Art and public commissions : chalk and cheese ?

Art has its rightful place in public spaces as do commissions in the economics of art. This alliance, which seems obvious, is nevertheless a challenge to implement in reality. Apart from the structural opposition between the bureaucratic functioning of the public sphere and the more transgressive sphere of artistic creation, there are two different ways of thinking which have to be reconciled in order to create a place for art in public spaces. Sylvie Veyrac is in charge of a project to commission twenty-three works of art for the Toulouse metro system. Over the past eight years, she has experienced the reality of this risky alliance. She realised that her role was to put into contact in a constructive way rational coherency and sectors which have different or even contradictory aims. She also had to understand and preserve the initial intentions of the project, the artist’s gesture and the act of creation and do so by passing through a maze of all kinds of constraints.