On Tuesday, Maggi Hambling’s commemorative statue to the ‘mother of feminism’, Mary Wollstonecraft, was unveiled in London’s Newington Green. A strange place for Wollstonecraft to be celebrated, you may be thinking, that funny rag-tag patch of grass in North London, more like a roundabout island than a park. Not so! Wollstonecraft, it turns out, lived and worked nearby, and opened a girl’s boarding school around the corner.
Very well, you’re thinking, that’s cleared that up, but I’m still not quite convinced by the amorphous blob of silver, spewing out of that black plinth. What’s that got to do with Wollstonecraft, or feminism, or A Vindication of the Rights of Woman? And…wait, hang on – I hear you cry – is that a tiny naked woman, protruding out of the top? What is going on!?
A crime against aesthetics
According to one article in the Guardian this week, the Wollstonecraft statue “shows a silvery naked everywoman figure emerging free and defiantly from a swirling mingle of female forms.” Is it just me or is there something comical, absurd, reductive, about this defiant, miniaturised woman with no clothes on? Turns out, I’m not on my own.
Within hours of the statue’s unveiling, people had taken to Twitter or were dashing out articles on ‘Why I hate the Mary Wollstonecraft statue’. Much of the backlash has been ideological – it’s hard to see what’s empowering about a tiny, vulnerable, naked woman – but to my mind, Hambling’s crime against aesthetics is just as worthy of accusation.
This will come as no surprise, however, to the follower of Hambling’s work. In 1998, the artist unveiled A Conversation with Oscar Wilde, a commemoration of that witty aesthete.
I have to keep looking at A Conversation with Oscar Wilde, because I can’t quite believe that it made it past the necessary hoops of approval through which public statuary must have to jump. It’s a sort of bench – but maybe it’s really a sarcophagus? – with Wilde’s head and hands clambering out at one end. He’s grinning (I think) but the heavily textured sculpting of the green granite makes it look like he started to putrefy a while ago.
Maybe its not a grin after all, but a corpse-like grimace – I’d be grimacing if my rotting head was stuck, for time immemorial, peering out onto Charing Cross station. Anyway, whatever his expression, I don’t want to have a conversation with this Wilde – I want press his wild head back from whence it came and get away fast.
Array
Pigskinpoison
Hambling isn’t alone in the art of bad statuary – and at least hers were an attempt at artistic impression. In recent years, there’s been a spate of terrible statues and sculptures: they keep popping insuppressibly up all over the place. Remember that bust of handsome Cristiano Ronaldo at Madeira airport? Well, he was handsome, until Emanuel Jorge da Silva Santos got his hands on some bronze in 2017 and started moulding a face out of it.
I still can’t decide if the result is funny or grotesque. Ronaldo’s eyes have slipped into the centre of his face – which is huge, and perched on an even huger neck. A wry smile has turned into a hideous leer, teeth bared and temples bulging like a twitching animal in mating season.
Meanwhile, the signature Ronaldo quiff looks more like the early signs of a receding hair line, disappearing above those goggly eyes. And now I can’t remember what Ronaldo looks like anymore: Santos has immortalised the star footballer as a cackling dummy forevermore.
A bronze sculpture of Lucille Ball at the Lucille Ball Memorial Park in the village of Celoron, N.Y.
If Santos’ Ronaldo is funny, David Poulin’s 2009 memorialisation of Lucille Ball is actually frightening. More muzzle than mouth, strangely spaced teeth just visible beneath a massive upper lip, and hideous bulging eyes, she’s like an ogre from an Arthur Rackham illustration.
She’s also holding a spoon and the bottle of ‘Vitameatavegamin’ – a reference to the ‘Lucy Does a TV Commercial’ episode from her hit 1950s sitcom, I Love Lucy. I don’t know what the contents of Vitameatavegamin were supposed to be, but I wouldn’t fancy my chances taking anything dispensed by this ghoul.
Little surprise, then, that the sculpture was dubbed ‘Scary Lucy’ and replaced, in 2016, with a comelier likeness. Scary Lucy is the stuff of nightmares, something from a Roald Dahl story – and I don’t mean his benign children’s books about chocolate factories and telepathic prodigies. I’m talking grim adult books, with titles like Pig, Skin and Poison; actually, all terms that seem commensurate with Scary Lucy. Perhaps a newfangled portmanteau of Dahl horror titles captures the statue better than description: the one where Scary Lucy Does a TV Commercial for Pigskinpoison.
Michael Jackson and Bubbles
Brutus and Bubbles
All of this suggests that the art of statuary is fast becoming a forgotten one: can you imagine Roman Emperors putting up with lopsided grimaces or merely waving off this ridiculous grotesquery, as Ronaldo’s brother Hugo Aveiro did, by conceding “There are no busts or statues in bronze that look like the person.” Hugo, let me introduce you to Brutus, a bronze head sculpted 500 years before Christ had even been born. I don’t know what the real Brutus looked like, but I can tell you that this bust is unnervingly lifelike in the flesh.
One strong contender for the worst in bad statuary is surely Jeff Koons’ insane, kitsch sculpture of Michael Jackson and Bubbles – a gilded porcelain affair that looks as though it stepped out of the eighteenth century and bumped into Jacko en route to the twentieth.
But giving Koons the prize would be too easy; he’d welcome it. Say what you will about the piece, its utterly compelling and, in this respect alone, is at least fulfilling the provocative rubric of postmodernism. And besides, it’s nowhere near as bad as the strange spate of Michael Jackson statues that seem to have popped up in the most unlikely of places (someone tell me why Jackson in a matador jacket was erected outside Craven Cottage, Fulham’s home stadium, in 2011).
Daniel Edwards, Life-sized statue of Britney Spears giving birth while nude on her hands and knees on a bearskin rug
And the winner is…
For me, the winner has to be Daniel Edwards’ bizarre pro-life monument to Britney Spears. Maybe it’s not sculpturally as bad as some of the other contenders, but this one takes the biscuit simply by force of its unabashed weirdness.
Made in 2006, the sculpture depicts a naked and heavily pregnant Spears. She’s in what yogis would call child’s pose – a wide-legged, kneeling position, arms extended in front of her and gripping – what’s that? A lion’s head!? Yes, Spears, on the brink of labour, is stretched out on an expensive rug, fashioned out of a dead lion, whose gaping mouth mirrors the slack-jawed, gawping expression I’m making as I look at this breathtakingly awful sculpture.
But wait – there’s more. Perambulate to the back of this immersive scene, and you’ll spot the crowning of a tiny skull, a little Sean Preston making his way into the world. Hurrah for…life? Pro-life or pro-choice is hardly the issue here – I’m amazed that Edwards (who incidentally never met, spoke to, or received consent from Britney) thinks of this as a celebration of life in any conceivable way.
Capitoline Brutus, bronze portrait head, glass-inlaid bone eyes, late 4th to early 3rd centuries BC
The thing is nothing short of hideous – especially given that its face looks more like Benedict Cumberbatch’s than Britney Spears’ – sort of long and waxy and utterly unlike the animated visage of a woman in the throws of labour (or maybe Edwards knows something I don’t).
Perhaps Hambling’s Wollstonecraft isn’t so bad after all – and its good to see neglected figures being recognised at last. Then again, that’s no excuse for settling at poor aesthetics. For as Oscar Wilde once sagely noted, “there is no sin except stupidity” – that, and bad statuary.
