Glittering Queen's head on Park Lane - trashy kitsch or a sparkling tribute?

There's a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on Park Lane. You can hardly miss it - at least at night.

Matt Marga's tribute to the monarch, One Million Queen.
To be fair, it looks a lot better on a sunny day.

As darkness falls, this literally flashy piece of public art catches the harsh LED headlights of the expensive cars which throng Park Lane. It shimmers all silvery like a Christmas tree decoration picked up in Poundland.

The piece in question turns out to be a tribute to the serving monarch on her 92nd birthday last year. The title is "One Million Queen" ("1MQ")  and it was made by Italian artist Matt Marga.  It's a massive object,  a portrait head made out 999,999 crystals sandwiched between sheets of glass, 3 metres wide and over 5 metres tall.

It must've cost a bomb to make this. Apparently it includes 53 real diamonds, to represent the Commonwealth states. And yet it looks a bit cheap. It's  a massive blow-up of that familiar profile of the queen seen on every UK postage stamp or coin of the realm. Then rendered in glittery stuff. That's it.

On a dull morning it looked as though the glitter had been mixed with a couple of pints of Thames mud before being squeezed between the four thick sheets of glass. No doubt it looks much more impressive when the sun's shining.

Rather like Damien Hirst's "For the Love of God" - a diamond-studded skull - you wonder whether there's some irony in the project.  Is it meant to be a comment on wealth and inequality? Or is it really just a straightforward tribute? If so you wonder how it was received by the object of this expensive adoration.

We're expected to believe that the reigning monarch is very careful with her cash, the Queen of Thrift and Austerity in person. Could this piece possibly be just a wee bit too tacky? Then again, is it perhaps showing us the reality - a display of absurd wealth, just like the actual crown jewels?

The location is perfect: it's very close to some of the most expensive hotels in the world, whch any day of the year will be filled with millionaires and billionaires and their families. It's also less than a mile from the Queen's London residence (another big display of dull excess, Buckingham Palace).

This famous avenue of glitzy hotels and luxury car showrooms has been the location for quite a lot of extravagant public art over the past few years, under a Westminster Council scheme to cheer up the sad central reservation. This new one replaces a more striking piece, sculptor Bushra Fakhoury's Dunamis, a 9 metre-tall sculpture of a man with a conical hat holding an elephant above his head by its trunk.

Much of the other stuff on this road seemed a bit too flashy, a bit over the top (see the entry on London's outdoor sculpture here) - but perhaps fittingly so for a road where people gawp at sports cars costing as much as a small house in Battersea.

And, as always, few yards away, in the subways to the underground car-parks, and even more up around the fountains at Marble Arch, hundreds of homeless people congregate, huddled against the icy spring winds.

The destruction of the Battersea Bridge Road mural and its aftermath: why property developers love 'Art', but hate art….

Nuclear Dawn - an inadequate photo of Brian Barnes'
amazing Brixton mural, which gives you a taste of what
we have all lost in the destruction of his biggest work,
The Good, the bad and the ugly on Battersea Bridge
Road, back at the dawn of Thatcherism (1979)

Since visiting Embassy Gardens, with its blingy public art and its splendid new Waitrose - I've had this nagging feeling, a sort of sense of mismatch and angst.

Can't get the strange sight of former Young British Artist Sarah Lucas's sculpture gracing the granite paving slabs of property developer Ballymore's crowning glory,  slap bang in the middle of the monstrous Battersea-Nine Elms-Vauxhall killing fields, out of this tiny mind.

We all know how much property developers love Art. Like a dog approaching fox shit, they want to roll in the stuff so that some of its magic rubs off on them, and onto the properties they are busily promoting. If they could just get a whiff of Bacon or Lucien Freud, just a dab of  Hirst or the essence of Emin, or best of  all….a little sprinkling of Bxxkxy….they would be so thrilled.

But look: they build a pug-ugly block on reclaimed brownfield marshland, or redevelop a former school or hospital or prison,  and sell their luxury apartments for £1,500 per square foot.

What rank amateurs!

Just think how much a square foot of a Banksy or a Basquiat or a Rothko would be worth.

No wonder they are so keen to get these names into their brochures.

A bit of the right sort of 'Art' in the right place - that is, not impeding their schemes to make billions out of millions. But it does have to be the right sort of art, in the right place. Art with a big fat "A" for asset, the sort dealers and auctioneers thrive on. Art with the capital F: we are rich and clever, you are  nothing: Fuck right off! And leave us here to appreciate this 'Art'.

It hasn't always been this way.  Or maybe it has.

Back in the 1970s, during the first phase of Battersea's gentrification, community art came up against property and lost out in a big way.

It happened about a mile to the west of the current mega-development. The factory of one of Battersea's biggest employers,  Morgan Crucible, was on the south-west corner of  Battersea Bridge, and it fronted the river most of the way down Battersea Church Street.

It was a big piece of prime riverside property, and after the company relocated in the early 70s the factory was left empty. Local residents launched a campaign to keep this space for the community, and the Wandsworth Mural Group, run by local RCA-trained muralist Brian Barnes, got to work on  London's biggest ever mural.

There's an excellent interview with Brian Barnes  by Julian Vigo on her Endoplasm site, in which Barnes explains how he asked locals what they'd like to see in place of the factory - and it was this dream landscape of an open-air swimming pool,  human-scale housing, factories to work in, car-free streets for kids to play in, and plenty of buses,  that went into the mural.

Against this utopian vision, Barnes and his fellow muralists knew about the forces they were up against - bent politicians and town-planners, the press, greedy developers, cynical capitalists - and these went into the painting as well, along with their henchmen, the cops. Hence the title, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

This mural, as I remember it, stretched all along the factory's boundary wall from the foot of the bridge all the way down to the junction with Battersea Church Street. It took Barnes and about 60 volunteers two years to paint. It was completed in late 1978, and at 276 feet long by up to 18 foot high, was one of the biggest murals in the UK.

Despite its satire and sharp political message, the mural gained praise from high quarters, and was apparently on the way to getting legal protection when, in the middle of the night of June 6 1979, the entire wall was demolished by Morgan Crucible's contractors.

This underhand behaviour by the owners, who knew they'd face a big public protest if they'd attempted this in the daylight,  set the scene for age of Thatcherism and all that followed.

Go there now and you see what looks like a smart housing estate from the outer suburbs, nicely planned and nicely maintained and nicely private. Perfectly bland residential architecture with one of the best views on the Thames, across to Chelsea Reach.

Sadly I have no photos of that great lost mural. You can get some idea of its scale and ambition from the always excellent London Mural Preservation Site, which also features many of the artist's other works. There's also an excellent 53-minute Arts Council funded  film, Morgan's Wall,  made in 1978, which you can buy or watch online from Concorde Media. The film looks at some of the other contemporary murals around the country and shows clearly why so many artists at that time chose to paint on exterior walls in public places rather than on canvas for private collectors.

Also worth a look is another interview: The man behind South London's murals - Brian Barnes, (Londoner #96) for the 1000 Londoners project.

Here's what the public got in compensation for the destruction of that
magnificent and utopian mural: the bland housing development of
Morgan's Walk and this even blander piece of sculpture

Well, at least we can now walk  along the riverside public path. Oh, and the developers even left a bit of art to cheer us up. Unfortunately it's a piece of sculpture so anodyne you wonder if it's ironically so: it's called In Town and it's by the late John Ravera.

Looking to illustrate this piece, I went to the site of one of Brain Barnes' many later murals - the Stockwell Deep Shelter War Memorial.

This famous piece of public art is currently almost totally obscured by those ubiquitous orange and green barriers and plastic fencing, as Lambeth 

undertakes another of its local prettification schemes - you know, wider pavements, a few sad trees in pots, those single-seater benches our co-operative council has fallen in love with. They are always set at slightly odd, suggestive angles, as if the planner had seen one too many 1940s noir movies where cops and narks exchange information in a public place.

Anyway, Stockwell is all set to follow Clapham Old Town into this utopian vision of public space.

Laugh! Cry!

The upshot being I took no photos. So you can make do with a much earlier shot of an earlier photo of  what I think is this artist's best work - the Brixton Nuclear Apocalypse. Hard to photograph, and suffering from neglect, this piece has some of the cinematic power that the old Battersea murals had in buckets. Love it while you can.

Brian Barnes, the Battersea Bridge muralist, is still very much alive and still kicking. In 2010 he hit the headlines again for adding a portrait of Jean Charles de Menezes to his famous War Memorial mural in Stockwell.

Why is so much of London's recent public sculpture so horrible?

Poor old Charlie Chaplin, knocked off his
place in Leicester Square and now demoted
 to  entertaining the queues outside the Prince Charles Cinema, London

Wandering through Broadgate yesterday - as, if you have much sense, you do not do very often - was
struck by two or three things.

First, just how much of this corporate architecture has gone up in this area in the past decade or so. Broadgate is like a little town all of its own, with its barren streets and squares and shopping areas and  even a little park.

Second - what a sad contrast between the stately Victorian architecture of the old  Liverpool Street Station canopy, and the mock-classicisim of all that flashy 1990s stuff.

Third - the completely repulsive piece of public sculpture, the massive 5-ton bronze nude Broadgate Venus.

In fact this work by a Colombian artist is absolutely perfect for the place; a grotesquely fat, featureless, personality-free female floating pointlessly in the middle of a space surrounded on three sides by identikit office blocks and on the fourth by the rail terminal at  Liverpool Street.

 It's a real cheek calling her Venus - she's got about as much to do with love or sex as an over-inflated barrage balloon. But as symbol of the ugliest sins of the city around her - avarice, cupidity, sheer greed, excess  - she is perfect.

Which is more than you can say of much of the recent public sculpture in this town.

It seems to range from the brash but competent show-off - such as Rudy Weller's  Four Bronze Horses of Helios (1992) rising out of a fountain at the corner of hideous 1980s building near Piccadilly Circus - to the totally naff.

That flashy new development in Knightsbridge overlooking Hyde Park - often referred to as having the most expensive apartments in the world - comes complete with some equally tasteless public sculpture.

I've no idea who it's by but it's a fairly extreme example of what seems fairly dismal public sculptures adorning various commecrial and residential developments in this  city of obscene wealth.

Sadly, even publicly-commissioned work to celebrate the great and the good somehow seem to always go bland. The horribly cliched Charlie Chaplin is one example, now mercifully moved from a prime site in Leicester Square to a dark turning off Lisle Street, as if relegated to the naughty corner.

The strange Oscar Wilde tribute behind St Martins -in-the-Fields is another. But to find the truly horrible modern sculpture you have to turn to the private sector - the stuff that now seems to be obligatory on every posh new residential apartments development anywhere in London.

Every cynical new block of "desirable" riverside apartments snow seems to have to have its own bit of dismal art. Look at these ghastly characters down by Battersea Bridge adorning one of a thousand similar recently-built Thameside estates for the very rich.

WHy, you wonder, can't these very wealthy people not commission something good - like Elisabeth Frink's work in Piccadilly, or the one great bit of modern sculpture in the CityRichard Serra's Fulcrum  (1987)  at the back entrance to  Liverpool Street Station.
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Even if not great art, it knocks you sideways. Meanwhile, there's virtue in comedy - and who cannot but laugh or at least smile when meeting the three-dimensional déjeuner sur l'herbe in Soho Square.

OK, I have to admit - it has to be better to have some naff art, some horrible public art, than to have no public art at all.