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Okay, the Olympics have finished, but imagine for a moment they have not and
you are in the arena, watching the final of the heavyweight championship of
culture — an almighty scrap involving two of the world’s most notable art
forms. In the red corner, we have painting — glamorous, agile, flashy,
famous and covered with bling. In the blue corner, there is sculpture — big,
honest, tough, muscular and experienced. Who would you pick to win? Who, in
the end, deserves to be recognised as the more important art form?
Painting would probably take the first round with its showy sidesteps and
smooth moves. Backed by Roman Abramovich (who recently began investing
heavily in the kid, alongside a consortium of Chinese, Indian and now
Brazilian backers), this new boy on the culture block (oil paints were
invented only 600 years ago) would skip hither and thither, jabbing skimmy
punches into sculpture’s worn and wrinkled face.
Sculpture, meanwhile, would plod on relentlessly, as it has done since the
beginning of time, caring little about the odd slap because it has been
through a lot worse so often before. After all, there has never been a
period in human history when sculpture was not there. Indeed, there isn’t an
inhabited place on earth that does not have a sculptural tradition of some
sort to celebrate.
As painting’s flashy slaps rain in on it, sculpture ignores them. It is used
to being pulled off pediments and having chunks broken off it. Why, it can
even get by without any arms. By the end of round two, the referee is forced
to step in and stop the fight because painting has slumped to the canvas in
a messy, abstract-expressionist heap, utterly exhausted and unable to
continue. It was no contest. Sculpture wiped the floor with the young
pretender.
Another good programme to watch on television if you need to be reminded of
the importance of sculpture is the news. When Trevor McDonald emphasises
sculpture’s criticality on News at Ten — as he often does — you are more
likely to listen than if you hear me banging on about it in my new series. I
am obviously partisan, and you, perhaps, don’t do the arts. Sir Trevor, on
the other hand, is the voice of the truth, right? Yet see how many newsy
occasions there have recently been when he has had to deal with sculpture’s
international significance. For instance, the Taliban’s barbarous decision
to blow up the world’s largest statue, the Buddha of Bamiyan, is a
television spectacle I will never forget. The Islamist loonies even had the
nerve to ensure a cameraman was on hand to record them doing it.
Wind forward a few years to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and those
extraordinary images of Saddam’s statue being hauled from its plinth and
dragged across Baghdad by screaming Iraqis will surely press into your
thoughts. I still remember the scary hatred in the eyes of these
contemporary Roundheads as they danced and trampled on Saddam’s badly
sculpted face. When the Berlin Wall came down, Sir Trevor was on hand again
to describe the anger being vented on statues of Lenin all the way across
the former communist world. There are even those — and I would count myself
among them — who remember 9/11 as a sculptural event, in which two sleek
totems of architectural minimalism were reduced to rubble by the ultimate
act of fiery, philistine iconoclasm. The fact is, no other art form has been
as intimately involved in the international unravelling of humanity. The
news reminds us constantly of the unique relationship that sculpture has to
our history.
For the past year or so, I’ve been making a television series on exactly this
subject. It’s not that I am against painting or anything stupid like that,
but I do feel that a regrettable confusion of values has somehow pushed
painting ahead of sculpture in the global weigh-in. The Monopoly cash being
spent on paintings by Abramovich and his pals is silly money in any
currency, but its perversity is heightened by the fact that it is being
spent on the wrong product. If it were being spent on ancient sculpture from
Mesopotamia, then at least some proper and adult values would be being
reflected.
Mind you, at various points I found myself wishing I had kept my mouth shut on
this topic and stayed at home with my paintings, because one of the chief
characteristics of sculpture is the uniquely impactful relationship it
shares with its surroundings. Sculpture can be just as portable as painting,
and often has been. But it usually chooses not to be. If you wish to gather
proof of the potency of sculpture by seeing the remnants of the great Buddha
the Taliban blew up, you need to brave war zones and go to Bamiyan. If you
want to see sculpture being hewn out of mountains to create a society, then
attacked violently for failing that society, you have to voyage to the most
remote island on earth: Easter Island. Sculpture and short cuts don’t go
together. There is no easy way to carve stone or whittle wood or mould clay
or build Stonehenge. Sculpture demands an effort from all the parties
involved that we seem no longer to appreciate. Indeed, one of the reasons
why the great messages of sculpture are so regularly lost on us is surely
because we have become a pop-out-and-buy society that no longer remembers
the deep pleasure of making things with our hands.
The other point I want to make in the series is that all this extra effort and
extra urgency give sculpture an extra potency. Voodoo masters and witch
doctors do not stick pins into paintings: they stick them into sculptures.
For a very good and ancient reason: sculpture has a power other art forms do
not. The relationship it has with the human body is uniquely visceral and
edgy. The fact that it occupies the same space as we do gives it a magical
presence a painting cannot match. When I say sculpture has a long history, I
mean a long history. According to the Bible, you are a sculpture, and so am
I. Both of us are the descendants of the first man, Adam, whom God fashioned
out of a lump of clay the day after he finished making the Earth. God patted
the clay into a likeness of himself, and voilà: a human. The first female,
Eve, was a sculpture, too. God thought Adam looked lonely, so he took one of
his ribs and made a woman. Eve, therefore, was more of an assemblage. But
that is still a sculpture. And we, her descendants, are still
mini-sculptures.
What is significant here is not the fact that our ancestors made up these
charming nonsenses to explain their origins, but that they chose to imagine
those origins in such strongly sculptural terms. The Bible sees Adam as a
divine work of sculpture, and this is something we need reminding of outside
the dotty confines of a creationist schooling. The best place in Britain to
see important sculpture that was created to do important things is the
British Museum, which is packed to the rafters with the stuff.
Since sculpture has never had a Dark Age — and has never not been made — and
because every society everywhere has always produced it, the BM has no more
chance of covering the entire history of sculpture in its displays than I
have in my short television series. But it has a go. Personally, I would
love the museum to mount a display devoted to the colour of ancient
sculpture that revealed how the Elgin Marbles were originally brightly
painted. If the Elgin Marbles were as they should be, it would be so much
easier to recognise the similarity that exists between them and, say, the
African tribal sculpture from which they were descended.
That is the thing about sculpture: it is the product of the international
family of man, the Esperanto of the arts. The BM has at least allowed me to
import some contemporary sculpture into the place, to bring its story up to
date, and in October you will be able to see various modern interventions
being made around the museum in a show, Statuephilia. Watch out for a
life-sized Kate Moss, sculpted in gold by Marc Quinn, taking her place among
the Venuses, and a cabinet full of painted skulls added to the Enlightenment
Gallery by Damien Hirst.
The Sculpture Diaries, 7pm, tonight, Channel 4; Statuephilia, British
Museum, WC1, October 4-January 25, 2009
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