Arts
Sculpture in the air
Bryan Robertson
It is a curious if heartening sign of the unpredictability of the relation between art and the times, conditioned by recession and general lack of funds, that so many schemes have recently been inaugurated to bridge the gulf between the public and contemporary sculpture by British artists. A lot of people would be happy to leave the gulf undisturbed, I know; but it seems a chronic waste of talent to have so many gifted sculptors — in great strength in England right now — perpetually working in the aesthetic vacuum of temporary gallery shows or permitted an occasional special installation in regional museums or exhibition centres. For most people, sculpture a kind of decorative garden furniture, glimpsed in the distance against the formal hedges of a rather grand estate open to the public in the summer months, and the glimpse recognises some sort of cheerful or strenuous aspect of classical mythology, comfortably removed to the remote past. For others, sculpture is merely a landmark looming up through the trees to tell them that they're sauntering in the right direction across a public park.
The problem remains: what to do with modern sculpture? Who wants it? Who needs it? Who can commission it, with enough enthusiasm or knowledge — or fpith? Who can house it? Sculptors are a courageous lot: the costs of running a studio, paying for materials, equipment and transport are formidable. Most of them teach to survive, long hours, full time or for several days a week and they travel to wherever employment can be found, more often than not with long and wearying journeys involved: Birmingham, Newcastle, Portsmouth, all over the place. Behind all this activity is the dispiriting knowledge that what they're inventing, with costly phases of trial and error, will end up for a few weeks' display in a gallery where it will be studied with interest, hostility or incomprehension by a few hundred people. Then the work, the sculpture, is packed away again in a shed. Only a small number of sculptors have this dubious good fortune; lean times have meant a contraction of the commercial gallery scene and the smaller number of galleries still in business are loath to take on the financial responsibility of building up the reputation of a new sculptor. Many good sculptors now are working alone, without a gallery's support, let alone interest.
At least two serious efforts have been made to improve the situation. Back in the days of the Attlee government, George Strauss fought hard to introduce a Bill through which half of one per cent of the total costs of any new public building would have been allocated for works of art, but without success. More recently, the Artists Placement Group, pioneered by Barbara Latham, got a different scheme going in which sculptors worked in factories and industrial premises to explore technique and raw or synthetic materials, among the other workers. The idea was also to leave a work of art behind! This has had some success, but not every sculptor has the right temperament for these kinds of exposure and working conditions. Sculptors are not exactly lily-like or rarified in their practical nature, but not every sculptor's imagination is best stirred by technology: some of them are striving to express ideas outside such a context, which might be very cheerful or agreeable objects for us to contemplate. But where?
Last year there was the first big open-air show of sculpture in Battersea Park for several years. The idea behind the Battersea exhibitions goes back to the immediate post-war years and its a good one to offer the public a broad view of contemporary work in a natural setting. Last year's show was a purely British affair linked to the Jubilee celebrations and financially secured by the fund established for those purposes. At about the same time, Baroness Birk and the Department of the Environment, with a suitable advisory committee, launched the idea which was a reality by last winter of placing a small number of sculptures in Regents Park. These were tactfully installed for easy accessibility in a formally laid-out section of the park. Nobody wants to thrust modern sculpture as a challenge in the face of a public intent upon relaxation around the flower beds and bosky vistas of a delightful park. On the other hand, the possibilities of hiding the sculptures away in charming dells and copses — however flattering such venues might be for sculpture — had to be avoided or tracking down the art could have turned into an exasperating field exercise. The plan in fact worked well: the public enjoyed the novelty or was indifferent. There was no hostility. Some of the sculpture in Regents Park is about to be changed, as it may be every eighteen months or so, and the conception is important because it marks the beginning, through cautious experiment on a shoestring, of the founding of a national sculpture park in London. This is long overdue, because whatever the concensus of Opinion may be about the virtues or otherwise of mid-twentieth century British art as a whole, its been agreed internationally for decades that Britain has produced an exceptional number of gifted sculptors. I believe that we've changed the face of sculpture. don't just mean Henry Moore, whose eightieth birthday celebrations this summer gathered together the biggest concentration of his work that London has ever seen — still on view in and around the Serpentine Gallery. This is an unprecedented event and, yet again, its only temporary. As a rule, with hordes of summer visitors in London each year, there's been nowhere for those seriously interested in modern British sculpture to see it. The reader with recollections of a blank encounter with a large three dimensional abstract object might wonder why anybody should want te see our sculpture, but the honest answer is that they do want to see it and there have been complaints for years about its invisibility. The same reader with sceptical thoughts of the degree of cultural probity shared by our foreign visitors should know that a sizeable number are young and instinctively eager to explore the language of their time, in art as in music, and there are plenty of other solid citizens who support their local museum back home and are reasonably well informed about our prowess in sculpture. The need to put our best foot forward, sculpturally speaking, has real substance. The Tate Gallery's collections have been on merely token display for ages through chronic lack of space caused by delays over the completion of an extra wing. In Holland, near Amsterdam, there's the Kroller-Moller museum where, in addition to masterworks by Van Gogh, Picasso, Braque and Mondrian indoors, an immense park contains the most important collection of modern sculpture in Europe, delightfully and unselfconsciously distributed: floating on lakes, reposing in leafy glades, and enjoyed, or at least accepted, as a spectacle by picknicking families or free wheeling visitors on bikes for hire at the entrance gates. The siting and representation of work shifts occassionally, to provide an element of surprise, but the vital factor is the collection's permanence. A lot of difficulties experienced by most people in their contact with modern art, particularly sculpture, are heightened by the fact that the confrontation invariably has the distancing unreality of a temporary occasion. But a sculpture changes in appearance at different times of the day, let alone seasonally, and familiarity can sometimes induce understanding. This is why the scheme started by the Department of the Environment, with selected artists lending work without fee, is so vital to the health of British sculpture. It could be argued that exposure of an artist's work in a public site is professionally useful, but the calibre of the artists so far selected or in mind for the future is so high that they hardly need it. Mostly it means involvement in unpaid work of one kind or another and the whole venture is idealistic.
Just over a year ago, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park was opened, just outside Wakefield, at Bretton Hall College, a Palladian house set in 260 acres of extremely beautiful parkland. About one third of the grounds were landscaped by Capability Brown, well planted, with characteristically artful vistas of distant farmland and open country across a long lake and there's a more formal Edwardian garden with lawns, ornamental pond, a long terrace with pillars, urns, giant rhododendron banks and the calm spaciousness of that period. The plan is to install a special show each year, and place other sculptures — a few so far borrowed from the Arts Council — elsewhere in the grounds on the basis of reasonably protracted loans. Initiated by the Yorkshire Art Association (a regional outpost of the Arts Council) the idea owes much to the imaginative energy of Peter Murray, a senior lecturer at the College and Michael Diamond who, as director of Bradford's Cartwright Hall Gallery, does a lot of liason work in the area. The Principal of the College, Dr Davis, is a scientist sympathetic to the arts, and the park flows into a nature reserve, the habitat of many species of animals and wild fowl. The context is ideal and the first one-man show this summer was given to John Maine, at thirty-five one of the finest sculptors of his generation. The exhibition gave an account of the evolution over a decade from metal constructions to stone carvings, culminating in an immense pyramid of finely and variously textured stone blocks, which changes in structure to surprising effect from different angles. For the past five years Maine has worked for long periods with the masons at the Portland stone quarries in Dorset and his recent stone carvings culminating in an immense pyramid of finely and variously textured stone blocks, which changes in structure to surprising effect from different angles. For ' the past five years Maine has worked for Theatre long periods with the masons at the Portland stone quarries in Dorset and his recent stone carvings crystallise his most mature inventions in which, roughly speaking, an earlier preoccupation with geometrical form is beginning to disrupt itself so that what looks like a hard star shape on a col umn suddenly takes on the rounded voluptuousness of a lotus flower.
Obviously the first allegiance of this sculpture park is to education — to add something to students' understanding of form, structure and technique. Maine has been appointed as the first 'resident sculptor' for a year and with the clear distinction of his own show this summer, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park is off to a flying start. There will be a partial allegiance to regional sculpture but Anthony Caro is also lending his private collection of sculpture to Bretton Hall, altruistically because his own work isn't involved, and other sculptors will relish the possibilities of showing suitable pieces in such an idyllic setting. A curious snag is the fact that the formal grounds are so elegant that sculpture seems almost an alien occupation: an adjoining deer park under the wing of the College might yield less obtrusive venues.
As I write the first permanent sculpture park in Scotland has also just opened: at Carrbridge in Invernesshire, through the efforts of the Scottish Sculpture Trust and the Landmark Tourist Centre with the backing of the Scottish Arts Council. A dozen pieces of sculpture — not all by Scottish artists — have been placed in clearings in an ancient pine forest. As I haven't seen the site yet, I can't say more but it sounds a good idea like the others I've described. But one of many questions in London and in Yorkshire that have to be faced revolves around the financial factor: is the work to be bought or borrowed? Can any money be raised locally or does the Arts Council, as for Yorkshire, provide sculptures on yet another temporary basis? If the work is borrowed from the artists shouldn't they receive a decent hire fee? If the Yorkshire park is to be open to the public, though primarily an educational facility for the Bretton Hall students, what about publicity, signposting, car parks, lavatories, somewhere to buy food and eat it if the weather's indifferent? Is there generally the danger of merely shifting the artificial 'temporariness' of sculpture seen indoors in galleries, to another kind of temporary location out of doors? How many of our best sculptors are thinking, in the imaginative nature of their work, of sculpture that's suitable for the open air? There's much else to say but at least a more enterprising attitude to sculpture seems to be energetically at work in England and Scotland and maybe one day London will have a permanent sculpture park in which to explore the work of our best artists sited with the same combination of ease and panache that you find at the Kroller-Moller in Holland.
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