Category: Comment

“Nothing and no one ever heard so many stupidities as a picture,” remarked Jules de Goncourt, and since he made his observation things have got worse. The insults to intelligence endured by 19th century pictures were as nothing to those routinely heaped on contemporary art.

Some things never change, however. Stupidity almost always originates in vanity, and art criticism is never more stupid than when it wants to sound clever. If the situation has deteriorated, it’s partly because conceptual art offers endless opportunities for cleverness. But other factors have contributed. For one thing, critical faculties are now weakened in advance by heavy shelling with stupid press releases and wall texts. For another, in order to praise a work of conceptual art it is no longer enough to wax stupidly lyrical; a lot of the time, you have to lie. And lying, for some physiological reason yet to be scientifically researched, affects the part of the brain that deals with sentence construction, resulting in obfuscation, the mortal enemy of intelligence.

For the liar, tautology and tortuous grammar are lifelines. Consider this sample from a wall text for the 2007 Turner Prize: “Enrico David’s imagery has developed through his use of drawing and painting and also finds form in sculpture, painting and works on paper.” If a stress test is carried out on the meaning of this sentence it collapses into: “Enrico David draws, paints and sculpts.” So why the extra verbiage? Because, on the visual evidence available to anyone visiting the exhibition, he did none of those things. It beats me why the security services waste money on polygraph technology, when a simple, hands-free lie detector test is to listen for the strangulated syntax. Here’s Serota in 2008 defending the Tate against criticism of the Turner Prize selection process: “We’re at the forefront of being as open as we possibly can”. Beep! If the convoluted phrasing sounds familiar, it’s because it comes straight out of Bliar’s Grammar Primer.

‘Heavy on style and light on substance’ is the obfuscator’s mantra; once the tortured phraseology has been mastered, the only real obstacle in the way of success is words. If a word has a clear meaning, it must be excised and replaced with one that makes a significant-sounding noise without adding anything quantifiable to the sense. But the trouble with buzzwords, like bluebottles, is obsolescence – when the buzz becomes annoying, people reach for the fly swat. Since we published our A-Z of Artbollocks in 2004, the language has moved on. ‘Innovative’ has lost its novelty and ‘rigorous’ its stiffness. ‘Navigation’ has drifted off course and ‘negotiation’ is grinding to a halt. Even ‘interrogation’ may soon be over. It would no longer be sufficient to say of 2005 Turner Prize nominee Gillian Carnegie that she ‘interrogates painting’. The present climate calls for something tougher: ‘rendition’, perhaps.

There are survivors from our earlier survey. ‘Investigations’ are ongoing and ‘exploration’ continues; ‘identity’, perforce, is ever with us. And there are newcomers. ‘Conversation’ and ‘discourse’ are now widely practised – witness Mima’s circuitously titled 2007 exhibition Draw: Conversations around the Legacy of Drawing and Kettle’s Yard’s 2008 offering Beyond Measure: conversations across art and space. Not to be left behind, in August the once fuddy-duddy Fine Art Society gave us Wit, Fear and Sarcasm, an exhibition featuring “the work of five artists whose practice presents a discourse with historicity”.

But the most notable stylistic advances have been in the formerly neglected field of punctuation. The past decade has seen a relentless rise in the use of the hyphen, in defiance of Keith Waterhouse’s sound advice in his immortal handbook On Newspaper Style: “Hyphens should never be used when they have nothing to do,” he warns. “Before admitting one to the page, ask what it has come for. If it cannot say, or if its answer is vague… refuse it admission.” Waterhouse might have made a special case for ‘ludic-artistic’, but I suspect he would have been less welcoming to ‘venue-based’, ‘text-based’, ‘time-based’ or ‘process-based’ – though ‘pizza-based’ he might have allowed. And I doubt he would have given elbow room to ‘site-specific’, ‘semi-site-specific’ or the now preferred locution ‘location-specific’ – not to mention ‘non-specific’, an expression formerly only associated with STDs that now appears regularly in respectable ‘non-specific contexts’, such as the “non-specific sense of discord with the general state of things” experienced by contributors to the Cafe Gallery’s summer exhibition Personal Use. We know how they feel.

A distinctive feature of the art hyphen is its decorative use, like a grace note, between a prefix and the stem of the word it qualifies. So we have ‘post-structural’ or ‘post-minimal’; if mail art was still in fashion, we might have ‘post-box’. But the art hyphen’s partner of the moment is the prefix ‘re’, sometimes italicised for added impact. In the endlessly repeating cycle of conceptual ideas, there’s no end to this little prefix’s usefulness. From ‘re-contextualising, ‘re-configuring’, ‘re-investigation’ and ‘radical re-visioning’ to ‘re-definition of space’, ‘re-investment in aesthetic language’ and ‘re-assessment of the relationship between realism and spectacle’, re is in a prefixal class of its own. If we’re to believe the publicity for FACT’s 2008 exhibition Sk-interfaces, it’s even capable of ‘re-virginisation’ – a felicitous coinage that, if it had any meaning, might absolve pious Muslims of the need for honour killing. Following the epidemic of art hyphens, we now seem to be experiencing an outbreak of art brackets. Originally introduced by abstract painters as a way of smuggling in a title behind the title Untitled, art brackets now perform a purely ornamental function, like emoticons emptied of emotion. The publicity for a 2010 exhibition organised by Romanian curator Mihnea Mircan for the David Roberts Art Foundation Fitzrovia contained a couple of choice examples: one exhibit was described as ‘a (counter-)manifesto etched in stone’ while another was titled ‘The Remains (The Making of)’. Mircan must be an indexer manqué, since his whole exhibition was filed under the title ‘History of Art, the’. But the prize for prettiest confection in the bracket bracket goes to Flowers East for its reference, re Jerry Judah’s 2009 exhibition Babylon, to “the redundancy of traditional hierarchies at the End of (art)-History”.

And so we come to subverted commas. Just as inverted commas are used by tabloid headline writers around words like ‘MURDERER’ or ‘RAPIST’ as “typographical crossed fingers to ward off libel actions”, as Waterhouse describes it, subverted commas allow art commentators to shrug off responsibility for apparently loaded, non-relativist statements – or indeed any statements, full (old-fashioned-)stop. Thus the Arnolfini’s current series of exhibitions The Apparatus is “about the ‘makings’ of artists, of artworks, of institutions, and of a cultural infrastructure,” while Sharon Lockhart’s film-making, in the words of the Whitechapel, “looks back to the pivotal interest in gesture and the ‘everyday’ of the late 1960s and examines contemporary manifestations of ‘work’”.

The ultimate syntactical shrug is, of course, the question mark. In this category Newlyn Society of Artists wins the pioneers’ prize for the trailblazing introduction of the Hispanic inverted question mark into the title of its 2005 exhibition ¿DRAWING? I’m not making this up. ¿Would I lie to you?

The Jackdaw Nov-Dec 2011

The traditionalist lament for loss of skill is a distraction. The modernists were right about that: skill on its own is not enough. The first step on the road to recovery is to reinstate the visual as the sole and proper domain of art. Once it is generally agreed that art’s impact is essentially visual, the skills to make it so will resurface.

It’s a paradox that we keep visual art in museums, when it’s the only branch of art for which there is no muse. Of the nine Greek muses, there was one for history – Clio – and one for astronomy – Urania – neither of which disciplines we now regard as arts. There was one for tragedy – Melpomene – and one for comedy – Thalia; one for music, naturally – Euterpe – and one for dance – Terpsichore. And there were no fewer than three for verse of different kinds: Polyhymnia for sacred, Erato for love and Calliope for epic poetry. But there were no muses for what we now refer to as the fine arts.

It’s hard to explain why not, unless it has something to do with their parentage. The muses were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, memory, and memory was a basic requirement for the practice and perpetuation of the literary, theatrical and musical arts (plus history and astronomy) in the days before pen and paper, let alone computers. Nowadays only actors and dancers need rely on their memories, although they too have written texts and notes when learning their parts. But artists rely on a different sort of memory, a memory of the how rather than the what. For the Greeks, this was another distinguishing factor. The muses’ arts were learned via the ears rather than the eyes, with the exception of dance – and that went with music.

Today we have different denominations and hierarchies. Astronomy and history are out; visual art is in, right up near the top of the table. So preeminent, in fact, has it become that it no longer needs a separate trade description and is classified simply as ‘art’ – except for the purposes of funding, when it is referred to as ‘visual art’. But the strange thing is, the more funding art absorbs the less visual it progressively becomes. Like a disease mimicking the behaviour of other cells, it increases its share of public funding by trespassing on the domains of other arts. How much of the art on show at Manchester International Festival was strictly ‘visual’? From the reviews I read of the exhibition 11 Rooms at Manchester Art Gallery, none. One room contained a live manga avatar, a second a naked woman with a hand-mirror, a third a war veteran standing in a corner, a fourth a man in bed. “In white room after white room you plunge in, 11 times, not knowing what you’ll find there,” wrote Adrian Searle in The Guardian. “More real presences, performances and theatre.” His review, headed ‘Room with No View’, was conspicuous for its avoidance of value judgements. His concluding observation, a propos Robert Wilson’s restaging of Marina Abramovic’s performances, was: “The images keep coming back.” So do traumas and undigested food.

If critics don’t know what category they’re judging in, how can they judge? Contemporary art criticism is based not on visual grounds but on other criteria (which, appropriately, is the name of Damien Hirst’s outlet in New Bond Street). Other muses sit on art’s judging panel – chaired by Clio’s kid sister, the muse of art history – and the critical faculty they use is the ear rather than the eye. The arrival of word processors has accelerated the verbalisation of art. Curators wrap exhibitions in webs of words as if ashamed of their visual nakedness, while press offices seem actively determined to put audiences off with assurances that there’ll be nothing to look at. Take last autumn’s Gabriel Orozco show at Tate Modern. The press release told us that he was “a sculptor of global significance”: that he “draws on the histories of western and Latin American practice”; that he has a “fascination with combining the systematic and the organic”; that his work “has been informed by his extensive travels and his relationship to the various places he visits”. But nowhere did it suggest that his art was a visual pleasure which, in the event, it turned out to be.

Non-visual art is by definition visually boring, so a campaign is now afoot to make ‘boring’ interesting. Two years ago Hoxton Square Gallery organised a competition for the title of ‘Most Boring Drawing’, accompanied by ‘Most Boring’ – A Performance. (Performances were sensibly limited to a single entry, or the jury might still be out). But why should non-visual art be boring when, say, non-visual poetry is not? Because it refuses to use the tools it has been given to stimulate the imagination. The connection of the arts with their mother Mnemosyne is umbilical; it goes a lot deeper than learning by rote. Art works on its audience by triggering memory. An education project at MoMA New York has discovered that, in front of paintings, previously vegetative Alzheimer’s patients are spurred to excited recollection. This could explain why ‘iconic’ art is at such a premium, because it occupies a place in our collective memory. Conceptual art, of course, can trigger memory too – we see with our brains – but the memory has to be of something outside itself to elicit a response. It can’t be a memory of another piece of art: ‘exploring issues of representation’ just doesn’t do it. Besides, without a nudge from Ma Mnemosyne artists would have no impetus (other than money) to make work.

The process of paring away visual association can only go so far before the stimulus is too weak for memory to pick up. For the past hundred years avant-garde art has been on a forced march of progress, casting off aesthetic baggage as it went. First modernism stripped art down to formal beauty, then post-modernism decided that beauty exceeded the baggage allowance and dumped it, along with skill, by the side of the road, replacing it with found objects picked up en route. Last to go, ironically, was monetary value, now the principal support for the whole flimsy structure. The situation has been succinctly summed up by German artist Fritz Balthaus in his sculpture Pure Moore, a stack of 221 bronze bars representing the 2.1-tonne Reclining Figure stolen for scrap from outside the Henry Moore Foundation in 2005. Appropriately, it is now installed outside the German federal criminal police office in Berlin.

The traditionalist lament for loss of skill is a distraction. The modernists were right about that: skill on its own is not enough. The first step on the road to recovery is to reinstate the visual as the sole and proper domain of art. Once it is generally agreed that art’s impact is essentially visual, the skills to make it so will resurface. The general public has never stopped responding to the visual, hence its perplexity in front of much contemporary art. All that’s needed now is the insistence that, to qualify for funding, visual art has to be overwhelmingly visual – as opposed to just visible – and our problems will vanish. So let’s drop the ‘fine’ and accentuate the ‘visual’. ‘Fine’ is a value judgment that has to be earned; ‘visual’ is a simple and crucial criterion by which to judge whether a piece of art is good or bad. Enforce it, and we may find our misnamed museums restocked with things that are worth looking at.

The Jackdaw Sept-Oct 2011

If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise. That’s if the woods are Mortimer Forest in Herefordshire, and the surprise hasn’t by now been deliberately spoiled by tree-hugging vigilante forest rangers.

Last spring, RCA graduate Philippa Lawrence took it into her pretty little head to barcode the trunks of selected young oaks in this ancient woodland at a spot called High Vinnalls, conveniently close to the Forestry Commission Car Park. The trees are due to be felled to make hardwood dowelling, a product for which the builders’ merchant barcode is FB184.

Barcode: FB184, organized by Meadow Arts and funded by ACE, is a site-responsive piece (responsive, mind, not merely specific) whose purpose, sayMeadowArts, is to draw “the viewer’s attention to how the individuality of each tree contrasts sharply with the uniformity of the commodity that it becomes”. You may question whether, four centuries after the invention of the sawmill, we need our attention drawn to this fact, but the artist thinks we do. “Hereford is known for its special relationship to trees,” she says – and special relationships, as we know,  need work. She hopes hers may help us “reconsider our relationship to these places and the centrality of wood in all of our lives” – and, quite possibly, in some of our skulls.

Lawrence’s own relationship with trees, she confides on her website, “is one built on a close and easy physical proximity”. In childhood “local trees accepted my slight young limbs and that [sic] of my friends as we scaled and climbed, testing our dexterity, flushed with delight at our exertions and in being abroad ‘in another place’ within the arms of the tree.” (Steady on, my dear, you’ll get the paedos excited.) Well, I spent much of my childhood up a tree and when the image of her barcoded trunks dropped into my mailbox it made me want to reach for the bow and arrow I used to take up there, dip the arrow tip in curare and lie in wait for Lawrence to waft along, flushed with delight, to install her next site-responsive project.

Unfortunately, the way things are going, I’ll need a quiverful. Since ACE teamed up last year with the National Trust on a new three-year partnerhip, Trust NewArt, site-responsive blights on the landscape have been spreading. The Trust now boasts a fresh young ContemporaryArts Programme Manager called Tom Freshwater who, with advice from experts including seasoned site-responders Ackroyd & Harvey and Richard Wentworth, is under instruction “to encourage new ways of looking at the work and the world”. Sounds harmless enough as far as it goes, but there’s more. The aim of Trust New Art, the launch announcement informed us, is “to build links between the National Trust and the contemporary arts and crafts sector” and “to make contemporary arts and crafts an integral part of the National Trust’s daily offer to visitors” [my italics]. This sort of management-speak speaks of one thing and one thing only: money. It’s the same old story of mismatched partners climbing into bed together for mutual warmth in a cold economic climate.

The National Trust has a circulation problem. While more and more visitors swarm freely over its 600,000-acre rural estate the size of Derbyshire, fewer and fewer want to pay an entrance fee to circulate around its historic houses which consequently, like gangrenous limbs,  are in danger of dropping off. Without increased footfall through its miles of stuffy corridors, it cannot meet the expense of keeping up its buildings. But who of the post-end-of-history generation wants to pay good money on a sunny afternoon to traipse around an airless house with the blinds half-drawn admiring the faded possessions of long dead toffs? They’d rather have a tour of Beckingham Palace. While the Trust’s energetic Chairman Simon Jenkins has managed to breathe some warmth into his hypothermic patient by such simple traditional expedients as lighting fires in grates, his organisation has been looking enviously at the inflated attendance figures of contemporary art galleries and, being of a trusting disposition, believing them. The trouble is, the two constituencies are poles apart. The blue-rinsed rump of NT membership wouldn’t Trust New Art further than they could throw it, which at their advanced average age is not very far.

Trust properties that have so far signed up to the new art deal include Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, Tatton Park in Cheshire, Croft Castle in Herefordshire, and Calke Abbey and Kedleston Hall, both in Derbyshire. Waddesdon had already converted its Coach House into a contemporary art space, opened in 2009 somewhat inauspiciously with an exhibition of Angus Fairhurst, a contemporary artist who chose to end it all by hanging himself in a wood. But Waddesdon is au fait with art and not in danger of doing anything silly, unlike Calke Abbey, winner of our 2010 Trust New Art Bumpkin Prize for a summer programme of supreme artbollocks titled Profusion – devised for it by Beacon Art Projects – that made no concessions to the rural location,  and no sense. Among its advertised attractions were a Doug Fishbone performance in the Deer Shelter of “a stream-of-consciousness mode lecture incorporating images found on the internet into unlikely scenarios, propositions and diatribes”; a Jimmy Durham video in the Ice House showing the artist “smashing his students’ works, reminding us of the origin and end of all things” – as if we were short of reminders of this in the countryside – and a display of Roger Hiorns’s “intention to dust areas of the smithy with powdered antidepressant, triggering different contradictory avenues of association between the setting and his intervention”. Mercifully Health & Safety intervened to nip his intention in the bud at the display stage.

Visitors to contemporary art museums go to look at contemporary art; visitors to National Trust properties go to look at flowers and trees in the gardens and cake display cabinets in the tearooms. Thankfully, the heritage-visiting public seems already to be taking things into its own hands. The fightback started in a small way last September in the grounds of English Heritage’s Belsay Hall in Northumberland, where nine Lilliputian hostages were seized from a mini-installation by street artist Slinkachu forming part of the exhibition Extraordinary Measures. A single escapee was later recovered from the weeds by a gardener, but the others are still missing, despite an amnesty. (Jackdaws were, unsurprisingly, on the list of suspects.)

There is a limit, beyond installing wheelchair ramps and disabled toilets, to how accessible you can make a historic house to a public increasingly uninterested in history. But wait! What’s this? An announcement from the ICA, that body cryogenically frozen in the 1950s and recently chilled to a deeper permafrost by Arts Council cuts.  During the run of its summer exhibition Sketches for Regency Living,  an architectural-cum-choreographic intervention by the fabulously named Pablo Bronstein, gallery guides will be offering daily ‘National Trust-style tours’ of Nash House, with dance performances on the hour and evening talks from historians, architects and antique specialists.  What goes around comes around, in a sexier costume. Time, perhaps, for a revivified National Trust to issue its volunteer room guides with oak leaf-monogrammed tights.

The Jackdaw Jul-Aug 2011

In economically choppy waters, artists without lifejackets can be forgiven for clinging to any passing spar. So when a life raft floats past flying a flag marked ‘EDUCATION’, it’s understandable that they should haul themselves aboard. But the flag is misleading. The raft isn’t headed for the familiar port of art school, where people used to receive an art education. Its course has been reset for the art gallery, where people are educated through art rather than in it.

Art schools may have fallen off the funding map, but gallery education is riding the storm. Engage has emerged from the Arts Council cuts with a 50% increase in funding, while the Whitechapel and South London Gallery have had their ACE grants boosted – SLG’s by 107% – in recognition of their ‘community engagement’. Sheffield Galleries, meanwhile, have had the bung pulled on them for being, well, simply galleries. In the new rankings they count as ‘agencies with more of a support function’, as opposed to ‘art producing agencies’ like the speciously named Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, which has earned a whopping raise of 143.8% as an ‘international-quality visual arts destination’.

For those of you who happen to be wondering how many visitors it takes to make a destination, I consulted a philosopher of language and he answered one – and intending to visit is enough. But let’s leave that aside and take an instructive look at what this art-producing agency has been producing, in case there are any lessons in it for Sheffield. A recent commission that presumably influenced the Arts Council’s decision was Bonnie Camplin’s autumn exhibition Railway Mania. Camplin, by the way, is one of those ‘internationally acclaimed artists’ whose hitherto unknown existence raises further philosophical questions about how many foreign admirers it takes to generate international acclaim and whether one hand clapping somewhere abroad will do. But let’s not get picky. From the educational point of view, she had two things going for her. 1) She was visiting Professor at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. 2) She was engaged in an “ongoing investigation into the deeper meaning of science, technology and rational thought”.

Based on ‘a hoard of research’ into the industrial revolution and the birth of the railways carried out over three years, Camplin’s exhibition opened with a room-sized diorama lined in galvanised steel with ‘two ominous heaps of the combustible black sedimentary rock’ otherwise known as… Come on, science class! You at the back! Yes Stephenson, well done – coal. But the educational value didn’t stop there. The heaps were topped by two giant female heads called Irene Iree and Feral Cheryl, while a later room featured depictions of ‘femme fashion figures in a variety of…uniforms representative of their various roles in industry’. Frau Professor Doctor has a parallel interest ‘in the entangled narratives of feminism’s movements’. On a lighter note, she ended with a film projection for which visitors could choose soundtracks from such popular favourites as ‘Trains in the Hills’, ‘The Power of Steam’ and  ‘The Great Western’.

Sheffield Museums missed a trick. There they were, sitting on the Ruskin Collection, and they failed to play the science hand. In the ACE funding stakes, they deserved to lose. As you can see from the above example, the education game requires no specialist knowledge. No former experience in the appliance of science is needed, though an MSc in the science of applications helps. If necessary, willing partners can be found in the scientific community to lend a sheen of academic credibility.

In times of hardship communities need to help each other, and artists and scientists are now pulling together. For artists, an association with science opens up new streams of funding; for scientists, a partnership with art generates publicity and gives off sex pheromones to attract corporate sponsors. This could explain the mystery of why distinguished scientists at the top of their professions should be bending over backwards to let artist ignoramuses look for deeper meanings in their work.

The Royal Society, no less, is currently hosting Beyond Ourselves – In the spirit of scientific enquiry, an Arts Council-funded exhibition featuring six contemporary artists ‘working within the realms of reflexion, hypothesis, philosophy and sensation and searching for new ways of expressing their compulsion to describe that which we do not yet know’ – a privilege of compilers of dodgy dossiers not normally accorded to scientists. Promised highlights include ‘a Starbucks coffee cup holder with scientist’s notation depicting Feynman diagram for an electron positron interaction’ by Geraldine Cox, an artist-in-residence at Imperial College ‘whose practice involves spending many hours with scientists listening to and developing a fuller understanding of the nature of their work’. Also on show is a series of sculptures by Chris Dunreath extending ‘his investigations into the deep realms of relativity and quantum physics’, using a choice of materials – in this case paper pulp – that ‘prompts us to remember that earthly things have their roots deep in the history of our universe’. Amazing really, I might have forgotten that without a reminder from a funny-shaped egg box.

Eventually some sharp-sighted curator was bound to spot an opening for a commissioning organisation to mine this potentially rich scientific seam. In 2009 Alice Sharp set up Invisible Dust with the marvellously named Professor Peter Brimblecombe – who sounds like an escapee from Hogwarts but is actually Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of East Anglia – and already she has five other scientists on her books. They include hydrologist Dr Kevin Hiscock, who recently put his Environmental Sedimentary Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the disposal of UEA resident artist Liz Ballard. Their collaboration bore fruit at Cambridge Science Festival in March in a site-specific artwork at Jesus Green Lido which pumped a continuous jet of water into the air, alerting viewers to the dangers of pollution by activating ‘movement and interaction between water and sediment’ and disturbing ‘the usual topography of the pool’. Meanwhile fellow Invisible Dusters HeHe took inspiration from the lido’s ‘Deep Water’ sign to recreate the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in miniature (without environmental impact on the pool). HeHe, incidentally, stands for Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen, a Parisian duo ‘renowned internationally for their architectural interventions that play with scale’. Which poses a final philosophical conundrum: if the currency were to devalue as fast as the price of international renown, would there be any money to pay international artists?

More Invisible Dust will be kicked up in May at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, where with support from the Wellcome Trust HeHe, Ballard and other Invisible Dust mites will be art-educating the inhabitants of the UK’s greenest city about pollution – HeHe via a fleet of vapour-trailing model aeroplanes and Ballard by melting luminous green dye in the River Wensum. (Interesting that one form of invisible dust recently dominating the news has yet to receive artistic attention, perhaps because funding has not been forthcoming.)

You Wensum, you lose some. Art and science partnerships would be harmless enough if they didn’t foster the pernicious notion that art needs added educational value to be worth funding. That way lies danger. Science doesn’t need art to find deeper meanings, nor does art need science. It’s a marriage of economic convenience that cheapens both.

The Jackdaw May-Jun 2011

Two beavers are standing looking at the Hoover Dam and one says to the other, “I didn’t build it, but it was my design”. Cue laughter. Now picture the same gag line under a cartoon of two artists looking at an enormous public sculpture. The gag still works, but the laughter’s forced. Because while a beaver has an innate grasp of the fundamentals of dam building, your average contemporary artist doodling a landmark sculpture on the back of an envelope could fit his knowledge of structural engineering on the other side.

This might bother a beaver, but we’re not fussed. In a world of ever narrowing specialisations, we habitually depend on the skills of others. Renaissance artists working in the public sphere were expected to master the principles of construction: Michelangelo and Raphael were architects, Leonardo was an engineer. But in this age of alpha males rather than Renaissance men, our public artists only seem able to function with specialist support from Ove Arup.

For a decade, the global firm of structural engineers which cut its teeth on the Sydney Opera House has kindly put itself at the disposal of contemporary sculptors in distress. A regional development agency, say, has commissioned a landmark sculpture you have absolutely no idea how to construct: simply summon the Arup genie from the bottle and all your structural worries will disappear. With added Arup, you can aim higher and think bigger. The firm can turn any 3-D dream into reality, and if you split the money with them you can take all the credit. They won’t mind, it’s just a job to them. When it’s over they’ll go back to doing something useful with their time, like building bridges.

Search the small print of the biggest public art commissions of the past decade, and the magic name of Arup will appear. If it’s a massive sculpture lifting the profile of a blighted skyline, Arup will be behind it holding it up. Conveniently, the firm seems to have an office in every northern town. When St Helens Council commissioned Jaume Plensa’s The Dream – the 20m concrete head now sprouting like a giant mushroom on the site of the former Sutton Manor Colliery – Arup’s Liverpool office made the dream come true.

Their assistance goes beyond structural design. According to the Arup website, they also took charge of the “planning, tendering and commissioning processes”, plus the “specialist ecology, lighting engineering and 3-D imagery, all required for the planning application submission”. Don’t stare in despair at your landmark doodle; just hand Arup the envelope and they’ll work out the “complex geometries” and come up with a professional “assessment of overall stability and  ‘buildability’.” Arup is the Jim’ll Fix It of the landmark sculpture business, a one-stop-shop for local enterprise partnerships wishing to lay the ghosts of the industrial past by commissioning monstrous beacons of false hope for the future.

It was Arup that calculated the wind-resistance of the Angel of the North’s 54m wingspan and stopped the 20m Gormley falling on its face, winning such gratitude from the artist that he has retained their services ever since. Arup’s Advanced Geometry Unit was the eminence grise behind Gormley’s Quantum Cloud at Greenwich and the brains behind the collapse mechanism built into his latest batch of iron men in the Waters of Leith, designed to make them go down like ninepins in the event of flooding (a sight I’d pay good money to see). If Thomas ‘Spillikins’ Heatherwick had had the humility to call on their superior expertise The B of the Bang might not have blown up in his face, but he was foolish enough to imagine he could go it alone. Anish Kapoor has no such illusions. It was Arup that stopped his Marsyas idea from going down like a PVC balloon in 2002. “If the calculations had been 1% out,” their engineer admitted, “it would have been sitting on the ground” – along, presumably, with the artist’s career.

After that, Kapoor was Arup’s for life. He hasn’t put pen to back of envelope since without the firm’s deputy chairman and AGU founder Cecil Balmond in attendance to do the workings out in the margin. They share an interest, apparently, in “interrogating form”. It was Balmond who ensured that Kapoor’s Temenos, the £2.7m 120m windsock launched in Middlesbrough last year, didn’t take off, and it is Balmond who will guarantee that the Arcelor-Mittal Orbit stays up for the duration of the 2012 Olympics. Now a celebrity in his own right, Balmond left Arup last October to found his own company and devote more of his time to art. It can’t be long before the engineers remove the artists from the equation altogether. But they’ll have to do better than the July 7^th Memorial, a soulless experiment in art-free design by architects Carmody Groarke and, yes, engineers Arup that surely ranks as the world’s least memorable monument, while serving as a stark reminder of why monuments need sculptors.

The question is, do monuments need engineers? The answer is, only when they are unjustifiably big. There are good reasons for making enormous dams, but there are almost never good reasons for making enormous sculptures. In fact, the reasons are almost invariably bad: jingoistic, militaristic, imperialistic, narcissistic or just plain hubristic. Temenos was to be the first of a £15m series of five giant Kapoors destined to ‘rejuvenate’ the Durham towns, with four more planned for Stockton, Hartlepool, Darlington and Redcar & Cleveland. Together, boasted the scheme’s publicity, the ‘Tees Valley Giants’ would “form the most significant public art project anywhere in the world”. With even greater hubris, the director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art Kate Brinsley proclaimed that Temenos would “call on the traditional twin skills of the region: precision engineering and heavy industry”. She neglected to say how many workers with those skills it would take off the dole queue in what has just been named the most economically vulnerable city in Britain. Now the North East’s regional development agency is being abolished and Tees Valley Unlimited, the local enterprise partnership behind the scheme, has had its budget slashed and lost its tourism arm. It looks as if four of the giants may never awaken, and cultural tour operators will have to strike Teesside off their itineraries.

Interrogating form is a game best played on a small scale, a scale at which the sculptor can work unaided. The RA exhibition Modern British Sculpture includes a 1937 piece by Naum Gabo titled Spheric Theme: Transparent Variation, a twisted double parabola of striated celluloid that speaks of flight more eloquently than the Angel of the North and, at its full eight inches, is more imposing. Unlike Hepworth, whose Single Form (Memorial) was scaled up to a monumental 21ft outside the United Nations Building, Gabo never hit the public sculpture jackpot (although ironically, with his engineering background, he would have had no trouble making monuments stand up). And so his sculptures remain as pure experiments in form, material and light on which no weight of meaning has to rest. They don’t have to trumpet anything, rejuvenate anything, apologise for anything. Their thinking was done in the materials of which they are made, with the result that they are entirely self-supporting.

The Jackdaw Mar-Apr 2011