Laidlaw and the Role of Public Art

If art once had its place in a gallery, it no longer belongs there alone. What modernism held apart, carefully framed and elevated, postmodernism dissolved, collapsing ‘high art’ into the stylistic promiscuity of popular culture. By holding a mirror up to reality, postmodernism blurred the boundary between art and everyday life, and in turn, opened the doors of galleries and museums to the mundane — to the kitchen and the advert through Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup, or to the television commercial through Gilbert & George’s Gordon’s Makes us Drunk. But the door that postmodernism opened not only let the everyday in; it allowed art to seep outwards into the design of ordinary life. Aesthetics were no longer the concern of artists or museum curators, but of corporations and marketing teams in an effort to mass-produce culture. By extension, art was no longer protected by modernism’s faith in ‘high art,’ or by high-tech museum security. 

“Form follows function” was modernism’s mantra. It is most often applied to architecture, which remains modernism’s stronghold, with many of the spaces through which we move being unapologetically shaped by function. Whilst easily dismissible, modernism’s insistence on function was not simply restrictive but reverential. By confining art to galleries, it acknowledged that the space in which we encounter artwork governs how we experience it. To understand art’s place outside those institutions, however, we must first understand art. For musician Brian Eno, art is not something intrinsic to the artwork, but

rather what happens within you, the observer. The value of the artwork lies in the degree to which it helps you have the experience that you call art. In the public space, however, context shapes the conditions under which we engage with, and even surrender to, the world an artwork suggests. It is therefore insufficient to hang a Henri Matisse print in the library, dust off your hands, and call it a job well done. Getting Matisse to paint a chapel in Saint-Paul-de-Vence with his own take on religious iconography — now that’s a different story. Art must lend itself to both form and function: it must become not only inseparable from the building, but also from those who use it. 

Three paintings entitled Powódź/Flood by Natalia Bocian now hang in the Laidlaw Music Centre, a temporary exhibition born out of the collaboration between Fife Contemporary and StAnza. An audio station plays Bocian’s poetry about the Wrocław flood of 1997, drawing the viewer into a retelling of the disaster as they stand in the foyer. Whilst this is a refreshing change from the Getty-Images-style stock photos that most walls have to offer, other artwork attracted my attention. Overlooking the open stairwell are 24 abstractions of musical notation, something almost everyone using the centre would recognise and would have just engaged with, coming straight from their rehearsal room. This artwork not only speaks to the function of a music centre and to those who use it, but it also moves beyond a temporary exhibition to become effectively inseparable from the building itself.

Of all places, the physics building has a similar artwork called In the event of always falling back down again by Tim Fitzpatrick, which abstracts images of the solar light spectrum. When I studied astrophysics, before I fully grasped the consequences of my UCAS choice, seeing the artwork between classes on a crowded rush-hour staircase restored humanity to a field that felt so far removed from it. These artworks, though, are too few and far between. Cost is one reason, but only if art is considered in the first place. Art is usually an afterthought and sometimes only placed there to reassure us that this corporation, this university, this bank, is suitably creative and cares about us. I’ve heard rumours that the SPACE accommodation laundry room has stock prints of jazz artists, because nothing shouts ‘jazz’ more than putting your dirty underwear in the washing machine on a delicate cycle. Here, art becomes simply a box to cross and a far cry from what Brian Eno described.

Spaces should be designed so that art and function are conceived together from the outset. To truly put art in its place is not to restrain it within some gallery or reduce it to some marketing ploy, but to make art become something that quietly transforms the spaces we pass through every day.

Illustration by Maya Mason