The Angel of the South - part one
Since time immemorial, the White Cliffs at Dover have welcomed peregrines and knights errant back to the British Isles. It is fitting, then, that a landmark is to be built at Ebbsfleet, within sight of the western end of the Eurostar station and on the modern gateway to London, the South East and beyond. The website, with pictures of the designs, is at ebbsfleetlandmark.com.
There are five designs being considered for what has already been dubbed ‘the Angel of the South’ and I have a strong preference for one, although I will briefly mention the other four. They are Mark Wallinger, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Deacon, Christopher le Brun, and Daniel Buren.
Rachel Whiteread is, I think, best known for her installation on the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square, Untitled Monument, but her other well-known work, House, is repeated in her submission. The core of the proposed work is a cast of the interior of an otherwise-ordinary house. I like Whiteread’s art for its habit of making us consider and reconsider the spaces we inhabit; like Antony Gormley’s Blind Light, it draws our attention to how constricting walls define space and how our living spaces affect us.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be seen like that. Rather, it will come across as a fitting description of the UK today: welcome to a land of quiet domesticity, tea-drinking and worrying about house-prices. I don’t think that is what is intended and I certainly don’t think it’s the message we want to give visitors to our shores. There is also the problem of scale; while
The gigantic horse proposed by Mark Wallinger has done most to publicise the project. It picks up on a couple of themes - chalk carvings on hillsides and Horsa, a semi-mythical Saxon invader of Kent. The iconicity test fails because it is too easy to achieve on a graphics programme; indeed, that’s already been done a few times. It’d probably end up with other farmyard animals around London and while I am not necessarily averse to a sheep guarding the M3, it’s not the memorable symbol one might want. Equally, a statue remembering an invader-king is possibly not the welcome note we want by the door-mat.
I find Richard Deacon’s proposal for a skeletal cairn cold and soulless; where a cairn was a welcoming sight for travellers, this is a shell that serves neither as a waymarker or a cache of food. I similarly find Daniel Buren’s stacking concrete cubes to be somewhat cold and clinical and, as many estates and tower blocks in London testify, concrete looks good on paper and its physical properties make it attractive to architects and artists, the result, particularly after weathering, is less attractive.
The proposal from Christopher le Brun is altogether the most fitting. Firstly, it has the potential to be an icon of the South East. The test to apply here is ‘which would look best in a photo’; bathed in the orange light of dawn or the rose light of dusk or with a moon behind it, le Brun’s proposal not only wins hands down but is actually a beautiful, distinctive piece of art; in any light, it would be aesthetically pleasing. Moreover, the wing and circle motif echo rather more important themes than, say, the white horse. The disc, for me, refers back to the entrance the Channel Tunnel, particularly when combined with the travelling, to and fro, represented by the wing. It also seems appropriate given that the Ebbsfleet Landmark has already been christened the Angel of the South.
Models of the proposals will be on show from 27th May at Bluewater shopping centre; I intend to go and so expect more thoughts towards the beginning of next month.
xD.
