The Memorial

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

KEVIN CAREY says that our public sculpture is just one symptom of the way we re-write history for our own comfort.

On our way to Gluck's Orpheo Ed Euridice -- a subject to which I may well return in the August days of little news -- my wife and I deliberately made a detour to Trafalgar Square in Central London to look at a new piece of sculpture by the now-famous Rachel Whiteread. Entitled "Plinth," it was an inverse in transparent resin of the empty granite plinth on which it stood.

As you walked round it you could either see things through it or reflected on its inner and/or outer planes. Sometimes it was steely, sometimes glassy, occasionally mossy or blue. It was an oddly lively piece of sculpture amidst the, mostly military, dead who stood on the other plinths.

This empty plinth, as recent tourists to London will know, has been empty for decades and there has been fierce controversy over who should occupy it. Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dickens were the early front-runners but our changing sensibilities have more recently proposed Charles Darwin and Nelson Mandela, who is not even English. The plinth's first occupant was a life size figure of a very human Christ and the next a piece of bronze, depicting a book surrounded by foliage -- something like an outsized, crude table decoration of the sort seen at annual produce fairs.

It was, then, a change to have an accomplished piece of sculpture, which prompted a little internal abstract thinking rather than a struggle with the torn out pages of history.

At the time I did not question what public spaces were for but the subject was given a new twist a few days later when a statue was unveiled of a blindfolded young man, hands tied behind his back, awaiting execution by firing squad as the result of a Court Martial for desertion in the First World War. He was representing the more than 300 young men - many of them having lied about their age at recruitment centres - who were similarly executed. There was a certain amount of outrage but, returning to Trafalgar Square, it prompted the question: "What is public sculpture for?"

It is, surely, a collection, more or less random, of public statements of what we are and what we have been. If so, it should have as much to do with our current failings and past shortcomings as with our successes and our triumphs. In an age where saying sorry seems to have become fashionable there is no reason why sculpture should not embrace this contrition. The problem is, however, that our political leaders -- reverting to a recent and much hammered theme in these columns -- are far ahead of us in the tortured calculus of reconciliation. The British Government may have apologised for its appalling treatment of the Irish but the prejudice remains amongst the populace. His Holiness the Pope may have penitently and peripatetically declared his sorrow for Catholic wrongs to the various strands of the Orthodox faith but it is hardly reflected amongst the faithful.

So, to the extent that sculpture is a public, as opposed to the political statement it would have been a century ago, individual artists will want to shake us into recognition of our incompleteness but we do not want to be reminded and put outrage before regret; that is why we need art.

What makes collective, as opposed to individual, penitence so difficult is that we have a much higher regard for the reliability of public history than for our own.

We know that we can delude ourselves into believing anything about ourselves and our motives but we do not transfer that scepticism to the textbook.

We have a massive respect for what we were taught at school about our national past. Historiography is as essential but as obscure as the economics of pumps. Just as the efficiency of pumps in a modern economy is much more important than the efficiency of automobiles, so historiography is a better guide to an understanding of ourselves than any number of works of history viewed without it.

Of course the focus is different from country to country. In the United States the key historiographical battlegrounds are the Declaration of Independence and the Civil War; in France they are the 1789 Revolution and, curiously, the Dreyfus Affair rather than either of the World Wars; in Britain a mass of raging controversies from the origins of democracy to imperial splendour have all given way to the single obsession with the Second World War; and in many countries the determining issue is the birth of the nation state.

In all such cases it is safe to say that the public orthodoxy, represented in public sculpture, school textbooks and popular mythology, is self-seeking and misleading. Most massive historical outcomes are the unseen consequences of self-interest. The exceptions to this are the Communist takeover of Imperial Russia and warring China, which were both more or less planned but whose implementation went morbidly awry. The very fact that they were planned as the necessary outcomes of scientific socialism explains why their historiography is so crucial.

It is naturally easier to be sorry about a past in which one only shares indirectly than about the present. This is why the statue of the young soldier is a necessary but not sufficient symbol of our public life. As there are so many technically if not always analytically gifted artists amongst us we should commission much more contemporary but temporary sculpture to inform our public spaces.

There is room enough for the glorious tarnish of Richard Nixon alongside the tarnished glory of Abraham Lincoln; we need to be reminded of what we got wrong as well as what we got right. Nixon, after all, almost won the Presidency in 1960, showed his nasty side shortly afterwards but was still elected President twice, the second time in a landslide unequalled since Franklin Roosevelt.

I am not sure how we would manage the same feat in Britain where so many of our historical villains, right up to Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, are still regarded as heroes, thus depriving the antithesis of vice and virtue of any of its force.

There are millions of my fellow citizens, indulging in what we might call historical freeloading, who bleat ceaselessly about the vital role of public services but revile the socialists who fought for them and then express undying love for Mrs. Thatcher who did her best to destroy them.

But, then, it is even easier to disconnect your historical from your political outlook than it is to disconnect your political stance from its outcome. To illustrate this I only have to remind you of an election campaign which I lost by just seven votes. The day after, a lady who had voted the other way asked me what I might do about the threat to our local bank branch from larger, external competitors, to which I replied to her utter shock: "Lady, you voted for the market, that's what you've got!"

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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