Review by Miriam Al Jamil
The Wollstonecraft Statue at Newington Green (Review)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.19
Cite: Jamil, Mariam Al. 2021. “The Wollstonecraft Statue at Newington Green (Review) ,” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 58-58.
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The Wollstonecraft Statue at Newington Green reifies in many ways the unresolved painful issue of disempowerment with which the history of the female nude is imbued, making it all but impossible to see it in any other way. This representation is in spite of the driving force of the statue’s campaign, which is stated in the artist Maggi Hambling’s description of its meaning and fortified by the historical revisionist approaches of feminist art that interrogate Kenneth Clark’s The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (1956)—such as work produced by Griselda Pollock and Lynda Nead.
Classical sculptures of goddesses represented the divine and were divested of the bodily signs of the reproductive body, a feature that characterized the archaic female nude. The design of these classical sculptures allowed the male gaze, particularly in the last two or three hundred years, to relentlessly reduce and sexualize the female nude to the exclusion of all other interpretations. This reduction is compounded in the more recent phenomenon of pornography in which the female body, though driving male fantasy, is infantilized and glabrous.
Hambling’s figure both references the “ideal” female figure in its youthful, slim, and perfectly proportioned anatomy and resolutely incorporates the pubic hair, which is either missing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art or, when included, is the subject of scandalized critical responses. Current reactions to Hambling’s figure express similar outrage but mainly because Wollstonecraft should be honored without the baggage of art historical female nudity to deflect from her reputation as a thinker, philosopher, and writer. It is a question of what measure of dignity and meaning can be assigned to the female nude. Can it convey extraordinary pioneering achievement, strength, and fortitude in the face of adversity, both creative energy and courage? Or must it always remain generalized, idealized, transcendental?
In many ways, the inchoate female forms from which the small figure emerges in the final piece are, for me, the most fascinating elements of the project and deserve to be appreciated in their own right. Building on Hambling’s previous sea and wave sculpture and paintings, these forms convey flesh and bone, twist in restless and dynamic movement, and gather force to bring the triumphant female to birth, like Venus rising from the foam. We are invited to contemplate what constitutes “female forms.” How would “male forms” differ? Is it easier to abstract and construct “female” shapes from the wealth of historical sculptural tropes with which we are familiar? I would like to know more. The installation has set in motion yet another layer of debate about the value and purpose of public sculpture, this time focused on gender but is as much about entitlement, veracity, and respect as all the previous examples which have galvanized participation. I hope this reinvigoration of sculpture as a significant cultural phenomenon will continue to inspire emotional engagement.
