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Place Specific Art Essay

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Place Specific Art & Censorship Georgia Wastell There are many forms of censorship of art and the opposition to certain art can be very powerful. This essay concentrates on visual art and in particular sculpture. The essay discusses the censorship of art that is created to go in a certain place, that is known as site or space or place specific art. The two main examples used are Tilted Arc by Richard Serra and Vault Melbourne by Ron Robertson-Swann. According to lawyers specialising in the law in Australia to do with art and artistic expression, ‘Everyone in Australia has the right to be an artist. No law permits it and no law forbids it. The law may limit the ideas that one may express (e.g. by the laws of defamation), or restrict the vehicle …show more content…

This sculpture has been described as a ''yellow-painted fabricated-steel construction, large in size and brightly coloured’. Vault Melbourne was created by Ron Robertson-Swann, who won a 1978 competition to create a sculpture to be the focus of a new city square. Ron Robertson-Swann was born in Sydney in 1941 and he studied sculpture with Tony Caro at St Martin’s School of Art in London. He was also an assistant to the famous sculptor Henry Moore before he returned to Australia in 1968 to continue his work. The sculptures of Ron Robertson-Swann have produced a lot of support and also much criticism but the most controversial work that he ever created was Vault Melbourne which was unveiled in Melbourne’s City Square in 1980. The competition had been organised by the architects of the square and ironically it was selected as the winning sculpture because it was assessed as being compatible with the design of the square. It was also selected because it was a ‘grand interlocked sculpture’ and it was ‘bold, visually simple and a strong focal point which would offset the formal character of the

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