PUBLIC SCULPTURE M.O.L 22
Ashraf Jamal
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ichelangelo’s memorable words, ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free’, are quaint yet enduring. We continue to think of sculpture as the extension of the human spirit, constructed in our own image out of marble, or cast in bronze. This view, Greek in origin, is not in fact the towering force it has been set up to be. As the sculptor Bruce Arnott pointed out, ‘If we look at the really big picture (30,000 BC to 300 AD), this episode in Western cultural history may be characterised as a brilliant but flawed deflection from a mainstream of artistic expression’. In other words, no matter how enduring, Greek sculpture is a blip which has ignored the fact that art’s roots long predate this fetish, revived in the Renaissance and persistent today. What of art’s roots ‘in the pre-historic, pre-literate, ancient, tribal and folkloristic,’ Arnott asks, ‘what of the pre-Classical and therefore pre-Christian?’ Sculpture is ancient and complex. Our recent obsession with toppling statuary, because it no longer reflects the ideals and ideas of the time, reveals the extent to which we have invested in sculpture as a mirror of ourselves, and why we’ve come to damn it when it no longer sustains that mirror. The mistake, of course, is to perceive sculpture as an ideal archetype. Life changes, and in our increasingly fluid and hybridised world it is unsurprising that the Greek ideal is falling by the wayside. As Percy Bysshe Shelley famously reflected in ‘Ozymandias’, it is hubris that is our weakness and profound error, for as the poet observes, in a desert lie ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone … half sunk, a shatter’d visage’. It is the vanity of kings the poet challenges, the futility of a monument which now lies in decay – a ‘colossal wreck’.
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But sculpture was not only the province and privilege of kings. In the nineteenth century, for the first time, sculpture became a democratised phenomenon, with sculptures of great civic leaders, scientists, artists, assuming centre stage in the public domain across Europe. In fact, this rage to commemorate and embody the best in social values resulted in what came to be known as ‘statue mania’. It is ironic, and fitting, that over a hundred years later, the very statues built to exemplify the best in society are now being challenged. Whatever one’s viewpoint on the matter – I’m not one who believes that the future is best served by erasing the past – one cannot ignore the fact that everywhere in the Western world the emblems of empire and racial supremacy are being challenged. White mythology – specifically its Greek ideal – is under attack. The question remains, what will these statues be replaced with? New bodies representing new ideals? Surely the problem lies in figurative art itself, the assumption that human beings are the measure of all things? But what of abstraction? Surely it is harder to pin down a claim when it is abstract? Isn’t this why the sculptures of Edoardo Villa are more enduring, say, than a sculpture of Cecil John Rhodes? Surely what is dated is not only imperialism but realism, an aesthetic which enshrines art as a mimetic mirror? There are other ways of seeing and experiencing life. And, in the realm of sculpture, we’ve found an immense flowering of new forms of expression. As Isamu Noguchi expressed it, ‘Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance borne into space, I consider a sculpture’. It is this widely embracing vision and grasp of sculpture which has proved a great antidote to what Arnott dubbed ‘a brilliant but flawed deflection’.
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