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
‘The A2 – the main highway from Dover to London – is the route in and out of the country and has been for millennia. They call it Gateway now. It was the Pilgrim’s Way, it was Watling Street. It was the route followed by everyone who landed in England, from Hengest and Horsa and St Augustine.’ That gets us to the other point that fascinates Wallinger about racehorses: they are the product of careful breeding, in effect genetic engineering. Modern thoroughbred blood stock all descends from three horses, one of which was the Darley Arabian, bought by Thomas Darley in Aleppo in 1704 and taken to Britain. An early series of Wallinger’s paintings, bought by Charles Saatchi, was entitled, Race, Class, Sex, which covered a lot of topics in human society too.
The Ebbsfleet horse will be in the traditional pose of the thoroughbred as painted by Stubbs, a painter who evidently fascinates Wallinger. ‘The Darley Arabian was the progenitor of the race so to speak. These Arab horses were imported then we exported the thoroughbreds to the rest of the world.’
Similarly, people arrived – and continue to arrive, at Dover, travel along the A2 and go on to become part of that complicated human group known to the world as ‘British’. The Anglo-Saxons, led by Hengest and Horsa, did so in the 5th century. Wallinger is delighted to note that ‘Horsa’ means horse, and ‘Hengest’ is Anglo-Saxon for ‘stallion’, very probably because these chieftains – if they existed – worshipped a horse deity. Certainly, some of their predecessors among Britain’s inhabitants did, hence (it seems) the huge figures of white horses cut into the chalk uplands of the south, at Uffington, Westbury and other places. Wallinger was thinking about these too when he proposed the horse, and also one of the most haunting images of mid- 20th-century British art. ‘I think at the back of my mind I had that Eric Ravilious painting Train Landscape (1940) looking out from a third-class railway carriage at a white horse on a distant hill.’
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