Character building

Do you remember that excellent and enlightened scheme that was developed and supported by the Arts Council and which promised to add a dash of wellplanned creative flair to the finishing touches on new buildings? It was called rather quaintly, but accurately, Percent for Art. The idea, so simple and logical in its conception, was that, right from the start of development of a new building project, a small percentage of the budget should be set aside for art work -sculpture, painting, mural, special decoration of some kind - to enhance the character of the building. It was potentially a wonderful opportunity for developers to show their cultural mettle and for an exciting era of new commissioning to open up. So what happened? Not much, I regret to say.

The principle of Percent for Art was first developed back in the Forties in a number of countries, including Sweden. With the Americans' enormous capacity and enthusiasm for taking on new ideas, they embraced it wholeheartedly, and today many states not only have fully operational percent for art schemes, but the schemes are underpinned by legislation. The story here in Britain is predictably less robust. Early in the Thatcher era, a House of Commons select committee on the public and private funding of the arts recommended that both public and private sectors should adopt percent for art policies. Ah, action! Well actually, no.

Enter the Arts Council. In an effort to get things moving again it established a steering group to examine all the possibilities and in 1991 published ten key recommendations in a document called Percent for Art: A Review. The most important of these was the mandatory application of percent for art to all government and executive buildings costing more than 3 million.

However, since that time nearly six years ago, the Government has never endorsed the review - and in case you are still living in hope, it is not about to rush it through this side or the other of an election. Nor would a Labour arts minister treat it with any more urgency even in the unlikely event of that person being Jack Cunningham, he of no known artistic enthusiasm.

All these thoughts have been prompted by a visit to the studio of the sculptor Michael Rizzello, a former president of the Society of Portrait Sculptors and, for ten years, president of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. He works in most sculptural media and at all scales from large architectural works and public statuary to wild life sculpture, portrait busts, plaques and medals. He has also designed coins for more than 90 countries. At the moment he is hard at work on what promises to be, judging from the models, a spectacularly lovely 12-foot high sculpture of a leaping woman called simply `Dancer with Ribbons'. The work is filled with life and energy, even at its armature stage, as the dancer's pony-tailed hair flies in the wind.

And where is this youthful and energising work to be displayed? You will be amazed - and I hope delighted - to discover that Oxford Street is to be its home. Oxford Street, that uniquely tawdry and awful concrete canyon that we are told is one of the world's foremost shopping streets, should have no place in what we are also told is now the world's most cool, fashionable and trendy city. In June, the bronze `Dancer with Ribbons' will be erected two storeys up on the front of the old Bourne and Hollingsworth building, a listed building that is now a shopping mall called The Plaza.

The work of Michael Rizzello does not come cheaply so this is a fine philanthropic gesture by the property company Firefly whose architects the Coleman Partnership were insistent that such a fine landmark building deserved more than yet another hunk of contemporary neon screwed on to its frontage. All of which brings me back to Percent for Art.

It is surely self-evident that such a scheme taken up with enthusiasm could gradually bring about a transformation of such offensively ugly places as Oxford Street as well as ensuring that new developments were given a soul as well as a face. One philanthropist cannot change everything.

Copyright Spectator Mar 8, 1997
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