Imperial College Road
If you ever visit the Natural History Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum you’ll know that running between them is the semi-pedestrianised road called Exhibition Road, which runs in a straight line up to a gateway into Hyde Park. Just beyond the entre to the Science Museum, half-way up on the left, is Imperial College Road, a fully pedestrianised street which leads into the open space of Dangoor Plaza. Bang in the middle of the pedestrianised road (as you walk along the pavement towards the car park and the bike racks at the other end) was recently unveiled the latest sculpture by one of Britain’s most famous and media-friendly artists, Sir Antony Gormley OBE RA.
Antony Gormley biography
Born in 1950, Gormley has been extraordinarily productive and has sculptures and installations at sites all over Britain, Europe and the world.
His most famous work is probably The Angel of the North, but you might have heard of Another Place (1997) which consists of 100 cast-iron humanoid figures facing out to sea on Crosby Beach, near Liverpool.
In 1991 Gormley developed a work titled Field consisting of around 35,000 individual terracotta figures, each between 8 and 26 cm high. These toured the world, getting placed in various interesting locations and buildings. In 1994 as many of the little figures as he could fit into the space were shown at Tate, and then at the British Museum, under the name Field for the British Isles. Or you might have caught sight of 2007’s Event Horizon, when he placed 31 life-sized and anatomically correct casts of his own body on top of prominent buildings along London’s South Bank, staring rather spookily down on the rest of us.
Most of Gormley’s works are based on the dimensions of the human body, very often his own body, which he has had cast in fibre glass, more often metal, in all kinds of positions and postures. I caught him on Radio London this morning explaining that he wants people to ponder the fact that we are first and foremost bodies – we like to think of ourselves as ‘people’ and personalities who act on the things we see external to ourselves – but we are only able to do this because we exist, first and foremost, as bodies in space. It is this insight or principle, which his work reverts to, again and again.
Gormley is not only an inventive sculpture but he must also be one of the most personable and articulate living artists. Although his work is, in a sense, remarkably restricted in range (mostly life-size models of the human figure) he can talk about it endlessly and – this is the key thing – always makes it sound fresh and interesting.
ALERT
This new piece in Imperial College Road follows this ongoing interest of Gormley’s in the adult human body, but with a twist. The twist is that it isn’t a naturalistic depiction of the body, but a diagrammatic, schematic one, with the result that, if you didn’t know otherwise, you could easily take it as an abstract piece.
ALERT is a 6-metre-high sculpture which uses stacked and cantilevered blocks of weathering steel to evoke the human form. Gormley regards the work as “the conversion of anatomy into an architectural construction.” The aim is to “re-assess the relation between body and space”.
ALERT is actually based on the posture of Gormley balancing on the balls of his feet while squatting on his haunches. He realised this posture is one of someone watching and waiting and surveying the world around them. It is a posture of being “alive, alert and awake”.
Like most of his sculptures ALERT is made of weathering steel, designed to form a stable oxide coating and an organic hue over time. Rust, to you and me.
The pedestrian precinct where it’s located faces onto a quad or square green space between modern campus buildings. There are plenty of benches around this grassy rectangle which is busy with students going about their day. It’s a nice, relaxed vibe. The pedestrian walkway where it’s located is lined by London plane trees and Gormley hopes that the work will ‘interact’ with them – in the summer “the deep red oxidised surface contrasting with the vivid green of the plane trees’ leaves and in the winter its orthogonal geometry [acting] in consort with the organic inscription of their boughs.”
As usual, reading an artist’s official statement gives quite a misleading impression of what you actually see, because behind the trees and dominating the pedestrian walkway is the steep facade of a tall grey office block in brutalist concrete, which I believe to be the Sir Ernst Chain building. Being a drab metal grey colour itself, ALERT is quite difficult to make out – it certainly matches the brutalist building in colour and design far more than the organic curves and green leaves of the trees.
Location
Most of the road has been completely renovated and pedestrianised as part of a fabulously generous donation of £5 million by former Imperial College students Brahmal Vasudevan (founder and CEO of private equity firm Creador) and his wife Shanthi Kandiah (founder of legal firm SK Chambers), two super high-achievers. ALERT was intended to be the cherry on the cake of this redesign.
In the press release, the couple are quoted as saying they were pleased to work with “JJS Fine Art Ltd, the Gormley studio, White Cube and Imperial College London” to bring this project to life. This is a good point because, of course, Imperial College is one of Britain’s leading centres of excellence in science and engineering and ALERT, in its mixture of art and engineering, is an apt symbol of collaboration across disciplines.
The Queen’s Tower
What none of the press blurb conveys, what you don’t know until you visit the location, is that the nice green space opposite Gormley’s sculpture is dominated by an enormous Victorian building, the Queen’s Tower.
The tower is 287 feet tall, clad in Portland stone and topped by a copper covered dome. You can go inside and climb the 324 steps from the ground to the base of the dome on a narrow spiral staircase, all the way up to the viewing platform at the top with fine views over London in all directions and, in the belfry, a peal of bells! (Admittedly, none of this is open to the public at the moment.) Some photos of it show it lit up with coloured lights at night. In every way this impressive edifice dwarfs the Gormley sculpture into insignificance. When you read about ALERT you think, ‘6 metres, wow, that’s massive’, but if anything it should have been twice the height to begin to compete with either the tower just north of it or the science block immediately south of it.
According to Imperial College, who own the land and the sculpture, ALERT will provide “a point of interest and intrigue”. Well, one of the most intriguing things about the sculpture has been the controversy it’s sparked.
The controversy
One of the funniest things in life is when a roomful of extremely clever people come up with a plan, discuss it, develop it, test it, implement it, roll it out and…it’s only then that anyone outside their group sees it and says, ‘Er, guys…I think we may have a problem. Did none of you notice this?’
To take a recent example, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng working with a small, loyal team at the Treasury and coming up with the bold idea of borrowing huge sums to make unfunded tax cuts including cutting the 45% rate of income tax, and only when he proudly revealed it to completely unprepared financial markets, discovering how catastrophic the impact would be.
Well, on a smaller scale, it was apparently only after this huge, expensive sculpture had been conceived, designed, built and installed in this prestige location that anyone pointed out, “Er… you see the big bit sticking out the front? It looks like a man’s penis…Did none of you notice?’
This is what the creators intended, a stylish, cleverly designed and artfully engineered schematic sculpture of a man squatting down, “alive, alert and awake”.
But this is how some have interpreted it – as a short-legged man with an erect penis sticking out from his body.

Schematic of ALERT showing how the big protuberance could be interpreted as a 3-metre long (metallic, rusty) penis
For what Sir Antony and all his collaborators, his sponsors and the college authorities overlooked is that they were installing this artwork on a university campus, an epicentre of gender politics and super-sensitivity, where a cigar is never just a cigar, where anything anybody says, does, writes, draws or creates has the potential to become a pretext for outrage and grievance. Thus the students union has described the statue as ‘exclusionary’, reinforcing the gross injustice that only 42% of students at the college are female. Time to pop some popcorn in the microwave and enjoy that traditional British pastime, a moral panic about a new artwork:
- The Antony Gormley ‘phallic’ sculpture row is an attack on modern art – and geometry (Guardian)
- Imperial College students try to block installation of statue of a man by sculptor Sir Antony Gormley claiming its squatting knees could be mistaken for a giant manhood and offend women (Daily Mail)
- Woke college students are ‘hurt’ by supposedly ‘phallic’ abstract sculpture (New York Times)
University wits have already renamed the area Dong Plaza. I wonder if the sculpture will be graffiti-ed, or whether angry feminists will splash it with paint or, better still, attempt to cut the protuberance off – although, having walked around it and patted the protuberance a few times, they’d need industrial-scale welding equipment to do that.
At the end of the day, ALERT is just another bit of nondescript modern sculpture in an all-too-familiar drab, metallic, geometric style, dwarfed by the long row of dismal office blocks behind it. If you’re in the area it’s maybe worth going to check it out to see what the storm in a teacup is about, but more to discover the peaceful quad with its lawn and numerous benches, a restful place to sit after a visit to one of the busy museums. But the most impressive sight in the area is the dominating Queen’s Tower. I wonder when they’ll reopen the viewing platform to the public. Now that would be worth a visit.
Related links
- Antony Gormley’s website
- Antony Gormley at the Royal Academy (December 2019)
Only Human by Martin Parr @ the National Portrait Gallery
Born in 1952 in Epsom, Martin Parr has become one of Britain’s most celebrated and successful photographers. He has achieved this by:
Lord Mayor’s Show, City of London, 2013 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos
Massive colour prints
In fact, leafing through the many books on sale in the shop, you realise that his early work, for example shooting chapelgoers in Yorkshire, consisted of relatively small, black-and-white prints. It’s only in the past ten years or so that switching to digital cameras has allowed Parr to make much bigger images, with digital clarity and colour.
And it is hosts of these massive, colour prints of hundreds of images of the great British public, caught in casual moments, going about a wide range of odd, quirky and endearing activities, or just being ugly, fat, old, and scruffy – which make up the show.
Nice, France, 2015. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
Humorous presentation
The exhibition fills the 14 or so rooms of the National Portrait Gallery’s main downstairs gallery space but the first thing to note is how Parr and the curators have made every effort to jazz it up in a humorous if rather downbeat way typical of the man and his love-hate relationship with the fabulous crapness of ordinary, everyday British culture. Thus:
Parr has always been interested in dancing, all kinds of dancing, and the big room devoted to shots of dancers – from punk to Goth, from gay pride to traditional Scottish dancing, to ballroom dancing to mosh pits at a metal concert – the room in which all these are hung is dominated by a slow-turning mirror ball projecting spangly facets on the walls and across the photos.
In the room devoted to beach life one entire wall is completely covered with a vast panorama of a beach absolutely packed with sunbathers in Argentina.
Installation view of the huge photo of Grandé Beach, Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 2014. Note the jokey deckchairs in front.
The Martin Parr café
Half way through the exhibition, the Portrait Gallery has turned a whole room into the Martin Parr café, not a stylish French joint with expresso machine, but a down at heel, fly-blown transport caff, with formica tables and those glass cases by the till which display a range of knackered looking Brandenburg cakes.
You really can buy tea and cakes here (two teas and two pieces of cake for a tenner), or a pint of the ‘Only Human’ craft beer which has been created for the show, read a copy of the exhibition catalogue left on each table, or stare at the cheap TV in the corner which is showing a video of the Pet Shop Boys busking at various locations around London (which Parr himself directed), or just sit and chat.
Buy now while stocks last
The gallery shop has similarly had a complete makeover to look like a cluttered, low-budget emporium festooned with big yellow and red placards proclaiming ‘Pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap’, and ‘Special offer’, ‘Special sale price’, and they have deliberately created the tackiest merchandise they can imagine, including Martin Parr sandals, deckchairs, tea towels, as well as the usual fridge magnets, lapel badges and loads of books by this most prolific of photographers.
Parraphernalia
The first room, before you’ve even handed over your ticket, is jokily titled Parraphernalia:
As Parr’s fame has grown, interest in the commercialisation of his images, name and likeness has grown exponentially. Parr approaches these opportunities with the same creativity he applies to his photography. Early in his career, Parr experimented with alternative methods for presenting his photographs, such as transferring pictures onto ceramic plates and other everyday objects.
Thus you’ll find a wall festooned with t-shirts, pyjamas, tote bags, mugs, posters, plates and so on each covered with a characteristic Parr image.
Stone Cross Parade, St George’s Day, West Bromwich, the Black Country, England, 2017. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
Fotoescultura
Then there’s a room of fotoescultura. What is fotoescultura? I hear you ask. Well:
In 2009, Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide introduced Parr to Bruno Eslava, an eighty-four year old Mexican folk artist, who was one of the last remaining practitioners of the art of fotoescultura (photo sculpture). Hand-carved in wood, and incorporating a photograph transferred onto shaped tin, fotoesculturas are traditionally used to showcase prized portrait photographs in the home, frequently, but not always, of deceased loved ones. Parr commissioned Eslava to produce a series of these playful and affectionate objects to draw attention to the disappearing art of fotoescultura in Mexico.
These take up a wall covered with little ledges on which perch odd-shaped wood carvings with various photos of Parr himself on them.
Installation view of fotoesculturas at Only Human by Martin Parr. Photo by the author
Oneness
And right next to these was a big screen showing the recent set of idents for BBC 1. I had no idea that Parr was involved in making these – although if you read the credit roll at the end you realise the whole thing was researched, produced and directed by quite a huge cast of TV professionals. Presumably he came up with the basic idea and researched the organisations.
In 2016, BBC Creative commissioned Parr to create a series of idents for BBC One – short films between programmes that identify the broadcaster – on the subject of British ‘oneness’. He subsequently travelled throughout England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales photographing volunteer organisations and sport and hobby clubs, which he felt exemplified this quality. Parr’s evolving portrait of modern Britain shows people united by shared interests and passions, and reflects the diversity of communities living in the UK today.
For each subject, both a 30-second film and a still photograph were made. The films were all produced in the same format: participants start by being engaged in their activity seemingly unaware of the camera, pause briefly to face the camera, then return to the activity as if nothing ever happened.
You can watch them on Parr’s website.
Full list of rooms and themes
The rooms are divided by theme, namely:
The Queen visiting the Livery Hall of the Drapers’ Livery Company for their 650th Anniversary, the City of London, London, England, 2014. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
Identity
Regular readers of this blog will know that, although I welcome the weird and wonderful in art (and music and literature) – in fact, on the whole, I am more disposed to 20th and 21st century art than to classical (Renaissance to Victorian) art – nonetheless I am powerfully allergic to a lot of modern art curation, commentary and scholarly artspeak.
This is because I find it so limiting. Whereas the world is big and wide and weird, full of seven and a half billion squabbling, squealing, shagging, dying, fighting, working human beings – artspeak tends to reduce all artworks to the same three or four monotonously similar ‘issues’, namely:
It’s rare than any exhibition of a modern artist manages not to get trapped and wrapped, cribbed, cabined and confined, prepackaged and predigested, into one or other of these tidy, limiting and deadly dull categories.
Many modern artists go along with this handful of ‘ideas’ for the simple reason that they were educated at the same art schools as the art curators, and that this simple bundle of ideas appears to be all they were taught about the world.
About accounting, agriculture, applied mathematics, aquatic sciences, astronomy & planetary science, biochemistry, biology, business & commercial law, business management, chemistry, communication technologies, computing & IT, and a hundred and one other weird and wonderful subjects which the inhabitants of this crowded planet spend their time practicing and studying, they appear to know nothing.
No. Gender, diversity and identity appear to be the only ideas modern art is capable of ‘addressing’ and ‘interrogating’.
Unfortunately, Parr plays right into the hands of curators like this. Because he has spent so many years travelling round Britain photographing people in classic ‘British’ activities (pottering in allotments, dancing, at the beach, at sports tournaments or drinking at street parties), many of them with Union Jacks hanging in the background or round their necks – Parr’s entire oeuvre can, without so much as flexing a brain cell, be described as ‘an investigation into British identity in the age of Brexit’ or ‘an analysis of British identity in the era of multiculturalism’.
And the tired visitor consumes these exhausted truisms and clichés without missing a beat, without breaking a sweat, without the flicker of an idea troubling their minds. For example, see how this photo of bhangra dancers ‘raises questions of British identity.’
Bhangra dancers, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2017, commissioned by BBC One. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
The introduction and wall labels certainly don’t hold back:
This exhibition of new work, made in the UK and around the world, is a collection of individual portraits and Parr’s picture of our times. It is about Britishness and Brexit, belonging and self, globalism and consumption, and raises complex questions around both national and self-identity.
The portraits used were drawn from Parr’s Autoportraits series, also on view in this gallery. By transforming these pictures into shrine-like objects, Parr pokes fun at his own identity. At the
same time, he raises questions about the nature of photography, identity and memory.
Parr’s Autoportraits reflect his long-standing interest in travel and tourism, and highlight a rarely acknowledged niche in professional photography. As Parr moves from one absurd situation to the next, his pictures echo the ideals and aesthetics of the countries through which he moves, while inviting questions. If all photographs are illusions, can any portrait convey a sense of true identity?
Parr shows that our identities are revealed in part by how we spend our leisure time – the sports we watch, the players or teams we support, the way we celebrate victories or commiserate defeat.
These pictures might be called ‘environmental portraits’, images in which the identities of person and place intertwine. Do the clothes we wear, the groups we join, the careers we choose, or the hobbies we enthusiastically pursue, express our personality? Or is the converse true – does our participation in such things shape and define us?
The way we play, celebrate and enjoy our leisure time can reveal a lot about our identities. Questions of social status often sneak into the frame. Whether a glorious opportunity to put on your top hat and tails, or simply an excuse to have a flutter on the horses, this ‘sport of kings’ brings together people from many different walks of life.
The 2016 referendum vote to leave the European Union is not only one of the biggest socio-political events of our time, it is also a curious manifestation of British identity. Politicians on both sides of the debate used the referendum to debate immigration and its impact on British society and culture. At times, this degenerated into a nationalistic argument for resisting change, rejecting the European way of doing things and returning to a more purely ‘British’ culture, however that might be defined.
But for me, somehow, the more this ‘issue’ of identity is mentioned, the more meaningless it becomes. Repeating a word over and over again doesn’t give it depth. As various philosophers and writers have pointed out, it tends to have the opposite effect and empty it of all meaning.
The commentary claims that Parr’s photographs are ‘about Britishness and Brexit, belonging and self, globalism and consumption, and raise complex questions around both national and self-identity.’
But do they? Do they really? Is a photo of some ordinary people standing at random on a beach ‘raising complex questions around both national and self-identity?’
Porthcurno, Cornwall, England, 2017. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
Or a photo of Grayson Perry, or Vivienne Westwood, or five black women sitting on the pavement at the Notting Hill carnival, or two blokes who work in a chain factory, or a couple of fisherman on a Cornish quayside, or toned and gorgeous men dancing at a gay nightclub, or a bunch of students at an Oxford party, or a photo of the Lady Mayoress of London, or of a bloke bending down to roll a bowls ball.
The Perry Family – daughter Florence, Philippa and Grayson, London, England, 2012. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
Does this photo ‘raise complex questions around both national and self-identity?’
I just didn’t think see it. So there’s a lot of black people at the Notting Hill carnival, so Indians like dancing to bhangra music, so posh people go to private schools, so Parliament and the City of London still have loads of quaint ceremonies where people dress up in silly costumes.
And so Parr takes wonderfully off-kilter, unflattering and informal photos of all these things. But I don’t think his photos raise any questions at all. They just record things.
Take his photos of the British at the seaside, an extremely threadbare, hoary old cliché of a subject which has been covered by socially -minded photographers since at least the 1930s. Parr’s photos record the fact that British seaside resorts are often seedy, depressing places, the sea is freezing cold, it’s windy and sometimes rainy, and to compensate for the general air of failure, people wear silly hats, buy candy floss, and eat revolting Mr Whippy ice creams.
None of this raises any ‘complex questions’ at all. It seems to me to state the bleedin’ obvious.
Same goes for the last room in the show which ‘addresses’ ‘the Establishment’ and ‘interrogates’ notions of ‘privilege’ by taking photos of Oxford students, public school children and the Queen.
In all seriousness, can you think of a more tired and predictable, boring and clapped-out, old subject? Kids who go to private school are privileged? Oxford is full of braying public school toffs? As any kind of sociological ‘analysis’ or even journalistic statement, isn’t this the acme of obviousness?
Magdelene Ball, Cambridge, England, 2015. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
In other words, although curators and critics and Parr himself try to inject ‘questions’ and ‘issues’ into his photos, I think they’re barking up the wrong tree.
Photographic beauty
And by doing so they also divert attention from any appreciation of the formal qualities of his photographs, Parr’s skill at capturing candid moments, his uncanny ability to create a composition out of nothing, the strange balances and symmetries which emerge in ordinary workaday life without anyone trying. The oddity of the everyday, the odd beauty of the everyday, the everyday beauty of oddness.
Preparing lobster pots, Newlyn Harbour, Cornwall, England, 2018. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
I don’t think Parr’s work has anything to do with ‘issues of Britishness’ and ‘questions of identity’. This kind of talk may be the kind of thing which gets publishers and art galleries excited, and lead to photo projects, commissions and exhibitions. In other words, which makes money.
But the actual pictures are about something else entirely. What makes (most of) them special is not their ‘incisive sociological analysis’ but their wonderfully skilful visual qualities. Their photographic qualities. The works here demonstrate Parr’s astonishing ability to capture, again and again, a particular kind of everyday surrealism. They are something to do with the banality of life which he pushes so far into Banality that they come back out the other end as the genuinely weird and strange.
He manages a consistent capturing of the routine oddity of loads of stuff which is going on around us, but which we rarely notice.
The British are ugly
Lastly, and most obvious of all – Parr shows how ugly, scruffy, pimply, fat, tattooed, tasteless and badly dressed the British are. This is probably the most striking and consistent aspect of Parr’s photos: the repeated evidence showing what a sorry sight we Brits present to the world.
It’s not just the parade of tattooed, Union Jack-draped chavs in the ‘Brexit’ room. Just as ugly are the posh geeks he photographed at Oxford or the grinning berks and their spotty partners he snapped at the Highland dances. By far the most blindingly obvious feature of Parr’s photographic oeuvre is how staggeringly ugly, badly dressed and graceless the British mostly are.
His subjects’ sheer lumpen plainness is emphasised by Parr’s:
And the consistently raw bluntness of his photos makes you realise how highly posed, polished and post-produced to plastic perfection almost are all the other images we see around us are – from adverts to film stills, posters and billboards, and the thousands of shiny images of smiling perfection we consume on the internet every day.
Compared to all those digitally-enhanced images, Parr has for some time now made his name by producing glaringly unvarnished, untouched-up, unimproved images, showing the British reflections of themselves in all their ghastly, grisly grottiness.
New Model Army playing the Spa Pavilion at the Whitby Goth Weekend, 2014. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
But this is a genuinely transgressive thought – something which the polite and respectable curators – who prefer to expatiate at length on the socially acceptable themes of identity and gender and race – dare not mention.
This is the truth that dare not speak its name and which Martin Parr’s photographs ram home time after time. We Brits look awful.
Video
Video review of the exhibition by Visiting London Guide.
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Posted by Simon on May 12, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/12/only-human-martin-parr-national-portrait-gallery/