HAVEYOUSEEN THISYET?
DR. LAURENS TAN
Risk-taking prevails in all walks of life and business. Calculated or intuited on likely outcomes—some decisions involve bigger stakes than others. Few real decisions manage not to involve a gamble. In business and in design, risk is a vital ingredient for progress. The action of not seizing an opportunity ends up equating to a loss, i.e. one takes a risk by not taking a risk.1 1
Public art is intended to communicate to the local community, or it may address a much larger audience. That essential function is not a simple one— does it aim to raise awareness, can it offend? Is it, or does it become, irrelevant? A contemporary Tan, Laurens, The Architecture of Risk, University of theme or idea may Technology Sydney, 2005 have a shelf life, or perhaps the idea may not be relevant until years later. Perhaps it is a marker of time. Like songs and movies, some works can become classics. A vision may be seen as timeless or ahead of its time—but by whom? I was first fascinated by Las Vegas back in 1995, when the late Felicia Campbell (Professor, Department of English, UNLV) invited me to experience the city after she heard my talk on souvenir design at a conference in Montreal presented by the University of Nevada, Reno.2 So, taken by the ubiquity of the Silver City, I soon changed my thesis to The Architecture of Risk (1997�2005), basing my research in Vegas.
14 DRY HEAT FALL 2023
At that time I was beginning to focus on large public-facing artworks, so the image of Las Vegas and the idea of public art are close together in my mind. I’ve lived and worked as an artist and educator in Australia and the US as well as Beijing, where I lease a studio. My public works range from permanent sculptures such as Hellbent, which has been on display at the Burwood campus of Melbourne’s Deakin University since 2018, to temporary installations like my inflatable Three Wise Monkeys, designed for the City of Sydney’s Lunar New Year celebrations in 2016. After practicing successfully on three different continents, I think my views on public art are blessed with the benefit of a well-traveled hindsight and working experience.3 2 Tan, Laurens, The Mass-Customization of Cultural Identity, University of Technology Sydney, 1995
3 In 1995, I won a major public commission for the Capitol Theatre in Sydney: Octogene. Also in 1995 I was invited to construct a large video installation, …well, the image is one thing… which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in an exhibition curated by Wendy McDaris (University of Memphis). Hellbent (2005) was a finalist in Australia’s McClelland National Sculpture Award. As Weeks Go By, another work from the same year, was a finalist in the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award.
One of the most successful public artworks I know is Sir Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Millennium Park, Chicago. It is a perfect example of how an artist’s vision and background can capably manage sculptural material in such a way as to create a universal and iconic voice. The work is based on liquid mercury. I can’t now imagine Chicago without Kapoor’s “Bean,” as it’s fondly called. Perhaps in a different way, I can’t picture New York without Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, or Paris without the Eiffel Tower, or (in architecture) Bilbao without Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, or Beijing without Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV Headquarters. (Which leads me to the point that architecture and larger public sculpture are very close cousins and both are indeed capable of spelling out a city’s iconography or making a significant stride towards it.) All of these works were put in place by cities that were able to commit money and time to the project. They were also able to hire the best people and thoughtfully consider the matter of where the sculpture should be placed. The Bean is a wonderful work of art in itself, but the placement, scale, and budget are important supports for such success. Decades of significant work by Kapoor led to Chicago awarding him this major public work, and at $28 million it’s considered to be money well spent. Their willingness to treat the commission seriously has been well rewarded. Of course there aren’t any comparably funded public sculptures in Las Vegas—the results reflect vast differences as, by comparison, projects here suffer from lackluster funding, downscaling, or awkward placement. The successes or failures of our sculptural artworks ultimately lead to bigger questions about the local art scene. Recent open calls for public sculpture indicate that Vegas is open to new work in parks and streetscapes, but the funding often makes for difficult economics. Apart from the key cost of design and fabrication, artists have to bear the cost of traffic management during installation, and other administration and liability insurance. By the end of the process they may (typically) discover In 2006, I was awarded an Australia-China Council residency in Beijing. Two other awards followed and before long I was convinced that living and working in Beijing had a real significance for my work. Since then I have moved my practice between China, Las Vegas, and Australia, while my large-scale installations and sculptures continue to flourish with curated exhibitions and commissioned works in major hotels and museums.
