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The Curse of Public Sculpture Westminster has spoken: enough is enough. In June the London borough announced that, with its tally of public memorials now topping 300, the time has come to put up a SCULPTURE PARK FULL sign. In a special report on the mounting problem it proposed a moratorium on all new sculpture, declaring Whitehall a ‘saturation zone’ and identifying ‘stress areas’ in Knightsbridge and Portland Place. From now on, bodies wishing to erect memorials in the borough must undergo a 10-year cooling-off period to ìallow partisan passions to cool and enable sober reflection". How very sensible. Ten years on, who would have campaigned for a Diana fountain, when we can’t even raise a quorum of ghouls to fill the public gallery at the inquest into her death? Full marks to Westminster Council. But why choose this particular moment to decide the borough has reached bursting point? As it happens, its report was published just two weeks after an announcement by the Arts Council that it is setting up a new body, Art in the Open Air, to ìensure that the arts become integral to the regeneration agenda" - in other words, it is redoubling its efforts to foist unwanted sculpture on the public. Westminster Council may have calculated that if it battened down the hatches fast enough, the ripples from ACE’s new initiative would radiate outwards from the centre of London, dumping artistic detritus in their surge along the country’s major traffic arteries before spending their partisan passions in the sea. Yes, we already have our first monumental offshore sculpture in Sean Henry’s 12.5m Couple, planted in August on an island (a maritime island, not a traffic island) 300 yards off Newbiggin-By-The-Sea. With Channel 4 getting behind wheel, the sculpture-in-the-community juggernaut now seems unstoppable. In October, C4 unveiled a 15m ‘sculpture’ of its 4 logo outside its HQ to mark the launch of The Big Art Project, a new reality TV series which, with £1m of funding from ACE and The Art Fund, aims to leave a legacy more lasting than the usual 15-minutes of D-list fame. As the channel’s head of arts Jan Younghusband gushed when production started in 2005: "We want to empower people to create and want art in their own towns." Television has ways of making people want things, and two years on seven sites have signed up for punishment: Burnley, St Helens, Cardigan, Sheffield, Beckton, Belfast, and the Isle of Mull. The first four have already sealed their fate – I mean chosen their artists – and secured funding; the last three are still weighing up the relative merits of competing blots on the landscape. Teams of curators, arts officers and artists are of course on hand to advise ‘community steering groups’ on possible problems. There will be problems. Any seekers after empowerment imagining otherwise should go and talk to Manchester City Council, currently dragging Thomas Heatherwick through the High Court over a piece of Big Art called The B of the Bang. After five years of teething troubles with this 184ft structure - which was commissioned to mark the 2002 Commonwealth Games but failed to leave the block on the ‘a’, ‘n’ or ‘g’ of the Bang, never mind the ‘B’ - the council is suing Heatherwick and his subcontractors for the £2m estimated costs of making it safe. Since last year when the gigantic sculpture, which looks like a cross between a starburst and a porcupine, succumbed to alopecia and started shedding quills, an ‘exclusion zone’ has had to be created around it. The site near the City of Manchester Stadium is now fenced off behind a sign reading ‘DANGER! PUBLIC SCULPURE. KEEP OUT’ (OK, I made that bit up) and a neighbouring slip road has had to be closed. (That bit is absolutely true, and thoroughly sensible. A further eight quills have been removed by Health & Safety, but until it has shot its last bolt ‘Kerplunk’, as it’s locally known, remains armed and dangerous.) In its report, Westminster Council promises to lift its ban on memorials in the wake of a major disaster, ignoring the fact that minor disasters quite frequently follow in the wake of the sculptures themselves. In the last few years, there have been at least two incidents of public sculptures literally going bang. Last December Spaceship Earth, a 15ft Brazilian quartzite globe by Finnish artist Eino commissioned by Kennesaw State University, Atlanta disintegrated within three months of its installation with a crash that shook the floor of the campus police station. Meanwhile in September 2005 at Clare College, Cambridge, a concrete sculpture of DNA by Charles Jencks blew up after a build-up of gas in its base was ignited by a blowtorch. Six months before that, Carlisle Council had to convene to debate the destruction of The Archbishop’s Stone, a 14-ton granite boulder inscribed by the artist Gordon Young with an ancient curse on the ìcommon traitors, reivers, thieves and dullards" of the Scottish Borders, which since its millennial installation had unleashed a biblical spate of flood, fire, foot-and-mouth, goal famine and factory closures on the local community. The council eventually decided the bad karma was worth enduring for the several thousands of pounds it would cost to undo it. The God-fearing among us might be tempted to see these examples as signs of divine displeasure with too much indiscriminate empowerment. But health and safety considerations aside, auto-destructive sculpture does have its attractions. How else can the public hope to counter the invasion of what Grayson Perry has rightly described as "culture tanks… parked on the lawn of society"? If only Islamic jihadists could be persuaded these things mattered to us, they might oblige by charging them in flaming four-by-fours. The scrap metal merchants have been doing their bit, it’s true, but they can’t be expected to shoulder the whole burden. Besides, their critical judgment is unreliable. They’re welcome to Peter Webster’s bronze of Steve Ovett in Brighton, but they should lay off Henry Moore. The risk with theft, rather than destruction, is that the melted-down bronze will be sold back to the foundry and re-emerge as something far worse. Now that, to judge from Ian Walters’s pyjama-wearing Nelson Mandela, we no longer seem able to produce dignified portrait bronzes even of those few great men and women still worth commemorating, does public statuary really have a future? Westminster Council recommends that, in place of memorial sculpture, people should plant living memorials such as gardens and trees. Excellent advice. How many civic monuments of this or any other century can honestly compete with the beauty – or the scale, if that’s what you’re into - of a tree? Personally, I’m with Joyce Kilmer on this: I think that I shall never see a sculpture lovely as a tree. And I also feel, superstitiously, that all this sculptural hubris cannot go unpunished. Younghusband and her Arts Council chums should learn from the fate of the Easter Islanders, who destroyed all their forests in pursuit of the Big Art Project to end all Big Art Projects. Where did it get them? It left them marooned on their island, lacking timber for deep sea fishing boats, and eventually drove them to cannibalism. So much for empowerment - but hey, it put them on the map. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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