SEPTEMBER\/OCTOBER, 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After even a short stint of filling this space one is soon re-heating the same few ideas, whilst hoping no one notices. In my case, after over 30 years of editorials, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m approaching lap 15 of the same threadbare circuit. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know about you, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s getting boring for me \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
Photographs of a sculpture museum in Sofia showing work of the Soviet era were recently sent to me by my son (pp. 22-25). He had recently visited it, there not being much else to do, he claims, in that grey, corrupt, theoretically post-Soviet city. A couple of years ago we published a set of images he sent from a similarly themed museum in Budapest, where, in one case, all that remains of a gigantic statue of Uncle Joe is the tyrant\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153vast and trunkless\u00e2\u20ac\u009d legs; Ozymandias redux. After 1990, when dividing walls tumbled, these same countries of former Marxist influence expressed new freedoms by, in among other ways, removing sculptures erected by their former overlords to the greatness of themselves and their failed ideology \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a conspicuous and perhaps hasty demonstration of throwing off the chains of oppression. This was a mistake, understandable perhaps but nevertheless short-sighted, and certainly costly in terms of lost art. In acknowledgement that their painful history should not be completely erased, some former Soviet satellites are bravely trying to preserve sculptures for their historical truth and artistic accomplishments.
I spent three weeks in the Soviet Union soon after that living waxwork Leonid Brezhnev died. How any of the Communist-leaning academics who visited the USSR could return home still supporting the Soviets while seeking to expand their influence is an enduring mystery to me. They had to have been blackmailed. (Night after night I sat longingly in the Kocmoc Hotel bar for a Bond-style honey trap, but never got a sniff.) If you hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seen it you wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe what a dump the USSR was, its populace grubby, permanently half cut, pasty-faced and with a life expectancy of what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d now consider early middle age. Existence there was grim, the few shops empty, the food disgusting (even for a northerner) and the air near factories darkly noxious and gritty \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s steam\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, I was informed by my Intourist minder, an unbalanced Ukrainian who one night became so drunk he tried to strangle me before collapsing unconscious on the tiles of a Siberian airport. But every cloud has a silver lining, and their public sculptures knocked spots off ours. I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get over how impressive they were. Virtually every example was worth a detour to examine it close up. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been conditioned by education to believe that crude spot welding and maroon I-beams zig-zagging across floors, not to mention circles of stones sold to me as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the best landscape art since Constable\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, were the last word in progress. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m now ashamed to admit that I fell for this rot. Sure, the Soviet pieces were bombastic, but nevertheless always ambitious and often elaborate in planning and execution. They really meant it. They were made with no hint of either fashion or planned obsolescence, and a generally sympathetic public seemed proud of them. Their war memorials and narrative tableaux \u00e2\u20ac\u201c many daring in form \u00e2\u20ac\u201c were easily as good as our best in those genres. These moving works embodied belief; the materials they used \u00e2\u20ac\u201c chiefly granite and assorted metals \u00e2\u20ac\u201c seemed imbued with it, as if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been forged for this very purpose. Even Siegfried Sassoon might have agreed that there was nothing \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcpeace-complacent\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 about this stone. If you had placed the war memorial in Tashkent \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t now find my snaps of it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c next to one of those bloated \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsheep pieces\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 by Moore, or one of Hepworth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s enormous punctured spatulas, you couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t come to any other conclusion than that for all our artists\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 freedoms to do whatever they liked, it was us who had taken the wrong road and deceived ourselves, not them. The worst of this is that State Art, having demolished anything resembling art education, couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t now provide us with even a Moore or Hepworth, deprived as students now are of any skills and materials necessary to communicate with a wide audience. Why didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t we think of this intelligent system 700 years ago? We could have saved ourselves the burden of looking at artless trash by noodles like the Pisani, Donatello, Bernini, Rysbrack or Grinling Gibbons.
You know instantly when a maker of art believes that what they are doing is worthwhile. You can smell it, and Soviet sculpture reeks of it. It achieved the best of art for the worst and most misguided of reasons. To me, this all underlined the obvious truth of Harry Lime\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s contention that the cruellest tyrants made the most memorable art \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, for example, seem to bother Greece (or the British Museum) that the Parthenon Marbles were only achievable in the highly developed slave society ruled by Pericles \u00e2\u20ac\u201c of course, I mean \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcDemocracy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.
Many remarkable pieces in the former USSR have probably been lost and the history of 20th century sculpture denuded by the impetuous damage thus inflicted. In the wake of the Colston vandalism, with its perverse exoneration of the guilty perpetrators, there is a lesson for us all here.
Stalin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1930s\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 edicts insisting on Socialist Realism were no more prescriptive than the trash we now get dumped upon us by our own State Art presidium. Socialist Realism promoted a lie. It was supposed to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153depict life truthfully\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, the last thing it did. Realism was replaced by idealism, that magnificent fantasy of eternal happiness through hard labour and self-sacrifice. Also, its purpose was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to educate the masses in the spirit of Socialism\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. If nothing else, for some it probably did achieve this. In contrast, for all the interest the British public exhibit in art, and especially in recent public works, the State Art industry might just as well take place on Mars.
The greatest, most modern sculpture of the 20th century I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever seen is the 26-yard high, stainless steel Worker and Female Farmworker monument (opposite top) made by Vera Mukhina (1889-1953) for the 1937 World\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Fair in Paris. Following a decade-long restoration and uncertainty about its future, it now resides in the national monument park of north Moscow. State Art take note: here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a foreign female artist you might \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcrediscover\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 for an exhibition.
Why, for all its ideological shortcomings, do I still like this work so much? The emptiness and artlessness of our own contemporary efforts undoubtedly has much to do with it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c virtually anything looks impressive against most of this junk. Soviet sculpture stands and falls on its merits. Direct in its aim, it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need special pleading or convoluted justifications. It looks \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcmade\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and meant-to-be and never looks trivial. Its shapes strive. The attraction of art which understands and conveys its purpose forces anyone to take it seriously whatever its dubious origins might have been. Art which has no other purpose than to exist for itself or to illustrate a theory or grievance, or simply to advance a career, and which requires incomprehensible explanation, is insulting to one of even limited intelligence. And this redundancy is why State Art id doomed to failure.
Art will never really add up to much without an underpining by a commonly held and understood belief. And it helps appreciation when everyone can instantly recognise it as Art, as something special.
Now compare, say, Mukhina with an over-indulged market phenomenon like Ulrich Ruckriem. Visiting a Cartier ch\u00c3\u00a2teau outside Cahors 30 years ago (one of my last press junkets), the jewellers had in the middle of their grand lawn some big rocks, and very proud of them they were. In reverential whispers I was informed that this work was by \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 Ruckriem. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcWow, not him?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say. The rich will believe any old rubbish a silvertongue hawker tells them. To me it just looked like boulders which had taken root where they fell from the sky. Little did I realise that, following an invitation from one of State Art\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ruling apostles, Ruckriem would soon land near where I was brought up in Lancashire. Courtesy of nearly half a million of your money Ruckriem deposited this, opposite below, on my doorstep. It was dropped on the site of the abandoned Outwood Colliery whose disused railway line serves as a rural-ish path down to Agecroft, another dead pit and a site now occupied by a prison. This entire scheme was mad. You couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have made it up. 400 tons of Spanish granite was shipped to an area peppered with its own quarries. Nobody can remember now what this \u00e2\u20ac\u02dchenge\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 was supposed, if anything, to symbolise. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just there \u00e2\u20ac\u201c here, where men had worked miles underground since 1830. It represents nothing more than another line on a CV to impress the gullible. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never met any neighbour or local who thinks it was other than a shocking waste of money. Nature, so brilliant at regrouping, was here best left alone.
Unfortunately State Art\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tail was now up. They hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t finished with me, oh no. Ten years ago a sculpture (above left) described as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153of world importance\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by the current supremo of the Tate no less (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153A woman who really ought to know, For she is paid for saying so\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, apologies to J. Betjeman), was unveiled alongside a dual carriageway passing over the site of Beswick pit and the massive BICC cable works in east Manchester, coincidently within earshot of where I was born. And, yes, I do feel proprietorial about this place, it is my area, it owns my past and my family\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history and I resent the likes of Dr Quack turning up and telling me what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s good for me.
Ignored by passers-by, there is no way anyone sensible could possibly believe this is an important sculpture, unless they were as credulous as those academics who visited Soviet Russia and returned home announcing continued dedication to its vileness. We live in a staggeringly delusional age. With its echoes of Stalinism, our art establishment expects us to swallow any rubbish it chooses to spout.
What would you rather have on your doorstep, an overblown shiny bollard, or this, below left? I came across this work while trawling the internet for the detailed information on the Ukraine war which the BBC should provide but doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. In the Donbas is a town called Kadiivka. Straddling the current front line, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s being fought over now as I type with horrible casualties on both sides. Hundreds of Russian deaths occurred here a while ago when Ukrainian cruise missiles hit a Wagner barracks \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I believe even the BBC referred in passing to this tragedy. Under the Soviets Kadiivka was renamed Stakhanov \u00e2\u20ac\u201c its name having been changed back in 2016. As readers of Animal Farm know, Alexei Stakhanov (Boxer the horse in Orwell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novella) was a hard worker said to have cut 227 tons of coal by himself in one day. His productivity, probably falsified with Putin- and Trump-like disregard for fact, was paraded as an example to other Soviet workers. Heroised, Alexei toured extensively exhorting greater effort. They set up a massive statue to him in this his home town. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a marvellous thing by the looks of it. If it hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been destroyed already I do hope it survives.
Loss of the impositions at Outwood and Beswick would worry no one. Nobody would miss them, or demand them back. They are the worthless products of talentless artists promoted and bought by a collection of religious fanatics with perverse priorities. They mean absolutely nothing to anyone anywhere except for State Art crusaders. On the other hand Stakhanov\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s statue, conceived and made with passion, would be a loss because it has the nerve to believe in something, to promote an ideal and, most of all, to look impressive.
When art is placed in a public setting everyone should be able to recognise it and form an opinion as to its merits. In order to achieve this art must first return to basics.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SEPTEMBER\/OCTOBER, 2023 After even a short stint of filling this space one is soon re-heating the same few ideas, whilst hoping no one notices. In my case, after over 30 years of editorials, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m approaching lap 15 of the same threadbare circuit. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know about you, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s getting boring for me \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6Photographs of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leader"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2763"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2764,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763\/revisions\/2764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}