Sculptures of London

By William Brown, Tom Maine, Lissa Schwerm

2021 • 23min • United Kingdom • English

In this essay-film, I explore the meaning of the sculptures of London. Drawing on earlier treatments of sculpture and architecture, including Les statues meurent aussi/Statues Also Die (Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, France, 1953) and Les dites cariatides/The So-Called Caryatids (Agnès Varda, France, 1984), Sculptures of London explores the ways in which a city’s public art, especially sculpture, reflects its primary concerns and its ideological worldview. For, across the hundreds of public sculptures in London, there emerges a clear trend whereby sculptures express an initial emphasis on representation (most are statues), which in turn convey a sense of anthropocentrism (most are statues of humans), while at the same time suggesting the importance of men, animals and war in the collective consciousness. In this way, the city carries its past, but through its public art, it also contains seeds for a new and different future.

Contact

William Brown • wjrcbrown@gmail.com

Cite this film:

Brown, William, Tom Maine, and Lissa Schwerm. 2021. ‘Sculptures of London’ (23 minutes, HD). In Annals of Crosscuts: Films of Environmental Humanities 1 (1). CERN: Zenodo. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4303916.