| THE Angel of the North is destined
to be one of the most widely seen works of art in the world - as well as
one of the heaviest, and tallest, and various other impressive statistics.
Around 90,000 people are expected to pass it every day on the A1 - though
drivers had better not take too long a look - plus more who will spy it
from 125s on the East Coast train line. And that's just as well, because
you have to view The Angel in the rusty steel original to see the beauty
of it.
Now that it has finally been
erected on the outskirts of Gateshead in Tyne & Wear, it's clear -
apart from all the other superlatives - that Antony Gormley's £800,000
sculpture is the most successful work of public art to be put up in this
country in decades. The Angel works artistically in a way that very few
of the post-war abstracts, reclining figures, and whatnot erected in the
piazzas and housing estates of Britain have ever worked. When you stand
in front of it - the head 64 ft above you, the wings outspread to 175 ft,
almost to the dimensions of a jumbo jet - it begins to be obvious why the
piece works.
First, it looks wonderful
on its site - a little knoll where there was once a colliery bath house.
All around is swirling traffic, and beyond that, rolling green fields,
houses, wide sky. It is firmly planted on the earth (anchored, in fact,
so that it is able to withstand winds of more than 100mph). And yet it
looks much lighter and more elegant than it seemed in the models and maquettes
(as though it might just take off and soar away).
The Angel has been linked
with the female colossus that is apparently to crouch within the Mandelson
Dome in Greenwich. Both, critics argue, are representative of the Blairite
age in which we live: grossly inflated figures, signifying nothing. But
the comparison is unfair. From the sound of it, the Dome and its massive,
but symbolically nebulous, maternal inhabitant really are representative
of something about cool Britannia: a vast glitzy structure with no coherent
central idea to put inside. The lack of fixed meaning in The Angel, on
the other hand, is one of the reasons that it succeeds.
To make sense, as the art
critic William Feaver remarked on the radio the other day, public sculpture
probably needs to be figurative. Abstraction can look fine in open countryside,
but in a public context - beside the A1, for example - it tends to resemble
an abandoned piece of industrial plant. But the trouble with figurative
public sculpture, notoriously, is that we've run out of generally held
beliefs, either religious, political or mythological, for it to represent.
The Angel doesn't represent anything.
It isn't really an angel, nor is it Icarus. It is a paradoxical image,
a cocoon of girders sprouting aerial appendages, the schematic image of
man combined with the wings of an aircraft. If anything, it looks like
one of those mysterious, bandaged figures in De Chirico's paintings, plus
B52 accessories. But, poetically, it suggests many things: the capacity
of technology to create objects that move and change the way we live, for
example (there is just a touch of Frankenstein's artifical man about it).
Alternatively - a popular interpretation, locally - it might stand for
the 21st-century regeneration of a rusty 19th-century industrial area.
I suspect that Gormley had
no such allegory in mind when he dreamt it up. If he had it would have
been a disaster; as it is, it's a triumph. The only problem is that every
urban district in the country will want one now - and I suspect that The
Angel is a one-off. |
Following
in the long line of attempts
to find the terminal unemployed in Hartlepool work, a conspiracy theory
was hatched to recycle all the rusty scrap cars from Big Mikes on Brenda
Road and then ship it all the way up the road and dump it by the side of
the A1 outside of Newcastle, call it art and see how many geordies we can
fool. Along the way we managed to scam nearly a million quid in the process,
get a ex-That That star to sing a song about it and get loads of free publicity
for the town. Canny eh?
