Sorcha Dallas

ALEX FROST exposed his new work to the elements of east Glasgow and it didn’t last long. Alexander Kennedy wonders if it was willfully na?Øve or an act of self-sacrificing bravery?

A few days into Glasgow International, art liggers on the peanut and free warm Chardonnay circuit received a curt (but not unexpected) email from Sorcha Dallas in foreboding capital letters informing all that ‘Due to unforeseen circumstances the walking tour of Alex Frost’s sculpture, scheduled to happen on Sunday 1st May, has been cancelled’. The sculpture in question, Maverick, had been vandalized. Nightmarish visions of a ball of flames rolling through the streets of Dennistoun quickly followed.

The work, an off-site project of Sorcha Dallas gallery, continued the Glasgow-based artist’s interest in self-portraiture filtered through process of pixellation. The mosaic technique used allowed him to create layers of colour and texture, yet avoided the clichéd mess of traditional expression. Images of the work shown lying on its side, staring into the distance like the decapitated head of a dead god or an early Christian saint in Hagia Sophia. The head, as portrait and subject, seems monumental, but its size contradicts its symbolic (and actual) fragility. This over-large narcissistic monad seems lost. As an art object and a symbol of subjectivity you are aware that its state of stasis and quiet gestation will not last. The outside world – society – will act on it and fragment it.

Frost is rightfully sick of the attention this daft attack has received saying ‘A number of journalists have been in touch wanting to make an issue of the fact that my sculpture was vandalized. This is disappointing.’ He has a point, but on the quest for a story greater depths have been plummeted. Frost is one of the few artists who is not scared of the finished, sculpted object; does not suffer from the paranoia that gathers in the corners of installations. So, when one of his works is tampered with and snatched away before art students can have a good look at how it can be done, we should all be a bit put out.

Public art and vandalism make uneasy bedfellows; figurative public sculptures seem to beg for an oh-so-hilarious Duchampian moustache, a grass mohawk or their specs to be yanked off. But contemporary artists know this (iconoclashes are de rigeur) so why did Frost install his self-portrait in wasteland off Melbourne Street in Glasgow’s Gallowgate? Well, as Dallas says, ‘Maverick’ is Alex’s most ambitious project to date … any art placed within the public realm is of course going to be open to intervention.’

Of course, you can play it safer. A recent programme of events in Bristol has attempted to meld contemporary artistic practices, approaches and material to the realm of public art, ‘contemporary art in unexpected sites’. ‘Thinking of the Outside’, curated by Claire Doherty, includes work by six international artists. All of the work seems to be sited in quite safe, semi-public spaces – churchyards, a warehouse, the castle vaults. Likewise, posters or live events help protect original work from vandalism. There is sense in this, but as an approach it also limits expression, access, and the overall impact that a work such as Frost’s Maverick can have in a site by jarring with or generously throwing itself to the open mercy of its surrounding locale.