Brian Rudman: Concrete jungle never right place for sculpture

Twenty-five years almost to the day after Michio Ihara's controversial Wind Tree sculpture was planted in desolate Queen Elizabeth Square, it is being removed.

But the deconstruction, if I can be excused an arty phrase, comes with the artist's blessing and with reassurance from city officials that eventually it will be replanted in new parkland, as yet unformed, west of the Viaduct Harbour.

Council arts adviser Warren Pringle says a conservator is overseeing the removal, numbering each part and videoing the whole process as backup just in case they end up, when the rebuilding takes place, with a tube or two left over.

And to avoid any of the 4km of assorted stainless steel tubing going missing, a special crate has been built to house the art work.

Just how long it will be stored is the question. Mr Pringle says parks and open spaces are planned for the western reclamation tank farm area over the next two to five years. Including the Wind Tree in this redevelopment has "a high priority ... it's not going into storage forever".

I'm not sorry the sculpture is on the move. When Mr Ihara was overseeing construction of the work, he expected people "to create their own kind of poetry" out of it. But stuck in that windswept concrete jungle it was hard to see the poetry.

Tucked up close to the adjacent buildings and set in a wasteland of concrete pavement, its intricate forms and patterns were lost. It looked more like leftover scaffolding. It subsequently had to raised and surrounded by a reflecting pool in an effort to protect it from vandals.

The Britomart redevelopment gives it another chance of life elsewhere. Setting it in parkland will give it a chance to breathe and give spectators the opportunity to stand back and view it from afar. Like Stonehenge and other great monuments.

Down on the waterfront would have been good, too, with the sparkling and ever-changing Waitemata as the perfect backdrop. But resource consent problems with the planned Viaduct Harbour sculpture walk have highlighted the pitfalls that come with siting such a large construction.

Harbourside residents have objected to the visual impact of one planned Waitemata Plaza sculpture - a decision is expected any day - so that area doesn't really seem an option. Given the size of the Wind Tree, finding a site big enough on the waterfront anyway would be another problem.

Ihara, a French-born American, has an international reputation for grand public works. His latest is on the Chicago waterfront, and he was one of five overseas artists chosen to create works to celebrate the Auckland City Council's centenary. It was a sign of the times that only international artists were invited to take part.

When Grey Lynn MP Eddie Isbey had the temerity in 1975 to question why all this money was being spent on a Japanese sculpture, Rob Muldoon, then Leader of the Opposition and not a known art lover, accused Mr Isbey of racial bias, saying not since the pre-war days of Nazi Germany had there been such an approach to art.

The city's present to itself was five modernist art works, four of which survive, and all were sponsored. But the Ihara piece more than doubled in price to $87,500, forcing both the city council and the harbour board to front up with the difference.

However, the mayor of the day, Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, whose recent monument has caused something of a controversy, was quick to point out the extra money didn't come from the public purse.

Always the controversialist, he told critics at the time of the unveiling that the money came from the Albert Park Improvement Trust Fund set up 100 years before. "So those who don't like it, don't worry. You didn't have to pay for it."

The other works were Mexican sculptor Helen Escabedo's Signals, standing tall above the container terminal near Fred Ambler's lookout in Parnell; Hiroaki Ueda's Opened Stone, near the Art Gallery; Fred Loopstra's Homage to Will wooden plough in Victoria Park; and a work in scrap metal by Canadian Tom Burrows.

The Burrows work, originally sited at the corner of Wakefield and Airedale Sts, was finally dispatched to the junkyard in 1977 by the city council. Burrows had said at the time of creation that he liked to construct "a thing in itself unique and useless". That seemed to be the city's ultimate feeling, too. The plough has had running repairs but has survived.

The Wind Tree is coming down. It took six years to create. Here's hoping it's not that long until it's back in a new, more suitable, home.