meish dot org: life, unfolding

In the great, grim, glorious days of the GLC in eighties london, the South Bank frequently played host to great works of public art, towering over the murky thames, often contrasting starkly with the grey paved and concrete-clad terraces which surround the National Theatre, SBC and Royal Festival Hall.

When conceived the terraces were supposed to be public spaces - for meeting and mingling, seeing and being seen, much like the great piazzas of Italy, and grand moorish plazas of Southern Spain. Unfortunately, London on a wet Saturday afternoon could not be further from these distant, sunny ideals, and the terraces seemed grey and cold, unforgiving and uncomfortable. In the seventies, people chose not to linger.

But soon, some bright spark realised that the terraces provided a perfect location for displaying big artworks - contrasting with the grey paving slabs, river and sky, large against the South Bank skyline.

Have you ever seen that thing attached to the Hayward Gallery that looks like illuminated scaffolding? It’s the Hayward Gallery Neon Tower, a kinetic sculpture designed by Philip Vaughan (structure) and Roger Dainton (kinetics), and it’s still standing after thirty years (Update, August 2008: It’s been taken down).

We arrived in London from Nigeria a few years after it was completed, at the beginning of the decade that taste forgot, but it’s always loomed large in my memories of the South Bank, colorfully twitching in the night sky.

The colours change and shift according to wind speed and direction. When the wind’s in the north, it’s mostly magenta. When it’s in the west, it blows yellow. North is red. South is green. The colours dance with change in winter, flashing through the colour combinations. On hazy summer days, the progressions and shapes thrown are more leisurely and languid altogether.

In 1980, a man called Maurice Agis created a pneumatic sculpture on the lower terrace of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and my mum dutifully ferried us down to the riverside to see it. Well, not so much to see as to experience. Colourspace was an inflatable structure pumped with slowly moving air. It consisted of dozens of differently-coloured chambers made of fairly thin plastic, though which natural light fell, casting livid hues within the structure itself. Visitors were limited, and were given a coloured cloak to wear over their clothes as they wandered through the colourspace, accompanied by dreamlike music, specially composed for the installation. Walking through the chambers, the cloaks took on the colours of the space. People would move from colour to colour, stepping through interlinked chambers. Others would sit for hours in the space, watching, experiencing. Moving, brightly-coloured people became part of the sculpture.

It was quite unique, quite amazing, and I never forgot it. We went back at least three times during that run, and every time it came to London after that, we were there. I’m annoyed because I’ve just discovered that his latest work, Dreamspace, was at Mardi Gras in Finsbury Park last year (along with me and a few thousand others) but I somehow managed to miss it. That’s such a shame - I’ve been waiting for it to come back to London, because I want to know if it was as magical and amazing as I thought when I was six. Few things are.

In 1983, there was a festival of Sculpture in London: Fifty Sculptors at the Serpentine and the South Bank, which in conjunction with the GLC, funded huge public artworks on the South Bank. My most vivid memory of the event is a giant bullet-shaped pink-tiled structure on an upper terrace, set around with handbasins and soap dispensers. People could stand and wash their hands, overlooking the Thames, and from within the structure the sound of running water, caused by the running and draining of the water in the sinks, made delicate haunting music. I had possibly the cleanest hands of any nine year old in London that summer.

Also that year, David Mach built a nuclear submarine entirely out of old tyres on the terrace behind the Hayward Gallery for his contraversial work Polaris. It was enormous, and ripe for climbing. We weren’t allowed to clamber on it, but we were very, very tempted, despite stern notices to the contrary. Later, it was torched by an angry critic who, having set light to the structure, coud not escape, and died in the flames he had lit. There were mumblings about irony, and we weren’t keen to walk around the back of the gallery for years.

More recently, in the late nineties, I huddled in winter clothes to watch video installations projected onto the river-facing wall of the Lyttleton Theatre, including Mark Wallinger as a blind man, swinging his cane and pacing the last few feet of a moving escalator at Angel, reciting from the opening verse of St John’s gospel, over and over. Soon, it became clear that the video was being played in reverse - in the background, people walked backwards down stairs and litter flew into their hands - and that his speech had been recorded backwards, phonetically, which accounted for his strange pronounciation - “Een thab igginning wusTHA wurrd…”

In the last few months alone, I’ve visited the Angel of The North and the newish Blue Pavement at the Laing Gallery (it’s not very blue, until you look down), and have been impressed and encouraged to see that art is gradually making its way out of the galleries, and into the everyday - not just in the form of statues and memorials, but as installations, interactive art, too.

It’s not always popular, but it’s getting increasingly public.