Like the Back of My Hand

Like the Back of My Hand By Julian Baggini

If you did nothing more than look at the 101 bronze casts in Like the Back of My Hand, what would you know about hands they were moulded from? You would probably be able to tell whether they belonged to children, middle-aged adults or the elderly. If you were more attentive, you might be able to see whether they belonged to males or females. In some, you might see signs of a life of physical toil, or contrariwise, one where brute physical labour was spared. A fortune teller might claim to know a great deal more than this, but most of us would not consider this “information” to be very reliable. However, there is one thing you could be pretty sure about, if not 100% certain: Each of those hands has created (or in the case of the very young ones, will create) a work of art. I don’t mean this in the tautologous sense that, because the hand has been cast in a work of art, therefore it must have created a work of art. It’s rather that making art is something everyone does at some stage in their life. You only need to go into the house of someone with young children to see the evidence stuck to fridge doors or pinned to notice boards. “But that’s not art,” you might say (though not in front of the children). It most certainly is, I would reply. It’s not very good art, admittedly, but surely you didn’t think I was suggesting I could tell by looking whether the owners of the 101 hands were talented or not, especially after I’d mocked fortune tellers? The point is worth making for several reasons. A lot of ink has been spilled arguing about what makes something a work of art. It hasn’t all been wasted, because even if they are inconclusive, such discussions often have the effect of making you think more profoundly about what art is about. But if the aim was to produce a decent answer, the best we seem to have come up with is that art is what we say it is. Slightly less futile than trying to define art is debating which artworks are any good. This too is pretty inconclusive, but again, the process of trying to find answers can make us look at art in a new light, and begin to appreciate it for reasons of which we were previously ignorant. A more urgent question which demands an answer, however, is why should the public support ventures to bring more art to their towns? In particular, why should public money help fund it? We can’t fudge this question since public funds are finite and there are hospitals and schools to staff and equip. Like the Back of My Hand points towards at least one convincing answer, and the fact that each of the hands has created art itself is a good starting point for giving it. It is reminder that art is in one sense highly democratic. That’s not to say everyone is equally talented, of course. It is rather that the creation of art is not the sole preserve of the most able. This may sound obvious, but while someone who can only prepare bad meals is called a bad cook, rather than not a cook at all, if someone can only draw bad pictures, we hesitate before calling her an artist, even a bad one. Like the Back of My Hand, like many of Strange Cargo’s projects, is not simply a gift from those with talent to the poor masses who lack it. It is an attempt to involve in its creation those for whom the art is for. More than an attempt: it is an undoubted success, for several reasons, which relate both to the piece itself and the manner of its creation. I grew up in Folkestone but haven’t lived here for twenty years. Still, I often come back to visit family, and my first port of call has usually been Folkestone Central rail station. For most of those twenty years it has been a sorry sight. The walkway from the station exit to Shorncliffe Road ran under a decrepit roof and a wall containing the fading, peeling remains of an old estate agent’s advert. To émigrés like me, to be welcomed home in this way merely serves to reinforce the feeling that leaving was a good idea. For townspeople, it was yet another reminder of Folkestone’s historic decline. For newcomers to the town, it hardly provided an auspicious omen for what was to come. Had Network Rail refurbished the station in the normal way, it would now be bright and clean, but what you’d see on the walls would simply be newer adverts. It would be what you might call an aesthetically neutral environment: you wouldn’t be struck by its ugliness, but neither would be inspired to call it beautiful. But now, of course, what you see is the shimmering, elongated stretch of tiles and casts that is Like the Back of My Hand. I’m not an art critic and I lack the vocabulary to describe it in the terms of the art world. But since the work exists not for that world, but for the people who use the station, perhaps that doesn’t matter. What it does for us is more easily expressed. It is a rare eruption of the beautiful into the drab landscape of daily life. Passing the mural at Folkestone Station is one of the few times when something in my environment make me look up and feel the rare pleasure of something vibrant and arresting remove the aesthetic anaesthesia that familiar, plain surroundings induce. For visitors and residents alike, the installation has transformed how people feel on entry to the town. I think one reason for its success is that Strange Cargo’s way of working means that the people who the art is for are always in the forefront of the minds of the people making it. Indeed, they almost have to be since they are collaborators in the project. Public art is often derided because it involves something people don’t understand suddenly being plonked down for all supposedly to admire. Although many good works are unfairly ridiculed, you often do get the feeling that the artists have not thought enough about the public on the receiving end. Like the Back of My Hand shows how public art cannot just be excellent, but also loved by the people in its host communities. It helps engender something that many say is being lost: civic pride. Strange Cargo’s public works are very rarely vandalised, and that is because people quickly embrace them as their own. Instead of being just another station, Folkestone Central is now unique, something that the people of the town can feel some pride in. The work has been up for a few years now, and it still brings a smile to my face every time I pass it. The only negative thought it tends to provoke is, why are there not more public spaces like this? It is a reminder of just how important the physical environment can be to our underlying feelings of contentment and well-being, and how often it fails us. I only really realised this when I spent a winter in Salamanca, Spain, a few years back. Salamanca is quite simply a beautiful city, stuffed full of sandstone renaissance architecture that seems to absorb the almost every-present crisp sunlight and radiate it out again in a warm glow. Every day you stepped out of your front door and walked into the town you would be surrounded by beauty. I’m convinced this had an effect on everyone, even those who have lived there so long you would have thought the novelty would have worn off. It certainly did seem to me that the Salmantinos were among the most cheerful, helpful I have ever met. This should not be surprising. We are very ready to allow that it is depressing to live on truly ugly estates, for example. If bad physical environments can have such a negative effect, why shouldn’t good ones have a positive effect? And if they do, shouldn’t we be doing more to make sure where we live is giving us a lift, not bringing us down? Folkestone is blessed with both a fine natural environment and a good stock of grand Victorian buildings. The hills, coast and cliff provide a great frame, but in recent years the picture itself has been in need of restoration. Thankfully, it appears that the town has turned a corner and has begun its long, slow climb back of the slope which it had even more slowly slid down over the years. If you look at what concretely has actually changed, in brute terms the answer is, as yet, very little. But these small changes have had a disproportionately large effect, precisely because they have enhanced the physical environment. The station, the Old High Street and the Lower Leas are now all spaces which lift those who pass through them, which is almost everyone. Like the Back of My Hand is one of the smaller improvements, but it also shows how improving public space is not all about major new developments and massive refurbishments. And I’m sure that one reason it punches above its weight is the citizens of the town were involved in its creation. People like beautiful things but they feel even more warmly about them if they, or those they know, created them. Look, for example, at the pictures people put on their walls. As an outsider, if you tried to put aside questions of personal taste, you could usually divide them into the excellent, the quite good and the pretty poor. The “excellent” would be reproductions of truly great art, such as the kind of Monet print which is made no less brilliant by its ubiquity. The “quite good” would probably be an original or limited edition print from a lesser, perhaps local, artist which the owner has bought because of some personal connection. Perhaps they know the artists or met them. Whatever the reason, they probably would not otherwise have bought it instead of the Monet. The pretty “poor would” be something like a photograph that they had taken themselves. It’s easy to buy a really good photo of a whale flipping its tale, but many would prefer to display their own inferior version, simple because they are delighted at having snapped the beast for themselves. It could be argued that we should, in fact, stick to displaying only the excellent. But I think that would be a mistake. We are creative beings and the delight we take in art is not just because of the quality of the finished product. The act of creation itself, and the satisfaction of having achieved it, is a large part of the value of art. Art is about the creative process, not just the finished product. The great achievement of Like the Back of My Hand is that it combines artistic excellence with local participation. There is not the either/or of the Monet or the dodgy whale snap. Folkestonians can have a real sense that this is their work, not as compensation for failing getting something truly wonderful, but as an added benefit. That’s why the public is the big winner in this project. Because that involvement has been so brilliantly co-ordinated by Brigitte Orasinski at Strange Cargo, the result is not the equivalent of a children’s mural on a playground wall, loved only because the children painted it. Like The Back of My Hand is a first-class piece of public art, worthy of its Rouse Kent Public Art Award. How does this relate to my earlier questions: Why should the public bother with art, and why should public money help fund it? In many cases, it is hard to come up with an answer that will persuade the average tax-payer. If public money is going to artists for the benefit or artists, and what they produce leaves the public cold, then there are good reasons to at least question whether this is right (even if the answer is eventually that it is). If public artworks are installed which do not enhance the public space in the eyes of the public, that too is questionable. And although it less common to mention it, if there is no public involvement in the creation of art paid for by the public purse, again, we might wonder if it is right to use channel general taxation from the many to the few. Because these drawbacks are gloriously absent in the case of Like the Back of My Hand, answers to the sceptical questions are much easier to give. The artists are not the main beneficiaries of the work, the public are. It is not just critics who believe the public space has been enhanced, anyone who uses Folkestone Central can see it has. And this wasn’t something that was simply parachuted in by a paternalistic art world clique, it was incubated and hatched in the local community. However, my main purpose in pointing out some of the reasons why I think the work is such a success is not merely to provide more praise for an already lauded piece. Rather, I think we should learn from its example so we can use art even more to provide a real public benefit. Not that all art funding decisions have to be based on the general public good. A civilised society should be prepared to enable a certain amount of art for arts sake, as it should scholarship for scholarship’s sake. But public benefit should be a part of the picture, and more often than not, it is only peripheral or dealt with in a patronising way. Official thinking about art has tended to drive a wedge between artistic elites and the mainstream population, in which the latter are turned into mere admirers at best, and bewildered passers-by at worst. The masses’ involvement in art is confined to turning up to galleries to admire the masterworks of the greats, or reacting to a new public installation once it is a fait accompli. We have already seen examples of how large-scale public art can be both bold and original and still be taken into the hearts of their host communities. Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North in Gatehead and Thomas Heatherwick’s B of the Bang in Manchester are two such examples. But such huge works are by their very nature rare. If we want public art to have a wider and more diffuse impact in communities large and small, then we cannot take these as templates. Rather, we should look to the example of Like The Back of My Hand and use it as an inspiration for other art projects which provide the double benefit of involving people and improving their environment. That is not to say that we now have a format we can simply copy. Art is, among other things, in the business of innovation and it would be a mistake to think that Strange Cargo had some kind of “formula” for generating great public art. What it has got is a duplicable attitude, one in which putting art at the heart of the community is not some pious, empty piece of rhetoric, but means something, because strictly speaking it is not really about putting art anywhere, but properly locating it. Art is at the centre of Folkestone’s regeneration plans. The approach being taken is quite rightly multifaceted. It includes education, enabling artists to find suitable workspace and a certain amount of bringing in quality art from outside. Strange Cargo’s brand of community-based art has been a key part of this mosaic, and is essential to the envisaged artistic renaissance being of the town and not just in it. Like the Back of My Hand will be an even greater success if turns out to be a sign of things to come for public art in this young century, as well as a unique record of the last one.