of the erosion of the idea of truly public space through such phenomena as gated communities and shopping malls - pausing here for a swipe at Temple Bar.
Architect Tom de Paor had pointed out that public art in Ireland tended to be reactive. Rather than wait for the long-overdue implementation of the recommendations of the Public Art Research Project Report, originally published in June 1997, and recommending such measures as a national agency overseeing public art projects, Colm O Briain suggested that artists should be more inclined to take the initiative. He got a less than enthusiastic response from an audience composed more of artists and art students than bureaucrats, but he had a point.
And he could easily have been describing the outlook of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
