What Temporary Art Does to a City Square, and How to Judge It

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In Zagreb, "under the clock" is an instruction everyone understands. You meet by the clock on the main square, you wait, you watch the trams swing round the corner, and you leave. Hardly anyone stands in the middle of the square for its own sake. Put something there for three weeks, though, a big sculpture, a ring of benches, a block of ice, and the habits bend. People walk round it, stop, argue about it, photograph it and start saying "meet me by the thing".

That bend is what temporary art in a public square is for. A permanent monument has to justify itself for decades and often ends up as street furniture with a plaque. A temporary work only has to justify itself for a season, which leaves it free to be strange, funny, sharp or plainly experimental. And because everyone who crosses the square remembers what it looked like before, the square itself becomes part of the work.

What follows looks at a few places that have turned short-lived art into a habit, what those works leave behind, and how to judge the next one that turns up on your way to the tram. More cases from streets and squares are collected in the public art strand.

The plinth that never got its horse

The best-known long-running example is in London. The plinth in the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square was built in the 1840s for an equestrian statue that was never made; the usual explanation is that the money ran out. It stood empty for well over a century. From 1999 it became a stage for a rotating series of contemporary sculptures, first through a scheme run by the Royal Society of Arts and then, from the middle of the 2000s, by the Mayor of London.

The list of works since then reads like a short course in what public sculpture can be. Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo put a life-size, pale figure of Christ, hands bound, on a block made for a king's horse, and it looked very small up there. Rachel Whiteread cast the plinth in clear resin and set the copy upside down on top of the original. Antony Gormley's One & Other, in 2009, handed the top to members of the public for an hour each, day and night, for a hundred days. Whether that counts as real participation is a fair question, and one taken up in a separate piece on what participatory art is and isn't.

Then came Katharina Fritsch's enormous blue cockerel, Hans Haacke's skeletal horse with a live stock exchange ticker tied to its leg, David Shrigley's absurdly long bronze thumbs-up and Michael Rakowitz's winged bull built from empty tins of date syrup. As I write, the plinth carries Samson Kambalu's Antelope, which restages a 1914 photograph of the preacher John Chilembwe standing beside a European missionary with his hat on, at a time when colonial custom expected him to take it off.

Why the plinth works

The reasons travel well. The frame never changes: the same stone block, the same sightlines from the steps of the National Gallery, the same company of George IV on horseback and two Victorian generals on the other plinths. So each new piece is judged against its neighbours and its predecessors, and the comparison does half the critical work.

The end date is known from the start, which takes the heat out of the arguments. Nobody has to love a sculpture for ever. And the choice is partly visible. Shortlisted proposals are normally shown to the public as models before a decision is made, and people come to look and take sides.

Most cities do not have an empty plinth in their best square. They do have a corner of a square, a dry fountain basin, a patch of lawn outside the town hall. The lesson is to fix the spot, fix the rhythm and publish the choices. If you are the one doing the choosing, the practical side is covered in a guide to commissioning public art in a small town.

A courtyard that learned from its furniture

Vienna's MuseumsQuartier offers a different model. The complex fills the former imperial stables just beyond the Ring, and its courtyards could easily have stayed a polite passage between museum entrances. What turned them into a place to spend an evening was not a sculpture but furniture: the large, curved, modular loungers known as Enzis, designed by the architects PPAG and introduced in the early 2000s.

They began as an experiment and became a fixture of the warmer months. They get stacked, rearranged and, every so often, repainted in a new colour. People lie on them, eat on them, read on them and hold small birthday gatherings on them. Any installation placed in those courtyards has to compete with that, and the good ones use the loungers rather than fighting them.

The lesson here is about adoption. A temporary object that is useful, one you can sit or lie on or shelter under, gets claimed by the public quickly, and that claim becomes the real work. An object you can only look at has a much harder job. It needs to be very good to hold a square for more than a few days.

Pavilions: buildings with a closing date

Every summer since 2000 the Serpentine in London has built a pavilion on the lawn beside its gallery in Kensington Gardens. Zaha Hadid designed the first. The rule has been to invite an architect who had not yet completed a building in England, and the structure stands for a few months before it is taken down. Many of the pavilions have been sold and rebuilt elsewhere, which gives them a second, quieter life. The format has been copied widely, from Melbourne's MPavilion to a long list of smaller summer structures in parks and squares across Europe.

A pavilion season is useful to a city even when the architecture is forgettable, because it tests a use. If people sit under a shaded structure all August, that is evidence the square needs shade and seats in August. If they walk past it, the planners have learned something cheaply. The most useful summer structures tend to be modest: a timber roof, long benches, a drinking tap and a light programme of talks or music.

What a temporary work leaves behind

Some temporary art is designed to leave nothing. Olafur Eliasson's Ice Watch brought blocks of glacial ice from Greenland to Copenhagen's City Hall Square in 2014, and to the square in front of the Panthéon in Paris during the climate conference of 2015, and left them to melt. The disappearance was the work. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, realised in Paris in the autumn of 2021 after Christo's death, stood for a little over two weeks, and its fabric and rope were recycled afterwards.

Most works leave more than that, whether anyone plans it or not. There are physical traces: anchor bolts, a rectangle of paving cleaner than the rest, a lawn that needs reseeding. There are habits, such as a new meeting point, or a corner people now cross diagonally because something stood there for a month. There are arguments, and those are not a failure. A square where people disagree in public about a sculpture is a square in working order.

Occasionally a temporary placement becomes permanent through sheer persistence. Ivan Kožarić's bronze sphere Grounded Sun was first shown in Zagreb in 1971 and moved more than once before it settled in Bogovićeva Street, where it now feels as if it has always been. In 2004 the artist Davor Preis added nine small planets, placed around the city at scale distances from it, and a single sculpture became a walk across Zagreb. Nobody planned that sequence at the start, which is part of its charm.

How to judge one: a checklist

When the next installation appears on your square, give it a week, then run through these questions. They work for a large commission and for a student project held together with cable ties.

• Does it read the square? Look at its scale against the buildings, the sightlines from each corner and the routes people already take. A good piece looks as if it was made for that spot and no other.
• Does it block anything that matters, such as a tram stop, a desire line across the paving, a market pitch or the only step-free route?
• Can you get close? The works people remember are the ones they can walk round, sit beside, step into or touch.
• Does it change with time? Look at it at night, in rain and on a weekday morning. Ice melts, timber greys, planting wilts, and some of the best works plan for exactly that.
• Is it safe for everyone? Anything overhanging or stretched at shin height should be detectable with a cane, and the information about it should not depend on a smartphone.
• Who chose it, and can you find out how? A visible selection process, even a simple one, makes the arguments more useful.
• Is the end date public? If nobody knows when it goes, it is not temporary art but an unplanned permanent one.
• Where do the materials go afterwards? Reuse, resale, recycling or a skip: the answer tells you a lot about the people who paid for it.
• What do the regulars think after a week? Ask the kiosk staff, the street sweepers and the man who feeds the pigeons. They see it more often than any critic.

The week after it leaves

The most revealing moment comes after the work has gone. Go back a week after the crane has left. Look at the paving, the patch of grass, the places where people now pause. If the square feels a little emptier than it did before the work arrived, the work did its job and handed the city a question about that space. If a few people still drift to the middle and stand where it was, looking at nothing in particular, it did more than that.