"Shall I be mean about British art? Okay. Realism and literature haunts almost all British art."

"I surmise that the capacious feel for language, narrative, and drama that seems to be inculcated in the British brain causes a lot of British art to fall into clever commentary, agitprop, or academicism — or be pulled back into realism. Great Britain’s is a primarily literary art; this doesn’t work well visually. I further surmise that abstraction is not foremost in the British mind. So much for my silly xenophobia. The real answer for why most public sculpture is bad — and why this keeps happening with art, much architecture, and too many governments — is bureaucracy and populism and the rule of the common denominator, a need to not offend, to please, to be liked (at least by the people making the choice), to be popular, and to not change. It defaults to the 'traditional values' of whatever white hegemony dominated that culture 150 years ago — at the apex of American and European colonialism. When it comes to public sculpture, this usually means hackneyed figurative art that claims to signify or represent an idea or person but really only represents lazy and regressive ideas."

 From "The Mary Wollstonecraft Monument in London Is Bad Kitsch Feminism" Jerry Saltz (New York Magazine). For more on the specific sculpture, listen to yesterday's podcast or read — and look at the pictures in — this post of mine. Saltz calls the sculpture "solemn, shallow, feebleminded, and homely" — and "a whirl of metal with a naked genie popping out of the top — strangely and inappropriately ejaculatory."

"I decided to befriend the crisis and give it a name — Locky Lockdown."

Said Maggi Hambling, in a May interview in the Times of London, which is popping up on my screen today because — as you can see, 2 posts down — we're talking about her sculptural tribute to Mary Wollestonecraft.  

Back then, she'd painted a self-portrait and called it "Angry" — her "lockdown self-portrait... about my rage at what’s happened, about the way every plan that I had has gone completely to pot.... We’re living under this dark threat... And yet at the same time we are aware of how good this time is; how the roads and the skies are not buggered up by cars and planes. And even as we are scared that we are going to die, we watch this lovely spring with its flowers and its leaves and its dawn chorus of birds. Life is always uncertain. But never more so than now. The uncertainty has been so concentrated, brought before our eyes in such a dramatic way. And, as a control freak, of course that at first made me furious. That’s why I painted that 'Self Portrait (Angry).'... Meanwhile, I’m still alive and time is all that I’ve got. Once I got to 60, even I who gave up arithmetic at the age of 11 had to realise that I was past the halfway mark."

And, I like this: "[I]n the 1990s a longstanding female admirer died and, much to Hambling’s surprise, bequeathed her a Suffolk cottage and its adjoining water meadows." Did anyone not a member of your family ever die and leave you anything — I mean, even $1,000? She gets a Suffolk cottage and adjoining water meadows?! 

"She likes jokes. She likes the one David Hockney told her once. It goes: 'The trouble with Van Gogh is if you tell him something it goes in one ear and stays there.'"

"She laughs again.... Maggi, I exclaim, you are smoking again! Didn't you give up five years ago? She says she did but last year, on her birthday, her large bronze sculpture of a rising wave was being erected, and it was fraught, and 'I thought: fuck it. It's my birthday. I'll smoke.'... She smokes with sensational gusto... I can't stand namby-pamby, take-it-or-leave-it smokers. I call them 'crap smokers' and Maggi is not a crap smoker.... 'I think I was once put forward to paint the Queen Mother but the word came back saying I was a bit risky, so it didn't happen.' Perhaps they thought you'd seduce her. 'She was very fond of gentlemen.' She could have painted Margaret Thatcher but didn't bother. Some big Conservative association wanted her to do it but she refused.... As a sculptor, Maggi's public works include her Charing Cross memorial to Oscar Wilde – it shows him rising from a sarcophagus.... Critics seem to loathe Oscar.... Would you have liked to have been a mother, Maggi? 'The thing of actually giving birth to this thing that's been inside you for nine months must be quite an event,' she says. 'And I've always said that if ever a painting was crying out in one room and a baby was crying out in another, I'm animal enough to go to the baby... it sounds corny but it's true... my works are my babies... '... Did your parents accept you being gay? 'My mother had a great problem with it... she hated saying the word lesbian, and I don't like it either. I prefer lesbionic or dyke....'" 

I'm reading "Maggi Hambling: 'I was put forward to paint the Queen Mother but the word came back saying I was a bit risky'/As a painter and sculptor, she’s an art-world legend – but as our intrepid interviewer discovers, Maggi Hambling's private life is every bit as colourful as her work" (The Independent). 

That's from 2010. I got there from Wikipedia, where I went because Hambling — whom I'd never heard of — is trending on Twitter this morning because....

"People Are Furious Over This New Statue of Pioneering Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in London/The internet wishes she were a bit less nude" (ArtNetNew).

Genuine question: Why present Mary Wollstonecraft as naked?
I’ve seen many statues of male writers, rights activists and philosophers and I can’t remember any of them being bare-assed. https://t.co/CNUmBgzldD

— Aunty Malorie Blackman (@malorieblackman) November 10, 2020

Was Hambling's tribute to Oscar Wilde more respectful? He's rising out of a tomb.