Platform for Art

by Alex Cole, with Introduction by Tasmin Dillon
Black Dog Publishing Ltd., London, UK, 2007
160 pp., 173 illus. Paper, UK 19.95 pounds, US $29.95
ISBN: 978 1 906155 06 3.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

Three and a half million journeys are taken each day on the London Underground, or Tube, and that number is expected to grow to four million by 2020.  Though the stations were built as much as a hundred (and as few as ten), years ago, the first public art project was exhibited in it in 2000—a century and a half after the first trains on the system rolled out of one station and into another.  This is a fine well-illustrated catalogue of the artwork on the Tube, assembled by the head of the art exhibition project.

Several works have a sensibility akin to the comics, including Zho Bano’s “Uh-oh! Pandaman,” where the artist photographed himself with a superimposed word balloon and cuddly toy bear to allude to China’s one-child policy. That species of bear also appears in Brian Griffith’s site-specific “Life is a Laugh”, where a giant concrete panda head and miscellaneous bric-a-brac are a piled upon the platform to suggest a construction site.  Comic books seem to have inspired works by Lars Arrhenius, Shizad Dawood and Asia Aiffasi, and Janette Paris’ “Going South” cartoons an imaginary rock band.  Cartoon style also informed the interface graphics of the digital “Platform for Art Online”.  And Chiho Aoshima would not be insulted for us to appreciate the anime or J-Pop delicacy of “City Glow, Mountain Whisper” 2006 within the round, arched niches in Gloucester Road station.

Niches in an underground stations was the site of David Batchelor’s “Ten Silhouettes”, axially symmetric and made of found, discarded steel, illuminated by colored lights.  Lothar Götz’s 2006 work made use of rhythmic colored triangles, while Richard Woods created multicolored mock-planks to surround a ticket booth.  Jim Isermann wrapped a train on the Picadilly Line in red and blue trompe l’oeil recessed squares, and Beatriz Milhazes’ 2005 “Peace and Love” gave the Tube riders a view of colored circles and baroque swirls evocative of her native Brazil.  Paul Caherall’s “London Linos”, striking linoleum-block prints exhibited in 2002, sport a mid-century Moderne simplicity.

Other projects were photography-based, beginning with 2002 work by Cindy Sherman, 10 portraits of women . . . which, of course, were all pictures of Cindy in various costumes.  Rose Butler worked with the London Underground staff for the mysterious “Platform Portraits”, black and white photographs, sometimes provocatively cropped. Braco Dimitrijevic created posters of passers-by that he photographed  Samuel Fosso exhibited three big “Autoportraits,” and Eileen Perrier’s “Grace” series of 2002 were similarly-posed portraits of a multiethnic  variety of gap-toothed individuals. In 2006 Suki Dhanda shot ”Year of the Dog” portraits of boys and families living near the station with their pets, while Paulo Piri’s “To Me” mysteriously depicted zebras atop snowy mountains.  Rut Blees Luxemberg’s “Picadilly Pecadilloes” of 2007 showed local signs reflected in puddles, a momentary something that one might notice while leaving the station on a rainy evening.

There were some community-based projects, that grew out of the neighborhoods around the Tube stations.  The program exhibited work by graduating Royal Academy students, posters by high schoolers, an installation by a women’s knitting society, works of fashion photography graduates, and young Chinese artists and museum-going schoolchildren who viewed Chinese artifacts and then painted them.  Ella Gibbs and Amy Platt 2006 “A Station Musical for Stratford” involved kids from Carpenters Primary School, while other projects were enlivened by the involvement of footballers and  young offenders.  Orello De’Souza Harley and Courtia Newland’s piece “Connected” concerned the West Indians brought to London after WWII to work in various capacities for London Transport.  As the meaning of so much changed since 9/11 and the War on Terrorism, the most political work was Beth Derbyshire’s “Careless Talk Costs Lives”, making use of warnings from the second world war.  Perhaps the Brazilian tourist, who was shot by nervous police who assumed he was an Arab terrorist, was gazing at this work?

A work dependent on type was Mark Titchen’s “I WE IT” in 2004, which had statements that began “We want...” with the look of trade union banners, ornamented with fists and garlands, supposedly inspired by both William Morris and the artist’s favorite 13th Floor Elevators album covers.  Other works making use of text were Simon Bedell’s 2004 “Advertising Never Tells Anyone Anything Anyway”, and the bibliographic citations exhibited by Emma Rushton and Derek Tyman.  Artists were also employed to create graphics for oyster card wallets, and covers to the Tube map. David Shrigley tangled colored lines are a good metaphor, for that’s what the transport system must appear as to a confused and frustrated traveler.  Cornelia Parker put rorshach blots on the Tube map cover, and other artists used other strategies.  In non-static media, Steven Willats’ film made and exhibited in 2007 in Ryners Lane and Sudbury Town stations, and Guy Bar Amotz produced a series of live musical performances, broadcast through speakers sculpted into statues of dead musicians.

Meanwhile, the visual culture of the Tube is reinforced with this book’s use of the handsome Gill Sans typeface, for Eric Gill was taught by Edward Johnston, who designed the typeface for the London Underground.  The book carries an Introduction by Tim O’Toole of its Advisory Committee, who thanks the Arts Council and Arts in Business, and an essay by Alex Coles follows.  If there is a limitation to this book, it is that its tone is invariably positive; this same limitation colors Jane Golden’s books from Temple University Press on the Philadelphia Murals program, which she runs.  While we are fortunate to be given an insider’s view, it is also inevitably a self-serving volume of successes, with a positive spin.  The reviewer has been involved in enough community art projects to know that sometimes things go wrong, despite the best of intentions.  Which projects were commissioned that screwed up?  Which ones do the Tube commuters dislike? Producer Maverick Litchfield-Kelly, of London’s Neath Films, recently told this reviewer that he recalled censorship of at least one of the poems that were displayed in the Tube, considered too vital and inflammatory.  One would like to read in this book of any controversy, of local opposition that was finally won over or that agreed to live peacefully with the project in its neighborhood station.

Maybe there wasn’t any, and the artists (excepting that rude poet) were all spectacularly chosen for their sympathy and understanding of the place where their art projects would appear.  Perhaps the diverse buffet of artworks were either rooted in the surrounding communities, or appreciated as exciting addition to its daily life...or simply ignored by the majority of busy commuters in transit.