waste of space
Dru tells me, with all due respect, that I haven’t yet developed my blogger’s voice. She means that I write like I always write. I haven’t managed that intimate but off-beat tone that she does so well herself. But then Dru has unfair advantages as a blogger. She does loads of stuff. She’s been having an adventure-a-day, against doctor’s orders, since before blogs were first used as solid fuel. Take a look. This is how it should be done.
Instead of adventures, I make a habit of sitting at my desk doing nothing much, though I do have an idea for an art installation that will be a speeded-up film of my day at work. The lucky audience will get to see exactly how often I drop my head into my hands. It will be fascinating.
Meanwhile, and in the absence of shipwrecks and poetry readings, there’s Dru on a walk through Leigh Woods stumbling across ‘a stone. It’s Welsh slate, carved with the words AND STONES MOVED SILENTLY ACROSS THE WORLD. It was put there by Alyson Hallet.’
This stone serves the perfect function of public art, in that it’s not very noticeable or thoughtful. Public art needs to be inconspicuous. It gets installed in public places. If the passing-by audience become animated in any meaningful way then the council fears a traffic hazard or an incitement to vandalism. Public art is therefore chosen for being whatever art isn’t -passers-by must pass it by.
Fountains are the second-lowest point for public art - they often get turned off, as if they were never there. The highest contempt, however, should be reserved for public sculptures of human figures on town-centre benches. They’re rubbish art. But they’re also taking up a space on a public bench. What good to the public is that?
they’re for people who don’t have any friends. This chap, for instance, could easily be saying, “Well, turned out nice again, you look a bit peaky if you don’t mind me saying so, what did the doctor say, oh you poor thing, she never” and so on.
He looks like he’s about to offer one of his Werther’s Originals to a child that is not his own…
No perhaps that’s not fair, he looks a bit like E.L. Wisty and as I recall he knew all about art…
what good to the public are those benches ? anyone who sits there suffers from an ass ache for at least a week.
I kindalike bronze figures on benches. ‘Blind Jack’ Metcalf of Knaresborough is one such http://www.panoramio.com/photo/19364394
If you are going to commemorate historic people in bronze at all (a separate debate?), then why not have them at ground level and in your face, rather than high atop some plinth, ignored by all except the town pigeonhood.
As for taking up bench space …. firstly, without the figure, there would likely be no bench at all; secondly, a bench occupied by a single regular human becomes unavailable to others unless you are on the pull or really really need a chat, in the way that a bronze occupied bench does not.
Finally, a reframe. If you don’t think of them as ‘art’, don’t bench-statues seem inoffensive in the same way as other ‘street furniture’ such as pillar boxes and litter bins?
Suzzy