Bristol
The day Bristol woke up to a new statue
City responds to guerrilla installation of sculpture inspired by the day the Colston statue fell

Marc Quinn’s BLM statue divides art world

Archie Bland

Wed 15 Jul 2020 14.57 EDT Last modified on Wed 15 Jul 2020 16.20 EDT


When Bristol went to bed on Tuesday night, the question was theoretical: what should replace the toppled statue of the slave trader Edward Colston?

When it woke up, the answer was concrete – or, at least, resin and steel. Just before 5am, a team directed by the artist Marc Quinn had swiftly and almost silently installed a sculpture of a Black Lives Matter activist, Jen Reid, and driven away.

Shortly after the vehicles left, a gaggle of photographers surrounded Reid, who stood with her fist in the air, echoing the picture from the day Colston fell that had inspired the piece.

“It’s just incredible,” she said of the artwork that felt like an ambush. “That’s pretty fucking ballsy, that it is.”

But in offering an answer to one problem, Quinn and Reid presented Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees, with another one. The installation of the new statue, unsanctioned by the council, was not how the Colston conundrum was supposed to be resolved, Rees told the local community radio station BCfm a couple of hours later.

“The subject matter is powerful, a local voice, a remarkable woman being represented,” he said. “All that is fantastic. But Bristol is a very delicately balanced city. A fractured city. So the process is really important, and this hasn’t really worked with the process.”

Despite Rees’s reservations, the statue of Reid – titled “A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020” – now had the same advantage that the Colston one had held for more than a century: it was there.

“It almost feels like it’s been there forever,” said Quinn. “It gets under the skin before you understand what it is.”

And, as the Colston case proved, the criteria for taking down a public sculpture turn out to be very different to those for putting it up.

Reid, a Bristolian, said it had been difficult to keep the secret from friends and family. “When friends say ‘I’ll see you later’, I think … yeah, you will!”

Her daughter Leila, Gazing up at her mother’s avatar a little later, shook her head and laughed. “It is incredible seeing it,” she said. “It’s surreal. From the kneecap to the shape of her hands - it’s just her.”

She said the statue was the right answer to the Colston problem, at least for now. “She’s proud to represent a movement, and if there’s a better way to do that, I can’t think of it.”

The police quickly concluded that no crime had been committed and the statue’s future was a matter for the council. The only official figure in sight was the driver of a road sweeper, who stopped to take a picture before continuing with his shift. Meanwhile, double-taking passersby and those who had heard the news stopped and stared throughout the day.

“It’s beautiful, and it’s really powerful,” said Shani Ackford, a speech therapist, who had come to see it with her young son. “It’s the right thing to represent how it came down.”

Sanna Bertilsson stopped on her bike to get a picture “before they take it down”.

Others were much less convinced, voicing concerns that a work by an established white artist had occupied a space created by black activism. Rees noted that Quinn was a “London-based artist”.

Quinn said it was Reid who had “created the sculpture when she stood on the plinth and raised her arm in the air”, and that his role had simply been to “crystallise it”.

Thomas J Price, who has been commissioned to create a sculpture dedicated to the Windrush generation, said he understood the “initial positive reactions” but called it a “votive statue to appropriation”.

Reid, for her part, took the opposite view, though she also expressed her sympathy for Rees. “It’s a demonstrable commitment to the cause of Black Lives Matter in that it shows active allyship,” she said. “Isn’t this what we need? Allies?”

Whatever the answer to that question, the council had a more immediate concern about safety. It sent a structural engineer to assess the installation, and was waiting for their report on Wednesday evening.

Quinn and his team said they had gone through exactly the same safety assessment that they would have done on a commissioned piece. The artist said it was “not a permanent artwork”, but it had been placed in such a way that it would be “extremely difficult to move”.

All the same, by the afternoon Rees had declared that the statue “will have to be removed”.

In the long term, the decision on Colston’s successor will reflect the conclusions of a specially appointed history commission – and, Rees was at pains to say, aim to accommodate even the “people do not get what they want”, so that they know “they live in a city that is their one and respects them.”


Allyship or stunt? Marc Quinn’s BLM statue divides art world
Read more
But Quinn argued that there was scope for a more urgent statement, too. “There are different speeds for different kinds of response,” he said. “If I’m in a position to put something like this up quickly, while the conversation is happening, there’s a duty to do it.”

By the end of the day, it seemed that the statue was going nowhere just yet.

As to what kind of question Bristol will wake up to on Thursday, no one could say. “Once you make an artwork, you have no control over it any more,” Quinn said. “I would encourage all artists to take the public realm into their hands, and do things to activate it. We put it there, and now it has its own life.”

Americans have had enough ...
... and are marching for justice in unprecedented numbers. They are responding to generations of police brutality and systemic racism, a desperation fueled by a pandemic and an economic crisis that have hit black Americans disproportionately. A mass movement has come together to say: we've had enough.

It's not just Americans. All over the world, citizens are protesting the marginalization of communities of color. Still, virtually nothing has been done to address racial and economic inequality in decades. Words, yes; action, not so much. Those who have the power to effect meaningful change have failed to do so.

At a time like this, an independent news organisation that fights for truth and holds power to account is not just optional. It is essential. Because we believe every one of us deserves equal access to fact-based news and analysis, we’ve decided to keep Guardian journalism free for all readers, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This is made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers across America in all 50 states.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/the-day-bristol-woke-up-to-a-new-statue

Jen Reid poses for a photograph in front of the sculpture of herself on the plinth where the Edward Colston statue used to stand. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images