Is it any wonder? On commissioning an ‘uncommissioned’ atmosphere: a reply to Hillary and Sumartojo

This article is a reply to Fiona Hillary and Shanti Sumartojo’s “Empty-Nursery Blue: On Atmosphere, Meaning and Methodology in Melbourne Street Art”, published in Public Art Dialogue in October 2014.1 Hillary and Sumartojo present a welcome addition to the literature on street art and graffiti in their sustained analytic focus on a particular work of street art and its place-based reception. However, their analysis of Adrian Doyle’s Empty Nursery Blue is compromised by their largely unacknowledged investment and involvement as commissioners and curators of the work. Further, Hillary and Sumartojo’s adoption of the concept of affective atmosphere and a positive sense of enchantment operates to discount viewers’ contradictory social-emotional responses to the work. While the authors’ attempt to incorporate authoethnographic methods appears promising, in practice this bears little in common with the critically reflexive practice of autoethnography, and is rather used as a circular rhetorical device to demonstrate the presence of the very notion of enchantment so central to the authors’ interpretation of Empty Nursery Blue. The liminal status of Empty Nursery Blue as apparently uncommissioned street art and as commissioned public art presents an unacknowledged tension at the core of this partial interpretation that may yet be ultimately productive of the very notion of wonder and enchantment. A critical expansion of the notion of enchantment to encompass a variety of affective responses and forms of material and ethical engagement is suggested

Public Experience/Private Authority

“A beam on its end is not the same thing as the same beam on its side,” wrote Robert Morris in his 1966 Notes on Sculpture, Part II, succinctly articulating the degree to which, in the context of minimalism, the identity of a work does not reside in a self-contained physical form, and is instead deflected outward to the relationship established between object and surrounding space. It also happens that Morris was not necessarily concerned about whether the simple geometric shapes he created during the mid-1960s as part of his exploration of the viewer’s spatial and temporal experience maintained a continuous physical existence. To the extent that the work could be disassembled and built again as needed (the same configuration, but different plywood and gray paint), this alternate way in which the same work might not be the same links his profoundly physical expression with a form of dematerialization more often associated with conceptual art