| IT IS COLOSSAL, but it has pleased no one. In fact Tim Knox, director of the Sir John Soane Museum, picked it out as the worst of a very bad scattering of public statues that have appeared recently across the country. He described it as “a gigantic Village People-style navvy, [one of an] epidemic of Frankenstein monster memorials”. Knox was describing the Monument to the Unknown Construction Worker, by Alan Wilson, next to the Tower of London.
It is hard to disagree. The three-metre-high bronze is crudely executed and lumbering on its feet. Its pose imitates that of Michelangelo’s sublime statue of David in Florence, and the name “Dave” is carved into the man’s belt. The fact that this little joke is more likely to be understood by those educated in the arts than by the labourers who built London invites snobs to scoff at the very people whose work the statue commemorates. It is a disgrace.
Around the country, recent public art has met diverse fates. Maggi Hambling’s shell-like memorial to Benjamin Britten on Aldeburgh beach has been defaced by middle-aged delinquents who want it moved. Nature itself has attacked Thomas Heatherwick’s starry B of the Bang in Manchester, fenced off because its explosive shards are dropping. But the aeroplane wings of Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North, blessing north-east England, have won the affection of many who initially despised it.
Why should Christians care that public art is of a high quality? We could, after all, simply ignore it. It is not as if we are forced to worship it, like Nebuchadnezzar’s effigy.
We should care because public art keeps the spiritual values that define our personhood in our peripheral vision. It awakens the same part of our inner lives that all religion, especially the Christian faith, enlivens. As the routine of our day brushes past it, sculpture politely places questions about who we are in the corners of our eyes. Free to all, it can ask us where we stand in relation to our community. Stationary in the rush of time, it can ask us how we move in relation to our heritage. Our responses are momentary and subconscious, but they explain to us who we are.
It does not necessarily need to be beautiful, but public art must communicate heart and hope. It declares: “We are not dust, and we are not divine. At this very moment we are human. This is our only now.”
Forgotten in a London railway station is a statue that I believe to be the finest piece of public art in the country. Halfway along Platform One at Paddington Station is the Great Western Railway war memorial. It was sculpted by Charles Sargeant Jagger, and has stood there since 1922.
It shows a British First World War soldier reading a letter from home. In his great, rough hands the paper is so fragile that a passing train might blow it away. Under his helmet his face is at once resolute and forlorn. His greatcoat hangs from his shoulders like the toga of a statue from antiquity, giving a lowly conscript the classical dignity usually afforded to an emperor. It is largely ignored.
After I had stood in front of it for five minutes last week, thinking about honour and waste, a cleaner asked me whether I was unwell. No, I was not. But the statue was doing to me what all good public art should do — allowing God to tap me on the shoulder during a humdrum day.
Peter Graystone’s new book Need to Know? Christianity is published by Collins.
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