A Small Thing

'Empire' - Andy Warhol

Public Art: always controversial if it strays beyond the conventional and usually sculptural personal encomiums of the great and the good. Even when applied prosaically, pleasing all of the people all of the time is just never going to happen. Sometimes, attempts at conventional representation of the subject of a commemorative piece just go horribly astray: think Ronaldo; or rather, don't. Sometimes, likeness is ephemeral: if the subject, say Winston Churchill, is held to be a national icon, typecast cliché is inevitable: hat, cigar, V for victory, etc.

Better then to take a more abstracted view; what did the person commemorated do, achieve? A likeness of an historical figure, even of relatively recent times, is a likeness out of time, remembered by no-one living. Better to express what they represented and their legacy to the currently living. Much has been said this week about Maggi Hambling's sculpture to commemorate Mary Wollstonecraft. That it is not a likeness of its subject, that it is too small, etc., etc. Criticisms on this level should really sound archaic in the twenty-first century, but they're still being made. Art in its purest and most professional forms has never been just about representing the real world. Granted, representation has always had a functional role in art, at least until the rise of abstraction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but more often than not, it has acted as a medium for allegory and storytelling; going far beyond the superficiality of the depiction of its subject.

Recently, much media space has been devoted [and quite rightly, if too belatedly] to the painter Artemisia Gentileschi and in particular her painting, 'Judith Slaying Holofernes'; one [the best, I think] version of which I have had the enormous pleasure of seeing in the Galleria Degli Uffizi in Florence. By now the story behind what is on the face of it a purely religious and allegorical painting is widely known; the Biblical figures that appear in the image representing a more immediate and visceral allegory: referring obliquely to the artist herself and to her rapist, in veiled but public revenge of the suffering she endured by torture to prove her case against him in the courts at the time. Google the artist and the painting for more detail and if by some lucky chance you do get to see her exhibition at the National Gallery, God and Covid willing, I would advise you to go for it: a truly stunning painter with an extraordinary backstory.

I use this example deliberately, as women have pretty much been written out of art history until recently, as anyone who attended Art School up until the last couple of decades will attest; in fact, written out of most histories come to think of it. That Maggi Hambling's Wollstonecraft sculpture is courting controversy is a good thing, just as feminism  disrupted the status quo, initially and still for some throwbacks, controversially. Art is there to make you think in much broader terms than you would normally: chocolate-box it should never be. If the standards some people apply to the visual arts were applied to other media such as books or movies, then the results would be so tediously prosaic no-one would bother to read or watch them. Andy Warhol proved this over fifty years ago in his archly ironic movies, such as Empire; his eight hour long locked-down-camera, static shot of the Empire State Building. If all you want from Art is representation, then look no further: just give me a shout when you're bored.