The city as sculpture. (Academy Forum).

This report by Jeremy Melvin records the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Arts Architecture Forum, which investigates concerns common to contemporary artists and architects. Held at the Royal Academy in London, the most recent forum explored the relationship between architecture and sculpture. The series is sponsored by Derwent Valley Holdings plc.

Is the city a work of art, as distinguished urban historian Donald Olsen suggested? Jacob Burckhardt, who more or less invented the discipline of cultural history in the nineteenth century, would certainly have had no doubt. In his Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy he described how even a state might become a work of art, though by art he meant something slightly different to the interpretation which has become common at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To Burckhardt, art described the product of artifice, and one of the great developments of the Renaissance was that every part of the state was subject to conscious thought and decision. Cities clearly follow a Burckhardtian definition of works of art, but are they or can they be considered as works of art in the contemporary sense? If so, when London has never been more vital as a centre of contemporary art and when artistic activity is making a significant contribution even to regeneration of areas like Hoxton, why is there so little contemp orary sculpture in the public realm? Art has retreated into museums -- 'not very different from hospitals', as Antony Gormley put it, 'where things are looked after' -- leaving unchallenged the plethora of Victorian bronzes on their plinths as the dominant image of public statuary.

With this paradox the art critic Richard Cork opened the first of the Academy Forum's pair of discussions on 'The City as Sculpture: from skyline to plinth', immediately highlighting the tension between the totality of the city and the particularities of artistic practice. The two speakers, sculptors Phyllida Barlow and Antony Gormley, delved into this problematic relationship from different directions. Barlow offered an insight into the paradoxes of experiencing the city as an object and the responses sculptors might make, and Antony Gormley outlined how sculpture can serve as a unifying, almost totemic, social purpose but only when it consciously engages with the public realm. In the second event, chaired by artist David Ward, architects Eric Parry, Ian Ritchie and Kathryn Findlay outlined their perceptions of and the sensibilities they bring to the urban realm, followed by a response from the Royal Academy's professor of sculpture, David Mach.

What emerged from the presentations and contributions from the floor, notably from sculptor Bill Woodrow and the Academy's Exhibitions Secretary Norman Rosenthal, was not so much a clear distinction between architecture and sculpture as a plurality of opinions with some analogies to readings of the modernist city. One of the hallmarks of the modern city is its fragmentation, and if architects' initial response to modernity was to try to assert their control by seeking to unify the entire urban environment, more recently they have begun to realize that much remains immune to their influence. No single solution or approach will work; rather there is a need for a pattern of strategic alliances which evolves according to contingent circumstances. Civilization's internal disequilibrium, Ian Ritchie cited, with reference to Stanley Diamond, is what 'propels the system forward and gives us progress'. So if architecture as a discipline has its limitations, it follows that other disciplines, be they highway engineeri ng, planning or sculpture, should be seen as potential components of the city.

Over the two sessions the similarities and differences between architectural and sculptural practice coalesced around three essential themes. One was the ways of interpreting and treating the physical object; the second concerned attitudes to space, its organization, uses and purposes, while the third concerned alternative views of the relationship between architecture and sculpture, and the possibilities for collaboration.

The object

Antony Gormley's ascribing of great power to sculptural objects contrasted with Kathryn Findlay's preference for describing Ushida Findlay's buildings, often described by critics as sculptural, as processes. For Gormley 'sculpture has always tried to link an imaginative object with a physical place and do it in an absolute way'. Japanese cities, Findlay suggested, where the 'distinction between landmark and ephemera is blurred', dissipate the power of objects into a myriad of tiny elements and experiences. Somewhere between these poles sat Eric Parry. Having suggested from the floor at the first event that architecture and sculpture come together in the 'theatre of the city, the way the city is used', his talk 'Beyond the Object' explored the relationship between history, contemporary patterns of use, and objects as links or mnemonic stimuli. For Parry, objects may not have the absolute completeness which they have for Gormley, but they are still necessary components in an experience which Findlay, at least i n the Japanese city, sees as entirely dissolved within the nebulous fabric.

Phyllida Barlow also proposed a fluctuating relationship between object and city, but one depending on the position of the viewer. Seeing the 'city as an object' from vantage points like Primrose Hill and Walthamstow Marshes, 'conceals its most object-like qualities'. From within, the city acquires sounds and smells and assumes the character of a stage set, until this 'choreography' collapses, 'the skin erupts ... innards and the city itself seep out' to reveal the anthropomorphized 'object-like qualities' of a human body. But sculpture has one more arrow in its quiver. A work like Walter de Maria's Vertical Earth Kilometre, 'embedded in the earth's surface', leaves its length to the imagination, piercing 'into the bowels of the city, penetrating the skin which so precariously holds the innards within'. For Barlow it demonstrates 'the power of sculptural objects, incomplete, unresolved physical experience, but where all senses are aroused'.

In commenting that 'architects don't think like sculptors, we don't see form and don't touch materials in the same way', Ian Ritchie may have made an obvious point, but the precise nature of these differences is important. Sculptors would probably not find significance in his monument in Dublin having 'no detail, so the rainwater can run straight down', as his architectural sensibilities, honed on the practicalities of waterproofing, make it to him. But they might respond to his evocative description of the monument as 'celestial acupuncture', motivated by wanting to 'get to those [wonderful Irish] skies and bring the light back to the ground'. This illustrates a connection for the imagination that Gormley would recognize, although if the physical connection disappeared in the effect, it would be close to Findlay's perception of the dissipation of object within process.

Gormley identified a distinction between sculptural and architectural objects. 'Architecture', he claimed, 'does not necessarily achieve art, but it can combine an understanding of human scale, the body, light and how it can penetrate form. Really great architecture is about creating wellbeing, the best decoration a building can have'. Sculpture 'acts as a witness, holding human feeling and thought and inscribes it within geological time'. The great challenge 'in a time of loss and deconstruction of grand narrative' when 'notions of freedom and democracy can no longer be embodied in one man' -- even if that man is Nelson Mandela, is to meet 'the need for the totemic'. With its 'primitive and atavistic qualities', sculpture can 'talk about the deepest fears and profound hopes'. The Angel of the North is 'not simply a guardian angel', but 'crucified by the wings it bears, [it] speaks of transition', while the pieces within the walls of Derry in Northern Ireland 'draw energies to itself, possibly becoming the f ocus of reconciliation'.

Space

Sculpture could not have the power Gormley assigns to it without its position within the community, precisely within public space. The superficial distinction, that architects necessarily have to deal with the urban context while sculptors can choose to avoid it, conceals much more complicated variations. David Mach has even exhibited in the unlikely location of 'the ashtray of a Hillman Imp'. He finds galleries 'clinical, remote and boring' and tries to 'work in very public spaces', such as the interior of a train in Amsterdam or inside a brothel -- 'cries of "Yes Yes Yes Yes" really concentrate the mind'. Gormley might also deride museums as art hospitals, but when Richard Cork asked Phyllida Barlow directly whether she thought art needs 'protection from the hurly-burly of the city', she replied emphatically, 'Yes', citing as an example Hans Haake's Standort Merry Go Round at the 1997 Munster Sculpture Exhibition. And even architects do not agree among themselves as to the nature of desirable engagement. Ia n Ritchie admitted to having great difficulty in designing projects such as speculative office blocks which do not have an explicit end-user. But Eric Parry argued that as '80 per cent of the city is taken up with workplaces', architects should address them on their own terms, just as George Dance designed Gower Street where 'everyone lives differently behind similar facades'.

Again these initial positions resolve into a complex and shifting interaction of views about the nature of urban space. Parry and Gormley both suggested, in different ways, that urban spaces have latent characteristics with which sculpture and architecture should engage. For Parry these might lie in mnemonic traces of history or in the annually re-enacted Easter Parade in the Sicilian town of Enna, and can be crystallized in spaces such as the small shrines which stud Bombay's urban fabric. Parry finds poetry in the pavement and when 'urban artefacts become part of street performance ... the idea of art in a city being monumental or permanent is defied by the amazing and imaginative uses of the city'. His monument and visitors' centre near London Bridge Station captures this sense. At once specific and even prosaic in function as an information centre which might help visitors to envisage an almost vanished past, the inclined stone spike monument lacks an obvious programmatic function but has become part of skateboarding lore.

For Bill Woodrow, commenting on his piece on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square, it was the form of the space itself, rather than the patterns of use, which bore on the possible object. Working in bronze evoked another layer of context. The material of the numerous nearby Victorian heroes, it carries an indelible historical burden irrespective of any form it might take.

Parry singled out Gormley's Fathers and Sons as a piece which 'challenges the everyday in underground space', bearing out Gormley's suggestion that one role of art is 'to confront and subvert perhaps ... to infiltrate rather than to confirm public space'. Iron: man in Birmingham and the piece within the Derry Walls demonstrate the strategy of infiltrating physical space with physical objects, in ways that change the perceptions and social attitudes which created and are reinforced by those spaces. Iron: man sinks up to his knees in the ground, but has a dialogue with Queen Victoria who surmounts a plinth. Devised as an 'expression about the Industrial Revolution and the material wealth of Birmingham', it attempts to create a 'collective image of the city' whose physical form challenges observers to re-examine the urban fabric, what it stands for and the processes which generated it.

Speaking of choreography where Parry spoke of theatre, and echoing Gormley's view that the physical sculptural object might lead to perceptions beyond its physical limits was Phyllida Barlow. And if from the distance she saw the city as an object, close to its object-like appearance dissolved into a myriad of fragmentary images. Kathryn Findlay, in her reading of Tokyo, found a social and functional justification to this dissolution. 'The city is a multiple of infinitesimally small, habitable spaces behind an illuminated and animated fabric', but 'the light you see is not like Las Vegas or Piccadilly Circus, but the dissolution of living functions across the city'. Urban life offers numerous relationships that are not especially sculptural but which can be noticed within buildings, such as the way the architect of a cosmetic company headquarters reflected the green railway embankment into the foyer, creating a 'peaceful, calm space but with a dynamic relationship to the city'. In these circumstances, the 'di stinction between building, city and art become irrelevant'.

Findlay pointed out that 'Japanese cities, made by a far more hierarchical society [than the West] actually have a multiplicity of hand' in their design. This is the complete antithesis to the vogue in Western urban developments for 'masterplanning'. Architect, masterplan, axis, stop thinking, is often the sequence, claimed Ian Ritchie, 'put things left, put things right' and then fill up the space with water. Elizabeth Frink's Horse and Rider at the corner of Dover Street and Piccadilly shows the lack of thought, for just in front of the piece is a brass plaque reading 'smoke outlet'; or the corporate square at Canary Wharf, where 'sculpture is on a stone plinth exactly like the buildings'. What is left over at the pavement level, on this corporate model, says Ritchie, 'is not dissimilar to the skyline; money dictates where and how we produce spaces'.

Collaborations

Collaboration between architects and artists might sound a tempting way to overcome this bleak scenario, but it is not an easy panacea. Barlow wondered whether there is a conflict of interest precisely around the issue of space. Sculptors, she explained, 'see space as a physical substance to be manipulated' but wondered, 'do architects see it as just a void?' Ritchie found a different difficulty in 'the collaboration myth ... it's like man meets woman, get married, have babies ... artists need more courage'. The real difference between architecture and public sculpture, he speculated, is that the former has working lavatories. David Mach wondered why architects 'invite me in to be some kind of act', making 'me want to put on a balaclava and swing in on a rope ...'

Richard Cork prompted a less bleak but still problematic view of the relationship when he asked Eric Parry about the intended Richard Deacon ceramic piece entwined, like the snakes encircling Laocoon, around the stone facade of Parry's building in Finsbury Square. 'I've learnt an incredible amount about materiality thought collaboration', responded Parry, 'a lot of thinking about interiors stems from it'. Separating the stone and glazing into two layers in the Finsbury Square building means the outer layer of stone can achieve a precision which conveys the essence of its material, and Parry thought Deacon 'the person for the intensity of cut stone'. Even so, with or without Deacon's piece, the facade achieves a poetic quality specifically tuned to the modern city: the subtle variations of the stone contrast with the regular division of the glazing behind. Parry found the experience of designing a pair of studios for Antony Gormley and Tom Phillips a 'fantastic part of my education', though Gormley discerned another issue of contention. The great struggle of artists in the twentieth century was to establish that art is self-determining, undermining any attempt at collaboration or indeed working in public space. It is this condition which he is trying to reverse.

David Ward introduced the second session with a pair of 'defining and influential artworks'. In Josef Beuys' 7000 Oaks, each was planted alongside a basalt block which they eventually outgrew, and Gordon Matta Clark's Conical Interest was a conical aperture cut through houses before they were demolished to make way for the Pompidou Centre. The second, he suggested, was a 'reversal of the sculptor's sculpture, creating spaces to allow these contributions to reveal themselves'. Here, perhaps the most intensely sculptural practice might come round in full circle close to Kathryn Findlay's position. Denying a sculptural intention in her fluid forms, her work nonetheless has formal and contemplative similarities to the Conical Intersect.

Architecture and sculpture appear necessarily to have a problematic relationship, partly because both can lay claim to the production of physical objects. Left to themselves, they would probably overlap at the edges, but when both try to engage with the modern city this relationship acquires a flux and dynamism, offering potential for interaction which may conflict or reconcile. In this maelstrom of the modern world, human nature inevitably leads some people to search for easy solutions and to offset responsibility to others. Bill Woodrow asked if this urge lay behind some architects' desire to 'collaborate' with artists. 'Are collaborations too easy?' he wondered, adding, 'I'm beginning to sense that the role of the artist is to move away from collaboration and explore new areas. The world of architecture has realized it has problems and is looking to other people to solve them. But ultimately architects will have to solve them themselves'. In accepting and addressing these challenges, architects could prove their credentials as artists.

Phyllida Barlow

In and out of the city

The cliches about the city do have a kind of truth about them, particularly because of their use of the body as a metaphor for the city; and the body, with its bowels, heart, pulse and soul, does seem to be an effective metaphor. It imbues the city with anthropomorphic qualities, as if it were a living, sentient thing. This is an accurate description of how the city affects us: as a personality to reckon with. Such cliches evoke convincingly the exterior of the city in relationship to its interior, and this paper has a narrative developed around this relationship.

The vista and the view

The narrative begins with the vista: how to view the city, get a grasp of it in its entirety. Almost impossible from the ground, and from being in the city, but possible from above, like, in London, from the top of Kite Hill, Primrose Hill, Greenwich Park, or Crystal Palace. Or closer in, from Walthamstow Marshes for example. where the expansive wetlands create a distance from which the city can be viewed at the same level, low down. This is my preferred view, because it is the back view of the city, where the overtly industrial pylons, railway tracks, factories, water works and reservoirs meets the residential, but divided by this five or six mile wide strip of the Lee Valley.

Being able to stand back from the city restores its three dimensionality: the greying of its edges round it, emphasize its mass, and its density, unifying it into a solidity which belies its fragmented reality, as experienced when in among it.

A view of the city, getting far enough back from it, enchants and turns it into an idyll, a sublime idyll, which hides its interior. A distance subdues noise, smell, chaos, and offers instead a stillness which is timelessly compelling, something which is difficult to takes one's eyes off, in the same way that it is difficult not to stare at an expanse of water.

In contrast, the city from inside is a series of facades: like the facades of a stage set or a pack of cards. It is impossible to experience buildings as three-dimensional. And the spaces within the city open and close, like doors constantly opening and shutting: from the narrow and constricted into the open but surrounded.

Getting far enough back, to be at a distance, being able to survey, to see the horizon as far away, is to be able to watch where the city as object meets its surrounding space, and where the city as pictorial emblem solidifies into a weighted down and placed thing.

Choreography

If standing back from the city makes it still and subdued, then being in the city reveals it as moving and noisy. You are either a participator or a bystander, an audience: the movement of the city is choreographed, and to be on the edge of that choreography is to be excluded, maybe through choice, but also for some reason, through default. Choreography relies on rules: rules of place and containment, where not complying with the rules is hazardous and anarchic. The flow of the city depends upon the collective movements in one direction or the other. The roar of the city is this movement, and is the most distinctive evidence when at a distance from the city: the all-pervading drone and muffled screech of the ceaseless traffic can be heard even when the roads and their traffic cannot be seen. The city can be heard, if not seen.

Seepage

The sounds of the city leak. The detritus of the city scatters, oozes and seeps. The choreography begins to collapse. The innards reveal themselves. The skin erupts. The edges fray with litter, and the spillage of the fumes and filth mutate the calculating control inherent to the movement of the city into unwanted growth. The movement spreads outwards into the vast hinterland of suburbia. Not only do the innards of the city seep, but the city itself seeps. Seen from the train, being carried outwards through the hinterland, the city becomes a system of back views, usually deserted, with little signs of life: industrial estates, back gardens, rows and rows of houses and buildings. But that's a different seepage to the seepage of stuff. The stuff from within is compelling and awesome, whether it is the flood of the burst water main, or the explosions onto pavements of the thick tresses of coloured wires of telephone cables, or the cavernous excavations for deeply buried pipework. All are accompanied by the persi stent sounds and smells of the workings of the city. And when the city discloses its inner workings, it reveals its frailty, because of its dependency on these visceral goings-on beneath the surface. The city as an object harbours its most object-like qualities within its hidden world. Those parts of an object which cannot be seen, but which inform what can be seen, do have an uncanny hold, and when these unseen things become visible and make their presence known, there is a kind of anarchy.

Incision and entrapment 

The narrative ends with a destination in the city, an arrival at two works sited within cities. They are Walter de Maria's Vertical Earth Kilometre installed for the 1977 Kassel Documenta and Hans Haake's Standort Merry Go Round, commissioned for the 1997 Munster Sculpture Exhibition. Importantly for me, they reveal a sculptural language rooted in the undisclosed, the hidden, the contained, the unfinished, the impossible to grasp, and the defiance and repudiation of an image and its inevitable optimum view.

Hans Haake's wooden stockade withholds the object incarcerated within it, and what is revealed about this object is its sound: within the stockade is, in fact, a fairground carousel constantly turning, accompanied by a steam organ rendition of the German national anthem, played at twice the speed. Bereft of people, who are relegated to peering in through the cracks between the wooden planks of the carousel, it becomes trapped within its own laboriousness, pathetically parodying the grandiose memorial next to which it is situated. It seems to refer to the stark realities of what becomes of a cosmetically constructed world, reciprocated by the city and its system of facades, and what happens when such facades collapse.

So too with Walter de Maria's Vertical Earth Kilometre. With only its brass end revealed, like a coin embedded on the street's surface, the kilometre's length has to be imagined, incising into the earth's surface with surgical precision. It pierces the bowels of the city and beyond, into the dark viscera, penetrating that all too fragile skin of the city, which holds the chaos and danger of eruptions so tightly under control. There is the thought of what happens when the kilometre length is extracted, what will ooze from the hole? What does the brass plug hold in?

These two works definitely offer the power of the sculptural object through undisclosure and concealment. It preys upon our sense, giving us an incomplete, unresolved physical experience, but through which all our senses are aroused, provoking our imaginations into action, which then achieve the completion which the objects' physical realities resist. They gazump the body metaphor for the city and its litany of bowels, hearts and souls. Instead they provide the perfect allegories for the irrational collection of experiences which conjure the dystopic chaos, the inherent viscera and the cosmetically apparent pretensions of the city, but which separation of distance magically transforms into the ultimate sculptural phenomenon.