As the devastating bashings go on, Seneca Scott’s response to Hank Willis Thomas Memorial honoring Martin Luther King Jr and his wife Coretta Scott King takes a few hits. The embrace, a sculpture made by Thomas with the MASS Design Group based on a photograph of the embracing couple, was unveiled at the Boston Common in January. But Scott, a cousin of Coretta, writing that it looks “like a pair of hands hugging a beefy penis”. Contrast that with the words of Arndrea Waters King – the wife of Martin Luther King III, the eldest son of civil rights leaders – who described it as “a remarkable statement of mutual love and togetherness”.
A similar debate welcomed the completion, after many years of delay, of Anish Kapoor’s last mirror globule, nicknamed the “half bean” or “mini bean”, in honor of its much larger monolith, Cloud Gate (2004), in Chicago. The New York artwork is located under an apartment building, 56 Leonard, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and known as “Jenga Tower”. write for ARTnews, Alex Greenberger described the sculpture as “the tacky fast-fashion cousin of its Chicago couture counterpart,” while a Chicago Sun-Times stated editorial Cloud Gate to be the “best bean”, which adds “a bit of fresh ammunition in the ongoing culture war between Chicago and New York”.
Anish Kapoor’s “bean” at the corner of Leonard and Church streets in New York ©Benjamin Sutton
Public sculpture is often hailed for bringing art out of sacred spaces from galleries, but it’s also extremely difficult to get it right
Public sculpture is often lauded for bringing art out of the hallowed spaces of the gallery – or moving it from art pages to front pages and funny – and inviting everyone to see it and have their say on it. . But it’s also devilishly difficult to get it right, especially since it’s often meant to be permanent and often costs exorbitant sums. That the sculpture of Thomas already invites to gags does not bode well.
It is no coincidence that many successful public projects have been temporary, whether in the programs of Creative Time and the Public Art Fund in the United States, or on the Fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. Impermanence liberates artists and allows more risk-taking. But even here there are problems. A report in the Guardian revealed that three-quarters of old Fourth Plinth orders are in storage, unwanted and racking up huge storage costs, with their debating days just a memory.
Rachel Whiteread, who made Monument for the fourth plinth in 2001, told the newspaper that the plinth had “run its course” as a site for sculpture. But Monument exposed the limitations of the order: I loved it when I saw it, but as an inverted resin “ghost” of the pedestal, it was quite site-specific. Where else could it have worked? The irony is that Whiteread made a very large public sculpture in Accommodation (1993), the concrete cast of a Victorian house in east London, which sparked controversy in the UK and was miserably demolished within months.
But Accommodation has a legacy – in the photographs, of course, but also in the memories and testimonies of those who saw it, which keep it quietly alive. What matters most about public sculpture is its ability to maintain its power and meaning beyond its immediate physical presence.
It’s true of Cloud Gate: it has site-specific effects, but also transcends them into people’s imaginations. That his New York sibling is pushed under a luxury building is an apt metaphor, in that he is inextricable from the condos above, one of which was reportedly bought by Kapoor for $13.6 million in 2016. How can art be transcendent and speak to a wide audience, in the midst of such remarkable abundance?
