OpinionSculpture This article is more than 6 years oldWhy we can’t escape the rise of ‘plop art’
This article is more than 6 years oldJonathan JonesRachel Whiteread is right – Britain is full of bad public art. But debates on the subject are irreconcilable: one person’s plop is another’s poetic visionThe sculptor Rachel Whiteread has come up with a new art term: “plop art” What can it mean? Is she cocking a snook at the American artist Paul McCarthy, whose controversial sculptures include a giant inflatable poo, perhaps? You wouldn’t want one of those plopping down in front of your house.
But no, Whiteread was talking about arbitrary acts of public sculpture in a more general sense. “I’m not a great fan of what I call ‘plop art’, where you plop a piece of work down where it doesn’t bear any relationship to anything else,” she said as her cast of the inside of a chicken shed went on display outside Tate Britain. Too much public art in Britain is, she suggests, “ill thought-out and put in places that it shouldn’t necessarily be.”
Surely she can’t be talking about Sean Henry’s Couple, two painted statues of a man and woman on a metal platform slap in the middle of a beautiful Northumberland seashore, or the floating sculpture project at St Pancras International that has seen a series of artists suspend abstract ornaments high above the heads of passengers who rarely look up at them?
Whiteread is right – Britain is full of bad public art that seems to have no particular reason to be where it is and can give little to its surroundings, let alone inspire or move anyone. Yet she has entered a debate that no one can win: a blasted wasteland of critical dispute littered with burnt-out shards of rhetoric. The real problem with putting permanent works of art in public spaces in modern Britain is that we have no consensus about what art should look like or even what it is. One person’s poetic vision is another’s plop art. Public sculpture is the Brexit of the arts; a savagely antagonistic, remorseless debate between irreconcilable camps. Indeed, this debate – which has raged since the 1990s – may, in retrospect, have been a foreshadowing all along of the two nations revealed by the Brexit vote.
Back in 1993, Whiteread’s great sculpture House created a fierce and shockingly destructive national controversy. Supporters saw it as a ghostly masterpiece that paid homage to the history of the East End. It was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire house from a demolished row at the edge of a common in Mile End: when the house it had filled was removed around it, this huge, grey, macabre object was left standing like a mausoleum on the common’s green expanse. Making a pilgrimage to see it was one of the experiences that turned me into a professional art critic. To my eyes and imagination, House was one of the most haunting and enduring things ever created by a British artist.
A lot of people disagreed. Tower Hamlets council, for instance, which was deaf to all the art lovers who went to see House or pleaded for it to be preserved – even to the Turner prize jury that recognised Whiteread’s achievement. House was demolished.
Tower Hamlets was undoubtedly speaking for some local people. To many eyes a huge concrete cast of a house is the very definition of “plop art” – a strange, unbeautiful modernist object plopped down in my neighbourhood. Whiteread says her art is “poetic” and I agree. But, Rachel, how are we going to force people to understand modern art? Should classes in advanced minimalism be compulsory in all schools?
Rightly or wrongly The Great British Bake Off has a bigger following than the art theory of Rosalind Krauss, and many people prefer figurative statues to abstract spectres of lost objects. The huge bronze statue of lovers kissing at St Pancras always has someone looking at it fondly. The art of Antony Gormley is successful because he brilliantly gives both sides what they want: the Angel of the North has a “modern” abstracted quality and is based on a cast, but in the end it’s an easily understandable statue of a winged figure.
Even to debate the artistic merits of public sculpture seems slightly old-fashioned. No one talks about artistic quality, only politics, in the protests and even riots that now rage around statues. Pulling down statues that offend and putting up statues of your heroes is what gets us going today. Whiteread’s art stands far apart from this new fervour. No one is going to either put up or pull down one of her casts as a political statement – unless, perhaps, she made a cast of Robert E Lee’s shed.
Poetry is rare and banality rules the world. Whiteread will never convert anyone to sensitivity or imagination by talking. She’s probably better off keeping quiet and casting. Her art has a silent power that rises high above the chatter and chanting of our time. It will be remembered when our arguments are forgotten.
Jonathan Jones writes on art for the Guardian
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