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Public Art: Wasted on the Public? Concern about the lamentable standard of public art has in the last few weeks found its voice with daily coverage in the papers. There was more than a little hypocrisy involved here as some of the bodies and artists who contributed to the criticism have themselves been responsible for no end of rubbish. When Antony Gormley, for example, tells us that most public art is “crap” one needs only to visit the boulders he dumped outside the British Library to realise that he is for once telling the truth. Whatever, a majority of informed opinion now feels that public art is poor in quality and attempts to add to it should be stopped before streets and squares are further blighted with ill-thought, ugly kitsch. I’m bound to say it’s taken them all long enough, because this much has been obvious for many years. For all the concerted criticism of it, the gravy train of public art rattles comfortably, unstoppably along. In the last few weeks there has been announced an Angel of the South for Kent, a national scheme for seven sculptures in “neglected” places, five “crap” ideas for the empty plinth, a pair of gigantic horse heads for Glasgow and memorial statues to Tommy Cooper, Dickens, Gandhi (another), Brian Clough, Captain Mainwaring, Gary Lineker, a black female activist from Stockwell and retired cricket umpire Dickie Bird. Immortality comes cheap in Chavland. I don’t wish to deal here with statuary, which even in antiquity was functional more often that it was artistic. Statuary has its place in any period and would undoubtedly have its place now were there not such an obsession with ephemeral television nonentities and sportsmen. Additionally, there is the paradox that as we build more statues than at any time in our history there are fewer sculptors with the modelling and carving ability to execute it, especially on anything resembling a public scale. Figurative sculpture is in crisis. Few appear capable of rising above caricature. With a couple of exceptions we have lost the ability to produce sober memorials to great public figures which aren’t insulting to the individuals concerned. Public art is different. A phenomenon exclusively of post-1945, its raison d’être is the desire of a liberal intelligentsia to introduce art to the public because, in its opinion, it will be good for them. If it’s good for us it’ll be good for you lot, seems to be the do-gooders driving principle. In the aftermath of a cruel war of sacrifices, Britain was to be a land fit for heroes and heroes deserved public art and new council houses in a moderne style. To take art out of the gallery and into the streets was necessary because the public, bless them, didn’t know what was good for them and, therefore, never made the effort to enter the art galleries and museums which had been provided, in most cases free of charge, for up to 200 years. This philanthropy was genuinely altruistic but totally misguided. Its biggest mistake was to assume the interest and gratitude of the recipients. Sadly, fine art is no more accessible to everyone than is fine literature. It would make everyone happy if the opposite were true, but it ain’t. As I have recently discovered on trips to Harlow and Milton Keynes, towns built virtually from scratch in the 1950s and ’60s, decent public art is wasted on the public and much of the most recent work is so patronising and maudlin as to be unfit for purpose. Both towns pioneered the display of public art as an essential constituent in a healthy, rounded civic life. Well, the dereliction and ugliness of Harlow today has to be seen to be believed and I’m bound to say that the collapsed standards of art exhibited there were undoubtedly first established by builders and architects. The place is desperately ugly and falling to bits and – of the pieces that haven’t already been stolen or eroded beyond recognition – so is much of the sculpture. Having been permitted this glimpse of public art Hell, certain conclusions about it are irresistible. There is now too much public art, which spreads like flu. Once located it is never looked after properly though damage is endemic. The crudest, most violent and inconsiderate generation of young ever spawned in any country purporting to be civilised – indeed, one undeterred from casual violence against the person – is hardly going to worry about damaging inanimate objects like sculptures. If we are to continue with public art – and neither Harlow nor Milton Keynes make a good argument for its continuance – there should be fewer and better works. And the select few should be sited where they can be seen and appreciated as works of art, and not as street furniture which eventually melts invisibly into the scene as though camouflaged. Virtually every work I saw was in the wrong place and even if it had been in the right place to start with it was soon rendered invisible as the location was invaded with the clutter of town centres. Even good works should never be allowed to remain in one place so they become ignored fixtures. They should be moved with surprise a constant. To be bluntly honest, I’m not convinced even that this policy would work because, wherever it is placed, public sculpture has an uncanny ability to look unwanted and alien. But my view goes further than merely the elimination of the worst offenders. It seems to me that it would make no difference if the sculpture were better. The street is the wrong place for art, pure and simple. However good or bad it is no one notices it. The public has no interest in art any more than it is engaged with literature or anything else demanding curiosity, effort, patience and intelligence: it is a sad truth that good public art is wasted on the public. To get anything from art requires personal commitment. A decision has to be made to look at it. Unless you are alert to examining the street world as a matter of habit, art will never register even when it’s shoved under your nose. Life, the clock, assorted onslaughts from mental and physical pain, shopping ... they overwhelm sculpture, because at this level of affairs art is unimportant. Sculpture is on no one’s shopping list. The best works of public art, and there are a number of interesting ones in Harlow (though almost none in Milton Keynes), might be removed to museums where people who have decided that they wish to look at art can discover them in close to ideal surroundings far away from distractions. Few if any pedestrians would notice their absence. The public is, furthermore, quite superlatively clueless where art is concerned. It doesn’t exist for them, although the arts gauleiters insist on pretending the opposite. New Labour’s “inclusive” arts policy is predicated on the wishful thinking that the grassroots is aching for access to art. It isn’t, and never was and never will be. It really couldn’t give a shit. Over half the population is so indifferent to art that they never set foot in a museum. Neither do they feel in any way deprived by this void in their lives. The assumption of those furnishing the streets with public art is that if you take art to the public they will come round to it. They don’t. I spent two whole days walking around Harlow and Milton Keynes and saw not one person looking at any of the hundreds of works of art dotted about. They walked past in their thousands without noticing. The idea that art is a rare and cherishable event to be savoured is an idea lost on those who provide the sculpture in Harlow and Milton Keynes. It could be that I have an unerring talent for intercepting the educationally sub-normal, but having vox-popped passers-by in both towns I conclude that the public is not only profoundly thick, ignorant and unpleasantly inarticulate to a degree unreported in newspapers, but they understand not the first thing about art. To most of the public art is a word signifying something so remotely peripheral to their lives its very mention registers only bored incomprehension. In their understanding of art most people are not even at first base: they can’t even look properly. As for the visual interrogation required by serious work they are clueless and don’t even suspect such a process exists. For them, art is inconveniently long-winded if it refuses to deliver an immediate punchline. None of those to whom I spoke realised that art does not have a definite meaning which can be explained and filed away. They think art might be solvable like a puzzle ... and, very probably, they were never much cop at puzzles anyway. Try to explain that art might be enjoyed for the beauty of its form alone without having to know anything about it and a look of lifeless fatuity crosses their face as if someone had just slogged them on the occiput with a baseball bat. I was particularly alarmed by the attitude of young people, many of whose responses to simple questions was beyond politeness slovenly and barely describable as a ‘Human’ reaction at all. Let me tell you if you don’t already know, there is a generation out there in the country towns who are dangerously, unemployably stupid. These blobs of vaguely animal material dropped off the production line equipped with only the most rudimentary software. Even were sculptures accompanied by concise written explanations, as some pedestrians requested of the more difficult (i.e. not illustratively figurative) pieces, few would understand them. Ask a member of the public if they have noticed a marvellous bronze by Rodin, or a superb figure of Elisabeth Frink (The Model) by F E McWilliam – one of this under-rated artist’s finest works (he was obviously in love with his student) – and they will say either that they haven’t noticed it or, if it is even a slightly abstracted figure, ask what it’s supposed to mean, indeed what it’s there for at all. One bovine pensioner heading for the windy bleakness of a stinking, stained underpass to the bus station and who had lived in Harlow for the fifty years Lynn Chadwick’s sculpture (opposite) had occupied its concrete plinth, claimed never to have noticed its existence on the main street before I pointed it out to her. The real problem surrounding public art, I suspect, is not the public’s response – why should an interest in art be compulsory? – but the unrealistic proselytising attitude of those enlightened types who wish to take art to the masses. They have, I strongly suspect, no idea what the consciousness of these ‘masses’ is really like. They don’t mix with them, otherwise they would realise that where art is concerned the post-school masses are ineducable. Neither do these donors understand people’s natural resistance to something forced upon them from outside. Those who enjoy looking at art, those who read, those who listen to music and who visit the theatre, can’t understand those who live fulfilling lives without pursuing any of these activities. Unfortunately, a small number of these (usually wealthier) culture vultures are like neophyte religious nutters: they can’t wait to inflict their enthusiasm on others. In Harlow they at least started with what they believed was the finest available; Moore, Hepworth, Ralph Brown, Chadwick... and then set off for the barrel bottom from there. In Milton Keynes there was no such aspiration. The barrel bottom looked good to them. What resulted was a species of council bling that has the same relationship to sculpture as a ring-tone has to Beethoven, a disgraceful accumulation of tacky abstraction and vapid figurative tat designed to echo the banal lives of the town’s inhabitants. No effort is needed on behalf of the public to come to terms with any of it. Surely art should aim for a plane higher than this. Art might reflect upon everyday stuff but it should never itself appear mundane. The real damage done by most public art is the pretence that it is art in the first place. The most acute problem with the fashionable trivia of public art is that the sort of toys preferred by committees go out of fashion, fast. Towns are then lumbered forever with the result of bad decisions because no one will admit to the original mistake. And this is the issue with public art generally: no one will concede that the basic philosophy of public art, that the public actually need it, is wrong. David Lee | |||||
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