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14th July 2008
Middlesbrough: deep,
mysterious and wonderful.
Is it a bird? Is it a
plane? Is a condom crossed with a hair
net with one end chopped off? No. It’s Temenos.
Fear it. Despite sounding like a
minor adversary of Doctor Who, Temenos is the first of five massive sculptures
planed for North East England’s best loved beauty spots; Middlesbrough,
Stockton, Redcar, Hartlepool and Darlington.
Or the Teesside Rivera as they are better known. By an addled tramp eating pigeons on a park
bench in Hartlepool. But Temenos is set to challenge the drug
dependent, prostitute infested, nuclear infused, culturally and intellectually retarded
image of the North East. Indeed, once
the last of the ‘The Tees Valley Giants’ has been completed, the construction team
are rumoured to be turning their attention to Chernobyl,
or ‘the glowing heart of Russia’.
Of course it’s easy to scoff. The chemically enhanced quinumvirate are at a
distinct disadvantage in the glamour department. But are £15 million worth of giant sculptures
the way to go in reinvigorating an area?
Stockton-on-Tees is the home of the
friction match. I know this because it
says so on a roundabout which has a large sculpture of a match atop a match box on
it. But am I inspired to start burning
things?
Temenos is the creation of Turner prize wining artist Anish
Kapoor and is ‘a pole, a circular ring and an oval ring, all held together by a
kind of cat's cradle of steel wire’. It
will nestle snugly between the iconic yet utterly crap Transporter Bridge and
the Riverside Stadium, home of the iconic yet utterly crap Middlesbrough FC.
Structural engineer Cecil Balmond thinks people will respond to Temenos with ‘a
kind of awe’ showing a fine ear for the North East accent as awe is often
employed in the sense of “aww it’s fukin
shite, like.” Which does tend to be the
reaction of the good folk of Teesside to strange, expensive and challenging
sculpture. Because the public artwork
method of rejuvenation has been tried here before. The Bottle O’ Notes, a public sculpture by
artist Claes Oldenburg, stands proudly in Middlesbrough town centre proclaiming ‘Kelly iz lush’ and ‘Fatboy suks cocks’. Which Claes
Oldenburg may not have intended. There’s also the Middlesbrough Institute of
Modern Art, 'Spectra-txt’, a 10 metre high interactive tower of metal and
fibre-optics, a rather fine Carnegie library and a very nice park. In short, Middlesbrough isn’t the culturally deprived wasteland it’s usually portrayed as. It’s just that a lot of the population act as
though it is. Sometimes it’s the people
that need redeveloping rather than the area.
Perhaps a more provocative sculpture is required. The stretchy string vest is all well and
good, but a fifty foot Gregg’s pasty fashioned out of marble could goad Teessiders
into filling their minds with culture rather than pastry.
It’s not that we at the BoF are innately opposed to
expensive public art. On the contrary,
when it was announced £100,000 was to be spent on staff training in a certain
library authority the BoF campaigned vigorously for an alternative way to spend
the money - buy a huge, bronzed phallus to put on the library roof with the
motto 'Library: We've got the cock, have you got the balls?' Sadly our proposal was not green lighted by
the local council, but the dream lives on.
And there is without fail one irritant that is guaranteed an airing in
discussions about public art. Must be
around here somewhere. Ah, here it is;
“£15 MILLION POUNDS. Could someone
calculate how many Nurses could be trained and employed for how many years with
that amount?” Because if something isn’t
paying for nurses it’s obviously a monstrous waste of public money. Gardens, parks, theatres, museums? Pah, How many nurses could they have paid
for. I’ve got to go and sell my car so I
can pay for more nurses. £15 million
also pays for about ten people to fanny about in meetings in council offices
without the debate, employment and inspiration of Kapoor’s string condom on a stick. But the ‘if in doubt build a large and
mockable art installation’ seems, paradoxically, unchallenging and tired. How about a botanical garden? A verdant arboretum? A lovely owl sanctuary. At least give the people somewhere nice to
eat their pasty.
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