Endpiece

Putting your man in the picture

Joe Holyoak

Is it permissible to make changes to someone else’s work of art? In 1919 Marcel Duchamp notoriously modified the Mona Lisa by adding a moustache and a goatee beard. But he added them only to a postcard reproduction of the painting: Leonardo da Vinci’s painting itself remained beardless in the Louvre. Outside the protected gallery environment, on the street, is public art more susceptible to change and modification? The artist having departed, perhaps the work of art is now part of the public realm and, like a building, can legitimately evolve and be adapted. Who does it belong to? Banksy’s work regularly provokes this question. A case in Digbeth last year did too, and caused a public row.

In 1966 the Irish community in Birmingham raised money to commission the artist Kenneth Budd to design and make a memorial to the assassinated US President John Kennedy. It took the form of a large mosaic panel, with a pyramid of faces, including brother Teddy, US policemen and Martin Luther King, looking admiringly up to Kennedy’s at its apex. The tone was heroic, it was – dare one say? – almost Soviet in its mythologizing iconography. It was installed in a pedestrian precinct inside a big traffic island, appropriately next to Pugin’s Roman Catholic Cathedral on the Inner Ring Road: a very strange place which I described in UD123.

When that junction was demolished in 2007, some parts of the memorial were removed with difficulty, with the intention of rebuilding it in the city’s Irish Quarter in Digbeth. In the event, it had to be totally remade from the original drawings by the artist’s son Oliver. 300,000 new pieces of mosaic in 200 colours were bought from Angelo Orsoni’s factory in Venice. It was intended to go into the new Connaught Square development on High Street Deritend, but when the developer went bankrupt a new location was found for it on the other side of the street, on the corner with Floodgate Street.

Changes were made. Firstly, on the street corner the memorial became convex, not concave like the original. Secondly, the limitations of the location led to the design being shortened in length, with the less descriptive ends of the mosaic being edited out. Thirdly, and controversially, a new face was added to the composition. I don’t know how the decision to do this came to be taken inside the City Council, and who took it. But now, in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, is the face of Birmingham Labour Councillor Mike Nangle, who became the first Irish Lord Mayor of the city in 2004, and who died in 2010.

Mike Nangle had an honourable place in the history of the Irish community in Birmingham. He was credited with achieving the restoration of the St Patrick’s Day Parade through Digbeth, after the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974 had thrown the whole Irish community under a shadow of suspicion for years. Yet the complaints against his addition to the mural came most strongly from the Irish Centre across the High Street. Despite Councillor Nangle’s popularity, the community’s representatives there felt that their 1966 gift to the city had been traduced by a political gesture. Opposition parties in the City Council also objected to what they saw as an act of political opportunism. A different objection came from someone who considered that shame had been unfairly cast on Mike Nangle, a man of spotless integrity, by associating him with the immoral Kennedy family.

What are we to think? Setting aside party political issues, and the absurdity of the idea of the ward councillor for Hodge Hill schmoozing with the Kennedys under the Stars and Stripes, I can’t see anything fundamentally wrong with the change. I actually like the idea that a public work of art can adapt and change, especially when it is rebuilt and relocated. But the question of who has the authority to decide is more difficult. The decision should be transparent and democratic: in the case of the JFK Memorial it wasn’t.

URBAN DESIGN 132 Autumn 2014 Publication Urban Design Group

As featured in URBAN DESIGN 132 Autumn 2014

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The JFK Memorial in Birmingham

 

The new portrait of Councillor Mike Nangle added to the bottom right side

 

Joe Holyoak is an architect and urban designer, working in masterplanning, site planning, area regeneration, historic conservation, and community participation.

He is also on the Editorial Board of the URBAN DESIGN journal.