Geoff Taylor column: Who needs art when they've got a report?

Riff Raff statue: No fuss, no fancy reports, just action.

Source: Waikato Times print edition

3 July 2010

BY Geoff Taylor

I WAS quite excited last year when Hamilton city councillors agreed to set aside an annual budget of $50,000 to provide public art in the city.

I was covering the council at the time and I remember the discussion around the table. I recall Gordon Chesterman pushing hard for it. It was a moment of vision, something tangible for the city which should have happened years ago. I was proud of them.

If you've ever wandered around central Wellington streets you'll know what I mean. You find yourself walking into all sorts of strange pieces of art unexpectedly. It just makes the whole experience more interesting. It makes you want to hang around in the CBD. So I was looking forward to Hamilton doing a similar thing.

But then, in October, when I read how councillors intended to spend the $50,000, my heart sank.

They were planning to spend $20,000 of the first allotment not on purchasing actual art works but on a report to tell them what to do next. I couldn't believe it.

Nearly half of the money on some boring report. Nothing tangible - just words.

I was pleased to see councillors such as Kay Gregory were outraged. She described it as a "disgraceful waste of ratepayers' money".

Maria Westphal's comment was a beauty. "I can give you a plan in five minutes - and it'll be free."

Roger Hennebry, Angela O'Leary and Dave Macpherson also criticised the move. But deputy mayor Pippa Mahood, who over many years on the council must have called for a trillion staff reports, was pushing it, saying councillors needed some help. Council staff didn't have time to do the report so community services general manager Sue Duignan suggested an Auckland consultant who, she said, had "a real interest in Hamilton".

"So we're going to let an Aucklander decide where public art should go in Hamilton?" asked Gregory incredulously.

And our city councillors actually let it happen. In the end councillors decided to not use any of the $50,000 for the study but to find another $20,000 from somewhere - in other words rates.

The decision was wrong on so many levels. It showed no commonsense, no practicality whatsoever. Why did they need an expensive report? Did they need an Aucklander to tell them the best places to put public art in the city? Surely not. We know the city better than anyone else.

Why didn't they just get the ball rolling, ask the arts community for input, select what they liked and put it out on the streets and see what happened? Not hard. I could have done it for them. It also shows what is becoming a disturbing dependence on glossy expensive reports before councillors can decide to do anything. A good idea will be raised and it will disappear from sight for a year while a consultant produces a report and crushes the life out of it.

Why not just give a character like Mark Servian a call and get some decent advice? This is the guy who brought us the Riff Raff statue on Victoria St, and showed that if you want to get something done, you just go out and do it. No fuss, no fancy reports, just action.

To me, the whole idea of public art should be the appearance of spontaneity. By definition it's not something that needs excessive planning or to be signed off by bureaucrats. That's the whole idea. It's supposed to be creative.

In the last month the consultant, Rob Garrett, unveiled his $20,000 report. And councillors weren't particularly impressed. Nor was I.
Mahood said the report appeared to have missed out important themes such as Maori and heritage. The themes set out by Mr Garrett were the river, arrivals and connections, innovation and people.

I can feel a headache coming on. "There are gaps in it," exclaimed Mahood. "There are areas where there are opportunities but at the moment they are very silent."

Sigh. Other councillors had problems with the report as well. Desiree Ryan, the council's strategic adviser of creativity and identity (her job title says it all) leapt to its defence, saying the plan was a "high-level document".

What the hell is a high-level document? Sounds like a crock of shit to me.

Why are councillors surprised they got this result? This is what happens when you try to be too clever. They took something they could have handled using commonsense and asked a consultant to turn it into mumbo jumbo. They tried to dress it up as something more than it was and they got what they deserved. And we paid for it.

And still we wait for something useful to come out of it. That brief beautiful moment of vision has long since vanished.