Did you know the camel was designed by a committee?

Three well-recorded events of howling public rejection of a public-art commission come to mind.

BERT FLUGELMAN, Pyramid Tower, 1978

Originally situated in the bottom third of the long and wide Martin Place, this sculpture - a memorial to Dobell - stood proud and priapic. Public response was swift. The media dubbed it The Silver Shish Kebab and together with a swell of letter-writers, instigated its move to a traffic island on the corner of Spring Street a block away. Ironically, its move has placed it in a better place.

KEN UNSWORTH, Stones against the sky, 1998

Within days of Unsworth's large brown cement boulders being attached to slender grey metal poles in the public plaza of the Elan building in King's Cross, the sculpture was widely-known as Poo on stilts. People hated it to the point of throwing paint, clothing and food at it with monotonous regularity. The owners, who scrimped on production costs from the start, painted the whole thing navy grey so as to blend it more easily with its environment and to get rid of the scatological trigger the brown balls signified for locals. The trees specified by the artist to be planted amongst the boulders were never considered in order to save costs. The piece today hangs as anonymous as the people who often lie next it.

RON ROBERTSON-SWANN, Vault, 1980

At the risk of sounding the same, Robertson-Swann's sculpture Vault was pilloried from day it was gently placed down on Melbourne's City Square. Before long it was dubbed The Yellow Peril by every person who frequented the city. Eventually ridicule had it relocated to a park on the banks of the Yarra where parks don't matter.

Personally, this was the first time that I realised the venom and vehemence of a public not consulted - the sculpture's hysterical yellow colour, it's modernist shape, and the relevance to its environment, were all fodder for those questioning the wisdom of this piece of public art in a part of Melbourne where heritage and prestige were City Square. It seemed like a parallel of the Richard Serra situation, however, there was no 'fuck you' ever conceived as part of the work.

The more I read Miwon Kwon's chapter, the more I visualised an elephant being pushed up the tight end of a funnel. The other thing that rang in my head was growing admiration for the work of WochenKlausur. Specifically as it relates to a paragraph towards the end of the chapter in which Kwon writes, "...if we identify the 'the work' as the dialogue and collaboration between an artist and a community group, we conjure a picture of the community nonetheless, albeit in different terms, precisely of work. In eschewing object production, many community-based artists, often with the help of curators, administrators and sponsors, orchestrate situations in which community participants invest time and energy in a collective project or process. This investment of labour would seem to secure the participants' sense of identification with 'the work' so that the community sees itself in 'the work' not through an iconic or mimetic identification but through the recognition of its own labour in the creation of 'the work'."

Don't forget the camel.