Big Art Map
Early in 2005, Channel 4 asked the public to nominate the buildings they wanted to see demolished in the series 'Demolition'. We can do the same here on Big Art Mob. There's a lot of ugly, inappropriate public art out there: badly commissioned, insensitively sited, poorly maintained or just a plain bad idea in the first place. Join BIN-IT and post images of the public art you don't want to see!
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Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was a Scottish proto-pop artist of Italian parents. He designed a lively mosaic for Tottenham Ct Road Central Line platform on the London Underground, was a keen collector of advertising ephemera and a prolific pop-collagist. He spent his mature years as a sculptor producing lumpen, mechanical-looking sculpture. These were often overly illustrative works which yoked the human form to the mechanical. I wish he hadn't. They are ugly and outdated (this kind of approach was far more successful, even exiting and dynamic in the early 1900s, when it was new – in the work of artists like Jacob Epstein and his 'Rock Drill'). It has always been an easy call for local councils and developers to call on the established well,tried names and commission one of Paolozzi's unsmypathetic, brutal pop-cyborgs or mechanical collages in an attempt to offset and even culturally validate an already over-commercialised and brutally designed cut-price-modernist concrete square or office block. Although such projects are usually devoted to anything but art and culture, this one, strangely enough houses the offices of Arts Council England's NE regional office. Arts Council and other workers in the building are greeted each day by this figure. Paolozzis – bin-'em! They just make the ugly uglier!
Posted on 11th July 2008
by nickp
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Ok, so it's not as horrible as some of the things on this site (see 'bin-it' bad art group). But since I first saw it (almost every day) when I worked for a while in Ealing, I always thought it just seemed too lumpy, dumb and awkward to be beautiful – and too naturalistic, and neither awkward nor ugly enough to be interesting. Also, its proximity to a Lloyds Bank (at the sign of the black horse!)in a shopping centre just doesn't do it for me!
Posted on 4th June 2008
by nickp
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. . . or so it was once sprayed on this mural - possibly referring to the BBC employees who filed out of Shepherds Bush tube station every morning on their way to work at BBC Richmond House on the other side of the Green (now an hotel). Who did this, and why? It's an ugly underpass and the mural doesn't make it any better I'm afraid. This sort of thing gives public art a bad name - with me anyway!
BIN IT!
Posted on 7th April 2008
by London
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Since 1988, platform 2 at Wakefield's Westgate train station, has housed the sculpture 'A Light Wave' by the Leeds-based artist Charles Quick. The installation comprises a series of wooden planks in the form of waves which are lit by a rippling light at night (apparently, though I've never seen it I know people who have, in the past). The light, combined with the movement of the train sets up a very pleasing rippled-wave effect. Or at least it used to. Now you have to look through a grotty chicken-wire fence, at an overgrown, area reminiscent of a disused municipal tennis court and are made very aware of the impermanence of paint and the vulnerability of materials by the fact that the sculpture has not been looked after too well and needs a good coat of the blue paint it originally had (might have been better made in enamelled metal?).
Charles Quick (http://www.uclan.ac.uk/facs/class/finearts/artist/cquick.html) is a serious artist working with technology and architecture and deserves better - as do all the viewing public. Wake up Wakefield council and put pressure on National Express East Coast to spruce up this sculpture! It is too visible and too much of an introduction to Wakefield and West Yorkshire to leave in this state!
Posted on 7th April 2008
by nickp
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Painted concrete and mosaic (1989), by Hammersmith's first (and last) sculptor in residence. A neglected and dilapidated public sculpture (it was originally painted differently, had a bench all around it and more mosaics) that probably wasn't a great idea in the first place – apart from anything else, it's a sharp contrast to the difficult and often dysfunctional lives of those who really can be found sleeping on the Green! Apparently it is based on a real 'local character' who used to walk about with his head in the clouds. The work was commissioned by the borough's Public Art Programme in 1989.
I think it's time for it to go!
Posted on 25th March 2008
by nickp
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