From The Oldie
Earlier this year, the people of the capital of Wales were apparently somewhat baffled to see blocks of yellow paint daubed over the Cardiff Bay Barrage. Given the current mania for public art, though, they probably should have realised it was something important, and indeed it was: The Three Ellipses For Three Locks by the Swiss-born artist Felice Varini formed three concentric circles – but you could only see them if you stood at one specific spot. Smart, eh?
Mansfield’s citizens have been treated to a rather more obvious piece called High Heels – a six-metre high pair of stainless steel stilettos, and in Stroud artist Philip Thompson is currently putting the final touches to his three-metre tall metal sculpture, titled Heart Of Stroud that will sit outside Stroud College.
While the Victorians treated their citizens to public parks, libraries and museums so today’s mania for “regeneration” is resulting in thousands of public artworks springing up like giant stainless steel and fibreglass weeds in our towns and cities.
“Local authorities park hundreds of anodyne public sculptures like tanks in a war of cultural aggression against the relatively uneducated,” wrote the artist Grayson Perry in The Times. “They hope that these civic baubles will replace social capital that has been lost to decades of upheaval in patterns of work, family and leisure time.”
You can see his point. The pomposity behind these simplistic, insensitive creations that litter the nation is quite breathtaking.
As they walk along a newly created pedestrian route from a viaduct in Hymers Court, next to the Tyne Bridge for example, the people of Gateshead can be inspired by the words “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,” that bark at them from five archways that form part of a railway viaduct.
“No, No, No, No, No” is “deliberately ambiguous”, according to Miles Thurlow , who created the work with fellow artist Cath Campbell (sort of complex idea that needs the creative input of not one but two artists, obviously). “By giving an answer, it forces you to find a question. The meaning comes from the person who’s looking at it, and not directly from the piece itself.”
The piece, according to Councillor John McElroy, “cabinet member for culture” – there’s posh – “challenges the way we think about ordinary locations”.
From Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North in Gateshead to the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth – cost a mere £35 million – public art is local government on steroids. You think I’m a dreary functionary? Well, look at my tower, mate. Liverpool is spending a staggering £96 million on its Capital of Culture programme (including £450,000 for a sculpture by Londoner Richard Wilson, an installation that rotates an oval panel cut from the side of a derelict office block through 360 degrees).
But it’s not just our urban areas in need of “regeneration”. On Tiree in the Inner Hebrides residents have been treated to an installation An Turas near the ferry port that acts as a shelter. Alas it was conceived by Tiree Arts Enterprise, a group of local and visiting artists, so much of it doesn’t have a roof. Nor is there a heater. Or any seats – which seems to make it at £98,000 rather poor value, even if it is, according to Tiree Arts Enterprise, “a work of individuality, epic in scale, aesthetically beautiful and of contemporary and Scottish cultural significance”.
Meanwhile, back in the North East of England, the 141,000 residents of south east Northumberland have been lucky enough to have their own public art “initiative” Inspire and their own public art and design officer, Wendy Stott. Wendy has rolled up her sleeves up to help conceive the country’s first offshore sculpture in the sea off the village of Newbiggin. The commission – part of a £10 million sea-defence breakwater scheme – is entitled Couple and comprises two bronze figures measuring five metres tall, which will stand 300 metres out into the bay.
“My hope is that the sculpture will embody some of the emotion we all feel when contemplating the sea, the sky and the horizon,” says the artist Sean Henry.
He shouldn’t bank on it. Last year Hackney Co-operative Developments decided to uncover a 4ft stencil of a girl wearing a frilly dress and gas mask by the ‘subersive’ graffiti artist Banksy. Alas, cleaners spotted the graffiti 24 hours before the official opening of Gillet Square and removed every trace of this great work. Their emotional response to this great work speaks volumes for what public art really means to ordinary people.
Sunday, 14 October 2007
Welcome to the new bossiness
From Compass magazine
In September this year, the murder of a motorcyclist led to some 10,000 motorists to be stranded for eight hours on the M40 when police closed the motorway. Eight hours of crying children with no food or water; flights missed; family reunions in tatters; vital assignations that oil the wheels of society cancelled.
Murder isn’t to be taken lightly, of course. And what’s a bit of a delay when compared to the poor schmuck who was taken out on his motorcycle? Nonetheless, why eight hours?
Because of a new bossiness that has blown into every nook and cranny of modern British life.
By refusing even to consider using some of their workforce to get the traffic moving while they investigated the murder, the police were saying, simply, that their time was more important than everyone else’s. And so the self-importance of officialdom hung over the scene like a damp, miserable fog.
We’ve all been subjected to this low-level inconvenience. London streets are routinely closed on a whim due to an “incident”. We are never told what these incidents are – one suspects a hoody with a catapult – but we are meant to genuflect before the greater good of our police forces, who, while very good at scrambling helicopters, closing off public highways and rushing to the scene of a case of alleged racist abuse, are absolutely diabolical at apprehending, arresting and charging criminals.
And if we have precious little sympathy for the police nowadays, what about the whole new raft of professional busybodies whose purpose is to treat us like five-year-olds?
Local authorities have decided that we’re incapable of making any adult decisions without their moral guidance. They spend millions of pounds sending out smoking cessation officers and five-a-day-co-ordinators to boss us into eating what they deem to be a healthy diet. They litter our streets with railings and signs telling us to slow down, stop, not to stop, to drive carefully through the village. (Damn! And we were just on the point of seeing if we could hit 100 miles an hour by the time we reached the primary school.) And now they are to boss us about in our homes (it was only a matter of time). So microchips are to be in placed our bins should we dare to drop in the remains of our lunch and we are issued with edicts by the Royal Society for the Protection of Accidents pointing out the hazards of going about our daily in business at home – if you are thinking of running a bath without an official to help you, it’s best to know that you should “test the water temperature before getting in”.
This sort of bossiness has become so all-pervasive, we barely now notice it. On the Red Jet “Hi Speed” ferry from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, the stewardess, whose main purpose is serving up an overpriced mud with the description of coffee, precedes her little speech over the Tannoy with the dreaded words “for your comfort and safety” – always translatable for “our convenience” – by telling us to stay in our seats like good children.
Alcoholic drink brands meanwhile entreat us to “drink responsibly”. Or what? Can we expect the nation’s brewers and distillers to send in the goons and snatch the glass out of our hands should we have the temerity to go one over the bossy government guidelines telling us not to drink more than three units a day.
Look out for the health warnings that already adorn cigarette packets to appear on bottles near you soon. And as for smoking, it is now law for any public building to stick up a sign telling us not to at its front doors. How meaningless is this? Even in the Fifties, when it was de rigueur to have a fag on even while you cleaned your teeth, no one, but no one, sparked up in the churches which are now required to deface their ancient porticos with these ghastly civic regulation-sized signs.
But what more do we expect under a government that has introduced 3,000 new laws since it came to power in 1997? A new one from Environment Secretary Hilary Benn will force us to use ugly, expensive lightbulbs that watt-for-watt are about as illuminating as a rainy day in Bognor. The self-righteousness of our age, it seems, can only be realised by living in the half light gloom of Seventies Leningrad. And we know the terrifying results of what happened when the bossiness of politicians was applied there.
In September this year, the murder of a motorcyclist led to some 10,000 motorists to be stranded for eight hours on the M40 when police closed the motorway. Eight hours of crying children with no food or water; flights missed; family reunions in tatters; vital assignations that oil the wheels of society cancelled.
Murder isn’t to be taken lightly, of course. And what’s a bit of a delay when compared to the poor schmuck who was taken out on his motorcycle? Nonetheless, why eight hours?
Because of a new bossiness that has blown into every nook and cranny of modern British life.
By refusing even to consider using some of their workforce to get the traffic moving while they investigated the murder, the police were saying, simply, that their time was more important than everyone else’s. And so the self-importance of officialdom hung over the scene like a damp, miserable fog.
We’ve all been subjected to this low-level inconvenience. London streets are routinely closed on a whim due to an “incident”. We are never told what these incidents are – one suspects a hoody with a catapult – but we are meant to genuflect before the greater good of our police forces, who, while very good at scrambling helicopters, closing off public highways and rushing to the scene of a case of alleged racist abuse, are absolutely diabolical at apprehending, arresting and charging criminals.
And if we have precious little sympathy for the police nowadays, what about the whole new raft of professional busybodies whose purpose is to treat us like five-year-olds?
Local authorities have decided that we’re incapable of making any adult decisions without their moral guidance. They spend millions of pounds sending out smoking cessation officers and five-a-day-co-ordinators to boss us into eating what they deem to be a healthy diet. They litter our streets with railings and signs telling us to slow down, stop, not to stop, to drive carefully through the village. (Damn! And we were just on the point of seeing if we could hit 100 miles an hour by the time we reached the primary school.) And now they are to boss us about in our homes (it was only a matter of time). So microchips are to be in placed our bins should we dare to drop in the remains of our lunch and we are issued with edicts by the Royal Society for the Protection of Accidents pointing out the hazards of going about our daily in business at home – if you are thinking of running a bath without an official to help you, it’s best to know that you should “test the water temperature before getting in”.
This sort of bossiness has become so all-pervasive, we barely now notice it. On the Red Jet “Hi Speed” ferry from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, the stewardess, whose main purpose is serving up an overpriced mud with the description of coffee, precedes her little speech over the Tannoy with the dreaded words “for your comfort and safety” – always translatable for “our convenience” – by telling us to stay in our seats like good children.
Alcoholic drink brands meanwhile entreat us to “drink responsibly”. Or what? Can we expect the nation’s brewers and distillers to send in the goons and snatch the glass out of our hands should we have the temerity to go one over the bossy government guidelines telling us not to drink more than three units a day.
Look out for the health warnings that already adorn cigarette packets to appear on bottles near you soon. And as for smoking, it is now law for any public building to stick up a sign telling us not to at its front doors. How meaningless is this? Even in the Fifties, when it was de rigueur to have a fag on even while you cleaned your teeth, no one, but no one, sparked up in the churches which are now required to deface their ancient porticos with these ghastly civic regulation-sized signs.
But what more do we expect under a government that has introduced 3,000 new laws since it came to power in 1997? A new one from Environment Secretary Hilary Benn will force us to use ugly, expensive lightbulbs that watt-for-watt are about as illuminating as a rainy day in Bognor. The self-righteousness of our age, it seems, can only be realised by living in the half light gloom of Seventies Leningrad. And we know the terrifying results of what happened when the bossiness of politicians was applied there.
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