Over the next two decades, millions of pounds will be invested in public art at North West Cambridge. But what does public art bring to the University and city?
Public art says something powerful about what you care about, what you want the public to know about you
Professor Simon Goldhill, Director of CRASSH
Standing, leaning back on their haunches, or kneeling on all fours, the white-suited figures behind yellow police tape appear to be searching for clues. But the mysterious team in the grounds of Jesus College is evidence not of crime, but of art.
Called The bigger the searchlight the larger the circumference of the unknown, the installation is by Harland Miller, one of five artists whose work forms 'Sculpture in the Close 2013'. Together with Miller's forensic scientists, the exhibition includes pieces by Doris Salcedo, who famously put a colossal crack through the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, and Theaster Gates, whose 7.5 tonne American fire truck daubed with tar is parked in the middle of Second Court until September.
“It's an incredibly distinguished cast list,” says Dr Rod Mengham, a Reader in English Literature and Curator of works of art at Jesus College, home to the popular permanent sculpture collection as well as the biennial Sculpture in the Close. “It's a rich demonstration of how to bring spaces alive, or make users think again about the places they use. It's providing something for the college but anyone can walk in, so it's for the whole of the University, the city and the region.”
Art at Jesus brings other benefits, believes Senior Bursar Christopher Pratt: “We think it civilises the community in a very real sense. It stimulates discussion and inevitably some controversy.” Not least, perhaps, among the porters tasked with looking after First Court's Bronze Horse. “Some of the exhibits are an invitation to high jinks among students wanting a ride on the horse,” says Pratt.
Over the next two decades, public art in Cambridge will get a huge boost thanks to North West Cambridge. “It's a major development, and a major investment in public art amounting to several million pounds over the lifetime of the project,” says Professor Jeremy Sanders, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional Affairs and Deputy Chairman of the Syndicate steering the development.
Akin to the Botanic Garden, West Road Concert Hall and the new Sports Centre, he wants North West Cambridge to enrich town and gown. “There is a lot we do for our own benefit that also benefits the wider community, and that has to be the right thing to do,” he explains. “One of my priorities is to get people from the city who aren't involved with the University to visit North West Cambridge and to think of it as part of the city, not as a University enclave.”
As well as drawing people to North West Cambridge, public art will also shape the new community, says Fabienne Nicholas of the Contemporary Art Society, who produced the public art strategy for the project. “It's the creation of a new urban extension to Cambridge – a tabula rasa. Public art and cultural activity are key ways of creating the identity of the site as it develops,” she says.
Two works – one for the western edge of the site and another for the local centre – are being commissioned, and three artists-in-residence have begun work with three departments – Archaeology, Astronomy and Earth Sciences. But the strategy allows for many forms of public art, says Sanders: “It could be a tangible object, it could be a performance, it could involve the public or children from local schools. It's entirely unpredictable what's going to come out of it at this stage.”
de Waal's vitrines
The unpredictability inherent in public art projects is something Professor Simon Goldhill, Director of CRASSH, understands, having been closely involved with commissioning a local history and atlas, Edmund de Waal's pottery-filled vitrines for the Alison Richard Building. “I was frightened by the fact that a lot of public art is genuinely undistinguished,” he admits. “Where it's most interesting, it's proved most controversial. We were not afraid of controversy, but we were afraid of bad public art.”
He need not have worried. “It was a significant commission so we had some first rate artists apply. It was a genuine treat,” says Goldhill, whose committee unanimously backed de Waal's vision. “We were charmed by its intellectual voice, by the fact that it understood this was a university, an academic place. One of the things public art does is to try to say something powerful about what you care about, what you want the public to know about you. It does it by being beautiful, by being reflective, by being not just physical but intellectual,” he says.
For staff whose daily commute takes them over the vitrines, the fact they change with the seasons also matters. “Public art is something a lot of people see every day, and the mistake some commissioners make is to go for bland ... We wanted something conceptually adept enough and artistically interesting enough that you want to look at it every day.”
The vitrines' success reflects their subtlety and semi-permanent air, and that they are recognisably the vision of one artist, says Andrew Nairne, Director of Kettle's Yard and chairman of the Public Art Panel for North West Cambridge.
“They have that quality of not shouting but encouraging thoughtfulness and reflection, and one of the advantages of permanent public art is there's time for people to come across it. It hasn't all got to happen in the first year, it can take its time,” he explains.
Nairne agrees with Goldhill that public art needs to be intrinsically interesting to survive always being the thing you see, a quality he believes comes “from the vision of an individual or group of artists, not the pared down result of a thousand planning decisions”.
In the same way the University attracts leading academics, the challenge for North West Cambridge will be to commission leading artists and allow them to produce excellent work. According to Nairne: “We've got to make art that is serious and long term and enduring. To do that we have to back the vision of the artist and enable them to make strong work out of their own vision. If we allow them to do that, the work will, by its quality, engage, encourage thought and reflection and significantly add to the experience of public space.”
Fragments of treasure
Back in February, on a freezing day in the muddy fields of North West Cambridge, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie began their residency with the Department of Archaeology by taking part in a volunteer dig. “It was absolutely fascinating; very hard work,” Guthrie remembers. “It's a weird act, a perverse thing, spending days with a tiny trowel when the diggers could do it in minutes.”
Both artists found “fragments of treasure”, including pieces of animal bone that Cambridge archaeologists identified as Roman because of the way they had been butchered. “Archaeologists look like builders, and the activity is very manual, but they have a casual expertise that's eye opening,” she says.
Guthrie is unsure how the dig will inform the work she and Pope produce, but mud might be involved. “I'm not the kind of artist who makes sculptures for roundabouts. I want to use my creativity to enhance public life – a film, an object, an event,” she explains. “There are lots of processes I want to do. I'm interested in clay, in mud architecture. It would be nice to do something with that and do something in the city that relates to the site.”
“It's incredibly rare to find a project of this scope with a budget in place. It's very visionary,” she says. “I think the air is different in Cambridge, there are so many people here at the top of their game. There's loads of scope in that. It's a bit like Butlins for artists. It won't be easy but it's great to work with the best of British education and culture.”