Exhibitions
Sculpture Beside the Thames (Chelsea Harbour, till 3 October) Recent British Sculpture (Royal Festival Hall, till 12 September)
Harbour lightweights
Giles Auty
To look closely in the space of an after- noon at nearly 90 pieces of sculpture by different artists is a tiring process. At the end of doing so I asked myself which piece had made the strongest impression, but found I was thinking instead of a visit I had made to a sculptor in Nottingham the pre- vious day. The work of Richard Perry was unknown to me formerly, yet I found it as memorable as anything I saw at Chelsea Harbour or the Royal Festival Hall even from the more vaunted names in British sculpture. This is not to say I saw few or no good things at the latter venues but that rather too much of what I saw was either sentimental or bombastic — quite the reverse of Mr Perry's small, unassuming but intensely thoughtful and well-crafted pieces.
Oddly, I had not visited anything at Chelsea Harbour except the tennis club and found the experience especially dis- turbing because it is an area I had known well since youth. Some might see the big development there as a prime paradigm of the Thatcher years; the nouveaux riches rubbing shoulders unwillingly with the perennially poor. I fear the kitchen-sink realism of worker tenements and Lots Road power station has given way now only- to a kind of sinkin' kitsch.
The Chelsea Harbour development looks better from a distance than too close, when the weirder and tackier aspects of po-mo architecture start to reveal themselves. Why must windows lie almost flush with the façades of buildings which are not with- out merit otherwise? The reason must be one simply of cost or convenience because the visual consequence is so ugly and jar- ring. I wonder sometimes whether the human race is losing all visual sense or judgment. Do some sculptors really see what they have done? In the same way that early town houses from Vicenza or Treviso would put the domestic architecture of Chelsea Harbour very firmly in its place, so one might imagine a great carved menhir from Easter Island or Corsica panicking the surrounding sculpture there and caus- ing it to rush headlong into the Thames.
Even Reinhard Buxel's would-be simple arch merely parodies something the Druids did better. Too much of the Chelsea Har- bour sculpture looks as though it was designed especially for the puffy, Armani- suited TV directors and their aerobic wom- enfolk who live there. Perhaps it was. That artists of all kinds have to earn a living is a fact I know well. At the ends of their lives only they will know whether compromises made with the grosser aspects of middle- class taste or Arts Council orthodoxy were really necessary or worthwhile. Bring on some heroes and heroines. Or has our cyni- cal civilisation buried all notions of genuine artistic valour?
The sculpture at Chelsea Harbour fol- lows an interesting trail through the devel- opment itself. But I cannot imagine the boaties of the yacht club there will wel- come the rust marks formed already by Nigel Hall's crushed cigarette of steel. However, the potential dangers of sculp- tural excess may be even greater, as Philip Jackson's 'Dangerous Liaison' illustrates so clearly. Even Henry Moore was not too hot on draped figures.
Glynn Williams, Lee Grandjean, Ivor Abrahams, Michael Sandie, Paul Neagu, Allen Jones, Peter Randall-Page, Dhruva Mistry, Brian Kneale, Maria Marshall and a handful of others emerge with sculptural reputations more or less intact. But why a truly awful sculptural head by which to remember Elizabeth Frink?
The foregoing notwithstanding, I salute the enterprise of the Chelsea scheme and the generosity of its sponsors. I also like the organising body — the Royal Society of British Sculptors — and accept the need for commercial exploitation. Indeed, if I thought buying a promotional T-shirt would help hasten the arrival among us of a new Verrocchio even by a day, I would have bought several. But I fear current atti- tudes to art and methods of training will ensure this never happens.
While the Chelsea Harbour scheme shows a certain catholicity, the show at the Royal Festival Hall of the Arts Council's recent acquisitions of sculpture demon- strates a much narrower and more rigidly modernist orthodoxy. But what it reveals also, to my pleasure and surprise, is the ability of Arts Council officers to pick work wisely even from sculptors of questionable pedigree. Thus Antony Gormley's 'Five Fishes' reveals a sensitivity to form that was previously unsuspected. Likewise Bill Woodrow's 'Crow and Carrion' shows that sculptor's off-beat humour at its very best.
Meanwhile Jean-Luc Vilmouth creates tribal masks from simple household uten- sils and Neville Gabie employs fire to telling effect for his pleasing 'Kiln'. Cor- nelia Parker's arrangement of melted sou- venirs of Big Ben into the shape of a coolie hat is striking visually but little is added otherwise by knowledge of the work's source. In short, the conceptual element in this work escapes portentousness only nar- rowly. This is a new area wherein the so- called sculptors of our time lack sense and judgment almost entirely — egged on, as often as not, by those critics I think of col- lectively as 'gushers'. It is to the great mis- fortune of Alison Wilding that she attracts such non-critics in droves. If she talked to critics who thought rather than drivelled she could yet become a good artist.
Maria Marshall's 'On the Banks of the Nile, 1992, fibreglass and iron filings, each element x 3' x 3': one of the sculptures now installed at Chelsea Harbour
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