13/02/17
City Sculpture Projects 1972
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds24 November 2016 – 19 February 2017
What defines a successful art project? One where the works
all sell? Or one where public opinion is changed and a new form of acceptance
is born? In 1972, the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation launched City Sculpture
Projects, an ambitious endeavour that led to the installation of public
sculptural works by 14 artists in eight cities in England and Wales, for a
period of six months. A towering five-metre-tall King Kong in Birmingham, a
revolving cone in Plymouth, and a conceptual enquiry in Cardiff were among the
commissions realised – but many deemed the project a failure, since none of the
works was acquired by its respective local council, and all were accordingly
removed at the end of the six-month run.
Nevertheless, the project has had a lasting impact. “It was
the moment when sculpture everywhere, but particularly in Britain, became
recalibrated,” says Lisa Le Feuvre, Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry
Moore Institute, Leeds, where an exhibition is currently being held,
commemorating the artistic and social experiment. “What we love more than
anything [at the Institute] is contesting possibilities of sculpture. The
ambition of the 1972 project was to show cutting edge sculpture, outside of
London, at a street level, city-oriented and also viewer-oriented.”
At the time, the project was well-served by the art journal
Studio International, which ran a 14-page special issue, featuring texts by the
artists involved, including some whose commissions were not ultimately
realised. These pages are on display now, alongside cuttings from local
newspapers, photographs, a slide show of footage and maquettes – some remade
especially for this exhibition. Outside the Institute, the colossal King Kong
towers ominously, attracting visitors, firstly for a selfie, and then, with any
luck, through the gallery doors. The artist behind the enormous ape is Nick
Monro, now a reclusive physicist, living in a cottage in Dorset, with no hot
water or electricity. His research into perpetual motion seeks to disprove
Newton’s Third Law. At the time, however, when briefed to produce a
“city-oriented” work, he decided, in a deliberately facetious manner, to make
King Kong, as a “city-disoriented” response.
Built out of fibreglass, the huge creature was scaled up from a tiny maquette,
entirely by using a tape measure and squinting. After his stint in Birmingham, it
lived, for three years, with a used car dealer, before moving to the Lake
District, from where it ventures for the first time for this exhibition.
Liliane Lijn’s six-metre-high revolving steel cone, cut
through with layers of Perspex sheet and neon, was born out of her thinking
around cosmological phenomena. “You can never finish a point,” she says. “It
goes on to infinity.” For this reason, she blunts the point of her cone, making
it parallel to the base and to Earth. The lit up elliptical lines are like
planetary trajectories. Lijn remembers how people kept asking her what her work
was in aid of, not quite grasping the concept that it was “just” art. After
Plymouth, White Koan was shown for six months on the terrace outside the
Hayward Gallery, London, then at the Globe Theatre, before finally being
purchased by the University of Warwick. “It’s very popular now. I don’t want to
be immodest, but it’s really captured the imagination of the students. They
really own it. They have a Koan site on Facebook and on Twitter.”
Garth Evans, whose 12-metre-long steel construct was
intended to speak to Cardiff’s industrial roots, was brave enough to loiter,
the day after installation, and take a microphone around asking people for
their opinion of his work. He made a point not to refer to it as “sculpture” or
a “work of art”, asking only “What do you think of this?” Similarly to Lijn’s experience in Plymouth, the Cardiffians
were struggling to come to terms with what this
actually was, many deeming it “rubbish”. The recordings now form part of the
retrospective exhibition at the HMI and have also been used by Evans since to
create a tongue-in-cheek work in which the sounds emanate from a rubbish bin,
as well as being published in a book and turned into a stage production.
At the time, there was no follow-up to or evaluation of this
ambitious project, and Le Feuvre, and curator, Jon Wood, see that as the role
of this exhibition – albeit some 45 years after the event. This time-lapse,
however, might be seen to attest to the power and lasting legacy of the
project, which, if not an obvious across-the-board success, certainly opened up
discussions about the role – and mere existence – of abstract art in the public
realm. Some may not have seen the point, but the few who did set the ball
rolling. One archive newspaper cutting tells, for example, of the lollipop lady
in Birmingham who donated £1 to a campaign to save King Kong.
“Is part of the power of the legacy of this project because
the sculptures didn’t stay?” ponders Le Feuvre. Had they been seen every day
since, become part of the furniture, as it were, perhaps their potency would
have faded. But by living on solely in the memory of those who witnessed them,
they have gained a certain status, as symbols of change. “Had they been there
longer, people would have grown fonder,” posits Lijn. And this has certainly
been attested to by the response of Warwick students to the potential removal
of White Koan – they went on strike! It will be interesting to see how the
public responds to the removal of King Kong from outside the HMI at the end of
this exhibition. While we often might not notice something until it has gone or
is under threat, this is one public sculpture, which has consistently drawn a
crowd.
Liliane Lijn
White
Koan, 1971
Work for Armada Way,
Plymouth
Painted mild steel,
neon tube, electric motor, height: 6.1 metres, base diameter: 3.6 metres
Arnolfini Archive at
Bristol Record Office
Photographer unknown
© Liliane Lijn. All
Rights Reserved, DACS 2016