Not the same old storeys, then
No peeking? The covers are still up over a mural, reaching eight storeys high, on the Invercargill Licensing Trust’s towering Kelvin Hotel.
Nearing completion, it will be revealed in January. Between now and then it’s going to pass the Christmas period as an unwrapped pressie of monumental scale.
Artist Deow (Danny Owen) is a celebrated talent and there’s little doubt that this undertaking, which will be one of the tallest pieces of street art in the nation, will be a striking piece.
Fact remains, people tend to differ in their views about what looks good.
This will be public art of a scale that will be hard for people to disregard so the stakes are as high as the structure itself.
The subject certainly holds appeal.
It will depict fetching wee 2 and a-half year old Mia Judson, whose Japanese-Filipino heritage represents that the makeup of our culture is diversifying and developing just as the city landscape will be under major CBD redevelopment.
Invercargill is far from the only city, or only place in Southland, where public art is more commonly part of the cultural landscape.
They range from the undeniably sizeable likes of our famous war memorials, more recent Russell Beck sculptures and the upcoming statue of Alex Lithgow . . . down to the cheerful messages and designs on little painted rocks that are tucked away to make for happy little discoveries in the nooks and crannies of our parks.
The corporate world weighs in, of course. And not always daintily, nor in a patronage role.
Pleased as we may be feeling with the ILT’s willingness to make one of its largest structures an art canvass, we might repeat our criticism that someone who drops a beer can in the gutter outside the trust’s Avenal headquarters would rightly be fined for defacing the environment, whereas the trust itself erects a huge and horrible replica of the same thing on top of the nose of a fake seal and that, somehow, is deemed okay.
We’re also seeing attempts, worthily intended and generally successfully executed, by businesses trying to enhance the ordinary, such as the Chorus ‘‘cabinet art’’ murals that do enliven otherwise drab structures bordering footpaths.
The Kelvin mural won’t, itself, exist in isolation. The ACI (Art + Creativity for Invercargill) complex barely a block away at Wachner Place, is proposed to be not merely be a container of art. It would have a sizeable external LED screen as part of ‘‘an active facade’’ with constantly changing, readily programmable images of national and international art.
Will this all be tasteful? Well that’s a subjective judgment. There’s potential for it all to amount to a right old garish jumble. Or it could prove to be, as they say, vibrant. Whatever the majority view of the outcome will be, there will also be dissenters who strongly feel otherwise.
There has always been the option of playing it safe. The risk of relentlessly doing so is the prospect that the results will be blandly uninteresting.
And for a city centre in Invercargill’s present state, urgently in need of peopleattracting revitalisations, ‘‘uninteresting’’ is likely to be a very unsafe approach indeed.
Invercargill is far from the only city, or only place in Southland, where public art is more commonly part of the cultural landscape.