Birmingham: It's Not Shit

Public displays of affectation

Thoughtful thoughts about Gormley’s Iron Man over at Inversion Layer, including a pointer to Dr Sian Everitt, Keeper of Archives at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, presenting a paper titled If Public Art Communicates, Who Chooses the Message? Birmingham’s Iron Man As a Case Study in Selection Processes for Public Art at next month’s Third International Conference on the Arts in Society in Brum.

Paul seems dismissive of the known facts about the statue namely:

“1) That it was given to the city on 2nd March 1993 by the Trustee Savings Bank which had, at the time, its HQ in the city.
2) That it was cast at Bradley and Fosters Castings (now Firth Rixson Castings) in Willenhall.
3) That at the time of its installation it was ‘controversial’ but when TSB moved from the city there was strong support to retain it.”

The third could probably do with some thinking around, controversy being mainly a media invention most of the time, but the first couple are not only verifiable but probably uncontested…

It would be a pity to think that there were those in Brum that were against the rusting, leaning, dude when he was installed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 8:17 pm by Jon Bounds and is filed under art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.