Sculpture – Page 5 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Big Things above three urinals

Indeed. To celebrate being able to post photos again with ease, this:

We’re in the Gents, at the Lord Palmerston pub, Dartmouth Park Hill. Although, they call it the “Lords”.

The above photo was photoed in 2015. I’d just been checking out the view from that Bridge that goes over Archway, from which you can see London’s Big Things for real. I went back to this Lords Toilet more recently, to try to get a photo that would work for the permanent top of this blog, but the Big Things had gone. Shame. Maybe looking at giant architectural penises proved off-putting for those seeking to piss through their own smaller penises.

Rabbits in a tray on a hamper

I am about to embark upon various medical complications involving things like blood tests, so am rather preoccupied today. I’ll probably manage more later, but meanwhile, since it’s Friday, here are some rabbits I photoed somewhere in the vicinity of Victoria Station, in 2013:

Also plates, a hamper, a sofa, some flowers. But it was the rabbits that got my attention.

More to come, I hope. I don’t actually promise, but I nearly do.

LATER: Another rabbit, made of metal, on a church, in Scotland.

That way that people hold their spectacles and their mobile

One from the “I just like it” photo-archive:

I can tell from the background, and in particular the lion statue, that we are walking east across Westminster Bridge.

My first encounter with Jeppe Hein’s Modified Social Benches outside the Royal Festival Hall

I am happy to note from my site stats system that a posting I did here about Jeppe Hein‘s Modified Social Benches has been receiving a regular trickle of visitors, as has this posting of photos of these red benches done more recently, during Lockdown, with consequent silly plastic tape all over them.

So, here are some more photos of these red benches, photoed by me on the very first occasion that I saw them, or at any rate the first time I properly noticed them, on May 22nd 2017:

As you can see, they were still working on their installation. But already, you could see that they were being well received. I now realise that the biggest one to be seen in these photos, the one in photos 3, 6, 7 and 8, was only there for a short while. It doesn’t appear in my later postings, so it had to have been gone. I would not have missed it otherwise.

In the first posting above, the photos were all done in rather dim weather, which emphasised how colourful these things are. The above photos, done in bright sunlight, are no less colourful, I hope you will agree.

The President of Turkmenistan expresses his love of dogs with a golden statue

Here:

Says Eurasianet:

The new monument that was commissioned several years ago puts the Alabai in exalted company at the forefront of state propaganda.

The Alabai being a breed of dog. The statue, which is in the middle of a roundabout, celebrates the entire breed, rather than any individual dog.

Previously the only animal to be celebrated in local sculpture was the Akhal-Teke horse. …

So, aside from dog statues, how has Turkmenistan been doing lately? Not so well, it would seem:

Berdymukhamedov’s professed love of native animals, expressed through poetry as well as more encyclopedic works, has only grown as the country slides deeper into an economic crisis …

Don’t take your people’s minds off their miseries with foreign wars. Do it with a dog statue!

Remembrance photos – 2020 and 2018

On that walk, a week ago now, I photoed the Remembrance preparations being made outside Westminster Abbey. Of course I did:

That was the first of them, and with a bit of cropping it is showable, but the rest were … Put it this way, I had to lean over the railings to photo anything, and I find that little crosses and dead leaves photo better if you get properly close to them.

Like this:

More Remembrance, of photos as well as of masses of young men dying. I photoed that on November 10th 2018, and showed it and other similar photos at my old blog on November 11th 2018, which was the exact one hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War 1.

This particular bit of Remembrance doesn’t seem to change much from year to year. I suppose it doesn’t need to. What else is there to say, and how else could you say it any better?

Bartle Frere

Often, when out-and-abouting, I go down Victoria Street and across Westminster Bridge, before turning left and walking downstream along the south bank of the river. But last Wednesday, instead of going over the bridge, I turned left at the Boudicca Statue and walked along the north side of the River. That takes you past more statues, slightly off-the-beaten-track of the best known history. Parliament Square has Mandela, Gandhi and Churchill, to name three particularly well-known historical celebs. On the North Bank, as you walk towards Embankment Tube, you encounter: Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible into English. You see Charles Portal, who was Chief of the Air Staff during WW2, without ever doing anything that caught the popular imagination, as they say, in the manner of Dowding or Guy Gibson or Douglas Bader. There is Gordon of Khartoum, who got himself killed in Khartoum and who was a huge celeb in his own time, but is now fading into the history books.

And, just before you get to Embankment Tube, there is this handsome looking grandee:

This, proclaims the plinth under him, is “Bartle Frere”.

Even for me, with all that time and money that was spent teaching me what is now decidedly ancient history, Bartle Frere is only a name. But now, in the age of the Internet, questions like “Who on earth was Bartle Frere?” are easily answered. And it turns out that Bartle Frere, or, to give him his full name, Sir Henry Bartle Edward Frere was a late nineteenth century colonial administrator of a sort who cannot now be discussed without extreme embarrassment and censure. He first had an impact in India, following the Indian Mutiny, generally cracking the whip and centralising British power there. And then they sent him to South Africa, to do the same there. Wars followed, against the Zulus, and eventually the Boer War. He seemed to have a genius for pissing people off, so much so that even at the time, people became rather doubtful about him.

You might think that, during the recent little moment of statue-complaining that came and went a few months ago, Bartle Frere would have more than qualified for public condemnation and possible toppling. Trouble is, he is just not known about or cared about. Nobody now says: “What we now need is another Bartle Frere.” “If only politicians nowadays had the moral stature of Bartle Frere.” They say this kind of thing about Mandela, Gandhi and Churchill, so if the wokists can find something unwoke to complain about with one of those guys, iconoclasm can at least be threatened, and a rise can be got out of all the people who respond by saying: Hey, leave Gandhi alone! Hands off Churchill! But nobody cares about Bartle Frere.

Iconoclasm only works if there is an actual icon to be clasmed, or clasmatised, or whatever the word is. Bartle Frere is not an icon, not now. He is now a nobody. So, his statue stood and stands tall and proud and utterly ignored by all but weirdos like me, and the woke mob never laid a finger on him.

At no point, a few months back when all the statue toppling was going on, was it felt necessary to put Bartle Frere in a box.

Two versions of Boudicca and the Wheel

I haven’t managed many London photos here recently, or at any rate not as many as before You Know What. But here are two, of the same scene, differently lit, and both elaborately cropped to make them cover the same visual territory:

On the left, how it Boudicca and her daughters and her horses and her chariot, with the Wheel and its shadow behind her, were looking on a sunny-with-clouds day back in February 2016, and on the right the same stuff quite recently, on the same day I photoed this dramatic skyscape, just over a week ago now.

On that same day on October 10th, with its dramatic sky, I also photoed another version of the shadow cast by the Wheel upon the Shell Building, shadows of all sorts, and those particular ones especially, being something of an obsession of mine. This is partly because it goes to how people see, compared to how cameras see, which is another obsession of mine. We see shadows one way, and cameras see them another way. Even as we look at shadows, We sort of unsee those shadows, so that we can grasp the reality of the shapes in front of us, and discount those light contrasts. We project what we know is going on in front of us, past the shadows, so to speak. Cameras just gobble up the contrasts created by the shadows and report them faithfully.