The attempts by artists to shift art out of the gallery and onto the streets in the 1960's were not simply about changing the locations of where art could be viewed but were about changing art itself, broadening its influence "born of democratic urges" (11) and attesting, not that art was good for society, but that art was part of society and its systems. While curators were organising outdoor exhibitions of contemporary sculpture, dominated by formalism and abstraction, artists themselves were taking their own initiatives across a broad range of art activities. To them formalism and abstraction were inappropriate forms of art practice with which to engage the broad constituencies of audiences who rarely, if ever, visited galleries or museums and, as a consequence, did not have the appropriate languages to come to terms with the art exhibited. The question that these artists were attempting to address was: could a critical contemporary art be developed which would achieve an engaged understanding and, yes, pleasure with broad unspecified publics? This wide-ranging move out of the gallery to seek new forms and systems of art practice was artist-led. It was the artists themselves who decided to look beyond the confines of the space and the audience of the gallery. Part of the politics of these actions was to oppose the commercialisation of art and its commodification. As Michael Heizer put it in 1969 after his move into the deserts of Nevada, "The museums and collections are stuffed, the floors are sagging, but the real space exists." (12) John Beardsley in his book, 'Earthworks and Beyond,' says, "Heizer shared in a then widespread notion that the art world was afflicted with a too grand preciosity, that artworks were valued only as commodities and that they were limited by their preoccupation with strictly formal concerns." (13)

Some artists offered their services to poor and under-privileged communities in an attempt to give form to the lived milieu. Mural painting and sculpture offered ways to make art which was owned by the community, some of whom collaborated in the development of the ideas and the execution of the works. These artists shared a commitment to serving working class culture and the environmental improvement of the inner city, suburban and new town housing estates. Other groups of artists formed to explore different ways of extending art practice. The 'Artist Placement Group', founded by John Latham and Barbara Stevini, developed a very particular way for artists to engage in non-art settings by organising placements for artists in institutions ranging from sea, rail and bus companies to civil service departments. The key premise which guided the process of making art out of, or in, these placements was the APG maxim, "the context is half the work." This was a crucial and enormously influential attitude for artists to adopt in positioning themselves in relation to the host community. Artists themselves began to develop the new skills needed to deal with non-art secular organisations and settings from the civic and social to business and industry. However the tentative and fragile success of many of these ventures was arrested and then diverted by the arts bureaucracies most infamously in the case of APG. The Arts Council of Great Britain intervened to stop the Civil Service funding directly the work that APG had been developing with it. In the mid-seventies I wrote that it might be that the arts councils had no role to play in relations between artists and local authorities; that artists were capable of doing this for themselves and did not need another bureaucracy to intervene. Similarly problemmatic for artists' initiatives was the opportunistic growth of self appointed public art curators and the organisations which they set up. They brought with them the essentially modernist attitudes that prevailed in the gallery culture of the time whereas public art was, by its very nature, a critique of modernism. They created barriers and obstructions between artists and the constituencies with which they wanted to work. They promoted 'art in public places' because it was the only thing they knew. The possibilities being explored by artists were seriously damaged by this growth in art bureaucracy and led, for a crucial period, to a limitation in the development of public art. (14)

Public art must be a broad inclusive church. Writing in a planning study for the development of public art in Seattle, reckoned by many to be the city with the most successful public art strategy, the authors compared public art to the public library. (15) Public libraries contains the broadest possible range of books from those for children to contemporary novels, from the classics to the very latest books which attempt to break the bounds of existing knowledge and understanding. Public art must aim to be as representative in its aims. In a very public way it can enrich a city, reinforce its culture, create identity, give rise to myth and humour, encourage risk, represent diversity, give voice to the unsung and allow us to remember. The new public art curators did not recognise this necessary breadth and imposed their own criteria on what could be commissioned and what could not.