For once, I agree with Jonathan Jones: The new public art commission in south east England, dubbed the Angel of the South, is a monstrosity.
Mark Wallinger: Ebbsfleet Landmark Project (Angel of the South)
Costing £2m, Mark Wallinger’s giant white horse will be approximately 164ft (50m) tall – twice as big as its counterpart, the Angel of the North, which was designed by Antony Gormley and completed in 1998. The BBC announced today that former Turner Prize winner Wallinger’s design for the southern sculpture had been selected from a shortlist of three.
Richard Deacon: Individual
The other two artists were Daniel Buren and Richard Deacon.
Why they didn’t choose Deacon is beyond me. Although the white horse is an ancient symbol of Kent, Richard Deacon’s organic forms would have rivalled Gormley’s
powerful sculpture in a way that Wallinger’s horse cannot.
I like horses. Lots of other people like horses. Kent especially likes horses.
Plus, it’s massive, which is cool. A big ol’ horse – it’s going to be ace. Anyway, that’s my artistic commentary.
And as Hippocrates might have said: ‘vita brevis, arse longa’.
Make one want to weep, doesn’t it! To think, one day this might be all that is left of our ‘western civilisation’.
[...] landscape of Ebbsfleet make? In the art world, the thumbs nay be up for Mark Wallinger’s Ebbsfleet horse. Ian Jack has a column in Saturday’s Guardian which looks at this from a different [...]
I still depair at the thought that Wallingers White Horse is still going ahead. No objections with the size, site or subject but wher is the artistic measure in this. It is nothing more tha a very large example opf a model horse taken from a childs farmyard play set. Hardly inspirational.