By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post 19/12/07

Thanks in large part to the Wellington Sculpture Trust, Wellington city has a strong legacy of public art. Yet the range of that art is limited; contained by a word in the Trust's title - sculpture. Public art here has been about creating permanent additions to the city's architecture, rather than events, performances or ephemeral and mobile works that might light the city up by shifting within it.

Image: Roman Ondak, Good Feelings in Good Times - a queue that can be staged in any place at any time. By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post 19/12/07

Thanks in large part to the Wellington Sculpture Trust, Wellington city has a strong legacy of public art. Yet the range of that art is limited; contained by a word in the Trust's title - sculpture. Public art here has been about creating permanent additions to the city's architecture, rather than events, performances or ephemeral and mobile works that might light the city up by shifting within it.

Image: Roman Ondak, Good Feelings in Good Times - a queue that can be staged in any place at any time.Wellington has yet to fully realise contemporary art's potential to open up as well as fill public space.

Due to be launched during the New Zealand International Arts Festival with the work of Slovenian artist Roman Ondak, the One-Day Sculpture series may help change that. This is a series of "place responsive sculptures" around the country over a year by leading New Zealand and international artists. Each is to last in duration no longer than 24 hours. Developed by Massey University's Litmus Research Centre, again the use of the word sculpture in the title is pertinent. Expect a rigorous interrogation of its meaning.

Ondak's festival work Good Feelings in Good Times is comprised wholly of people - it's a queue that can be staged in any place at any time. A group of actors assemble in a line and then disperse in accordance with the artist's instructions. On loan from the Tate Gallery in London, the Tate bought the work (i.e. the instructions for the queues) from the artist in 2004. While Ondak's queue shifts location it never actually moves forward. In this perverse way it could be considered as permanent as any sculpture.

Recently the Sculpture Trust launched its first temporary sculpture commissioning programme, the Four Plinths Project, with a work by Regan Gentry sited on the four square slabs between Te Papa and Circa Theatre. The brief for the series means the work is likely to be as close to permanent as a temporary work can be. Each is due to be on the site for 18 months before the next is installed. These plinths have long demanded use, and the series takes inspiration from The Fourth Plinth project in London. Running since 1999 this project sees leading artists commissioned to create work for an empty plinth in Trafalgar Square.

It's great to see the first project go to a Wellington artist. As such Regan Gentry is a safe pair of hands having impressed widely with his previous public sculpture work and recent Gorse project at the Dowse. And yet after the initial thrill of the work's physical audacity Gentry's work Green Islands has left me rather underwhelmed.

In no mean feat, Gentry has twisted life sized cabbage trees, flax bushes and other trees out of number eight fencing wire. That the work is a comment on the lack of mature flora in the city is plain to see, and there's a nice echo of the plants spilling out of their enclosure in Te Papa's Bush City. I also like with its proximity to the museum the pedestal isolation of these plantings, emphasising the way specimen might be isolated as if in a bell jar. The use of fencing wire not only nods to the can-do Kiwi vernacular, but how fencing wire (much like the planting gorse) has worked to either keep nature out and, conversely, provide protection for it to regenerate.

I'm left wondering however whether either a more abstracted sculptural approach or a more literal one (with real plants) might have engaged me in the ideas more powerfully. As it is there's a bit of a dull relationship between material and form. It's only when in the tops of one windblown Manuka-like tree, with the fencing wire allowed to crackle and coil, that I start to get a nice spooky energy from the work.

Across town on top of Toi Poneke, the Wellington Arts Centre on Abel Smith Street, Victor Berezovsky's Junction has a seditious presence amongst this month's Christmas ornamentation. This black and white stencil work painted onto the box that sits on this building's roof is drawn from abstract symbology Berezovsky devised for an exhibition at Mary Newton Gallery last year.

Teasing composites of Christmas bobble decoration, and political and corporate logos, the work provides a powerful meditation on the power of public art up large. While one side can be read as a kind of compass or other fictional instrument, the other presents an icon that resembles a safety pin crossed by a syringe, as if the Situationist-inspired art of the punk era has led to a cultural and political movement proper. Sited above the city and lit at night, it could be read like some beacon of hope like the Bat Signal of Gotham City; a logo scrambler, an artistic counter to the vacant use of symbols to sell businesses.

Junction is the second of three works in the Wellington City Council initiated Stack Box Project using this site. Applications from local emerging artists are being welcomed in January for the third commission through the council's Public Art Panel, of which I am a member.

We are a group of contemporary art advocates working with the council on their forward work plan for art in public spaces. The panel actively welcomes proposals from curators and artists for temporary art projects and related activities which engage with public space.

More information on the Public Art Panel and Art in Public Places..