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Sunday, February 10, 2008
Move this tin can!
The Art Newspaper does a story on the backlash against tasteless public art in London. Among the data points: an editorial in The Burlington, and an attack by Tim Knox of the Sir John Soane's Museum on the "epidemic of these Frankenstein monster memorials". It strings together some rather good criticisms of recent works, and speaks to a representative of the Westminster City Council, which is responsible for statuary. Worth a read.UPDATE: Here's an article in the New Zealand Herald covering the UK controversy, and pointing out the the Nea Zealand WWII War Memorial is attracting notice as one of the worst of the lot.
"A colossal sculpture by Paul Day of a man and woman embracing (The Meeting Place) at St Pancras Station is described by Mr Shone thus: “As romantic as a couple who have just been refused a mortgage.” Mr Shone argues that Westminster City Council, which is responsible for the statuary of central London, should enforce stricter controls. A council spokeswoman said that it is “now consulting on plans to limit the number of applications for statues”. But Ian Leith, deputy chairman of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, says the problem is that no “government agencies actually audit public art”. This has led to the removal of works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth."Labels: controversy, UK
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Saturday, June 02, 2007
Lapper's tenure on the fourth plinth ending
Strong article in the Guardian complaining about the Alison Lapper Pregnant piece which has been on the "fourth plinth" in Trafalgar Square for a year-and-a-half. I'm sorry to miss seeing it in person, this is one of those works about which everyone has an opinion without having seen it. One nice thing about this article by Brendan O'Neill is that it attempts to bring its materiality -- size, presence and the color of the Carrera marble -- into the discussion of its meaning and impact.# posted @ 10:44 PM 0 comments | add a comment
O'Neill's argument is strong but one-dimensional - the piece celebrates a person for what they were born with, not what they have done, "a 13-tonne celebration of the distortion wrought by nature on a woman's body rather than that woman's contributions to public life and society...[it] celebrates what nature, in all its arbitrariness, does to humans rather than what we do to shape, lead and transform the world around us. In this sense, it captures the deeply conservative nature of the identity agenda".
Living in Southeast Asia, I'm alive to the sad and deeply conservative power of the identity politicians, and I think O'Neill's point is an important one. But it is one-dimensional: there's no historical consciousness. While continuing celebration of the bodies of variously differently distorted humans (and nature distorts all of us no?) on Trafalgar Square really would be a deeply conservative practice, celebrating one, and for a comparatively short time, is clearly not a conservative act, and does achieve some of the "opening" that Alison Lapper says she was looking for in agreeing to pose. As one commenter said, we are marking a moment in our development as a society when we can "bear to look", and celebrate her beauty and power.
And O'Neill just quickly avoids the big question of celebrating individuals in public art: The problem in holding fast to a public that can evaluate or even recognize the contribution of people to society. I mean, Sir Henry Havelock and Sir Charles James Napier? Should the US be building statues to Dick Cheney? (still, my favorite move out of this dilemma was Mostar's decision to build a statue of Bruce Lee - "Out of all the ethnic heroes and those who have a material interest in acting as victims, we have chosen Bruce Lee. Now they can rack their brains trying to decide whether he is Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), Croat, or Serb...")
The Guardian's commentors on this article are a pretty class act - it's a good dialogue. For example I had missed the fact that Trafalgar Square already has a statue of a disabled person on it. The opposition that Artist Marc Quinn's work presents -- boring white war heros vs disabled woman artist -- clearly works to erase Lord Nelson's own disability.Powered by ScribeFire.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
The London Gormley's
Earlier this month I blogged the FT's coverage of Antony Gormley's upcoming London installation. Well, the figures are up, and the Flickr crew has some pretty good coverage over at the well-run Gormley group.
Glenn Weiss at Aesthetic Grounds makes some interesting points about how the ability and interest of amateur photographers to create views of Gormley's work helps constitute its monumental character. An analysis of "photographability" is key to understanding the function of public art these days. He also sneaks in a reading that Gormley's works are "a psychological acceptance of depression, loneliness and suicide" in public space.
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Sunday, May 06, 2007
Antony Gormley's ambitions for public art
The Financial Times ran a review of Antony Gormley in their weekend edition, a curtain-raiser on an important installation at the Hayward. It's well worth reading, and I was struck in particular by the depth of Gormley's ambition and idealism around public art.
His metal human figures are to him "corpographs", characterless, far from idealised. He uses them "because the body is the basis of everything. It is how we bond with matter and it is the instrument through which all our impressions of being alive arrive, and all our expressions of being alive flow." It is a particularly non-materialist way of describing the importance of the body isn't it? The body as instrument, as vehicle. But the kicker comes at the end, when he's talking about how he'd like to campaign to have some important public art around King's Cross, soon to be the terminus for the Eurostar. He says it should be "a place that says something profound about Britain".
From I quote from the FT in full:«I ask ... if thinks it is even possible to say something profound artistically about Britain.
"That was the question that 'Angel' asked. And I think that it is. It showed that art can be a force for hope, and the re-establishment of pride, and identity and all those elusive things that have taken a hell of a bashing."
He gives a final damning verdict on the state of the nation. "The way that Britain has become a place that aspires to be, and is, manipulated by financial instrument creators and managers, and has lost its ability to be a nation of makers, is an absolute tragedy".»
Is the belief in the ability of public art to be a force for hope tied to the nostalgia for a manufacturing economy? Or is that the particular nostalgia we allow an artist who works in rusted steel? # posted @ 6:16 PM 0 comments | add a comment
