A bad week for public art

It’s been a bad week for public art. First, the worst of the five entries – Mark Wallinger’s far too literal statue of a bloody big horse – wins the competition for the Ebbsfleet Landmark. And today, Manchester City Council announces it’s going to pull down Thomas Heatherwick’s spectacular B of the Bang sculpture over ‘technical problems’ – i.e. fears that it might fall down anyway.

A shame because both outcomes will only confirm the philistines in their view that monumental public art is just a big waste of time, particularly in a recession.

Phylum

I'm just off to Channel 4 to discuss the next series of Time Team, whose website I have run for the past eight years (it even won us a Bafta, for 'interactive entertainment', in 2002!). I also do some writing for the channel's Big Art Project, which won a Royal Television Society innovations award in 2007 for its Big Art Mob. This includes a nifty bit of software that enables people to post pictures of public art onto the website direct from their mobile phones.

It's a great idea that has seen people posting photos from all over the country. The one I've selected here, called simply 'Phylum', was taken at the New Art Centre, Roche Park, East Winterslow, by Claire from Regent's Park community college, Southampton. The artist is Paul Morrison. Beats the fourth plinth anyday, don't you think?

Pigeon shit on the fourth plinth

I don't normally like to express what I dislike about public art too strongly because a) there are plenty of people around who do that anyway; b) anything is usually better than nothing; and c) one person's inspiration is always going to be another person's pigeon's shit. But what are those horizontal sheets of coloured plastic doing on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, where Marc Quinn's 'Alison Lapper Pregnant' used to stand?

Actually, they're sheets of 'specially engineered glass in yellow, red and blue, which collects the light, reflecting it through the edges', as I discovered from the fourth plinth website. That's 'specially engineered' as in 'made to look like plastic', presumably.

Thomas Schütte's 'Model for a Hotel 2007' is exactly what it says on the label. It's 'an architectural model composed of three blocks: a building with 21 storeys, a big lobby, and a horizontal block of eight storeys, extending over the edge of the plinth'.

And it should have stayed in an architect's office - or at least somewhere more in keeping with what it represents. In Trafalgar Square, surrounded by all that classical, imperial stonework it doesn't add anything, it doesn't belong: it just jars.

That isn't even intentional, if we are to believe the blurb on the website. 'The sculpture is translucent against the sky and will become part of the important historical buildings all around Trafalgar Square,' it says. 'Model for a Hotel 2007 is sculpture, model and architecture all in one. It is also, at the same time, a commentary on the present.'

'What pigeons will do to the material is not quite clear,' the blurb concludes. I guess that is what passes for irony in some circles.

Big art

Channel 4’s Big Art Project website, for which I’m supplying some of the words to go with the pictures, has just won a Royal Television Society innovations award for its Big Art Mob project. This is a great wheeze whereby members of the public take pictures of ‘public art’ (anything that isn’t private seems to be the definition we’ve settled on) and post them on the website via their mobile phones.

There’s a huge amount of it around, from the big prestige artworks like Manchester’s B of the Bang, currently the subject of a £2 million court case because bits of it keep falling off, to the unofficial additions to the urban art scene that test the boundaries between creativity and vandalism. To be honest, I’m getting a bit bored by the Banksy wannabes, who’re generally not as good technically and nowhere near as imaginative as the man himself. And now that his works are fetching up to £300,000 a time at auction, much of the original anarchic edge has rubbed off along with the paint on some of his classic works.

My local council in Islington has just drawn up a list of officially protected Banksies in the borough to avoid them being painted over by its anti-graffiti team. Some of them are even being ‘restored’ by council workers, who paint over the tags of less well respected graffiti artists.

Nearby Tower Hamlets has apparently gone in the opposite direction and decided to remove the lot. In a way, you can hardly blame them. Where might this sort of thing lead, after all? There are already heated discussions taking place in parts of north London over whether particular graffiti are genuine Banksies or, perish the thought, stylistic copies. The idea of council officials having to make an expert aesthetic judgement on every piece of graffiti in the area before deciding whether to remove it is an odd one indeed.

I was once what Jill Posener, in her book Spray it Loud, called a ‘graffitist’ myself. I’ve even got the convictions to prove it. I believe, for example, that I am the only person ever to have been prosecuted for ‘putting up posters without permission’ on the old Widnes market (fined £5 and a night in the stocks). All that’s left of my work now is Posener's book and a few photos, which I haven’t yet decided whether to post on the Big Art Mob or auction off at Sotheby’s.