Alexander Stoddart, the Scottish sculptor that The American Arts Quarterly has hailed as “clearly the most important British sculptor of his generation” has some unusual and intriguing comments on life, art and political ideology in the latest edition of the Spectator. Here's my favorite passages:The great British philosopher Brian Magee, writing about Richard Wagner’s political life, points out that it is wrong to think of the Sage of Bayreuth moving to the Right in his later life. Magee’s proposal is compelling; Wagner leaves left-wing politics precisely as men who are maturing leave politics generally. They drift in middle age towards the static wasteland of metaphysics, and this is observed by those still remaining in politics as a move towards the Opposition, since they still cannot think of anything outside the political sphere. It appears that the ageing man ‘goes Tory’. In reality, however, there is every chance that he has simply glimpsed his first sight of the ‘other side’...
The Left, early in the last century, failed to secure direct revolution in the West, so another tactic was adopted — to dismantle the institutions of the Occident in a long, piecemeal slog. The focus fell on the arts, and this explains why the high music and visual arts of today are so startlingly different from anything you might encounter in undeconstructed times. Where the family, say, was singled out as a sinister and coercive societal institution, so certain artistic forms likewise became suspect: the tune; the rhyme; the moulding; the plinth. Today they are half-heartedly trying to reconstruct the family; but the cultural institutions are proving harder to patch up and this can be attributed to something in the artistic forms of traditionalism that the newly barbarised human being deeply dreads.The Modernism of the last century has forged a sub-sensibility, where man is engineered to be a healthy kind of ignoramus — a Superman — unneedful of the analgesic mercies that art of the old sort delivered into the veins of suffering humanity. The pain is the gain — so let’s write poems that are merely chopped prose, boil our testicles to win the Turner prize, build houses that look like washing machines for living in and, if we make statues at all, make sure they are bolted down at pavement level, so we can ‘interact’ with them (usually with some vomit on a Saturday night)...Proper, old-fashioned-looking statues have stillness, which grates on the nerves of the naturally clamorous. Then they have great scale with which to emphasise that calmness. Observe how the eyes of these statues never follow you about: they ignore you. This offends left-wingers, who are always craving attention. And the statues are far away, in the sky. Why are they not down here, with us, on our level?...
The photos above show Stoddart with clay models in production of, respectively, his Adam Smith and St. Nicholas of Tolentino. More information about Alexander Stoddart can be found at his website here.
