W 'V

How do you make a great piece of public sculpture?

Last week at the opening of Amnesty's exhibition Imagine a World Without Violence to Women, I met Alison Lapper, the subject of Marc Quinn's marble statue now on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Meeting her in the warm, life-size flesh with her son made me fully appreciate how great it is that we have such a sculpture in our most public of spaces, celebrating life and fecundity and difference. Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant is the newest work featured in a television programme called The Sculpture 100 which takes us on a dash through the 100 most significant public sculptures in Britain made during the last 100 years. Public sculpture is a phrase that can so easily send a shudder down my spine. It conjures up what the artist Keir Smith calls "bland art by committee", content-free, culture-lite three-dimensional logos; there's probably one on a roundabout or in a mall near you. He attributes their proliferation to the rise of professional public artists who hoover up commissions and are trained on specialised courses to make work that won't upset sponsors or local pressure groups. Making a great piece of public art is very difficult. The fact that an artwork is destined for permanent public view places so many limitations on the artist. The chosen materials have to be resistant to vandalism, graffiti, wind, rain, heat and cold, bird droppings and corrosion. The design has to comply with health and safety regulations: Anish Kapoor had to make sure his Sky Mirror didn't focus the sun's rays and fry a good burgher of Nottingham. The subject matter must avoid offending anyone and may have to fit a prescribed theme. What's left of the artist's tattered vision has to work within the site, the budget and a deadline. With all these threats hanging over the artist, it is no wonder that a lot of the sculptures featured in the programme seem somehow