Sculpture - what’s the point?

You may not think of Wakefield as an artistic Mecca, but just a few miles south towards Barnsley there are 500 acres of beautiful parkland dotted with a several sheep and a cracking range of sculptures.

Last week was half term, and there’s only so much swing-pushing this aging uncle can manage, so by the Monday we headed off to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  Our aim was complete exhaustion of kids and cultural stimulation for grown-ups.  It may have ended up the other way round, but at least there were great muffins in the café.

My brother and sister-in-law were fascinated by Jaume Plensa’s heads made of alphabet shapes, which are undeniably clever (though I’m not sure why).  Katja was taken with Anthony Gormley’s ‘One & Other’ installation, interestingly situated up a tree but otherwise rather like his other stuff (is that the point?). 

Mum admired Henry Moore’s ‘draped seated woman’ - though I doubt the model was quite as impressed with her huge body and square head.  Dad's favourite was the ‘deer shelter’, a wide concrete bunker with a large skylight so you lie and gaze upwards, whilst all kids love the Greyworld musical planks, which make different noises depending on where you jump (but are these really sculptures?).

We all found Magdalena Abakanowicz’s 10 seated figures rather disturbing, I think as she forgot to give them heads.  And I tried not to like the giant hare with a female bottom, though at some level I found it rather attractive.  I do unreservedly love Dennis Oppenheim’s plant-like installations of toilets and other furniture, which make you both laugh and think, surely the point of modern sculpture?  I just think they should be called ‘lavor-trees’...

All a long way from the old commemorative tradition of public art, which in Britain’s Victorian cities generally consists of forgotten imperial duffers on horseback.  

But even these may have hidden depths.  For example, have you heard that if the horse is rampant (both front legs in the air) the rider died in combat; one front leg up means he was wounded or died of war wounds; and if all four hooves are on the ground, the rider died outside battle?   Or of the distinction between such equestrian statuary – that is, those including a rider – and equine statues such as the huge ‘angel of the south’ White Horse planned for Ebbsfleet on the Eurostar line?   And at least the old generals now have competition in places like London’s Trafalgar Square.

Arriving back in Oxford I started to notice more and more public art.  Of course there’s plenty of great old sculpture here, such as gruesome college gargoyles and fabulous busts outside the Bodleian library.  But there’s also striking newer stuff too, from animal carvings cleverly integrated into wooden benches in Bury Knowle park, to the fun oversized Simpsons characters in the new Atomic Pizza restaurant on Cowley Road.

Most famous of all is the huge fiberglass shark crashing into a suburban house in Headington.  I’m not quite sure how the shark expresses “someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of anger and desperation”, nor how the owner Bill Heine links its meaning to CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki.   But I still love it, and was delighted the council failed to have it removed.  For once I agree with the Times, which described it as “delightful, innocent, fresh and amusing” – and had a justified dig at the council, noting these are “all qualities abhorred by such committees”.

The shark sent me on my own sculpture trail, reminding me of the fantastic pair of legs sticking out of the Duke of York’s cinema roof in Brighton, round the corner from where I lived for a while.  Not surprisingly, these turn out to be by the same sculptor, John Buckley.  

Interestingly, Buckley is a trustee of Mines Advisory Group.  Having just returned myself, I couldn’t agree more with his recent exhibition summary:  "I doubt anyone can go to Cambodia and come back the same".   For him this led to merging prosthetic limbs and landmine fragments to create powerful reminders of this ongoing tragedy.  

Whilst they are undoubtedly harrowing, they do give me a pleasing conclusion:  these works at least show that sculpture can be both attractive and have a powerful point.