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Robyn Backen’s Delicate Balance (2009), a hollow concrete shaft that sits like a perched cannon off the edge of the newly developed Ballast Point Park in Sydney’s Balmain, offers its user (and I should emphasise that it should be used) a sensory and bodily experience. Not quite architecture and not just public art, Backen has provided a space that, against the sea of disappointment usually surrounding any public addition, is agreeable to its surroundings whilst maintaining an interpretive relationship to its environment. Indeed Delicate Balance might remind us that just as the term ‘sculpture’ was obscured for Rosalind Krauss due to the experiments of the ’60s and ’70s (as was expressed in her now used and abused article of 1979 ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’), ‘architecture’ and ‘public art’, as designating categories, must come face to face with their own mutations, extensions, malleability and marriage.
Delicate Balance leans towards thinking in architectural terms under the agenda of public art. Here observation is corroborated through participation as you can enter the angled structure (through a slim opening somewhat reminiscent of a sci-fi film). Once inside, you are faced with small windows that offer snapshots of the harbour, and it is because of their size that these scenic apertures encourage concentration rather than relaxation. To look up is not to meet a roof but to confront the sky, while to look down is to notice that the work has been installed on a precipice—as you peer through a grate water is revealed, lapping against the rock below. These openings connect you with the surrounding environment through different viewpoints and sensory exposures. It is, if we can poach from the American architect Thom... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline