Think of England
Mark Wallinger’s proposal for a 50-metre-high sculpture of a white horse at Ebbsfleet, Kent, has captured the headlines. He talks to Martin Gayford about public art, national identity and bloodstock.
Martin Gayford, Sunday, 29th June 2008
It came to him, Wallinger told me when I visited his south London studio – situated in a suitable ideological no man’s land between the Secret Service headquarters and the Oval cricket ground – ‘quite organically and quickly for lots of reasons’. For one, he himself comes from similar terrain. He was born in Chigwell, north of the river, in 1959: ‘Being from Essex I feel a certain amount of affinity with the Thames Estuary and its rather scarred post-industrial landscape.’ Moreover, Wallinger is and always has been – this is an important point about his work – a fancier of horse flesh. ‘I find horses incredibly beautiful’, he told me years ago, at our first conversation. ‘The jockey Lester Piggott was a great hero of mine. There was something about that poise and the almost supernatural relationship of the rider with this other animal. I still get a bigger buzz out of seeing a great horse than a great athlete, which may be a bit peculiar. There was a very visceral call for me.’
‘I’ve always been a racing fan, and for a long time I just wanted to keep that separate from my work. And in a way I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed it so much since I brought them together.’ But bring them together he did, so that racing and horses were an important theme in his earlier work – in paintings, video works and at one point a genuine racehorse, declared a Duchampian ready-made, and dubbed A Real Work of Art.
So, to Wallinger, the Ebbsfleet site seemed not just a bit of estuary rust-belt, strewn with elderly cement factories, but also a place with a topographical connection with Epsom. ‘The North Downs are tailing off here, and on the North Downs the Derby is run.’ So the horse is a subject with emotional meaning for him. It’s also subtle, and contemporary.
The characteristic next step is the way Wallinger goes on to make the ancient symbol of the horse, which in itself is verging on chauvinist – indeed, it happens to be the emblem of the county of Kent, in which Ebbsfleet is situated – into a metaphor for the complexity and contradictions of national identity.
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