The city council has an art in public places programme which has had its own funding allocation for many years.
The council's arts advisory officer, Cara Paterson, has been the staff member underpinning its work and it has its own changing committee often including co-opted people to assist in identifying sites, possible artists and projects and recommending chosen ones to the full council.
This isn't simple stuff. There are many things that can go wrong. And it's also very high-profile stuff.
Considering the modesty of the sums involved it's remarkable how much energy and vehemence people can work up about results they don't like.
For a long time these shoals were successfully navigated and the city's stock of art in public places which had virtually stopped growing entirely an even longer time before, started to grow again. But recently the seas have got stormier and the programme has been suspended.
The commemorative sculpture Ouroborus in the Dunedin Botanic Garden was produced with other funding and another mechanism and there has been criticism of that, too, including from your columnist.
It was recently damaged again, not this time by a vandal but apparently because of a structural failure, a solution to which has been proposed.
The council is developing an overarching new arts strategy which would look at the suspended programme and doubtless make recommendations about changes.
Meanwhile another body, the Otago Sculpture Trust, has made its own suggestion which it aired at the annual plan hearings on Wednesday last week (ODT 8.5.14).
It proposes it takes over the selection of sites, or at least candidate artists for available sites, and through a committee or panel formed for the purpose to oversee the nurturing of commissions into existence.
Their spokesmen, local senior sculptors Peter Nicholls and Steve Mulqueen, said they were proposing a pilot scheme for which they had a site in mind, which I know and is available in the Warehouse Precinct, where street works are now taking place as part of a revitalisation scheme.
The trust has been in existence since 2002. It consists of practising sculptors. It has published several booklets providing sculpture trails, invaluable for people trying to seek out works rather than accidentally stumbling across them.
It has a collective wealth of experience, not only of conceiving and placing works and the practical problems of making them, but also of methods of commissioning projects used here and elsewhere in New Zealand.
It recently staged an innovative exhibition in the garden at Olveston which closed on Sunday.
The proposal has not come out of the blue. Trust members have discussed it with council staff, where I understand three key personnel are supportive.
It was reported the staff response was a suggestion that ''there was an opportunity to work with the trust on a pilot scheme similar to what they suggested, and that they would talk further to the trust to advance the idea''.
The staff suggested an allocation of $10,000 seed funding.
Small seeds can turn into mighty totaras. I understand councillors' request for ''clarification of how much money would be required'' to fund the pilot scheme before they discussed the request this week. My understanding is there is reason to believe this may well be the total.
Cr Aaron Hawkins asked reasonably whether this was the right group to pilot the scheme, given they were all sculptors while public art was ''broader than just sculpture''.
The trust's people replied the word ''sculpture'' now is just a generic name for very many different types of art, which is true.
A brief review of just some of the trust's members' productions, such as those at Olveston, gives an idea of how wide these artists' conception of it is.
Some works of art in public places are a bit more architectural than what might be termed sculptural though, even under a wide conception. The idea might be tweaked to sometimes co-opt an architect on to the panel when it seemed the commission might be like that.
The selection and commissioning model the trust has in mind is like one used in Wellington. That has certainly been successful in putting together an international class collection of works in public places which the public appear to appreciate.
I don't know if the recently reported remarkable theft of a very large one is strictly evidence of that or not.
Any commissioning process faces challenges. Here are some pointers for overcoming them:
• Prior identification and aesthetic characterisation of sites is necessary to determine what sort of proposal might work where.
• Selecting artists whose work fits is helpful.
• Remember the public is less tolerant of experiment and obscure references outdoors than inside in public galleries.
The proposal seems a good idea. I support it.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
