Hambling told PA Media that the statue was every woman and clothes would have restricted her to a time and place. “It’s not a conventional heroic or heroinic likeness of Mary Wollstonecraft. It’s a sculpture about now, in her spirit,” she said.
Bee Rowlatt, a writer who has been a central figure in the fight to have a statue of Wollstonecraft, said the statue represented “an idea of collaboration” and the birth of feminism.
How? How does it represent that? Who would look at it and see that? And anyway it’s supposed to be about Mary Wollstonecraft, not collaboration or generalized feminism. It’s so classic, in a way – this falling into the trap of agreeing that women must not stand out, women must support the group and never the self. By all means create monuments to collaboration and solidarity and the birth of movements. The more the better! But don’t hijack a monument to a specific woman for the purpose. That’s just yet another erasure, and erasure is what we’re trying to end.
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10 responses to “Wollstonecraft was an idea”
And there is nothing in that statue that says anything about collaboration, or all women, except that all women are naked, maybe. We are not. It’s smoke and mirrors.
Well I prefer jeans and sweatshirts to smoke and mirrors, but…
Art critic Jacky Klein tears it to pieces. Porny, vaguely spiritual, as awful as they come. 11:40 in.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000p79w
I just learned from the BBC’s piece that the artist included Wollstonecraft’s quote “I don’t wish women to have power over men, but over themselves” next to the statue. The statue of a woman’s body that the artist had the power to represent in any way she liked, and decided to depict naked, on top of a grotesque melted mass of female body parts. Point very much missed, I think.
If it’s about every woman, not just Mary, then why mention Mary at all?
Sure, perhaps one COULD do a nude figure as a stand-in for women in general. But that thing is utterly static and passive. Rising from an amorphous blob. Is it possible that the blobby pillar represents anything?
On the other hand, perhaps Wollstonecraft got off lightly. This is Hambling’s statue of Oscar Wilde:
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-om9FKIWHXiE/WYhUsv5S-QI/AAAAAAAA8_0/99wVK01aDjI30smvqDukQlISaLRQkmzDwCLcBGAs/s1600/1609250436.jpg
@Iatsot #7 That looks like something out of Lovecraft.
latsot, it looks like his face melted.
Ah, but when she first made the Wilde statue it looked just like him.