Shapes

Friend, I am still here! Life has been full of late, what with the younger generation (a wedding coming up), the older generation (to be visited and ambulances called for), the garden (the compost heaps to be disinterred), the lake (windsurfing to be committed), one's artistic imagination (to be fed), the bridge (to be ridden over). The other day I spent a few hours walking in a bitter wind round the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where there is a huge exhibition of Miro's sculpture, the one the Miro descendants feel is the best ever, and some paintings too. See: Miro's sculptures Miles of parkland to walk. When I get back from today's bike ride to Hull and back, I will share some of the pics I took, with accompanying thoughts.

Eh?

The first stroll round the Miro stuff made me think of just one thing: the pogo stick. Somewhat resentfully, I looked at each bigger and weirder Big Shape and thought 'How is it that this man could get a foundry to cast these things and be celebrated and make a living out of it, and yet I only have to look at a pogo stick for people to shake their heads sadly?'

"Invasion". Mmm, yes.

I have an ambivalent view of sculpture. The things I do in my art time are all very small by comparison, and I envy these sculptors their self-esteem in thinking that the earth is big enough to give their physical thought-expressions a permanent home, often quite a lot of square feet of hard standing room, and requiring cranes to get to work when they say 'I could bring some of my work to show you?' (Do you note a little bit of barely-repressed seething envy here?) We are told that the earth is not big enough for the world to be fed by organic farming methods, and yet here are acres given over to shapes. Mmm. But some of them are rather good at making us think about land use, and one I thought did this very well was this Tarmac in a field thingy (my title) by Michael Zwingmann. The YSP blurb says:

"Invasion consists of five cylindrical forms sited on a former football field, which from a distance resemble giant black hay bales. Closer inspection, however, reveals the solidity and potential menace of the material and the work demonstrates a collision between the man-made and natural worlds."

Cyril Conolly, please comment.

Anyway, this is what I am looking at and thinking about, and (smugly) yes I can still pogo, even after 40 years of not doing. Cyril Conolly said, "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall." Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Let's see what the pogo-stick in the hall can do.