Brian Rudman: Bureaucrats spend $200,000 getting it wrong

Top art dealer Gary Langsford was leading with his chin yesterday with his sneering dismissal of the Khartoum Place suffragist memorial as having no aesthetic merit and belonging "in a 1970s craft shop".

Is this the same Gary Langsford who flogs Goldies for a living?

He sniffs at the tile mural's "garish colours and simplistic floral and bird motifs", saying such works "have had their day".

Does this mean he'll be cleansing his stable of anything by Don Binney and Karl Maugham as well?

In an age when the arts Mafia tell us a Trekka van and a braying dunny are icons of New Zealand art, I've come to the conclusion that art is anything an artist or dealer says is art.

But exactly what is art is beside the point as far as Khartoum Place is concerned. The 2000-tile work was erected and unveiled in 1993, not as a public art work but as a memorial to the pioneers who achieved universal suffrage for women a century before.

For reasons best known to the Auckland City bureaucrats involved, it is they who have insisted, throughout this debate, on the misnomer "artwork". If I was of a suspicious nature, I'd suspect it was done so the work they wanted destroyed could be dismissed as bad art and aesthetically displeasing, and therefore much easier to be rid of.

If they'd succeeded, it would have been a very bad precedent for memorials. If bad art was the criterion for "decommissioning" them, what war memorial would be safe? As for Pania of the Reef of recent controversy, she'd have been melted down long ago.

Standing around on Wednesday at the "victory over the bureaucrats" rally, clutching my white rose and listening to the celebratory speeches, I couldn't help thinking that, every now and then, the politicians do win one over their bureaucratic masters.

Mayor Dick Hubbard was there to promise assorted women leaders - and the odd chap - that the memorial, tiles and all, would stay.

Backing him up was his deputy, majority leader Bruce Hucker, eager to tell me that he had the numbers to ensure this happened.

It will have been glum news for the bureaucrats, even if they must have realised the game was up some time back. But now they're going to have explain how they could have wasted $200,000 of ratepayers' money getting it so wrong.

After ploughing through some of the documentation obtained under the Official Information Act, I've found the explanation stands out. Throughout the process, the only reference to the dominating feature of the square, the $75,000 suffrage memorial, is about how to get rid of it.

The breathtaking disrespect for it is what stands out, particularly as it was an exercise driven by women bureaucrats. The design brief is full of gorgeous gobbledegook, calling on applicants "to achieve a space people can identify with and experience as an exemplary open space ..."

In one breath, it calls upon the designers to build on Auckland's "sense of place" and "reflect its people and their society [and] its history ..."

Then, in a dismissive afterthought, it says the existing water feature and artwork "may be removed".

It's a flabbergasting direction. Reflect the people's history by destroying the historic monument. On second thoughts, that is a so-very-typical Auckland thing to do.

In this case, the emphasis was on turning Khartoum Place into a grand entrance for the planned $90 million extensions to the public art gallery up the hill on Kitchener St. The existing stairway would be too narrow and pokey for the hordes they envisioned flowing up from Queen St once the gallery was enlarged. Yeah, right!

This disrespect is not new. The tiles were hardly set on the memorial back in 1993 before the architects of the New Gallery, which forms one side of the square, were bashing a hole through one part of the mural to insert a steel girder to support the obligatory coffee bar balcony. At ground level, a loading bay was created to further degrade the people-place ambience. To our shame, in the excitement of getting a new gallery, we were diverted from the first assaults on the suffrage memorial.

Now it's time to repair that damage, and give this memorial, and the activists it honours, the respect they deserve.

The mayor's even suggesting a renaming. Could I suggest we twit the bureaucrats for all time and call it "Exemplary Open Space".