Statues in the creative city, challenging social reproduction
(originally written as a short piece of coursework at UCL — 500 word limit is a real challenge!)
‘Because our statues send a powerful message about what matters to us – and implicitly about what doesn’t’
Statues have been an important part of urban public art since antiquity. Their role has primarily been to venerate those we hold aloft (often literally on a pedestal). Who is held aloft forms how we understand our public landscape of the creative city and who is seen as powerful and important.
How might the arrival of the controversial new statue for Mary Wollstonecraft ‘The Mother of Feminism’, designed by artist Maggi Hambling enable us to reconfigure our gendered understanding of the public landscape? The statue has been commissioned at a time when who is represented in public spaces has been the subject of polarised discourse about existing statues in London, and how they act as a form of social reproduction (1), perpetuating a patriarchal societal viewpoint.
Could we see this statue as a performative intervention that is designed to ‘“trouble” the exclusionary production of urban space’(2). To answer this it’s useful to also contrast The Mother of Feminism with Gillian Wearing’s new statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square. These are two very different pieces of public art, both by female artists, both realised through community and political campaigning by British feminists. So far, so similar.
Bee Rowlatt, feminist and writer behind the Mary on the Green Campaign wanted the sculpture to represent the birth of a movement and to get away from the idea of putting people on pedestals . Caroline Crido Perez, feminist and writer behind the campaign for the Fawcett statue had a very clear idea how she wanted Fawcett portrayed: “I wanted her to be like the men she is with, not young and nubile.”
The statue of Millicent Fawcett is very recognisably a statue of, on a plinth, historically defined through her clothes, whilst the Mother of Feminism is sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft which is meant to represent every woman and a movement. It is a far more creative piece of art, providing a more useful challenge to our current understanding of what public art, particularly statues that venerate somebody, can be in a creative city.
Creativity in cities shouldn’t just be about economic growth (3) or attracting the creative classes (4) – it’s there to challenge and prod us into examining our deeply held beliefs about our place in history and who has power.
By contrasting the two different approaches to redressing the gender imbalance we see in public statues we can see underpinning similarities of radical democratic politics in how we increase female cultural capital and hopefully start to change how we experience creative urban life in London.
Further reading:
(1) McRobbie A (2011) Rethinking creative economies as radical social enterprise. Variant 41:32–33
(2) McLean, H., 2014. Digging into the Creative City: A Feminist Critique. Antipode
(3) Landry, C. 2000. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators, London: Earthscan
(4) Florida, R.L., 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, New York, NY: Basic Books.
