The document discusses the interaction between artists and their environments, presenting two approaches: artists coming with preconceived notions or as blank slates. It highlights how contemporary artists challenge traditional boundaries between art, geography, and community engagement, advocating for interdisciplinary collaboration in public spaces. The importance of meaningful public art and creative collaboration with design professionals is emphasized, suggesting a future where art enhances everyday environments.

1. “A place comes into art loaded with content. An artist comes to a place in one of
two ways: either loaded with content or like a clean slate, ready to receive,
interpret and represent what is already there. If the former, an artist will displace
the resident meanings of a place with his preconceptions about art. If the latter,
(s)he will make those meanings visible as if for the first time.” [Jeff Kelley]

2. William Forsyth's 19th century terracotta sunflowers
Are Asteraceae composite hyperaccumulators
Or gardens that interanimate an architecture
Of Walter Ritchie's post-War proposals for shared allotments and sheds
That catch, channel and screen the rainwater across the cattle market park
And over the two acres of Mr. Millington's cabbages, in an 18th century Artichoke Field
John Gwynn's "Shew how Convenience, Beauty, Symmetry, How Method, Art, and Nature will agree"
Becomes an art of unnameable hybrids
That charge the city's everyday plexus with Leader Williams' earthy matters,
That skew John Constable and Samuel Smith panoramas
Through oblique arches, up spires and to peaks of distant hills,
That slip gilded paths with water's edgemarks
Through gate, over sidings, past wall, over ditch and pool, pitch, road and river to the transpontine,
And that pen narratives into textures across crossings
Of sitting-room-caught pike
Or the Screen House refracting and guiding the eye around the convex east bank,
From the South Quay to the Upper Quay stonemason and waterwork's moorings
And up across the plain,
Pearmain and alder become dotted with the plum accents of Octar Copson's brush.

3. The crucial issue is not whether but how an artist enters a space."
[Rosalyn Deutsche]

5. Breaking with the modernist paradigm, artists of extraterritorial reciprocity
undermine the whole issue of topography inasmuch as they refuse not only
geographical borders but borders of all kinds, including those separating art
from what is not art, from other and sundry social undertakings.
Their artistic practice does not necessarily culminate in the production of
works, but nor is it exclusively process based. Rather, these artists see art as
a system for producing meaning, which is most effective when engaged in
overstepping borders and setting up interdisciplinary 'work sites'
[Stephen Wright]

7. Maybe you think things are okay and that you are doing ‘all right’.
But someday the monotonous and ugly spaces you live and work in will
be organised as intelligently and as beautifully as the spaces have
been in some paintings. [Ad Reinhardt 28th April 1946]
The best spaces are often the product of creative cross-cutting
between public art and the design professionals, where the continuity
of user experience and expression of place are prioritised over what
separates art from architecture from landscape. [David Patten]

10. I will argue that the vast vast majority of artists practicing in the public
realm rely on collaborative, rather than co-optive means of achieving
ideas with the people they work with. [Jack Mackie]