Visual arts review: Alexander Stoddart

Published on Monday 13 July 2009 20:09

ALEXANDER STODDART **** HUNTERIAN ART GALLERY, GLASGOW

PUBLIC art is in the news. Anthony Gormley has caught the headlines as he seeks to merge the transience of reality television with the permanent forms of sculpture, offering individuals plucked at random from obscurity an instant of instant fame on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. It is a success for Gormley. It helps him consolidate his own place in the media, first established by his monumental – and monumentally clumsy – Angel of the North, but it does very little for sculpture, the art he claims to profess. Like most modern street art, this exercise is mostly about himself. Indeed that is why so much contemporary public art is so bad. It is not truly public at all. It is private art in a public place. It is like being accosted in the street by some self-obsessed, monumental bore who wants to tell you his life story. One thing Gormley's project does do, however, is remind us that the flip side of Warhol's 15 minutes of fame is a lifetime of obscurity; that the celebrity cult that occupies so much space in our collective consciousness is no more than blowing soap bubbles in the dark. But the stone plinth on which Gormley's temporary heroes disport themselves for their brief hour belongs to a very different culture. It speaks of permanence and elevation. It is a form devised in classical times, if not before, to present a sculpture in stone or bronze that embodies an idea that is quite literally above the casual flow that passes beneath it. It is not constrained by the shortness of the individual life, yet it is also part of life because visible to it. It is an image of aspiration, a window from our temporary existence towards the permanent and the ideal.

Alexander Stoddart has ploughed a lonely furrow to champion that idea of public sculpture: that it should be there to celebrate our heroes and embody our ideals and to remind us that, whatever the fashion of the moment, our lives are shaped by more enduring achievements. Without the work of the great physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, for instance, we would not have understood electromagnetism and so there would probably have been neither television nor computers to power the bubble cult of celebrity.

Clerk Maxwell's statue in George Street, Edinburgh, is the most recent major work by Stoddart to adorn our city streets and some of the preparatory work for this and other recent monuments features in an exhibition at the Hunterian Gallery at Glasgow University. It is a small, but timely tribute to a remarkable artist. When Clerk Maxwell's statue was unveiled at the end of last year, it joined monuments to David Hume and Adam Smith in Edinburgh and other monumental works in Glasgow and elsewhere. Heroes are Stoddart's subject and especially those who have heroically pursued ideas and ideals. His proposal for a monument to the great Communist MP, Willie Gallacher, has, for instance, recently been given planning permission in his home town of Paisley.

With projects like this, he is quietly transforming our streets, bringing into them an iconography to celebrate past heroes who may have been overlooked, but who are there now to focus our present and future aspirations. This is what public art should be about, the collective, the things that we share and that thus bind us into a community. Part of the great strength of the way Stoddart has done this is the ease with which his work takes its place in the existing street architecture. It is grand, yet it makes barely a ripple in the texture of its surroundings. Turning his back on the intensely personal preoccupations of contemporary art, he has emulated the forms and styles of the monumental art of the past and so his work fits seamlessly in our historic townscapes. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he is neither scared of history, nor ignorant of it. Nor is it just a matter of imitation. The works that result from this process are not pastiche. Far from it, the exhibition demonstrates how each project or undertaking is carefully thought through and informed by a deep understanding both of the subject he is dealing with and the history, forms and language of sculpture in which it is to be realised; in short, how the monumental style actually works.

The exhibition is devoted to working models, projects and some exploration of Stoddart's working methods. The latter are themselves fascinating. He has had to teach himself the traditional techniques of sculpture. He works from ideas sketched in clay models, through the stages of more formal models to the point where the whole object has to be scaled up around an armature. In his larger works this is itself a feat of engineering and sheer physical labour. In the processes that then lead up to casting in bronze, much is necessarily lost, but there are one or two monumental fragments here, the heads of Adam Smith and Clerk Maxwell, full-scale in clay, for instance. They give a sense of Stoddart's command of scale and also, seen close-to, the way he strikes a balance between the individual likeness and the ideal.

Some of his work is purely ideal, however. It represents figures from literature or mythology of whom there can be no likeness. Sometimes these are emblematic. The Clerk Maxwell statue has on its plinth, for instance, two reliefs that deploy, in allegory, images of classical deities and mythological figures to illustrate the scientist's own key ideas and his place in the scientific pantheon alongside Newton and Einstein.

As a Scot, however, Stoddart is also determined that our own national mythology is relevant to who we are and so should find fitting expression in the modern world. One of the most impressive objects in the exhibition is a bronze head of Ossian, his hair and beard blowing in the wind and his blind eyes raised towards the sky as he explores the inner visions of his imagination. This is labelled Ossian: In Memoriam to James MacPherson and is linked to a truly monumental project to create a national monument. Ossian was a bardic hero who gave his name to MacPherson's collection of epic fragments. Based on actual Gaelic poetry, these were the publishing sensation of the late 18th century. Since then, MacPherson's Ossian has never been out of print and it has been translated into practically every literary language on earth. That is an achievement that is itself heroic and part of Stoddart's project is that MacPherson himself should be properly acknowledged and not dismissed as he too often is. Beyond that, however, Stoddart wants to give truly monumental form to the heroic stories that the bardic tradition represents. And his idea really is monumental. The proposal takes several forms, but they have in common two things. Firstly that the monument should represent the dying hero, Oscar. He was Ossian's son and lamentation for his death was central to Ossian's own recitation. Secondly, that the monument should be carved on a heroic, even mountainous scale out of the living rock somewhere on the west coast. Whether he achieves this or not, and I hope he does, Stoddart is right about one thing in this and in all his work. Our identity and our success as a community depend on the strength and the richness of our collective imagination and to function properly this imagination needs to find fitting forms of expression for the ideas, myths and memories that hold it together and make it truly collective.

&#149 Until 12 September