Dinosaur

Regular visitors to London's Natural History Museum may recognise the statue at the heart of this new "Guardians" picture: it's the imposing marble rendering of Darwin, enthroned at the top of the staircase in the main entrance hall. Although positioned and unveiled there in 1885, from 1927 until 2009 it had been usurped in that prominent spot by a bronze of the museum's founder, Richard Owen. Owen was a complex Victorian figure, a gifted comparative anatomist, able to taxonomise, reconstruct, and predict the appearance of a creature from a few bone fragments, an ability which led him to identify and name the dinosaurs as an extinct group of lizard-like creatures. However, despite broadly accepting the principle of evolution, he fell out with Darwin over the central idea of natural selection, favouring a more creationist view, and became a spiteful establishment enemy of Darwin and his allies. As Darwin said, "It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me." It is quite surprising that it took the museum so long to re-right that wrong, if only symbolically.

But what strikes me is the excellence of that statue, carved out of solid marble by Sir Joseph Boehm. Is there anyone alive today who could achieve such a vivid likeness? On the evidence of the few statues that have been erected in recent decades, the answer is emphatically no. Setting aside abstract sculpture, or semi-figurative work like Antony Gormley's endless series of casts made from moulds of his own body, when it comes to statuary we seem to be stuck with kitschy stuff like the St. Pancras station monstrosity (The Meeting Place), or well-meaning but pedestrian efforts like this statue of that alternative Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace. I mean, seriously, if that were a six-inch plastic figurine it would be pretty good – I can easily imagine a series of Great Naturalists action figures, with switchable nets, hats, cleft sticks, and other collector's impedimenta – but at seven feet tall and cast in bronze it surely lacks any real sense of weight, volume, texture, or presence, doesn't it?

I suppose one of the motivations behind my "Guardians" series is precisely that uncanny sense of presence that inhabits so many pre-20th century sculptures, often of dignitaries whose names have long faded from history, but whose likenesses still gaze across museum galleries and civic spaces. Biologists are always at pains to point out that evolution is not teleological: it is not a process of refinement towards some ultimate end (maybe you, possibly even me), but an endless series of adaptations to changing environments and the niches they offer or cease to offer to life-forms. I'm not sure most of us believe that in our hearts, but then we also don't really believe that the sun only appears to go round the earth, do we? Or, for that matter, that the entropic heat death of the universe is inevitable. Somehow life and entropy seem to be fighting different battles, don't they? Something that, I now realise, my new Guardians image might be seen to express.

Similarly, when it comes to the art of sculpture, I suppose there are perfectly valid sociological and economic reasons why no-one today has the time or skill or motivation to release a truly lifelike simulacrum from within a block of cold marble. For one thing, quite apart from its sheer difficulty, it's too bloody expensive: even that oversized bronze Wallace action figure cost its commissioners £50,000. So our current lack of skill and sophistication ought not, in theory, be seen as a backward step, just as a new way of making public art, appropriate to the prevailing socio-economic conditions. But, come on, it really does feel like a falling off, doesn't it? And it's something I feel acutely in nearly every exhibition of contemporary work of any sort I visit: I'm tired of seeing the easy shortcuts, the lack of finish, the ironic promotion of calculated ineptitude over skill and craft, and the universal elevation of idea over execution. But then, as I am beginning to realise, I'm just a dinosaur...

Darwin in Berlin

(Museum für Naturkunde)