One of the more minor repercussions of a win for Boris Johnson in the forthcoming Mayoral elections would be that a question-mark would descend over the future of the ‘fourth plinth’ rotating sculpture initiative in Trafalgar Square.
As a strategy for cocking a snook at London’s imperial past, and conventional expectations of public art, it’s been pretty successful, stirring debate while enshrining Ken’s anti-establishment, man-of-the-people, attitudes.
What with his support for the campaign for a statue for Battle of Britain hero Sir Keith Park, it’s hard to see why Bozza would want to pick up this particular baton and run with it. Perhaps he’ll play benign patron but the temptation to meddle with one of Livingstone’s pet projects would be fairly overwhelming.
One of those holding his breath to see what the outcome will be is the artist Patrick Brill who works under the amusing pseudonym of Bob and Roberta Smith. His shortlisted ‘fourth plinth’ proposal goes under the title ‘Faîtes L’Art, pas La Guerre (Make Art, Not War)’ – an illuminated peace sign, powered by the sun and the wind which will ‘question our ideas about history and monuments on the one hand, and art and war on the other.’
The Bob and Roberta style is the jokey agit-prop slogan or statement. Viz, this, painted on a wooden door:
WHEN I WAS TEN I WANTED TO BE AN ARTIST.
WHEN I WAS 20 I SAID I WOULD GIVE IT 10 MORE YEARS,
WHEN I WAS 30 I WAS FIRMLEY [SIC] ESTABLISHED ON THE FAR FLUNG MARGINS OF AN ALTERNATIVE CULTURE.
I EVEN LIVED IN NEW YORK.
NOW I AM FORTY I HAVE NO MONEY, NO PENSION AND TWO KIDS
GOD KNOWS WHAT LIFE WILL BE LIKE WHEN I AM FIFTY?
Which is good value, let’s be honest. By his/her standards, the Fourth Plinth looks quirky but straight-faced. You can read more about it on the London Assembly website.
My main interest in Bob/Rob concerns his/their work further to the East, in the area now known as the Thames Gateway. Brill has written a fascinating book documenting the public arts project he put together in 2006/2007 with the input of five other artists – at the behest of Commissions East. The book is entitled ‘Art U Need: My Part in the Public Art Revolution’ and Brill read sections from it the other day in a presentation in Notting Hill.
When he was first asked to get involved, he quotes his sister as warning him: “You will end up labelling the poor by painting the buildings they live in in bright colours.” You can tell run-down areas from the train, she suggested, because they have all been “done up… you don’t hear about large public art projects going up in Hampstead”.
Embedded, then, in his approach to the Gateway project was a healthy scepticism as to what public art is expected to do – and a suspicion that artists can be, through dint of economic necessity, co-opted into imposing the values of other interest groups – those of developers, public commissioners etc – on the supposed beneficiaries.
The thrust of the projects he initiated with five artists was essentially low-key, community-related and transient; with no monumental impact or aftermath. Jane Wilbraham saw to it that a giant carnivalesque fish was constructed in Purfleet; Hayley Newman arranged for a duck-like ‘secret’ sculpture to be ceremonially placed on the island of Rochford Reservoir; Milika Muritu draped wavy, colourful acrylic sheets down the stairwells of 15-storey tower blocks on the Queensway Estate in Southend; Andrea Mason organised a range of participatory activities for local people at Northlands Park in Basildon; and Lucy Harrison attempted an exploratory walking club on Canvey Island.
Against the usual ‘public art’ type, this wasn’t designed to bring people to the area; it was for people already in situ. You could argue that what Bob and Roberta Smith was doing was sweetening the pill of regeneration; softening the blow. The Thames Gateway development – Europe’s largest housing project – represents a way-of-life-changing upheaval: hardly any part of the 40-mile-long stretch of the Thames that forms the basis of this new ‘linear city’ will be unaffected by the development it brings in its wake: 40,000 new homes and 28,000 new jobs by 2016 – with a target of 160,000 new homes.
Given that the Thames Gateway zone is to all intents and purposes a fait accompli, what is the role of the artist in helping locals to navigate that change? ‘Art U Need’ culminates in a strident, persuasive conclusion: “What we have found is obvious and for all to see, that is, the communities of South Essex and The Thames Gateway already exist and have a culture. These communities have histories and desires for the future that must be met by politicians. The Thames Estuary is London’s backyard, rather than its gateway. In a backyard, you prepare, have provisions, you work and you play… A pessimist would be suspicious of the densely packed, ungenerous housing that is already being built. It is the low-paid service workers of London who will have to live in this cheap housing. What awaits the existing networks, the communities and the wildlife..?”
In the final pages, he strikes a big cross through a scribble-drawing of the Angel of the North. The template laid down by Antony Gormley’s steel structure in Gateshead needs challenging, Brill asserts. In statistical terms, the Angel of the North – now 10 years old – represents a triumph of public art as economic miracle-maker: it is seen as a precursor to a £600m urban redevelopment of Gateshead; an estimated 150,000 people visit it every year. According to the Gateshead Arts Development Team: ‘The success of the Angel today has become a workable model for economic revival across Europe.’
Scrawny-faced and scruffily un-corporate, Brill is saying – hang on a minute. Is public art there to set a seal on ‘urban renewal’, to flag-wave on behalf of development, to cheer-lead rather than critique?
What’s the connection, then, between his work in London‘s outer reaches and that project designed for the heart of the city. For one thing the city will be changed, however little it realises it in the short-term, by what‘s happening on its margins. And inadvertently Art U Need asks a tough question of ‘Faîtes L’Art, pas La Guerre’. Should one ‘Faîtes L’Art’ if the art in question is shackled to a particular orthodoxy of progress? Much attention was paid to the rhetoric of Ruth Kelly‘s speech at the Thames Gateway Forum in 2006 when she stressed: ‘Our aim is to build homes, not houses. Create communities, not conurbations’. In other words, success in the Thames Gateway will come down to a feeling of warm collectivity rather than icy individuation. But the artist is not a ‘them’ but an individual – ‘Bob and Roberta’ poses as a plural, but the underlying impulse behind the name asserts one man’s right to subvert expectations.
The problem with the Fourth Plinth as a model of subversion is that it risks not being an entertaining fly in the ointment to an outmoded set of values but becoming the emblem of another set of power relations.
Could a public work of art in the heart of London actually critique London’s own governance? I doubt it, to be honest – and if that’s the case what real value does it have? A win for Ken, and the selection of Brill’s plinth suggestion would probably do wonders for his profile – but I’d argue his noble crusade for the artist as a true champion of the powerless would be, however obliquely, blunted.
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