Narratives of Public Art: Yellow Peril, Vault and a Large Yellow Object

Abstract

In 1980 a large yellow steel sculpture by the Australian sculptor Ron Robertson-Swann was installed in the City Square in Melbourne, Australia. Commissioned by the Melbourne City Council, the sculpture attracted enormous media scrutiny and its tenure in the Square was a regular agenda item on City Council meetings from the time that a maquette of the proposed work was first displayed. Over the next 20 years the sculpture, later named Vault, was twice dismantled and reassembled at other sites. In this article I approach the sculpture through an object-oriented method, one that attributes agency to the human and nonhuman actors in these events. In so doing I seek to locate what Bruno Latour might have described as the “hidden geographies” of the sculpture. This close examination of the life of the work, and the many and varied interactions with the sculpture on the part of the people of Melbourne, demonstrates how Vault far exceeded Robertson-Swann's intentions for it.