ARTS
Sculpture
Outward bound
John Thackara climbs above the treetops to survey a bold attempt to take art out of the gallery and into the world
Deep in Believer Forest on Dartmoor, astride a mossy track, sits a ring of riveted iron megaliths: each contains a television monitor, on which plays the same video, over and over, 24 hours a day. A ruddy- faced horseman, on confronting the specta- cle, declares that 'it must be a gimmick'; a group of Teepee People from Aberyst- wyth, deciding they have found a 'good picnic spot, start eating hard-boiled eggs; and a posse of art critics, their loafers Edward Allington's baroque motif, St Martin-in-the-Fields, London sinking into the mud, conclude that the work falls somewhere between Stonehenge and The Price is Right. TSWA3D, the most ambitious public visual arts event to be staged in Britain, is under way.
Judith Goddard's 'Television Circle' is one of 14 works, loosely described as sculpture, that have been installed at pub- lic sites throughout the country. The joint initiative of South West Arts, Television South West, and a raft of business sponsors and local galleries, TSWA3D resembles an outward-bound course for artists, adminis- trators and public alike. And the bracing air has done the trick: the event succeeds magnificently.
The scale of organisation required to place sculpture in bridges, suspend it from cranes, or sit it atop the walls of Derry has left little scope for heavy theorising in TSWA3D: most of the work displays a lightness of touch that long-digested gal- lery pieces often lack. Richard Wilson, in particular, has taken Newcastle by storm with 'One Piece at a Time', a spectacular, five-week-long sound work inside a tower at one end of the Tyne Bridge: in it hang 1,200 silvered and shining car parts which crash, one by one, to the floor at 12-minute intervals. Wilson is a master of gripping sculptural theatre: his Tyne Bridge work followed the triumph of his recent 'oil lake' installation at Matts Gallery in London; the two works are among the best installa- tions of recent years. Wilson thrives on technical challenge: in London, he had to contain thousands of gallons of used sump oil in a white-walled gallery; in Newcastle, he had to invent an infernal device that would cut 1,200 supporting strings without going berserk.
Although it is often by such details that visitors are engaged in TSWA sculpture, the project has a grander ambition: that we should respond anew to our surroundings, as much as to the art itself. This hope is fulfilled. Climbing Ron Haselden's hair- raising tower up through the pine trees of Believer, art is the least of one's worries but the view as you clamber above the treetops, at a level normally reached only by the birds, is stunning. Haselden's scaf- folding edifice, made, by backbreaking labour, somewhat in the image of Tatlin's monument to the Third International, evokes a strong feeling that here, at least, Nature is unlikely unduly to be troubled by the incursions of technology: the trees soar effortlessly — man puffs.
Although entertaining, the rural work in TSWA3D is less charged than the city- based installations; here, tension between the artist's intervention and the historical patina of a city site can be palpable. Nowhere is this more evident than in Deny, where Antony Gormley has placed three iron double figures literally on the front line, along the city's 17th-century walls. Siamese twin-like, their arms out- stretched in cruciform shape, we are told that 'although looking away from each other, they are inescapably bound together'. Whether this message will influ- ence, in time, the youths who threw rocks at the figures during their installation, or for that matter the soldiers who egged them on in the hope of unloosing a few plastic bullets, remains to be seen. Art may well be irrelevant here; on the other hand, Gormley's figures command more respect than those who would direct Ireland's affairs from afar.
In Derry, the TSWA3D proposition that its chosen sites are 'already meaningful' is something of an understatement; in Lon- don, Edward Allington's sculpture is a more cerebral affair altogether. He has inserted a vast baroque motif into the portico of St Martin-in-the-Fields, a trompe l'oeil that is intended to stimulate anew our interest in a building so common- ly seen as to be invisible. Allington's piece works best when seen from a passing cab, or from the top of a bus — he describes it- as 'a perverse form of tourism': visited for a proper look, it strikes one as a slight conceit. If the purpose, as Allington sug- gests, was to raise the issue of decoration, and the psychic damage wreaked by our loss of a shared symbolic order, then he would surely have served his purpose better by inserting sculpture into the Tro- cadero, say, or a branch of Next. (That said, I should declare a bias: I've never been relaxed around old London buildings since reading Hawksmoor.) Although TSWA3D is an exciting de- monstration of the strength in depth of Britain's new sculpture, an older artist, George Wyllie, provoked the strongest local response by suspending a straw locomotive from the Finnieston Crane. One cynical soul described the sculpture as the world's biggest corn-dollie, but a noisy majority were delighted that this brooding monument to heavy industry should be- come the focus of a happening so late in its career. There is talk of setting the whole thing on fire, in the manner of a Viking funeral.
An intimate, hands-on reading of the site preceded most of the TSWA3D sculp- tures — a reading that extended to history and culture, not just topography. The work proved that taking art out of the gallery and into the world need not entail the honors of sculpture parks, garden festivals and those windswept corporate parks.
They proved too, against architecture for example, that it is possible by human intervention both to impart and to extract meaning from places without destroying the original — a post-modern connection between works that, for all our global media and communications, are rather hard to visit in one go.
TSWA3D sculptures are on site into June. A full list, with locations, is available from: TSWA3D, 123 Tottenham Court Road, London W.1.
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