'The Streets our Brushes, the Squares our Palettes'

'A sculpture, however, appears to be totally opposed to the space that surrounds it. Its frontiers with that space are definitive. Its only function is to use space in such a way that it confers meaning upon it. It does not move or become relative. In every way possible it emphasises its own finiteness. And by so doing it invokes the notion of infinity and challenges it.'
John Berger, Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny, Endurance, and the Role of the Artist (1969)



Reading through John Berger's study of the Soviet monumental sculptor Ernst Niezvestny, two things kept coming to mind. One of them was the Statue Park in Budapest, which describes itself as 'Giant Monuments from the time of Communist Dictatorship' and is the city's biggest tourist attraction, advertised seemingly everywhere in English. With the customary post-Stalinist tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater, there is, in amongst some genuinely hideous Stalinist grandiosities, some genuinely great works here: a cubic, robotic International Brigades memorial for instance. Budapest now is, in its public squares, full of 19th century sculptures of medieval Magyar warlords, usually the very works pulled down to make way for plinths for the proletariat.



There was a strange fidelity to the Constructivist art-into-life demand in actually existing socialism, usually via these monuments, placed in council estates, as in the enormous Ernst Thalmann memorial in Berlin, or in public squares or on the sides of buildings as in the Niezvestny scuplture above (top). For Berger it is the reminder of this aesthetic-political leap that made the bureaucracy fear Niezvestny more than liberal painters or avantgardists: because he was working in the same area as them, and by so doing revealing the fundamental falsity of their state and 'realist' aesthetic.



One of the first things the Bolsheviks did in power was to commission monuments to revolutionary heroes: the potential of the early revolution can be seen in how the list encapsulated Bakunin as well as Marx and Robespierre. The other point that lingered when reading Berger's book was on public sculpture in London. The mass of this is of Victorian worthies more or less lost to history, sundry Palmerstons and Shaftesburys plonked in squares and parks or in front of town halls, usually ignorable and utterly ignored by the people that use these spaces- though hooray for Birmingham and their Tony Hancock memorial. A few examples from inter and immediately post-war suggest another, more genuinely communicative and public idea of sculpture, most obviously in those commissioned by London Transport.



There are the series of reliefs on London Transport's headquarters at Charles Holden's 55 Broadway, St James': some Henry Moore, Eric Gill and Eric Aumonier on the edifice's wings, but dominated by huge, lumbering and brutally carnal Jacob Epstein sculptures (more obviously so in fact than those for another Holden building in the Strand, which were mutilated by the Rhodesian government when it moved in). The collision of primitivist and naively modern was continued in other Holden works: East Finchley, as I've mentioned. Lesser but also sometimes quite pretty attempts at this sort of monumentalism were made by the BBC, Eric Gill's wizened beard wearer ushering one into Broadcasting House. Another go at this was made in the LCC Estates or New Towns of the 50s and 60s: usually cutely, timidly abstract, but fantastically incongrous: Harlow in Essex had in its squares and estates one of the best collections of Modernist sculpture in the world, which its council have been lately trying to get rid of.



The thought of Moore aficionados from around the world having to make pilgrimages to the Brandon Estate in Kennington is obviously an enjoyable one, and this shows post-war social democracy in all its paternalism and idealism. Best of these attempts at public art are often in Lubetkin and Tecton's structures, such as the relief in Priory Green or Peter Yates' mural in a Kings Cross council block (near where a bust of Lenin briefly stood). The City's reconquest of London in the 80s brought its own 'public' art of course, and the best place to see this is unsurprisingly at Canary Wharf: innumerable lumps of 'fun' sculpture, usually evoking some awful combination of Jeff Koons and Albert Speer. Only one of these has a certain accidental, horrifying power: a sculpture of hundreds of traffic lights stuck together, where suddenly the true chaotic evil of late capital appears inadvertently clear.