“Context is Half the Work”

Many writers have brought 'city' into valuable discussions of art in the urban public. Art in public will always negotiate with other demands on urban space: for movement, commerce and inhabitation. Artists such as Victor Pasmore were appointed as consultants to urban planning departments as part of the "town artist experiment". In Glenrothes in the late 1960s, resident town artist David Harding applied abstract reliefs to the walls of road underpasses, demonstrating a new spatial ideology in which art is an embellishment of small urban spaces and a backdrop to public life rather than a monumental totem to be gazed upon in reverence. One of the 'generic functions' of urban space is to allow access from every location in the city to every other location along axes of movement, through streets and across larger open spaces.