Large bad statue

Public art. As a concept, we should embrace it: art for everyone, in an open and democratic space; its purpose to brighten our day, or provoke comment, or simply make us look at our familiar cityscape anew. And there have been many brilliant examples in London. The fourth plinth project in Trafalgar Square (where the giant blue cock, the subject of a previous post, is still crowing); Charles Sargeant Jagger’s Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner; Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Olympic Park (which was promptly closed as soon as the big event was over; I am looking forward to its reopening); absolutely anything by Moore or Hepworth.

So when the powers that be get these things right, they are extraordinary and vital additions to the environment. But when they get them wrong …

I have always hated Maggie Hambling’s ‘bench’ sculpture, A Conversation with Oscar Wilde. I compare this to Wilde’s grave, designed by the great Jacob Epstein, which must be one of the most beautiful and appropriate memorials ever created – with Epstein’s stylised male angel in flight, his wings like a ocean spreading behind him. To be fair to Hambling, I have mentioned her Scallop in a previous post, a tribute to Benjamin Britten and Aldeburgh and Peter Grimes, a remarkable piece which is for me wholly successful. But there are several things that work against her Wilde. Firstly, the strange composition, with Wilde’s bronze head emerging from a dark granite block that’s more like a grave – its role as a bench is not apparent, nor is the cold hard granite particularly inviting as a seat. The location doesn’t help – in a thoroughfare behind St Martin’s, across from Charing Cross Station; not a place many people think to stop (apart from the winos who congregate around the tube station exit). The head itself resembles a twisted mass of spaghetti or a horror movie zombie. It’s a strange, misguided piece.

But not as shocking as Meeting Place, the monstrous sculpture of two lovers embracing, like Rodin’s Kiss re-envisioned by Jack Vettriano. It is too huge to ignore, spoiling the beautiful lines of the magnificent St Pancras Station. There was a story that Ruskin used to make a long and indirect detour in his daily walk to avoid having to look at Keble College in Oxford (which offended his architectural sensibilities); no such opportunity for innocent commuters. I was coming off the train, having spent a lovely weekend in Paris, only to encounter the ghastly sight – it’s practically the first thing you see when you arrive in London on Eurostar. Antony Gormley (whose works of public art are always appropriate and resonant – just look at the way people have embraced his Angel of the North or his figures on Crosby Beach) has referred to it as ‘crap’. The sculptor is Paul Day – not exactly a household name – but a quick look on Wikipedia shows that he has other public works on display in London and Brussels. When his monumental piece for St Pancras was unveiled, he came out fighting:

This is not an art work that is going to be selected for the Turner Prize. It isn’t a Damien Hirst sculpture of a pregnant woman stripped down to the constituent parts. It is diametrically opposed to that sort of art. It isn’t about a cynical world view or the artist’s glory.

Some will say it is a chocolate box sculpture. But I don’t want it to be bound by the prevailing view of art. Meeting Place is an appeal to universal values.

I don’t see how a sculpture of a pregnant woman, by Damien Hirst or anyone else, represents a ‘cynical world view’. Also, I would be interested to know what the ‘prevailing view of art’ is exactly, at least as far as Day is concerned. He seems to be defending his own work, and at the same time attacking what he considers to be modern, and therefore not appealing ‘to universal values’. It’s like Munnings attacking Picasso (and who is the more famous of the two today?). Day’s attitude infuriates me, even more than his terrible sculpture, the idea that he’s presenting what people want, a radical campaigner in his extraordinary Daily Mail-type conservatism. Talk about ego …

Speaking of which, what government department, what small group of individuals with clearly no taste but plenty of opinions (and a control of the purse strings – Day’s piece cost £1 million), was actually responsible for choosing it?

Although I am interested in what is contemporary in art, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I would want Hirst’s pregnant woman encountering me in the train station. It goes without saying that public art should be appropriate to its surroundings. Further along the concourse at St Pancras is a work which is not shouting its value systems at its viewers. It is a conventional, figurative piece of sculpture which is also never going to be up for the Turner, but it is a perfect little celebration of one person – the poet John Betjeman – who, as the laureate of both the Northern suburbs of London and the great Victorian structures of the city, would be delighted to find himself, a compass point, in the middle of the throng, his raincoat catching the breeze like a sail.

Dark Blue Square

 

St Ives remains with me even now I’ve returned to the urban hub of Stockwell – the hard beauty of the landscape matched by the clarity of the artists who depicted it. So with the landscape still very present, I was saddened to read of the passing on Sunday of Breon O’Casey, one of the last of the generation of St Ives artists apprenticed to Hepworth at Trewyn. It is of particular interest to me that O’Casey came from a literary background – his father was the playwright Sean O’Casey, a contemporary of Yeats. It is perhaps too easy then to say that his paintings have the feeling of small moments arrested in time: birds captured mid-flight, landscapes reduced to the elemental (a field in spring, a group of circles resembling a cairn or pagan stones, a constellation suspended in a night time sky). There is the exuberance of the French painters he loved, Braque and Matisse, but in the restrained and earthy palette of the Penwith School.

It was only a few months ago that I went to a show of his work at Somerset House. I didn’t actually know it was on; I’d just come from the Courtauld where there was a show of Cezanne’s sketches for The Card Players (an interesting transition, as it happens). It was a bleak winter day, flat grey and featureless; the sort of day you get in London in January and February, when one day blends into the next and seems to go on forever, and you are just waiting for a small sign of spring. And O’Casey cheered me, with his simple birds and flat squares of pure colour – the sort of painting that looks simple enough (well, maybe to those who can’t paint) but which is pared down and spare and studied, like a poem by Charles Simic. Difficult to accomplish without being twee or shallow. But O’Casey’s work is resonant, meaningful.

Take for example this painting, one of his many stylised depictions of birds, the title of which is Dark Blue Square. In that title there is a statement about proportion, measurement; I think of the way the sky is viewed from the ground, slivered between buildings or trees. It is a portion of sky, like the painter’s own patch. But then it appears in the bottom left of the picture, not at the top as we’d expect, so maybe our bird is swooping over a lake or reservoir. There is a paler shade of blue just touching its body – a shadow, a memory of light. The two brown columns that hold it are like tree trunks, or legs. A simple juxtaposition of shapes and colours, the colours simplified to brown, white, blue. But it’s the blue O’Casey wants us to focus on, bright and vital against the dark brown, the bird just passing through.

It’s like the last soldiers of the Great War, all those artists of that generation passing. They brought us modernism, which might feel like old hat now, but they were pioneers then (with Hepworth cracking the whip). And the work still feels valid and exciting.

Measuring the Universe

 

As I walked through the galleries at Tate St Ives on a sultry Friday evening last week (beginning in a room of stunning Gabo constructions) it seemed to me that the artists assembled were concerned in various ways with measurement: of distances, of shapes and forms, of human scale, of volume and air, of experience.

How does a person walk through an enclosed space, from one end of a room to another?  It’s just something you do, naturally, instinctively, one foot in front of the other, without thinking about it. In Martin Creed’s installation, Half the air in a given space, he has filled half the volume of the Tate’s curved gallery with white balloons, like cartoon clouds. The visitor is invited to move through them; it was surprising how resilient, how hard they were, every now and then, one yielding to enough pressure to burst. You had to fight your way through a solid, rubbery mass, your steps slowed, as you poked and kicked them into submission – the brilliant plot of some demented clown. When I was finally released at the other end of the gallery through a glass door, one or two balloons escaping in my wake, I smelled of rubber, like something slick and strange and my hair was standing on end.  But what I thought of was breath, the breath of a person walking, the breath of effort, the breathlessness of blowing up thousands and thousands of balloons (ok, I concede they would have used a machine for that). Charles Olson said that a poem represents certain laws and possibilities of breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as his listenings. In the gallery, muffled by those rubber cushions, all I could hear was the sound of myself breathing (as well as the sounds of fellow balloon-strugglers laughing and trying to find each other in the depths).  

The gallery above contained Lucio Fontana’s canvases and structures, slashed and shot full of holes, as if the artist was hell-bent on destroying whatever perfection he might create— although Fontana did not consider his holes, his interruptions, to be a form of destruction. A hole is an intervention, something which disrupts, but not necessarily in a negative way. You want to touch it, to stick your finger in it. It suggests the hand of the artist, a bit of a joker, winking at the viewer. But the hole has (excuse the pun) deeper connotations. Jeanette Winterson, writing about Barbara Hepworth, said

Holes are also tunnels or worm-holes making a route through time … The hole is a way back and a way forward. The hole is also the space occupied by the air we are breathing now, by the sunlight that has taken eight minutes to reach us, and by the starlight that is two thousand years old. In the space inside, or rather through, the sculpture, time is both present and meaningless – and that is time’s true nature, it does and it does not exist …

Moving away from Fontana, I found myself in a room full of Margaret Mellis’s driftwood constructions; another way of looking at proportions, associations. Mellis trawled the shore for pieces of wood – the remains of larger structures; dissembled, worthless – and by bringing them together made something new. That’s what poets do too – find connections in what is seemingly random.  So I was particularly pleased to hear Telfer Stokes, Mellis’s son, quote her as saying that when she was able to make such connections, to see how a construction might come together, it was like reading a really good poem. Each construction is like a window framing multiple landscapes; the landscape of the beach where Mellis found the constituent parts, the landscape of the boat or crate or tool that once was whole (now ‘hole’), the new landscape she’s made from such simple means, and which means more than the sum of its parts. It is hard to say why they are so beautiful, so complex and compelling; maybe it has to do with all the hands that went into making things, things which were destroyed then constructed anew.

And to move from Mellis’s constructions to Agnes Martin’s bands of soft colour – almost non-colour; just shade, tone, light – on canvas made perfect sense. As Martin said, like crossing an empty beach to look at the ocean. And there it was, outside the gallery, just waiting for us …

http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/

The title of this post comes from an installation by Roman Ondák, which invites visitors to have their height measured and recorded on the gallery wall:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNiwsDnzFiw

The show Margaret Mellis – Structure and Colour is also showing at the Wills Lane Gallery during the Tate Summer season: www.willslanegallery.co.uk

The constructed space

Thinking about poetry and structure, in the wake of my writing workshop at the Fitzwilliam Sculpture Promenade. I had decided to name the session ‘The Constructed Space’ after the WS Graham poem of the same title. And that poem will always remind me of a weekend in St Ives with a group of poets: walking the cliff paths in Zennor, sitting in Barbara Hepworth’s garden after rain, talking about those extraordinary Wallis paintings where ships tilt in their harbours and sail up streets. After the Fitzwilliam workshop I ended up in Kettle’s Yard, looking at more paintings by Wallis and thinking about how everything is linked, certainly by memory, but also by what moves us and continues to move us.

And so back to Graham’s poem. The 'constructed space’ is the poem itself, but also the 'abstract scene’, the 'public place’ (those lines make me think of empty city squares with isolated figures heading in different directions, never to connect), and also communication, the words on the page reaching out to the reader, two speakers engaged in conversation. Even in that transaction, it is never certain that meaning will be conveyed, which is how I read the phrase 'lonely meanings’. But the attempt is all, and so he must continue in 'this abstract act’, the act of writing poems.

The painting is by Roger Hilton, Graham’s long-time friend and drinking companion. It’s called 'January 1957’. Hilton often titled his paintings with dates or months, as if he was trying to fix an impression or sensation in time. When I look at it I too think January, in all its cold greyness, parched fields and bleached skies …

The Constucted Space

Meanwhile surely there must be something to say,
Maybe not suitable but at least happy
In a sense here between us two whoever
We are. Anyhow here we are and never
Before have we two faced each other who face
Each other now across this abstract scene
Stretching between us. This is a public place
Achieved against subjective odds and then
Mainly an obstacle to what I mean.

It is like that, remember. It is like that
Very often at the beginning till we are met
By some intention risen up out of nothing.
And even then we know what we are saying
Only when it is said and fixed and dead.
Or maybe, surely, of course we never know
What we have said, what lonely meanings are read
Into the space we make. And yet I say
This silence here for in it I might hear you.

I say this silence or, better, construct this space
So that somehow something may move across
The caught habits of language to you and me.
From where we are it is not us we see
And times are hastening yet, disguise is mortal.
The times continually disclose our home.
Here in the present tense disguise is mortal.
The trying times are hastening. Yet here I am
More truly now this abstract act become.