PhD ThesisThis thesis explores the ways in which museological ‘collections thinking’ can
generate new knowledge of public art’s material and cultural afterlives within a time
of increased institutional and academic interest in the aftercare and everyday use of
public art. Taking Newcastle-Gateshead (the home of the UK’s best-known public
artwork, The Angel of the North) as a case study, the thesis asks: what happens if we
examine the public art cityscape through the concepts and management principles
applied to museum collections? How might consideration of the commonalities and
tensions between museum and city-based collections offer new understandings of
permanent public artworks, and what is the relevance of this for their future
presentation and management? In bringing these museological paradigms to bear
upon public art production this thesis generates new understandings of the character
of city-based collections and the dynamics of the audience-artwork encounter as
enacted within the urban cityscape.
The thesis addresses the relevance of ‘collections thinking’ to public art in four ways.
Firstly, examining the temporal dimension, the Newcastle-Gateshead public art
cityscape exists as an unintentional collection, one that has ‘crept up’ on the city over
a 55-year trajectory of commissioning activity. Looking back into this timeline,
permanent public artworks are shown as essentially time-vulnerable in both their
physical materiality and their valorisation. Secondly, looking across the cityscape, a
speculative typology of the city’s public artworks is presented. This suggests that the
Newcastle-Gateshead collection is representative of most forms of permanent public
art practice, but can also be situated within a distinctive Northern-English culture of
post-industrial artistic production. Expanding further on the spatial dynamic of
collections, the thesis explores the comparative value and significance of public
artworks both within and outwith their relation to geographically-rooted notions of site
and place. In doing so it suggests alternative ways of constructing value around
public art, particularly in relation to artistic authorship and long-term ‘use-value’.
Thirdly, ‘collections thinking’ engenders an original investigation of institutional
interpretive practice around public art production. This analysis shows that
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Newcastle-Gateshead’s public artworks are firmly mapped within an ‘interpretive
cartography’ of artistic intention, materiality and sense of place. Finally, through an
analysis of public art audience’s in-situ ‘arts talk’ (Conner 2013) the thesis argues
that public art meaning-making exists in the balance and tension between three
factors: the potentialities of the artwork; audience-held domain knowledge; and
crucially the specific ‘in-the-moment’ contexts of the encounter.
In examining the post-commissioning phase of public art production through these
cycles of interpretation and audiencing, and in reevaluating the relevance and
potential of museological thinking for public art practice, this thesis offers an
extension to the existing interdisciplinarity of public art research and a way of
rethinking the long-term management and curation of public art.School of Arts and Cultures (SACs) at Newcastle University for
travel and fieldwork, and of course, to the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC) who generously funded my PhD