26 THE ART NEWSPAPER SECTION 2 Number 284, November 2016
Exhibitions United Kingdom
The colossal public
sculpture show that
the UK forgot
An ambitious—and unwelcome—1972 project is at the centre of a new show
REMBRANDT: © NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES/CHRIS TITMUSPIENE
BLACK MELT
& LIGHT RAYS
22 November 2016 –
18 February 2017
Königsallee 22 40212 Dusseldorf Germany
http://www.ludorff.com [email protected] Tel. +49-211-326566Otto Piene, Sky Hook, 2014, fire gouache on board (detail)
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016, photo: Achim Kukulies, Dusseldorf/8'25))
PUBLIC ART
Leeds. In 1971, organisers of the City
Sculpture Project invited 24 artists to
submit models for possible construction
and public installation in one of eight
cities across the UK. They had whittled
down their list from around 200 artists,
and finally selected 14 works to be put
in cities including Birmingham and Liv-
erpool. For six months, the sculptures
(by artists such as Barry Flanagan, Nich-
olas Monro and Liliane Lijn) were kept
in situ, after which each city could then
elect to buy the work and make it a
permanent fixture. None did. The sculp-
tures were debated, ridiculed, some
were even vandalised—and all were
removed by Christmas 1972.
It was “incredibly ambitious, partly
successful and partly failed,” says Jon
Wood, the curator of a forthcoming
show about the project. “It was an
unusual project from the outset with a
very small team running it.”
The scheme was the brainchild of
Jeremy Rees, the founder of Bristol’s
Arnolfini gallery, who worked closely
with the curator Anthony Stokes to
develop the idea and secure funding
from the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation
and the Arts Council.
“Rees wanted more cutting-edge
sculpture out there being discussed,”Wood says. One departure from tradi-
tion was that the artists were asked to
make site-specific proposals. “At the
time, that concept that we’re now more
familiar with wasn’t on everyone’s lips,”
Wood says. “It was challenging for some
of the artists, who were used to making
whatever sculpture they wanted. It was
also challenging for the public, whowere asked to work out what these
weird and wonderful things were doing
in relation to their town.”
One of the best-known commissions
was Monro’s 5.5m-tall King Kong (1972),
which was positioned beside Birming-
ham’s Bull Ring shopping centre, one
of the first American-style malls to be
built in the UK. “There was a campaign
in Birmingham to keep King Kong,”
Wood says. “A lollipop lady put a pound
down to start it of because she said: ‘I
walk thousands of children across the
pedestrian crossing to school and they
all talk about King Kong—they love it.’”
The campaign was unsuccessful and the
sculpture was bought by a car salesman
who displayed it on his forecourt.
If nothing else, the show generated
conversation. “There was a lot of press
coverage but it was what you’d expect:
‘What a waste of money’ or ‘what on
earth is that?’,” Wood says. The two
works installed in Cambridge, by Fla-
nagan and Brower Hatcher, were both
vandalised. “It was a bit of student japes,coupled with an old-fashioned dislike of
contemporary sculpture,” Wood says.
The show in Leeds, which opens in
November, will include two of the orig-
inal works from the project: Monro’s
King Kong and William Turnbull’s Angle
(1972), as well as a number of original
maquettes and archival documents.
Three of the participating artists— Garth
Evans, Peter Hide and Hatcher—have
agreed to remake models for the show.
Was the project really a failure?
“It was a shame that cities didn’t buy
them,” Wood says. “It was a different
environment then; there wasn’t all the
money and interest in contemporary
art.” In some ways it may have been
ahead of its time, taking place five
years before the first Skulptur Projekte
Münster in 1977, Wood points out. “I’d
like to think people today would be a lot
more open to it.”
José da Silva- City Sculpture Projects 1972, Henry
Moore Institute, Leeds, 24 November-
19 February 2017
Nicholas Monro’s
5.5m-tall King
Kong (1972)
failed to become
a permanent
ixture in central
Birmingham,
despite a local
campaign to
keep itEDINBURGHThe Goldinch makes a solo light to Scotland
Q Carel Fabritius’s painting The Goldinch (1654) is leaving the Mauritshuis
in The Hague for the Scottish National Gallery (4 November-18 December)
on a “brief winter migratory”, says the Scottish museum’s senior curator of
northern European art, Tico Seifert. On the back of the Scottish gallery lending
Titian’s Venus Anadyomene (around 1520) in 2014, the Mauritshuis was very
open to lending a one-of painting in return, Seifert says. “As a picture focusing
on one bird entirely, without any sort of context—and a live bird, not a game
piece—it is unique in its time,” Seifert says. The small canvas, measuring
33.5cm by 22.8cm, is perhaps best known to a wider audience as the cover
of the 2013 novel of the same name by Donna Tartt. The Pulitzer-winning
bestseller was partly responsible for record exhibition attendance at the Frick
Collection in New York in 2013: the picture was a key exhibit in its show of
masterpieces from the Mauritshuis. J.S.The painting drew record crowds at New York’s Frick Collection in 2013LONDONWill the real Rembrandt please stand up?
Q Questions of attribution, scholarship and connoisseurship are at the
core of a small Rembrandt exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in
London (Am I Rembrandt? 8 November-5 March 2017). The show centres
on a pair of pictures by the artist, one of which is Self-Portrait, Wearing a
Feathered Bonnet (1635), borrowed from the National Trust, which was
only fully conirmed as a work by the artist in 2014 after technical study
and scholarly research. The exhibition “aims to show that attribution is a
thoroughly collaborative process, involving discussion between curators,
art historians and conservators”, says the exhibition’s assistant curator,
Helen Hillyard. The other chief work in the show is Girl at a Window (1645),
an unquestioned work by the artist that the museum cites as a standard-
bearer for comparative analysis. P. P.The artist’s 1635 self-portrait was authenticated in 2014