In 1972, sixteen artists were each given £1000 to produce a site-specific sculpture, to be installed in one of eight cities across England and Wales. The City Sculpture Project, which is documented in an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England (on view through February 19), was intended to rejuvenate public sculpture in Britain. The project sought to move sculpture out of the garden and gallery and place it on the streets of living cities, to confront the people where they lived. The people weren’t immediately convinced.
At the time, British public sculpture was predominantly found in London or fairly traditional, or both. It often took the form of monuments to the heroic war dead and the equally monumental—if rather less staid—work of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Anthony Caro. Attempts to present British sculpture en plein air outside the capital—most notably in 1968, with “New British Sculpture/Bristol” and the touring show “Sculpture in a City,” which temporarily installed works in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Southampton—were sporadic. The City Sculpture works were displayed for six months, after which time local authorities or other interested parties had the right to buy them at cost. In the end, none did.
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The loss of most of the original City Sculpture commissions is a shame, as the exhibition doesn’t really convey what must have been their real point: their unsettling, provoking, or glorious real-world presence. Nor do we get much of a sense of how they interacted with their environments, what it might have been like to walk close to them, to touch them, or to climb them. Many of the sculptures were located in modern, redeveloped areas: Kenneth Martin’s Sheffield Construction, 1972, a rigid tower of nineteen blue boxes, stood alongside a concrete flyover in Sheffield; Robert Carruthers’s Timber Framed Complex, a series of wooden constructions which was part stylized pagoda, part children’s playground, peeped out from the middle of a traffic intersection in Colmore Circus in Birmingham. Many of these were works designed to sit alongside—indeed to draw attention to or contrast with—Britain’s equally contentious post-war architecture.
But the records of the public responses are fascinating—if slightly depressing—in themselves. “Now, what’s all this then?” read the headline in the South Wales Echo announcing the installation of Garth Evans’s Work For The Hayes in a street in Cardiff. Evans said subsequently that his sculpture—a black bar connecting two geometric blocks, like a huge dumbbell made of steel—was made to commemorate the victims of the 1913 Senghenydd mining disaster in which 440 men had died, but this wasn’t made clear to the people of Cardiff, who on the whole found the work cold and meaningless. The day after the piece was installed Evans went out with a tape recorder and asked people what they thought of it. A scrap dealer told him he admired the craftsmanship of the piece, but most of the voices were bewildered, suspicious, even angry: “What is it supposed to represent? Total waste of time, total waste of ratepayers’ money. And the welding’s no good either.”