A very public art affair

Whether it’s giant roadside balls, steel trees or metal chieftains, how do you plan art that is going to be viewed at 120kph?

People’s Island Brass bird tracks and footprints, embedded in the pavements near O’Connell Bridge in Dublin, by Rachel Joynt.

Mothership Also by Joynt, the huge cast bronze sea urchin on the seafront in Sandycove.

Last Oak Tree Stainless steel tree, by Denis O’Connor, on the N30 between New Ross and Enniscorthy. Strange objects growing from its branches were designed by local children.

Gaelic Chieftain Maurice Harron’s horse and rider, made from what looks like scrap metal, is a local icon in Boyle, Co Roscommon.

Big Fish John Kindness’ 10-metre ceramic fish in Belfast manages to be quirky, fun and monumental. Hybrid Love Seat By Louise Walsh with local teenagers, at the St James’ Hospital Luas stop. A fence becomes a seat, and is topped with magical gargoyles.

SOMETIMES I think Ireland’s roads might be the equivalent of the road to hell – in that they are, if not paved, then lined with good intentions. These “good intentions” are the sculptures that punctuate our motorways, bypasses, roundabouts and city streets. And, as intentions go, they have to have been good, because I can’t imagine any planner or artist saying to themselves “let’s put something awful, or simply banal, just there where everyone can see it . . .”

A work of art on a roadside is a tricky commission: you have to create something large enough to attract attention from a distance (viewing art at 120kph leaves little scope for intricacies), and yet it cannot be so attention-attracting as to cause accidents. It also has to be robust enough to survive weather, graffiti (though some consider this a form of public art), vandalism and play. Unlike art in a gallery, the public don’t make an active choice to see it, and so it must be generally inoffensive – or, at least, as inoffensive as possible.

To add to these difficulties, as public money is being spent, the work is usually selected by committee, and so the choice can end up being a compromise.

That's why temporary work can be far more interesting than permanent: the Fourth Plinth project in London's Trafalgar Square sees experiments installed that catch the imagination, and which can be risky because they are not intended to be there forever. In Ireland we have had similar success with the Nissan Art Project, which saw Dorothy Crosses Ghost Shipin Dublin Bay in 1999. The Hugh Lane installations (Barry Flanagan and Julian Opie) on O'Connell Street are another example.

When permanent art on public roadways does work, it becomes more than the sum of its parts: providing landmarks on anonymous stretches; creating familiar, intriguing, stunning, and fun moments on long drives; and defining place. Heading out west, I always see Perpetual Motion, the enormous ball painted with road markings (by Remco de Fouw and Rachel Joynt), as a sign that I have finally left Dublin behind and the real journey has begun. Joynt, whose projects include some of my favourites (see panel) says: "For me, a successful public artwork needs to have a sense of place, a freshness, some intrigue and playfulness, a bit like a frozen moment from a daydream."

Some public sculptures, such as Antony Gormley's Angel of the Northat NewcastleGateshead, become icons, defining symbols of a city, and suddenly every city wants one. Gormley's angel owes a debt to the statue of Christ the Redeemer(by Heitor da Silva Costa and Paul Landowski) in Rio de Janeiro – another figure with arms spread to welcome people to the city. Dublin's massive Gormley sculpture (scheduled for Docklands) has been put on hold due to the current financial situation, and I wonder whether, when things improve, if we won't have moved on and decided that maybe size isn't everything, and that bigger isn't necessarily better. Anyway, Dublin already has its own Big Thing with Ian Ritchie's Monument of Light, aka The Spire.

Still invested in the size-matters way of thinking in the UK, a consortium consisting of railway companies and the developers of Ebbsfleet Valley (a new town) in Kent have commissioned Mark Wallinger to create a statue of a white horse on the M25. At 50 metres, the statue inevitably calls to mind that other horse, carved in a hill, at Uffington in Oxfordshire. The Uffington White Horse, however, was created sometime in the Bronze Age; proving that public art is not a new phenomenon, and that the desire to mark place and make icons has existed for as long as humanity.

Horses are a staple of another form of public art: the memorial or the monument. In Ireland, we don’t have a great deal of equestrian statuary, and its symbolism is generally lost. But in a pre-literacy age, people would have recognised the significance of the horse’s position: if rearing, the rider died in battle; a raised hoof said the rider died from battle wounds; and foursquare meant the rider died peacefully. In the era of such monuments, art was a means of communication, and propaganda. These ideas survive in John Henry Foley’s statue of Daniel O’Connell at the bottom of O’Connell Street in Dublin, where the angels at the foot of the monument represent the provinces of Ireland.

As a symbol of its times, public sculpture may quickly date, and sometimes become an embarrassment. In former Communist countries, the solution has been to move the Lenins, Marxes and their less well-known colleagues to sculpture parks outside the cities. These parks make eerie places to visit – like wandering through an ideological graveyard. In Ireland, the transition of sculptured symbols as we moved from colonial rule to self rule was managed by ignoring the issue – leaving the IRA (and others) to destroy them: William of Orange (College Green), George II (St Stephen's Green), and Nelson's Pillar (O'Connell Street) were all blown up. One of the few to remain is Prince Albert at Leinster House; the statue of his wife, Queen Victoria was exiled to Australia in the 1980s. Another Foley sculpture, the Gough Memorial (Phoenix Park) was blown up in 1957. It was an equestrian sculpture, and the horse is being re-created for Ballymun by John Byrne, whose Girl on Horsewill show a local teenaged girl in a tracksuit, instead of a uniformed general, astride. Meanwhile, another modern monument is to be seen in Dublin at the junction of Buckingham Street and Sean MacDermott Street, in the North Inner City, where Leo Higgins' Home is a gilded eternal flame in a limestone arch. Home is a memorial to all those who have died as a result of heroin. When the flame was cast local people went to the foundry to throw mementoes of loved ones into the molten bronze. This sort of symbolism is not immediately legible to those who don't know the story, yet it makes the memorial intensely meaningful to those closest to it.

A great deal of public art on roadways is funded by the Percent for Art scheme, which dictates that up to 1 per cent of budgets (to a maximum of €64,000) for capital projects from public bodies should be earmarked for public art. At its best, this means the roads are enlivened by works of art but, at worst, it leads to an over-supply of cement oddities. At the height of the boom, so much Percent for Art money was coming on-stream that commissioners rightly felt that some should be used to allow artists to make work that was not necessarily permanent, that might not even have a physical result, and which could be all about social process and communication.

This development has tapped into an international movement where public art is seen less as decorative monumentalism, and more as a socially engaged, often intellectual, pursuit. A new website, established by the Arts Council, www.publicart.ie, which comes online at the end of May, aims to address both these aspects of public art. With definitions from artists and commissioners, studies of different types of project, and texts for further reading, the site appears initially to focus primarily on the interests of the arts community. The website’s commissioners Cliodhna Shaffrey and Sarah Searson plan to build up the aspect of the site that should be of greater interest to the general public: how to identify and learn more about those pieces of art that we see in passing.

The website also doesn’t yet address those sculptures that the art world may not call “art”, and yet which are beloved of locals and tourists alike – such as Molly Malone, Phil Lynnot and Joe Dolan. At present the main way of finding out what certain sculptures are, and who made them, is through the websites of local authorities, although, for the money that is spent on commissioning the work, remarkably little seems to be allocated to letting the public know about it. Searching generally for “public art” on local authority websites, I found the best information on Donegal County Council’s donegalpublicart.ie.

Everyone’s heroes and villains of public art will be based on the routes they take most frequently, and you’re never going to please everyone with art on the roadsides. Nonetheless, I can’t help feeling if we all thought more about what works and what doesn’t, and if we had an easy way to discover more about what is out there already, the compromises that appear might yet be all the better.

ON THE ROADWAYS: THE HITS

• People's IslandBrass bird tracks and footprints, embedded in the pavements near O'Connell Bridge in Dublin, by Rachel Joynt.
• MothershipAlso by Joynt, the huge cast bronze sea urchin on the seafront in Sandycove.
• Last Oak TreeStainless steel tree, by Denis O'Connor, on the N30 between New Ross and Enniscorthy. Strange objects growing from its branches were designed by local children.
• Gaelic ChieftainMaurice Harron's horse and rider, made from what looks like scrap metal, is a local icon in Boyle, Co Roscommon.
• Big FishJohn Kindness' 10-metre ceramic fish in Belfast manages to be quirky, fun and monumental.
• Hybrid Love SeatBy Louise Walsh with local teenagers, at the St James' Hospital Luas stop. A fence becomes a seat, and is topped with magical gargoyles.