A bit of creativity. A bit of controversy.
Plus giant doughnuts, toxic caterpillars and London from space
One of the most uplifting and vital things London has going for it is the sheer amount of cultural ‘stuff’ that you can encounter just walking the streets (and we’re not talking about those ‘living statues’).
Of course, for the past eighteen months the activity formally known as ‘walking around the streets of central London’ has been somewhat off limits. But as life begins to inch towards something resembling normalcy and the streets start to become populated not just by people, but also by their wonderful/infuriating/impressive/entertaining creations, we thought we’d take a stroll around town to breathe in some of the stuff that’s cropped up just in the past few weeks.
First stop: The Fourth Plinth
The most obvious and contentious example of London’s public art offering has to be Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, and while we’re not going to get a new piece of work there until next year, we couldn’t ignore the announcement that came this week or the ensuing conversation.
Like it or not, art is just another front in the ongoing ‘culture war’ (whether that war is being fought around statues, in the gift shops, or even in the restaurants), and Monday’s announcement has done nothing to dampen those flames, with Samson Kambalu’s sculpture of the preacher John Chilembwe and the English missionary John Chorley being chosen to grace the plinth in 2022.
It was also decided that 2024 will see Mexican artist Teresa Margolles place 850 “life masks” of transgender sex workers around the plinth, with the expectation that the casts will slowly disintegrate in the rain.
With deadening predictability, the Daily Mail renamed Trafalgar Square ‘Woke Square’, while the Express opted for ‘Woke Fest’. And in the Telegraph, this week was deemed “the moment when identity politics and British art jumped the shark.”
We don’t have much to say here that isn’t better expressed by this quote from Toni Morrison:
“All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ … My point is that it has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world.”
It’s worth noting that the work that’s on the Fourth Plinth right now, Heather Phillipson’s THE END, is itself a response “to Trafalgar Square as a site of celebration and protest… A call to action, to put an end to the things that aren’t right in our society and to put them right.”
So when the most recent choices for that Fourth Plinth are dubbed products of “Sadiq Khan's woke and wacky London,” or “a dull puppet show for social issues,” that’s not a reflection of the state of contemporary art (which is just doing what art has always done), but a reflection of the state of contemporary discourse around culture. Which, right now, is a total shit show.
Next up: Soho Music Month
So let’s go to the other side of Shaftesbury Avenue, to Soho, where July is ‘Music Month’, which means a series of free events in “celebration of the area’s vibrant musical history” (far less controversial than sculpture, as rock musicians of the 60s and 70s were essentially angels!).
Events include an independent label record fair on Carnaby Street on 18 July, free music-themed walking tours of the area, and pop-ups and exhibitions from people like The Museum of Youth Culture who are showing “rare vintage photographic prints… featuring iconic artists performing in and around Soho,” (e.g. Mods on the Tube, above) and Creative Media Network “who will host a gallery showcasing music-themed NFT art by renowned UK and international digital artists.”
A quick visit to Mickey Mouse in Mayfair
Apparently Jerkface is “one of the most controversial and collectable artists in the world,” but as we’re in the buttoned-down world of Mayfair art galleries, we should probably read ‘controversial’ as meaning something closer to ‘someone who used to be a street artist’.
That doesn’t stop it it being a lot of fun to wander down Maddox Street and see a giant Simpsons-inspired doughnut hanging off the side of a building though (Fourth Plinth next?). And if you’re a fan of Jeff Koons/Takashi Murakami-ish interpretations of pop culture icons like Winnie the Pooh and The Flintstones, then the Villainy exhibition is definitely a bit of a crowd-pleaser (it’s only on to 15 July though).
If you want some real controversy though, you have to take a trip over to SE1…
Spot some grazing Guerrillas in London Bridge
Feminist activist artists, The Guerrilla Girls are back in London with new project: The Male Graze. It’s probably better if we let them explain it:
As part of that project, the group have teamed up with the Art Night Festival (more details on that here) to install a “national series of billboards”. There are two in London right now, one at 1 London Bridge / Borough High Street and one at 345 Old Street.
And then back to Bond Street for some lefty sculpture
We imagine the critics over at the Mail and the Telegraph don’t mind a bit of Henry Moore sculpture, despite the fact the Yorkshire miner’s son, committed anti-fascist and devout pacifist would probably be described today as ‘painfully woke’
The other thing Moore has going for him is his women are usually clothed, or at least ‘draped’ as in Draped Reclining Figure, the sculpture that’s been on public display in the courtyard of the Hermes store on Bond Street for the past six years (although the sculpture has been on that spot since 1953, when the building was the headquarters for Time Life Magazine).
Hermes have just revamped their garden terrace with “fragrant beds of lavender, herbs, flowers, including an elegant wisteria, and newly planted trees,” so if you want to grab your packed lunch, sit in an urban oasis (a very corporate urban oasis, but an oasis nonetheless) and contemplate the role of identity politics in British art, or just look at your phone for a bit, this is where to go.
You only have a month to do it though. After August 1 the terrace will return to its previous state and all of the plants and materials used in its creation will be donated to The Exchange, “a community-run organisation that uses the Old Library in Erith, south-east London as a hub for workshops and local projects.”
One last bit of public art news
The V&A has unveiled its plans for V&A East, its “national museum complex” in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The project incorporates V&A East Storehouse, which opens in 2024 and “offers a new immersive visitor experience providing unprecedented public access to 5,000 years of creativity,” and the V&A East Museum, opening a year later, which “will celebrate global creativity and making”.
If you want to find out a little more about what all that actually means, as well as see some pretty sweet digital renderings of what the spaces will look like, Fashion United has all the details.
And the rest…
We now know what caused last week’s ‘fireball’ at Elephant and Castle. According to the London Fire Brigade, the explosion was the result of “an electrical fault within a car in a spray booth.”
The Met have put out a call to try and identify the two skateboarders who intervened after the murder of 60-year-old Stephen Dempsey in Oxford Circus last Thursday:
Three of the six Met officers who stopped, searched and handcuffed the athlete Bianca Williams and her partner in Maida Vale in July 2020, are under investigation for gross misconduct.
The e-scooter trial has been expanded to three more boroughs. City of London, Southwark and “some parts of Lambeth” will begin rolling out e-scooters from this week, taking the total number of scooters to rent to 1,200.
Hounslow toxic caterpillar infestation might sound like a very high concept prog rock album, but it’s an actual thing that “can cause itchy rashes and breathing difficulties in children and pets”.
NASA Astronaut, Shame Kimbrough is on the International Space Station right now, and is passing the time taking snapshots of London from 400km up:
