Lisa Le Feuvre on Failure, Desire, and Rumour: the eternal lives of outdoor sculpture

Listen to Lisa Le Feuvre speaking at Fountains Failures Futures: The afterlives of public art – a free public symposium in Lund, held at Skissernas Museum 28-30 September 2023.

Lisa proposed that outdoor sculpture lives a life defined by failure and desire. Eternal, monumental, timeless, universal, visible, remarkable, permanent, enduring: these are the adjectives that swarm around sculpture outside the museum – be it placed in the city or in the landscape. Sculpture outdoors often exceeds its own materiality and location through representation. They travel through the world as photographs, as postcards, as backdrops for events. These rumours create charismatic sculptural fictions that always disappoint. Considering statues, public sculpture and Land Art, Lisa celebrates the inescapable relationships outdoor sculpture has with those very human experiences of failure, desire, and rumour. *Lisa was introduced by Maddie Leach.

*Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, and editor. She is the inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Between 2010 and 2017 Le Feuvre directed the Henry Moore Institute, a centre for the study of sculpture. She has written extensively on the idea of failure as a productive force and was editor for the Documents of Contemporary Art edition titled Failure (2010).

Banner image: Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Image courtesy of Holt/Smithson Foundation.

*Listening time: 35 minutes. Scroll down for a selection of images.