I think there’s an argument to be made that sculpture is the most hackneyed art form. We pass by public statues everyday without so much as looking up, without so much as realising they’re there. Statues, unlike other forms of art, have a kind of camouflage to them. We frame portraits in gold, music blares, we watch films on 30-feet high silver screens. But a statue does not announce itself like these – it stands silently and waits for you to notice it.
At least some of them do. India’s ‘Statue of Unity’ is 597 feet high and commemorates Sardar Patel – it’s even placed on a plinth just in case you missed it. Often, these public statues have served ideological ends rather than artistic ones. For years, public statues have depicted dictators, colonisers, and divisive figures from history. The toppling of a statue has come to represent a rejection rather than a celebration of the history that has led up to this point.
“This is the fine line on which public statues teeter: discreet street furniture or gauche propaganda?”
Statues in Cambridge aren’t quite as dramatic. Last year, there was what can only be described as a big fuss made about ‘The Cambridge Don’ on Hills Road. The statue depicted a figure in vice-chancellor’s robes, and was supposed to represent Prince Phillip. Passers-by objected to it as something ugly which lacked planning permission. Personally, I didn’t realise it existed until it was removed. Despite having been described as a kitsch eyesore, I’m sure it was completely invisible to many. This is the fine line on which public statues teeter: discreet street furniture or gauche propaganda?
Another story of a much objected to statue took place in 1845. Bertel Thorvalsden’s statue of Lord Byron depicts the poet sat atop Greek ruins, composing his poem ‘Childe Harold’, and gazing into the distance. He cuts an undeniably dashing figure in the Wren Library. But before the statue found its home in Trinity’s 330-year-old library, it was rejected from both the college’s chapel and Westminster Abbey. It turns out that being a mad, bad, and dangerous to know firebrand is not something that the clergy find particularly appealing, nor wish to memorialise. Indeed, the church objects to Byron to this day. In 2020, a grieving husband was told by a Church of England court in Lichfield that he could not have Byron’s poetry on his late wife’s gravestone. The husband had wanted to memorialise his wife with lines from ‘So We’ll Go No More a Roving’:
So we’ll go no more a roving
For the sword outwears its sheath
And the soul wears out the breast
And the heart must pause to breathe
And love itself have rest.
Due to an objection on both aesthetic and religious grounds, the husband was denied this. Both ‘The Don’ and Thorvalsden’s statue of Byron were objected to, but for very different reasons. We struggle with public art not just on an aesthetic level, but also because it forces us to interact with ideas that we find objectionable in an everyday context. But this struggle is saved for only the most noticeable statues, and being noticed is seemingly incredibly difficult for these artworks.
“While they might commemorate the great and good of yesteryear, they do little more than adorn and decorate the Cambridge of today”
Not far from Byron is Cambridge’s Sidgwick Site. The campus is home to several unidentifiable statues that all serve their own unidentifiable purposes. I’m sure many of you have walked over Edmund de Waal’s ‘a local history’ several times without ever having realised. The installation hides in a showcase beneath your feet and is filled with porcelain items. The glass is translucent, the spot is unmarked, and the work does nothing to draw any attention to itself. Not far from de Waal’s piece, though entirely different, is Nigel Hall’s ‘Bigger Bite’. Hall’s statue, while equally ineffable, is enormous. The printed word can endeavour to describe it, but no matter how I’ve tried to phrase it, fails. My best attempt is to say that it is a big bronze ring conjoined with a small bronze cone. Yet despite its mammoth strangeness, I’d never really looked at it before. Just outside the ARC Café, the statue seemingly blends right into its surroundings when everything about it suggests that it should not.
But it is not just the more modern public statues that go unnoticed in Cambridge. Along Trinity Street, faces and figures protrude from the walls. These gargoyle-like figures look like the kind of statue that could come alive at night, switch places when you’re not looking, or come crashing down to earth at any minute. There’s something quite charming about how unnecessary they are. Like the porcelain beneath the glass on Sidge, they are equally unassuming: they frown down from above and ask nothing in return. While they might commemorate the great and good of yesteryear, they do little more than adorn and decorate the Cambridge of today.
But I do find myself smiling as I pass beneath this series of mysterious mugs. There’s something in the idea that what delights us most about art, as viewers, is risk. We can admire Michelangelo’s David and easily imagine the chisel slipping and picture a chunk of lithe marble torso smashing on the floor. But it didn’t. These statues have endured for years and have been unmoved throughout all of it. From exquisite carvings to alien effigies, public statues in Cambridge show us how tastes have changed – we’ve moved from marble to bronze, and from form to formlessness. More than this, these statues can serve as a record of how we have chosen to memorialise our past and our precursors.
Not only have the types of figures that we commemorate changed, but the figures that we once esteemed have literally been worn away by time into obscurity. The names and coats of arms that were intended to be made immortal in art have been corroded by acid rain, beaten by centuries of storms and gales, and eroded by hands passing over them. As much as they have endured over time, they have also had to change with it. This is not something we expect of statues – Lord Byron is hidden away in the Wren and sheltered from the wind and wet. But public statues are things which exist alongside us, things that share our habitat; we learn to live with them. The argument that public statues are the most hackneyed art form is one that may hold water for some. To my mind, these statues show us how fickle taste is and how quickly things age. Statues are a form by which we try to immortalise people, and that’s impossible. Legacies fade, histories are forgotten, and attitudes change. What is left is a smattering of nearly invisible artworks that live alongside us, unnoticed.
