January 2009

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So there it is – a public art project with a touch of Harry Potter magic to it, and also a futuristic edge. These seem to be the ingredients of the new wave of public sculpture – if one can generalise from The Angel of the North, Jeff Koons’s Puppy in Bilbao, and this. All three are figurative, indeed blatantly so, but stand for something much more elusive than the old-fashioned variety, which represented famous men, cast in bronze and standing on plinths. They are also, as Wallinger points out, all more ‘bespoke’ than public art was in the era when the artist just took a maquette down to the foundry. Wallinger’s work is so diverse – it includes video, painting, sculpture and performance – that there is not much in his studio – some photographs on the walls, many depicting white horses collaged into fields, a laptop, a kettle. What he mainly does there, one concludes, is think.

His other current sculptural projects are radically unlike the horse. For the Folkestone Triennial this summer he is producing a permanent installation at the top of the cliffs. ‘The piece is going to be called Folk Stones – which I like, it gives a sense of something rather primal.’ It will consist of nine square metres of stones from the beach, cemented in place at the top of the cliff (Fig. 4). They will be numbered by a machine mimicking Wallinger’s handwriting from one to 19,240 – which is how many British troops fell on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. So this is a different kind of mingling of art – minus the numbers, the piece sounds a bit like a Richard Long – with history and memory. The point is that hundreds of thousands of troops embarked there for the western front. From Folkestone, he points out, you could hear the sound of the guns in Flanders.

Another – again quite different – project is for the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford. It takes the form of a wire sculpture resembling both a tree and also ‘a sort of family tree’ (Fig. 5). The obsessive mapping of racehorse genealogies, he suggests, plays a part in this. Viewed as a family tree, the sculpture goes back through 17 generations to the foundation of the college in the 15th century.