Thursday 14 March 2013

One Hyde Park SW1

Sculpture can be difficult to photograph, especially if you can't get the angle you want. In the case of these figures I couldn't decide which angle is best.
From the side, showing the artful way the circles intersect? From the front, where they look a bit like Easter Island gods? I don't know, so here are all the pictures. You decide.
I also can't decide if they are true art or pretentious rubbish.
The fact that the figures are displayed outside the Candy Bros Occasional Home for the Stupendously Rich tends to indicate that they were bought off the shelf from the same dealers that supply Ramada hotels with all that stuff they put in their foyers. But that may be my prejudice.
The work is called Search for Enlightenment, and is by the British artist Simon Gudgeon. They are male and female, which you can easily see because the male has an Adam's apple the size of Suffolk. Their brains are empty, waiting to be filled with enlightenment.
The faces are expressionless but have genuinely individual features.
Expensive certainly. Good or bad?



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I agree that sculpture is hard to photograph successfully and the larger and more complex the piece, the more this is the case. As you walk around it looking at the sculpture, the eye-brain makes the connection between the different viewpoints so that what you "see" is actually an impression of completeness. A photo is almost always going to be a disappointment. That said, I think you managed to catch the essence with your views.

As for the art-or-rubbish dilemma, I am only too exercised by this myself. On the one hand, I know that each generation tends to reject the new and appreciate the past but, on the other, I think I have solid grounds (logical and aesthetic) for rejecting much modern art as, in your phrase, "pretentious rubbish".

The good news is that if artists have the right to stick an "Art" tag on practically anything, then we have an equal right to dismiss it as rubbish.