Losing street cred
Josie Appleton wonders why so much public art is second-rate
Another week, another ‘landmark’ piece of public art. This time it’s Manchester’s celebration of the 2002 Commonwealth Games, ‘B of the Bang’, a sculpture composed of 180 steel spikes that evokes the explosion of the starter’s gun.
Over the past decade or two, a quiet revolution has been going on in Britain’s streets and squares. While public art was frowned upon in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, since the 1980s and ’90s it has come back with a vengeance. Statistics from the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association (PMSA) suggest that today’s boom in public art surpasses even that of the statue-happy Victorians, who peppered public spaces with their generals, local philanthropists and royalty. While the PMSA’s survey has identified 95 statues built in the period 1880–90, that figure is dwarfed by the 659 that have appeared over the period 1990–9.
Signs are that commissioning public art in the 21st century is continuing apace. A spokesman for Commissions North, the body that oversees public sculpture in the north-east region, says that several million pounds have been spent on public art over the past five years, and he estimates that some £2 million worth of projects are now in the pipeline. At any one time, he tells me, there are ‘40 decent-sized’ public art projects in progress.
Statues aren’t just hitting metropolitan centres, though places such as Manchester, Newcastle and Birmingham get their fair share. We see artworks appearing in small towns — 22 works have been erected in the centre of Basingstoke since 1990, while Milton Keynes has a website called Public Art News to ‘update you on new public art projects in Milton Keynes’ (one recent addition is 26 artworks representing the alphabet for Netherfield Local Park). Even rural regions get their own sculptures, with Cumbria boasting a series of stone artworks by Andy Goldsworthy, and the Irwell Valley region north of Manchester featuring work by more than 50 artists.
Who is driving this revolution in public art? Certainly not the public. Much of the finance came from Lottery money channelled through the Arts Council in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But Commissions North reports that this stream of cash is now less important, and that a whole variety of public bodies are getting in on the game — local authorities, regeneration organisations and hospital trusts. Increasingly, public art is seen as an essential adjunct to any public work, be it a new hospital, a new shopping centre or a neighbourhood facelift. While public bodies commission art with the aim of ‘creating community’ and ‘strengthening local identity’, the business sector is encouraged to see art as a way of winning popular support for developments. The Commissions North website mentions works commissioned by Barratt as part of a housing development, and by Capital Shopping Centres Plc as part of a new development at the Metro Centre, Gateshead.
It is this art’s detachment from the public that makes much of it so bad. It often has a safe, sanitised feel that bears little relationship to the conflicting views and passions of real people. Many artworks invoke a folksy idea of community tradition, for example, picking out noteworthy dates from local history. Sarah Cunnington’s statue for West Malling is of a woman striding forwards with a dove in her upraised hand; the statue’s cloak is marked with a pattern depicting the history of West Malling. Woolston Millennium Garden in Southampton has brick paving inscribed with key dates and events in its history, including a list of the local people who served on the Titanic. Artworks by the seaside show seabirds (Morecambe Bay); fish (Whitehaven in Cumbria); or nautical themes (Brighton seafront and Bridlington Promenade). This is picture-postcard stuff — fine for the tourists, but hardly likely to get the locals going.
Other works deal with vague, inoffensive themes, such as Tower Hamlets’ monument to diversity, or Liverpool’s monument to communication, which connects to the World Wide Web. Alternatively, artworks are based on a personal statement or view — Manchester’s Commonwealth Games piece draws on Linford Christie’s one-time comment that, while poised on the blocks, he listened for the ‘b of the bang’. Not a bad anecdote, perhaps, but hardly the stuff of a public monument.
Victorian statues were fought for through a vocal campaign, with individuals admiring of the subject’s ‘rare gifts’ and ‘eminence’ making a public appeal for funds. Unveilings would often be highly charged political affairs. A book published last year, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, reports that Bolton Conservatives’ unveiling of statues to Disraeli and others ‘took on the tenor of political meetings’. Meanwhile, Manchester’s erection of statues of Peel and Gladstone was an overt promotion of the principle of free trade.
By contrast, contemporary artwork appears unbidden in streets and squares. It comes with the official wish to ‘create community’, but this is their vision of community, not ours. That is why this growth in public art doesn’t register on the public radar — people often just walk past it, as they would a lamppost, barely noticing that it’s there. It is no surprise, then, that Manchester’s new statue came in with a whimper, not a bang.
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